Meaning and Form in a Language Computer Simulation

The competition between languages of adult people [1] has been intensively simulated on computers [2, 3] or mathematically [4] for several years. When language structures were studied, they usually consisted of about a dozen features, often binary [5, 6, 7]; see [8] for a review. This number corresponds roughly to the 47 statistically independent language features [9] in the World Atlas of Language Structures [10], which relate to phonology, morphology, and syntax. In contrast, thousands of words are needed in everyday life for thousands of different concepts, not counting special terms e.g. from the sciences. While the origin of words has already been simulated [11], we want to simulate the subsequent proliferation and competition between thousands of languages, each containing thousands of forms for thousands of meanings. In