This is a somewhat orthogonal point to most of your post, but an important precept of modern linguistics is that every natural language is equally powerful. That is, any natural language can “express the highest concepts that the human mind can explore: science, mathematics, metaphysics.”[1] Of course, that isn’t a formal language, but the only real difference between a natural language and a formal language is the language ability the listener needs to understand it. So Darwinism is a bad lens to look at languages, since it isn’t “survival of the fittest language” but rather “survival of the language spoken by the group of people that controls the most other people.”
[1]: Some languages have the vocabulary to talk about different concepts that others can’t, but any language can be introduced to that vocabulary and use it successfully. For example, a language might not have the words “integral” and “derivative” needed to talk about calculus, but after introducing those words to the language, speakers of the language can use them to talk about calculus.
This is a somewhat orthogonal point to most of your post, but an important precept of modern linguistics is that every natural language is equally powerful. That is, any natural language can “express the highest concepts that the human mind can explore: science, mathematics, metaphysics.”[1] Of course, that isn’t a formal language, but the only real difference between a natural language and a formal language is the language ability the listener needs to understand it. So Darwinism is a bad lens to look at languages, since it isn’t “survival of the fittest language” but rather “survival of the language spoken by the group of people that controls the most other people.”
[1]: Some languages have the vocabulary to talk about different concepts that others can’t, but any language can be introduced to that vocabulary and use it successfully. For example, a language might not have the words “integral” and “derivative” needed to talk about calculus, but after introducing those words to the language, speakers of the language can use them to talk about calculus.