In Linguistics: Language Change
In linguistics, the logistic function can be used to model language change: an innovation that is at first marginal begins to spread more quickly with time, and then more slowly as it becomes more universally adopted.
Read more about this topic: Logistic Function
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or change:
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)