It would be more understandable and educational if your simulation had the following:
- A way of visually indicating the divergence between languages. Minimal differences are just "accents", but more make them dialects, and yet more make them distinct languages. Perhaps use color.
- A slider to change the frequency of exchange across islands. This would show that if interchanges were high, there would be little divergence (none if the interchanges were high enough). If interchanges were rare, divergence to distinct languages becomes inevitable. At some middle rate you get dialects but not languages.
- Perhaps another slider to change the mutation rate.
- Perhaps start with a small subset of a real language. This way people could click on an island and see the actual evolution, or the divergence between any two pairs. Instead showing the most used word, I'd show a sample of the same words (those with the same meaning) for each language, along with the original real language, so we could see, for example, how "tree" changed and diverged over time.
- I'm not a linguist, but I'd think divergence ends up negatively impacting interchanges -- i.e even if you had a bridge connecting the islands, fewer people would cross it if they can't speak the local language. If this is true, divergence would accelerate over time.
> I'm not a linguist, but I'd think divergence ends up negatively impacting interchanges
I think this is true if there is a meaningful iteration between the persons.
For example, some of them get some food and some water, and they have to interchange a some of it because both need food and water. And they only can interchange it if they can talk a little (only a greeting? a minimal barter?) Else they die and are somehow replaced with new agents.
But IIUC in simulations is more simpler and the agents only bounce against each other, and the words are somewhat contagious.
- A way of visually indicating the divergence between languages. Minimal differences are just "accents", but more make them dialects, and yet more make them distinct languages. Perhaps use color.
- A slider to change the frequency of exchange across islands. This would show that if interchanges were high, there would be little divergence (none if the interchanges were high enough). If interchanges were rare, divergence to distinct languages becomes inevitable. At some middle rate you get dialects but not languages.
- Perhaps another slider to change the mutation rate.
- Perhaps start with a small subset of a real language. This way people could click on an island and see the actual evolution, or the divergence between any two pairs. Instead showing the most used word, I'd show a sample of the same words (those with the same meaning) for each language, along with the original real language, so we could see, for example, how "tree" changed and diverged over time.
- I'm not a linguist, but I'd think divergence ends up negatively impacting interchanges -- i.e even if you had a bridge connecting the islands, fewer people would cross it if they can't speak the local language. If this is true, divergence would accelerate over time.