The ‘universal’ structure of name grammars and the impact of social engineering on the evolution of natural information systems
2013-01-01

The ‘universal’ structure of name grammars And the impact of social engineering on the evolution of natural information systems Michael Ramscar Asha Halima Smith Melody Dye Richard Futrell Peter Hendrix Harald Baayen Rebecca Starr University of Tubingen, Stanford University, Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon Abstract retrieval than for other knowledge (Yasuda, Nakamura & Beckman, 2010); and the recall of names appears to be disproportionately impaired in old age. Indeed, many older adults consider deteriorating name memory to be the most disturbing cognitive problem they face (Lovelace & Twohig, 1990). Here, we identify a common information structure in the name grammars of the world’s languages, and reveal the impact that regulating names for legal and political purposes has had on their memorability as populations have grown in the wake of industrialization: while some name systems survive intact, legislation has had a detrimental effect on many name grammars, dramatically undermining their communicative efficiency. Proper name systems provide individuals with personal identifiers, and convey social and hereditary information. We identify a common information structure in the name grammars of the world’s languages, which makes this complex information processing task manageable, and evaluate the impact that the re-engineering of naming practices for legal and political purposes has had on the communicative and psychological properties of these socially evolved systems. While East-Asian naming systems have been largely unaffected by state legislation, legal interference has transformed Western naming practices, making individual names harder to process and remember. Further, the structural collapse of Western naming systems has not affected all parts of society equally: In the US, it has had a disproportionate impact on those sections of society that are least successful in economic and social terms. We consider the implications of these changes for name memory across the lifespan, and for future naming practices. Why names are different—and difficult Keywords: Names; Learning; Memory; Information Theory What’s in a name? Naming is unique to our species and central to our lives. Names are the primary linguistic means by which we discriminate individuals from their peers, and they are an integral part of our identities. Names also play an important social role: they carry hereditary information that helps regulate marriage between relatives and the transference and distribution of property, as well as fostering group identities that bring cohesion to the conduct of social enterprises such as agriculture, industry, statecraft, and war. While names for individuals appear to be as old as civilization itself, some functions of names are recent developments (Scott, 1998). Henry VIII decreed that English marital births be recorded under the surname of the father in the 14th Century, but children could, and regularly did adopt different surnames. Hereditary family names only became universal in the UK with the establishment of Her Majesty’s Register Office in 1836 (Matthews, 1967). Naming conventions in the Netherlands were formalized by statute in 1811 (Van Poppel, Bloothooft, Gerritzen & Verduin, 1999); in Korea, naming practices were regulated in 1812 (Nahm, 1988), the same year that a Prussian edict granted citizenship to Jews in return for the adoption of fixed patronyms (Scott, Tehranian & Mathias, 2002). Despite their personal and social importance, names are uniquely difficult to learn and remember (Cohen, & Burke, 1993; Valentine, Brennen & Bredart, 1996). Names produce most naturally occurring tip of the tongue states (TOTs— where one cannot produce a word one is sure one knows) (Rastle & Burke, 1996; Griffin, 2010); patients with cognitive impairments show greater decrements in name While most nouns are generic—spoon, dog, idea— personal names are sui generis: ideally, they uniquely discriminate individuals from their peers. While this could easily be achieved by giving each individual a unique label, this approach would massively increase linguistic complexity. By now, it would have generated a billion extra English words. At points in speech where a name could occur in this kind of a system, entropy—a formal, information theoretic measure of uncertainty (Shannon, 1948)—would vastly exceed anything heretofore encountered. Because entropy peaks accurately predict difficulties in the production and comprehension of speech (McDonald & Shillcock, 2001; Clark & Wasow, 1998), this would cause far more processing problems than actual English names, which are already far more taxing than other vocabulary items. Thus, while ‘one-name-per-person’ would eliminate residual uncertainty about the identity of named individuals, it would maximize processing demands in doing so. Realistically, the psychological cost of such a system is too high: Given the highly social, interconnected nature of human life, and our finite information processing capacities, one-name-per-person would prove unworkable as societies developed beyond small groups. Unsurprisingly, no major language has a naming system remotely close to it (Alford, A “Universal” Grammar for Names Although some fine-grained details differ, all the world’s major languages have evolved the same solution to the challenges names pose: instead of using unique labels, individual identifiers are formed from hierarchically structured naming tokens. Name grammars enable large sets of identifiers to be constructed out of much smaller sets of