[http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/yang03dynamics.html]

TaoYang (2003)

"In this paper we study the evolution of vocabulary from the dynamic system point of view. Based on some basic assumptions of the relationship between the brain dynamics and the pronunciation of vocabulary, we model the beginning of vocabulary evolution as an interacting, classifying and clustering process of brain's dynamic representations of speakable and unspeakable meanings. As illustrative examples, we use chaotic attractors to model brain's dynamic representations of meanings. Chaotic attractors of brain dynamics are used to code meaningful information such as words and sentences while limit cycles or chaotic attractors with relatively simple structures are used to encode basic building blocks of meanings in spoken languages. Based on our model, we also present a reasonable model for the mergence of phonemes in primitive languages. Our model shows that the evolution route leading to the emergence of phonemes shoudl include the following three phases: speak meaningful, speak meaningless, and phoneme formation. We also conclude that the number of words should be bigger than a critical value in order to provide strong enough interactions among different brain dynamic representations of words and furthermore enable the emergence of phonemes."

this is REALLY fucking cool. tie this in with the ["Synesthesia"] paper.

it puts forth a theory of language formation that is just begging to have ["Synesthesia"] work added to it as the basis...

thunder-sound == thunder-word

gesture + thunder-sound == lighting-word

• -> sound!