Language is a Living Organism

Martin Sereno (1991) has categorized analogies between the two fields into four categories, taking into the consideration the characteristics of the components in each domain: species and languages; genes and culture; organisms and concepts; and cells and persons. Victorri (2007:3) shows an example comparing the two fields; he makes an analogy between a language and a proteome (term combined of words protein and genome and is the entire complement of proteins) by stating that “we can define a language as ‘the whole set of sentences that can potentially be produced by a speaker’ and a proteome as ‘the whole set of proteins that can potentially be produced by an organism’” and he goes further with the analogy by comparing the size difference “between the set of sentences that can be produced by a speaker and the set of proteins that can be produced by an organism. The first set is often said to be infinite while the other is definitely finite, and in any case much smaller than the first one” (ibid.).
According to Martin Lockley (2009) “in the 1850s August Schleicher proposed that languages are natural organisms which emerged independently of man’s will thus manifesting a cycle of growth and decay.” …