Symbiosism is a philosophy about the mind and man's place in nature. It is a Darwinian theory, which considers language an organism residing in the human brain and claims that language is a memetic life form. Symbiosism is defined by the

Leiden School The Leiden school is a school of thought in linguistics that models languages as memes or benign neurological parasites,http://www.semioticon.com/virtuals/imitation/van_driem_paper.pdf and tries to use rigorous mathematical tools borrowed by analog ...

Overview

Memes are meanings, i.e. iso-functional

neuroanatomical Neuroanatomy is the study of the structure and organization of the nervous system. In contrast to animals with radial symmetry, whose nervous system consists of a distributed network of cells, animals with bilateral symmetry have segregated, defi ...

constructs corresponding to

sign A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or ...

s in the sense of

Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wide ...

. Meanings thrive, replicate incessantly and constitute the essence of language. An essential characteristic of memes is that linguistic meanings have the nature of nonconstructible sets in the mathematical sense and do not abide by constraints governing Aristotelian logic, such as the

principle of the excluded middle In logic, the law of excluded middle (or the principle of excluded middle) states that for every proposition, either this proposition or its negation is true. It is one of the so-called three laws of thought, along with the law of noncontr ...

. The Leiden conception of the meme contrasts with the Oxford definition as a unit of imitation, a behavioral notion that in Leiden is captured by the term ''meme''. The fecundity of memes as replicators and their fidelity of replication are limited, more so in pre-linguistic contexts. Language is a mutualist symbiont and enters into a mutually beneficial relationship with its hominid host. Humans propagate language, whilst language furnishes the conceptual universe that guides and shapes the thinking of the hominid host. Language enhances the Darwinian fitness of the human species. Yet individual grammatical and lexical meanings and configurations of memes mediated by language may be either beneficial or deleterious to the biological host. The symbiosis is rendered more complex than just simple mutualism, both by the physiological discrepancy between language as an overall condition and the nature of individual ideas conveyed through language, as well as by the ecological difference between vertically and horizontally transmitted memes. The symbiotic theory of language propounded by

George van Driem George "Sjors" van Driem (born 1957) is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he is the chair of Historical Linguistics and directs the Linguistics Institute. Education * Leiden University, 1983–1987 (PhD, ''A Grammar ...

grew out of the Leiden school of language evolution, fathered by Frederik Kortlandt.

Resources

* *van Driem, George. 2003. The Language Organism: The Leiden theory of language evolution, in Jiří Mírovský, Anna Kotěšovcová and Eva Hajičová, eds., ''Proceedings of the XVIIth International Congress of Linguists, Prague, July 24–29, 2003''. Prague: Matfyzpress vydavatelství Matematicko-fyzikální fakulty Univerzity Karlovy. *van Driem, George. 2004. Language as organism: A brief introduction to the Leiden theory of language evolution, pp. 1–9 in Ying-chin Lin, Fang-min Hsu, Chun-chih Lee, Jackson T.-S. Sun, Hsiu-fang Yang and Dah-ah Ho, eds., ''Studies on Sino-Tibetan Languages: Papers in Honor of Professor Hwang-cherng Gong on his Seventieth Birthday'' (Language and Linguistics Monograph Series W-4). Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia *van Driem, George. 2005. The language organism: The Leiden theory of language evolution, pp. 331–340 in James W. Minett and William S-Y. Wang, eds., ''Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence: Essays in Evolutionary Linguistics''. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. *Kortlandt, Frederik Herman Henri. 1985. A parasitological view of non-constructible sets, pp. 477–483 in Ursula Pieper and Gerhard Stickel, eds., ''Studia linguistica diachronica et synchronica: Werner Winter sexagenario anno MCMLXXXIII gratis animis ab eius collegis, amicis discipulisque oblata''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kortlandt, Frederik Herman Henri. 1998. Syntax and semantics in the history of Chinese, ''Journal of Intercultural Studies'', 5: 167-176Kortlandt, Frederik Herman Henri. 2003. The origin and nature of the linguistic parasite, pp. 241–244 in Brigitte Bauer and Georges-Jean Pinault, eds., ''Language in Time and Space: A Festschrift for Werner Winter on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
*Salverda, Reinier. 1998. Is language a virus? Reflections on the use of biological metaphors in the study of language, pp. 191–209 in Mark Janse and An Verlinden, eds., ''Productivity and Creativity. Studies in General and Descriptive Linguistics'' in Honor of E.M. Uhlenbeck. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. *Salverda, Reinier. 2003. Letter to the Editor, ''New Scientist'' (1 February 2003), 2380: 25.
Wiedenhof, Jeroen Maarten. 1996. Nexus and the birth of syntax, ''Acta Linguistica Hafniensia'', 28: 139-150
{{philosophy of language Theories of language