Symbiosism
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Symbiosism is a philosophy about the mind and man's place in nature. It is a
Darwinian Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations tha ...
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 ...
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Overview

Memes A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...
are meanings, i.e. iso-functional neuroanatomical 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 me ...
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 widel ...
. Meanings thrive, replicate incessantly and constitute the essence of language. An essential characteristic of memes is that
linguistic meaning Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
s 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 noncontradi ...
. 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 Symbiosis (from Greek , , "living together", from , , "together", and , bíōsis, "living") is any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between two different biological organisms, be it mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasit ...
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 Theory of language is a topic from Philosophy of language#Nature of language, philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; "Why do languages have the properties they have?"; or ...
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 Frederik Herman Henri (Frits) Kortlandt (born 19 June 1946) is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in gen ...
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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
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