Richard Dawkins

But selection is the interesting part of evolution.

What I wonder is...

really putting a question back to you now, is there, is it all drift in language evolution or is there a, we could call it memetic selection where if you think of words as memes then using the word meme in the proper sense by the way, not the so-called internet meme, is there a sense in which natural selection, not natural selection, a form of selection favors certain

What about the great vowel shift, for example?

Is it possible that... Meaning, why the word... I made a hat.

Okay, so suppose one vowel shifted for some reason...

then that might have caused a necessity for other vowels to shift in order to disambiguate because there might have been confusion resulting from the first vowel shift.

Could the whole series, a cascade of vowel shifts, have followed for functional reasons disambiguation?

What I don't understand is why North Americans don't differentiate between can and can.

Because we don't have to.

You do, because cannot, they're the exact opposite of each other.

Okay, well, we'll have to agree to differ about that.

Look, I want to ask you, I want to challenge something.

What?

Okay.

Proto-Indo-European, supposed to be the ancestor of a very large number of languages, all European languages except Basque and several Indian.

Well, in evolutionary biology, it is a fact that if you take any two animals you like, like, for example, you and a kangaroo,

There is a single individual animal which is the most recent common ancestor of you and a kangaroo, and that's an individual.

I literally mean an individual.

There was a mother animal, looked a bit like a shrew or something like that, which had two children.