This was a fascinating post, I learned a lot from it.
But it seems to me the understandings of language and change it
describes could be expressed in other terms than the metaphor of
evolution. Natural selection, applied to human history, including the
history of language, seems to caught up in
Languages (that is, communities of speakers who use a language or a form of
it in communication) in their current state of play (parole, collective
performance) have to balance competing but not negating, for want of a
better word, 'principles' of 'redundancy' and 'efficiency'. Without
redundancy,
