Accidental what now?

A little while ago, my friend Frank asked me what I thought the coolest thing in linguistics was. Another friend, Pedro, suggested accidental gaps. At the time I dismissed them as pedestrian. I mean really, so languages have extra words lying around. Big deal. But accidental gaps have gotten under my skin. Now I'm starting to think they are a big deal.

Here's why.

It's pretty clear that synonymy is rare in human language. That means people don't like to have two words that mean the same thing. Obviously, synonymy avoidance puts pressure on the speaker to have a lot of different, distinct words. Especially if you have to develop a specialized vocabulary and make fine-grained distinctions, like artists do with colors.

Given this pressure, accidental gaps seem like an anomaly. We have a desperate need for words to distinguish actions, events, things, etc. And yet here are perfectly good words like wurp and troot going unused.

Oddly enough, we think nothing of having two words that are pronounced exactly the same. In fact, homonymy seems pretty rampant. So we have words like read and reed or the two meanings of mouse, etc. We're doubling up on many words and letting others go unused.

So now I'm thinking, "Yeah accidental gaps are weird!"

There are probably a number of reasons why language is this way. It may be simply a result of evolution. It's pretty common for evolved systems to be poorly designed since natural selection is restricted to the history of the organism. It can only produce variation of what has come before; it can't redesign from scratch. Another possibility is that the two tendencies, synonymy avoidance and homonymy are design features that address two different usage pressures: production and perception.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad I rethought accidental gaps