By Geoffrey Sampson

 

The Unfolding of Language

By Guy Deutscher

William Heinemann, 360 pp., £20.00

ISBN 0-43401-135-5

Published 5 May 2005

 

The Talking Ape: how language evolved

By Robbins Burling

Oxford University Press, ix + 286 pp., £16.99

ISBN 0-19-927940-3

Published 25 August 2005

 

 

Both of these books are about how language evolved – once a taboo subject for linguists (because it seemed so wholly speculative), but rehabilitated over the last twenty to thirty years.  Robbins Burling is chiefly concerned with what we know (or can reasonably surmise) about how our remote ancestors developed from languageless apes into creatures using a stock of meaningful words.  Guy Deutscher discusses the later and more accessible process by which the “me Tarzan, you Jane” stage of language evolved into the systems we know today, with their wonderful structural intricacy and logical expressiveness.

Deutscher stunned many linguists in the year 2000, at a time when it was widely taken as axiomatic that “the earliest written documents already display the full expressive variety and grammatical complexity of modern languages” (to quote Ray Jackendoff), by demonstrating that this simply is not so:  the written records of Akkadian, an ancient language of the Middle East, show complement clauses evolving under the pressure of new communicative needs in a language that previously lacked them.  More recently, Deutscher’s finding has been somewhat overshadowed by Dan Everett’s even more remarkable discovery that a language of our own day, Pirahã, spoken by a monolingual tribe in the southern Amazon basin, is astonishingly simple in logical structure – not only does Pirahã entirely lack clause subordination of any kind (early Akkadian did have relative clauses), but for instance it cannot express any quantification concepts (no “all”, “most”, numerals, etc.). 

This all helps to make the evolution of grammar, which would once have seemed too mysterious to say anything useful about, a topic whose time has come.  Once we are prepared to entertain it as a realistic subject for research, many current languages turn out to contain fossilized clues to how abstract grammatical features evolved out of words for concrete realities, long before written records began.  The slice of time that we can directly inspect is not long enough to see much detail of how modern grammars evolved, but the fossil clues from different languages point in a sufficiently consistent direction to give us reasonable confidence about how in principle it must have happened.

Through my work as a panelist for the Ask-a-Linguist public information service, I know that no aspect of language or languages fascinates the public as much as questions about their ultimate origins, and Deutscher has accordingly aimed his book at a very broad readership.  Sometimes his funky style verges on the embarrassing, as when a vicar insists on hauling out a guitar to make divine service “cool”.  If a topic is intrinsically interesting, to my mind it is best expounded in a non-pompous but sober style and allowed to stand on its own feet.  But I suspect Deutscher would argue that his unusual style serves a very specific purpose, in helping the reader to contemplate well-known phenomena through new eyes.

Take, for instance, Deutscher’s extended treatment of Semitic verb inflexion, whereby roots consisting solely of consonants are put into various tenses, moods, etc. by interdigitating various patterns of vowels among the root consonants.  In The Origin of Species Darwin used the eye as an example of an organ which one would suppose must have been designed as a finished whole, yet which in reality could be shown to have evolved by many small steps each of which was independently adaptive.  In a similar way, Deutscher feels that if he can convince his readership that Semitic verb inflexion might have emerged through the same kinds of process which we can hear happening in our own language today, then he will have won them over to his general point of view.

A young Jew beginning Hebrew school would typically be introduced to verb inflexion via some standard Biblical root such as l-m-d, “to learn”.  Instead, Deutscher invents a hypothetical root s-n-g, “to snog”, which yields Hebrew or Akkadian forms such as asnug “I snogged”, ushasnag “I shall cause to snog”, sunnag “he was snogged intensively”, etc.  The structure of a classical language commonly seems to us to possess a monumental quality that is worlds away from the everyday sloppiness by which, say, an English phrase such as “going to” is reduced to a slovenly “gonna” and used to express futurity.  By describing Semitic verb forms in terms of snogging, Deutscher makes it easier for the reader to get his mind round the idea that these verb forms, and all other grammatical structures, are products of that same sloppiness.  In millennia to come, schoolchildren may find themselves studying the gonnative tense of 21st-century Classical English in much the same spirit of resentful awe with which youngsters in recent times have contemplated Greek aorists, Latin perfects and pluperfects, or the Niphals and Hiphils of Biblical Hebrew.

The bulk of Deutscher’s book shows how the three factors of expressiveness, analogy, and economy (or sloppiness), can between them explain the full growth of a structurally complex language, over many millennia, from an initial “me Tarzan” stage at which there were only concrete words and no grammar or methods for expressing abstractions.  But, to speakers of modern European languages, it often seems that in the historical period language evolution has been proceeding in the opposite direction.  English in particular, but also modern Continental languages, feel structurally simpler than the languages of classical antiquity. 

Famously, August Schleicher (the scholar who in 1861 first formulated the family-tree concept of language relationships) explained this simplification in terms of Hegelian philosophy.  Nations in the prehistoric period evolve their intellects, and with them their languages, to a point where they can achieve free will and rise above the blind laws of nature to create their own histories; after that, they are no longer dependent on the structure of their languages, which accordingly withers away as a plant withers after its time of ripeness has passed.  For most of the subsequent century and a half, linguists have scoffed as these ideas as unscientific, Romantic nonsense.  Remarkably, in an epilogue Deutscher argues tentatively that Schleicher may have been on to something.  Deutscher believes that it may indeed be characteristic of advanced modern civilizations to reverse the arrow of language evolution.

Robbins Burling’s book contains none of Deutscher’s verbal fireworks.  It is very clearly written, but if Burling had occasion to discuss Semitic verb inflexions he would surely use the verb “learn” rather than “snog”.  Burling gives us a workmanlike and up-to-date acccount of what we can infer about our distant ancestors’ initial acquisition of language:  he assumes no prior knowledge, though his readers will probably be people with some existing interest in the human sciences.  Where there are controversies, Burling draws our attention to these, but he consistently suggests that we should prefer reasonable, biologically-realistic scenarios over wild if influential hypotheses, such as Derek Bickerton’s idea that the full complexity of modern language emerged overnight through a genetic mutation in a single individual.

Although Burling is chiefly concerned to present consensus views of how our species became verbally articulate, there are interesting issues which come more into focus in his book than in other comparable writings.  One of these is the relative importance of the ability to comprehend language, compared to the ability to produce it.  As Burling rightly says, discussions of language acquisition usually emphasize the speaker’s rather than the hearer’s side of the equation, for the obvious reason that speaking is so much easier for a third party to observe.  But Burling argues that the acquisition process in the individual child is led by comprehension, with speaking abilities following on after a delay; he suggests that the mistaken emphasis on production may have systematically distorted our understanding of the evolution of language in general.

Burling’s book also gives full attention to the idea which has emerged in recent years that the evolutionary advantage of language for the earliest speakers had to do with social relationships.  People had long taken it for granted that the reason why language promoted survival was that it helped human groups to co-operate in manipulating the non-human world, for instance co-ordinating their behaviour when hunting, or efficiently transmitting technological knowledge.  But Burling, who has spent many years living in a tribal society in N.E. India, comments from personal experience that language is not in practice crucial to the execution of such functions in primitive societies.  A number of recent writers (notably Geoffrey Miller) have argued that the true reason why those early members of our species who were skilled in using language tended to leave many descendants (which is the definition of evolutionary fitness) was that speaking well is the key to social popularity and to sweet-talking members of the opposite sex. 

Understanding and manipulating the external world – which to the modern academic seems such a central use of language – could in reality have developed as a secondary function after language was well established.  Thus it may be that Deutscher was spot on when he chose “snog” as his archetypal ancient verb root.

 

1490 words

 

Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing at the University of Sussex. His recent publications include The “Language Instinct” Debate (Continuum, 2005).