The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind, and Understanding
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At current estimates, approximately half the world's population speak a descendent of the original Indo-European language. And by looking at which words are common across all the descendants of that language, and which are different (and hence refer to concepts that developed after the languages had split), historical linguists have deduced that the original Indo-European civilization developed in a cold forest region of eastern Europe, away from a coast (there is no common word for `sea'), about 5000 years ago. Dogs and horses were domesticated, and they farmed animals such as sheep and cows (the domestication of animals and crops happened about 5000 years before). These people also had words for wild animals such as bears and wolves. They probably knew about copper, but not about any other metals. Around 2500 BC the civilization broke up (for any number of possible reasons, such as paucity of food, climactic change, or social disintegration) and a mass migration took place in many different directions. It was these migrations that formed the basis for the different individual Indo-European languages that exist today, Lithuanian being considered the oldest.
The Indo-European languages are not the only languages to be found in Europe. Finnish and Hungarian are Uralic languages, whilst Basque shows no similarity whatsoever to any other language. It is now thought that the ancestors of all the European languages, together with the AfroAsiatic languages (which include the Semitic and Egyptian languages), the Altaic languages (including Turkish and Mongolian) and some of the languages of southern India are descendants of a language that goes back 10 000 to 13 000 years. That language, together with the Australasian languages, the North American Indian languages, and in fact all the other languages of the world, is itself perhaps a descendant of an ancestral language that goes back many thousands of years before then. These descendants may even have developed after the initial migration, around 100 000 years ago, out of Africa. As different populations settled in different areas, so their languages began to diversify.
Estimates regarding the age of our languages' ancestors are pure conjecture, because there were, of course, no written records earlier than around 3500 BC. Most of these estimates are based on a mixture of linguistic and archaeological information. Languages can be compared with one another in terms of features they do or do not share. They may have similar words, or use similar sounds, or similar ways for expressing grammatical information. There are many different ways of plotting the relationships between the different languages (geographical proximity is a useful guide also). On the basis of these relationships, historical linguists can work backwards and infer the ancestral languages that could have given rise to the languages we see today. Dating those ancestral languages, and when their `offspring' diverged, relies primarily on archaeological information about the patterns of migration that have taken place through the ages.
Recently, attempts have even been made to bring genetics into the equation. Geneticists have been able to develop family trees of racial groups based on similarities and differences in the DNA, and to estimate the ancestral lineage that led to the present day. They have even estimated, on the basis of what is known about the rate of genetic mutation, that the roots of that tree-our common ancestors-date from between 150 000 and 200 000 years ago. According to the geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, the shape of the gene tree is not too dissimilar from the shape of the language tree.
This last observation (admittedly, a somewhat controversial one) does not mean that differences in language are caused by differences in DNA. An Englishman is no more or less pre-programmed to speak an IndoEuropean language than he is to speak one of the Australasian languages. All it means is that when people migrate, they take both their genes and their language with them.
A relatively recent example of one such migration took place around 1000 years ago, when the Gypsies first left their ancestral homeland. Originally, it was thought that the Gypsies had come from Egypt (from which the word `gypsy' is derived). But linguistic comparisons of Romany (the language of the Gypsies) with the Afro-Asiatic languages, and with Sanskrit and the subsequent Indian languages, showed quite unambiguously that Romany, and its speakers (and their genes), had originated in India.
So, for whatever reasons, and over however many years, the world's populations migrated, settled, and migrated again, until they reached the point, now, where they speak over 5000 different languages.
The diversity of language
Ninety-five percent of the world's population speak fewer than 100 languages. Twenty percent speak just one language (Chinese). Five percent speak one or other of the remaining 5000 or so languages. A country that is just a few hundred square miles can be the home to several different languages each of which is unintelligible to a speaker of one of the others. The island of New Guinea is host to some 700 languages. Even in Europe the same situation holds. Ask someone what language is spoken in Italy, and he or she will probably say `Italian'. Yet the inhabitants of two villages separated by only 15 miles may have dialects that are as different from one another as French is from Spanish. `Italian' is in fact just one of the many dialects to be found in Italy, which are, effectively, different languages. `Italian' originated in Tuscany (around Florence) and achieved literary prominence following the publication of works by Dante in the fourteenth century.
Most of us are familiar with languages like French, Italian, Spanish, or German. French and Italian share a lot with English in terms of grammar. One needs barely more than a dictionary to translate a sen tence from one of these languages into another. German is somewhat different because its verbs can appear at the ends of its sentences (see Chapter 8). Even so, it tends to do pretty much the same sorts of things as English. A language like Malay, though, is quite different. For example, plurals are usually dealt with simply by repeating the singular form. Whereas speakers of English say `books', speakers of Malay say `book book' (actually, they say `buku-buku') and `child child' ('anak- anak'). Some words do have different plural forms though. The equivalent to `eyes' is not `eye eye'-that means `police'!
Other languages go to other extremes. French and Italian use gender (nouns are masculine or feminine). German adds a third gender-neuter. Swahili adds a fourth, fifth, and sixth. Finnish, on the other hand, has no gender and unlike English, no articles (like `a' or `the'). But it makes up for this in other ways. Like German, Finnish is a case-marked language (see Chapter 7). For German this means that a different article is used depending on the role that the noun plays in the sentence (such as the subject of the sentence, the indirect object, or whatever). German has just four cases, Latin had one more-but Finnish, which uses different inflections to indicate case, has fifteen.
So the different languages of the world have quite different ways of dealing with grammar. They can also use quite different sounds. Languages like Hottentot (also referred to as Nama), from South West Africa use clicks, which are made by clicking the tongue away from the roof of the mouth. Languages like Thai and Mandarin Chinese use differences in pitch to distinguish between words that would otherwise sound the same-they are tone languages (see Chapter 11). And whereas English words can select from around 12 000 syllables, Chinese words can select from only around 400. So some languages have smaller repertoires of sounds than others. English, for instance, uses around 44 different phonemes. Hawaiian uses just 1.2 (five vowels and seven consonants).
Different languages also have different written forms (see Chapter 11). Quechua was the language of the Incas, who flourished in the late fifteenth century. Although the language is still spoken today, mainly in Peru, the Incas themselves never developed a writing system. Records were kept in the form of knotted cords (called quipu) which represented numerical information such as records of census counts, goods in storage, and distances. The Aztecs, who flourished in Mexico between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, spoke Nahuatl, which is still spoken today in parts of Mexico. They used a pictographic script until the Spaniards introduced the Roman script as part of their conquest of the region. Pictographic sc
ripts are more primitive even than the hieroglyphic scripts that developed around 3500 BC. None the less, in Southern China, the Nakhi language still uses one. The majority of languages, though, use alphabetic scripts. Some of these alphabets, and the scripts they use (that is, the symbols they use to represent each phoneme), can be traced to the invention of a single person. The Armenian alphabet, for instance, was invented at the beginning of the fifth century by a missionary called Mesrop Mashtots. The Russian Cyrillic alphabet dates from the ninth Century, and was invented by a Greek missionary called Cyril and his brother!
One of the more recently invented scripts is used by speakers of Cherokee (an American Indian language). Cherokee has a syllabary, with one symbol for each of its 86 syllables. It was invented by an Indian called Sequoyah, who believed that an essential ingredient of the white man's power was his written language. In 1821, after several years' work, he `published' his syllabary. He borrowed many of the characters for his syllabary from English, but because he was unable to read English, they took on a completely different pronunciation-w is pronounced as /la/, z as /no/, and h as /ni/, for instance. So quick was its uptake amongst the Cherokee people that the first Cherokee newspaper appeared only a few years later.
Single-handedly developing, and `marketing', an entire writing system is certainly a quite extraordinary feat. Single-handedly saving an entire language from extinction is another.
The extinction of language
It is estimated that of the 5000 or so languages currently spoken, half will become extinct over the next 50 years. Many of these languages are spoken by only a handful of people, and as those people disappear, so will their languages.
Hebrew ceased as a spoken language over 2000 years ago. Its existence continued only through religious ritual and prayer. In the late nineteenth century, Eliezer ben Yehuda, a Lithuanian studying in Paris, dedicated himself to reviving Hebrew. He emigrated to Palestine, and recreated Hebrew as a language for contemporary use (he is credited with coining 4000 new words that were needed to bring the language back into what was by then the twentieth century). But Hebrew was a lucky language indeed. It was of such historical and religious interest that there was enormous support for ben Yehuda's work. No such luck for some of the North American Indian languages, or the Australian Aboriginal languages, or the hundreds of other languages around the world that are slowly being cleared to make way for the languages of television, film, books, and newspapers.
To lose a language is to lose an entire history. Much folklore is passed down through the generations by word of mouth only. When those mouths stop talking, that folklore is lost. Some Australian Aboriginal folklore has its roots, apparently, in events that happened at least 10 000 years ago, when Tasmania and the Australian landmass were still joined. There are folk memories of a time when the land that is now submerged was walked upon by the ancestors of today's aboriginal people. Lose a language, and you lose that past, and everything that its speakers' ancestors struggled to achieve.
Looking towards Babel: the final view
As adults, language is probably the most effortless thing we do. But understanding how we do language is as difficult as doing language is easy. The psycholinguistic ascent, which attempts to bring us closer to that understanding, is nowhere near as smooth, as effortless, or even as complete, as the ascent that each baby embarks on as they make their way to adult language use.
None the less, we have caught brief glimpses here of what the views would be like as we made that psycholinguistic ascent-from how babies learn something about their language before they are even born, to how adults derive meaning from the words they hear, or express meaning using the words they say.
A theme that has been common to the various stages of our psycholinguistic ascent has been that how we learn language underlies everything we do with language. Ultimately, language serves no other purpose than to convey meaning. And yet meaning is nothing more than the experience we have accumulated from infancy onwards. In order to understand what is going on, and why, in your brain or mine as we speak or listen, we need to understand how these brains of ours accumulate experience, how they encode it, how they react to it, and how they predict it. Meaning relies on what we have learned, and what we can predict from that learning.
If the meaning evoked by a sequence of words did not constitute, amongst other things, a prediction of what was likely to happen next, we would never look round when someone shouted `Look out!'. We would still touch the stove when told `It's hot'. We would be unable to conjure up, using words alone, images of things that were absent. And if we could not represent, within the neural structures of our brains, what was about to happen, we would be unable to encode what we were about to say-we would be unable to utter, one-by-one, the words that would express the meaning we wished to convey. So being able to encode what is about to happen, or might be about to happen, is an essential ingredient in the language recipe, not to mention the evolutionary recipe.
So, finally, what is language? In the end, there is just one view from Babel. Language, quite simply, is a window through which we can reach out and touch each other's minds. Anyone can reach through itregardless of race, regardless of belief. It is the most intimate act we can ever perform. We must be sure, always, to keep that window open.
Bibliography
For each chapter, references are provided to (1) general non-specialist reading covering similar topics; (2) academic articles and reviews describing the key findings discussed in the chapter; and (3) academic articles containing other material relevant to the chapter.
General reading for the non-specialist on language as a whole, as well as a selection of academic textbooks, are referred to under the first chapter.
Chapter 1: Looking towards Babel
General reading
Crystal, D. (1987). The Cambridge encyclopedia of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, G. A. (1991). The science of words. New York: Scientific American Library.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: The new science of language and mind. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.
Psycholinguistic textbooks
Caplan, D. (1992). Language: Structure, processing, and disorders. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Caron, J. (1992). An introduction to psycholinguistics. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Carroll, D.W. (1994). Psychology of language (2nd edn). Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole.
Harley, T. (1995). The psychology of language: From data to theory. Hove: Erlbaum (UK) Taylor & Francis.
Taylor, I., & Taylor, M. M. (1990). Psycholinguistics: Learning and using language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Chapter 2: Babies, birth, and language
General reading
Mehler, J., & Dupoux, E. (1994). What infants know: The new cognitive science of early development. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Key findings
Bertoncini, J., & Mehler, J. (1981). Syllables as units in infant speech perception. Infant Behaviour and Development, 4, 247-260.
DeCasper, A. J., Lecanuet, J.-P., Busnel, M. C., Grapier-Deferre, C., & Maugeais, R. (1994). Fetal reactions to recurrent maternal speech. Infant Behaviour and Development, 17, 159-164.
DeCasper, A. J., & Spence, M. J. (1986). Prenatal maternal speech influences newborns' perception of speech sounds. Infant Behaviour and Development, 9, 133-150.
Mehler, J., Jusczyk, P. W., Lambertz, G., Halsted, N., Bertoncini, J., & Amiel-Tison, C. (1988). A precursor of language acquisition in young infants. Cognition, 29, 143-178.
Other sources
Bertoncini, J., Bijelac-Babic, R., Jusczyk, P. W., Kennedy, L. J., & Mehler, J. (1988). An investigation of young infants' perceptual representations of speech sounds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 117, 21-33.
Cooper, R. P., & Aslin, R. N. (1989). The language environment of the young infant: Implications for early perceptual development. Canadian Journal of Psych
ology, 43, 247-265.
Goodman, J. C., & Nusbaum, H. C. (Eds.) (1994). The development of speech perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Jusczyk, P. W. (1985). The high-amplitude procedure as a methodological tool in speech perception research. In G. Gottlieb & N. A. Krasnegor (Eds.), Infant methodology, pp. 195-222. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Jusczyk, P. W. (1993). How word recognition may evolve from infant speech perception capacities. In G. T. M. Altmann & R. C. Shillcock (Eds.), Cognitive models of speech processing: The second Sperlonga workshop, pp. 27-55. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Jusczyk, P. W. (1997). The discovery of spoken language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Mehler, J., Dupoux, E., & Segui, J. (1990). Constraining models of lexical access: The onset of word recognition. In G. T. M. Altmann (Ed.), Cognitive models of speech processing, pp. 236-262. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.