All of these ideas had a lasting impact on the way we think about language evolution, and in some form they’re still taught in many classrooms today. They are explained, and caricatured, as the “bow-wow” theory of evolution. The theory goes like this: If you told a stranger on the street, “There’s a mad dog a block away,” these few words should be enough to save him from a possibly dangerous encounter. If you discovered the stranger spoke another language, your warning might take longer to convey, but you’d still try, and you’d probably be successful. Waving hands and rolling eyes might do it, and a natural flair for the dramatic would help. But to really sell the message, you should bark like a dog while jabbing your finger in the correct direction.
The ease with which humans produce and understand such signals when words don’t work—the combination of gesture and auditory mimicry—feels innate. Proponents of such a theory would argue that not only is it innate but it’s how we communicated before we had language and it was, in fact, crucial to the evolution of language.
Other general ideas about how language evolved that have been bandied about for ages—and, like the bow-wow theory, actually explain very little—include the “yo-he-ho” and “pooh-pooh” theories. “Yo-he-ho” stands for the rhythmic grunts and chanting of people working together, and according to the theory it is from such social cooperation that language arose. The “pooh-pooh” theory proposes that language originated in cries of emotion. (Perhaps it would more accurately be called the “ouch” theory of language evolution.)
Rousseau is a key representative of an important period in language evolution, standing at the brink of modern thought and theorizing. But his era was not the first in which men began to question where words came from. Several millennia before Rousseau was born, the Pharaoh Psammetichus believed that one single language must have been the source of all subsequent human languages. In search of that first tongue, the ancient Egyptian king isolated two babies in a mountain hut. He sent a shepherd to feed and clothe the children but forbade the man to speak to them.
It was thought that with no exposure to speech, the original human language would emerge from the children’s mouths as naturally as their hair would grow and their limbs would lengthen. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the children eventually uttered the word bekos, which is Phrygian for bread, which led Psammetichus to deduce that Phrygian was the first human language, even though it was not his own.
The quest for humanity’s mother tongue spans centuries and cultures. Seekers believed there once existed a “monolinguistic golden age.” Rediscovering the first ancient tongue was considered a way to re-create this time, a chance to attain perfect expression by conveying one’s thoughts and intentions without ambiguity.
The pharaoh’s test was repeated at least twice: The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, a soldier, diplomat, and scholar who was said to be fluent in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, and Greek, likewise confined two children to silence in the early Middle Ages. His subjects died before articulating a word. Two hundred years later, King James IV of Scotland imprisoned two Scottish children who in the end, apparently, “spak very guid Ebrew.”
The Church held for centuries that Hebrew was the first language, but scholars proposed many other contenders. In the fifteenth century, the architect and scholar John Webb argued for the supremacy of Chinese, claiming that the biblical Noah had washed up in China after the flood. Chinese remained a popular candidate for a few centuries, with Joseph Edkins writing in 1887 in The Evolution of the Chinese Language that it had to be the world’s primeval language simply because of its age. Noah Webster proposed in 1830 that the primordial language was Aramaic, another Semitic language and the native tongue of Jesus.
Inseparable from the notion of a single tongue that united all humanity is the idea that language is exclusively a property of human beings and one that originated with the source of all life. Before the Darwinian revolution, it was thought that there was no prehuman existence and no pre-linguistic human experience. Consequently the first acts or expressions of language were universally said to be divinely inspired. In other cultures and times, the Egyptians believed the god Thoth was the progenitor of language, while the Babylonians attributed it to Nabu. For the Hindus, Sarasvati, wife of Brahma (creator of the universe), gave language to humanity.
When Rousseau and his fellow thinkers imagined a world before words, they pictured an extended period of language genesis. Instead of being a magical property of humanity, language was something our species acquired over time. This new model of evolution shifted the focus from a perfect first language from which all varieties descended to language as undergoing a developmental stage that resembled the communication systems of other animals. Even though Rousseau is well known as a believer in the unbridgeable line between humans and the rest of creation, this shift left the sharp division between us and the rest of the animal world a little blurred.
Proposing the existence of more than one stage of language development immediately raises the issues of how and why people moved from one stage to the next. What forces drove us to speak in the first place? What passions shaped the way language was formed?
Although Darwin mentioned language very little in On the Origin of Species, the book is a keystone for every discussion about language evolution that has followed it. In fact, all debate about who we are and how we came to be on this planet can be divided into conversations that took place before publication of Origin and those that have taken place after it. Origin was printed six times during Darwin’s lifetime, and many times since. Not only did it introduce the concept of evolution (truly the most superlative-laden theory in science; Jared Diamond’s evaluation—“the most profound and powerful idea to have been conceived in the last two centuries”2—is typical), but it initiated the modern study of evolutionary biology. The flow of books published about Darwin every year seems endless.
Darwin focused more on language in The Descent of Man (1871) than in Origin. Language was not a conscious invention, he said, but “it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps.”3 At the same time, he noted, humans don’t speak unless they are taught to do so. Psammetichus’s experiment could never have worked, because language is “not a true instinct.”4
Darwin believed that language was half art, half instinct, and he made the case that using sound to express thoughts and be understood by others was not an activity unique to humans. He cited the examples of monkeys that uttered at least six different cries, of dogs that barked in four or five different tones, and of domesticated fowl that had “at least a dozen significant sounds.” He noted that parrots can sound exactly like humans and described a South American parrot that was the only living creature that could utter the words of an extinct tribe.5 Darwin included gesture and facial expressions under the rubric of language: “The movements of the features and gestures of monkeys are understood by us, and they partly understand ours.”6
He also considered animals’ abilities of comprehension and cognition. “As everyone knows,” he wrote, “dogs understand many words and sentences.” He likened them to small babies who comprehend a great deal of speech but can’t utter it themselves. Darwin quoted his fellow scholar Leslie Stephen: “A dog frames a general concept of cats or sheep, and knows the corresponding words as well as a philosopher [does].”7
Darwin also pointed out compelling parallels between human language and birdsong. All birds, like all humans, utter spontaneous cries of emotion that are very similar. And both also learn how to arrange sound in particular ways from their parents. “The instinctive tendency to acquire an art,” said Darwin, “is not peculiar to man.”8
Where humans differ from other animals, Darwin believed, is simply in our greater capacity to put together sounds with ideas, which is a function of our higher mental powers. What got us to that level was love, jealousy, triumph—sex. Before we used language as we know it today, we sang, producing “true musi
cal cadences” in courtship.
On the Origin of Species and, in more detail, The Descent of Man also discuss similarities in the way that languages, like animals, change over time. Just as species split off from one another to form new groups, languages split to form dialects and entirely new languages. From the common ancestor of all mammals, many different species arose, like the manatee, the horse, and the gorilla. Likewise, Latin branched over time to give rise to the modern Romance languages, including Italian, French, and Spanish.9
Darwin’s theory of language change was embraced most enthusiastically by scholars of language. Evolutionary theory turned out to be a perfect analogy for language phenomena that they had observed but were unable to account for in any systematic way. Linguists of the nineteenth century (known as philologists) are often described as having been overly preoccupied with their status as genuine scientists, and their newfound ability to explain language change in terms of biology and natural history gave them a greatly desired sense of credibility.
Biological evolution proved to be an excellent analogy for language change, and linguists took up the evolutionary analogy with such enthusiasm that they began to treat natural selection as a literal account of language change rather than as a helpful analogy, applying the idea of survival of the fittest to such phenomena as the ways that speech sounds change over long periods of time (how, for example, a distinct sound like f might become s). Ironically, linguists still regarded speculating on the origins of language to be an unscientific problem, and it remained controversial to adopt Darwin’s theory for that purpose. So while Darwin himself freely considered the origins of language, linguists did anything but.
The distaste for speculation about language origins culminated in an extraordinary move by the Société de Linguistique of Paris in the nineteenth century: it banned any discussion of the subject, even though it was attracting more and more attention. Its pronouncement read: “The Society will accept no communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language.”10 In 1872 the London Philological Society followed suit.
This act of academic censorship had remarkably long-reaching consequences. Despite the occasional flare of interest, language evolution was considered a disreputable pursuit for more than a century. In 1970 a meeting of the American Anthropological Association presented a number of papers on language evolution, many of which were later collected in the book Language Origins. Even then, a contributing anthropologist wrote that scholars who studied the subject did so either apologetically or with reluctance.11 In 1976 the New York Academy of Sciences collected another series of conference papers on the topic in a volume called Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech, and in 1988 proceedings from a NATO summer institute organized by Philip Lieberman were published. The volume was called Language Origin: A Multidisciplinary Approach.12 Yet despite the widespread interest that these collections suggest, the field remained marginal. This changed in the 1990s with the publication of one article about language evolution that drew together commentary from researchers with dramatically different ideas of what language is. Since then, tensions between the types of research, and researcher, have energized the topic, causing it to finally flourish.
1. Noam Chomsky
Housed in the modern, gabled, jarringly chrome, brick, and mustard yellow Stata Center at MIT is the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Noam Chomsky has had an office in the department for forty-five years. His room is full of shelves with books, five rubbery office plants, and a small table in the center facing a poster of Bertrand Russell. Under Russell’s looming face is the quotation: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” Across Chomsky’s desk stretch piles and piles of books and unbound manuscripts. They look like a small mountain range.
Prior to an office interview, Chomsky spoke at the 2005 Morris Symposium on the Evolution of Language at Stony Brook, New York. There, his speech seemed flat, almost without affect. He stood at a lectern and read directly from a paper, speaking in such low tones that it was sometimes hard to make out what he was saying. Today, in person, he accompanies his greeting with a puckish grin but is otherwise grave. He takes a seat at the table and sits very still, talking in such a forceful stream that it is virtually impossible to get a word in edgewise. The sense that he cares deeply about what he is saying is unmistakable and compelling.
Chomsky’s style of exposition in person is almost exactly the same as in his writings—he takes no prisoners. Depending on whether you disagree or agree with him, you will probably experience his manner as one of airless conviction or the just impatience of a man who knows the truth and is weary of waiting for others to get it. Debating him is a high-stakes venture—he shows little respect for the intelligence of those who don’t accept his views.
Chomsky has served as a geographical constant in the minds of generations of scientists and linguists since the early 1960s. It was as if, on the publication of his first book, he thumped down a flag and said, “This is the North Pole,” and the rest of the scientific world mapped itself accordingly.
Anyone who has studied language or the mind since then has had to engage at some level with Chomsky’s definition of language. Chomsky’s signature claim is that all humans share a “universal grammar,” otherwise known as UG, a set of rules that can generate the syntax of every human language. This means that apart from the difference in a few mental settings, English and Mohawk, for example, are essentially the same language. Traditionally researchers committed to Chomskyan linguistics believed that universal grammar exists in some part of our brain in a language organ that all humans possess but no other animals have. For Chomsky, syntactic structure is the core of human language, and a decades-long quest for the universal grammar—the linguistic holy grail—has shaped linguistics since he first presented his ideas.
Around the time of the Stony Brook conference, the British magazine Prospect published the results of a poll in which Chomsky was voted the world’s top intellectual. (He beat Umberto Eco, who took second place, and Richard Dawkins, in third.) Twenty thousand voters, mainly from Britain and the United States, had been canvassed, and a flurry of media about Chomsky had accompanied the poll’s announcement. Prospect published two articles about the world’s top intellectual: a “for” and an “against” Chomsky. On the “for” side Robin Blackburn wrote that Chomsky had transformed an entire field of inquiry and likened him to the child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. On the “against” side Oliver Kamm spoke of Chomsky’s “dubious arguments leavened with extravagant rhetoric.”1
This latest burst of attention is merely one of many. Chomsky has been famous in several worlds for a long time. Within the university there are apocryphal Chomsky stories. It’s said that graduate students would sometimes come to their meetings with him in pairs, so they could take turns, trying to keep up. His weekly seminars are legendary. Over the decades, they have been attended not just by MIT graduates but also by an ever-changing cast of unfamiliar students, whom none of the regulars knew. Time and again, so the story goes, the outsiders would try to beard the lion in his den, and Chomsky would swat them one by one. By now, it has to have become tiresome.
Until 2002, and in some ways even since then, Chomsky’s exact position on the evolution of language was hotly contested, but both sides in the debate would at least agree on this: for many years Chomsky deemed language evolution unworthy of investigation, and given the extraordinary nature of his influence, his pronouncement was as deadening as any formal ban. Now, he has decided, it is feasible to study the topic.
Before Chomsky, most linguists were field linguists, researchers who journeyed into uncharted territory and broke bread with the inhabitants. They had no dictionary or phrase book but learned the local language, working out how verbs connect with objects and subjects, and how all types of meaning are c
onveyed. They have always been seen as adventurers, but the soul of a field linguist is really that of a botanist. When they transcribe a language for the first time, they create a rigorous catalog of sounds, words, and parts of speech, called the grammar of the language. Once this is completed, they match one catalog to another—finding evidence of family relationships between languages. Grammar writers are meticulous and diligent, arranging and rearranging the specimens of language into a lucid system.2
In the early 1950s, Chomsky submitted a grammar of Hebrew for his master’s thesis at MIT. At the same time he was also at work on a huge manuscript titled The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, in which he wrote about grammar in the abstract.3 Instead of describing an actual language, Chomsky discussed the different ways that a language can be described. He submitted one chapter of this effort for his Ph.D. thesis, but it was so different from the way linguists typically thought and worked that many academics who read it didn’t really know what to do with it.4 In 1954 Morris Halle, an MIT professor famous for his work on the sounds of language, wrote to Roman Jakobson, another famous linguist: “I am very impressed with Noam’s ability as a linguist; he has a wonderful head on his shoulders, if only he did not want to do all things in the most difficult way possible.”5
With his next project Chomsky moved even further away from the concerns of his colleagues. After receiving his doctorate, he got a part-time job at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.6 He carried on with his work, taught linguistics, and, in order to make enough money, also taught German, French, philosophy, and logic. In 1957 Chomsky published the notes from his first linguistics course as Syntactic Structures.
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language Page 3