Authors: Bill Bryson
At all events, Neanderthal man was hopelessly outclassed. Not only did Homo sapiens engage in art of an astonishingly high qual-ity, but they evinced other cultural achievements of a compara-tively high order. They devised more specialized tools for a wider variety of tasks and they hunted in a far more systematic and cooperative way. Whereas the food debris of the Neanderthals shows a wide variety of animal bones, suggesting that they took whatever they could find, archaeological remnants from Homo sa piens show that they sought out particular kinds of game andtracked animals seasonally.All of this suggests that they possessed
a linguistic system sufficiently sophisticated to deal with concepts such as: "Today let's kill some red deer. You take some big sticks and drive the deer out of the woods and we'll stand by the riverbank with our spears and kill them as they come towards us."
By comparison Neanderthal speech may have been something more like: "I'm hungry. Let's hunt."
It may be no more than intriguing coincidence, but the area of Cro-Magnon's cave paintings is also the area containing Europe's oldest and most mysterious ethnic group, the Basques. Their lan-guage, called Euskara by its speakers, may be the last surviving remnant of the Neolithic languages spoken in Stone Age Europe and later displaced by Indo-European tongues. No one can say.
What is certain is that Basque was already old by the time the Celts came to the region. Today it is the native tongue of about 600,000
people in Spain and ,000
in France in an area around the Bay
of Biscay stretching roughly from Bilbao to Bayonne and inland over the Pyrenees to Pamplona. Its remoteness from Indo- European is indicated by its words for the numbers one to five:
bat,
bi,
hirur,
laur, bortz. Many
authorities believe there is simply no connection between Basque and any other known language.
One of the greatest mysteries of prehistory is how people in
THE MOTHER TONGUE
widely separated places suddenly and spontaneously developed the capacity for language at roughly the same time. It was
as
if people carried around in their heads ( genetic alarm clock that suddenly went off all around the world and led different groups in widely scattered places on every continent to create languages.
Even those who were cut off from the twenty or so great language families developed their own quite separate languages, such as the Dravidian languages of southern India and northern Sri Lanka, or the Luorawetlan languages of eastern Siberia, or the even stranger Ainu language spoken on the northern island of Hokkaido in Japan by people who have clear Caucasian racial characteristics and whose language has certain (doubtless coincidental) similarities with European languages. (For instance, their word for eighty is
"four twenties.") How they and their language came to be there is something no one knows. But then Japanese itself is a mystery.
Although its system of writing and some of its vocabulary have been taken from Chinese, it is otherwise quite unrelated to any other known language. The same is true of Korean.
Or perhaps not. There is increasing evidence to suggest that languages widely dispersed geographically may be more closely related than once thought. This is most arrestingly demonstrated by the three language families of the New World: Eskimo-Aleut, Amerind, and Na-Dene. It was long supposed that these groups were quite unrelated to any other Ian age families, including each other. But recent studies of cognate that is, words that have similar spellings and meanings in two or more languages, such
as
the French tu, the English
thou,
and the -Hittite
tuk, all meaning
"you"—have found possible links between some of those most un-likely language partners: for instance, between Basque and Na- Dene, an Indian language spoken mainly in the northwest United States and Canada, and between Finnish and Eskimo-Aleut. No one has come up with a remotely plausible explanation of how a language spoken only in a remote corner of the Pyrenees could have come to influence Indian languages of the New World, but the links between many cognates are too numerous to explain in terms of simple coincidence. Some cognates may even be universal. The word for dog for instance, is supsiciously similar in Am-
24
THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE
erind, Uralic, and Proto-Indo-European, while the root form "tik,"
signifying a finger or the number one, is found
on every continent .
-As Merrit Ruhlen noted in
Natural History magazine
[March 1987]:
"The significant number of such global cognates leads some lin-guists to conclude that all the world's languages ultimately belong to a single language family."
There are any number of theories to account for how language began. The theories have names that seem almost to be begging ridicule—the Bow-Wow theory, the Ding-Dong theory, the Pooh- Pooh theory, the Yo-He-Ho theory—and they are generally based in one way or another on the supposition that languages come ultimately from sp
o
ntaneous utterances of al
arm, joy, pain, and so
on, or that they are somehow imitative , onomatopoeic of sounds in the real world. Thus, for instance, the Welsh word f
hw
or owl,
gwdi-
pronounced "goody-hoo," may mimic the sound an owl makes.
There is, to be sure, a slight tendency to have words cluster around certain sounds. In English we have a large number of
sp-
words pertaining to wetness: spray,
splash, spit, sprinkle, splatter,
spatter, spill, spigot.
And we have a large number of fl- words to do with movement: flail,
flap, flicker, flounce, flee.
And quite a num-ber of words ending in
-ash
describe abrupt actions:
flash, dash,
crash, bash, thrash, smash, slash.
Onomatopoeia does play a part in language formation, but whether it or any other feature alone can accounts for how languages are formed is highly doubtful.
It is intriguing to see how other languages hear certain sounds—and how much better their onomatopoeic words often are. Dogs go oua-oua in France,
bu-bu in
Italy, mung-mung in Korea,
wan-wan
in Japan; a
purring cat goes ron-ron in France, schnurr in Ger-many; a bottle being emptied goes
gloup-gloup in
China,
tot-tot-to
in Spain; a heartbeat is
doogan-doogan in
Korea,
doki-doki in Ja-
pan;
bells go
bimbam in
Germany,
dindan in
Spain. The Spanish word for whisper is susurrar. How could it be anything else?
Much of what we know, or think we know, about the roots of language comes from
watching children learn to speak. For a long
time it was believed that language was simply learned. Just
as we
learn, say, the names and locations of the fifty states or our mul-tiplication tables, so we must learn the "rules" of speech—that we 7 25
THE MOTHER TONGUE
don't say "house white is the," but rather "the house is white." The presumption was that our minds at birth were blanlk slates onto which the rules and quirks of our native languages were written.
But then other authorities, notably Noam Chomsky of the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology, began to challenge this view, arguing that some structural facets of language—the
ground rules
of speech,
speech, if you like—must be innate. That isn't to suggest that you would have learned English spontaneously had you been brought up among wolves. But perhaps you are born with an in-stinctive sense of how language works, as a general thing. There are a number of reasons to suppose so. For one thing, we appear to have an innate appreciation of language. By the end of the first month of life infants show a clear preference for speechlike sounds over all others. It doesn't matter what language it is. To a baby no language is easier or more difficult than any other. They are all mastered at about the same pace, however irregular and wildly inflected they may be. In short, children seem to be programmed to learn language, just
as
they seem to be programmed to learn to walk. The process has been called basic child grammar. Indeed, children in the first five years of life have such a remarkable facility for language that they can effortlessly learn two structurally quite different languages simultaneously—if, for instance, their mother is Chinese and their father American—without displaying the slightest signs of stress or confusion.
Moreover, all children everywhere learn languages in much the same way: starting with simple labels ("Me"), advancing to subject-verb structures ("Me want"), before progressing to subject-verb-emphatics ("Me want now"), and so on. They even babble in the same way.
A
study at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Baltimore
[reported in
Scientific American
in January 1984] found that chil-dren from such diverse backgrounds as Arabic, English, Chinese, Spanish, and Norwegian all began babbling in a systematic way, making the same sounds at about the same time (four to six months before the start of saying their first words).
The semantic and grammatical idiosyncrasies that distinguish one language from another—inflections of tense, the use of gender, and so on—are the things that are generally learned last, after the
THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE
child already has a functioning command of the language. Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost al-ways learn to say no before yes and in before on and all children
-everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fas-cinated with the idea of " gone" and "all gone."
The traditional explanation is that all of this is learned at your mother's knee. Yet careful examination suggests that that is un-likely. Most adults tend (even when they are not aware of it) to speak to infants in a simplified, gitchy-goo kind of way. This is not a sensible or efficient way to teach a child the difference between, say, present tense and past tense, and yet the child learns it.
Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying "buyed," "eated," and "good - because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.
Where vocabulary is concerned, children are very reliant on their mothers (or whoever else has the role of primary carer). If she says a word, then the child generally listens and tries to repeat it.
But where grammar is concerned, children go their own way.
According to one study [by Kenneth Wexler and colleagues at the University of California at Irvine, cited by
The Economist,
April 28, 1984], two thirds of utterances made by mothers to their infants are either imperatives or questions, and only one third are state-ments, yet the utterances of children are overwhelmingly state-ments. Clearly they don't require the same repetitive teaching because they are already a step ahead where syntax is concerned.
Some of the most interesting theories about language develop-ment in recent years have been put forward by Derek Bickerton, an English-born professor at the University of Hawaii, who noticed that creole languages all over the world bear certain remarkable similarities. First, it is important to understand the difference be-tween pidgins and creoles. Pidgins (the word is thought to be a Chinese rendering of the English word
business)
are rudimentary languages formed when people from diverse backgrounds are thrown together by circumstance. Historically, they have tended
THE MOTHER TONGUE
to arise on isolated plantation-based islands which have been ruled by a dominant Western minority but where the laborers come from a mixed linguistic background. Pidgins are almost always very basic and their structure varies considerably from place to place—and indeed from person to person. They are essentially little more than the language you or I would speak if we found ourselves suddenly deposited in some place like Bulgaria or Azerbaijan. They are makeshift tongues and as a result they seldom last long.
When children are born into a pidgin community, one of two things will happen. Either the children will learn the language of the ruling class,
as
was almost always the case with African slaves in the American South, or they will develop a creole (from French
creole, "native").
Most of the languages that people think of as pidgins are in fact creoles. To the uninitiated they can seem prim-itive, even comical. In Neo-Melanesian, an English-based creole of Papua New Guinea, the word for beard is
Bras belong fes
(literally
"grass that belongs to the face") and the word for a vein or artery is rop
belong blut
("rope that belongs to the blood"). In African creoles you can find such arresting expressions as
bak sit drayva
("back seat driver"),
wesmata
("what's the matter?"), and
bottom-
bottom wata waka
("submarine"). In Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, stomach gas
is bad briz,
while to pass
gas
is to
pul bad briz.
Feel free to smile. But it would be a mistake to consider these languages substandard because of their curious vocabularies. They are
as
formalized, efficient, and expressive as any other language—and often more so. As Bickerton notes, most creoles can express sub-tleties of action not available in English. For instance, in English we are not very good at distinguishing desire from accomplishment in the past tense. In the sentence "I went to the store to buy a shirt" we cannot tell whether, the shirt was bought or not. But in all creoles such ambiguity is impossible. In Hawaiian creole the per-son who bought a shirt would say, bin go store go buy_ shirt while the person who failed to buy a shirt would say, "I bin go store for buy shirt." The distinction is crucial.
So creoles are not in any way inferior. In
fact, it is worth re-membering that many full-fledged languages -- the Afrikaans of 28