The Mother Tongue (4 page)

THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE

South Africa, the Chinese of Macao, and the Swahili of east Africa—were originally creoles.

In studying creoles, Bickerton noticed that they are very similar in structure to the language of children between the ages of two and four. At that age, children are prone to make certain basic errors in their speech, such as using double negatives and experi-encing confusion with irregular plurals so that they say "feets" and

"sheeps." At the same time, certain fairly complicated aspects of grammar, which we might reasonably expect to befuddle children, cause them no trouble at all. One is the ability to distinguish between stative and nonstative verbs with a present participle.

Without getting too technical about it, this means that with certain types of verbs we use a present participle to create sentences like

"I am going for a walk" but with other verbs we dispense with the present participle, which is why we say "I like you" and not "I am liking you." Very probably you have never thought about this be-fore. The reason you have never thought about it is that it is seemingly instinctive. Most children have mastered the distinction between stative and nonstative verbs by the age of two and are never troubled by it again. Intriguingly, all creole languages make precisely the same distinction.

Al of would seem to suggest that certain properties of lan-guage are innate. Moreover, as we have seen, it appears that the earth's languages may be more closely related than once thought.

The links between languages—between, say, German
bruder,
En-glish
brother,
Gaelic
bhrathair,
Sanskrit
bhrata,
and Persian biradar—seem self-evident to us today but it hasn't always been so. The science of historical linguistics, like so much else, owes its beginnibgs to the work of an amateur enthusiast, in this case to an Englishman named Sir William Jones.

Dispatched to India as a judge in 1783, Jones whiled away his evenings by teaching himself Sanskrit. On the face of it, this was an odd and impractical thing to do since Sanskrit was a dead language and had been for many centuries. That so much of it survived at all was in large part due to the efforts of priests who memorized its sacred hymns, the Vedas, and passed them on from one generation
THE MOTHER TONGUE

to the next for hundreds of years even though the words had no meaning for them. These texts represent some of the oldest writ-any Indo-European language

. Jones, noticed many striking

similarities between Sanskrit and European languages the San-skrit wordforinstance, was
bhurja.
The Sanskrit for king,.
raja,
is close to the Latin rex. The Sanskrit for ten,
dasa,
is reminiscent of the Latin decem and so on. All of these clearly suggeste a common historical parentage. Jones l00ked at other languages and discovere rt er simi arities. In a landmark speech to the Asiatick Society in Calcutta he proposed that many of the•

classical languages—among them Sanskrit, Greek Latin, Gothic,

"Celtic, and Persian—must spring
from
the same source. This was a bold assertions since nothing in recorded history would encourage such a conclusion, and it excited great interest among scholars all over Europe. The next centu saw a feverish effort to track down

'the parent language, Indo-European
as
it was soon called. Scores of people became involved, including noted scholars such as the Germans Friedrich von Schlegel and Jacob Grimm (yes, he of the fairy tales, though philology was his first love) and the splendidly named Franz Bopp. But, once again, some of the most important breakthroughs were the work of inspired amateurs, among them Henry Rawlinson, an official with the British East India Company, who deciphered ancient Persian more or less single-handed, and, somewhat later, Michael Ventris, an English architect who deci-phered the famously difficult Linear B script of ancient Minoa, which had flummoxed generations of academics.

These achievements are all the more remarkable when you con-sider that often they were made using the merest fragments—of ancient Thracian, an important language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle Ages, we have just twenty-five words—and in the face of remarkable indifference on the part of the ancient Greeks and Romans, neither of whom ever bothered to note the details of a single other language. The Romans even al-lowed ETruscan that had greatly contributed to their

own, to be lost, so that today Etruscan writings remain tantaliz-ingly untranslated .

Nor can we read any Indo-European writings, for the simple

THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE

THE MOTHER TONGUE

THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE

nation state, so they were easily divided and conquered. Even now the various branches of Celtic are not always mutually comprehen-sible. Celtic speakers in Scotland, for instance, cannot understand the Celtic speakers of Wales a hundred miles to the south. Today Celtic survives in scattered outposts along the westernmost fringes of Europe—on the bleak Hebridean Islands and coastal areas of Scotland, in shrinking pockets of Galway, Mayo, Kerry, and Done-gal in Ireland, in mostly remote areas of Wales, and on the Brittany peninsula of northwest France. Everywhere it is a story of inexo-rable decline. At the turn of the century Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia had 10o,000 Gaelic speakers—most of them driven there by the forced clearances of the Scottish Highlands—but now Gaelic is extinct there
as a means
of daily discourse.

Latin,
in direct contrast,didn't so much decline as evolve. It became the Romance anguages. I is not too much to say that French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian (as well as a dozen or so minor languages/dialects like Provençal and Catalan) are essentially modern versions of Latin. If we must fix a date for when Latin stopped being Latin and instead became these other

.languages, 8

13 is a convenient milestone. It was then that

Charlemagne ordered that sermons throughout his realm be deliverd in the "lingua romana rustica" and not the customary "lin-gua Latina." But of course you cannot draw a line and say that the language was Latin on this side and Italian or French on that. As late as the thirteenth century, Dante was still regarding his own Florentine tongue
as
Latin. And indeed it is still possible to con-struct long passages of modern Italian that are identical to ancient
Latin.

The Romance languages are not the outgrowths of the elegant, measured prose of Cicero, but rather the language of the streets.

and of the common person, the Latin vulgate. The word for horse in literary Latin was
equus,
but to the man in the street it was
caballus,
and it was from this that we get the French
cheval,
the Spanish
caballo,
and the Italian
cavallo.
Similarly, the classical term for head was
caput
(from which we get
capital
and
per cap-
ita),
but the street term was
testa, a
kind of pot, from which comes the French
la tete
and the Italian
la testa
(though the Italians also
THE MOTHER TONGUE

use
il capo).
Cat in classical Latin was
feles
(whence
feline),
but in the vulgate it was
cattus.
Our word salary comes literally from the vulgar Latin
salarium,
"salt money"—the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy. By the same process the classical
pugna
(from which we much later took
pugnacious)
was replaced by the slangy
battualia
(from which we get
battle),
and the classical
urbs,
meaning "city" (from which we get
urban),
was superseded by
villa
(from which the French get their name for a city,
Mlle,
and we take the name for a place in the country).

The grammar of the vulgate also became simplified as Latin spread across the known world and was adopted by people from varying speech backgrounds. In Classical Lati

word endings

constantly changing to reflect syntax: A speaker could distinguish between, say, "in the house" and "to the house" by varying the ending on house. But gradually people decided that it was simpler to leave house uninflected and put
ad
in front of it for "to," in for

"in," and so on through all the prepositions, by this means the

case endings disappeared. An almost identical process happened with English later.

Romanians often claim to have the language that most closely resembles ancient Latin. But in fact, according to Mario Pei, if you wish to hear what ancient Latin sounded like, you should listen to Lugudorese, an Italic dialect spoken in central Sardinia, which in many respects is unchanged from the Latin of 1,500 years ago.

Many scholars believe that classical Latin was spoken by almost*

no one—that it was used exclusively as a lite rary and scholarly _

language. Certainly such evidence as we have of everyday writing—graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, for example—suggests that classical Latin was effectively a dead language as far as com mon discourse was concerned long before Rome fell. And, as we shall see, it was that momentous event—the fall of Rome—that helped to usher in our own tongue .

3.

OSLO AL LANGUAGE

*ALL

LANGUAGES

HAVE

THE

SAME

purpose—to communicate thoughts—and yet they achieve this sin-gle aim in a multiplicity of ways. It appears there is no feature of grammar or syntax that is indispensable or universal. The ways of dealing with matters of number, tense, case, gender, and the like are wondrously various from one tongue to the next. Many lan-guages manage without quite basic grammatical or lexical features, while others burden themselves with remarkable complexities. A Welsh speaker must choose between five ways of saying
than: na,
n', nag, mwy,
or yn
fwy.
Finnish has fifteen case forms, so every noun varies depending on whether it is nominative, accusative, allative, inessive, comitative, or one of ten other grammatical con-ditions. Imagine learning fifteen ways of spelling
cat, dog, house,
and so on. English, by contrast, has abandoned case forms, except for possessives, where we generally add
's,
and with personal pro-nouns which can vary by no more than three ways (e.g.,
they,
their, them),
but often by only two
(you, your).
Similarly, in En-glish
ride has
just five forms
(ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden);
the same verb in German has sixteen. In Russian, nouns can have up to twelve inflections and adjectives as many as sixteen. In English adjectives have just one invariable form with but, I believe, one exception:
blond/blonde.

*Sometimes languages fail to acquire what may seem to us quite basic terms. The Romans had no word for gray. To them it was another shade of dark blue or dark green. Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of
yes
or
no.
They must resort to roundabout expres-sions such as "I think not" and "This is so." Italians cannot distin-
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guish between a niece and a granddaughter or between a nephew and a grandson. The Japanese have no definite or indefinite articles corresponding to the English
a, an,
or
the,
and they do not dis-tinguish between singular and plural as we do with, say,
ball/balls
and
child/children
or as the French do with
chateau/chateaux.
This may seem strange until you reflect that we don't make a distinction with a lot of words—sheep,
deer, trout, Swiss, scissors—and
it scarcely ever causes us trouble. We could probably well get by without it for all words. But it is harder to make a case for the absence in Japanese of a future tense. To them
Tokyo e
yukimasu means both
"I
go to Tokyo" and "I will go to Tokyo." To understand which sense is intended, you need to know the context. This lack of explicitness is a feature of Japanese—even to the point that they seldom use personal pronouns like me, my, and
yours.
Such words exist, but the Japanese employ them so sparingly that they might as well not have them. Over half of all Japanese sentences have no subject. They dislike giving a straightforward yes or no. It is no wonder that they are so often called inscrutable.