The Mother Tongue Read online

  In other languages, questions of familiarity can become even more agonizing. A Korean has to choose between one of six verb suffixes to accord with the status of the person addressed. A speaker of Japanese must equally wend his way through a series of linguistic levels appropriate to the social position of the participants. When he says thank you he must choose between a range of meanings running from the perfunctory arigato (“thanks”) to the decidedly more humble makotoni go shinsetsu de gozaimasu, which means “what you have done or proposed to do is a truly and genuinely kind and generous deed.” Above all, English is mercifully free of gender. Anyone who spent much of his or her adolescence miserably trying to remember whether it is “la plume” or “le plume” will appreciate just what a pointless burden masculine and feminine nouns are to any language. In this regard English is a godsend to students everywhere. Not only have we discarded problems of gender with definite and indefinite articles, we have often discarded the articles themselves. We say in English, “It’s time to go to bed,” where in most other European languages they must say, “It’s the time to go to the bed.” We possess countless examples of pithy phrases—“life is short,” “between heaven and earth,” “to go to work”—which in other languages require articles.

  English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages. German is full of jaw-crunching words like Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company), Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee), and Kriegsgefangenenentschädigungsgesetz (a law pertaining to war reparations), while in Holland companies commonly have names of forty letters or more, such as Douwe Egberts Koninlijke Tabaksfabriek-Koffiebranderijen-Theehandal Naamloze Vennootschap (literally Douwe Egberts Royal Tobacco Factory-Coffee Roasters-Tea Traders Incorporated; they must use fold-out business cards). English, in happy contrast, favors crisp truncations: IBM, laser, NATO. Against this, however, there is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon. At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.” That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

  But perhaps the single most notable characteristic of English—for better and worse—is its deceptive complexity. Nothing in English is ever quite what it seems. Take the simple word what. We use it every day—indeed, every few sentences. But imagine trying to explain to a foreigner what what means. It takes the Oxford English Dictionary five pages and almost 15,000 words to manage the task. As native speakers, we seldom stop to think just how complicated and illogical English is. Every day we use countless words and expressions without thinking about them—often without having the faintest idea what they really describe or signify. What, for instance, is the hem in hem and haw, the shrift in short shrift, the fell in one fell swoop? When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm that you are over, and what exactly does it look like? And why, come to that, can we be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not semiwhelmed or—if our feelings are less pronounced—just whelmed? Why do we say colonel as if it had an r in it? Why do we spell four with a u and forty without?

  Answering these and other such questions is the main purpose of this book. But we start with perhaps the most enduring and mysterious question of all: Where does language come from in the first place?

  2.

  The Dawn of Language

  We have not the faintest idea whether the first words spoken were uttered 20,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago. What is certain is that mankind did little except procreate and survive for 100,000 generations. (For purposes of comparison, only about eighty generations separate us from Christ.) Then suddenly, about 30,000 years ago, there burst forth an enormous creative and cooperative effort which led to the cave paintings at Lascaux, the development of improved, lightweight tools, the control of fire, and many other cooperative arrangements. It is unlikely that any of this could have been achieved without a fairly sophisticated system of language.

  In 1857, an archaeologist examining a cave in the Neander Valley of Germany near Düsseldorf found part of an ancient human skull of a type never before encountered. The skull was from a person belonging to a race of people who ranged across Europe, the Near East, and parts of northern Africa during the long period between 30,000 and 150,000 years ago. Neanderthal man (or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) was very different from modern man. He was short, only about five feet tall, stocky, with a small forehead and heavyset features. Despite his distinctly dim-witted appearance, he possessed a larger brain than modern man (though not necessarily a more efficient one). Neanderthal man was unique. So far as can be told no one like him existed before or since. He wore clothes, shaped tools, engaged in communal activities. He buried his dead and marked the graves with stones, which suggests that he may have dealt in some form of religious ritual, and he looked after infirm members of his tribe or family. He also very probably engaged in small wars. All of this would suggest the power of speech.

  About 30,000 years ago Neanderthal man disappeared, displaced by Homo sapiens sapiens, a taller, slimmer, altogether more agile and handsome—at least to our eyes—race of people who arose in Africa 100,000 years ago, spread to the Near East, and then were drawn to Europe by the retreating ice sheets of the last great ice age. These are the Cro-Magnon people who were responsible for the famous cave paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain—the earliest signs of civilization in Europe, the work of the world’s first artists. Although this was an immensely long time ago—some 20,000 years before the domestication of animals and the rise of farming—these Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: They had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man’s larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

  Other mammals have no contact between their airways and esophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn’t in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months—curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot.

  According to studies conducted by Philip Lieberman at Brown University, Neanderthal man was physiologically precluded from uttering certain basic sounds such as the /ē/ sound of bee or the /oo/ sound of boot. His speech, if it existed at all, would have been nasal-sounding and fairly imprecise—and that would no doubt have greatly impeded his development.

  It was long supposed that Neanderthal man was absorbed by the more advanced Homo sapiens. But recent evidence indicates that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in the Near East for 30,000 years without interbreeding—strong evidence that the Neanderthals must have been a different species. It is interesting to speculate what would have become of these people had they survived. Would we have used them for slaves? For sport? Who can say?

  At all events, Neanderthal man was hopelessly outclassed. Not only did Homo sapiens engage in art of an astonishingly high quality, but they evinced other cultural achievements of a comparatively 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 the
y could find, archaeological remnants from Homo sapiens show that they sought out particular kinds of game and tracked animals seasonally. All of this strongly 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 toward us.” By comparison Neanderthal speech may have been something more like: “I’m hungry. Let’s hunt.”

  It may be no more than an 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 language, 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 100,000 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 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 a 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 language families, including each other. But recent studies of cognates—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 unlikely 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 suspiciously similar in Amerind, 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 linguists 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 spontaneous utterances of alarm, joy, pain, and so on, or that they are somehow imitative (onomatopoeic) of sounds in the real world. Thus, for instance, the Welsh word for owl, gwdihŵ, pronounced “good-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 number 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 account 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 ouâ-ouâ in France, bu-bu in Italy, mung-mung in Korea, wan-wan in Japan; a purring cat goes ron-ron in France, schnurr in Germany; a bottle being emptied goes gloup-gloup in China, tot-tot-to in Spain; a heartbeat is doogan-doogan in Korea, doki-doki in Japan; 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 multiplication tables, so we must learn the “rules” of speech—that we don’t say “house white is the,” but rather “the house is white.” The presumption was that our minds at birth were blank slates onto which the rules and quirks of our native languages were written. But then other authorities, notably Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began to challenge this view, arguing that some structural facets of language—the ground rules of 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 instinctive 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 children 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 child already has a functioning command of the language. Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all chi
ldren everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated 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 unlikely. 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 “goed” 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 caregiver). 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 statements, yet the utterances of children are overwhelmingly statements. Clearly they don’t require the same repetitive teaching because they are already a step ahead where syntax is concerned.