The Kingdom of Speech

I just read a strange book on linguistics called The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe, published August 2016. I don't recall buying it, it must have been a $1 Kindle special or something.

I describe it as strange for several reasons. Wolfe's writing style is cynical, even flippant. His writing reminds me of one of the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series, "Plunges into History" (2001). For example in describing Charles Darwin's response to the letter from Alfred Wallace (in which Wallace introduces his "survival of the fittest" theory of the origin of species which Darwin had been musing about for 20 years but never published or even written down) as "freaking out" (Wolfe does apologize for the anachronism).

Wolfe frequently wanders off in tangents. He "surfed and Safaried and finally moused upon..." an academic from Rice University upon which he wonders for half a page on how the Rice football team is doing and wanders from there to a discussion on concussions in the NHL.

The whole point of the long chapter on Darwin and Wallace seems to be merely to introduce the concept of the "flycatcher", a rather derogatory term for science field men, as opposed to the wealthy Gentleman Scientists like Darwin and Sir Charles Lyell. Because Wallace was considered a mere flycatcher, Wolfe argues, he was not given due recognition for his insights.

Wolfe next attacks Noam Chomsky, undoubtedly the most influential linguist of the 20th century. Chomsky's biggest asset, according to Wolfe, is his charisma. He compares him to Joseph Smith of the Mormons, the Buddha, Ron Hubbard and several other leaders of religious cults, and then for his youthful success to Joan of Arc, Alexander the Great and Napoleon. Chomsky and his followers deplore fieldwork, becoming "air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts."

Wolfe's biggest problems with Chomsky, other than his unprecedented domination of a field of study, was two of his theories - the Language Organ and Universal Grammar. The language organ theory developed and promoted by Chomsky argues that humans are born with a built in ability for language complete with what he called a "Universal Grammar" - basic syntax and structure, and the 6,000+ languages spoken around the world are mere variations of this. One of these structures is recursion, the ability to put thoughts inside of thoughts inside of thoughts. I use recursion in my own writing a lot (probably too much?) and have done so long before I even knew there was a name for it. Recursion, according to Chomsky (according to Wolfe), is what separates language from communication among other animals.

Wolfe also criticizes Chomsky for his political writings and activism, but that seems to me to be irrelevant to the case at hand. I have a copy of Chomsky's short book "9-11" on American foreign policy that makes sense to me.

The flycatcher term reappears in the chapter on Dan Everett and his 30 year study of the Piraha, a small tribe deep in the Amazon jungle. The Piraha have a very simple culture and a correspondingly simple language. Their only significant artifacts are bows and arrows. Their housing is little more than temporary shelters of branches and leaves. They have no leader, no class structure, no religion, no music. Their language likewise is simple - they use only 3 vowels and 8 consonants. They have no words for yesterday or tomorrow (only "today" and "other day") so have no concept of history or future. There is in fact only one tense, the present. They have no names for colors. They have no names for numbers, not even one and two, just a vague concept of a little and a lot. The simplicity of the language however does not make it easy to learn, and is described by Everett (the only outsider to become fluent in the language) as the most difficult language in the world with "highly esoteric constructions in grammar, including meaningful glottal stops and shifts in tone, plus a version consisting solely of bird sounds and whistles...to fool their prey while out hunting." However one thing the Piraha language did not have is recursions. Every sentence is simple and straightforward. Everett believed he was experiencing a civilization preserved virtually unchanged for thousands of years and that the Piraha represented an early stage of human culture and language.

Everett published an article in Current Anthropology August-October 2005 describing the Piraha and arguing that, contrary to Chomskyan theory, the Piraha's grammar comes from their culture, not from any preexisting mental template. In 2008 Everett published a book aimed at the public about the Piraha which he called "Don't Sleep - There Are Snakes". The title comes from the Piraha's typical "good-night" greeting. (It's on my wish list!)

The Current Anthropology article, according to Wolfe, struck the Chomsky universal grammar with a "OOOF!--right into the solar plexus!...". Wolfe explicitly compares Everett with Wallace: "Everett struck them as a born-again Alfred Russel Wallace, the clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers."

Everett was immediately attacked by Chomsky's minions (my word - I'm surprised Wolfe didn't think of it) and accused him among other things of being a shameless liar and making claims no one will bother to check. Everett one-upped this claim by inviting a New Yorker magazine writer John Colapinto and linguist W. Tecumseh Fitch to visit the Piraha and see for themselves. Colapinto's story, published in April 2007, became instantly popular and Wolfe imagines Chomsky fuming

"...the New Yorker called him Dan, not Daniel L. Everett...in the magazine's eyes he was an instant folk hero...Little Dan standing up to daunting Dictator Chomsky."

Another thing that sticks out in Wolfe's book is his thumbing his nose at what he considers "political correctness". In referring to the various groups being studied by linguistic field workers he writes "...among more breeds of na--er...indigenous peoples..." He must have thought this joke rather clever and funny for he repeats it five or six times throughout the book. Another time he refers to "the Inuit (the new "politically correct" name for Eskimos) at the North Pole...". To me, all Wolfe is doing here is proudly displaying his own ignorance.

Wolfe then goes on to relate several incidences from Everett's book: rushing his wife Keren who was dying of fever to a hospital upriver; and warding off an attack of Piraha men under the influence of cachaca, the local alcoholic beverage. To what purpose? I can only assume to make his readers want to read Everett's book. It adds nothing to the theme of his own book that I can see.

In the final chapter  Wolfe rambles on about the various directions that linguistics are moving in but ends with Everett's theory that language is a cultural tool, an artifact if you will, that man has made himself to represent things. Language is the ultimate form of mnemonics. Wolfe ends with his own personal revelation that speech was the first artifact and was essential for the creation of all the rest that have followed.

If you are still with me here, I'm going to share my own inexpert opinions on the theories discussed in this book.

Universal Grammar and the Language Organ - I believe there is something to this but it's not as hard wired as some portray it. The human brain is wired to learn language at an early age but the lexicon (list of words) and grammar that they learn varies considerably among the 6,000+ languages still spoken today. Words and grammar are artifacts in that they have been created by the people who spoke the language before, and are slowly changed, in ways fairly well understood, by the people who are speaking them now. But language itself is not an artifact. We are not all born with the ability to make pottery or weave textiles - we have to learn those and not everyone does. But everyone learns a language. We will never know, but it is possible and quite likely that all languages have a common ancestor.

The Piraha - From what we know of human migration, the ancestors of peoples in the Amazon jungle came from Asia some time in the last 10-20 thousand years. These ancestors had a well developed culture and language. I believe the simplicity of the Piraha culture and language is an example of regression rather than an early stage of development. For whatever reasons - isolation, catastrophic loss of elders, etc, they lost much of their ancestors' culture and language. Like fish who live in dark caves lose their sight. They didn't need to count so lost the ability to do so. Every day is much the same so no need to remember history or plan for the future. Interestingly the only artifact they retained is the bow and arrows, a rather sophisticated hunting tool important for survival. Had this culture been discovered in the Kalahari in a branch of the San people, there would be a stronger argument for this being a truly primitive (early stage of development) example of culture and language, but even then I believe regression would have played a significant role.

Other than display his gross ignorance, Tom Wolfe accomplished little in the writing of this book. He did generate some discussion on the topic, which I suppose always does some good. He makes a few valid points - that the domination of a field of study by an individual stifles progress; that Wallace didn't get the recognition he deserved; and that field workers are as important as office theorizers in advancing knowledge.

There are many critiques of this book. I wrote this before reading any of them to provide my own unbiased impressions. If you would like to see what other, more knowledgeable writers have to say, you can find some links here:
The Kingdom of Speech [Wikipedia]
The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe - a bonfire of facts reeking of vanity [Book of the Day]
Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech Takes Aim at Darwin and Chomsky [New York Times]
His white suit unsullied by research Tom Wolfe tries to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. [by Jerry Coyne, Washington Post]

The Simplification of English – Stage 1, Proto-Germanic

While our children were in high school we hosted several European exchange students in our home for whom English was a second, third, or even fourth language. I was surprised when they told me that they considered English an easy language to learn, or at least less complicated than their own (French, Polish, German and Hungarian). What they meant by this was the lack of gender for most nouns and the simplified verb forms, not our beloved illogical English spelling.

John McWhorter, in “Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage” (The Great Courses), explains two quite different stages in the development of English where simplification occurred. The first occurred at the Proto-Germanic stage and therefore affected all the Germanic languages. The second occurred between Old and Middle English. In this post I’ll explore the first.

Compared to the other branches of Indo-European (e.g. Latin, Greek, Celtic, Persian, Sanskrit and Slavic), Proto-Germanic is different in several striking ways. One was the shift in consonants which is known as Grimm’s Law (discussed in an earlier post) where “p” becomes “f”, “k” becomes “h” etc. Another was a significant loss of complexity of verb forms. Where other IE language families have different verb forms for I, we (you & I), we (you, I & others), you (singular), you (plural) and they, PG had only one “we” and had the same verb form for “we”, “you all” and “they”. Verb tenses were also simplified to four (present, past, subjunctive and passive) from six in Indo-European. There were also some internal vowel changes in verb tenses introduced to Proto-Germanic (which I don’t understand so won’t attempt to explain here). Then there is vocabulary – many Germanic words were borrowed early on from the neighboring Indo-European languages of Roman and Celtic, but up to a third of Germanic roots are believed to be of non-Indo-European source.  What was going on here?

This type of language change (significant simplification) is not the normal pattern. In fact it is only seen when a language is learned by a group as adults. Who could these adults be?

First keep in mind that nearly all of the wide distribution of Indo-European languages is the result of imposition of the language on existing inhabitants by an introduced ruling class (either military or mercantile), rather than by mass migration of Indo-European speakers. See my post on the PIE Homeland. It had been proposed by Colin Renfrew (and others) that the Indo-European languages were introduced to Europe along with agriculture by farmers migrating west and north from Anatolia (modern Turkey). It made a nice neat theory but turned out not to be true – agriculture preceded IE languages by several thousand years in Europe. There were therefore, by the time the Indo-European language was advancing up the Danube into northwest Europe, farmers settled there with their own languages, whatever they may have been. It was these people who learned Indo-European as adults and adopted it as their own.

There is some linguistic evidence suggesting that these northwestern European people who learned Indo-European, and made it into Proto-Germanic, spoke a Semitic language (of which Arabic and Hebrew are members). Semitic languages are rich in the internal vowel changes of the kind seen in Proto-Germanic verbs; the fricative consonants “f”, “h”, and “th” introduced to Proto-Germanic as explained in Grimm’s Law are common in Semitic languages, and a few of the non-PIE Germanic roots seem to have a Semitic connection. This Semitic influence theory, promoted by Prof. Theo Vennemann, is quite controversial.

One theory to explain a Semitic influence on Germanic languages has the Phoenicians, a Semitic speaking sea-faring people who are known to have reached Portugal, to have sailed all the way around to north-western Europe – the Netherlands perhaps or even Denmark. This is highly speculative at best, as there is no archaeological evidence and so far to my knowledge no genetic evidence, to support their presence that far north. My theory (and you saw it here first) is that some influence of Semitic languages had accompanied agriculture as it made its way from the middle east to northwestern Europe. One of Bryan Sykes' maternal ancestors of modern Europeans described in his 2001 book " The Seven Daughters of Eve" is Jasmine who originated in the middle east and is associated with the spread of agriculture into Europe. Her genes spread into Europe and it seems quite likely that her language did as well, hundreds of years before the introduction ofGermanic Indo-European languages.

Whoever the first speakers of Proto-Germanic were, we owe them our gratitude for helping to simplify not only English but every other Germanic language spoken today.

The next stage of simplification for English, which occurred during the transition from Old English to Middle English, is credited to, of all people, the Norse Vikings who settled in northern England. But that’s a story for another week.

Grammar Mistakes That Aren’t

I’ve just nicely started reading a new language book and want to share some thoughts from it. Robert Lane Greene is a writer who lives in New York. Greene is a regular correspondent for The Economist and has published in The New York Times and many other well established periodicals so is well acquainted with modern English usage yet is no fan of prescriptionism. In his 2011 book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, Greene “pokes gentle fun” at linguistic sticklers.

As Greene learned new languages (he speaks nine last count) he began to question English grammar rules. If Danes can end sentences with a preposition, why can’t the English?

Here are some quotes from the Preface:

I think flexibility, humility, and multilingualism should take the place of sticklerism, arrogance, and nationalism when we think about language.

Language isn’t just rules and words, but communication.

Greene warns about journalists or other writers who, because they know how to use language well, think they can write about language without doing their research. He compares this to a top athlete thinking he is a physiologist. Greene devotes several pages to humorist author Bill Bryson’s “facts” about English and other languages that, in fact, just aren’t so.

Greene then takes umbrage with language sticklers, focusing on Lynne Truss in particular. The rally cry of her best-selling book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” (2003) is “Stickler’s unite!”. Greene argues that her “fury on the decline of English punctuation and those who hasten it” is greatly “out of proportion to the crime”. As an example he quotes her pronouncement that those who misplace apostrophes “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” Greene doesn’t seem to get her use of the British hyperbole. Later Truss demonstrates her appreciation of the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (1450-1515) for standardizing Western punctuation by “absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babies”. Perhaps Greene missed reading the Publisher’s Note to the American edition which ends “Please enjoy this narrative history of punctuation as it was meant to be enjoyed, bone-dry humour and cultural references intact…”

Getting back to my post title, there are two types of “grammar mistakes that aren’t”. One type occurs when the critic misunderstands or misapplies grammar rules himself. An example might be saying that the sentence “Send a copy to Joe and me” should be “Send a copy to Joe and I”. The first sentence is correct; the “and I” rule applies to the subject not the object of a sentence. Such incorrect corrections can be either ignored or dealt with satisfactorily by reference to the actual rule.

The second type, a few of which Greene tackles in his book, are grammar rules that shouldn’t be. Greene lists three bases for grammar rules:

·         clarity – does it make the meaning clearer?

·         literary tradition – is it used (or not) by great English writers, past and present?

·         purity – is it native to English or adopted from another language?

I would argue that only the first is essential. Just because Milton or Shakespeare broke a grammar rule doesn’t make it obsolete. And a rule borrowed from another language, if it makes English easier and clearer, should be welcomed. Some grammar rules, however, fail all three. Here are some examples:

Ending a sentence with a preposition

This is a natural sentence structure. We all do it. But according to a grammar rule, we shouldn’t. (We aren’t supposed to start a sentence with “but” either; I’ll get to that in a minute). So where did the rule prohibiting this particular sentence structure come from? (Now doesn’t that sound better than “from where did the rule… come?)  Blame a 17^th century poet, John Dryden, who liked to compose in Latin and then translate into English. Because one can’t end a Latin sentence with a preposition, Dryden stipulated that one shouldn’t in English either. His arbitrary rule was adopted by the writers of the first English grammar books in the 18^th century and continues to influence writers to this day.

Double Negatives

Robert Lowth, who I discussed in my post of April 2, proclaimed that two negatives cancel each other. Thus “He don’t know nothing” must mean that he does know something rather than emphasizing his ignorance. While this rule has some basis in mathematical logic (-2 x -3 = +6) there is no reason that it has to apply to English. The use of double negatives for emphasis is common in certain dialects and everyday speech both historically (Chaucer and Shakespeare used it) and currently. Some languages like Spanish and Russian require the negative pronoun with a negative verb.

Split infinitives

The rule banning the insertion of words between the “to” and the rest of the verb in the infinitive tense is more modern, appearing in an anonymous article in 1834. The rule was adopted by grammarians and quickly became official. It likely originated from Latin and Greek where it is impossible because the infinitive form is one word. It completely fails the clarity test and has a long list of respected authors who ignore it – both historically (before the rule was invented) and afterwards (witness Star Trek’s “to boldly go...”). George Bernard Shaw verbally attacked an editor of a newspaper who had corrected his split infinitives calling him, among many other names, “a pedant, an ignoramus, an idiot…” and suggested he be replaced by an intelligent Newfoundland dog. Ironically, Shaw’s character Henry Higgins in Pygmalion shows a complete intolerance of nonstandard speech when he tells Eliza Doolittle “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live.”

The attitude towards these (and other) rules is changing. Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) in his 1926 book A Dictionary of Modern English Usage encouraged readers to ignore rules that didn’t make sense or which caused ambiguity. He freely gave license to split infinitives, to end sentences with prepositions, to begin sentences with “and” or “but”, and to use “none” with a plural verb (e.g. “none of us are going”).

I agree that the first and third rule described above can be safely ignored. On the use of double negatives I’m not so sure. While the rule could have gone either way (that two negatives cancel or reinforce each other), one or the other should be standard. The use of double negatives was already in decline when Lowth’s rule was written, he just finished it off. For clarity sake, I would reserve a reinforcing double negative for dialogue in a dialect where it would not be unexpected (did you catch my double negative where the intent is to cancel?). One tip is the word “ain’t”; if someone says “she ain’t never comin' back” there’s no use waiting up for her.

Fowler’s rather liberal English usage book was published in England which one would expect to be the bastion of prescriptionism. Meanwhile in freedom-loving America William Strunck Jr. and E.B. White published, in 1959  The Elements of Style, commonly referred to as “Strunk and White”. This book is full of picky little rules, many of which are quite arbitrary like Strunk’s ban on beginning a sentence with “however”. White added “hopefully” to the sentence-beginning ban list as in “Hopefully, I’ll do better tomorrow”. Greene argues that in this usage “hopefully” is a “sentence adverb”, and gives another example “Honestly, he’s a liar”. In Greene’s example, “honestly” obviously does not describe the person being talked about but modifies the rest of the sentence. If “honestly” is acceptable in this structure, why shouldn’t “hopefully” be?

White’s inflexibility on the many rules in their book seems at odds with his beautiful quote on language change that I use in my blog heading. I suppose it illustrates the idea that language is very personal: “all changes to language are fine and acceptable – except for the ones I don’t like”.

Grimm’s Law

In linguistic circles Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) is better known for his discovery of phonetic changes in the development of Proto-Germanic than for his German folk tales.

Jacob was trained as a lawyer but was more interested in history and language – early German literature in particular. He authored many scholarly books including Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language), Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), and the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary). In 1812 and 1814 he and his younger brother Wilhelm published their collection of old German folk tales as Grimms Märchen (Grimms’ Fairy Tales) Volumes 1 and 2.

Grimm’s Law was first published in the second edition of his German Grammar in 1822. It is considered significant in linguistic science for introducing “…a rigorous methodology to historic linguistic research.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Grimm].

Sometime during the progression from Proto-Indo-European (about 2000 BC) to Proto-Germanic (about 500 BC), certain sound shifts in consonants occurred which were nearly universal (occurring to all words). These changes did not occur in any other PIE daughter languages such as the Proto-Romance language, so are observable with comparisons between English words taken directly from Latin, French or other Romance languages and those from its Germanic roots.

Greatly simplified, the changes are (with examples):

Labials (sounds made with the lips)

p changes to f: ped / foot; pater / father

f changes to b: fund / bottom

b changes to p: labial / lip

Velars (sounds made mid-palate)

k changes to h: canine / hound

h changes to g: host / guest

g changes to k: genuflect / knee

Dentals (sounds made with the tongue and teeth)

t changes to th: triple / three

th changes to d: thyroid / door

d changes to t: duo / two

Note that in all three groups, the changes go full circle, sort of like musical chairs.

Verner’s Law, developed by Danish linguist Karl Verner, explains further changes that occurred later to certain consonants in certain conditions (depending on the accent of the preceding syllable).

These sound changes are evident in all of the modern Germanic languages: German, Frisian, Dutch (and Africaans), Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Luxembourgish, and of course English.

Sound changes like this are common in language history and take several generations, often a few centuries, to complete. A more recent example in English is known as the Great Vowel Shift which occurred between 1400 and 1600 (between Chaucer and Shakespeare). That’s a subject for a future post.

The Forces of Language Change

Modern linguistics accepts that all languages are constantly changing and considers this a normal process. But if normal, then what are the forces behind language change?

Guy Deutscher in The Unfolding of Language devotes several chapters to answering this question. First he lists and dismisses three "obvious" reasons for languages to change. 

The first is to keep up with new technology and ideas. While this accounts for many new words, especially during the last few decades, it utterly fails to account for the vast majority of seemingly random changes which have occurred over many millennia. Language change has been recorded, over the space of one or two generations, among stone age tribes whose technology hasn't changed in over 30,000 years.

The second "obvious" theory is that languages change from contact with neighboring tribes by borrowing or imitating vocabulary and grammar. As I showed in the previous post, the French speaking Normans and later Latin speaking clerics and clergy had a significant influence on the English language. But change happens even in isolated peoples. The island of Papua New Guinea has 850 indigenous languages (about 14% of the world's 6,000) precisely because the tribes live in isolated mountain valleys.

The third theory is that people seek novelty and like to change things just for the sake of changing them. But most people actually fear change and try hard to prevent it from happening. This explains why, even though pronunciation of English has changed much in the last 400 years, spelling has changed little, resulting in the problems discussed in my last post.

So if these theories don't explain language change, then what does? It's only in the last few decades that linguists have developed satisfactory answers. Before providing three motives for change, Deutscher  addresses the question of who does the changing. The answer of course is that we all do, albeit unintentionally. I refer you to the quote on my blog header. One cow wanders off the path a little - perhaps to crop a fresh bunch of grass, or to follow a butterfly - and the one behind follows. As an example, I've noticed people lately using the word "perfect" at the end of a transaction as a new way of saying "thank you". I overheard a really absurd situation in the bank last week when the teller apologized to a customer for not having enough American dollars to complete the requested cash withdrawal for her planned holiday to the States, and asked her to come back in a few days. The customer answered "perfect" as she turned away empty-handed. My point here is that as silly as this expression seemed to me the first few times I heard it, I now catch myself using it sometimes. I admit it - I am a human cow. In summary, we all are the modifiers of our language, unintentionally and often unknowingly. Now - what motivates us to make changes?

Deutscher lists three motives for language change: economy, expressiveness and analogy. Economy refers to the human propensity for energy conservation - especially our own. In other words, we are just plain lazy. We pronounce words and phrases with the least effort possible to still be understood. "I don't know" comes out as "dunno"; "what's up?" something like "tsup?". These examples, from my youngest son's telephone conversation earlier this evening, involve omitting one or more syllables from a phrase. The words "don't" for "do not" and "what's" for "what is" are examples of the very same thing which have become formalized as proper English.

A countering motive to economy is expressiveness where we add more words for emphasis. Instead of replying with a simple "yes" we might say "by all means" or "I'd be delighted". I explained in the August 25 post on Grammaticalization how this led to the development of the French word "pas" to mean "not". As words become overused (an "awesome" salad), the intensity of their meaning is reduced (similar to the value of money with inflation) and new words must be found to replace them.

The third motive, analogy, is a force that returns order to language. Irregularities in grammar over time become more regular. Children learning to talk do this unintentionally, and are usually quickly corrected. Classic examples are "I goed" or "two foots". Sometimes these "mistakes" catch on. Deutscher gives the following examples: the plural of "book" used to be "beek" but changed to "books" in the 13th century; "eyes" replaced "eyen" as the plural of "eye" in the 14th century; and "kine" was replaced by "cows" for the plural of "cow" in the 16th.

These changes do not occur everywhere at once. They start at a particular place and time - perhaps with a 4 year old! Others copy and it starts to spread. Both versions would co-exist, for several generations, with one gradually growing in popularity until it becomes the standard. Sometimes we can find in literature examples of two versions co-existing. Chaucer in "The Merchant's Tale" uses the word "maked" referring to God's creation of Adam (chosen to rhyme with "naked") and four lines later uses "made" for God's creation of Eve (chosen to fit the line's meter). Note - this is an example of economy, not analogy. A word which uses the regular past tense form ("maked") is in the process of being changed into an irregular one ("made") just because it's easier to pronounce. A similar current situation is "dove", the past tense of "dive", which, at least in North America is replacing the regular "dived", perhaps following "drive" and "drove". Both forms are in current use.

Different languages change in different ways, which has resulted in the 6,000 extant languages today plus the tens of thousands of extinct and intermediate languages of which we can only surmise.

The Original Word Order

The October 23 AWAD email had a link to a news article on the word order of the first language. Talk like Yoda? We May have originally by Natalie Wolchover in the Science website of msmbc.com. She was reporting on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages.

Of the six possible word orders of Subject, Object, Verb, slightly over half of the 2,000 languages they looked at are SOV (I you like). English is SVO (I like you) while Latin and German are SOV. The SOV order, the authors claim, is the most likely order for the proto human language from which all the rest have evolved. Incidentally, it is also the word order spoken by Yoda in Star Wars, hence the title of the article.

Ruhlen and Gell-Mann came to this conclusion after creating a family tree of the world's languages and discovering a clear pattern. While SOV languages changed into other orders, the other orders never changed into SOV. Therefore SOV had to be the original order.

A previous article had also predicted SOV as the original but based on an entirely different information. Tom Givon, a linguist from the University of Oregon, argued that the SOV order is the most natural to humans as evidenced by how children learn language.

So, perhaps Yoda's speech would not seem so strange to a German?

Who, Whom and Wham

In the last post I quoted a newspaper columnist’s dismay at the degradation of English, particularly the incorrect use of who and whom. Linguistics professor John McWhorter mentions this particular pair of words in Lecture 19 of The Story of Human Language. In this lecture, titled “The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar”, McWhorter argues that the idea of speaking “incorrectly” is a property only of the minority of languages which have a written standard. For most of the world’s languages – which are oral only (think Amazonian natives) – this notion would be absurd.

The rules of English grammar were first encoded by two authors writing in the 1700s. Their books A Short Introduction to English Grammar by Robert Lowth (1762) and English Grammar by Lindley Murray (1794) set out for the first time rules for English speakers. Many editions and similar texts followed – their influence lives on more than 200 years later.

There are two different approaches to linguistics. Lowth and Murray were following the Prescriptive approach – telling people how they ought to speak. Modern linguists prefer the Descriptive approach – describing how people actually do speak. To be fair to Lowth and Murray, English was, during their time, becoming an international language and standardization of the spoken and written language would be useful. They were also writing long before the modern science of linguistics had developed.

Lowth and Murray believed that Latin and Greek were superior to Modern English because of their many case endings in both verbs and nouns. They rescued the few remaining case endings of nouns that had not already been lost from Old English and standardized them. Many of these are pronouns with different words for subject and object: I/me, he/him, she/her, and who/whom. Imagine if there were sets of 4 or more (not just pairs) of these for every noun! My older brothers studied Latin in high school and found these case endings a chore to memorize. I’m grateful that English has been greatly simplified, at least in this respect.

Let’s look at who/whom for example. In Old English there was a different word for each of the following noun cases:

                  Case                              OE    Modern           Example

            Nominative (subject)   hwā     who     Who gave you my book?

            Genitive (possessive)  hwæs   whose  Whose book do you have?

            Accusative (object)      hwone whom  Whom did you see with my book?

            Dative (recipient)         hwām  wham  Wham did you give my book?

The modern form of the dative case wham is italicized because it does not exist in any dictionary. Its role is adequately covered by “to whom” and, I think it’s safe to say, it has never been missed. According to Wikipedia, the Dative case is completely absent in modern English, having merged with the Accusative case during the Middle English period to form one Objective case. McWhorter’s argument is that like wham, whom is also unnecessary.

The demise of whom is predicted by many, not just because it is a relic of an archaic system, but because of the observation of its declining use in everyday speech. This demise is not imminent, however, as the loss of whom is a grammatical change, not a lexical one, which typically takes much longer - often centuries – to complete. Language purists strive to slow this process even more but their cause will eventually fail.

The more I think of it, the more I like wham. Let’s start a movement to bring wham back into the English language. Wham shall we direct this movement first?

Language Degradation

The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix published a column in this morning’s paper by Bronwyn Eyre titled “Who still appreciates proper grammar?” In it Eyre laments the loss of proper grammar in speech and writing: “…for me, the inexorable disappearance of whom and the non-nominative use of who, frequently by people who should know better, puts me into a mini-melancholy.” After describing the proper and improper usage of who and whom, and a few other common grammatical errors, she concludes “The reason grammar and usage aren’t much taught in schools these days, I expect, is that many teachers no longer know the distinctions in question. Which, for a who-whom stickler like me, is a sad development indeed.”

I’ve been thinking of writing on this topic for some weeks, so this column provides the necessary motivation to tackle it (and a wonderful introduction - thanks Bronwyn!).

Every generation has writers with serious concerns about the (then) current degradation of their language. Most believe that a generation or two back the language was spoken more correctly. Let me share some quotes from Chapter 3 of Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language (2005).

A review by Clive James in the Times Literary Supplement, 2002, lamented the falling off from the English of even just two generations ago when “a mistake was a mistake and not a sign of free expression”.

So, what did writers have to say of the language from the period of which James nostalgically refers? George Orwell, writing in the journal Horizon in 1946, stated “…most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way”.

Is this a 20^th century phenomenon? Hardly! In 1848 August Schleicher, a renowned linguist wrote that English showed “how rapidly the language of a nation important both in history and literature can sink” and predicted that English would likely further “sink into mono-syllabicity”.

Going back another century, Thomas Sheridan wrote in 1780 “…that many pronunciations, which thirty or forty years ago were confined to the vulgar, are gradually gaining ground [among people of fashion]; and if something is not done to stop this growing evil …English is  likely to become a mere jargon”. Sheridan believed that only seventy years earlier “during the reign of Queen Anne [1702-14] … English was … spoken in its highest state of perfection.”

But it was during the reign of Queen Anne that Jonathan Swift wrote what Deutscher described as “one of the most astoundingly bigoted rants” among language critiques – his “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue”. Swift begins with “…our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions…” and goes on (and on) from there.

Do you see a pattern here? And this pattern is by no means limited to English. Modern Germans consider the age of Goethe and Schiller to be its “Golden Age” yet Jacob Grimm (of fairy tale fame) lamented in 1819 (during Goethe’s lifetime) that, compared to the language of his day, “six hundred years ago every common peasant knew … perfections and niceties of the German language of which the best language-teachers nowadays can no longer even dream.”

Serge Koster complained in 2001 of the recent changes in French that are “corrupting a system of grammar which was constructed throughout the centuries, and which has stayed almost stable since the eighteenth century”. In 1843 the French philosopher Victor Cousin argued with author Victor Hugo that “the decay of the French language began in 1789.” Gaston Paris, a French linguist, goes much further back, stating in 1862 that French, because it developed from Vulgar Latin (the Latin of the “illiterate masses”), was “inferior in beauty and logic” to the Latin of the age of Virgil and Cicero.

Cicero himself, comparing the Latin of his day with the speech of a century before him, wrote “…practically everyone … in those days spoke correctly. But the lapse of time has certainly had a deteriorating effect in this respect.”

The pattern is clear. Every age laments the changes that they observe happening in their lifetime and look back on the previous generation as being superior. Why should this be?

Modern linguists now agree that language change is inevitable and unstoppable, and in itself is neither good nor bad. Even the strict Academie Francaise could not stop the French language from changing (as we saw in a previous post with the modern dropping of “ne”). But why is language change always seen as degradation? The answer, which was only recognized by linguists over the last few decades, is that the forces of destruction and decay are more easily observed than the forces of construction and creation. Both of these forces are constantly at work, gradually removing from, and adding to, the language.

I will leave descriptions of these opposing forces for future posts.

Grammaticalization - the French "Pas"

Linguists class words as either concrete or grammatical. Concrete words represent objects, actions, feelings, etc - things that can be named. Imagine two people sitting under a tree in the African savanna 100,000 years ago inventing words for the first language (that's not how it happened by the way). We can understand how words might have been made up for animals, stones, sun & stars, even feelings like hot and tired. These are concrete words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). It is harder to imagine how they would have come up with words that we use to tie these concrete words together into meaningful sentences. Words like "and", "but", "the", "for", etc. These are called grammatical words because they form a language's grammar (prepositions, articles, conjunctions, interjections, auxiliaries).

Linguists believe that most if not all grammatical words started out as concrete words which later began to be used in a different way. An obvious example is the number one being used as the article "a". In French it is the same word "un/une". A more interesting example is the French word pas (pronounced pah - the French are even worse than English for not pronouncing all their letters). [Since my French is quite rusty, I  will use the examples from McWhorter's Lecture 4 in The Story of Human Language DVD.]

Pas is a concrete word meaning "step" which developed into a grammatical word meaning "not". Originally in French "He does not walk" would be "Il ne marche". For emphasis one could say "Il ne march pas" - "He doesn't walk a step". Similarly "Il ne mange" (He doesn't eat) could be said "Il ne mange mie" (He doesn't eat a crumb) and "Il ne bois" (He doesn't drink) as "Il ne bois goutte" (He doesn't drink a drop).

As time went by, the emphasis became weaker (like the word "awesome" which used to mean something really spectacular and can now be used to describe a salad) until the added "step", "crumb" or "drop" no longer made any real difference in meaning, and were dropped from usage. All that is, except for the word pas for step. It not only hung in there for not walking but began to be used for all negative actions. "He doesn't eat" became "Il ne mange pas"; "He doesn't drink" became "Il ne boit pas", etc. This is how I was taught French 40+ years ago.

Completing the process, in modern spoken French the "ne" is no longer used, leaving only the "pas". So to continue with our examples of not walking, eating or drinking, we now have "Il marche pas", "Il mange pas" and "Il boit pas" where the word for "step" is the only negative.

A familiar example in English [from The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher] is the verb going to which means "moving yourself to" but has taken on an element of a future tense. Consider: "I am going to the store. When I get to the store I am going to buy a book." Interestingly the "going to" in the second sentence can be shortened to "gonna" but the "going to" in the first cannot. So the slang word gonna has developed only for the future sense of "going to" not the original travelling sense. In the future should gonna become accepted as "proper English" it will be a new grammatical word. With further changes it could eventually morph into something unrecognizable from its original "going to".

Transitions like this have created all the grammatical words we now use not only in English but all languages. Fascinating!

The Story of Human Language DVDs

After several years of receiving catalogues in the mail from The Great Courses [www.getgreatcourses.com] I finally ordered one (my wife actually encouraged me to order one for my birthday). There are easily half a dozen that I would love to get, but one at a time... My first was The Story of Human Languages with professor John McWhorter.

There are 36 half-hour lectures on 6 dvds - 18 hours worth total. Donna and I have watched 7 lectures so far. It even comes with a Course Guidebook so you don't have to take notes, and can see how words referred to are spelled. McWhorter is one of my favorite linguistic authors anyway for his The Power of Babel book published in 2001.

In Lecture 3 McWhorter talks about sound changes, and explained the Great Vowel Shift which started in the late 1300's in English. The word name for example used to be pronounced NAH-meh which is why it is spelled the way it is. Two changes turned name into the way it sounds today - the first vowel changed into a long A, and the E became silent. This explains much of our weird spelling in English - the spelling is a fossilized remnant of the way words used to be pronounced - the sounds changed but the spellings did not. Boat, coat, etc used to be two syllable words BO-at, CO-at, etc. which is how they are still pronounced in modern Frisian. Inherent laziness caused our ancestors to turn them into one syllable words. Other examples were given of how words shorten over time.

Lecture 4 deals with how words are added to, a process that continuously occurs along with the shortening trend. Prefixes and suffixes started out as separate words that got shortened and attached. McWhorter explained how grammatical words (prepositions, articles, conjunctions etc like in, under, the, but, not...) develop out of concrete words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), a process called Grammaticalization. He gave the fascinating example of how, in the French language, the concrete word pas meaning "step" became a grammatical word meaning "not" (if someone asks, I'll explain it in a future post).

Another process called Rebracketing creates new words out of other words. For example all one became alone from which came the word lone (not the other way around as we might suppose). Similarly a noranj became an orange, and an ekename became a nickname.  Another example of rebracketing is hamburger which started as Hamburger steak, named for the German city where burg means "fort" and ham has nothing to do with meat. It has been further shortened to burger, referring to the meat patty, from which variations like cheeseburger  and fishburger were invented. He also showed how new words in tonal languages can develop using an example from the Lahu language of SE Asia.

I'll share more from these dvds in future posts.