The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (35 page)
Read The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language Online
Authors: Christine Kenneally
The two possible arrangements of the Iceland study chromosome are known as H1 and H2, and they are thought to have split from the original chromosome three million years ago. As findings like these accumulate, they reveal not only that evolution has not stopped but that we are necessarily creatures of time. We could never have existed in our current form three million years ago—and if the evidence for ASPM is correct, we didn’t even exist in the same form only ten thousand years ago. From gene to chromosome to different kinds of gene expression, human beings are as changeable as all that. In a 2006 study, the geneticist Jonathan Pritchard and his colleagues at the University of Chicago announced that there were at least seven hundred regions of the human genome that had clearly undergone positive selection in the last five thousand to fifteen thousand years. Some of the genes affect taste, smell, digestion, and brain function. It is thought that some of these changes resulted from the pressures involved in moving from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to a more agriculture-based one.
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Not all change is good. As much as language enables us to control nature and keep our environments stable, it also makes possible the dramatic altering of our environment in unexpected and dangerous ways. The same language skills that promote technological innovations like water irrigation, road building, and air-conditioning also produce the ozone-destroying pollution and countless other ecological dangers of the modern age. Any of these phenomena could result in a sharp left turn for the human genome. And perhaps the same linguistic skills that give us science, and currently some control over DNA, will lead to our own extinction in less obvious ways. Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world’s population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogeneous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem because variation is important to the evolutionary health of a species, for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct. Indeed, some genetic variants of the human species are disappearing altogether as small indigenous groups die out.
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Freeman Dyson, a well-known writer and retired professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, argues that one day in the not too distant future, biotechnology will become widely available to all. Gardeners will use do-it-yourself kits to engineer the plants of their dreams, and hobbyists and animal lovers will directly tinker with the genome of their favorite animal. Dyson thinks that children will also have access to toy genetic kits in much the same way his generation played with Erector sets. “When teenagers become as fluent in the language of genomes as they are today in the language of blogs,” he writes, “they will be designing and growing all kinds of works for fun and profit.”
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Is it possible that even if we have not stopped evolving, language itself has?
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Mainstream linguistics assumes that language has hit a steady state, and that even if words and phrases appear and disappear—indeed, even if there is a change in the way fundamental roles like actor and object are marked—language remains essentially the same. And yet the linguistic landscape appears to be a rapidly changing one. Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world’s population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten. British colonialism initiated the spread of English across the globe; it has been spoken nearly everywhere and has become even more prevalent since World War II, with the global reach of American power. Currently about 400 million people have been born to speak English, and another 430 million have learned it as a second language. (It is the most popular language for students of a foreign tongue.) But even its commanding dominance doesn’t mean English will always be the world’s most spoken language, and experts even doubt that it will be the chief language of the near future.
It’s not yet possible to say which of the large and complicated currents that move through the world’s languages are indicative of evolutionary change or just change. Within languages, some linguists see signs that evolution is afoot, such as John McWhorter, who argued persuasively that all languages are not the same because they are not equally complex. Perhaps this is the kind of variation that future moments in evolution will act upon?
Linguists who take a functionalist approach to grammar argue that the complexity of a language is shaped by the needs of its speakers rather than an innate grammar module. It is these relatively universal forces, they say, that mean some languages are more or less complex than others. This implies that grammatical structures arise in a language only as required by its speakers. Joan Bybee describes how languages that are historically and geographically unrelated undergo syntactic change in very similar ways—for example, verbs meaning “want” or “go” may become future tenses (as in English, “wanna,” “gonna”), and the numeral “one” can turn into an indefinite article (as in English “a/an,” German “ein/eine,” French “un/une,” and Spanish “un/una”).
A pure functionalist would find little that is linguistically innate in humans, while an extreme nativist position finds almost everything innate. Taken as a whole, the data presented in this book support neither end of the continuum. Instead, they are compelling evidence that human specialization for language exists, and that forces that have often been neglected, such as the needs of speakers to communicate and indeed the need of a language to survive, contribute to the dynamic character of human language and to evolutionary change.
Extinction is as fundamental to the big evolutionary picture as survival, and certainly the extinction of languages continues all over the world. As human groups perish or shift cultural and political allegiances, their languages die too. The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It’s been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal.
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Whether or not it’s moral to let language extinction occur, it is the case that languages are irreplaceable records of the development of human societies and alternate windows into the human mind. When a language dies, we lose the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo and the
Tyrannosaurus rex.
Unfortunately, even if we, and our languages, are still evolving, we still don’t know where we are heading. Things will probably remain unchanged for quite some time, and then…they won’t.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the end of the world in
Galápagos.
In the novel a global disaster kills off most of the human species, but one small group survives, washed up on the Galápagos Islands. As time passes, evolution works its magic on the survivors’ descendants, and traits that are not conducive to survival are inevitably superseded by those that are. In Vonnegut’s brave new world, big brains are no longer an advantage, but a sleek, powerful swimming body is, and
Homo sapiens
end up seal-like and simple.
Vonnegut exposes the assumption that if we do change biologically, we typically think we will end up smarter in the terms in which we consider ourselves smart today.
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But to survive means only that we’ll be smart in the context of the environment we find ourselves in. If we continue to exist, we will by definition be smarter than the versions of us that did not survive, but that intelligence won’t necessarily be comparable to what we have today.
At least individually, we do know where we are going: you and everyone you know are going to die. For this awareness, you can thank language. Talk about spandrels.
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The same linguistic structures that allow us to soar through time and space and model entire universes in our heads also enable us to foresee our own mortality. Language also permits us to imagine a self that isn’t earthbound and a world beyond death. So far it hasn’t offered a way to avoid it.
Scientists typically offer up the wondrous metaphysical architecture we build with language as a consolation for our mortality. We may not be here for long, but because we have language, we can understand the way that the cosmos spins and twists back on itself, we can see the scintillating and sticky interplay of all the particles of existence, and we can work out the way that small evolutionary changes build steam and spread throughout a population, cascading through a species, funneling it through particular environments, over pressure humps, and around the threat of extinction, along the way turning it into another species entirely.
Awareness of our impending death seems to be an artifact of language’s reaching a certain stage of complexity. Now we are coming to another realization about language and our species that may be the seed of an equally profound idea. We have believed for a long, long time that language is a monolithic thing. But all the evidence reported in this book argues that it is not. The bottom line is that language is not how we intuitively think of it. As Terrence Deacon says, language is not language in the way the Lego is Lego. Lego is Lego all the way through, but language, which we experience as an integrated whole, is instead a bitsy pile of stuff, some parts ancient and others less old.
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It turns out that the same can be said about us—neuroscience indicates that individuals are no more unitary or whole than language is. We think of ourselves as single creatures, but as individuals and as a species we are assemblages of traits, features, and experiences, and these all shift in relative importance in different contexts. Certainly, language is fundamental to our identity. It shapes who we are in ways that are irreversible, and there is no going back to who you were before you were taught to speak. But if we weren’t taught, we would never speak. As evolution works upon us, it may choose to elaborate parts of ourselves that we don’t really see or elements of behavior that we don’t regard as separable from the rest of us. In this way, our descendants might become unrecognizable to us. There is only so much destiny in our genome—life arises when DNA and the world wind together, and that’s not in our control.
Think back now to the worldwide language web. Imagine all the language networks, parent to child, that extend from the present back through time. It’s small wonder that humans dream in myth and in art about other worlds, because we all have the experience of inhabiting one world and, as we are taught language, of walking through a door into another. Even physicists are obsessed with the idea of a multiverse. But we already live in one.
B
ecause the revolution in language evolution is so recent, one of the most important messages of this book is the very basic idea that investigating the evolution of language is a good and worthwhile pursuit. Indeed, it’s not possible to fully understand language if you don’t take evolution into account—either you must begin with evolution or you must make room for it.
I have tried to draw attention to the commonalities among language evolution researchers, and it may turn out that many of the researchers who disagree have more in common than currently seems to be the case. At the moment, most scientists are not particularly concerned with tying the stages they consider important to language evolution to the chronology of our evolutionary history. But as the research becomes more elaborated, what now look like conflicting theories of linguistic expansion may end up as different phases in the same evolutionary account.
This epilogue is devoted to the differences among researchers. Part of the glory of the language evolution debate, as with all the other big, messy debates, like that about the relationship between mind and brain, is just how many highly trained and really smart people disagree completely with one another.
It used to be that words like “innateness” and “uniqueness” were sufficient to pinpoint the distinctions between particular scientists or schools of thought. Until recently, a great divide separated those who believe there is some kind of computational mechanism at work in the generation of language and those who think it can be explained only by general principles. But even now, these two positions are becoming more difficult to distinguish. No one serious has taken a stance at an extreme end of the continuum, and each side makes concessions to the other.
Everyone would agree that our biological endowment and the way that our individual lives unfold cannot be fully disassociated. In fact, we need an easy word to describe what we actually do have: a unity of nature and nurture. Geneticists talk about the phenome, the inextricable mesh of the individual’s genome and the environment that selects and deselects the way the genome gets expressed. Probably the best word for our purposes is just “life.”
But even without extreme arguments, examining the role of biological endowment and the environment in language learning remains one of the best ways to identify differences between scholars who differ in the relative weight they assign to each. Chomsky once likened the emergence of language to the growth of limbs, implying that language is something that inexorably projects out of the individual without effort or conscious intervention. Other researchers like Philip Lieberman cite cases like Genie, the little girl who was not spoken to as a child and never developed language normally. He maintains that children must be exposed to language in order to acquire it fully.
I asked the key researchers interviewed for this book to answer the following question (some declined to participate):
If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galápagos Islands—assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to thrive—would they produce language in any form when they grew up? And if they did, how many individuals would you need for it to take off, what form might it take, and how would it change over the generations?
Michael Arbib:
The closest data that we have on this topic is that of Nicaraguan Sign Language. Here, a group of deaf children, brought together in a school for the deaf in Managua, Nicaragua, spontaneously developed a full human signed language over three “generations” (where a generation was not a biological generation but rather a cohort of children admitted over a ten-year period). Each cohort seemed to plateau in its capability, so that the signing of the first generation was more like pantomime and less like conventionalized sign language. But with each generation, the repertoire of conventionalized signs and the expressivity with which they combined increased greatly.
Let’s leave aside the fact that babies given food, water, and shelter but without caregivers are unlikely to survive. Assuming they did survive as an interacting group, the data on Nicaraguan Sign Language might suggest that if a group of babies were raised in isolation from humans with language (the Galápagos Islands really don’t qualify), then in three generations (this time, biological generations) some critical mass of children—let’s say thirty or so—would develop language. And presumably, since these children are not deaf, one might well expect the resulting language to combine vocal and manual gestures, as does normal human discourse.
However, I doubt very much that this would happen. I believe that the brain of
Homo sapiens
was biologically ready for language perhaps 200,000 years ago, but if increased complexity of artifacts like art and burial customs correlate with language of some subtlety, then human languages as we know them arose at most 50,000 to 90,000 years ago.
One may either respond by rejecting this idea that it took human brains 100,000 years or more to invent language as we know it or suggest that the Nicaraguan deaf children had an advantage that early humans lacked. I adopt the latter view. And what is that advantage? I claim that it is the knowledge that things can be freely named, and the knowledge that languages do exist. Certainly, the Nicaraguan children could not hear, but they could see the lip movements that indicated that their families could communicate their needs and requests. In addition, they lived in a world of many distinctive objects, both natural and artificial, and could see that something more subtle than pointing could be used to show which object was required. Moreover, some had at least basic knowledge of Spanish and had both seen and performed a variety of co-speech gestures. They thus would be motivated to try to convey something of their needs, or share their interest by pantomime and the development of increasingly conventionalized gestures. Intriguingly, Ann Senghas (an expert on Nicaraguan Sign Language) has told me that the second generation even went to Spanish dictionaries in search of words for which they needed to develop hand signs.
For us, as modern humans, it seems inconceivable that the very idea of language is something that has to be invented. Yet, to take a related example, we know that writing was invented only some five thousand years ago. Yet once one has the idea of phonetic writing, it is a straightforward exercise to invent a writing system—as has been demonstrated by many Christian missionaries who wanted to bring literacy and the Bible to a people who had language but no writing.
In view of all this, I doubt very much that a few children on a desert island would develop much beyond a rudimentary communication system of a few vocal and manual gestures and some conventionalized pantomime unless they had hundreds of generations in which to create culture and the means to discuss it. But they would have the brains to support such inventions, whereas other creatures would not.
Paul Bloom:
The answer is: yes, two. This is more than guesswork because a variant of this situation has already occurred, more than once. This is when children grow up without being exposed to a language model, such as deaf children who are raised by adults who don’t use sign language. Such children will sometimes create a rudimentary language, complete with words and some sort of morphosyntax. Over generations, the vocabulary will grow, and the syntax and morphology will become more complex.
Wolfgang Enard:
Yes, if there are more than two.
Tecumseh Fitch:
Yes. You’d need a village worth. They start out with something very basic in the first generation. Then they’d develop a pidgin in the second generation. In the third they’d have a creole, and by the fourth they’d have a fully stable language.
Marc Hauser:
Since the language faculty requires input of some kind in order to be expressed as an externalized or e-language in Chomsky’s sense, there would be highly structured internal thought but there would be no expressed language and no communication, as there would be no one to communicate with.
Ray Jackendoff:
Yes. Only if there were about thirty of them to begin with.
Simon Kirby:
There are two different sources of evidence that we can use to get a handle on these Galápagos children. Firstly, because computational agents aren’t yet complex enough to have acquired any rights as experimental subjects, we are free to re-create this Galápagos in computer simulation. This very scenario has been the subject of a good deal of research, particularly over the past decade. One of the problems with this approach is that it can tell us only what might happen, given particular assumptions about how children’s brains work, and that in itself is a difficult research issue. However, we
can
learn from simulation exactly how little, or how much, of language is required to be pre-wired before a language would emerge in the Galápagos population, and what factors other than individual psychology are important.
A second source of evidence comes from studies of spontaneous language emergence in real populations. Of particular interest are the indigenous sign languages that have evolved in populations of deaf children who lack a preexisting shared system for communication. The most celebrated case is the language that emerged in Nicaragua around the time of the Sandinista revolution when a large population of deaf children were brought together for the first time. However, a fascinating meta-study conducted by the anthropologist Sonia Ragir has shown that this kind of language emergence is not guaranteed to occur in all populations of deaf children who lack a common language. Just as has been suggested by the computational models, certain features of the population (and its dynamics over time) appear to be critical for a novel language to emerge.
I would bet that the emergence of what we’d consider a “full” human language in the Galápagos scenario is equally not guaranteed. What would make it more likely is if the population of children was large, if further boats of children arrived at regular intervals (say once or twice a year), and if every member of the community was engaged socially with the group in a way that made linguistic communication relevant. I would expect that language emergence would be gradual, with later arrivals and younger arrivals using the language in increasingly abstract ways and with increasing amounts of what we’d consider linguistic structure. I would expect that for a good number of generations a visiting linguist would be able to tell straightaway that the Galápagos language was unusual. Whilst it would be likely to “obey” some of the key universal principles of language organization—particularly ones that have their explanation in language processing and use—it would lack many of the morphological irregularities and paradigmatic quirks that are common in “normal” languages (i.e., languages with a history). If I were to go out on a limb, I’d say it is at least possible that the language would initially lack some of the features that we take for granted, like potentially unlimited embedding (my brother’s son’s friend’s mother’s fishing net), and perhaps some basic grammatical categories. In addition, we can be almost certain that for a very long time it would lack an extended numeral system or more than a handful of basic color terms.
I think the Galápagos experiment might also show us that much of the complex structure of human language doesn’t really give us immediate payoffs in terms of any enormously increased chance of survival. I would predict that the vast majority of the survival needs of the nascent community would be served by a much more primitive protolanguage. If a structured, complex language were to emerge, it might not be of any immediate survival benefit (at least as a result of communicative efficacy); rather, structure and regularity would appear purely because of the adaptive dynamics arising from the way the language itself is transmitted from individual to individual. Only much later, as more and more complex cultural artifacts appeared on the Galápagos, would having a complex human language come into its own as a way of transmitting cultural information from individual to individual.
If this is right, it suggests a problem for explanations of language structure that rely on natural selection pressures arising from communicative needs. Why then would we have the ability to acquire complex language at all? Of course, this is the question we all want to answer. Certainly, we already know that signaling systems with fairly complex structure have evolved a number of times in nature without providing any obvious communicative benefit. Perhaps the visiting linguists would also learn a lot from listening to the songs of the birds on the island, or to any whale song they might hear on their voyage there.
Chris Knight:
The key innate feature of human cognition—the one most relevant to the emergence of language—is in my view the capacity for joint attention and egocentric perspective reversal. We humans possess an inborn capacity to correlate our perspectives on the world, viewing ourselves from one another’s standpoint. As well as being cognitive in the narrow sense, this faculty has, simultaneously, moral relevance. If I choose to have a violent tantrum, I must temporarily shut down my moral self-awareness. I need this kind of awareness only if I am trying to tune my behavior to social requirements.
For this reason, I imagine the boatload of babies would spontaneously produce some kind of language. But if I think this, it’s because I assume the population would comprise females and males in about equal proportions, and because I assume potentially violent conflicts over sex would be sorted out as these individuals reached puberty. A potentially aggressive, sexually violent male, for example, would soon meet collective opposition. If this was effective, it would force him to view his behavior from the standpoint of others, modifying that behavior accordingly. The idea that language as we know it could emerge wholly autonomously, in isolation from any kind of institutional structure—any kind of self-organized moral regulatory framework—is gravely mistaken.