The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (36 page)

Like the use of paper money, linguistic communication depends entirely on trust. If the social and sexual dynamics on the Galápagos Islands obstructed the emergence of sufficient mutual trust, then the emergence of a shared public language in the shipwrecked population would be severely threatened and obstructed. As we all know, chimpanzees, bonobos especially, have considerable innate potential for symbolic communication. Why is such potential not drawn upon in the wild? The reasons are political as much as cognitive. Chimpanzees don’t hold one another to collectively agreed standards of public behavior. Although as individuals they value cooperation and sociability, it soon becomes clear that a kind of internal civil war is the default state in relations between sexually mature adults. Sometimes this civil war is latent; sometimes it explodes into the open. Where public trust is not the default state, individuals have no choice but to fall back on emotionally persuasive, hard-to-fake gesture-calls. This applies even to humans. One theoretically possible outcome in the Galápagos would be something like the scenario depicted by William Golding in his terrifying novel
Lord of the Flies.
Under violent and inhuman conditions, I imagine that this shipwrecked population would engage in a lot of screaming, crying, and so on, but not a lot of quiet, rational conversation.

Philip Lieberman:
No.

Gary Lupyan:
The emergence of language on the island is by no means certain even with a fairly large number of individuals. I think the emergence of modern language is as much a cultural as a biological phenomenon.

It’s helpful to think of the emergence of language in terms of other cultural achievements of our species such as the emergence of writing. Biologically modern humans are obviously capable of reading and writing, but if you put a bunch of already-speaking babies on an island, what’s the chance that writing would emerge within their lifetimes? Well, it happened at some point, so it’s not zero. But the chance depends on factors like their motivations, their culture, their technology, and so on. Hunter-gatherers have little need for writing. But given a culture with money, farmers, and landowners, and you can foresee a need to keep permanent records.

Like writing, the emergence of language depends on motivational and environmental factors. What those are is a bit of a mystery. Group size is an obvious one; the need to organize and cooperate is a likely factor. If food is plentiful on this island and individuals can get by in small groups, the emergence of language is less likely.

If language emerged, I think it would change radically over the first few generations, demonstrating the kinds of changes languages undergo as they move from pidgin to creole. But language change is not just something that happens with time—change responds to pressures of the environment and the society. If the people on the island needed ways to talk about time in a precise way, we could expect a complex system of tenses to emerge. If the culture created by the children is very hierarchical, a grammaticized system of honorifics may emerge in the language.

I believe the idea of language as an instinct is wrong. People who hold this view are so impressed with children’s proficiency in acquiring language that they take for granted that modern children are born into a linguistic environment. The hard part—“inventing” a language—has already been done for them. From the day they are born, children interact with people whose minds and behaviors have been shaped by language.

In the case of the Nicaraguan deaf children, though they couldn’t understand the words spoken by their hearing parents, the children were interacting with people who did possess full-blown languages. In creating their own sign language, these kids were not copying the languages of the people around them, but this process of creation was in no small part launched by the linguistic environment in which they found themselves.

Heidi Lyn:
No to “language.” I believe they would develop a protolanguage communication system, but if there was no need for cooperation and no culture to model communication for them, I don’t think they would develop full-blown language. I think you would need at least ten individuals for any kind of real communication to take place. I still think this protolanguage would be more developed than what we’ve seen in other species, but with only a few individuals I don’t think there would be any need even for that.

Gary Marcus:
Yes. You’d need two. Language builds on our cognitive capacities to reason about the goals and intentions of other people, on our desire to imitate, our desire to communicate, and our twin capacities for using convention to name things and sequence to indicate differences between differing possibilities. Two children who started a language afresh might have simpler language—a smaller set of sounds, nouns and verbs, but not adjectives or adverbs, little (perhaps nothing) in the way of inflectional morphology. Languages certainly become richer over time, and a language that started from scratch would in its first generation be limited. But put two human children together on a desert island, and I bet they would develop a system that looks a lot more like language than anything found in any other species in the natural world.

Irene Pepperberg:
Will the babies develop some kind of communication system? Very likely, as some innate predisposition to bond, gain the attention of others, interact, and so on seems to exist. Will this communication system initially be anything as complex and sophisticated as “regular” human language? Unlikely…Would it increase in complexity over generations? Tricky question…That depends on how much information will need to be communicated.

Steven Pinker:
I’d guess that the children would create a simple but fluent language, perhaps with a mixture of signs and speech, somewhere between a creole and Nicaraguan Sign Language.

Luc Steels:
Yes. They would develop language. It’s a social institution. There has to be a joint problem to solve—food or navigation—and then it would happen within one generation. You learn a language by building it. You invent it on your own.

For their important work and their willingness to share it, thank you, Michael Arbib, Kate Arnold, Derek Bickerton, Paul Bloom, Josep Call, Dorothy Cheney, Noam Chomsky, Morten Christensen, Terrence Deacon, Frans de Waal, Frederic Dick, Laurance Doyle, Wolfgang Enard, Dan Everett, Ramon Ferrer i Cancho, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Timothy Gentner, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Peter Gordon, Melissa Groo, Marc Hauser, William Hopkins, Gavin Hunt, Jim Hurford, Ray Jackendoff, Alex Kacelnik, Ben Kenward, Simon Kirby, Chris Knight, Leah Krubitzer, David Leaven, Philip Lieberman, Heidi Lyn, Vittorio Loreto, Gary Lupyan, Gary Marcus, Lori Marino, John McWhorter, Svante Pääbo, Katy Payne, Irene Pepperberg, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, Steven Pinker, Diana Reiss, Duane Rumbaugh, Robert Seyfarth, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Brad Schlaggar, David Schwartz, Katie Slocombe, Luc Steels, Mike Tomasello, Carel van Schaik, Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, Janette Wallis, and Klaus Zuberbühler.

My reporting on brain surgery at Johns Hopkins was done while on assignment for
The New Yorker
. My sincere appreciation to the Nissley family and the doctors and researchers at Johns Hopkins, and also to Kim Hoppe. Many thanks as well to Leo Carey, Raffi Khatchadourian, and Henry Finder. Some of the reporting and writing on language and music was carried out for the
Boston Globe
“Ideas” section. Thanks to Alex Star.

Teachers, editors, writers, linguists, and friends who have generously given practical help and imparted wisdom about their craft and interests include Sidney Allen, Melissa Anderson, Michael Anderson, Jayne Ashley, Elaine Blair, Elizabeth Brown, Katherine Chetkovich, Caleb Crain, Joe Doebele, Nick Evans, Suzy Hansen, Emily Loose, Ellen Maguire, Peter H. Matthews, Peter Meyers, Lisa-Jane Moody, Francis Nolan, Rachel Nordlinger, Cliona O’Gallchoir, Amanda Schaffer, Sue Shapiro, Peter Terzian, Lawrence Weschler, and Jenny Wiggins. Thanks and g’day to Helby, Tubs, Son, and Woz.

For their invaluable advice, assistance, and cheer, I am indebted to my monthly authors’ group. It includes Gary Bass, Susan Devenyi, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, Abby Ellin, Sheri Fink, Katie Orenstein, Pamela Paul, Heidi Postlewait, Alissa Quart, Paul Raeburn, Deborah Siegel, Rebecca Skloot, Stacy Sullivan, Harriet Washington, and Tom Zoellner. Many, many thanks to the experts who have been our guests. In the same vein, I have great admiration for Kamy Wicoff and Nancy K. Miller for their wonderful salon.

Much love and thanks to Deveka Leibovitz, Jessika Milesi, and Camille Cadougan for doing the most important job in the world. Along these important lines, I am profoundly grateful for the camaraderie of Jessica Alger, Anne Baker, Jessica Bauman, Holly Kilpatrick, Robbyn Kistler, Rose Ricci Mullen, Brigid Nelson, and Kate Porterfield. I would also like to express my humble appreciation to Eva Sosnowska.

Thanks to Oren Arnon, Rachel Bingman, Gerry Cole, Ben Grasso, Emily Guzzardi, Jesse Hewit, Kevin Johnston, Amanda Key, Ali Narimani, Bridget Scruggs, Josh Sidis, Alma Steingart, Rachel Stogel, Peter Twickler, and Greg Wolf for solving the problem of consciousness, or at least my problem with it. Writing this book wouldn’t have been half as much fun without the Tea Lounge. Thank you, Libba Bray and Ben Jones for your delicious companionship.

By meeting almost every week for a couple of excellent years, Marci Alboher, Sarah Milstein, and I bootstrapped ourselves from one place to another altogether. We also ate a lot of great food. Cheers, goils.

Nothing happens without the love and support of Desmond Kenneally, Josephine Kenneally, Hugh Kenneally, Katherine Milesi, Angela Kenneally, and Shelagh Lloyd. I appreciate them all so much, and I thank them for Janet McAllister, Sam Trinder, Madeleine Kenneally, Steve Milesi, Jessika Milesi, Justin Milesi, Mick Jukes, Simon Lloyd, and Allegra Lloyd.

All writers need serenity to accept the things they cannot change, courage to change the things they can, and an agent to tell them the difference. For this, among his many talents, I am so lucky to have Jay Mandel at the William Morris Agency. Rick Kot at Viking gave me all the space I needed to write this book, and then he applied his immense skills to every line. He is not just a patient and engaged editor; he is the kind of person who makes you want to write really well. Thank you, Greg Mollica and Nicholas Blechman, for creating a beautiful cover, and Francesca Belanger, for a wonderful book design. It’s been an education and a boon to receive the ministrations of Bruce Giffords and Ingrid Sterner, and I appreciate the help of Talia Cohen, Liza Monroy, Charlotte Wasserstein, Laura Tisdel, and Sabila Khan.

Thanks to Lorin Stein, whose delightful friendship and expert guidance helped kick this book off, and to the brilliant Annie Murphy Paul, who had the last word on the first three.

Finally, a perpetual motion machine’s worth of thanks to Christopher Baldwin, and also to Nathaniel and Fineas, who give evolution all the meaning it needs.

Many interviews were conducted in the course of researching this book, taking place over a period of five years. Some were face-to-face, in offices, in laboratories, and at conferences. Some were carried out on the phone and others by e-mail. Often, all three methods were used with one researcher. If the source of a quote is not apparent from an endnote reference or from the text itself, the citation originated in a personal interview.

Prelude

1. Terrence Deacon discusses the way the virtuality of language and the physicality of the world intersect in
The Symbolic Species
.

Introduction

1. Morten Christiansen and Simon Kirby ask if language evolution is the hardest problem in science in the introduction to M. H. Christiansen, S. Kirby,
Language Evolution
.

2. Thanks to Simon Kirby for being the first to track the number of papers and for pointing in the direction of http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/amag/lang ev/.

3. C. Darwin,
On the Origin of Species,
162.

4. Peter Matthews was my Ph.D. supervisor.

I. Language Is Not a Thing

Prologue

1. J.-J. Rousseau, V. Gourevitch,
The First and Second Discourses Together with the Replies to Critics and Essay on the Origin of Languages
. In order to get around the religious establishment, Rousseau posited a first language that was given to Adam by God. Somehow we lost it along the way. According to Jean Aitchison, this creation-and-destruction myth allowed Rousseau to talk about evolution. See J. Aitchison,
The Seeds of Speech,
6.

2. E. Mayr,
What Evolution Is,
vi.

3. C. Darwin,
The Descent of Man,
89.

4. Ibid., 88.

5. Ibid., 189.

6. Ibid., 87.

7. Ibid., 92.

8. Ibid., 89.

9. He also noted that just like animal species, once a language becomes extinct, it never returns. Similarly, no language or species ever appears in two different birthplaces.

10. V. Volterra et al., “Gesture and the Emergence and Development of Language.”

11. G.W. Hewes. “Primate Communication and the Gestural Origin of Language,” 6.

12. Other conferences discussed the topic within a broader context, such as another NATO summer institute in Italy organized by Philip Lieberman and two conferences sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research that took place in 1986 and 1990.

Chapter 1. Noam Chomsky

1. R. Blackburn, O. Kamm, “For and Against Chomsky.”

2. Of course, field linguists are still hard at work today, racing to record the world’s languages and describing the relationships among them. Linguistic fieldwork requires not only extreme diligence but a mix of intellectual brilliance with a certain pragmatism.

3. It didn’t get published for another twenty years.

4. R. A. Harris,
The Linguistics Wars,
38.

5. Roman Jakobson Collection, MIT Archives.

6. R. A. Harris,
The Linguistic Wars,
39. more and more there was a sense that grammars were psychologically real, and that phrase structures rules existed inside the heads of speakers.

7. Ibid.

8. Chomsky did not invent the term or the basic idea, but his version of it animated the field.

9. R. A. Harris,
The Linguistics Wars,
39. Over time, the implication shifted;

10. T. Grandin, C. Johnson,
Animals in Translation,
9–10.

11. N. Chomsky, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” 26–58.

12. This was with reference only to humans. Chomskyan theory, if not Chomsky himself, continued to contribute to the view that animals are unthinking machines.

13. Randy Allen Harris brings together a great deal of such evidence in chapter 3 of
The Linguistics Wars
.

14. Ibid., 67.

15. Howard Maclay, “Overview,” 163.

16. R. Jackendoff,
Foundations of Language,

17. D. C. Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,
385.

18. C. Knight, “Decoding Chomsky,” 581.

19. Chomsky has been called Copernican, Newtonian, Einsteinian, Planck-like. For both its significance and its revolutionary character, his work has been compared to that of Spinoza, Pierce, Wittgenstein, Darwin, and Freud. He is an angel, a God, an enfant terrible. Supporters criticize him with the inevitable caveat “Noam Chomsky is one of the half-dozen great geniuses of the twentieth century.” In 1990 Derek Bickerton wrote in
Language and Species
: “Most of what we know about language has been learned in the last three decades.” Four years ago in
Science,
David Premack wrote that “linguistics is the science of sentences”—an entirely Chomskyan way of looking at it. Alternately, Chomsky has been described as satanic, the Enemy, a crank, an embarrassment. Generative linguistics has been called a cult; generative linguists have been described as “born again.” An extensive literature analyzes everything Chomsky has wrong, from the misinterpretations that he made of Skinner to all the ways he ignores contrary evidence. Today, people writing in Internet mailing lists work themselves into apoplectic rages about statements he allegedly made twenty years ago. A recent article said he has led linguistics down a blind alley.

20. R. A. Harris,
The Linguistics Wars
, 73.

21. Ibid., 67–68.

22. George Lakoff, Haj Ross, James McCawley, Jerrold Katz, Paul Postal.

23. R. A. Harris,
The Linguistics Wars,
201.

24. P. H. Matthews,
Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky,
250.

25. R. A. Harris,
The Linguistics Wars,
157.

26. One phenomenon for which Chomsky and his early colleagues in transformational grammar have been held responsible is the sour way researchers in the field used to deal with disagreement. In 1998 James McCloskey wrote that while other types of linguists manage to get along, “syntacticians seem to thrive on a more robust diet of anger, polemic and personal abuse.” From R. A. Harris,
The Linguistics Wars,
80.

27. N. Chomsky,
Reflections on Language,
4.

28. P. H. Matthews,
Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky,
237.

29. Many histories of twentieth-century linguistics are concerned with misapprehension. Most of them set out to correct the erroneous impressions and mythmaking of the other tomes. No one seems to be telling a straight story, and everyone addresses the fact that other writers don’t have it right. Some books propose candidate publications as the moment when things really changed, and others argue that, no, that wasn’t the first publication to change everything, it was the second.

30. N. Chomsky,
Language and Mind,
97–98.

31. Ibid.

32. N. Chomsky, “Discussion of Putnam’s Comments,” 321.

33. Elsewhere, Chomsky suggested that the question of language evolution was of no more interest than the evolution of the heart.

34. G.W. Hewes, “Primate Communication and the Gestural Origin of Language,” 6.

Chapter 2. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

1. Goodall’s research and that of scholars who followed her lead resulted in the installment of primatology centers all over the United States in the 1940s. Most of our knowledge about our closest relatives comes from the fact that one individual, like Goodall, has hunched down in the wild or at a primate facility and spent many hours watching them.

2. R. M. Sapolsky,
A Primate’s Memoir.

3. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, S. Shanker, and T. J. Taylor,
Apes, Language, and the Human Mind,
25.

4. Gardner, M. “Monkey Business.”

5. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, S. Shanker, and T. J. Taylor,
Apes, Language, and the Human Mind,
207.

6. D. M. Rumbaugh, W. D. Hopkins, D. A. Washburn, and E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, “Comparative Perspectives of Brain, Cognition and Language,” 45.

Chapter 3. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom

1. S. J. Gould, “Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism.”

2. S. J. Gould,
Full House,
216. Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and author of many books on evolution, including
The Selfish Gene
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), has stressed in his work the ways that evolution is nonrandom. For instance, mutation may be random, but selection is not. Rather, the animals that are the best at what they do survive—there is nothing random about this. Dawkins and Gould vigorously debated this, and other topics, over many years.

3. The Internet has made technical reports obsolete.

4. S. Pinker, P. Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” 710.

5. Ibid., 708.

6. But see John McWhorter’s comment on p. 287.

7. C. Darwin,
On the Origin of Species,
186.

8. Said Pinker: “The talk was given at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science seminar series (I don’t know if the series itself had an official name, but it was well known around the Boston area). The series ran from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. A paper was circulated in advance, and the authors defended it and engaged with one or two commentators. It was assumed that the audience had read the paper; the authors presented a brief summary, then gave the stage to the commentators, then replied, and a discussion followed. It was a terrific format, and there were often fireworks.”

9. S. Pinker, P. Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” 710.

Chapter 4. Philip Lieberman

1. P. Lieberman,
The Biology and Evolution of Language.

2. C. Darwin,
On the Origin of Species,
190.

3. P. Lieberman,
Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain,
23.