The Kingdom of Speech (7 page)

Darwin's goal was to show that all Müller's and Wallace's Higher Things evolved from animals—animals even as small as earwigs. He had no evidence, causing him to fall back over and over on the life and times of
my dog
. Fellow naturalists, as well as the linguists, seemed less than riveted. This new theory of language prompted no
Ahahh!
responses, let alone
Ahura!
Negative reviews criticized the thinness of his reasoning as well as the lack of evidence, and positive reviews avoided bringing up the subject at all.
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Obviously Darwin was as baffled about the origin of language as everybody else.

The very next year, 1872, the Philological Society of London gave up on trying to find out the origin of language and would no longer accept papers on the subject or countenance bringing it up at society meetings.
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The members were getting almost as batty about language as Darwin and Wallace. All the endless cerebration had proved to be pointless. It clarified nothing and drove the society in no direction but into the slough of despond. The Linguistic Society of Paris had banned the subject on the same grounds six years earlier, in 1866.
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Of course, philologists and Darwinists were different creatures, as demonstrated when Max Müller took on Darwin in 1861, pooh-poohed him, and declared that language was a sheerly dividing line elevating man above animal in a final and fundamental way. But when Darwin's own attempt, in
The Descent of Man,
failed to clear up the muddle, Darwinists threw their hands up, too. The subject of the origin of language and how it works entered a dark age that was to last for seventy-seven years, comparable in the annals of science to the Dark Ages that descended upon Europe after the invasion of the Huns. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man—language—was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

By the time Darwin died, in 1882 at Down House, of a heart attack after almost three months of intermittent chest pains, his great PR army, the X Club, was in a bad way, too, thanks to the same malady, old age. In 1883 one member died of typhoid, and of the remaining eight, only two were healthy enough to continue meeting regularly. One of the ailing was Huxley, the onetime boy wonder, who suffered from severe recurrent depression and dropped out for good in 1885, at age sixty (and died ten years later). A bid to recruit new members was rejected. The X Club, the most powerful backers any new scientific theory ever had…passed away unceremoniously in 1893.
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More bad news for the Theory of Evolution broke suddenly in 1900, when three different naturalists from three different countries—Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands—each out to solve, on his own, the mysteries of biological inheritance, came upon the never-heralded and long-since-forgotten work of a long-since-deceased contemporary of Darwin, an Austrian monk named Gregor Johann Mendel. Mendel had been born plain Johann Mendel in 1822 (three years before Huxley) to a pair of landowning Moravian peasants who realized early on that they had a prodigy on their hands. They sacrificed themselves down to the bone for going on fifteen years to pay for his education, from first grade through a two-year university program he completed with honors. For whatever reasons, Mendel, like Huxley, began to suffer bouts of depression and entered an Augustinian monastery in northern Austria. As was the custom, he took the vows and was given a new, saintly name, Brother Gregor, and a typical monastery chore, gardening, to help provide food for all the brothers.

The gardener had no training in biology, much less agronomy, but he began to notice certain patterns repeating in successive generations of pea plants, and in plant life the generations go by rapidly. In 1856 he began an experiment with green peas that took nine years and by and by involved twenty-eight thousand plants, very likely the biggest and longest agricultural experiment up to that time. In 1865 he laid out all the fundamental laws of heredity in a lecture and then in a monograph entitled
Experiments on Plant Hybridization
—and created the modern science of genetics. This was just five years after Darwin's
The Origin of Species
.

Experiments on Plant Hybridization
barely made it into a dim German-language journal and wasn't noticed at all anywhere else.
d
Fortunately for his equanimity, Mendel was an ace self-regarder. He was convinced that his laws of heredity for green peas applied to every living organism, animal as well as vegetable. Darwin died in 1882, unaware of Mendel. Mendel died two years later, in 1884, all but unread but also undaunted. Not long before he died, he wrote himself a note: “I am convinced it will not be long before the whole world acknowledges the results of my work.”
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Dead he was, and dead right. Sixteen years after he died, an Austrian, a German, and a Dutchman discovered his work in the German journal and became Mendel's posthumous Huxleys.

Mendelian genetics overshadowed the Theory of Evolution from the very beginning. This new field had come straight out of purely scientific experiments that agronomists and biologists everywhere were able to replicate. The Theory of Evolution, on the other hand, had come out of the cerebrations of two immobile thinkers, one lying on a sweat-wet makeshift bed in a makeshift hut in Malay…thinking…the other behind a stalwart walnut desk in a stately mansion in the countryside near London…thinking…about things no man had ever seen and couldn't even hope to replicate in much less than a few million years. Next to genetic theory, the Theory of Evolution came off not as a science but as a messy guess—baggy, boggy, soggy, and leaking all over the place. Nevertheless, Darwinists had never given up their cosmogonic determination to make Darwinism explain Everything. In the 1920s and 1930s they hit upon the bright idea of co-opting genetics and treating it as one of the Theory of Evolution's components. A component is part of something bigger—right?

That was how the Darwinists made a comeback after forty years as also-rans. Mendel's theory became just one of their tools. Thus was born what came to be known as the modern synthesis. The leading synthesizer was a geneticist from Ukraine, Theodosius Dobzhansky, who had immigrated to the United States in 1927. In 1937 he published the modern synthesis bible,
Genetics and the Origin of Species
…and in 1973, two years before he died, he published a manifesto with a title Darwinists have been quoting ever since: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.”
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And nothing about language made sense to Dobzhansky and his modern synthesizers. They pitied—
pitied
—people who still tried to study its origin. It was about as much use as trying to study the origin of extrasensory perception or mental telepathy or messages from the Other Side. To use a
nom de bouffon
from 1959, before the modern synthesis transmuted into neo-Darwinism, any academic who spent time on the origin of language was written off as…a flake.

It was dumbfounding—utterly
dumbfounding!
Three generations of Darwinists and linguists kept their heads stuck in the sand when it came to the origin of the most important single power man possesses. It took a turn of history on the magnitude of World War II to get their attention.

A prominent linguist named Morris Swadesh was the classic case. Before the war he had been a brilliant but thoroughly traditional linguist. In the 1930s he had trekked tirelessly to remote places nobody but the neighbors, if any, had ever heard of—in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, living off coconuts, fava beans, and beef jerky and, in the chronic absence of plumbing, lowering his pants and squatting down in the tall grass…all the while seeking out tribes and other ethnic enclaves few had ever heard of, either…to study their languages…Tarahumara, Purépecha, Otomi, Menominee, Mahican…close to a hundred of them before he had finished…and sorting them out into language families such as the Algonquin, the Oneida, the Tarascan…becoming fluent in more than twenty of them while he was at it.
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Then World War II broke out. Swadesh was thirty, well below the military draft's cutoff age of thirty-five, and wound up in the army assigned to military intelligence projects involving mainline languages—Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Burmese, and country cousins such as Burma's Naga language, for use in interpreting, monitoring, and possibly espionage. (Swadesh was a quick study. He soaked up so much Naga in one day touring around with a local guide that he managed to pull off a ten-minute thank-you speech in the language that night.
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)

The military was not interested in anecdotal material that academics such as Swadesh had picked up on their treks. They wanted data suitably mathed-up, quantified,
hardened
(the going metaphor), and standardized in the interest of routinized efficiency. All by itself, throughout the country, the military generated tremendous momentum for a trend toward an empirical approach. “Empirical” was a single adjective encompassing all the foregoing (quantified, hardened, mathed-up, standardized). Empiricism put great pressure on academics in the soft sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, to harden up until they had at least a ghost of a chance of resembling physics or chemistry—or, at the very least, biology.

In 1948 Swadesh created, and not very mellifluously named, a new field of linguistic study: glottochronology…and its offshoot, glottogenesis…from the Greek
glotto,
meaning “tongue” and, by extension, “language.” Both terms bristled with lexicostatistical (Swadesh invented the term) mathematical symbols—

—such as the sigma, with its sharp angles and bladelike lines impaling the unwary human brain and making language research look and sound like radioactive carbon dating, which was the whole idea, literally. Radioactive carbon dating was used to approximate, within thousands of years, the age of solid objects, chiefly rocks and bones. Swadesh liked the scientifical look and sound of that. He wanted to establish the chronology of languages by the changes in their grammars, syntaxes, spellings, vocabularies, and rates of absorption of other languages over time, and he wanted it as hard as radioactive carbon dating appeared to be.
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Linguists intrigued by Swadesh's glottogenesis began to close in on the subject of exactly how language works. Notable among them was a Canadian sinologist named Edwin G. Pulleyblank:

“Our capacity, through language, to manipulate the mental world and so deal imaginatively with the world of experience,” said Pulleyblank, “has been a major factor, perhaps the major factor, in giving humans the overwhelming advantage over other species in terms of cultural, as opposed to biological, evolution.”
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Close he was, but he never quite made it to the heart of the matter, which is not merely what language can do but what it
is
…nor did any other glottogenesist.

Swadesh's glottolingo gradually disappeared from the journals.

Swadesh might have been the first, but the most prominent of the war-boom linguists were affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Radar turned that twelve-syllable mouthful into MIT, initials soon uttered worldwide when the subject of brilliant engineering feats came up. In 1940, at the outset of the war, the government set up the Radiation Laboratory at MIT with the urgent, secret, highest-priority mission of developing radar as a military weapon. For one thing, radar could aim bombs from the belly of a bomber toward the target. The program was so successful that at the height of the war in 1945 the Rad Lab—svelted down from nine syllables to two—had 3,897 employees working day and night in an intended-to-be-temporary three-story building known as Building 20, slapped together out of wood framing with asbestos cladding and crammed into the campus only by relocating the squash courts and a cluster of other soft, as it were, facilities. By then Building 20 had 196,200 square feet of floor space, i.e., three and a half football fields' worth.
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At war's end the building's radar heroes moved out, and microwave, nuclear science, and communications engineers moved in. Speech communications, as it was called, had become a major discipline, thanks to the war, and a regular
hard science.
The communications angle opened the doors of Building 20 to a pair of soft sciences, too, namely, modern languages and…linguistics. The linguists were now thrust face-to-face with the engineers…and their glow. The engineers were lit up, the entire breed, with the aura of the victorious radar warriors. In 1949 this curious couple, linguistics and engineering, held a joint conference at MIT.
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Such excitement!—so much of it that from then on the conferences kept rolling in…waves of them. The linguists were now
eager
to be indistinguishable from the engineers. From the very beginning they decorated their papers with enough esoteric equations, algorithms, and that most scientifical of all visual displays, graphs, to outdo even Morris Swadesh and his glottochronologists. And languages? They mastered language after language and wore them proudly, like pelts on a belt.