The Unfolding of Language

an evolutionary tour of mankind's greatest invention

by Guy Deutscher

Excerpts from The Unfolding of Language

© Guy Deutscher, 2005

From the Introduction

Of all mankind’s manifold creations, language must take pride of place. Other inventions – the wheel, agriculture, sliced bread – may have transformed our material existence, but the advent of language is what made us human. Compared to language, all other inventions pale in significance, since everything we have ever achieved depends on language and originates from it. Without language, we could never have embarked on our ascent to unparalleled power over all other animals, and even over nature itself.

But language is foremost not just because it came first. In its own right it is a tool of extraordinary sophistication, yet based on an idea of ingenious simplicity: ‘this marvellous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul’. This was how, in 1660, the renowned grammarians of the Port-Royal abbey near Versailles distilled the essence of language, and no one since has celebrated more eloquently the magnitude of its achievement.

Even so, there is just one flaw in all these hymns of praise, for the homage to language’s unique accomplishment conceals a simple yet critical incongruity. Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented. This apparent paradox is at the core of our fascination with language, and it holds many of its secrets. It is also what this book is about.

…

Often, it is only the estrangement of foreign tongues, with their many exotic and outlandish features, that brings home the wonder of language’s design. One of the showiest stunts that some languages can pull off is an ability to build up words of breath-breaking length, and thus express in one word what English takes a whole sentence to say. The Turkish word şehirlileştiremediklerimizdensiniz, to take one example, means nothing less than ‘you are one of those whom we can’t turn into a town-dweller’. (In case you are wondering, this monstrosity really is one word, not merely many different words squashed together – most of its components cannot even stand up on their own.) And if that sounds like some one-off freak, then consider Sumerian, the language spoken on the banks of the Euphrates some 5,000 years ago by the people who invented writing and thus kick-started history. A Sumerian word like munintuma’a (‘when he made it suitable for her’) might seem rather trim compared to the Turkish colossus above. What is so impressive about it, however, is not its length, but rather the reverse: the thrifty compactness of its construction. The word is made up of different ‘slots’ mu - n - i - n -tum- - a - ’a , each corresponding to a particular portion of meaning. This sleek design allows even a single sound to convey useful information, and even the absence of a sound has been enlisted to express something specific. If you were to ask which bit in the Sumerian word corresponds to the pronoun ‘it’ in the English translation ‘when he made it suitable for her’, then the answer would have to be … nothing. Mind you, a very particular kind of nothing: the nothing that stands in the empty slot in the middle. The technology is so fine-tuned, then, that even a non-sound, when carefully placed in a particular position, has been invested with a specific function. Who could possibly have come up with such a nifty contraption?

......

This book will set out to unveil some of language’s secrets, and thereby attempt to dismantle the paradox of this great uninvented invention. Drawing on the recent discoveries of modern linguistics, I will try to expose the elusive forces of creation and thus reveal how the elaborate structure of language could have arisen. The ultimate aim, towards the end of the book, will be to embark on a fast-forward tour through the unfolding of language. Setting off from an early prehistoric age, when our ancestors only had names for some simple objects and actions, and only knew how to combine them into primitive utterances like ‘bring water’ or ‘throw spear’, we will trace the emergence of linguistic complexity and see how the extraordinary sophistication of today’s languages could gradually have evolved.

From Chapter 1: A Castle in the Air

...But it would be disingenuous not to mention another side of language, a less appealing aspect that I have so far conveniently overlooked. For wherever one finds impressive edifices in language, one is also likely to find scores of imperfections, a tangle of irregularities, redundancies and idiosyncrasies that mar the picture of a perfect design. English, for example, is renowned for the irrationality of its past tense verbs. Native speakers may be blithely unaware of the chaos that reigns in the English verbal system, not so anyone who has had to learn it at school. Here is a rhyme I wrote in memory of my frustrations:

The teacher claimed it was so plain,

I only had to use my brain.

She said the past of throw was threw,

The past of grow – of course – was grew,

So flew must be the past of fly,

And now, my boy, your turn to try.

But when I trew,

I had no clue,

If mow was mews

Like know and knew.

(Or is it knowed

Like snow and snowed?)

The teacher frowned at me and said

The past of feed was – plainly – fed.

Fed up, I knew then what I ned:

I took a break, and out I snoke,

She shook and quook (or quaked? or quoke?)

With raging anger out she broke:

Your ignorance you want to hide?

Tell me the past form of collide!

But how on earth should I decide

If it’s collid

(Like hide and hid),

Or else – from all that I surmose,

The past of rise was simply rose,

And that of ride was surely rode,

So of collide must be collode?

Oh damn these English verbs, I thought

The whole thing absolutely stought!

Of English I have had enough,

These verbs of yours are far too tough.

Bolt upright in my chair I sat,

And said to her 'that’s that' – I quat.

From Chapter 3: The Forces of Destruction

Leofan men, gecnawað þæt soð is:

ðeos worold is on ofste, and hit nealæcð þam ende,

and þy hit is on worolde aa

swa leng swa wyrse ...

Beloved men, know that this is the truth:

This world is in haste, and it approaches its end,

and therefore always in the world

The longer (it is), the worse (it gets) ...

Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (died 1023 AD)

The world has been hastening towards its imminent end for as long as anyone cares to remember, and language with it. Not only does language always change, but if one is to believe the authorities, it always changes for the worse. 'Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration,' declared Samuel Johnson in the introduction to his Dictionary of the English Language.

The critics of the English language today are divided on the question of who is to blame for its current ills: the headline-hungry press, sound-biting politicians, or the slovenly habits of the young. But they are all united by the conviction that English is in a parlous state. What a falling-off was there, from the English of even just two generations ago, in the good old days when – as a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement recently reminisced – ‘a mistake was a mistake and not a sign of free expression’.

That may be so, but it was not quite the opinion of the ‘authorities’ in those good old days. In 1946, for instance, George Orwell (about whom it was once said that he could not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry) wrote in the journal Horizon: 'most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way'. A bad way compared of course to the language of previous generations, which was purer and more correct than the English of his own time. Perhaps, but had Orwell consulted his predecessors, he would have encountered different sentiments. In 1848, a century before Orwell’s article, the renowned linguist August Schleicher dismissed the English of his day as the most ‘ground-down’ of all the Germanic languages. English only showed 'how rapidly the language of a nation important both in history and literature can sink', and it was improbable that 'from such language-ruins the whole edifice will be raised anew'. Instead, he added gloomily, the language is likely to 'sink into mono-syllabicity'.

Or take this chilling prediction of impending doom: 'The greatest improprieties … are to be found among people of fashion; many pronunciations, which thirty or forty years ago were confined to the vulgar, are gradually gaining ground; and if something [is] not done to stop this growing evil ... English is likely to become a mere jargon.' Everyone has read such sentiments expressed in countless letters to broadsheet editors, so there is nothing especially surprising about this particular one, except, perhaps, that it was written some threescore years and ten before Schleicher’s proclamation, in 1780, by one Thomas Sheridan (actor, advocate of correct elocution, and father of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan). What Sheridan found most galling was that the decline of English was of such recent origin, since according to him, only seventy years earlier, 'during the reign of Queen Anne [1702–14] … it is probable that English was … spoken in its highest state of perfection'.

Really? The cognoscenti at the time would have begged to differ. Right in the middle of Queen Anne’s reign, Jonathan Swift embarked on what would go down in posterity as one of the most astoundingly bigoted rants in the distinguished history of this genre. His 1712 ‘Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue’ starts with the following fanfare: 'I do here, in the Name of all the Learned and Polite Persons of the Nation, complain ... that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions ...' and that’s only the beginning. So the English of today is not what it used to be, but then again, it never was.

From Chapter 4: A Reef of Dead Metaphors

In Antonio Skármeta’s Burning Patience (the novel on which the film Il Postino was based), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda tries to explain to the young postman Mario what poetry is all about:

‘Metaphors, I said!’

‘What’s that?’

The poet placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

‘To be more or less imprecise, we could say that it is a way of describing something by comparing it to something else.’

‘Give me an example.’

Neruda looked at his watch and sighed.

‘Well, when you say the sky is weeping, what do you mean?’

‘That’s easy – that it’s raining.’

‘So, you see, that’s a metaphor.’

Mario desperately wants to become a poet himself, but he fails to come up with any metaphors of his own. So Neruda tries to give him a helping hand:

‘You are now going to walk along the beach to the bay and as you observe the movement of the sea, you are going to invent metaphors.’

‘Give me an example!’

‘Listen to this poem: 'Here on the Island, the sea, so much sea. It spills over from time to time. It says yes, then no, then no. It says yes, in blue, in foam, in a gallop. It says no, then no. It cannot be still. My name is sea, it repeats, striking a stone but not convincing it. Then with the seven green tongues, of seven green tigers, over seven green seas, it caresses it, kisses it, wets it, and pounds on its chest, repeating its own name.'’

He paused with an air of satisfaction.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s weird.’

‘Weird? You certainly are a severe critic.’

‘No, Sir. The poem wasn’t weird. What was weird was the way I felt when you recited it ... How can I explain it to you? When you recited that poem, the words went from over there to over here.’

‘Like the sea, then!’

‘Yes, they moved just like the sea.’

‘That’s the rhythm.’

‘And I felt weird because with all the movement, I got dizzy.’

‘You got dizzy?’

‘Of course, I was like a boat tossing upon your words.’

The poet’s eyelids rose slowly.

‘Like a boat tossing upon my words.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You know what you just did, Mario?’

‘No, what?’

‘You invented a metaphor.’

Skármeta here portrays the conventional image of metaphor as the ‘language of poetry’, the summit of the poetic imagination. On a flight of inspiration, the poet carries a concept away from its natural environment into an entirely different realm. Mario’s chance metaphor, which links the unrelated worlds of words and the sea, may not be the most striking of poetic images, but in the hands of more inspired poets the impact of uprooting a concept from its natural environment can be arrestingly evocative – just think of Yeats’s closing lines from his poem ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’: 'I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.'

As the quintessence of poetic genius, metaphor may at first seem entirely irrelevant to the history of ordinary day-to-day language. For what could this elixir of artistic inspiration possibly have to do with the evolution of mundane communication? But in fact there is also an entirely different side to metaphor, far-flung from the poetic imagination. Removal vans in Athens, like the one in the picture below, don’t bear the word ΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΕΣ (METAFORES) because they are advertising courses in creative writing. The reason is much more prosaic, and is simply that meta-phora is Greek for ‘carry across’ (meta= ‘across’, phor= ‘carry’). Or to use the Latin equivalent, meta-phor just means trans-fer.

And one certainly does not have to be an aspiring poet in order to transfer concepts from one linguistic domain to another. Even in the most commonplace discourse, it is hardly possible to venture a few steps without treading on dozens of metaphors. For metaphors are everywhere, not only in language, but also in our mind. Far from being a rare spark of poetic genius, the marvellous gift of a precious few, metaphor is an indispensable element in the thought-processes of every one of us. As will soon become apparent, we use metaphors not because of any literary leanings or artistic ambitions, but quite simply because metaphor is the chief mechanism through which we can describe and even grasp abstraction.

From Chapter 6: Craving for Order

(The chapter contains a short introduction to Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon and Assyria):

... the oldest known member of the Semitic language family, Akkadian, is attested from around 2500 BC, and is thus one of the earliest written languages of all. (Only Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian can beat that record.) Akkadian was spoken in Mesopotamia, the land ‘between the rivers’, the Euphrates and the Tigris, in an area roughly corresponding to today’s Iraq. The name of the language derives from the city of Akkade, founded in the twenty-third century BC as the imperial capital of the first ‘world conqueror’, King Sargon. Later on, after 2000 BC, Akkadian diverged into two main varieties, Babylonian in the south of Mesopotamia and Assyrian in the north, both of which were to become the languages of large and powerful empires. Speakers of Akkadian (both Babylonian and Assyrian) dominated the political and cultural horizon of the Ancient Near East up until the sixth century BC. Their political star may have waxed and waned, but for a good part of 2,000 years, Mesopotamian emperors, from Sargon in the third millennium BC to Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar in the first, would lay claim to the title ‘King of the Universe’, ruling over the ‘the four corners (of the earth)’. More stable than the power of the sword, however, was the cultural hegemony of Mesopotamia over the whole region. The Akkadian language shaped the dominant canon for much of the Near East in religion, the arts, science and law, and was used as a lingua franca, the means of diplomatic correspondence. Petty governors of provincial Canaanite outposts, mighty Anatolian kings, and even Egyptian Pharaohs wrote to one another in Akkadian. Languages across the Near East also borrowed many scientific and cultural terms from Akkadian, a few of which may even be recognized by English speakers today. The Jewish expression mazel tov ‘good luck’, for example, is based on the Hebrew word mazal ‘luck’, which was borrowed from the Akkadian astrological term mazzaltu ‘position (of a star)’. But after nearly 2,000 years of cultural supremacy, the political demise of Assyria and Babylon in the sixth century BC ushered in an age of rapid decline, and within a few centuries both the Akkadian language and its writing system fell into utter oblivion. Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets, the product of 2,000 years of civilization, lay forgotten in the desert sands for two more millennia, to be rediscovered and deciphered only in the nineteenth century. Since then, an almost unbelievable wealth of texts has been recovered from the soil of Iraq and neighbouring countries and has opened up a unique perspective on one of history’s greatest civilizations. The texts encompass almost every imaginable genre, from poetry to legal documents, not to mention religious incantations, histories, royal inscriptions of heroic deeds, diplomatic correspondence, monolingual and multilingual dictionaries, mathematical and astronomical texts, medical treatises, and a seemingly endless quantity of administrative documents. One of the most fascinating genres, however, is that of ordinary private letters dealing with quotidian subjects, from commercial haggling to domestic disputes. Here, as one example, is perhaps the first ever recorded endeavour to calm family tensions. This short missive was written in the twenty-third century BC, and shows that on some issues, little has changed in more than 4,000 years: