Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site uwmacc.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois From: dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois) Newsgroups: net.origins Subject: Language (2 of 2) Message-ID: <1168@uwmacc.UUCP> Date: Wed, 29-May-85 14:21:30 EDT Article-I.D.: uwmacc.1168 Posted: Wed May 29 14:21:30 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 31-May-85 04:29:38 EDT Distribution: net Organization: UW-Madison Primate Center Lines: 302 K. A. Dahlke inquired about creationist views on language. One creationist position on linguistic diversity is that of Henry Morris. This position may be briefly summarized as follows: "[H]ow can we explain the origin of different languages? If all tribes and races come from a common ancestral population, they must have all had, at one time, the same language. As long as they had the same language, they would never separate sufficiently to develop distinct racial characteristics. The fact is, however, that by some means such characteristics have developed; which means that the tribes were somehow separated; which means that languages somehow became different." Henry Morris, _Scientific Creationism_. Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego, 1974, p183. (See also Henry Morris, "Language, Creation, and the Inner Man". _Acts and Facts_, Number 28, Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, October 1975.) Morris feels that the segregation could not occur unless the language changed. (And I assume that the incident of the Tower of Babel is what he would propose to account for much of linguistic diversity.) That is possible, I suppose, but I see no reason to believe, however, that his explanation MUST be true. Morris says that a change in language leads to geographical separation. This is not the only possibility. For example, geographic separation could lead to a change in language. Whatever the origin of language, it does change once it is in use. It is not difficult to see that a large increase in population would force spread of that population over a large geographical area. When this happened, differences would emerge - local dialects, if you will. Carried far enough, we end up with different languages, e.g., French, Italian and Spanish from Latin. (I sound uncomfortably like a Darwinian gradualist here!) So I think that Morris' theory may be dismissed on these grounds. It may also be criticized in that it relies (in sections that I have not discussed) on charges of racism against evolutionary theories. I think most of us know that both creationists and evolutionists can, and have, levelled accusations of this sort against each other for some time now. Ray recently provided us with a list of the epithets that have been hurled at creationists on this net. I don't know that I see the value of this. I will ask instead, what do we know about the origin of language? And, as a corollary, is there something we cannot know? ---------- *What we cannot know* Julia S Falk, Linguistics and Language. Xerox College Publishing, Lexington, 1973. [pp52-53] "Since most, if not all, languages have onomatopoeic words, some people believe that early man first began to use language by imitating the sounds of nature. There is no evidence to support this bow-wow theory of the origin of language, just as there is no way to support the pooh-pooh theory (that language started with grunts, groans and cries of pleasure) or the ding-dong theory (that man happened to make noises when he saw certain objects and the noises gradually acquired the status of words naming the object). All such theories on the origin of human language are pure speculation; they go back beyond the period of recorded history and, because of this, can never be either supported or refuted." Ralph Linton, "The Tree of Culture". Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1955. [p9] "We know absolutely nothing about the early stages in the development of language." He adds, "although this has not prevented philologists from putting foward a number of more or less ingenious theories." John Paul Hughes, _The Science of Language_. Random House, New York, 1969. [pp30-32] "It has been pointed out that a bylaw of the Linguistic Society of Paris constitutes anyone _ipso facto_ out of order who wishes to read before it a paper on the origin of language. This is a scientifically sound attitude for, whenever and however language originated, one thing is sure: it was at a time so remote that there is not a shred of evidence on which to reconstruct any part of the story. But a word or two should be said in any serious linguistic work to counter the arrant nonsense on this subject which is still circulated in Sunday-supplement science features. "According to this pseudo-evolutionary foolishness, based on nothing but rampant imagination, language originated among our caveman ancestors when someone tried to tell the hitherto speechless tribe about the wolf he had killed, and was forced to give an imitation of the wolf, so that _owoo-owoo_ became the word for "wolf" (this is called the "bow-wow" theory); or when he hit his thumb with the mallet while shaping a stone spear, so that _ouch_ became the word for "pain" (the "ouch-ouch" theory); and similar fairy stories. "What needs to be pointed out is that there _is_ evidence against several of these hypotheses. For one thing, we are _not_ descended from the cave man - if by cave man we mean those prehistoric people whose remains were found in caves in France and Germany. (To assume that the whole human race went through a cave-dwelling stage is another inadequately founded hypothesis.) We know that the Indo-Europeans, from whom most Europeans and their languages are descended, entered Europe proper later than 3000 B.C.; how then could they be descendants of people who had lived in France some thousands of years before? The Basques _could_ be descendants of the cave man, likewise the _Tuatha Dea Danann_ of old Irish legend, and the people who built Stonehenge and the dolmens and menhirs of Brittany; but not any other present-day Europeans. "As to onomatopoeic theories of the origin of language, note first that in no language is a dog called a "bow-wow" or a cat a "meow." Secondly, it can easily be shown that we hear and imitate the sounds of nature _within the limitation of our first language;_ in fact, we cannot reproduce a sound of nature with a sound that is not used in our own language. Thus, to speakers of English it seems obvious that the sound a bell is _ding-dong;_ but to speakers of French, which has no _ng_ sound, it cannot be - and as _dindon_ is a turkey, a bell is more commonly _tam-tam_. The Spanish hear the same sound as _tin-tin_, the Germans as _bim-bam-bum_. The sound a cat makes is _meow_ to us, but _minou-minou_ to a French child. In Germany, the cock does not crow _cock-a-doodle-do,_ but _kikeriki;_ the dog does not go _bow-wow_, but _wau-wau_ (in which the _w_ is pronounced as _v_ in obedience to German spelling). Since onomatopoeia is influenced by language, it obviously cannot be the source of language. "There is an _a priori_ notion that language must have originated from "primitive grunts," and that consequently the tersest and most disjointed expressions we use today represent an earlier stage in the development of the language. Here again, however, scientific study of language reveals that all such expressions are merely fragments from more elaborate expressions containing all the structure of the fully developed language. Thus, when a Frenchman colloquially says _dac_, it is an abbreviation of _d'accord_, which is in turn an abbreviation of _je suis d'accord_. When a German says _guten Tag_, the adjective has an accusative form, showing that it comes from a sentence _ich wunsche Ihnen einen guten Tag;_ a polite exclamation like _bitte_ is in the first person singular - because it is abbreviated from _ich bitte Ihnen (dass Sie davon nicht sprechen)_. Since short forms presuppose developed ones, they cannot be the nucleus of the latter's development. "If we leave off pursuit of these will-o'-the-wisps, originally loosed across our path by, probably, Herbert Spencer, and set ourselves to seeing how far sound reasoning would carry us (undiscouraged by the fact that it will not carry us very far), we find ourselves in possession of three or four solid facts. "First of all, as far back as we can trace the process, every language ever spoken has originated from a previous language, and the lines usually converge: several languages in use at a given time derive from one in use some centuries before. It is therefore not impossible that all the languages of the world descend from a single language; though it is improbable that we shall ever have the data to prove this. "Second, as far as we can ascertain, each first speaker of any language has learned it from his parents, or, in rare cases, from other mature individuals who were already in full possession of its total structure. This poses us a problem analogous to the old riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Before anyone can learn a language, someone has to have learned it. "Third, there is some indication that "immediate" speech preceded "referred" or "displaced" speech (for a full explanation of these terms, see Chapter IX). This would seem to justify what we would assume _a priori_, that language arose from the need of human beings to signal to each other, and from their mental capacity to appreciate symbolism and to construct a system of symbols. The moment they could, by this means, manipulate phenomena not present to the eye, we may say that human language was born. But this leaves us one dilemma - if they were not living in society they would not need language; and how could they have commenced to live in society without it? "Here the data run out, and science abandons us. From here on, any hypothesis is equally possible - and equally unprovable. Let each choose his favorite, and find whither it leads him." [pp30-32] ---------- *What we do know* Linton. "It is safe to conclude that the use of language is exceedingly old, but unwritten languages disappear without leaving a trace. By the time that writing first appeared, in Egypt and the Near East, about 4000 B.C., the evolution of language was complete. [I believe that what Linton means here is that the development from animal communication to human language was complete, not that human language has become static.] The earliest languages which have left a record were as complex in their grammar and as adequate for the conveyance of ideas as any modern ones. Moreover, everything indicates that during the early part of human history there were far more languages spoken than there are at present. Each of the little, strictly local groups in which early man must have lived probably had its own. "The so-called primitive languages can throw no light on language origins, since most of them are actually more complicated in grammar than the tongues spoken by civilized peoples." [don't know page - it's close to the other quote from Linton, though.] Albert C Baugh, "A History of the English Language". Appleton-Century-Crafts, New York, 1957. [p10, 2nd ed] "A second asset which English possesses to a pre-eminent degree is inflectional simplicity. The evolution of language, at least within the historical period, is a story of progressive simplification. The farther back we go in the study of languages to which English is most closely allied, the more complex we find them." Baugh also said, regarding the relationship between complexity and primitiveness of a language: [p13, 1st ed] "Since grammatical simplification appears to be a mark of progress in language, English has some right to be considered the most advanced among the languages of Europe today." Baugh evidently had some doubts about this statement himself, as it was dropped from the second edition. I shouldn't wonder. The logical conclusion would be that the most complex languages are the most primitive, and the very simplest the most advanced. This might be a difficult proposition to defend in view of its manifest absurdity. George Gaylord Simpson, "The Biological Nature of Man". Science, 152, 22 April 1966, 472-478. [p477] "Even the peoples with least complex cultures have highly sophisticated languages, with complex grammar and large vocabularies, capable of naming and discussing anything that occurs in the sphere occupied by their speakers. The oldest language that can reasonably be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view." Noam Chomsky, "Language and Mind". Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1968. "There is no more of a basis for assuming an evolutionary development of 'higher' from 'lower' stages, in this case, than there is for assuming an evolutionary development from breathing to walking." (However, it is fair to add that Chomsky has always despised the "teaching animals language" studies.) Suzette H Elgin, "What is Linguistics?". Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973. "The most ancient languages for which we have written texts - Sanskrit, for example - are often far more intricate and complicated in their grammatical forms than many modern languages." [don't know page] Mario Pei, _The Story of Language_. J B Lippencott, Philadelphia, 1965. [p23] "It seems at least partly established that language changes least rapidly when its speakers are isolated from other communities, most rapidly when they find themselves, so to speak, at the crossroads of the world." An inference to be made from this, given the observed trend towards simplification in civilized languages, and the high degree of complexity of the languages of primitive cultures, is that the languages of the latter cultures are more closely related to their original languages than are the civilized ones. This is entirely consistent with the hypothesis of an origin of language that was complex and completely functional from the start. It is also inconsistent with a developmental theory of language origin positing increasing complexity arising from non-linguistic sources. [pp26-27] "What are the chances that modern linguists, equipped with the powerful aids of present-day science, may one day break down the veil of mystery that enshrouds the origin of language? Frankly, very slight...The languages of primitive groups do not cast too much light upon the problem. They are, as a rule, anything but primitive, save with reference to the vocabulary of modern civilization. Linguists who explore these tongues regularly find in them refinements of distinctions and complexities unknown to our own languages, even though circumscribed by the primitive group's experience and environment." It should be noted that all or nearly all of these writers believe that language did evolve from non-language (e.g., animal communication systems) - but can give us no facts to support this supposition. They merely cast what facts we have into the framework of an evolution that is assumed to have occurred. And the framework does not hold them too well. ----- It appears that languages become progressively simpler and that the oldest languages are the most complex. This is all wrong for a theory which must have language coming from non-language, although it is perfectly consistent with a model positing language beginning full-blown from nothing. The data also suggest that degeneration (or simplification) processes be must be a component of such a model. I daresay that it would not be impossible to come up with an evolutionary interpretation that would incorporate these facts. However, I doubt that the facts themselves would derive the interpretation. An interpretation must be derived into which the facts will fit. Such information as we have is difficult to explain on evolutionary grounds, since language must develop from non-language, i.e., become qualitatively different and quantitatively more complex. One might postulate an increase of complexity to a level higher than currently, followed by a period of decline, but the facts do not suggest this. It is an assumption that is required by the evolutionary interpretation. -- | Paul DuBois {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois --+-- | |