In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  John McWhorter, the author of a sociolinguistic compendium for public consumption and therefore a general overview of the current state of play, confidently asserts that human language started with just one language, which is predictably called the Ur-language. Scientifically we have no way of knowing whether or not there was only one original human language or how such a language could have come about. As it is hard to believe that the extraordinary linguistic skills of human beings were born “all of a piece”, it seems just as likely that some rudimentary form of independent language (not hard-wired) was already in existence before the self-appointed homo sapiens developed as a species. It is then equally likely that language differentiated itself linguistically but not biologically before a recognisably complex human language appeared – that language skills grew in an environment of linguistic diversity and flexibility through an evolutionary process that pre-dated our current languages and our emergence as a finite species.

  Only a very loose grammatical template and the ability to learn language is hard-wired. It appears to be in the nature of language to fragment and evolve quickly, and this process was only reversed by the rise of the state, which imposes greater uniformity spatially, and writing, which slows down the rate of change (and imposes greater uniformity chronologically).

  We have, of course, no way of knowing because the history of language starts with all the rest of human history; it is written history and the writing down of older oral history that marks out history from the gloom of pre-history.

  Recently archaeology has taken us a little further back, but mainly it has added to our knowledge of periods on which written records had already thrown some light. The most sensible comments on the origins of language are in my opinion the self-confessed speculations of Bruce Chatwin in his book Songlines, which considers the origins of language principally in relation to the aboriginal peoples of Australia. The dialogue between the policeman and Arkady, the Russo-Australian champion of the Aborigines, is undoubtedly one of the most powerful scenes in the book:

  Many Aboriginals, [Arkady] said, by our standards would rank as linguistic geniuses. The difference was one of outlook. The whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future. The Aboriginals put all their mental energies into keeping the world the way it was. In what way was that inferior?2

  “Primitive” peoples are polyglots, poets, songsters and taxonomists. Lacking intellectual specialisms, they can boast a much wider knowledge of the human arts and the environment that surrounds them. Chatwin was particularly interested in the close relationship between language and landscape, and the use of song to memorise the topography of aboriginal itineraries. If this is correct, then oral huntergatherer societies must have attempted to retain the integrity of their stories while allowing their languages to change, in part through the inevitable instability of the non-literate and in part through their attempts to improve on their poetry. Modern societies change the storylines in a constant search for new material that shocks and titillates, but show less interest in language itself, which so often fails to rise above the most pedestrian mimesis.

  Steven Pinker provides a very interesting example of the complexity and subtlety of languages in societies once considered primitive or even “savage” by European imperialism: the highly agglutinate language, Kivunjo, which is spoken in Tanzania and Kenya, has an extremely complicated tense structure; indeed there are tenses that refer the action of a verb to today, earlier today, yesterday, no earlier than yesterday, yesterday or earlier, the remote past, the habitual, the ongoing, the consecutive, the hypothetical, the future, an indeterminate time and the occasional. Moreover, it has various markers, including the prefix “n-” which indicates that the word is the “focus” of that particular part of the conversation. I will make more of this point when I examine what I define as the Social Mind, but for the moment let us stress that “primitive” man in historical times generally uses complex linguistic forms, and it is therefore legitimate to conjecture that early man also did. This point is relevant here because it relates to how language is perceived in the definition of man.

  Dante, who obviously believed that all animals were created by God and did not change or evolve, did however believe in a hierarchy that developed from the basest animals, made a gigantic leap to mankind and then another gigantic leap to angels. Language, for him, defined the human being and its intermediate place.3 Darwin, who obviously believed in evolution, also believed in evolution within the human species. He was certainly not Gobineau, but his ideas did reflect most of European thinking at the time (imperialism) and he perceived gradations that continued from the animal kingdom into humanity. To some extent there has been a partial return to this thinking. Those who hold these views naturally want to downplay the importance of language and give greater importance to technological advancements (it may of course be that Darwin as a biologist felt more qualified to speak about the other factors). He clearly states, “[Language] certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.” But he is clearly confused, because he immediately backtracks and claims that “man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children.”4 He needed to show how his evolutionary continuum went through many gradations that divide both animals and men:

  Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping his basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or a Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who uses hardly any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakespeare. Differences of this kind between the highest of men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected to the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other.5

  We now know more about “primitive” languages and are not so dismissive of them (indeed we admire their complexities).6 But what matters here is that by considering language to be the main determinant of what it is to be human we are also compressing the whole of humanity onto the same stage in evolution, and marking out the distinctiveness of its separation from other animals (evolution does appear to be a series of steep climbs and plateaus, so this human plateau is not an unusual occurrence). In this sense, the recognition of the importance of language in our nature is a humanism, and takes us back to the humanist tradition that straddled the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era. For English-speakers, Hamlet’s soliloquy immediately springs to mind.7 But of course, when we now argue that language, rather than the more mundane opposable thumb or bipedalism, is the badge of our distinctiveness, and that we are therefore divided by culture and not biology or divine intervention, we are not denying our closeness to the animals; we are simply indicating the particular gift of nature and evolution that has ensured our survival and perhaps made us dangerously successful.

  The opposable thumb allows us – alone amongst the primates – to get a really good mechanical grip on the world around us, while language has enabled us to express our individuality and to communicate with others in great depth. It has nurtured our reflective side and allowed us to store up knowledge. The hand with an opposable thumb has allowed us to grasp the sword, battle-axe, spear and dagger. It set us on the path of war. As technology developed, the contributions of the two attributes became more balanced. The opposable thumb made it possible to hold a pen and record language, and language became a tool of power and class differentiation. Together these two remarkable attributes have allowed the construction of all the great machinery of coercion that surrounds us – coercion that affects us and affects our entire environment.

  I have heard that dolphins too might have the faculty of language expressed through the modulation of their clicking sounds. If this is true, they are extremely fortunate not to have a hand with an opposable thumb. Perhaps they have languages and dialects. Perhaps they recite poetry to each other in the South Atlantic while one of their number simultaneously t
ranslates it into White Sea for the benefit of a delegation from the north. But no one can lift a weapon and no one can impose their will. So dolphins leap from the waves, and humans toil and look on jealously at a talented species that does not appear to have been expelled from its earthly paradise. We feel an affinity but also feel that we came off worse in our airy element than they did in their watery one.

  We may be inclined to adopt attitudes of moral superiority in relation to men like Darwin, but we are all affected by the spirit of our time, often to the detriment of our own ideas (and of no one more than Darwin could it be said that he was not affected by the zeitgeist but, rather, invented it). It must have been very difficult for Western Europeans, like any other people who finds itself militarily unstoppable, not to believe in their own innate superiority and to translate that false sense of superiority into exceptionally cruel behaviour. It could be argued that they were less cruel than many other peoples who found themselves temporarily in such a position and whose reputation relies on myth as much as it does on historical fact: the Vandals, the Huns and the Mongols (whose orgies of destruction annihilated cities and brought to an end the advanced civilisations of the Middle East and Central Asia, and ultimately left the way open to the decline of the Arab world and its maritime empires and to the rise of Western Europe and its rival ones). But to put that argument, we would have to conceal (or continue to conceal) the unpalatable truths of what the Europeans did in sub-Saharan Africa in relatively recent times, for which there is ample documentation: the most hidden of the hidden holocausts. Another reason for European superiority was that the Victorians, who suffered in many ways from their Industrial Revolution, were winning a battle that was as old as settled communities – the battle against our own dirt. Today, after the terrible events of the twentieth century, one would have hoped that no sane person could insist upon the moral and intellectual superiority of the European.

  But this quasi-moral humanist argument is not what primarily concerns me here, although it is a very valid and attractive one; I believe that the importance of language in defining human nature, which stresses the underlying similarities and therefore equality between all human beings irrespective of their material wealth, raises the question of how our unusual treatment of language has been affecting the people of the West for some time and is now beginning to affect nearly all the peoples of the world. I wish to argue that our current relationship with language is having some damaging effects on humanity as a whole or, at the very least, that this hypothesis deserves consideration.

  McWhorter argues that his single primeval language “was low on decorative bells and whistles”, and “that the first language, not having existed for a long enough time for inflections to appear through grammaticalisation or other gradual processes, can be assumed not to have had inflections”.8 If we go back just quarter of a century, learned thinking appears to have been even more bizarre: Ronald Englefield is absolutely certain that, while language was undoubtedly a remarkable “invention” on the part of humanity, it was “no more remarkable than the fact that apes do not make use of bows and arrows, clothes or agricultural implements”.9

  These speculations are less than convincing. Because we have fossil evidence, it appears that the brain of our forebears began to grow about 2.5 to 2.0 million years ago and ceased about 400,000-200,000 years ago. It may be assumed that at least in part that brain growth was needed to develop the power of speech, and that the power of speech required brain power to deal with a multiplicity of languages. This seems much more logical than the idea that the ability developed before the reality that required it, which is exactly what Englefield and McWhorter are arguing, the former very crudely and the latter in a more nuanced or, some might say, inconsistent manner.10 As for the lack of ornamentation in early speech, it seems just as probable that ornamentation was precisely the element that drove language development. Our ancestors probably had more subtle minds and more time to chatter, to natter, to jabber, to gibber, to gabble, to gas, to prattle, to prate, to blather, to blether and to otherwise engage in that activity for which the English language has such an abundance of pejorative verbs. In other words, to dwell upon that God-given right and ability to be garrulous. But the comic-strip version of our ancestors still pervades our thinking and portrays our earliest ancestors as cave-dwellers who have suddenly realised the potential for modulating their grunts. I find it more believable that modern man is moving swiftly to plain language, reduced vocabulary and an absence of memory (because language and memory are intimately entwined). Evidence from the family of Indo-European languages since the invention of writing shows a marked trend from the complex towards the simple. All these languages appear to have originally had three genders, but many are now reduced to two and English has managed some time ago to dispense with gender altogether. Indo-European languages once had dual verb forms, but only Slovenian has retained this subtlety (and it is now disappearing in the spoken language). Older languages have more complex but also more elegant syntax (although some might say more cumbersome). Their vocabularies are more subtle and the meanings of their words more influenced by context (the standardisation of modern “national” languages has undoubtedly assisted learning, but it naturally discards such apparently useless things as context-specific colours). Welsh and Gaelic, like Latin, have no single word for “yes” and “no”, and express these concepts by using a construction based on the main verb in the question. Gaelic, unlike Latin, has not yet learned how to predicate the verb to be with a noun. The construction, “she is a teacher” is impossible; it has to be either “it is a teacher that is in her” (’s e tè-teagasg a th’innte) or “she is in her teacher” (tha i na tè-teagasg). Obviously this does not mean that either Latin or Gaelic are unable to express certain subtleties; it means that Latin and Gaelic speakers work a bit harder and their linguistic abilities may therefore be more highly developed than those of speakers of newer and simpler languages. Of course, McWhorter could quite reasonably object that this example only concerns the very end of the long history of human language, but as the long prehistory remains in the dark and probably always will, he has no evidence other than the “common-sense” conceit that man is always evolving. Englefield is more disconcerting in his claims (McWhorter’s at least have the merit of a certain speculative logic). The inventions of clothing and agricultural implements denote cognitive abilities, which include language, or to put it another way, we are able to invent these things precisely because we have language. Moreover, language denotes a specific predisposition particularly in young children. Babies apparently lie on their backs for their first nine months showing few signs of activity because they are engaged in the difficult task of distinguishing and recording the phonemes specific to their own language community. What, we may ask, were they doing before language was “invented” or developed its complexities, if language came after our full development as a species? Other mammals are up and running around the place long before that, because they do not have this difficult task imposed on them by nature. When Darwin was asked to specify the years in which humans do most of their learning, he replied with the surprising intuition of a scientific genius, “The first three.”11 Human beings are not capable of inventing their own brain; it is their brain that invents, and their brain already includes language as an essential component. After Chomsky, it has become clear that the human brain is designed to receive language. Humanity did not invent language; language invented or at least defined humanity.

  I could find many examples of creation narratives for language other than my own modern version at the beginning of this chapter. These myths are entirely harmless as long as they make no claim to be anything other than myths. When they dress themselves up as science and claim to be facts, they risk taking us off on a path of mistaken certitudes. Often when writers invent a creation myth, they are trying to say something about their contemporary society and beliefs. The desire for creation myths is perhaps itself a product of the
template of human language: a subject acts upon an object, and so reality is a chain of cause and effect. The imagination then applies itself to that logic and comes up against the terrifying realisation that there must have been a first cause, just as there will ultimately be a final effect (today, we possibly do not see this as an inevitable truth). The first cause therefore obsesses the philosophical mind and provides the political thinker with a means to describe what he considers to be “natural”, because the first cause is considered to be appropriate and very often divine, while everything that followed was some kind of degeneration or compromise with reality.

  At least, this was the case up until the birth of the idea of progress, and even after that, large popular movements such as socialism and feminism continued to invent “golden ages” that could be reinvented in modern society. I cannot say whether Plato really believed that first man grew out of the ground and did not have a penis or indeed a female companion. I suspect that he didn’t. However, he definitely believed in the primacy of men in relation to women and that sexual activity is a distraction from man’s true nature, which is supposed to be meditative and rational. The myth was not a quirky little fable, a Tolkien-like reinterpretation of a form from a previous age primarily as a literary divertissement; it was a clear statement about the nature of pleasure, sex and man’s place in the world. It is more likely but by no means certain that Rousseau believed his assertion that the first man who fenced off a piece of land was responsible for enslaving humanity. For us, of course, it is a much less outlandish claim; nevertheless the marking of a territory for agricultural use so that the sower of seed could enjoy the fruit of his or her labours some months later may well have been done not in the name of private property but communal ownership. Rousseau’s creation myth for property is highly effective and personally I find the truth it suggests more appealing than Plato’s wonderfully inventive but ultimately unacceptable pronouncements on sexual difference and the nature of pleasure. But I would advise against taking Rousseau’s words too literally, as all myth is an over-simplification even at its best; ultimately Rousseau’s words may well have been the force that emptied Phnom Penh.12