Origin & Evolution of Languages

Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton mclasutt at brigham.net
Sat Jun 5 15:56:46 UTC 1999


[ moderator re-formatted ]

Nicholas:

[snip of your arguments about biology and language]

Your analogy of linguistic change being analogous to the slow accumulation of
change in biological organisms is, I'm sorry to say, false to a certain extent.
Were you a member of the Evolution of Language list last year?  If so, you'll
remember that we worked on this issue for a long time and two things basically
emerged from that discussion:

1) Nonlinguists were constantly trying to pigeonhole linguistic change into
some hard science/evolutionary model that could be quantified and codified like
biological evolution can be.

2) Linguists were equally firm in their contention that linguistic change does
not fit into that model, and that every language we have records of (whether
written or reconstructed) shows the same level of expressibility and complexity
that every other language does, thus no "evolution" has occurred within the
last 10,000 or so years.  In fact, linguists tend to agree that modern language
was fully developed by about 40,000 years or so (that's a terminus ad quem, not
a fixed point for the conclusion as some linguists think it was finished long
before that).  That date is based on the peopling of Australia.  Language
complexity reached a point where it took about twelve years to learn it
fluently and no longer.  Since then it's been stable--change, but NO evolution.

Basically, we look at the difference between the evolution of the system
(Language versus languages), but change within the system (languages, not
Language).  This is a fundamental distinction which nearly all linguists make.
No serious linguist is going to argue that the change from Anglo-Saxon to
Modern English has somehow improved the overall nature of Language or even
affected the overall nature of Language.  Likewise, no serious linguist is
going to argue that Modern English is any better at discussing any topic than
Anglo-Saxon was.  The only advantage that Modern English has is in a readily
available vocabulary for some topics as opposed to others, but Anglo-Saxon had
all the word-building and borrowing processes already at hand that could solve
that deficiency quickly.  The grammars are functionally equivalent, as is the
grammar of any language in the world.  I've got tapes of Timbisha speakers in
Death Valley talking about the details of park administration and environmental
preservation completely in their language.  They've borrowed some English words
("Death Valley" refers to the national park, but "Timbisha" refers to the
physical valley, for example), adapted some native words for a modern meaning
("trail" is now "road", "bow" is now "gun"), and coined some new words using
old parts ("green leaf" is "money").  They didn't have any problems using their
language.  How long was Latin used as a medium for writing scientific papers?
Newton and Bacon wrote their major scientific works in Classical Latin 1500
years after it had ceased to be anyone's native language.  I have a grammar of
Kutenai written in Latin in the 1920s.  The author used Classical Latin grammar
and had absolutely no problem dealing with modern linguistic thinking and
terminology.  In other words, he quite easily used a language dead for at least
2000 years in a modern setting to discuss a modern topic.

That's exactly what linguists mean when they say that all languages are
equivalent.  The system which evolved several tens of thousands of years ago is
quite stable given the time required to learn it (no more than twelve years)
and the expressibility of any one of its daughters.  Linguistics evolution will
kick in again when the human brain takes another leap forward.

If you must think in terms of an evolutionary model for language, then think in
terms of Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium.  Basically organisms stay
in a stable state for long periods of time.  That's exactly where language is
right now and for the past several tens of thousands of years.  Sometime in the
future, some island population of humans will rapidly evolve a larger or more
complex brain and language will take another evolutionary step.  But until
then, "language evolution" is an incorrect term to use as a substitute for
"language change".  Remember, in linguistics, "evolution" refers to Language
and the system, "change" refers to individual languages.

John McL



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