Origin & Evolution of Languages

[Nicholas Widdows]

Dr John McLaughlin wrote:

> 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.
[snip rest]

I labour to be brief, I become obscure. My previous posting was not at all
meant the way you took it, and I still can't see how you read all of it and
came away with the impression you did. With one exception, I agree 100% with
all the facts of linguistics and biology that you cite, and have vigorously
argued several times recently on this list that modern language evolved once
and has not become significantly different since.

My one exception is the meaning of the word "evolution". It's an English
word meaning "unfolding, unrolling, development". It's not a technical term
coined by biologists. Even in the biological context, it doesn't mean
speciation. It doesn't mean punctuation, catastrophe, large-scale change.
You're saying that it's used this way by linguists. Maybe it is by some, but
clearly others on this list don't use it that way: they use it to mean
"change, development". This is not to disagree about biological facts, it's
to disagree about semantics.

Assume for simplicity that modern language came from brain changes encoded
in DNA in an evolutionary event in Africa about 50 000 years ago, as you and
I believe. (Details not important.) That was a _biological_ event, and a
_biological_ change in language. It was part of human DNA evolution, not
part of language evolution. But once language came into existence, it too
began to change, and continues to change. This change is not biological. It
has no DNA counterpart, it probably has no great amount of natural
selection. (And of course it's not progressive.) But many of us call it
"evolution" because we use the word to refer to continuing change or
development.

Now it may be that we shouldn't do so, because many people think it must
refer to a biological process, and a few think it must refer to large
changes like speciation, and quite a few equate it with progress or increase
in complexity. I disagree with all these, but the etymology and historical
and technical uses of a word aren't enough to withstand popular
misapprehension. If it's now hopelessly ambiguous, so be it. We should
restrict the word to the biological event that began language change.

I don't mind so much the restriction to one sense, the best-known example of
evolution, as after all we can use synonyms like "development" for the rest.
But I'm pretty sure it's wrong in biology too (in the usage of most
biologists). Evolution of life is a gradual process with occasional
instances of speciation, perhaps some periods of stasis with only neutral
change, but evolution is always turned on, and means the whole process. So
even treating the word as either literally or metaphorically biological,
language is evolving right now, and has been from the start.

Thus ends my public vindication. More details in a private e-mail.
Nicholas