The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language Read online

  THE FIRST WORD

  THE FIRST WORD

  The search for the origins of language

  CHRISTINE KENNEALLY

  Viking

  VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2007 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Christine Kenneally, 2007

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kenneally, Christine.

  The first word / by Christine Kenneally.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 1-4295-4125-3

  1. Language and languages. 2. Evolution. I. Title.

  P107.K465 2007

  400—dc22 2007003182

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For Agnes (Nessie) Kenneally

  CONTENTS

  Prelude

  Introduction

  I. LANGUAGE IS NOT A THING

  Prologue

  1. Noam Chomsky

  2. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

  3. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom

  4. Philip Lieberman

  II. IF YOU HAVE HUMAN LANGUAGE…

  5. You have something to talk about

  6. You have words

  7.You have gestures

  8.You have speech

  9. You have structure

  10. You have a human brain

  11. Your genes have human mutations

  III. WHAT EVOLVES?

  12. Species evolve

  13. Culture evolves

  14. Why things evolve

  IV. WHERE NEXT?

  15. The future of the debate

  16. The future of language and evolution

  Epilogue: The babies of Galápagos

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  THE FIRST WORD

  Prelude

  Imagine all of your knowledge about language whirling above your head instead of inside it, each word a star. At least sixty thousand glittering specks of light—“brick,” “axel,” “pawn,” “shoe,” “Victorian,” and “apple”—hang in the air over your skull.

  Look more closely at each star and you’ll see that each is not a single point of light but an intense cluster of all the things you know about that word. The “rose” star includes bits of knowledge such as how the word sounds when you say it and how it looks when you write it. Perhaps a small image of a rose floats there, or maybe ten or twenty rose prototypes, all of which help you connect “rose,” the word, to the bloom of any Rosaceae shrub you come across.

  You know that roses, like most flowers, are perfumed, delicate, and short-lived. This constitutes physical knowledge. When you raise one to your nose, your body has expectations about what’s going to happen next. If the flower smells rotten, you feel shock as well as distaste. You also have linguistic knowledge. “Rose” has a special relationship with words like “scent” and “fragrance”; they go together in a way that “concrete” and “fragrance,” for example, do not.

  In the word constellation now twisting above your head, picture the connection between “rose” and “scent” as a filament running between the two stars. Other lines would run between “rose” and “red,” and “rose” and “flower,” and “rose” and “nose.” In fact, lines would connect “rose” and all sorts of words—words with similar meanings, words that make similar sounds, words that are the same part of speech.

  If all the different things you know about “rose” and its connections with other words were embodied in your language universe, lines would rapidly proliferate.

  Try mapping out connections for other English words, including everything from the lousiest pun to the densest nugget of grammar, all the associations and the conjugations, the synonyms, homonyms, and homophones—make them manifest.

  Now everywhere you look, fibers wind around words, tugging them together, pulling the entire assemblage tight. Some links might have especially significant relationships. The stronger the connection between words, the thicker the thread will be. (Consider “mow” and “lawn,” for example.) There are so many lines you can hardly see the words for the relationships between them. What began with a few threads is now a tangled language web.

  It may seem as if the complicated mass above you maps the world. After all, the connections between words are like the connections between physical objects. People eat apples, for example, and not coincidentally there is a word for people, a word for eating, and a word for apple. Actors act on objects in language as they do in life, and when we put words together, it seems as if the point of language is simply and accurately to describe the real thing. But language is not a replication of the physical world. If you look closely, you’ll see there are holes in the web you have built, places where the world of words does not correspond to the physical world. Words align according to their own rules. Moreover, there is so much that happens in our daily lives for which there is no language. There is no verb for the way an airplane’s shadow ripples across the landscape, no specific adjective to describe that single unruly hair poking out of your eyebrow.

  Because language does not mimic the world, you can do things with it that are impossible under the laws of physics. You are a god in language. You can create. Destroy. Rearrange. Shove words around however you like. You can make up stories about things that never happened to people who never existed. You can push a camel through the eye of a needle. It’s easy if “camel” and “needle” are words.

  In language, mortality does not tick relentlessly. You can conceive of yourself as alive forever. Or you can imagine yourself dead. And then alive again. You can live, die, live, die, live, die, live.

  Now imagine what it’s like for the person nearest you. Look over and visualize everything he knows about language bristling above his head. No individual’s language is ever exactly the same as another’s, but assuming he also speaks English, the basic size and shape of his word constellation are similar to yours. Perhaps he has stars that you don’t, like “Rexism,” an early-twentieth-century religious m
ovement. Maybe the connections that run from his “who” and his “whom” are different from yours. Because dialects and idioms differ, some words and grammatical rules aren’t identical, even if you both speak English.

  But there is much that is the same between your language and his. Your “rose” star maps closely onto his, as do “car” and “grill” and “Bombay” and tens of thousands of other words. If threads ran from the words in your language network to the matching words in his, your heads would be simultaneously joined and dwarfed by the vast, complicated lattice you share.

  If you add a third and fourth person, it’s going to start to look as if your heads are plugged into a huge, shining network consisting of billions of lines. Add some more speakers, and the number of connections becomes uncountable.

  After you’ve included everyone who speaks English, imagine the 410 million people in the world who speak Spanish. Draw a different network for each of them individually, and then join it up. Bring in Kurdish and Arabic. Add Basque, Urdu, and American Sign Language.

  Now add all the speakers of all the languages of the world. Step back. You can see that the whirling word universe above your own head is merely an atom in the linguistic matrix surrounding your entire species. Everyone who has language is connected, and anyone who is connected lives in two worlds—the physical realm, where one’s feet touch the earth, one’s ears capture sound waves, and one’s eyes sieve light, and the realm of language, where one ceaselessly arranges symbols in particular patterns so as to connect with other beings who also move the same symbols in the same patterns.1

  For all the complexity of each world, one has a certain primacy: the physical plane is the indispensable platform of the symbolic world. You articulate the abstract with the same throat, tongue, and lips that you use to eat, breathe, and taste. The buzz of your vocal cords resonates through all the bones of your body.

  Because the two worlds overlap so much, people get to interact with other beings on both planes—with their bodies in the physical world, and within the language matrix. As I write these words—here at the Tea Lounge on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn—you, the reader, may be anywhere—Manhattan, London, Melbourne—and I could be dead. It doesn’t matter. In language, you and I are connected.

  When you access the vast global network of computers we call the Internet, you can travel the world, find information, and interact with people in a way that was never before possible. The creation of the net was an awesome leap in technological evolution. Yet for all that it offers, it is the merest shadow of something much larger and much older. Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on.

  Introduction

  In the popular imagination, evolution is a clean arc from rock hammer through arrowhead to Pentium processor. It’s an inevitable outcome of one of those vague principles of life: the superior somehow unfolds out of the inferior. Likewise, language evolution begins with the urgent grunting of a guy with a club, moves through a “Me Tarzan, you Jane” phase, and ends finally with the epitome of civilization—the whip-crack enunciation of Sir Laurence Olivier as Hamlet.

  For a long time the scientific account of language evolution wasn’t that dissimilar to the popular version. Researchers sketched only a broad-stroke picture in which the complex somehow inevitably arose from the simple. Some thought, for example, that prior to Homo sapiens’ current brilliance with words there existed a protolanguage, a clever form of communication that distinguished us in crucial ways from our fellow primates. But how did this protolanguage and the systems that followed it arise? Did a single genetic mutation shape the destiny of man? Or was it a slow layering of change over countless generations that propelled us from grunt to nominative case and from screech to sonnet—not to mention haiku, the OED, six thousand distinct languages, and words like “love,” “fuck,” “nothingness,” “Clydesdale,” and “aquanaut”? There are no easy answers.

  Of all the formidable obstacles to solving this mystery, the first lies in the nature of the spoken word. For all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation; it is little more than air. It exits the body as a series of puffs and dissipates quickly into the atmosphere. On the evolutionary timescale, bone can last long enough to leave an impression, enabling us to track, for example, the adaptations that shaped 150 million years of ichthyosaurs. We can now see from the fossil evidence how these ocean dwellers changed over time, ballooning from a half meter into four-meter monsters, lengthening their spectacular snouts, and evolving fins and flukes from lizard bodies, before vanishing from the earth forever. But there are no verbs preserved in amber, no ossified nouns, and no prehistoric shrieks forever spread-eagled in the lava that took them by surprise.

  Writing is a kind of fossil and so can tell us a little about the languages that have been recorded since it was invented. While it shares a lot with spoken language, including most of its words and much organizational structure, writing cannot be considered the bare bones of speech, for it is something else entirely. Writing is static, structured by the conventions of punctuation and the use of space. The kinds of sentences that occur in writing bear only an indirect relationship to the more free-flowing and complex structures of speech. Writing has no additional channels for avoiding ambiguity, as speech has with intonation and gesture. And writing is only six thousand years old.

  In the absence of petrified words, evidence of change in language-related body parts offers a compelling clue to the course of language evolution. The brain, the tongue, the larynx, the lungs, the nose, and the uvula—the pendulous flap that swings in the throat of screaming Looney Tunes characters—are all intimately involved in speech production. But on the geologic timescale, soft tissue doesn’t last much longer than a sound wave. It leaves traces only in very peculiar cases, like the skin of a thirty-thousand-year-old mammoth stalled in Siberian permafrost or the famous prehistoric iceman, a five-thousand-year-old mummy naturally preserved in an alpine glacier on the Italian-Austrian border.

  For a long time the closest we could get to language-related fossils were the impressions left by the bones of distant ancestors. Scientists gained some useful information by interpreting cranial remnants, since skull size is an interesting, if indirect, measure of brain volume. Assumptions about the language skills of our forebears can also be made when considering the length of the neck vertebrae and the progression of other skeletal changes over time.

  But the size of a skull or a femur takes you only so far. It doesn’t tell you when the first word was uttered. Nor does it tell you if it was a noun like “tiger,” a verb like “eat,” or an imperative—“Run!” Bones can’t tell you who said the first word or who was listening. Did language begin as a soliloquy, or is the fundamental nature of language to be communicative? A conversation requires at least two people—but how could someone invent language at exactly the same time that someone else figured out how to decode it? Fossils cannot answer this question.

  Only very recently have scientists begun to work out how language evolved. But in the same way that no single fossil can provide an answer, no one researcher can solve this problem, which is fundamentally awesome and multifaceted. There will be no Einstein of linguistic evolution, no single grand theory of the emergence of language. Unearthing the earliest origins of words and sentences requires the combined knowledge of half a dozen different disciplines, hundreds of intelligent, dedicated researchers, and a handful of visionary individuals. Finding out how language started requires technology that was invented last week and experiments that were conducted yesterday. It also needs simple basic experiments that have never been done before.

  It was only four centuries ago that electricity was discovered. A century later the principles of internal combustion were worked out and the engine was created. In the twentieth century we invented the computer, discovered DNA, split the atom, sent Voyager 1 into the outermost regions of the solar system, and unrav
eled the human genome. It is only now that we are getting to the really difficult questions. Piecing together several million years of linguistic evolution without a single language fossil is not just a cross-discipline, multidimensional treasure hunt; it’s the hardest problem in science today.1

  This book tells two intertwined stories about language evolution. The first is an account of how it happened, the twenty-first century’s best guess at humanity’s oldest mystery: how the fundamental processes of evolutionary change spiraled together to produce an ape with protolanguage and, eventually, a linguistic primate—us. The second story is about what prompted a group of scientists to start asking questions about language evolution at this point in time. As with all scientific tales, it is a parable about humility and hubris, about progress and intellectual folly. It begins with a basic uncertainty about the validity of even studying how language evolved—think of this tale as the evolution of a doubt. The doubt began to nag at certain individuals thousands of years ago, and it has flourished over the years to concern many people in modern times. It has taken different forms: like Did language evolve at all? Is this question scientific? and Even if it is scientific, can we ever answer it? If you picked just one of these questions and followed its threads, you would soon find yourself tangled in a bloody thicket: Is the study of language a science? What counts as scientific evidence? Is language what makes us unique? What is language, anyway? What, in God’s name, is science?