The Origin of Language

Last week, I read an extremely interesting book on The Origin of Language. The book, written by Merritt Ruhlen, a distinguished linguist principally connected with Stanford University, was interesting because of its subject matter, but also because of its controversial nature. Perhaps you, like me, were unaware that there was a raging controversy among experts in the fields of linguistics. We would all do well, I think, to pay attention to it; it may hit closer to home than you think.

Language Connections

The book was mainly about the way you trace the connections between one language and another. This, argues Ruhlen, is done primarily by comparing the vocabulary words and grammatical forms of languages. Languages with many similar forms, like Spanish and Italian, or Hebrew and Arabic, are probably related.

Of course, there are other ways that languages could come to have the same vocabulary – for instance, the Modern Hebrew word for iphone is “ay-fone,” but this doesn’t mean Hebrew and English are related. However, Ruhlen makes a strong case for being able to differentiate when words just naturally developed the same, when they were borrowed, and when they are genuine indicators of a common earlier language – for instance, Italian and Spanish both come from Latin. He is then able to trace back a family tree of sorts for all the major language groupings in the world.

As pedantic as some of this might sound, this method of grouping languages is highly controversial amongst linguists. They are, according to Ruhlen, divided into two camps. Camp one, which most modern experts call home, says that it is impossible to tell whether languages are related. These experts maintain that it is ridiculous to think that we can trace languages back to their common origins, and it is quite entertaining to witness Ruhlen’s frustration at what he sees as irrational obstinacy.

The Story of Language

But why are the experts so obdurate? What makes this controversy more than an academic squabble? Well, the simple fact that the history of language cannot be separated from the history of humanity. And this history begins to take a very interesting shape if we accept Ruhlen’s evidence.

Ruhlen ends his book by making an extremely bold claim. After laying out his evidence in layman’s terms and explaining both his side and the other side, he appeals to the reader to judge between his view and the experts’. His view is this: that ultimately, all language in the world can be traced to a single original language for mankind, which then split between Africa and the rest of the world – that is, which split around ancient Mesopotamia.

Now, Ruhlen thinks this is a perfectly straightforward case of evolution, of gradual change over time in language. There is only one problem with this. Throughout the book, both Ruhlen and his opponents take it for granted that language gets less complicated over time. It doesn’t grow and branch out as much as it degenerates and fragments. Thus, as both these sides, in their own ways, trace the change in language over time, they look for patterns of grammar and pronunciation that always move toward decreasing complexity.

The Story of Humanity

You see, as passionate as Ruhlen is about the truth of this matter, he has missed the most exciting part of his discovery. He is willing to fight tooth and nail against the experts in his own field, but he is unable to see what his evidence means because he has accepted without question the account other experts have given of the world: gradual increasing complexity. He cannot get past this, even when all his evidence runs directly counter to it. I suspect that is what many of the linguistic experts do realize, and perhaps why they don’t want to hear his evidence.

What kind of world might we find if we threw out this presupposition of gradual increasing complexity and looked at the evidence? Well, we might get a different world entirely, and this is why linguistics is so interesting to me. Because a people’s language cannot be separated from a people, and it can also not be separated from a people’s stories. When we trace back the language of mankind, we also trace back its stories, way back to the myths that tell us their earliest accounts of the world.

A few decades ago, a professor at Oxford grew interested in languages for this very reason and was drawn into looking for a common origin story for mankind, a “forgotten heroic past,” revealed by language and rich enough to have produced all these degenerated myths for mankind in the same way one original language (which he also believed existed) fragmented into many. He did his best to recreate that sense of heritage and history in his fictional writings. You may have come across his work – his name was J. R. R. Tolkien.

What if the world is less like the pre-history our schools teach and more like Lord of the Rings? What if?

“Rosetta Stone” by Ryan Somma is licensed under CC BY 2.0