IN THE BEGINNING: The Art of Slowing Down and Thinking Things Through (Chapter 1, Part 2)
This is the second of a six-part series. Below is a table of contents I'll update as each part is posted to Minds.
2. The Evolution (or Transformation) of Language (you are here!)
5. Mathematics and Symbolic Logic Are Languages Too
6. Why Thinking Through Language is the First Topic of This Work
B. The Evolution (or Transformation) of Language
My work is not intended to be an exhaustive examination of the exact machinations and specific evolution and quality of language. While a fascinating subject, the important point I am driving at is all of our understanding of the world, as well as understanding of other people, is mediated by language. John McWhorter has an excellent book called “The Power of Babel,” which I highly recommend to those who are interested in exploring more ideas about language and language evolution, and I will be quoting partially from his work. In terms of how humans even began using something we might call language, McWhorter asserts that the best guess is that our ancestors began using language some 150,000 years ago. His work is, in large part, an attempt to explain how we might have “evolved” (or, as he more accurately puts it, “transformed”) into the state of being where there are 6,000+ recognized languages (and innumerable more dialects, which he views as a better descriptor than “language” since the idea that there is something we could call a hard and fast “language” such as English is misguided – an idea echoed by other authors and arguments we’ll be taking a look at in this chapter) being spoken the world over in our modern age. It is important to understand the significant differences in human ability to communicate (particularly through language) and anything else we might observe in the animal kingdom, as he covers in an extended analysis:
To understand this [what language is] requires an awareness of two things. First, human language differs sharply in a qualitative sense from the various levels of communicative ability, marvelous in themselves, possessed by some animals…. [H]uman language is unique in its ability to communicate or convey an open-ended volume of concepts: we are not limited to talking about exactly where home is, to warning each other that something is coming to try to eat us, or to matching vocalizations to fifty-odd basic concepts pertaining to our immediate surroundings and usually focusing on bananas and desire. Neither bees, chimps, parrots nor dogs could produce or perceive a sentence such as “Did you know that there are squid fifty feet and longer in the deep sea? They have only been seen as corpses washed up on beaches.” Because animals can only communicate about either things in the immediate environment or a small set of things genetically programmed (“The honey is over there,” “A leopard is coming,” “Banana!”), they could not tell each other about giant squid even if they had seen one, nor could they “talk” about corpses even if they had seen plenty. Then there is the specificity for which human language is designed: no animal could specify that the squid have been seen in the past, rather than being seen right now, nor could they communicate the concept of “knowing” in “Did you know…?”
Moreover, McWhorter does away with a notion that has been common in our history, the idea that some languages or language abilities are more sophisticated than others, and sophistication is somehow a subset of civilization or “civilized societies,” for example. He states that “language is as sophisticated in all human cultures and is thus truly a trait of the species.” In what may seem counter-intuitive at first, McWhorter further writes:
The more remote and ‘primitive the culture, the more likely the language is to be bristling with constructions and declensions and exceptions and bizarre sounds that leave an English speaker wondering how anyone could actually speak the language without running the risk of a stroke. Meanwhile, many of the hotshot “airport” languages are rather simple in many ways in comparison with the “National Geographic” cultures; languages: English, Spanish, and Japanese grammar are “Romper Room” compared with almost any language spoken by the hunter-gatherers who first inhabited the Americas.
At first, one might suppose that hunter-gatherers lack of a seemingly “sophisticated” language was some how correlated with (or even causal for) their level of technological sophistication – indeed, as we’ll see later, this was the prevailing attitude of colonizers from European countries. However, it might also make just as much sense to suppose that an overly-complex language would not lend itself as well to technological advancement, as efficiency of communication is reduced.
McWhorter builds the case that language is best understood as “change” rather than as a static, rigid system. It might change slowly according to an individual’s perception, but tracked over multiple generations the rate of change can be quite astounding. This is why a speaker of what we call “Modern English” would be entirely unable to understand what linguists call “Old English,” and why Shakespeare exists in a kind of difficult-to-parse middle ground between the two. In each time period, speakers of the language just called it plain old “English,” however, and it is only with hindsight that we can observe the shifts and adaptations. McWhorter’s book is full of fascinating details about this process, and is highly recommended, but the exact mechanics and process of these changes is not relevant to our discussion. What might be important to understand, however, is the universal nature of language change; that language change cannot be tied down specifically to “historical, social, and cultural conditions,” and that “change would continue apace even without these things” as McWhorter observes. Additionally, McWhorter writes:
The slow pace of language change has two effects. One is to condition the illusion that a language is a static system. The other is that a new stage in the change coexists with the older stage for a while before taking over…The combined effect is that, where some evidence of language transformation peeks out at us, we process it as “a mistake…” Yet it is through just the kind of thing that seems slovenly today that the language of tomorrow develops. Language change, to the extent that we can perceive it, appears to be decay…No scholar has yet encountered a forlorn culture where the language simply “wore down” to the point that the people can no longer communicate beyond desperate barks (not even English, contrary to ever-popular belief)… Language change is neither decay nor even evolution, it is transformation – a term I have deliberately used in place of evolution, with its connotation of progress.
Martin A. Nowak approaches the idea of language from a different route in his work, the Evolutionary Biology of Language. His conception differs from McWhorter’s in that he assumes language “evolved” from a simple system of symbols into modern language. Using his fair share of advanced logic and mathematical concepts – which are beyond the scope of this work – he outlines how language could have changed from a rigid system of limited symbols whereby one object had one symbol, to the more modern system which allows for (perhaps) unlimited expression of ideas and events. Another scholar in this field, Greg Urban, describes modern systems in the following way: “Present-day human languages can be readily deployed to talk about events, objects, people and places far removed in space and time from the act of speaking, and the signs used to talk about such displaced referents have no detectable physical similarity to the referents themselves” (from the article, Metasignaling and Language Origins). While McWhorter makes a strong case that language probably did not evolve in this fashion, Nowak’s work is still instructive in terms of how it assesses the “evolutionary fitness” of different language systems.
Nowak (2000) incorporates arguments about biological evolution in his analysis of language: “Evolution relies on the transfer of information from one generation to the next. For billions of years this process was limited to the transfer of genetic information. Language facilitates the transfer of non-genetic information and thus leads to a new mode of evolution.” Essentially, he asserts that language has evolutionary advantages, and thus more effective (or “fit”) systems of languages would be the ones that get passed down from our ancestors, while less “fit” systems would become extinct. How do systems become more or less fit? It has to do with how many symbols and how many definitions there are in a system:
In other words, adding the possibility of describing more and more objects (or concepts) to the repertoire of a language cannot increase the maximum amount of information transfer beyond a certain limit. If, in addition, we assume that objects have different values, the new find that the maximum fitness is usually achieved by limiting the repertoire of the language to a small number of objects. Increasing the repertoire of the language can reduce fitness. Hence the natural selection will prefer communication systems with limited repertoires.
He goes on to argue that “successful communication increases the survival probability or performance during life history and hence enhances the expected number of offspring. Thus, language is of adaptive value and contributes to biological fitness.”
You might be wondering, if languages which retain fewer concepts (“reduced repertoires”) have increased biological fitness and evolutionary advantage, how did modern language become so complex and accommodate so much ambiguity and confusion? Nowak offers his thoughts in the conclusion of Evolutionary Biology of Language (emphasis my own):
Efficient and unambiguous communication together with easy learnability of the language is rewarded in terms of pay-off and fitness. While we think that these are absolutely fundamental and necessary assumptions for much of language evolution, we also note the seemingly unnecessary complexity of current languages. Certainly, systems designed by evolution are not often optimized from an engineering perspective. Moreover, it seems likely at times evolutionary forces were at work to make things more ambiguous and harder to learn, such that only a few selected listeners could understand the message. If a good language performance enhances the reputation of the group, we can also imagine an arms race towards increased and unnecessary complexity. Such a process can drive the numbers of words and rules beyond what would be best for efficient information exchange.
Here, Nowak has laid the seed for an idea which will become very important shortly – the idea that language can become ideologized. In other words, language inherently lends itself to a polarized or specifically structured view of reality; people caught in the grasp of such an ideology might think they are describing objective phenomenon, when in actuality they are unable to see how they have been caught in a trap of ideological language which has an outsourced influence on how they are able to decode information around them and coming to them.