How we erode & generate language

books:

	• The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention Guy Deutscher Holt Paperbacks, 2006 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I'm no linguist

Let's be honest; I am no linguist but I learned so much about the origins of language reading this book. Reading about the subject interested me because of something I am curious about. Looking for books on the subject, I noticed the mention of this book in a review for another book about 'the mother language.' This received high approval ratings, so I took a chance and haven't regretted the decision.

How we erode & generate language

I read this on bus and plane rides recently, and wondered if I'd fall asleep despite its concentration on an issue that intrigued me: how do languages evolve? Do we decide what words fade and which expressions survive? And, are languages doomed to decay? Word-mavens bemoaning the idiocy of our current state of English, or any other language, compared to the glories of past prose and universal literacy and elegant wit will be disappointed. Deutscher begins with a string of citations from the past, with a mandarin amidst his philistine generation hearkening back to a Golden Age now irrevocably vanished.

Language, he assures us, will always morph on two principles: economy and expressiveness. In speaking, we tend to be lazy. Our mouths move in intricate fashion to shape sounds. We tend to take shortcuts. Over time, endings erode and prefixes rot. Their residue collapses into the center of words. Meanings compress into the core. This, in time, frustrates us even as we inadvertently contribute to language change by our collective action, as users slowly adopt to what individuals, seeking order, impose in our quest for logical, systematic syntax. What appears to horrified schoolmarms as regression to the inarticulate is, Deutscher insists, the course every language must and has and will take. We seek the easy way out in speech.

But, we also turn restless. Unhappy with worn-out expressions, we invent new ones. Analogies captivate us and we want fresh ways to communicate what matters to us. So, we build up new endings, invent new verbs, add new prefixes, and twist and turn meanings and phrases into vibrant, contradictory, or plain attention-getting forms. For instance, he cites "wicked" as used by old ladies coming out of a theatre to comment on the performance; this is contrasted with two teenaged girls using "wicked." The first pair mean that the entertainment was "bad" or "evil" or "immoral." The second pair convey their delight in its imaginative qualities, and give a positive spin to the word. In the course of a few decades, we can witness, he shows, language evolving as we listen. No one person controls this, but we adapt to the innovative gradually, and the change happens so gradually that for a while (as with many familiar usages) we will understand both meanings. In a century, we can predict, "wicked" will have reversed what we today regard as its primary definition.

The roots of these principles are buried in our minds, our perceptions, and predate by arguably hundreds of thousands of years our few recorded instances of how we talk and write. These, being so recent, offer fewer clues than many of us imagine; our language may have been around 100,000-40,000 years ago and itself rests on the way we separate actions from objects, and thus nouns from verbs, static from (potentially) dynamic entities, and what can change vs. what endures. Primates and some lower-level animals share these abilities of cognition, and out of this understanding, Deutscher explains with immensely learned, marvelously diverse, if often recondite examples, we create sounds to match what exists in our minds, our world, and our emotions and activities-- a tremendous wealth of symbolic and practical power.

When I read John McWhorter's "The Power of Babel" a few years ago (also reviewed by me on Amazon), he explained that languages decline from an overly complicated order into a simpler one, rather than-- as we'd expect-- vice versa. McWhorter's book complements Deutscher's. McWhorter wished to defend language against critics bemoaning its death throes, and supported the vigor of language shifts. Still, I had wanted to find out more about why the earlier stages of language were so declined and conjugated and structured so rigidly, systematically, and (to me) overwhelmingly.

Deutscher offers a solution, at least as much as we can know from the comparatively brief information from a few thousand at best out of probably at least a hundred thousand years of language. "A reef of dead metaphors" becomes his guiding metaphor!
We compress and erode language by our wish to economize. The rich detritus itself generates material to build upon the rubble and create structures that rise, like an ancient city stratified, ruins leading to higher ground and material to build syntactical patterns and form neologisms and extend analogies and spin off metaphors anew. Even the dense, rigid Semitic languages that we can glimpse from 5000 years ago themselves may have grown from eroded roots, and this process of growth and compression, rising and falling, may be ingrained in the way we manufacture language.

The book addresses a general reader, but is not easy reading. He does not pander to a reader, yet he also takes pains to find hundreds of examples from our daily patterns of communication to support his scholarship. He popularizes his findings from many linguists (see his footnotes that carefully record his energies and his qualifications-- he draws upon a dizzying range of studies in dozens of languages) This etymological excursion proves bracing. Parts-- as he warns in one later chapter fairly-- can be rather eye-glazing. Linguistics can be daunting. Yet, its laws and controversies and jargon, as with any science, reward careful investigation.

Illustrations scatter throughout, many rather superfluous such as clip art engravings of historical figures. However, the family trees of languages and the maps of Indo-European and Semitic language groups are drawn elegantly by hand and enhance the volume. I would have liked more explanation of why Mark Twain's famous complaint about women being neuter and turnips being feminine in German might have been based in structural categories; Deutscher dismisses much of an investigation into this as beyond the historical record early on but in a later chapter raises the point again only to repeat that most languages have such categories rooted in originally if irretrievably logical earlier groupings that already, by the time writing came along to document such usages, had altered beyond the norm. Also, the manner in which verbs emerge from prehistoric, non-grammatical utterances of objects and things alone appeared too hazy. I realize these are both topics whose origins rest thousands of years before any records, and they may be beyond our capacity to fully explain. Still, I wish more attention had been given these elusive situations!

This serious, yet engaging, book demands attention, and Deutscher exerts considerable effort in making linguistic erudition understandable. This may be suited more for time (as my commutes) when you can get lost in its pages for hours at a time. After reading it, you will understand how metaphor and analogy embed themselves in so many more profound ways than the obvious. Language, as Deutscher lovingly lists, drifts and crashes and coalesces over centuries, and we all, unintentionally, contribute to its evolution in our innate drive towards mental acuity through elegant expression-- combined with our tongue's own tendency towards sloth!

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Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Charles Lyell's "Principles of Geology," published in 1830, established the doctrine of uniformitarianism, an assumption that the forces active in the past are the same as the forces active today. With this assumption, Lyell was able to show how all of the geological structures of the earth could have arisen from just two forces, uplift and erosion. Charles Darwin carried the first volume of "Principles" with him on the Beagle, and that work greatly influenced his own thinking. In his "Origin of Species," published in 1859, Darwin showed how complex organisms could have evolved from less complex ancestors through a simple process of natural selection. Guy Deutscher, in his new book "The Unfolding of Language," has accomplished a similar feat for linguistics, showing how all the complexity of modern languages could have evolved from a simple proto-language by means of linguistic processes that still operate on languages today.

Deutscher claims that only three processes are needed to explain how syntactic and morphological complexity evolved from a "Me Tarzan, you Jane" pre-language. The first process is economy; in general, people will try to reduce effort whenever possible. For example, we see economy at work in contractions and newspaper headlines. The second process is expressiveness; that is, speakers have a need to create new utterances as new circumstances arise, and they need to add emphasis and emotional content to what they say. Exaggerated expressions like "not in a million years" provide an example of expressiveness. The third process is analogy; humans are very good at detecting patterns (even where they do not really exist), and they have a need for order. The recent shift in the past tense of "dive" from "dived" to "dove" for many American speakers is built on an analogy with "drive/drove."

Economy in languages is like the process of erosion in geology; both are gradual destructive forces. Speakers take shortcuts, dropping parts of words, running words together and omitting words altogether, all in an effort to save effort. Over the course of generations, these shortcuts become the standard forms in the language. A good example of this is the Latin case system, which was worn away over the centuries in the regional dialects that became the Romance languages. The more frequently an expression is used, the more it gets worn down, just as mountains are gradually reduced by the flow of wind and water.

Expressiveness, then, is like the process of uplift in geology. Various geological forces act to lift terrain, creating new mountains and ridges. Likewise, inventive speakers need to express new ideas and add emphasis, so they put words together in new combinations and extend the meanings of words by metaphor. These novel usages become standardized over time, and new structures in the language are created.

Expressiveness and economy are complementary processes in languages, just as uplift and erosion are in geology. The first process in each pair builds new structures, and the other wears them down. Together, they create a repeating cycle of build-up and decay.

The third process needed for full-fledged language to evolve from proto-language is analogy. Humans are excellent pattern recognizers, and they like to extend patterns as much as possible. Children learn their native language through pattern-recognition processes, picking up on the statistical regularities of the language. For example, they learn the pattern of adding "ed" to form the past tense and then produce forms like "goed." Sometimes these pattern extensions make it into the next generation of speakers and become standard forms in the language. Archaic English plurals like "eyn" for "eyes" and "kine" for "cows" are examples of this.

Next, Deutscher demonstrates how these three processes can build up a complex language, bringin in evidence from a vast number of languages. Bombarded by example after example, the reader is left wondering how language could have evolved any other way. Additionally, the reader is left wondering why no one had figured this out before, given that the data Deutscher presents is not new.

In Deutscher's model, there is no need for a language instinct. Instead, these three processes build up language upon a cognitive foundation that had already evolved millions of years ago in our primate ancestors. Furthermore, he shows how a number of language universals are also based general cognitive principles. Although Deutscher states that he prefers to avoid the nature-nurture issue, the evidence he brings forth leaves little support for the "language is special" view.

It is important to keep in mind that Deutscher is after the big picture. First, he does not even attempt to explain how every linguistic structure evolved, even though his examples are copious. Second, he gives the reader fair warning whenever he shifts from the attested to the speculative. His purpose is to show how complex linguistic structures could have evolved--in principle--by simple processes. In this regard he is like Darwin, who demonstrated how natural selection could work in principle; a century and a half later, biologists are still working out the details.

There is something else that languages and organisms have in common--both appear to have been designed. In the case of organisms, it was generally assumed, until Darwin, that they were designed by a divine creator. In the case of languages, however, five thousand years of writing has provided incontrovertible evidence that languages do evolve. The beauty of both Darwin's and Deutscher's ideas is that they provide compelling evolutionary explanations for apparent design.

Some time in the distant past the first word was uttered, and our ancestors began to speak. Haltingly at first, but a word or two at a time, and then over the eons they gradually built up a complex linguistic framework. No one invented language; rather, it emerged slowly from the social interactions of hominids over many thousands of generations, in much the same way that gradually more complex organisms arose. At the end of "The Origin," Darwin ponders: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." And so it is with languages, that most beautiful and wonderful of human endeavors.

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Informative and Fun

I loved this book. He doesn't write above the readers' heads, but language afficionados still feel like they're on his level. I loved his sense of humor. It moved very well. A great informative read.

Bursting with new ideas

I've read a goodly amount of material on linguistics, so I expect each new book to go over much the same ground as previous books, but this one took me by surprise -- it's chock full of new and interesting ideas. Other reviewers have already explained the basic structure of the book; allow me to offer some of the tidbits that stuck to my mind:

1. The concept of erosion. People always shorten words, cut off consonants, simplify vowels. His working example, and an excellent one it is, is "gonna", an eroded form of "going to". Erosion wears down words to the point that they start to lose expressiveness, at which point people tack on something else to clarify their meaning. He presents one case of a French word; I can't recall the details but here's an analogy: suppose that "gonna" someday gets eroded to 'gon' and later to 'g'. At some point, people will need to flesh it out, so perhaps they'll tack 'will' onto it to get 'gwill', which in turn might get eroded down to 'gill'. And so on and on and on. Many of the words in our language are eroded, compressed, multi-layer fossils of much longer original expressions.

2. Complementing erosion is back-formation, a process by which people extend patterns in the language to other words. One example might be the child who says, "I goed with mommy." The trick is, there are lots of patterns scattered all through the language, and ofttimes a pattern can be recruited to a word when that word has been dangerously eroded. This is especially likely when two words are similar in pronunciation. "sing sang sung" leads to "ring rang rung" -- but should past tense of the fairly new verb "wing" be "winged" or "wang" or "wung"? With so many patterns to choose from, there's always grist for language change.

3. He starts off with a delightful point on the common plaint that English is going to hell, that people nowadays don't know how to use it properly, how just 30 years ago the language was so much more pristine. He presents a modern quote to this effect; then another quote from 30 years ago saying the same thing; then another quote from 30 years before that saying the same thing; and so on all the way back to 1620. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

4. I was particularly impressed by his explanation of how the weird Semitic word system (every word has a root of three consonants, and the vowels that are filled in specify its gender, case, number, and so forth.) He starts by pointing out that this system is too intricate, too well-ordered, to have simply arisen by chance. Or is it? He proceeds to demonstrate just how it could have happened using erosion and back-formation.

5. Vowel coloring. This is another concept that I had seen mentioned but never explained. Some vowels can affect vowels near them in a word. The example he gives is the Germanic "gest", whose plural was "gestiz". [I'm probably screwing up the spelling here.] The 'i' in the plural form "colored" the 'e' and caused it to shift into an 'a'. Later on, the 'iz' was eroded down to a schwa (spelled as an 'e', but pronounced as a short "uh"). Thus, the singular is "Gest" but the plural is "Gaste".

All in all, a surprising and fascinating book. This guy is definitely on my list of authors to watch.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct, an original inquiry into the development of that most essential-and mysterious-of human creations: Language

Language is mankind's greatest invention-except, of course, that it was never invented." So begins linguist Guy Deutscher's enthralling investigation into the genesis and evolution of language. If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of "man throw spear," how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced degrees of meaning?

Drawing on recent groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication, giving us fresh insight into how language emerges, evolves, and decays. He traces the evolution of linguistic complexity from an early "Me Tarzan" stage to such elaborate single-word constructions as the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ("you are one of those whom we couldn't turn into a town dweller"). Arguing that destruction and creation in language are intimately entwined, Deutscher shows how these processes are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings.

As entertaining as it is erudite, The Unfolding of Language moves nimbly from ancient Babylonian to American idiom, from the central role of metaphor to the staggering triumph of design that is the Semitic verb, to tell the dramatic story and explain the genius behind a uniquely human faculty.

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