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Listening for the Voice of Eve
Merritt Ruhlen
The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue
The title of this book might suggest that it somehow deals with how human beings evolved the capability of speech, or how speech arose from non-speaking creatures, but it works in quite the other direction. What the author, a working linguist, is seeking here is the pattern of relatedness among languages — a taxonomy, if you will, of the entire vista of human speech.
His method is an intriguing and interesting one, which makes the book particularly challenging and rewarding. Instead of simply reporting his own conclusions, he invites the readers to perform rudimentary vocabulary analysis to determine for ourselves the degree of relatedness among languages. He admits that he stacks the deck, in that when he provides us with tables of languages he has chosen a limited number of words, which will provide us with more "success" in linking languages than we would have if working from the entire lexicon of all the languages being compared. However, this really does not harm his thesis — that all the human languages descended from a mother tongue, and did so recently enough that vestiges of it remain in all the language groups, even if not all the individual languages in a group still use the pertinent words.
Languages evolve, and not by natural selection, either — indeed, sometimes it seems almost random. Nevertheless, there are laws and probabilities governing the modifications of language. The word "buck" will not change in a single generation to the word "emulsion," for instance, though some changes do occur with startling rapidity. Nevertheless, in the midst of change there are still remarkably stubborn examples of conservatism in language, where ancient words remain in a form very close to their earliest recorded instance. And when two languages have more than a few of those marker words in common, or in forms that clearly have a close relationship of meaning and sound so that a simple evolutionary path can be imagined, then it is hard to escape the conclusion that those languages are related somehow.
The historical record must be searched, of course, to determine if the relationship is merely one of borrowing rather than of common descent from an ancestor language — the existence of the English word "pickaninny" for a small black slave child does not prove that English descended from Portuguese, but rather suggests that when Portuguese slave traders offered a little African child for sale, they called it a "pequenino" or "pequenina" and the word was borrowed by the English buyers.
Still, Ruhlen is not making up his lists out of whole cloth, and while he has his critics, their objections to his method seem to take the form, not of reasoned presentation of alternative explanations, but rather of somewhat personal attacks that generally boil down to, "He's not an expert in the language we study, so we will pay no attention to what he says." Actually, the resistance to his ideas seems quite pointless, since it is obvious that human languages must descend from one or at most a handful of common ancestors, and the arguments are mostly about which language groups are most closely related and how recently the related languages bifurcated. The underlying principle is sound, and the experience of tracing through the patterns of language relationships with Ruhlen is fascinating. He is probably wrong in some details, as he himself makes clear, but he is probably right in the fundamental principle he assumes and even in his methodology in applying it. In the meantime, the reader gets to play linguist without going to all that nasty work of learning a foreign language ...
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