Language Origins: from Mythology to Science
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Language Origins: From Mythology to Science Przemysław Żywiczyński This a pre-print of the book Language Origins, 2018, pub. Peter Lang Acknowledgements This book owes a great deal to a great many people. I am deeply indebted to Prof. Piotr Stalmaszczyk and Prof. Aleksander Szwedek, who took on the burden of reviewing the book and whose numerous comments significantly improved its quality. My warm thanks go to friends and colleagues – Prof. Rafał Michalski, Dr. Maciej Pokornowski, Dr. Rafał Toczko, Marta Sibierska and Dr. Sławomir Wacewicz – who familiarised themselves with the manuscript and generously offered advice. I thank Dr. John Kearns for untiring proofreading and expert editorial guidance. I want to express gratitude to Prof. Mirosława Buchholtz, Editor of Peter Lang’s series Dis/Continuties and Head of the Department of English at the Nicolaus Copernicus University, who kindly agreed for this book to appear in the series and enthusiastically supported the writing and publication process. I also would like to acknowledge Prof. Przemysław Nehring for the financial support that made its publication possible. I owe the greatest debt to Monika Boruta, without whose careful reading and editorial help the completion of this work would have been difficult, if not impossible. Contents Introduction 0.1. Motivation for the book 0.2. Organisation of the material 0.3. Methodological problems 0.4. Main sources Chapter 1. Divine origins of language and 1.1. Glottogononic myths 1.2. Glossogenetic myths Chapter 2. The problem of the Adamic language 2.1. Definition of the Adamic problem and its textual basis 2.2. The Kabbalah 2.3. The forbidden experiment 2.4. Dante’s “illustrious vernacular” 2.5. Etymological eccentricities 2.6. Babel reinterpreted 2.7. Beyond Adam and Babel Chapter 3. Language and language origins in ancient and medieval philosophy 3.1. Plato’s mimetic naturalism 3.2. Aristotle’s linguistic conventionalism and objectivism 3.3. Epicureans and Stoics on language and its origin 3.4. The problem of universals 3.5. Augustine’s linguistic scepticism 3.6. Aquinas and the speculative grammarians Chapter 4. Naturalistic glottogony 4.1. Epicurean inspirations 4.2. Search for a new definition of humankind 4.3. Lord Monboddo’s scientific speculations 4.4. Empiricists vs. rationalists and the problem of language 4.5. The Mandeville-Condillac thought-experiment 4.6. Rousseau on human evolution 4.7. Herder on representations, bees and language origins 4.8. Les Idéologues Chapter 5. Linguistics, Darwinism and the twilight of traditional language origins 5.1. Humboldt’s conception of language as activity 5.2. The rise of comparative philology 5.2.1. Comparative philology, biology and Darwinism 5.2.2. Comparative philology and language origins 5.3. Darwin on linguistic change, anthropogenesis and the origin of language 5.4. How language origins became a taboo: From bans on glottogonic speculation to de Saussure 5.5. Jespersen’s plea against the taboo 5.6. Tylor’s natural language and the orofacial hypothesis Chapter 6. The science of language evolution 6.1. Linguistics, gesture studies and language origins 6.2. The Chomskyan factor 6.3. The empirical factor 6.3.1. Primate ethology and ape language experiments 6.3.2. Genetics 6.3.3. Paleoanthropology and archaeology 6.3.4. Neuroscience 6.4. Modern evolutionism: The Kuhnian factor 6.5. The science of language evolution: A new era of language origins 6.6. SLE’s characteristics 6.7. Terminological conundrums 6.8. In what sense is the science of language evolution a science? Concluding remarks References Name index Subject index List of illustrations and tables Fig. 1. Popol Vuh: Gods creating humans Fig. 2. Vāc identified with Sarasvati. An illustration from the lyric poem Meghaduta written by Kālidāsa (c. 4/5 century CE) Fig. 3. The rainbow serpent carrying bags with children Fig. 4. Engravings from van Helmont’s Alphabeti veri naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio (1667: 109, 111, 113, 115) Fig. 5. Postel’s 12 alphabets: The title page from Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium Alphabetum (1538) Fig. 6. The first figure of Llull’s Ars Magna Fig. 7. Edward Tyson’s Orang-Outang Fig. 8. Antropomorpha according to Christian Hoppius Fig. 9. The Indo-European language family reconstructed by Schleicher (1861-62/1874, vol I: 8). Fig. 10. The frontispiece from Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), where Huxley argued for the ape ancestry of man. Fig. 11. Lexigrams used by Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh Table 1. Factors involved in the development of the modern science of language evolution (adapted from Żywiczyński and Wacewicz 2015: 134) Introduction Language evolution is an interdisciplinary area of research concerned with the evolutionary processes that brought about language in our phylogeny and the evolutionary processes that are responsible for language change.1 The term “evolution” in “language evolution” has three principal meanings, all of which are derived from modern evolutionism: • the evolutionary emergence of language as a human-specific trait (as in Pinker and Bloom 1990 or McMahon and McMahon 2012), • language change viewed as a culturally adaptive process (as in Croft 2000, Blevins 2004 and Ritt 2004) and • language variation, particularly with a focus on how the natural as well as social environment impacts patterns of linguistic variation (e.g. Lupyan and Dale 2010, Dediu et al. 2017).2 Language evolution appeared at the end of the last century but topically belongs to language origins – the domain of investigation that is concerned with the beginnings and diversification of language. The youth of language evolution as a research area contrasts with the antiquity of language origins, which can be traced back to the earliest forms of traditional reflection. Language evolution emphasises its empirical and scientific orientation, whereas throughout most of its history language origins constituted a complex mixture of mythology, philosophy of language, as well as religiously and scientifically inspired speculation. In a decade or so since its inception, language evolution, or the science of language evolution as it perhaps should and will be referred to in this book (henceforth also SLE),3 became ripe for synthesis into secondary and tertiary literatures, which include monographs devoted to various problems investigated by SLE researchers (e.g. two books by Hurford: Hurford 2007 devoted to the evolution of meaning and Hurford 2012, to the evolution of grammar) as well as textbooks (Johansson 2005, Fitch 2010, Hurford 2014) and a handbook (Gibson and Tallerman 2012). The synthesising works have appeared in both English and other languages: French (Dessalles 2000), Italian (Ferretti 2010), Polish (Żywiczyński and Wacewicz 1 For the difference between this area of language evolution (sometimes referred to as evolutionary linguistics) and historical linguistics, see 6.7. 2 Haspelmath, http://dlc.hypotheses.org/894; see also the ensuing discussion. 3 The relation between the terms “language origins” and “the science of language evolution” (SLE) is discussed in detail in 6.7. Now, it suffices to note that in this book “language origins” are inclusive of both the science of language evolution and prescientific reflection on beginnings and diversification of language. 2015) and Russian (Burlak 2011). These publications testify to the fact that the dynamic growth of SLE is accompanied by an increasing need to subject its research to internal reflection. However, this internal reflection has not yet included the historical context out of which the science of language evolution grew. Textbooks or introductory literature are either completely silent about the historical origins of language (Johansson 2005; Hurford 2014) or limits treatment of the subject to cursory mentions (Fitch 2010). Among these works, only the Polish introduction to SLE by Żywiczyński and Wacewicz (2015) dedicates a separate chapter to discussing reflections on language origins that preceded the appearance of the science of language evolution. There is also a volume of articles focused on language origins The origins and development of language: A historical perspective, edited by Gensini (2016), but given its form it is able to present only a fragmentary picture of this very rich and long tradition. Initially, a lack of comprehensive treatments of pre-scientific language origins was understandable, as SLE was trying to assert its scientific character, often in opposition to earlier, more speculative approaches to the problem. Today, however, when it possesses all the hallmarks of a mature scientific enterprise, this lack is less excusable. Does this mean that a history of language origins should contain an extensive discussion of various views that are unrelated to the problems and methods used in the modern science of language evolution? Someone may answer “no” because – to use an analogy – no one expects a history of chemistry to contain an extensive discussion of alchemy. There is however an important difference between the two: chemistry is not part of alchemy, whereas SLE topically belongs to language origins and hence a book on language origins should present a whole history of this area of investigation, also including elements that have little do with modern theoretical commitments or research practices. Even more importantly, the success of a science in giving a viable explanation of a selected research issue does not merely depend on the quality of research. It equally depends on a sense of belonging that comes with the realisation that one is engaging in a scientific programme together with other researchers. Knowledge of predecessors’ efforts in such a programme or its previous versions constitutes an important factor that generates this sense of belonging. That’s why the science of language evolution needs a dose of reflection on historical language origins, and the present work is the first attempt to administer it. 0.1. Motivation for the book This book is primarily directed to language evolution scientists, and as such it ends where most of the literature mentioned above begins – with the appearance of the science of language evolution.