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The Origin and Diversification of Language

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The Origin and Diversification of Language Originn AND Diversificatiof n T anguagOI e n O rigiAND Diversificatio^M. • m mm n f Language Morris Swadesh Joel F. Sherzer, editor With a foreword and appendix by Dell Hymes Routledge Taylor Si Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2006 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2006 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2005046663 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Swadesh, Morris, 1909-1967. The orgin and diversification of language / Morris Swadish with a forward by Dell Hyme. p. cm. Originally published: Chicago : Aldine, Atherton, [1971] Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-202-30841-3 (alk. paper) 1. Language and languages. I. Title. P107.S933 2006 00—dc24 2005046663 ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30841-8 (pbk) Dedication To my colleagues in the scientific study of language, especially three of them: one who has systematically studied the origin of language and was able to give me some helpful hints in my work; another who assured me that the problem intrigued him, but was afraid it might be impossible to obtain sure answers; and a third who counseled me, for my own good, to drop my study because continuing with it might cause me to lose my reputation for strict scientific judgment; and to all the ordinary people, nonspecialists, whose curiosity and questions about the origin of language have stimulated me to attempt to find reliable answers. Foreword Morris Swadesh was an original, productive, provocative linguist. He helped initiate structural linguistics in the United States and developed practical and scientific linguistics in Mexico; he worked with four or more dozen languages, devising new methods for relating and dating languages, formulating new hypotheses of linguistic relationship; and broaching a theory of the relationship and origin of all the languages of man. And while others regarded the origin of language as a point past which notions of evolution had no place, he sought the continuities in the development of language from before its full emergence to its place in human life today. This book is devoted to this last great theme. I shall say something about the theme of the book, then about the man who wrote it. The one concerns the future of the study of language, the other its recent- history; but each suggests something about the other. As need for the work broached by this book becomes obvious, one begins to ask why it was not obvious before. And a controversial career that began in a depression and spanned a hot war and a cold may offer some insight into the future. A few years ago the appearance of this book would have been an isolated event. It appears now just when the tabu against an evolutionary perspective on languages seems about to be effectively broken. It will help secure that break and help orient the work that is to come. This book will contribute, I believe, to a major reorientation of linguistic theory in the remainder of This introduction and the essay on ''Morris Swadesh from the First Yale School to World Prehistory" that appear at the end of this book are revised and expanded from an article in Anales de Antropologia (Hymes 1968). I am indebted to the editors of that journal for permission to use material from the article here; I am also grateful to Fvangclina Arana de Swadesh, Zellig S. Harris, Alexander Lesser, Floyd G. Lounsbury, Michael Silverstein, Murphy D. Smith, and William C. Sturtcvant as well as to articles by Norman McQuown (1968), Stanley Newman (1967). and Juan Jose Rendon (1967), for information and assistance; and to Lisa Lcvine for aid in preparing the manuscript. V vi Foreword this century. Only the renewal in modern terms of an evolutionary perspec- tive can enable linguistic theory to connect languages and lives in a way that satisfies the concern among linguists for relevance in their intellectual work and that satisfies the needs of mankind. Few indeed have the heart today to pursue studies divorced from human problems and realities. Linguistic theory confined to the structure of language often is justified by an appeal to the importance of language as perhaps man's most distinctive trait. There is indeed a partial validity to that appeal; what is already known about the complexity and richness of any human language can refute stereotypes and prejudices that do much harm. But a theory of the structural basis of all languages speaks only to a natural potential. It does not speak to what has been made of language here and now, or there and then, through selection and emergence from a uni- versal grammar. Such a theory cannot explain why languages differ and why they differ in the particular ways they do. The actual diversity of character and function among varieties of language is left a mystery. A linguistic theory is required that deals not only with structures of grammar but also with structures of speaking, a theory in which the human functions of language are not simply postulated as everywhere the same, but are treated in terms of the adaptation and development of languages as a part of sociocultural evolution. The widespread objection to an evolutionary perspective has a history that gives it some justification. Just as anthropologists have sometimes denied the existence of any racial differences for fear of giving comfort to the racially biased, so anthropologists and linguists have often felt that to consider developmental differences among languages smacked of outmoded views of 'primitive' languages without structure or with vocabularies so impoverished as to have to be eked out with gesture. In reaction to the support of colonialism and oppression, drawn from nineteenth century- evolutionary theories, American linguists and anthropologists by and large have adopted since the First World War a humanistic, liberal, progressive, egalitarian viewpoint. Concepts have been favored that apply equally to all cultures and languages and that are empty of evolutionary differentiation. Private ownership of productive resources was found among aboriginal hunters; "religion'" "law," "economics," and the like were defined as univer- sal categories of culture, even if prefixed with "primitive"; kinship termin- ologies were compared and found to vary in complexity without regard to type of subsistence or population size, linguists found morphological types to vary independently. An evolutionary understanding of the overall course of cultural history was not really abandoned, It was even mentioned, since it could hardly be ignored in technology, political organization, and the sciences. But prior theory and methods as to evolutionary stages having been rejected, no alternative way of understanding and studying the evolu- tionary aspect of culture was provided. Foreword vii Linguistics has shared in this parade. Linguists continued to speak for some time of "primitive languages", but insisted that it was really only languages in "primitive communities" (Whorf 1936) that was meant. One saw in them diversity only of structure, not of function. No connection of diversity intrinsic to language with sociocultural diversity was accepted. Swadesh's master, Sapir, expressed the point elegantly; "When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam" (1921:234). What Sapir had in mind, presumably, were the formal morphological features of nineteenth century typology, but the statement was taken to stand for whatever one might mean by linguistic form. Vocabulary obviously differs in kind (and amount) between languages, but this has been regarded as a fact of culture more than a fact of language. Vocabulary has been called an "index of culture," suggesting its perfect adaptation to its parent culture. Functionalist harmony and equilibrium— assumptions now. widely under attack in the rest of the social sciences— have continued now widely under attack in the rest of the social sciences— have continued to be assumed with a vengeance in linguistics. Evolutionary perspectives have returned vigorously in the study of cultural and social life. In a latent sense it was never possible to do entirely without them, and some vague general evolution of culture was always assumed. Specifically, the famous case of private ownership of hunting grounds was found to be a product of acculturation and the fur-trade; concepts involving emergent levels of organization, such as "the state," were freshly studied; it was realized that proper comparison is not between kinship terminologies as such, in abstraction from general function, but between terminologies for the sphere of status and role as a whole (complexity there clearly varying with other factors). A renewed interest in ecology sharpened our under- standing of the adaptive bases of cultural change. But linguistics has lagged. A variety of lines of study that would contribute to evolutionary theory have gone unnoticed or have lacked general per- spective to integrate them. The semantic properties of obligatory gram- matical categories (e.g., duality, shape) do not seem to be randomly distributed among "levels of sociocultural integration". Some aspects of color categories and plant terminologies are found to form developmental scales (Berlin 1970). Differential complexity in surface word-structure, may well be adaptive, complexity being a function of boundary maintenance in the case of small communities and groups, and simplicity a function of a language's use as a lingua franca.
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