LANGUAGE EVOLUTION

Bernard H. Bichakjian

BHB@Post.Harvard.edu

This blog is about language evolution. By evolution I don’t mean how our species acquired the faculty of language. That may be a worthy pursuit, but the existing hypotheses have not convinced me that such an objective is within our reach, except perhaps in very general terms. I am also not convinced that we can reconstruct proto-world, the ultimate Ursprache.

What I am convinced of and what can be supported with solid linguistic data is that languages have evolved, evolved in the Darwinian sense of the word, that is to say that in the course of the natural history of languages, linguistic features – speech sounds, marking devices, grammatical distinctions, and syntactic strategies – have been consistently replaced with alternatives that have greater selective advantages.

Understanding evolution

While the trend towards more advantageous alternatives is universal, one may not assume that every linguistic feature has been consistently replaced with more advantageous alternatives in every language. Some features have continuously evolved in some languages while making only modest strides or even remaining static in others. A great number of languages, for instance, have shifted from head-last (or Subject-Object-Verb) to head-first (or Subject-Verb-Object) structures, while others largely apply the ancestral model.

It should also be noted that from an evolutionary point of view, languages are mosaics: within a given language, some of the features may be quite modern, while others could be unexpectedly archaic. French, for instance, has a modern sound system, but its grammatical system, which on an evolutionary scale is trailing that of English, is burdened with archaic features. That does not make one language archaic and the other modern. It simply means that some specific features of these languages are modern and other features are archaic. In turn, archaic models may undergo an “internal” evolution to make them more functional.

All of the above are in the nature of evolution. Bony fishes have crossed an evolutionary step that the cartilaginous sharks have not, but the two swim in the same waters with some of the former running the risk of being eaten up by the latter; in the heyday of the pharaohs, Egypt had an advanced civilization while Western Europe was in a humble state of development; and today, nations at the pinnacle of technological advance and sociological progress can here and there display some surprisingly archaic features. I let the reader provide examples to illustrate this point.

strong>The opponents of language evolution

The notion that languages evolve in the Darwinian sense of the word is not one that everyone in linguistics is prepared to accept. Many reject it peremptorily. The reasons are manifold. Perhaps the most anodyne reason is that the present generation of linguists was taught in Linguistics 101 that languages do not evolve, but simply undergo random changes. With that statement indelibly imprinted in their minds, today’s linguists promptly reject the evolutionary approach considering it against the axiom they had been taught unambiguously.  Unfortunately, history tells us that over the years, the so-called axioms that were taught in schools and universities did not withstand the test of time.  The non-evolution of languages could be one of those so-called axioms.

Opponents of evolution in linguistics may also be the product of a Zeitgeist. In the second half of the twentieth century and even already earlier, it was fashionable to be against evolution. Obviously, the Synthetic Theory became accepted in the biological sciences, but Nature was to be strictly confined to bones and other body parts, while Nurture would reign supreme in all other realms. Psychology has since abandoned her earlier intransigence and opted for a balanced approach, but linguists continue to reject evolution. They tolerate it only when it comes to their quixotic attempt of explaining the acquisition of the language faculty by our species, but they continue to maintain that languages do not evolve. 

Fairness compels me to stipulate that the Nurture-only attitude was an understandable and indeed a worthy reaction to the prevailing eugenic infatuation of the early part of the twentieth century. Today, the eugenicist threat has receded, but there exist among some the fear that if evolution is recognized in linguistics, some languages would be considered less worthy and their speakers second class individuals. Some wicked minds may indeed draw such conclusions, but however noble the motives of the all-Nurture advocates may have been or may still be today, the responsibility of scientists is not to bend the observational data to suit a political agenda, but to interpret them objectively and fight political fights in the political arena.

Some have also a methodological reason to reject language evolution as it is understood here. In the days when things were explained in a creationist framework, language was easy to account for. Since humans have speech while animals are speechless, it was assumed and pontificated that the Creator endowed us with speech just as he gave fins to the fishes and wings to the birds. While science has made less and less room for divine agency, the conception of language as a totum, as an all-or-none entity has continued to live on. Today’s account in mainstream linguistics is in fact a transposition of the creationist model: instead of a benevolent deity bestowing the gift of tongues on humans, a fortuitous genetic accident makes our species suddenly loquens. There are a number of competing scenarios, but all of them postulate that language is a totum, and that this all-or-none entity has been coded in our genes since the day of that fateful mutation. What according to authors of such scenarios is coded in our genes is an abstract universal model which individual languages flesh out with contingent material. The abstract universal model has been static since the day the mutation that produced it took place and will remain static until another genetic mutation occurs. With the universal model being static and the diversity of the contingent material from individual languages being considered purely accidental, the innatist theories can only apply evolution to our becoming endowed with the genetic correlates of the universal model, and the study of linguistic features in a Darwinian perspective becomes thereby methodologically excluded.

Today, the innatist theory has acquired the status of the default theory of linguistics in spite of the fact that, after fifty years of broad and intensive research, the necessary empirical support remains wanting, and biologists are less than optimistic about the chances of finding it. Stronger yet, they are frankly skeptical about a universal linguistic model being coded in our genes. The rejection of language evolution as it is understood here by advocates of innatist theories is therefore no more than a self-serving action, serving an unfounded postulate.

There are perhaps other groups of linguists or scientists from other fields who are uncomfortable with the notion of language evolution, but the innatists, the products of the all-Nature Zeitgeist, and those who remain unconditionally faithful to what they had been taught as students are, I believe, the most representative. Their reasons for being against language evolution are, as I have tried to show, ill-founded.

Arguments used against language evolution:

The complexity argument

Perhaps the most common argument used against language evolution is the assertion that all languages are complex. The fact is as obvious and undeniable as the presence of a nose on everybody’s face. Natural languages are complex.  No one can contest it, but what does that prove?  Does it prove that languages do not evolve?  Before attempting an answer, let’s turn for a second to biology and focus our attention on sharks, crocodiles, tigers and gorillas. Are these organisms complex? Of course, they are, and the evolutionarily naïve observer would even suppose that they are equally complex. But those who have taken and passed Evolutionary Biology 101 know that these organisms represent distinct evolutionary steps, and that amphibians have selective advantages that fishes don’t have, that mammals have advantages that amphibians don’t have, and that among mammals primates have advantageous features that non-primates do not have. Therefore, rough, overall complexity is no valid indicator: on the contrary, it is a misleading factor. One must focus on the features and investigate the selective advantages of ancestral and modern features. SOV languages, for instance, are as complex as SVO languages, but when the changes have taken place under normal circumstances SOV has become SVO, never the other way around. That change is unidirectional – under normal circumstances – because SVO has selective advantages that SOV does not have, and such changes constitute in part the evolution of languages. 

Not only is complexity misapplied, and therefore becomes a specious argument, but the very notion of complexity is often misunderstood. One often sees complicatedness and labels it complexity. The two notions are quite different and of different polarity: complexity is a positive feature, while complicatedness is a negative value. Let us take two imaginary systems: on the one hand, a tallying system that considers each number from 1 to 99 as a specific unit and labels it with a specific word and, on the other, a counting system that has conceptualized the notion of tens and can represent the numbers 1 to 9 and the tens from 10 to 90 as specific entities and therefore can combine them when needed to count from 1 to 99. Since the first system features 99 words and the matching memory task while the second can only boast of having 18, 9 of which being derivatives of the first 9, one may be overwhelmed by the unary tallying system and consider it more complex that the decimal system. But the considered judgment is that the decimal system is complex, since it has introduced the operational level of tens, while the unary system is simply complicated. In terms of evolution, the decimal model is modern; the unary system is archaic (see, mutatis mutandis, the complexity and the attendant advantage of the five-bar gate notational system as opposed to the mere accumulation of vertical strokes of the unary system).

The above example was indeed imaginary and for the sake of the argument somewhat over-dramatized. But the problem is real and can, mutatis mutandis, be observed in the Ionic (or Alexandrian) numeral system, where the numbers 1 to 9 were represented with the first 9 letters of the expanded version of the Greek alphabet, the tens from 10 to 90 with the next 9 letters, and the hundreds from 100 to 900 with the remaining 9 letters. That the Ionic system displayed a measure of ingenuity will not be disputed, but it will be noted that it used 27 opaque symbols, while the modern Hindu-Arabic system only uses 9 plus the numeral zero, which serves as an operator to produce all the tens and all the hundreds and beyond. The Ionic system with its greater number of opaque representations is more complicated, while the Hindu-Arabic system features a higher degree of complexity. The latter prevailed because the use of the numeral zero provided selective advantages that the zero-less systems were sorely lacking.

The above examples, imaginary and empirical, were from numeral systems. In linguistics, it is not uncommon to come across cases where even celebrated linguists have mistaken complicatedness for complexity and erroneously concluded it to be the sign of a positive attribute. Perhaps, the most masterly and commensurately tragic example is August Schleicher’s interpretation of the history of the Indo-European languages. Schleicher (1821–1868) was a learned comparatist and a passionate admirer of Darwin. His fondest wish was to introduce into linguistics the method used for the study of the evolution of species – a worthy ambition, but his mistaking complicatedness for complexity, liabilities for assets, foiled his project. Seeing, on the one hand, the rich inflectional system existing in Proto-Indo-European and, on the other, the steady reduction of flexional markers in the derived languages, Schleicher came to the conclusion that after reaching a morphological pinnacle, the languages of the Indo-European family had entered a period of decline and decay. Such a rise-and-fall pattern was of course difficult to fit into an evolutionary model, and Scheicher’s hopes of bringing the evolutions of species and the evolution of languages together were suddenly thwarted. The only escape was to give up Darwin and cast his interpretation of the data in Hegel’s rhetorical framework – thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The matter was buried in learned style, and the failure to understand the linguistic data was consummated.Schleicher’s failure is really tragic because he was so close to the truth, but he unfortunately failed to uncover it because he misinterpreted the data. The derived languages have not, as he assumed, cravenly slipped and slid on the slope of decay and linguistic depravation; instead and quite to the contrary, they have gradually endeavored to replace with more functional and neurologically less costly alternatives the cumbersome markers taxing the memory of speakers and listeners. What he saw as assets and signs of superiority in the protolanguage was not complexity, but mere complicatedness; the modern languages have achieved greater complexity by developing new grammatical categories and a marking system relying on free morphemes. Complicatedness must not therefore be mistaken for complexity. 

The archaeological inference

During the last few years a new group of scientists from an adjacent field of research have joined the discussion on language. They are the prehistorical archaeologists, and their reasoning is the following: if a given society was capable of a given type of artifacts, it was capable of language. And since the artifacts can be dated, the corollary conclusion is that language existed at the time when these items were crafted. The reasoning cannot be faulted, provided once again one considers language to be a totum, an all-or-none entity – you have it, or you don’t. But in fact the reasoning is specious and the conclusion vacuous. To say that X thousand years ago a given society had language is as vacuous as saying that a society X thousand years ago had technology. Of course, they had technology, but technology is not a totum, and between bifaces and tempered razor blades or ballistic missiles there is a long evolutionary continuum.

Language is also a continuum, not a totum, but unlike archaeologists, we don’t have tokens going back twenty, fifty, one hundred thousand years ago. With a generous margin of error, we can surmise that articles are a recent invention dating back to two to three millennia ago, that temporal distinctions and sentence embedding were introduced ten millennia ago, that nominative alignment probably developed fifteen millennia ago, and that the category of adjectives emerged twenty millennia ago. These developments cannot be dated with precision, and the preceding indications are very approximate. What is sure, however, is that the historical linguistics and language typology clearly suggest that there was a time when there were no articles, no temporal distinctions, no complex sentences, no nominative syntax, and no adjectives; just like there was a time when there were no microprocessors, no electricity, no steam engines, no gun powder and no wheels. That life was possible without these technological commodities is of course a truism. Similarly, communication was possible without the above listed grammatical features. But, just as the technological advances introduced implements that have provided humans with increasingly higher performance and lower expenditure of energy, so have the linguistic features that have developed over time provided speakers with an ever-more efficient system of communication, one that generates ever-more power while requiring ever smaller neurological investment and muscular effort.  That’s what language evolution is all about.

Epilogue 

Just as it did in the days of Darwin, evolution often triggers fierce visceral reactions. Today, evolutionary biology is strong enough to withstand the attacks of Creationists and advocates of Intelligent Design. Evolutionary linguistics will also gain strength and prevail one day – truth always eventually prevails – but that day has not come yet, and at the present time there is a struggle going on between its advocates and the pundits of the linguistic profession who perfunctorily object to such an approach.

My objective here was to make a positive presentation and avoid polemics. That explains why I did not refer to contemporary linguists by name and omitted bibliographical references.  Readers who wish to examine the data and weigh the arguments supporting the evolutionary approach will find the necessary information in “Language Evolution and the Complexity Criterion,” which is on the Web, and in Language in a Darwinian Perspective, which is available through Amazon. They are also welcome to get in touch with me by e-mail.