The Power of Babel
A Natural History of Language
by John McWhorter
You might think it strange if a linguist said there is no such thing as languages. That's one of the points John McWhorter makes in this fast-paced book: Dialects are all there is.
Not language, languages. The author takes the reasonable position that one day all human beings spoke a single language (after all, there were only a few dozen of us) and at some later time we didn't. He aims in this book to describe not only the relationship between people and how we speak, but also the causes that have led to a world population speaking in tens of thousands of distinct ways.
OK, no one else is going to quote this for you. You can thank me later:
1. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly, And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.
9. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1-9)
This is strong material, folks. It accounts for not only the diversity of speech but also the distribution of human beings throughout the world. The image is so compelling that approximately two out of every five pop linguistics books refer to Babel in the title.(*) Believe the tale or don't believe it, but you must agree that Babel, its undone tower, and the people of confounded speech still move us.
If the Genesis story contains a fact, it comes in the very first verse. It's implausible that the first troop of human beings could not all speak to one another. But it also appears that their few million descendants, at the time of the first writing, indeed could not. What happened to our one language? That is half of McWhorter's concern in this book.
Scientists put hypotheses about the unknowable past in two classes, gradualist and catastrophist. Noah's flood is a catastrophe (leaving aside all the wicked whom it removed). A lot of people don't find much satisfaction in catastrophism, because it both leaves the past unknowable (you can't tell whether dinosaur bones were emplaced by the deluge or before it) and denies value to all observations we can make now (you can't deduce that a deeper-lying rock is older than a shallower-lying one). A gradualist in geology reasons that processes we can see in the present also worked in the remote past, so that if we find out how volcanoes work we can apply our knowledge to volcanoes 500 million years ago. It is safe to say that historical linguists mostly take a gradualist approach rather than accepting the Babel story—a catastrophe, the LORD knows—in its own terms.
So the question for such linguists is this: What forces can we observe acting on human beings that lead them to change their language? McWhorter lists five processes that can be seen working today:
- sound change: how Latin femina became French fahm, spelled femme
- extension: how special rules like the one that makes sorores the plural of Latin soror got applied to other words and thus became general rules (French femme to femmes)
- "the expressiveness cycle": how intensifying words like Latin illa turned into routine sentence pieces like definite articles
- rebracketing: how bits of words get reassigned, like the first n sound in the English phrase an eke-name attaching itself to the noun, giving a nickname
- semantic change: how hound, which used to mean any dog, found itself narrowed to refer to just one branch of dogs, or how silly went from the meaning "blessed" to the meaning "foolish"
A gradualist would bet that these processes worked 100,000 years ago pretty much the same way they do now. Well, suppose they did: Would 100,000 years be time enough to morph one ancestor into thousands of descendants? Consider that the Latin of say A.D. 350 took about a thousand years to become Spanish, more or less—but everybody recognizes Spanish as still being "close" to Latin, so that isn't an answer. What we want to know is whether the ancestor of Hebrew can plausibly be the ancestor of Norwegian Nynorsk. No one can give an answer that's completely free of fuzz and hand-waving, but we can be fairly sure that four or five millennia sufficed to evolve Russian and Hindi from a single source. Russian and Hindi aren't "close," and a hundred millennia is a long time. But it may never be possible to prove beyond doubt that gradual processes have continued over such a span or that all of today's variety has resulted from them.
McWhorter's other focus is on the old question of how you tell a language from a dialect. He makes the quite unambiguous claim that, in logic, there is no basis for drawing a line between the two notions. Dialects in part of Central Europe cluster together and we call them "German," but there's no unitary German language. Every speaker perceives differences between her language and every other speaker's language. I'm not so sure about this; it's like saying there is no such thing as a mouse because every creature is different from every other, even within what we've chosen to call one species. There is only this beast and that beast, and it is convenient to call both of them mouse, but the Platonic ideal mouse doesn't creep around behind our cabinets. The conclusion seems overdrawn—but it is exciting to watch McWhorter make his case. He has arrayed a ton of examples, ranging from the Oaths of Strasbourg to the "Asterix" comic books published in various cultural centers, and he gets great mileage out of them.
The Power of Babel tells a story well. The author (a Berkeley professor) makes the reader aware of a continuum of language, over time and over space and culture. He writes forcefully and brings in widely varying evidence. The book repays reading . . . and McWhorter may even be right in what he says about his topic.
(*) A statistic I can't at all support with facts, but doesn't it feel round and juicy in your mouth.
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Power of Babel