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John H. McWhorter
New York: Times Books,
Henry Holt and Company
2001
ISBN 0-7167-4473-2
327pp. (hardbound)
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John McWhorter is a linguist at the University of California at
Berkeley. His writing style is light, even entertaining, for a serious
work intended for the intelligent general reader. Some of his allusions
are to the American scene, but they are not crucial to the exposition.
(Some of them even I missed, as I am not a television watcher.)
McWhorter takes the position that there WAS a single, first
UR-language, spoken perhaps 150 000 years ago or so in East Africa.
Without being an innatist in the manner of, say, Steven Pinker, he does
think that humans have a genetic predisposition to acquire and use
language. He discusses five ways in which languages change*, with
respect to both vocabulary and grammar, so that the UR-language
eventually gave rise to thousands upon thousands of languages and
dialects. His thesis throughout the book is the constancy of change.
Indeed, he goes so far as to say that, in a manner of speaking, there
are no "languages," only dialects, and that "language standards" are
largely the result of socio-historical and political processes. (Be it
noted, however, that McWhorter himself writes in "impeccable English.")
In terms of change, naturally enough, he deals with the matter of
language extinction and predicts that by 2100 most of today's 6000 or
so languages will be extinct, for good or for ill.
He takes to task those, such as Greenburg and, especially, Ruhlen
and Bengston, who think that they can reconstruct two dozen or so words
from "Proto-World." McWhorter argues that the constancy of change would
have obliterated traces of words going back 150 000 years. He gives an
example of how Proto-Algonquian "peponwi" ("winter") mutated into
Cheyenne "aa'" (sic!) in only about 1500 years. (Fortunately, he gives
many, many examples in his discussions throughout the book.)
Nevertheless, McWhorter argues that we can deduce some of the
probable characteristics of the UR-language, the minimum for full
communication: no inflections, no tones, no alienable possessive
marking, no definite and indefinite articles, no evidentials (and
presumably no attitudinals apart from interjections, although he does
not say this), few or no tense and other verb markings, and few if any
relative or subordinate clauses. In other words, the languages which
exist today probably most like the original language of humankind are
some of the creoles. He does devote quite a bit of space to pidgins,
"semi-creoles," and creoles, and remarks that even creoles, if they
exist long enough and have contact with other languages, themselves
tend to acquire some of what he calls linguistic "sludge."
(Incidentally, he does not at all discuss constructed auxiliary
languages. He mentions Esperanto in passing in one sentence and
Zamenhof in one more. And, by the by, he does not conjecture how the
original language might have arisen biologically in the first place.)
I recommend the book, even if not everyone will agree with all his
assertions and arguments.
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 *Sound change, grammatical extension, expressiveness and degradation,
rebracketing, and semantic change. He discusses and gives examples for
each of these.
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Copyright 2002 Paul Bartlett. All rights reserved.
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