The Ultimate Ursprache

Taking a break from my onerous task of reading fantasy and science fiction (mostly) for review, I'm rereading after quite some time Merritt Ruhlen's The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. It's a hands-on guide to the relationships among our languages that results in the discovery of the ancestor of all modern languages. I think one reason Ruhlen's arguments are so persuasive is the way that he presents his material: the first few chapters include a series of worksheets in which the reader is presented with a list of words from various languages and asked to group them according to their similarity -- essentially, basic lessons in the taxonomy of language. He carries it through successively larger groups -- i.e., from Romance languages to Indo-European to Eurasiatic, each successive family including more groups, until he has developed strong groundwork for the idea of "Proto-Sapiens," the original Mother Tongue.

It's even more fascinating because he spends a chapter or so relating the purely linguistic evidence to some of the recent work in genetics and anthropology and palaeoanthropology to build a vivid picture of the radiation of Proto-Sapiens and its descendants.

I'm usually resistant to the idea of exporting the idea of "evolution" out of biology into other fields, but linguistics is one area where it works. And of course taxonomy, which is really what the book is about, is all about organizing things, which I think is a nice theoretical exercise.

Worth checking out.

(Language fascinates me -- it is so innately human and yet doesn't seem to be limited to us. [I have strong arguments against those who trashed the ape-language studies of the 1970s on methodological grounds -- "classical" methodology stacks the deck against the study and warps the result simply because language acquisition is strongly associated with socialization, and arguments that the studies were invalid because the researchers interacted with the subjects simply don't hold water. Bunch of bureaucrats.] It is also a way of shaping thought. One anomaly: I think most people are like me and dream in images, not words; I tend to think in a mix of words and images, which offers some translation difficulties sometimes -- maybe it's that right brain/left brain thing again. If I had gone on in psych, I probably would have developed a discipline incorporating some kind of evolutionary linguistics, which didn't exist as a field at the time -- I'm not sure if it does yet. It seems a natural outgrowth of areas like developmental psych and cognitive science.)