This I found a hard book, as I do not automatically recall the theories of every Western philosopher, linguist, anthropologist and psychologist who has ever lived! Dan Everett relates his sociolinguistic explanation of the structure of language to its derivation from not only the whole history of Western thought but also refers to parallels in Buddhist explanations of human behaviour. His bibliography includes, moreover, a work by Carl Rogers, who founded a school of counselling based on a recognition of the emotional nature of human beings. I happen to be aware of this work as my brother has counselled damaged and difficult teenagers very successfully using this school of counselling.

However, in spite of the overload of philosophy, the new material in this book is, as far as I know, original and very convincing. The title encapsulates the metaphor used for constructing this theory. Astro-physicists tell us that the universe is made up largely of “dark matter” which is (at present at least) inaccessible to human senses and gadgetry. (Presumably, mathematics leads them to believe in its physical presence.) Everett argues that the human mind is similarly largely made up of patterns of behaviour and ideas which we have acquired from the people we live amongst and of which we are normally unaware. Some of this can be accessed through introspection and therapy, and some is forever ineffable. For instance, when we can ride a bike, we forget the sequence of skills which we learned when we started and take it for granted. Basic attitudes on such matters as religion, gender roles, race and political allegiance also drop into the cavern of the unconscious but they make us what we are.

Very telling is the description of his experience as a Christian missionary among various remote tribes of Amerindians in the Amazon particularly the Piraha. Everett flushes out the largely unconscious beliefs of the would-be converters and the convertees and it is all too clear that the incompatibility between the two world views makes it impossible to reconcile them. My life has been full of arguments which, I now comprehend, got nowhere because of basically incompatible “dark matter” (e.g. Marxism and Catholicism, or people who know something of the former Soviet Union and those who know nothing.) In the chapter Dark Matter and Hermeneutics Everett flushes out the implicit knowledge which underlies all human speech and writing through the close examination of texts.

What I found surprising is that Everett’s list of the differences between the Piraha and Portuguese languages includes an absence of phatic communication in the former. I hope he will write more about this at some point. It seems that mothers do not talk baby talk to their infants, which is amazing to us. However, they do use “hum speech” in communicating with babies, so this may be an equivalent. Fascinating is his detailed description of the way grammar and phonology are used for different purposes in the two languages. I met this myself when I was living in Bulgaria and trying to learn the language. There is in Bulgarian a whole group of verb forms which look like the perfect tense in English. Many years after I ran down a grammar of Bulgarian which explained that they in fact indicate that the authenticity of the information is not guaranteed. This is also an important feature of Piraha grammar.

This book for me opens a new chapter in the expansion of understanding about language. I just wish I were a young linguist starting on a career of research!

The very title of Dan Everett’s book is a challenge to more than what, since the 1960s, has become linguistic orthodoxy. In 1866 the French Academy of Sciences forbade further discussion of the subject rightly arguing that there was insufficient evidence to make discussion anything more than wild speculation. How Language Began surveys the many subjects that now have a contribution to make to this ever-fascinating topic. Particularly interesting is the research in the field of Evolutionary Biology, which leads Everett to postulate that speech did not spring whole from the brain of homo sapiens but may well have been developed by our cousins on the evolutionary tree homo erectus.

Where Chomsky’s exploration of language is psycholinguistic, examining and attempting to describe the emergence of language in the individual human brain, Everett’s is a more generous sociolinguistic approach. He attributes the structure of language to the demands of culture and the need of the members of all societies to communicate. It is, he argues, an evolutionary process not one that is biologically programmed into all human brains (Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device). Everett is drawing, of course, on a knowledge of more than European languages. The Pirahas of the Amazon jungle, whose language Everett described, do not have tense markers because life is so precarious that they live in the present.

Most cogent (and difficult) is a large section on new knowledge about the human brain produced by the use of recent technology such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This indicates that, when people speak, many areas of the brain are shown to be active. Language, he argues, is intimately connected to other cognitive functions, including gesture. There is in the brain no one place, as was supposed in the last century, for language. Chomsky’s hypothesis is simply wrong.

It is disappointing that Everett not only does not refer to alternative sociolinguistic descriptions of language like that associated with MAK Halliday and the Australian school of linguistics, but does not seem to know about the fascinating work of Guy Deutscher, who has put forth exciting hypotheses about the emergence of grammatical features based on his study of ancient Akkadian documents. (See earlier blog.)

I see Everett has already (2016) published another book, which sounds pretty challenging – Dark Matter of the Mind: the Culturally Articulated Unconscious. I look forward to moving on to that.

We are now halfway through this book and enjoying it very much, not least the malicious wit with which the author challenges received opinions in Linguistics.

On looking up the author’s background, it is clear that he has come to the study of language after a successful academic career in Mathematics, which is notoriously exigent in demanding evidence for any statement. He finds Linguistics lacking in academic rigour in this respect.

For example, it has been axiomatic in Linguistic studies that “all languages are equally complex”. When I learned this, I realised that the reason for this statement was to counter the popular opinion that technologically primitive people are cognitively and linguistically primitive.

However, it has been left to Deutscher to challenge this statement as a matter of fact. He shows in this book that, not only is there no evidence from real languages for this statement, but there is no measure of complexity in language. Some languages are more complex than others at the morphological level – German, with its case and gender endings is more complex that English in this respect, for example. Which language is more complex at the level of the clause? No-one has done this research or attempted to produce a measure of complexity.

It seems that isolated languages spoken by few people are less complex phonologically than more widely used languages, clearly because people who know one another well cut down on the sounds for communication (by the force of linguistic destruction described in Deutscher’s previous book i.e. laziness). Otherwise the field is wide open for research.

Guy Deutscher: The Unfolding of Language

We have “finished” this book at last. That is, two of us have read and discussed it, chapter by chapter. The third has been visiting her eighteen-month-old grandson and bringing back to us fresh data on language acquisition. We have been highly satisfied with our reading of the book and even more delighted by Isaac’s miraculous move into language.

In this book Guy Deutscher has made a convincing case for using the processes of language change which we can see at work now to propose a theory as to how these same processes have shaped language over the four thousand years or so for which we have evidence in the form of written records. He makes the parallel with Geology, which also uses evidence from the present day to understand the historical processes which have formed the earth. He firmly leaves on one side questions, such as the relation between animal language and human language, for which we have no evidence. Continue reading →

Having wrestled with Tomasello’s Constructing a Language for several weeks, my friends and I decided to choose something easier for our next book.

Tomasello’s book was difficult because it was, as the author notes, intended as a textbook which he could not manage to write. The ideas were not particularly difficult but readers like us needed more examples to understand what he was referring to. The main purpose of the book was to join the growing chorus of linguists putting forward a sociological approach to language learning in opposition to the psycholinguistic approach of Chomsky and his followers, which has dominated academic linguistics for half a century. To people like us, used to systemic linguistics, this is hardly a new idea. It still astonishes me that Tomasello (and now Everett) make no reference to Halliday’s pioneering work in the field. Continue reading →