The First Word

"This is a book about words and language and evolution. Christine Kenneally, the author, starts off by describing how, surprisingly enough, this subject was completely ignored by linguistics for a really long time. One of the big official international linguistic bodies in the late 19th century banned all study of the topic, saying that it was unknowable. Even when most intellectuals accepted evolution was a fact, they figured it was too hard to figure out whether language itself had evolved. Then she tells the 20th century story of how Noam Chomsky basically sighed and shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Not interesting, can’t know it,’ and didn’t want to get into it for a very long time. Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist, came to see it as a ‘spandrel’ of some other structural change, basically a by-product of evolution – something that was adapted for another purpose, but repurposed for language. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So it’s only been in the last 20 years or so – and Pinker is part of that story – that people have really tried to start figuring out how language might have evolved. It was so long ago that we don’t have obvious answers – there aren’t things like bat wings or human arms that you can look at next to one another and go: ‘OK, this bone is different from that bone in that way.’ But there are a lot of fascinating animal studies. For example, we can see to what extent human language resembles predator calls of vervet monkeys telling whether an eagle is coming or a leopard is coming, i.e. whether they need to look up or down. In some ways they are similar, and in some ways they are obviously very different. To what extent were the bonobos and the chimpanzees that researchers worked with using words? To what extent are they using structure? What did we share with a common ancestor? We do see that there are basic elements of human language in other species. Like the other authors she is popularising a body of research and she does a very good job bringing together all of the people who worked on this. It’s bringing together most of these theories and concluding that there probably is something there. In other words, in contrast to what Chomsky used to think, it’s not just a hopeless question that can’t be answered or shouldn’t be answered."