The Origin and Diversification of Language

Morris Swadesh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351478021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Morris Swadesh, one of this century's foremost scientific investigators of language, dedicated much of his life to the study of the origin and evolution of language. This volume, left nearly completed at his death and edited posthumously by Joel F. Sherzer, is his last major study of this difficult subject.Swadesh discusses the simple qualities of human speech also present in animal language, and establishes distinctively human techniques of expression by comparing the common features that are found in modern and ancient languages. He treats the diversification of language not only by isolating root words in different languages, but also by dealing with sound systems, with forms of composition, and with sentence structure. In so doing, he demonstrates the evidence for the expansion of all language from a single central area. Swadesh supports his hypothesis by ""exhibits"" that conveniently present the evidence in tabular form. Further clarity is provided by the use of a suggestive practical phonetic system, intelligible to the student as well as to the professional.The book also contains an Appendix, in which the distinguished ethnographer of language, Dell Hymes, gives a valuable account of the prewar linguistic tradition within which Swadesh did some of his most important work.

Language in Space and Time

[It may seem as though the story of the origin and diversification of language ought to begin at the beginning rind go on from there, step by chronological step. The data, however, come to us the other way around. The basic approach of this book is to reconstruct earlier stages of language on the basis of languages still spoken today or attested to by written records. This chapter is thus an introduction to the techniques of historical and comparative linguistics. It discusses the nature of language distribution and linguistic change as well as the ways in which specific changes can be inferred. The basic notions presented here will be needed for an understanding of later chapters.]

Language is an amazingly flexible instrument that can be adapted to all sorts of circumstances. It is characterized by variation in every conceivable dimension. It shows differences according to the subjective mood of the speaker, the kind of persons he is addressing in any particular moment, the nature of the occasion, and the nature of the subject matter. Adults and children do not speak exactly alike, nor do men and women, laymen and churchmen, mechanics and merchants, city dwellers and farmers, members of different sects and organizations. There may even be some special varieties of language peculiar to or especially favored by individual families. There are some special usages that vary within the lifetime of each person and reflect adaptations to a variety of personal contacts and social situations.

Norms and Norm Bundles

Despite the great amount of variation, the specific manifestations of language fall within limits imposed by the social role of communication. If each subgroup in a community or each individual talked now one way and now another, with freely varying phonetics, construction, and vocabulary, each family would be a tower of Babel and the inner thoughts of each individual would be confused. Hence, although language can and must admit variation, at the, same time it has to stay within such bounds as will guarantee, at least most of the time, approximate comprehension among the members of any social group.

Society can be thought of as imposing forms of behavior on its members. People in large measure accept these standards without objection. They learn behavior from those about them by adopting the models they see, hear, or otherwise experience, partly because it is man’s nature to imitate and also because the individual sees in the behavior of his fellows the promise of satisfying particular desires of his own. Social control is not always kind, but neither is it always tyrannical. Much of it consists of opening paths to satisfactions; only a part is demand, discipline, or coercion.

Any form of behavior that tends to repeat itself, in the individual or in the members of a group, constitutes a norm. The individual acquires a norrri by imitation of specific acts that have come to his attention, whether in the behavior of other individuals or in an act he himself has hit upon. The models need not necessarily be presented objectively; they may also be communicated as ideas or be the products of the individual’s thinking or insight. In a way, a norm is the sum of previous acts, but these are necessarily filtered through the wish patterns of the group and its members, because anyone is more likely to follow a model if he is convinced that the result will be desirable. In matters of language, favorable results are comprehension and social approval, insofar as each person is capable of judging when these have been attained and insofar as the consequent events are of a nature to help him judge.

The individual may follow a model or a norm either consciously or unconsciously. In each attempt, his actual behavior may fall close to or far from his understanding of the model, and his understanding may be close to or far from the reality. How close he comes depends on objective and subjective circumstances. For example, the presence of food in the mouth may deflect the point of the tongue from producing a given sound; so the need to speak intelligibly may lead the speaker to move the food out of the way or shift the position of his tongue sufficiently to offset the distortion that might otherwise result. Likewise, in the choice of a remark to make in a given situation, a person may avoid or modify his expression because of the sex, age, or religion of the other persons present; or he may suffer interference from something he hears in the exact moment or that is passing through his mind, in which case he may come out with a word that does not even fit the intended expression. Because of these and other specific circumstances, performance shows a scatter around the previously existing norm. Those manifestations that fall too far out, especially if they lead to failure of communication, are often immediately disowned by the speaker, and he corrects himself. In any event, they tend to be discounted. In general, however, performance tends either to confirm or to modify the norm. Thus specific linguistic patterns may continue relatively unchanged for long periods of time, may be modified in various ways, or may be completely replaced, perhaps after a period of competition between alternate equivalent models.

Linguistic usage can be described in terms of norms and ranges of variation around them. Each norm represents a central type near which fall the specific instances of a usage. The range of variation is the measure of deflection in one or another direction from the average or most representative form. In some cases the norm is in flux, tending in a given direction, or vacillating between two or more main variants. Or there may be functional rivalry between two or more quite different formal patterns capable of being used for the same purpose in speech.

The simplest norm applies to a detail of phonetics, phonology, construction, or vocabulary, or their semantic correlates. Since every language is composed of a whole complex of sounds, combinatory patterns, meaningful elements, and semantic values, it is a large bundle of traits, each definable in terms of its norm. There also exist language variants corresponding to the usage of various subgroupings in a community, based on class, profession, age, sect, ideological group, or whatever. Linguistic scholars call such speech forms dialects, a term derived from Greek and made up of the prefix dia-, through or apart, and the verb legein, to speak. The technical term for an individual’s special way of speaking is idiolect. In nontechnical language we can describe it as an individual’s variant. A special way of talking in a given situation can also be called a variant or a style, the same expression that is used for an author’s language in his writings—his literary style.

Of all the possible variations of a language, the kind that has had most to do with the history of speech in all periods of time is that determined by geography, the regional or local variant. These local variants are the ones we shall be speaking of mostly, but it is important never to lose sight of the general fact that language is by nature a variable phenomenon, held to a very approximate uniformity among the members of each social group and subgroup.

The Language Community

A language community may be defined as that group of people who communicate with one another by means of the same language. In the usual situation, such a community occupies a continuous ternitory, and each of its members is in contact with at least some other members of the same community. Some part of this contact has to be face to face and continuous, particularly in the first years of life, when the child is acquiring language. Some individuals or groups may be separated from their fellows for fairly extended periods, but even in the most primitive communities, prevailing customs provide for some shared activities—economic, ceremonial, and social—at weekly, monthly, or yearly intervals, reestablishing contact with those who might be isolated from day to day. If ties are broken for long periods, the original language may be lost. Or a separate community that continues to use the original language may be formed. Then after protracted separation for several centuries, a distinct language begins to take form as a result of simultaneous gradual linguistic change in both the old and the new communities.

The development of local, class, and other variants is a consequence of either more frequent contacts or greater group loyalties among persons who share experiences and ideas. If the community is small, geographically concentrated, and integrated, there will be little tendency to variation. With increased area and reduced contact, the tendency to form variants increases.

Within limits, subjective attitudes may augment or reduce the rate of differentiation. That is, if any class, area, or other subgrouping of the total community comes to feel that it is and ought to be distinct from others, it is likely to emphasize and add to any special characteristics that distinguish it from others. It may begin to keep apart and to dress, act, and talk differently. And yet such group consciousness is ordinarily not sufficient to bring about a complete separation. Even highly self-centered groups, if they remain in contact with the rest of the community, must maintain some economic, ceremonial, political, and social relations with the others. In consequence, they continue to speak the same language, with only a few special peculiarities. For example, the aristocracy may adopt distinctive mannerisms of pronunciation, construction, and vocabulary, but it will still be able to communicate with the peasantry, on whom, indeed, it is dependent for its privileges. The Quakers, as a religious sect, .maintained the use of the archaic pronoun thee and some other turns of expression, but otherwise continued to speak much like their neighbors. Today, except where Quakers live in concentrated and isolated groups, they generally say you, like everybody else.

Intelligibility, Gradation Among Variants, and Standard Language

The function of a common language, ease of interaction, depends upon the fact of mutual intelligibility, yet this is a relative matter that at best only approaches 100 percent and at times is fairly incomplete. People generally understand other members of their own families, immediate neighbors, and close associates, but they may have some difficulty with groups that are a little further removed geographically or socially.

Frequently there are receding proportions of intelligibility as one moves further away, whether in physical or in social distance, from any starting point. This tendency is evidently related to that fact that each nucleus has most frequent contact with those next removed, but less with those a bit further on, and so on. The amount of sameness and difference reflects mostly the mobility of the people and partly their attitudes toward their neighbors, and these factors are related to the way of life of the community and of its component parts. Hunters and nomad herders move about a great deal, but are likely to cross paths with neighboring bands and to assemble at certain seasons for ceremonial and social purposes. Farmers are likely to stick close to home. Traders may travel back and forth, buying in one place and selling in another. The absence or abundance of roads reflects the mobility as well as the technology, of a community. In modern countries there are not only excellent means of transport, but also various forms of communication, like publications, broadcasting, and telephone lines, which increase contact across great distances. To a considerable extent, large cities may be in closer communication with each other than any of them is with some of its neighboring rural areas, and may therefore be in considerable agreement in vocabulary and style of speech.

If one finds a particular similarity between distant places, chances are it is due to some special historical fact. For example, if the pronunciation of Boston and coastal New England shows similarities to that of southern England, this reflects circumstances in the early history of the American colonies.

The recent rapid spread of a population favors the wide extension of fairly uniform language. This is the case of English in the United States and Canada. Long settlement in an area is generally characterized by relatively sharp distinctions in speech. This may be seen in the great variation of English spoken in England and the even greater local differences in the languages spoken in Germany and Italy.

It is possible that extreme points in a sequence of speech variants, even though it is made up of easy gradations, may be very different. The speakers of adjoining variants may understand each other with reasonable ease, while the extremes are mutually unintelligible. If one finds rather different regional forms of a language in geographic contact with each other, something must have happened to bring about this unusual situation. Perhaps migrating speakers of a distant variant have come to live close by. Possibly certain regional forms have been gaining ground, as neighboring areas drop their way of speaking in favor of the new types; in the process, intermediate gradations are eliminated until notably different variants border on each other.

The linguistic variant used as the conventional or standard in a community in which many varieties exist need not necessarily be the variant ordinarily-used by either of two individuals who are communicating. It may be the manner of speaking of some very large or especially influential portion of the total community. In a large modern nation there is usually some form of the language known as standard, regularly adopted in intervariant situations. The use of the standard variant tends to expand at the expense of the provincial forms. Modern governments generally promote the use of an official standard language by employing it in the schools, by requiring its use in official documents and transactions, and by making its use a necessary qualification for government employment. Many organizations and individuals may favor it for either idealistic or practical reasons. In general, the standard languages are more and more widely used, but there are hardly any places in which they have come even close to eliminating local variants. This is evidently due to a variety of things: the comfort of speaking in the style to which one is most accustomed; nostalgic love for the things of one’s childhood; pride in one’s own home region; the advantage one obtains in some situations from being able to say things to a friend that strangers are unable to understand. Dramatic examples of countries in which there is a tremendous amount of linguistic variation in addition to the recognized standard language (or languages) are India and Italy.

The motives for not dropping a local variant of a language are sometimes strong enough actually to increase its peculiarities. Thus regional pride sometimes leads people to avoid turns of speech that coincide with other localisms or with the standard variant, or even to revive old-fashioned expressions that increase local color. Group solidarity has also favored the invention of new figures of speech that help identify a person with his own group. Various forms of slang have thrived and become increasingly elaborate in this manner. The desire to hide one’s conversation from outsiders has also been a strong reason for cultivating unique expressions.

The tendency for variants to develop in a language community is extremely marked, in fact, a linguistically homogeneous community is something quite exceptional. It is likely to be found only where the population is small, socially unified, and geographically limited. Just as the heterogeneous language community is much more common than the homogeneous one, the multilingual (or multivariant) individual is found more frequently than the monolingual person. Multilingualism (or multivariantism) arises in individuals who have grown up in homes or areas where more than one variant is used, who live close to a border between language zones, or who have traveled.

In more advanced or complicated societies, the types of multivariant control are likely to include passive or active use of a literary language, not necessarily identical with the standard spoken language, and perhaps various archaic forms. For instance, people who have studied literature will have some knowledge of Shakespearean English, and some may know one or more forms of Old and Middle English.

The areas in which the variants of a language are spoken naturally differ in shape and size, and they intercross in complicated ways. At any particular moment of histo...