The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue Review

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The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue ReviewWhen the Tower of Babel was being constructed, so the story goes, God was so incensed at the presumption of humans that he condemned them to speak a multitude of tongues. Ever since then, we've often needed translators to speak to each other, and imperfectly at that. Many are the battles fought because of misunderstandings caused by language differences.
Merritt Ruhlen has a different take on the language schism. In his book, called *The Origin of Language*, appropriately enough, he explains the theory that all of today's languages had a common origin, many thousands of years ago, and that linguistic drift accounts for all the differences we see today.
The way that he arrives at this point is fascinating. He allows the reader to play along in the linguistics game, providing sample words that work nicely to group languages together in ever larger categories, until they all tie together in one world glotknot. It's all so obvious that you can't believe that anyone could think differently.
Of course people think differently. In fact, a lot of linguists (Eric Hamp at the University of Chicago, for one) think differently. Many of them think that Ruhlen and his sometime mentor, Joseph Greenberg, are kind of nuts. For one thing, picking ten words at a time to group languages together is a risky endeavor. Even if Ruhlen believes he picked the ten words at random, you can't get around the fact that Ruhlen *knows* what conclusion he wants to reach, and that could taint the whole process. Anecdotal evidence is a notoriously bad way to come up with general theories.
Furthermore, Ruhlen doesn't really go into the quantitative business of assessing how great an effect phonetic drift has in muddying up the genetic relationships between languages, and when he does do it, the mathematics are misleading or simply wrong. Richard Feynman made a big point of telling his students not to use an observation that suggested a theory as confirming evidence of that same theory, a lesson Ruhlen seems to have missed.
All of which Ruhlen probably doesn't worry too much about. He and Greenberg are more concerned about getting the big picture together first, and addressing the details later. Nothing wrong with that, but in his effort to gain converts to the "lumpers" faction (as opposed to the "splitters"), he has an alarming tendency to denigrate the work of others. Like the guy who runs his coworkers down behind their backs, he tends paradoxically to lose a lot of support.
It's too bad, because linguists often do seem polarized around this question of origin, and the field really could use a solid, balanced book that looks at what new work needs to be done without ignoring or downplaying work that's already been done. This book isn't it, though. The casual reader will learn a lot about the way that lumpers work, because it's more exciting; more inquisitive readers will hanker for something with more study and less politics.The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue Overview

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