The Kingdom of Speech (13 page)

Later on, a ragtag delegation of Pirahã with black eyes, swollen jaws, and fat lips comes to Everett's house to apologize. They're friendly, indolent, loose, laid-back, lazy. Soon they will forget they went mad from cachaça: Who remembers “other day” anyway?

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
instantly became a hit and the biggest wallop in the breadbasket Noam Chomsky's hegemony had ever suffered. Everett didn't so much attack Chomsky's theory as dismiss it. He spoke of Chomsky's “waning influence” and the mounting evidence that Chomsky was wrong when he called language “innate.” Language had not evolved from…
anything
. It was an artifact. Just as man had taken natural materials, namely, wood and metal, and combined them to create the ax, he had taken natural sounds and put them together in the form of codes representing objects, actions, and, ultimately, thoughts and calculations—and called the codes
words
. In
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes,
Everett animates his avant-garde theory with the story of his own thirty years with this, the most primit
a
—
er,
indigenous—tribe known to exist on earth, the Pirahã…risking death in virtually every conceivable form in the jungle, from malaria to murder to poison to getting swallowed by anacondas.

National Public Radio read great swaths of the book aloud over the their national network and named it one of the best books of the year.
148
Reviews in the popular press were uniformly favorable, even glowing…to the point of blinding…as in the
Sacramento Book Review:
“A genuine and engrossing book that is both sharp and intuitive; it closes around you and reaches inside you, controlling your every thought and movement as you read it.” It is “impossible to forget.”
149

Ideally, great wide-eyed romantic acclaim like this should have no effect, except perhaps a negative one, in academia. But when the truth squad's forty-thousand-word “reassessment” finally came out in
Language,
in June of 2009, there was no explosion. The Great Rebuttal just lay there, a swollen corpus of objections—cosmic, small-minded, and everything in between. It didn't make a sound. The success of
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
had defused it.

Chomsky and the squad were far from done for, however. They concentrated on the academic press. No academic, in what was still the Age of Chomsky, was likely to write any gushing review of Everett's scarlet book. Chomsky and the squad were on the qui vive for anyone who stepped out of line. A professor of philosophy at King's College London, David Papineau, wrote a more or less positive review of
Don't Sleep
—only that: “more or less”—and a member of the truth squad, David Pesetsky, put him in his place. Papineau didn't take this as good-hearted collegial advice. “For people outside of linguistics,” he said, “it's rather surprising to find this kind of protection of orthodoxy.”
150

Three months after
Don't Sleep
was published, Chomsky dismissed Everett to the outer darkness with one of his favorite epithets. In an interview with
Folha de S.Paulo,
Brazil's biggest and most influential newspaper, news website, and mobile news service, Chomsky said Everett “has turned into a charlatan.”
151
A charlatan is a fraud who specializes in showing off knowledge he doesn't have. The epithets (“fraud,” “liar,” “charlatan”) were Chomsky's way of sentencing opponents to Oblivion. From then on Everett wouldn't rate the effort it would take to denounce him.

Everett had, as it says in the song, let the dogs out. Linguists who had kept their doubts and grumbles to themselves were emboldened to speak out openly.

Michael Tomasello, a psychologist who was codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the scholars who commented on Everett's 2005 article in
Current Anthropology,
had been critical of this and that in Chomsky's theory for several years. But in 2009, after Everett's book was published, he went all out in a paper entitled “Universal Grammar Is Dead” for the journal
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
and confronted Chomsky head-on: “The idea of a biologically evolved, universal grammar with linguistic content is a myth.”
152
“Myth” became the new word. Vyvyan Evans of Wales's Bangor University expanded it into a book,
The Language Myth,
in 2014. He came right out and rejected Chomsky's and Steven Pinker's idea of an innate, natural-born “language instinct.” In a blurb, Michael Fortescue of the University of Copenhagen added, “Evans' rebuttal of Chomsky's Universal Grammar from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics provides an excellent antidote to popular textbooks where it is assumed that the Chomskyan approach to linguistic theory…has somehow been vindicated once and for all.”
153

Thanks to Everett, linguists were beginning to breathe life into the words of the anti-Chomskyans of the twentieth century who had been written off as cranks or contrarians, such as Larry Trask, a linguist at England's University of Sussex. In 2003, the year after Chomsky announced his Law of Recursion, Trask said in an interview, “I have no time for Chomskyan theorizing and its associated dogmas of ‘universal grammar.' This stuff is so much half-baked twaddle, more akin to a religious movement than to a scholarly enterprise. I am confident that our successors will look back on UG as a huge waste of time. I deeply regret the fact that this sludge attracts so much attention outside linguistics, so much so that many non-linguists believe that Chomskyan theory simply is linguistics…and that UG is now an established piece of truth, beyond criticism or discussion. The truth is entirely otherwise.”
154

In 2012 Everett published
Language: The Cultural Tool,
a book spelling out in scholarly detail the linguistic material he had tucked in amid the tales of death-dodging in
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
…namely, that speech, language, is not something that had
evolved
in
Homo sapiens,
the way the breed's unique small-motor-skilled hands had…or its next-to-hairless body. Speech is man-made. It is an artifact…and it explains man's power over all other creatures in a way Evolution all by itself can't begin to.

Language: The Cultural Tool
was Everett's
Origin of Species,
his
Philosophiae Naturalis
…and it wasn't nearly the success that
Don't Sleep
had been. It went light on the autobiographical storytelling…Oh, the book had its moments…Only Everett had it in him to make direct fun of Chomsky…He tells a story about visiting MIT in the early 1990s and going to what was billed as a major Chomsky lecture. “A group of his students were sitting in the back giggling,” says Everett. “When Chomsky mentioned the Martian linguist example, they could barely constrain their chuckles and I saw money changing hands.” After the talk, he asked them what that was all about, and they said they had bets with each other on exactly when in his lecture Chomsky would drop his moldy old Martian linguist on everybody.

Critics such as Tomasello and Vyvyan Evans, as well as Everett, had begun to have their doubts about Chomsky's UG. Where did that leave the rest of his anatomy of speech? After all, he was very firm in his insistence that it was a physical structure. Somewhere in the brain the
language organ
was actually pumping the UG through the
deep structure
so that the LAD,
the language acquisition device,
could make language, speech, audible, visible, the absolutely real product of
Homo sapiens
's central nervous system.

And Chomsky's reaction? As always, Chomsky proved to be unbeatable when it came to debate. He never let himself be backed into a corner, where he could be forced to have it out with his attackers jowl to howl. He either jumped out ahead of them and up above them or so artfully dodged them that they were left staggering off stride. Tomasello had closed in and just about
had
him on all this para-anatomy, when suddenly—

—shazzzzammm
—Chomsky's language organ and all its para-anatomy, if that was what it was, disappeared, as if it had never been there in the first place. He never recanted a word. He merely subsumed the same concepts beneath a new and broader body of thought. Gone, too, astonishingly, was recursion.
Recursion!
In 2002 Chomsky had announced his discovery of recursion and pronounced it
the
essential element of human speech. But here, in the summer of 2013, when he appeared before the Linguistic Society of America's Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan…recursion had vanished, too. So where did that leave Everett and his remarks on recursion? Where? Nowhere. Recursion was no longer an issue…and Everett didn't exist anymore. He was a ghost, a vaporized nonperson. Naturally, the truth squad could no longer see him, either. They couldn't have cared less about churning up an angry wave for
Language: The Cultural Tool
to come surfing in on. They didn't even extend Everett the courtesy of loathing him in print. They left non-him behind with all the rest of history's roadside trash.

The passage of time did not mollify Chomsky's opinion of the non-him, Everett, in the slightest. In 2016, when I pressed him on the point, Chomsky blew off Everett like a nonentity to the minus-second power.

“It”—Everett's opinion; he does not refer to Everett by name—

As a result, Everett's new book didn't begin to kick up the ruckus that
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
had. An entirely new world had been born in linguistics. In effect, Chomsky was announcing—without so much as a quick look back over his shoulder—“Welcome to the Strong Minimalist Thesis, Hierarchically Structured Expression, and Merge.” A regular syllablavalanche had buried the language organ and the body parts that came with it.

Starting in the 1950s, said Chomsky, whose own career had started in the 1950s, “there's been a huge explosion of inquiry into language.…Far more penetrating work is going on into a vastly greater array of theoretical issues.…Many new topics have been opened. The questions that students are working on today could not even be formulated or even imagined half a century ago or, for that matter, much more recently.…” They are “considering more seriously the most fundamental question about language, namely, what is it.”
What is it?!
With the help of “the formal sciences,” said Chomsky, we can take on “the most basic property of language, namely, that each language provides an unbounded array” of (Chomsky loved “array”) “hierarchically structured expressions…through some rather obscure system of thought that we know is there but we don't know much about it.”
156

The following year, in August of 2014, Chomsky teamed up with three colleagues at MIT, Johan J. Bolhuis, Robert C. Berwick, and Ian Tattersall, to publish an article for the journal
PLoS Biology
with the title “How Could Language Have Evolved?” After an invocation of the Strong Minimalist Thesis and the Hierarchical Syntactic Structure, Chomsky and his new trio declare, “It is uncontroversial that language has evolved, just like any other trait of living organisms.” Nothing else in the article is anywhere nearly so set in concrete. Chomsky
et alii
note it was commonly assumed that language was created primarily for communication…
but
…in fact communication is an all but irrelevant, by-the-way use of language…language is deeper than that; it is a “particular computational cognitive system, implemented neurally”…
but
…“we are not sure exactly how”…there is the proposition that Neanderthals could speak…
but
…there is no proof…we know anatomically that the Neanderthals' hyoid bone in the throat, essential for
Homo sapiens
's speech, was in the right place…
but
…“hyoid morphology, like most other lines of evidence, is evidently no silver bullet for determining when human language originated”…Chomsky and the trio go over aspect after aspect of language…
but
…there is something wrong with every hypothesis…they try to be all-encompassing…
but
…in the end any attentive soul reading it realizes that all five thousand words were summed up in the very first eleven words of the piece, which read:

“The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma.”

An enigma!
A century and a half's worth of certified wise men, if we make Darwin the starting point—or of bearers of doctoral degrees, in any case—six generations of them had devoted their careers to explaining exactly what language is. After all that time and cerebration they had arrived at a conclusion: language is…
an enigma?
Chomsky all by himself had spent sixty years on the subject. He had convinced not only academia but also an awed public that he had the answer. And now he was a signatory of a declaration that language remains…
an enigma?