The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (42 page)

English has changed on both sides of the Atlantic, and had been changing well before the voyage of the
Mayflower
. What grew into standard contemporary English was simply the dialect spoken around London, the political and economic center of England, in the seventeenth century. In the centuries preceding, it had undergone a number of major changes, as you can see in these versions of the Lord’s Prayer:

The roots of English are in northern Germany near Denmark, which was inhabited early in the first millennium by pagan tribes called the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. After the armies of the collapsing Roman Empire left Britain in the fifth century, these tribes invaded what was to become England (Angle-land) and displaced the indigenous Celts there into Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall. Linguistically, the defeat was total; English has virtually no traces of Celtic. Vikings invaded in the ninth to eleventh centuries, but their language, Old Norse, was similar enough to Anglo-Saxon that aside from many borrowings, the language, Old English, did not change much.

In 1066 William the Conqueror invaded Britain, bringing with him the Norman dialect of French, which became the language of the ruling classes. When King John of the Anglo-Norman kingdom lost Normandy shortly after 1200, English reestablished itself as the exclusive language of England, though with a marked influence of French that lasts to this day in the form of thousands of words and a variety of grammatical quirks that go with them. This “Latinate” vocabulary—including such words as
donate, vibrate
, and
desist
—has a more restricted syntax; for example, you can say
give the museum a painting
but not
donate the museum a painting, shake it up
but not
vibrate it up
. The vocabulary also has its own sound pattern: Latinate words are largely polysyllabic with stress on the second syllable, such as
desist, construct
, and
transmit
, whereas their Anglo-Saxon synonyms
stop, build
, and
send
are single syllables. The Latinate words also trigger many of the sound changes that make English morphology and spelling so idiosyncratic, like
electric-electricity
and
nation-national
. Because Latinate words are longer, and are more formal because of their ancestry in the government, church, and schools of the Norman conquerors, overusing them produces the stuffy prose universally deplored by style manuals, such as
The adolescents who had effectuated forcible entry into the domicile were apprehended
versus
We caught the kids who broke into the house
. Orwell captured the flabbiness of Latinate English in his translation of a passage from Ecclesiastes into modern institutionalese:

English changed noticeably in the Middle English period (1100–1450) in which Chaucer lived. Originally all syllables were enunciated, including those now represented in spelling by “silent” letters. For example,
make
would have been pronounced with two syllables. But the final syllables became reduced to the generic schwa like the
a
in
allow
and in many cases they were eliminated entirely. Since the final syllables contained the case markers, overt case began to vanish, and the word order became fixed to eliminate the resulting ambiguity. For the same reason, prepositions and auxiliaries like
of
and
do
and
will
and
have
were bled of their original meanings and given important grammatical duties. Thus many of the signatures of modern English syntax were the result of a chain of effects beginning with a simple shift in pronunciation.

The period of Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, lasted from 1450 to 1700. It began with the Great Vowel Shift, a revolution in the pronunciation of long vowels whose causes remain mysterious. (Perhaps it was to compensate for the fact that long vowels sounded too similar to short vowels in the monosyllables that were now prevalent; or perhaps it was a way for the upper classes to differentiate themselves from the lower classes once Norman French became obsolete.) Before the vowel shift,
mouse
had been pronounced “mooce”; the old “oo” turned into a diphthong. The gap left by the departed “oo” was filled by raising what used to be an “oh” sound; what we pronounce as
goose
had, before the Great Vowel Shift, been pronounced “goce.” That vacuum, in turn, was filled by the “o” vowel (as in
hot
, only drawn out), giving us
broken
from what had previously been pronounced more like “brocken.” In a similar rotation, the “ee” vowel turned into a diphthong;
like
had been pronounced “leek.” This dragged in the vowel “eh” to replace it; our
geese
was originally pronounced “gace.” And that gap was filled when the long version of
ah
was raised, resulting in
name
from what used to be pronounced “nahma.” The spelling never bothered to track these shifts, which is why the letter
a
is pronounced one way in
cam
and another way in
came
, where it had formerly been just a longer version of the
a
in
cam
. This is also why vowels are rendered differently in English spelling than in all the other European alphabets and in “phonetic” spelling.

Incidentally, fifteenth-century Englishmen did not wake up one day and suddenly pronounce their vowels differently, like a switch to Daylight Savings Time. To the people living through it, the Great Vowel Shift probably felt like the current trend in the Chicago area to pronounce
hot
like
hat
, or the growing popularity of that strange surfer dialect in which
dude
is pronounced something like “diiihh-hoooood.”

What happens if we try to go back farther in time? The languages of the Angles and the Saxons did not come out of thin air; they evolved from Proto-Germanic, the language of a tribe that occupied much of northern Europe in the first millennium
B.C.
The western branch of the tribe split into groups that gave us not only Anglo-Saxon, but German and its offshoot Yiddish, and Dutch and its offshoot Afrikaans. The northern branch settled Scandinavia and came to speak Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. The similarities in vocabulary among these languages are visible in an instant, and there are many similarities in grammar as well, such as forms of the past-tense ending -
ed
.

The ancestors of the Germanic tribes left no clear mark in written history or the archeological record. But they did leave a special mark on the territory they occupied. That mark was discerned in 1786 by Sir William Jones, a British judge stationed in India, in one of the most extraordinary discoveries in all scholarship. Jones had taken up the study of Sanskrit, a long-dead language, and noted:

Here are the kinds of affinities that impressed Jones:

ENGLISH:
brother mead is thou bearest he bears

GREEK:
phrater methu esti phereis pherei

LATIN:
frater est fers fert

OLD SLAVIC:
bratre mid yeste berasi beretu

OLD IRISH:
brathir mith is beri

SANSKRIT:
bhrater medhu asti bharasi bharati

Such similarities in vocabulary and grammar are seen in an immense number of modern languages. Among others, they embrace Germanic, Greek, Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian), Slavic (Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian), Celtic (Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Breton), and Indo-Iranian (Persian, Afghan, Kurdish, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, and the Romany language of the Gypsies). Subsequent scholars were able to add Anatolian (extinct languages spoken in Turkey, including Hittite), Armenian, Baltic (Lithuanian and Latvian), and Tocharian (two extinct languages spoken in China). The similarities are so pervasive that linguists have reconstructed a grammar and a large dictionary for a hypothetical common ancestor language, Proto-Indo-European, and a set of systematic rules by which the daughter languages changed. For example, Jacob Grimm (one of the two Grimm brothers, famous as collectors of fairy tales) discovered the rule by which
p
and
t
in Proto-Indo-European became
f
and
th
in Germanic, as one can see in comparing Latin
pater
and Sanskrit
piter
with English
father
.

The implications are mind-boggling. Some ancient tribe must have taken over most of Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India, western Russia, and parts of China. The idea has excited the imagination of a century of linguists and archeologists, though even today no one really knows who the Indo-Europeans were. Ingenious scholars have made guesses from the reconstructed vocabulary. Words for metals, wheeled vehicles, farm implements, and domesticated animals and plants suggest that the Indo-Europeans were a late Neolithic people. The ecological distributions of the natural objects for which there are Proto-Indo-European words—elm and willow, for example, but not olive or palm—have been used to place the speakers somewhere in the territory from inland northern Europe to southern Russia. Combined with words for patriarch, fort, horse, and weapons, the reconstructions led to an image of a powerful conquering tribe spilling out of an ancestral homeland on horseback to overrun most of Europe and Asia. The word “Aryan” became associated with the Indo-Europeans, and the Nazis claimed them as ancestors. More sanely, archeologists have linked them to artifacts of the Kurgan culture in the southern Russian steppes from around 3500
B.C.
, a band of tribes that first harnessed the horse for military purposes.

Recently the archeologist Colin Renfrew has argued that the Indo-European takeover was a victory not of the chariot but of the cradle. His controversial theory is that the Indo-Europeans lived in Anatolia (part of modern Turkey) on the flanks of the Fertile Cresent region around 7000
B.C.
, where they were among the world’s first farmers. Farming is a method for mass-producing human beings by turning land into bodies. Farmers’ daughters and sons need more land, and even if they moved just a mile or two from their parents, they would quickly engulf the less fecund hunter-gatherers standing in their way. Archeologists agree that farming spread in a wave that began in Turkey around 8500
B.C.
and reached Ireland and Scandinavia by 2500
B.C.
Geneticists recently discovered that a certain set of genes is most concentrated among modern people in Turkey and becomes progressively diluted as one moves through the Balkans to northern Europe. This supports the theory originally proposed by the human geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza that farming spread by the movement of farmers, as their offspring interbred with indigenous hunter-gatherers, rather than by the movement of farming techniques, as a fad adopted by the hunter-gatherers. Whether these people were the Indo-Europeans, and whether they spread into Iran, India, and China by a similar process, is still not known. It is an awesome possibility. Every time we use a word like
brother
, or form the past tense of an irregular verb like
break-broke
or
drink-drank
, we would be using the preserved speech patterns of the instigators of the most important event in human history, the spread of agriculture.