The Mother Tongue (4 page)

When children are born into a pidgin community, one of two things will happen. Either the children will learn the language of the ruling class, as was almost always the case with African slaves in the American South, or they will develop a creole (from French
créole,
“native”). Most of the languages that people think of as pidgins are in fact creoles. To the uninitiated they can seem primitive, even comical. In Neo-Melanesian, an English-based creole of Papua New Guinea, the word for beard is
gras bilong fes
(literally “grass that belongs to the face”) and the word for a vein or artery is
rop belong blut
(“rope that belongs to the blood”). In African creoles you can find such arresting expressions as
bak sit drayva
(“back seat driver”),
wesmata
(“what's the matter?”), and
bottom-bottom wata waka
(“submarine”). In Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, stomach gas is
bad briz,
while to pass gas is to
pul bad briz.
Feel free to smile. But it would be a mistake to consider these languages substandard because of their curious vocabularies. They are as formalized, efficient, and expressive as any other language—and often more so. As Bickerton notes, most creoles can express subtleties of action not available in English. For instance, in English we are not very good at distinguishing desire from accomplishment in the past tense. In the sentence “I went to the store to buy a shirt” we cannot tell whether the shirt was bought or not. But in all creoles such ambiguity is impossible. In Hawaiian creole the person who bought a shirt would say, “I bin go store go buy shirt,” while the person who failed to buy a shirt would say, “I bin go store for buy shirt.” The distinction is crucial.

So creoles are not in any way inferior. In fact, it is worth remembering that many full-fledged languages—the Afrikaans of South Africa, the Chinese of Macao, and the Swahili of east Africa—were originally creoles.

In studying creoles, Bickerton noticed that they are very similar in structure to the language of children between the ages of two and four. At that age, children are prone to make certain basic errors in their speech, such as using double negatives and experiencing confusion with irregular plurals so that they say “feets” and “sheeps.” At the same time, certain fairly complicated aspects of grammar, which we might reasonably expect to befuddle children, cause them no trouble at all. One is the ability to distinguish between stative and nonstative verbs with a present participle. Without getting too technical about it, this means that with certain types of verbs we use a present participle to create sentences like “I am going for a walk” but with other verbs we dispense with the present participle, which is why we say “I like you” and not “I am liking you.” Very probably you have never thought about this before. The reason you have never thought about it is that it is seemingly instinctive. Most children have mastered the distinction between stative and nonstative verbs by the age of two and are never troubled by it again. Intriguingly, all creole languages make precisely the same distinction.

All of this would seem to suggest that certain properties of language are innate. Moreover, as we have seen, it appears that the earth's languages may be more closely related than once thought. The links between languages—between, say, German
bruder,
English
brother,
Gaelic
bhrathair,
Sanskrit
bhrata,
and Persian
biradar
—seem self-evident to us today but it hasn't always been so. The science of historical linguistics, like so much else, owes its beginnings to the work of an amateur enthusiast, in this case an Englishman named Sir William Jones.

Dispatched to India as a judge in 1783, Jones whiled away his evenings by teaching himself Sanskrit. On the face of it, this was an odd and impractical thing to do since Sanskrit was a dead language and had been for many centuries. That so much of it survived at all was in large part due to the efforts of priests who memorized its sacred hymns, the Vedas, and passed them on from one generation to the next for hundreds of years even though the words had no meaning for them. These texts represent some of the oldest writings in any Indo-European language. Jones noticed many striking similarities between Sanskrit and European languages—the Sanskrit word for birch, for instance, was
bhurja.
The Sanskrit for king,
raja,
is close to the Latin
rex.
The Sanskrit for ten,
dasa,
is reminiscent of the Latin
decem.
And so on. All of these clearly suggested a common historical parentage. Jones looked at other languages and discovered further similarities. In a landmark speech to the Asiatick Society in Calcutta he proposed that many of the classical languages—among them Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Persian—must spring from the same source. This was a bold assertion since nothing in recorded history would encourage such a conclusion, and it excited great interest among scholars all over Europe. The next century saw a feverish effort to track down the parent language, Indo-European, as it was soon called. Scores of people became involved, including noted scholars such as the Germans Friedrich von Schlegel and Jacob Grimm (yes, he of the fairy tales, though philology was his first love) and the splendidly named Franz Bopp. But, once again, some of the most important breakthroughs were the work of inspired amateurs, among them Henry Rawlinson, an official with the British East India Company, who deciphered ancient Persian more or less single-handed, and, somewhat later, Michael Ventris, an English architect who deciphered the famously difficult Linear B script of ancient Minoa, which had flummoxed generations of academics.

These achievements are all the more remarkable when you consider that often they were made using the merest fragments—of ancient Thracian, an important language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle Ages, we have just twenty-five words—and in the face of remarkable indifference on the part of the ancient Greeks and Romans, neither of whom ever bothered to note the details of a single other language. The Romans even allowed Etruscan, a language that had greatly contributed to their own, to be lost, so that today Etruscan writings remain tantalizingly untranslated.

Nor can we read any Indo-European writings, for the simple reason that not a scrap exists. Everything we know—or, to be more precise, think we know—is based on conjecture, on finding common strands in modern-day languages and tracing these strands to a hypothetical mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European, which may never even have existed. The lack of documentary evidence isn't too surprising when you bear in mind that we are going back an awfully long time. The early Indo-Europeans were Neolithic—that is, late Stone Age—people who can be dated back to about 7000
B
.
C
. The descended languages of Indo-European almost always show some kind of kinship in their names for primary family relationships, such as mother and father; for parts of the body, such as eye, foot, heart, and ear; for common animals, such as goat and ox; and for natural elements, such as snow, thunder, and fire. We can deduce something about how these people lived from these cognates. They had a common word for snow and cold, so the climate obviously was not tropical, and yet they appear to have had no common word for sea. Those tribes that reached the sea each came up with words of their own, so presumably they began their migration from a point well inland. Among the other words held in common are
oak, beech, birch, willow, bear, wolf, deer, rabbit, sheep, goat, pig,
and
dog.
They had no common word for horse or window. By studying the known range of certain flora and fauna, linguists have placed their original homeland in various places: the Russian steppes, Scandinavia, central Europe, the Danube valley, Asia Minor—indeed, almost everywhere.

Their common existence is thought to have ended between 3500 and 2500
B
.
C
., when they began to fan out across Europe and Asia. For the most part these were probably not great exoduses but rather gradual encroachments as each new generation sought new pastures and hunting areas. Over the millennia they spread over wide areas—even reaching China. Explorers at the turn of the century were astonished to find a cache of Buddhist documents written in two related but unknown languages in what is now the Chinese province of Sinkiang, along the Old Silk Road. The languages, which they called Tocharian, were clearly Indo-European, as can be seen, for instance, in their words for the number three:
tre
and
trai.
As the centuries passed, the original Indo-European language split into a dozen broad groups: Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Slavonic, Thraco-Illyrian, and so on. These further subdivided into literally scores of new languages, ranging from Latin to Faroese to Parthian to Armenian to Hindi to Portuguese. It is remarkable to reflect that people as various as a Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlander and a Sinhalese-speaking Sri Lankan both use languages that can be traced directly back to the same starting point. With this in mind, it is perhaps little wonder that the Greeks and Romans had no idea that they were speaking languages that were cousins of the barbarian tongues all around them. The notion would have left them dumbfounded. Just within Europe the degree of divergency is so great that only relatively recently have two languages, Albanian and Armenian, been identified as being Indo-European.

Of all the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is the one that has changed the least—so much so that it is sometimes said a Lithuanian can understand simple phrases in Sanskrit. At the very least, Lithuanian has preserved many more of the inflectional complexities of the original Indo-European language than others of the family.

English is part of the Germanic family, which gradually split into three branches. These were North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages; West Germanic, consisting principally of English, German, and Dutch (but also Frisian, Flemish, and other related dialects); and East Germanic, whose three component languages, Burgundian, Gothic, and Vandalic, died off one by one. Many other European languages disappeared over time, among them Cornish, Manx, Gaulish, Lydian, Oscan, Umbrian, and two that once dominated Europe, Celtic and Latin.

Celtic, I must hasten to add, is not dead. Far from it. It is still spoken by half a million people in Europe. But they are scattered over a wide area and its influence is negligible. At its height, in about 400
B
.
C
., Celtic was spoken over a vast area of the continent, a fact reflected in scores of place-names from Belgrade to Paris to Dundee, all of which commemorate Celtic tribes. But from that point on, its dominions have been constantly eroded, largely because the Celts were a loose collection of tribes and not a great nation state, so they were easily divided and conquered. Even now the various branches of Celtic are not always mutually comprehensible. Celtic speakers in Scotland, for instance, cannot understand the Celtic speakers of Wales a hundred miles to the south. Today Celtic survives in scattered outposts along the westernmost fringes of Europe—on the bleak Hebridean Islands and coastal areas of Scotland, in shrinking pockets of Galway, Mayo, Kerry, and Donegal in Ireland, in mostly remote areas of Wales, and on the Brittany peninsula of northwest France. Everywhere it is a story of inexorable decline. At the turn of the century Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia had 100,000 Gaelic speakers—most of them driven there by the forced clearances of the Scottish Highlands—but now Gaelic is extinct there as a means of daily discourse.

Latin, in distinct contrast, didn't so much decline as evolve. It became the Romance languages. It is not too much to say that French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian (as well as a dozen or so minor languages/dialects like Provençal and Catalan) are essentially modern versions of Latin. If we must fix a date for when Latin stopped being Latin and instead became these other languages, the year 813 is a convenient milestone. It was then that Charlemagne ordered that sermons throughout his realm be delivered in the “lingua romana rustica” and not the customary “lingua latina.” But of course you cannot draw a line and say that the language was Latin on this side and Italian or French on that. As late as the thirteenth century, Dante was still regarding his own Florentine tongue as Latin. And indeed it is still possible to construct long passages of modern Italian that are identical to ancient Latin.

The Romance languages are not the outgrowths of the elegant, measured prose of Cicero, but rather the language of the streets and of the common person, the Latin vulgate. The word for horse in literary Latin was
equus,
but to the man on the street it was
caballus,
and it was from this that we get the French
cheval,
the Spanish
caballo,
and the Italian
cavallo.
Similarly, the classical term for head was
caput
(from which we get
capital
and
per capita
), but the street term was
testa,
a kind of pot, from which comes the French
la tête
and the Italian
la testa
(though the Italians also use
il capo
). Cat in classical Latin was
feles
(whence
feline
), but in the vulgate it was
cattus.
Our word “salary” comes literally from the vulgar Latin
salarium,
“salt money”—the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy. By the same process the classical
pugna
(from which we much later took
pugnacious
) was replaced by the slangy
battualia
(from which we get
battle
), and the classical
urbs,
meaning “city” (from which we get
urban
), was superseded by
villa
(from which the French get their name for a city,
ville,
and we take the name for a place in the country).