In The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe tackles a subject that has generated a considerable amount of controversy over the years-- the origin of human language. The bulk of the book contrasts two sets of figures who have played an important role in the debate over the origin of language--Charles Darwin and Alfred Rusell Wallace (in the 19th century, and Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett (in the 20th and early 21st century). Wolfe discusses how Darwin and Chomsky both developed theories explaining the origin and nature of human language, and how Wallace and Everett brought those theories into question.
Wolfe begins his book with Darwin and Wallace. Both men were (in their own time, at least) hailed as the discovers of the theory of natural selection, which they used to explain the origin of biological species (although, according to Wolfe, Darwin acquired a greater share of the glory because he was a member of the English upper class, unlike Wallace). However, they ultimately had a falling out over the matter of human origins. Wallace argued that natural selection could not explain why human beings have certain characteristics not found in other living things. In particular, natural selection cannot explain why human beings have brains that allow them to engage in abstract thought. Consequently, "a superior intelligence" or "controlling intelligence" (by which Wallace appears not to have meant God) must have been involved somehow in mankind's development. Since language is connected to thought, in effect, "Wallace was attributing to supernatural powers something as natural as breathing to human beings everywhere--and only to human beings--namely, speech, language, the Word" (p.64). Darwin's response was to argue that purely naturalistic explanations could account for the seemingly unique characteristics of homo sapiens. Specifically, with regard to language, Darwin asserted that it evolved from human efforts to imitate the mating songs of birds. However, Darwin's birdsong theory never gained wide acceptance as an explanation for the origin of language. In fact, disagreements among scholars about the origin of language continued and became so heated that in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned discussion of the topic in their meetings, with the Philological Society of London imposing a similar prohibition six years later.
In the last three chapters of his book, Wolfe turns to Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett. Like Darwin and Wallace before them, Chomsky and Everett have clashed over the origin of human language. Their disagreement has focused on Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (often shortened as UG), which Chomsky first presented in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures. Decades later, Chomsky continues to hold to the notion of UG, though with some modifications. The basic idea of UG is this--despite their obvious differences, human languages at the most basic level all share certain common characteristics, and all human beings have an in-born knowledge of those fundamental properties of human language. Moreover, this innate capacity for language emerged somehow in the course of human evolution. In a 2002 article in Science, Chomsky and his colleagues Marc D. Hasuer and W. Tecumseh Fitch went further, claiming that there was one distinctive characteristic that all languages share--they all exhibit recursion. Recursion simply means the embedding of one phrase within another. For example, in the sentence The man that John saw was tall, the phrase that John saw is embedded within the phrase that begins with the man. According to Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch, this sort of structuring occurs in every language.
However, in 2005, Everett, a one-time disciple of Chomsky, published an article which seemed to put this "law" of recursion, and more generally, UG theory, into doubt. Everett had learned Piraha, a language spoken by a few hundred members of an Indian tribe living in the Amazon basin, while serving as a missionary in Brazil. In the article, Everett made the following points, as paraphrased by Wolfe:
First, this particular tiny language, Piraha, had no recursion, none at all, immediately reducing Chomsky's law to just another feature found mainly in western languages; and second, it was the Piraha's own distinctive culture, their unique ways of living, that shaped the language--not any..."universal grammar" ...that Chomsky said all languages had in common. (p. 109)
In response, although he dismissed Everett's claims, Chomsky quietly abandoned the idea that recursion is essential to human language (without actually acknowledging that he had done so). He now also admits that the question of how language could have evolved is still a mystery (or so Wolfe tells us).
Wolfe concludes his book by arguing that the problem of the origin of human language--which has proven so troublesome to so many-- can be resolved by giving up the idea that language is the result of evolution--as Darwin believed and Chomsky still believes. Instead, like Everett, Wolfe argues that language is an artifact--something created by humans. More specifically, human langugage developed from mnemonics--devices used to help us remember particular pieces of information (like the mnemonic Every Good Boy Does Fine learned by countless numbers of of music students to remember the letters associated with the lines in a music staff). He asserts that:
Throughout the history of language--and it's quite irrelevant to try to make the usual paleontological guesses as to when that was--man has converted objects, thoughts, concepts, and emotions into codes, conventionally known as words. No one now knows...and there is no reason why anyone is likely to ever know...when it occured to Homo sapiens to use words as mnemonics. But there are now between six thousand and seven thousand different mnemonic systems, better known as languages, covering the world today. They, and they alone, are language (pp. 162-163).
Thus, from Wolfe's perspective, the origin of human language is not that mysterious after all if we just adjust our thinking about it. But, is it just that simple? This is one of the points I will discuss in the second part of my review.
Image of Tom Wolfe from Wikimedia Commons