Over on the evolutionnews.org website, Tom Bethell has an excellent post (see here) regarding the evolution of language entitled “In the Context of Human Artifacts, Something Like Darwinian Actually Happens.” In his post, Bethell points out that in the case of biological species we actually lack any actual direct evidence for one species changing into a totally new species, as assumed by Darwinian evolution. However, Bethell says:
[A] concept of evolution not unlike the Darwinian one is validly applied to human constructions. Language may be the best-known example. Latin evolved into French over a two-thousand-year period. Roman documents in Latin survive, and the language is still used by the Catholic Church. We have two millennia of documentation showing how Latin morphed into its daughter languages.
In other words, we have actual evidence of one language turning into another over time. Nevertheless, even though we have such evidence for a Darwinian-style evolution of languages, linguists are still unable to account for the origin of language—a predicament similar to that faced by biologists, who are unable to explain the origin of life. Efforts to explain how human language per se could have developed through a gradual process have not proven very convincing. Bethel then makes some very interesting observations:
This brings us to both a similarity and a divergence between the evolution of species and the evolution of language. First the similarity: language does evolve but it is not teleological. It does not aim to approach an end state, and in that sense it is Darwinian. The changes in Latin that led to French were not all along aiming to produce something elegant enough to please the Academie francaise (created in 1635); or indeed aiming to produce anything in particular.
The difference is this. The evolution of language has been observed, and recorded in detail. But in every instance it is produced by intelligent agents, namely human beings. Parrots can utter words, sometimes with disconcerting precision, but they don’t understand those words when considered as elements of a sentence.
I would say that Bethell makes some excellent points in these two paragraphs. However, I would qualify one of his statements. While it is true that language “is produced by intelligent agents,” in the sense that “intelligent agents”—humans—produce language orally or through writing, to a large extent language does not develop as the result of the conscious efforts of those intelligent agents (which is why language is not teleological, as Bethell properly notes). Yes, it is true that human beings contribute to the development of language through such acts as the invention of new words or the writing of grammars setting forth “the rules” for a certain language (or the compiling of dictionaries standardizing the spelling of words in a language). However, most language change occurs without any conscious effort to modify a particular language. For example, starting around 1400, the pronunciation of certain vowels in English changed, in what is now known as the “Great Vowel Shift,” which helped lead to the transformation of Middle English into early Modern English. For instance, in Middle English, the word life had been pronounced like “leaf,” but due to the Great Vowel Shift it gained its current pronunciation. This change in the pronunciation of English was not likely the result of some conscious decision.
Similarly, English grammar underwent a major change from the Old English period (500-1100 AD) to the Modern English period (1500-today). Originally, English was an inflected language, which is to say that the grammatical function of a word was signaled by differences in the spelling or structure of the word (like in Latin). Thus, while in modern English the word like can be a noun, adjective, verb, or preposition, in old English the word was spelled differently, depending on its grammatical function: gelica (noun), geic (adjective), lician (verb), or gelice (preposition). Over time, however, English became a word order dependent language, in which the grammatical function of a word is determined by its position in a sentence. Thus, the grammatical function of the word John in the sentence John kissed Mary is different from its grammatical function in the sentence Mary kissed John. This dramatic transformation of the nature of English grammar, was, again, not due to any intentional act by speakers of the language.
In short, in light of the discussion above, I think it needs to be acknowledged that most changes in languages are not the result of the conscious decisions of intelligent agents. However, I would argue that the case can be made that the origin of language itself still required the involvement of an intelligent agent. The complexity of language, which can be seen even in the case of ancient languages and those languages spoken by so-called primitive peoples today, suggest that it could not have emerged via some Darwinian process in which the simple became gradually complex. Rather, it is more likely that human language emerged as a complete system, which strongly implies an intelligence behind it. Thus, even as people like Bethell can argue the case for Intelligent Design in biology, a strong case for Intelligent Design in linguistics can also be made.
Image of Brueghel's painting "The Tower of Babel" from commons.wikimedia.org