The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Paperback)

More than anything else, I came away from The First Word thinking that linguists love to argue. In fact, every few pages I found myself arguing with author Christine Kenneally and I'm not even a linguist. I disagreed with much of the book and wanted more evidence for many of her arguments. But when I find myself thinking about a book this much and discussing it with people at length, I have to give it five stars.

The subject is the origin of human language. How did it start? Obviously there's no way of knowing, but that doesn't (nor should it) keep linguists from looking for the answer. Since no one can prove or disprove any of the theories about language origin, it's a free-for-all. Linguists seem to enjoy knocking their colleagues' theories even more than they enjoy defending their own theories.

Kenneally is mostly even-handed in her presentation of the many interesting theories currently in debate. However, she chides Martin Gardner for a 1980 article he wrote debunking experiments claiming to have taught chimps, apes, and dolphins human language. Gardner acknowledged the popularity of such experiments, especially when they featured an attractive blonde scientist teaching an ape (evoking Beauty and the Beast) to "talk." Kenneally suspects that no one writes of Chomsky or other male scientists by describing their hair or appearance. Yet Kenneally thinks nothing of mentioning Steven Pinker's "flop of curls" or that Stephen Jay Gould is "short and remarkably loud."

Many of the theories about language origin seem to rest on isolated cases. Linguists cite the case of Genie, a girl who was raised by people who didn't speak to her. She didn't learn to speak and when she was removed from the abusive environment as a teenager, she couldn't learn to speak. It is difficult to draw valid conclusions from a few psychologically scarred individuals.

Kenneally is a linguist and also a journalist, so she is able to condense and present these complex ideas to people who have no background in linguistics but who are interested in it anyway. Sometimes the going gets a little tough, but there are some amusing asides to ease the way, such as the story of what happened when two gorillas who had learned sign language got together and had a sign language shouting match.

It's obvious that there's a lot more that we don't know about language origin and less that we do know. Only twenty or thirty years ago anthropologists were listing the attributes that make us human. Opposable thumbs, using tools, making tools, language, self-awareness. Point by point, evidence has shown that we are not unique, at least not in the ways we had defined ourselves. The same thing has happened with our arguments for why we speak but other animals don't: the descended larynx, the bigger brain, more complex thoughts, a greater need to communicate. Maybe we should stop trying to teach dolphins and apes to use human language and try to communicate with dolphins and apes in their language. We might learn something.

In any case The First Word is a great introduction and a tidy summary of the debate on language origin as it stands today. But read it soon because the evidence and theories are bound to change quickly.