(44 reviews)Author: Merritt Ruhlen
ISBN : 9780471584261
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"A powerful statement...also a wonderfully clear exposition of linguistic thinking about prehistory."––Anthropological Science
One of the world's foremost language researchers takes readers step-by-step through the hotly contested evidence that all modern languages derive from one "mother tongue" once spoken by primitive humans in Africa. With The Origin of Language, Merritt Ruhlen makes this fascinating science accessible to readers with no linguistic background.
MERRITT RUHLEN, PhD (Palo Alto, California) is the author of A Guide to the World's Languages
- Paperback: 239 pages
- Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 22, 1994)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0471584266
- ISBN-13: 978-0471584261
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue
When the Tower of Babel was being constructed, so the story goes, God was so incensed at the presumption of humans that he condemned them to speak a multitude of tongues. Ever since then, we've often needed translators to speak to each other, and imperfectly at that. Many are the battles fought because of misunderstandings caused by language differences.Merritt Ruhlen has a different take on the language schism. In his book, called *The Origin of Language*, appropriately enough, he explains the theory that all of today's languages had a common origin, many thousands of years ago, and that linguistic drift accounts for all the differences we see today.
The way that he arrives at this point is fascinating. He allows the reader to play along in the linguistics game, providing sample words that work nicely to group languages together in ever larger categories, until they all tie together in one world glotknot. It's all so obvious that you can't believe that anyone could think differently.
Of course people think differently. In fact, a lot of linguists (Eric Hamp at the University of Chicago, for one) think differently. Many of them think that Ruhlen and his sometime mentor, Joseph Greenberg, are kind of nuts. For one thing, picking ten words at a time to group languages together is a risky endeavor. Even if Ruhlen believes he picked the ten words at random, you can't get around the fact that Ruhlen *knows* what conclusion he wants to reach, and that could taint the whole process. Anecdotal evidence is a notoriously bad way to come up with general theories.
This is not a book about comparative linguistics. Instead, it is a book devoted to Ruhlen's personal fantasies.Comparative linguistics, like all linguistics, and indeed like all serious scholarly work, is done by applying rigorous and scrupulous methods to carefully obtained data. The right way of doing comparative linguistics was worked out only at the end of the 18th century, and it has been developed and refined ever since.
Before that time, people had no idea how to compare languages, and they worked wholly in the dark. Their favored "method" was nothing more than the assembly of miscellaneous resemblances among miscellaneous languages, in the hope that this might shed light on language origins. But it didn't, and it doesn't: miscellaneous resemblances are meaningless and worthless, as has been amply demonstrated countless times. See any decent textbook of historical linguistics.
But this Dark Age procedure is exactly what Ruhlen wants his readers to accept, believe in, and follow. Ruhlen shows no understanding of the numerous and serious obstacles to the comparison of languages, and no understanding of the formidable pitfalls that must be avoided if useful work is to be done.
In place of rigor, Ruhlen offers us only lists of miscellaneous resemblances, which, like the forlorn scholars of the past, he wants us to take seriously, and to use as the sole basis for spectacular conclusions.
Worse, Ruhlen wants his eager readers to believe that they too can do serious work in linguistics: "Don't believe the blinkered professionals when they tell you that good work requires years of training and experience, or that it requires a comprehensive knowledge of the languages you want to compare.
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