David Crystal’s book Words Words Words is a light bit of linguistic entertainment that anybody with a taste for language should enjoy, even though there is not much that is terribly new. The fact that I am an American and Crystal lives in the UK does give novelty to many of the examples. I did not know, for instance, that in 2005 somebody in Britain proposed that schools no longer speak of failure, only deferred success.
The biggest pleasure in a book like this comes from its ability to stir thoughts, seducing readers into re-thinking familiar ideas in new contexts, and for visitors to this blog the central stirring comes in Part II The Origin of Words. The section is not about the evolutionary origin of words back when words were something new, but that is not as much of a handicap as you might suppose.
Many speculations about the first word refer to sources that no longer produce words. Sighs, moans, and onomatopoeia are notorious ideas for how language began, although they are unusual sources for words today. Crystal’s little book provides a list of the way most words begin today and that provides food for thought about where words might have come from when they were knew. I must admit, however, that Crystal does not himself follow that route. His paragraph on the ultimate origin of words is shockingly old fashioned for a linguist of Crystal’s stature.
Perhaps, in the beginning, certain types of sound were used to express certain basic feelings or biological states, or to imitate environmental sounds. Several theories of the origins of language have been proposed which assume some such development. Primitive words might have come from imitating animal noises or natural sonic effects, such as wind and water. They might have arisen from spontaneous expressions of pain, anger, or other strong emotions. They might have been a development of the noises people make when they pull something heavy or have sex. (p. 45)
Charles Lyell managed to revolutionize geology by proposing that the same forces producing geological changes today were the ones that produced the geological changes of the past. Why not at least begin thinking about the origin of words in the same way, by asking which present day methods of producing new words could possibly have been in effect when words were new.
That question immediately rules out some proto-Shakespeare who began coining words for the benefit of all humanity. Crystal tells the story of William Barnes, a Victorian who hated the presence of so many non-Anglo-Saxon words in English and invented many Englishy forms for foreign-based words. My favorite of those listed is speech-craft instead of the French-based grammar. But Crystal says:
A tiny number of his coinages found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary … But most of his lexical innovations were never taken up, and remain linguistic curiosities. It would have been surprising if it had been otherwise. It is rare indeed to find a single individual altering the character of a language’s lexicon. (p. 50)
Genius are not the source of our modern vocabularies. Even the contributors of enduring words, poets like Shakespeare and Chaucer, got their words by following the systems that Crystal describes for getting new words. So before we go rushing off trying to think up ways the first words might have been coined, it’s not a bad idea to look at Crystal’s list of methods.
This approach might seem hopeless since the basic method is to use existing words, but let’s be confident and look at the list anyway. At the top are “loan words,” borrowings from other languages.
‘Borrowing’ is another misnomer. When one language ‘borrows’ from another, it does not give them back. ‘Steals’ would be more appropriate. (p. 59)
Would it be more appropriate? We take words where we find them. Anyone who lives where cultures meet (and these days who does not live there?) can see the process at work around them. When I lived in East Africa English speakers routinely included Swahili terms in their talk. Conversely, Africans commonly stuck English words into their conversations. I once heard two men conversing in Swahili. Suddenly one said, we’ll share, only he used a word that was neither Swahili nor English. He said tutashare. The first part, tuta, is the Swahili marker for the first person, plural future tense conjugation of a verb. The second part, share, is the English verb being conjugated. This kind of seizing upon words from any source without regard for formal membership in a particular language is a standard aspect of normal speech. It only seems odd (or funny, I burst into laughter when I heard it) if you have two abstract categories of language and notice that this word tangles the two.
All very nice, but it does not sound like it could be the source for a first word since loan words consist of taking over somebody else’s word. And yet before there was speech there were already plenty of animal noises. Bird songs proclaiming a territory are probably of no interest to members of other species and apes would have little reason to notice them, but alarm calls are more generally useful. The superb starling makes one alarm call to warn of land-based predators and a different one to warn of flying predators. The information in these calls is useful to other species as well and, sure enough, work 20 years ago (abstract here) showed that some monkeys, vervets, run up into a tree when starlings warn of predators on the ground, and they look up when starlings warn of flying predators. Vervets themselves never make starling calls, but they do have their own set of distinct alarms. In fact, vervets seem to have many more distinctive alarm calls than apes do, even though we generally think of monkeys as being “less advanced” than apes.
An ape that was able to take vervet alarm calls and make them their own would indeed be doing something special and I wonder if there are any reported chimpanzee or bonobo actions in the wild where this has happened? A vervet call is not considered a word because it emerges as a reflexive vocalization, but it would be a word if taken up and used by an ape. At that point it does become a word because:
- It is used voluntarily.
- It has a meaning.
- It is arbitrary in the sense of there being no inherent relation between the sound and its meaning.
- It is not arbitrary in the sense that there is a historical reason for the form used.
Once a word is taken over and added to somebody’s speech it is subject to a world of tugging and changing in the many ways that Crystal’s book entertainingly describes.
Comments