Reading :: The Origin of Language

The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue
By Merritt Ruhlen

I found this 1994 book fascinating, but not entirely for its subject matter. Merritt Ruhlen studied with the late Joseph Greenberg, who advanced the controversial idea that all extant languages can be traced to a single language. Ruhlen took up that standard, but by his account, "these proposals do not enjoy wide acceptance within the linguistic establishment, where, in fact, they are almost universally condemned as 'futile,' 'subversive,' or worse" (p.125). Aggrieved, Ruhlen concludes that the linguistic establishment is wrong and their reasoning faulty, and he brings his case to us, the public. 

To make the case, he provides us with carefully curated tables that allow us to compare words in different languages. Through this approach, he walks us first through comparing European languages (Ch.1) while providing the basics on how languages change; then through language families, specifically in Asia and (native) Americas (Ch.2); then the idea of families of families of languages (Ch.3), noting that linguists do not believe that families of languages are related to each other—and congratulating us on seeing through "one of the great hoaxes of twentieth-century science" (p.66). In Ch.4, he examines Native American language families, concluding that these belong to different families-of-families common with the rest of the world, and in Ch.5, he argues that the evidence suggests "a single origin for all extant human languages" (p.104). Ch.6 reviews the conflict he and Greenberg have with the linguistic establishment, which contends that languages change too much for comparison to be useful past about 6000 years (cf. p.76). He points to relatively new evidence that the three North American language families correspond to genetics and to teeth (p.166), arguing that all three lines of evidence point to three distinct waves of immigration that made up what we call Native Americans. 

So what do we, the public, think of this line of argument? Despite Ruhlen's attempt to teach me the basics of linguistic comparisons, I am not confident in my newfound ability to compare languages and language families. This controversy is relatively easy to explain, but I — and, I think, most of the rest of the public — are not equipped to judge it on its merits or on the evidence that Ruhlen provides. I'm also not convinced by Ruhlen's explanation for why the linguistic establishment is unpersuaded—my suspicion is that if I were to talk to members of this establishment in 1994, they would have plenty of other reasons that Ruhlen did not discuss. A quick scan of his Wikipedia page suggests that this intuition is correct.

All this doesn't mean that I am taking sides! I am just intrigued by the idea of bringing a bitter disagreement from your specialty to the court of public opinion, a court that has neither the training nor the investment to make a ruling. It's a proposition that is doomed to fail, but maybe that's why I enjoyed reading it.