Languages born and languages gone: the quest for a common grammar

LINGUISTS THINK of languages the way geneticists think of species. Unlike the latter, however, people who study languages have to rely not on stones, bones and DNA as evidence but on history and current prevalence of speech and the written word. This makes their quest more elusive and their discipline less of a hard science.

Just as species on earth, languages are known to be born or evolve, and to die or disappear due to disuse. Some evolve and generate new words out of old, and some even generate new scripts or written forms. Two of the recent new "species" of language are Urdu and Yiddish. Urdu evolved out of the languages spoken in the Northern Indian subcontinent (primarily Hindi, which itself evolved as a language only about 600 years ago) and in the Middle East (largely Persian and Arabic). While it took its words and grammar from both families of its origin, its script is basically a variation of Persian and Arabic, and not Devanagari. Yiddish is another recently born language.Originating from the diaspora of the Jewish settlements of Eastern Europe, it came out of medieval German and Hebrew, with generous sprinklings from several East European tongues (e. g., Russian, Polish, Lithuanian). Hebrew was sacred and used by the rabbis, while the more "profane" version was Yiddish. Here too, while the spoken word and grammar evolved from the parent German as distinct forms, no new script evolved; the Hebrew script was adopted.

Since the origin of Urdu and Yiddish was from the common classes of people and not from high society, these languages were not accorded "status"; they were not used in the Royal Court (as Persian, French or Hoch-Deutsch were) but belonged to the market place, the barracks and the ghetto. Yet, buffeted, rubbed and honed as they were in the mouths and minds of the commoner over generations, they have survived, lived and blossomed with an innate lilt, grace and nuance of their own- lilies of the field or lotus of the swamp. One cannot but marvel at their power, range and beauty as one reads Mirza Ghalib or Isaac Bashevis Singer. Passages from their writings "float as a butterfly and sting as a bee", to paraphrase Muhammad Ali (who said this of his prowess in the boxing ring). These languages are expressive, philosophical, concise and pithy; they speak of the agony and the unfairness of life; and have occasionally been used as vehicles of anti-establishmentarian thought. In an interesting turn- around, the birth of Israel and the extensive use of Hebrew as its common language (and not just for religious purposes) have made Yiddish lose its popularity and role. The language is now on the wane.

Languages die too, just as species have disappeared. Latin, the mother of many languages, is no longer used. Sanskrit, another great mother, is suffering the same fate- despite valiant efforts by the Hindu priests and by the radio stations of Akashwani and Deutsche Welle to broadcast daily news in Sanskrit to this day. Just as we men and women arose out of Africa, from a mitochondrial "Eve" about 200,000 years ago, many languages of Europe and Asia arose out of Latin and Sanskrit. Until recently, geneticists and anthropologists used to talk of five basic sets or "races" of human beings, namely the Negroid, Caucasian, Eastern Asian (or Mongolian), American Indian and the Polynesian, largely based on their morphological and physiognomic features. Linguists talk of a similar handful of ancestral languages, namely Latin based Romance languages, Indo- European, Oriental, African and so forth, each with its grammar and syntactic structure. Molecular genetics is fast doing away with this rigid classification of humans into the five basic races;one wonders whether a similar grand unification of the structure of human languages might come about too.

Humans are not the only species on earth. We do not even know how many species inhabit our planet; is it a million? Ten millions? The tally is still on. Even as we discover and describe new species of life forms year after year, we are losing or killing species too. The dodo is dead- as a dodo, and the cheetah is just about gone. The wondrous thing is that we have come to understand that all these millions of species share a common origin that traces back to about four billion years ago. The ancestral thread is the genetic material DNA (or RNA in some mavericks). Evolution of life has occurred through mutations, variations and rearrangements in this genetic material. The grammar of life is writ in the moving finger of DNA. And having writ, this river of life has moved on over these four billion years.

Linguists too are debating over the common thread and the genetics of all languages. The DNA here are the words, word forms and grammar. Out of a study of the grammar of various languages, they hope, will come an understanding of how languages evolved, what their history and connections are. Unlike biologists who have millions of species to worry about, linguists have to contend with only a few thousand languages. It has been estimated that the world's 6 billion people speak about 6000 to 7000 languages. But, alas, we are losing a great many of them at an alarmingly rapid rate. Most experts estimate that at least half, perhaps even up to 90% of them, will disappear in the 21st century. Already a large number of them are endangered because of wars and conquests, dispersal of people, homogenization of the world through the trans-regional use (some say hegemony) of a few chosen languages. As more and more languages disappear, it will become more difficult for us to understand the basis and the origins of languages.

Just as all living beings use DNA as their genetic material, do all these 7000 languages have a common grammar? Did they evolve from an innate syntactic structure? Can we study their individual grammars and understand their unity and their diversity? This issue has been discussed by Bernice Wuethrich in the 19 May 2000 issue of Science. At one end is the linguist-philosopher Noam Chomsky of MIT, Cambridge, MA, who proposed about 50 years ago that all languages share a basic seminal grammar and syntactic structure, and that this innate structure may well be genetically programmed into the brain of every human child. There are others who disagree; they suggest that language and grammar are cultural products and learned, rather than innate.

In order that this issue is researched, and understanding gleaned out of such research, one needs to study as many languages as possible. With the imminent loss of thousands of languages in the near future, the task is urgent. Most linguists put a language in the "endangered" list when fewer and fewer children learn it. For example, over 300 years ago, aboriginals in Australia spoke as many as 260 languages. Today, says Wuethrich, only 20 of these have a reasonable number of speakers. Most others are extinct or near- extinct. When a language is lost, a culture is lost since a language "encapsulates a long history of people in an ecology, a way of living and a way of thinking... Different languages reflect peoples' perception of the world, capture their prehistory, and may subtly shape thought itself...When these languages die, we will lose these glimpses into the capacities of the human mind", writes Wuethrich, quoting linguists Steve Levinson of Nijmegen, Holland and Marianne Mithun of Santa Barbara, CA, USA.

Chomsky's theory is that grammar is universal and is hard-wired into the human brain as part of its linguistic ability. This leads to the idea that we humans have an innate ability to master language. This universality also leads to the idea that the types of languages that are possible must be restricted. In other words, the basic sentence structuring would be common in all languages .Is this testable, and is it true? Debate is raging on this issue. For example, a basic rule of grammar is that only verbs can express tense. In most languages, we say "I eat food", or "I ate food". We do not say "I ate food-ed". The universal rule is that only verbs are changed in order to express past or future tense. Yet, there are languages such as Kayardild, a rapidly dying language of aboriginal Australia, which marks tense in its nouns too- "The boy speared the fish-ed", or even "Speared fish-ed the boy". Kayardild is fast dying. And we will never have known, had it already been extinct, that the above- mentioned verb rule is not universal at all.

"Speared fish-ed the boy": This is an unusual sentence structure, in that the verb (V) comes first, then the object (O) and finally the subject (S). But it is not unheard of. Most languages usually have the sentence structure SVO (e.g., English, I love you), or SOV (as in Tamil, Naan Unnai Kadalikkiren, or I you love), or VSO (apparently in Irish Gaelic). It has been the belief of linguists that other orders were prohibited. Yet, apparently the order OVS does occur in fewer than 50 or 60 languages of the world, all of them endangered. One such example quoted is from Hixkaryana, a language spoken by no more than 300 people today in Amazonian Brazil. Dr. Norvin Richards, the linguist who noted this has remarked: "If linguists had waited another couple of decades, languages with this construction would all be dead, and we would say it is not possible". (On an aside, even in well-known languages, liberty is occasionally taken with the word order, but more as a poetic license or to impart an element of drama; thus is the VOS declaration of Hanuman in Kamba Ramayanam: "Kanden Sithaiyai" or "Saw I Sitha").

Wuethrich points out several such oddities in sentence order and word modifications, all in near-extinct languages. We know of affixes, namely prefixes and suffixes at the beginning or the end of a word so as to change its meaning in particular ways. This was thought to be universal, until it was discovered that in the language Yu'pik, stem words such as "eat" are suffixed to a word like "egg", in order to signify the meaning "egg-eat" or the idea that an egg is being eaten. There are suffixes in this language to mean "to be inept at", or to mean "finally, after desiring to do so, but being prevented by circumstance"! The language Riau, a dialect of Indonesian, allows any word to function as a noun, verb or an adjective, depending on the context. The same word is used to mean food and also to eat. The meaning becomes clear in the context used.

But the diversity of languages is also a window to the relationship between the spoken word and thought. As Levinson asks: " Does the language you speak affect the way you think"? The answer seems to be, yes indeed. It would appear from his studies that even spatial thinking- namely the concept of coordinate systems, left-right, north-south duality- are learned from the culture the child grows up in, and the language he uses. Herein may lie the clue to the diverse linguistic systems that humans are capable of creating. Language is clearly one of the most intimate parts of culture. This would be so, it would appear, even if a large part of the grammar and syntactic structure is shared universally, or programmed genetically.

D. Balasubramanian

L. V. Prasad Eye Institute

Hyderabad 500 034

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