Historical Linguistics

Historical linguistics and diachronic linguistic

"Historical linguistics" is parallel, but doesn’t coincide with, diachronic linguistic, which is a perspective that doesn’t take into account the historical facts, the cultural, the social facts. Historical linguistics tries to combine the diachronic model, to describe and account for linguistic facts that we have to analyse and the historical facts that determine the social circumstances in which language is used. They only partially share methods and purposes. Time is a factor, but it is not the only one, whenever we talk about historical linguistics. Underneath there is history, models to represent linguistic changes, and models of human language.

Origin of human language

• We know a lot about the origin of the human language nowadays, much more than we used to know some years ago. Nowadays we have a picture about the origin which is clearer.
• Knowing how language developed is crucial to understand what language is, how it develops, and from what stage it started developing. We cannot fully understand what language is if we don’t know how it develops, which can be described only if we know the point of departure, which is how the human language developed in its very origins.

Talking about the way the language developed is not easy and it is a difficult investigation; we have to use the scalpel to achieve the smallest details to describe them correctly. Talking about the origins of the human language is easy to mix up facts with the interpretations we give of these facts: the interpretations are referred to as ideology, in the sense that how we see something is implied by the lenses through which we see these facts. We see what belongs to the mechanism/the lens through which we see and try to explain these facts.

Early ideas and experiments on language origin

The ideas about the origin of the human language in the past: from the beginning, people tried to understand how it was possible that human beings in general could utter sentences, could speak, express themselves in means of articulated sounds and sentences. In 1863, the French Academy and in 1866, the Society of Linguistics aimed to study languages, legends, traditions, customs, and documents that can inform ethnographic science. Any other object of study is strictly forbidden; they do not accept any communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of the universal language. There is a purpose to avoid receiving any work concerning the origins of human language because the notions of science have to be taken into account. The way we look at science, the epistemological model, is different from the epistemological model of those times, and if we start talking about the origin of language today, it’s because we have the epistemological and theoretical instruments to avoid fantasy or too imaginative models, but only models based on facts. We know much more about archaeology, paleontology, prehistory so that we can have a real image of how language developed.

What is interesting is also to have a survey of what thoughts in the past people had about the origin of language: this curiosity is peculiar to mankind. The first mention of an episode in which people tried to achieve knowledge about the origin of language is to be found in the Greek writer, Eruditus (484-430). In Egypt, in the 6th century BC, a Pharaoh (Psammetichus II (595-589)) was curious to see how people acquired their language.

"Reasoning from this… The Greek says about many foolish things": the first question to distinguish facts from ideology (in the way Eruditus presents the facts) is to assert what happened and distinguish it from the way it is told. Children might have heard the word from someone; it probably wasn’t spontaneous. This is not the only experiment on the origin of language; these experiments were repeated many times. Is there any word that makes us understand the interpretation of Eruditus: "foolish" is a trace of his attitude; he was probably rejecting it, telling funny stories, not real ones. Eruditus told many episodes that are hardly believable; it is not easy to accept this fact, even if there are many other episodes in history that we are aware of. Even the worst and most dangerous experiments are possible, not only during Nazism, Communism, but even in more democratic countries/settings: President Bill Clinton officially apologised for the Tuskegee experiment, conducted in the 50s. There are some experiments going on around the world. The experiment conducted by the Pharaoh is not unbelievable; it is possible that he really isolated two children just to try to achieve the result of knowing what was the first language. The children could utter the word Bechos; it shouldn’t have been much more different from their babbling. This is just an episode in which there is a lot of ideology. In this case, we know this episode has been investigated in depth, and it reflects the Ionian ideology. It is not as simple as one could think; it is full of the Ionian ideology (region of Ancient Greece where a philosophy developed, where Eruditus was born and influenced). This episode was highly probable, despite the Eruditus attitude.

Another important episode is closer to us in a way: it took place at the court of Frederick II of Sicily (1194-1250) replicated the Pharaoh experiment in Medieval times. This formulation makes us think that he was aware of the experiment told by Eruditus, while this is not certain, we don’t know if he knew anything about the experiment told by Eruditus, even though he knew Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, he was highly educated. This episode was told by a friar Salimbene da Parma: his chronicle is a mix of real facts and fancy stories, unbelievable stories. Traditionally scholars think that what is narrated by Salimbene de Adam concerning this episode is not true, cannot be believed, even if it is not hard to believe it as true if we think that the Eruditus episode really happened. Friedrich was depicted as a hero (both positive and negative). There are several new elements in this episode; there are a couple of things that are interesting: in the environment of ancient Greece, there were people that were likely to be very old (Egyptians), in this case, history tends to become a myth; history can only say that these people were old, but not as old as Greeks thought they were. Eruditus was influenced by the culture of his own time. In the second episode, there are crucial considerations: in the meantime, there is another element: Christianity, the Bible, which was mentioned as a possible oldest language of the world, because probably Adam and Eve could speak Hebrew in Eden (myth); Greek or Latin, because these languages were traditionally considered the most prestigious among the oldest languages in the world, or Arabic, which is mentioned because at that time the culture of Arabs was particularly prestigious, the Arabic world was spreading all over the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East, at the most flourishing moment. There is another new point: Operchans, the tongue of their parents, to whom they had been born: it is a remark that renders this episode believable. This particular viewpoint is taken into account: the fact that the language these children could spontaneously utter could in some way be acquired by their parents. Children could inherit their language from their parents, as a genetic and biological heritage. This is the first time that this possibility is mentioned in the history of such episodes, that they could learn a language because their parents’ language had been transmitted in some ways. It is interesting and a new idea that anticipates some perspectives that are modern, that were developed during the last century.

There is another episode which is interesting, it is even later on, conceived by James IV of Scotland. We don’t have any evidence that neither Friedrich nor James IV of Scotland (1473-1513 - highly educated king, considerable culture) were trying to reproduce the experiment, we don’t know if there is any connection among these experiments conducted in different periods and levels. We simply know that even James IV tried this experiment again, to assert whether children in isolation could develop a language and in particular what language. There are new elements: care of a mute woman, couldn’t speak, in order to be sure that there wasn’t any linguistic contact, on an isolated island. As a result, he got that when the babies started speaking, they reportedly could speak a good Hebrew, which was once again seen as the natural language of mankind (primordial language because of the Bible culture, since it was the book which tells the story of mankind from the origin). In this case, we have to distinguish between facts and ideology: fact, it was likely that there was an experiment by James IV; ideology: the result was that children started speaking Hebrew, it is hardly believable. It was tied to the mentality, the cultural environment, and the influence of the Bible on the way people used to think. The Bible is the lens through which the experiment is interpreted and narrated. Witnessed the original language that any human being could speak if left in isolation was Hebrew (cultural importance of the Bible). There is implicitly the idea that in any case, there is a language that develops in isolation or not.

James IV brought a girl and a boy to an isolated island, they had everything they needed; it turned out that they developed the Hebrew language. It is almost certain that this episode is influenced by the reading of the Bible, which is central. (Adam and Eve in Eden were thought to be speaking in Hebrew, the language of God).

Another episode is interesting: took place not much later than the experiment of James IV and it took place in India, in an environment where the Muslim culture was prevailing. Moghul (noble) Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Akbar (1542-1605) (Jalal: name of God, the Great, Muhammad: name of the prophet, Akbar masculine comparative form). He was a very tolerant and refined Moghul and he was open to other cultures, religions. He was open-minded and accepted many Jesuits, who were there in order to convert Muslims to Christianity, even if they failed. Among the Jesuits there, there was a Spanish nobleman, a Jesuit of noble origins, Father Jeronimo Xavier, who informed us of this experiment, the source: it is written in Portuguese. He wrote a letter in 1598 to his superior in which he informs him that Akbar the Great had said to him that 20 years before, in 1578, he had placed 30 infants in isolation so that they could develop their own language to see what language the children could speak when they grew up. But Xavier informed the superior that the experiment was a failure, because Akbar the Great could ascertain that in such condition nobody could develop a distinct language: no language could develop out of that condition: this is very interesting, because it seems a proof that in isolation a child, without gestures or being educated, couldn’t develop any language. But we also possess another version, that differs relevantly.

François Catrou: Jesuit, historian, every religious order has its own historian, in charge to write the history of the order itself. His report is rather different from what father Jeronimo Xavier recounted. His narration is based on Niccolao Mannucci’s book, which remained unpublished until the beginning of the 20th century and it is the history of the Jesuit’s order. The topic of "articulate sounds of the language" is a common topic: children couldn’t speak any language. Hebrew was said to be the oldest/original language of the world: the Bible (in Genesis Adam and Eve name things in Hebrew), it is one of the most influential books in the world and the grounding book in the Western culture. It tells the story of Hebrew. It must be pointed out that in any religion God speaks the language of the people for which the Holy Book is written for. (The Coram coincides with God in the Muslim religion; in Islam there isn’t the problem of the language, because we don’t know what language God speaks and the prophet couldn’t read). He ordered 12 children to be confined in a castle, with 12 dumb women, so that they couldn’t help them develop a language. When a child was 12, he had to be taken to the emperor and it was supposed to be speaking Hebrew. Usually, we imagine our city as cities in which monolingualism prevails (homogeneous linguistic community), but this is not the normal case: there are always people from other places gathering together. In a city of medium size, there are always people that speak several languages and the eastern countries have many languages. What language could these children speak? Arabic, Caldeans (people from the Middle East): people think that the original language is the one they speak (Indian → Sanskrit, Europe → Latin). Children were found incapable of speaking in any languages or to utter any articulated sound, they used gestures to express their thoughts: these were the only means they had. Gestures replacing words. Conclusion: without any social environment, there is no language that can develop. They were uncultivated: the description is very close to the description of animals, which have to be tamed, so they were shy, uncultivated. This is a quite different story from the one told by Jeronimo Xavier. The conclusion that Akbar drew from this experiment was that speech doesn’t arise spontaneously in children, it is only possible when people have to communicate and listen to each other. A child left alone cannot develop any language. This is the obvious conclusion, but we can understand the scientific level of each particular age: the fact that children doesn’t imply implicitly that there isn’t any faculty of language, nobody associated that people in the right environment develop a language and the fact that if there isn’t such an environment, people can't speak. They thought of a very simplistic conclusion. If there are no other people around them, then there is no language.

The curiosity was huge to know what the original language was. The real problem concerned the way people tried, the methods they employed to ascertain what the original language was. Were experiments the best method? We have to separate the faculty of language, the possibility of human beings to develop a language from the fact that that specific peculiarity of mankind can develop in the right environment, among other people. This is even more correct if we think that more than 80 cases of feral children are reported, about children abandoned, left alone in isolation. Carl Linnaeus: one of the fathers of modern science, the scholar who ordered all animals and plants (taxonomy). He introduced another species of man: the homo sapiens ferus, that means savage, wild, as something in between a man and an animal. This was taken as an exaggeration: as one of the most famous anthropologists of last century, Claude Lévi-Strauss, claimed that this reported episode, cases of wild children didn’t become feral because they are abandoned, but they were abandoned because they showed (at 1 or 2 years) signs of autism and cognitive problems and this is the reason why they were abandoned in the forest (many cases are reported in Africa) and some of them were reported to be living with monkeys and wolves. This isn’t a modern story: the most famous feral child reported in history is Victor de l'Aveyron: we don’t know anything about his origins, who his parents were and he was discovered in the bushes, in the forest and he was "adopted" by a French physician, Jean Itard, who tried to cultivate him, to educate him for 5 years, without any results. The child was never able to speak or to use the tools of normal human communication. The physician tried to teach him how to behave and communicate, without any result. This child died when he was 40. Even closer to our days there is a case: Genie. She had a terrible life: her mother was blind, her father a tyrant who prevented her from behaving normally, she couldn’t speak, she was handcuffed and if she only uttered a sound, she was beaten, so she stopped talking. By accident, she was discovered when she was 13 years old and couldn’t speak; nowadays she lives in a hospital with people who have serious cognitive problems. There was a nurse who paid loving attention to her, but she couldn’t help her to develop a language. This is another story that tells us that people without the right environment cannot speak, not because they don’t possess the faculty of the language, but because they don’t activate it at the right time. One of the problems is that these people, instead of developing the faculty of language, develop autism (development disorder which is characterised with difficulties in the social interaction, by repeated gestures). Parents frequently notice that their children don’t behave correctly, since during the first 3 years of life there are signs of it, but it is difficult to predict if these signs will end up being crucial or not. Today we think that autism is caused both by genetic/neurobiological and environmental reasons. The conclusion we can draw from these stories is that the right social environment and society are necessary for human beings to develop the possibility of language.

Christianity and the origin of language

Hebrew was considered as the original language, due to the influence of the Bible, but there are other interesting traces of influence. The fact that the original language was Hebrew remained a long-standing belief and topic of debate during the middle ages in Europe. Dante Alighieri wrote "De Vulgari Eloquentia" about the language of the common people and there is a passage about the origin and the development of language. His knowledge was influenced by the culture of the 14th century, but he finds it reasonable that a man, rather a woman, was first to receive the power of speech and that the first word uttered in Paradise must have been El, the name of God addressed to God himself. El is a sound that reminds the name of God in Hebrew (Eloim), which is strictly connected to the Arabic Allah. There is another myth that is crucial in explaining and forging the way people used to look at language during the Middle Ages: the myth of the tower of Babel: people were so...