The Biological Model and Historical Linguistics | Language | Cambridge Core (original) (raw)

Extract

Bad luck with biological models has left historical linguistics with such a heritage of confusion and specious explanations as to condition linguists to reject or ignore all putative parallels between languages and living organisms. Traditional textbooks for the history of the English language, though they show vestiges of biology-patterned language history, make regular protests that a language, after all, is not really an organism. Sapir charged ‘the evolutionary prejudice’ with being ‘probably the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking’, and offered a devastating, memorable comparison: 'A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoölogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow.' A few years ago Charles F. Hockett attacked the shoddy terminology of historical linguistics, demonstrating that, from both the pedagogical and the professional point of view, ' “evolution” and “progress” certainly ought to be avoided', that ‘law’, a longtime troublemaker, was distorted by deterministic biology as well as by physics, and that the use of kinship terms ‘must be modified in order to render them fit for use in discussing language’. Henry M. Hoenigswald's Language change and linguistic reconstruction treats language so unbiologically that the few traditional terms employed for language relationships—‘ancestor’, ‘daughter’, and 'sister'—are as startling as if they were bold, fresh metaphors. Quite recently Winfred P. Lehmann declared on behalf of historical linguists: 'We now view language as a set of social conventions so complex that a simple biological or geometrical model is totally inadequate. Rather than force one on language, we attempt to understand it in its complexity.'

References

1 Edward Sapir, Language 123–4 (New York, 1949; 1st ed. 1921).

2 ‘The terminology of historical linguistics’, SIL 12.57–73 (1957). See also Hockett's Course in modern linguistics 369 (New York, 1958).

4 Historical linguistics: An introduction 142 (New York, 1962).

5 Even in his final effort to sustain ‘progress in language’, in Efficiency in linguistic change (København, 1941; reprinted in Selected writings 381–466), Otto Jespersen could not make ‘energetics’ a convincing basis for declaring that linguistic change generally results in progress.

6 And if they are, some analogies between their parts should be close, hence potentially useful in either direction.

7 Hockett, ‘Terminology’.

8 Not only in the immediate context of the sentences quoted, but in the article as a whole. Again the implications are those of typical protests.

9 They do not evolve in the sense of ‘evolve’ and ‘evolution’ used in this context. In an older and quite different sense, similar to that of ‘develop’, individuals are said to evolve.

10 Theodosiu8 Dobzhansky, Genetics and the origin of species2 362 ff. (New York, 1941).

11 International encyclopedia of unified science 1:2.567–654 (Chicago, 1955).