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[Thanks to Leni Silberman for originally drawing my attention to one of the media reports, and to Antonia Cavendish, Maria Soukhanova, Anna Dybo, Peter Shalen, Razib Khan, and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions.] In the past few days, several popular media outlets, including Daily Mail, Popular Archaeology, and Times of Israel, posted articles about […]
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[Thanks to Leni Silberman for originally drawing my attention to one of the media reports, and to Antonia Cavendish, Maria Soukhanova, Anna Dybo, Peter Shalen, Razib Khan, and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions.]
In the past few days, several popular media outlets, including Daily Mail, Popular Archaeology, and Times of Israel, posted articles about recently published research by Paul Wexler, Eran Elhaik, and their colleagues about the origins of Yiddish and Ashkenazi Jews (Das et al., 2016, published in Genome Biology and Evolution). As my long-time readers would know, I have been working on this topic for some time now—and will be presenting my results at the International Conference on "Language Contact, Continuity and Change in the Emergence of Modern Hebrew" in Jerusalem this summer. So naturally, these reports have immediately caught my attention. The two senior members of the team have worked on related topics for some time: linguist Paul Wexler has published extensively on the history of Yiddish (and Hebrew), and geneticists Eran Elhaik has previously published work in support of the Khazarian Hypothesis of Ashkenazi Jewish origins. I have commented on their works in earlier posts on this blog (see here and the series of posts starting here). I am currently working on a detailed response to the research article by Das et al., but since many of my readers are likely to read only the reports in the popular media, I would like to comment to these reports here.
Let's begin with the headlines of the three popular media reports linked to above. (Of course, the headlines are typically written by someone other than the journalist who pens the article itself, and certainly not by the scholars whose work is being discussed, but… someone got paid for creating these headlines, which are also all that some people would read or remember of the articles, so they are worth considering.) The "winner" of the "Most Absurd Headline" award is definitely the Daily Mail's "Yiddish may be a TURKISH dialect: DNA study suggests it was invented by Jews as they traded on the Silk Road". It is an eye-catching title, for sure, especially since "Turkish" is in uppercase; at least the headline writer hedged the statement with a modal may. Still, proving that Yiddish is a Turkish dialect (or a Turkic language at all, for that matter) would be a tall order: whether one adopts a linguist's or a layman's definition of "dialect", dialects are similar to… other dialects of the same language. For example, Geordie dialect (spoken in Newcastle in northeastern England) is similar to other English dialects, especially those in northern England and southern Scotland. Similarly, northern dialects of Russian (spoken, for example, in the cities of Vologda and Kostroma) are similar to other Russian dialects. When it comes to Yiddish and Turkish, there is virtually no similarities between them at all! Compare, for example, the translations of The boy will see the girl in the two languages:
Yiddish: Dos yingl vet zen di meydl. (literally: the boy will see a girl)
Turkish: Oğlan kızı görür. (literally: boy girl will.see)
Words for 'boy', 'girl', and 'see' are not cognates and not even look-alikes. The word order is different: in Turkish, the verb comes at the end of the sentence, while in Yiddish it is in the middle. And the Yiddish sentence has more words than the Turkish counterpart: both 'boy' and 'girl' come "adorned" with definite articles, dos and di, respectively, and the futurity is expressed by an auxiliary vet rather than by inflection on the verb itself. Grammatical differences between Yiddish and Turkish go further still. For example, in Yiddish definiteness is expressed by articles (dos and di for definites vs. a for indefinites), while in Turkish definiteness is expressed on nouns themselves, and only for the object in the form of the suffix –ı (here, on kız-ı). To say 'The girl will see the boy' in Yiddish all we have to do is to flip the order of the subject and the object: Di meydl vet zen dos yingl (in Yiddish, subjects and objects are also marked for nominative and accusative case, respectively, but often the nominative and accusative forms are the same, as is the case here). In contrast, in Turkish we have to "move" the accusative case suffixe from kız 'girl' to oğlan 'boy': Kız oğlan-ı görür. Note that although both 'boy' and 'girl' are definite, only the one that finds itself in the object position has an explicit expression of definiteness in Turkish. Moreover, Turkish exhibits the so-called vowel harmony: all vowels in a word must be the same in the front/back dimension (i.e. how far forward the tongue is positioned to pronounce the vowel) and roundedness (i.e. the shape of the lips). For example, the past tense suffix can be pronounced in at least four different ways: -di in gel-di '(he) came', -dı in anla-dı '(he) understood', -dü in gör-dü '(he) saw', and ‑du in bul-du '(he) found' (additional forms due to consonant assimilation are not considered here). Most Turkic languages exhibit vowel harmony (with the exception of Uzbek, which presumably lost vowel harmony through contact with non-Turkic languages); Yiddish, in contrast, does not, and there is no evidence that it ever had.
However, "Turkish dialect" is not the only error in the Daily Mail headline. It also states that Yiddish was "invented". Some languages, including some well-known ones like Esperanto and Klingon, have indeed been invented or constructed (hence the term ConLangs, "constructed languages"), but there is no evidence whatsoever that Yiddish was invented in a similar fashion, rather than developed naturally.
The headline in Popular Archaeology, "DNA sat nav uncovers ancient Ashkenaz and Yiddish origin", is problematic too as it appears to have been created by someone who gave the article itself only a cursory reading. The article does make reference to "GPS", which must be what the headline writer meant by "sat nav", but the researchers used a very different tool, one that has little to do with satellites or navigation, but just happens to abbreviate the same way as the "sat nav" tool a layperson would be familiar with. The GPS used by Das et al. (2016: 6) is the Geographic Population Structure, described in the article as a software that "infers the geographical coordinates of an individual by matching its admixture proportions with those of reference populations known to reside in a certain geographical region for a substantial period of time". As far as I can gather, it does the job without help from outer space.
The Times of Israel headline, "New DNA tech traces origins of Yiddish to… Turkey", is much more appropriate to the article itself, which nonetheless contains a few problematic statements attributed to the lead researcher, Erah Elhaik. First, much like in the Popular Archaeology headline, Elhaik uses the word "invented" in describing the origins of Yiddish (though neither in the press release nor in the research article does he offer any evidence for the ConLang nature of Yiddish). He also refers to Yiddish as "a secret language that very few [could] speak or understand other than Jews". "Secret languages" are not uncommon, ranging from English children's Pig Latin and French teenagers' Verlan to Cockney rhyming slang and to the nut-gathering ("pandanus") form of Kewa, a language used by the Kewa people in Papua New Guinea… you guessed it, during the annual gathering of pandanus nuts! Still, attributing the emergence of Yiddish to secrecy is odd in the context of numerous other mixed Jewish languages, including Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Malayalam, Karaim, Krymchak, and others. Everywhere the Jews settled, it seems, they went on to adopt (modified versions of) the languages of the locals so that they could interact with their non-Jewish neighbors. The only language that Jews around the world used as marker of Jewish identity is Hebrew, which served as both the language of prayer and on occasion a lingua franca for Jews from far-flung communities that used different local languages.
The Times of Israel article goes on to cite Elhaik as saying that "Yiddish is truly a combination of familiar and adapted German words using Slavic grammar". We will leave aside the issue of words, which, as discussed in my earlier posts, are easily and frequently borrowed from one language to another, and are therefore not the best way to establish language relatedness. What of the Yiddish grammar? Contrary to Elhaik's claim, which is probably based on his collaborator Paul Wexler's earlier work, the grammar of Yiddish does not strike a speaker or scholar of Slavic as particularly familiar. As mentioned above, Yiddish uses both definite and indefinite articles, which are notoriously absent from Slavic languages (with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, which have an article-like element, probably "borrowed" from other Balkan languages). On the other hand, Yiddish is lacking the rich case system that characterizes most Slavic languages (again, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, whose case systems are much reduced, also due to their "Balkanization"). The word order in Yiddish is also different from what is found in most Slavic languages, which are known for their "flexible" word order, driven by such factors as information structure (what is given and what is new, in the context of the utterance). In contrast, Yiddish exhibits the Verb-Second pattern, which is characteristic of Germanic rather than Slavic languages.
However, Slavic languages had a significant impact on Eastern Yiddish, which was co-territorial mostly with Slavic languages (as well as Lithuanian), in contrast to Western Yiddish, which was spoken in Germanic-speaking lands. These two varieties of Yiddish emerged in the 15th-17th centuries, and Western Yiddish has subsequently virtually died out, so most Yiddish speakers one is likely to encounter today speak Eastern Yiddish. Slavic influences on the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Eastern Yiddish are especially well-documented (e.g. Weinreich 1980, inter alia). My own research shows how changes in the syntax of Yiddish, which are documented in texts from the East but not from the West starting in the late 1500s, can be attributed to the influence of co-territorial Slavic languages. Yet, those are later influences found in only one variety of Yiddish; therefore, the origins of Yiddish are not with Slavic languages.
The quote ascribed to the team's other lead researcher, Paul Wexler, in the Daily Mail article is also bizarre: "The linguistic data used are from Yiddish, which we assume was invented in Western Asia as a Slavic language with a largely German-like lexicon and a significant Iranian component on all levels of the language." First, if the researchers assume that Yiddish comes from Western Asia, the results of their research cannot possibly be that Yiddish comes from Western Asia, as the abstract of Das et al. suggests. This would simply be circular reasoning. Moreover, if one were to come up with a new language in northern Turkey, as the researchers claim, it is not impossible for it to have some Iranian influences (Kurdish dialects/languages are spoken nearby), but why would it have Slavic grammar and German(ic) lexicon?!
The plot thickens if we try to find answers by putting together these reports in the popular media. The Times of Israel piece states that "the researchers have surmised that [Yiddish] may have been invented by Iranian and Slavic Jews who traded on the Silk Road around the 9th century". But historical geography is further muddled in the Daily Mail piece, which states that "researchers … believe that towards the end of the first millennium, Ashkenazic Jews may have relocated to Khazaria before moving into Europe half a millennium later after the fall of the Khazarian Empire". Putting together all three reports, Ashkenazi Jews must have moved in the 9th or 10th century from the then-mostly-Greek-speaking northern Anatolia where they had "invented" a language with "Iranian, Turkish, and Slavic origins" (as stated in all three reports under consideration here) to Khazaria, mostly Turkic-speaking but with a significant Slavic population in its western fringe, and then 500 years later—in the mid-1300s to late 1400s—moved from Khazaria, which had collapsed some 250-400 years earlier, to Europe. None of this, however, make any sense! Moreover, presumably, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews must have moved at least as far west as the Germanic-speaking lands, where they could introduce both "common and unfamiliar German words" (as in mentioned in the Daily Mail article) to their language. But this scenario, cobbled from the popular media reports, is not only a higgledy-piggledy jumble of peoples, places, and times, but it also contradicts the fact, noted in Weinreich (1980) and cited in Santorini (1989: 18), that "Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities had been established along the Main, the upper Danube and the upper Rhine and as far south as northern Italy" already "by the middle of the 1200's". There are written documents to support the claim that Jews in Germany used an early form of Yiddish long before the date when Wexler and Elhaik claim they got there. Moreover, by the mid-1300s and subsequently, the movement of Ashkenazi Jews across Europe was not westward but eastward as they were escaping persecutions in the wake of the Black Death.
Before trying to make sense of all this gobbledygook by considering (in a subsequent post) the scholarly article written by the researchers themselves, I will briefly mention one other nonsensical and therefore amusing quote from the Daily Mail piece: Yiddish purportedly "has an unmusical grammatical structure of its own". What is that even supposed to mean? As opposed to a musical grammatical structure of what language or languages? In what sense can grammar be musical or not? When I read reports such as these, I wonder if journalists think their readers to be completely ignorant nincompoops. But perhaps a simpler explanation is that the reporters themselves are.
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One of my current students drew my attention to the latest episode of Castle (aired on ABC on February 29, 2016). So I figured, hey, it fits with the content of my class, I should watch it. I used to really like this show some years ago… But this one was hard to follow because […]
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One of my current students drew my attention to the latest episode of Castle (aired on ABC on February 29, 2016). So I figured, hey, it fits with the content of my class, I should watch it. I used to really like this show some years ago… But this one was hard to follow because the linguistic (and cultural) blunders were to conspicuous.
1) One of the characters—a student in an ESL class—supposedly speaks Geordie. It is, however, more gibberish than Geordie, the real thing (on which I have written before, see here and here). Real Geordie is not that incomprehensible even to an average American, without much exposure to British dialects. It would also be super strange to have a Geordie speaker (or a speaker of any other British dialect/sociolect) in an ESL class. After all, they do speak English (natively!), even if they speak it differently, and they typically can perfectly well understand "normal" English and can speak with more or less Geordie accent depending on the circumstances (so a Geordie speaker wouldn't speak Geordie if his interlocutors can't speak/understand Geordie).
2) The specific piece of syntax in the text message that sent Castle and Beckett to look for this guy is not even Geordie (which the "expert in the English language" Castle could have known if he were an expert…). It is, however, a typical feature of Scots and some Scottish English dialects (none of which sound like the gibberish in this episode). An example of this construction can be heard in this joke (the joke is in English but the punchline is in Scots).
In "regular" English, subjects of infinitives can't be overt: Children are eager to eat broccoli, but not *Children are eager their parents to eat broccoli. But infinitives can have overt subjects if there is a "for": Children are eager for their parents to eat broccoli. So you either have "for" and the overt subject, or neither, but not the subjects without "for", nor "for" without the subject. But in Scottish English the latter is actually possible: Children are eager for to eat haggis.
3) The ESL students are repeating after their teacher with a perfect pronunciation, hmm?!
4) The ESL students were learning some pretty simple sentences in the first scene (where they repeat, to a comic effect when they repeat after Ryan and Esposito, which, by the way, normal ESL students can't do very well), but then learning counterfactual conditionals when the teacher is arrested??? Has the investigation been going on for many, many months??? Or is it a unique pedagogical method??? It must work since they both understand and speak perfect English by the end of the episode.
I used to like the show but this one is pretty low. Thumbs down.
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[Many thanks to Leni Silberman for drawing my attention to the ScienceAlert article that describes the study discussed below!] A growing body of linguistic literature, to which I have made a modest contribution (cf. Pereltsvaig 2004 a-c, 2008), has been written on the topic of language attrition, that is a loss of one's first […]
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[Many thanks to Leni Silberman for drawing my attention to the ScienceAlert article that describes the study discussed below!]
A growing body of linguistic literature, to which I have made a modest contribution (cf. Pereltsvaig 2004 a-c, 2008), has been written on the topic of language attrition, that is a loss of one's first language due to its diminished use (or complete lack of use). It has been shown that language attrition typically affects all aspects of one's mother tongue: its vocabulary, sound system, and grammar, although often at a different pace. Pressures from one's new dominant language affect the course language attrition takes in each case, as do properties internal to the "forgotten" language. Some Heritage speakers retain fluency, albeit in a simplified form of the language; others retain only the most rudimentary abilities in their first language or lose it entirely. At least, that is how things seemed until recently.
A new study, conducted by Lara J. Pierce, Jen-Kai Chen, Audrey Delcenserie, Fred Genesee & Denise Klein of McGill University and reported in Nature Communications, suggests that one's first language is never lost completely, even when a person completely shifts to a different language early in life. Traces of one's mother tongue lurk somewhere in the brain, affecting how one perceives sounds of one's dominant language. This neurolinguistics study consisted of a set of phonological working memory tasks, which the test subjects performed while in the fMRI machine. There were three groups of subjects, all of whom spoke French, and the tasks were in French. The groups differed by the participants' knowledge of Chinese.* (Montreal, where the study was conducted, has a substantial Chinese-speaking community). One group spoke no Chinese at all, ever—this is the "monolingual" group. The second group consisted of teenagers who learned Chinese as their first language and later learned French, but maintained Chinese up until the time of the study—these are the "bilingual speakers". The third and most crucial group in the study consisted of early adoptees, that is teenagers (matched in age to the other two groups) who were exposed to Chinese in infancy but were later adopted by French-only families and did not speak any Chinese at the time of the study—this was the "adoptee" group. In terms of their speaking and understanding abilities in Chinese, test subjects in the adoptee group were effectively monolingual at the time of the study, but the researchers asked whether their fleeting exposure to Chinese during infancy would make the adoptees in any way similar to the bilingual speakers.
Interestingly, all three groups did equally well in terms of the accuracy of performing the tasks. But differences crept up in the fMRI scans. Monolingual French speakers exhibited brain activation in areas expected for the nature of the task (i.e. the so-called phonological working memory, or PWM, areas). Both bilingual and adoptee participants, on the other hand, "more strongly activated several areas that have been implicated in non-verbal memory tasks, as well as attentional, goal directed and cognitive control processes". These brain areas had been linked to suppressing information from the "wrong" language in bilingual speakers. Crucially, the fMRI results for bilingual and adoptee groups are strikingly similar to each other, yet different from those of the monolingual participants. The overlap of active brain areas in bilingual speakers (red) and adoptees (blue) can be seen in the image on the left, reproduced from the research article. (The light green areas are those activated in monolingual speakers.) The researchers thus concluded that "even relatively short delays in exposure to French, and/or early exposure to another language, lead to different neural patterns for processing the sounds of that language than is found in native [read: monolingual] speakers".
This study not only sheds new light on the effects of early exposure to a language that is later discontinued, but it also turns the study of language attrition upside-down: instead of looking at what is lost, when, and why, it focuses on what remains even when one's first language had seemingly been completely lost. It will be interesting to see how the results of this study would influence the growing field of Heritage Language study and pedagogy.
*The research article refers to the language in question as "Chinese" without specifying where it is Mandarin, Cantonese, or some other form of Chinese, or a mix of different Chinese varieties, that their test subjects speak.
Pereltsvaig, Asya (2004a) Aspect Lost, Aspect Regained: Restructuring of aspectual marking in American Russian. In Paula Kempchinsky and Roumyana Slabakova (eds.) Aspectual Inquiries. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Pp. 369-395.
Pereltsvaig, Asya (2004b) Agreement in the absence of Agreement: Gender Agreement in American Russian. In Danijela Stojanović (ed.) Cahiers Linguistique d'Ottawa. Special volume on Slavic psycholinguistics. 32: 87-107.
Pereltsvaig, Asya (2004c) Immigrant Russian: Factors in the restructuring of the aspectual system under attrition. The Proceedings of BLS 29S.
Pereltsvaig, Asya (2008) Aspect in Russian as grammatical rather than lexical notion: Evidence from Heritage Russian. Russian Linguistics 32(1): 27-4.
Pierce, Lara J.; Jen-Kai Chen, Audrey Delcenserie, Fred Genesee & Denise Klein (2015) Past experience shapes ongoing neural patterns for language. Nature Communications 6, Article number: 10073, doi:10.1038/ncomms10073
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[Note to Readers: the following is my translation from Russian of Ekaterina Lyutikova's video lecture posted on PostNauka.ru, posted here with her permission. Some Russian examples have been replaced by corresponding English examples.] Linguist Ekaterina Lyutikova of syntactic categories, part of speech characterization and the relationship between morphological and syntactic dependencies What comes […]
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[Note to Readers: the following is my translation from Russian of Ekaterina Lyutikova's video lecture posted on PostNauka.ru, posted here with her permission. Some Russian examples have been replaced by corresponding English examples.]
Linguist Ekaterina Lyutikova of syntactic categories, part of speech characterization and the relationship between morphological and syntactic dependencies
What comes to mind when a layperson, far removed from linguistics, hears the word "syntax"? Such a person would probably remember the word "syntax" from the school days in conjunction with the word "punctuation". Syntactic parsing of a sentence is needed in order to properly punctuate. But such a utilitarian understanding of syntax is, of course, not the same as a scientific understanding of syntax. The latter is closer to the understanding of syntax as syntax of programming languages. What is, for instance, the syntax of the C++ language? It consists of a set of descriptions of what types of objects exist in this language, and what rules one can use to connect them to obtain well-formed expressions in the language. This is very close to an understanding of what we call syntax in linguistics.
Syntax is a field of linguistics studying and modeling rules that are used to form units larger than a word, namely, phrases and sentences. Let's think what a syntactic model may consist of. The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about creating something larger out of small pieces is the metaphor of building a house. In this metaphor, we have bricks, of which we construct larger units—phrases—and we keep going until the house is completed. Words are our building blocks from which we build one unified whole. This metaphor correctly depicts the essential idea of syntax: that of combining or joining, and thus also the relationship "consists of". This is a crucial idea for any model of syntax.
But beyond that, the metaphor starts to fall apart because when we build a house, all the bricks are, in general, the same, but we have different words. And words are different not only in meaning, which is not very important for syntax, but they are different in terms of their syntactic categories, or parts of speech.
One of the first Russian theorists of linguistics, Alexander Potebnja, wrote in the 19th century: "The essential feature of a sentence in our languages is that a sentence must include parts of speech; where there are no parts of speech, there is no sentence". Before composing words into a larger unit, we must classify words into syntactic categories, which often correspond to the parts of speech that we know from morphology.
Thus, we need to upgrade our building metaphor. Instead of building a house, let's think of it in terms of playing with Lego blocks or playing Tetris. We have various types of pieces. Those types are not very numerous, but they are different. Some elements combine well with each other, others don't. For example, a noun combines well with an adjective ("a slow walk") but poorly with an adverb ("a slowly walk" is a bad phrase in English). A verb, on the contrary, combines well with an adverb but not an adjective ("walks slowly" is better than "walks slow"). Thus, our model of syntax must, on the one hand, include a classification of the elementary syntactic units, that is words, and on the other hand, it must include a set of rules that tell us which types of units combine with each other and what the properties of resulting larger units that are produced by these combinations are.
What I've just described is the general schema that all current models of syntax, be they of the functionalist or the generative framework, follow. These are always two-part models.
Let's now talk about such a two-part model in linguistic terms. Thus, our model contains, on the one hand, a lexicon, a sort of dictionary—or a warehouse of elementary syntactic units. The dictionary stores words, and in some theories, not only words, but also affixes: suffixes, prefixes, and so on—parts of words, as it happens in some syntactic models. But this is not just a warehouse. Inside the lexicon, words are classified by categories or syntactic parts of speech. A word's part of speech is its crucial characteristic, which is needed when the word becomes a part of a larger expression. But besides its part of speech, a word has other features, such as phonetic/phonological features (how the word sounds), semantic features (what the word means), grammatical features (which grammatical categories are characteristic of a given word). This grammatical categories, it must be noted, are related to parts of speech in a non-random fashion. That's the lexicon.
On the other hand, we have a set of rules that say which types of units can combine with each other, what type of unit is produced as a result of the combination, and what the properties of this resulting unit are. For example, if we take the noun "poetry" and the adjective "Russian" and put them together, the resulting larger unit—"Russian poetry"—is generally similar to the noun. And if we combine the noun "poetry" with the transitive verb "read", the resulting unit—"read poetry"—is similar in nature to the verb.
How can we understand what the properties of the resulting unit are, what it resembles? This is understood on the basis of what the resulting unit can be subsequently combined with. "Russian poetry" is very similar to "poetry" because, like the noun, it can be combined with another adjective ("beautiful Russian poetry") or with a transitive verb ("read Russian poetry"). Linguists say in this case that the distribution of the phrase "Russian poetry" (or the set of syntactic contexts in which it can appear) is the same, or essentially the same, as with the distribution of the noun "poetry", so the larger unit, "Russian poetry" is nominal in nature, or a noun phrase.
And how many units can one rule put combining? It is clear that if we are talking about combining or putting together, it must involve more than one elementary unit, but how many can there be? Two units? three? many? The conceptually necessary minimum number of units to have a combination is two. And linguists believe that in fact we can build syntactic models that are binary, that is models in which combinations are always binary. Indeed, there is virtually no language constructs in which more than two units combine and which we could not describe by using repeated applications of a binary joining operation. A famous example of such structures that resist a binary structure is a coordinate structure, where there are two conjuncts and a conjunction between them: "Mary and Peter". When two units are combined, a syntactic relation emerges between them, and that syntactic relation is asymmetrical, even antisymmetric. Of the two units that are joined together, one is the head and the other is a dependent. This antisymmetric nature of two units in a syntactic relationship is one of the most basic and universal properties of syntactic relations of natural language, and again only coordinate structures present a challenge for this perfect harmony of subordinating nature of syntactic relations.
However, a semantic conjunction can also be expressed by a subordinating structure in syntax, in some languages. For example, in Russian we can say "Mary and Peter", or (to mean the exact same thing) "Mary with Peter" (the latter involves a subordinate structure in syntax). And how do you know which word is the head, and which is the dependent? This can be determined on the basis of, once again, distribution: whichever word has a similar distribution to that of the resulting larger unit, that's the head. Thus, we apply the distribution criterion in determining the head of the phrase. You may think that there is an easier way to do it. Perhaps, in some languages agreement can be used to determine which word is the head? Thus, in the Russian (or Spanish) counterpart of "Russian poetry", the adjective "Russian" agrees with the noun "poetry". The adjective's specification for gender, number, and case (in Russian) is chosen depending on the gender, number, and case of the noun. (In English, of course, adjectives do not agree with the nouns they modify.) Or in a phrase "read poetry", the case form of the word "poetry" is defined by the fact that the verb "read" is transitive. (Again, this does not apply in a straightforward way in English or Spanish, but does in Russian or German, or Latin.) Maybe, in languages where agreement and case are expressed morphologically, we can just look at the direction of the morphological dependency to determine which word is the head and which is the dependent? In some instances it might work, but as a general rule, the direction of morphological dependency need not coincide with the direction of the syntactic dependency in the same phrase.
Let's look at the so-called possessive structures consisting of two nouns, one of which refers to the owner, and the other to the thing owned. Take, for example, "a book of the teacher": in Russian (kniga učitelja) the direction of the morphological dependency coincides with the direction of the syntactic dependency, because we have the word "book" and "teacher" (učitelja) in the genitive case. But this is not true of all languages. For example, in Farsi such expressions is composed in an almost diametrically opposite way. We have the noun "book" with a special indicator, the so-called Farsi ezāfe marker, and then the noun "teacher" in its original form. And there are some cases where the head and the dependent exhibit mutual morphological dependency. For example, in the Tatar possessive structures (ukıtuchı-nıŋ kitab-ı, 'teacher's book') we see the genitive form of the noun "teacher" (marked by suffix ‑nıŋ) and the possessive affix agreeing with the possessor on the noun "book" (here, -ı). Thus, morphological dependency goes in both directions, but it does not tells us the direction of the syntactic dependency. Thus, the most important criterion for syntacticians is the distributional criterion.
To summarize, syntax is a system of rules that allows you to take words and, given their properties, to predict what properties the units resulting from a combination of these words will have. As we can see, the syntax plays a much more important role than just helping us with the assignment of proper punctuation marks. In general, syntax in the last fifty years is one of the most rapidly developing areas in linguistics, and, I think, in this area where the most interesting and exciting research discoveries are taking place.
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[Many thanks to Martin W. Lewis and Johanna Nichols for insightful discussions of some of the issues considered in this post.] As discussed in the previous post, Vyvyan Evans advocates an alternative to the so-called saltationist understanding of language evolution that follows from the Universal Grammar (UG) theory; according to Evan's gradualist view, language […]
The post Why Are There Different Languages?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 4, Conclusion) appeared first on Languages Of The World.]]>
[Many thanks to Martin W. Lewis and Johanna Nichols for insightful discussions of some of the issues considered in this post.]
As discussed in the previous post, Vyvyan Evans advocates an alternative to the so-called saltationist understanding of language evolution that follows from the Universal Grammar (UG) theory; according to Evan's gradualist view, language emerged in an incremental process of improvement in cooperative behavior. However, as I pointed out at the end of the previous post, this gradualist theory does not explain why there are so many mutually incomprehensible variations on the theme of human language. If language "evolved for the purpose of communication", as Evans indicates, why don't we all have the same language that would allow us all communicate with each other?
One popular way to explain linguistic diversity is to tie it to cultural variability—and perhaps even to variation in cognitive abilities. The proponents of this approach think that languages are different because they are expressions of cultures and ways of thinking that vary widely from place to place. There are two problems with this idea. First, it moves the issue of diversity to another level without solving it: if languages vary because they express varied cultures, why do cultures themselves differ so dramatically (in ways expressible by language diversity)? The second and more fundamental problem concerns linguistic patterns that cannot be taken as expressions of culture.
Surely, languages have many words that reflect the local environment or customs: Norwegian gravlax 'cured salmon' and sludd 'mix of rain and snow' are unimaginable in the tropics, and it is hardly surprising that Norwegian words for 'banana' and 'coconut' are themselves "imports", just as these fruit are. Even words for something so seemingly universal as numerical concepts can be culturally loaded. For example, in Russian the words pervoje 'first', vtoroje 'second', and tretje 'third' mean not only the order in a progression, like their English counterparts, but have also become associated with specific types of dishes based on customary meal patterns: the 'first' is necessarily a liquid, soupy dish, while the 'second' is some sort of "solid" food, and the 'third' is a sweet course. These culture-specific meanings can override the purely numerical ones: thus, one can skip the soup and start the meal with "the second" (vtoroje), or eat "the first" (pervoje) as a second course, after an appetizer or salad of some sort. In a multi-course dinner, "the third" (tretje) may come as a fifth or seventh course.
However, the key elements of language—most importantly, grammar—do not correlate with environment or customs. Take, for instance, patterns of word order across languages. As Evans reminds us, languages "also differ over the word order used for subject, verb and object, with all possibilities being attested. English uses a fairly common pattern – subject (S) verb (V) object (O): The dog (S) bit (V) the postman (O). But other languages do things very differently." For example, Japanese places the object before rather than after the verb. According to the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS), 47% of the languages in their sample exhibit the OV pattern as in Japanese, and 46% of the languages exhibit the VO pattern as in English (the remaining languages do not have a dominant order). But what do languages in either group have in common in terms of environment or customs? The answer, as it turns out, is "nothing". For example, languages that place their objects before verbs are found in diverse physical environments ranging from the steppes of Central Asia to the mountainous Andes of South America and from the temperate Basque Country to the tropical jungles of Papua New Guinea (see the WALS-based map on the left). Moreover, languages in neighboring, climatically identical locales may differ radically with respect to their linguistic patterns: for instance, in coastal Papua New Guinea, one finds languages with Subject-Object-Verb, Subject-Verb-Object, and Verb-Subject-Object orders. Patterns of lifestyle, social organization, and technological advancement are equally haphazardly distributed with respect to such linguistic typology. For example, languages with the Subject-Object-Verb order include Japanese, whose speakers live in a high-tech world, Evenki, spoken by reindeer pastoralists in Siberia, and Guugu Yimidhirr, a language of Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherers. Rarer word order patterns, such as Verb-Subject-Object, are found in languages spoken by groups that share nothing in terms of environment or culture, such as salmon-fishing speakers of Halkomelem on the Pacific Coast of British Columbia and cow-herding speakers of Maasai in Eastern Africa. Many additional examples can be brought to illustrate this argument. Such varying word orders are not only meaningless but also do not correlate with "culture", however loosely defined. Why then do they exist?
Even more difficult to substantiate is the Whorfian thesis, named after Benjamin Lee Whorf, its most ardent proponent. (This thesis is also known as Sapir-Whorf, or alternatively Whorf-Sapir, hypothesis, after Edward Sapir, who was Whorf's mentor but a less vocal advocate of these ideas.) According to this theory, different peoples have different ways of thinking about the world that are reflected, or perhaps even shaped, by their languages. Whorf's views were based on his understanding of Hopi, a Native American language that he claimed to lack tense markers such as English -ed or will or words like afterward. Driven by his agenda to show that peoples commonly dismissed even by the educated folk of his day as "savages" are as mentally developed as Westerners are, Whorf claimed that this gap in the Hopi language was connected with the circular sense of time in Hopi cosmology—and as a result the language was not worse, not poorer, and not simpler than languages with tense markers, just different.
Subsequent studies have shown that Whorf's conception of the Hopi language as lacking temporal expressions is plain wrong, as it actually does have tense markers and words like later and already. Similarly, linguists have discredited other claims about language made by advocates of the Whorfian thesis. Yet, the idea that the specific language one speaks affects—or perhaps even determines—one's ways of perceiving and thinking about the world remains widely popular in non-linguistic circles. In recent years, a number of studies by psychologists and sociologists have sought to revive the Sapir-Whorf thesis. In one study, Yale economist Keith Chen argued that whether or not a language has future tense affects how people perceive the future, which in turn translates into such socio-cultural outcomes as tendencies to save or spend money, or propensities for health-improving practicing such as exercising and not smoking. Other studies examined whether a language that has grammatical gender based on biological sex—that is, whether it divides nouns into "masculine" and "feminine"—shapes speakers' perception of objects denoted by these nouns as more "male" or "female" and influences how their societies treat women. In previous posts, I have argued that such studies are so problem-ridden that they cannot be taken seriously. As John McWhorter writes in Language Hoax, despite the Whorfian attempts to link people's cognition to their language, "all you get is false leads and just-so stories" (pp. 36-37).
McWhorter suggests instead that languages are "shambolically magnificent accretion[s] of random habits". There is a great deal of truth to his words: many bewildering puzzles in any language are merely petrified relics of earlier regular patterns. One such puzzle particularly bewilders my students of Russian: why does the vowel in lev 'lion' disappear in l'va 'of lion', but the vowel in a similar-sounding les 'forest' does not, so that 'of forest' is lesa, not *l'sa? To solve this mystery, one has to look beyond modern Russian. Historically, the two vowels, which sound exactly the same now, developed from two different sounds: the vowel in 'lion' was pronounced like the i in the English pit, whereas the vowel in 'forest' used to be the same as in the English pat. Moreover, only the former vowel was subject to a rule that deleted it if it was followed by another syllable in the same word. Hence, when the ending -a (meaning, roughly, 'of') was added, the vowel in 'lion' dropped out, while the vowel in 'forest' remained unaffected. Over time, two independent sound changes converged, causing the two vowels to be pronounced exactly the same in standard Russian. (In some rural Russian dialects, however, the two vowels are still pronounced differently: 'lion' is pronounced [lejv] and 'forest' sounds as [ljes].) As spelling often lags behind pronunciation changes, for a long time Russians continued to spell the two vowels differently, even after the pronunciations merged. The spelling reform of 1918 finally abolished the letter that had been used for the vowel in 'forest' (called "yat"). Now the two vowels are pronounced the same and spelled the same, yet only one of them still drops out when an ending is added. A "shambolically magnificent accretion of random habits" indeed.
Various grammatical distinctions that some languages make and others do not—gender, source of evidence, 5‑way past tense distinction (e.g. in Yagua, a small tribal language spoken in northeastern Peru), and so on—are also seen by McWhorter as "random habits". Because his main concern is why such grammatical complexities are retained over time rather than how they emerged in the first place, McWhorter can avoid the latter issue. According to him, languages "complicate as a natural result of millennia of habits developed by people using them quickly and unconsciously" (What Language Is, p. 59). In essence, he argues that languages stay complex because they can. To an outside—and crucially, adult!—observer, languages like Ket (spoken in Western Siberia) or Archi (spoken in northeastern Caucasus) seem "ingrown" and "disheveled". Take, for example, Ket: as described by McWhorter, Ket uses different prefixes to mark the subject on the verb, so di– in diksivɛs 'I come' and bɔ- in bɔɣatn 'I go' both mean 'I'. This is not unlike -o in Spanish vengo 'I come', except in Ket, 'I' is appended to the beginning rather than the end of the verb. Moreover, there is no "logic" to this division into the di-class and bɔ-class: if for some random reason you decide to learn Ket, you would have to memorize which verbs appear with di– and which ones with bɔ-. To make matters worse for a foreign learner, both di– and bɔ- change depending on what sounds they end up next to, so di– may drop the i, bɔ- may become ba-, and so on. In another seemingly random twist, some Ket verbs in both classes—again, you can only memorize which ones—can "take two pronoun prefixes meaning the exact same thing" (McWhorter, p. 58). Thus, "digdabatsaq means that I [not we!] go to the river and come right back a little later… digdaddaq … is how to say I go to the river and stay for the season… and … digdaksaq means that I go to the river and stay for some days or weeks" (p. 58). Go figure!
But since babies and toddlers have no problem picking up languages like Ket despite their complexity, their grammatical complications are perpetuated—unless adult learning intervenes. In the case of Ket, very few outsiders care to learn it. But when many grown-ups have to pick up a language, they tend to "shave off" such layers of grammatical complexity, argues McWhorter. The result is a language that has fewer grammatical distinctions and fewer exceptions to regular patterns—at least for a while, as over time the normal process of accretion kicks in again. To McWhorter, "languages are like bathtub rings. For whatever it's worth, viewed under a microscope, bathtub rings are complex, teeming slices of biology. But that doesn't mean they serve a purpose" (p. 59).
But while we understand how bathtub rings form, McWhorter remains rather vague as to why grammatical distinctions arise in the first place: how does the quick and unconscious use of language lead to the emergence of the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns, or between events witnessed directly and those inferred, or between events that happened hours, weeks, or years ago? Why do they emerge only in some languages but not in others? And if it is true that at least some parts of language are innate, as is claimed by the Universal Grammar theory, why is so much of the substance of language left open to chance? Why are there so many blanks in the "how-to" manual that is Universal Grammar? Why, for example, can languages "decide" whether to put objects before or after the verbs, or whether to drop meaningless "it" in "weather"-sentences? Why aren't languages all the same? After all, if they were, communication—and learning foreign languages, and designing machine translation tools, and governing multilingual countries—would be so much simpler. Why, then, are languages so mind-bogglingly different?
Below, I sketch an outline of the answer, as proposed by Mark Baker (2003). To understand the significance of variation in language, we have to challenge the popular wisdom that language, as Evans puts it, "reflects human pro-social inclinations for inter-subjective communication" (The Language Myth, p. 3), or Mark Amidon once quipped, serves as "the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery". Communication is not the only function of language. Crows, after all, have pro-social inclinations and extensively employ "inter-subjective communication", but as sophisticated as their messaging may be, it does not come close to matching human language.
To probe for the answer to the "why" of linguistic diversity, let's take as a concrete example two languages spoken in neighboring areas of the north-central Caucasus: Ossetian and Chechen. You may have heard of the two groups because of their roles in the ongoing geopolitical tensions in the region, yet their languages are largely unfamiliar to non-linguists outside the region. Sure enough, due to a centuries-long sojourn in the same region, the two languages swapped words and even sounds. (Particularly, Ossetian, a relative newcomer to the area, picked up many words and sounds from its neighbors.) Yet, the grammars of the two languages differ radically, especially when it comes to marking subjects and objects. Ossetian, which happens to be a distant "cousin" of English, does exactly what English does with subjects and objects that are pronouns: subjects always appear in the same form, regardless of whether there is an object in the sentence, while object pronouns have a different form. Thus, the subject is the same form he in He kissed a girl and in He left, but the object is him, not he: The girl kissed him. In Ossetian, this same pattern is found: subjects are subjects, and objects are different—except in Ossetian not just pronouns but nouns too change their form, adding a suffix -ɨ. (To pronounce this sound, try to say the "oo" of book, but spreading the lips as if for "ea" in beak.) Thus, 'The boy kissed the girl' is "boy girl-ɨ kissed" (verbs are typically placed at the ends of sentences in Ossetian, like in Japanese). To say 'The girl kissed the boy', swap the two nouns and put the -ɨ on 'the boy': "girl boy-ɨ kissed". And 'The boy left' is just "boy left", with no -ɨ. Neighboring Chechen, however, is entirely different on this score: here a special suffix -s is added to subjects rather than objects, and only if there is also an object in the same sentence. Thus, 'The boy kissed the girl' is "boy-s girl kissed" (as in Ossetian, verbs typically come at the end in Chechen), and 'The girl kissed the boy' is "girl-s boy kissed", but if the sentence lacks an object, as in 'The boy left', the subject no longer has the -s: "boy left". A system like that in Chechen is called ergative alignment, and the more familiar pattern of Ossetian (and English) is known as the nominative-accusative alignment, after the nominative and accusative cases known from Latin grammar. The two different types of alignment are also reflected in what the verbs agree with and many other phenomena. The two languages, in short, have a very different "flavor" to them. But why?
One could explain this contrast, as McWhorter does, through the "accretion of random habits", but such accounts simply push the question further into the past. A more interesting answer emerges if we consider other factors at play here. Recent genetic studies have shown that despite the long-term co-existence of the Ossetians and the Chechens in the same general area, their gene pools remained rather distinct. This is particularly true in regard to Y-DNA, which is passed on along the male line: women seem to have intermarried more often across the ethnic divides, but men mostly stayed within the group. Yet, many elements of Chechen and Ossetian culture, including music, dances, costumes, cuisine, are strikingly similar. How, then, have these groups kept track of their ethnic affiliations? The answer is language, which serves as an obvious marker of who is "us" and who is "them". This idea is developed by Mark Baker (2003), who likewise challenges the idea, all too often taken for granted, that "the evolutionary purpose of language is to provide a way of communicating complex propositional information to kin and collaborators", comparing language to codes and cyphers. As Baker puts it: "Our language faculty could have the purpose of communicating complex propositional information to members of our group while concealing it from members of other groups" (p. 351).
If language serves to create and perpetuate ethnic groupings, what then is the evolutionary purpose of such ethnic divisions? Wouldn't the world be a better and more peaceful place without such rifts? This has been precisely the thinking behind the creation and spread of Esperanto, intended to be the language of all humankind, even a path to lasting peace. Yet despite its relative success in becoming a means of interlinguistic communication and acquiring a community of first and second language speakers, Esperanto has never come close to becoming "everybody's language" nor has it led to peace and harmony, as its creator Ludwik Zamenhof had hoped. Instead, scholars such as Mark Fettes propose viewing the Esperanto-speaking community as a quasi-ethnic minority in its own right (cf. Fettes 1996). Although Esperanto is reasonably popular in many parts of the world, especially in Europe, North America, and East Asia, and although its speakers share no ethnic, geopolitical, or historical background, most Esperantists do share a certain set of cultural and ideological views. A number of psychological and sociological studies reveal a typical Esperanto speaker to be "anti-conformist, well-educated, […] often declar[ing] contrarian or left-leaning values such as 'internationalism', 'humanitarianism', 'green politics', and ha[ving] sympathy for issues such as minority and regional language rights" (Gledhill 2014, p. 323). Thus, ironically, instead of breaking down inter-group barriers, Esperanto has produced a new division into "us" and "them". So why does humanity hold on to these divides?
A detailed answer to this question goes beyond the scope of this post, but psychologists suggest that there are many benefits to our species "groupishness". For example, it has been proposed that group identity gives one a chance of improving one's self-image: "if I belong to such a smart/handsome/brave group, I must be smart/handsome/brave". Similarly, Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, wrote: "Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility". Although humans find themselves as members of all sorts of groups, from clans to sports teams, genetically-bound groups play an important role in human social organization. Genes, however, are invisible, and if the ideas outlined here are on the right track, language may have been "designed" to vary in a constrained way in order to create an overt, easily recognizable marker of "our people". Recent findings that languages matches genes better than geography offer some support to this idea that language helps demarcate gene pools.
Additional Sources:
Baker, Mark C. (2003) Linguistic differences and language design. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 7(8): 349-353.
Fettes, Mark (1996) The Esperanto Community: A Quasi-Ethnic Linguistic Minority? Language Problems & Language Planning 20(1): 53-59.
Gledhill, Christopher (2014) Phraseology as a Measure of Emergent Norm: The Case of Esperanto. In: José Carlos Herreras (ed.) Politiques linguistiques et langues autochtones d'enseignement dans l'Europe des vingt-sept. Valenciennes: Presses universitaires de Valenciennes. Pp. 317-348.
The post Why Are There Different Languages?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 4, Conclusion) appeared first on Languages Of The World.]]>
[Many thanks to Martin W. Lewis and Matthew Jobin for insightful discussions of some of the issues considered in this post.] The next set of objections to the Universal Grammar (UG) theory raised by Vyvyan Evans concerns its implications for human evolution. If UG is a species-specific innate biological capacity, it must be encoded […]
The post Universal Grammar, Neanderthals, and the Evolution of Language—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 3) appeared first on Languages Of The World.]]>
[Many thanks to Martin W. Lewis and Matthew Jobin for insightful discussions of some of the issues considered in this post.]
The next set of objections to the Universal Grammar (UG) theory raised by Vyvyan Evans concerns its implications for human evolution. If UG is a species-specific innate biological capacity, it must be encoded in our genome, differentiating it from the genomes of other species. And, Evans writes, "if language is genetically hard-wired, then it self-evidently had to emerge at some point in our evolutionary lineage". When the UG theory was originally being developed, language was generally assumed to be absent in other species—including our closest relatives, the Neanderthals—and its evolutionary emergence was dated variably between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. The earlier date is generally assumed to correlate with the emergence of anatomically modern humans (AMHs), whose earliest fossils come from Omo (~200,000 years ago) and Herto (~160,000 years ago) in Ethiopia. (Some scholars now give a more recent date for AMHs, and consequently the date for the emergence of language would need to be understood as more recent as well.) Supporters of this earlier date for the birth of language argue that AMHs, with their lightly built skeleton, were viable only in the presence of modern behavior: our "smarts" made up for the deficiencies in our physique. According to advocates of the later date, circa 50,000 years ago, a sudden abundance of sophisticated man-made artifacts in the archeological records shows a leap in human cognitive and symbolic abilities, which is presumed to correlate with the emergence of language around that time.
Evans, however, maintains that this "sudden jump" theory (technical term: "saltationist theory") is wrong. His objections can be summarized as follows:
Similar views are developed in Dediu & Levinson (2013).** They claim that the Neanderthals "were probably not very different biologically or cognitively from us, and that their linguistic capacities were closely similar to our own"; that "essentially modern language" was "already present in the common ancestor of these two lineages about half a million years ago (that is, five to ten times older than is often assumed)"; and that the emergence of language was "a gradual process of culture-gene co-evolution extending to the present day".***
Before considering these issues in more detail, it is worth noting that we know relatively little about the biochemistry of language. As Hauser et al. (2014) point out, "the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence", and as Dediu & Levinson readily admit, "the evidence is necessarily circumstantial", "data […] give rise to conflicting interpretations", and the relevant "literature […] crosses many fields and is complex, and moreover in continuous flux with the result that there are very few points of full consensus". However, I disagree with Dediu & Levinson in that the evidence they bring up is convincing or conclusive; moreover, I think that most of what has been written about the evolution of language so far needs to be taken with a grain of salt. A high degree of uncertainty is simply unavoidable given the state of our knowledge at present and its rapid development, particularly, in the field of genetics.
Let's now go back to Evans' objection and consider each of them in turn, starting with how much of a "jump" the UG theory actually requires. When the UG theory was first developed, nothing was known about how language may be expressed genetically and if indeed it is expressed genetically at all. In 2002, geneticists discovered a gene, dubbed FOXP2, which is thought to be linked to language and speech. Its discovery resulted from a study of a British family with about half its members (15 people in 3 generations) affected by a strange disorder: although they are of near normal intelligence, they have certain difficulties with speech (both in production and comprehension) and especially with grammar. The familial pattern looked remarkably like an autosomal genetic disorder, and it was subsequently discovered that the affected members of the family had a "defective" variant of the FOXP2 gene (located on chromosome 7). Comparison of human and chimp genomes showed that the normal human FOXP2 gene differs from the corresponding region in chimps by just two "typos": two single-nucleotide substitutions (or polymorphisms, or SNPs) at positions 911 and 977. Moreover, it has been shown that this gene is highly conserved amongst mammals, with only 3 non-synonymous SNPs separating humans from mice. Is this as huge a leap as Evans makes it sound? Consider this: the alignable sequences within genomes of humans and chimps differ by about 35 million SNPs. Allowing 2 out of 35,000,000 SNPs to "handle" language does not seem excessively generous to me.
One necessary caveat is that there may be other "language genes" besides FOXP2 that are undiscovered or little understood (but see Berwick, Hauser, & Tattersall 2013 for more details), and in all likelihood, there are additional differences in the regulatory DNA that are responsible for turning the "language gene(s)" on and off as necessary, a point to which I return below.
All in all, "the modern neo‑Darwinian synthesis" is not at odds with the possibility of a couple of SNPs mutating in the course of the ape evolution, with a side-effect of language emerging as a result. This linguistic ability of Homo sapiens could very well compensate for less heavily built bodies, allowing our ancestors to outsmart other ape species whose brains spent more energy on operating their more muscular bodies. (There is also some evidence that the Neanderthals had larger eye sockets, and perhaps better vision, and that more of their brain was devoted to processing visual information; see Pearce, Stringer, & Dunbar 2013.)
This brings us to the question of whether our closest evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, had language. Evans claims that they must have, as evidenced by their complex learning and co-operation. This is not a convincing argument, however. Members of the genus Homo, since its earliest days, have shown a slow increase in the complexity of tools; similarly, gradual increase in tool sophistication is observed in H. neanderthalensis. By the end of their existence, Neanderthals were using tools about as sophisticated as those of fully modern humans: flakes were struck from a core stone, and then carefully modified to hold a good edge. Moreover, some use of jewelry points to the existence of symbolic thinking among the Neanderthals. But many animal species show sophisticated co-operation, even rudimentary symbolic thinking, yet lack language in the sense of the human computational ability. For example, studies with chimps, such as Kanzi the bonobo and Nim Chimpsky, show that they can acquire a substantial "vocabulary" of symbols (over 250 forms, in the case of Kanzi, which corresponds to the vocabulary size of an average 19-month old human toddler). Yet, they fail to acquire anything like human syntax. Nim Chimpsky's most sophisticated "sentence" is reported to have been "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you", a far cry from human recursive embedding ability.
So did Neanderthals have syntax like us, or lacked it like chimps?
It is hard to know at present. Barceló-Coblijn (2011) argues that Neanderthals had the anatomical traits (particularly as concerns the larynx and the brain) for producing and perceiving vocalizations. A more recent study by D'Anastasio et al. (2013) confirms that internal architectures and micro-biomechanical behaviors of Neanderthal voice box were compatible with producing speech sounds. This ability to produce human-like speech sounds distinguished Neanderthals from chimps. Some scholars, and most journalists in the popular media, tend to jump from this fact to the conclusion that "Neanderthals could speak like modern humans" (as in the title of this article by BBC News science reporter, Melissa Hogenboom).
But human language ability goes beyond spoken sounds, as evidence by sign languages. As noted by Wendy Sandler and Diane Lillo-Martin, two prominent experts in the field, human sign languages "are bona fide linguistic systems, with structures and rules and the full range of expressive power that characterize spoken languages", so much so that "the academic world is now convinced that sign languages are real languages in every sense of the term" (p. 533). Thus, as Berwick, Hauser, & Tattersall (2013) conclude, "the anatomical capacity for speech cannot by itself be taken as a proxy for language". Our best hope, therefore, is to turn to the Neanderthal DNA.
An influential study led by paleogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (reported in Krause et al. 2007) has shown that DNA from two partially sequenced Neanderthal bones found inside the El Sidrón Cave in northwestern Spain (labeled 1253 and 1351c) had the same bases in the crucial positions of the FOXP2 gene (A at position 911 and G at position 977) that modern humans do. The researchers offered three alternative interpretations for their findings, two of which they deemed unlikely.
The first interpretation involves the Neanderthals getting the "human" version of the FOXP2 gene through interbreeding (aka sex) and gene flow from Homo sapiens. This scenario was reckoned to be improbable because in 2007 there was no other evidence of interbreeding between the two species (although Duarte et al. 1999 described the child discovered at the Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal as a Neandertal-modern human hybrid resulting from "admixture between regional Neandertals and early modern humans dispersing into southern Iberia").**** However, since then, evidence from whole-genome studies (cf. Green et al. 2010) showed that there must have been some interbreeding after all, as contemporary European men have somewhere between 1-9% Neanderthal DNA.***** Although Green et al. (2010) show that "all or almost all of the gene flow detected was from Neandertals into modern humans", the possibility of reverse gene flow from modern humans into Neanderthals cannot be completely excluded. Thus, these recent findings put the possibility of the Neanderthals having acquired the human version of FOXP2 through gene flow back on the table.
The second possible interpretation of Krause et al.'s results is that mutations in positions 911 and 977 occurred in the common ancestor of both H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis and were present in some individuals, but were subject to a selective sweep only in H. sapiens. Krause et al. consider this scenario highly unlikely as well because the mutations must have been frequent enough among the ancestral species to have the observed frequency among the Neanderthals, yet such high frequency among the ancestor would preclude the observed evidence of a selective sweep. However, it must be remembered that the these calculations are based on data from very few Neanderthal remains (possibly from related individuals), and rely as well on "inherently unreliable estimates" and "parameters not known with certainty", as Krause et al. themselves admit.
Krause et al. (2007) favor the third interpretation, namely that the "modern human" version of FOXP2 was present and selected in the common ancestor of both H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis, meaning potentially that not only did Neanderthals themselves have language not unlike that of modern humans, but that our common ancestor did as well. That pushed the emergence of language back potentially by as much as an order of magnitude, from 50,000 years to 500,000 years ago.
Another possibility, not considered by Krause et al. (2007) is that although Neanderthals and modern humans share the protein-coding sequences in the FOXP2 gene, some regulatory elements may be different—and thus the expression of the gene would have been different in Neanderthals. In other words, although the Neanderthals may have "had the same language gene", they may not have had full‑fledged language as in modern humans. Differences in relevant regulatory DNA have been detected by Maricič et al. (2013), although they also show that the "Neandertal" genetic variant is still present in approximately 10% of today's Africans, meaning that it is within the modern human variation. Here, I agree with Dediu & Levinson (2013) that "more research will help clarify what these […] differences entail" and that "regulatory changes can have hard-to-predict effects, making any inferences from the identity (or not) of gene sequences to speech and language necessarily tentative". However, unlike Dediu & Levinson (2013), who conclude that the linguistic differences between Neanderthals and modern humans are quantitative in nature and concern such parameters as "perhaps range of speech sounds or rapidity of speech, complexity of syntax, size of vocabularies, or the like", I do not exclude the possibility that the main gap between Neanderthals and modern humans was qualitative and concerned the ability to embed structures rather than simply string sequences.
Note, however, that even if Krause et al.'s and Dediu & Levinson's interpretations are correct in that language emerged in H. heidelbergensis, it could simply push the saltationist scenario one step back on the evolutionary tree. Perhaps we are not the first species to have a genetically-encoded language ability, but the common ancestors we share with the Neanderthals, H. heidelbergensis, was. But this possibility would still involve a sudden—if less recent—emergence of language due to a single genetic mutation, or a few correlated genetic mutations. This scenario is still a far cry from the scenario involving a gradual development of "co‑operative intelligence" over the course of more than 2 million years, which Evans and Dediu & Levinson advocate.
Moreover, adopting the hypothesis that full-fledged language developed in H. heidelbergensis and was inherited by us and our Neanderthal cousins, of course, reopens the question of why we ultimately survived and they did not. Even if some of the Neanderthal genes survived in modern humans, they did not survive as a species. Prior to the discovery that the Neanderthals had the "human" FOXP2, the scholarly consensus was that the Neanderthals died out shortly (in evolutionary terms) after H. sapiens appeared in the areas that they inhabited simply because we managed to outsmart them. Language was thought to be a key component of what allowed us to edge the Neanderthals out. But if we were of similar intelligence, but they were brawny and we were scrawny, how come we survived and they did not? As far as I can tell, this question remains open.
Equally unresolved are many other controversies that could have an impact on the question of language evolution, such as the proper interpretation of prehistoric remains that have been suggested to show signs of dual Neanderthal-Sapiens ancestry; Neanderthals' cognitive development, brain plasticity, and infant maturation; the anatomy and physiology of their respiratory muscles, vocal tract, and hearing apparatus; and even the relationship between music and language (for some references on these issues see Dediu & Levinson 2013, and for a detailed discussion of music, language, and Neanderthals, see Mithen 2007). All in all, the jury is still out on when and how full-fledged modern language first appeared. While some of the abilities to map sound to meaning may have developed for hundreds of millennia, there is no unequivocal evidence that language-specific computational systems (syntax, semantics, phonology), based on hierarchical structures, could—or did—develop gradually.
Finally, the gradualist theory that involves a step-by-step development of cooperative behavior has no way of explaining why human language exists in so many mutually incomprehensible variants that we call "languages" (though some traditional "dialects" could fall into this category as well). If language "evolved for the purpose of communication", as Evans indicates, why don't we all have the same language so we could all communicate with each other? I will turn to this question in more detail in the following post.
* It should be noted that although Neanderthals left some evidence of symbolic behavior (art, burials), it appears that their behavior was not as sophisticated as that of modern humans (e.g. their material culture was relatively impoverished and changed very slowly).
**It is worth noting that, like Vyvyan Evans, Stephen C. Levinson is a renowned opponent of the UG theory (see, e.g., Evans & Levinson 2009).
***Elsewhere in the same article, Dediu & Levinson are careful to specify that what the Neanderthals shared with us is "something like modern speech and language" (boldface mine) and may not have included what Chomsky called "FLN ("faculty of language narrow")" or "the operation of unbounded Merge". As noted in Berwick, Hauser, & Tattersall (2013), because Dediu & Levinson's definition of language is so vague, "it is difficult to test their evolutionary claims".
****See also this interview given by Krause at the time.
*****It is thought that much of that gene flow may have involved genes that "conferred strong selective advantages in the out-of-Africa environment, especially in the immune system" (see Dediu & Levinson 2013 for details), which would make sense since the Neanderthals adapted to that environment for millennia before modern humans arrived.
Additional Sources:
Barceló-Coblijn, Lluís (2011) A Biolinguistic Approach to the Vocalizations of H. Neanderthalensis and the Genus Homo. Biolinguistics 5.4: 286–334.
Berwick, Robert C.; Marc D. Hauser, & Ian Tattersall (2013) Neanderthal language? Just-so stories take center stage. Frontiers in psychology 4.
D'Anastasio, Ruggero; Stephen Wroe, Claudio Tuniz, Lucia Mancini, Deneb T. Cesana, Diego Dreossi, Mayoorendra Ravichandiran, Marie Attard, William C. H. Parr, Anne Agur, & Luigi Capasso (2013) Micro-Biomechanics of the Kebara 2 Hyoid and Its Implications for Speech in Neanderthals. PLOS One.
Dediu, Dan & Stephen C. Levinson (2013) On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences. Frontiers in psychology 4.
Duarte, Cidália; João Maurício, Paul B. Pettitt, Pedro Souto, Erik Trinkaus, Hans van der Plicht, and João Zilhão (1999) The early Upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia. PNAS 96(13).
Evans, Nicholas, and Stephen C. Levinson (2009) The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and brain sciences 32(5): 429-448.
Green, R. E., Krause, J., Briggs, A. W., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., et al. (2010) A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome. Science 328, 710–722.
Hauser, Marc D.; Charles Yang, Robert C. Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky, and Richard C. Lewontin (2014) The mystery of language evolution. Frontiers in psychology 5.
Krause, Johannes; Carles Lalueza-Fox, Ludovic Orlando, Wolfgang Enard, Richard E. Green, Hernán A. Burbano, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Catherine Hänni, Javier Fortea, Marco de la Rasilla, Jaume Bertranpetit, Antonio Rosas, and Svante Pääbo (2007) The Derived FOXP2 Variant of Modern Humans Was Shared with Neandertals. Current Biology 17: 1908–1912.
Maricič, Tomislav; Viola Günther, Oleg Georgiev, Sabine Gehre, Marija Ćurlin, Christiane Schreiweis, Ronald Naumann, Hernán A. Burbano, Matthias Meyer, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Marco de la Rasilla, Antonio Rosas, Srećko Gajović, Janet Kelso, Wolfgang Enard, Walter Schaffner, & Svante Pääbo (2013) A Recent Evolutionary Change Affects a Regulatory Element in the Human FOXP2 Gene. Molecular Biology and Evolution 30(4): 844-852.
Mithen, Steven (2007) The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. Harvard University Press.
Pearce, Eiluned; Chris Stringer, & R. I. M. Dunbar (2013) New insights into differences in brain organization between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 280(1758).
Sandler, Wendy & Diane Lillo-Martin (2001) Natural Sign Languages. In: M. Aronoff & J. Rees-Miller (eds.) Handbook of Linguistics. Pp. 533-562.
The post Universal Grammar, Neanderthals, and the Evolution of Language—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 3) appeared first on Languages Of The World.]]>
In the previous post, I began laying out a response to Vyvyan Evans' article in Aeon and more generally in his book, The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct. That earlier post focuses on whether language is in instinct. In this post, I address what Evans considers "a more important problem"; he writes: […]
The post Does Universal Grammar Theory Imply that Language Are All the Same?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 2) appeared first on Languages Of The World.]]>
In the previous post, I began laying out a response to Vyvyan Evans' article in Aeon and more generally in his book, The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct. That earlier post focuses on whether language is in instinct. In this post, I address what Evans considers "a more important problem"; he writes:
"If our knowledge of the rudiments of all the world's 7,000 or so languages is innate, then at some level they must all be the same. There should be a set of absolute grammatical 'universals' common to every one of them. This is not what we have discovered. Here's a flavour of the diversity we have found instead."
He then proceeds to catalogue several points of differences across languages, to which I shall return below. This is an odd sort of counter-argument for Universal Grammar (UG) theory. If what its opponents have discovered is that languages differ from each other in sounds, words, meanings, and grammatical patterns, that is not much of a discovery! After all, diversity of languages is "the most striking thing about the study of languages", as Ferdinand de Saussure, dubbed "the father of modern linguists", observed in his Course in General Linguistics. Differences among languages are so conspicuous that people must have noticed them very early on. "Even savages grasp them", de Saussure remarked, "thanks to their contacts with other tribes that speak a different language". Ancient Greeks recorded linguistic diversity, although they were more concerned with Hellenic dialects than with the various languages of "barbarian" outsiders. Virtually all ancient and medieval works on language either describe one particular language or highlight differences across several tongues. Most modern language textbooks, dictionaries, and grammar descriptions focus on the dissimilarities as well. Real science begins when things contrary to common wisdom are detected, such the fact that the Earth rotates around the Sun and not vice versa. In this sense, UG theory made a radical progress, compared to what came before.
An even bigger problem with the way Evans structures his argument is that he misrepresents his opponents' theory as making a claim so silly that it doubtlessly must be wrong. Consider, for example, his description of UG theory in The Language Myth; Evans writes (boldface mine):
"This idea is often referred to as Universal Grammar: all human languages, no matter the variety we happen to end up speaking, are essentially the same. Whether someone learns English, Japanese, Swahili, Tongan or whatever, when you get down to it, they are all alike. Sure, each of these languages has different vocabularies. And each language makes use of a different, although partially overlapping, set of sounds. But underneath it all, the essential ingredients of language – our grammar – is pre-programmed in the human genome…" (p. 2)
Even a casual observer of language cannot help noticing that it is not only vocabularies and sets of sounds used to produce the words that differ from language to language, as grammars vary widely too. So do the proponents of UG theory claim that all human languages have "essentially the same" grammar? Not at all! Some grammars require the verbs to appear in the beginning of a sentence (Welsh), others at the end (Japanese), and yet others somewhere in the middle (English). (Image on the left is taken from here, but note that Russian is incorrectly classified as SOV.) Some grammars require "weather" sentences (e.g. 'It rains' or 'It snows') to have a meaningless subject 'it' (English and French), while others do not (Spanish and Italian). Some grammars require all question words (the "who", "what", "where" etc.) to be placed in the beginning of a question (Russian and Serbo-Croatian), other grammars require (and allow) only one question word to be in the beginning (English), and yet others do not require any question words to appear at the beginning of the sentence (Japanese and Mandarin). Some grammars place the verb before adverbs meaning 'often', 'always', 'sometimes' and the like (French and Italian), other grammars place verbs after such adverbs (English and Russian). It
will surprise Evans' readers to find out that these and other differences across languages were actually discovered and described in minute detail by proponents of UG theory, not its opponents. I would go as far as suggest that the idea that all languages are "essentially the same" is so absurd that only someone hell-bent on fabricating a disingenuous critique of UG theory can claim that that is what "Universal Grammar" means. Needless to say, this strategy does nothing to promote an honest discussion and is at best misleading.
Of all the grammatical universals postulated by advocates of UG theory, Evans considers just one: recursion, which allows the creation of potentially infinite strings out of a finite set of elements. Evans writes:
"It […] remains unclear whether it is really universal among human languages. A number of researchers have suggested that it might in fact have emerged rather late in the evolution of human grammar systems, a consequence, rather than a cause. And In 2005, the US linguist-anthropologist Daniel Everett has claimed that Pirahã – a language indigenous to the Amazonian rainforest – does not use recursion at all."
Everett's claims have raised a heated controversy, some of which has been discussed in my earlier posts (see here, here, and here). The latter post, in particular, deals with the issue of recursion; for a more technical discussion, the reader can turn to Nevins, Pesetsky & Rodrigues (2009).
Let's now turn to some of the other differences across languages listed by Evans as potential arguments against UG theory. His first point of difference is that "spoken languages vary hugely in terms of the number of distinct sounds they use, ranging from 11 to an impressive 144 in some Khoisan languages (the African languages that employ 'click' consonants)". This difference, however, pertains not to grammar as such, but to the range of "building blocks" on which a grammar operates. But it is interesting to note that even in regards to sound inventories, there are some universal patterns. All languages use both consonants and vowels. All languages employ more consonants than vowels. All languages allow syllables that have a consonant followed by a vowel (CV), but not all languages allow the reverse: VC syllables. If one assumes that there can be no innate universals about language, as Evans does, such generalizations must be brushed off as accidental (unless they can somehow be explained as consequences of our particular anatomy and physiology).
Evans' second point of cross-linguistic differences concerns word order; he writes:
"[Languages] also differ over the word order used for subject, verb and object, with all possibilities being attested. English uses a fairly common pattern – subject (S) verb (V) object (O): The dog (S) bit (V) the postman (O). But other languages do things very differently. In Jiwarli, an indigenous Australian language, the components of the English sentence 'This woman kissed that bald window cleaner' would be rendered in the following order: That this bald kissed woman window cleaner."
The description is correct, but several important points have been glossed over. While Evans' claim that languages "differ over the word order used for subject, verb and object" is true, it is also true—though ignored by Evans—that all languages distinguish these elements in the first place. For starters, consider Evans' claim that "Straits Salish, an indigenous language spoken in and around British Columbia, gets by without nouns and verbs". Indeed, claims have been made that Salish languages do not distinguish nouns and verbs. But even such claims do not amount to saying that Salish languages lack both nouns and verbs. Rather, it has been suggested that these languages have one category, which can be labeled either "nouns" or "verbs", depending on one's analysis. (Baker 2003: 89 suggests that these words are better conceptualized as verbs than as nouns, but see pp. 175-189 of his book for a more detailed discussion of lexical categories in Salish.) More generally, having defined what a verb is, Baker (2003: 88-94) asks if there are any verb-less languages. The "most serious candidate that [he] ha[s] found for a verbless language is the Australian language Jingulu", originally described by Rob Pensalfini. After a careful consideration of Pensalfini's arguments and data, Baker concludes that even Jingulu has a lexical category of verbs. (Evans also claims that some languages lack adjectives; this possibility is considered and ultimately rejected by Baker 2003: 238-263.)
In addition to distinguishing lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, all known languages distinguish grammatical functions of "subject" and "object" in that at least some rules in each language treat them differently. This non-interchangeability of subjects and objects is called "configurationality". In some languages, like English, configurationality is easily observed from word order: subjects must precede the verb, and objects must follow it. (I am leaving aside some peculiar structures that need additional treatment.) The sentence John devoured Brussels sprouts is fine, but the reverse—Brussels sprouts devoured John—is not (unless we imagine some nightmarish scenario in which Brussels sprouts is the subject and John is the object). The bottom line is that in English word order rules make reference to subjects and objects as distinct categories.
But this is not the case for all languages: for example, indigenous Australian languages like Jiwarli (mentioned by Evans) and Warlpiri are known for their free word order. For example, in Warlpiri 'The child is seeing me' can be rendered with the same Subject-Auxiliary-Verb-Object word order as in English (S-Aux-V-O: Kurdu-ngku ka-ju nya-nyi ngaju). But the order of subject and object can also be flipped: O-Aux-V-S Ngaju ka-ju nya-nyi kurdu-ngku. (These examples are taken from Baker 2001: 409.) This observation led some linguists to claim that Warlpiri, Jiwarli, and other similar languages are non‑configurational, namely that their grammars do not distinguish subjects and objects but rather treat them as one and the same.
However, subsequent research has shown that subjects and objects are not indistinguishable even in languages of the Warlpiri/Jiwarli type, which allow flipping them around as far as the word order is concerned. While word order rules may be "blind" to the subject/object distinction in these languages, some other grammatical rules, for example, those concerning anaphora and coreference, do make that distinction. To understand what is meant by "anaphora and coreference", let's consider some English examples first. Certain English words, such as himself or each other, depend in their interpretation on other words in the sentence. For example, if I say John praised himself, it means that John is being praised, but if I say Bill praised himself, it means that Bill is being praised. The same word, himself, changes its meaning depending on other words in the sentence, in this case the subject.* Words like himself are called "anaphors" and their meaning dependence on some other word in the sentence is called "coreference" (in particular, himself co-refers with either John or Bill in the examples above.)
Now we come to the crucial observation: anaphors in English can be objects co-referring with subjects, but not vice-versa: John praised himself is fine, but *Himself praised John is a word-salad. (The technical term is "ungrammatical" and this is marked by an asterisk in front of the bad sentence.) One might expect *heself to be a subject anaphor form (by analogy with him/himself, he/*heself), but that form does not exist—because a subject could never be an anaphor in English. Thus, rules governing the distribution of anaphors in English "care about" which is the subject and which is the object.
Guess what? When it comes to anaphors and coreference, the same asymmetry between subjects and objects obtains in the allegedly non-configurational languages, including Warlpiri and Jiwarly, whose grammars are presumed to be "blind" to the subject/object distinction! For example, the Warlpiri analog of *Heself sees the man is as ungrammatical as the English sentence (Baker 2001: 411). This means that the grammar of Warlpiri is not, after all, insensitive to the distinction between subjects and objects.
Similarly unhelpful to opponents of UG theory are languages like Inuktitut, which Evans describes as "build[ing] 'sentences' by creating giant words from smaller word-parts". In this language, an entire sentence such as 'Do you have any tobacco for sale?' is expressible in one word, he claims: tawakiqutiqarpiit. Languages such as Inuktitut are called "polysynthetic" because they "synthesize" (i.e. put together) "poly" (many) morphemes. It is not true, however, that in polysynthetic languages "each word is an entire sentence", as Evans claims: in addition to one-word sentences such as tawakiqutiqarpiit, there are multi-word sentences in Inuktitut. But even with multi-word sentences, Inuktitut and similar languages (e.g. Mohawk) do not "use word order to signal who is doing what to whom". Subjects, objects, and verbs can appear in any order imaginable. Like Warlpiri and Jiwarli, Inuktitut and Mohawk were once considered non-configurational languages, namely languages where the subject/object distinction does not apply.
But it turned out that even in polysynthetic languages some grammatical rules are sensitive to the subject/object distinction. Recall that the defining property of these languages is that they can "lump" (technical term: "incorporate") nouns into verbs creating "giant words". Well, only objects—but crucially not subjects!—can be "lumped" into the verb. As an example (taken from Baker 2001: 419), consider how the sentence 'The stone broke the window-pane' can be expressed in Mohawk. Besides, a three-word sentence, where both the subject and the object are independent words, this meaning can be expressed by a two-word sentence that translates roughly as "STONE INDEED-IT-PANE-SHATTER-CAUSED-ONCE" (hyphens indicate that these are morphemes of one giant word). Note that the noun meaning 'window pane' ("PANE") is inserted into the giant verb word, between a bunch of prefixes—including a factive prefix (which, for purposes of illustration, I rendered as "INDEED" though that hardly does it justice) and an agreement prefix (which I rendered as "IT")—and the verb root 'shatter'. The factive prefix ("INDEED"), the causative suffix ("CAUSED"), and the punctual suffix ("ONCE") tell us that this giant word is indeed a verb, and the agreement prefix ("IT"), expressing agreement with a neuter singular subject—and no agreement with an object—tells us that it is an intransitive verb. The subject, "STONE", is expressed by a separate word.
If Mohawk were a truly non-configurational language, whose grammar treats subjects and objects the same, we would expect that the same meaning could be expressed by the reverse of the sentence described above, namely with the subject "STONE" lumped into the verb and the object "PANE" forming an independent word: "PANE INDEED-IT-STONE-SHATTER-CAUSED-ONCE". However, this sentence is ungrammatical in Mohawk.** The overall generalization is that "objects but not subjects can be incorporated into the verb in Mohawk" (Baker 2001: 419). Thus, we have seen that the structural notions of subject and object appear to be relevant even for the languages like Warlpiri or Mohawk, which do not wear their configurationality on their sleeve, so to speak.
Readers of Evans' article may be surprised to find out that the generalizations described above—that in Warlpiri anaphors cannot be subjects co-referring with objects and that in Mohawk objects and not subjects can incorporate—were discovered and described not by opponents of UG theory, who seem to put cross-linguistic diversity on a pedestal, but by advocates of the theory: Ken Hale and Mark Baker. Moreover, these facts would have probably gone unnoticed if advocates of UG theory had not been looking for evidence of configurationality in such languages where they least expected to find it, such as free-word-order languages of the Australian aboriginal type and polysynthetic languages of the Americas. In this respect, UG theory is methodologically advantageous in that it prompts linguists to discover facts that would otherwise remain overlooked.
Ironically, opponents of UG theory (including Evans) seemingly like to emphasize cross-linguistic diversity, mentioning lesser-known languages and their unusual features at every chance they get. Yet, in reality, they almost always ignore the nitty-gritty details of such seemingly "exotic" patterns as the distribution of anaphors in Warlpiri or incorporation in Mohawk, described above. They have little use for these facts, or for the more general observation that even the seemingly non‑configurational languages turn out to be configurational after all. The anti-UG position does not inspire one to find such universal truths about language. But even if opponents of UG could stumble upon such a generalization accidentally, they would probably shrug their shoulders ("It's an accidental coincidence, meaning nothing!") or brush it under the carpet as an inconvenient truth.
Finally, I would like to challenge another conclusion a lay reader may draw from this debate, namely that proponents and opponents of UG theory are like optimists and pessimists, one side seeing the proverbial glass as half-full and the other as half-empty. Evans and like-minded challengers of UG theory focus on diversity among languages and either deny or ignore the existence of grammatical universals (or diminish their importance), whereas supporters of UG theory seemingly focus on the similarities across languages rather than the differences. In reality, UG theory embraces both similarities and differences. Its main conjecture is that languages are different in a constrained way. As much as languages differ from one another, certain types of "languages" one could imagine or construct artificially are not found among the nearly 7,000 languages spoken today or in the scores of languages known to have been spoken in the past. An important premise of UG theory is that these gaps in linguistic diversity—that is "languages" that are imaginable but do not actually exist—occur for a reason, as they are outside the bounds of what is possible for natural human languages. It is those bounds that we call "Universal Grammar". According to this key hypothesis, natural languages cannot violate the laws of Universal Grammar any more than physical objects can violate the laws of physics. But within the bounds of UG, a broad range of variation is possible—and indeed observable. Figuring out exactly what the bounds of UG are is one of the main goals of the advocates of UG theory.
*Similarly, The professors praised each other means that professors are being praised, and The students praised each other means that students are being praised. Thus, the interpretation of each other also depends on other words in the sentence, here the subject.
**Actually, like the English "Brussels sprouts" example above, this sentence is grammatical with a bizarre meaning that the window pane broke the stone.
Additional Sources:
Baker, Mark C. (2001) The Natures of Nonconfigurationality. In: Mark Baltin and Chris Collins (eds.) The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 407-438.
Baker, Mark C. (2003) Lexical Categories. Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Nevins, Andrew; David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues (2009) Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment. Language 85(2): 355-404.
The post Does Universal Grammar Theory Imply that Language Are All the Same?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 2) appeared first on Languages Of The World.]]>
About a year ago, Aeon published an article by Vyvyan Evans, titled "Real talk", which was recently brought to my attention by Polish linguist Piotr Gąsiorowski. Evans's article in Aeon summarizes some of the key ideas in his book, The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct. Upon its publication, I was planning to […]
The post Is Language an Instinct?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (part 1) appeared first on Languages Of The World.]]>
About a year ago, Aeon published an article by Vyvyan Evans, titled "Real talk", which was recently brought to my attention by Polish linguist Piotr Gąsiorowski. Evans's article in Aeon summarizes some of the key ideas in his book, The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct. Upon its publication, I was planning to lay out a detailed response, also in a book format; however, that project has not been completed, chiefly for reasons of time and other obligations, so I would like to publish sections from the manuscript in the form of a mini-series of posts on this blog. As is true of most of my posts here, it is aimed primarily at a broader audience with little or no background in linguistics.
The gist of Evans' article (and book) is summarized nicely in the introductory sentences: "For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong." But not so fast. The theory that Evans sets out to criticize does not focus on the "language as instinct" idea as such. That phrase was coined by Steven Pinker as the title of a book first published in 1994 that has since become a classic. But the theory that Evans criticizes, which I shall call "Universal Grammar theory" (or UG theory, for short), took shape decades earlier and, to the best of my knowledge, neither Chomsky nor other linguists working within that theoretical framework ever used the phrase "language instinct" as a serious technical term.
Pinker's book was addressed to a broader audience, and—like any good writer—he took into account that audience's (presumed) common knowledge. The assumption against which Pinker focused his argument is that language is a cultural invention, like metalworking or the wheel. This idea that language is something that people "figured out how to do" may seem ridiculous to a professional linguist, but it is still far more commonly believed that Evans seems to realize, even more than 20 years after the publication of Pinker's book. I find that this notion is deeply rooted among my adult education students all the time. One of the reasons why this assumption is so entrenched, I think, is because many non-linguists often equate language with writing. Not too long ago I had to explain to my students that (Biblical) Hebrew and Yiddish are two completely different languages that have less in common than English and Russian (i.e. many words from the former in the latter, but little grammatical similarity). I later realized that the confusion had to do with the fact that Hebrew and Yiddish look similar as they are written with the same characters. Another question I often get, which also comes from the same conflation of language and writing, is why writing post-dates spoken language by so long (roughly 95% of the time, spoken language existed without any writing). The answer, of course, has to do with the "cultural invention" nature of writing—but not of language—which required a certain level of civilizational development.
Taking into account that assumption, widely-held by non-specialists, Pinker's essential point is clarified: language is not a human invention in the sense of the wheel or even writing, but a biological fact about our species. In this laymen's sense of "instinct", what Chomsky, Pinker, and other proponents of UG theory say about language fits quite well: language is thought of as an inherent human inclination, much like spiders' weaving of webs. This is also roughly how Evans defines an instinct in the Aeon article: "an inborn disposition towards certain kinds of adaptive behaviour". In what sense language (or language use) can be viewed as an adaptive behavior is an interesting question, which I will address in more detail in a later post.
But if we are to consider a stricter technical sense of "instinct", as it is understood by biologists, there is a clincher: as Evans points out, instinctive "behaviour has to emerge without training". He writes: "A fledging spider doesn't need to see a master at work in order to 'get' web-spinning: spiders just do spin webs when they are ready, no instruction required." Similarly, baby kangaroos climb into their mothers' pouches upon being born. Sea turtles, newly hatched on a beach, move toward the ocean. Honeybees communicate the direction of a food source by "dancing" a certain way. Nobody teaches baby kangaroos, sea turtles, or honeybees to do these things and yet they do them. Thus, calling language an "instinct" seemingly suggests that language is a purely biological phenomenon—all nature and no nurture!
Critics like Evans easily show that this view is incorrect, stressing the socio-cultural component of language. Stories of so-called feral children, either lost by accident or purposefully deprived of human contact by cruel parents, show that without exposure to human language within a certain time-window known as the "critical period", children never develop their language ability. Evans describes
"the appalling story of Genie, a girl in the US whose father kept her in a locked room until she was discovered in 1970, at the age of 13. The general lesson from these unfortunate individuals is that, without exposure to a normal human milieu, a child just won't pick up a language at all."
How well such feral children can pick up language after being brought into normal communicative environment (or even with specialized training) depends on the age at which they are "discovered". In one well-documented case, a girl, known in the literature as "Isabelle", had been hidden in the attic by a deranged mother and never spoken to, until she was discovered at age 6. At that time, Isabelle had no speech and her cognitive development was estimated as that of a 2-year-old child. But within a year she was able to catch up with other 7-year-olds, even in her linguistic development. A much sadder case is that of "Chelsea", a partially-deaf woman incorrectly diagnosed as suffering from a mental disorder, who was "discovered" at age 31 and fitted with hearing aids. Despite concerted efforts to teach her to speak, all Chelsea ever managed was to learn a large vocabulary; her "grammar", the ways she put these words together, remained virtually non-existent. Her "sentences" were strings of words like "Breakfast eating girl" or "Banana the eat"—resembling more the utterances produced by "Nim Chimpsky", a chimpanzee supposedly taught to speak American Sign Language (ASL), than those of a typical two-year-old. Exposure to human language at the right time is thus vital to the development of language. "Language is not something that emerges automatically, and effortlessly", Evans writes in The Language Myth (p. 3). As a result, how can it be reasonably regarded an instinct?
It should be noted, however, that many behaviors that certain species are biologically predisposed for require some exposure to either environmental or social factors. For example, the communicative "dance" of bees is adjusted to the latitude at which they live: the latitude determines the position of the sun above the horizon, one of the elements that define the "dance". More similar to the "learning" required for human language to be fully realized is the way that birds "learn" their species' song. Studies conducted with singing bird species, such as finches and warblers, show that when newly-laid eggs are incubated in soundproof chambers and the hatchlings are hand-reared in individual and acoustic isolation, they can sing only a very simple tune, representing "the inborn component of the song". The more intricate "embroidery" of the song has to be learned, or at least acquired via exposure to the singing of other male finches. According to an article in British Library, "there are also species [such as the Indian hill mynah] whose song (and indeed whose entire vocabulary) is handed down culturally, generation by generation". Should such behavior be called "instinctual" or should there be a different term for it? Either way, the claim of UG theory is that human language fits into the same category as bird singing: some "software" needed for its development is innate but exposure to other members of the species is necessary for its full realization.
There is another obvious yet significant difference between human language and other instinctual animal behavior: within the same species, instinctual behavior is essentially uniform. All spiders in the same species weave webs the same way. All bees in the same species encode the information about the direction of food source using the same "dance moves" (but different species do different "dances"). All birds in the same species produce their species-specific song. But humans obviously do not all speak the same way. Babies pick up the language spoken around them: as Evans writes, "a child born in Tokyo learns to speak Japanese while one born in London picks up English". Children adopted across linguistic barriers speak the language of their adoptive family rather than their biological parents: a child of, say, Vietnamese parents adopted by English-speaking Americans at a young age will learn to speak English just as well as her American-born peers. In fact, if she ever wants to learn her "biological mother tongue", especially after the critical period is over, she will probably have as much trouble as any non‑Vietnamese person. Simply put, we are not born to speak any particular language.
But generative linguists, advocating UG theory, have never claimed that we are. The expression "language instinct" refers to a predisposition for human language in general, not for any specific language. It might be more useful to think of individual languages as variations on a common theme, with Universal Grammar as that motif, much like different recipes for chicken soup are variations on a common theme. Sure enough, Scottish cock-a-leekie, Thai tom kha gai, and Eastern European matzo ball soup have little enough in common in terms of ingredients, flavor, texture, and color—just as the Scottish Gaelic, Thai, and Yiddish languages each have a sound and a feel of its own. But if we examine chicken soup recipes carefully enough, we will find common ingredients: chicken and water are certain to show up in every recipe, as do other types of ingredients, such as aromatics (whether leek, galangal, or garlic), vegetables of some sort, and perhaps some doughy element, like noodles or matzo balls. The procedures for making the soup will also be different but the same types of techniques (e.g. boiling the soup) will be used in different recipes. We could even write a Universal Chicken Soup recipe, one that will contain not all the details of how any particular chicken soup may be made, but a lot of blanks to be filled in for specific recipes. Universal Grammar, similarly, is not a detailed how-to manual for language, but rather a fill-in-the-blanks "recipe" of how human language works. In other words, Universal Grammar is not a denial of linguistic diversity, but a common denominator of the diverse expression of human language—the similarities that are often obscured by the more conspicuous differences across languages.
In the following post, I will address the issue of how linguistic diversity is addressed within UG theory, as well as Evans' claim that "absolute grammatical 'universals' common to every one of them […] is not what we have discovered".
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[Thanks to Martin Lewis, Michael Nosonovsky, Katya Shilova, and Elena Zusmanovich for insightful conversations that led to certain points in this post.] In his essay "Yiddish? Why Don't We Speak Judeo-French?", George Jochnowitz considers the questions of why Yiddish survived a transplantation from German-speaking lands to Slavic-speaking Eastern Europe, why it finally gave way […]
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[Thanks to Martin Lewis, Michael Nosonovsky, Katya Shilova, and Elena Zusmanovich for insightful conversations that led to certain points in this post.]
In his essay "Yiddish? Why Don't We Speak Judeo-French?", George Jochnowitz considers the questions of why Yiddish survived a transplantation from German-speaking lands to Slavic-speaking Eastern Europe, why it finally gave way to Slavic languages there in the mid-20th century, and why it survives among the Hassidic communities in New York. According to Jochnowitz,
"A determining factor […] is whether or not the language spoken by the local population and the official language of the country are the same. In a country where most people speak the official language of the country in their homes, Jews speak the official language or a Jewish variety of that language. Thus, Jews speak English—or Jewish English—in America, French in France, Hungarian in Hungary, etc."
Indeed, as I argued in my recent post, the degree of linguistic russification in different parts of the Russian Empire and later of the Soviet Union played an important role in whether Jews retained their language, Yiddish. Similarly, other modern states with a strong agenda of cultural and linguistic uniformity, like France, have managed to eliminate—or almost eliminate—indigenous linguistic varieties including those of the Jews.
As for United States, Jochnowitz' other example, it is not clear whether his correlation actually holds: by and large, American Jews live in large cities and their suburbs (New York City, South Florida, San Francisco, Los Angeles), which are also among the least English-speaking in the country, as can be seen from a comparison of the two maps on the left: the first map depicts the percentage of Jewish population by county and the second map — the percentage of speakers of heritage languages (i.e. language other than English). Yet, as Jochnowitz points out, American-born Jews by and large speak English, regardless of their parents' mother tongue (with the exception of Hassidic communities in New York City).
However, I do not think that Jochnowitz is correct in applying the same "rule of thumb" everywhere, especially when considering historical cases. When considering historical periods before the emergence of a modern nation-state model, it is hard to see what "official language" might even mean. For example, Jochnowitz mentions Judeo-French, which was spoken in France before the 1394 expulsion of the Jews. However, at that point there was no official language in France, in the modern sense of the expression. In fact, non-Jewish population spoke many regional varieties across what is today France, and Jews spoke several regional varieties as well. Judeo-French was spoken in northern France, but Jews living in the papal lands near Avignon, for instance, spoke Judeo-Comtadine (see chapter 12 of Languages of the World: An Introduction for more details).
One of Jochnowitz' own examples contradicts his claim—Ladino. When Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, some of them resettled in the Balkans, which was a part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, and some others resettled in Italy. However, what happened to Ladino in these two areas is completely different: in the Balkans it survived into the 20th century, whereas in Italy, it disappeared, its speakers having shifted to the pre-existing Judeo-Italian. Jochnowitz explains these developments by the same factor, namely whether the official language was also the one spoken locally. In the Balkans, Ladino survived, Jochnowitz claims, because "the Ottoman Empire, like Poland-Lithuania and the Russian Empire, was a multi-lingual country. Ladino coexisted with Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Serbian, and a number of other languages". In contrast, in Italy Ladino did not survive (despite the obvious similarities between it and the local languages, one might add). All that Jochnowitz says in this connection is that "since Italy already had a Jewish population that spoke Judeo-Italian, Ladino and Portuguese speakers switched languages". However, similarly to Italy, Greece already had a Jewish population that spoke Judeo-Greek (aka Yevanic), but there Ladino speakers did not switch. Although he does not say so explicitly, Jochnowitz implies that it is linguistic uniformity of Italy—people actually speaking the official Italian language—that is to blame for the replacement of Ladino with Judeo-Italian. But in the late 15th century, Italy was not a modern monolingual (or close to it) nation state that Jochnowitz makes it sound like. Italy's geopolitical unification was still over 350 years away, and although Dante's Divine Comedy was circulating all over the peninsula, not till the 19th century can one speak of just one official language in Italy. When Sephardic Jews arrived to Livorno, Ancona, and elsewhere in Italy, local inhabitants—including the Jews—spoke related yet quite distinctive linguistic varieties there.
Moreover, Jewish Diaspora features a number of mixed Jewish languages based on local language that that were never an official language of any country or state. Two of my favorite examples are Judeo-Berber and Judeo-Tat. Neither Berber languages nor Tat were official languages of any state where Jewish population might have been led to speak them under the linguistic acculturation pressure that Jochnowitz claims to be the decisive factor. Berber languages survived under the Phoenicians and the Romans, and later the Arabs. Standard Moroccan Berber has only recently been recognized as an official language of Morocco, and no other Berber language served as an official language in Morocco at the time when Jewish communities who speak Judeo-Berber might have first encountered it. Similarly, Tat is a local but not an official language. It is an Iranian language that is spoken in the mountainous areas of the Eastern Caucasus, geopolitically divided between Azerbaijan and Russia. It has never been a lingua franca in the region (a role played by Lezgin, a Nakh-Dagestanian language), let alone an official language. Yet Jews that settled in the region adopted the language.
While I do not think that Jochnowitz is correct in his formulation of the chief criterion that determines whether a particular Jewish language survives or is replaced by another local tongue, I think he is close: it is not about whether the local language of the non-Jewish population enjoys the status of an official language, but whether the newcomer Jewish language enjoys a certain level of above-average prestige. Moreover, I believe that the question that Jochnowitz tries to answer is wrong: we should be asking ourselves not what prevented a given Jewish language from surviving (as Jochnowitz does in the subtitle of his essay, "Why Don't We Speak Judeo-French?"), but what allowed a few exceptional Jewish languages to survive being transplanted into a new environment. As a rule, wherever Jews settled throughout the Diaspora, they picked up a local language—from Spanish to Malayalam, from Berber to Persian, and scores of others in between—as the most useful language that allowed them to create economic links with the local non-Jewish populations. Jews have never wielded the power to subjugate indigenous groups politically, culturally, or linguistically. Instead, Jews have always adapted.
This is true almost everywhere, but with two notable examples of Jewish languages that survived a move to a new land: Yiddish and Ladino. As mentioned above, Ladino survived in the Balkans, and the crucial factor, I think, was not the multi-lingual nature of the Ottoman Empire (although that might have played a role as well), but the high prestige that the Sephardic Jews enjoyed among the local Balkan Jews and more generally among the Gentile population as well. Their high social status among the Jews derives in part from the fact that Jews in Spain had experienced a lengthy period of relative stability and cultural heyday, first under the Muslim rulers and then under some of the Christian kings. Although the situation soured for the Spanish Jews in the 13th century, some of the later Spanish kings, such as Peter I, were relatively favorably disposed toward the Jews. Even during the later period, the Jewish community in Spain produced such influential figures as Nahmanides (1194-1270) and Abraham Zacuto (1452-1515). The prestige of the newly-arrived Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire, among both Jews and non-Jews alike, was bolstered by the support of the Sultan who made them the exclusive tailors for the Ottoman Janissaries; as the Wikipedia states, the Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki "enjoyed economic prosperity through commercial trading in the Balkans".
Similarly, when Ashkenazi Jews moved into what is now Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, they rode a wave of prestige. Pervasive anti-Semitism was not yet part of life in those areas, which was one of the chief reasons Ashkenazi Jews moved there in the first place. Moreover, Jews settled mostly in cities and town which already had a substantial German-speaking population. A great example of that is Lviv (German name: Lemberg; presently in western Ukraine), which had one of the earliest documented Jewish communities and was also home to a substantial German-speaking population. These German speakers, and to some extent the Ashkenazi Jews as well, were relatively well-off and educated merchants brought there by the trade privileges granted by King Casimir III, Queen Jadwiga, and the subsequent Polish monarchs. In fact, Yiddish retained its prestige by association with German, of which it was perceived to be a mere dialect, even when most Yiddish-speaking Jews became poor working-class inhabitants of shtetls in the Pale of Settlement. The massive shift from Yiddish to Russian, which happened not only in Russia proper or in chiefly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, but across the Soviet Union, had as much to do with the shift in Soviet policies towards Yiddish (and other ethnic languages, including German) as it did with the movement of Jews to monolingual Russian-speaking areas. By the end of the Soviet period, even in western Ukraine, which remained de facto multilingual, the majority of the Jews no longer spoke Yiddish. And those that still did, like my maternal grandparents, virtually never did so in public. Speaking Yiddish was not only "not cool", it was outright dangerous.
The survival of Yiddish among certain ultra-Orthodox communities, both in New York and in Jerusalem, has in my opinion little to do with whether the surrounding populations speak the official language (English or Hebrew), but a lot to do with the structure of the communities and their interactions with the outside world, as well as with their attitudes towards Hebrew (particularly relevant in Israel). Whether in Williamsburg or in Me'a She'arim, these are tight-knit communities that provide support needed for continuation of the Yiddish tradition. The self-segregation, especially among (male) Yeshiva students, diminishes the pressure to use to the language of the outside world. (In fact, Jochnowitz recognizes that the higher degree of interaction with the outside world among the Lubavitcher community in Crown Heights, NY explains the broader use of English in this community.) Finally, their belief that Hebrew is a "holy language", to be kept away from everyday use, means that these ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel have little choice but to keep Yiddish going.
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A century ago Yiddish was the predominant language of Jews in the Russian Empire; three of my four grandparents, born in 1900s-1920s spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue. Yet according to the 2010 population census, only about 30,000 people, or a little over 12% of Russia's Jewish population,"know" (whatever that means in the context of […]
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A century ago Yiddish was the predominant language of Jews in the Russian Empire; three of my four grandparents, born in 1900s-1920s spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue. Yet according to the 2010 population census, only about 30,000 people, or a little over 12% of Russia's Jewish population,"know" (whatever that means in the context of the census) Yiddish… and Hebrew—both of which are lumped into one category. When did Yiddish begin to disappear and what factors prompted its demise?
Many writers associate the death of Yiddish with the Holocaust. David Shyovitz, for example, in his article "History & Development of Yiddish", found in the Jewish Virtual Library, writes: "The decimation of European Jewry during the Holocaust in the mid-twentieth century marked the end of Yiddish as a widely spoken language and of the unique culture the language generated." Similarly, Lev Stesin in "The end of the Ashkenazi world" (published in Jerusalem Post) mentions the Holocaust along with "accelerating pace of assimilation" as factors that destroyed the Yiddishkeit culture. Certainly the atrocities of the Nazis and their local collaborators led to the decimation of the Jewish population in the western part of the USSR, and correspondingly to the decline in the percentage of the surviving Jews who spoke Yiddish. Thus, in the 1939 census 40% of the Jews living in the "Slavic republics"—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—declared Yiddish as their native language, but in the first post-WWII census of 1959 only 17.7% did so. (Unless otherwise indicated, all Yiddish-related figures in this post are cited from an unpublished paper by Mark Tolts, "Yiddish in the Former Soviet Union Since 1959: A Statistical-Demographic Analysis", presented at the conference "Yiddish in the Contemporary World" at the University of Oxford in 1998 and revised in 2012. I am grateful to Mark Tolts for sharing his work with me.)
However, the Holocaust was not the only reason for the decline of Yiddish in the FSU: the process of language shift to Russian among Ashkenazi Jews began much earlier and continued for reasons internal to the region. The decline in the percentage of native speakers of Yiddish began in the first three decades of the 20th century. In 1897, 97% of the Jews in the Russian Empire spoke Yiddish as their native language (figures from this Wikipedia article), but by 1926 this number was down to 73% (John Myhill, personal communication). Later census data, examined by age cohort, also reveal the downtrend in the transmission of Yiddish to children. According to the 1970 census, among Jews born before 1910 (i.e. those who were over 60 years of age at the time of the census) 17.7% spoke Yiddish as their native language, whereas in the next birth cohort, those born between 1910 and 1919 (i.e. people in their 50s at the time of the census), only 10.6% spoke Yiddish natively.
The shift from Yiddish to Russian was most prominent in the big cities of the Russian Empire, especially St. Petersburg and Moscow. In 1890, some 30% of the Jews living in St. Petersburg spoke Russian as their native language, whereas by 1910 the number was up to 42% (John Myhill, personal communication). During the existence of the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement, very few Jews could live outside of that area: as the Wikipedia article explains, only "Jewish merchants of the First Guild, people with higher or special education, University students, artisans, army tailors, ennobled Jews, soldiers, drafted in accordance with the Recruit Charter of 1810, and their families had the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement". During WWI, many Jews fled the Pale to escape the invading German army; in the spring of 1917, the Provisional Government abolished the Pale, precipitating Jewish migration to the major cities in Russia proper, and the ensuing linguistic russification of the Jewish population.
These developments are reflected well in my family's history. My only grandparent who spoke Russian natively, my paternal grandmother Mina, was born in 1915 in Bobruisk, a relatively small town in Mogilev Governorate (now, Magileŭ Region of Belarus), but in 1917 her family moved to Petrograd (now, St. Petersburg). My paternal grandfather was born and raised in Kiev; his family moved to Russia when he was already a teenager. My maternal grandparents were born and raised in smaller towns in Belarus and Ukraine, and moved to Leningrad as young adults. Although they spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, all of my grandparents spoke perfectly fluent Russian later in life. Neither of my parents spoke any Yiddish, and the only occasions when my maternal grandparents spoke Yiddish together was when they did not want me or my parents to understand what they were talking about.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Yiddish was promoted by the Soviet authorities as the national language of the Jews. (Hebrew, in contrast, was deemed "reactionary" for its strong connections to religious Judaism and the Land of Israel, and hence was banned from Soviet schools in 1919.) As discussed in more detail in my earlier post, Yiddish schools, newspapers, theaters, and other cultural institutions received state support. Things began to change in the late 1930s, at the time of the Great Purges, and took a real turn for the worse in 1948, when the famous Jewish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels—the head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during WWII—was murdered by the Secret Police, his death staged to look like a car accident. Mikhoels' cameo performance in the finale of the 1936 film Circus, where he sang a lullaby in Yiddish, alongside other actors singing in various languages representing "the tight-knit family of peoples" of the Soviet Union, was cut out from the film on Stalin's personal orders. In 1952, several prominent Soviet Yiddish writers were executed in the event known as "The Night of the Murdered Poets". The winter of 1952/53 saw the unfolding of the so-called Doctors' Plot, in which a group of prominent Moscow physicians, most of them Jews, were arrested and tried on fabricated charges of conspiring to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders. A campaign of vitriolic anti-Semitic propaganda referring to these Jewish doctors as "doctors-saboteurs", "doctors-killers", or "assassins in white coats" was conducted in the state-run mass media. As a result, scores of Soviet Jews were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, sent to the Gulag, or even executed. Although the situation calmed down after Stalin's death in March 1953, it remained fairly tense; it is possible that some of the drop in the percentage of self-declared native speakers of Yiddish in the 1959 census can be explained by fear of declaring knowledge of Yiddish and hence stressing one's Jewish self-identity.
The process of shift from Yiddish to Russian accelerated in the post-WWII period. For example, according to the 1989 census, in the birth cohort of 1944-1948 (i.e. people 41-45 years of age at the time of the census) only 7.8% declare knowledge of Yiddish (as first or second language), and only 5.9% claim Yiddish as their native language. These figures indicate a significant decline when compared to an older cohort, those born before 1919 (i.e. people in their 70s and older at the time of the census), of whom 21% declared knowledge of Yiddish and 12.1% claimed Yiddish as their native language. Oddly however, the same census records the percentage of Yiddish speakers among Jewish children under the age of 10 as significantly higher than in their parents' generation, at around 12-13%. Overall, according to the 1989 census, 13% of Ashkenazi Jews of all ages (living in Russia and other western republics of the USSR) declared Yiddish as their native or second language, down from 19.5% in 1970. The same trend is observable in comparing these later census data with those of the 1959 census; however, as that earlier census (and those before it) asked only about one's native language, comparing figures between earlier and later censuses is somewhat problematic (see Tolts' paper for a more detailed discussion).
It should be noted that the shift from Yiddish to Russian progressed faster in Russia proper than in neighboring "Slavic republics" of the former USSR (i.e. Ukraine and Belarus), which historically had higher percentages of Yiddish speakers. According to Tolts' estimate based on the data of the 1939 census,
"only about 40 per cent of the Ashkenazi Jews in the three Slavic republics of the FSU declared Yiddish as their native language. According to the same census this indicator was as low as about 25 per cent for Ashkenazi Jews in the Russian Federation (including Crimea) and 45 per cent for Ukrainian Jewry. Only in Belorussia was Yiddish declared to be their native language by slightly more than half (55 per cent) of the Jews" (p. 3).
However, by the time of the by the 1989 census near the end of the Soviet period, the shift away from Yiddish was well underway in Ukraine and Belarus as well: only 11.1% and 14.3% of the Jews declared knowledge of Yiddish in those republics, respectively. In contrast, Yiddish was showing higher survival rates in the two Baltic-speaking republics of Latvia and Lithuania, which had significantly smaller Jewish communities (only about 23,000 Jews in Latvia and about 12,000 in Lithuania, compared to about half a million each in Russia and Ukraine, and over 100,000 in Belarus), yet a much higher proportion declared knowledge of Yiddish: 26.9% in Latvia and 37.7% in Lithuania. Estonia's Jewish community was fairly small, less than 5,000 in 1989, and less than 15% of them declared knowledge of Yiddish. In contrast, in Moldova, the Jewish community was substantial (over 65,000) and about a third of them declared knowledge of Yiddish.
As mentioned above, the process of linguistic russification of the Ashkenazi Jews began in big cities, and the loss of Yiddish continued to be faster in large industrial cities of Russia and Ukraine throughout the Soviet period. For example, while about 11% of Ashkenazi Jews in Russia knew Yiddish in 1989, only 9.1% of those living in Moscow and 8.7% of those living in St. Petersburg did. This contrast is even more evident in the case of Ukraine and Belarus. In Ukraine, 11% of Jews knew Yiddish, but less than 8% of the Jews residing in the capital Kiev did. Similarly, in Belarus, 14.3% of Jews declared knowledge of Yiddish, but only 10.8% did so in the capital Minsk. In the regions surrounding the capital cities, a much higher proportion of Jews spoke Yiddish than in the capital cities (17.3% in Kiev Oblast', 19.6% in Minsk Oblast').
In fact, the negative correlation between urbanization levels (see Wikipedia map on the left) and percentage of Jews speaking Yiddish can be observed across Ukraine (as noted by Tolts). In the more urban regions of Eastern Ukraine—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk—the percentage of Jews speaking Yiddish varied from 9.3% (Donetsk oblast') to 6.3% (Dnipropetrovsk oblast'). In contrast, the more rural regions, such as Ivanovo-Frankivsk, Vinnitsa, Transcarpathia, and Chernovtsy, the percentages of Jews speaking Yiddish were significantly higher (ranging from 18.6% in Ivanovo-Frankivsk oblast' to 33.9% in Chernovtsy oblast'). Tolts explains the higher levels of Yiddish retention in Vinnitsa, Zhitomir, Khmel'nitsky, Ivano-Frankovsk and Kiev regions by appealing to their historical past as "part of the Tsarist Pale of Settlement before 1917"; however, the same factor cannot explain a much lower levels of Yiddish retention in Kherson, Odessa, and Mikolyiv (aka Nikolaev) regions in southern Ukraine, which formed the Kherson Governorate, also part of the Pale of Settlement. I do agree with Tolts, however, in that some aspects of geopolitical history played an indirect role in the later retention of Yiddish among Jews in those regions. For example, he mentions that "Chernovtsy, Zakarpat'e and others, were included in the Soviet Union only during the Second World War". This joining "the happy family of the Soviet peoples" at a relatively late date meant that these regions experienced less linguistic russification. (The linguistic history of Zakarpat'e/Transcarpathia is rather more complex, though, as discussed in my earlier post).
The overall level of linguistic russification of a given region, I believe, is one of the crucial factors that determined the level of Yiddish retention. This tendency is particularly clear in the case of Ukraine: in those areas of Ukraine where Russian rather than Ukrainian is more commonly spoken, fewer Jews speak Yiddish. This factor helps explain the relatively low figures of Yiddish retention in the southern Ukrainian regions: 10.1% in Kherson region, 9.8% in Odessa region, 8.2% in Mikolayiv region. As mentioned above, these areas were part of the Tsarist Pale of Settlement, yet they show a very different picture with respect to Yiddish retention than other areas of the Pale in western Ukraine. Moreover, outside of the regional capitals, these regions are not heavily urbanized, so urbanization alone cannot explain the low retention of Yiddish either. However, as the map on the left shows, these are regions of predominantly ethnic Ukrainian population that is mostly Russian speaking. (It must be noted that in the last couple of years there has been a shift in the ethnolinguistic landscape and attitudes towards the Russian language, as discussed in my earlier post.)
Interestingly, no such correlation between the higher proportion of Russian speakers and lower retention of Yiddish among the Jewish population can be observed in Belarus. First of all, Belarus as a whole exhibits a much higher degree of linguistic russification, especially when it comes to the use of language at home and the transmission of language to children; in these respects, russification in Belarus has been so severe that UNESCO considers Belarusian an endangered language (for a more detailed discussion and maps, see here). This heavy linguistic russification of Belarus was evident during the Soviet period, yet the Yiddish retention rates of Belarus (in the 1989 census) are comparable to those of Ukraine and Russia (and are in fact a little higher). Furthermore, there is no correlation between the russification of a given region within Belarus and the levels of Yiddish retention there. The least heavily Russian-speaking regions (whether by proportion of native speakers or by language use at home) are the Grodno and Minsk regions. Yet, while Grodno Oblast' had the lowest Yiddish-retention figure of 13.2%, Minsk Oblast' boasted the second highest figure of 19.6%. (Mogilev Oblast' had the highest Yiddish-retention figure of 20.8%.)
(Parenthetically, I would like to note that the low Yiddish-retention in Grodno Oblast' is ironic since its capital city has been home to one of the oldest Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. According to Spolsky (2014: 181), it dates back to 1128 CE; most other sources (e.g. Jewish Virtual Library), however, offer a more recent date of 1389 CE, when the Grodno Ashkenazi Jewish community supposedly received a charter from Grand Duke Vytautas, indicating the existence of a synagogue and cemetery and showing that Jews owned real estate in the city and its environs and engaged in commerce, crafts, and agriculture. However, yet other sources such as the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe claim that the 1389 charter is a forgery dating from the early sixteenth century.)
In fact, variation among regions of Belarus in the rate of Yiddish retention remains somewhat a mystery. Tolts offers no explanation, beside pointing out that the biggest city, Minsk, shows the lowest rate of Yiddish retention. However, unlike Ukraine, which has clearly more and less urbanized areas, Belarus has one or two sizable cities per region (oblast') and no clearly urbanized regions. Therefore, more detailed linguistic census data is needed to see if the correlation between urbanization and loss of Yiddish can be observed in Belarus. Moreover, as mentioned above, linguistic russification alone cannot explain all the Yiddish retention data for Belarus. However, the late inclusion into the USSR and relatively lesser russification does help explain the relatively high Yiddish retention figures in Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova. (Estonia, however, remains a mystery, as Belarus does.) Finally, when it comes to Russia proper, there are also some sharp contrasts in Yiddish retention rates among the different regions (data in Tolts' paper is mapped on the left). As in the other republics, discussed above, large cities (chiefly Moscow and St. Petersburg) have lower Yiddish retention rates than the surrounding regions. Yet there are other patterns that I am at a loss to explain. For example, Tolts mentions that "the Volga region had the largest number of units with high totals declaring Yiddish: Astrakhan oblast (19.6 per cent), Tatar republic (18.9 per cent) and Penza oblast (18.4 per cent)", but I fail to see why this could be so. Any readers who have ideas about this are welcome to comment in the Disqus section below.
While the census data cited above paint a grim picture of a rapid loss of Yiddish across the FSU, an analysis taking into account population structure (esp. age and gender) reveals the situation to be even more severe. Thus, Tolts points out that "in the censuses, older Jews more often declared Yiddish as their native or second language […] Thus, the process of aging has partly offset and camouflaged the decline of Yiddish in the FSU" (p. 4). Moreover, he shows that across the republics of the FSU, more women than men declare knowledge of Yiddish, both as native and as a second language. However, this gender bias is tied to the age structure; Tolts writes:
"The female Jewish population is much older than the male Jewish population (according to the data of the 1989 census, in the FSU as a whole, the median age of Jewish females was more than 6 years higher than that of Jewish males), and in older ages, the proportion declaring Yiddish was higher." (p. 10)
Therefore, even if the same trends had continued from 1989 onwards, the number of Jews who spoke Yiddish in the FSU would have been expected to continue declining precipitously. However, in addition to continuing demographic trends (e.g. aging Jewish population, non-transmission of Yiddish to children in larger cities, etc.) something changed abruptly in 1989: after the fall of the USSR, the majority of its Jews immigrated to Israel. According to the Wikipedia, "about 1.6 million Soviet Jews and their non-Jewish relatives and spouses" left the FSU between 1989 and 2006. As a result of all these processes, less than half of the 56,341 Yiddish-speaking Jews who lived in Russia in 1989 were accounted for in the 2010 census. One is left wondering how many more Yiddish speakers were lost in the last five years…
Additional Sources:
Spolsky, B. (2014) The Languages of the Jews. A Sociolinguistic History. Cambridge University Press.
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