Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (40 page)

The second surprise is that speakers of different languages all use more or less this same subset of words frequently in their speech and a different set infrequently. It seems that around the world we all talk about the same things and in roughly the same amounts. This holds whether the speaker is French or Bantu, Chinese or Hungarian, Basque, English, Turkish, Finnish, Greek, or using a Polynesian language. We know this from studying a common set of words that the American linguist Morris Swadesh, working in the 1950s, proposed as a “fundamental vocabulary.” Swadesh’s goal was to identify a list of words that should be found in all human languages. It includes words such as
what, where, when, mother, father, fish, bird, hold, count, throw, float, say, day, night, bite, eat, sky, drink
,
and
louse
, along with number words, names of body parts, pronouns, colors, and common verbs, adjectives, and nouns. It deliberately excludes technological words or words that describe specific environments or features of them.
Louse
might surprise modern readers, but Swadesh was interested in the history of language use, and lice infections have been a common feature of our history—and still are in many parts of the world (and annoyingly among children of school age).

Linguists and linguist-missionaries have translated this list into thousands of languages around the world. The frequently used words in nearly every language are typically
I
,
you
,
he
,
she,
it
, and other pronouns; the verb
to be
; number words like
two, three, four, five
; and
who
,
what
,
where
,
why
, and
when
. Other words in the Swadesh list such as
scratch
,
guts
,
stick
,
throw
, and
dirty
are typically used much less often, no matter what culture is studied. Putting this together with the results from the
Oxford English Dictionary
, we not only seem to be using language the same way around the world, but for the same reasons—principally to talk about each other, to refer to quantities of things, and to what people are doing, when they did it, to whom, and how much. These are also the words that we would expect to be used if language is for promoting and monitoring social relations, making exchanges, and advertising and assessing reputations. Because this information comes from a worldwide sample of languages, it is a reasonable step from there to guess that this will have been true throughout the history of human language use.

The genes you pass on to your children will have been replicated or copied only a small number of times between you acquiring them from your parents and then your children inheriting them from you. Even so, each time a gene is copied there is a chance that a mutation or error will creep in, and over long periods of time genes can change out of all recognition. But for a word to last for even a generation it will have been spoken—its sound replicated—thousands or even millions of times, and of course this will be especially true of the frequently used words. If words could not be stably transmitted from mind to mind, then something I told you about someone else might get corrupted by the time it makes it way around the tribe—like what happens in a game of
Whispers
or
Telephone
. And something my mother said in her youth might not be intelligible to me by the time I am old enough to appreciate it. If this happened, our cultures would erode and decay.

But this is not what happens. In fact, our languages can demonstrate quite extraordinary degrees of stability over long periods of time, far longer than is necessary for us to be able to communicate with each other throughout our lifetimes. Here, for example, is 1,000 years of the evolution of the familiar Lord’s Prayer, spanning Old to Modern English:

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.

OLD ENGLISH—11TH C.

Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyndoom come to; be thi wille don in erthe as in heuene.

MIDDLE ENGLISH—1380

Our father which art in heauen, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdome come. Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heauen.

EARLY MODERN ENGLISH:
King James Bible
—1611

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.

LATE MODERN ENGLISH
Book of Common Prayer
—1928

Most of us have great difficulty now in reading the Old English, but what we see from one version of the Lord’s Prayer to the next is the gradual process that Darwin called “descent with modification.” We saw this earlier as a description of how species, over long periods of time, give rise to somewhat different daughter or descendant species. Darwin appreciated that a similar process was true of languages, saying in
The Descent of Man
, “The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel… .” Ancestral languages evolve to give rise to somewhat different daughter languages, which in turn do the same. Each of these daughter languages retains some of the features of its ancestral or mother tongue, but differences creep in as people fan out to occupy new areas.

When this process is played out over a large area, and among different sets of ancestral and descendant languages, entire family trees of related languages evolve. This was recognized as early as the late eighteenth century, nearly a hundred years before Darwin, by an English judge, Sir William Jones, working in colonial India during the reign of George III. To process court papers, Sir William found it necessary to learn Sanskrit, and in doing so he became aware of curious parallels between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. Jones described these to a meeting of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta on February 2, 1786, noting that the Sanskrit language bears “a stronger affinity… [to Greek and Latin] . . . both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” For instance, the Sanskrit word for the English “brother” is
bhratar
; the ancient Greeks used the word
phrater
(
ϕρᾱτηρ
) to mean something akin to a fraternity or brotherhood; and
frater
is the Latin word for “brother.” Another example is the Sanskrit word for “three” or
tri
, which is
tria
(
τρία
) in Greek and Latin. The familiar-sounding
khanda
in Sanskrit is the French word
candi
and the English “candy.”

What Jones had identified would later be recognized as the Indo-European language family, and it includes the languages currently spoken all over Europe, parts of Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew in his
Archaeology and Language
links the spread of these languages to the origin of agriculture sometime around 9,000–10,000 years ago in the region of the world known as the Fertile Crescent (roughly present-day Turkey and Iraq). Farming reset the world’s carrying capacity to a higher level, allowing a greater number of people to survive in a given area. The growing populations meant that farmers and their ideas spread out in all directions from the Fertile Crescent. Those that went north and west formed what we recognize today as the Greek, Germanic, and Romance or Latinate languages of Western Europe; those that went north and east produced the Slavic languages; and those that went south gave rise to the languages of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The Basque language of northern Spain, although in Europe, is not an Indo-European language. In fact, it might be an isolated remant of the languages that were spoken by the hunter-gatherers in Europe before farming and farmers arrived. Russell Gray and his colleagues were later able to confirm Renfrew’s arguments by applying dating techniques to the Indo-European languages, confirming that this family probably did arise sometime around 9,000 years ago. And it is because of descent with modification within the separate branches of this family that today we recognize similarities in the Romance languages of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, just as we recognize similarities in the Germanic languages of German, Danish, Dutch, and English.

But how long can the words causing these similarities last, and are there some in particular that turn up over and over in different languages as ones that get retained for the longest periods of time? It turns out that it is the small subset of words that we use most frequently in our everyday speech—and especially those we have suggested are related to social relations—that can show truly startling resistance to changing, sometimes being conserved in a related form across all Indo-European languages. For example, linguists recognize that the number word for
two
of something is probably derived in all Indo-European languages from the same shared ancestral sound that has been conserved for thousands of years. Thus, in Spanish the word is
dos
, it is
twee
in Dutch,
deux
in French,
due
(doo-ay) in Italian,
dois
in Portuguese,
duo
(
δύο
) in Greek,
di
in Albanian,
do
in Hindi and Punjabi, and Caesar would have said
duo
. This leads to the proposal that the original or proto-Indo-European word was also
two
-like in its sound, and indeed some scholars suggest
duwo
or
duoh
.

A handful of other words, including the words for
three
and
five
,
who
,
I
, and
you
, are also highly conserved like the word for
two
. For example, the English
three
is
tre
in Swedish and Danish,
drei
in German,
tre
in Italian and
tres
in Spanish,
tria
in Greek,
teen
in Hindi and
tin
in Panjabi, and
tri
in Czech. The proto-Indo-European word for
three
might have been
trei
. These conserved words are closely followed by other pronouns such as
he
and
she
, and by the
what
,
where
, and
why
words, all of which can show a striking degree of similarity among many Indo-European languages. Remembering that the Indo-
European
languages all derive from a common ancestral language, this tells us these words have been retained in separately evolving branches of this family tree, each one of which represents up to 9,000 years of language change. If we add up the time in each of these branches, we see that some words have not substantially changed their forms for what is, in effect, hundreds of thousands of “language-years” (thus, for example, the sound for
three
has been evolving separately in the Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and Indian languages).

This degree of conservation tells us that the people alive in the parts of the world where the Indo-European languages arose might have been using forms of these slowly changing words that we could still recognize today. Their words would not have been identical to our modern words, but close enough that if we travelled back in time and encountered a gang of three of our proto-Indo-European ancestors, we might be able to point to ourselves and say, “I, one,” then pointing to them, say, “You, three,” and be understood. Now, this might not be a wise or even very imaginative thing to do, and you might think it a limited conversation anyway. But consider that if you are of Indo-European origins and you are reading this book on an international flight, you might have less in common linguistically with the person seated next to you than you would with a linguistic ancestor who lived close to 10,000 years ago.

How far back in time can we go with words? The existence of a set of highly conserved words raises the possibity that we might be able to find some evidence for what our mother tongue, or the language of the very first humans, was like. The linguist Merrit Ruhlen has proposed twenty-seven “global etymologies,” or words left over from our original or proto-language, citing evidence that they are found in many language families from all over the world. Ruhlen’s list includes words for
who
,
what
,
two
,
water
, and
finger
or
one
. For instance, Ruhlen points out that the sounds
tok
,
tik
,
dik
, or
tak
surface repeatedly in these language families as a word for the number
one
or
toe
or a
digit
. Ruhlen’s proposals have always been highly controversial among linguists, but it should not escape our attention that he includes words we have seen are among those that are both frequently used and highly conserved. They are also those we might have expected if indeed we have used language to monitor and manipulate social relations throughout our history.

Whether or not we can ever reconstruct the human mother tongue, we should be astonished that words can be retained and conserved over thousands of years and potentially millions of speakers. For a word to be transmitted, a sound I make must travel through the air and enter your ear, where it is turned (transduced) into an electrical signal that travels to your brain. Then, at a later time when you want to use the word, your brain must somehow send messages to your mouth and lungs to get you to produce the same sound. That sound will then travel to someone else’s ear, where the process will be repeated. The opportunities for corruption or loss of signal are many. We should also remember that, unlike for genes, there is seldom any necessary connection between a word’s form (its sound) and its meaning—I might just as easily call a
tree
a
table
, and vice versa. Where a gene’s chemical form is directly related to the protein it makes, this “form-function” connection is generally only true in language of the so-called onomatopoeic words that imitate sounds, like
bang
,
meow
,
moo
,
woof
, or
pop
.