Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (41 page)

We might have suspected that the more a word is used, the more likely it is to acquire mistakes or errors as it passes out of successive speakers’ mouths, into others’ minds via their ears, and then out again. Instead, it is the words we use less often that are more prone to changing. Consider that in contrast to a highly conserved word like
two
, what English speakers call a
bird
the Germans call a
vogel
, the Spanish say
pajaro
, the Italians
ucello
, the French
oiseau
; to Aristotle and modern Greeks after him, the word is
pouli
, and Caesar would have said
avis
. Words like
dirty
and
guts
are even more variable. For instance, compared to the conservation of sounds for
two
of something, there are at least forty-five different words for
dirty
among the Indo-European languages (four of these are the German
schmutzig
, Dutch
vuil,
French
sale
, and Spanish
sucio
). In fact, a given word for
dirty
gets replaced by some new sound every 800 years or so, compared to the many thousands of years a word like
two
can last.

Are these infrequently used words more prone to change because they are somehow less important and so it doesn’t matter so much if someone comes up with a new word or mispronounces an existing one? This might be part of the answer, but only indirectly. When we think about it, we realize that because there is seldom any connection between a word as a mere sound and that word’s meaning, different words (sounds) have to compete with each other for the privilege of carrying a particular meaning. We can pick and choose among them, and this competition for our affections is natural selection acting on words, sieving out the winners from the losers. Among English speakers, nearly everyone uses the word
kitchen
to describe the place where they prepare their food. That sound has won in competition with other sounds we might produce—such as
scullery
or
galley
—to describe that particular meaning. In other cases, we can see the competition for space in our minds going on in front of us in common words like
sofa
and
couch
or
living room
,
sitting room
,
reception room
, or
parlor
.

Which of these forms will win? There are no simple answers, but precisely because there is seldom any necessary connection between a sound and its meaning, the competition often focuses on characteristics of the sounds themselves, and we can expect the competition to be more intense the more we use a word. One of the most common ways that frequently used words adapt to our minds is to get shorter. Do you say
automobile
or
car
?
Refrigerator
or
fridge
?
Cannot
or
can’t
? The Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf had recognized this relationship between frequent use and shorter words by the 1930s and it is now enshrined in the eponymous Zipf’s law. We give people “diminutives,” or shorter names, for names like Alexander (Alex) or William (Will, Bill), Arthur (Art), Richard (Dick), David (Dave), Michael (Mike), but we seldom if ever lengthen a name. We see this too in the contractions—
can’t, won’t, don’t
, and in familiar usages like
g’morning
or
g’day
. So strong is the effect Zipf’s law describes that none of the words that English-language speakers use more than a few thousand utterances in every million is longer than around five letters (words like
the
,
and
, and
is
might be used 10,000 to 30,000 times per million). If a sound “wants” to be highly used as a word, it can’t afford to be long. When we say someone uses “big words” to mean he or she uses words we don’t know, we are, without knowing it, recognizing that the words we don’t know are typically ones we don’t hear very often, and so natural selection has not pared them down to size.

We learn from this that out of all the possible sounds we could make as words, only a far smaller number has ever been used. The
Oxford English Dictionary
catalogues around 250,000 English words, of which around 50,000 are considered extinct or no longer used. This might sound like a large number, but even 250,000 words is just a minuscule subset of all possible words. Consider just for sake of discussion that English conventionally defines five vowels and twenty-one consonants. Let’s consider how many six-letter words we could make from this set of twenty-six letters, restricting ourselves to words with two vowels and four consonants, as in a word like
letter
or
friend
. If words are unrestricted, then each of the four consonants could be any one of the twenty-one that we can choose from and each of the two vowels can be any one of five. This leads to 21×21×21×21×5×5 = 4,862,025 possible six-letter words with two vowels. Let’s now move to seven-letter words also with two vowels: say, a word like
letters
or
friends
. There are 21
×
4,862,025 = 102,102,525 possible varieties of these!

This simple exercise tells us that the survivors among all the possible sounds that could have become words—that is, the words we actually use—are a highly rarefied set of winners of an overwhelming competition to occupy our minds. For example, there are no words in English that begin with “ng” and words that begin with “q” are nearly always followed by “u.” Adding to this already intense competition among sounds is that our minds are remarkably good at remembering words, meaning we can compare them with ease. In fact, so good are our minds at remembering words that we easily recognize words that are used less than once per million utterances in normal speech, even if we cannot always remember their meanings.
Adumbrate, dilatory, feculent, parvenu, fractious
,
and
traduce
are all used perhaps one to five times per million utterances.
Eponymous
—mentioned earlier—is another. How many do you recognize? How about
demanate
? Don’t recognize it? Good, because it is not recognized as an English word. If you got all of these right, or even most of them, then your mind can routinely discriminate words it hears at only very low frequencies from so-called words like
demanate
that it should have never heard.

We are beginning to get an answer to our question of why frequently used words might be so stable. It is not necessarily their importance to communication per se. Rather, the frequently used words might be stable over long periods of time because they have become so highly adapted to our minds that it becomes difficult for a new form to arise to outcompete or dislodge them. It is no accident, then, that all of the highly used and highly conserved words that we use in talking about social relations—
who
,
what
,
where
,
why
,
when
,
you
,
me
,
I
,
he
,
she
,
we
,
it
, and the number words from
one
to
ten
—are short, mostly monosyllabic, and easy to pronounce. This isn’t just a property of English or Indo-European languages more generally. Listen to the numbers one to nine for the New Guinean language of Mangareva:
tahi, rua, toru, ha, rima, ono, hitu, varu, iva
.
The frequently used words also evolve to be distinct from each other and therefore less prone to being misunderstood. Try saying the words
mail
and
nail
,
fail
and
veil
, or
bale
and
pail
over the phone to someone, and there is a good chance you will be misunderstood. Now, imagine
fail
means
two
and
veil
means
ten
, and you are using these words to order shirts over the phone from a clothing retailer: chances are if you wanted two, your bill might be higher than you expected. But this sort of thing seldom happens with the number words because we don’t mishear them—they have evolved to be distinct. And this is also true of the words we have said are related to social relations more generally. Humans have domesticated language to make it efficient at communicating what they want to talk about the most.

Incidentally, this discussion of how languages adapt to our needs as speakers can help us to understand a proposal that has never caught on. Esperanto is a designed or made-up language that was proposed in the late nineteenth century as a politically neutral and easy-to-learn universal system of communication. But despite attracting a loyal band of followers, it has never become popular. One reason might be that it is not really politically neutral, with many of its words linked to or drawn from Indo-European languages and especially Latin and Greek forms: “yes” in Esperanto is
jes
, “hello” is
saluton
, and “no” is
ne
(which would be especially confusing to Greeks as
ne
[
ναι
] means “yes” in Greek). “Good morning” is
Bonan matenon
. A second reason is that Esperanto was probably never really necessary, especially now as English is used so widely, not to mention that adopting Esperanto meant giving up one’s own linguistic heritage. But the final and most interesting reason from the perspective of our discussion of how words evolve is that to succeed, Esperanto has to win in competition with other languages. But unlike these competitors, Esperanto is made up. It has not had to evolve to suit our minds and the ways we speak. There is reason, then, to suspect that it is not as “good” a language (not as easy to learn, use, or speak) as natural languages that have had to go through the sieving of cultural selection.

If our natural languages can be so stable and easy to use as a result of their evolution, why are there so many around the world? There are about 7,000 different languages currently in use, and this is almost certainly far fewer than there were in our past. Even 7,000 is more different languages for a single species of mammal than there are mammal species. By comparison, all human beings share a more or less identical set of our other great digital system of inheritance, our genes. Why the difference? The Babel myth we saw earlier provides one explanation and yields the amusing irony that our many languages exist to stop us from communicating! In Chapter 1 we even saw that there might be a kernel of truth to this. Groups of people often change their languages as an act of asserting their social identities, or as a way to be different from others living nearby.

But could there be another reason, one that is closer to the theme of the Babel story of restricting the flow of information? If our languages really do act as conduits of important social information, then it might be useful to protect this information from others, and especially so when they live nearby. Changing your language might be a way to avoid eavesdroppers who could be lurking in the bushes. The many different languages spoken in the tropics might come about because this is where people are the most tightly packed and have the greatest need to protect themselves.

Speaking a different language has the additional value that it allows people quickly to identify others who are not members of their group. There is the poignant scene in the movie
The
Great Escape
when the British and American prisoners of war have fled from their German captors and two of them find their way in disguise to a German railway station. A German officer at the station is suspicious but unable to identify them. Suddenly, he shouts out in German for everyone on the platform to get down. All of the German civilians immediately comply, exposing the fleeing prisoners, who are gunned down. Or listen to this passage from the Old Testament:

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivour of Ephraim said, “Let me go over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time. (Judges 12:5–6)

Languages that have gone through large numbers of what we might think of as cultural splitting events or divorces in their past—where one group of speakers, for whatever set of reasons, divides into two—tend to accumulate more changes than languages whose history records fewer social upheavals. It is as if the many-times-divorced languages have suffered a series of distinct bursts of rapid change, each one an attempt to distinguish the language from the form it is separating from. One such divorce might have influenced the form of American English. American English drops the
u
compared to British English in words such as
colour
,
behaviour
, and
honour
. These changes didn’t arise haphazardly or over long periods of time. Rather, they were introduced overnight when the American educator and compiler of dictionaries Noah Webster (1758–1843) produced his
American Dictionary of the English Language
. In preparing that work he insisted that “as an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” To Webster at least, spellings of words as a way of marking out a distinct identity had been elevated in importance to the philosophical issues that lay behind the American War of Independence.