November 13th, 2023

I read the introduction. I guess the book will explain the technical aspects of what makes a language, such as words, structure, declensions, conjugation, etc., before going into other things. I think then it will be how language is used or something like that. Somewhere in the middle it will try to explain what the “original” language may have been. Essentially modern languages are analyzed and then their features are back-traced to probably earlier features. Over time, languages “degrade”, such as the Italians lack of Latin declensions. These trends are then look at in reverse to see what our oldest written languages could have descended from. This is where all those conjectured Indo-European words and grammar come from. The author will also talk about how the things that created language may still exist in man today, and how the act of language destruction leads to language growth or change. Then there were a good number of pages about how linguists argue over whether language is genetically programmed in humans and by how much. This will not be discussed in the book. Well, there’s 7 chapters so let’s see where it goes.

November 14th, 2023

The first chapter is kind of boring, at least for me. It doesn’t seem to have much of a goal other than to talk about what some languages do. English depends on word order and has grammatical words to say what part of the sentence a clause is. It also has prefixes and suffixes to alter words. Russian and Latin change the end of a word depending on its case. Semitic languages have very odd verbal systems, with consonantal roots that are interwoven with standard vowels to determine its subjugation. The author keeps saying how we will explain how these came to be in chapter 7. I’ve read a lot about English and other languages before, so none of this was particularly interesting. The semitic verbs was new to me. This unrelated, but I wonder if Neanderthals could speak. I think I read they had limited noise making ability. Could a model be created of the vocal chords, larynx, mouth cavity, etc., and “vibrated” to see how it sounds? That’d be impressive.

November 16th, 2023

Chapter 2 talks about how the language changes. It uses a biblical passage to show the changes in English from today back to 1000. It describes a lot, but doesn’t explain much. Anyone can see that words change meaning, pronunciation and spelling change, English lost cases and complex conjugations, etc. He shows some German and French examples too. He talks about how all Indo-European languages stem from the same root and change through separation over years. He also talks about sound changes, such as the Germanic f (e.g. father) and Romance p (e.g. padre). He compares this to modern day pronunciation of th as f (e.g. I fink so). This is acceptable to the ear, despite not being proper. One day it may take over and we will lose th. For change in words, it kind of comes down to slang. He uses the example of “wicked”. It can mean evil (something wicked this way comes) or to a Bostonian, it can mean cool or whatever. Still not impressed. It’s all set-up, though it’s almost a quarter over.

November 18th, 2023

The third chapter gives some interesting details on what destroys language. A lot of it comes down to ease. If why go through the extra effort of saying a syllable when meaning is clear without it? For example, hlaf-weard degrades to hlaford degrades to lord. The “ed” in English past tense, or even the silent “e”, were once pronounced. The case system collapses as the meaning becomes clear with simpler systems, like word order or pre/post positioning. Pronunciation is the same. Grimm’s Law traces several consonantal changes in Germanic languages from its Indo-European cousins. Vowels change too, depending on adjacent sounds. A Swiss linguist proposed that all PIE verbs had “e” as the consonant. Some changed, like cut vs sec (e.g. dissect). He proposed that to transfer from e to a, there was an unknown intermediate that had not been found. He proposed it would have been some sort of glottal sound aX, but left it at the unknown. Decades later, the mysterious Hittite language was deciphered as a IE language, and there in the cuneiform tablet, a millennium older than Latin or Greek texts, was the “ah” verb. But destruction should not be seen as the key to some golden age of language thousands of years ago. For example, “chose” is a normal past tense word, However, in the past, it was chose and curon. This is the opposite direction of the flos-floris change. So where can we find the creative elements? They lie very close to the destructive elements, and thus were hard to detect. To be continued.

November 19th, 2023

I forgot one thing (at least) from chapter three. The “weakening” of hyperbole brings words to standard usage. For example, “not” started as some sort of equivalent “not in the slighted” type of word and now we use it as the standard for negation. That leads to chapter 4, how metaphors effect language. This chapter was more interesting. The first bit is that a lot of common usage words come from metaphor, which then becomes overused and the metaphor is forgotten. For example, after hearing “she greeted him coldly”, one does not think of temperature. That’s kind of the hole chapter. Then the author talks about how spatial words link to temporal and other types of sentences. Look at “from”. From is obviously spatial, but can be temporal (“from 5 to 7 o’clock”) and can be causal (“I’m sick from eating too much”). The author then goes to claim these basic grammatical terms were once in fact metaphors, and they come from something very simple: the human body. The most obvious one in English is “back”. A less obvious one is “front”, which has the etymology of “frontem”, Latin for forehead. So as metaphor dies, they create more vocabulary and even grammatical terms. Interesting stuff.

November 20th, 2023

Chapter 5 takes an odd turn and is written as a transcript at a language conference. Where before they lamented the destruction of language, the current speaker is going to talk about the creative forces that partner with destruction. Look at “go”. Originally only meant to mean movement, the phrase “going to” was created, meaning to move with the intent to do some other verb, which then by the time of Charles I became a future indicator, like will (which used to mean “want”, as it does in German or Dutch). Now many of us say “gonna”, and in black vernacular they sometimes drop the “is”, as in “X gonna give it to ya”.

An audience member asks how can a verb become an auxiliary. A different example is given, how the word “back of”, as in “at the back of the store”, goes from the noun “back” to a preposition. This conversation goes on and on. He talks about the complex French verb system to explain how endings to verbs came to be. In the future conjugation, “I will love” is j’aimerai, and if you go down the list of persons, you’ll see that the ending is nothing more than the verb “to have”. “To have to” had it’s meaning changed from an obligation to a statement of going to, and over time degraded to nothing more than a verbal cue at the end of the verb. Of course, this happened in written history, meaning the acts that destroyed Latin created French.

What about noun declensions? This is something more ancient, but the author says it may have been that in IE, there truly was one declension. A postposition was used after the noun to determine case, which then morphed with the noun. Over time, depending on the ending of the noun, sound changes and combinations and elisions would have developed unique endings. Thus the erosion of the postposition created a complex noun system.

That ends the chapter, but in Appendix A, the audience member is not happy about the answer for how a verb can turn into an auxiliary. The speaker says that all the grammatical terms we use are merely descriptions and now laws. The phrase “going to” was always used in the auxiliary position, as in “I X buy bread”. Where X may once have been “am going to the store to” (a normal verb), it weakened to “am going to” or “’m gonna”. Same for any of these swaps. The speaker notes that “gonna” can’t be a “true” auxiliary, because it doesn’t work in all cases. One does not say “Gonna you come tomorrow?” like you can will will or should. Language is much more fluid.

November 22nd, 2023

Chapter 6 goes big. It boils down to the claim that the biggest creative force in language is analogy and the mind’s desire to see and create order. Imagine a world where people start saying foots and gooses instead of feet and geese, and no one corrects them. A generation or two later, this becomes the standard and the old way is forgotten. One example given is that cherry comes from Norman French cherise, which is singular. The English saw this as the plural “cherries” and starting calling one a “cherry”, a completely made up word. More examples include the creation of -or nouns from verbs, like visitor or governor, or the “fluffing” of words, like this path: to compute → computer → to computerize. Some of this is in the appendices. The chapter ends with the author speculating how the Semitic verb system, described early, could come about from analogy. It’s long, but interesting to see the author come up with “normal” roots in the ancient past and describe how we would get the consonantal root system by the time ancient Akkadian was written. This book has definitely gotten better as the chapters advance. The last one is next, in which the author proposes his “original” language.

November 24th, 2023

The last chapter is a long one; it’s like 20% of the whole book. In it, the author tries to tell possible scenarios for how language can evolve from what the author calls the “me Tarzan” phase to a recognizably modern language. The example story is something like “girl fruit see, pick, eat, turn, mammoth see, etc,”. The givens here are that words already exist and some sort of structure exists. First, the words are only “things” or “actions”. There are no adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, or grammatical words. The “Caesar principle” is used, as in everything is told in order. In the sections that I read, the author, in no particular order, describes how pronouns may have evolved, as well as adjectives and prepositions. For pronouns, we must assume the existence of pointing words, meaning “this” or “that”. Once the brain can understand the malleable meaning of these words, how this can become that based on proximity, then this can expand into personal pronouns. It can then be understood that my “me” is your “you” or even your “he”.

Prepositions may have come about from the over usage and weakening of certain verbs. For example, “give” already has a non-literal meaning, as in “I gave it my all”. That could further erode from the original meaning. Imagine a scenario where “give” is the second word in a sequence: “I bring meat, give you”. Through constant use, this becomes equivalent to “I bring meat to you”, thus turning the verb “give” into a preposition. It can then expand further into the metaphorical context. I started dozing off during the adjective bit, so I’ll have to reread it.

November 26th, 2023

Adjectives, or property-words, have two lives. There’s the high life as the object of a verb, such as “the stone is sharp”, or at a basic (or foreign) level, “stone sharp”. Here the adjective is independent and has its own place in the sentence. This can easily evolve from a standard thing-action statement. The low life is where it is dependent on the object, like “man sharp stone throw”. This could have been a product of the “this/that” type, where the pointing word is insufficient to determine what is required. If “that stone” doesn’t help distinguish between 5 stones, then “that sharp stone” may. These words are usually based on object words, like how colors “orange” and “violet” come from a fruit and a flower. The low life is a critical evolution because now two separate words are combined to fit in one slot. From that, it’s an easy transition to many words into one slot and more abstract attachments like quantifiers, articles, case/plurals, or possessives.

The next bit is about nouns and verbs. In many languages, it’s very easy to turn a noun into a verb; you just use it as a verb. You water the flowers or you skin an animal. To turn a verb into a noun is difficult; you need some sort of modification. A building is built, an explosion stems from something exploding. These modifications, along with modifications with verb tenses, tend to stem from another word that through erosion becomes attached. Then through analogy this spreads to other words and becomes a system in itself.

Lastly, all of this leads to the most complex part of language: subordination. This is really a simple extrusion of the property words and objectification of verbs. Instead of saying “I killed the lion. He was chasing the rabbit. The rabbit was running towards me.”, one can now say “I killed the lion chasing the rabbit running towards me”. This one sentence consists of two subordinate clauses that describe (like property words) which lion and which rabbit. This subordination can continue ad nauseam. To make things less confusing, we usually would add “that” at the start of the relative clause. This may stem from the demonstrative use. It may once have been “I killed the lion. That one chasing the rabbit” and eroded to become a clause marker. That’s pretty much it. The author spent 50 pages drawing high level examples of how basic and limited speech could become complex and nuanced language. All that is left is an epilogue.

November 27th, 2023

Finished the book today. The epilogue, as expected, sums up the book. A question the author asks is: does language change linearly, or does it go forever in cycles? The author says that from the caveman days up to a point, it advanced and became more complex. Once it reached a level of complexity, it possibly goes in cycles of becoming less complex through erosion and then complex again through addition of prefixes and suffixes to words. However, in the historical period we only see a “decline” from the complex PIE structure down to today. Why is this? Well, poorly document hunter-gather languages, which are dying everyday, do still have quite complex systems. This may be because of two reasons. First, they are only spoken among small groups of people that have little interaction with other cultures. There is no need to change the language to ease communication between different cultures, like the English and Danish in the Viking era. Another reason is literacy. The written word reinforces the idea of separation between words and also enforces a “concreteness” in structure. In speech, words bleed together and can be modified without a “rule book” to enforce the old way is the right way. As cultural ties expanded and the written word became more important, language simplified and solidified. What will the future bring? Who knows. I wonder if I lived 1000 years, would I still understand the English of the day. We will never know.