The Power of Babel

All of my readers, or perhaps I should say both of my readers, would enjoy John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. McWhorter presents a compelling picture of why and how languages change over time, but all three hundred pages of his argument are contained in five principles:

1. Sound Change. Everyone everywhere tends to pronounce accented syllables more clearly and unaccented syllables less clearly. If the first generation brings the unaccented syllable in a word from a clarity of level ten to a clarity of level eight, then eight is now the new standard of clarity for the second generation; the second generation then brings it from eight to six, and six is now the standard of clarity for the third generation; eventually, the sound just drops off, as did all the case endings of Latin on the way to the formation of the Romance languages. McWhorter convincingly compares this to the erosion of soft rocks in the mountains.

2. Extension. A rule that applies only to a particular grammatical situation is eventually applied everywhere, as people find it easier to use one rule all the time. For example, the English genitive in apostrophe plus “s” was once only one of several possible genitive endings, but was extended to cover every case of possession.

3. The expressiveness cycle. We’re all familiar with this one; C.S. Lewis describes it in his essay, “The Death of Words”. A new phrase or word is introduced as an especially forceful description; the new phrase is so good that it is used again and again; eventually, it looses its force by long use and joins the ranks of “dead words”. “Awesome” originally spoke to an experience of the numinous, of the divine; it was applied to terrestrial things as an expression of extreme force, was used again and again, and now describes the taste of a cheeseburger.

4. Rebracketing. McWhorter tells about his mother’s experience as a girl at church. She was convinced that the congregation sang a song about a bear with an ocular misalignment: the story of “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.” She put “cross-eyed” together from the originally separate “cross I’d”, and created a new title entirely. Another example is the word “nickname”: it began as “an eke-name” (literally “an also-name”), but the “n” moved over so that now we have “a nickname”.

5. Semantic change. This is a kind of catch-all category for the general fact that words change meaning over time. McWhorter gives the example of “silly”, which originally meant “blessed”. Blessedness implies innocence, the innocent are deserving of compassion, those who deserve compassion are generally weak, and the weak are often foolish—and behold, “silly” has gone from “blessed” to “foolish”! This sort of “drift” happens to words all the time as people apply words creatively to new situations.

The important point to note about all five of these principles is that they are independent of changes in culture, location, or government. While a particular language change may relate to a particular event in history, the general phenomenon of language change is independent of any general force in history: language changes constantly by its very nature. McWhorter compares it to a lava lamp, or to cloud formations, always changing but not necessarily changing towards anything in particular: just changing. And in fact, his conclusion seems born out by history.

If this is true, then I can say several other geeky things:

1) Despite what some say, Hebrew was not the language spoken in Eden. Even on a young-earth theory, several thousand years elapsed between the death of the early generations and the first recorded words of Scripture, and so necessarily language had changed dramatically in the meantime.

2) If Adam had not sinned and so death had not entered the world, the original language and its speakers would have continued forever. Aside from the “expressiveness cycle”, each of the five principles of language change seems to depend to some degree on the fact that one generation gives way to another, but this would not have been the case. Once might argue that the expressiveness cycle itself would have been mitigated, because man’s unfallen imagination would not have needed the aid of ever-new linguistic explosions to maintain a vividness of perception. So the intriguing possibility is introduced that the splintering of language is a result of the fall and of death—a fact surely related to the interpretation of the story of Babel, whence McWhorter’s book takes its name. The only factor I can think to the contrary is geographical separation of speakers.

3) It’s fun to apply all of this to The Lord of the Rings, in which men and hobbits die but Elves do not. Hooray for Elvish!