The Mother Tongue Read Online Free

language. The same is true of Korean.
    Or perhaps not. There is increasing evidence to suggest that languages widely dispersed geographically may be more closely related than once thought. This is most arrestingly demonstrated by the three language families of the New World: Eskimo-Aleut, Amerind, and Na-Dene. It was long supposed that these groups were quite unrelated to any other Ian age families, including each other. But recent studies of cognate that is, words that have similar spellings and meanings in two or more languages, such as the French tu, the English thou, and the -Hittite tuk, all meaning
    "you"—have found possible links between some of those most un-likely language partners: for instance, between Basque and Na- Dene, an Indian language spoken mainly in the northwest United States and Canada, and between Finnish and Eskimo-Aleut. No one has come up with a remotely plausible explanation of how a language spoken only in a remote corner of the Pyrenees could have come to influence Indian languages of the New World, but the links between many cognates are too numerous to explain in terms of simple coincidence. Some cognates may even be universal. The word for dog for instance, is supsiciously similar in Am- 24

    THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE
    erind, Uralic, and Proto-Indo-European, while the root form "tik,"
    signifying a finger or the number one, is found on every continent .
    -As Merrit Ruhlen noted in Natural History magazine [March 1987]:
    "The significant number of such global cognates leads some lin-guists to conclude that all the world's languages ultimately belong to a single language family."
    There are any number of theories to account for how language began. The theories have names that seem almost to be begging ridicule—the Bow-Wow theory, the Ding-Dong theory, the Pooh- Pooh theory, the Yo-He-Ho theory—and they are generally based in one way or another on the supposition that languages come ultimately from sp o ntaneous utterances of al
    arm, joy, pain, and so
    on, or that they are somehow imitative , onomatopoeic of sounds in the real world. Thus, for instance, the Welsh word f hw
    or owl, gwdi-
    pronounced "goody-hoo," may mimic the sound an owl makes.
    There is, to be sure, a slight tendency to have words cluster around certain sounds. In English we have a large number of sp- words pertaining to wetness: spray, splash, spit, sprinkle, splatter, spatter, spill, spigot. And we have a large number of fl- words to do with movement: flail, flap, flicker, flounce, flee. And quite a num-ber of words ending in -ash describe abrupt actions: flash, dash, crash, bash, thrash, smash, slash. Onomatopoeia does play a part in language formation, but whether it or any other feature alone can accounts for how languages are formed is highly doubtful.
    It is intriguing to see how other languages hear certain sounds—and how much better their onomatopoeic words often are. Dogs go oua-oua in France, bu-bu in Italy, mung-mung in Korea, wan-wan in Japan; a purring cat goes ron-ron in France, schnurr in Ger-many; a bottle being emptied goes gloup-gloup in China, tot-tot-to in Spain; a heartbeat is doogan-doogan in Korea, doki-doki in Ja- pan; bells go bimbam in Germany, dindan in Spain. The Spanish word for whisper is susurrar. How could it be anything else?
    Much of what we know, or think we know, about the roots of language comes from
    watching children learn to speak. For a long
    time it was believed that language was simply learned. Just as we learn, say, the names and locations of the fifty states or our mul-tiplication tables, so we must learn the "rules" of speech—that we 7 25

    THE MOTHER TONGUE
    don't say "house white is the," but rather "the house is white." The presumption was that our minds at birth were blanlk slates onto which the rules and quirks of our native languages were written.
    But then other authorities, notably Noam Chomsky of the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology, began to challenge this view,