The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue

by Merritt Ruhlen

Book Overview

The author of this book argues that there is proof to argue that all languages now spoken on earth are descendents of a single ancestral language.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471159638
• ISBN13: 9780471159636
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Groundbreaking ideas for the non-specialist

I have given this book 5 stars because of the potential significance of the ideas it contains. The book is a bit quirky and I can see why those trained in linguistics might give it the thumbs down. The methods and approach that are described in the book are not rigorous. However, they are designed to present a few important concepts and in that regard, I think the book succeeds. First of all, this book and its author have been seriously challenged by mainstream academics. But it is worth pointing out that there are two sides to any debate. In a nutshell, the author bases his ideas (in part) on those of his mentor Greenberg and he presents the idea that it is possible to identify protolanguages that existed and form the basis for the language families of today. In itself, that is nothing terribly new or controversial. It is well understood that languages like Hindi, German, Welsh, Latin, English, Greek, Hittite etc. all fall into a common language family known as Indo-European and that a proto-indo-european (PIE) language may have been spoken somewhere in eastern Europe or the middle east thousands of years ago. Rather than review the book in depth, I would like to take the space provided here to argue against the critics of this book. The book becomes controversial when the suggestion is made that remnants of an original common world language can be identified from a few common words found in many of the world's existing languages. The major criticisms of this idea are (as I understand it): 1) Ruhlen does not use methodology that is considered appropriate by most linguists. He uses a global comparison approach which many linguists believe favours the identification of chance similarities. Ruhlen himself argues elsewhere that the length of the words he has identified rules out the possibility of chance comparison. Because I do not know any way of easily evaluating this statistically, I cannot comment on this argument. However, as a scientist, I would never dare to argue that something was not true solely because the only method that was accepted by the academic community provided no evidence for its truth. 2) It is argued that the rate of language change is too great for there to be any possibility of comparison between major language families. Here I have to differ. Of course I am not a linguist. But it seems to me obvious that the rate of change of languages depends on many social and geographic factors. A larger population might be expected to have a more stable language structure than a smaller population for example. It might be argued for example that language would evolve faster among small mobile populations spread out over a large geographical space (e.g. the America 12,000 years ago). It is argued that over just a few hundred years, French and English have changed almost to the point of being different languages. This may be true, but obviously we can still easily discern similarities between Indo-European languag

Controversial Thesis: All Languages Come from One Source

This is Ruhlen's point. Based on modern similarities, all languages are related, some more distantly than others. At the end there is a "tree" showing the purported relationships between our language families. Ruhlen offers his case; he does not prove it. And with the exception of a handful of words, he does not attempt to recognize *Proto-World. He argues that reconstruction is unnecessary. This book is for the lay reader. It offers a small group of words from a group of languages, and asks the reader to compare them. In each case the careful reader will find the intended relationships. Thus "The Origin of Language" guides the cooperative reader to accept the existence of language families, and then, and here's the controversial part, to accept the existence of links between families. At first I found this infuriating. I was not a cooperative reader. After all, I have always known that there are several major language families and several isolates, each separate from the others. Ruhlen hand-picked words that would make his point. But as I read on, I accepted first that he was making a case that I disagreed with and that was likely wrong. And by the end, my previous thinking had been shaken. "New Synthesis" "The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue" falls into a category of scholarship that seems to go by the name "new synthesis." Mutually supporting bits of linguistic, archaeological, genetic, and social evidence are woven together to tell the story of humans leaving Africa and spreading, first along the shores of the Indian Ocean and on to New Guinea and Australia, later to the interior and western parts of Eurasia (and even later to the Americas). Authors including Renfrew and Cavelli-Sforza have written, in their own fields, books which fit into this new synthesis. A nice introduction would be Steve Olsen's "Mapping Human History." Worth a Look You may not agree with Merritt Ruhlen's thesis. But if you curious about the origins of language, you should take a look at this short volume. Reject it if you will, but at least you will know what the "lumpers," the single origin people are claiming.

Do-It-Yourself Comparative Linguistics

I was so inspired by Ruhlen's do-it-yourself tutorial approach to language comparison that I decided to try it myself and "fly solo." Since all we have of Etruscan is a 200-word vocabulary (400 max), I appointed myself an instant expert and tried to find out which of Ruhlen's language families Etruscan relates to the best.I doubt there's a better way of finding out that in setting up this book's comparative tables, Ruhlen has done an enormous amount of work behind the scenes. I'll conceed this point to his critics. I encountered all sorts of nullities and "misses" and very few hits, whereas Ruhlen has filtered out most everything but the hits. Even so (surprise!) I found hints of a Dravidian association with Etruscan, unlikely as that seems, and having worked to get to this conclusion, I feel my own ego getting involved in defending it, so I can understand the wars of clashing egos that Ruhlen's book alludes to.(I will conceed to everyone who cares that Etruscan does not have a Dravidian grammar. In fact it seems wonderfully Indo-European. But this is way beside the point.)This is a book people are going to care about, because people care about work they've done themselves. Ruhlen is breeding up a multitude of enthusiastic "lumpers" and I include myself in that number.

Fantastic Entry into the Intellectual World of Linguists

Suddenly realizing that I wanted to find out more about linguistics, I didn't have a clue as to where to scratch the surface. I glad I stumbled upon this book. Ruhlen demystifies the inaccessibility of linguistics and shows that they do the same kind of intuitive, rational-based thinking involved in the other sciences. This was helpful to someone like me, who assumed that linguistics catered to an marginal crowd of thinkers who toyed around with arcane and esoteric terminology and symbols. This book proves that thinking about language does not require a PhD in linguistics. Indeed I immensely credit Ruhlen with dismantling the mystique of linguistics. This book presents interesting ideas about the origin of language, includes accessible scientific concepts (to most eduacted laymen) like evolution and also attacks the cultural assumptions made in liguistics that curb the intellectual potential of research on language. Namely I'm talking about how he points out the irrational and discriminatory thinking that goes in in linguistics with respect to European languages and African languages. In summary, for a beginner with a curiosity about the origin of languages Ruhlen's book is a great choice for it candor, accessibility, and intuitive sense.

Fascinating! Pulls you into comparative linguistics.

This book makes me wish I was an undergraduate now so I could study linguistics in more detail. Starting with the well-established Indo-European family of languages and moving around the globe and back in time to trace other language groupings, Ruhlen encourages you to decide for yourself at each step what the relationships among the various languages and families are. He also relates these linguistic findings to recent genetic and archaeological discoveries to provide an "emerging synthesis" of the prehistory of modern humans.