The Birth Of A New Language

By: Gabriel Rise
Submitted: 2007-01-17 11:29:09
Print this article | Tell a friend | For publisher |

Rating:

 

One of the greatest questions of civilization is: “When and how the first language did come about?” for language is its foundation. Without a systematic form of communication used and understood by all, then nothing could ever be done. Laws could not be followed, orders couldn't be filled and love letters would be unintelligible. Fortunately, most of us have the gift of language. The question is, where and how did this wonderful gift originate. Language is older than history, so the actual birth of language, metaphorically speaking, tool place to long ago to be recorded. However, we are lucky to be able to study the next best thing. That is how a group of people have created a language from the bottom up.

Pidgins occur where groups of people speaking more than one language are forced together. In order for any kind of society or culture to exist a form of communication or language is needed. The form of communication that results from the interactions of all these people who originate from different language backgrounds is refereed to by Pinker as being "a makeshift jargon". Its lexicon is the result of the mixing and matching of words and phrases from the many source languages. This "jargon" is not a language in the traditional sense. Evidence collected by Derek Bickerton shows that a pidgin, during its first generation does not have many of the elements common to most languages. Examples of such are, in the words of Pinker, "no consistent word order, no prefixes or suffixes, no tense or other temporal and logical markers, no structure more complex than a simple clause, and no consistent way to indicate who did what to whom." That is to say that many of the grammatical "resources" that we rely upon to make ourselves understood are not present. In addition, the actually meaning of what is said is debatable. For instance the following statement, from a Hawaiian Pidgin, can be understood to mean different things.

Me cap buy, me check make.

The statement above can be seen to mean, in English, "He bought my coffee; he made me out a check.", or alternatively, "I bought coffee; I made him out a check." The only way to no for sure is from the context in which the statement was made and inference.

Bickerton has shown, using the example of Hawaiian Creole, how a pidgin can "mature" into Creole. This process is apparently as simple as allowing the language to naturally age. This is because for the originators of the language, the pidgin is a form of communication that was developed after they acquired their first language. The pidgin was a compromise solution. However, when young children are exposed to the pidgin at a time when they would normally be acquiring their first language than what results is called a Creole. It is at this stage of the languages development that "grammatical complexity is introduced". This has been observed and recorded by linguists.

Even though Creole languages are often dismissed, by laymen as simply being a corrupted form of another language, there is no mistaking the fact these creoles are bona fide languages in their own right. What are viewed as corruptions of other languages are anything but, as Pinker says, "Do not be misled by what look like crudely placed English verbs, a such as go, stay, and come, or phrases like one time. They are not haphazard uses of English words but systematic uses of Hawaiian Creole grammar: the words have been converted by the Creole speakers into auxiliaries, prepositions, case markers, and relative pronouns." In fact, S Romaine's analysis of the tense ending -ed, for the verb do, leads us to the possible conclusion that our language evolved along similar lines. An example is "He bullied". This, at one time, might have been expressed as "He bully-did".

Bickerton claims, in his work, that Creole languages around the word are grammatically very similar. He further argues that there is evidence of the same grammatical structure in the language usage of young English speaking children. This suggests that there is an underlying grammatical structure imbedded in the human mind that affects how a language develops. In the case of a mature developed language, such as English, the effect of this "underlying design" is minimal since a grammatical structure already exist that children very quickly adapt to. In the case of pidgins, there is no pre-existing grammatical structure for a new generation of young speakers to accept. It is in these cases, claims Bickerton, that the "underlying" and pre-existing design surfaces to create order from chaos, so to speak. The argument that is made against Bickerton's conclusions is that he is relying to much on the analysis and "reconstruction of events that occurred decades or centuries in the past."

The argument is a valid one and is merely an extension of the one put forward at the beginning of the essay concerning viewing the birth of language. However, although there are no contemporary examples of the birth of a spoken language that does not mean that new languages are not being born even now.

Just because a child cannot verbalize the grammatical template they are born with, does not mean they cannot communicate them in another manner. Sign languages are, in every respect, fully recognizable as languages equal to spoken ones. In addition, the proficiency of signers who have been exposed to sign language since infancy is equal to that of speakers of language. Bickerton's conclusions have been corroborated by analyses of sign languages in Nicaragua.

While educators were attempting to teach deaf children in Nicaragua lip reading and speech the children themselves were developing a system of signs that eventually became known as the Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragense or LSN. LSN presents many of the characteristics consistent with a pidgin, e.g. the lack of a systematic grammatical system, which is essentially what it is. However, there is a difference. The deaf children and young people who devised LSN had no formal training in sign language, and could only contribute the makeshift signs they had used when communicating with their parents. This makes what happened next all the more remarkable. The next generation of LSN signers, who were exposed to the language when they were infants, actually created a Creole from this pidgin. The Creole is known as Idioma de Signos Nicaragense or ISN. LSN, as a system of signs was signed differently by all its users and required much circumlocution. ISN, conversely, is signed the same by all its users and is very expressive, to the point that the children can quite easily describe surrealistic and abstract concepts.

It seems, therefore, that languages, during their first generation, are crude systems of communication. This, however, seems to radically, and quickly, change as soon as the language is exposed to a generation of infants. When this occurs, the previously makeshift system is transformed into a rich and expressive language. Is it necessary, however, for a group of young people to come together for language development to take place? If not, than we may have some clue as to how language was originally developed.

We may find our answer by once again looking at the plight of the deaf. Since we have already stated that sign language is as valid a language as any spoken language, then we can take that statement one step further. That is that deaf infants, exposed to sign language from deaf parents who are competent signers, will acquire the language in the same manner that hearing infants acquire spoken language. However, what would occur if a deaf child were exposed to a form of sign language that is closer to a pidgin than to a Creole or a fully developed language? Research has shown that, when exposed to language that does not make "proper" use of the grammar of the particular sign language (or Chomsky's theoretical Universal Grammar) a child will not "imitate" his parents mistakes. Even when isolated from any other source of sign language, the child absorbs the parent's language, and somehow manages to filter out the grammatical errors.

We can thus postulate that this may be how the first languages were developed. At some point in our past, humans communicated in a manner that resembled the pidgins of today. Eventually, whether it was a gradual or sudden change, we do not know, a generation of infants were born who, when exposed to this ancient pidgin, overlaid on to it a grammatical template that resulted in the eventual appearance of the languages we are familiar with.

In conclusion, there is much to be learnt about the birth of a new language from pidgins and creoles. The grouping together of individuals, who cannot otherwise communicate, shows us how, out of necessity, a relatively primitive form of linguistic communication is created. The exposure of infants to this newly conceived language results in its transformation from a primitive to a complex form.

In this way, the process of transformation of a pidgin into a Creole is the process by which a language is born. Or is it? It could be argued that the creation of the pidgin is analogous with birth. Although the initial influence of the pidgin can not be denied, to call a pidgin a language, on the same level as English, BEV or even Hawaiian Creole would be an error. As a compromise, the creation of a pidgin could be viewed as the "conception" of a language. The analogy can be extended to the development of the pidgin from a makeshift form of communication into a lingua franca as being analogous to a "pregnancy". The great step from pidgin to Creole would then be the act of birth, where a new language, so different and yet so similar to all others, is born.

Article source: Expert Articles