Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

This contentious foundation of the Babel story acquired implicit if unintended support in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the scholarly work of historical linguists. They sought to group languages into “families” and to reconstruct the hypothetical progenitors of these cousin tongues, as well as the rules by which each had received its inheritance. The discovery of a family likeness among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Old Persian opened a new vista into the past, toward a single source for a whole spectrum of languages spoken between northern India and the Atlantic Ocean.

These exciting advances made it easy to see the historical derivation of modern languages like a cascade trickling down the mountainside of time, branching out into streams and rivers. At the now inaccessible top of the hill, there must have been a single source—Proto-Indo-European, for the great family that joins the languages of northern India to many of those of the West; and, at an even more remote altitude, Nostratic, the supposed ancestor of Indo-European and other language groups of Europe and Asia; and, high above that, “proto-World,” the language of ante-Babel, the original and unitary human tongue.

Some saw the underlying meaning of linguistic change and diversification through spectacles borrowed from Darwinism. For them, the growth in complexity from single-cell life forms to the magnificent machinery of humankind served as a model for understanding the “evolution of language,” from the rough-and-ready speech of hunter-gatherers to the refinements of the Académie Française. Others saw language change as a perpetual fall from the economy and mystery of the ancient tongues to the confusing multiplicity you can hear in the street. But behind these scholarly (and often schoolmasterly) pursuits lay a single barely questioned assumption—that all languages are, at bottom, the same kind of thing, because, at the start, they were the same thing. In fact, there was rather better evidence of the contrary. The Babel story may say that in the beginning all language was one—but what it shows is that, for a single people in the third or second millennium B.C.E., linguistic diversity was a major fact of life.

However, if we accept the proposition that all languages are instances of the same kind of thing, we have to ask: What is it that makes them the same? The most influential answer to this question in the twentieth century has been: a grammar.

The idea that a grammar is the common property of all human languages looks like a hypothesis—something you could test against data, then either abandon or refine. But that’s not the main way in which it has actually been used. Characteristically, the “grammaticality hypothesis” is an axiom, a circular foundation stone. The axiom “explains” why animal and mechanical signaling systems are not languages. Since traffic lights and the barking of dogs seem to have either no discernible rules of combination or no ability to create new combinations, they have no grammar, and because all languages have a grammar in order to count as languages, dog barking and traffic lights are not languages. QED.

In a similarly circular way, the axiom of grammaticality pushes to the edge of language study all those uses of human vocal noises—ums, hums, screams, giggles, mumbles, stammers, exclamations, and interjections, alongside ellipses, nonsense words, gargles, cooing, baby talk, pillow talk, and so forth—that don’t decompose neatly into nouns, verbs, and periods.

Even leaving out the whole range of “ungrammatical” and “nonlinguistic” uses of vocal sounds, the variability and range of the things that the grammars of actual languages regulate make it very hard to see what it can mean to say that a grammar is what all languages have in common. Inevitably, it prompts a second question: What is it that all grammars have in common?