The Story of Human Language - Course Guide by Prof John McWhorter (2004).pdf - Ebooki - morefaya2006

The Story of

Human Language

Part I

Professor John McWhorter

T HE T EACHING C OMPANY ®

John McWhorter, Ph.D.

Senior Fellow in Public Policy, Manhattan Institute

John McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, earned his Ph.D. in

linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of

Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University. His academic

specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of The

Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language , on how the world’s languages

arise, change, and mix. He has also written a book on dialects and Black

English, The Word on the Street . His books on creoles include Language

Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles , The Missing Spanish

Creoles , and an anthology of his creole articles called Defining Creole . Beyond

his work in linguistics, Dr. McWhorter is the author of Losing the Race and an

anthology of race writings, Authentically Black. He has written on race and

cultural issues for The New Republic , The Wall Street Journal , The Washington

Post , The Chronicle of Higher Education , The National Review , The Los

Angeles Times , The American Enterprise , and The New York Times . Dr.

McWhorter has appeared on Dateline NBC , Politically Incorrect , Talk of the

Nation , Today , Good Morning, America , The Jim Lehrer NewsHour , and Fresh

Air and does regular commentaries for All Things Considered . His latest book is

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America

and Why We Should, Like, Care .

Table of Contents

The Story of Human Language

Part I

Professor Biography ........................................................................................... i

Course Scope ...................................................................................................... 1

Lecture One What Is Language? ................................................... 3

Lecture Two When Language Began ............................................. 8

Lecture Three How Language Changes—Sound Change.............. 12

Lecture Four How Language Changes—Building

New Material .......................................................... 17

Lecture Five How Language Changes—Meaning and Order ...... 23

Lecture Six How Language Changes—Many Directions .......... 27

Lecture Seven How Language Changes—Modern English ........... 32

Lecture Eight Language Families— Indo-European ..................... 36

Lecture Nine Language Families—Tracing Indo-European......... 42

Lecture Ten Language Families—Diversity of Structures.......... 47

Lecture Eleven Language Families—Clues to the Past ................... 51

Lecture Twelve The Case Against the World’s First Language ....... 55

Language Maps .................................................................................. See Part III

Timeline ............................................................................................................ 59

Glossary ............................................................................................................ 60

Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 67

The Story of Human Language

Scope:

There are 6,000 languages in the world, in so much variety that many languages

would leave English speakers wondering just how a human being could possibly

learn and use them. How did these languages come to be? Why isn’t there just a

single language?

This course answers these questions. Like animals and plants, the world’s

languages are the result of a long “natural history,” which began with a single

first language spoken in Africa. As human populations migrated to new places

on the planet, each group’s version of the language changed in different ways,

until there were several languages where there was once one. Eventually, there

were thousands.

Languages change in ways that make old sounds into new sounds and words

into grammar, and they shift in different directions, so that eventually there are

languages as different as German and Japanese. At all times, any language is

gradually on its way to changing into a new one; the language that is not

gradually turning upside-down is one on the verge of extinction.

This kind of change is so relentless that it even creates “languages within

languages.” In separate populations who speak the same language, changes

differ. The result is variations upon the language—that is, dialects. Often one

dialect is chosen as the standard one, and when it is used in writing, it changes

more slowly than the ones that are mostly just spoken, because the permanency

of writing has an official look that makes change seem suspicious. But the

dialects that are mostly just spoken keep on changing at a more normal pace.

Then, the languages of the world tend to mix together on various levels. All

languages borrow words from one another; there is no “pure” vocabulary. But

some borrow so much vocabulary that there is little original material left, such

as in English. And meanwhile, languages spoken alongside one another also

trade grammar, coming to look alike the way married couples sometimes do.

Some languages are even direct crosses between one language and another, two

languages having “reproduced” along the lines of mitosis.

Ordinarily, language change is an exuberant process that makes languages

develop far more machinery than they need—the gender markers in such

languages as French and German are hardly necessary to communication, for

example. But this overgrowth is checked when history gets in the way. For

example, when people learn a language quickly without being explicitly taught,

they develop a pidgin version of it; then, if they need to use this pidgin on an

everyday basis, it becomes a real language, called a creole . Creoles are language

starting again in a fashion—immediately they divide into dialects, mix with

other languages, and start building up the decorations that older languages have.

The Story of Human Language - Course Guide by Prof John McWhorter (2004).pdf

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