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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
.
©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
i
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
ii
©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
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.
©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
1
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