> Origins and/or
> evolution of language is not a topic that belongs to any systematic
> study. One can study the evolution (though that is not really the right
> word) of English _beginning_ with Old English. Comparative linguistics
> can study t he evolution (still not really the right word) of (some)
> language groups (indo-european; afrio-semitic, etc.), but the evolution
> of language is a matter of personal speculation, not study.
Historical/comparative linguistics (formerly 'philology', a nicer term I think) is a perfectly legitimate study, and can actually come up with real results. For example, there's quite a lot we rather amazingly know about Proto-Indo-European.
But using the term "evolution" for this, in the sense that we understand that term now, is misleading. "Evolution" for most of us means the thing Darwin thought up, with selection and comparative fitness. Few of us doubt that this picture is broadly correct wrt the history of critters, but it's not clear at all that anything similar holds true for languages.
> The speculation, however, need not be a sociobiological specualtion: two
> of the more interesting speculations, one 60 years ago and one in the
> present decade, are not. The first is that of Susanne Langer, who in
> Philosophy in a New Key, suggested that language emerged from ritual.
> The other, by Ian Tattersall, is that it was invented by children
> playing, probably several times before adults picked it up and developed
> it for more 'practical' purposes.
Fair enough. Carrol correctly characterizes these as "speculations" and of course speculation (of any variety other than financial) can be fun and thought-provoking. Without any way to investigate whether one speculation is better than another, though, it's hard to see where you can go from there.
I would add that in the current climate of received opinion, pseudo-Darwinian or social-Darwinian or sociobiological speculations are the ones most likely to be advanced, and taken by the lumpen- intelligentsia as Scientific Truth.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org