The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Hardcover)

by Christine Kenneally (Author) "In the popular imagination, evolution is a clean arc from rock hammer through arrowhead to Pentium processor..." (more)
Key Phrases: language suite, ape language research, guage evolution, Steven Pinker, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Noam Chomsky (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This book grows out of Kenneally's conviction that investigating the evolution of language is a good and worthwhile pursuit—a stance that most in the field of linguistics disparaged until about 20 years ago. The result is a book that is as much about evolutionary biology as it is about linguistics. We read about work with chimpanzees, bonobos, parrots and even robots that are being programmed to develop language evolutionarily. Kenneally, who has written about language, science and culture for the New Yorker and Discover among others, has a breezily journalistic style that is occasionally witty but more often pragmatic, as she tries to distill academic and scientific discourses into terms the casual reader will understand. She introduces the major players in the field of linguistics and behavioral studies—Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Philip Lieberman—as well as countless other anthropologists, biologists and linguists. Kenneally's insistence upon seeing human capacity for speech on an evolutionary continuum of communication that includes all other animal species provides a respite from ideological declamations about human supremacy, but the book will appeal mainly to those who are drawn to the nuts and bolts of scientific inquiry into language. (July 23)
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Review
“It never hurts to begin with a genius, so the author opens by declaring, "the story of language evolution studies is unavoidably the story of the intellectual reign of Noam Chomsky." Before Chomsky, linguists searched for new languages, wrote down vocabulary and grammar and compared them to other languages. They never addressed questions about the origin of language because conventional wisdom declared such questions could not be answered. Sixty years ago, Chomsky pointed out that infants learn to talk merely by interacting with those around them for a few years. Since conversation contains too little information to provide rules for this incredibly complex skill, humans must be born with the unique ability to learn to speak. This assertion galvanized a generation of researchers who turned their attention to the roots of language. Since Chomsky asserted that language is a uniquely human phenomenon, he doubted evolution played a role in its origin. So great was his influence that scientists have only recently overcome their inhibitions and turned up fascinating evidence to the contrary. Readers will blink as the author describes studies demonstrating that animals use language and can be taught more. Early, highly publicized experiments with apes gave the field a bad reputation because the animals seemed to be responding to trainers' cues, but careful studies make it clear that many animals can employ syntax and vocabulary at the level of a three-year-old human. Despite our vastly superior language abilities, researchers have yet to find any speech areas in the human brain that are not present elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Kenneally's book features a steady stream of brilliant, opinionated people expressing ideas that often contradict those of other brilliant people, but she channels this flood of frequently technical arguments into a comprehensible and stimulating narrative.

Lively portrait of a fascinating new scientific field.”
—Kirkus

“All branches of science search for origins. Biologists want to know how life on earth began. Astronomers want to know how the universe got started. Even in mathematics, questions about how different numerical systems came to be constitute a legitimate line of inquiry.

Linguists are different. In the middle of the 19th century, the main professional bodies governing linguistic research formally banned any investigation into the origins of language, regarding it as pointless. The topic remained disreputable for more than a century, but in the last decade or so, language evolution has eased toward the front burner, attracting the attention of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and geneticists. Their search is the subject of “The First Word,” Christine Kenneally’s lucid survey of this expanding field, dedicated to solving what she calls “the hardest problem in science today.”

One nut to crack is the nature of language itself, and here Ms. Kenneally introduces the unignorable presence in virtually every linguistic debate, Noam Chomsky. Mr. Chomsky and his many adherents regard language as a uniquely human endowment, centered in a specific area of the brain. It gives every living person the ability, unsought, to generate infinite strings of sentences in infinite combinations. Animals, in this view, do not have language, nor do they think. The reasons that humans speak, or how language might have made its way to the human brain, do not matter. It may simply be that in a linguistic version of the big bang, a language mutation suddenly appeared, and that was that.

This view now faces many rivals. The big-bang theory has been countered by linguists who believe that just as the eye evolved to meet a need for vision, language evolved to meet the need for communication. Ms. Kenneally ushers onto the stage researchers who have discovered that many animal species possess languagelike skills previously unimagined and, without benefit of syntax or words, have a complicated inner life. They believe that the study of animal language and gestures could shed light on a possible protolanguage stage in human development.

The idea that language is restricted to a specific area of the brain has been more or less discarded. Brain researchers now believe that language tasks are assigned throughout the brain. Moreover, some linguists now believe that language is a two-way street. It’s not something emanating from the brain of a communicating human. It actually changes the processes of the brain. Stroke victims suffering from aphasia, a condition involving language loss, do not simply find it difficult to communicate, they also find it more difficult to categorize, remember and organize information.

One of Ms. Kenneally’s most intriguing scientists, Simon Kirby, a linguist at the University of Edinburgh who works with computer models, has proposed the idea that language might be a self-evolving phenomenon. Somewhat like a computer virus, it changes and adapts to survive.

Ms. Kenneally, a linguist trained at the University of Cambridge, covers an enormous expanse of ground as she brings the reader up to date on developments in a wide variety of disciplines touching on language evolution. At times, she lapses into a somewhat mechanical recitation of experiments, papers and positions, which she tries to enliven, in vain, by inserting long, unedited quotations from her interview subjects that could just as well have been paraphrased.

On the plus side, she explains difficult ideas concisely and clearly, and she maintains a firm grip on the steering wheel, moving the overall argument along in a straight line. Above all, she is scrupulously fair-minded. Although obviously taken with the idea of language evolution and language acquisition as a continuum seen in primitive form in other species, she gives Mr. Chomsky his due, despite his withering scorn for most of the ideas she presents, and defends him from his most vehement detractors.

Best of all, Ms. Kenneally zeroes in on a host of fascinating experiments. What happens when one ape trained in sign language meets another equally proficient ape for the first time? Not communication, it turns out. “What resulted was a sign-shouting match; neither ape was willing to listen,” Ms. Kenneally reports.

Mr. Kirby, the computer modeler, devised an experiment in which subjects were shown objects on a screen along with words describing the objects in what was represented as an invented alien language. The subjects were asked to learn the language. In testing one student after the other, however, Mr. Kirby added new objects to the ones already shown, whereupon the subjects unthinkingly generated new words and combinations. These changes were added to the core list and passed along to successive subjects who, trying to master the language created, in part, by each of their predecessors, made their own additions and changes.

“Except for the initial random language given to the first subject, there was no alien language, only the contributions of each individual, which were culturally transmitted from generation to generation,” Ms. Kenneally writes. “Each subject in the experiment believed that he was simply giving back what he had learned, but instead the language was evolving.”

In similar fashion, researchers have been looking at Internet sites that generate their own protolanguages and linguistic structures.

Ms. Kenneally concludes with a little experiment of her own. She asks many of the subjects she interviewed to imagine a group of infants stranded on the Galapagos Islands, provided with all the necessities of life but no access to speech. Would they create a language? How many babies would it take, what might their language be like, and how would it change over the generations?

The answers range from no language to sign language to a full-fledged language in three generations. The real point is that Ms. Kenneally could gather 15 linguists willing to think about the problem. Onward to the first Neanderthal dictionary.”
—The New York Times (daily)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (July 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670034908
• ISBN-13: 978-0670034901
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #101,173 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everybody's Talking, August 13, 2007

By	takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

More than anything else, I came away from The First Word thinking that linguists love to argue. In fact, every few pages I found myself arguing with author Christine Kenneally and I'm not even a linguist. I disagreed with much of the book and wanted more evidence for many of her arguments. But when I find myself thinking about a book this much and discussing it with people at length, I have to give it five stars.

The subject is the origin of human language. How did it start? Obviously there's no way of knowing, but that doesn't (nor should it) keep linguists from looking for the answer. Since no one can prove or disprove any of the theories about language origin, it's a free-for-all. Linguists seem to enjoy knocking their colleagues' theories even more than they enjoy defending their own theories.

Kenneally is mostly even-handed in her presentation of the many interesting theories currently in debate. However, she chides Martin Gardner for a 1980 article he wrote debunking experiments claiming to have taught chimps, apes, and dolphins human language. Gardner acknowledged the popularity of such experiments, especially when they featured an attractive blonde scientist teaching an ape (evoking Beauty and the Beast) to "talk." Kenneally suspects that no one writes of Chomsky or other male scientists by describing their hair or appearance. Yet Kenneally thinks nothing of mentioning Steven Pinker's "flop of curls" or that Stephen Jay Gould is "short and remarkably loud."

Many of the theories about language origin seem to rest on isolated cases. Linguists cite the case of Genie, a girl who was raised by people who didn't speak to her. She didn't learn to speak and when she was removed from the abusive environment as a teenager, she couldn't learn to speak. It is difficult to draw valid conclusions from a few psychologically scarred individuals.

Kenneally is a linguist and also a journalist, so she is able to condense and present these complex ideas to people who have no background in linguistics but who are interested in it anyway. Sometimes the going gets a little tough, but there are some amusing asides to ease the way, such as the story of what happened when two gorillas who had learned sign language got together and had a sign language shouting match.

It's obvious that there's a lot more that we don't know about language origin and less that we do know. Only twenty or thirty years ago anthropologists were listing the attributes that make us human. Opposable thumbs, using tools, making tools, language, self-awareness. Point by point, evidence has shown that we are not unique, at least not in the ways we had defined ourselves. The same thing has happened with our arguments for why we speak but other animals don't: the descended larynx, the bigger brain, more complex thoughts, a greater need to communicate. Maybe we should stop trying to teach dolphins and apes to use human language and try to communicate with dolphins and apes in their language. We might learn something.

In any case The First Word is a great introduction and a tidy summary of the debate on language origin as it stands today. But read it soon because the evidence and theories are bound to change quickly.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Evolution vs. Innate Capability, August 18, 2007

By	One Man's View (Lawrenceville, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

As the title suggests, this book does not lay out a theory for the origins of language. It is a solid effort to capture the debate between linguistics and many other branches of science concerning the origin and development of language, more specifically human language. It is a highly controversial subject with great disagreements among many well known scientists, which is well captured by the author, a linguist as well as a journalist.

Noam Chomsky, longtime professor of linguistics at MIT, has been the giant of linguistic studies. It is his theories that are the starting point for the origins, even the definition, of language. But as the author shows, his basic view that humans possess a highly localized center of the brain that emerged due to some form of genetic mutation fairly complete in its ability for language is now largely unaccepted by a preponderance of the scientific community. Instead, language is seen to be a part of a general capability to communicate and has been evolving for millions of years with some periods more significant than others, in particular one about 200,000 years ago.

The Chomskian emphasis on language syntax has given way to the evolution of practical communication including the importance of gestures as a forerunner to spoken language. A variety of injuries and surgeries to the brain have discredited the notion that the center of language is located in a particular area of the brain. Perhaps most important are a number of studies that clearly demonstrate that animals have highly effective understanding and communication abilities that exist outside the bounds of Chomskian formalities, though admittedly at far less than human levels.

The book in attempting to thoroughly cover the debate runs into the problem of detail saturation with clear understanding and continuity of the argument sacrificed. Perhaps that is inevitable because there is no overriding theory on which to hang the various positions taken. The book is a nice introduction to the subject of language definition and origin.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but heavy slogging., December 29, 2007

By	David M. Giltinan (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"The First Word", Christine Kenneally's "search for the origins of language" comes with its share of celebrity endorsements. The back cover contains laudatory blurbs from both Steven Pinker ("a clear and splendidly written account ...") and author of "The Ghost Map", Steven Johnson, ("a rare and delightful mix..."). Then there is the following gem on the inside jacket cover - "The First Word is not only a compelling historical account of our greatest intellectual faculty but a provocative consideration of what it means, finally, to be human".

Well, it seems hardly fair to hold an author accountable for whatever silliness her publishers might assemble on a book's exterior in the interest of boosting sales. Let's just say that this book is ambitious in its scope and that the author is obviously academically well-qualified. My own formal qualifications in the field of linguistics are non-existent, so this review is from the point of view of a non-specialist with a keen amateur interest in the topic.

An obvious question: `is this a book for the non-specialist?' I think that the publishers would like to market it as such, and that Dr. Kenneally possibly thinks of it that way. But, much as I wanted to like this book, if it is meant to be accessible to the general reader, I think it falls well short of the mark. This is not to say it's not interesting - there are parts which I found fascinating. But it gives the distinct impression that the author did not have a well-defined audience in mind, or - if she meant it to be accessible to the general reader - she has not mastered the ability to write effectively for a non-specialist audience.

The problems manifest themselves in two main areas. First, the question of scope and organization. There is a definite sense that the author wants this to be a totally comprehensive account of the current state of knowledge. This is fine, but ultimately greatly increases the indigestibility of the book. The book's structure is unwieldy to the point where one wonders whether Viking actually had an editor read it. A "prelude", followed by an "introduction", leading in to a "prologue"? What were they thinking??? The sixteen chapters of the book follow an equally awkward organizational structure. Four are devoted to specific linguists (Chomsky, Pinker & Bloom...). Seven discuss specific features of human language, such as words and syntax, but are clumsily titled. For example, grouped under the blanket heading "If you have human language..." are the "chapters"
* You have something to talk about
* You have words
* You have gestures
* You have a human brain
The next three chapters are grouped under the heading "What evolves?", and are titled
* Species evolve
* Culture evolves
* Why things evolve
That the author finds it necessary to remind us that a human brain is a prerequisite for human language, or does not appear to recognize that "why things evolve" does not answer the question "what evolves?" are, of course, minor details. Nonetheless, these potentially distracting irritants could have been avoided, given a little more aggressive intervention by a professional editor.

The second major problem area - and it's a serious one - is in the author's style. It would be wrong of me to slam it completely here, there are paragraphs which I found delightful:

"Even though humans are more closely related to vervets than vervets are to chickens, it appears that vervets and chickens have converged upon a common tactic for survival. The forces that led them both to this strategy are powerful, but alarm calls were probably not bequeathed to them from a common ancestor. In fact, the most important thing that they share with all the other alarm-call-making animals is that they are small and delicious. Fitch explained: `The things that have alarm calls are little tiny guys who get eaten by lots of things, and the common ancestor of chimps and humans wasn't in that category. Humans don't have alarm calls, and apes don't have alarm calls. It's not that they don't have threats, but they don't have all these different threats where it pays to be able to refer very rapidly to aerial threat versus ground threat. Whether you're the Snickers bar of the Sahara or the Snickers bar of South Dakota, you're going to evolve alarm calls'".

Similarly, the opening `Prelude' to the book is a fluid, evocative tribute to the power, mystery, and magic of human language. Unfortunately, for every paragraph that soars, there are three that amount to nothing more than plodding, indescribably dry accounts of X's 2006 findings about gesturing in bonobos being a partial refutation of Y's 2004 study in vervets. We get it, Dr Kenneally, you know your stuff. What you haven't figured out how to do is to winnow through the assembled evidence and shape it into a reasonable narrative. Laying everything out there for the reader to sift through to find meaning is certainly one strategy for writing a book, but this is not the approach that makes the writing of your colleague Steven Pinker both edifying and fun to read. To reach a broader audience, an author needs to do better than this:

"The entropy level indicates the complexity of a signal, or how much information it might hold, such as the frequency of elements within the signal and the ability to make a prediction about what will come next in the signal, based on what has come before. Human languages are approximately ninth-order entropy, which means that if you had a nine-word (or shorter) sequence from, say, English, you would have a chance of guessing what might come next. If the sequence is ten words or more, you'll have no chance of guessing the next word correctly."

There are several problems with this paragraph. The second sentence is so vague as to be effectively meaningless ("a chance of guessing what might come next" - given even a random guess has some finite chance of being right, how big a chance are we talking about?). There's the unilluminating, apparently unnecessary insertion of `say, English'. But the real problem is that the combination of the second and third sentences don't really make any obvious sense. They certainly don't explain the concept of ninth-order entropy in an intelligible manner.

Another example. Early in Chapter 9, there is this sentence:

"Until very recently it was believed only we could understand or deploy any of the structural devices found in human syntax, but Kanzi showed that this is not entirely the case."

Sounds like Kanzi is an investigator in the field, and one proceeds, expecting to hear about the details of Kanzi's study. Well, no, it turns out that Kanzi is a bonobo we learned about in Chapter 2, with an amazing capacity for language. Clearly, Dr. Kenneally expects us to have remembered this. The problem is that the book is full of test animals across the spectrum, from bonobos to dolphins to crows to parrots, many of whom are introduced by name. The reader can be forgiven for not remembering that Betty is the tool-fashioning crow, not to be confused with Alex, the garrulous parrot (or his buddies Griffin and Arthur) or Elodie, the flirtatious elephant. Again, this may seem like a minor quibble, but it is indicative of the repeated failure of Dr Kenneally to be able to put herself in the place of a reader unfamiliar with the material being explained.

What is disappointing about these examples, and ultimately about the work as a whole, is the sense that, with stricter editing, this could have been a really fascinating book. As it is, it is an interesting book, but one which is very uneven, requiring the reader to slog through some fairly tedious, unilluminating material to find the good bits, written for the most part in a style which makes little concession to the non-expert.

Despite these reservations, I enjoyed the book. I think it doubtful that it will reach as wide an audience as does, for example, the work of Steven Pinker.