Customer Reviews

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

The development of our incredible ability to make meanings out scribbles on a rock or a page remains a stunning evolutionary leap. This book is a wonderful outline of some of the factors that went into the development of language. It is also full of interesting insights into the disputes between some of the major experts in the field.

Christine Kenneally is a linguist who writes about language for the genera public, and here she stresses the importance of looking at language as a set of abilities, many of which we share with other species. An important key to language, and one that has lead to sometimes fractious debates, is to understand where these abilities overlap with and diverge from those found in species like chimpanzees, monkeys and dolphins. Abstract language may be uniquely human, but most of the neurological machinery that it uses has been present in other species for millions of years.

Christine takes us on a journey through gesture and imitation and the evidence that they were important in the development of speech and language. She takes in the whole debate about whether or not speech is the medium of communication with others, while language exists only for communication with ourselves, or whether language and speech are inextricably linked. We learn about the syntax of anima vocalizations and the discovery of FOXP2, a gene of profound importance to the development of human language.

Although I have been interested in language for three decades, and thought that I knew quite a lot about it, I finished this book feeling re-energized.

After I closed the book I looked again at the title, "The First Word," and marveled at the extraordinary suite of cognitive abilities that enabled me to take those three words, decode them, link them to other thoughts, images and memories, before finally extracting their meaning.

That sequence is in itself quite remarkable. It is even more so when we realize that the sophisticated system that we use every day has likely only existed for a few tens of thousands of years.

Christine is an excellent writer who not only understands the issues but can also communicate them with a rare lightness of touch.


Highly recommended


Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

Personally, it has always (at least since I started to get the hang of evolutionary theory) seemed pretty obvious that the ability for language must have evolved, along with all our (and other life forms) capabilities and features. It came as a shock, therefore, to discover that the topic had been formally 'banned' in 1866 by the Societe de Linguistique of Paris, and had remained in disrepute for well over a century. Kenneally tells of her own initial encounter with this attitude in the early 1990s in Linguistics 101 at the University of Melbourne. After asking the lecturer about the origin of language, he replied: "linguists don't explore this topic: we don't ask the question because there is no definitive way to answer it"!

It seems that much of this attitude in the second half of the 20th century came about because Noam Chomsky - one of the 'intellectual giants' in linguistics - had this opinion, and his opinions tended to dominate a great deal of academic discussion (although to be fair, they did at times generate considerable controversy). Kenneally quotes a story from Paul Bloom: "... A linguistics friend of mine told me in all seriousness about what he called the C-principle. The idea is that if Chomsky believes something, then it makes sense to agree with him in the absence of other knowledge. Because, you know, he is a really smart guy."

On the evolutionary side, Stephen Jay Gould apparently also held the view that "the human species was a glorious accident". Naturally, this included human language. The prominence of these two individuals made it difficult for serious research to get started.

In recent years, Chomsky himself has published on the topic of language evolution. In many ways, The First Word is the story of how this came about, and the stories of the key researchers who made the idea of the evolution of language 'academically respectable'.

It is a complex topic, weaving together a great many threads. Kenneally pulls it all together by focusing on different 'capability platforms' (speech, gesture, and so on) and the ways in which they can be seen to have evolved through different species over evolutionary timescales.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and learned a great deal from it. If I had a criticism it would be that it doesn't explore how language evolution has accelerated in the last 10,000 years or so (aided by cultural mechanisms). However, that is something that would probably require a whole book in its own right, and is arguably beyond the scope of 'The First Word'.

All in all, it really shows that no matter how smart someone is, or how great their reputation, they can still be dead wrong about really major questions. Highly recommended!

I bought this book a while ago and only come around reading it now. My intention in buying this book was to understand the state of the debate as to the origins of language and particularly how we came from the first simple utterances of homo sapiens 200'000 years ago all the way to Shakespeare.

As the review title says, I was thoroughly disappointed. In this book the author does not follow a clear path of how we evolved the actual physical ability to speak and when these preadaptation arose in our evolutionary history and how from that we began to intentionally communicate in every more complex and abstract ways.

Instead the author chose to jump around in the evolutionary topic like a flea on a chimpanzee leaving the actual task of connecting the dots to the reader. This approach leads to a number of obvious improvements for future works on the same subject matter.

Instead of dividing the topic into rather random parts as done by the author as following:

I. Language is not a thing (the big names in linguistics)
II. If you have human language... (What language is about)
III. What evolves? (More evolutionary origin of language)
IV. Where next? (Future of language)

one could developed a much more focused and helpful book by working around the following structure:

I. The Phenomenon of Language (description of anatomy, neurology, linguistic properties enabling and constituting language and how and where we are different from other animals)
II. Genetic Evolutionary Origins (When and how did the different crucial body/brain bits and parts arise - oldest to youngest. End with H. sapiens)
III. Cultural Evolutionary Origins (Linguistics from the first gestures/words to postmodern poetry)
IV. Open/contested areas for further research

Most disappointing for me was that despite the highly suggestive title of the book, there is virtually no discussion of what the first words might actually have been. I have seen a much better job done in this regard in the Chapter The Evolution of Language in James Jayne's book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind pages 129-138 published in 1976.

Christine Kenneally fails miserably in even as much as summarizing the advances in this field of study over the course of 30+ years that have passed since. Considering that her book is supposed to be dedicated to the subject this was a major disappointment indeed.

The only reasons why I do not give a 1 star rating for this book, is because it fixed me up to Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature) and Lieberman (Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language) for further study.

Save yourself the trouble and go directly to the masters!

I bought this book after hearing the end of a review on the radio someplace, and thought it would be fun to have it on my bookshelf next to "The Last Word" (a celebration of unusual lives edited by Marvin Seigal). I thought it would be tracing the evolution of languages - from Indo-European, etc. Instead, it's about the evolution of language itself, from animal to man, from gestures to words. It covers the history of the science of linguistics, and almost makes Noam Chomsky intelligble. It's full of those passages that cause me to nudge my wife and say, "did you know that... ?"

The key word in the title of this book is "search." No one knows much about the evolution of the capacity for language in humans, and even the current state of the capacity is the subject of fundamental debate. Kenneally is best at describing the history and sociology of the conflicting parties to the debate. In the process, the reader will learn a good deal about the structure of the human brain, the nature of adaptation in evolutionary theory, the physiology of sound production, the relationship between communication in animals and humans, and several other basic facets of human biology and behavior. This is a great book for someone who has not studied these issues in the past decade or two.

The reader will also learn that we don't know much about the issue, and the intense parti pris attitudes of the researchers in this area are an inverse reflection of their level of firm knowledge.

Kenneally has a knack for making really hard issues (such as generative grammar) seem really easy to understand, and for making clear the basic contrasting positions in the evolutionary theory of language. The book is a pleasure to read. On the other hand, these issues are in fact quite difficult, and some of the beauty in the study of language comes from intrinsically difficult theoretical issues in linguistic theory and game theory. Indeed, game theory, which supplies the basics of signaling theory, supplies basic insights that are missing from this book. Also missing are accounts from behavioral ecology and bio-anthropology on the relationship between social organization and brain size, a subject which I consider a basic background for the study of the evolution of language. Finally, humans are special in that we cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals, a subject with a voluminous literature that Kenneally ignores. Yet, language is first and foremost a prerequisite and central element in the capacity of humans to cooperate. The notion that one could model the evolution of language while abstracting from these issues in not plausible. However, the book is a great read, and would have to be four times as long to fulfill my wish list, so I recommend it as a nice place to start.

By the middle of this book, it becomes clear that the author's agenda is served by leaving the definition of "language" as vague as possible. Only by this ruse can she substitute gesture, vocalization, symbolization or sequencing for "language". Only by this ruse can she pretend that the origins of "language" can be simulated by a computer program. Only by this ruse can she pretend that animals share "language" (though willing, out of context, to permit that "certainly no other animal puts [it] all together...in the same way we do" -- perhaps that "way" might be the essence of "language"?).

The real reason why it is necessary to avoid a working definition of language is that it is clearly impossible to fill a book with actual information on the origins of language, well-defined. There is a lot of heat but very little light. In the best scholastic tradition, there is more talk about folks talking about the origins of language than there is actual talk about the origins of language. And attempts at the latter are largely incoherent.

Strangely, the author seems (and even more strangely, her sources seem) entirely unaware of the research performed on "feral children". In particular, the real-life cases of the Naderi sisters and of Kamala and Amala render a number of the expert opinions concerning the "babies of the Galapagos" laughable. This experiment has actually happened at least twice in history, folks.

After a careful reading of the book, the best "argument" provided for the evolution of language is the Paley-esque "it [is] obvious from the design of language that it [has] evolved." (pg. 63) Right. The "arguments" concerning _how_ this evolution took place are no more convincing.

That I give this book 4 stars is owing to the very compelling subject matter it addresses; the scholarship it reviews; and the fascinating questions it raises. Less 1 star (very nearly less 4 stars) for the abysmal writing in the first 100 or so pages of TFW. TFW reads like a 3rd rate high school book report in its first few chapters. I was really quite shocked reading them, esp. considering the author's pedigree (PhD in linguistics; occasional writer for the New Yorker Magazine; etc.). As the title of my review indicates, however, the author eventually (thankfully!) caught her stride. The second two-thirds of TFW were, I thought, quite well-written and very interesting. A few times along the way, Kenneally notes that TFW was the product of 5 years' worth of research and writing. Considering the entire book is cribbed together from other researchers' ideas -- largely drawn from a relatively short bibliography -- that seems an inordinately long time to have spent researching and writing this book. I assume she cobbled it together in her off hours, between stints at the New Yorker and elsewhere. On the other hand, a 5 year incubation period might explain the wild upwards swing in the quality of the writing in TFW from its start to its finish. In the end, Kenneally strikes this reader as a thoughtful and informative reporter but a not obviously original thinker. I'm glad I read TFW: it's a fine enough introduction to a fascinating topic, and it turned me on to some of the essential scholarship in the field. Having read TFW, I now look forward to delving into some more serious literature on the origins and evolution of language.