"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.
