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76 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Did all of today's languages have a common origin?, March 17, 1998
When the Tower of Babel was being constructed, so the story goes, God was so incensed at the presumption of humans that he condemned them to speak a multitude of tongues. Ever since then, we've often needed translators to speak to each other, and imperfectly at that. Many are the battles fought because of misunderstandings caused by language differences. Merritt Ruhlen has a different take on the language schism. In his book, called *The Origin of Language*, appropriately enough, he explains the theory that all of today's languages had a common origin, many thousands of years ago, and that linguistic drift accounts for all the differences we see today. The way that he arrives at this point is fascinating. He allows the reader to play along in the linguistics game, providing sample words that work nicely to group languages together in ever larger categories, until they all tie together in one world glotknot. It's all so obvious that you can't believe that anyone could think differently. Of course people think differently. In fact, a lot of linguists (Eric Hamp at the University of Chicago, for one) think differently. Many of them think that Ruhlen and his sometime mentor, Joseph Greenberg, are kind of nuts. For one thing, picking ten words at a time to group languages together is a risky endeavor. Even if Ruhlen believes he picked the ten words at random, you can't get around the fact that Ruhlen *knows* what conclusion he wants to reach, and that could taint the whole process. Anecdotal evidence is a notoriously bad way to come up with general theories. Furthermore, Ruhlen doesn't really go into the quantitative business of assessing how great an effect phonetic drift has in muddying up the genetic relationships between languages, and when he does do it, the mathematics are misleading or simply wrong. Richard Feynman made a big point of telling his students not to use an observation that suggested a theory as confirming evidence of that same theory, a lesson Ruhlen seems to have missed. All of which Ruhlen probably doesn't worry too much about. He and Greenberg are more concerned about getting the big picture together first, and addressing the details later. Nothing wrong with that, but in his effort to gain converts to the "lumpers" faction (as opposed to the "splitters"), he has an alarming tendency to denigrate the work of others. Like the guy who runs his coworkers down behind their backs, he tends paradoxically to lose a lot of support. It's too bad, because linguists often do seem polarized around this question of origin, and the field really could use a solid, balanced book that looks at what new work needs to be done without ignoring or downplaying work that's already been done. This book isn't it, though. The casual reader will learn a lot about the way that lumpers work, because it's more exciting; more inquisitive readers will hanker for something with more study and less politics.
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51 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ruhlen's fantasies, September 18, 2001
This is not a book about comparative linguistics. Instead, it is a book devoted to Ruhlen's personal fantasies. Comparative linguistics, like all linguistics, and indeed like all serious scholarly work, is done by applying rigorous and scrupulous methods to carefully obtained data. The right way of doing comparative linguistics was worked out only at the end of the 18th century, and it has been developed and refined ever since. Before that time, people had no idea how to compare languages, and they worked wholly in the dark. Their favored "method" was nothing more than the assembly of miscellaneous resemblances among miscellaneous languages, in the hope that this might shed light on language origins. But it didn't, and it doesn't: miscellaneous resemblances are meaningless and worthless, as has been amply demonstrated countless times. See any decent textbook of historical linguistics. But this Dark Age procedure is exactly what Ruhlen wants his readers to accept, believe in, and follow. Ruhlen shows no understanding of the numerous and serious obstacles to the comparison of languages, and no understanding of the formidable pitfalls that must be avoided if useful work is to be done. In place of rigor, Ruhlen offers us only lists of miscellaneous resemblances, which, like the forlorn scholars of the past, he wants us to take seriously, and to use as the sole basis for spectacular conclusions. Worse, Ruhlen wants his eager readers to believe that they too can do serious work in linguistics: "Don't believe the blinkered professionals when they tell you that good work requires years of training and experience, or that it requires a comprehensive knowledge of the languages you want to compare. Just trust me when I tell you that any idiot with a bilingual dictionary can do real linguistics, better even than the professionals." There is more, much more. The very first duty of a scholar is to get the data right, but Ruhlen can't even do that. For example, of the 13 Basque items presented on page 65 (as "language B"), four are wrong, and two more are not even native Basque words, but are words borrowed from Latin or Spanish. And there are also some profound problems concerning the origins and earlier forms of several of the others, problems which Ruhlen ignores because he doesn't even know about them: he's just extracted his forms incomprehendingly from a bilingual dictionary. But Ruhlen doesn't care about such humdrum tasks as getting the facts right: he merely wants to persuade readers of the spectacular success of his primitive and wrongheaded approach. So what if the data are wrong: it's the Big Picture that's important, right? Professional linguists, who are all too aware of the enormous difficulty of establishing links between any languages at all, have no time for this sort of nonsense. This shabby book is made even shabbier by Ruhlen's practice of making nasty remarks about those linguists who have quite properly criticized his work -- which means just about every linguist who has ever commented on it at all. He even goes so far as to say nasty things about long-dead linguists of the past, like Meillet (on page 79), apparently on the ground that they too would have condemned his work if they had lived to see it. You will learn nothing about doing comparative linguistics by reading this dreadful book. You will learn only how to join the massed ranks of the linguistic cranks. And we already have more than enough of those. There are thousands and thousands of cranks churning out useless and pathetic "comparisons" like Ruhlen's every year. Ruhlen is more prominent than most, but he is no better. R. L. Trask
Professor of Linguistics (mail addresses withheld at Amazon's request)
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable Read, August 21, 2003
I am by no means an expert on languages or the history of languages. I picked up this book on a whim awhile back. After reading the reviews on here, I can understand why the author warned the reader that his view is controversial.Basically Ruhlen gives you a list of about 10-15 words from 10 or so different languages. Basic words like "hand" or "head" or "water," words that would've been around for awhile. He lets the reader group the words accordingly while he would give a few pointers on how words change over time and what one sound would tend to change to. He starts with the Indo-European languages and proceeds to do the same with Native American, African, and Asian languages as well. Eventually we find out that all the languages have come from a single mother tongue. We also find out that his theory coinsides considerably with current genetic theories on the spread of humans. It was very interesting and fun to do, and Ruhlen never talks down to the reader. That said, there were some problems. He kept referring to "Indo-Europeanists" who, according to him, dismiss his theories in-hand without even looking at them. I find this hard to believe. Sometimes it seemed to me that he all but called them racists. Then again, after reading some of the quotes from those who disagree with his theory, it all seems a bit petty, like someone who disagreed with a person's theory personally attacked that person. All in all, it is a good book to read to get a different take on the story of language. If you're really interested after this, you probably need to get a book that has the "traditional" viewpoint of linguists.
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