The Power of Babel (Paperback)

I am always a step behind when it comes to technological developments. At the start of my graduate study at Stanford in 1988, I had no idea what "e-mail" meant when I encountered it on a personal data form, but soon discovered that for most of the people in the department, e-mail had largely replaced the telephone, written letters, and memos. It took me about three years to incorporate e-mail into my routine. By 1998, it was the World Wide Web that, for people with computers, had become a norm rather than a marginal toy, first choice for movie listings, personals ads, travel booking, and fact checking. I still use the Web more when I must than as an ingrained habit. My next problem will be cell phones, which by the summer of 1999 became "default" in the United States. It has gotten to the point that saying that I don't have "a cell" lends me, I suspect, the air of a sequestered holdout

I am always a step behind when it comes to technological developments. At the start of my graduate study at Stanford in 1988, I had no idea what "e-mail" meant when I encountered it on a personal data form, but soon discovered that for most of the people in the department, e-mail had largely replaced the telephone, written letters, and memos. It took me about three years to incorporate e-mail into my routine. By 1998, it was the World Wide Web that, for people with computers, had become a norm rather than a marginal toy, first choice for movie listings, personals ads, travel booking, and fact checking. I still use the Web more when I must than as an ingrained habit. My next problem will be cell phones, which by the summer of 1999 became "default" in the United States. It has gotten to the point that saying that I don't have "a cell" lends me, I suspect, the air of a sequestered holdout that we sense in people who do not have VCRs. I'll have given in by the time you read this, but by then I'll probably be among the last people in America not reading e-mail on their wristwatches.

My problem is that I have never been comfortable with change. I have an illogical underlying notion that under normal conditions life stays eternally the same and that changes constitute occasional and disruptive departures from this stable norm. A dinner six years ago will sit in my mind as so recently past that it is unofficially still in the present, whereas the person I was with will barely remember it; when a child I haven't seen for years is now much bigger and more articulate, I have a hard time shaking a sense that some trick has been played. But of course, as everybody but me seems to accept with no trouble, change is not an exception; life is change. Kids grow, musical styles change, people keep inventing things, Seinfeld goes off, women get pregnant, men go bald.

Most of us are less aware that language, too, is change. All human speech varieties are always in a constant process of slow transformation into what eventually will be so different as to be a new language entirely. This change is certainly influenced by historical, social, and cultural conditions but is not caused by them alone; the change would continue apace even without these things. Human speech transforms itself through time just as vigorously, and even more so, in isolated hunter-gatherer societies where cultural change of any kind has been minimal for millennia. Just as we can understand biology only by being fully aware of the centrality of evolution to how life as we know it arose and will develop, we can truly understand language only by shedding the Monopoly-instructions conception that school inculcates us with and replacing it with a conception of language as a fundamentally mutative phenomenon.

We begin by exploring a basic question: As that initial band of hunter-gatherer Homo sapiens migrated northward carrying the first human language with them, what happened to the language? In other words, why doesn't anyone speak it today? Well, the first thing that happened to it is that as time went by, and especially as the original band multiplied and split into offshoots, the first language gradually turned into several thousand different ones. How did this happen, though? How does a language change beyond the likes of the coming and going of expressions like "That was hella cool" or isolated words like thou? Why didn't the language stay the way it was, with only slang words and expressions differing from place to place? What happened to the first language?

The transformative nature of language is as difficult to perceive as the fact that the mountains that look so indestructible to us are gradually eroding, to be replaced by new ones "thrown up" by geological collisions we never seem to see. We can only perceive the changes that occur quickly and frequently enough to fall within a human life span, and thus, just as we are aware of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, we are all aware that languages change, but mainly on the level of slang.

In New York City in the 1830s, young people of the merchant class were given to saying things like, "I blew up the post office." But the people using this expression were nonviolent people with jobs. "Blowing up" an establishment meant walking in and giving the management a piece of one's mind for a slip-up or discourtesy -- "I went in and blew up the post office when I found out they lost that letter." That seems as queer to us today as the corsets and waistcoats the people suffered in as they said it, because slang comes and goes like fashion. "That's for mine!" a flapper might have said in the 1920s to mean exactly what her equivalent in the 1980s would have put as "That rocks!"

This sort of thing, however, is merely the outer layer of the kind of change that all languages undergo, the profundity of which we can only see when we juxtapose a language at two points separated by a good millennium or two. Changes in slang will have been so buried by the turning inside out and upside down of everything that made the language recognizable as itself that only in the intellectual sense are we dealing with one language: instead, we see a language that has evolved into another one.

Here, for example, is a sentence in one human language as spoken in a.d. 1, followed by the same sentence in the language as spoken in a.d. 2000. The sentence itself is quite randomly chosen, likely to be uttered by all of us several times in any given month:

Admit it, my sisters -- the woman hasn't even seen the talking dog!

a.d. 1: Agnoscite, sorores meae -- femina ne canem loquentem quidem vidit!

a.d. 2000: Admettez-le, mes soeurs—la femme n'a même pas vu le chien qui parle!

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Excerpted from The Power of Babel by McWhorter, John H. Copyright © 2004 by John McWhorter. Excerpted by permission.
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