More than fifty years ago, in an article published in the journal the Western Political Quarterly, the historian Carl Becker commented that, âNow, when I meet a word with which I am entirely unfamiliar, I find it a good plan to look it up in the dictionary and find out what someone thinks it means. But when I have frequently to use words with which everyone is perfectly familiarâwords like âcauseâ and âlibertyâ and âprogressâ and âgovernmentââwhen I have to use words of this sort which everyone knows perfectly well, the wise thing to do is to take a week off and think about themâ (1955, p. 328). I am extremely fond of this passage, because it makes abundantly clear the point that words, the meanings of words, and how we choose to use words, really do matter, and indeed, they often matter a great deal. As Robert Fitzgibbons has observed, âThe varying degrees of precision in ordinary language cause remarkably few difficulties in conducting our everyday, nonprofessional affairs. In private matters, people tend to overlook imprecision, and adjust. Indeed, in many cases the lack of precision is beneficial. However, the opposite tends to be the case when it comes to public matters ⊠the problems created by imprecision become especially acute in attempting to make ⊠decisions rationallyâ (1981, p. 106). The word âlanguageâ is an excellent example of such imprecision. âLanguageâ is a word we use frequently, and is one we certainly believe we understand and of which we know the meaning. And yet, the more we reflect on the concept of âlanguageâ, the fuzzier and more problematic it becomes. Given the importance of language, and indeed, of its centrality to being human, this lack of clarity is especially intriguing. Noam Chomsky, in Language and Mind, asserted that, âWhen we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the âhuman essenceâ, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to manâ (1972, quoted in Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2014, p. 1). In fact, some linguists have gone even further, arguing that not only is language unique to human beings, but that it is, to at least some extent, a necessary condition for âhuman being-nessâ. As Neil Smith has written,
Language makes us human ⊠Whatever we do, language is central to our lives, and the use of language underpins the study of every other discipline. Understanding language gives us insight into ourselves and a tool for the investigation of the rest of the universe. Proposing marriage, opposing globalization, composing a speech, all require the use of language; to buy a meal or sell a car involves communication, which is made possible by language; to be without languageâas an infant, a foreigner or a stroke victimâis to be at a devastating disadvantage. Martians and dolphins, bonobos and bees, may be just as intelligent, cute, adept at social organization and morally worthwhile, but they donât share our language, they donât speak âhumanâ. (2002, p. 3)
The uniqueness of human language is an idea dating back thousands of years, certainly to parts of the Book of Genesis composed somewhere between the tenth and fifth centuries BCE at the very latest. It is also an idea that has become, in many ways, an act of faith (or, perhaps more accurately, a collection of claims that together constitute a series of related acts of faith) in modern linguistics. Among contemporary linguists, there are broadly speaking two different sets of views about the origins of human language: the majority advocate a continuity position, while a minority believe human language to be the result of an evolutionary discontinuity. Basically, the continuity position means that the emergence of language was the result of the evolution of pre- and proto-linguistic forms which over time became increasingly complex and that ultimately took the form of human language as it now exists. The alternative perspective, advocated by Chomsky and some others, is that language is so unique that it cannot really be explained by any kind of gradual evolution from earlier types of communicative behavior, and so must be the result of a fairly suddenâgenetic and cognitiveâchange, which probably took place around 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. Regardless of how human language emerged, though, there is agreement about its general characteristics, and about what makes modern human language unique.
There is an important distinction that needs to be made here: there is a key difference between âlanguageâ, referring to all human languages and their common, universal characteristics, and any specific language (e.g., English, French, Russian, Sesotho, Thai, Spanish, Zulu, etc.) and its own special and unique features. Thus, we can assert that âall languages have nouns and verbsâ (Hudson, 2000, p. 74), which is a general claim about human language as a singular, unitary construct. On the other hand, we can make observations about the features and characteristics of particular languages, as in:
Among the formal characteristics of English nouns are that they typically: (a) may be made definite in meaning by use of preceding the (the definite article), as in the book, the guy, the answer; (b) may be made possessive by suffixingââs, as in peopleâs. Janeâs, a politicianâs; (c) may be made negative by prefixingânon, as in nonbeliever, nonsense, nonunion ⊠(Hudson, 2000, pp. 74â75)
Both of these types of claims are perfectly reasonable, and both are useful in certain contexts, but the kinds of evidence required to support or reject them is different. Claims that purport to be universal are particularly difficult to defend, since to reject such a claim requires evidence from only a single languageâthat is, if the claim is true universally, then it must be true of each and every human language, without exception. The claim that âall languages have nouns and verbs,â for instance, might be true as far as we know at the present time, but there are quite literally thousands of human languages that have not been studied, any one of which could provide disconfirming evidence for the claimâand thus leading to its rejection as a universal characteristic of human language. It is entirely possible for there to be a language that somehow gets along without anything remotely noun-like or verb-like. Further, the ways in which noun-like and verb-like lexical elements exist and are used in languages varies considerably. For instance, in Nunavut Inuktitut there is the word âTusaatsiarunnanngittualuujungaâ, which is a single lexical item that would be expressed in English as, âI cannot hear very wellâ. In some languages and groups of languages, such as some Bantu languages in southern Africa, this becomes especially problematic:
There has been debate as to the proper arrangement of the Bantu lexicon, and the question is far from settled. The inflection of nominals and verbals by means of prefixes, and the complex and productive derivational system, both characteristic of Bantu languages, pose difficulties ⊠If items are alphabetized by prefix ⊠a verb will be listed far from its nominal derivations, however transparent these may be ⊠A competing school arranges the lexicon by stem or root; this usefully groups related items, and saves on cross-referencing. Unfortunately, in such a system the user must be able to identify the stem, which given the sometimes complex morphophonemics of Bantu languages may not be easy. (Bennett, 1986, pp. 3â4)
In fact, the situation is even more complex that this might suggest, since we actually distinguish between two logically different kinds of linguistic universals. There are absolute universals, of the types we have been discussing thus far, which must be true for every single human language, but there are also statistical universals (or tendencies) which may not be true of all languages, but which are true of far too many languages to be simply the result of chance or random accident. Linguistic universals are also sometimes divided into implicational and non-implicational universals; implicational universals are characterized by claims that assert that if one feature is present, then a second feature will also be present. Thus, an example of a statistical, implicational universal would be that âlanguages with subject-object-verb ⊠word order are most likely to be postpositional.â While there is clearly a relationship between language universals and features of specific languages, it is nevertheless essential as we proceed with this discussion that we keep the distinction between the two in mind.
A key conviction of many, probably most, linguists about human language, as articulated in one of the more widely used introductory college and university linguistics textbooks, that:
The claims made in this passage are well-intentioned, and given the folk wisdo...No language or variety of language ⊠is superior or inferior to any other in a linguistic sense. Every [language] is equally complex, logical, and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought. If something can be expressed in one language ⊠it can be expressed in any other language ⊠It might involve different means and different words, but it can be expressed ⊠All human languages ⊠are fully expressive, complete and logical ⊠(Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2014, pp. 10â11)