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9
The
language
Organism:
The
leiden
Theory
of
Language Evolution*
1.
language
is an Organism
George van Driem
Leiden University
Language
is
a symbiotic organism. Language
is
neither an organ,
nor
is
it
an
instinct. In
the
past
two
and
a half million years, we have
acquired a genetic predisposition
to
serve as the
host
for this
symbiont. Like any true symbiont, language enhances
our
reproductive fitness. We
cannot
change the grammatical structure
of
language
or
fundamentally change its lexicon by
an
act
of
will, even
though
we might be able
to
coin a
new
word
or
aid
and
abet the
popularity
of
a
turn
of
phrase. Language changes,
but
not
because
we
want
it to.
We
are inoculated
with
our
native language in
our
The following
is
a synoptic statement on the Leiden theory
of
language
evolution which I presented in a talk
at
the
2nd
Workshop
and
Language
Acquisition, Change
and
Emergence
at
the City University
of
Hong
Kong on
24
November
2001
at
the kind invitation
of
Bill Wang. The Leiden theory
of
language emergence
is
presented in greater detail in my
handbook
(van
Driem, 2001b).
331
332 Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence
infancy. Like any other life form, language consists
self-replicating core.
The
units
of
this self-replicating core are
mt:mef:<
and
their neural correlates.
The
Leiden theory
of
language evolution was developed in
early
1980s
by
Kortlandt
(1985)
and
is
further developed in
handbook
of the greater
Himalayan
region (van Driem, 2001
Meaning
is
the basis
of
language.
The
nature
of
understood
in terms
of
the intuitionist set theory
or
mathematics developed by L.E.J. Brouwer,
is
a function
neuroanatomy
and
their behavior as units in the
Darwinian
of
neuronal
group
selection.
The
Leiden conception of
evolution provides a linguistically informed definition
of
the
(van Driem,
2000a,
2000b,
2001a). Previous characterizations
the meme by Dawkins (1976), Delius (1991)
and
Blackmore (199
fall
short
of
identifying
the
fecund high-fidelity replicators
extra-genetic evolution.
The
Leiden
approach
to
linguistic forms
vehicles for the
reproduction
of
meaningful elements in the ·
brain
differs fundamentally from
both
the functionalist
or
structuralist conception
of
language, whereby linguistic forms
seen as instruments used
to
convey meaningful elements,
and
formalist
or
generative
approach,
whereby linguistic forms
treated as
abstract
structures
which
can
be filled
with
·
elements.
Naming
and
syntax
can
be
shown
to
be
two
faces
of
same phenomenon.
2.
A Meme
is
a Meaning, Not a Unit
of
Imitation
What
precisely
is
a meme?
The
Oxford
English Dictionary
meme as
'an
element
of
culture
that
may
be considered
to
be
on
by non-genetic means, esp. imitation'. This
is
a
lexicographer's recapitulation
of
Richard
Dawkins'
original
com~tge
I
think
that
a
new
kind
of
replicator has recently
emerged
on
this very planet.
It
is
staring us in the face.
It
is
still in its infancy, still drifting a
bout
in its
The Language Organism: The Leiden Theory
of
Language Evolution 333
primaeval soup,
but
already it
is
achieving evolutionary
change
at
a rate
that
leaves
the
old gene
panting
far
behind.
The
new
soup
is
the
soup
of
human
culture. We
need a
name
for the
new
replicator, a
noun
that
conveys
the idea
of
a
unit
of
cultural transmission,
or
a unit of
imitation. (1976: 206).
This
Oxford
definition
of
the meme
is
incomplete
and
linguistically
uninformed. Charles
Darwin
came closer
to
the Leiden definition of
the meme
when
he
wrote
that
'the
survival
or
preservation
of
certain
favoured
words
in the struggle for existence
is
natural
selection'
(1871,
I:
60-61).
By
contrast, Susan Blackmore's memetics
is
essentially a linguistically naive view:
Whether
a particular
sound
is
copied because it
is
easy
to
remember, easy
to
produce, conveys a pleasant
emotion,
or
provides useful information, does
not
matter.
...
There
is
no
such
problem
as the symbolic
threshold
with
the memetic
theory
of
language.
The
critical step was the beginning
of
imitation
....
Once
imitation evolved, something like
two
and
a half
to
three million years ago, a second replicator, the meme,
was born. A spoken grammatical language resulted
from
the success
of
copyable sounds. (1999:
103-104,
107)
,,,L.au;e.u''"'"
is
more
than
just copyable sounds. A unit
of
imitation
is
a
and
a mime does
not
meet the criteria
of
fecundity,
replication
and
longevity required
to
qualify as a
life-sustaining replicator. There
is
an
essential difference
between pre-linguistic mimes, such as
the
rice washing
of
Japanese
ues,
and
post-linguistic mimes, such as music, clothing
and
dancing styles,
which
are able
to
evoke a myriad
of
in the
realm
of
memes. However, the theme
of
!'{,,,_~,~''"~
s
9th
symphony
is
a mime,
not
a meme.
Language exists
through
meaning.
The
Leiden school defines
as meanings in the linguistic sense. Grammatical memes, i.e.
334 Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence
the meanings of grammatical categories, are the systemic memes
any given language
and
are demonstrably language-specific.
meanings
of
words, morphemes
and
fixed idiomatic expressions
lexical memes. Some lexical memes are systemic
and
structural
given language. Some are free-wheeling
and
parasitic. Some
an
intermediate status. The idea
that
America
is
one nation
God, indivisible with liberty
and
justice for all,
is
not
a meme. It
syntactically articulate idea composed
of
a number of
co1rrstttu:
lexical
and
grammatical memes,
and
this idea
and
its
r-.-
..
,n~t-;..,;,
parts are subject
to
Darwinian natural selection.
Researchers in the field
of
Artificial Intelligence fail
to
the problem
of
meaning when they resort
to
the propositional
developed by the English mathematician George Boole.
adequacy
of
this approach
is
claimed as long as the variables
'grounded'.
By
grounding, logicians mean
that
there
ts
determinate way in which variables
or
symbols refer
referents. Yet natural meaning does
not
obey the
Aristotelian logic or Boolean propositional calculus. A
thrives by virtue of its applications, which
cannot
be deduced
its implications. The implications of a meaning must be
nP'~'"'"n'"
its applicability, rather
than
the other way around.
By
conseq
a meaning has the properties
of
a non-constructible set in
mathematical sense.
The behavior of the English meaning open
is
such
that
door is open' can be said
of
a shut
but
unlocked door, in
that
door is
not
locked. Likewise,
of
the same door
it
can be said
'The door is
not
open', for
it
is
shut. It
is
a cop-out
to
polysemy
to
clarify such usages because the meaning of English
remains unchanged in either case. The same situation can
truthfully referred
to
by a linguistic meaning
as
well as by
contradiction. Yet there
is
no
way
of
formalising a
traditional logic because
of
the principle
of
the excluded
uu•.1u""'
tertium non datur. This principle, which dates back
to
renders classical logic a powerful tool
and
simultaneously
classical logic a mode of thought which
is
at
variance
with
the
of natural language. The insight
that
meaning operates
ac<~ordillL~
The Language Organism: The Leiden Theory
of
Language Evolution 335
mathematics
of
non-constructibJe sets was set forth by Frederik
Kortlandt in 1985 in a seminal article entitled
'On
the parasitology
of non-constructible sets'. The insight
that
human
language operates
of
the principle of the excluded middle was
by the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer when he
intuitionist set theory in the first quarter
of
the
20th
Brouwer rejected the principle of the excluded middle for
and
went
as far as
to
warn
mankind
that
-mediated ideas
and
language itself were inherently
Tertium Datur
fact
that
meanings have the nature
of
non-constructible sets
not
mean
that
meanings are fuzzy. Rather, meanings
to
sets which are indeterminate in
that
there
is
no a
way of saying whether a particular referent can
or
cannot be
as
a member of a set.
If
a homeless person in Amsterdam
a cardboard
box
a house,
that
box
becomes a referent
of
the
house by his
or
her very speech act. The first bear most
are likely
to
see today
is
a cuddly doll from a toy store
and
a member
of
a species of the Ursidae family. Errett Bishop, chief
u"'"''"'"u
of
the school of constructivist mathematics which grew
intuitionist set theory, also rejected the principle
of
the
middle.
He
observed
that
'a
choice function exists in
mathematics because it is implied by the very meaning
existence' (1967: 9). Even though Willard Quine adhered
to
the
of
the excluded middle throughout his life because of its
as
'a
norm
governing efficient logical regimentation', he
on<~edled
that
this Aristotelian tenet was
'not
a fact of life',
and
was
fact 'bizarre' (1987: 57).
Classical logical analysis requires the identifiability
of
u•;o,uauH::
elements as belonging
to
the same set. In the case
of
extensional definition, it presupposes a sufficient degree of
336 Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence
similarity between the indicated
and
the intended elements. In the
case of
an
intentional definition, it presupposes the applicability of a
criterion, which depends
on
the degree
of
similarity between the
indicated property
and
the perceptible characteristics of the intended
objects. The constructibility
of
a set is determined by
identifiability of its elements. Language does
not
generally
this fundamental requirement
of
logic.
Ever since Gottlob Frege, logicians have focussed
on
problems
of
truth
in their attempt
to
understand meaning
and
language,
this approach has been inherently flawed from the very outset.
Frege
had
defined a Gedanke
as
something which
can
be subject
logical tests
of
truth
(1918: 64), he was inexorably led
to
·
grammatical sentences in language which cannot be reinterpreted
logical prepositions
and
therefore embody
no
Gedanke (1923: 3
The inadequacy
of
classical logic for coming
to
terms
with
uu)'.uJL~uc:
meaning underlies the failure
of
both
the earlier
and
the
Wittgenstein to understand the workings
of
language. Instead,
remained perplexed by the nature
of
linguistic meaning
lUJ.uLtl!.lJLu
his life and saw the whole of philosophy
as
a battle against
bewitching
of
reason by language (1953: 47).
The nature
of
meaning is a direct function
of
its
microanatomy
and
the way neurons branch
and
establish their
of
circuitry in
our
brains. The parasitic nature of
.,·
..
F.
..... o
.........
au
mediated meanings does
not
mean
that
there is no such thing
invariant meanings
or
Gesamtbedeutungen of individual lexical
grammatical categories within a given speech community.
meanings are functionally equivalent within a speech
and can be empirically ascertained through Wierzbickian
semantic analysis. Language began
to
live in
our
brains
as
organismal memetic symbiont when these brains became host
to
first replicating meaning. The difference between a meaning
signal such as a mating call or the predator-specific alarm calls
vervet monkeys is
that
a meaning can be used for the sake
argument, has the properties of a non-constructible set
and
has
temporal dimension.
The Language Organism:
1;he
Leiden Theory
of
Language Evolution
337
4.
Syntax
is
a Consequence of Meaning
Syntax arose from meaning. Syntax did
not
arise from combining
labels
or
names for things. Syntax arose when a signal was first split.
Hugo Schuchardt
had
already argued
that
the first utterance arose
from the splitting of a holistic primaeval utterance,
not
from the
concatenation
of
grunts
or
names.
He
argued
that
the first
word
was
abstracted from a primordial sentence
and
that
the first sentences
did
not
arise from the concatenation
of
words (1919a, 1919b).
First-order predication arose automatically when the first signal was
split. For example, the splitting
of
a signal for 'The baby has fallen
out of the tree' yields the meanings
'That
which has fallen
out
of the
tree
is
our
baby'
and
'What
the baby has done
is
to fall
out
of
the
tree'.
Maria
Ujhelyi has
considhed
long-call structures in apes in
this regard. The ability
to
intentionally deceive
is
a capacity
that
we
share
with
other apes
and
even with monkeys. In using an utterance
for the sake of argument, the first wordsmith went beyond the
capacity
to
deceive.
He
or
she used
an
utterance in good faith,
splitting a signal so
that
meanings arose, yielding a projection of
reality with a temporal dimension.
Since when has language resided in our brains? The idea
that
the
Upper Palaeolithic Horizon is the terminus ante quem for the
emergence of language dates back
at
least
to
the 1950s. The sudden
emergence of art, ritual symbolism, glyphs, rock paintings and
animal
and
venus figurines 60,000
to
40,000 years ago set the world
ablaze with new colours and forms. The collective neurosis
of
ritual
activity
is
an
unambiguous manifestation
of
linguistically mediated
thought. However, rudimentary stages
of
language existed much
earlier.
What
the Upper Palaeolithic Horizon offers
is
the first clear
evidence
of
the existence of God. God
is
the quintessential prototype
of the non-constructible set because it can mean anything. This
makes God the meme almighty. The British anthropologist Verrier
Elwin quotes the Anglican bishop Charles Gore:
I once
had
a talk
with
Bishop Gore and told him
that
I
had
doubts about, for example, the
truth
of the Bible,
338 Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence
the Virgin Birth
and
the Resurrection. "All this, my
dear boy,
is
nothing. The real snag in the Christian, or
any other religion,
is
the belief in God.
If
you can
swallow God, you can swallow anything." (1964: 99)
The brain of
our
species has grown phenomenally
as
compared
with
that
of gracile australopithecines or modern bonobos, even
when we make allowances for
our
overall increase in body size.
Initially the availability of a large brain provided the green pastures
in which language could settle
and
flourish. Once meanings began to
reproduce within the brain, hominid brain evolution came to be
driven by language
at
least as radically as any symbiont determines
the evolution
of
its host species. Language engendered a sheer
tripling
of
brain volume from a mean brain size
of
440
cc
to
1400 cc
in just two
and
a half million years. At the same time, the
increasingly convoluted topography of
our
neocortex expanded the
available surface area
of
the brain.
The role
of
innate vs. learned behavior in the emergence of
language
is
an artificial controversy when viewed in light
of
the
relationship between a host and a memetic symbiont lodged in its
bloated brain.
In
the
past
2.5 million years,
our
species has evolved
in such a way as to acquire the symbiont readily from earliest
childhood.
Our
very perceptions
and
conceptualization
of
reality are
shaped and moulded by the symbiont
and
the constellations of
neuronal groups which language sustains
and
mediates.
References
Bishop, Errett. (1967) Foundations
of
Constructive Analysis.
New
York:
McGraw-Hill.
Blackmore, Susan. (1999) The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Darwin, Sir Charles Robert. (1871) The Descent
of
Man and Selection in
Relation to Sex
(2
v9ls.). London:
John
Murray.
The Language Organism: The Leiden Theory
of
Language Evolution 339
Dawkins, Richard. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Delius, Juan D. (1991) The nature of culture. In Marian Stamp Dawkins,
Timothy R., Halliday and Richard Dawkins (Eds.) The Tinbergen Legacy
(pp. 75-99). London: Chapman and Hall.
van Driem, George. (2000a) De evolutie van
taal:
Beginselen van
de
biologische
taalwetenschap. Public lecture delivered in Paradiso, Amsterdam, 16 April
2000.
--.
(2000b) The language organism: A symbiotic theory
of
language. Paper
presented at the Belgian-Dutch Workshop on the Evolution
of
Language
held
at
the Atomium in Brussels, 17 November 2000.
(2001a) Taal
en
Taalwetenschap. Leiden: Research School
of
Asian,
African and Amerindian Studies
CNWS.
(2001b) Languages
of
the Himalayas:
An
Ethnolinguistic Handbook
of
the Greater Himalayan Region with
an
Introduction to the Symbiotic
Theory
of
Language
(2
vols.). Leiden: Brill.
--.
(Forthcoming) The Language Organism.
Elwin, Verrier. (1964) The Tribal World
of
Verrier Elwin. London: Oxford
University Press.
Frege, Gottlob. (1918) Der Gedanke, eine logische Untersuchung. In Arthur
Hoffmann and
Horst
Engert (Eds.) Beitrage zur Philosophie
des
deutschen
Idealismus (pp. 58-77), 1. Band,
1.
Heft (1918-1919). Erfurt: Verlag der
Keyser'schen Buchhandlung.
--.
(1919) Die Verneinung, eine logische Untersuchung. In Arthur Hoffmann
and
Horst
Engert (Eds.) Beitrage zur Philosophie
des
deutschen
Idealismus (pp. 143-157), 1. Band, 2. Heft (1918-1919). Erfurt: Verlag
der Keyser'schen Buchhandlung.
--.
(1923) Logische Untersuchungen. Dritter Teil: Gedankengefuge. In Arthur
Hoffmann (Ed.) Beitrage zur Philosophie
des
deutschen Idealismus
(pp. 36-51), 3. Band, 1. Heft. Erfurt: Verlag Kurt Stenger.
Kortlandt, Frederik Herman Henri. (1985) A parasitological view of
non-constructible sets. In Pieper and Stickel (Eds.) Studia linguistica
diachronica et synchronica: Werner Winter sexagenario anno
MCMLXXXIII gratis animis
ab
eius collegis, amicis discipulisque oblata
(pp. 477--483). Berlin:
Mouton
de Gruyter.
Quine, Willard Van Orman. (1987) Quiddities:
An
Intermittently Philosophical
Dictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Schuchardt, Hugo. (1919a) Sprachursprung. I (vorgelegt am 17. Juli 1919).
Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften XLII,
716-720.
340 Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence
--.
(1919b) Sprachursprung.
II
(vorgelegt am 30.
Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der
863-869.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann. (1953) [posthumous].
Untersuchungen. London: Basil Blackwell.
. Introduction
10
Taxonomy, Typology and
Historical Linguistics
Merritt
Ruhlen
Stanford University
decade has witnessed a renewed interest in historical
as the various controversies surrounding Amerind,
ostratic,
and
even broader proposed
taxa
well attest. Yet this
renewed interest seems
to
have revealed
as
much the current state
of
confusion within historical linguistics as the validity of any of the
newly proposed families. I will argue here
that
the comparative
method was misunderstood by historical linguists in the twentieth
century, with the result
that
the discovery of new genetic
relationships among languages effectively ground
to
a halt -with
the significant exceptions of the
work
of
Joseph Greenberg and the
Nostraticists.
What
is
equally distressing
is
that
the borders between
three distinct
fields-
taxonomy, typology, and historical linguistics
-have become blurred. Each
of
these fields has its
own
goals and
its
own
methodology,
and
they are
not
the same. This in no way
implies
that
these fields are completely disconnected from one
another. Certainly Greenberg's enormous knowledge of diachronic
typology informed his classification
of
Eurasiatic languages in many
ways, most spectacularly in the explanation
of
the origin of the
341
