The career of language

The Indo-European group of languages covers an immense geographical area: from the British Isles in the West to Siberia in the East, and from the Arctic down to India.  Among the hundreds of different members deriving from the single common ancestor are English and the Germanic languages, the Romance languages stemming from Latin, the Celtic family, Greek, Russian and the Slavonic tongues, most of the Indian languages, and many others such as Iranian, Armenian, Latvian and Kurdish.

Although every language in the group has followed a different course of development, they all have one thing in common: over the centuries and millennia since that primal tongue, each has become more basic in terms of its morphology - that is, the endings used to distinguish different parts of verbs, and cases of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and the rest.  This is a continuing process.  Today's English, for example, is still evolving towards simplicity, chipping away at the few remaining subtle distinctions in the language - such as the use of 'whom' rather than 'who'.  Similarly every tongue seems to have gradually lost a case ending here or dropped a letter there, perhaps because everyone seemed to understand what you meant anyway, or it was easier to say, or just for reasons of fashion.

Largely through the efforts of dedicated German philologists in the last century, we have an excellent idea of what changes occurred when.  By looking at the entire Indo-European family, and comparing the features of the ancient language each retained, finding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle now in this tongue, now in that, the scholars managed to reconstruct almost completely the original Indo-European mother-tongue from which all these far-flung varieties emerged. It is a splendid achievement.

Splendid but disconcerting. For what we are presented with is a language deduced from its slimmed-down descendants, and therefore necessarily much more complex than any of them, even Classical Sanskrit, perhaps the nearest we have to it in time - Sanskrit texts date back to around 1500 BC - and hence in appearance.  Cases and forms seem to exist for practically every category of experience imaginable.  But given that, as we have seen, language seems to show an irresistible tendency to become less complicated, how did this amazing tongue ever evolve with such an incredibly rich structure? Are we to imagine the elders of a tribe sitting around defining for their language ever more complicated noun and verb declensions with an almost Teutonic rigour and attention to detail?

It remains a mystery to this day how it all happened, and is likely to stay that way at least until a point in the future when some kind of time travel is possible. Then the world's greatest philologist - probably a German, if such concepts still exist - a life's career founded on the study of this riddle, will be able to return to the age when the original Indo-European language was at its peak, and find out what exactly happened. But imagine her mortification if she were to return to that time and find...nothing. Just a few rudimentary pig-like grunts, the merest sketch of a language. Her life's work in ruins. Perhaps she might be tempted to teach the elders a few basics of Indo-European grammar and vocabulary; just enough to get them going, you understand.…

(26.12.91)

See also Moody Sonnets – Mind Your Language

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