The Birth Of A New Language
One of the greatest questions of civilization is: “When and how the first language did come about?” for language is its foundation.
Without a systematic form of communication used and
understood by all, then nothing could ever be done. Laws could not be
followed, orders couldn’t be filled and love letters would be
unintelligible. Fortunately, most of us have the gift of language. The
question is, where and how did this wonderful gift originate. Language
is older than history, so the actual birth of language, metaphorically
speaking, tool place to long ago to be recorded. However, we are lucky
to be able to study the next best thing. That is how a group of people
have created a language from the bottom up.
Pidgins occur where groups of people speaking more than one language
are forced together. In order for any kind of society or culture to
exist a form of communication or language is needed. The form of
communication that results from the interactions of all these people
who originate from different language backgrounds is refereed to by
Pinker as being “a makeshift jargon”. Its lexicon is the result of the
mixing and matching of words and phrases from the many source
languages. This “jargon” is not a language in the traditional sense.
Evidence collected by Derek Bickerton shows that a pidgin, during its
first generation does not have many of the elements common to most
languages. Examples of such are, in the words of Pinker, “no
consistent word order, no prefixes or suffixes, no tense or other
temporal and logical markers, no structure more complex than a simple
clause, and no consistent way to indicate who did what to whom.” That
is to say that many of the grammatical “resources” that we rely upon
to make ourselves understood are not present. In addition, the
actually meaning of what is said is debatable. For instance the
following statement, from a Hawaiian Pidgin, can be understood to
mean different things.
Me cap buy, me check make.
The statement above can be seen to mean, in English, “He bought my
coffee; he made me out a check.”, or alternatively, “I bought coffee;
I made him out a check.” The only way to no for sure is from the
context in which the statement was made and inference.
Bickerton has shown, using the example of Hawaiian Creole, how a
pidgin can “mature” into Creole. This process is apparently as simple
as allowing the language to naturally age. This is because for the
originators of the language, the pidgin is a form of communication
that was developed after they acquired their first language. The
pidgin was a compromise solution. However, when young children are
exposed to the pidgin at a time when they would normally be acquiring
their first language than what results is called a Creole. It is at
this stage of the languages development that “grammatical complexity
is introduced”. This has been observed and recorded by linguists.
Even though Creole languages are often dismissed, by laymen as simply
being a corrupted form of another language, there is no mistaking the
fact these creoles are bona fide languages in their own right. What
are viewed as corruptions of other languages are anything but, as
Pinker says, “Do not be misled by what look like crudely placed
English verbs, a such as go, stay, and come, or phrases like one time.
They are not haphazard uses of English words but systematic uses of
Hawaiian Creole grammar: the words have been converted by the Creole
speakers into auxiliaries, prepositions, case markers, and relative
pronouns.” In fact, S Romaine’s analysis of the tense ending -ed, for
the verb do, leads us to the possible conclusion that our language
evolved along similar lines. An example is “He bullied”. This, at one
time, might have been expressed as “He bully-did”.
Bickerton claims, in his work, that Creole languages around the word
are grammatically very similar. He further argues that there is
evidence of the same grammatical structure in the language usage of
young English speaking children. This suggests that there is an
underlying grammatical structure imbedded in the human mind that
affects how a language develops. In the case of a mature developed
language, such as English, the effect of this “underlying design” is
minimal since a grammatical structure already exist that children very
quickly adapt to. In the case of pidgins, there is no pre-existing
grammatical structure for a new generation of young speakers to
accept. It is in these cases, claims Bickerton, that the “underlying”
and pre-existing design surfaces to create order from chaos, so to
speak. The argument that is made against Bickerton’s conclusions is
that he is relying to much on the analysis and “reconstruction of
events that occurred decades or centuries in the past.”
The argument is a valid one and is merely an extension of the one put
forward at the beginning of the essay concerning viewing the birth of
language. However, although there are no contemporary examples of the
birth of a spoken language that does not mean that new languages are
not being born even now.
Just because a child cannot verbalize the grammatical template they
are born with, does not mean they cannot communicate them in another
manner. Sign languages are, in every respect, fully recognizable as
languages equal to spoken ones. In addition, the proficiency of
signers who have been exposed to sign language since infancy is equal
to that of speakers of language. Bickerton’s conclusions have been
corroborated by analyses of sign languages in Nicaragua.
While educators were attempting to teach deaf children in Nicaragua
lip reading and speech the children themselves were developing a
system of signs that eventually became known as the Lenguaje de Signos
Nicaragense or LSN. LSN presents many of the characteristics
consistent with a pidgin, e.g. the lack of a systematic grammatical
system, which is essentially what it is. However, there is a
difference. The deaf children and young people who devised LSN had no
formal training in sign language, and could only contribute the
makeshift signs they had used when communicating with their parents.
This makes what happened next all the more remarkable. The next
generation of LSN signers, who were exposed to the language when they
were infants, actually created a Creole from this pidgin. The Creole
is known as Idioma de Signos Nicaragense or ISN. LSN, as a system of
signs was signed differently by all its users and required much
circumlocution. ISN, conversely, is signed the same by all its users
and is very expressive, to the point that the children can quite
easily describe surrealistic and abstract concepts.
It seems, therefore, that languages, during their first generation,
are crude systems of communication. This, however, seems to radically,
and quickly, change as soon as the language is exposed to a generation
of infants. When this occurs, the previously makeshift system is
transformed into a rich and expressive language. Is it necessary,
however, for a group of young people to come together for language
development to take place? If not, than we may have some clue as to
how language was originally developed.
We may find our answer by once again looking at the plight of the
deaf. Since we have already stated that sign language is as valid a
language as any spoken language, then we can take that statement one
step further. That is that deaf infants, exposed to sign language from
deaf parents who are competent signers, will acquire the language in
the same manner that hearing infants acquire spoken language. However,
what would occur if a deaf child were exposed to a form of sign
language that is closer to a pidgin than to a Creole or a fully
developed language? Research has shown that, when exposed to language
that does not make “proper” use of the grammar of the particular sign
language (or Chomsky’s theoretical Universal Grammar) a child will not
“imitate” his parents mistakes. Even when isolated from any other
source of sign language, the child absorbs the parent’s language, and
somehow manages to filter out the grammatical errors.
We can thus postulate that this may be how the first languages were
developed. At some point in our past, humans communicated in a manner
that resembled the pidgins of today. Eventually, whether it was a
gradual or sudden change, we do not know, a generation of infants were
born who, when exposed to this ancient pidgin, overlaid on to it a
grammatical template that resulted in the eventual appearance of the
languages we are familiar with.
In conclusion, there is much to be learnt about the birth of a new
language from pidgins and creoles. The grouping together of
individuals, who cannot otherwise communicate, shows us how, out of
necessity, a relatively primitive form of linguistic communication is
created. The exposure of infants to this newly conceived language
results in its transformation from a primitive to a complex form.
In this way, the process of transformation of a pidgin into a Creole
is the process by which a language is born. Or is it? It could be
argued that the creation of the pidgin is analogous with birth.
Although the initial influence of the pidgin can not be denied, to
call a pidgin a language, on the same level as English, BEV or even
Hawaiian Creole would be an error. As a compromise, the creation of a
pidgin could be viewed as the “conception” of a language. The analogy
can be extended to the development of the pidgin from a makeshift form
of communication into a lingua franca as being analogous to a
“pregnancy”. The great step from pidgin to Creole would then be the
act of birth, where a new language, so different and yet so similar to
all others, is born.
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