But we all use language, for a variety of purposes, every day. In that sense we’re all “under water,’’ to use the terms of McWhorter’s inadvertently apt analogy. If you get a PhD in linguistics, aren’t you the one staring clinically from the shore? That’s a good thing: Would we want to read a guide to marine life written by a fish?
This book is full of fascinating tidbits about Persian and Pashto (though it is weirdly technical in parts - there are charts and graphs on most pages), the click dialects of Africa, the glories of Archi and Akha. McWhorter compares his view of languages to natural selection, and quotes Darwin:
“There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are, evolving.’’
If languages are really like organisms in every regard, no one would quarrel that they are most beautiful when left alone, doing only what comes naturally. Why would you ever try to corral these magnificent creatures, when they are naturally so beautiful and wonderful?
It isn’t hard to see the flaws in this analogy. If languages evolve, isn’t grammar just part of the process? Isn’t “correct’’ English - the kind enforced by stern-faced elders - to be understood as equally the product of natural selection? And doesn’t the application of Darwin to human culture raise uncomfortable problems? When BP moves a pipeline by a couple miles and wipes out a Pakistani village, scattering its residents and killing off its dialect, that’s not natural selection?
