The Mother Tongue Read Free Page A

worse—is its deceptive complexity. Nothing in English is ever quite what it seems. Take the simple word what. We use it every day—indeed, every few sentences. But imagine trying to explain to a foreigner what what means. It takes the Oxford English Dictionary five pages and almost 15,000 words to manage the task. As native speakers, we seldom stop to think just how complicated and illogical English is. Every day we use countless words and expressions without thinking about them—often without having the faintest idea what they really describe or signify. What, for instance, is the hem in hem and haw, the shrift in short shrift, the fell in one fell swoop? When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm that you are over, and what exactly does it look like? And why, come to that, can we be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not semiwhelmed or—if our feelings are less pronounced—just whelmed? Why do we say colonel as if it had an r in it? Why do we spell four with a u and forty without?
    Answering these and other such questions is the main purpose of this book. But we start with perhaps the most enduring and mysterious question of all: Where does language come from in the first place?

2.
    The Dawn of Language
    W e have not the faintest idea whether the first words spoken were uttered 20,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago. What is certain is that mankind did little except procreate and survive for 100,000 generations. (For purposes of comparison, only about eighty generations separate us from Christ.) Then suddenly, about 30,000 years ago, there burst forth an enormous creative and cooperative effort which led to the cave paintings at Lascaux, the development of improved, lightweight tools, the control of fire, and many other cooperative arrangements. It is unlikely that any of this could have been achieved without a fairly sophisticated system of language.
    In 1857, an archaeologist examining a cave in the Neander Valley of Germany near Düsseldorf found part of an ancient human skull of a type never before encountered. The skull was from a person belonging to a race of people who ranged across Europe, the Near East, and parts of northern Africa during the long period between 30,000 and 150,000 years ago. Neanderthal man (or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis ) was very different from modern man. He was short, only about five feet tall, stocky, with a small forehead and heavyset features. Despite his distinctly dim-witted appearance, he possessed a larger brain than modern man (though not necessarily a more efficient one). Neanderthal man was unique. So far as can be told no one like him existed before or since. He wore clothes, shaped tools, engaged in communal activities. He buried his dead and marked the graves with stones, which suggests that he may have dealt in some form of religious ritual, and he looked after infirm members of his tribe or family. He also very probably engaged in small wars. All of this would suggest the power of speech.
    About 30,000 years ago Neanderthal man disappeared, displaced by Homo sapiens sapiens, a taller, slimmer, altogether more agile and handsome—at least to our eyes—race of people who arose in Africa 100,000 years ago, spread to the Near East, and then were drawn to Europe by the retreating ice sheets of the last great ice age. These are the Cro-Magnon people who were responsible for the famous cave paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain—the earliest signs of civilization in Europe, the work of the world’s first artists. Although this was an immensely long time ago—some 20,000 years before the domestication of animals and the rise of farming—these Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: They had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man’s larynx deeper