Is there really a story behind language? And, if so, shouldn’t its dissection be left to the philologists and grammatical pedants? Perhaps. For language at its root is merely a tool, and tools serve best when least noticed.
Yet even though words are tools they are not like shovels or hammers, really. They are the cause behind such instruments, the root of innovation, the very foundation of civilization. Grunts and mumbles may serve cavemen (or grumbly teenagers), but they will not serve humanity. Not, at least, a humanity that strives and yearns and grieves. Sunsets must be described, adventures told, and ideas expressed. The why’s of such innate desires will be left to the philosophers; the how’s, meanwhile, are the realm of linguists and the curious.
Of course there was a beginning to language. There must have been. Yet like all origin stories the beginning is so shrouded in an impenetrable haze of myth and legend that conjecture is the tenuous stone upon which this history must be built. There are no archaeological bones showing the first word, the first sentence, or the first time two people muttered sounds and mutually understood one another. No, language is simply there, always. When previously unknown peoples of this earth were and are stumbled upon, living in what contemporary society disparages as primitive, they speak not archaically or childishly; no, they speak as intelligently and expressively as any culture the world over. Different? Yes. Simply? No.
So the plunge into understanding language is not necessarily about its origins, but about its change. About how one language splinters into a dozen. About how words that mean one thing suddenly and almost imperceptibly mean another. About how the only unequivocal truth regarding language is that if it’s not changing then it’s dying. Indeed, every language is only one generation away from vanishing. English may hold sway in the Western world today, but so too did French, before that Latin, before that Greek, before that Etruscan, and before that some other mystery tongue that its speakers probably thought was eternal.
If the origins of language itself can’t be discerned, then at least one can learn of the origins of specific languages themselves. Wasn’t French once Latin? And wasn’t English part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European? How, exactly, does one language become another language? By degrees, to say the least. For English speakers an easy example of this degree is to read Shakespeare. Certain words and phrases present difficulties, but understanding remains attainable. Shift further back a couple hundred years, though, to the time of Chaucer, and all but a handful of words are discernable to the modern reader. Yet this is English, we are told, but it certainly doesn’t feel so.
Remnants of this incomprehensible language remain with us, though, such as in knight and knife, the ‘K’ of which was once pronounced but disappeared in the spoken vernacular yet remained in the written. Common words or phrases which we use without second thought, like ‘hello’ and ‘you’re welcome’, are also ancient relics of a language that’s morphed into something vastly different than it once was. The Anglo-Saxon ‘hal beo thu’ (whole be thou) changed into today’s ‘hello’. While ‘thank’ evolved from ‘think’, as in focusing one’s thoughts of gratitude towards a person to think of them.
Not only is it instructive to see how words arose in English, but also how words and phrases are used by other tongues. Indeed, does the language a person speaks affect how they view the world? Such as, what does it say of English speakers that it among no other language capitalizes the pronoun ‘I’? And what of the aforementioned ‘thank you’? The Latin expression ‘gratias agere’ (to give thanks) remains in Spanish (gracias) and Italian (grazie). French, however, uses ‘merci’, which has its roots in Latin’s ‘merces’, the term for reward. The Japanese ‘arigato’, meanwhile, literally means ‘it is difficult’. Russians ‘spasibo’ is ‘God save’ which, under its once atheistic communistic rule seemed a bit contradictory.
Many words and phrases, though, are innocently used by a modern society that has little idea of their true origin. Sabotage came from ‘sabat’, which was a wooden shoe that unhappy factory workers threw into machinery. ‘Rival’ meant ‘pertaining to a river bank’, whereat landowners contended for water rights on the bank of a stream. ‘Naughty’ was ‘poor’, one who had naught. ‘So long’ has its roots in the Arabic ‘Salaam’ (peace), which was used by Malay in the form ‘salang’, which the colonial British troops brought home for their own use.
Yet for every word that’s created, appropriated, or downright stolen, there are a slew which also go extinct. In English ‘pingle’ meant ‘to fight’, ‘yerk’ to ‘hit’, ‘snudge’ to be ‘miserly’, ‘begeck’ for ‘cheat’. Even Shakespeare, only four hundred years removed from today, used a bevy of words that remain unknown to us: aroint, ronyon, bubukles, and coystril are just a few. Complicating this tug and pull of word creation and word death are words and phrases that remain in use but don’t really make sense. To ‘burn up’ really means to ‘burn down’, while ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ aren’t relative to an informed understanding of the universe. ‘Look out’ may give warning to a native English speaker, but would cause a person of another language to merely peer outside.
But language isn’t always as precise and logical as it seems. Perhaps this speaks to its organic and imprecise development. For example, while Western readers consume their books by scanning from left to right, and other languages like Hebrew and Arabic read from right to left, the earliest Greek texts appearing in Homeric times read right, then left, then right again, and so on and so forth. This method, in fact, is so restful for the eyes that one wonders that it didn’t catch on. This leads to conjectures about what languages that may have existed that were, at least to modern speakers, more precise and logical than any spoken today. What’s been lost is as tantalizing as what’s been learned.
And so the story of language is unlike any tale ever told. There is no beginning, no end, no denouement upon which rests the scintillating conclusion. No, language is and always will be an enigma; a tool used by all but fully understood by none.
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