Tom Wolfe plays mischief with language in 'Kingdom of Speech'

The Kingdom of Speech

nolead begins By Tom Wolfe

Little, Brown. 185 pp. $26

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Frank Wilson

nolead ends According to a 2004 article in Frontiers of Psychology titled "The Mystery of Language Evolution," "the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever."

Among the article's eight authors - as Tom Wolfe notes in his new book, The Kingdom of Speech - was Noam Chomsky, "the biggest name in linguistic history."

Wolfe found the article odd: "I had never heard of a group of experts coming together to announce what abject failures they were." He wondered what it was that "has left endless generations of academics, certified geniuses, utterly baffled when it comes to speech."

Speech always posed a problem for evolution. Wolfe notes that "as early as 1838 Darwin had written in his notebooks and letters about the conundrum of language." After the publication of On the Origin of Species, the conundrum became a sore point. Max Müller, professor of modern languages at Oxford, declared "the science of language will yet enable us to withstand the extreme theories of evolutionists and to draw a hard and fast line between man and brute."

That, however, was precisely the line Darwin wished to erase, and in The Descent of Man, he declared, "I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man's own instinctive cries." Müller had already dismissed this idea as the Bow-wow Theory. That didn't stop others from speculating further that speech derived from instinctive cries such as "ouch," or the coos and other sounds mothers say to babies, and so on.

Wolfe has a lot of fun recounting how much of human behavior Darwin found mirrored in the behavior of dogs, including abstract thought ("when a dog sees another dog at a distance, it is often clear that it is a dog in the abstract") and religion ("a dog looks upon its master as on a god.")

The upshot, however, as Wolfe notes, was that scholars in Darwin's day reached much the same conclusion as the authors of the paper in Frontiers of Psychology. In 1872, "the Philological Society of London gave up on trying to find the origin of language and would no longer accept papers on the subject or countenance bringing it up at society meetings."

Then, in 1955, along came Chomsky, who declared that human beings were born with a "language organ" that enabled every child to "use the 'deep structure,' 'universal grammar,' and 'language acquisition device' he was born with to express what he had to say, no matter whether it came out of his mouth in English or Urdu or Naga."

According to Wolfe, there is only one recorded instance of anyone confronting Chomsky "over this business of a language organ," and in Wolfe's view, "Chomsky double-talked his way out of it con brio."

The question was posed by writer John Gliedman: "Is there a special place in the brain and a particular kind of neurobiological structure that comprises the language organ?"

"Little enough is known about cognitive systems and their neurological basis," Chomsky replied. "But it does seem that the representation and use of language involve specific neural structures, though their nature is not well understood."

In 2002, Chomsky and two colleagues produced the theory of recursion. Recursion consists, he said, of "putting together one sentence, one thought, inside another in a series that, theoretically, could be endless." Take the sentence He assumed that now that her bulbs had burned out, he could shine and achieve the celebrity he had always longed for. As Wolfe points out, tucked inside the first thought ("he assumed") are four others.

According to Chomsky, every language depends on recursion.

Enter Daniel L. Everett, a linguist who spent some years among the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-hannh), a tiny tribe in the Amazon basin. In 2005, Everett published a paper in the journal Current Anthropology titled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã." The article focused on two points: The Pirahã language had no recursion and was shaped, not by any Chomskyan language organ, universal grammar, deep structure, or language-acquisition device, but rather by the Pirahã's unique culture.

Wolfe's thesis is that speech is not a product of biological evolution, but a human artifact, the artifact of artifacts, the one that has made all the others possible. Devout evolutionists have already denounced Wolfe for heresy - although Wolfe, an atheist, objects to evolution because, he says, it is a cosmogony, a faith-based theory of everything.

The common reader will likely find The Kingdom of Speech an entertaining and informative romp, thanks to Wolfe's patented stylistic hijinks. It may raise more questions than it answers, but that may well be its greatest virtue. It is also, quite often, very funny.

Frank Wilson is a retired Inquirer book editor. Visit his blog, Books, Inq. - The Epilogue. Email him at PresterFrank@gmail.com.