In the wild, animals can communicate with different sounds and movement. Honeybees even have a way to convey where the best flowers and pollen are. Dogs can learn their names, and so can some cats. I think my cats know their names (Couscous and Bo), but they like to annoy me so they pretend not to. They certainly listen and come when I tap on the food can.

What would a human life be like if we were limited to such basic communication? What if all of our correspondence was so simple that we could only express a few emotions and a few basic wants and needs (food, water, shelter)? This is probably how our language started out thousands (millions?) of years ago.

Today there are somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 different languages spoken in the world. There are many more that are now extinct. Every single language (ever!) has been based on a limited number of sounds that all humans are capable of making. Now, an interesting thing to note is that after a certain age (usually around 2 years), it’s harder for the brain to develop synapses that will recognize certain sounds. In other words, if you aren’t exposed to certain sounds regularly by the time you’re 2 years old, you might lose the ability (or just make it really really hard to learn) to make certain sounds or even distinguish between certain sounds (example – for native Japanese speakers, the distinction between <l> and <r> is really hard).

So linguistics is a subfield of anthropology. It’s a way of studying cultures and exploring how culture is learned and taught. Without language, we would have trouble communicating our culture and passing us on – this is part of what makes us human. Language, culture, communication… I find it fascinating to study what really sets humans apart from the animals that share most of our DNA.

I wrote a post here about how cooking has influenced humans & how it has helped to define and impact our evolution. If you liked this post you’d probably enjoy that, too!

This is a tricky topic. There are pundits who criticize speech as being riddled with “errors” and “incorrect grammar”. I’m often one of them. We say people are lazy or uneducated if they cannot speak “properly”. But who are we to decide what “proper” is? It used to be “proper” to have sentences with scads of commas, like so:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

I cringe. Comma splicing is just one of the many reasons that I cannot stand Dickens. This is just a personal defect – many people love this crazy comma-man; I am not one of them.

So we know that language changes (a lot) over time. Slang terms change, come into popularity, and drift away. Examples: airhead (80s), as if! (90s), far out (70s), groovy (60s), Nowheresville (50s), niftic (40s), the bee’s knees (20s). We might be familiar with these words, but we don’t really use them much anymore.

Let’s get more drastic. Try comparing Old English and Modern English (Beowolf, opening lines):

Hwaet! They are like two different languages. Some words are similar, but it’s kind of like comparing German and English:

• Der alte Mann hat mir heute das Buch gegeben. (The old man has given me the book today.)

Actually, sometimes German and English seem closer than Old English and Modern English do.

I think the most important thing to remember is this (in the words of one of my favorite linguists, John McWhorter):

Language change is not decay.

I had a lot more to say on this, but now I’m beginning to ramble, so I will stop now and continue later. I believe that language change is not always decay, but I do appreciate a good grasp of grammar and proper writing. There’s a difference between beautiful new language conventions and laziness. It’s a hard distinction to make, though. I love ending sentences with prepositions, and I love the Oxford comma (red, white, and blue instead of red, white and blue). (Confession: sometimes I add Oxford commas to books… even library books.)

What language quirks (new or old) do you love or hate?