Over the weekend I was at a dinner where the subject of language came up and which language is the most difficult to speak or learn. One guest, an amateur linguist, asserted that it was the Khoisan languages of Africa that employ clicks of the tongue as consonants.
I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but I thought of it in listening to the new interview with Stephen Meyer and Michael Knowles, released yesterday, anticipating the new theatrical documentary The Story of Everything, which opens on April 30.
“No Primitive Languages”
In this very interesting conversation with Knowles, Dr. Meyer has an observation drawing on the thought of linguist Noam Chomsky:
Every single human language has this complexity and suppleness of expression, all the tenses and the declensions and so forth. This was Chomsky’s mantra: There are primitive cultures technologically, but there are no primitive languages. And how you get from what the primates do to what we do is a complete mystery. It is a hugely unsolved mystery in evolutionary theory. It underscores our uniqueness as well.
That’s striking. If languages evolve in the familiar Darwinian manner, you would expect there to be a range of sophistication levels across the spectrum of human languages. You would anticipate that there would be primitive languages and more sophisticated ones. But the truth is otherwise: Whether any given culture develops advanced technology or not, we find no primitive languages (difficult does not equal more or less sophisticated). And that is according to an atheist and a leftist like Chomsky who is not looking to score points for traditional over secular views.
Not an Appeal to Authority
Knowles finds that delicious:
Though I know it’s erroneous to appeal to authority, and in this way I’m kind of appealing to the opposite of an authority because Chomsky’s wrong about everything [else]. But he’s pretty good on language and I like that people who don’t share my priors about a lot of things increasingly seem to be coming to the same dilemmas, making concessions about really fundamental issues.
Yes, indeed, and the responses we are getting in advance to The Story of Everything, based on Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis, illustrate that. Says Knowles, “When I was a kid, only dummies denied Darwinian evolution. Increasingly, denying Darwin is the standard position of all the smartest people I know.” Watch the interview with Michael Knowles here: