CULTURE
Speaking in tongues A Tom Wolfe take on language is a mixed blessing, finds Alun Anderson
TOM WOLFE, one of America’s bestknown writers, has been skewering the pompous and the self-obsessed for five decades. In his bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities, he took on greed and ambition among New York bond traders. His latest book is The Kingdom of Speech. On the surface, it is about the struggle to understand the origin of language, but you soon discover that it is also a tale of two heroic outsiders who come up against the dead weight of the academic establishment. This is familiar Wolfe territory and you know which side he is on. His starting point is a paper by US linguist Noam Chomsky and his colleagues from 2014, which seems to confess that decades of research into language have led nowhere. Wolfe appears shocked, saying they were “throwing in the towel... crapping out when it came to the question of where speech – language – comes from and how it works”. The style is instantly recognisable, and the book hurtles on for 160 pages of wicked, opinionated, high-velocity prose. Wolfe’s first protagonist is naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who clashes with Charles Darwin over whether their theory of evolution can account for language. Then there’s US linguist Daniel Everett, whose important dispute with Chomsky and his school of language runs today. Tom Wolfe, taking on the academic establishment over language 44 | NewScientist | 12 November 2016
Both Wolfe’s heroes are be offended by Wolfe’s treatment adventurers. Wallace struggles of him as an anguished with fever after fever on his hypochondriac. Chomsky and travels, and has to bury a his disciples may be less pleased. companion. During Everett’s Back in the 1950s, a brilliant many years with the Amazonian young Chomsky is seen punching Pirahã tribe, learning their big holes through B. F. Skinner’s extraordinary language, his behaviourist psychology, arguing wife and daughter nearly die. that children pick up language so Both men are also tremendous “ Enter Everett, with a paper writers. Everett’s Don’t Sleep, delivering an ‘OOOF! – right There are Snakes is an into the solar plexus!’ of international bestseller. But they the Chomsky tribe” are outsiders. Wallace is not a “gentleman” but must collect specimens from far-off lands to easily the underlying rules must survive. Everett, a fieldworker, be stored in their brains. Language is apparently scorned by “airis an instinct, Chomsky claims, conditioned armchair linguists and with his rise to fame as one of with their radiation-bluish the world’s greatest intellectuals, computer-screen pallors and the hunt for its “universal faux-manly open shirts”. grammar” dominates linguistics. Darwin is long dead and will not Enter Everett in 2005, with a
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The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe, Jonathan Cape, £14.99
paper delivering an “OOOF! – right into the solar plexus!” of the Chomsky tribe. His claim: the Pirahã language does not fit universal grammar but their unique culture. Language is not an instinct, but a cultural invention shaped by evolution. The challenge is big and the response ugly. Everett is labelled an “out-and-out liar”, and Chomsky calls him “a charlatan”. But Everett’s bestseller turns him into a folk hero “standing up to daunting Dictator Chomsky”. That is the essence of Wolfe’s fable and it is a riveting read. But be warned: it is partisan, Wolfe’s grip on the science is sometimes insecure and his story has no real end. Everett’s work has not convinced researchers, as Wolfe might wish, that they have wasted 50 years on “Chomsky’s doctrine of Universal Grammar”. That said, many will agree Everett is right to think that language needs much more than the study of grammar. We need to know how humans evolved cooperative cultures with communication at a premium and the role of theory of mind that lets us understand the intentions of others. Then there’s the appearance of symbolic thought and how language comes to “mean” something. Not to mention how language may have co-evolved with culture to slowly acquire grammatical complexity. All these and more are active research areas. Everett himself has two books out soon. After more storms pass, I’d bet we’ll see a grand new synthesis that may cast quarrelsome academics in a better light than Wolfe allows. n Alun Anderson is a consultant for New Scientist