Anatomy of a Linguist
Anatomy of a Linguist
What Keeps Us Up at Night
Is Human Language Unique? T. R. Williamson, Columnist for Anatomy of a Linguist, examines Hockett’s designfeatures of language for comparison with animal languages, looks at bee waggling, and argues for a benefit of analysing similarities between us and our fellow cohabitants of Earth.
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ots of people have pets. More have at least interacted with animals at some point. They are ubiquitous in our lives in many ways — as livestock, as companions, and as cohabitants of the Earth. Children grow up memorising species’ names, enthralled by the abundant ecological variety offered by the world into which they’ve been born. Darwin spent years comparing their similarities and revolutionised the scientific study of biology with his On the Origins of Species[1]. From this came the very notion of evolution, and with it the concept of a ‘comparative’ approach to studying naturalistic phenomena. Over a hundred years ago, debates raged amongst members of the Linguistic Society of Paris about whether to admit speculative research into the origins of language[2]. No doubt inspired by the influence of Darwin and the progress of historical linguistics during the Victorian era[3], many rushed at the chance to make proposals about what we might call Proto-Indo-European. In their attempts, scholars often employed the comparative method; using historical sources of various languages to cross-reference lexical or grammatical similarities and track common ancestors through language families.
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