The Mother Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page A

errors in their speech, such as using double negatives and experiencing confusion with irregular plurals so that they say “feets” and “sheeps.” At the same time, certain fairly complicated aspects of grammar, which we might reasonably expect to befuddle children, cause them no trouble at all. One is the ability to distinguish between stative and nonstative verbs with a present participle. Without getting too technical about it, this means that with certain types of verbs we use a present participle to create sentences like “I am going for a walk” but with other verbs we dispense with the present participle, which is why we say “I like you” and not “I am liking you.” Very probably you have never thought about this before. The reason you have never thought about it is that it is seemingly instinctive. Most children have mastered the distinction between stative and nonstative verbs by the age of two and are never troubled by it again. Intriguingly, all creole languages make precisely the same distinction.
    All of this would seem to suggest that certain properties of language are innate. Moreover, as we have seen, it appears that the earth’s languages may be more closely related than once thought. The links between languages—between, say, German bruder, English brother, Gaelic bhrathair, Sanskrit bhrata, and Persian biradar —seem self-evident to us today but it hasn’t always been so. The science of historical linguistics, like so much else, owes its beginnings to the work of an amateur enthusiast, in this case an Englishman named Sir William Jones.
    Dispatched to India as a judge in 1783, Jones whiled away his evenings by teaching himself Sanskrit. On the face of it, this was an odd and impractical thing to do since Sanskrit was a dead language and had been for many centuries. That so much of it survived at all was in large part due to the efforts of priests who memorized its sacred hymns, the Vedas, and passed them on from one generation to the next for hundreds of years even though the words had no meaning for them. These texts represent some of the oldest writings in any Indo-European language. Jones noticed many striking similarities between Sanskrit and European languages—the Sanskrit word for birch, for instance, was bhurja. The Sanskrit for king, raja, is close to the Latin rex. The Sanskrit for ten, dasa, is reminiscent of the Latin decem. And so on. All of these clearly suggested a common historical parentage. Jones looked at other languages and discovered further similarities. In a landmark speech to the Asiatick Society in Calcutta he proposed that many of the classical languages—among them Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Persian—must spring from the same source. This was a bold assertion since nothing in recorded history would encourage such a conclusion, and it excited great interest among scholars all over Europe. The next century saw a feverish effort to track down the parent language, Indo-European, as it was soon called. Scores of people became involved, including noted scholars such as the Germans Friedrich von Schlegel and Jacob Grimm (yes, he of the fairy tales, though philology was his first love) and the splendidly named Franz Bopp. But, once again, some of the most important breakthroughs were the work of inspired amateurs, among them Henry Rawlinson, an official with the British East India Company, who deciphered ancient Persian more or less single-handed, and, somewhat later, Michael Ventris, an English architect who deciphered the famously difficult Linear B script of ancient Minoa, which had flummoxed generations of academics.
    These achievements are all the more remarkable when you consider that often they were made using the merest fragments—of ancient Thracian, an important language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle Ages, we have just twenty-five words—and in the face of