Book Report: The Language Puzzle

To say the least, as a former linguist, I was excited to find this book by a genuine researcher that claimed to explain the origins of language. And by gosh, Steven Mithen undertook a boat-load of multidisciplinary research on the history of humanity, culture, anatomy, and climate (among other things) to put together the various factors that could shape the development of language. It’s impressive. Lots of footnotes.

I enjoyed learning about all aspects of the puzzle, particularly the parts where he summarizes the history of linguistics and how the various parts of language fit together. Even if I didn’t already have a pretty firm grasp of the parts of speech, sound systems, semantics, and pragmatics, I think I could have grasped enough of it from Mithen’s clear explanation. Just the first few chapters are worth the price of the book.

One thing that bugs me, especially when he gets to the sections on human development, is that it takes a lot of conjecture to move from the time when the human line diverged from the chimpanzee evolutionary path. There are many missing pieces in the fossil record, and much of our anatomy doesn’t survive to the present day.

And all the parts about how words sounded are fun to think about, and he does find evidence to back up many of the concepts, such as different head shapes and vocal tracts. I just found some of the story Mithen comes up with, about fire shaping storytelling and such to be plausible but not verifiable.

I’m not saying this wasn’t a good book, because I enjoyed it very much and learned a great deal about human history. I’m simply pointing out that I still don’t think we have a clear picture of how human language developed. I wonder if we ever can figure out details of something there’s no record of, like spoken or signed language.

Maybe Mithen will next turn to written language. It has more examples to investigate.