Dr. Guy Deutscher: Thank you. That's nice to hear.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes that was precisely my aim so I'm quite happy if it actually works.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Actually, this is something I say in the beginning of my book. I tell an anecdote about trying to learn a bit of Latin when I was a child and not quite understanding where it all could have come from. That's a true anecdote. Since I was a child, I have always been fascinated by how that amazing thing called language could have come about and who might have been there when it all happened. I used to ask: was it some sort of prehistoric assembly of elders who decided on all these incredibly complex conventions? Of course, I knew that wasn't the case, but I just had no idea how it could have emerged otherwise. That was really the main question I wanted to answer when I started studying linguistics and language. So I suppose it has been driving me ever since.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes and secretly I was writing the Unfolding Language) to myself at the age of 17 or 18, because I couldn't find anything or anyone that could answer my burning questions. So in some sense, I'm closing a cycle there.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's right and of course, when I call language "Mankind’s greatest invention" that's tongue-in-cheek somewhat, precisely because of what you’ve just said. Language was not an invention like the wheel, or E-mail. As I say in the book, language is what made us human in the first place. So it was our greatest invention, except it wasn't invented. Of course, some people might wonder why I say that language, of all things, is what made us human. I don't think there's an objective, or true answer, here, because there are clearly lots of things that differentiate us from all other animals. So it must be to some extent a subjective decision about what we feel is absolutely most special about us. Still, of all the characteristics that differentiate us from the other animals, I think most people would agree, quite instinctively even, that language is the fundamental thing that makes us qualitatively different. We can also say that without language, we simply couldn't have achieved everything that we have done.

David Boulton: It seems pretty clear that language is our species most distinguishing attribute. However, it seems there's also something that's showing up just before language, which is the human ability to learn together. I believe it has somewhat mediated the emergence of our use of language.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: The ability to learn together? Do you mean to transmit knowledge from generation to generation?

Dr. Guy Deutscher: We know today that primates can communicate in a much more sophisticated way than we ever imagined. The famous pygmy chimpanzee, Kanzi, is perhaps the best example. But, there is still a huge gap between the most sophisticated things we've seen chimpanzees doing and what every human child is doing. Obviously, that is something that involved long evolutionary and historical processes. But, we have very little to go on when we try to reconstruct this process, and of course, there have been hundreds of proposed scenarios for how it would have happened.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: I’m referring to the scenarios that have been proposed for what came before language, and what were the sources for the first words: from gesture to language, and from music and rhythm to language, etc. But, it's very difficult to tell which of these is right, because we have so little evidence. It’s also very difficult to put a precise limit and say, this is where language began.

David Boulton: Yes. I don't mean to go too far into this, but it would seem certain precursors are necessary to produce rapid articulate speech, as we think of it today. Given the FOXP2 gene study, and the anthropological findings that reveal when the necessary changes in jaw, teeth, and tongue came in, there seems to be a 50,000 to 200,000-year window or something like that, during which language sprouted forth.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: That's right. But, even these studies are not conclusive. I think what you're referring to concerning changes in the jaw and tongue are the studies about the lowering of the larynx. We have a much lower larynx than chimpanzees, which enables us to produce a much wider range of sounds. Anatomically modern humans, in other words, humans with precisely the same anatomy as ours, have been around for 150,000-200,000 years, so that gives you a certain kind of limit.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: But we have to qualify these limits a little. It’s true that hominids with a higher larynx had a much narrower range of possibilities to produce sounds. But the fact that our ancestors, say, 500,000 years ago couldn't produce the vowel 'ee' doesn't tell us that they had no language at all. We simply don’t know whether they had language, and how much language they had.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Around 70,000, and according to some new studies as early as 100,000 years ago, there is the emergence of ‘symbolic artifacts’, things like ostrich-shell beads that are clearly there not as utilitarian tools, but as decorative elements. Many people believe that when you find such symbolic artifacts, you can assume a symbolic language. So if they are right (and it does sound on the whole fairly plausible assumption) then language was around for at least 70,000 years. But it is terribly important to stress that there's no direct evidence for anything to do with language before five thousand years ago.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: I agree entirely. The only thing is, how exactly did that transition occur? I don’t believe we will be able to pin it down.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Right. I think we instinctively feel it, and it must also reflect, in some sense, a historical reality that will forever be a mystery.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: That's precisely what I tried to do, yes. I concentrated on the part of the story we can make reasonable conjectures about, tried to start from a point where we already had some simple words.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely, that's why I decided to start there. From this starting point we can, based on what we can see today, actually build fairly plausible scenarios about how complex language evolved from a very simple beginning. The stage I choose to start with, which I call, "Me Tarzan"; is undoubtedly already human, because by that stage you have the basic ability to describe things, even if they're very, very simple things. So I start with the most rudimentary materials of language and try to show how, we can extrapolate the processes that we can see in operation in the historical period back and see how the complexity of language has evolved.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, it's the process by which ideas or conventions emerge, not because someone decides on them consciously, but, through the act of communication itself. So, it is the evolution of memes, if one wants to speak in those terms.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: To mean?

Dr. Guy Deutscher: That is really a wonderful example. So, yes I think the three main driving forces for change are economy, expressiveness, and analogy making. Economy is ultimately just laziness, manifested mostly in pronunciations, trying to pronounce as little as possible, and as little as you can get away with.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. Of course, no one tries to optimize consciously. No one sits and looks at the whole system and thinks, well, we have a redundancy here; we have a word that's too long there, let's do something about it. It's sort of like free-market economies. Things happen through actions people do individually when trying to address very immediate concerns. So, you just instinctively know you don't want to put any more effort than needed for your conversation partner to understand you.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, and the resulting changes come through continuous negotiations that are for the most part unconscious. If you go a little bit too far in economizing, your partner will not understand you, and you will have to repeat it. So, the next time you won't go quite as far as you did. There is always that negotiation between the speaker and the hearer. But, if you economized and you were understood, you will turn that into a habit. The result of this, over time, is a sort of constant drive towards optimization, towards reduction, and making the code more efficient.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's right. Of course, if that were the only thing around, words would just always get shorter and shorter and shorter, and things would be incredibly efficient, but possibly quite dull also.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. But, there are other driving forces, because of course; we also have this expressive urge – we want to extend our expressive range or say things in a more forceful way, creating greater effect, which drives us in the other direction - towards maybe using more words, or using words with stronger meaning.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's one manifestation, precisely.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, I try to describe it as the cycles of expansion and reduction, where expressiveness builds new or longer or more complex phrases, and then economy (or erosion) gradually reduces them. Erosion checks the excesses of the expressiveness, and vice versa..

Dr. Guy Deutscher: In what sense speciation?

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's right.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: …there's analogy, which is trying to make order out of that whole mess. Analogy is the instinctive need to find as much order as possible, especially by children, in order to cope with learning the language. When you learn language as a child, you have to cope with absolutely mind-boggling amounts of information and detail. It would be completely impossible to do that if you didn't assume, at least as your default-working hypothesis, that as much as possible works by logic and by rules. That is why children, (but not only children), whenever they are confronted with new forms try to fit them into other rules they already know, or even make new rules on the spot, based on similarities between forms and expressions they already know. Most of the time they get it right, in the sense that they create the same rules or regularities that are really there in the language of their parents. But sometimes they don't. Then, we get all these cute errors children make, which are usually producing a regular form where in real language it happens to be irregular. Or taking one regularity and imposing it in a place where another rule applies.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, It is the ability to find similarities between things that are not identical, but nevertheless have some things in common, and to create a rule or a pattern and then apply it along with the patterns you already know to new situations or new forms you encounter. The changes in language over time are driven by the fact that the analogies every generation makes are not entirely identical to those of the previous generation. They don't generate precisely the same system because some forms which had been more frequent became less frequent and so the new generation would not use these forms to draw their analogies. And vice versa. Some forms, which used to be quite infrequent, have become very frequent, so these are now the dominant ones in which to make the patterns on.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. The changes in meaning, changes in frequencies, changes even in pronunciation, and then the combination of these three basic forces, each pushing in a slightly different direction is what drives language all the time and what doesn't allow it to stay still. Ultimately, it's what can develop more and more sophisticated grammatical structures, as well as a wider range of vocabulary and abstract terms, which I tried to show toward the end of the book.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher. Well, in some sense, I suppose these are the characteristic effects of the three forces. Metaphor is a manifestation of expressiveness. Destruction is a manifestation of economy, and creation is slightly more difficult because it is a manifestation of all these things, combined. Metaphor is a manifestation of expressiveness because we try to extend our expressive range to abstract concepts. Abstract concepts don't just grow on trees. They have to come from somewhere, and the only way to create them is to use material that's already there and to extend its meaning. The material that's already there are words for simple things, for simple objects or simple actions. So, metaphor is the means by which we create more sophisticated, abstract vocabulary, from words for simpler concepts.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely, and use them as images for more abstract things. Then, destruction is obviously the manifestation of laziness. Creation, as I said, is more complex because it really is the combination of the three. In the book I show how different aspects of creation are achieved through the three forces combining together. For example, expressiveness creates new, longer expressions, and then, erosion or destruction compacts them into one longer word; analogy then, is able to pick up on accidental patterns that emerge in these new words and regularize them into more complex paradigms. So, the reason that creation is more elusive or more mysterious, is because it's the three forces coming together in a very particular combination, and in just the right dosages .

Dr. Guy Deutscher: I suppose that's mostly manifested in expressiveness and extending the range of words.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Let’s put it this way, creation is almost a by-product, especially if you talk about grammatical elements . No one ever sets out to create a grammatical structure. It's always the by-product of the combination of these processes we’ve just been talking about. So, in some sense, it is ironic that the creation of the sophistication of language is always a by-product. It's always the result of other things. It's never....

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: I'm entirely with you on that. I think I wrote to you after I looked at your web site online; your work really is incredibly ambitious and extremely important. So, I really appreciate what you're doing.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: There are very different directions in which one can answer this. On the one hand there's an enormous amount of regularity in the way language changes; and that's mostly what I concentrate on in the book. But, in addition to that, there's an enormous amount of completely random changes. So, although we can expect that the basic mechanism of change would work in a similar way, nevertheless, there's such an amount of noise in the processes of change, that unless two groups are in contact with one another, and the need for communication keeps the two groups together, then the changes in the two groups just drift apart, which is the basis of linguistic diversity, the real answer to the Tower of Babel story.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. It’s no wonder the highest density of different languages in the world is in Papua, New Guinea. There is a joke that half of the world's languages are in Papua, New Guinea. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's not so far off. And, the reason is precisely because you have these small, isolated groups living in these valleys with mountains around them that they can't go through. So each group, in isolation, has developed independently and that's why there are so many very different languages around there.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Well, Indo-European, of course is just one family. It is of particular importance to English speakers because it's the family that English happens to belong to. But, it is just one family and there are quite a few others. And in each one of them you can see the same processes of divergence. If you take the Indo-European family, there is no agreement on where they came from originally . But wherever they came from, whether it was Asia Minor or Siberia, or somewhere in the Caucasus, what is clear is that they split up and started spreading all the way from what is now India to Western Europe. And in that process, as they lost contact with one another, their languages started to diverge. We see the same process of divergence in all other language families. Because of geographical dispersal, over time, the languages start to diverge from one another.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Of course, some families, such as Indo-European, have diverged so much that although English is Indo-European and Persian is Indo-European, speakers of English and speakers of Persian still can't understand a single word of the other Language.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: That's true, but, they have developed in their separate ways for many thousands of years. Cognates are what remains from that common source that can still be recognized. They're most often not recognizable to the speakers themselves because the sounds have actually changed so much. But, scholars who re-trace the evolutionary process can still recognize that these two words come from the same source.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Perhaps the issue of dialects and languages is something that many people don’t understand. People tend to think there's some mysterious point when, what used to be the same language changes into two different languages. Whereas, for linguists it's essentially a continuous process. If two varieties are not in close enough contact with one another, they will gradually drift apart. There is no such thing as 100 percent mutual comprehension suddenly becoming zero percent mutual comprehension.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: No, and we can see that even in English dialects. There is a joke about an American and a Scotsman, who meet somewhere and can't understand a word of what each other is saying, and so, in the end, they decide to speak French.

It’s the same story in Germany, for instance, where you get dialects of what's supposed to be the same language, which are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible. So, you get the whole range from 100 percent comprehensibility, to almost zero. But, on the other hand you have separate languages such as Norwegian and Swedish, where there's nevertheless a fair amount, of mutual comprehensibility,. So, the point, when you decide to call a different variety a different language, is to a large extent, arbitrary, and depends on many other, political...

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, or the feelings of the actual people using the language.

David Boulton: For example, perhaps, just as when the English tried to restore the English language after the French in the fourteenth century?

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes or more modern examples are Serbo-Croatian, which used to be one language when Yugoslavia was one country. But after the war, it suddenly became two languages. Nothing has changed in terms of the real linguistic situation. They still can understand each other perfectly, but now they feel they are speaking different languages, so they call it different languages. In any case, the underlying process is that when two varieties are not in contact, they gradually diverge and so the mutual comprehensibility decreases. Now if you wait, I don't know, a thousand years or so, you can be sure the two languages will become mutually incomprehensible, but before that, you will get all these shades in between. What you decide to call them in those cases is, to a large extent, arbitrary. I think that's something that people are not always aware of.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely. I can't put it any better.

David Boulton: Again, it seems so amazing there's such a parallel in the workings of this process with how life itself works.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: I agree.

David Boulton: As we go into the differences between written and spoken language, one important piece has to do with Deacon's notion that languages are constrained in their range and growth by how learnable they are to children, whereas writing systems are almost the opposite. The statement refers to language being generational. Language has got this generational evolutionary dynamic in it that's constrained by its learnability to children.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. I entirely agree I think this is one of these things that sound so simple and obvious once someone has explained it the way Deacon has. But, it needed someone to actually say it. I think that's an extremely, powerful explanatory mechanism for the evolution of language in general, and it explains why children manage to learn language even though it's so complex. In many ways, it puts the traditional explanations for why language is learnable on their head. The idea is that if only learnable elements or rules in language which are can survive, then it's not surprising that children can learn language so effectively and so quickly. Simply, the things they couldn't learn are not part of our language.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely. So, I really admire that argument.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: And, I while I never thought about this before, you’re right that unfortunately one cannot apply this argument in such a simple way to writing because, well I suppose, because writing is...

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Well, that's also true in some sense. But, what I meant was that a writing system that requires years of hard work and frustration and energy, can still be perpetuated through the generations because it's learned at a later age, where you actually can force people to learn. You can't force two-year-olds to learn to speak.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. But, what I mean is, suppose you now devise a language that is almost unlearnable to speak, and you try to force your two-year-old to speak it. What can you do? You can tell them "if you don't start speaking it I won't give you any food", or "I'll beat you", or whatever you want. But, that won't help you, because at that age, if they can learn it, they learn it. If they can't, they won't. But, with writing, it's different because that's something you do later, and you force people who are already at an age when the whole system of social coercion is in place and is workable, and that is why writing systems can allow themselves to have so much more unnecessary complications and difficulty than spoken language.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, and some of them are even intended.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: For example, in the cuneiform writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, in which Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian) was written; when you look at the history of the writing system you actually see how the writing system became more and more complex over time, not simpler and simpler. The reason for that, it wasn't in the interest of anyone to make it simple, quite the reverse. Reading and writing was limited to a small group of scribes who were a sort of guild. In order to go to a scribal school, one usually had to be either well-to-do or to have come from a family of scribes. But, once you became a scribe, and learned to read and write, then your economic future was secure. So, they certainly didn't want to make it simple, and lose their privilege in this way.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Complexity served their interest and that's why with time, you can actually see the script becoming more and more complex. They invented more and more signs. So, by 500 B.C., after 2,000 years of written history, the system has really become extremely complex, much more complex than it was at 2,500 B.C.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: I don't know very much about all the psychological aspects behind it. But it's clear that with the advent of writing, you essentially have a separate kind of language emerging, with its own rules and conventions, and this is written language. People usually say that written language is different just because it's conservative and so it reflects the situation in earlier days. Of course, that's partly true. But it is, a mistake to think that the written language as it is today represents the spoken language exactly as it was.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. Written language has always had its own rules, because it is a different medium, it's a different way of expressing things. The structure of sentences has always been different in the written language and the spoken language, and that written language has always been denser than spoken language.

In English, of course, as opposed to Babylonian, no one has tried to make spelling intentionally difficult. It is more the case of spelling conventions simply not keeping up with changes in pronunciation, and so, they just misrepresent the situation today. There would be quite a good representation of English in the sixteenth century.

David Boulton: Right, right. We've talked to a number of different people in this field, about how the English writing system comes in with the Chancery scribes, I should say, comes back, after the French domination, and then the Great Vowel Shift hits, and how the printing press comes in, and all these things are kind of cementing this still-forming slush. But, my concern, stepping back, for a moment, is about the kind of confusions which are unique to writing systems. I'm interested in the complexity in the relationship between the sound system and writing system and how one’s early learning of the writing system has to evoke that sound system.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: So, you mean, there is an expectation that once you can translate sound, letters into sound, you should be able to understand written language?

Dr. Guy Deutscher: At the stage before word recognition and the higher complexities?

This leads to one of the most interesting historical tracks; my understanding is that during the initial use of the alphabet by the Hebrews, there's something like 17 consonants in play and there's a pretty tight correspondence between their letters and sounds. When the Greeks get it, via the Phoenicians, within a reasonable period of time, the Greeks, in some way, looking out for the Greek language, adjust the alphabet, so that it has the additional symbols necessary to represent their language.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Well, at least in modern times, it's not entirely true that nobody tries to adjust it. In some countries, eventually, additional letters were devised precisely in order to represent sounds that weren't there in the Roman system. You have all the diacritics, or the umlauts in German, or the accents in French, and you have various...

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, but, essentially extending it, not by devising a whole new alphabet, but by extending the Roman alphabet in order to adapt it to represent the sound system of the particular languages, and some languages have done this quite effectively.

David Boulton: Right. When I said no one, I was really referring to England. My understanding is that it looks like a small number of scribes, who grew up in a Latin school, and who spoke primarily Latin and were proud of their Latin and living in kind of an elite bubble if you will, are the ones who figured out how to take the English spoken system, with its 40-plus sounds and represent it as close as possible with Latin sounds, and a 24-something letter alphabet.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, I don't know enough to tell whether this was a decision made by arrogance, or whether it was simply lack of imagination or lack of intellectual horizon to say we can do things differently. But, I think it must be a similar symptom to the phenomenon that was common until fairly recently of teaching English grammar as if it was Latin grammar, because, well, grammar equals Latin, and therefore we shall pretend English is Latin, and teach the grammar of English as if it were Latin, which is utterly ridiculous, of course.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. But, the motives may simply be an inability to imagine that things can be otherwise, because of this enormous prestige.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Not necessarily, it may simply be lack of imagination.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. I agree entirely. Although, it is interesting that in previous stages of English, there was some attempt to introduce some other sounds. In Old English, you have a special letter (in fact two) for "th" In Middle English, you have the "yough" letter. It looked a bit like a cross between a 'g' and a 'y', that letter was used to represent the sound "ch" [as in Bach].

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's right.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: That might well be the case, in that what happens here is unusual, because the writing system pretends to represent sounds, whereas, in fact, it doesn't. There were previous writing systems, which were very difficult, but, at least they did not pretend to represent sounds.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, I think that's more or less what I meant, in the sense that in Greek, or Latin, for example, once you could view the letters, you could read, you could get the sound. For Greek and Latin, there was almost a perfect match, and what happens in English today is there's still the pretension that it's a system representing sounds, but in fact, it isn't the case anymore.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: They expect that it should be.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes English readers, I should say, have a much more difficult task than those in countries like Germany or Hungary, or Scandinavian countries, or even the Netherlands, where there have been consistent spelling reforms to make sure that the writing does represent the sound system of the language, in a fairly transparent way.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Well, I'm enjoying it as well and I'm glad it's helpful.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: That's really a very difficult question. In many of the modern European languages there are more distinct phonemes than there were in Latin. I think I vaguely remember reading something very provocative and very tentative trying to argue that generally sound systems have become more complex in the last few thousand years.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: That's one way, and we know that in English some new phonemes, like 'j' I think, came in through borrowing. But I don’t think it can be reduced to just that, since we know of ways in which new sounds develop, naturally, not because of foreign influence. One simple example is the process of affrication, by which ‘stops’ like 'p' are weakened into fricatives such as 'f', and if this happens not to all p’s but only to some, and if there was no f in the language to start with (many languages don’t), then the language will have gained a new sound.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. Admittedly, one has to remember that even in the Latin system, there were long and short vowels, which they didn't indicate. But, the general principle, I think, still stands, that there has been a noticeable increase in the inventory of phonemes. The main question is why. You could expect that the overall number of sounds should not change radically. Some new sounds can come in, but some old ones would disappear. But, in fact in the history of the European languages in the last two thousand years, the balance has shifted and more new phonemes came in than old ones disappeared. I don't think anyone can do more than speculate why.

David Boulton: So, it’s a bit of a mystery that goes right next to the Great Vowel Shift, as being something we have lots of theories about, but nothing approaching consensus as to what happened.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: No. I think it is really quite difficult, much more difficult than just trying to explain why one particular sound changes into another, which usually, turns out to be laziness of one sort or another. But the explanation we want for this question of the number of phonemes in the language is on an entirely different level. You are now looking at the global system to see why there's been some sort of upset to the balance.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: It's extremely interesting. I agree. And, it's unlikely to be a coincidence, in the sense that it didn't just happen in English. I think it happened in most modern European languages.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Again, I agree entirely.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: It's an interesting thought.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. Although, I wonder whether there is really an obvious point where it spikes, or whether it's more gradual.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. It may well be connected. Ultimately, it's very difficult to give answers. There are other things like this where you see some obvious direction or changes. Some global changes that do upset the balance of language, and you can see these changes over the last couple of thousands of years.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: In the European languages, there's a clear movement toward simpler and shorter words. If you look at all the older languages, not just Latin and Greek, but the older stages of all Indo-European languages, they have very complex words, with lots of different endings and prefixes. Much of what is done today, with separate, independent words, was done then in one word. So, the older languages were highly ‘inflected’, but, as history moves forward you just consistently see these inflected words generally turning into invariable words, so all these case endings gradually disappear, and most of the verbal endings too.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: ...just one form for each word, rather than, sometimes, dozens of different forms in the older languages. What we would, in English, do with: I have done, I would have done, I should have done, and I will have been doing. All these different tenses, were expressed within the verb as one word. It can't be just a coincidence because it's happening in so many different languages, in fact, in all European languages to some extent. But, trying to answer the ‘why’ is, again, extremely difficult.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: I agree. Although, I’m not sure I can get terribly excited about the alleged advantages. But ultimately, it really is this inherent power struggle between the generations, in the sense that once you've mastered the system, it's not in your interest to change it, because you’ve already done all the hard work, you don’t want more work relearning the system and also you've already internalized the system of values, which leads you to think that this is right and traditional. So, you are then in a position of power to impose the same suffering that you had to go through on the new generation. It certainly would be in the interest of the new generation to have a more sensible, simpler writing system. But, they are never in a position to make it happen.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: You can see that, because recently, there's been a huge debate in Germany about some fairly minor spelling reform, which was meant to make things less complicated, and easier to learn. But, there was a huge, massive opposition to this. From writers, and from all the people who have a vested interest in the system as it is, because they've learned it and because they value the element of tradition, et cetera. But, the result of this, of course, is that you perpetuate the unnecessary suffering of the people in the learning process, a new generation who doesn't have a say in the matter. By the time they do have a say, they have already switched sides, or at least, those who will reach positions of influence will have.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. It really would need tremendous political will power.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: No.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Sure.

David Boulton: It has to do with Melvil Dewey, the guy who developed the Dewey decimal system for libraries, at least, here in America.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

David Boulton: He impresses Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie puts up a quarter of a million dollars, or so, into an organization that he forms, which includes the Chancellors and Presidents and English department heads of most of the major European and American universities and schools, as well as the major publishers. It has big, notable, heavyweight names, like Charles Darwin and Lord Tennyson, and so forth. They decide that they've got to fix the spelling, that it's causing the English language to be retarded in its imperialistic advance, and it's causing two years, or more, of additional learning troubles, for children to come up into it.

And, so, recognizing how Ben Franklin, and Noah Webster, and other spelling reformers before them had failed, they chose to take a multi-generational approach, and convince authors, publishers, and writers in general, to slowly shift the spelling over a couple of generations. But, one of the leaders of this happens to be a friend of Theodore Roosevelt. And, one day he goes to the White House and tells Roosevelt about this, who apparently had a spelling problem himself. He was not a good speller and so, he just thinks this is a great idea and issues a President of the United States order to the office of government printing of the United States government ordering that it will now print everything according to these new spelling reforms. This occurs while Congress is out of session. Congress comes back in session, and they debate it and they pass a resolution preventing Presidents and any members of Congress from ever changing the spelling of anything. Then, the Supreme Court gets involved, but says it will not take up the case. Finally, what kills it, is not scholarly debate as to the wisdom of it, but because a smear campaign gets run in the American newspapers, which attributes the whole purpose of the project as being nothing but a motive, on the part of Andrew Carnegie, to make a lot of money selling the new books that would be required if the system was adopted.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Right.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. I had no idea about all that. But, that sort of opposition is unfortunately not at all surprising. In places where there were drastic reforms in spelling, it's usually connected to some major political upheaval. You know, after the Russian Revolution there was quite a substantial reform of the writing system. They just got rid of some letters, which weren't doing anything useful and were confusing.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: No, no. They wanted to fix the writing system. They could afford to do so because they were a new regime and everything was different.

David Boulton: That was Webster's logic for over-hauling the spelling when breaking away from England in his day.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Right. Then, similarly, the Turks, after the First World War switched from the Arabic letters to the Latin letters. Again, that was a complete break from the past and the Ottoman Empire, connected to a major political upheaval. So, in such circumstances, at least you have a bit more of a chance for an extremely strong figure to force such a change. And then, in some countries, you just have a long tradition of doing spelling reforms. Each change is usually fairly minor, because there's a history of such reforms, so each single one doesn't seem like a great upheaval.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, except the French have hardly reformed anything. So, I think, French is almost as bad as English.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. But, you know, in Holland, they have just had a spelling reform a few years ago. They really just changed a few minor things, and there was very little opposition to that because these sort of small reforms are already a tradition.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

David Boulton: Interesting. If we go back to what we were saying about Deacon earlier and how the evolutionary dynamic in spoken language is, in some respects, constraining or conserving language to be learnable by children at a certain age; that same mechanism is in play, but in an entirely different way here, in that the levels of illiteracy that we have are relative to the lack of learnability of the orthography by children. Spoken language couldn't work the same way.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: No, no, because you can't get children who can't speak the language. That just wouldn't function. Whereas, children who can't read is commonly accepted.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, and you need a sociologist to think about why that is tolerated.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. That's certainly true.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Of course, writing evolved much more gradually than most people think. But that doesn't change the basic fact that writing, and the norms of written language, are entirely conscious artifacts. It is an invention in the completely traditional, normal sense, whereas spoken language is a different beast altogether.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: So, in some societies, there are debates about changes in the writing system, and there are institutionalized changes. Though the idea that you could institutionalize change in the spoken language is fairly absurd, opposition to changes in the spelling convention are purely political...

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Well, the second one is very difficult to say something sensible about. It just must be that at some stage, once language became a sufficiently powerful tool, it must have appropriated the process of thinking itself.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Possibly.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: I suppose that with children, the problem is that until they speak, you can't really ask them what they're thinking.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. With the other question, what writing did to spoken language, we are on more secure ground. Because there, we are talking about the beginning of the historical period, when writing starts.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's part of it. In fact, this is something I've just started working on for my next book, which will be on language and culture.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Of extreme interest. And it's something that many, many pages can be written about.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: But very generally, there's no question that written language has effected quite profound changes in the whole way we relate to language, even to spoken language. I don’t think all of the changes have been positive. In particular, one negative result is that written language quickly usurped spoken language as the real thing, so to speak.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, because it's a permanent medium and it quickly came to have a much higher prestige than the spoken medium because of the way it was used, and the purposes it was used for. And, it has created a tension between what spoken language really is, and what it thinks it ought to be. Because now we tend to think of written language as the real thing, whereas spoken language is just some sort of approximation to it, there's this tension between what we actually do when we speak, which is really something fairly different from the conventions of written language, and what we believe we do. We tend to think that what we ought to be doing is to speak with these perfectly formed sentences, which begin in the beginning, and end in the end, and which are grammatical all the way through. But when you look at real spoken language, it looks just completely different. That's an insight that has emerged fully only in the last, I don't know, twenty years, where linguists have started collecting these massive corpora of actual spoken language, and finally decided that it's worthwhile to look at language as it is actually spoken. This is when they discovered that things in spoken language are really quite different from the written one.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.It's a different mode of communication. It's no wonder that it's done in quite different ways. But, this primacy of written language has fooled, quite a lot of people, including linguists, who think of those perfectly formed sentences as the ‘real thing’. Many linguists believe that the ‘real’ system of language we have in our minds is essentially that of written language, of these perfectly formed, dense sentences, and that the spoken language is just a poor relative, trying, usually unsuccessfully, to reach that ideal, But I think that just doesn't make sense.

But to get back to your original question, there are many cases where we now know that people have changed traditional pronunciation of certain words to reflect more closely how they're written.

David Boulton: Yes. John Fisher makes the argument, in his work on the standardization of English, that it's actually the writing system that creates the conservative stability in the spoken system, relative to its conventions. Otherwise, there is no standard in spoken language except that imposed by cultural acceptance of convention.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. And it's also on the level of syntax and on practically all levels of language.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. There are some things that we think of as completely obvious concepts, like the word ‘word’. What can be more obvious than that? But we know this, to a large extent, because we have in our mind's eye a word written, with spaces on either side of it. But in some languages which have never been written, it turns out it’s not at all always obvious what a word is.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: No. Even for linguists it's not always obvious what are separate words and what is one word. There are cases where people have very seriously and earnestly discussed questions like that.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: So, that's just a simple example of precisely what you were saying that it's a reflexive process. What we see in written language then feeds back to how we perceive our spoken language.

Dr. Guy Deutscher: Well, it really was my pleasure.

Special thanks to volunteer Carol Covin for transcribing this interview.