Catastrophism in Linguistics

Following my precis of Lyell yesterday, today I read another learned article by Mario Alinei which discusses Catastrophism in Linguistics. Interestingly, this article takes issue with one of the conclusions I myself drew from reading Lyell when I stated that:

"Lyell's interest was to shed light on what happened to species, and thought to do this by using languages as an analogy. Thinking of language in this way allows us to see it as a living entity. An entity that can have a moment of birth and a moment of death."

In fact, my conclusion from reading Lyell, that language behaves like an organism, is, according to Alinei, exactly the same conclusion that late 19th and early 20th century linguists drew from Lyell. They started to think of language as an organism, which is to say something which had definable lifespan. The death of a language was considered to have occurred through a cultural 'blitz' (to use Alinei's translator's word). Hence, Pre-Indo-European languages (PIE) were deemed to have died out 6000 years ago as a result of a widespread cultural invasion. While linguists adhered to uniformitarian ideas such as those postulated by Lyell, their actual interpretation of the evidence was catastrophist. Not only that, but the language which prevailed following the 'blitz' was considered superior, the vanquished language being inferior and 'damned'. Alinei makes a point of criticising these points of views, just as Claude Levi-Strauss criticises earlier anthroplogists for relativistic attitudes in their studies of tribespeople.

To remind readers, catastrophist thinking came about when geologists tried to fit the known geological record into the period of time (roughly 6000 years) ordained by Archbishop Ussher to be the age of the earth based on his interpretation of biblical events. The only way to explain such a thick pile of rocks was to invoke a series of major catastrophes by which they could be emplaced. William Buckland was an advocate of this kind of thinking and his study of the remnants of the flood served to bolster the view that the flood described in Genesis could be underpinned by real geological evidence.

Alinei thinks that the interpretations of early linguists betrays their colonialist (racist) thinking. He notes that these linguists considered the Indo-European languages as the most sophisticated and beautiful, a sort of peak of intellectual development. Such a peak must (naturally) have been attained relatively recently and hence a relatively short history was ascribed to the development of the IE language as compared to, for example, the language of Australian aborigines which was considered to have had a development beginning some 40,000 years ago. At the same time, learned societies such as the Société Linguistique de Paris banned communications concerning the origin of language making the 6000 year origin into a doctrine.

Alinei's view is that the IE language came about not by a major cultural invasion, but by a process of slow change that goes back much further than the start of the metal age some 6000 years ago. This is actually much truer to Lyell's original thesis that both languages and species change slowly, continuously and incrementally, the apparent gaps in the record being due to absence of preservation and difficulty of conservation.

My own view is that, very much like geology, linguistics probably contains some uniformitarian and some catastrophic elements. The effect, for example, of the Norman invasion of Britain was a profound one for the English language. It radically altered the language in a way that was sudden and one might say catastrophic. Whether these catastrophic changes outweigh the changes brought about by the bartering of languages between interested parties, I am unable to judge.

I do think, however, that these links between geology and linguistics contain some fascinating grounds for thought. Sea level rises in the post-glacial period of 120m that occurred between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago considerably altered the geographical landscape. For example, the present day English Channel would have been dry land not just between Dover and Calais but as far as the Current Atlantic margin shelf break.

These sea level rises may have been up to 2m in a hundred years, which, compared to current rates of 20cm in the last 100 years might be considered as quite catastrophic, possible resulting in flooding of extensive lowland areas within a single lifetime. What would be the cultural effect if the whole of Bangladesh suddenly disappeared underwater, for example. Surely it would have a strong cultural influence on the people of the surrounding areas as a mass exodus was imposed on them?