By Anatoly Liberman
I have received many questions, some of which are familiar (they recur with great regularity) and others that are new and will answer a few today and the rest in a month’s time.
Nostratic Hypothesis. Our correspondent Mr. Steve Miller asked me whether I ever treat the topic of language evolution and, if I do, what I think of the Nostratic hypothesis. This is also a question I have once tackled in the past, but there is no reason to assume that everybody remembers everything I have ever written. With age the idea of one’s place in the world undergoes a noticeable change. Decades ago (I will coyly suppress the numeral before decades), I used to feel slighted on discovering that somebody had not read my poems, articles, or even books. Now I am surprised to meet those who have not missed them.
The Nostratic hypothesis revived the age-old idea, according to which all languages go back to the same protolanguage, and attempts to reconstruct the phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary of that language. It was advanced by a scholar of exceptional talent and developed by a group of his able followers. Like all grand theories of evolution — whether the subject is language, religion, oral tradition, or art (I will leave out the laws of nature) — it runs into serious, partly insurmountable difficulties. In principle, the idea of monogenesis (development from a single center) is more attractive that the idea of polygenesis, for language, as it seems, must have evolved once (no one knows how it happened, where, and when), but God is in the details, and numerous details refuse to conform to the Nostratic idea. However, the work done in this direction has been useful and stimulating. Its main thesis can never be proved to everybody’s satisfaction, but such is the fate of all distant reconstruction. We are not on the last page of an Agatha Christie novel or at 221B Baker Street. Compare the negative (in my opinion, justified) reception of Joseph Greenberg’s picture of the Amerindian languages and the unsettled questions of the the earliest forms of the Indo-Europeans and of their homeland.
Fillers in Present Day English. Mr. Jon Lockerby defends the use of like and you know because they perform a certain function. Indeed, those fillers emerged to express hesitation, uncertainty, polite detachment, and other shades of meaning subsumed under what linguists call modality. (There is a sizable body of literature on this subject: blogs, articles, chapters in books, and monographs. See, for instance, Gisle Andersen, Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation, Amsterdam, 2001.) I will reproduce part of Mr. Lockerby’s letter. He quoted the invented sentence I told her what her boyfriend did and she was, like, no way, and I was, like yeah, way, and she was like, oh my God and commented: “No one really talks like that, not even teenagers (unless they’re trying to irritate you, because they know good and well how irritating it is).” “Put the gun down,” he continues, is final. But in conversational speech, people are more likely to say: “I was, like, put the gun down.”
