TAKE six couples who speak very different languages, each with one or two infants, and strand them on a deserted island for one year. Provide them with a starter pack of vocabulary consisting of 200 or so neologisms. Stand back and watch how a new language emerges.
This is the 鈥渇orbidden experiment鈥� at the heart of Derek Bickerton鈥檚 . Audacious? You bet! But Bickerton nearly persuaded the US National Science Foundation to fund it, and his intellectual enthusiasm is so contagious that many readers will find themselves sharing his indignation at the last-minute rejection. And who can blame us? By this stage in the book we have accompanied Bickerton on a hugely entertaining personal journey through time, across continents and into the vicious underworld of scientific rivalry.
When we first meet he is in a dead-end teaching job in Ghana, but a chance encounter in a bar reveals his 鈥渢rue purpose in life鈥�: to understand the nature of language. Armed with the scantiest training in linguistics, he moves to Guyana in South America to investigate why the local children, who speak a patois based on English, find it so difficult to master English itself. His research takes him to a series of picture postcard locations before he winds up in Hawaii, a linguist鈥檚 paradise, where the local Creole grew out of a 鈥渨ord-salad鈥� with ingredients from half a dozen languages. Along the way we find Bickerton pissing in gutters, hanging out with the 鈥渦nrighteous鈥� and 鈥渟moking some of Hawaii鈥檚 most profitable crop鈥�. The rebel in you can鈥檛 help but warm to him.
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Through all this, Bickerton finds that 鈥� the eponymous bastard tongues 鈥� are not the 鈥渋mbecile jargons鈥� that previous generations of linguists would have had us believe. These languages are as complex as any, and, he believes, represent the purest expression of the human capacity for language.
His argument hinges on the discovery that remote and isolated Creoles share some spookily similar grammar. Other researchers have tried to shoehorn this fact into their theories by suggesting that the languages have a common origin. 鈥淚mpossible!鈥� says Bickerton 鈥� the only thing they have in common is the human minds that created them. The unavoidable conclusion, he says, is that grammar arises from an innate, hard-wired, human capacity for language.
鈥淚solated Creoles share spookily similar grammar鈥�
When Bickerton proposed this idea three decades ago, his peers flatly rejected it. These days some see it as the most convincing argument for . But if Bickerton鈥檚 theory has acquired a sheen of respectability, one gets the impression that he would rather it hadn鈥檛. He may have shelved his forbidden experiment, but if Bastard Tongues is anything to go by, he still has some more hellraising to do.
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Bastard Tongues
Hill and Wang