Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language

Preface

PREFACE In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris imposed a ban on all discussions related to the question of the origin of language. A similar prohibition was endorsed by the Philological Society of London a half century later in 1911. Such drastic actions were motivated, no doubt, by the endless speculations , conjectures, and unfounded theories that were being bandied about at the time. For most of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and for the greater part of the twentieth century, language scientists have, in fact, tended to shy away from engaging in any kind of debate related to the seemingly insoluble enigma of the phylogenesis of speech. In the early 1970s, however, interest in this conundrum was rekindled, probably because of the intriguing and suggestive findings that were being accumulated in such interrelated fields of inquiry as archeology, paleography , animal ethology, sociobiology, psychology, neurology, anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics. Language scientists'came to see these as tantalizing bits and pieces to the puzzle of language origins. The result of this new awareness was a disciplinary cross-fertilization and the birth of a new branch of the language sciences, glottogenetics, known vicariously as glossogenetics (e.g., Grolier 1983; Crystal 1987: 290). Today, the aim of this new domain of scientific inquiry is to do exactly what the Linguistic Society of Paris and the Philological Society of London had dismissed as impracticable : namely, to conduct meaningful research forays into the origin (or origins ) of language and to formulate theories on the etiology of speech in the human species. In the words of Landsberg (1988a: vii), glottogenetics has developed, in a very short time, into an interdisciplinary form of investigation that brings together "anthropologists, biologists, archeologists, linguists, prehistorians and inhabitants of adjacent intellectual realms" in the common goal of determining to what extent it is "possible to gather objective and verifiable data about the genesis of human language." Glottogenetics has indeed begun to unravel and put together some of the intriguing pieces to the mystifying puzzle of language origins. The proliferation of anthologies of studies that this science has spawned-e.g., Wescott (1974), Harnad, Steklis, and Lancaster (1976), Grolier (1983), Skomale and Polome (1987), Landsberg (1988a), Gessinger and Rahden (1988), Koch (1989), Raffler-Engel, Wind, and Jonker (1989), Shevoroshkin (1989)provides samples of the kinds of fascinating scientific work that this fledg- viii Preface ling field has now made possible. From the outset, however, the gathering together of the bits and pieces has made it saliently obvious that glottogenetics needs a principle, or set of principles, for connecting them in some scientifically plausible way, so that the original glottogenetic "scenario"or "primal scene" as Gans (1981: ix) calls it-can be reconstructed. This has always been the goal of the traditional theories, and, in my view, should continue to be the ultimate target of the new scientific focus. Actually, since the 1970s several very interesting attempts at reconstruction have been made. Sundry book-length discussions by Lieberman (1975, 1984, 1991), Stam (1976), Stross (1976), Gans (1981), Smith (1985), Dewart (1989), and Bickerton (1990), for instance, have put before language scientists a substantial number of detailed and cogently argued "scenarios" for the genesis of language. Anyone of these could be profitably selected to shape and guide future research probes into this fascinating terrain. So, the purpose of this book is certainly not to add to the burgeoning stack of logically consistent glottogenetic theories. My specific aim here is to bring to the attention of those working (or just interested) in the field that perhaps the most plausible theoretical framework for synthesizing and assessing the scattered findings now coming out of the diverse scientific domains investigating the evolution of human speech was laid out in the pages of a volume written over two and a half centuries ago. In 1725, nearly a century and a half before the imposition of the Paris Society's interdiction, the Neapolitan rhetorician and philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) published a book whose title alone, La scienza nuova, should have guaranteed it a wide audience and a broad range of reactions. But it went virtually.unnoticed outside of Naples. The probable reasons for this unfortunate neglect will be discussed in the second chapter of this book. Suffice it to say at this point that perhaps the most important of these is that no English-language version of the New Science (henceforth NS) was available before Thomas G. Bergin and Max Fisch's translation of the third and final...