74 Books & arts The EconomistNovember 14th 2020
2Johnson On natural declension
The evolution of language mirrors the evolution of species“B
ecause politics.” “Latinx.”
“Doomscrolling.” Language is
developing all the time, as new usages
like these arise and old ones disappear.
One common way to describe this pro-
cess is to say that “language evolves”. It is
an apt formulation, for there is a deep
and revealing relationship between
linguistic change and biological evolu-
tion—along with some big differences.
Linguists today aim to apply methods
from other sciences to messy social
phenomena. But the influence once ran
the other way, with discoveries in lin-
guistic history leaving a mark on evolu-
tionary theory. In the late 18th century
William Jones, a British judge in Calcut-
ta, concluded that Sanskrit’s similarity to
Latin and Greek was too great to attribute
to mere chance. He proposed a parent
language, the descendants of which
included Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian
and other European tongues. Like Co-
lumbus, he was not the first to get there,
but he made the revelation famous.
As Jones’s findings were elaborated by
the philologists who came after him,
they also came to the attention of a
young Charles Darwin. As early as 1837,
looking at the evidence that wildly differ-
ent languages had once diverged from a
single parent, he wrote to his sister that
mankind must have been around much
longer than the Bible allowed. In 1871 he
made the parallel between language
divergence and evolution more specific,
writing in “The Descent of Man” that “the
formation of different languages and of
distinct species, and the proofs that both
have been developed through a gradual
process, are curiously the same.” One
language giving birth to both Hindi and
English was not so extraordinary if you
gave tiny changes time to accrete.
Speciation—the emergence of dis-words from old pieces (as in “doom-
scrolling”) may all baffle the uninitiated.
As tweaks of these and other kinds
mount up in one group, its speakers
gradually lose the ability to converse
with another—as two speciating pop-
ulations begin to lose the ability to mate.
Mark Pagel of Reading University has
made a list of other compelling parallels
between the two processes. Like genes,
he notes, words are “discrete, heritable
units”. The replication of dnais akin to
language teaching. Physical fossils re-
semble ancient texts. And so on. But
there are contrasts, too, perhaps the
biggest being that the chief driver of
biological evolution—natural selec-
tion—is mostly absent in language.
Nature is red in tooth and claw: a
maladaptive mutation can get you killed.
Language doesn’t quite work that way.
For the most part, changes don’t take
hold because they help you avoid a pred-
ator, but because they help people com-
municate. For that, they have to be adopt-
ed by others at the same time—which
may happen for reasons that have little to
do with “fitness”. A celebrity’s coinages
will take off quicker than those of a bril-
liant basement neologist not because
they are superior, but because the star
has more Twitter followers.
There is, though, a final, important
overlap between the two kinds of evolu-
tion. In a common visual depiction of the
ascent of man, an ape gradually becomes
a human through a series of intermedi-
ate steps. That gives the impression that
evolution is a process of ever increasing
sophistication. Not always: rather, or-
ganisms, like languages, change to fit
their environments. They may not al-
ways become more refined. But neither—
despite the incessant chorus of grum-
bles—are they in decline.tinct species—offers one of the closest
parallels between linguistic and biological
evolution. Darwin found that finches
separated on different Galapagos islands
had developed into different species, and
worked out why. When a homogenous
population is split, each subset will be
affected by its own genetic changes. Those
that contribute, even a little bit, to survival
will tend to become more prevalent
through the process of natural selection.
When such changes accumulate, you no
longer have two populations of a single
species, but two different species.
Two linguistic populations separated
by enough distance, or by a physical barri-
er such as a mountain range, can undergo a
similar experience. Random alter-
ations—to pronunciation, the meaning of
words or grammar—are often so small that
no one notices them as they are happen-
ing. Over the course of many generations,
for instance, atsound might become an s.
Or take the terms in the opening lines of
this column: using “because” as a preposi-
tion, shedding grammatical gender (as
“Latinx” purports to do) or forging newAthens. She first encounters Wilder while
travelling around America in 1976; later he
hires her to act as an interpreter and secre-
tary for “Fedora”.
She and the production move from
Greece to the final shoot in West Germany.
A lack of American backing had meant
Wilder, an Austrian-born Jew, was obliged
to turn to German investors. In a dramatic
and ingenious scene, Mr Coe grafts the
transcript of an actual interview with the
director onto a swanky dinner in a Munich
hotel. Wilder’s reflections in the interview
on the fate of his relatives under Nazismbecome a biting rebuttal of a Holocaust-de-
nying guest.
Calista narrates the novel, largely in
flashback from the present day. Now a mar-
ried woman with twin daughters, she gives
a retrospective view of her own life as well
as insights into the enigmatic Wilder, who
rails against the “kids with beards” (a new
generation of film-makers such as Martin
Scorsese and Steven Spielberg). Thus “Mr
Wilder and Me” is also a coming-of-age
story, in which the first sip of a martini is,
for the unworldly Calista, “like a gentle slap
in the face to bring you round after a faint”.To appear knowledgeable on set, she mem-
orises and quotes every entry in “Halli-
well’s Film Guide”, accidentally finding her
vocation as a composer of scores.
Mr Coe has drawn on real-life memories
of the production, including those of Wild-
er’s actual personal assistant, to create the
composite figure of Calista. “Fedora”
flopped on its release in 1978; the New York
Timesthought it had “the resonance of an
epitaph”. It is now widely recognised as an
artistic masterpiece about the illusion of
cinema itself. In his finely tuned novel Mr
Coe has done it, and its director, justice. 7