Darwinism, traditional linguistics and the new Palaeolithic Continuity Theory of Language Evolution
Mario Alinei
published in Gontier, Nathalie; Bendegem, Jean Paul van; Aerts, Diederik (Eds.), Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture. A non-adaptationist, systems theoretical approach, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, pp. 121-147.
As the author has shown in previous work, although linguistics as a science was born in Darwin’s century, Darwinism’s influence on it was superficial and produced the mystifying, but still current, view that language is a living organism, and language change an organic law. Language is, instead, a social artifact with an interface with nature, which is governed by the law of conservation and changes only exceptionally. Since language is innate - as claimed by Chomsky and now demonstrated by natural sciences - and Homo was thus born loquens, the evolution of language - and all world languages, including Indo-European (IE) - must be mapped onto the entire course of human cultural evolution, in the new framework provided by the Palaeolithic Continuity Theory (PCT).
Key words: Darwinism, historical linguistics, language evolution, Indo-European, Palaeolithic continuity.
Introduction
In this paper I try to argue that the epistemological framework of traditional historical linguistics with regards to language evolution has always been and still is based on a misconception of Darwinism, and therefore needs a radical revision. The so called organic linguistic change, assumed by traditional linguistics as the governing law of language, itself considered as a biological organism, should be replaced by the view that language is a social artifact with an interface with nature, and that the only law of language, as of all other social artifacts, is conservation, whereas change is the exception, occurring only in certain periods and because of external influences. The conclusions of several sciences concerned with the origins and evolution of language also justify, in my opinion, the formulation of a new, interdisciplinary paradigm for the evolution of language and languages, which I have called the Palaeolithic Continuity Theory (PCT), and which elsewhere I have worked out in detail for the Indo-European (IE), Uralic and Altaic languages of Europe (Alinei 1996-2000). The PCT, insofar as it provides us with a general evolutionary framework for all domains that find an expression in language – from grammatical structure to spiritual and material culture -, can also contribute to the development of the EE.