ON THE DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY OF LANGUAGES

I read Doctors Werner and Kaplan’s paper in the current issue of the AKERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST with the greatest interest, the more so that I am working on the developmental approach to cognition, and use language and culture data in my approach. I found this paper very remarkable and certainly indicating that we may expect interesting results from further research on the part of the authors. At the same time, I would like to mention certain points on which I disagree. The first of these is the factual question of the law of evolution of languages. I t is true that the majority of the so-called primitive languages follow Jespersen’s descriptions. At the same time, there are many exceptions to it, for instance Mazateco or Mixteco in Mexico, or again Ibo in West Africa. On the other hand, Smith and Trager have shown that there is a formation in English of clusters with a single semantic value such as “go-down” or “down payment”; these may be written as two words but are pronounced as one with a primary stress on the first syllable and a plus juncture. Something similar is happening in Chinese, although there clusters appear primarily as a defense against homonyms and their semantic value is unclear. Another point concerns the interpretation of such evolution as may be said to exist. While I agree with Dorothy Lee’s interpretation of Trobriander, I would strongly disagree with any interpretation which would place flexed languages (cantavisset) somewhere in between languages like Trobriander and languages characterized by free association with invariant forms. The principal conceptuaI significance of synthetic languages may not be that of necessary clusters of meaning, but on the contrary it may have the significance of a compulsory subdivision of a main concept into more precise subconcepts. I have given an example to that effect in regard to Polish (“Semantic Difficulties in International Communication.” Etc., Spring 1954). A third point may be put in parallel with the h s t one. From the point of view of conceptualization, the tendency to differentiation which the authors describe as a direction of evolution is reversed in the case of such philosophies as those of Hegel and even that of Whitehead, not to speak of the voluntarism of Fichte and of some characteristics of totalitarianism and nationalism in general. On the basis of these remarks, i t seems to me that it is a t least premature to speak of any direction of evolution. We might instead have one or several cyclic phenomena. I t is also dangerous to insist particularly on a single polarity (which might even be called a paradigm). For instance, in addition to the paradigm which I would rather call association-disassociation so as to avoid the use of the value-laden word “primitive,” there may be the universal-particular polarity first suggested by Pribram or the esthetictheoretical polarity suggested by Northrop. In the last respect, Northrop places Chinese culture on the side of the esthetic continuum which has some points of resemblance with the authors’ pole of participation or association; this in spite of the fact that Chinese is a highly analytic language. Or is it so in fact? While it appears to be so in its spoken form, it is highly synthetic in its writing. To sum up, I definitely agree with the basic developmental thesis, according to