2. THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE

We have not the faintest idea whether the first words spoken were uttered 20,000

years ago or 200,000 years ago. What is certain is that mankind did little except

procreate and survive for 100,000 generations. (For purposes of comparison,

only about eighty generations separate us from Christ.) Then suddenly, about

30,000 years ago, there burst forth an enormous creative and cooperative effort

which led to the cave paintings at Lascaux, the development of improved,

lightweight tools, the control of fire, and many other cooperative arrangements.

It is unlikely that any of this could have been achieved without a fairly

sophisticated system of language.

In 1857, an archaeologist examining a cave in the Neander Valley of Germany

near Dusseldorf found part of an ancient human skull of a type never before

encountered. The skull was from a person belonging to a race of people who

ranged across Europe, the Near East, and parts of northern Africa during the

long period between 30,000 and 150,000 years ago. Neanderthal man (or Homo

sapiens neanderthalensis) was very different from modern man. He was short,

only about five feet tall, stocky, with a small forehead and heavyset features.

Despite his distinctly dim-witted appearance, he possessed a larger brain than

modern man (though not necessarily a more efficient one). Neanderthal man was

unique. So far as can be told no one like him existed before or since. He wore

clothes, shaped tools, engaged in communal activities. He buried his dead and

marked the graves with stones, which suggests that he may have dealt in some

form of religious ritual, and he looked after infirm members of his tribe or

family. He also very probably engaged in small wars. All of this would suggest

the power of speech.

About 30,000 years ago Neanderthal man disappeared, displaced by Homo

sapiens sapiens, a taller, slimmer, altogether more agile and handsome—at least

to our eyes—race of people who arose in Africa, spread to the Near East, and

then were drawn to Europe by the retreating ice sheets of the last great ice age.

These are the Cro-Magnon people who were responsible for the famous cave

paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain—the earliest signs of

civilization in Europe, the work of the world's first artists. Although this was an

immensely long time ago—some 20,000 years before the domestication ofanimals and the rise of farming—these Cro-Magnon people were identical to us:

They had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks.

And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on

food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that

pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility,

also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

Other mammals have no contact between their airways and esophagi. They can

breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going

down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the

larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be

inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position

from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months—

curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant

Death Syndrome. At all the descended larynx explains why you can speak and

your dog cannot.

According to studies conducted by Philip Lieberman at Brown University,

Neanderthal man was physiologically precluded from uttering certain basic

sounds such as the é sound of bee or the oo sound of boot. His speech, if it

existed at all, would have been nasal-sounding and fairly imprecise—and that

would no doubt have greatly impeded his development.

It was long supposed that Neanderthal was absorbed by the more advanced

Homo sapiens. But recent evidence indicates that Homo sapiens and

Neanderthals coexisted in the Near East for 30,000 years without interbreeding

—strong evidence that the Neanderthals must have been a different species. It is

interesting to speculate what would have become of these people had they

survived. Would we have used them for slaves? For sport? Who can say?

At all events, Neanderthal man was hopelessly outclassed. Not only did Homo

sapiens engage in art of an astonishingly high quality, but they convinced other

cultural achievements of a comparatively high order. They devised more

specialized tools for a wider variety of tasks and they hunted in a far more

systematic and cooperative way. Whereas the food debris of the Neanderthals

shows a wide variety of animal bones, suggesting that they took whatever they

could find, archaeological remnants from Homo sapiens show that they soughtout particular kinds of game and tracked animals seasonally. All of this suggests

that they possessed a linguistic system sufficiently sophisticated to deal with

concepts such as: "Today let's kill some red deer. You take some big sticks and

drive the deer out of the woods and we'll stand by the riverbank with our spears

and kill them as they come towards us."

By comparison Neanderthal speech may have been something more like: "I'm

hungry. Let's hunt."

It may be no more than intriguing coincidence, but the area of Cro-Magnon's

cave paintings is also the area containing Europe's oldest and most mysterious

ethnic group, the Basques. Their language, called Euskara by its speakers, may

be the last surviving remnant of the Neolithic languages spoken in Stone Age

Europe and later displaced by Indo-European tongues. No one can say.

What is certain is that Basque was already old by the time the Celts came to the

region. Today it is the native tongue of about 600,000 people in Spain and in

France in an area around the Bay of Biscay stretching roughly from Bilbao to

Bayonne and inland over the Pyrenees to Pamplona. Its remoteness from Indo-

European is indicated by its words for the numbers one to five: bat, bi, hirur,

laur, bortz. Many authorities believe there is simply no connection between

Basque and any other known language.

One of the greatest mysteries of prehistory is how people in widely separated

places suddenly and spontaneously developed the capacity for language at

roughly the same time. It was as if people carried around in their heads ( genetic

alarm clock that suddenly went off all around the world and led different groups

in widely scattered places on every continent to create languages.

Even those who were cut off from the twenty or so great language families

developed their own quite separate languages, such as the Dravidian languages

of southern India and northern Sri Lanka, or the Luorawetlan languages of

eastern Siberia, or the even stranger Ainu language spoken on the northern

island of Hokkaido in Japan by people who have clear Caucasian racial

characteristics and whose language has certain (doubtless coincidental)

similarities with European languages. (For instance, their word for eighty is

"four twenties.") How they and their language came to be there is something no

one knows. But then Japanese itself is a mystery.Although its system of writing and some of its vocabulary have been taken from

Chinese, it is otherwise quite unrelated to any other known language. The same

is true of Korean.

Or perhaps not. There is increasing evidence to suggest that languages widely

dispersed geographically may be more closely related than once thought. This is

most arrestingly demonstrated by the three language families of the New World:

Eskimo-Aleut, Amerind, and Na-Dene. It was long supposed that these groups

were quite unrelated to any other Ian age families, including each other. But

recent studies of cognate that is, words that have similar spellings and meanings

in two or more languages, such as the French tu, the English thou, and the -

Hittite tuk, all meaning "you"—have found possible links between some of those

most unlikely language partners: for instance, between Basque and Na-Dene, an

Indian language spoken mainly in the northwest United States and Canada, and

between Finnish and Eskimo-Aleut. No one has come up with a remotely

plausible explanation of how a language spoken only in a remote corner of the

Pyrenees could have come to influence Indian languages of the New World, but

the links between many cognates are too numerous to explain in terms of simple

coincidence. Some cognates may even be universal. The word for dog for

instance, is suspiciously similar in Amerind, Uralic, and Proto-Indo-European,

while the root form "tik," signifying a finger or the number one, is found on

every continent. -As Merrit Ruhlen noted in Natural History magazine [March

1987]:

"The significant number of such global cognates leads some linguists to

conclude that all the world's languages ultimately belong to a single language

family."

There are any number of theories to account for how language began. The

theories have names that seem almost to be begging ridicule—the Bow-Wow

theory, the Ding-Dong theory, the Pooh-Pooh theory, the Yo-He-Ho theory—and

they are generally based in one way or another on the supposition that languages

come ultimately from spontaneous utterances of al arm, joy, pain, and so

on, or that they are somehow imitative, onomatopoeic of sounds in the real

world. Thus, for instance, the Welsh word hw or owl, gwdi-pronounced "goody-

hoo," may mimic the sound an owl makes.There is, to be sure, a slight tendency to have words cluster around certain

sounds. In English we have a large number of words pertaining to wetness:

spray, splash, spit, sprinkle, splatter, spatter, spill, spigot. And we have a large

number of fl-words to do with movement: flail, flap, flicker, flounce, flee. And

quite a number of words ending in -ash describe abrupt actions: flash, dash,

crash, bash, thrash, smash, slash. Onomatopoeia does play a part in language

formation, but whether it or any other feature alone can accounts for how

languages are formed is highly doubtful.

It is intriguing to see how other languages hear certain sounds— and how much

better their onomatopoeic words often are. Dogs go oua-oua in France, bu-bu in

Italy, mung-mung in Korea, wan-wan in Japan; a purring cat goes ron-ron in

France, schnurr in Germany; a bottle being emptied goes gloup-gloup in China,

tot-tot-to in Spain; a heartbeat is doogan-doogan in Korea, doki-doki in Japan;

bells go bimbam in Germany, dindan in Spain. The Spanish word for whisper is

susurrar. How could it be anything else?

Much of what we know, or think we know, about the roots of language comes

from watching children learn to speak. For a long time it was believed that

language was simply learned. Just as we learn, say, the names and locations of

the fifty states or our multiplication tables, so we must learn the "rules" of

speech—that we don't say "house white is the," but rather "the house is white."

The presumption was that our minds at birth were blank slates onto which the

rules and quirks of our native languages were written.

But then other authorities, notably Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, began to challenge this view, arguing that some

structural facets of language—the ground rules of speech, speech, if you like—

must be innate. That isn't to suggest that you would have learned English

spontaneously had you been brought up among wolves. But perhaps you are

born with an instinctive sense of how language works, as a general thing. There

are a number of reasons to suppose so. For one thing, we appear to have an

innate appreciation of language. By the end of the first month of life infants

show a clear preference for speechlike sounds over all others. It doesn't matter

what language it is. To a baby no language is easier or more difficult than any

other. They are all mastered at about the same pace, however irregular and

wildly inflected they may be. In short, children seem to be programmed to learn

language, just as they seem to be programmed to learn to walk. The process hasbeen called basic child grammar. Indeed, children in the first five years of life

have such a remarkable facility for language that they can effortlessly learn two

structurally quite different languages simultaneously—if, for instance, their

mother is Chinese and their father American—without displaying the slightest

signs of stress or confusion.

Moreover, all children everywhere learn languages in much the same way:

starting with simple labels ("Me"), advancing to subject-verb structures ("Me

want"), before progressing to subject-verb-emphatics ("Me want now"), and so

on. They even babble in the same way. A study at the John F. Kennedy Institute

in Baltimore [reported in Scientific American in January 1984] found that

children from such diverse backgrounds as Arabic, English, Chinese, Spanish,

and Norwegian all began babbling in a systematic way, making the same sounds

at about the same time (four to six months before the start of saying their first

words).

The semantic and grammatical idiosyncrasies that distinguish one language from

another—inflections of tense, the use of gender, and so on—are the things that

are generally learned last, after the child already has a functioning command of

the language. Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children

almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on and all children

everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the

idea of "gone" and "all gone."

The traditional explanation is that all of this is learned at your mother's knee. Yet

careful examination suggests that that is unlikely. Most adults tend (even when

they are not aware of it) to speak to infants in a simplified, gitchy-goo kind of

way. This is not a sensible or efficient way to teach a child the difference

between, say, present tense and past tense, and yet the child learns it.

Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform

to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying "buyed,"

"eated," and "good – because, even though he has never heard such words

spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and

thinked about it.

Where vocabulary is concerned, children are very reliant on their mothers (or

whoever else has the role of primary carer). If she says a word, then the childgenerally listens and tries to repeat it.

But where grammar is concerned, children go their own way.

According to one study [by Kenneth Wexler and colleagues at the University of

California at Irvine, cited by The Economist, April 28, 1984], two thirds of

utterances made by mothers to their infants are either imperatives or questions,

and only one third are statements, yet the utterances of children are

overwhelmingly statements. Clearly they don't require the same repetitive

teaching because they are already a step ahead where syntax is concerned.

Some of the most interesting theories about language development in recent

years have been put forward by Derek Bickerton, an English-born professor at

the University of Hawaii, who noticed that creole languages all over the world

bear certain remarkable similarities. First, it is important to understand the

difference between pidgins and creoles. Pidgins (the word is thought to be a

Chinese rendering of the English word business) are rudimentary languages

formed when people from diverse backgrounds are thrown together by

circumstance. Historically, they have tended to arise on isolated plantation-based

islands which have been ruled by a dominant Western minority but where the

laborers come from a mixed linguistic background. Pidgins are almost always

very basic and their structure varies considerably from place to place—and

indeed from person to person. They are essentially little more than the language

you or I would speak if we found ourselves suddenly deposited in some place

like Bulgaria or Azerbaijan. They are makeshift tongues and as a result they

seldom last long.

When children are born into a pidgin community, one of two things will happen.

Either the children will learn the language of the ruling class, as was almost

always the case with African slaves in the American South, or they will develop

a creole (from French creole, "native"). Most of the languages that people think

of as pidgins are in fact creoles. To the uninitiated they can seem primitive, even

comical. In Neo-Melanesian, an English-based creole of Papua New Guinea, the

word for beard is Bras belong fes (literally "grass that belongs to the face") and

the word for a vein or artery is rop belong blut ("rope that belongs to the

blood"). In African creoles you can find such arresting expressions as bak sit

drayva ("back seat driver"), wesmata ("what's the matter?"), and bottom-bottom

wata waka ("submarine"). In Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, stomach gas is badbriz, while to pass gas is to pul bad briz. Feel free to smile. But it would be a

mistake to consider these languages substandard because of their curious

vocabularies. They are as formalized, efficient, and expressive as any other

language—and often more so. As Bickerton notes, most creoles can express

subtleties of action not available in English. For instance, in English we are not

very good at distinguishing desire from accomplishment in the past tense. In the

sentence "I went to the store to buy a shirt" we cannot tell whether, the shirt was

bought or not. But in all creoles such ambiguity is impossible. In Hawaiian

creole the person who bought a shirt would say, bin go store go buy shirt while

the person who failed to buy a shirt would say, "I bin go store for buy shirt." The

distinction is crucial.

So creoles are not in any way inferior. In fact, it is worth remembering that many

full-fledged languages — the Afrikaans of South Africa, the Chinese of Macao,

and the Swahili of east Africa were originally creoles.

In studying creoles, Bickerton noticed that they are very similar in structure to

the language of children between the ages of two and four. At that age, children

are prone to make certain basic errors in their speech, such as using double

negatives and experiencing confusion with irregular plurals so that they say

"feets" and "sheeps." At the same time, certain fairly complicated aspects of

grammar, which we might reasonably expect to befuddle children, cause them no

trouble at all. One is the ability to distinguish between stative and nonstative

verbs with a present participle.

Without getting too technical about it, this means that with certain types of verbs

we use a present participle to create sentences like "I am going for a walk" but

with other verbs we dispense with the present participle, which is why we say "I

like you" and not "I am liking you." Very probably you have never thought

about this before. The reason you have never thought about it is that it is

seemingly instinctive. Most children have mastered the distinction between

stative and nonstative verbs by the age of two and are never troubled by it again.

Intriguingly, all creole languages make precisely the same distinction.

Al of would seem to suggest that certain properties of language are innate.

Moreover, as we have seen, it appears that the earth's languages may be more

closely related than once thought.The links between languages—between, say, German bruder, English brother,

Gaelic bhrathair, Sanskrit bhrata, and Persian biradar—seem self-evident to us

today but it hasn't always been so. The science of historical linguistics, like so

much else, owes its beginnings to the work of an amateur enthusiast, in this case

to an Englishman named Sir William Jones.

Dispatched to India as a judge in 1783, Jones whiled away his evenings by

teaching himself Sanskrit. On the face of it, this was an odd and impractical

thing to do since Sanskrit was a dead language and had been for many centuries.

That so much of it survived at all was in large part due to the efforts of priests

who memorized its sacred hymns, the Vedas, and passed them on from one

generation to the next for hundreds of years even though the words had no

meaning for them. These texts represent some of the oldest writ-any Indo-

European language. Jones, noticed many striking similarities between Sanskrit

and European languages the Sanskrit word for instance, was bhurja. The Sanskrit

for king,. raja, is close to the Latin rex. The Sanskrit for ten, dasa, is reminiscent

of the Latin decem and so on. All of these clearly suggested a common historical

parentage. Jones looked at other languages and discovered similarities. In a

landmark speech to the Asiatick Society in Calcutta he proposed that many of

the classical languages—among them Sanskrit, Greek Latin, Gothic, "Celtic, and

Persian—must spring from the same source. This was a bold assertions since

nothing in recorded history would encourage such a conclusion, and it excited

great interest among scholars all over Europe. The next century saw a feverish

effort to track down 'the parent language, Indo-European as it was soon called.

Scores of people became involved, including noted scholars such as the Germans

Friedrich von Schlegel and Jacob Grimm (yes, he of the fairy tales, though

philology was his first love) and the splendidly named Franz Bopp. But, once

again, some of the most important breakthroughs were the work of inspired

amateurs, among them Henry Rawlinson, an official with the British East India

Company, who deciphered ancient Persian more or less single-handed, and,

somewhat later, Michael Ventris, an English architect who deciphered the

famously difficult Linear B script of ancient Minoa, which had flummoxed

generations of academics.

These achievements are all the more remarkable when you consider that often

they were made using the merest fragments—of ancient Thracian, an important

language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle Ages, we havejust twenty-five words—and in the face of remarkable indifference on the part of

the ancient Greeks and Romans, neither of whom ever bothered to note the

details of a single other language. The Romans even allowed Etruscan that had

greatly contributed to their own, to be lost, so that today Etruscan writings

remain tantalizingly untranslated.

Nor can we read any Indo-European writings, for the simple reason that not a

scrap exists. Everything we knew – or, to be more precise, this we know – is

based on conjecture, on finding common strands in modern-day languages and

tracing these strands to a hypothetical mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European,

which may never even have existed. The lack of documentary evidence isn't too

surprising when you bear in mind that we are going back an awfully long time.

The early Indo-Europeans were Neolithic – that is, late Stone Age – people who

can be dated back to about 7000 B.C. The descended languages of of Indo-

European almost always show some kind of kinship in their names for primary

family relationships, such as mother and father; for parts of the body, such as

eye, foot, heart, and ear; for common animals, such as goat and ox; and for

natural elements, such as snow, thunder, and fire. We can deduce something

about how these people lived from these cognates. They had a common word for

snow and cold, so the climate was not tropical, and yet they appear to have had

no common word for sea. Those tribes that reached the sea each came up with

words of they own, so presumably they began their migration from a point well

inland. Among the other words held in common are oak, beech, birch, willow,

bear, wolf, deer, rabbit, sheep, goat, pig and dog. They had no common word for

horse or window. By studying the known range of certain flora and fauna

linguists have placed they original homeland in carious places: the Russian

steppes, Scandinavia, central Europe, the Danube Valley, Asia Minor – indeed,

almost everywhere.

Their common existence is thought to have ended between 3500 and 2500 BC,

when they began to fan out across Europe and Asia. For the most part these were

probably not great exoduses but rather gradual encroachments as each new

generation sought new pastures and hunting areas. Over the millennia they

spread over wide areas – even reaching China. Explorers at the turn of the

century were astonished to find a cache of Buddhist documents written in two

related but unknown languages in what is now the Chinese province of Sinkiang,

along the Old Silk Road. The languages, which they called Tocharian, werenearly Indo-European. as can be seen for instance, in their number three: tre and

trai. As the centuries passed, the original Indo-European language split into a

dozen groups: Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Slavonic, Thraco-Illyrian,

and so on. these further subdivided into literally scores of new languages,

ranging from Latin to Faerose to Parthian to Armenian to Hindi to Portugese. It

is remarkable to reflect that people as various as a Gaelic speaking Scottish

Highlander and a Sinhalese-speaking Sri Lankan both use languages that can be

traced directly back to the same starting point. With this in mind, it is perhaps

little wonder that the Greeks and Romans had no idea that they were speaking

languages that were cousins of the barbarian tongues all around them. The

notion that would have left them dumbfounded. Just within Europe the degree of

diversity is so great that only relatively recently have two languages, Albanian

and Armenian, been identified as being Indo-European.

Of all the Indo-European languages Lithuanian is the one that has changed the

least-so much so that it is sometimes said a Lithuanian can understand simple

phrases in Sanskrit. At the very least, Lithuanian has preserved many more of

the inflection complexities of the original Indo-European language that others of

the family.

English is part of the Germanic family, which gradually split into three branches.

These were North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages; West

Germanic, consisting principally of English, German, and Dutch (but also

Frisian, Flemish and other related dialects); and East Germanic, whose three

component languages, Burgundian, Gothic, Manx, Gaulish, Lyndian, Oscan,

Umbrian, and two that once dominated Europe, celtic, and Latin.

Celtic, I must hasten to add, is not dead. Far from it. It is still spoken by half a

million people in Europe. But they are scattered over a wide area and its

influence is negligible. At its height, in about 400B.C., Celtic was spoken over a

vast area of the continent, a fact reflected in scores of place names from

Belgrade to Paris to Dundee, all of which commemorate Celtic tribes. But from

that point on, its dominions have been constantly eroded, largely because the

Celts were a loose collection of tribes and not a great nation state, so they were

easily divided and conquered. Even now the various branches of Celtic are not

always mutually comprehensible. Celtic speakers in Scotland, for instance,

cannot understand the Celtic speakers of Wales a hundred miles to the south.

Today Celtic survives in scattered outposts along the westernmost fringes ofEurope—on the bleak Hebridean Islands and coastal areas of Scotland, in

shrinking pockets of Galway, Mayo, Kerry, and Donegal in Ireland, in mostly

remote areas of Wales, and on the Brittany peninsula of northwest France.

Everywhere it is a story of inexorable decline. At the turn of the century Cape

Breton Island in Nova Scotia had 100,000 Gaelic speakers—most of them driven

there by the forced clearances of the Scottish Highlands—but now Gaelic is

extinct there as a means of daily discourse.

Latin, in direct contrast,didn't so much decline as evolve. It became the

Romance languages. I is not too much to say that French, Italian, Spanish,

Portuguese, and Romanian (as well as a dozen or so minor languages/dialects

like Provençal and Catalan) are essentially modern versions of Latin. If we must

fix a date for when Latin stopped being Latin and instead became these other

languages, is a convenient milestone. It was then that Charlemagne ordered that

sermons throughout his realm be delivered in the "lingua romana rustica" and

not the customary "lingua Latina." But of course you cannot draw a line and say

that the language was Latin on this side and Italian or French on that. As late as

the thirteenth century, Dante was still regarding his own Florentine tongue as

Latin. And indeed it is still possible to construct long passages of modern Italian

that are identical to ancient Latin.

The Romance languages are not the outgrowths of the elegant, measured prose

of Cicero, but rather the language of the streets and of the common person, the

Latin vulgate. The word for horse in literary Latin was equus, but to the man in

the street it was caballus, and it was from this that we get the French cheval, the

Spanish caballo, and the Italian cavallo. Similarly, the classical term for head

was caput (from which we get capital and per capita), but the street term was

testa, a kind of pot, from which comes the French la tete and the Italian la testa

(though the Italians also use il capo). Cat in classical Latin was feles (whence

feline), but in the vulgate it was cattus. Our word salary comes literally from the

vulgar Latin salarium, "salt money"—the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it

would buy. By the same process the classical pugna (from which we much later

took pugnacious) was replaced by the slangy battualia (from which we get

battle), and the classical urbs, meaning "city" (from which we get urban), was

superseded by villa (from which the French get their name for a city, Mlle, and

we take the name for a place in the country).

The grammar of the vulgate also became simplified as Latin spread across theknown world and was adopted by people from varying speech backgrounds. In

Classical Latin word endings constantly changing to reflect syntax: A speaker

could distinguish between, say, "in the house" and "to the house" by varying the

ending on house. But gradually people decided that it was simpler to leave house

uninflected and put ad in front of it for "to," in for "in," and so on through all the

prepositions, by this means the case endings disappeared. An almost identical

process happened with English later.

Romanians often claim to have the language that most closely resembles ancient

Latin. But in fact, according to Mario Pei, if you wish to hear what ancient Latin

sounded like, you should listen to Lugudorese, an Italic dialect spoken in central

Sardinia, which in many respects is unchanged from the Latin of 1,500 years

ago.

Many scholars believe that classical Latin was spoken by almost no one—that it

was used exclusively as a literary and scholarly language. Certainly such

evidence as we have of everyday writing—graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, for

example—suggests that classical Latin was effectively a dead language as far as

common discourse was concerned long before Rome fell. And, as we shall see, it

was that momentous event—the fall of Rome—that helped to usher in our own

tongue .