The view from evolutionary linguistics
序言: [演化语言学的视野]

Foreword by William S-Y. Wang 王士元

Abstract 摘要
The study of language evolution in Europe has an interesting history. In 1769 the Berlin Academy announced as the subject of a competitive prize essay the question of how language emerged. The winning essay by Johann Gottfried Herder, Ursprung der Sprache, has been thoughtfully discussed by Edward Sapir; it is available in English translation, together with another essay on the same theme by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The question is a fascinating one, of course, but given the state of knowledge at that time, it must have attracted endless speculations and futile controversies which did little to advance linguistic scholarship. This in turn led the Société Linguistique de Paris to famously ban discussions of the question at their meetings, in the second article of their 1866 statutes, a ban that was echoed in London several years later. It took approximately another century before an article in the Scientific American by Charles F. Hockett in 1960 resurrected the question. By this time knowledge has advanced importantly on two critically relevant fronts: animal communication across species, and the diversity of linguistic structures. For the first time, with Hockett’s proposal of a set of design features comparing human language and animal communication, the discussion shifted away from philosophy and theology into the realm of empirical science. The pace for evolutionary linguistics picked up when in 1976 the New York Academy of Sciences sponsored a very successful conference that drew over a thousand participants, with experts interacting across a dozen disciplines, with anthropology and zoology literally spanning A to Z. The launching of a series of international conferences in 1996, called EVOLANG, by linguists at Edinburgh University, notably by James R. Hurford, meeting every two years, gave the study of this multi-disciplinary area a stable forum for interaction. Even though evolutionary theory entered China early in the 20th century, when YAN Fu 严复 translated some of Thomas Huxley’s lectures (Tian Yan Lun天演论), unfortunately this perspective has not had much influence on linguistics in China. Following EVOLANG, another series of annual conferences was then launched in 2009 in Guangzhou, called Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics (CIEL). Reports for most of these CIELs have been published in the Journal of Chinese Linguistics. The acronym CIEL is especially auspicious, since the meaning of the French word is ‘heaven’, calling to mind YAN Fu’s famous Chinese phrase for natural selection, which is wu jing tian ze 物竞天择 “organisms compete as heaven selects”. While CIEL meets primarily in China, one of its main goals is to promote international interaction, with participation of leading scholars from other parts of the world.

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