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 .