hellog〜英語史ブログ / 2024-02-08

■ #5400. ルクレティウスの集団的言語起源論 [origin_of_language]

　紀元前1世紀のローマの詩人・哲学者 Titus Lucretius Titus (B.C 96?--55?) が興味深い言語起源論を提起している．現代の主流の仮説となっている言語単一起源説 (monogenesis) の1変種ともみなせるが，一方で重要な疑念を呈しているともとらえられる．1個人から言語が発生したとしてもコミュニケーションツールとしての有用性はない以上，言語は集団的に発生したと考えざるを得ない，という議論である．Mufwene (17--18) が，この見解を引用し，紹介している．

   Writing in the first century BC, the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus questioned one particular brand of monogenesis that is not necessarily Adamic:

[...] To think that one individual then distributed names to things and that humans learned the first words from him is absurd. For why would he be able to mark everything with utterances and emit different sounds of the tongue, and at the same time others not being capable of having done it? Besides, if others too had not used their voices with one another, from where was the notion of utility implanted, and from where was this power first granted to him, to know what he wanted to do and conceive of it in his mind? Similarly, one person could not have prevailed and forced so many to want to learn the names of things so thoroughly [...] (Lucretius Carus 2003 [?54 BC]: ll. 1041--51).

Lucretius thereby suggests that language emerged and evolved from the collective communicative acts of individuals interacting with each other. We may, in modern terms, think of different interactants innovating on different occasions and the successful innovations being copied by others. This is the position articulated by Michel Bréal in the late nineteenth century . . . , in contrast with the vast majority of scholars who have simply ignored the question.

　ルクレティウスの疑義はまっとうのように思われる．あるいは，言語能力の発現と言語使用の開始を分けて考えた方がよいのだろうか．「言語の起源」や「言語の発生」が意味するところに応じて答えも変わってくる可能性がある．

　・ Mufwene, Salikoko S. "The Origins and the Evolution of Language." Chapter 1 of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics. Ed. Keith Allan. Oxford: OUP, 2013. 13--52.

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