Human biology and human speech.

Abstract

(1) ISOGENS AND ISOPHONS Since a discussion at the British Association, several scientific and other journals have given wide publicity to views which Darlington published in 1947 under the title Genetic Component of Language. In their book, Elements of Genetics, Darlington and Mather (1949) again set forth this thesis. A large number of their readers will accordingly gain the impression that it is already acceptable to scholars equipped with specialist know ledge to assess its credentials. Several philologists have expressed to me a contrary view, and are puzzled because biologists seemingly give silent assent to Darlington's thesis. Otherwise, I should be reluctant to give utterance to misgivings that I myself share with some of my biological colleagues. The word language, in the title of the publication cited, is unduly comprehensive. The topic of Dar lington's memoir is indeed the distribution of two sounds, both familiar to an Englishman, to a Welsh man, or to an Icelander, though neither of them occurs in spoken French, Swedish, Dutch, or Ger man. They are the so-called voiceless dental fricative, represented in English orthography by TH as in thin and wreath, and the voiced dental fricative, also rep resented in English by TH as in then and writhe. Darlington compares the geographical distribution of speech communities in which these sounds are current with the geographical distribution of the triple allelomorph A-O-B. From this comparison, he draws categorical conclusions concerning the role of genetic differences with regard to the phonetic peculiarities of speech communities. Since the pub lication of Darlington's memoir, the issue has emer ged again in a contribution entitled Blood Groups, Ethnology and Language in Wales and the Western Countries, by Mourant and Watkin (1952), of whom the latter takes all responsibility for what is relevant to Darlington's theme. In his original memoir, Darlington (1947) uses TH indiscriminately for the two sounds respectively represented by p and S in Icelandic and by 0 arid 8 in the International Phonetic Script. Welsh orthography provides individually for each by com bination: TH for the voiceless fricative in thin and DD for the voiced fricative in then. For typographi cal convenience, I shall here use TH as in Welsh and DH for Welsh DD. A fair statement of the conclu sions drawn by Darlington from mapping the wes tern world in terms of the distribution referred to above is as follows: