ABSTRACT
In a famous passage in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin speculated that his ideas about variation arising through descent with modification may apply as well to languages as species: ‘The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process are curiously parallel’ (Darwin 2005 [1871]:676). Darwin proposed that languages could be classified into hierarchical taxonomic groupings similar to biological families, genera, and other taxa based on their genealogical relationships. This idea was taken up—or possibly even anticipated by—August Schleicher (1869), the founder of modern historical linguistics. Schleicher hypothesised that relationships among the Indo-European languages could be directly modelled on the kind of tree diagrams used by Darwin to depict the phylogeny of biological species (Figure 11.1). Thus, he suggested that they were all derived from a single common ancestral language that gradually differentiated into separate branches like ‘Romance’ or ‘Germanic’. Many contemporaries of Darwin and Schleicher believed that the analogy between organisms and languages could be extended to other cultural domains. One of the most important of these figures was Augustus Henry Pitt-Rivers (Pitt-Rivers 1875, 1906), whose ethnographic collections were conceived with the express intention of demonstrating how the principles of evolution are borne out in tools, weapons and craft objects. As he explained, ‘human ideas, as represented by the various products of human industry, are capable of classification into genera, species and varieties, in the same manner as the products of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and in their development from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous they obey the same laws’ (Pitt-Rivers 1875:307).
