Alter Stephen G
Gordon College, 255 Grapevine Road, Wenham, Massachusetts MA 01984, USA.
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2008 Sep;39(3):355-8. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2008.06.009. Epub 2008 Aug 15.
In the second chapter of The descent of man (1871), Charles Darwin interrupted his discussion of the evolutionary origins of language to describe ten ways in which the formation of languages and of biological species were 'curiously' similar. I argue that these comparisons served mainly as analogies in which linguistic processes stood for aspects of biological evolution. Darwin used these analogies to recapitulate themes from On the origin of species (1859), including common descent, genealogical classification, the struggle for existence, and natural selection, among others. Skeptical of this interpretation, Gregory Radick sees the naturalistic account of language formation in the Descent comparisons as reinforcing Darwin's idea that languages and the races of mankind have both undergone progressive development. (The opposite view was that modern-day primitive peoples had degenerated from an originally civilized condition.) Yet the details of Darwin's language-species comparisons, as well as the polemical context in which they appear, show that they were not aimed at so limited a function. Rather, they addressed issues related to species transmutation in general.
在《人类的由来》（1871年）第二章中，查尔斯·达尔文中断了对语言进化起源的讨论，描述了语言形成与生物物种形成“奇妙地”相似的十种方式。我认为，这些比较主要起到了类比的作用，其中语言过程代表了生物进化的各个方面。达尔文利用这些类比来概括《物种起源》（1859年）中的主题，包括共同祖先、谱系分类、生存斗争和自然选择等。格雷戈里·拉迪克对这种解释持怀疑态度，他认为《人类的由来》中关于语言形成的自然主义描述强化了达尔文的观点，即语言和人类种族都经历了渐进式发展。（相反的观点是，现代原始民族是从原本文明的状态退化而来的。）然而，达尔文语言与物种比较的细节，以及它们出现的论战背景表明，其目的并非如此有限。相反，它们总体上涉及与物种转变相关的问题。
