Our Ancestors Murdered Their Mother Tongue, Thankfully

Reviewing Laura Spinney’s ‘Proto: How One Language Went Global’

At the beginning of the musical My Fair Lady, professor Henry Higgins points to native English speakers’ wild mispronunciations and laments “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.”

Linguistics is, says Higgins, both his profession and hobby. As such, he’s hypersensitive to variability in usage and pronunciation. What’s more, he assumes there is …