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FIVE FROM LANGUAGE TO SPEECH: The Audio--Oral Osmosis Hypothesis Human speech arose out of a generalized gesture language-made by the limbs as a whole (including the tongue and lips)which became specialized in gestures of the organs of articulation. Paget 1930: 24 The third event in the Vichian scenario signals the passage from Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens sapiens (= Homo loquens). The main feature of this event is audio-oral osmosis-the tendency to emit sounds that reflect or reproduce some property of the referent (onomatopoeia), or to associate an interjectional emission with some affective state, urge, or response. This chapter will look briefly at the plausibility of this hypothesis, focusing especially on the ontogenesis of speech. The discussion ends with a brief look once again at the language vs. speech distinction. Audio,Oral Osmosis As Wescott (1980: 70-71) remarks, because of audio-oral osmosis "our sapient ancestors transformed their linguistic skills from the visual to the auditory channel one becoming, for the first time, speakers rather than signers." The appearance of osmotically-produced speech onto the glottogenetic scene is a remarkable accomplishment. The organs of articulation were designed to serve the more basic survival function of eating, not speaking. The echoes of articulated words in the ears of our hominid ancestors, and the images of beings, objects, and events that they conjured up, must have been interpreted as divine voices by these "first poets," as Jaynes (1976) suggests. To this day, we feel the "power" of articulated speech: obscene words, angry words, sweet words, etc. are expressions which 106 VIeo, METAPHOR, AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE reflect how we react physiologically and affectively to the mere uttering of words. Children invariably emit sounds osmotically when they play to accompany their rhythmic movements, to imitate the sounds of their toys, and to generate emotional responses in other children (Opie and Opie 1959). Speech evokes physiological responses because it literally grew out of the body (Appelbaum 1990). Audio-oral expression affirms the body's role in the evolution of speech. Since the first articulated words stemmed from a physical osmosis in the vocal tract with some aspect of reality, it is obvious that there should be traces of this physical process in the speech of modern humans and, especially , in the ontogenesis of language. I will therefore examine this question in the next section. In the section after that I will discuss the plausibility of audio-oral osmosis in etymological terms, for it predicts that the items of core vocabularies will reveal an osmotic origin. The Nature of Audio..Oral Speech Audio-oral speech entails a psycho-physiological capacity to consciously use the organs of the vocal tract to emit sounds and to distinguish acoustically among the various sounds that these organs are able to produce. Linguists have developed the concept of the phoneme to account for thi8 capacity. The phoneme is a unit of sound that the mind can identify as having some feature that keeps it distinct from other sounds and that allows it to enter into a referential relation with other sounds. Let us assume that an early hominid uttered the syllable Pal in terrified response to a bolt of lightning. This hominid would be able to utilize the new word again only if the ear and mind of the same individual could distinguish it from, say, Ra! (hypothetically) "the sound of thunder." The use of Pal and Ra! in different contexts would indicate that the mind of that early speaker had made a meaningful distinction between Ipl and Ir/. (In linguistics it is the normal practice to use slant lines to represent phonemes.) This distinction could then become an instrument of speech programming only after other speakers used it to refer to objects and events with similar osmotic properties as lightning and thunder. As Hewes (1983) has argued, the primary advantage of the phoneme in glottogenesis inhered in the "indexical function," as he calls it, that it had for memory storage and retrieval. The difference between Ipl and Irl is psycho-physiological. The former sound involves the sudden explosion of breath at the lips, while the vocal cords located in the larynx are kept taut. The latter involves a rapid vibration of the tip of the tongue against the palate, as the air escapes from the mouth. In the case of Ir! the vocal cords are allowed to vibrate. These articulatory differences are perceived by the hearing center of the brain (see fig. 6...

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