Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

8. Language in a Chrysalis

CHAPTER 8 Language in a Chrysalis W E KNOW that language is able to express more things in heaven and earth than anyone person can imagine. Language is also able to express everything that scientists have found, everything that science fiction writers can imagine, everything that poets have said, and most wonderfully, all that we, they, or anyone else may ever say or think. This is the potential oflanguage, but a potential and its realization are not the same thing. The very first language utterances were probably prosaic stuff. The first signers would have had no suspicion that this new way of representing separate and connected things was opening up infinite possibilities . Surely at first they would have used their gesture sentences to refer to creatures and objects and activities that were right there in front of them-thoroughly familiar sights, the events of everyday life. Nevertheless, the first language signs would have been epoch-making. No contrast of before and after could be sharper. Before language signs, all the visible attributes of the world were out there-some dimly reflected in early hominid world-modeling systems or concepts-but none was fully expressible. Afterward, all the world was still there; nothing had changed, except that now there was a species with the potential, the power conferred by vision-brain-motor linkage, to see and conceptualize this world and to represent these conceptions to themselves and to each 119 120 Language in a Chrysalis other, in natural, easily produced, visible, doubly signifYing (wordlike and sentencelike) language signs. The first language signs would not have raised any barrier between seeing and thinking about these matters and feeling and reacting to them. It is difficult today, after centuries of science and several millennia of Western philosophy, to put thought and feeling or intellect and emotion back together.They have been too thoroughly pulled apart by philosophers and reductionist scientists.Yet there is good reason to suppose that they were once united and that our languages and our Western cultures force us to use two names-emotion and intellect-for one global, holistic engagement of body-mind. We make a division where none exists naturally.1 It is not necessary to go far afield to find cultures that unite the mundane and the supernatural, cultures that do not divide consciousness into thought and "mere" feeling. Native tribes of North America have languages with roots as ancient as any, but unlike people in the Hebraic-Hellenic tradition, some ofthem keep and use signed languages as acceptable alternatives to speech. Moreover, with and within their languages , they preserve a tradition, a view of life, in which feeling and thought are one.2 Gender and Early Language Something else, besides speaking and signing modalities, makes languages different from each other. Author Deborah Tannen suggests that men and women use language differently: women, to make connections and develop relationships; men, to negotiate power and status.3 This view of gender difference in language use has been criticized by some; but her view is compatible with the gesture-to-language-to-speech hypothesis. IfTannen has it right, men and women would have used language differently from the beginning. It is plausible to hypothesize that making connections and developing relationships was a mother's chief role in prehistoric society. That role may have begun even before her child's birth-when she was choosing its father. Men building shelters, defending territory, or hunting needed to be clear about who "gives the signals" Language in a Chrysalis 121 and where each one stands in relation to the leader and to each other. Thus, to understand language in human perspective, it makes sense to think of the uses oflanguage as equally important with its grammatical forms. The perspective opened by Barbara King, which shows the roots of language in the primate order, indicates that every mother, even before there was a language, had to transfer essential information to her child as quickly and effectively as possible.4 That information gave her children a better chance to grow and survive. All social animals share the biological drive to produce and foster offspring, but human animals differ radically from their nearest primate relatives. The human baby's gestation continues for about a year after birth. The human brain triples in size during this period, and after the child is no longer within the uterus, the brain requires large amounts of physical...