Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

11. Languages in Parallel

CHAPTER 11 Languages in Parallel BEFORE SPOKEN LANGUAGE carved in stone or written on parchment and paper helped to make cities, states, and empires possible, persons in the act ofspeaking conveyed meaning with more than the vowel and consonant sounds their voices made-which is all that writing records. During the long period before writing, speakers' facial expression and hand and arm movements were attended to, because the whole meaning of an utterance is distributed (though not evenly) among all these signs and speech. Even those who can hear get additional meaning if they are also able to see a speaker. Listeners interpret a speaker's appearance and performance as well as the words being spoken and the way ofspeaking.The invention ofwriting centuries later brought changes, however. In many kinds oflanguage use-especially academic, legal, bureaucratic -the spoken words were considered to carry the whole message ; visible signals were suppressed or disregarded. But in the give and take of ordinary everyday life, what can be seen still carries meaning. In classical Greece and Rome, live oratory was highly prized as indispensable to democracy. A Roman liberal education began with the trivium-grammar, rhetoric, and logic-the first three of the seven liberal arts. Instruction in arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy followed when the first three were mastered. This beginning curriculum thus sorted language into three compartments. It implied that words and 162 Languages in Parallel 163 sentences belong to grammar, their delivery to rhetoric, and their truth function to logic or philosophy. Surviving treatises on Roman rhetoric do not tell the pleader or the politician what to say, but they give a great deal of instruction about how to present it. They discuss ploys for gaining favorable response from judges in court proceedings and for capturing the attention and approval ofan audience in the forum. The tradition lingers: we still treat gesture, general demeanor, tone of voice-everything that would have been part of face-to-face communication before the invention ofwriting-as rhetorical flourishes, optional features. Most people think of them as add-ons to speaking, some even as nonverbal. In preliterate societies, because communication had to be carried on face to face, what could be seen could be just as important as what could be heard.We, as heirs to several thousand years ofliteracy, find this difficult to understand fully-almost as difficult as understanding that signing can be language.The availability ofwritten records has much reduced the kinds of data that linguists take into account, while expanding the number and direction of their abstractions. Written languages dominate formal education and have almost completely eliminated from consideration as part oflanguage any of the visible information in a live utterance . Much ofwhat can be heard is also treated as unrelated to language. Some go so far as to call what writing does not capture "nonverbal."And yet it cannot be denied that language is older than writing, and that communication is older than language. BefiJre writing gained its dominant place in human cultures, language and communication were richer by being multimodal. Preliterate societies exist today, and a century ago there were more of them. Fortunately, some of them still retain their ancient cultural traditions . One of these traditions is just beginning to be recognized for what it is and what it implies. It cannot be described in a word or phrase, for it is a whole way of looking at animal, human, and spirit life as part ofa seamless whole. It is also too large a subject to cover in a single chapter , but one aspect of it is most pertinent to the progression from gesture to language to speech. One special feature ofsome surviving preliterate cultures is that their languages are not constrained by the conventions of alphabetic writing. In some of these societies, speech and visible signing are equally valid 164 Languages in Parallel ways of communicating. It is not surprising then that in these communities both the spoken language and the signed language are treated as language. This fact has taken even longer to be recognized than the fact that deaf people's signed languages are languages. Of course, early explorers reported that the natives they encountered used gestures, but usually such gestural displays were taken as evidence that the natives had not yet evolved into full human status and that their spoken languages were not complete. Later writers have a more enlightened...