Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

2. Chasing the Language Butterfly

CHAPTER 2 Chasing the Language Butterfly IT WAS ASKING for trouble in the early 1960s to argue that a symbol system without sounds was a genuine language, but it seemed to me a good idea anyway. Once my idea was out in the open, other interesting questions followed. One ofthese was whether the very first languages would have looked like the languages most people today use. I don't think they would have. I think that language must have begun in one form and changed to another.This is a radical idea, perhaps, but I think it can be explained.All ofus use a language (or more than one) in the daily business ofliving and find it a pretty straightforward process.We make signs that we and others can hear or see or both."\;V'hether we make the signs with our unaided voices or with our upper-body movements or with the assistance ofpens or keyboard strokes or microphones, we, and those we interact with, assume that the signs we are making mean approximately the same things to them as they mean to us. When we talk about these language signs, we call them words and sentences; and for most adults most of the time, they pose few problems. These words and sentences are made out of the sounds we speak and hear every day. They are also represented by markings we see on paper, billboards, television screens, and so forth. We seldom think about how 17 18 Chasing the Language Butteifly and why the words and sentences mean what they mean. As long as they work, we don't need to worry. Most of us think even less often about what deaf people's words and sentences must be like. Once in a while, though, something happens to make us think about the way words and meanings get connected. Reading Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland gives our comfortable belief that words and meanings are solidly connected a sudden jolt. When Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty in Looking Glass Land, Humpty Dumpty tells her that when he uses the word glory it means "a knock-down argument." Because she is a stranger there and he has the authoritative manner of an Oxford or Cambridge don, she doesn't argue with him, but we may stop a moment and reflect that, yes, indeed, the words we use mean just what we and others say they mean. There is nothing else to make them mean that. The words and phrases and sentences we use every day mean what they do because that is what most of us intend them to mean. This leaves us with the mystery of how they got their particular meanings in the first place. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was noted for saying that language signs are arbitrary, not motivated, not naturally connected to what they mean. He also is credited with saying they cannot be motivated. Before Saussure, Rene Descartes was even more extreme, concluding that language and thought are quite separate from bodies and the material world. Language signs seem to be arbitrary because they are conventional, and given a convention-an agreed-upon usage-anything can be a sign for anything else. A convention is a tacit social contract. People who regularly interact with each other use the same form-meaning pairs. They never negotiated a contract among themselves confirming the connection between forms and meanings, but the contract holds nonetheless. When people disagree about meaning-in civil disputes as well as in families and in international relations-they often need courts and arbitrators and other intermediaries to sort out the resulting chaos. The question of how language signs acquired their meanings takes us back to the beginning of life on earth.Without considering that begin- Chasing the Language Butteifly 19 ning, we could not refute ancient myths that claim language resulted from divine intervention. Even to deal with the thoroughly modern mythlet that supposes a brain mutation initiated language as a strictly human, species-specific instinct, we need the story of life. Life began as single living cells. Much later, aggregations of cells formed more elaborate living creatures. Still later, central nervous systems evolved. But through all this long time, life proceeded by movement and change and adaptation to change-from the organism's point ofview, by interpreting change.All animal~" using whatever sensory nerves and...