Lingua Adamica Restituta

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume 14 · Number 4 · Summer 1971 LINGUA ADÁMICA RESTITUTA* MACDONALD CRITCHLEY, M.D.f It is unfortunate to find that psychologists have done so little with artificial languages . Language engineers have demonstrated the enormouspossibilities thatexist and the practical consequences that research can have. As international cooperation becomes more and more ofa problem, the needfor such information becomes increasingly clear. The reasons why so little has been done are probably the magnitude of thejob and the fact that several disciplines must cooperate to carry it offsuccessfully. Ifcooperative research continues to increase inpopularity,perhaps thefuture willsee an increased interest in the business ofcreating new languagesfor specialpurposes. [G. A. Miller, 1951] The distinction of being a Rickman Godlee Lecturer is one which I appreciate with pride. We are assembled to honour a great surgeon, cultivated and revered. He was born in 1849 at No. 5 Queen Square, a house which I have long coveted, for I have passed and re-passed it day after day for nearly fifty years. In this very house two decades later resided Hughlings Jackson, whose predictive concepts of brain function led directly to that bold gesture of Rickman Godlee when he removed at operation a cerebral tumour. This surgical pioneering took place on November 25, 1884. Rickman Godlee was a man of parts, and his many talents included a flair for language and an interest in linguistics. I venture to hope that our Patron would have found it not unimportant to project one's imagination and to speculate upon the possible future ofour systems ofcommunication. A century ago the Académie Française proscribed all argument about * The Rickman Godlee Lecture for 1970. f National Hospital, Queen Square, London. 507 the beginnings of language, but the mandate at no time extended across the Channel. Today, our concern is with the mutability ofcommunicative systems, and we will deal with the dynamic rather than the static properties oflanguage. But while looking forward, we cannot avoid some brief reference to the origins of speech. Are the differences between the communication ofthe highest primates and that ofthe lowliest representatives oíhomo sapiens qualitative or quantitative? Currently we favour the former hypothesis. "Species-specific" is the habitual jargon in this connection. Language—unlike the calls and cries ofthe animal kingdom—is a human and sensitive endowment, which is vulnerable to brain pathology. Unfortunately , we are never likely to know at which stage in phylogeny a rudimentary language came into being. The evidence is not weighty enough and probably never will be, although we can continue to piece together such tenuous clues as the size of the cranium, the shape of the mandible, artifacts indicating toolmaking as well as tool using, and such skills as kindling fire. Certainly the Aurignacian culture with its wall paintings and hand imprints must have embraced a system of verbal symbols. It is still in doubt whether the art oflanguage was the perquisite ofevery adult member of a particular genus. Perhaps in those remote days it was confined to merely a few especially gifted individuals who, by dint of some intellectual or sensorimotor skill, had a better survival rate and a greater fertility. We need not discuss the various notions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as to the origin oflanguage, however interesting and even amusing this would be. Many speculative ideas were bandied about: speech as the elaboration of gesture, speech as the audible concomitant of vigorous physical effort, speech as onomatopoeia emerging from the mimicry of animal cries or of sounds in nature, speech as evolving from the dance, speech as a correlation between delicate linguobuccal motor skills and symbolic thinking, or even speech as a dissociation between sound production and deglutition. More serious discussion devolved around the question of monogenesis versus polygenesis. Did language begin in one geographical locus and in spreading undergo modifications according to accepted rules oflinguistic change? Or did pockets of communicative endeavour crop up quite independently here and there throughout the world? The latter idea seems 508 Macdonald Critchley · Lingua Adámica Restituía Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Summer 1971 more credible, for anthropologists know well that vast linguistic differences often exist in the speech...