I'm reading through, belatedly (it was published in 2016) Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech. It's so good I've almost finished it in one sitting; but like all Wolfe's works, it's not that good. Maybe I'm too dismissive there. The central thesis of the book is that language is humanity's "superpower" over all the creatures of the earth (it's been pointed out by better thinkers that Genesis has Adam naming the animals, and thus asserting a level of supremacy over them). He traces this thesis through Darwin (who struggled with the problem of proving language was a product purely of evolution, like fangs or claws or humans being hairless (no, really!), and so keeping his theory a Grand Unifiying Theory of Everything. His other locus of interest is Noam Chomsky, who starts with the assertion of a grand theory of language that explains everything about language; until it runs into an example from the real world that undoes all he did. Not that Chomsky ever acknowledged that (no more than Darwin did). I want to give it some measure of reflection here, in what are essentially my public notes on such matters as interest me. But as I'm at the end of the book now, I'm going to start there, and work backwards a bit as time and my interest allow.
So, at the end, Wolfe tries to Sum It All Up, trumping both the Evolutionists (as he labels them) and the other linguists who throw up their hands and declare they don't know what language is, after 150+ years of trying to answer that simple question. Wolfe answers it (he thinks), but already (surprise!) he misses a salient point:
One bright night it dawned on me---not as a profound revelation, not as any sort of analysis at all, but as something so perfectly obvious. I could hardly believe that no licensed savant had ever point it out before. There is a cardinal distinction between man [sic] and animal, a sherrly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.
....
Speech was the first artifact, the first instance in which a creature, man, had removed elements from nature...in this case, sounds...and turne them into something entirely new and man-made...strings of sounds that formed codes, codes called words.
He goes on, but tp no greater effect. And the point he misses is an intersting one. For pages and pages and pages he points out that Chomsky, in the '50's, has posited both a Universal Grammar and a LAD, a "language acquisition device" which is embedded in the brain (soon to be discovered!, Chomsky said then. It hever has been, and he eventually abandoned the idea altogether). This LAD both provides humans with a UG, and allows humans to learn and use language. (If you're thinking of the classic cartoon where step two is "And then a miracle occurs," you'll be disappointed to learn Wolfe never reaches for that rather obvioius reference. I'm still convinced that cartoon is applicable to most grand theories, especially in science, which is far less self-examining than philosophy or theology. But I digress....) Wolfe is a bit obssesed with it, but even in the late '70's, when I was in college, the LAD was spoken of as more a product of mind than brain (a function of human consciousness, not an organ embedded in gray matter somewhere, like the pineal gland). But there is a physical factor about speech, one Wolfe doesn't examine, although it's quite, quite fundamental (read Wolfe too long you start repeating adjectives for emphasis, too, also):
Human speech is only possible because of human phsyiology.
There's a reason Koko's handlers had to teach her sign language. Koko had lips, and a tongue; but not vocal chords, at least not human ones. And no brain power capable of shaping those lips, with the tongue, into sounds. Not language sounds, anyway. They knew that. They didn't even try (it had been done, and failed.) So they went with ASL, perhaps to prove language began as gestures (one of the evolutionary theories of where language came from. Nobody knows, because we have no records of language, well, before language.)
Humans alone can control their vocal chords and their breath and lips and tongue, even teeth, to produce language. We alone have the mental capacity (or ability, if you prefer) to conjure speech from our bodies, and our bodies are uniquely set up to produce speech. Our brains direct our throat, larynx, tongue, lips, lungs; and sounds come out that our hears can hear and, in turn, our brains interpret. For whatever reason, of all the creatures on earth, we alone can do this.
Two things set us apart, then: one wholly physical (we learn speech first, writing later); one wholly...well, what, exactly?
Aye, there's the rub.
(Wolfe also tries to argue for what language "is," and all he comes up with is that language ia mneonic device that allows us to remember large amounts of information, but compact that data in to much simpler, shorter words. There's an argument to be made there until we get to simple sentences like "I love you" or "This music is particularly beautiful," which hardly seems the stuff of mnemonics at all. It can carry a great deal of resonance; or it can be a flat, dull statement with very limited context. I love my wife, I love my cat, I love my daughter. Hardly three equal statements, and do they convey to you a wealth of knowledge, or just a rather uniteresting commonplace, especially since you don't know me, my wife, my cat, or my daughter? What am I remembering, to myself or you, with those phrases? I dunno; seems like weak tea to me (which is a mnemonic; most metaphors are, I suppose.). Memory is clearly a function of language: we write books to @remember” knowledge (which is language; or stored in language. How do we know the dancer from the dance?) But us that the primary use of language? When I tell my wife “I love you,” what am I remembering?)
(And if words are codes, how is it we adopt them so swiftly? Chomsky supported his theory of a UG by pointing out how children use "grammar" of a language, even if they aren't quite proficient at it, and only later refine their understanding. Our (the Lovely Wife and mine) favorite story is our daughter at age four or so declaring she couldn't pick up some of her toys, as we'd just asked her, because she was "full of hands." She meant her hands were full; but we still say "Full of joy" as well as "joyful," so why was she wrong? Except the code isn't quite right, is it? Part of the problem with Wolfe's analysis is that language is a bit too complext to speak of it in simplistic terms.)
Yeah, that's a poor start; but it's all I've got. I'm gonna go finish the book and then, maybe, start from Darwin and move forward. Later, gators.
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