Language

Unless you spend a lot of time reading academic criticism, it is easy to forget that language originates in the torrent of undifferentiated cries, grunts, and howls that Man the Animal produces in his quest for survival. Why these grunts eventually evolve into expressions like Hamlet, jive, the Declaration of Independence, and the Tractatus seems to me a source of rich speculation: if we could find a scientific justification for the claim that the Australian tree sloth achieves its highest literary expression in the gutteral snarl-screech of the ovulating female, Harold Bloom’s next text on subtextual intertextualism might actually have something to say.

Zoogle is learning to talk. He’s not quite at the level of Elizebethan revenge tragedies, but he has acquired a range of sounds that can be strung together in different ways to express a small but growing suite of complex ideas. (The semantic range of the word ‘idea’ may need some light stretching to accommodate what Zoogle has to say.) Although a thorough classification of Zoogelian morphemes would require more time, energy, and expertise than I can muster for this blog, the following list contains a few of the more recognizable language units, along with hyperlinks to audio field samples:

* the glooble
* the schnorfelwail
* the Marvin Gay wah
* the short sigh of complicity
* the triple squak of indignation

He ocassionally puts these sounds together into complete sentences:

* an example sentence, where he asks us to turn down the volume on the canticuentos.

And, very rarely, he produces a complete narrative:

* the wacky misadventures of the dog Wagglepox and his sidekick George the Chicken.

Again, this list represents a short sub-sample of the Zoogelian lexicon; anyone interested in a more comprehensive reference would do well to consult the forthchoming Definitive Field Guide to Calls of the Wild Zoogle, currently under contract with American Fauna Press, issue date TBA.

Of course it is one thing to play the scientist, observing and taking notes on a set of phenomena that are designed and presented by nature, quite another to play the creator, guiding and transforming those phenomena into shapes of your own devising. Our ambition is to produce a bi-lingual child, a creature who can formulate complete, syntactically correct sentences in both Spanish and English. However, in light of the fact that a typical sentence in our household sounds something like ‘buenas mañanas, chicalica, come va mi furry round pepino?’, there is a very real chance that Bensoosco will end up being totally unintelligible in five languages, a pentatonic illiterate at equal odds with all his tongues.

To avoid this sad eventuality, we have tried to tighten the ship of our daily discourse: father-son conversations are to be in English, mother-son conversations are to be in Spanish, and mother-father conversations are to be in Spanish unless non-Spanish speakers are present or we are speaking about art, love, or finances, in which case we can use whichever language seems appropriate (preferably sign language in the latter case; all we need is the sign for death by strangulation.) The idea behind formalizing the language-setting rules is to provide a clear division of context so that the baby can sort out the various idioms. It’s not totally clear to me how the system is supposed to work, unfortunately. Apparently, consistency is key, and if you are consistent, your child can learn an arbitrary number of languages. But is there no upper bound on the complexity of the system to which one is supposed to be consistent? Could we stipulate that terms of affection will be in Italian, cream-based sauces will be in French, cries of despair will be in Pig-latin, and still entertain any hope of producing a child who can talk?

Like every other specimen of biological life, our evolutionary success depends on how well we can leverage the stimulus-response circuit to our own advantage. A baby who creates the ruckus of a five alarm fire when it is hungry has a better chance of being fed than one who merely whimpers his displeasure (noise abatement may not be love, but it works in a pinch.) The evolutionary advantages of emitting squeals of delight upon experiencing pleasure are not so clear-cut, however: one could conceive of biologically closed systems designed under purely negative principles. Though ill-qualified to judge the merits of this argument, I do know that nothing lightens the load of parenting more than hearing a happy coo, perhaps with a side of bright eyes and one of those twisted, toothless baby smiles. At which point I don’t care what the program is, all bets are off and formal language is dropped as the parents descend into an imitative chorus of coos and giggles, each outdoing the other to produce the Word, the Sound, that will strike the tocsin of the Childsoul and send a signal of Love peeling across the courtyard of the psyche. These parents are like pet lovers who say 'miao' when they see a cat: both undone by the mimetic fallacy, the doomed attempt to use low-level phenomes to capture high-level language structures. The cat stares dumbly; the baby laughs at our ineptitude; my wife laughs at my basic, instinctual ridiculousness; and the alien psychologists in the sky once again just scratch their heads and write it all down in their notebooks.