Ordinary Language

Over the last several weeks, Rita and Helena Iara have been talking quite a lot.  I'm not joking: Helena is responding thoughtfully, engaged in a real conversation with her mother.

Helena isn't even eight weeks old: clearly her proud father is exaggerating.  Everyone knows that children may speak their first word at about twelve months, and certainly won't converse for a good time after that.  And etymologically, "infancy" comes from the Latin of "do not speak".  So what in the world am I talking about?  These reflections became the theme for a long conversation with Helena Iara a couple of nights ago, after she and Rita had spent a good half an hour talking back and forth.

Now, if language is essentially the communication of meaning through verbal symbols, as most people have defined it through history, then I'm just writing nonsense.  However, over the last sixty or seventy years, beginning with Wittgenstein and JL Austin, philosophers and anthropologists have looked at other ways to define language, not merely as meaning, but also as a social practice.  Austin called his famous series of lectures How to do things with words, trying to show that meaning was only one of many activities that one can do with language.  When a priest or a judge says "I hearby declare you man and wife," for instance, he doesn't mean anything.  His words change the world, create or formalize a relationship that did not exist before.

Austin focussed on these kind of uses of words, but we can also see lots of other ones.  When two teenagers flirt with each other, for instance, the meaning of their words is less important than the romantic game they are playing.  Many modernist poets insisted that they wanted to create beautiful sounds more than convey meaning: after all, poein in Greek, the origin of poem, means "to make".  And words always work as a way to bring people together or force them apart, to create relationships, to develop intimacy.  They are a tool for sociality.

Since this theory that I'm proposing is a major part of Rita's research, it shouldn't surprise me that she would play these sorts of games with Helena Iara.  She speaks or giggles or grunts, and then waits for Helena to respond with a different sounds.  To which Rita will then respond, and the game goes on.  "Game," I say, but it is really the social practice of language: not the language game (Sprachspiel, in Wittgenstein's terms) of meaning, but a language game even so.  Helena has learned to speak long before she has learned how to mean.