I and Thou

Helena Iara has a new sound: "ó".  I'm not sure whether she gets the Portuguese sounds from people around her, or whether all babies sound like this, and I'm the one that understands it like the ó sound, but if you can imagine someone with a strong French accent expressing disbelief, you get something like it.  In Portuguese, however, this sound is very close to the signal for the vocative case, the particle that you put before someone's name to indicate that you are talking to him or her.  The vocative is common in many classical languages, but English has lost it, except in the "Hey, Alex" form, often considered rude.

And in fact, Helena does seem to use this new word as a way to call our attention to her (though I have to admit, just about anything she says will get our attention: that's the nature of a baby), so as we conversed this week, a dialogue that went something like this:

"Ó."
"Oooh."
"Ó."
"É?"
"É." (Giggle)
"Eh."
"Ó." (Laugh)

I managed to get in a few words edgewise about Martin Buber, the German Jewish philosopher.  Like Helena in our conversation, he begins with the vocative, or more exactly, with the "I-Thou" relationship.  Buber wrote during one of the most tumultuous times in German history, beginning during the era of Bismark, continuing through the first world war, and staying in Germany as a popular educator (Jews were excluded from formal education during the Third Reich) until he fled for Palestine in 1938.  Though certainly not an opponent of modernity, he saw the way that fascism and technology had made people into things.  Most of modern science and politics was focussed on the relationship between the I and the it, an attempt to gain objective understanding and thus control.  What this focus failed to consider, Buber said, was that relationships between humans are not I-it, but I-Thou, two people seeing each other as subjects, not as subject and object.

In the end, Buber insisted, the I-Thou relationships is prior to the I-it.  If we look at the chronological development of a baby (or at least of Helena Iara, the only baby I know well), he is clearly right.  For her language doesn't exist in order to describe or to control the world.  It exists to develop a relationship to others, to call their attention and stimulate their care, their laughs, their loving gaze.  To a certain degree, all of her language is vocative, and not just "ó."