Her Mommy

Over the last week, we've see the same scene several times: Helena takes two toys, one big and one small, and then says of the larger, "É a mãe dela." (It's her mother)  She's excited about the idea, and won't staop saying it until we repeat and agree.

When you think about it, "Mother" (or father, uncle, any kinship terms) are a strange kind of noun.  If you and I are talking together, and we say "tree" or "car," we can trust that we are probably referring to the same concrete thing.  But when I say "Mother" and you say "Mother," we are in fact talking about very different people.  The same word "means" different things.

I was tempted to write that Helena is learning that Mother is a term of relationship, and not one of reference, but that assumes that the "original" or real way we use words is that of signifier and signified, a sound that refers to a concrete thing.  I'm not sure that's true, though: babies may understand relationship nouns before they understand absolute nouns.  "Mommy," "Daddy", and many of the other first words in a baby's vocabulary are, in fact, relational.  Perhaps the "her Mommy" is in fact a way to transform relational into absolute, and not the other way around.

One of the most interesting developments in Brazilian anthropology in the last decade has been based on the same idea: for the native people of the Amazon basin, all nouns are relational.  It isn't just that "Mother" points to the relationship between the speaker and a woman, but "jaguar" or "fish" do as well. This idea seems at first impossible, until we see that what "jaguar" means is really "he who can eat anything."  Thus, if a fish could say "jaguar", it would be talking about a fisherman.  If a monkey could say "jaguar", it might refer to a harpy eagle, which hunts monkeys as it flies through the trees.

We see this kind of language in European poetry, or in proverbs like "man is a wolf to man," but we seem to think it is a secondary, metaphorical way to use language.  Both babies and Amazonian indians suggest that it may be the other way around.