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.

Adventures in language

Yesterday, I took Helena to the grocery store, and as always, she was the hit of the day, with everyone staring at her, talking to her... (in fact, we may have to work hard so that she doesn't get too arrogant, given how everyone dotes on her in public.)  Then, at the cashiers, we checked out and Helena said "obrigada" to the girl working the line.  The girl was in a bad mood, and didn't pay attention to Helena, so Helena spoke in a louder voice, "Thanks!"  The message, at least the one I understood, was "if you don't understand me in Portuguese, then let me try English!"  Better, after all, to think that someone doesn't understand, than to think that they are being rude.

The point of all of this, I suppose, is that Helena has learned that language is descriptive; it's also a way to ask for what you want.  But at some basic level, language is a social lubricant, a way to make contact with other human beings.  And when they don't recognize that element (something common to rude cashiers and many types of analytic philosophers), Helena wants to try something else.  Even if that means talking English in Brazil.

This morning, another interesting bilingual game.  Helena loves to use the diminutive and the aggrandizing forms of nouns: Mãe (mother) becomes maezinha (little mommy), a rock is a pedrinha, and she sings "macaco, macaquinho, macacão" (monkey, little monkey, big monkey) to herself for hours on end.  As she walked around her room this morning, looking for her stuffed alpaca ("paca, paca?"), she had to step around a number of pillows.  She looked at Rita and me in the way she does when she wants us to do something, and said, "pilinho."

"Pilinho" would be the perfect diminutive form if pillow were a Portuguese word, meaning "little pillow."  It isn't, of course, and Helena probably learned quickly as we laughed.  But it makes me wonder how Helena distinguishes one language from another.  How does she hear the difference?  Know that she should speak one language to me, and another to a person she meets on the street?  Honestly, I'm not sure how she figures it out, but as her language skills get better (and as we travel to the US next month, where she'll have to figure out the whole context anew), I have a lot to learn.

A ball of meaning

For at least a month and a half, Helena Iara has been using words, but it's only in the last day or two that I'm confident that she understands that words aren't only useful, but also can signify.  And the word that has shown this fact is the very simple "ball", which she says (and repeats and repeats) in both Portuguese (bola) and English.

Neurologists and linguists who work with language acquisition talk about "semantic over-reach," lingo which just means that when babies begin to understand how words refer to things, they think the word means a much broader category than it really does.  The classic example is a child who learns the word "doggie", and then declares any four-legged animal, from a puppy to a lion, a "doggie".  Language learning happens through paring down our knowledge, chiseling away the meanings that don't work so that we get down to the "real" meaning of a word ("real" in scare quotes because it is always a little flexible, turned into a metaphor, and in flux).

For Helena, what that means is that any sphere is a ball.  She has a little ball that she loves to kick, but she also likes a full-sized soccer ball and an interesting little empty ball with lots of holes.  Oranges and apples are also balls, as are passion fruit... a problem when she declares "ball" and throws them onto the tile floor. The truth is, though, that an orange seems more similar to her little ball than either the empty ball or the soccer ball: she's developed a theory about "ball-ness" and is trying to apply it.

We don't lose this tendency as we grow up; it just changes.  In college, for instance, marxist cultural  theory was my "ball", something I tried to apply to everything.  Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?  Jane Austin?  Post-modern philosophy?  The drinking culture of small, liberal arts colleges?  A combination of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse offered an explanation and solution to everything, generally detailed with excessive pedantry (and a bit of humor) in my monthly column in a college magazine.

Now this isn't a bad thing, even as I make fun of my younger self.  Helena's joyful shouts of "bola, ball!" as she sees anything round make her excited about the world, curious and thrilled about learning.  The same was true of my own theoretical over-reach, and it continues to be: finding an idea that you love is essential not just to intellectual life, but to life itself.

In the long run, we all learn that an apple isn't a ball, and that if we throw it on the ground, it will be too bruised to eat.

Sound is like touch at a distance

 I have been editing a lot of film recently: we shot hours and hours in the favela of Recife last month, and have to turn it into a good short film in less than a month, so the pressure is on.  Editing means a lot of time with headphones stuck in my ears, and me lost to the external world.  Several times over the last couple of days, I have heard Rita talking with someone, what sounds like a profound enough conversation that I take off my earphones to see who is visiting... only to find out that it's Helena Iara.

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has begun to speak.  Yes, there are words that show up, from the expected mommy and dada to strange ones like "ímã" (magnet), but what I'm really talking about is the material stuff of speech, its sounds and rhythms.  When I'm not listening carefully, or when I am paying attention to something else, it sounds as if Helena is talking adult speech.  The tone rises and falls like discourse, the nouns and consonants sound like English or Portuguese, and she has the exact tones of joy and frustration and desire that we associate with speech.

It's cliché to say that 90% of language is non-verbal, but that doesn't make it any less true.  Helena is gathering the lessons of non-semantic language, the tones and music and sounds that will eventually come together to be adult speech.  And she communicates with these sounds, even if she doesn't understand that sounds are supposed to "mean" something, instead of simply being.

By chance, I was listening to an old Radiolab episode a couple of nights ago, where the neuroscientist Anne Fernald suggested that speech begins not as communication, but as a caress (or a punch, a tickle... not as meaning, but as something much more direct).  Across cultures, people talk to babies with almost exactly the same tones of voice, whether soothing or complimenting or disciplining.  Voice serves to embrace a child and educate her, not through its content, but through its music.  Remembering that the cilia and timpanum and hammer that make up hearing are really feeling the motion of the air, Fernald coins the elegant phrase, "Sound is like touch at a distance."

Before Helena is learning language as meaning, she is learning sound as touch, as a direct way to relate with Rita and with me.  Semantics may come later, but for now I'm happy to have touch at a distance.

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.