From Hand to Mouth by Michael C. Corballis

Author:Michael C. Corballis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

But of course speech eventually won out: “In proportion as the language of articulate sounds became more copious, there was more need of seizing early opportunities of improving the organ of speech, and for preserving its first flexibility. Then it appeared as convenient as the mode of speaking by action: they were both indiscriminately used; till at length articulate sounds became so easy, that they absolutely prevailed.”5

That just about says it all.6 You are nevertheless invited to read on.

So yes, it’s true what they say: people talk. The remarkable dominance of the spoken word over our lives is surely a defining feature of the human condition. Of course, we gesture too, but unless you are fluent in signed language, you will know that it is very difficult to get your message across using gestures alone. When traveling in a country where they don’t speak your language, you may well resort to gesture, but communication is very limited, and you may curse the foreigners’ inability to understand you—or your own lack of attention in foreign-language classes in high school. As we saw in chapter 5, people do gesture as they speak, and the gestures can certainly help one make a point, as it were, but they are not sufficient by themselves. Curiously, people often gesture when they speak on the phone or talk over radio, but listeners can understand quite adequately without seeing these gestures. One of the difficulties people have in accepting the gestural theory is that speech seems so natural and dominant that it is hard to believe we ever communicated in any other way.

We get a rather different impression, however, if we consider what the common ancestor of ourselves and the modern chimpanzee and bonobo must have been like. As we have seen, these modern great apes have poor control over vocalization but relatively sophisticated control over the arms and hands, and they have highly complex visual systems. They cannot be taught anything resembling vocal language, but they can be taught gestural or visual communication, at least to the level of what Derek Bickerton has called protolanguage and with at least some ability to combine symbols to form new meanings. Based on the primate evidence, the common ancestor of ourselves and our nearest relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo, would seem to have been destined for a communication system based on gestures, rather than one based on vocalization.

Or if you don’t believe in destiny, let me put it this way. Suppose you were to go back 5 or 6 million years and try to establish communication with that common ancestor. You would no doubt be faced with much the same problem as that faced by modern investigators trying to communicate with modern great apes, and you would no doubt resort to visual rather than vocal methods. Yet evolution somehow took a different course. What on earth can have happened to bring about such a dramatic change of direction, and when did it occur?

In this chapter I try to piece

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.