17

They say that if one does not  learn to speak his language by the age of ten, he never will. Tarzan may have been an exception. He did not learn English as a child because English was not his home language. Tarzan’s home language was  ape language which he learned before he was ten years old and he seemed to have been pretty good at it. Apes do communicate in some way, and apparently Tarzan’s ape language enabled him not only to play with his ape playmates but to later learn a second language, English, when he was an adult. It does seem amazing to us, but learning any language is difficult, and for an infant to learn language is close to miraculous. No surprise if so much has to be done in the early years before habits and patterns  are locked in. (I don’t want to get into a discussion about whether or not there really was a Tarzan. We leave that for another time.)

Language has many aspects; sound, grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and one aspect of the miracle of language that can be discussed and probably should be in this day when we all confront different dialects and accents everywhere we go, is speech sound itself.

Think for a moment of the predicament of an infant who emerges into a world of different speech sounds, a world of different sounds  because no two speech sounds are exactly alike. Think of the variety of human voices and the variety of voices.  We all make sounds and they all are different, some widely different, some almost identical. Linguists call each sound a ‘phone’,  and an infant is bombarded with phones, each one different than the other. The infant will hear phones from parents, nurses, visitors, hospital staff, the outside, everywhere. The phones will be comparable to fingerprints—no two alike. The mother may say love, the father may say love, and a sibling may say love. We think the infant will hear, as we will,  the same series of sounds three times, but not so. Those sounds are very different because of the shape of the mouth, the sex of the speaker, the effort put into the speech, the language background of the speaker, etc. An electronic device will record three  different sounds and so will the ear of the infant, but unless the infant figures out some way to organize those many sounds into a few, he will never hear the single word, love, he will hear similar sounding but not identical sounds, and he will never learn the language. He will  only hear and babble sounds or phones. Yet children learn to use their language in the first few years. Tarzan did this but we don’t really understand how.

Somehow the infant begins to pull similar sounds into a group of sounds that are called ‘phonemes’,  and the infant begins to hear and use phonemes, not phones. After he learns the phonemes of his language, his mind is sealed off. He doesn’t hear phones any more, only phonemes and only the phonemes of his language, and that has to be done in the first ten years because it can’t be done after that. (Except Tarzan.)

Each language has its own collection of phonemes. English has 42 – 44 phonemes. (They are hard to measure.) One language has only ten or eleven phonemes. One has about 141. The linguists who study these languages have to be careful about how they count because next year different linguists might identify new phonemes. Tarzan’s birth parents were English but Tarzan never learned English as a child, only ape language, and we don’t know much about the phonemes of ape language. But the adult Tarzan, really Lord Greystoke, learned English, returned to England, didn’t like it, and went back to the jungle. I don’t know whether or not his English had an ape accent or whether when he went back home his ape language had picked up an English accent. That’s a problem for linguistic scholars. (There are sceptics who don’t believe the Tarzan story.  They’re missing out on a lot of books and movies.)

A child can learn more than one language at the same time. He may have a father who speaks one language and a mother who speaks another, but the learning process is the same. The child hears multiple phones but puts them into different phonemes and once he gets the phonemes of a certain language or certain languages, he seems to be locked into those patterns.

I remember a certain incident in my own life. It was back when I was in the service. No war. One day we were hiking along some trail in the bush. During a break, I found myself next to a man from Oklahoma and another Midwesterner. For some reason we were trying to get him to say “all the oil in the barrel .” He couldn’t do it. We would carefully say “all” and carefully say “oil”, two different words,  but all he could hear was one sound, one vowel phoneme, that was the same one in each word (leave out the beginning and the end of the word),  and all he could hear and utter was the same sound, the same phoneme.  Even “barrel” gave him trouble. You say those words and you will see how close the vowel phones are and why a man from the Oklahoma oil fields would have trouble dealing with those particular English phonemes uttered by a Swede. I don’t know how Tarzan would have done.

First phones, then phonemes, but whether one or two (or more, even) the process, like much of life,  is a mystery, and we are still talking about the sounds that go into words. Putting the words together to make meaningful communication is a matter of grammar, and that has its own problems. There is a lot of controversy among linguists who try to explain language acquisition.

For a long time, people accepted the conventional, mechanical view of learning language, that we learned by imitating. We hear, we imitate, we learn. But there are obvious difficulties. The parent says, “Drink your milk.” The child does not go around saying “Drink your milk.” The parent says, “Stop crying now.” The child does not go around saying “Stop crying now.” The parent says, “if you do that again you will get spanked.” The child does not go around saying “If you do that again, you will get spanked.” If the child has any sense, he will say, “I won’t”. But that learn-by-imitation view prevailed and still does in many places. You probably accept it also.

But more and more linguists, though not all, have begun to question it. One prominent sceptic is a man named Noam Chomsky who postulated his “black box” theory of mind. Basically, Chomsky said that language acquisition is a mystery. It cannot be mechanically explained. I don’t know how far Chomsky has pushed his theory, but I find it quite acceptable, for Chomsky’s view fits in with my own view that not only is gathering phones into phonemes a mystery, but all life is mystery, from the Big Bang to an infant learning to talk and everything in between.

Materialists believe—they must, given their premises—that all life is levers and wheels, and learning about life is discovering and studying and reproducing  levers and wheels, but duplicating levers and wheels is not quite the same as understanding life. Why are there levers and wheels in the first place? Why did they start turning together? What keeps them going? Why and how do those first levers and wheels evolve into more complicated assemblies of levers and wheels? Levers and wheels that could learn to think and talk? It’s hard enough to describe what is happening, and  describing is not the same as explaining and understanding.

No matter how smart you are or are not, whether it’s Tarzan learning ape nursery rhymes or Einstein explaining  why time and space are the same thing, or everything else, it is all a mystery.