Essay on language

“I was in a printing house in hell and saw the method by which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.”

– William Blake, A Memorable Fancy

Somewhere else I have written on the possibility, which appears to me every day as more of a probability, that a written language existed before humans could form words in their minds and utter them as sounds. This will not surprise anyone. Of course there was such a language. Many languages in fact. Systems of gesture, systems of drawings and symbols scratched in sand or painted on rock. And of course these pre-languages influenced the later spoken ones. This is not difficult to prove, for there still live on the planet today peoples whose spoken language is a secret one and whose only communication with other tribes, even those in the vicinity, is in just such nonspeech: the gesture, the scratched message, the special arrangement of sticks and pebbles, yes, even the smoke signal. All this is common knowledge.

My own first experience of such a language was in the mysterious chalkmarks left by gypsies on our gatepost at home. What could these mean? We dared not rub them off, for this, we were sure, would bring us the worst of bad luck. Did they mean we were a soft touch and that, having understood the signal, more and more gypsies would appear to sell us clothespegs and baskets and tell our fortunes? This was an exciting prospect for us children. But those crosses and circles might also signify that the gypsies hadn’t liked the reception they got: the dog had growled at them: the food was grudgingly given. We had an uncle who had a book which was supposed to explain everything, but when it came to translation he could not make head or tail of any of the chalklines. He suggested, and I have believed it ever since, that the gypsies, not wanting to be caught out, changed their signals every so often; it would seem a very sensible thing to do. If I knew a gypsy well enough I would ask if this is so. But then why would she answer truthfully to a nosy question like that?

When I write of a pre-speech language I am not, of course, referring to any of these somewhat makeshift wordless methods of passing on information. On the contrary I want to advance the idea, perhaps I should say I want to speculate on the idea, that these scratches, symbols and gestures are merely the remnants of a once highly complex and sophisticated language that, after the gift of suitable throats and mouths, has been lost to us forever in favour of the spoken word, or at least has dwindled to the fading traces we now see of it. I am speaking of a language unspoken, one that did not contain words as we know then but all the same had its own sophisticated grammatical structure, a language which could express every nuance of human emotion, which could describe the inner as well as the outer landscape. This could be, perhaps was, a language which in its flowering would produce its own literature, its own stories and drama, and in which could be written poems so delicate in their implications that our own efforts would appear crude beside those of these distant ancestors of ours.

Indeed those ancestors must have been very distant, for I think of all this as beginning while humankind was still cradled in Mother Africa, in the time before the great migrations which have taken us all to the ends of the earth and back. This is why I am referring to that forgotten language in the singular. From such a language, of course, the blind would have been excluded. Just as in the long years of our illiteracy the deaf must have been excluded from our spoken word.

A what-if story, you say, a long walk down the lane of foolish speculation? Not quite, for this is in fact the point from which I took off on this journey, which I tend to think of as in some ways a pilgrimage.

For some years now I have had a friend, a poet, who has consistently brought me her interesting and indeed extraordinary poems. Written in a language she could not hear very well, they yet showed a great perception of the rhythm of English as well as its many assonances and its unfortunately few rhymes. These were poems of ideas, poems of imagination. This young woman had that rarest of gifts, poetic insight. Things were hard for her but the struggle, I thought, was good. Per ardua ad astra, and so on.

About a year ago she began not so much to write as to perform quite different poems. Some of these had the same ideas as her verbal poems but these were expressed in a non-verbal language – American Sign Language. Her gestures were passionate and forceful, I felt abashed that I could not read her hands. This experience was obviously important to her – to me it was a revelation. Here at last was what I was seeking for, a non-verbal language. The ultimate perhaps in ideogrammatic expression.

I would like to be able to say that I went right out and learned this new and powerful way of communicating. For lack of a teacher I did not. I still hope one day to do so. I did however have a vision of a world in which perhaps every one of us could become free from the restraints of the word. If we could all learn our mother tongue and besides that a non-
verbal language such as asl wouldn’t we be able to communicate with each other around the planet with a certain degree of ease?

There remains, of course the problem of a script. Perhaps my friend the deaf poet could help us there. What we would
need is an ideogrammatic script something like Chinese characters, one that would lend itself to a Braille-like embossing technique.

But can we hope that literature, even poetry, could be expressed in such a script? We can never be sure of that. Yet every written language, and every oral language too, has so far been able to produce its own stories, poems and liturgies. There is more danger by far that over the centuries and millennia one of these languages would triumph over the other and we would be left once more with one mode of communication. Which would be the victor, the wordless expression of ideas? The naming mode of the verbal language? I suppose that in spite of my interest in the non-verbal, the ideogrammatic, if I had to make the choice I would do what my ancestors did and choose the Word made manifest in the mouth.