All-Night Lingo Tango By Barbara Hamby
University of Pittsburgh Press 3400 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Paper / 88 pages $14.95 USD ISBN 978-0-8229-6017-1
Cleaning Out the Attics of the Mind: Barbara Hamby’s All-Night Lingo Tango Cleaning Out the Attics of the Mind: Barbara Hamby‘s All-Night Lingo Tango
~ By E. K. Mortenson
When
he was an infant, I used to sit and wonder what my son was thinking about. I don’t mean that in the generic way that parents do, but literally, as a writer and thinker. Since he had no language skills, what could he be thinking about? How does one describe what one perceives when one has, again, literally, no words to do so? He saw me talking (didn’t know that was what I was doing, of course), heard the words coming out of my mouth (didn’t know they were words, of course), must have assumed I was saying something to him (didn’t know how to assume or that there even was a ―him‖), but what was going through his little reptilian brain at that point?
As we know, infants are not too forthcoming with that sort of information, and I am always dubious when it comes to ―infant brain research‖ into the subject. How do these scientists know? Is there a ―special‖ test infant who actually does tell researchers what he or she was thinking? As a toddler, my son continues to play coy when it comes to describing what he was thinking pre-language. My own assumption is that he — we, actually — don‘t think much of anything before we acquire language. It is possible that we do not have what we would call ―memories‖ per se, until we have a language matrix into which to place them, and a system by which to recall them. Of course the real magic occurs once we do
have that language structure. The even bigger question is: from where do we acquire it? I have read a few scholars, most recently E.D. Hirsch, who suggests that we humans are ―hardwired‖ for language. Let me be clear, though: hardwired for spoken language. We just ―pick it up‖ from our parents, siblings, friends, and society at large. We are decidedly not so programmed for written language. If so, my son would be writing poems — or at least the alphabet — instead of the scribbles he tells me are letters. No, written language is a different animal. Ah, but spoken language, it seems that is encoded in our very DNA as humans.