“We do not, as children, first enter into language by consciously studying the formalities of syntax and grammar or by memorizing the dictionary definition of words, but rather by actively making sounds – by crying in pain and laughing in joy, by squealing and babbling and playfully mimicking the surrounding soundscape, gradually entering through such mimicry into specific melodies of the local language, our resonant bodies slowly coming to echo the inflections and accents common to our locale and community.
“We thus learn out native language not mentally but bodily. We appropriate new words and phrases first through their expressive tonality and texture, through the way they feel in the mouth or roll of the tongue, and it is this direct, felt significance – the taste of a word or phrase, the way it influences or modulates the body – that provides the fertile, polyvalent source for all the more refined and rarefied meanings which that term may come to have for us.” David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Learning and creating languages is an interesting intellectual pursuit, but I think there’s more depth to it than that, something I’ve discovered in my exposure to other languages. The idea being that language goes back to our primal roots, through cries, grunts, murmurs, screams. The calls of animals we hear in the wild places are the primal matrix from which languages evolved, like the first light sensitive cell on a microorganism that eventually became an eye.
Our first experience of language acquisition is instinctive, not intellectual; it is something experienced by the body, and from there our learning of language is built up. Looking through a dictionary we might be mistaken that language is a purely intellectual pursuit, something “raised above” our instincts, and that translation between languages is just a logical pursuit of matching meanings of the words and/or parallel grammatical approaches.
Perhaps this is the reason I never learnt French in school (despite 6 years of learning), because the formal approach in a school doesn’t resonate emotionally or instinctively with us; it doesn’t access the roots of language. It’s well known that emersion in a language is the best way to learn, and that’s certainly the case with me: I’ve learnt more French and Spanish since living with them.
Sometimes I say something in Spanish, not because I know intellectually that it is correct, but because I have a gut feeling that some words or phrases are correct. I think even if I make mistakes in another language (or my own even) it is understood because I am learning to speak from a “gut feeling” level and am understood at the same level. The flow of the words (or even their non-flow) can communicate more than the words themselves.
I think even the written word, though supposedly abstracted from our bodies, can have an effect on us. Going back to gut instinct, we can get a feeling for the words on a page, not just their dictionary meanings. So much has been done so that our experience of the body is distrusted, and I think that use of language has a lot to do with it. If we trust the sensations of the body through our languages a whole new level of communication is accessible.
June 4, 2012 at 7:27 pm
[...] roots of language for here, but in the end it became too long and aquired a quote, so I put it on The Grove of Quotes here. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in [...]
June 19, 2012 at 11:41 am
some people are emotionally blocked they hardly say something and never go back to their roots by the mean of screams murmurs laugh..To be able to speak one need to feel safe in their expression. Why people can’t talk in certain circumstances and can do it in other. Is it all about relaxation state or lack of it? In the spoken language I avoid using words that I know exist I don’t know why maybe I’m not sure about pronounciation besides the words taste strange in my mouth. It’s easier to write them on the sheet of paper than say it out loud. Two completely different things what I’ve learned while writing and what I’ve learned when speaking different language. I need to reapeat words and phrases several times due to assure myself they feel “correct”.
June 19, 2012 at 2:43 pm
Right, we need to feel safe in our expression, I absolutely agree.
There are some words that, though they may hold the same concept (dog and canine, for example), we’d use them differently because they contain different energies.
I think when we’re very young we learn words by the energies they contain more than the concepts. The intellectual part comes later.