On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Chris Hamilton-Emery wrote...
>Pre-lingual communication always "seems" to directly situate species in the
>here and now. But language certainly separates us as a species and separates
>us from directly shared experience. Not that I see language as the report
>back from some primary experience; it is, I believe, the constructor of
>experience and permitted modes of being. Its power simply imprisoning us.
It might be worth recalling, vis-a-vis the blurring of distinctions
between species, the experiments that were done in the 70s (I think) to
teach chimpanzees to talk. Not having the right sort of mouths for vocal
speech, the chimps were taught American Sign Language (Ameslan). The
most famous of the chimps was called Washoe. Two anecdotes I've always
found particularly entertaining and interesting. One is that if Washoe
was communicating in Ameslan with a human who wasn't very proficient at
it, she (Washoe) would recognise this and *slow down* her speed of
communication.
The other episode was when Washoe encountered a caged monkey that was
making a lot of noise and generally being a nuisance. Her response was
"Dirty monkey" which strikes me as interesting use of metaphor.
Actually, it's even better than that. Washoe had two words for "dirty",
one meaning just "unclean" and the other being more specifically to do
with, er, excrement. So what she said could be more accurately
translated as "Shitty monkey."
Best,
--
Peter
http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry/
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