I just got this little fun mental (spiritual?) rush. I’ve made it a habit to read for an hour or so in the morning while it’s still relatively quiet, and well, that’s what I was doing this morning when I got this… woooo! in my tummy.
A Bit of Back Story: My mom claims that before I began talking in English, I would talk in what she called “babble-talk”. I’d converse with cats, walls, windows and other people for hours on end, apparently oblivious to the fact that no one understood what I was saying. She didn’t know this was strange (I was her first child) until a few surprising incidents with baby-sitters alerted her to the fact that this was pretty odd. She claims that the day she decided to try to record some of it, I abruptly stopped, and began speaking English. I never uttered another babble-phrase again. My mom used to joke that the “babble-talk” was the language of my “real” parents, who were actually aliens from another solar system, and the day I stopped, it was because they had sent me a message saying “quit talking in Centaurian! You’ll give our plot away!”. (Yeah, my mom’s a funny lady.)
Anyway, in The Power of Babel (which is what I was reading this morning) the author attempts to trace human language from it’s original single source, probably originating in Africa, and probably a syllabolic and sometimes described by linguists to have sounded like “babbling”. Nothing of the language can be recreated now, simply because of the vast amount of time and language drift that has come since people even began to write their languages. But all linguists agree that it existed.
In (the fictional book) Snow Crash, that original language is a kind of code that deep inside the oldest areas of the human brain, people still have the potential to understand. A kind of universal language, like the binary code computers from Japan, US, or Russia can all read. (ok, so that’s the benign, un-scary description of what it is.)
So… what if, what if that babble talk I “communicated in” when I was little was that first language? What if, when a child is still young, before the nearly empty neurons have been written on with verbs, adjectives, pronouns and the grammar of their parents’ tongue, there is a few months when a child might revert to the original inherent language of our first ancestors, before language drift, or the event known in biblical circles as the “Tower of Babel.” Woooooo.
It’s so ridiculously unlikely, and stupidly absurd, and probably absolutely unfounded in any kind of science, but… wouldn’t it be cool? I probably thought of this because of the lack of any time between finishing Snow Crash and starting Power of Babel. That plus my desire to have something mystical in my life again…
So, that was the rush I got this morning while reading. Now I want to google up some stuff about “toddler babble talk” and see what other people think it really is.
