Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

There is no form of language in the world that is ever spoken aloud without accompanying hand movements. Indeed, the greater the effort of concentration on live speech, the more the speaker needs to move his or her hands. Try watching the conference interpreters behind their glass screens in Luxembourg or Geneva. Although absolutely nobody is supposed to be looking at them, all of them—whether they are speaking German, Estonian, Arabic, or Dutch—gesticulate wildly, simply in order to keep the flow of speech up to speed. Hand movement is a profound, unconscious, inseparable part of natural speech.

We could therefore start from the reliable and repeatable observation that natural speech is a partly but obligatorily manual activity.[183] Here’s an obvious exception that proves the rule. In most languages, television newscasters do not gesticulate at all but keep their hands on or under the desk, or use them just to shuffle the papers in front of them. That is because they are only pretending to talk to you. What they are actually doing is reading words written on the teleprompter screen. Similarly, a lecturer who moves his hands is almost certainly ad-libbing—actually talking to you, in the forms of natural speech. One who is reading written lecture notes aloud characteristically keeps his hands to his side or on the desk. Speaking is not the same thing as reading aloud from written text.

Conversely, delicate fingerwork of a nonlinguistic kind almost always prompts movement of the lips. Have you watched anyone threading a needle? Few people can do it without pursing or twisting their mouths.

What links hand and mouth? The most obvious connection is feeding. The hand—of humans, but also of many other primates—is used to take food to the mouth, which is also the organ of speech.

Eating and speaking are two separate activities that have a great deal in common. They both involve hand and mouth. Moreover, they use almost all of the same muscles. That is perhaps why trying to do both at the same time is regarded as uncouth. For infants and young children, whose muscular control is not yet fully developed, it can also be quite dangerous.

Speaking can be seen in this light as a parasitic use of organs whose primary function is to ensure survival. But what, then, was the original function of this wonderful, additional, alternative use of lips and tongue and of the muscles that control breathing and swallowing? In what way did it correlate with other uses of hands and arms?

There are considerable variations in the communicative force of hand and arm use among different cultures and communities, but they are not nearly as extensive as the bewildering range of different sounds, words, and grammatical structures among the languages of the world. A slap on the back, a shrug of the shoulders, and a punch in the gut don’t have exactly the same meaning the world over, but they are far more “transportable” than any word or sound I can make. Even a cry for help, a burst of laughter, or a squeal of pain is less intercomprehensible between different language cultures than a touch on your arm.

Articulated language, however and whenever it emerged, in one group of our ancestors or among many, added a communicative channel that was radically different from hand use. It was far less transportable than the resources available up to that point. That is likely to have been the reason it caught on.

In most domains of life we are well aware that what a thing was invented for and what is actually done with it bear no necessary relationship to each other. The umbrella may have been designed to protect us from the rain, but on one notorious occasion one such device was used to assassinate a dissident on Waterloo Bridge. Matchsticks owe their existence to a wish to make ignition widely and cheaply available, but they are also very serviceable toothpicks. What a thing is “for” and what it can be used to do must be kept apart. It is very odd that almost no serious thinking about language and translation has ever bothered to observe this basic rule.

The plain fact of linguistic diversity suggests very strongly that speech did not arise in order to communicate with members of other groups of like beings. If that is what it was for, our ancestors got it badly wrong. They should have dropped it on the spot.

Similarly, there is no particular reason to think that language first arose in order to allow members of the same group to communicate with one another. They did that already—with their hands, arms, bodies, and faces. Many species clearly do. You can watch them at it in the zoo.

“Communication” is what we think we do when we speak or write, largely because that is what we have been taught at school. But when we watch and listen to humans “behaving linguistically,” as spectators at the human zoo, what we see and hear is something altogether different.