Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Maybe Gary was right to feel that a python can no more imagine what it is like to be one of us than we can imagine what the mental world of a reptile is like—and it’s typically generous of him to allow a fearful and pea-brained monster like Pete the Strangler a reciprocating intuition of the ineffability of human life. On the other hand, many nonhuman species—and perhaps all living things—do communicate with one another, and some most definitely communicate with us. Dog owners, to take the most obvious example, easily distinguish among the meanings of different kinds of bark. But the dog language we can access is a fairly limited thing. It consists of a small set of individual signals. Signals are generally treated as the isolated vehicles of specific pieces of information—“There’s an intruder in the house,” “Hello and welcome,” or “Take me for a walk.” They can’t be combined with one another to produce more complex meanings—as far as we know, dog language has no grammar. In addition, the set of signals possessed by domesticated dogs—like the signals used by monkeys or bees—is inherited and fixed. There’s no new word formation going on in dogs, just as the signaling system of traffic lights is incapable of producing more than “slow down,” “stop,” “get ready,” and “go.” (The green-and-orange “get ready” combination is used in the U.K., as a courtesy to drivers of ancient sports cars with gearshift sticks.) Those are the main criteria by which human language is distinguished from all other kinds of communication by most modern theorists of language. Monkeys can say only what they have to say, and nothing else; whereas human signaling systems are forever changing and always capable of adapting themselves to new circumstances and needs. These are fairly persuasive reasons for keeping animal language outside the field of “language proper” and far away from the concerns of translation. But we could try to be as generous and as imaginative as Romain Gary. From such a perspective, human language may well seem to a dog to be just as limited and inflexible a signaling system as linguists imperiously declare dog language to be.

From infancy to the onset of puberty, children of every culture have always known that animals have things to say to them. There’s no folklore in the world that doesn’t similarly break the alleged barrier between human and other.[89] But in our Western, script-based cultures, growing up (which is so heavily entwined with formal education that it might as well be treated as the same thing) involves unlearning the instinctive childhood assumption of communicative capacity in nonhuman species. No wonder our philosophers and priests have long insisted that language is the exclusive attribute of humans. That self-confirming axiom makes children not yet fully human and in real need of the education they are given.

However, the traditional reasons for making a radical separation between “signaling” and “speaking” are not quite as hard-edged as they are often made to seem. Some animal signaling systems that have been studied (among ants and bees, for instance, where the channels are not by voice but by physical and chemical means) communicate what for us would be extremely elaborate geographic and social information. Whales emit long streams of haunting sounds when they gather in a school in waters off the coast of Canada. The tonal and rhythmic patterns of whale song are of such complexity as to make it quite impossible to believe that what we can hear (and pick up on instruments more sensitive than human ears) is just random noise. Even more striking is the recent behavior of a group of monkeys in a Colchester, England, zoo: they have added two new gesture signals to their prior repertoire of communicative behavior. Even if the “monkey sense” of these gestures is not absolutely certain, they are indisputably meaningful signs within the community, and indisputable inventions of the monkeys themselves.[90]

But what makes the communicative behavior of ants, bees, whales, monkeys, dogs, and parrots mysterious to us, what takes cross-species communication into the realm of the ineffable, is the fact that, save for a very limited range of noises from a limited range of long-domesticated pets, nobody knows how to translate “animal signals” into human speech or vice versa. When and if we ever can translate nonhuman noises into human speech, species-related ineffabilities will evaporate like the morning haze.

Translation is the enemy of the ineffable. One causes the other to cease to exist.

FOURTEEN How Many Words Do We Have for Coffee?