(no subject)

[sanura]

Hockett's inclusion of the vocal-auditory channel as a primary design feature of language, human or not, is interesting to me. Not only his omission of sign language as a language with legitimacy equal to that of any spoken language (I kept waiting for him to mention it as an exception, and he never did), but his admission that the "organs of speech" did not evolve as such for the specific purpose of speech, no matter how he might qualify the statement, seem to weaken his insistence on the vocal-auditory channel's primacy as a feature of language. He also does not discuss the possibility of writing as a form of language closely related to but not the same as spoken language, which, young, naive and inexperienced in the field of linguistics though I be, seems like something one might at least spend some time dismissing.

I do acknowledge the process he's undertaking, that not every one of these design features is going to be a vital component or that "they are not all of equal importance, and they vary a good deal as to the extent to which they can be characterized in purely abstract terms," but by making a list at all he's assigning them importance. This one even has several subcategories; vowel color, sure, with the exception of the single-vowel-phoneme language we discussed in class, seems to be a pretty important means of differentiation once you've established your vocal-auditory channel. I don't know if there is any language composed exclusively of consonants, but even if there were, it'd be the exception, or the fringe weirdo language on the edge of the radial category.

Cortical control I can accept far more readily as an indispensible facet of language; the hand-eye coordination required for the dexterity and subtelty of sign language is, I assume, as cortically controlled as the articulation required for speech, although the point Hockett makes about the importance of the ear and mouth in human life could as easily be made for the importance of the hand and eye in a speaker of sign language.

Thus comes the third category of the vocal-auditory channel, "hand, eye, mouth, and ear". We've got amazing hand-eye coordination, so historically and evolutionally let's hijack its corticial development and use it for something other than communication, he seems to say. Fine, but that and the dismissive little sentence about My problem with his aside on interspecies communication is that he excludes the possibility of nonauditory communication that we simply don't study because we wouldn't think to search for it. It's a section on the vocal-auditory channel, certainly, but if it's a subsection on the possibilities of interspecies communication, here rather than in the section on vowel color, there should be at least some mention of inexplicable communicative phenomena that may well not be auditory, that may be using a conduit that we don't have the evolutionary equipment to intercept or decode, like the vowel-color example of dogs and possible differences in body odor. Aside from the clues that we know are visual (which should also be mentioned).

In any case, the whole fully-established vocal-auditory prejudice looks a little flaky around the edges to me. It's definitely got a place in the list, but more careful qualifications would make me happier.