Continuing from here with Stalin’s remarkable essay on language. The PDF includes several letters written to various academicians after the ‘Ask Me Anything’ session at Pravda. In one of those letters he deals with the silly gesture-first idea, which was apparently popular among Soviet academicians at that time.
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In that reply I criticized N. Y. Marr who, dealing with language (spoken) and thought, divorces language from thought and thus lapses into idealism. Therefore, I referred in my reply to normal human beings possessing the faculty of speech. I maintained, moreover, that with such human beings thoughts can arise only on the basis of linguistic material, that bare thoughts unconnected with linguistic material do not exist among people, who possess the faculty of speech.
From Comrade Belkin’s letter it is evident that he places on a par the “language of words” (spoken language) and “gesture language” (“hand” language, according to N. Y. Marr). He seems to think that gesture language and the language of words are of equal significance, that at one time human society had no language of words, that “hand” language at that time played the part of the language of words which appeared later.
But if Comrade Belkin really thinks so, he is committing a serious error. Spoken language or the language of words has always been the sole language of human society capable of serving as an adequate means of intercourse between people.
History does not know of a single human society, be it the most backward, that did not have its own spoken language. Ethnography does not know of a single backward tribe, be it as primitive or even more primitive than, say, the Australians or the Tierra del Fuegans of the last century, which did not have its own spoken language.
In this respect, the significance of the so-called gesture language, in view of its extreme poverty and limitations, is negligible. Properly speaking, this is not a language, and not even a linguistic substitute that could in one way or another replace spoken language, but an auxiliary means of extremely limited possibilities to which man sometimes resorts to emphasize this or that point in his speech.
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Hmm. Seems like this particular error is remarkably persistent in some circles. I was discussing it last week.
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The new popularity of gesture-first surprises me. I’ve been reading and writing and teaching about language for 65 years, and never encountered the gesture-first hypothesis. Within the world of speech and hearing therapy, gradual elaboration from simple syllables is the universal assumption. Babies start experimenting with sound almost immediately, and their experiments are shaped by feedback from mothers and others. Gestures are optional, and gestures come later, not earlier. Specialized subcultures like sailors and football players and deaf people have developed gestural systems for unusual situations where sound is either unavailable or inaudible, but gesturing is clearly not the innate default.
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Similar tone in response to similar silliness.
Polistra's Mill 