tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post3359088767920127268..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Between Species: Animal-Human BilingualismCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-56160569879460226842013-04-01T12:49:53.445-04:002013-04-01T12:49:53.445-04:00A later comment on a post that has stuck in my min...A later comment on a post that has stuck in my mind. My one-year old son is at the stage where he makes a lot of repeated syllables, some of which sound like words, but which don't really seem to have the indexicality (is that a word?) of real words. He's growing up in a trilingual environment, so it'll be a while before he speaks, I expect, and he also does not tend to repeat words when we suggest it to him.<br /><br />However, one thing he has been good at repeating, at least in the past week, are animal sounds. They don't even have to be real animal sounds. A lion puppet that roars now elicits my son's own little "ooo." I downloaded a Romanian app for my iPad that shows pictures of animals, names them, plays a recording of the sound they make, then a recording of a man imitating the sound. Suddenly, my kid is imitating some of the animals. This morning he tried howling back at a dog.<br /><br />I haven't read anything on this, though I'm sure there's some research out there on it. Everything I've read on child language has been in a strictly human context. But at least with our kid, he seems better able immediately to imitate animal noises. (I'm not talking about accuracy so much as immediacy.) I wonder if there's something to this in the context of language learning that our medieval educators recognized...ihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14105686105741162480noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-11189978104225899122013-01-22T23:27:26.754-05:002013-01-22T23:27:26.754-05:00Robert: Thanks! I hadn't come across that one ...Robert: Thanks! I hadn't come across that one yet; I'll add this to my list...Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-50801899071675164002013-01-21T14:09:05.380-05:002013-01-21T14:09:05.380-05:00Jonathan: a bit of biblio you probably know about,...Jonathan: a bit of biblio you probably know about, but just in case...Lia Formigari, _A History of Language Philosophies_ (John Benjamins, 2004). It's quite brief, but beautifully lucid and synthetic, and has an excellent bibliography.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-45884127308966629122012-11-09T02:10:49.199-05:002012-11-09T02:10:49.199-05:00The fish sings. As do rivers.
Interesting post!
...The fish sings. As do rivers.<br /><br />Interesting post!<br /><br />With certain species you are looking at both natural and non-natural sound landscapes often with a tangled relationship.<br /><br />The song of fish, sirens, city's beneath the seas. All ring like bells.<br /><br />Oorie Cooleeroo Cradoo is the sound heard in Ceylon from the 'crying shell' described by Europeans as the sound of a harp or a wine glass when rubbed by a moistened finger, a watery sound.<br /><br />But similarity/ differences between natural and non-natural/preternatural species of sound and cultural transmission/reception/ memory.<br /><br />An interesting one I think.Jebhttp://historyfrog.wordpress.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-92198311164205791812012-11-06T10:46:30.489-05:002012-11-06T10:46:30.489-05:00Really wonderful post, Jonathan -- rich, with lots...Really wonderful post, Jonathan -- rich, with lots to chew over. I've nothing to add but a personal anecdote that sprang to mind in your description of animal sound lists as a kind of multilingualism. When I was first in graduate student I lived in a dorm with a fairly international cohort of fellow grad students from many different disciplines. A good icebreaker at gatherings was to have people name the sound that different animals made in their native language. The game was a success for communalizing because it was a noncompetitive way for anxious (and overly competitive) grad students to bond over differences, with nothing at stake other than a little more intimacy.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-20586274727605836702012-11-04T11:29:52.255-05:002012-11-04T11:29:52.255-05:00@Robert: Ooh ooh! That sounds *really* great - per...@Robert: Ooh ooh! That sounds *really* great - perhaps I can figure out a way to make it up there.<br /><br />By the way, what's up with all the cool conferences happening in Boston this academic year? I was just up there BABEL and will be heading up to Boston again present to papers at MLA and NeMLA...Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-75853574194242535482012-11-03T15:36:00.030-04:002012-11-03T15:36:00.030-04:00I would recommend reading Bretha Crolige (Judgment...I would recommend reading Bretha Crolige (Judgments on bloodlying)<br /><br />ed and trans by D.A Binchy (on jstor) in particular the conrechta (the dog/wolf with a human voice) and confeal (the howling one). They get up to some interesting speech acts. Early Irish legal text.<br /><br />I am reading at the moment a much later work, french translation from 1740<br /><br />A philosophical amusement upon the language of beasts and birds (up at archive org.)<br /><br />Discuss points you have raised, some karl made and a number of subjects that pop up in posts here. Its rather interesting<br /><br />Interesting post thanks.<br /><br /> Jebhttp://historyfrog.wordpress.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-45681139892151963582012-11-02T18:15:09.728-04:002012-11-02T18:15:09.728-04:00Please do! I'm just starting into this project...Please do! I'm just starting into this project and will be talking about it at <a href="http://www.bu.edu/medieval/voice-and-voicelessness-in-medieval-europe-and-beyond/" rel="nofollow">this conference:</a><br />No program up yet, but it's going to be pretty cool, including Julie Orlemanski talking about Margery Kempe's noise and the etiological imagination. Doesn't get much better than that!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-85426075562709770702012-11-02T12:00:18.141-04:002012-11-02T12:00:18.141-04:00Oh and @Paolo, thanks for the additional Svetonius...Oh and @Paolo, thanks for the additional Svetonius citation!Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1745031657517374372012-11-02T11:58:32.959-04:002012-11-02T11:58:32.959-04:00@Robert: Wow, what a great poem! Love this idea of...@Robert: Wow, what a great poem! Love this idea of working onomatopoeia and these wordlists into HEL courses. It seems to have dropped out of my blog posting, but I originally had a statement to the effect that an Anglo-Saxon sheep isn't recorded as sounding the same as a modern English sheep (with the idea that animal mimicry within "one" language must also be historicized); the way you put it -- "linguistic erasure of sheep and goat agency" via the GVS -- is right on the mark actually, and doesn't strike me as too New Agey.<br /><br />Your point about denigration of (inferior/alien) languages by conflation with animal sound is well-taken. This essay orig. started out with Wace's description of the Conquest, when the Normans perceive the English as barking like dogs. Somehow I found I'm more drawn to moments of partial or near-intelligiblity rather than assertions of difference. I guess that's why the Clanvowe bit intrigues me -- it's the *dominant* prestige language (French) that's encoded as "nyse" here, and the act of translation that takes place says a lot about the bivernacularity of the people in the Clanvowe/Chaucer etc. orbit.<br /><br />Hope you don't mind, but I'm *totally* going to incorporate that poem into my future HEL courses! (And if you've written anything on embodied sound already, let me know!)Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-91655211846449142272012-11-02T11:20:42.292-04:002012-11-02T11:20:42.292-04:00Wonderful stuff, Jonathan. I’ve often used animal-...Wonderful stuff, Jonathan. I’ve often used animal-sound lists when I teach History of the English Language, to explain the problematic status of “onomatopoeia” as a category of signification and the subtle ways in which geographical and cultural differences can manifest themselves in small linguistic changes. Your work will definitely help bring these challenging issues into the classroom even more forcefully. So thanks for that!<br /><br />I’m not totally sure whether this point will go with your ideas about communication and articulacy, but your take on intra-species communication in Clanvowe (the English cuckoo and French nightingale) sparked some thoughts about the many occasions and modes in which writers within one (perceived dominant) culture denigrate the language of another (perceived inferior) culture by representing it as animal noise, i.e., instinctive, non-intellectualized communication (i.e., Priscian’s inarticulate vox). One thinks of the disputed etymology of "barbarian" and words such as babble, jabber, twitter, natter, witter, etc., which purport to be onomatopoeic and hence constitutive of non-civilized speech. A small footnote, perhaps, to your more central speculations about near-hits, near-misses, slippages, and unexpected correspondences between species utterances.<br /><br />At the moment I’m working on embodied sound in the Old English Exeter Book Riddles; in the riddle genre, the question of voice and signification is complicated considerably by the spectral role of the riddler and the guessing hearer/reader (i.e., the place of meaning and the centrality of the meaning-maker are always in question). In the “say what I am” animal riddles, the multiple ways a poet and riddler can signify, or create meaning, mix with the mysterious ways in which speaking animals make themselves understood (at the surface, in poetic lines). The most interesting is Riddle 24 (Krapp-Dobbie numbering; jay or magpie), which is short enough to present here. The text is from Paull Baum’s version, online<br /><a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Riddles_of_the_Exeter_Book/68" rel="nofollow">here:</a> <br /><br />Ic eom wunderlicu wiht - wræsne mine stefne:<br />hwilum beorce swa hund, hwilum blæte swa gat, <br />hwilum græde swa gos, hwilum gielle swa hafoc.<br />Hwilum ic onhyrge þone haswan earn, <br />guðfugles hleoþor; hwilum glidan reorde <br />muþe gemæne, hwilum mæwes song, <br />þær ic glado sitte. (giefu) mec nemnað, <br />swylce (æsc) ond (rad) (os) fullesteð, <br />(hægl) ond(is). Nu ic haten eom <br />swa þa siex stafas sweotule becnaþ.<br /><br />(the bracketed parts are runes)<br /><br />I’m a wonderful thing; I vary my voice:<br />I bark like a dog, I bleat like a goat,<br />I quack like a goose, I shriek like a hawk;<br />I imitate the eagle, the gray one, the cry<br />Of the fighting bird; sometimes the kite’s voice<br />is familiar to my mouth, or the sea-mew’s song,<br />where I happily sit. GIFT is my name,<br />OAK and RIDING and the GOD helps,<br />HAIL and ICE. Now you have my name,<br />as those six letters clearly betoken.<br /><br />(sorry, no runes)<br />Anyway, it’s a nice little dynamic catalogue of OE animal noises.<br /><br />And finally (this is why I love teaching HEL), I remember reading somewhere that the word "bleat" is an example of the Great Vowel Shift. Sheep and goats, we understand, make low and middle vowel sounds, and OE blǣtan (occurring only in Ælfric’s Grammar, this riddle, and glosses on balatus or grunnire) sounds about right for those two beasts. But when the vowel got raised, it became separated from its animal sound. If I were a Marxist or New Age linguist, I would spin a theory about the linguistic erasure of sheep and goat agency in the Early Modern period…Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-36930441552898935892012-11-02T04:33:18.667-04:002012-11-02T04:33:18.667-04:00Voces animancium is based upon Svetonius (Leonum e...Voces animancium is based upon Svetonius (Leonum est fremere vel rugire, tigridum rancare, pardorum felire, pantherarum caurire, ursorum uncare vel saevire, aprorum frendere, lyncum urcare, luporum ululare, serpentium sibilare, onagrorum. mugilare, cervorum rugire, boum mugire, equorum. hinnire, asinorum rudere vel oncare, porcorum grunnire, verrium quiritare, arietum blatterare, ovium balare, hircorum miccire, haedorum bebare, canum latrare seu baubari, vulpium gannire, catulorum glattire, leporum vagire, mustelarum drindrare, murium mintrire vel pipitare, soricum desticare, elephantum barrire, ranarum coaxare, corvorum crocitare, aquilarum clangere, accipitrum plipiare, vulturum pulpare, miluorum lupire vel lugere, olororum drensare, gruum gruere, ciconiarum crotolare, anserum gliccire vel sclingere, anatum tetrissitare, pavonum paupulare, graculorum fringulire, noctuarum. cuccubire, cuculorum cuculare, merularum frendere vel zinziare, turdorum trucilare vel soccitare, sturnorum passitare, hirundinum fintinnire vel minurrire (dicunt tamen quod minurrire est omnium minutissimarum avicularum), gallinarum crispire, passerum titiare, apium bombire vel bombilare, cicadarum fritinnire.<br /> Caius Svetonio Tranquillus. Liber de naturis rerum), but after a selction and, above all, the addition of new voices from 'natural world'. O think it's a significnt innovation: humans are invited not just to zoovocalise, but also to vegetal/mineral vocalizing.<br />And, I guess that hunting criyng could also be intended as inter species pidgin - nice argument.<br />Paolo GalloniAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-56816933757431844812012-11-01T22:36:34.760-04:002012-11-01T22:36:34.760-04:00@Karl: So glad to see you chime in here (and hope ...@Karl: So glad to see you chime in here (and hope you are recovering from Sandy OK!) - I knew you'd have lots of great suggestions! This is all VERY much appreciated. I'll take a look at the other bits of Bruce (it is interesting that thinking about nonhuman language means looking 'up' to angels or 'down' to animals, huh?) and great to have some leads beyond Britain. Yes - speaking via gesture and "organs other than the tongue" is *exactly* the sort of thing I wanted to try and think about, so I'll take another look at that pm piece you and Peggy wrote.<br /><br />P.S. That bit from Crane re: hunting cries (sparse, simplified syntax) reminds me a lot of the work of on human contact linguistics and pidgin languages - I wonder if hunting cries can be conceived as a sort of inter-species pidgin? Cool cool.Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-40067018961779920832012-11-01T11:04:14.958-04:002012-11-01T11:04:14.958-04:00Hi, finally weighing in. Jon, this is fantastic st...Hi, finally weighing in. Jon, this is fantastic stuff. Really keen to read more.<br /><br />Here's some additional stuff to explore -- there's a bit in the Scott Bruce book. From my HtMaH, <br />"For one peculiar example of this tradition, see the protests of a tenth-century Cluniac monk against his order’s new imitation of the silence of angels: “God did not make me a serpent, so that I should hiss at you, nor did he make me an ox, so that I should bellow, but he made me a man and gave me a tongue so that I might speak!”; from John of Salerno, The Life of Odo of Cluny, 2.23, PL 133:74A, quoted and translated in Scott G. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c. 900–1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 50."<br /><br />Susan Crane's discussion of hunting cries in her "Ritual Aspects of the Hunt <i>à Force</i>" in <i>Engaging with Nature</i>, p. 74-75, that takes them as simplified language analogous to way language is simplified to use with foreigners or children: "Think of the tourist in Berlin saying to a taxi driver, not 'we're going to the airport,' but 'airport, airport' hoping that simplifying the message and repeating it will do the trick."<br /><br />If you want to look outside British examples, you could look to the complaining and snooty messenger raven in the Munich Oswald, translated here: J. W. Thomas, trans. The Strassburg Alexander and the Munich Oswald. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Camden House: Columbia, South Carolina, 1989, although this isn't so much animal language as an animal character... the same could be said, incidentally, for the bird in the Middle English Bird w/ Four Feathers.<br /><br />Wonder if Siegfried's understanding of bird language also relevant in some small way?<br /><br />Gesture is a HUGE topic and will be VERY VERY productive. FWIW, Peggy McCracken and I did a tiny bit on that in our Fish Knights essay in Postmedieval: "Another arduous battle ensues between ‘the two champions’ (‘les deux champions,’ 281), the fish king is wounded, the exhausted combatants fall exhausted to the ground, and the fish king makes signs of peace, ‘speaking’ through gesture. This is a language common to the supposedly irrational ‘mute beasts’ of medieval romance, one of a host of examples asking that limitrophic (Derrida, 2008, 29–30) appraisals of barriers between the linguistic and nonlinguistic might attend to organs other than the tongue" (90-91)medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-53823632627924449542012-10-30T22:54:58.762-04:002012-10-30T22:54:58.762-04:00@Paolo: Thanks so much for that reference! I shoul...@Paolo: Thanks so much for that reference! I should have mentioned that medievalists who have done work on these animal-sound wordlists tend to trace these to Isidore's Etymologies -- but it would stand to reason that there might be deeper, longstanding Classical traditions that could more obliquely inform these medieval Latin lists. I'll def. check that one out!<br /><br />@i (ooh, I just noticed you had a Romanian cooking blog! cool) - interesting questions. 1. I don't have any studies to base my statement upon, just a general hunch - I'd say that when I hear a dog bark and it doesn't *really* sound like an English "woof" nor Chinese "wang" in my own head - but maybe that has something to do with growing up using both of those languages and being able to think in either one in diff. contexts. What I'm really trying to suggest here is the idea that no human language accurately replicates animal sound, so the animal sound is always going to be something resonating 'beyond' the bounds of any particular human language. 2. Really like your observation/suggestion here about how *neighboring languages* -- even if they aren't "related" to one another -- might mimic a certain animal sound in a similar way. (I think that New Guinea 'frog' article is making a similar speculation.) What I like about this is the idea is that an animal sound itself can force us to re-configure and re-think how we approach (human) contact linguistics: there are other mediating factors that we can use to trace the interplay between vernaculars that take us beyond those nice language-trees we all like to construct.Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-17033975441502635502012-10-30T12:37:46.572-04:002012-10-30T12:37:46.572-04:00A pleasure to read, and I have a feeling I'll ...A pleasure to read, and I have a feeling I'll be citing this, or the later version of it, some day. <br /><br />Here are a few thoughts, Jonathan:<br /><br />1. Re, this sentence: "Rather than thinking of these pairings as instances of the same animal vocalization replicated divergently in Latin or in the vernacular, I’d like to entertain the possibility that the reader (medieval or modern) is actually invited to process these disparate linguistic units concurrently, approximating in one’s memory to arrive at a zoo-vocalization that can never be transcribed (in any human language or writing system)."<br /><br />Could you say a little more about this? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Is this phenomenon different than bilingual word-lists in two "human" languages? And is the idea based on studies or on an experience of yours? I.e., is that what happens in your head when you learn foreign animal noises? (I ask because it doesn't for me -- my L1 is really what dominates my sense of how animals speak, and every other version of the sound, including my L2 mother tongue, sounds incredibly foreign and weird.) <br /><br />2. I went to the link of animal sounds and looked up those for dogs. They do not have Romanian, which is "ham ham." But you know what I noticed? Romanian is "ham ham," as is Albanian, apparently. Polish is "hau hau." Turkish, "hav hav," Ukrainian "haf haf," Slovene "hov hov." In other words, these languages which share a rough geographical area but have, often, nothing in common linguistically, have similar sounding ways for dogs to speak. On the other hand, West European languages like English, German, French, Spanish, tend to have more of a vocalic start and a pronounced "ow" noise. So I'm wondering -- is animal language actually regional, one of those things that is passed on between neighbouring tongues, perhaps even more easily given that it does not need to fit into any foreign grammatical structures? On that evidence (measly as it is), I'd be disposed to buy the argument that the noises humans imagine animals make work on a different linguistic level than regular bilingualism, one that allows cross-linguistic connections and contaminations of a rather different kind. ihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14105686105741162480noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-56230625475396150762012-10-30T12:11:02.558-04:002012-10-30T12:11:02.558-04:00Dear Jonathan, it's a wonderful document. Your...Dear Jonathan, it's a wonderful document. Your arguments are also very interesting. An excellent book dealing with animal's voices in the ancient world was published in Italy in 2008: Maurizio Bettini, 'Voci. Antropologia sonora del mondo antico'. Maybe you know it. I'm going to give a look to my copy in order to compare ancient and medieval voices ...<br />Paolo GalloniAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com