From “In the Days before Language”
The days before language are many and all the same. I wash the bottles. I fill them with measured water and measured powder and mix. I hold the baby on this hip and then this hip. I wait for her to sleep. Then I wait for her to wake. Yesterday is an echo of today, fading. I wipe her tears. I wipe mine. I wash. I fold. I put away. I take out.
I go on a walk without the baby and hear a chicken in someone’s backyard but think at first that it’s a baby crying. I am walking without the baby because my husband told me to. I am walking without the baby because I need to. I am walking without the baby because I need to be told what I need to do. There is something of despair in the tone of the chicken’s voice. Or the sky. Or my mind. What am I doing?
At the baby’s doctor appointment, I fill out the postnatal depression questionnaire. It is laminated. I’m supposed to check the boxes with a whiteboard marker. My marker is black, but the mother before me used blue. I can see where “things have been getting on top of” her and where she has “been so unhappy that [she’s] been crying.” Little remnants of the letter X. X as affirmation instead of deletion, as yes instead of no no no.
One of the ways in which human language is distinct among other animal communication systems is that we have negation, saying what is not the case.
We are at the doctor because the baby is still sick. Her little voice is hoarse. Her cry a creature without wings, wet, on the ground, inconsolable, crusted over. They also ask us if the baby is echoing our sounds yet. Like da or ba—Yes Sometimes No—I X No.
So many viruses circulating this winter that take away the breath, close up tiny windpipes. I watch for the tug of tender skin between ribs. I watch for blue-gray lips. I listen, impossibly, for silence.
Language, too, is contagion. Little airborne syllables, particles—fragments of meaning. We inhale and exhale to speak but at the bottom of every exhale, a cough waits to grate the voice dry.
“A word is a symptom / of what can’t be described.” –Elizabeth Willisi
The baby books advise us not to use pronouns because they are slippery. Everyone is I and you, everyone is us and them. The world without pronouns is small, specific, separated. There is no perspective, no relational between. All distances from each to each the same.
Most babies’ first words are nouns as opposed to, say, verbs. Dada is a common first word in English. My friend’s daughter’s was the name of their dog. My sister’s was ball. But imagine if it were be. Imagine if it were stay.
So many nursery rhymes and children’s tales have nonsense language in them. Fee fi fo fum. Syllables, sprouts of words. Nick nack paddy whack. Hickory dickory dock. Some exist just to scratch the itch for rhyme, that conclusive echo.
Even from the very beginning we don’t want anything to be alone.
At six months, all hearing babies can make out all spoken sounds equally well. Their brains do not privilege one alphabet or intonation over another but soon they home in on their mother tongue, stop being able to distinguish other languages’ sounds, lose universality, lose the common. Already, so new, loss.
Language is a long ribbon of melody repeated. Babies listen statistically. Every language uses forty to sixty distinct sounds to form words. The baby hears pretty baby—not pre ttyba by, not pre tty ba by—pretty baby.
It’s the music of language that first draws us to it, to imitate it. Brooks and babies both babble. A world of streams. A baby’s babbling drifts toward and sounds like English if her parents speak English to her. Babies are very good at imitating the rhythm and intonation of the language they’re hearing.ii
Repetition induces learning in babies. Every night when I put the baby down in her crib, I say, I love you. Every morning my husband picks her up and, holding her to the window, says, Good morning, mountains. Imitation precedes expression, which precedes communication.
Vocal learners are species who can imitate a novel sound mostly from their own species. These include humans, hummingbirds, elephants, songbirds, bats, dolphins, seals, and parrots. Parrot is also a verb.
One-year-olds understand ten to fifty words on average, though they usually can’t say any yet. Babies can only learn language from social interaction as opposed to, say, television. The social brain is the gateway for language acquisition. Language is a tool of connection. It is inherently cooperative.
Scientists have measured how babies’ brains are already preparing to respond when spoken to before it is even possible.
Speech is muscled out, words shaped by our appetites.
“We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.” –Anthony Marraiii
The moment our first language turned from pictorial to alphabet supposedly marked the moment humanity abandoned the natural world. Even though:
A was an upside-down ox’s head.
M was water.
N was a snake or eel.
O was an eye.
The source of our existence is belonging. With every word we are tracing back to our origins. One body from two.
The built world predates and is embedded in our alphabet. Language is built, too.
B was first a house.
D a door.
H a fence.
So many more letters (C, G, W, Z, S) began as weapons. It makes sense to have war be the thread from which our pacifist texts today are woven. Language may at first glance obscure but it does not forget.
“What a | Hazard | a Letter | is—” Emily Dickinsoniv
I don’t remember what it’s like to join the world. The process of belonging seems so gradual, or innate, a little seed the mother waters.
I carry the baby around the house like a ponderosa seedling I once had, setting it in new places every couple hours wherever the spring sun was streaming in. Here, soak in this good light now.
Sometimes we speak our way into meaning. Belief is not necessary; just hear the words. Verify I say unto thee. Like the process for how a tree becomes stone, may my words replace my cells and build something that lasts, something beautiful, the inverse of carving—a living epitaph.
The baby’s toothless mouth is primed for vowels. Babies listen best to elongated vowel sounds, sing-songy, called baby talk or parent-ese. As I wean her, the breast is replaced by breath in her mouth. Empty, suckling becomes clicking.
Mostly I sing to her—sway when I hold her, give her rhythm because language is an invitation to the dance. In the days before language, she studies the music and the rhythm. She waits to be invited.
“A speechless person is a stranger…” –Anna Badkhenv
In middle-school German class, our teacher gave us a language origin story. The most common first syllable for all babies around the world, she said, is da. In German, this means there. In Russian, yes. In English, the beginning of Dada, father. We each, around the world, respond accordingly, assign first words and their meanings.
At ten months, the baby is pointing. Everything is da. I give her the words. Globe. Water. Fan. Chair. Birds. Bottle. She replies, da. Da. Da da da da.
Daycare sends me a video of the baby signing and saying all done, purportedly. She waves her hands, says oah-dah after the teacher. I text the video to my family.
My dad asks, Is done her first word?
My sister says, That would be a funny first word.
The baby echoes to learn. No, she resonates.
The baby has three and a half teeth. The teeth do not touch each other. I imagine this makes it hard to pronounce certain sounds. The teeth are so small, they don’t seem real. I mean, they don’t seem like they can be used the way real teeth are supposed to be used.
People say teething, my husband says, like it’s a one-time thing. Like oh, is your baby teething? Yes, she’s under the age of two. She’s teething.
When you start to understand several words of any language, you lose the ability to stop listening to it. When you’re fluent, or don’t understand anything, you can tune it out. But when you understand even little fragments, your brain searches for them. It searches even when you think you’re not listening.
In this way, listening is a passive mode the mind is always in—and not just listening but trying to understand everything. No, even trying is wrong. I mean more like receptiveness. Teach us a few words, and we become receptive to their roots everywhere, spoken and seen.
When I first learned good morning in Croatian, dobro jutro, I couldn’t help but find good everywhere, in all its variations.
The newsvi is talking about artificial intelligence in the form of GPT’s most recent iteration. Journalists describe it as the most powerful autocomplete machine, functioning primarily at the level of language. It decides on the next word, and then the next. So why, then, when GPT is presented with a drawing of a hornless unicorn is it able to place the horn in the exact right spot? Maybe, in this very accidental way, we’ve discovered language is at the root of the many ways we understand the world. Maybe intelligence is as much about the animal as it is the way we talk about it.
The other day my brother-in-law asked if we had the choice between depressed but intelligent or happy but dumb, which we’d choose, and I was the only one who said the former because I think happiness is a vapid cultural obsession, which is probably something a depressed person says to grant undue significance to their depressed feelings, but I stand by it. I guess I find depressed intelligence more interesting, and maybe it’s things being interesting that makes me happy, and so in the end it’s about happiness after all. But no, interesting things don’t seem to make me happy, exactly. They make me focused. They take me.
“Joy is not made to be a crumb.” –Mary Olivervii
It is not in our nature to be satisfied, evolutionarily speaking. It is in our nature to feed and to grow, to seek the whole loaf over any measly crumb. I am too hungry to stop at happy.
What happens when we make an intelligence that isn’t hungry? A responsive intelligence? (I used the autocomplete function on my word processor to end that last sentence, and this one, too.) GPT waits to be used. Every day the baby speaks alone, standing in her crib, hungry for morning, and doesn’t stop.
I rock the baby to sleep and it’s trochees. For a minute, I misremember trochees as trophies. Trophee-ac tetrameter. How everything sounds like everything else is proof of our interdependence, I want to believe.
In a meeting, a colleague suggests using what she calls clean language in order to avoid using upsetting metaphors like ones that conjure violence. Language cleansed of idiom and slang and metaphor. As much as I am so tired of hearing baseball metaphors in a room full of businessmen who aren’t baseball players, or military metaphors in a room full of professionals who’ve never sacrificed or been sacrificed to war, the idea that we can communicate effectively or even communicate better without cultural touchstones fundamentally misunderstands the functions of language.
In an interview with Michaeleen Doucleff, the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent, I remember hearing how effective it was for a small child to hear that there was a monster in the lake rather than explaining that they could drown in there.
And in the second episode of the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race for whom the crew’s universal translators don’t seem to function. This is because these aliens communicate using metaphor, constantly alluding to their own mythology and history to talk about the present. Here, translation is basically a futile exercise without storytelling.
Clean language originated as a methodology for therapists to work with patients on past trauma in order to, in part, keep therapists from imposing their own frameworks on their patients. It has also been adapted as an approach to interviewing research subjects that seeks to obtain accurate and reliable information.
The baby will more reliably stay away from the lake if you tell her the story about the lake monster. Mythology can provide a more accurate context for the present cultural moment. Language is not all about obtaining. It also preserves.
The baby and I go by the vet to pick up the dog’s arthritis medication. Going out in public with the baby is like an amped-up version of wearing a really cool hat; she is an invitation for conversation. How old? Or I remember when, or little truisms like It all goes by so fast. The front-desk employee at the vet tells me about the time her son came back from Afghanistan and got a girl pregnant during a one-night stand, a girl who didn’t want to be pregnant, didn’t feel connected to the baby, and so she didn’t take care of herself during her pregnancy and gave the baby to the grandma for a year and a half until she decided she wanted the baby back. The new mom said, you love this boy more than I do, and the vet employee did this handing over gesture when she said it, her hands cradling but desperate. My baby is fourteen months old now, four months away from the age where this girl decided she could mother again.
They don’t tell you how crazy heavy those things are, the vet employee laughs, pointing to my baby in her car seat.
In a video on the internet about new parents arguing constantly about stupid things because we’re so tired all the time, the top-voted comment is a mom saying she and her partner once got in an argument about whether Lightning McQueen, a car character from the Pixar movie Cars, would have life insurance or car insurance. She said this argument ended with her and her partner sleeping in different beds.
I’ve read in many places that when we argue, we are almost never talking about what we’re really talking about. The concrete world is distracting; it keeps us from one kind of reality. I wanted to say The concrete world, where language starts, but does it? Perhaps the concrete world is just the reference point. Where it starts is between us.
i From Elizabeth Willis’s poem “Friday”
ii https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189989603/bilingual-kids-speech-development
iii From Anthony Marra’s book A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Random House, 2013)
iv A fragment Emily Dickinson wrote on an envelope, later collected in Envelope Poems, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner (New Directions, 2016)
v From Anna Badkhen’s essay “The Language of Catastrophe,” published first in the Spring 2023 issue of Orion vi This passage is referring to episode 803 of the radio program This American Life, titled “Greetings, People of Earth.” vii From the end of Mary Oliver’s poem “Don’t Hesitate”
Katherine Indermaur
Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Book Award, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, Frontier Poetry, the Journal, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Fort Collins, Colorado.