Let us try to imagine, way back in the days, when no-one had the faintest idea
of what a particular sound meant. There were no books or jotters or dictionaries
to tell us what's what but only our own intuitions and experience to tell us
what meaning, if any, a particular sound conveyed. How, in such circumstances,
where we to make others aware of what it was that was on our minds - could we
have been lumbered by too many thoughts at all, I wonder?
Let us cast
askance for a moment at prelinguistic prehistoric man and woman huddled together
in a cave during a blizzard. The woman nods "meaningfully" towards a pair of
snowflakes melting slowly on the bare stone entrance and, comforted by the
warmth of her partner's embrace utters the single syllable, "gal" or "gel"; the
voiced velar plosive [g] coupled with the velar lateral approximant [l] which,
as it happens, denotes, in reconstructed Proto Indo-European, the concept of
'cold' or 'coldness'.
Back then, in our hypothetical cave, this produces
a Proustian cake-crumbling moment upon our man whose mind, at first lazily,
attempts to retrieve a resemblant echo of the last time he had heard the same
combination of these strangely soothing sounds. They had come then from her lips
too, long ago, when the others were always present until, strangely enough, they
had all but vanished. No, he corrected himself and reassembled the images in his
mind in that special way of his that had always given him pleasure. He felt sure
there was an image before they had vanished and confidently pressed his brows
tightly together full sure this would bring him the picture he knew was there to
be found.
He enjoyed taking his time at these moments. He was aware that
she was looking at him fixedly and the more concentrated her face became the
more he was determined. He was seeking slowly and carefully, stalking secretly,
ready to ambush, for her - his memory now was retrieving it for him - acting on
it's own accord and bolstered by a considerable desire.
Yes, he would
find it for her, he always did. Patient and expectant he resisted, though he
longed to look deep within those eyes. He must find it. Together now the
searchers. What pictures did she see? Were they in her mind like his? Were they
darker, less bright? He, the object of her gaze, would find. He had learnt all
the ways of bringing the pictures back and couldn't have known, but
half-suspected, that she too had done the same. Maybe before he had ever been?
The image, the image, the image. Why couldn't he bring it back? Maybe he
was looking in the wrong place. Perhaps it was something he had touched, yes,
slowly he felt this to be the truth. Yes, it was only later that 'they' had
'vanished'. At first, he then recalled, they too were cold, like, "gel". Like
"gel". He had been wrong. He had been searching to give her pleasure and now he
knew that she only wished for him to recall this moment again, perhaps so that
together they could puzzle its meaning.
It was he who had made them
'gel'.
He looked at her again and repeated those sounds that he had used
so loudly back then though this time it was soft and pitiful; mu mu mu. What did
it mean he wondered?
If he had lived so long he would no doubt have
rejoiced to discover that unique among the International Phonetic Association's
106 phonemes the bilabial nasal consonant [m] produces a 'sonorant' airflow
through the nose along with 'an obstruction in the mouth'; it is thus the only
phoneme in existence whose articulation is accompanied by 'flared nostrils'.
This, though, was neither here nor there.
All he knew was that she was
sure to 'tell' him but for now she was silent, gazing deep into the snow; with
child.
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