Other Language

OTHER LANGUAGE
DIRKS PALMER did not speak until just before his third birthday, shortly after his younger sister was born. The parents were concerned with his lack of language, but not overly so. Family and friends agreed that, yes, it was unusual for a three-year-old not to be speaking, but Dirks was such a loveable child in every other way. In fact, perhaps in large part because of his silence, they found him adorable, for even if he never talked, he also seldom cried; and he entertained himself splendidly, in a quiet manner and without bothering anyone.
All that changed abruptly with Deekie’s birth. Dirks took an immediate interest and liking to his sister. Which quickly turned to love. And then suddenly, without warning, he began talking.
(God is Love; and in the beginning was the Word.)
He’d lie down close to his sister, snuggle up next, look directly into her face, and then he’d talk to her in clear, clean, multi-syllabic strings of sound. It was like he’d been talking all along, for more than a year--his pronunciation was that clear. But there was one problem: no one could understand a single word of what he was saying. It seemed that he was speaking a language other than English. And when friends or family would come over to visit Deekie, the newborn, none of them could identify what language young Dirks was speaking. Nevertheless, he’d sit by his sister for hours on end and speak to her in his strange, new tongue. She seemed to enjoy it tremendously, much more so than the parents’ baby talk or their ridiculous cooing. She would gaze back up into her brother’s face intently, seemingly hanging onto every sound that came out of his mouth.
At five months Deekie herself began talking. And like her brother, she too could enunciate the vowels and consonants in a crisp flow of articulation.
A number of people-–family, friends, and even a couple of the neighbors--said that it could have been English, with its steady use of l and r, as well as both the voiced and the voiceless th. But it was not. There was no recognizable vocabulary or syntactic structure, and the vowels were too rich and full with their own texture for it to be the language of the parents: no schwas in the pronunciation. No, definitely not English, or even anything Germanic. Or Indo-European. It had the sound of . . . well, it was like no other language that Mom and Pop Palmer had ever heard before.
(The earth was without form, and void.)
They called in linguists from the University, and they too were puzzled. The professors in turn brought in their graduate students, who were then assigned to record and collect the sound clusters and to do the necessary research in the library archives to see if anything could be matched.
Meanwhile, Dirks and Deekie talked on and on. Together. And to no one else.
By Deekie’s second birthday, things were really rolling. Their vocabulary (and that’s what people were calling it--a vocabulary--even though no one could discern or decode the actual words or their meanings) included hundreds and hundreds of sound units. Deekie especially confounded the scholars in that her language seemed every bit as advanced as her older brother’s.
But the big thing was that Dirks was now beginning to speak in English. To be sure, he continued in his native tongue, but he added to it the language of his parents. Furthermore, his newly acquired English was spoken with a heavy, unrecognizable accent. Once again the scholars were called in to try to make sense out of this latest complication--to try to match it with something that already existed in the world. To try to get to the source of the language. The roots.
(In the beginning was the Word.)
And then there were the neighbor kids. Children everywhere love to play together, and this neighborhood was no exception. The result was that they were beginning to pick up bits and pieces of the new (or was it the old?) language. In fact, they picked it up quite well. More and more, when they were out playing in the yards--either at the Palmer’s or at one of the neighbors’–-they would laugh and scream and giggle and talk in the strange language that was not the language of the mothers and the fathers.
It was the language of the uninfected children.
The Palmers spaced each of their three children three years apart. With the birth of Doink-quack, Dirks and Deekie left their playmates for awhile to turn their attention to the new sibling. They surrounded her, they lay down beside her constantly, touching her face, stroking her hair, and chattering in their private language. They loved her too.
(God is love.)
Perhaps because both of them were interacting with her so intensely, Doinka (everyone shortened her name after the first week) began speaking even earlier than Deekie: three months. She could not even sit up, but she’d lie on her back and stare up into Deekie’s enthusiastic face, or, on her tummy, she’d raise her head and look back at Dirks with her sub-colonial smile and repeat the sounds that she was hearing–-that she was learning: once again, the crisp, clean, even syllables that rang and sang like a song. Sometimes the neighborhood kids would come over, and it was like a party. Six, eight, ten kids all gabbing away. The laughter was contagious–-except to the parents, who were still confused by it all.
When they would ask Dirks to translate what their infant daughter was saying, he’d blush and giggle and whisper to Deekie, who would giggle back, and then, together, the two children would turn their backs on their mother and father, who would then leave the room to make an appointment with the marriage counselor.
Deekie began speaking individual English words.
Dirks was scribbling strange, letter-sized symbols on the lined pages of the notebooks he kept under his bed in his room.
Doinka turned one.
The professors from the University stepped up their studies. The graduate assistants worked long and hard into the nights. They sent and received e-mails; they held conference telephone calls with colleagues across the nation; they attended international conferences around the globe; they spent months and months studying the research, listening to the tapes, playing them back. Listening again. And then finally, at last, they announced the decoding of a single word. A minor breakthrough certainly, but a breakthrough nonetheless. The scholars reported that they were noting the repetition at close intervals of a certain sound unit. It must be a word, they said–-an important word. Using the English model of syntax and word frequency tests, they pronounced this word to be the equivalent to the English definite article, the. And, if they were correct in their assessment, they said, this one word just could hold the key to opening the secret of the entire language.
(In the beginning was the Word.)
Dirks turned nine.
Deekie six.
Doinka was three.
All three eventually learned English. And, with the aging and maturing process, they spoke it well: functionally, fluently. But throughout the rest of their lives they would still occasionally--on very rare occasions--hear in a crowd of people, whether on a train or a bus, or at a convention, or just in a crowded room, the little familiar something in a voice. They’d look around and maybe hear it again and where it was coming from, and sometimes they’d make the connection of voice with face. With a nod maybe. Or they might say something back, maybe just a call of some sort--something that would allow the other to detect the same thing in the voice. And a returned nod. And if there was time, the two of them might be able to get together in private to exchange the earlier language--the language that allowed them to get back, and beyond and below and beneath the surface of things. The real. The sub-colonial. The uninfected.
But usually, and far more often, as their lives progressed and then began to wind down, they would be approached by the other people--the ones who heard only the unfamiliar in the voice--and who would then ask where they were from.
"You’re not from here, are you?" they’d say. "You don’t sound like you’re from around here. Your accent. Where are you from?"
And they would always answer, proudly at first, but later in resignation, "Where am I not from?"