The Mother of All Languages

Now that my daughter’s language skills are starting in earnest to develop and unfold, I find myself thinking about Frederick the II, that once Emperor who wanted to test whether Latin was the one natural language of all mankind. Frederick felt that a child, left untouched by human language or nurturance, would blossom to maturity with the sounds of Latin on his lips. Of course, Frederick’s experiment failed. The child died before words could ever be formed from his breath. But that leads me to thinking about the possibility of Norwegian being the MOAL (Mother of All Languages).

You’ve got to start with a leap of faith on this one. What I mean by that is, forget about all those language trees spawned and propagated by historical linguists. I’m starting from scratch here with a brand new baby, still under warranty, still untouched by the more conventional understanding of language with syntax and its entailments. Think of this baby as the first flicker of the universe expanding and we’ll go from there.

My daughter, at nine months old, is now at the developmental stage associated with “indiscriminate babbling,” which is to say that sounds escape her without meaning, like bodies without a shadow, signifiers without the signified. To the untrained ear, these random pronouncements are syllables unharnesed by language or perhaps just at the verge of being tamed by it. Her first “real” words won’t be for a few months now.

But as I listen to my daughter sometimes, I can’t help but wonder if some root of Norwegian-ness is there, bubbling up into her throat and reaching out to me through her lips like the children of Psammetichus crying “becos, becos.” At about four months she started with the famous Norwegian aspirated “ja,” that agreeable “yes” on the intake of breath that let me know I was on the right track. From there she went to the more conversational “ja da,” encouraging me to go on as I toiled endlessly over my thesis data with her.

“Do you think it’s reasonable to do a factor analysis on these items?” I’d ask.

“Ja da,” she’d say.

Even in the heart of an emotional storm, there is a Norwegian impulse that beats its rhythm through her vocal chords. As the veins in her forehead swell to red, her screams can be heard echoing across any corridor or room that we occupy: “MammaMammmaMamma.” If not attended to her satisfaction, the screams turn to the heart-wrenching shudder of “NeiNeiNeiNei” that wrack her body as if the earth were on fire and her only hope was to negate it.

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