SPEAKING OF TONGUES

SPEAKING OF TONGUES

            “Speaking in tongues” is an old trick.  The ancient Greeks must have done it, since they used the word:  a word for babbling with the tongue.   “Babble”  is either an onamatopoeic word like “blab” or “burble”—a nonsense sound—or it has as its source the Tower of Babel in the Western Bible.  Jesus’s apostles supposedly spoke in tongues when the Holy Ghost sat on their heads on Pentecost. In later Christian times, it has been associated with inspired talk, presumably in a language only God can understand, and is reverenced. 

            Religions often reverence things that can’t be understood:  like Athena being born out of Zeus’s forehead, or the virgin birth of Jesus, or the Christian idea of three persons in the one god.  Those are all imaginable, even if they are illogical or unnatural.  But speaking in tongues—babble—is well beyond that.  It doesn’t communicate anything, and nobody ever bothers to write it down.  Still, in some traditions it is reverenced.

            But speaking of  tongues, maybe we should think about the ways the animal world—not including humans, for the most part—speaks with tongues.

            Humans use their tongues to turn the noises that breathing and the voice box make into various different sounds, which become words and language.  And human have become clever enough to translate those mostly tongue-differentiated and tongue-controlled sounds into symbols, and sometimes to write them out.  Many children use their tongues—unconsciously—when they are learning to write, making lingual gestures which might be linguistic gestures

            Western languages share an “alphabet”—which, as a word, must be the most absurd bit of babble ever recorded.  It gets its name from the first two letters  for the ancient Greeks, alpha and beta.  There is no reason, of course, why they should be the first two letters.  “O”—or “OM”--has a long tradition of being considered the first sound, the original word of the God.  “I” is a straight line, a simple part of the circle:  it might have been a good place to start, especially as it is the me-word.  And all language comes from a self.  It isn’t a separate creation.

            The oldest of the Western languages, Sanskrit, from maybe five or six thousand years ago, has a very carefully logical ordering of sounds and the letters that represent them.  (In the West, with a nice blend of ignorance and arrogance,  we call the Sanskrit letters an “alphabet.”)  And the Korean language has a similar ordering of its sounds, thanks to King Sejong, a fifteenth century king, who learned the Sanskrit lettering system from Buddhist monks in China.

         But animals—or some of them, anyway—speak with their tongues, or with their wet noses.   Being kissed by a dog may be sloppy, but it’s reliable.  Dogs don’t do Judas kisses.  And though cats licking each other at bath time isn’t kissing, it is both friendly and seemingly pleasurable both for the licker and the licked.

            Humans say that snakes are not trustworthy:  they “speak with forked tongues.”  But snakes lie on their bellies, not with their tongues.  Snakes aren’t talkers at all.  Human tongues are the ones that lie—so why do we malign reptiles for having forked tongues?

            When humans say that someone speaks “with a crooked tongue,” they mean that the crooked-tongued person can’t be trusted.  Although there are untrustworthy animals of various kinds, we don’t identify them as being so by their having crooked tongues.  Even monkeys don’t use their tongues to play tricks.

            With the exception of humans, the animal world seems to have honest, trustworthy tongues.   Does our more elaborate intelligence enable us to misuse our tongues?   Sure.  It’s not just a matter of our giving false kisses.  Look at all the dishonest things we say!

            “I love you” frequently doesn’t mean what it says.  Indeed:  as saying go it’s about as trustworthy as     “I O U,”  among humans.   And the saying “Speak softly, but carry a big stick” doesn’t suggest that what we say is worth much, or to be trusted.  And “Telling lies,” we say, “is easier than telling  truths.”  Our language is so full of sayings that promote dishonesty that we should probably call tongue a dirty word.

             Speaking of tongues, perhaps what we should say is that maybe we would be better off if we didn't.