The story is tremendous, creepy. A British woman has been sentenced to seven years in prison for especially cruel and inexplicable child abuse: she kept her daughter locked in a drawer for three years, since the baby was born. «I was stunned by what I saw and was very surprised to see a baby looking at me sitting in a drawer of the couch. “He was staring at me and rocking back and forth,” the social worker who intervened in the rescue testified in court. “It was an overwhelming horror to think that I was probably the only face the girl had ever seen apart from her mother.”
The chronicles have said that, when she was found, the girl “could not crawl, walk, speak or make any communicative sound”. The italics are mine. He looked more like an animal than a human being, a small being animalized by his inhuman mother.
He could not “speak or make any communicative sound”… It is language that makes us human, what gives us the human condition, what makes us a chosen species, what has unfolded civilization. Without language, homo sapiens would have stayed in a homo with another more modest surname that would have placed him in an irrelevant place in Linnaeus’ taxonomy.
We all carry within us at birth the so-called “human faculty of language”, a kind of software innate, natural, of language, of that complex and structured system that allows us to communicate. The extreme isolation in which the British baby lived made the activation and deployment of this faculty difficult to the point of practically blocking it.
There are several documented cases of babies who did not speak after having lived without contact with other humans. The case of Victor, a boy of about 12 years old, found by hunters at the end of the 18th century in the forests of Aveyron, near Toulouse, in the southeast of France, is well known and much studied. François Truffaut made a memorable film about his story, The sauvage child. Another real case, that of a child raised by wolves and found at the end of the 19th century in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, inspired The jungle bookby Rudyard Kipling.
Nature imitates art, and sometimes art imitates nature. Two years ago, fans of our classical theater were surprised by the adaptation of life is dreamby Calderón, made for the National Dramatic Center by the British stage director Declan Donnellan. Almost at the beginning of the performance, in the first of Segismundo’s two famous soliloquies, the actor, Alfredo Noval, stuttered!
He stammered so much that he could barely understand “hurry up, dear, I pretend, / since you treat me like this, / what crime I committed / against you when I was born.” A glaring mistake? No, a conscious and brave decision by the director and the actor: Sigismund had been locked in a cave for many years by order of his father, King Basil, and he barely had contact with other human beings, so it was impossible for him to be skilled in the use of the language. As the plot and function advanced, Segismundo’s diction improved, and at the end of the second act, Noval could perfectly understand the second soliloquy, that of “What is life? A frenzy. / What is life? An illusion, / a shadow, a fiction, / and the greatest good is small; / that all life is a dream, / and dreams are dreams.”
The name of the British mother at the beginning of this article has not been made public, due to a court decision. I have not found any recent information about the girl in the chronicles. The arrest of the mother and the rescue of the little girl occurred in February 2023. It is very likely that in these almost two years the girl has acquired language normally, and speaks and communicates exactly the same as other children her age. , now about five years. And the memory? What will you remember, and from when? Or is memory also a part of human language?
#Language #human
