It is in the same way that their descendents – today’s children – become
persons.
We have here a very attractive myth. But a myth none the less: the latest
developments in anthropology, genetics, and primatology probably preclude
us from considering this description of the origin of language as corresponding
to the facts. And yet, in addition to the ‘facts’ being (perhaps irretrievably)
out of our reach in this instance, I note that recent American studies of the
issue offer solutions which, while they ignore the role of labour, are not so
far removed from Tran Duc Thao’s analyses. For they suggest that the origin
of articulated language is to be found in the gestures of primates or in their
becoming carnivorous, when it is not via socialisation by delousing.^7 But a
myth does not need to be ‘true’ in the sense of positive science to be effective,
as is clearly demonstrated by the Freudian myth of fort-da, which is not
unrelated to this one. It is enough for it to be relevant to our philosophical
concerns and, so far as possible, correct. And this myth, which claims to show
us what we can never see, renders explicit, by contradicting it, what the
dominant philosophy of language leaves implicit (doubtless because this
embarrasses it): naturalistic and/or individualistic myths of the origin of
language.
Tran Duc Thao’s myth of origins is therefore to be regarded as an anticipation
of truths to come, in a Hegelian manner, and as evidence of the intimate link
between language and social praxis. We can, for example, read Tran Duc Thao
in the light of Vygotsky’s theories about the relations between language and
thought, in which Vygotsky identifies two separate functions. Vygotsky is
not directly interested in the origin of language, but in the acquisition of
language by children, the emergence of internal language as an internalisation
of public language, via the intermediate step of what he calls egocentric
language. As in Tran Duc Thao, however, his starting-point is the collective,
public, interlocutory aspect of language. Like him, he has a historical
view of the relations between thought and language and the development
of human consciousness. The following quotation is typical: ‘We found no
specific interdependence between the genetic roots of thought and of word.
It became plain that the inner relationship we were looking for was not a
Propositions (1) • 149(^7) See Liebermann 1998 and Dunbar 1996.