Language as a Tool

[A. Katz]

Jess,

Your observation about body parts serving as prototypical tools is apt. I 
would add that teeth serving as cutting tools came first, and that their 
use in making dental consonants was discovered later. But we have other 
tools now to help us represent dental consonants, including but not 
limited to the writing system and speech synthesizers. Parrots can make 
sounds that pass for dental consonants, though they have no teeth. 
Chimpanzees have teeth, but cannot make those sounds.

The point? There is more than one object that can serve as a tool to 
produce language contrasts. Some are embodied, and some are not. 
Anatomical similarity isn't everything.

   --Aya


On Mon, 13 Sep 2010, jess tauber wrote:

> Actually I'd say the true prototypical tools are body parts doing particular jobs- nails, teeth, hairs, wings, fins, legs etc. I doubt it escaped our early ancestors that their created or found tools had functions similar or identical to parts they had themselves or saw in other creatures. Even other lineages must have some inkling (as when a jay uses a thorn to prize a grub out of rotten wood, or a sea otter bashes shellfish with stones fished up from the sea floor). Not everything is pure instinct.
>
> Sometimes these parts come out- we lose teeth, nails, hair, birds feathers, and so on, and you can also yank them out of corpses, skeletons, etc., and the occasional unwilling live victim. We may find them loose. This sets the stage for alienability, and generalization perhaps? I can get a sharp tool from a sabertooth, or from the living rock if I knock politely.
>
> In languages with 'bipartite' structure, effector bodypart and instrument terms are often dealt with identically, and stand in contrast with pathway/position terms, which may have a mirror in the way the brain deals with tools and gait/posture related motion.
>
> Jess Tauber
> phonosemantics at earthlink.net
>
>