SUB-HUMAN CULTURE BEGINNINGS 



3x9 



EACK OF SPEECH AMONG APES 



On the side of speech it is agreed that 

 the ape is completely deficient in imita- 

 tiveness. Observations and experiments 

 are uniformly negative. At this point 

 the close human associations and manual 

 adaptations of Yerkes' animals are of 

 high significance. They did learn to 

 brush their teeth, to spit, to eat with a 

 spoon, to go to bed, and a hundred other 

 things which the family was doing. They 

 could not be taught to speak at all. 



Furness, by long and repeated practice, 

 taught his young orang to say "Papa," 

 and apparently to realize that this sound 

 complex in some way related to her mas- 

 ter. Whether the animal recognized that 

 "Papa" was Furness' name, as Furness 

 believes, is another question. When he 

 goes on to tell how the animal, as she was 

 being carried into water which she dread- 

 ed, clung to him and cried "Papa! Papa! 

 Papa!", the facts may be accepted, and 

 yet the interpretation that the ejaculation 

 was an "appeal" in the human sense is 

 wholly subjective. Next, the same orang 

 was taught to pronounce the word "cup." 

 Her tongue was repeatedly pressed back 

 with a spatula into position for articula- 

 tion of the hard "c" or "k" sound. After 

 she had learned to release the consonant 

 and the vowel, the lip motion of the 

 "p" was added and mastered. The poor 

 brute managed after a time to produce a 

 pretty fair rendition of the word "cup." 

 But there is nothing to show that it meant 

 anything to her. Pronunciation may 

 have seemed nothing more than an end in 

 itself; perhaps a game, or an intrinsically 

 meritorious act that earned approval. 

 Once at night, on awakening, she spon- 

 taneously uttered the word. Furness 

 thought that she might be thirsty, offered 

 her a drink, and the animal accepted. 

 But, who knows why? Almost pathetic 



was the way in which the docile little 

 animal was trying her best to cooperate 

 without apparantly grasping the point. 

 After a time she offered to push the spatula 

 against her tongue with her own hands. 

 Here was something that master wanted, 

 and she was eager to help. But what it 

 was all about, or that she might utilize 

 the lesson, quite likely never entered her 

 consciousness. Furness quite properly 

 concludes that the apes do not possess the 

 faculty of language in the proper sense of 

 the word. 



Parallel are the results of Boutan, who 

 worked with a gibbon, a particularly 

 vocal species. The gibbon, he finds, is 

 capable of no more than pseudo-language. 

 Its sounds are like those of the other mam- 

 mals in expressing emotions; they do not 

 convey anything objective. Utterances 

 relieve the utterer: there is no semblance 

 of their being purposive as regards con- 

 veying information. The chimpanzee, in 

 fact, does not confine himself to vocal 

 utterances: when frightened he rattles 

 a tin pan or thumps the wall of his cage. 

 It is clear that we are beyond the realm of 

 what can profitably be construed as 

 language when we are driven to include 

 the rattling of pans. 



All in all, the data at hand are unani- 

 mous to the effect that the speech faculty 

 of the apes is substantially on a par with 

 that of a normal six-months old human 

 infant: namely, nil. When we inquire 

 why this is, it seems likely that however 

 we may paraphrase it in more technical 

 terms, the old reason literally holds: 

 animals do not talk because they have 

 nothing to say. 



This fact is particularly striking because 

 the structure of the mouth parts of the 

 apes is so similar to that of man that there 

 is no doubt that they could render reason- 

 ably close approximations to the sounds 

 of human speech. They might talk with 



