Finding His Own Way To Communicate
Linguist Ryan Paulison reviews Jonathan’s backward speech and discovers another revelation
Professor Ryan Paulison sat pensively at his desk in his office at the Cornell University Linguistics Department. He kept office hours on Tuesdays in the afternoon and he had few students who came to see him. This afternoon while he waited, he was playing the cassette of Jonathan’s backward speaking which Dr. Carmichael had sent to him.
He still was having difficulty accepting what he had witnessed with Jonathan and he wondered if there were others like Jonathan, with similar linguistic skills. In the twenty years he had been studying human speech, he had seen many anomalies. But Jonathan’s abilities raised so many questions that he realised he was only a novice in the face of these revelations.
His secretary, Agatha, came into his office carrying his mail. As she was listening, she could hear the succession of short incoherent phrases and then the clear sounds of a boy’s voice speaking, when he played the tape backwards.
“What is that you’re listening to, Professor?” She asked him.
“This, Agatha, is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Although I witnessed it with my own eyes and ears and I know it was real, I still can’t figure out what it means or how it is even possible. It presents so many questions, I can’t even begin to unravel them.”
“Are these words played backwards?” She asked him.
“Yes, But it is more complicated than that. It has caused me to question how human speech is processed in the brain and I wonder can we hear backwards speech as well as speak it. Can communication be occurring bi-directional across space and time?”
Agatha didn’t know what to make of his remarks and returned to her work station.
“They tell me he is not doing it anymore. I don’t know how he could have done it in the first place,” he told her.
He seemed distracted.
“I’ve been a linguist now for over twenty years and I can’t find a reasonable explanation.”
He turned off the player.
“This obsession has taken over my life,” he lamented.
He removed three cassettes from his desk drawer and set them on his table.
“The Beatles ‘Abbey Road,’ Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon,’ I’ve been listening to everything backwards now. I’ve begun to read Quantum Physics, to contemplate the meaning of time. I’m reading neurophysiology and struggling to understand the nature of consciousness. All because of a trip to New York to meet a little boy.”
“I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Professor,” Agatha told him.
“I don’t think I have been hard enough. I’ve lived in a comfortable somnambulant haze for too long. Robotically going through routines and patterns of behavior, not conscious,” he paused. “The boy spoke backwards, and he began speaking forwards. Something happened which changed that, and it couldn’t have just been a seizure. The seizure was just a symptom of some other phenomenon.” He paused. “You see what I mean, it has become an obsession.”
“Not all obsessions are bad. My dad is obsessed with gardening. We have the most beautiful flowers surrounding our house,” she told him.
“My father was obsessed with birds,” he responded. “He wanted to know how they could fly. I understand obsessions. I’m going to be out of here in about ten minutes and then I’m back to my studies of human speech.” He hesitated. “I’ve learned more about human speech in the past few weeks than in twenty years of study.”
“It sounds exciting!” she acknowledged.
“It is. That’s the perfect word. I’ve been so excited that I can’t even sleep. Tonight, I’m listening to toddlers speak, to watch small children as they begin to understand the rudiments of language. I’m going with my sister to a mall to watch children in a playground. I feel like I’m on the threshold of a revelation.”
He felt a little awkward that he had spoken to Agatha in this way. But he had to speak to someone about what he was thinking. After this she left him and returned to the main department office at the other end of the corridor.
He took the cassette player in his right hand and put it back into his drawer then he put the cassettes in the same drawer with it.
In the weeks since he had come back from his trip to New York to see Jonathan, he had spent over two hundred hours on this special project and he had discovered things he didn’t know about human speech, things which as a linguist, he thought he should have known before this visit to New York, that seemed obvious to him now and he was beginning to rethink his position on whether human speech was indeed wired in the human brain. He was beginning to rethink everything he had learned about the nature of consciousness, and he was considering whether human intelligence could be artificially enhanced, whether the processes in the human brain could be accelerated to provide unforeseen powers of perception. His brief experience with me had intensified his curiosity, that had been dormant in him since he had had finished his PHD dissertation. He was questioning many of the conclusions he had documented there.
When he was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, his interest in linguistics was sparked by a theoretical question concerning the origin of ideas or memes as those in linguistics had agreed to call them. He was interested in the mechanics of speech production and novel theories about the catalysts of sound changes in languages. His faculty advisor, Abigail Primakov, had devoted her entire career to an exhaustive study on the Indo-European proto language among the hunter gatherers in the steppes of the Caucasus Mountains. These speculative theoretic musings held little interest for him. He had focused on how ideas were transmitted and altered by the passage of time. He was also curious as to how sounds got attached to certain ideas and he believed in an almost inexplicable way they were tied to the manner in which infants learned to speak. In the case of Jonathan, he wondered if he was seeing a glimpse into the way children learned to perceive time. The big question for him in the last ten years concerned whether there was uniformity or diversity in the way individuals perceived time. It had undertones of a quasi-spiritual inquiry. Because he was beginning to question the positive, materialist paradigm which had dominated linguistics since the 1920’s with the widespread acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theories about Natural Selection. He had been taught that all language was simply the result of random variation and sound changes came from the widespread laziness among speakers of various dialects. Jonathan’s tape was beginning to cause him to question everything he had been taught. Once he had begun to question it, he realized he had already stepped away from it. Like a sailboat tossed by both the waves beneath and the wind above, he was moving wherever the changes in pressure were taking him.
As he sat waiting for the last few minutes of his office hours to run out, suddenly at three minutes before the hour, there was someone standing in his doorway.
“Professor Paulison,” he heard a female voice. He shuddered a moment as he came into focus.
“I’m sorry to come at the last minute. But I needed to talk to you a few minutes.”
He turned his face and saw a young woman in her early thirties with brown hair and Spanish features, “My name is Sofia Starr Primangela.” She told him. “I have a story to tell you which I am sure you won’t believe.” She hesitated a moment as though she was reluctant to tell him. “I have an eight-year-old daughter name Carmella who was mute. She never spoke a word. Then two weeks ago we went to visit a friend in Pennsylvania, and she began to speak for the first time. But it is not in any language I recognize. I have taped some of it for you to listen to.”
“Where is your daughter now?”
“She is with her father. He does not approve of me coming to see you.”
She reached into her purse and removed a cassette.
“I was sent here to you to have you listen to it.”
“Who sent you to me?” Dr Paulison asked.
“It was a postcard,” Sofia removed a postcard from her bag and handed it to Dr. Paulison.
It read, “Here is a man who can help you with your daughter, Carmela. Professor of Linguistics Ryan Paulison at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Sincerely, A Friend.”
“You must know how crazy this all sounds.” Dr Paulison told her.
“Entiendo,” (I understand.) she responded in Spanish. “Por favor, ayudame.” (Please help me.)
“Ciertamente,” (Certainly,) he responded. “Puedo tener el casete?” (May I have the cassette?)
“Si muchas gracias.”(Yes, Thank You)
She handed him the cassette.
He removed the cassette player from his drawer and put the cassette inside the machine and pressed play. They both could hear a small girl’s voice that went on for about three minutes, but the words were completely unintelligible.”
“Que` idioma es?” he asked. (What language is it?)
“No (lo) se. Suena nada como cualquier idioma de la que estoy familiarizada.” (I don’t know. It is not like any language with which I am familiar.)
He rewound the cassette and prepared to play it again.
“Donde lo grabaste?” (Where did you record this?)
“En nuestra casa.” (In our house.)
He pressed the play button and listened again. He didn’t’ comment.
“What languages do you speak in your house, English or Spanish?” He asked.
“We speak both. My husband speaks English.”
“As crazy as this might sound, I must play this backwards. This machine can do that.”
“Como podia hablar al reves?” (How could I speak backwards?)
He pressed the play button, and they could both hear her speaking in Spanish.
“Mama, habla conmigo por favor. Por fin puedo hablar contigo.” (Mama, talk with me please. Finally I can speak with you.)
Two streams of tears were running from Sofia’s cheeks.
“I need to see your daughter. You can either bring her here or I can go where she is.”
“My husband will not let her come here.”
“Then I will go. Where do you live?”
“Columbus, Ohio,” she answered.
“That’s about a seven-hour drive. If we leave now we will be in Columbus by midnight.”
“Ciertamente?” (Certainly)
“Tan serio como un ataque del corazon.”(As serious as a heart attack)
“Si,” she shuddered. “Mi marido puede ser dificil. Mi marido se va enojar.” (Yes, My husband can be difficult. My husband is going to be angry.)
“Voy a manejar su marido. Por favor.” (I will manage your husband.)
“Y estoy de acuerdo.” (and I agree.)
“Muchas gracias, Senora.”