TERESITA TANHUECO-TUMAPON
“FOR all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation; it is little more than air. It exits the body as a series of puffs and dissipates quickly into the atmosphere…. There are no verbs preserved in amber, no ossified nouns, and no prehistorical shrieks forever spreadeagled in the lava that took them by surprise.” Indeed, our speech as human beings is unrestricted in what we can communicate. Through the language we are born into or through a language learned, we are enabled, through symbolic function of knowledge, “to express our wishes, feelings, likes, dislikes.” Language achieves this by “encoding and externalizing our thoughts.” “No area of experience is accepted as necessarily incommunicable,” though it may be necessary for us “to adapt one’s language in order to cope with new discoveries or new modes of thought.” Animal communication systems, compared to human speech, are “by contrast very tightly circumscribed in what may be communicated.”
