Excerpt from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But how do these infants intuit the shapes of words, immersed as they are in language in its liquid form? The particles of one meaningless word flow in an uninterrupted stream with the particles of other meaningless words. Without being handed bricks of words, how does the child extract solid objects from this torrent?

The order in language ripples throughout all its layers, from the solid crust of meaning down into its meaningless, boiling substrate of sound. The very existence of words has mathematical consequences: syllables that are part of the same word occur together in speech more often than syllables that belong to different words. Tell an uncomprehending infant, "We'regoingtovisitgrampa," and she may recognize that the syllables "vi-sit" form a unified clump of … something. She may know this only because these two syllables have appeared next to each other many times before, seemingly bonded to each other whenever they run the river of sound; the syllables "sit-gram," however, have bobbed and floated apart more often than not, despite being linked together in this particular sentence.

If you invent a new language with fabricated, meaningless words repeated over and over in various combinations, and play it continuously for a few minutes, a child of about eight months will come to distinguish sequences of sounds that form "words" from combinations that do not. Thus, babies intuit the pure mathematics of sound before they have tethered these sounds to meanings, perhaps even before they know for certain that they have meanings.

Unlike adults, infants inhabit a liminal space of language, perceiving order that runs on its own plane of existence, detached from meaning. These patterns have great importance, and babies labor to reproduce them. They babble alone in their cribs like ardent believers touched by the gift of tongues, and though their babble has no meaning, it becomes a closer and closer imitation of the structured sounds of the mother tongue.

Over time, language becomes less fluid as more and more clumps of sound solidify. These offer themselves as vessels for meaning, and the strands of sound and meaning begin to braid together. But there was a time in each of our lives when we experienced language as sheer music. We felt its rhythms in our bodies, we recognized its patterns and motifs, we could be soothed by its repetition, then surprised by its departure from pattern. But we did not understand it.

What would our lives be like, if we continued to live in this state? If, like the baby babbling alone in his crib, we devoted precious time to becoming virtuosos of language sounds that had no referents or signifiers? If this language music, meaningless as it was, still acted as a glue that bound us to each other?

We might live, I think, much as birds do.

One of nature's puzzles is how little we have in common with our primate kin in the domain of language. The calls, hoots, and shrieks of monkeys and apes have some sort of meaning, to be sure. But they lack the structure threaded into our language-music. And even the most articulate of apes fail tragically in their efforts to shape the sounds of speech. In the wild, their vocalizations spring from instinct—like human laughter or yelps of fear—more than from deliberate intent. Even under human tutelage, when it comes to speech, apes don't do much aping; they can mimic much of our behavior, gestures, even signed words, but they are terrible at mimicking speech.

This has led us to believe that we live alone in the house of language.

But among songbirds, we find our kindred patternmakers and imitators of sound. Just as we do with language, songbirds build elaborate structures of sound. They fashion syllables, motifs, and phrases out of notes—not in random combinations, but according to the templates of the music of their species. The more we listen to birds and their songs, the more echoes of language we hear.

Excerpted from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Sedivy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.