Registrare la simian tongue

Il contributo di Richard Lynch Garner al dibattito sul linguaggio degli animali

Autori

  • Michela Piattelli Università “La Sapienza” di Roma

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4454/blityri.v7i1.277

Parole chiave:

Richard Lynch Garner, animal language, simians, evolutionism, recording

Abstract

The paper introduces the figure of American self-taught naturalist Richard Lynch Garner (1848-1920) and his work with the language of animals. Garner was mainly known for his use of the “phonograph”, a tool realised by Thomas Alva Edison towards the end of the Nineteenth-century for recording and reproducing sounds. It was Garner’s intuition to use the instrument to record the verses uttered by monkeys in order to study them from a linguistic point of view. Aided by his recordings, Garner came up with a theory that considered the languages of monkeys as real idioms, allegedly the antecedents of human articulate language. Though not fully up-to-date with Darwinism and evolutionism, Garner’s proposal holds a great interest in the history of animal studies as an early instance of empirical observation conducted in close contact with animals.

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Pubblicato

2018-09-28