My Colombian conversation exchange partner has the good fortune to be possessed of a voice that is easy on the ear, something particularly evident in his native language. His facility with English attests that he himself has a good ear. He has said he prefers the spoken language to reading. When he shares his screen on Zoom it is packed with YouTube tabs. He works as a language teacher and interpreter. He sends voice messages more than texts. At one time he was a professional musician. Sound, then, would seem, to him, to be important.
The common view that reading, writing and literacy go hand in hand is not wrong, but perhaps it is not altogether inclusive. In Italy for instance, far more importance is placed on being able to speak and to present, than in the UK. Many Italian exams are oral.
And what of our ability to use information we hear? Listening, noticing things we hear, is not something we all do equally well and yet it is not a skill that seems to be given much attention in UK schools.
There are many who have suffered from dyslexia and other problems or delays related to reading and writing who go on to write well. To give one, now rather unfashionable example, Rosemary Sutclif, the superb children's author of historical fiction, became chronically ill when very young. She did not learn to read until she was nine but acquired Celtic and Saxon legends from listening to her mother. She left school at fourteen to study art and became a painter before publishing The Eagle of the Ninth in her thirties. I know a twelve year old who struggles with reading yet has always had a wide vocabulary and a surprising verbal ability with language from a very young age.
Recently, a Danish national told me her near-faultless English accent stemmed from listening to her Scots husband, whom she met at nineteen. She learnt English through his reading stories to her, much as adults read to children. It is a curious testament to the immense power of voice that this act of reading to someone both develops the bond between reader and listener and develops language in the listener.
My Colombian friend's emphasis on sound and voice reminded me of the Rosemary Sutclif story that I had first come across some years before. Happily and never through overt teaching on his part, he reminded me that an interest in and facility with language is not something confined just to readers.
Plato's doctrine of recollection says that knowledge is not found in the external world. Rather, we "remember" ideas that we possess innately in the 'soul', in consciousness. This always struck me as tosh but I concede that we can be brought to remember and revive connections between things we think we have forgotten. The Socratic method, the elenchus does at least that. Through conversation it draws out, either, depending on your point of view, knowledge and understanding on the one hand, or on the other, memories, (whether supposedly innate or not).
An appreciation for language, whether written or spoken, often goes hand in hand with a sense of humour. My father writes well but is also a great raconteur with a particular ear and memory for a joke. Martin Amis, recognised as one of the twentieth century’s great stylists in English is also riveting to listen to in interviews invariably clever and funny. Clive James, another fun guy, had a great facility for language. He said, famously, that humour was like common sense, dancing, a phrase that reveals the poet in him.
Jokes, particularly puns, require a relatively sophisticated use of language yet children love a pun, illustrating that we can grasp these complexities at an early age. The average twelve year old will understand the pun in the news headline “Fish shop battered by a rise in the price of fish” but all three of the Spanish women to whom I sent this, all intermediate / advanced English speakers, needed help to get the joke, missing that one sense of battered is "rebozado" in Spanish, not just "golpeado". And a joke, except when a newspaper headline, is invariably better conveyed through voice, something which points to the close relationship between voice and humour.
The power of the voice is a reminder that oral culture came long before and lasted far longer than our much more recent written cultures. It is our natural state. Researchers now think that between sixty and eighty per cent of our communication happens not through the content of what we say, but through body language and tone of voice. It can be hard to maintain attention to a verbal monologue or presentation, particularly one using a more formal language as in business or academia, probably because it is unnatural. And yet, how effortlessly we follow dialogue. There is something about the colour, richness and style of everyday, street language and conversation that holds our attention, even while the content of an educated discourse, using perhaps more stilted language, may be interesting.
Anyone who doubts the power of the ear need only reflect on the language we all carry with us and which we learn effortlessly from birth. I curate a list of English colloquial expressions, turns of phrase and words, in part for my conversation exchange partners to use as a resource. They have become a meditation on my own language and a way of attuning my ear to everyday colloquialisms or the outer reaches of common language.
Experience says these are words that even some advanced non-native English speakers are unlikely to be able to use. Some of them (like "Owt, or nowt?") are in registers that I recognise but don't use myself. We are the products of our upbringing and its context. Colloquialisms and turns of phrase are enhancements to the basic scaffolding of language. If this scaffolding forms the essentials needed to communicate, the turns of phrase are the bells and whistles, the things that enrich and add colour to our communication. Which we use depends usually on where and how we grew up. Our use of these phrases are one of the key things, besides accent, that distinguishes native speakers from non-natives. My list is gleaned from the radio, from the street, from conversations with others and from films. While reading unquestionably broadens the vocabulary and improves our facility to use language, these phrases are testament to the magical power possessed by each and every one of us to pick up language by doing nothing more than listening.
These realisations about the power of listening and of the voice started when my Colombian friend sent me short snippets of native Spanish speakers speaking. We had been talking about the curious subject of Colombian forms of address: they have five ways of saying “you” (singular). His chosen approach to unravelling this intriguing, complex subject, was, wisely, not to make claims about why and when people slipped effortlessly between these forms but to find out, by asking them.
At first, I thought of these snippets as conversation before realising that in the first two, only one person actually spoke, giving a response to some unheard question. Listening to them, almost unconsciously, queries formed about their subjects.
The first, less than ninety seconds long, featured a guy, presumably a friend, talking about how he uses tú , usted and su merced. In the second, a woman spoke clearly, and in the way of someone used to reflection and analysis, of conveying ideas to others and with some authority. She sounded highly educated, and turned out to be a university lecturer. It was surprising how much mere tone could convey.
The third was a true dialogue in which a man (my conversation partner) was talking to someone who seemed to be a younger woman, something conveyed partly by her voice, but mostly by the way in which he talked to her. He explained the subject and then asked his questions. Later, he talks about an interesting idea of two forms of ‘crisis’ in the use of the ‘tuteo' in Colombia, but it is clearly not a common topic of daily conversation. The woman doesn't say much then says, "Nunca había pensado en eso". Through most of the dialogue it is "él que lleva la voz cantante". [Try Deepl for a translation]
During the dialogue the woman talked about how she addressed people in a shop. There was a lot of background noise and banging. Was she working in a cafe or shop as she talked? Perhaps she was a shop assistant he saw often.
Part of the discussion is about the “tú” and “usted”forms of address. "A quién les dices usted?" he asks.
With older people, she replies. With a teacher, with someone who is giving me some information. Then,
Man: Tú nunca me has dicho a mí ‘usted’?
Woman: Si, pero molestando, informalmente,
Man: Como? expliqua!
Woman: Como por ejemplo si me haces una broma y yo digo, "Usted si que molesta".
Man: ¡Aha! Soy la misma persona no obstante, cambias el registro si quieres
Woman: Uh-huh. Sí.
Man: Claro, si cuando uno está bromeando de....
Woman: Cuando uno habla en broma, habla de 'usted'
Man: Es curioso no?
In the tones of the voices, there is much humour. Most of the first part of the dialogue, however, is transactional, composed of requests for information on how the woman uses the different forms of address and her interesting responses.
Then they discuss how in certain parts of the country people incorrectly mix up the tú and usted parts of speech in the same sentence and give examples:
Man: Lo que decíamos ahorita de la gente de Santander y no solo ellos, en Boyacá también, porque en Boyacá no saben tutear bien...
Woman: Y en Cundinamarca tampoco.
Man: No, no saben tutear bien. Ellos les confunden, ¿no? Entonces, meten una parte en 'tú' y una parte en 'usted', como te le decía.
Woman: "Oye, venga."
(Laughter)
Man: "Oye, venga. Eh,...Venga y haz me suya."
(Laughter)
Qué más hay de eso.... Enséñale a tu hermanito.
(Laughter)
Curiously, the humour seemed to have an equalising effect.
At the time, this expression, the origin of the laughter, meant nothing to me. It led to another funny moment in my kitchen when a Catalan friend was helping me translate the tricky bits of this dialogue.
Bueno, significa…, he said, opening his arms.
I stared at him, blankly. He looked back as though considering a particularly obtuse child. Clearly, someone was being especially slow on the uptake. There was a long silence as the penny started to drop, very slowly. But the meaning still did not relate itself to the words, which might as well have been Martian.
- ¿Qué? ¿Acércate?
He sighed and waggled his fingers towards himself, arms still forming a circle in front. I felt distinctly discomposed and hoped we were still talking about the meaning of a phrase.
- Y más… he said
- ¿Abrázame?, I replied, sitting hard in my seat.
- Más…
- ¿Bésame?
He sighed, patiently and signed the clear message, "Keep going..."
- Oh!
Seconds after the penny did finally drop, the meaning attached itself to the individual words, with the joke falling into place hot on its heels.
He shook his head sorrowfully, an “At last!” hanging between us in the air which vibrated with our laughter.
This dialogue was the richest of the three snippets, though why wasn't immediately clear. It might now have crossed my mind that it was rather odd if it was between a customer (however regular) and an assistant, because of the implicit power imbalance. But if it did, "cultural difference" was the easy explanation why two such people might be laughing around a slightly risqué topic. But musing on the dynamics of the conversation was not, then, uppermost in mind. The meaning of the conversation as a whole and the interesting content were the main event, together with the difficulty in understanding it because of the background noise.
In the dialogue, the woman went on to give a more conventional example:
Woman: "¿Hola...hola, cómo estás, cómo le va?"
Man: "Eso, cómo estás, cómo le va." Es terrible, ¿no?
Later, the friend who had helped me decipher this dialogue said he too had thought at first that the context was possibly a shop or café because of the background noise, but suggested this was more likely to be a friendship because of the jokes. He qualified this saying it was always possible that cultural difference could make such a topic acceptable even between, say, an assistant and a customer. He gave an example where in Seville people apparently might say hijoputa even to a colleague they knew well, and it is no more than cariñosa, whereas in other parts of Spain to call someone an hijo de puta would be a gross insult.
In our next conversation my friend mentioned that the woman was an ex-girlfriend from many years previously. The background noise had been because they were on a terrace and she was kicking the table.
It was this revelation that caused the realisation that my brain had constructed a completely false context around this dialogue until certain facts showed the mistake. The realisation then, was that voice alone, while it can convey so much more than mere text, can also lead the brain to make assumptions and create stories that are completely erroneous. Our brains seem to have an almost pathological insistence on solving puzzles, coming up with explanations and filling in the background. When lacking context, rather than immediately reaching for logic, or suspending the answer to a question, or even realising there is a question, it will tend to fill in the gaps itself. It does this in a way in which you are barely conscious, because of course, the brain has no interest in your knowing it is, in a way, deceiving you.
Since at least the seventies cognitive psychologists have known we are not naturally logical creatures. Most of our decisions are made emotionally, with logic providing the justification, rather than the reason for them. Perhaps it's less that the brain cares not a whit for prejudice or truth, just rather less than we might think. For the most part, it wants a coherent story.
Anyone who has interacted on an online dating site will know that in the presence of only sketchy information about a potential date, the mind can insidiously fill in the missing blanks. Since dating is, in essence, an activity about which we have to be optimistic, little wonder when the brain is optimistic in the way it fills out the blank spaces surrounding your potential date's profile without your being aware of it. This may go some way to explaining the common disappointment upon meeting said date in real life and the claim by some that online dating isn't a patch on real life encounters.
These tricks of the brain are reminiscent of a process in neuropsychology called 'confabulation' where, in situations where there might be some missing information about the actual facts of what happened, the brain creates false memories to create a coherent story. Confabulation is marked in patients with brain injury or degeneration but is something we all, apparently, frequently do. It explains the common disagreements we have over the details over past events, the trip we both took, or the event we both attended but remember differently. It is a tendency to which we would be wise to be alert, not only when it comes to memory but also in our almost-unconscious assumptions about context.
