Not quite unlike a language

In paragraph 528 of his Philosophical Investigations - a wonderfully intricate tome of brief thought experiments that represents one of the major reasons I've been such a poor poster this week - Wittgenstein notes that “It would be possible to imagine people who had something not quite unlike a language: a play of sounds, without vocabulary or grammar.”

Well, indeed it would. In fact, one doesn't really have to do much imagining. Hang out with Cleo for an hour these days, and you'll get a pretty wide range of grammarless sounds: hasty, put-upon breaths; feline squeals; almost erotic moans; scratchy exhalations like the roar of a tiny dragon. And, moreover, they don't generally seem random; instead, they recur, and often seem knit to their context. A long, warbling wail suggests exhaustion, while a a rich, M-my sound can signify pleasure. Not quite, in other words, unlike a language.

But Wittgenstein is not quite done. In the next paragraph, he wonders, “But what would the meaning of the sounds be in such a case?” And then responds, in a different voice: "What is it in music?” What, indeed? Like music, the sounds of a four-month-old are abstract and seemingly not quite linguistic - and yet they're also structured, and sometimes deeply powerful.