Дуглас Престон - Jennie

She had difficulty creating the subject-verb-direct object form that human children naturally take up. In English, of course. Other languages are different. It’s all there in the papers I gave you.

Jennie, you see, had trouble going from give ball to give me ball . The concept of the indirect object — like give ball to Sandy — was beyond her abilities. She could understand it, but not say it.

Her syntax was weak. It was terrible. We did statistical analyses of her utterances and found only a slight correlation with correct syntax. What I mean is, she would sign Ball give almost as often as Give ball . Of course, our enemies — I mean that jerk Craig Miller at Penn — seized on this and said that without syntax there wasn’t language. Well that’s a lot of shit. Excuse my French. I mean, not all human languages even use syntactical constructions. Like Latin, for Christ’s sake. Miller was a real shithead. He was out to get us. Oh, you’ve still got that tape recorder on. Well, don’t put that in. [Laughs.]

Don’t get me wrong. We weren’t disappointed in Jennie’s progress. It was just that our hopes had been raised by the incredible rate of learning in the first three years, and we had expected ever more complex sentences to result. It didn’t happen. We noted the same “plateau” among our colony chimpanzees, though at a lower level of vocabulary. This was a big divergence from the way human children learn language, and that itself was interesting. But it wasn’t the big deal that Miller made it out to be.

Did you read those transcriptions that I gave you? “Conversations with a Chimpanzee”? Good. You know, I can’t get that book published. Nobody’ll touch it after that Proxmire shit. Anyway, from reading that you can see how incredible the communication was between us. Jennie and I communicated like you wouldn’t believe. What you don’t see from those transcripts is the body language. For example, in ASL a question is not noted with a special sign, or even syntax, but with a pause and a quizzical expression, a lifting of the eyebrows. Just like in Italian. Like this: Jennie eat . And Jennie eat? [Dr. Prentiss demonstrates.] See? It’s signed the same way, but the question is in the body language.

If you have ever watched a fluent ASL person, you’d see immediately that the entire body and face are involved. Watch me. I’m going to tell you a story about Jennie. In ASL. Oh, I hope I can remember it after all these years! But instead of just mouthing the words — like real ASL translators do, to help lip readers — I speak them. See? Here goes. [Dr. Prentiss stands up and demonstrates.]

A-little-while-ago Jennie and Pam go walk. We walk, walk, walk to brook. See water there. Jennie like go swim? No! Jennie no like water! Jennie and Pam go tree. Jennie climb, climb, climb tree. Jennie see everything! Jennie queen of everything! Jennie hoot. Entire town hear Jennie. Pam cannot climb. Pam stay at bottom. Pam cry, cry, cry .

See what I mean? The whole body is involved.

One of the great myths of ASL is that it is an “artificial” or “invented” language. Not so. ASL has biological and evolutionary roots just as surely as spoken language does. Did you know that research on gorillas has shown that they communicate using gestures? Now listen to this. An ASL-like language may very well have preceded spoken language in human development. A kind of language with gestures and vocalizations. Gradually the vocalizations took over from the gestures, because it’s so much more convenient to speak than gesture. I mean, this stuff is unbelievable .

With me and Jennie, so much was beyond just signing. So much more was exchanged between us than what you see in those transcripts. There was no way to quantify the incredible level of communication we had.

Jennie and the other chimpanzees had this ability to convey information through facial expression, gesture, and body language. While the utterances remained mostly one to three words, the facial expressions and body language became more and more sophisticated. You see, the problem is that this result was very difficult to quantify. It was mind-to-mind, in a way. But of course, none of that is scientific or quantifiable. If I said anything like that at a meeting, they’d laugh me out of the room. Nobody knows what language is. It isn’t just speech, that’s for sure. But try to explain that to some of these reductionist structural linguists.

Anyway, I have a theory. I believe that we humans, in teaching chimpanzees and gorillas ASL, stumbled upon a natural communication system already in use. We just enhanced it. This is just my opinion and I wouldn’t dare put it in a paper. See, with this vicious attack against the Jennie project, we never had a chance to look at some of these things.

We had planned a six-year project. It ended up being about five years. Toward the end Jennie and I had quite a bit of trouble. The inconsistent and chaotic atmosphere in the Archibald home was starting to take its toll. Jennie became very disobedient. She picked up a lot of Mrs. Archibald’s ways. Very aggressive.

I am very sorry to report to you that the Archibalds began giving Jennie liquor to drink. They were drinkers in the evening, having a cocktail before dinner and then a glass of wine at dinner. They actually allowed Jennie the same. Almost every night. I tried to put a stop to it but was unsuccessful. I know this will sound shocking to you but it was no secret to anyone. I must report it as the truth. So you can see that Jennie’s home situation was not exactly ideal.

When Sandy was young, we had a great relationship. Sandy was a brilliant child. He is, if I may use a tired world, I mean word, a genius. Where did that Freudian slip come from?

As he became a teenager, he developed an antagonism toward me. He picked this up from his mother. He made all these outrageous and silly accusations against me. He kept Jennie out late at night. She was bleary and irritable in the mornings when I arrived. He interrupted our sessions. He talked about me to Jennie behind my back. Jennie never did reject me, however. Oh no. She loved me to the very end. Her love for me was more powerful than anything the Archibalds could undermine.

When Sandy reached adolescence he rebelled. He was a terrible role model for Jennie. You see, Sandy affected the pose of an SDS Yippie “radical.” Of course, he wasn’t a real radical, just a spoiled white middle-class teenager. He was never in danger of being drafted, either. But this didn’t stop him from protesting and calling for the burning of the banks.

Jennie picked up a number of terrible habits from Sandy. I’m almost positive she smoked pot, and it’s possible she even took LSD with Sandy or his friends.

The real blow to the project came in 1973. I expected a renewal of my NSF grant for 1973. This was automatic. The NSF rarely cuts off funding in the middle of a research project, especially when the results are as spectacular as ours were. But there were other forces afoot. Do you remember Senator William Proxmire and his “Golden Fleece” awards? That shit Proxmire found he could get votes by criticizing government-funded scientific research that he didn’t understand. Proxmire had about a fifth-grade knowledge of science. Every year he would select a few projects that he felt had no merit and would award them a golden fleece. As in “fleecing” the taxpayers.

Oh my God, I’ll never forget the morning I unfolded my New York Times and found that our chimpanzee linguistic project “won” a golden fleece. Right on the front page. I felt like throwing up. Proxmire said the American taxpayers had wasted $550,000 teaching five chimpanzees to talk sign language. What could a chimpanzee have to say that might be of interest? Proxmire asked. Well, he said, here it is in black and white, here are the earth-shattering comments from these chimps, after a half million dollars of English lessons: “Gimme banana!” and “I gotta go potty!” He was reading from one of my papers on the Senate floor! The big fat pompous asshole. I should’ve sued the bastard. Then he went on and on about how our young people can’t afford the five thousand dollars to go to college while millions are being spent teaching chimpanzees. As if this money had been taken away from deserving students. The big fat sack of shit.