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Linguistics 437
‘The adaptive nature of communication’, rightly emphasized by modern
biologists, is manifest in the behavior both of higher and lower organisms
adjusting themselves to their living environment or, inversely, adjusting this
environment. One of the most striking examples of the ability to make persistent
and intensive adjustments is the child’s imitative and thereby creative learning of
language from parents or other adults, notwithstanding the recent untenable
surmise that nothing is needed other than ‘some superficial adaptation to the
structure of their behavior’ (98, p. 378).
The child‘s gift of acquiring any tongue whatever as his first language and,
perhaps even more generally, the human, especially juvenile aptitude to com-
mand unfamiliar linguistic patterns, must arise primarily from the instructions
coded in the germ cell, but this genetic assumption does not authorize us to
conclude that for the little apprentice the language of adults is nothing more than
‘raw material’ (98, p, 375). For example, in the Russian verb system none of its
morphological categories - persons, genders, numbers, tenses, aspects, moods,
voices - belong to linguistic universals, and children, as it has been shown by
abundant and precise observations and records, deploy all their gradual efforts
in order to comprehend these grammatical processes and concepts and to pene-
trate, step by step, into the numerous intricacies of the adults’ code. All the
devices needed for its attainable mastery are used by the beginner: its initial
simplification with selection of accessible components, progressive grades of
approximation to the entire code, glossing metalinguistic experiments, various
forms of tutor-tutee effective relations, and insistent demands for learning and
instruction (60; 87); everything positively contradicts the credulous references to
the ‘absence of any need for teaching of language’ (98, p. 379). But the question
of genetic endowment arises as soon as one deals with the very foundations of
human language.
The spectacular discoveries of the last few years in molecular genetics are
presented by the explorers themselves in terms borrowed from linguistics and
communication theory. The title of the book by George and Muriel Beadle,
The Language of Life. is not a mere figurative expression, and the extraordinary
degree of analogy between the systems of genetic and verbal information fully
justifies the guiding statement of this volume: ‘The deciphering of the DNA
code has revealed our possession of a language much older than hieroglyphics,
a language as old as life itself, a language that is the most living language of
all’ (6, p. 207).
From the newest reports on the gradual breakthrough of the DNA code and,
in particular, from F. H. C. Crick‘s (34) and C. Yanofsky’s (191) condensed
accounts of ‘the four-letter language embodied in molecules of nucleic acid’,
we actually learn that all the detailed and specified genetic information is con-
tained in molecular coded messages, namely in their linear sequences of ‘code
words’ or ‘codons’. Each word comprises three coding subunits termed ‘nucleo-
tide bases’ or ‘letters’ of the code ‘alphabet’. This alphabet consists of four
differing letters ‘used to spell out the genetic message’. The ‘dictionary’ of the
genetic code encompasses 64 distinct words which, in regard to their components,
are defined as ‘triplets’, for each of them forms a sequence of three letters.