1. Introduction

Three years ago I discovered a dusty volume published in 1896 by the British linguist John Britimore Hughes titled, "A Description of a Newly Discovered Language Called Ga-Goo Spoken by Infants in the British Isles." This was astounding beyond belief--one of the great events in modern linguistics, eclipsing even the discovery of the Indo-European language family and the decipherment of Linear A. And yet, what had happened? Why was this language forgotten? After much sleuthing, the trail led to Freud. This infantile language so challenged Freud's oedipal empire that he personally discredited it into oblivion. Hughes, already an old man, was made a laughing stock and seems to have retired from public life to an orphanage where he spent the remainder of this days happily chatting with infants.

The time had come, I felt, for the world to know of Hughes' forgotten discovery. As it was nearly a century old, a review was in order, and so I began a several-year study to update and refine Hughes' work. More than a dozen of my shirts were ruined from my linguistic informants puking on me, and some good notes were likewise lost. But I persisted and now I present for the first time in over a century a description of the salient features of the language called Gagoo by its speakers, but what I shall call Standard American Gagoo, or SAG, to distinguish it from British Gagoo and regional American forms.

2. Overview.

Infants come out of the womb speaking SAG. How this happens remains a mystery--perhaps for someone in the embryonic field of zygolinguistics to figure out. The congenital howl we all know is in fact a complicated word-string containing any number of unpublishable swear words, though I have heard newborns say unexpected things like, "What's on t.v.?" and even more incredibly, "I want a lawyer, now." Undoubtedly the most fascinating feature of this language is that SAG is really two languages: InfantSAG and TweenlerSAG (Tweenler: a baby of age between infant and toddler). Hughes came close to uncovering this bi-lingual feature, but didn't quite get there. My own research has for the first time in the annals of linguistics revealed this linguistic marvel. InfantSAG (ISAG) is a free-wheeling tonal/decibel language with three vowels and a vocabulary of about eight-hundred words. At four weeks the language abruptly transforms like a chrysalis into non-tonal TweenlerSAG (TSAG), with a more recognizable and predictable structure. To my knowldege such a shift occurs in no other pyscholinguistic community. During the fifth month of life, SAG vanishes from the baby's head. There is a special word in SAG that labels six-month-olds: 'oogoo,' which literally means, 'suddenly stupid.'

3. ISAG (InfantSAG). This language joins a distinguished group of isolates including Andamanese, Zuni and Basque, which have no known genetic relationship to any other language. Like many Southeast Asian languages, ISAG is tonal, though it far exceeds Cantonese's nine tones with its own twenty-two. To complicate matters, meaning can be determined by decibel level. To give an example, 'oo' in the third tone means 'fast.' At a whisper it means 'sort of fast, sort of slow.' (I know this doesn't make sense, but my informants insisted on this definition.) In a soft voice it means 'basically fast,' or as one infant patiently explained, "Allegro, ma non troppo." In a normal voice, 'pretty fast.' In a shout, 'faster.' Loud shout, 'fastest.' Urgent scream, 'fast"--as an imperative. Subjunctive and conditional forms likewise can be created by decibel level and tone.

Ex. A. /Uauaaaaaaaauuuuuuuaaaaa'eeee/ = "I would like to picked up so that I can pull Mom's glasses off and throw them and point to Dad and say that he did it."

The apostrophe toward the end is the only non-vocalic element of ISAG: a glottal stop indicating firm intent and usually mistaken for a hiccup. At four weeks of age, ISAG completely vanishes and is seamlessly replaced with TweenlerSAG (TSAG). Though there are some subtle and enticing similarities, ISAG has no clear relationship to TSAG syntactically, lexically or phonologically, yet TSAG speakers continue to understand ISAG for about four weeks after the shift. Apart from infants considering their language expressively superior to the older babies' language, it's unclear how much if any they understand of TSAG. More research is called for in this area.

4. TweenlerSAG.

4a. Syntax. SAG is an agglutinating language with a productive system of infixes which define all grammatical relationships. It is highly contextual, with referents, pronouns, subjects and agents frequently omitted.

Ex. B. /Ah'/ = "I'm tired of staring at myself in the Minnie Mouse mirror; let's watch Teletubbies for awhile."

This is not to say that TSAG speakers always do this; complex sentences are regularly formed on a single idea, generally a word that is both a noun and verb. Within this word the speaker can embed a string of infixes to create a word-sentence of astounding complexity.

Ex. C. /B'go'gaawaabyyuu'wageegeehahaama'a/ translates: "Mother's milk drink won't mood wrong too bright until lights small dim won't drink milk." Idiomatically, "I won't drink any of Mom's milk until they soften the ambiance a bit with the light dimmer." You will notice that the extended meaning is sandwiched between the inital B and the final A of the root 'ba--milk.' TSAG is structurally akin to Eskimo and a number of Native American languages. It is not an easy language to learn, and I endured innumerable jibes from infants in regard to my labored production of their langauge. At first I informed them a bit haughtily that not only was I a speaker of the grownup language English, but could speak some Russian, Mandarin and Spanish as well. They said it all sounded like cows mooing.

4b. Semantics. TSAG has at least six-thousand lexical items (words) and possibly much more. Conversations with TSAG speakers are fairly predictable and circumscribed, and at times frustrating, though I have reason to believe they are more cerebral than they let on, as you will see. Here is a typical conversation with a two-month-old from Topeka:

Muir: Hi, how are you?

Baby: A bit colicky, but cautiously optimistic. Give that to me, will you?

M: Give what to you?

B: Never mind. I'm going to chew on this.

M: I see you are. I'd like to ask you a few questions.

B: You talk funny. You from the South?

M: No.

B: Well, you're not from around here; that's as plain as my mom's tit. I'm going to flail my stumpy things (arms) and cry a bit.

M: Why?

B: Look, Bud, you seem smart enough for an adult. You figure it out. (Baby screams, end of interview.)

Here is a list of high-frequency words:

ba = mother's milk, food, good, thing, something, anything

b'a = formula, food, good, something, anything

haha = personal attendant of nursing variety (mom)

hoho = personal attendant (dad, brother, sister, anyone else)

gak = eat, throw, wall, floor, dirty, nice

mak = feces, stink, bowel movement, frequent, nice

bo = spoon, throw, bang

ooa' = uh-oh

ee = high chair

uh = Neometaphysical platonic trantoniation. I overheard this in a bustling Manhattan daycare, and only with difficulty extracted an explanation, which I never quite understood. Okay, I didn't understand any of it at all. The infant quickly grew impatient with me and returned his attention to the cute seven-week-old baby next to him. I increasingly suspect that in my presence TSAG speakers dumb down the conversation as a polite gesture to assure that I understand. Conversations among TSAG speakers might be far more high-brow than I thought at first.

oogoo = a six-month-old who no longer speaks gagoo.

lapoo = stupid talk--kitchy kitchy koo type talk from adults to babies.

lap'oo = stupid talk--any grownup language at all (not considered quite as stupid as lapoo, but definitely more bovine).

gagoo = sensible talk.

4c. Phonology. TSAG relies heavily on lax vowels with the addition of a tense /ee/. By seven weeks a TSAG speaker fully distinguishes d/t, b/p, g/k and j/ch. There is no /v/ or /th/, though there is something like a German umlaut. The rhythm and cadence of this language is subtle and deceptively easy. Frankly, I am not as good at it as I believed at first, and have reconciled myself to carrying a thick accent. New York babies think I'm from Jersey, where they think I'm from the Midwest, where they think I'm from California, where they just accept me for who I am and offer me a sip of their pureed mango and banana splash.

5. Conclusion. These, then, are the general features of Gagoo, a watershed discovery in linguistics, rediscovered after a century of obscurity. Clearly more research remains, particularly in the relationship between ISAG and TSAG, and it is my hope that this summary will inspire other linguists to mine this wide-open field. As for the rest of us, Gagoo is a fascinating pursuit, and with diligence will more than repay the effort.

This, though, comes with a caveat to expectant and new parents. To you I say that while you no doubt will have an interest in learning Gagoo, don't bother. You probably don't have enough time to learn much of use. Remember, babies speak Gagoo for only five months before it mysteriously vanishes. If you are in fact a quick study at languages, it's nearly certain you will speak in a stumbling accent, and infants will question your intelliegence. And don't be fooled by the inevitable cd's promising "Gagoo in Five Easy Days." It's taken me three years of hard study merely to reach the status of 'infant-friend, not too bright.' I further suggest laying off baby talk, what they call 'lapoo.' Because of the "Does snoogy-oogums want cookie-ookie?" sort of talk they hear from adults, eleven percent of babies' utterances express grave concern that they are in the stewardship of blithering idiots. Of course, speaking regular English with them merely sounds like cows mooing, which doesn't boost IQ either. I think you parents had best just ride out the first five months until the slate is wiped clean and they begin learning English. In the meantime, make them lots of pureed mango and banana splashes. They like those, and your overall rating should go up.