YZUR (3)
By:
September 20, 2025
Inspired no doubt by Richard Lynch Garner’s widely publicized 1900 study Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language, Lugones’ proto-sf story about the secret of chimpanzee intelligence (and the cruelty of science) was first published in the author’s 1906 collection Las Fuerzas Extrañas (Strange Forces). Translation by Carlos Costa and Georges Dodds for ERBzine.com. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize an excerpt for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
But the exercise of speech is a difficult art, as it is proven by the long stammering of babies, which occurs in parallel with their intellectual development and acquisition of learned behaviours. It was demonstrated, in effect, that the center of the vocal nerves is associated with that of speech in such a way that the normal development of both depends on their harmonious exercise. This had already been pointed out by Heinicke in 1785, the creator of the oral method of education of the deaf-mute, along with its philosophical consequence. He speaks of “a dynamic concatenation of ideas”, a phrase whose great clarity would do honour to more than one contemporary psychologist.
Yzur was, with respect to speech, in the same situation as that of babies who before speaking already understands a number of words; but given his greater life experience, he was much more apt to make judgements regarding certain things.
These judgments, that, judging by the different forms they took, not only represented a gathering of impressions, but a sign of inquisitiveness and of reasoned analysis, suppose a capacity for abstract thinking. This indicated his superior degree of intelligence, which was most favourable to my purposes.
If my theories appear overly audacious, it should be sufficient to reflect that the syllogism, that is the fundamental basis of logical argument, is not alien to the mind of a number of animals. For originally, the syllogism was a comparison between two sensations. If not, then why do animals that know of men flee from them, and not from those that they have never met?
I began, then, the phonetic education of Yzur.
It involved with first teaching him words mechanically, then progressively moving onto meaningful words.
Monkeys having a voice and thus a great capacity for rudimentary articulations, have, so to speak, an advantage over the deaf-mute. It was only a matter of teaching him the differences that constitute the phonemes and their articulations, termed static or dynamic by teachers, according to whether they refer to vowels or consonants.
Given the gluttony of monkeys, and following in this a method used by Heinicke with the deaf-mute, I decided to associate each vowel with a treat: a with papa (potato); e with leche (milk); i with vino (wine); o with coco (coconut); u with azúcar (sugar), so that the vowels were either individually dominant or repeated in the name of the treat, as in papa, coco, leche, or presented in combination, with tonic and prosodic accentuation, as in vino, azúcar.
In terms of the vowels, everything turned out well, as these sounds are formed with the open mouth. Yzur learned them in a fortnight. However, sometimes, the air in his cheeks imparted a thundering roar to them. He had the most difficulty in pronouncing the letter u.
The consonants gave me a lot of trouble. I also learned that he would never be able to pronounce those consonants whose formation involves the teeth and gums. His long eyeteeth and his cheeks entirely hindered him from doing so.
The vocabulary was reduced, then to the five vowels and the consonants b, k, m, g, f and c. This is to say all those consonants whose formation requires nothing but palate and the tongue.
For this the ear was not sufficient, even for me. I had to appeal to the sense of touch like a deaf-mute, placing his hands on my chest and soon after on his chest so that he could feel the vibration of the sound.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.