In a message dated 10/21/2015 7:31:20 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx writes on a different thread: Thinking about customized
pets, at a stop light, I scanned the bumper of the car in front of me. It had
a sticker, “Parrots
Well, yes, a parrot is a customised pet.
Geary, who speaks proper English is fascinated by Locke's "Essay concerning
human understanding", where the Oxford philosopher) Locke, expands on an
English conversation (as reprinted) that a parrot (a customized pet if ever
there was one) once had with humans. Locke uses this example to prove that,
on occasion, a human (with his/her understanding) can become, by reversal,
the customized pet of the parrot (Grice disliked the spelling 'parrot',
and preferred 'pirot').
Cheers,
Speranza
Locke writes: "He told me short and coldly, that he had heard of such an
old parrot when
he had been at Brazil; and though he believed nothing of it, and it was a
good way off, yet he had so much curiosity as to send for it: that it was
a
very great and a very old one; and when it came first into the room where
the prince was, with a great many Dutchmen about him, it said presently,
What
a company of white men are here! They asked it, what it thought that man
was, pointing to the prince. It answered, Some General or other. When they
brought it close to him, he asked it, D'ou venez-vous? It answered, De
Marinnan. The Prince, A qui estes-vous? The Parrot, A un Portugais. The
Prince,
Que fais-tu la? Parrot, Je garde les poulles.
The Prince laughed, and said, Vous gardez les poulles? The Parrot answered,
Oui, moi; et je scai bien faire; and made the chuck four or five times
that people use to make to chickens when they call them. I set down the
words
of this worthy dialogue in French, just as Prince Maurice said them to me.
I asked him in what language the parrot spoke, and he said in Brazilian.
I asked whether he understood Brazilian; he said No, but he had taken care
to have two interpreters by him, the one a Dutchman that spoke Brazilian,
and the other a Brazilian that spoke Dutch; that he asked them separately
and privately, and both of them agreed in telling him just the same thing
that the parrot had said.
I could not but tell this odd story, because it is so much out of the way,
and from the first hand, and what may pass for a good one; for I dare say
this Prince at least believed himself in all he told me, having ever passed
for a very honest and pious man: I leave it to naturalists to reason, and
to other men to believe, as they please upon it; however, it is not,
perhaps, amiss to relieve or enliven a busy scene sometimes with such
digressions,
whether to the purpose or no.
I have taken care that the reader should have the story at large in the
author's own words, because he seems to me not to have thought it
incredible;
for it cannot be imagined that so able a man as he, who had sufficiency
enough to warrant all the testimonies he gives of himself, should take so
much
pains, in a place where it had nothing to do, to pin so close, not only on
a man whom he mentions as his friend, but on a Prince in whom he
acknowledges very great honesty and piety, a story which, if he himself
thought
incredible, he could not but also think ridiculous.
The Prince, it is plain, who vouches this story, and our author, who
relates it from him, both of them call this talker a parrot: and I ask any
one
else who thinks such a story fit to be told, whether, if this parrot, and
all
of its kind, had always talked, as we have a prince's word for it this one
did,- whether, I say, they would not have passed for a race of rational
animals; but yet, whether, for all that, they would have been allowed to
be
men, and not parrots?
For I presume it is not the idea of a thinking or rational being alone that
makes the idea of a man in most people's sense: but of a body, so and so
shaped, joined to it: and if that be the idea of a man, the same successive
body not shifted all at once, must, as well as the same immaterial spirit,
go to the making of the same man."
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