| Culture art. Primitive culture. CHAPTER VI. EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE (continued} - 2 |
Page 2 of 2 Again, there is the familiar process of reduplication, simple or modified, which produces such forms as murmur, pitpat, helterskeUer. This action, though much restricted in literary dialects, has such immense scope in the talk of children land savages that Professor Pott's treatise on it 1 has become ncidentally one of the most valuable collections of facts ever imade with relation to early stages of language. Now up to a certain point any child can see how and why such doubling is done, and how it always adds something to the original idea. It may make superlatives or otherwise intensify words, as in Polynesia loa ' long,' lololoa ' very long ' ; Mandingo ding a child/ dingding ' a very little child/ It makes plurals, as Malay raja-raja ' princes/ orang-orang ' people/ It adds numerals, as Mosquito walwal ' four ' (two-two), or distributes them, as Coptic ouai ouai ' singly ' (one-one). These are cases where the motive of doubling is compara- tively easy to make out . As an example of cases much more difficult to comprehend may be taken the familiar reduplica- tion of the perfect tense, Greek ytypa-fa from ypa^w, Latin momordi from . mordeo, Gothic haihald from haldan, ' to hold/ Reduplication is habitually used in imitative words to intensify them, and still more, to show that the sound is repeated or continuous. From, the immense mass of such words we may take as instances the Botocudo hou-hou-hou- gitcha ' to suck ' (compare Tongan huhu ' breast '), kiaku- kdck-kdck, ' a butterfly ' ; Quichua Muiuiuinichi ' wind whistling in the trees ' ; Maori haruru ' noise of wind * ; hohoro ' hurry ' ; Dayak kakakkaka ' to go on laughing loud ' ; Aino shiriushiriukanni ' a rasp ' ; Tamil murumuru ' to murmur.' ; Akra ewiewiewiewie ' he spoke repeatedly 1 Pott, ' Doppelung ( Reduplication, Gemination) als ernes der wichtigsten Bildungsmittel der Sprache,' 1862. Frequent use has been here made of this work. 22O , EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. and continually ' ; and so on, throughout the whole range of the languages of the world. The device of conveying different ideas of distance by the use of a graduated scale of vowels seems to me one of great philological interest, from the suggestive hint it gives of the proceedings of the language-makers in most distant regions of the world, working out in various ways a similar ingenious contrivance of expression by sound. A typical series is the Javan : iki ' this ' (close by) ; ika ' that ' (at some distance) ; iku ' that ' (farther off). It is not likely that the following list nearly exhausts the whole number of cases in the languages of the world, for about half the number have been incidentally noted down by myself without any especial search, but merely in the course of looking over vocabularies of the lower races. 1 Javan . . . t At, this ; ika, that (intermediate) ; *M, that. Malagasy . . ao, there (at a short distance) ; eo, there (at a shorter distance) ; to, there (close at hand), flwy, there (not far off) ; etsy, there (nearer) ; itsy, this or these. Japanese . . ko, here 5 ka, there. korera, these ; karera, they (those). Canarese . . ivanu, this ; uvanu, that (intermediate) ; avanu, that. Tamul . . i, this ; a, that. Rajmahali . . ?&, this ; db, that. Dhimal . . . ishoj ita, here ; usho, uta, there. m, idong, this ; uti, udong, that [of things and persons respectively], Abchasian . . abri^ this ; ubri, that. Ossetic . . . am, here ; m, there. Magyar . . . z, this ; az, that. Zulu . . . apa, here ; apo, there. /i, /o, lesiya; abu, abo, abuya ; &c.= this, that, that (in the distance). 1 For authorities see especially Pott, ' Doppelung,' p. 30, 47-49 ; W. v. Humboldt, ' Kawi-Spr.' vol. ii. p. 36 ; Max Muller in Bunsen, ' Philos. of Univ. Hist.' vol. i. p. 329 ; Latham, ' Comp. Phil.' p. 200 ; and the gram- mars and dictionaries of the particular languages. The Guarahi and Carib on authority of D'Orbigny, ' L'Homme Am6ricain,' vol. ii. p. 268 ; Dhimal of Hodgson, * Abor. of India,' p. 69, 79, 115; Colville Ind. of Wilson in 1 Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iv. p. 331 ; Botocudo of Martius, ' Gloss. Brasil.' GRADUATION OF VOWELS. 221 Yoruba . . . na, this ; ni, that. Fernandian . . olo, this ; ole, that. Tumale . . . re, this ; ri, that. gi, I ; ngo, thou ; ngu, he. Greenlandish . . uv, here, there (where one points to) ; iv, there, up there [found in comp.]. Sujelpa (Coleville Ind.), a-^a, this ; t^t, that. Sahaptin . . kina, here ; n<z, there. Mutsun . . . ne, here ; nu, there. Tarahumara . . ibe, here ; abe, there. Guarani . . . tide, ne, thou ; ndi, ni, he. Botocudo . . ati, I ; oti, thou, you, (prep.) to. Carib . . . ne, thou ; ni, he. Chilian . . . tva, vacbi, this ; tvey, veycbi, that. It is obvious on inspection of this list of pronouns and adverbs that they have in some way come to have their vowels contrasted to match the contrast of here and there , this and that. Accident may sometimes account for such cases. For instance it is well known to philologists that our own this and that are pronouns partly distinct in their formation, thi-s being probably two pronouns run together, but yet the Dutch neuters dit ' this,' and dot ' that,' have taken the appearance of a single form with contrasted vowels. 1 But accident cannot account for the frequency of such words in pairs, and even in sets of three, in so many different languages. There must have been some common intention at work, and there is evidence that some of these languages do resort to a change of sound as a means of ex- pressing change of distance. Thus the language of Fernando Po can not only express ' this ' and ' that ' by olo, ole, but it can even make a change of the pronunciation of the vowel distinguish between o boehe ' this month,' and oh boehe, 'that month.' In the same way the Grebo can make the difference between ' I ' and ' thou,' ' we/ and ' you/ ' solely by the intonation of the voice, which the final h of the second persons mdh and ah is intended to express/ ma di, I eat ; mdh di, thou eatest ; a di, we eat ; ab di, ye eat. 1 Also Old High German diz and daz. 222 ^MOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. The set of Zulu demonstratives which express the three distances of near, farther, farthest, are very complex, but a remark as to their use shows how thoroughly symbolic sound enters into their nature. The Zulus not only say nansi, ' here is,' nanso, ' there is/ nansiya, ' there is in the distance,' but they even express the greatness of this distance by the emphasis and prolongation of the ya. If we could discern a similar gradation of the vowels to express a corresponding gradation of distance throughout our list, the whole matter would be easier to explain ; but it is not so, the i-words for instance, are sometimes nearer and some- times farther off than the a-words. We can only judge that, as even children can see that a scale of vowels makes a most expressive scale of distances, many pronouns and adverbs in use in the world have probably taken their shape under the influence of this simple device, and thus there have arisen sets of what we may call contrasted or * differential ' words. How the differencing of words by change of vowels may be used to distinguish between the sexes, is well put in a remark of Professor Max Miiller's : ' The distinction of gender ... is sometimes expressed in such a manner that we can only explain it by ascribing an expressive power to the more or less obscure sound of vowels. Ukko, in Finnic, is an old man ; akka, an old woman. ... In Mandshu chacha is mas. . . . cheche, femina. Again, ama, in Mandshu, is father ; erne, mother ; amcha, father-in-law, cmche, mother-in-law.' 1 The Coretu language of Brazil has another curiously contrasted pair of words tsdacko, 4 father,' tsaacko ' mother,' while the Carib has baba for father, and bibi for mother, and the Ibu of Africa has nna for father and nne for mother. This contrivance of distinguishing the male from the female by a difference of vowels is however but a small part of the process of for- mation which can be traced among such words as those for father and mother. Their consideration leads into 1 Max Muller, I.e. CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE. 223 i very interesting philological region, that of ' Children's .anguage.' If we set down a few of the pairs of words which stand or ' father ' and ' mother ' in very different and distant anguages papa and mama ; Welsh, tad (dad] and mam ; Jungarian, atya and anya; Mandingo, fa and ba; Lummi N. America), man and tan; Catoquina (S. America), payu and nayu; Watchandie (Australia), amo and ago their contrast seems to lie in their consonants, while many other pairs differ totally, like Hebrew ab and im; Kuki, p'ha and noo; Kayan, amay and inei; Tarahumara, nono and jeje. Words of the class of papa and mama, occurring in remote >arts of the world, were once freely used as evidence of a common origin of the languages in which they were found alike. But Professor BuschmamVs paper on ' Nature- tSound,' published in I853, 1 effectually overthrew this [argument, and settled the view that such coincidence (might arise again and again by independent production. It was clearly of no use to argue that Carib and English jwere allied because the word papa, ' father,' belongs to (both, or Hottentot and English because both use mama for |* mother,' seeing that these childish articulations may be used in just the opposite way, for the Chilian word for mother is papa, and the Tlatskanai for father is mama. Yet the choice of easy little words for ' father ' and r mother ' does not seem to have been quite indiscriminate. The immense list of such words collected by Buschmann shows that the types pa and ta, with the similar forms ap and at, preponderate in the world as names for 'father,' while ma and na, am and an, preponderate as names for ' mother.' His explanation of this state of things as affected by direct symbolism choosing the hard sound for the father, and the gentler for the mother, has very likely truth in it, but it must not be pushed too far. It cannot be, for 1 J. C. E. Buschmann, ' Ueber den Naturlaut,' Berlin, 1853; and in * Abh. der K. Akad. d. Wissensch,' 1852. An English trans,, in ' Proc. Philo- logical Society,' vol. vi. See De Brosses, ' Form, des L.,' voL i. p, 2.1 \. 224 ' EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. instance, the same principle of symbolism which leads the Welshmen to say tad for ' father ' and mam for ' mother/ and the Indian of British Columbia to say maan, ' father ' and taan, ' mother/ or the Georgian to say mama ' father ' and deda ' mother/ Yet I have not succeeded in finding anywhere our familiar papa and mama exactly reversed in one and the same language ; the nearest approach to it that I can give is from the island of Meang, where mama meant ' father, man/ and babi, ' mother, woman/ 1 Between the nursery words papa and mama and the more formal father and mother there is an obvious resemblance in j sound. What, then, is the origin of these words father and j mother ? Up to a certain point their history is clear. They j belong to the same group of organized words with vater and j mutter, pater and mater, irarrip and /^rrjp, pitar and mdtar, : and other similar forms through the Indo-European family of languages. There is no doubt that all these pairs of names j are derived from an ancient and common Aryan source, and ' when they are traced back as far as possible towards that j source, they appear to have sprung from a pair of words which may be roughly called patar and matar, and which j were formed by adding tar, the suffix of the actor, to the verb-roots pa and ma. There being two appropriate Sanskrit I verbs pd and md, it is possible to etymologize the two words j as patar, ' protector/ and matar, ' producer/ Now this j pair of Aryan words must have been very ancient, lying back at the remote common source from which forms parallel to \ our English father and mother passed into Greek and Persian, Norse and Armenian, thus holding fixed type, through the eventful course of Indo-European history. Yet, ancient as these words are, they were no doubt preceded by simpler rudimentary words of the children's language, for it is not likely that the primitive Aryans did without baby- words for father and mother until they had an organized system of adding suffixes to verb-roots to express 1 One family of languages, the Athapascan, contains both appd and mama as terms for ' father,' in the Tahkali and Tlatskanai. CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE. 225 such notions as ' protector ' or ' producer.' Nor can it be supposed that it was by mere accident that the root- words thus chosen happened to be the very sounds pa and ma, whose types so often occur in the remotest parts of the world as names for ' father ' and ' mother.' Prof. Adolphe Pictet makes shift to account for the coincidence thus : he postulates first the pair of forms pa and ma as Aryan verb- roots of unknown origin, meaning ' to protect ' and ' to create,' next another pair of forms pa and ma, children's words commonly used to denote father and mother, and ' lastly he combines the two by supposing that the root- verbs pd and md were chosen to form the Indo-European words for parents, because of their resemblance to the familiar baby-words already in use. This circuitous pro- cess at any rate saves those sacred monosyllables, the Sanskrit verb-roots, from the disgrace of an assignable origin. Yet those who remember that these verb-roots are only a set of crude forms in use in one particular language of the world at one particular period of its development, may account for the facts more simply and more thoroughly. It is a fair guess that the ubiquitous pa and ma of the children's language were the original forms ; that they were used in an early period of Aryan speech as indiscriminately substantive and verb, just as our modern English, which so often reproduces the most rudimentary linguistic processes, can form from the noun ' father ' a verb ' to father ; ' and that lastly they became verb-roots, whence the words patar and motor were formed by the addition of the suffix. 1 The baby-names for parents must not be studied as though they stood alone in language. They are only import- ant members of a great class of words, belonging to all times and countries within our experience, and forming a chil- dren's language, whose common character is due to its con- 1 See Pott, ' Indo-Ger. Wurzelworterb.' s.v. ' pa * ; Bohtlingk and Roth, * Sanskrit-Worterb.' $. v. malar ; Pictet, ' Origines Indo-Europ.,' part iL p. 349 ; Max Muller, ' Lectures,' 2nd series, p. 212. 226 , EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. cerning itself with the limited set of ideas in which little children are interested, and expressing these ideas by the limited set of articulations suited to the child's first attempts to talk. This peculiar language is marked quite character- istically among the low savage tribes of Australia ; mamman 1 father/ ngangan ' mother,' and by metaphor ' thumb,' ' great toe ' (as is more fully explained in jinnamamman 1 great toe/ i.e. foot's father), tammin ' grandfather or grandmother/ bab-ba ' bad, foolish, childish/ bee-bee, beep ' breast/ pappi ' father/ pappa ' young one, pup, whelp/ (whence is grammatically formed the verb papparniti ' to be- come a young one, to be born/ Or if we look for examples from India, it does not matter whether we take them from non-Hindu or Hindu languages, for in baby-language all races are on one footing. Thus Tamil appd ' father/ amma ' mother/ Bodo aphd ' father/ ay a ' mother ; ' the Kocch group ndnd and ndni ' paternal grandfather and grandmother/ mdmd 'uncle/ dddd 'cousin/ may be set beside Sanskrit tata ' father/ nand ' mother/ and the Hindustani words of the same class, of which some are familiar to the English ear by being naturalized in Anglo- Indian talk, bdbd ' father/ bdbu ' child, prince, Mr./ MM ' lady/ dadd ' nurse ' (dyd ' nurse ' seems borrowed from Portuguese). Such words are continually coming fresh into existence everywhere, and the law of natural selection determines their fate. The great mass of the nana's and dada's of the nursery die out almost as soon as made. Some few take more root and spread over large districts as accepted nursery words, and now and then a curious philologist makes a collection of them. Of such, many are obvious mutilations of longer words, as French faire dodo ' to sleep ' (dormir), Brandenburg wwi, a common cradle lullaby (wiegen). Others, whatever their origin, fall, in consequence of the small variety of articulations out of which they must be chosen, into a curiously indiscriminate and unmeaning mass, as Swiss bobo ' a scratch ; ' bambam ' all gone ; ' Italian bob 6 ' something to drink/ gogo CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE. 227 ' little boy/ for dede ' to play.' These are words quoted ( by Pott, and for English examples nana ' nurse,' tata ! ' good-bye ! ' may serve. But all baby-words, as this very j name proves, do not stop short even at this stage of pub- I licit y. A small proportion of them establish themselves in I the ordinary talk of grown-up men and women, and when I they have once made good their place as constituents of fc general language, they may pass on by inheritance from age f to age. Such examples as have been here quoted of nursery i words give a clue to the origin of a mass of names in the }, most diverse languages, for father, mother, grandmother, aunt, child, breast, toy, doll, &c. The negro of Fernando Po who uses the word bubboh for ' a little boy/ is on equal terms with the German who uses bube; the Congo-man who uses tata for ' father ' would understand how the same , word could be used in classic Latin for 'father/ and in mediaeval Latin for ' pedagogue ; ' the Carib and the Caroline Islander agree with the Englishman that papa is a suitable word to express ' father/ and then it only remains to carry on the word, and make the baby-language name the priests of the Eastern Church and the great , Papa of the Western. At the same time the evidence explains the indifference with which, out of the small stock of available materials, the same sound does duty for the most different ideas ; why mama means here ' mother/ ' there ' father/ there ' uncle/ maman here ' mother/ there ' father-in-law/ dada here ' father, there ' nurse/ there ' breast/ tata here ' father/ there ' son/ A single group of words may serve to show the character of this peculiar region of language : Blackfoot Indian ninnah ' father ; * Greek vtwo* ' uncle/ viwa. ' aunt ; ' Zulu nina t Sangir nina, Malagasy nini 'mother;' Javan nini 'grandfather or grandmother ; ' Vayu nini ' paternal aunt ; ' Darien Indian ninah ' daughter ; ' Spanish nino, nina ' child ; ' Italian ninna 'little girl;' Milanese ninin 'bed;' Italian ninnare ' to rock the cradle/ In this way a dozen easy child's articulations, ba's and 228 EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. na's, ti's and de's, pa's and ma's, serve almost as indiscrimi- nately to express a dozen child's ideas as though they had been shaken in a bag and pulled out at random to express the notion that came first, doll or uncle, nurse or grand- father. It is obvious that among words cramped to such scanty choice of articulate sounds, speculations as to deriva- tion must be more than usually unsafe. Looked at from this point of view, children's language may give a valuable lesson to the philologist. He has before him a kind of language, formed, under peculiar conditions, and showing the weak points of his method of philological research, only exaggerated into extraordinary distinctness. In ordinary language, the difficulty of connecting sound with sense lies in great measure in the inability of a small and rigid set of articulations to express an interminable variety of tones and noises. In children's language, a still more scanty set of articulations fails yet more to render these distinctly. The difficulty of finding the derivation of words lies in great neasure in the use of more or less similar root-sounds for most heterogeneous purposes. To assume that two words of different meanings, just because they sound somewhat alike, must therefore have a common origin, is even in ordinary language the great source of bad etymology. But in children's language the theory of root-sounds fairly breaks down. Few would venture to assert, for instance, that papa and pap have a common derivation or a common root. All that we can safely say of connexion between them is that they are words related by common acceptance in the nursery language. As such, they are well marked in ancient Rome as in modern England : papas ' nutricius, nutritor,' pappus ' senex ; ' ' cum cibum et potum buas ac papas dicunt, et matrem mammam, patrem tatam (or papam).' l From children's language, moreover, we have striking proof of the power of consensus of society, in establishing words in settled use without their carrying traces of inherent 1 Facciolati, ' Lexicon ; ' Varro, ap. Nonn., ii. 97. CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE. 229 expressiveness. It is true that children are intimately ac- quainted with the use of emotional and imitative sound, and their vocal intercourse largely consists of such expression. The effects of this are in some degree discernible in the class of words we are considering. But it is obvious that the leading principle of their formation is not to adopt words distinguished by the expressive character of their sound, but to choose somehow a fixed word to answer a given purpose. To do this, different languages have chosen similar articulations to express the most diverse and oppo- site ideas. Now in the language of grown-up people, it is clear that social consensus has worked in the same way. Even if the extreme supposition be granted, that the ulti- mate origin of every word of language lies in inherently expressive sound, this only partly affects the case, for it would have to be admitted that, in actual languages, most words have so far departed in sound or sense from this originally expressive stage, that to all intents and purposes they might at first have been arbitrarily chosen. The main principle of language has been, not to preserve traces of original sound-signification for the benefit of future etymo- logists, but to fix elements of language to serve as counters for practical reckoning of ideas. In this process much original expressiveness has no doubt disappeared beyond all hope of recovery. Such are some of the ways in which vocal sounds seem to have commended themselves to the mind of the word-maker as fit to express his meaning, and to have been used accor- dingly. I do not think that the evidence here adduced justifies the setting-up of what is called the Interjectional and Imitative Theory as a complete solution of the problem of original language. Valid as this theory proves itself within limits, it would be incautious to accept a hypothesis which can perhaps satisfactorily account for a twentieth of the crude forms in any language, as a certain and absolute explanation of the nineteen-twentieths whose origin remains doubtful. A key must unlock more doors than this, to be I. Q 230 EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. taken as the master-key. Moreover, some special points which have come under consideration in these chapters tend to show the positive necessity of such caution in theorizing. Too narrow a theory of the application of sound to sense may fail to include the varied devices which the languages of different regions turn to account. It is thus with the distinction in meaning of a word by its musical accent, and the distinction of distance by graduated vowels. These are ingenious and intelligible contrivances, but they hardly seem directly emotional or imitative in origin. A safer way of putting the theory of a natural origin of language is to postulate the original utterance of ideas in what may be called self-expressive sounds, without denning closely whether their expression lay in emotional tone, imitative noise, contrast of accent or vowel or consonant, or other phonetic quality. Even here, exception of unknown and perhaps enormous extent must be made for sounds chosen by individuals to express some notion, from motives which even their own minds failed to discern, but which sounds nevertheless made good their footing in the language of the family, the tribe, and the nation. There may be many modes even of recognizable phonetic expression, unknown to us as yet. So far, however, as I have been able to trace them here, such modes have in common a claim to belong not exclusively to the scheme of this or that particular dialect, but to wide-ranging principles of formation of lan- guage. Their examples are to be drawn with equal cogency from Sanskrit or Hebrew, from the nursery-language of Lombardy, or the half-Indian, half-European jargon of Vancouver's Island; and wherever they are found, they help to furnish groups of sound-words words which have not lost the traces of their first expressive origin, but still carry their direct significance plainly stamped upon them. In fact, the time has now come for a substantial basis to be laid for Generative Philology. A classified collection of words with any strong claim to be self-expressive should be brought together out of the thousand or so of recognized UNITY AND DIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE. 23! languages and dialects of the world. In such a Dictionary of Sound- Words, half the cases cited might very likely be worthless, but the collection would afford the practical means of expurgating itself ; for it would show on a large scale what particular sounds have manifested their fitness to convey particular ideas, by having been repeatedly chosen among different races to convey them. Attempts to explain as far as may be the primary forma- tion of speech, by tracing out in detail such processes as have been here described, are likely to increase our know- ledge by sure and steady steps wherever imagination does not get the better of sober comparison of facts. But there is one side of this problem of the Origin of Language on which such studies have by no means an encouraging effect. Much of the popular interest in such matters is centred in the question, whether the known languages of the world have their source in one or many primaeval tongues. On this subject the opinions of the philologists who have com- pared the greatest number of languages are utterly at variance, nor has any one brought forward a body of philo- logical evidence strong and direct enough to make anything beyond mere vague opinion justifiable. Now such pro- cesses as the growth of imitative or symbolic words form a part, be it small or large, of the Origin of Language, but they are by no means restricted to any particular place or period, and are indeed more or less in activity now. Their operation on any two dialects of one language will be to introduce in each a number of new and independent words, and words even suspected of having been formed in this direct way become valueless as proof of genealogical con- nexion between the languages in which they are found. The test of such genealogical connexion must, in fact, be generally narrowed to such words or grammatical forms as have become so far conventional in sound and sense, that we cannot suppose two tribes to have arrived at them independently, and therefore consider that both must have inherited them from a common source. Thus the 232 EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. introduction of new sound-words tends to make it practi- cally of less and less consequence to a language what its original stock of words at starting may have been ; and the philologist's extension of his knowledge of such direct formations must compel him to strip off more and more of any language, as being possibly of later growth, before he can set himself to argue upon such a residuum as may have come by direct inheritance from times of primaeval speech. In concluding this survey, some general considerations suggest themselves as to the nature and first beginnings of language. In studying the means of expression among men in stages of mental culture far below our own, one of our first needs is to clear our minds of the kind of supersti- tious veneration with which articulate speech has so com- monly been treated, as though it were not merely the principal but the sole means of uttering thought. We must cease to measure the historical importance of emotional exclamations, of gesture-signs, and of picture-writing, by their comparative insignificance in modern civilized life, but must bring ourselves to associate the articulate words of the dictionary in one group with cries and gestures and pictures, as being all of them means of manifesting outwardly the inward workings of the mind. Such an admission, it must be observed, is far from being a mere detail of scientific classification. It has really a most important bearing on the problem of the Origin of Language. For as the reasons are mostly dark to us, why particular words are currently used to express particular ideas, language has come to be looked upon as a mystery, and either occult philosophical causes have been called in to explain its phenomena, or else the endowment of man with the facul- ties of thought and utterance has been deemed insufficient, and a special revelation has been demanded to put into his mouth the vocabulary of a particular language. In the debate which has been carried on for ages over this much- vexed problem, the saying in the ' Kratylos ' comes back to EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 233 minds again and again, where Sokrates describes the tymologists who release themselves from their difficulties to the origin of words by saying that the first words were livinely made, and therefore right, just as the tragedians, rfien they are in perplexity, fly to their machinery and ing in the gods. 1 Now I think that those who soberly mtemplate the operation of cries, groans, laughs, and other emotional utterances, as to which some considerations have been here brought forward, will admit that, at least, our present crude understanding of this kind of expression would lead us to class it among the natural actions of man's body and mind. Certainly, no one who understands any- thing of the gesture-language or of picture-writing would be justified in regarding either as due to occult causes, or to any supernatural interference with the course of man's intellectual development. Their cause evidently lies in natural operations of the human mind, not such as were effective in some long-past condition of humanity and have since disappeared, but in processes existing amongst us, which we can understand and even practise for ourselves. When we study the pictures and gestures with which savages and the deaf-and-dumb express their minds, we can mostly see at a glance the direct relation between the out- ward sign and the inward thought which it makes manifest. We may see the idea of ' sleep ' shown in gesture by the head with shut eyes, leant heavily against the open hand ; or the idea of ' running ' by the attitude of the runner, with chest forward, mouth half open, elbows and shoulders well back ; or ' candle ' by the straight forefinger held up, and as it were blown out ; or ' salt ' by the imitated act of sprinkling it with thumb and finger. The figures of the child's picture-book, the sleeper and the runner, the candle and the salt-cellar, show their purport by the same sort of evident relation between thought and sign. We so far understand the nature of these modes of utterance, that we are ready ourselves to express thought after thought by such 1 Plato, ' Cratylus ' 90. 234 EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. means, so that those who see our signs shall perceive our meaning. When, however, encouraged by our ready success in making out the nature and action of these ruder methods, we turn to the higher art of speech, and ask how such and such words have come to express such and such thoughts, we find ourselves face to face with an immense problem, as yet but in small part solved. The success of investigation has indeed been enough to encourage us to push vigorously forward in the research, but the present explorations have not extended beyond corners and patches of an elsewhere unknown field. Still the results go far to warrant us in associating expression by gestures and pictures with articu- late language as to principles of original formation, much as men associate them in actual life by using gesture and word at once. Of course, articulate speech, in its far more complex and elaborate development, has taken up devices to which the more simple and rude means of communication offer nothing comparable. Still, language, so far as its constitution is understood, seems to have been developed like writing or music, like hunting or fire-making, by the exercise of purely human faculties in purely human ways. This state of things by no means belongs exclusively to rudimentary philological operations, such as the choosing expressive sounds to name corresponding ideas by. In the higher departments of speech, where words already existing are turned to account to express new meanings and shade off new distinctions, we find these ends attained by con- trivances ranging from extfeme dexterity down to utter clumsiness. For a single instance, one great means of giving new meaning to old sound is metaphor, which transfers ideas from hearing to seeing, from touching to thinking, from the concrete of one kind to the abstract of another, and can thus make almost anything in the world help to describe or suggest anything else. What the German philosopher described as the relation of a cow to a coinet, that both have tails, is enough and more than EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 235 enough for the language-maker. It struck the Australians, when they saw a European book, that it opened and shut like a mussel-shell, and they began accordingly to call books ' mussels ' (muyum). The sight of a steam engine may suggest a whole group of such transitions in our own language ; the steam passes along ' fifes ' or ' trumpets/ that is, pipes or tubes, and enters by ' folding-doors ' Or valves, to push a ' pestle ' or piston up and down in a ' roller ' or cylinder, while the light pours from the furnace in ' staves ' or ' poles/ that is, in rays or beams. The dictionaries are full of cases compared with which such as these are plain and straightforward. Indeed, the processes by which words have really come into existence may often enough remind us of the game of ' What is my thought like ? ' When one knows the answer, it is easy enough to see what junketting and cathedral canons have to do with reeds ; Latin juncus ' a reed/ Low Latin juncata, ' cheese made in a reed-basket/ Italian giuncata ' cream cheese in a rush frail/ French joncade and English junket, which are preparations of cream, and lastly junketting parties where such delicacies are eaten ; Greek *avij, ' reed, cane,' xavwv, ' measure, rule/ thence canonicus, ' a clerk under the ecclesiastical rule or canon/ But who could guess the history of these words, who did not happen to know these intermediate links ? Yet there is about this process of derivation a thoroughly human artificial character. When we know the whole facts of any case, we can generally understand it at once, and see that we might have done the same ourselves had it come in our way. And the same thing is true of the processes of making sound- words detailed in these chapters. Such a view is, however, in no way inconsistent with the attempt to generalize upon these processes, and to state them as phases of the development of language among mankind. If certain men under certain circumstances produce certain results, then we may at least expect that other men much resembling these and placed under roughly similar circum- 236 EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. stances will produce more or less like results ; and this has been shown over and over again in these pages to be what really happens. Now Wilhelm von Humboldt's view that language is an ' organism ' has been considered a great step in philological speculation ; and so far as it has led students to turn their minds to the search after general laws, no doubt it has been so. But it has also caused an increase of vague thinking and talking, and thereby no small darkening of counsel. Had it been meant to say that human thought, language, and action generally, are organic in their nature, and work under fixed laws, this would be a very different matter ; but this is distinctly not what is meant, and the very object of calling language an organism is to keep it apart from mere human arts and contrivances. It was a hateful thing to Humboldt's mind to ' bring down speech to a mere operation of the understanding.' ' Man/ he says, ' does not so much form language, as discern with a kind of joyous wonder its developments, coming forth as of themselves.' Yet, if the practical shifts by which words are shaped or applied to fit new meanings are not devised by an operation of the understanding, we ought consistently to carry the stratagems of the soldier in the field, or the con- trivances of the workman at his bench, back into the dark regions of instinct and involuntary action. That the actions of individual men combine to produce results which may be set down in those general statements of fact which we call laws, may be stated once again as one of the main proposi- tions of the Science of Culture. But the nature of a fact is not altered by its being classed in common with others of the same kind, and a man is not less the intelligent inventor of a new word or a new metaphor, because twenty other intelligent inventors elsewhere may have fallen on a similar expedient. The theory that the original forms of language are to be referred to a low or savage condition of culture among the remotely ancient human race, stands in general consistency with the known facts of philology. The causes which have EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 237 | produced language, so far as they are understood, are notable for that childlike simplicity of operation which befits the infancy of human civilization. The ways in which sounds are in the first instance chosen and arranged to express ideas, are practical expedients at the level of nursery philosophy. A child of five years old could catch the meaning of imitative sounds, interjectional words, symbolism of sex or distance by contrast of vowels. Just as no one is likely to enter into the real nature of mytho- logy who has not the keenest appreciation of nursery tales, so the spirit in which we guess riddles and play at children's games is needed to appreciate the lower phases of language. Such a state of things agrees with the opinion that such rudimentary speech had its origin among men while in a childlike intellectual condition, and thus the self- expressive branch of savage language affords valuable materials for the problem of primitive speech. If we look back in imagination to an early period of human inter- course, where gesture and self-expressive utterance may have had a far greater comparative importance than among ourselves, such a conception introduces no new element into the problem, for a state of things more or less answer- ing to this is described among certain low savage tribes. If we turn from such self-expressive utterance, to that part of articulate language which carries its sense only by tradi- tional and seemingly arbitrary custom, we shall find no contradiction to the hypothesis. Sound carrying direct meaning may be taken up as an element of language,, keeping its first significance recognizable to nations yet unborn. But it may far more probably become by wear of sound and shift of sense an expressionless symbol, such as might have been chosen in pure arbitrariness a philo- logical process to which the vocabularies of savage dialects bear full witness. In the course of the development of language, such traditional words with merely an inherited meaning have in no small measure driven into the back- ground the self-expressive words, just as the Eastern 238 ' EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE. figures 2, 3, 4, which are not self -expressive, have driven into the background the Roman numerals II, III, IIII, which are this, again, is an operation which has its place in savage as in cultivated speech. Moreover, to look closely at language as a practical means of expressing thought, is to face evidence of no slight bearing on the history of civilization. We come back to the fact, so full of suggestion, that the languages of the world represent substantially the same intellectual art, the higher nations indeed gaining more expressive power than the lowest tribes, yet doing this not by introducing new and more effective central principles, but by mere addition and improvement in detail. The two great methods of naming thoughts and stating their relation to one another, viz., metaphor and syntax, belong to the infancy of 'human ex- pression, and are as thoroughly at home in the language of savages as of philosophers. If it be argued that this similarity in principles of language is due to savage tribes having descended from higher culture, carrying down with them in their speech the relics of their former excellence, the answer is that linguistic expedients are actually worked out with as much originality, and more extensively if not more profitably, among savages than among cultured men. Take for example the Algonquin system of compounding words, and the vast Esquimaux scheme of grammatical inflexion. Language belongs in essential principle both to low grades and high of civilization ; to which should its origin be attributed ? An answer may be had by comparing the methods of language with the work it has to do. Take language all in all over the world, it is obvious that the processes by which words are made and adapted have far less to do with systematic arrangement and scientific classi- fication, than with mere rough and ready ingenuity and the great rule of thumb. Let any one whose vocation it is to realize philosophical or scientific conceptions and to express them in words, ask himself whether ordinary language is an instrument planned for such purposes. Of course it is not. EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 239 It is hard to say which is the more striking, the want of scientific system in the expression of thought by words, or the infinite cleverness of detail by which this imperfection is got over, so that he who has an idea does somehow make shift to get it clearly in words before his own and other minds. The language by which a nation with highly developed art and knowledge and sentiment must express its thoughts on these subjects, is no apt machine devised for such special work, but an old barbaric engine added to and altered, patched and tinkered into some' sort of capa- bility. Ethnography reasonably accounts at once for the immense power and the manifest weakness of language as a means of expressing modern educated thought, by treating it as an original product of low culture, gradually adapted by ages of evolution and selection, to answer more or less sufficiently the requirements of modern civilization. |