Chapter XXI The Origin of Speech
§ 1. Introduction. § 2. Former Theories. § 3. Method. § 4. Sounds. § 5. Grammar. § 6. Units. § 7. Irregularities. § 8. Savage Tribes. § 9. Law of Development. § 10. Vocabulary. § 11. Poetry and Prose. § 12. Emotional Songs. § 13. Primitive Singing. § 14. Approach to Language. § 15. The Earliest Sentences. § 16. Conclusion.
XXI — § 1. Introduction
Much of what is contained in the last chapters is preparatory to the theme which is to occupy us in this chapter, the ultimate origin of human speech. We have already seen the feeling with which this subject has often been regarded by eminent linguists, the feeling which led to an absolute taboo of the question in the French Société de linguistique (p. 96). One may here quote Whitney: “No theme in linguistic science is more often and more voluminously treated than this, and by scholars of every grade and tendency; nor any, it may be added, with less profitable result in proportion to the labour expended; the greater part of what is said and written upon it is mere windy talk, the assertion of subjective views which commend themselves to no mind save the one that produces them, and which are apt to be offered with a confidence, and defended with a tenacity, that are in inverse ratio to their acceptableness. This has given the whole question a bad repute among sober-minded philologists” (OLS 1. 279).
Nevertheless, linguistic science cannot refrain for ever from asking about the whence (and about the whither) of linguistic evolution. And here we must first of all realize that man is not the only animal that has a ‘language,’ though at present we know very little about the real nature and expressiveness of the languages of birds and mammals or of the signalling system of ants, etc. The speech of some animals may be more like our language than most people are willing to admit—it may also in some respects be even more perfect than human language precisely because it is unlike it and has developed along lines about which we can know nothing; but it is of little avail to speculate on these matters. What is certain is that no race of mankind is without a language which in everything essential is identical in character with our own, and that there are a certain number of circumstances which have been of signal importance in assisting mankind in developing language (cf. Gabelentz Spr 294 ff.).
First of all, man has an upright gait; this gives him two limbs more than the dog has, for instance: he can carry things and yet jabber on; he is not reduced to defending himself by biting, but can use his mouth for other purposes. Feeding also takes less time in his case than in that of the cow, who has little time for anything else than chewing and a moo now and then. The sexual life of man is not restricted to one particular time of the year, the two sexes remain together the whole year round, and thus sociability is promoted; the helplessness of babies works in the same direction through necessitating a more continuous family life, in which there is also time enough for all kinds of sports, including play with the vocal organs. Thus conditions have been generally favourable for the development of singing and talking, but the problem is, how could sounds and ideas come to be connected as they are in language?
What method or methods have we for the solution of this question? With very few exceptions those who have written about our subject have conjured up in their imagination a primitive era, and then asked themselves: How would it be possible for men or manlike beings, hitherto unfurnished with speech, to acquire speech as a means of communication of thought? Not only is this method followed, so to speak, instinctively by investigators, but we are even positively told (by Marty) that it is the only method possible. In direct opposition to this assertion, I think that it is chiefly and principally due to this method and to this way of putting the question that so little has yet been done to solve it. If we are to have any hope of success in our investigation we must try new methods and new ways—and fortunately there are ways which lead us to a point from which we may expect to see the world of primitive language revealed to us in a new light. But let us first cast a rapid glance at those theories which have been advanced by followers of the speculative or a priori method.
XXI — § 2. Former Theories
One theory is that primitive words were imitative of sounds: man copied the barking of dogs and thereby obtained a natural word with the meaning of ‘dog’ or ‘bark.’ To this theory, nicknamed the bow-wow theory, Renan objects that it seems rather absurd to set up this chronological sequence: first the lower animals are original enough to cry and roar; and then comes man, making a language for himself by imitating his inferiors. But surely man would imitate not only the cries of inferior animals, but also those of his fellow-men, and the salient point of the theory is this: sounds which in one creature were produced without any meaning, but which were characteristic of that creature, could by man be used to designate the creature itself (or the movement or action productive of the sound). In this way an originally unmeaning sound could in the mouth of an imitator and in the mind of someone hearing that imitation acquire a real meaning. In the chapter on Sound Symbolism I have tried to show how from the rudest and most direct imitations of this kind we may arrive through many gradations at some of the subtlest effects of human speech, and how imitation, in the widest sense we can give to this word—a wider sense than most advocates of the theory seem able to imagine—is so far from belonging exclusively to a primitive age that it is not extinct even yet. There is not much of value in Max Müller’s remark that “the onomatopœic theory goes very smoothly as long as it deals with cackling hens and quacking ducks; but round that poultry-yard there is a high wall, and we soon find that it is behind that wall that language really begins” (Life 2. 97), or in his other remark that “words of this kind (cuckoo) are, like artificial flowers, without a root. They are sterile, and unfit to express anything beyond the one object which they imitate” (ib. 1. 410). But cuckoo may become cuckold (Fr. cocu), and from cock are derived the names Müller himself mentions, Fr. coquet, coquetterie, cocart, cocarde, coquelicot.... Echoic words may be just as fertile as any other part of the vocabulary.
Another theory is the interjectional, nicknamed the pooh-pooh, theory: language is derived from instinctive ejaculations called forth by pain or other intense sensations or feelings. The adherents of this theory generally take these interjections for granted, without asking about the way in which they have come into existence. Darwin, however, in The Expression of the Emotions, gives purely physiological reasons for some interjections, as when the feeling of contempt or disgust is accompanied by a tendency “to blow out of the mouth or nostrils, and this produces sounds like pooh or pish.” Again, “when anyone is startled or suddenly astonished, there is an instantaneous tendency, likewise from an intelligible cause, namely, to be ready for prolonged exertion, to open the mouth widely, so as to draw a deep and rapid inspiration. When the next full expiration follows, the mouth is slightly closed, and the lips, from causes hereafter to be discussed, are somewhat protruded; and this form of the mouth, if the voice be at all exerted, produces... the sound of the vowel o. Certainly a deep sound of a prolonged Oh! may be heard from a whole crowd of people immediately after witnessing any astonishing spectacle. If, together with surprise, pain be felt, there is a tendency to contract all the muscles of the body, including those of the face, and the lips will then be drawn back; and this will perhaps account for the sound becoming higher and assuming the character of Ah! or Ach!”
To the ordinary interjectional theory it may be objected that the usual interjections are abrupt expressions for sudden sensations and emotions; they are therefore isolated in relation to the speech material used in the rest of the language. “Between interjection and word there is a chasm wide enough to allow us to say that the interjection is the negation of language, for interjections are employed only when one either cannot or will not speak” (Benfey Gesch 295). This ‘chasm’ is also shown phonetically by the fact that the most spontaneous interjections often contain sounds which are not used in language proper, voiceless vowels, inspiratory sounds, clicks, etc., whence the impossibility properly to represent them by means of our ordinary alphabet: the spellings pooh, pish, whew, tut are very poor renderings indeed of the natural sounds. On the other hand, many interjections are now more or less conventionalized and are learnt like any other words, consequently with a different form in different languages: in pain a German and a Seelander will exclaim au, a Jutlander aus, a Frenchman ahi and an Englishman oh, or perhaps ow. Kipling writes in one of his stories: “That man is no Afghan, for they weep ‘Ai! Ai!’ Nor is he of Hindustan, for they weep ‘Oh! Ho!’ He weeps after the fashion of the white men, who say, ‘Ow! Ow!’”
A closely related theory is the nativistic, nicknamed the ding-dong, theory, according to which there is a mystic harmony between sound and sense: “There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. Each substance has its peculiar ring.” Language is the result of an instinct, a “faculty peculiar to man in his primitive state, by which every impression from without received its vocal expression from within”—a faculty which “became extinct when its object was fulfilled.” This theory, which Max Müller propounded and afterwards wisely abandoned, is mentioned here for the curiosity of the matter only.
Noiré started a fourth theory, nicknamed the yo-he-ho: under any strong muscular effort it is a relief to the system to let breath come out strongly and repeatedly, and by that process to let the vocal chords vibrate in different ways; when primitive acts were performed in common, they would, therefore, naturally be accompanied with some sounds which would come to be associated with the idea of the act performed and stand as a name for it; the first words would accordingly mean something like ‘heave’ or ‘haul.’
Now, these theories, here imperfectly reproduced each in a few lines, are mutually antagonistic: thus Noiré thinks it possible to explain the origin of speech without sound imitation. And yet what should prevent our combining these several theories and using them concurrently? It would seem to matter very little whether the first word uttered by man was bow-wow or pooh-pooh, for the fact remains that he said both one and the other. Each of the three chief theories enables one to explain parts of language, but still only parts, and not even the most important parts—the main body of language seems hardly to be touched by any of them. Again, with the exception of Noiré’s theory, they are too individualistic and take too little account of language as a means of human intercourse. Moreover, they all tacitly assume that up to the creation of language man had remained mute or silent; but this is most improbable from a physiological point of view. As a rule we do not find an organ already perfected on the first occasion of its use; it is only by use that an organ is developed.
XXI — § 3. Method
So much for the results of the first method of approaching the question of the origin of speech, that of trying to picture to oneself a speechless mankind and speculating on the way in which language could then have originated. We shall now, as hinted above (p. 413), indicate the ways in which it is possible to supplement, and even in some measure to supplant, this speculative or deductive method by means of inductive reasonings. These can be based on three fields of investigation, namely:
(1) The language of children;
(2) The language of primitive races, and
(3) The history of language.
Of these, the third is the most fruitful source of information.
First, as to the language of children. Some biologists maintain that the development of the individual follows on the whole the same course as that of the race; the embryo, before it arrives at full maturity, will have passed through the same stages of development which in countless generations have led the whole species to its present level. It has, therefore, occurred to many that the acquisition by mankind at large of the faculty of speech may be mirrored to us in the process by which any child learns to communicate its thoughts by means of its vocal organs. Accordingly, children’s language has often been invoked to furnish illustrations and parallels of the process gone through in the formation of primitive language. But many writers have been guilty of an erroneous inference in applying this principle, inasmuch as they have taken all their examples from a child’s acquisition of an already existing language. The fallacy will be evident if we suppose for a moment the case of a man endeavouring to arrive at the evolution of music from the manner in which a child is nowadays taught to play on the piano. Manifestly, the modern learner is in quite a different position to primitive man, and has quite a different task set him: he has an instrument ready to hand, and melodies already composed for him, and finally a teacher who understands how to draw these tunes forth from the instrument. It is the same thing with language: the task of the child is to learn an existing language, that is, to connect certain sounds heard on the lips of others with the same ideas that the speakers associate with them, but not in the least to frame anything new. No; if we are seeking some parallel to the primitive acquisition of language, we must look elsewhere and turn to baby language as it is spoken in the first year of life, before the child has begun to ‘notice’ and to make out what use is made of language by grown-up people. Here, in the child’s first purposeless murmuring, crowing and babbling, we have real nature sounds; here we may expect to find some clue to the infancy of the language of the race. And, again, we must not neglect the way children have of creating new words never heard before, and often of attaching a sense to originally meaningless conglomerations of sound.
As for the languages of contemporary savages, we may in some instances take them as typical of more primitive languages than those of civilized nations, and therefore as illustrating a linguistic stage that is nearer to that in which speech originated. Still, inferences from such languages should be used with great caution, for it should never be forgotten that even the most backward race has many centuries of linguistic evolution behind it, and that the conditions therefore may, or must, be very different from those of primeval man. The so-called primitive languages will therefore in the following sections be only invoked to corroborate conclusions at which it is possible to arrive from other data.
The third and most fruitful source from which to gather information of value for our investigation is the history of language as it has been considered in previous chapters of this work. While the propounders of the theories of the origin of speech mentioned above made straight for the front of the lion’s den, we are like the fox in the fable, who noticed that all the traces led into the den and not a single one came out; we will therefore try and steal into the den from behind. They thought it logically correct, nay necessary, to begin at the beginning; let us, for variety’s sake, begin with languages accessible at the present day, and let us attempt from that starting-point step by step to trace the backward path. Perhaps in this way we may reach the very first beginnings of speech.
The method I recommend, and which I think I am the first to employ consistently, is to trace our modern twentieth-century languages as far back in time as history and our materials will allow us; and then, from this comparison of present English with Old English, of Danish with Old Norse, and of both with ‘Common Gothonic,’ of French and Italian with Latin, of modern Indian dialects with Sanskrit, etc., to deduce definite laws for the development of languages in general, and to try and find a system of lines which can be lengthened backwards beyond the reach of history. If we should succeed in discovering certain qualities to be generally typical of the earlier as opposed to the later stages of languages, we shall be justified in concluding that the same qualities obtained in a still higher degree in the earliest times of all; if we are able within the historical era to demonstrate a definite direction of linguistic evolution, we must be allowed to infer that the direction was the same even in those primeval periods for which we have no documents to guide us. But if the change witnessed in the evolution of modern speech out of older forms of speech is thus on a larger scale projected back into the childhood of mankind, and if by this process we arrive finally at uttered sounds of such a description that they can no longer be called a real language, but something antecedent to language—why, then the problem will have been solved; for transformation is something we can understand, while a creation out of nothing can never be comprehended by human understanding.
This, then, will be the object of the following rapid sketch: to search the several departments of the science of language for general laws of evolution—most of them have already been discussed at some length in the preceding chapters—then to magnify the changes observed, and thus to form a picture of the outer and inner structure of some sort of speech more primitive than the most primitive language accessible to direct observation.
XXI — § 4. Sounds
First, as regards the purely phonetic side of language, we observe everywhere the tendency to make pronunciation more easy, so as to lessen the muscular effort; difficult combinations of sounds are discarded, those only being retained which are pronounced with ease (see Ch. XIV § 6 ff.). Modern research has shown that the Proto-Aryan sound-system was much more complicated than was imagined in the reconstructions of the middle of the nineteenth century. In most languages now only such sounds are used as are produced by expiration, while inbreathed sounds and clicks or suction-stops are not found in connected speech. In civilized languages we meet with such sounds only in interjections, as when an inbreathed voiceless l (generally with rhythmic variations of strength and corresponding small movements of the tongue) is used to express delight in eating and drinking, or when the click inadequately spelt tut is used to express impatience. In some very primitive South African languages, on the other hand, clicks are found as integral parts of words; and Bleek has rendered it probable that in former stages of these languages they were in more extensive use than now. We may perhaps draw the conclusion that primitive languages in general were rich in all kinds of difficult sounds.
The following point is of more far-reaching consequence. In some languages we find a gradual disappearance of tone or pitch accent; this has been the case in Danish, whereas Norwegian and Swedish have kept the old tones; so also in Russian as compared with Serbo-Croatian. In the works of old Indian, Greek and Latin grammarians we have express statements to the effect that pitch accent played a prominent part in those languages, and that the intervals used must have been comparatively greater than is usual in our modern languages. In modern Greek and in the Romanic languages the tone element has been obscured, and now ‘stress’ is heard on the syllable where the ancients noted only a high or a low tone. About the languages spoken nowadays by savage tribes we have generally very little information, as most of those who have made a first-hand study of such languages have not been trained to observe and to describe these delicate points; still, there is of late years an increasing number of observations of tone accents, for instance in African languages, which may justify us in thinking that tone plays an important part in many primitive languages.107
So much for word tones; now for the sentence melody. It is a well-known fact that the modulation of sentences is strongly influenced by the effect of intense emotions in causing stronger and more rapid raisings and sinkings of the tone. “All passionate language does of itself become musical—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song” (Carlyle). “The sounds of common conversation have but little resonance; those of strong feeling have much more. Under rising ill-temper the voice acquires a metallic ring.... Grief, unburdening itself, uses tones approaching in timbre to those of chanting; and in his most pathetic passages an eloquent speaker similarly falls into tones more vibratory than those common to him.... While calm speech is comparatively monotonous, emotion makes use of fifths, octaves, and even wider intervals” (H. Spencer).
Now, it is a consequence of advancing civilization that passion, or, at least, the expression of passion, is moderated, and we must therefore conclude that the speech of uncivilized and primitive men was more passionately agitated than ours, more like music or song. This conclusion is borne out by what we hear about the speech of many savages in our own days. European travellers very often record their impression of the speech of different tribes in expressions like these: “pronouncing whatever they spoke in a very singing manner,” “the singing tone of voice, in common conversation, was frequent,” “the speech is very much modulated and resembles singing,” “highly artificial and musical,” etc.
These facts and considerations all point to the conclusion that there once was a time when all speech was song, or rather when these two actions were not yet differentiated; but perhaps this inference cannot be established inductively at the present stage of linguistic science with the same amount of certainty as the statements I am now going to make as to the nature of primitive speech.
As we have seen above (Ch. XVII § 7), a great many of the changes going on regularly from century to century, as well as some of the sudden changes which take place now and then in the history of each language, result in the shortening of words. This is seen everywhere and at all times, and in consequence of this universal tendency we find that the ancient languages of our family, Sanskrit, Zend, etc., abound in very long words; the further back we go, the greater the number of sesquipedalia. We have seen also how the current theory, according to which every language started with monosyllabic roots, fails at every point to account for actual facts and breaks down before the established truths of linguistic history. Just as the history of religion does not pass from the belief in one god to the belief in many gods, but inversely from polytheism towards monotheism, so language proceeds from original polysyllabism towards monosyllabism: if the development of language took the same course in prehistoric as in historic times, we see, by projecting the teaching of history on a larger scale back into the darkest ages, that early words must have been to present ones what the plesiosaurus and gigantosaurus are to present-day reptiles. The outcome of this phonetic section is, therefore, that we must imagine primitive language as consisting (chiefly at least) of very long words, full of difficult sounds, and sung rather than spoken.
XXI — § 5. Grammar
Can anything be stated about the grammar of primitive languages? Yes, I think so, if we continue backwards into the past the lines of evolution resulting from the investigations of previous chapters of this volume. Ancient languages have more forms than modern ones; forms originally kept distinct are in course of time confused, either phonetically or analogically, alike in substantives, adjectives and verbs.
A characteristic feature of the structure of languages in their early stages is that each form of a word (whether verb or noun) contains in itself several minor modifications which, in the later stages, are expressed separately (if at all), that is, by means of auxiliary verbs or prepositions. Such a word as Latin cantavisset unites in one inseparable whole the equivalents of six ideas: (1) ‘sing,’ (2) pluperfect, (3) that indefinite modification of the verbal idea which we term subjunctive, (4) active, (5) third person, and (6) singular. The tendency of later stages is towards expressing such modifications analytically; but if we accept the terms ‘synthesis’ and ‘analysis’ for ancient and recent stages, we must first realize that there exist many gradations of both: in no single language do we find either synthesis or analysis carried out with absolute purity and consistency. Everywhere we find a more or less. Latin is synthetic in comparison with French, French analytic in comparison with Latin; but if we were able to see the direct ancestor of Latin, say two thousand years before the earliest inscriptions, we should no doubt find a language so synthetic that in comparison with it Cicero’s would have to be termed highly analytic.
Secondly, we must not from the term ‘synthesis,’ which etymologically means ‘composition’ or ‘putting together,’ draw the conclusion that synthetic forms, such as we find, for instance, in Latin, consist of originally independent elements put together and thus in their turn presuppose a previous stage of analysis. Whoever does not share the usual opinion that all flexional forms have originated through coalescence of separate words, but sees as we have seen (in Ch. XIX) also the reverse process of inseparable portions of words gaining greater and greater independence, will perhaps do well to look out for a better and less ambiguous word than synthesis to describe the character of primitive speech. What in the later stages of languages is analyzed or dissolved, in the earlier stages was unanalyzable or indissoluble; ‘entangled’ or ‘complicated’ would therefore be better renderings of our impression of the first state of things.
XXI — § 6. Units
But are the old forms really less dissoluble than their modern equivalents? This is repeatedly denied even by recent writers, on whom my words in Progress, p. 117, cannot have made much impression, if they have read them at all; and it will therefore be necessary to take up this cardinal point. Let me begin with quoting what others have said. “Historically considered, the Latin amat is really two words, as much as its English representative, the final t being originally a pronoun signifying ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘it,’ and it is only reasons of practical convenience that prevent us from writing am at or ama t as two and heloves as one word.... The really essential difference between amat and he loves is that in the former the pronominal element is expressed by a suffix, in the latter by a prefix” (Sweet PS 274, 1899). “It is purely accidental that the Latin form is not written am-av-it. To the unsophisticated Frenchman il a aimé is neither less nor more one unit than amavit to a Roman.... When the locution il a aimé sprang up, each element of it was still to some extent felt separately; but after it had become a fixed formula the elements were fused together into one whole. As a matter of fact, uneducated French people have not the least idea whether it is one or three words they speak” (Sütterlin WGS 11, 1902). “In some modern languages the personal pronoun is, just as in archaic Greek, beginning to be amalgamated with verbs so as to become a mere termination (sic: désinence; prefix must be what is meant): Fr. j’don’, tu-don’, il-don’ (je donne, tu donnes, il donne) and E. i-giv’, we giv’, you-giv’, they-giv’, correspond exactly to Gr. dido-mi, dido-si, dido-ti, only that the personal particle is in a different place” (Dauzat V 155, 1910). “If French were a savage language not yet reduced to writing, a travelling linguist, hearing the present tense of the verb aimer pronounced by the natives, would transcribe it in the following way: jèm, tu èm, ilèm, nouzémon, vouzémé, ilzèm. He would be struck particularly with the agglutination of the pronominal subject and the verb, and would never feel tempted to draw up a paradigm without pronouns: aime, aimes, aime, aimons, etc., in which traditional spelling makes us believe.... He would even, through a comparison of ilèm and ilzèm, be led to establish a tendency to incorporation, as the only sign of the plural is a z infixed in the verbal complex” (Bally LV 43, 1913).
In these utterances two questions are really mixed together, that of the origin of Aryan flexional forms and that of the actual status of some forms in various languages. As to the former question, we have seen (p. 383) how very uncertain it is that amat and didosi, etc., contain pronouns. As to the latter question, it is quite true that we should not let the usual spelling be decisive when it is asked whether we have one or two or three words; but all these writers strangely overlook the really important criteria which we possess in this matter. Bally’s traveller could only have arrived at his result by listening to grammar lessons in which the three persons of the verb were rattled off one after the other, for if he had taken his forms from actual conversation he would have come across numerous instances in which the forms occurred without pronouns, first in the imperative, aime, aimons, aimez, then in collocations like celui qui aime, ceux qui aiment, in which there is no infix to denote the plural; in le mari aime, les maris aiment, and innumerable similar groups there is neither pronoun nor infix. If he were at first inclined to take ilaaimé as one word, he would on further acquaintance with the language discover that the elements were often separated: il n’a pas aimé, il nous a toujours aimés, etc. Similarly with the English forms adduced: I never give, you always give. This is the crucial point: the French and English combinations are two (three) words because the elements are not always placed together; Lat. amat, amavit, are each of them only one word because they can never be divided, and in the same way we never find anything placed between am and o in the first person, amo. These forms are as inseparable as E. loves, but E. heloves is separable because both he and loves can stand alone, and can also, in certain combinations, though now rarely, be transposed: loves he. Some writers would compare French combinations like il te le disait with verbal forms in certain Amerindian languages, in which subject and direct and indirect object are alike ‘incorporated’ in a ‘polysynthetic’ verbal form; it is quite true that these French pronominal forms can never be used by themselves, but only in conjunction with a verb; still, the French pronouns are more independent of each other than the elements of some other more primitive languages. In the first place, this is shown by the possibility of varying the pronunciation: il te le disait may be either [itlədizɛ] or [itəldizɛ] or even more solemnly [iltələdizɛ]; secondly, by the regularity of these joined pronominal forms, for they are always the same, whatever the verb may be; and lastly, by their changing places in certain cases: te le disait-il? dis-le-lui, etc.
Nor can it be said that English forms like he’s = he is (or he has), I’d = I had (or I would), he’ll = he will show a tendency towards ‘entangling,’ for however closely together these forms are generally pronounced, each of them must be said to consist of two words, as is shown by the possibility of transposition (Is he ill?) and of intercalation of other words (I never had); it is also noteworthy that the same short forms of the verbs can be added to all kinds of words (the water’ll be..., the sea’d been calm). In the forms don’t, won’t, can’t there is something like amalgamation of the verbal with the negative idea. Still, it is important to notice that the amalgamation only takes place with a few verbs of the auxiliary class. In saying ‘I don’t write’ the full verb is not touched by the fusion, and is even allowed to be unchanged in cases where it would have been inflected if no auxiliary had been used; compare I write, he writes, I wrote with the negative I don’t write, he doesn’t write, I didn’t write. It will be seen, especially if we take into account the colloquial or vulgar form for the third person, he don’t write, that the general movement here as elsewhere is really rather in the direction of ‘isolation’ than of fusion; for the verbal form write is stripped of all signs of person and tense, the person being indicated separately (if at all), and the tense sign being joined to the negation. So also in interrogative sentences; and if that tendency which can be observed in Elizabethan English had prevailed by using the combination I do write in positive statements, even where no special emphasis is intended, English verbs (except a few auxiliaries) would have been entirely stripped of those elements which to most grammarians constitute the very essence of a verb, namely, the marks of person, number, tense and mood, write being the universal form, besides the quasi-nominal forms writing and written.
Now, it is often said that the history of language shows a sort of gyration or movement in spirals, in which synthesis is followed by analysis, this by a new synthesis (flexion), and this again by analysis, and so forth. Latin amabo (which according to the old theory was once ama + some auxiliary) has been succeeded by amare habeo, which in its turn is fused into amerò, aimerai, and the latter form is now to some extent giving way to je vais aimer. But this pretended law of rotation is only arrived at by considering a comparatively small number of phenomena, and not by viewing the successive stages of the same language as wholes and drawing general inferences as to their typically distinctive characters (cf. above, p. 337). If for every two instances of new flexions springing up we see ten older ones discarded in favour of analysis or isolation, are we not entitled to the generalization that flexion or indissolubility tends to give way to analysis? We should beware of being under the same delusion as a man who, in walking over a mountainous country, thinks that he goes down just as many and just as long hills as he goes up, while on the contrary each ascent is higher than the preceding descent, so that finally he finds himself unexpectedly many thousand feet above the level from which he started.
The direction of movement is towards flexionless languages (such as Chinese, or to a certain extent Modern English) with freely combinable elements; the starting-point was flexional languages (such as Latin or Greek); at a still earlier stage we must suppose a language in which a verbal form might indicate not only six things, like cantavisset, but a still larger number, in which verbs were perhaps modified according to the gender (or sex) of the subject, as they are in Semitic languages, or according to the object, as in some Amerindian languages, or according to whether a man, a woman, or a person who commands respect is spoken to, as in Basque. But that amounts to the same thing as saying that the border-line between word and sentence was not so clearly defined as in more recent times; cantavisset is really nothing but a sentence-word, and the same holds good to a still greater extent of the sound conglomerations of Eskimo and some other North American languages. Primitive linguistic units must have been much more complicated in point of meaning, as well as much longer in point of sound, than those with which we are most familiar.
XXI — § 7. Irregularities
Another point of great importance is this: in early languages we find a far greater number of irregularities, exceptions, anomalies, than in modern ones. It is true that we not unfrequently see new irregularities spring up, where the formations were formerly regular; but these instances are very far from counterbalancing the opposite class, in which words once irregularly inflected become regular, or are given up in favour of regularly inflected words, or in which anomalies in syntax are levelled. The tendency is more and more to denote the same thing by the same means in every case, to extend the ending, or whatever it is, that is used in a large class of words to express a certain modification of the central idea, until it is used in all other words as well.
Comparative linguistics did not attain a scientific character till the principle was established that the relationship of two languages had to be determined by a thoroughgoing conformity in the most necessary parts of language, namely (besides grammar proper) pronouns and numerals and the most indispensable of nouns and verbs. But if this domain of speech, by preserving religiously, as it were, the old tradition, affords infallible criteria of the near or remote relationship of different languages, may we not reasonably expect to find in the same domain some clue to the oldest grammatical system used by our ancestors? What sort of system, then, do we find there? We see such a declension as I, me, we, us: the several forms of the ‘paradigm’ do not at all resemble each other, as they do in more recently developed declensions. We find masculines and feminines, such as father, mother, man, wife, bull, cow; while such methods of derivation as are seen in count, countess, he-bear, she-bear, belong to a later time. We meet with degrees of comparison like good, better, ill, worse, while regular forms like happy, happier, big, bigger, prevail in all the younger strata of languages. We meet with verbal flexion such as appears in am, is, was, been, which forms a striking contrast to the more modern method of adding a mere ending while leaving the body of the word unchanged. In an interesting book, Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen (1899), H. Osthoff has collected a very great number of examples from the old Aryan languages of different stems supplementing each other, and has pointed out that this phenomenon is characteristic of the most necessary ideas occurring every moment in ordinary conversation: I take at random a few of the best-known of his examples: Fr. aller, je vais, j’irai, Lat. fero, tuli, Gr. horaō, opsomai, eidon, Lat. bonus, melior, optimus. Osthoff fully agrees with me that we have here a trait of primitive psychology: our remote ancestors were not able to see and to express what was common to these ideas; their minds were very unsystematic, and separated in their linguistic expressions things which from a logical point of view are closely related: much of their grammar, therefore, was really of a lexical character.
XXI — § 8. Savage Tribes
If now it is asked whether the conclusions we have thus arrived at are borne out by a consideration of the languages of savage or primitive races nowadays, the answer is that these cannot be lumped together; there are among them many different types, even with regard to grammatical structure. But the more these languages are studied and the more accurately their structure is described, the more also students perceive intricacies and anomalies in their grammar. Gabelentz (Spr 386) says that the casual observer has no idea how manifold and how nicely circumscribed grammatical categories can be, even in the seemingly crudest languages, for ordinary grammars tell us nothing about that. P. W. Schmidt (Die Stellung der Pygmäenvölker, 1910, 129) says that whoever, from the low culture of the Andamanese, would expect to find their language very simple and poor in expressions would be strangely deceived, for its mechanism is highly complicated, with many prefixes and suffixes, which often conceal the root itself. Meinhof (MSA 136) mentions the multiplicity of plural formations in African languages. Vilhelm Thomsen, in speaking of the Santhal (Khervarian) language, says that its grammar is capable of expressing a multiplicity of nuances which in other languages must be expressed by clumsy circumlocutions; the native speakers go beyond what is necessary through requiring expressions for many subordinate notions, the language having, so to speak, only one fine gold-balance, on which everything, even the simplest and commonest things, must be weighed by the adding-up of a whole series of minutiæ. Curr speaks about the erroneous belief in the simplicity of Australian languages, which on the contrary have a great number of conjugations, etc. The extreme difficulty and complex structure of Eskimo and of many Amerindian languages is so notorious that no words need be wasted on them here. And the forms of the Basque verb are so manifold and intricate that we understand how Larramendi, in his legitimate pride at having been the first to reduce them to a system, called his grammar El Imposible Vencido, ‘The Impossible Overcome.’ At Béarn they have the story that the good God, wishing to punish the devil for the temptation of Eve, sent him to the Pays Basque with the command that he should remain there till he had mastered the language. At the end of seven years God relented, finding the punishment too severe, and called the devil to him. The devil had no sooner crossed the bridge of Castelondo than he found he had forgotten all that he had so hardly learned.
What is here said about the languages of wild tribes (and of the Basques, who are not exactly savages, but whose language is generally taken to have retained many primeval traits) is in exact keeping with everything that recent study of primitive man has brought to light: the life of the savage is regulated to the minutest details through ceremonies and conventionalities to be observed on every and any occasion; he is restricted in what he may eat and drink and when and how; and all these, to our mind, irrational prescriptions and innumerable prohibitions have to be observed with the most scrupulous, nay religious, care: it is the same with all the meticulous rules of his language.
XXI — § 9. Law of Development
So far, then, from subscribing to Whitney’s dictum that “the law of simplicity of beginnings applies to language not less naturally and necessarily than to other instrumentalities” (G 226), we are drawn to the conclusion that primitive language had a superabundance of irregularities and anomalies, in syntax and word-formation no less than in accidence. It was capricious and fanciful, and displayed a luxuriant growth of forms, entangled one with another like the trees in a primeval forest. “Rien n’entre mieux dans les esprits grossiers que les subtilités des langues” (Tarde, Lois de l’imitation 285). Human minds in the early times disported themselves in long and intricate words as in the wildest and most wanton play. Nothing could be more beside the mark than to suppose that grammatical and logical categories were in primitive languages generally in harmony (as is supposed, e.g., by Sweet, New Engl. Grammar § 543): primitive speech cannot have been distinguished for logical consistency; nor, so far as we can judge, was it simple and facile: it is much more likely to have been extremely clumsy and unwieldy. Renan rightly reminds us of Turgot’s wise saying: “Des hommes grossiers ne font rien de simple. Il faut des hommes perfectionnés pour y arriver.”
We have seen in earlier chapters that the old theory of the three stages through which human language was supposed always to proceed, isolation, agglutination and flexion, was built up on insufficient materials; but while we feel tempted totally to reverse this system, we must be on our guard against establishing too rigid and too absolute a system ourselves. It would not do simply to reverse the order and say that flexion is the oldest stage, from which language tends through an agglutinative stage towards complete isolation, for flexion, agglutination and isolation do not include all possible structural types of speech. The possibilities of development are so manifold, and there are such innumerable ways of arriving at more or less adequate expressions for human thought, that it is next to impossible to compare languages of different families. Even, therefore, if it is probable that English, Finnish and Chinese are all simplifications of more complex languages, we cannot say that Chinese, for instance, at one time resembled English in structure and at some other time Finnish. English was once a flexional language, and is still so in some respects, while in others it is agglutinative, and in others again isolating, or nearly so. But we may perhaps give the following formula of what is our total impression of the whole preceding inquiry:
The evolution of language shows a progressive tendency from inseparable irregular conglomerations to freely and regularly combinable short elements.
The old system of historical linguistics may be likened to an enormous pyramid; only it is a pity that it should have as its base the small, square, strong, smart root word, and suspended above it the unwieldy, lumbering, ill-proportioned, flexion-encumbered sentence-vocable. Structures of this sort may with some adroitness be made to stand; but their equilibrium is unstable, and sooner or later they will inevitably tumble over.
XXI — § 10. Vocabulary
On the lexical side of language we find a development parallel to that noticed in grammar; and, indeed, if we go deep enough into the question, we shall see that it is really the very same movement that has taken place. The more advanced a language is, the more developed is its power of expressing abstract or general ideas. Everywhere language has first attained to expressions for the concrete and special. In accounts of the languages of barbarous races we constantly come across such phrases as these: “The aborigines of Tasmania had no words representing abstract ideas; for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree, etc., they had a name; but they had no equivalent for the expression ‘a tree’; neither could they express abstract qualities, such as ‘hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, round’”; or, The Mohicans have words for cutting various objects, but none to convey cutting simply. The Zulus have no word for ‘cow,’ but words for ‘red cow,’ ‘white cow,’ etc. (Sayce S 2. 5, cf. 1. 121). In Bakaïri (Central Brazil) “each parrot has its special name, and the general idea ‘parrot’ is totally unknown, as well as the general idea ‘palm.’ But they know precisely the qualities of each subspecies of parrot and palm, and attach themselves so much to these numerous particular notions that they take no interest in the common characteristics. They are choked in the abundance of the material and cannot manage it economically. They have only small coin, but in that they must be said to be excessively rich rather than poor” (K. v. d. Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Brasiliens, 1894, 81). The Lithuanians, like many primitive tribes, have many special, but no common names for various colours: one word for gray in speaking about wool and geese, one about horses, one about cattle, one about the hair of men and some animals, and in the same way for other colours (J. Schmidt, Kritik d. Sonantentheorie 37). Many languages have no word for ‘brother,’ but words for ‘elder brother’ and ‘younger brother’; others have different words according to whose (person and number) father or brother it is (see, e.g., the paradigm in Gabelentz Spr 421), and the same applies in many languages to names for various parts of the body. In Cherokee, instead of one word for ‘washing’ we find different words, according to what is washed: kutuwo ‘I wash myself,’ kulestula ‘I wash my head,’ tsestula ‘I wash the head of somebody else,’ kukuswo ‘I wash my face,’ tsekuswo ‘I wash the face of somebody else,’ takasula ‘I wash my hands or feet,’ takunkela ‘I wash my clothes,’ takutega ‘I wash dishes,’ tsejuwu ‘I wash a child,’ kowela ‘I wash meat’ (see, however, the criticism of Hewitt, Am. Anthropologist, 1893, 398). Primitive man did not see the wood for the trees.108
In some Amerindian languages there are distinct series of numerals for various classes of objects; thus in Kwakiatl and Tsimoshian (Sapir, Language and Environment 239); similarly the Melanesians have special words to denote a definite number of certain objects, e.g. a buku niu ‘two coconuts,’ a buru ‘ten coconuts,’ a koro ‘a hundred coconuts,’ a selavo ‘a thousand coconuts,’ a uduudu ‘ten canoes,’ a bola ‘ten fishes,’ etc. (Gabelentz, Die melan. Spr. 1. 23). In some languages the numerals are the same for all classes of objects counted, but require after them certain class-denoting words varying according to the character of the objects (in some respects comparable to the English twenty head of cattle, Pidgin piecey; cf. Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson s.v. Numerical Affixes). This reminds one of the systems of weights and measures, which even in civilized countries up to a comparatively recent period varied not only from country to country, sometimes even from district to district, but even in the same country according to the things weighed or measured (in England stone and ton still vary in this way).
In old Gothonic poetry we find an astonishing abundance of words translated in our dictionaries by ‘sea,’ ‘battle,’ ‘sword,’ ‘hero,’ and the like: these may certainly be considered as relics of an earlier state of things, in which each of these words had its separate shade of meaning, which was subsequently lost and which it is impossible now to determine with certainty. The nomenclature of a remote past was undoubtedly constructed upon similar principles to those which are still preserved in a word-group like horse, mare, stallion, foal, colt, instead of he-horse, she-horse, young horse, etc. This sort of grouping has only survived in a few cases in which a lively interest has been felt in the objects or animals concerned. We may note, however, the different terms employed for essentially the same idea in a flock of sheep, a pack of wolves, a herd of cattle, a bevy of larks, a covey of partridges, a shoal of fish. Primitive language could show a far greater number of instances of this description, and, so far, had a larger vocabulary than later languages, though, of course, it lacked names for a great number of ideas that were outside the sphere of interest of uncivilized people.
There was another reason for the richness of the vocabulary of primitive man: his superstition about words, which made him avoid the use of certain words under certain circumstances—during war, when out fishing, during the time of the great cultic festivals, etc.—because he feared the anger of gods or demons if he did not religiously observe the rules of the linguistic tabu. Accordingly, in many cases he had two or more sets of words for exactly the same notions, of which later generations as a rule preserved only one, unless they differentiated these words by utilizing them to discriminate objects that were similar but not identical.
XXI — § 11. Poetry and Prose
On the whole the development of languages, even in the matter of vocabulary, must be considered to have taken a beneficial course; still, in certain respects one may to some extent regret the consequences of this evolution. While our words are better adapted to express abstract things and to render concrete things with definite precision, they are necessarily comparatively colourless. The old words, on the contrary, spoke more immediately to the senses—they were manifestly more suggestive, more graphic and pictorial: while to express one single thing we are not unfrequently obliged to piece the image together bit by bit, the old concrete words would at once present it to the hearer’s mind as a whole; they were, accordingly, better adapted to poetic purposes. Nor is this the only point in which we see a close relationship between primitive words and poetry.
If by a mental effort we transport ourselves to a period in which language consisted solely of such graphic concrete words, we shall discover that, in spite of their number, they would not suffice, taken all together, to cover everything that needed expression; a wealth in such words is not incompatible with a certain poverty. They would accordingly often be required to do service outside of their proper sphere of application. That a figurative or metaphorical use of words is a factor of the utmost importance in the life of all languages is indisputable; but I am probably right in thinking that it played a more prominent part in old times than now. In the course of ages a great many metaphors have lost their freshness and vividness, so that nobody feels them to be metaphors any longer. Examine closely such a sentence as this: “He came to look upon the low ebb of morals as an outcome of bad taste,” and you will find that nearly every word is a dead metaphor.109 But the better stocked a language is with those ex-metaphors which have become regular expressions for definite ideas, the less need there is for going out of one’s way to find new metaphors. The expression of thought therefore tends to become more and more mechanical or prosaic.
Primitive man, however, on account of the nature of his language, was constantly reduced to using words and phrases figuratively: he was forced to express his thoughts in the language of poetry. The speech of modern savages is often spoken of as abounding in similes and all kinds of figurative phrases and allegorical expressions. Just as in the literature transmitted to us poetry is found in every country to precede prose, so poetic language is on the whole older than prosaic language; lyrics and cult songs come before science, and Oehlenschläger is right when he sings (in N. Møller’s translation):
Thus Nature drove us; warbling rose
Man’s voice in verse before he spoke in prose.
XXI — § 12. Emotional Songs
If we now try to sum up what has been inferred about primitive speech, we see that by our backward march we arrived at a language whose units had a very meagre substance of thought, and this as specialized and concrete as possible; but at the same time the phonetic body was ample; and the bigger and longer the words, the thinner the thoughts! Much cry and little wool! No period has seen less taciturn people than the first framers of speech; primitive speakers were not reticent and reserved beings, but youthful men and women babbling merrily on, without being so very particular about the meaning of each word. They did not narrowly weigh every syllable—what were a couple of syllables more or less to them? They chattered away for the mere pleasure of chattering, resembling therein many a mother of our own time, who will chatter away to baby without measuring her words or looking too closely into the meaning of each; nay, who is not a bit troubled by the consideration that the little deary does not understand a single word of her affectionate eloquence. But primitive speech—and we return here to an idea thrown out above—still more resembles the speech of little baby himself, before he begins to frame his own language after the pattern of the grown-ups; the language of our remote forefathers was like that ceaseless humming and crooning with which no thoughts are as yet connected, which merely amuses and delights the little one. Language originated as play, and the organs of speech were first trained in this singing sport of idle hours.
Primitive language had no great store of ideas, and if we consider it as an instrument for expressing thoughts, it was clumsy, unwieldy and ineffectual; but what did that matter? Thoughts were not the first things to press forward and crave for expression; emotions and instincts were more primitive and far more powerful. But what emotions were most powerful in producing germs of speech? To be sure not hunger and that which is connected with hunger: mere individual self-assertion and the struggle for material existence. This prosaic side of life was only capable of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections, howls of pain and grunts of satisfaction or dissatisfaction; but these are isolated and incapable of much further development; they are the most immutable portions of language, and remain now at essentially the same standpoint as thousands of years ago.
If after spending some time over the deep metaphysical speculations of a number of German linguistic philosophers you turn to men like Madvig and Whitney, you are at once agreeably impressed by the sobriety of their reasoning and their superior clearness of thought. But if you look more closely, you cannot help thinking that they imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image as serious and well-meaning men endowed with a large share of common-sense. By their laying such great stress on the communication of thought as the end of language and on the benefit to primitive man of being able to speak to his fellow-creatures about matters of vital importance, they leave you with the impression that these “first framers of speech” were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely business and matter-of-fact side of life; indeed, according to Madvig, women had no share in the creating of language.
In opposition to this rationalistic view I should like, for once in a way, to bring into the field the opposite view: the genesis of language is not to be sought in the prosaic, but in the poetic side of life; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry play and youthful hilarity. And among the emotions which were most powerful in eliciting outbursts of music and of song, love must be placed in the front rank. To the feeling of love, which has left traces of its vast influence on countless points in the evolution of organic nature, are due not only, as Darwin has shown, the magnificent colours of birds and flowers, but also many of the things that fill us with joy in human life; it inspired many of the first songs, and through them was instrumental in bringing about human language. In primitive speech I hear the laughing cries of exultation when lads and lasses vied with one another to attract the attention of the other sex, when everybody sang his merriest and danced his bravest to lure a pair of eyes to throw admiring glances in his direction. Language was born in the courting days of mankind; the first utterances of speech I fancy to myself like something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale.110
XXI — § 13. Primitive Singing
Love, however, was not the only feeling which tended to call forth primitive songs. Any strong emotion, and more particularly any pleasurable excitement, might result in song. Singing, like any other sort of play, is due to an overflow of energy, which is discharged in “unusual vivacity of every kind, including vocal vivacity.” Out of the full heart the mouth sings! Savages will sing whenever they are excited: exploits of war or of the chase, the deeds of their ancestors, the coming of a fat dog, any incident “from the arrival of a stranger to an earthquake” is turned into a song; and most of these songs are composed extempore. “When rowing, the Coast negroes sing either a description of some love intrigue or the praise of some woman celebrated for her beauty.” The Malays beguile all their leisure hours with the repetition of songs, etc. “In singing, the East African contents himself with improvising a few words without sense or rime and repeats them till they nauseate.” (These quotations, and many others, are found in Herbert Spencer’s Essay on the Origin of Music, with his Postscript.) The reader of Karl Bücher’s painstaking work Arbeit und Rhythmus (2te aufl. 1899) will know from his numerous examples and illustrations what an enormous rôle rhythmic singing plays in the daily life of savages all over the world, how each kind of work, especially if it is done by many jointly, has its own kind of song, and how nothing is done except to the sound of vocal music. In many instances savages are mentioned as very expert in adapting the subjects of their songs to current events. Nor is this sort of singing on every and any occasion confined to savages; it is found wherever the indoor life of civilization has not killed all open-air hilarity; formerly in our Western Europe people sang much more than they do now. The Swedish peasant Jonas Stolt (ab. 1820) writes: “I have known a time when young people were singing from morning till eve. Then they were carolling both out- and indoors, behind the plough as well as at the threshing-floor and at the spinning-wheel. This is all over long ago: nowadays there is silence everywhere; if someone were to try and sing in our days as we did of old, people would term it bawling.”
The first things that were expressed in song were, to be sure, neither deep nor wise; how could you expect it? Note the frequency with which we are told that the songs of savages consist of or contain totally meaningless syllables. Thus we read about American Indians that “the native word which is translated ‘song’ does not suggest any use of words. To the Indian, the music is of primal importance; words may or may not accompany the music. When words are used in song, they are rarely employed as a narrative, the sentences are not apt to be complete” (Louise Pound, Mod. Lang. Ass. 32. 224), and similarly: “Even where the slightest vestiges of epic poetry are missing, lyric poetry of one form or another is always present. It may consist of the musical use of meaningless syllables that sustain the song; or it may consist largely of such syllables, with a few interspersed words suggesting certain ideas and certain feelings; or it may rise to the expression of emotions connected with warlike deeds, with religious feeling, love, or even to the praise of the beauties of nature” (Boas, International Journ. Amer. Ling. 1. 8). The magic incantations of the Greenland Eskimo, according to W. Thalbitzer, contain many incomprehensible words never used outside these songs (but have they ever been real words?), and the same is said about the mystic religious formulas of Maoris and African negroes and many other tribes, as well as about the old Roman hymns of the Arval Brethren. The mere joy in sonorous combinations here no doubt counts for very much, as in the splendid but meaningless metrical lists of names in the Old Norse Edda, and in many a modern refrain, too. Let me give one example of half (or less than half) understood strings of syllables from “The Oath of the Canting Crew” (1749, Farmer’s Musa Pedestris, 51):
No dimber, dambler, angler, dancer,
Prig of cackler, prig of prancer;
No swigman, swaddler, clapper-dudgeon,
Cadge-gloak, curtal, or curmudgeon;
No whip-jack, palliard, patrico;
No jarkman, be he high or low;
No dummerar or romany...
Nor any other will I suffer.
In the cultic and ceremonial songs of savage tribes in many parts of the world this is a prominent trait: it seems, indeed, to be universal. Even with us the thoughts associated with singing are generally neither very clear nor very abstruse; like humming or whistling, singing is often nothing more than an almost automatic outcome of a mood; and “What is not worth saying can be sung.” Besides, it has been the case at all times that things transient and trivial have found readier expression than Socratic wisdom. But the frivolous use tuned the instrument, and rendered it little by little more serviceable to a multiplicity of purposes, so that it became more and more fitted to express everything that touched human souls.
Men sang out their feelings long before they were able to speak their thoughts. But of course we must not imagine that “singing” means exactly the same thing here as in a modern concert hall. When we say that speech originated in song, what we mean is merely that our comparatively monotonous spoken language and our highly developed vocal music are differentiations of primitive utterances, which had more in them of the latter than of the former. These utterances were at first, like the singing of birds and the roaring of many animals and the crying and crooning of babies, exclamative, not communicative—that is, they came forth from an inner craving of the individual without any thought of any fellow-creatures. Our remote ancestors had not the slightest notion that such a thing as communicating ideas and feelings to someone else was possible. They little suspected that in singing as nature prompted them they were paving the way for a language capable of rendering minute shades of thought; just as they could not suspect that out of their coarse pictures of men and animals there should one day grow an art enabling men of distant countries to speak to one another. As is the art of writing to primitive painting, so is the art of speaking to primitive singing. And the development of the two vehicles of communication of thought presents other curious and instructive parallels. In primitive picture-writing, each sign meant a whole sentence or even more—the image of a situation or of an incident being given as a whole; this developed into an ideographic writing of each word by itself; this system was succeeded by syllabic methods, which had in their turn to give place to alphabetic writing, in which each letter stands for, or is meant to stand for, one sound. Just as here the advance is due to a further analysis of language, smaller and smaller units of speech being progressively represented by single signs, in an exactly similar way, though not quite so unmistakably, the history of language shows us a progressive tendency towards analyzing into smaller and smaller units that which in the earlier stages was taken as an inseparable whole.
One point must be constantly kept in mind. Although we now regard the communication of thought as the main object of speaking, there is no reason for thinking that this has always been the case; it is perfectly possible that speech has developed from something which had no other purpose than that of exercising the muscles of the mouth and throat and of amusing oneself and others by the production of pleasant or possibly only strange sounds. The motives for uttering sounds may have changed entirely in the course of centuries without the speakers being at any point conscious of this change within them.
XXI — § 14. Approach to Language
We get the first approach to language proper when communicativeness takes precedence of exclamativeness, when sounds are uttered in order to ‘tell’ fellow-creatures something, as when birds warn their young ones of some imminent danger. In the case of human language, communication is infinitely more full and rich and elaborate; the question therefore is a very complex one: How did the association of sound and sense come about? How did that which originally was a jingle of meaningless sounds come to be an instrument of thought? How did man become, as Humboldt has somewhere defined him, “a singing creature, only associating thoughts with the tones”?
In the case of an onomatopoetic or echo-word like bow-wow and an interjection like pooh-pooh the association was easy and direct; such words were at once employed and understood as signs for the corresponding idea. But this was not the case with the great bulk of language. Here association of sound with sense must have been arrived at by devious and circuitous ways, which to a great extent evade inquiry and make a detailed exposition impossible. But this is in exact conformity with very much that has taken place in recent periods; as we have learnt in previous chapters, it is only by indirect and roundabout ways that many words and grammatical expedients have acquired the meanings they now have, or have acquired meaning where they originally had none. Let me remind the reader of the word grog (p. 308), of interrogative particles (p. 358), of word order (p. 356), of many endings (Ch. XIX § 13 ff.), of tones (Ch. XIX § 5), of the French negative pas, of vowel-alternations like those in drink, drank, drunk, or in foot, feet, etc. Language is a complicated affair, and no more than most other human inventions has it come about in a simple way: mankind has not moved in a straight line towards a definitely perceived goal, but has muddled along from moment to moment and has thereby now and then stumbled on some happy expedient which has then been retained in accordance with the principle of the survival of the fittest.
We may perhaps succeed in forming some idea of the most primitive process of associating sound and sense if we call to mind what was said above on the signification of the earliest words, and try to fathom what that means. The first words must have been as concrete and specialized in meaning as possible. Now, what are the words whose meaning is the most concrete and the most specialized? Without any doubt proper names—that is, of course, proper names of the good old kind, borne by and denoting only one single individual. How easily might not such names spring up in a primitive state such as that described above! In the songs of a particular individual there would be a constant recurrence of a particular series of sounds sung with a particular cadence; no one can doubt the possibility of such individual habits being contracted in olden as well as in present times. Suppose, then, that “in the spring time, the only pretty ring time” a lover was in the habit of addressing his lass “with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.” His comrades and rivals would not fail to remark this, and would occasionally banter him by imitating and repeating his “hey-and-a-ho-and-a-hey-nonino.” But when once this had been recognized as what Wagner would term a person’s ‘leitmotiv,’ it would be no far cry from mimicking it to using the “hey-and-a-ho-and-a-hey-nonino” as a sort of nickname for the man concerned; it might be employed, for instance, to signal his arrival. And when once proper names had been bestowed, common names (or nouns) would not be slow in following; we see the transition from one to the other class in constant operation, names originally used exclusively to denote an individual being used metaphorically to connote that person’s most characteristic peculiarities, as when we say of one man that he is a ‘Crœsus’ or a ‘Vanderbilt’ or ‘Rockefeller,’ and of another that he is ‘no Bismarck.’ A German schoolboy in the ’eighties said in his history lesson that Hannibal swore he would always be a Frenchman to the Romans. This is, at least, one of the ways in which language arrives at designations of such ideas as ‘rich,’ ‘statesman’ and ‘enemy.’ From the proper name of Cæsar we have both the Russian tsar’ and the German kaiser, and from Karol (Charlemagne) Russian korol’ ‘king’ (also in the other Slav languages) and Magyar király. Besides being designations for persons, proper names may also in some cases come to mean tools or other objects, originally in most cases probably as a term of endearment, as when in thieves’ slang a crowbar or lever is called a betty or jemmy; E. derrick and dirk, as well as G. dietrich, Dan. dirk, Swed. dyrk, is nothing but Dietrich (Derrick, Theodoricus), and thus in innumerable instances. In the École polytechnique in Paris there are many words of the same character: bacha ‘cours d’allemand’ from a teacher, M. Bacharach, borius ‘bretelles’ from General Borius, malo ‘éperon’ from Captain Malo, etc. (MSL 15. 179). Pamphlet is from Pamphilet, originally Pamphilus seu de Amore, the name of a popular booklet on an erotic subject. Compare also the history of the words bluchers, jack (boot-jack, jack for turning a spit, a pike, etc., also jacket), pantaloon, hansom, boycott, to burke, to name only a few of the best-known examples.
XXI — § 15. The Earliest Sentences
Again, we saw above that the further back we went in the history of known languages, the more the sentence was one indissoluble whole, in which those elements which we are accustomed to think of as single words were not yet separated. Now, the idea that language began with sentences, not with words, appears to Whitney (Am. Journ. of Philol. 1. 338) to be, “if capable of any intelligent and intelligible statement, a fortiori, too wild and baseless to deserve respectful mention” (cf. also Madvig Kl 85). But the absurdity appears only if we think of sentences like those found in our languages, consisting of elements (words) capable of being used in other combinations and there forming other sentences: this seems to be what Gabelentz (Spr 351) imagines; but it is not so wild to imagine as the first beginning something which can be translated into our languages by means of a sentence, but which is not ‘articulated’ in the same way as such a sentence; we translate or explain the dental click (‘tut’) by means of the sentence ‘that is a pity,’ but the interjection is not in other respects a grammatical ‘sentence.’ Or we may take an illustration from the modern use of a telegraphic code: if suzaw means ‘I have not received your telegram,’ or sempo ‘reserve one single room and bath at first-class hotel’—we have unanalyzable wholes capable of being rendered in complete sentences, but not in every way analogous to these sentences.
Now, it is just units of this character (though not, of course, with exactly the same kind of meaning as the two code words) whose genesis we can most easily imagine on the supposition of a primitive period of meaningless singing. If a certain number of people have together witnessed some incident and have accompanied it with some sort of impromptu song or refrain, the two ideas are associated, and later on the same song will tend to call forth in the memory of those who were present the idea of the whole situation. Suppose some dreaded enemy has been defeated and slain; the troop will dance round the dead body and strike up a chant of triumph, say something like ‘Tarara-boom-de-ay!’ This combination of sounds, sung to a certain melody, will now easily become what might be called a proper name for that particular event; it might be roughly translated, ‘The terrible foe from beyond the river is slain,’ or ‘We have killed the dreadful man from beyond the river,’ or, ‘Do you remember when we killed him?’ or something of the same sort. Under slightly altered circumstances it may become the proper name of the man who slew the enemy. The development can now proceed further by a metaphorical transference of the expression to similar situations (‘There is another man of the same tribe: let us kill him as we did the first!’) or by a blending of two or more of these proper-name melodies. How this kind of blending may lead to the development of something like derivative affixes may be gathered from our chapter on Secretion; it may also result in parts of the whole melodic utterance being disengaged as something more like our ‘words.’ From the nature of the subject it is impossible to give more than hints, but I seem to see ways by which primitive ‘lieder ohne worte’ may have become, first, indissoluble rigmaroles, with something like a dim meaning attached to them, and then gradually combinations of word-like smaller units, more and more capable of being analyzed and combined with others of the same kind. Anyhow, this theory seems to explain better than any other the great part which fortuitous coincidence and irregularity always play in that part of any language which is not immediately intelligible, thus both in lexical and grammatical elements.
Primitive man came to attach meaning to what were originally rambling sequences of syllables in pretty much the same way as the child comes to attach a meaning to many of the words he hears from his elders, the whole situation in which they are heard giving a clue to their interpretation. The difference is that in the latter case the speaker has already associated a meaning with the sound; but from the point of view of the hearer this is comparatively immaterial: the savage of a far-distant age hearing some syllables for the first time and the child hearing them nowadays are in essentially the same position as to their interpretation. Parallels are also found in the words of the mamma class (Ch. VIII § 8), in which hearers give a signification to something pronounced unintentionally, the same syllables being then capable of serving afterwards as real words. If one of our forebears on some occasion accidentally produced a sequence of sounds, and if the people around him were seen (or heard) to respond appreciatively, he would tend to settle on the same string of sounds and repeat it on similar occasions, and in this way it would gradually become ‘conventionalized’ as a symbol of what was then foremost in his and in their minds. As in agriculture primitive man reaped before he sowed, so also in his vocal outbursts he first reaped understanding, and then discovered that by intentionally sowing the same seed he was able to call forth the same result. And as with corn, he would slowly and gradually, by weeding out (i.e. by not using) what was less useful to him, improve the quality, till finally he had come into possession of the marvellous, though far from perfect, instrument which we now call our language. The development of our ordinary speech has been largely an intellectualization, and the emotional quality which played the largest part in primitive utterances has to some extent been repressed; but it is not extinct, and still gives a definite colouring to all passionate and eloquent speaking and to poetic diction. Language, after all, is an art—one of the finest of arts.
XXI — § 16. Conclusion
Language, then, began with half-musical unanalyzed expressions for individual beings and solitary events. Languages composed of, and evolved from, such words and quasi-sentences are clumsy and insufficient instruments of thought, being intricate, capricious and difficult. But from the beginning the tendency has been one of progress, slow and fitful progress, but still progress towards greater and greater clearness, regularity, ease and pliancy. No one language has arrived at perfection; an ideal language would always express the same thing by the same, and similar things by similar means; any irregularity or ambiguity would be banished; sound and sense would be in perfect harmony; any number of delicate shades of meaning could be expressed with equal ease; poetry and prose, beauty and truth, thinking and feeling would be equally provided for: the human spirit would have found a garment combining freedom and gracefulness, fitting it closely and yet allowing full play to any movement.
But, however far our present languages are from that ideal, we must be thankful for what has been achieved, seeing that—
Language is a perpetual orphic song,
Which rules with Dædal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
Footnotes
1 See his essay on Herder’s “Ursprung der sprache” in Modern Philology, 5. 117 (1907).
2 It dates back to Vulcanius, 1597; see Streitberg, IF 35. 182.
3 I have given a life of Rask and an appraisement of his work in the small volume Rasmus Rask (Copenhagen, Gyldendal, 1918). See also Vilh. Thomsen, Samlede afhandlinger, 1. 47 ff. and 125 ff. A good and full account of Rask’s work is found in Raumer, Gesch.; cf. also Paul, Gr. Recent short appreciations of his genius may be read in Trombetti, Come si fa la critica, 1907, p. 41, Meillet, LI, p. 415, Hirt, Idg, pp. 74 and 578.
4 Only in one subordinate point did Rask make a mistake (b = b), which is all the more venial as there are extremely few examples of this sound. Bredsdorff (Aarsagerne, 1821, p. 21) evidently had the law from Rask, and gives it in the comprehensive formula which Paul (Gr. 1. 86) misses in Rask and gives as Grimm’s meritorious improvement on Rask. “The Germanic family has most often aspirates where Greek has tenues, tenues where it has mediæ, and again mediæ where it has aspirates, e.g. fod, Gr. pous; horn, Gr. keras; þrír, Gr. treis; padde, Gr. batrakhos; kone, Gr. gunē; ti, Gr. deka; bærer, Gr. pherō; galde, Gr. kholē; dør, Gr. thura.” To the word ‘horn’ was appended a foot-note to the effect that h without doubt here originally was the German ch-sound. This was one year before Grimm stated his law!
5 The muddling of the negatives is Grimm’s, not the translator’s.
6 I am therefore surprised to find that in a recent article (Am. Journ. of Philol. 39. 415, 1918) Collitz praises Grimm’s view in preference to Rask’s because he saw “an inherent connexion between the various processes of the shifting,” which were “subdivisions of one great law in which the formula T:A:M may be used to illustrate the shifting (in a single language) of three different groups of consonants and the result of a double or threefold shifting (in three different languages) of a single group of consonants. This great law was unknown to Rask.” Collitz recognizes that “Grimm’s law will hold good only if we accept the term ‘aspirate’ in the broad sense in which it is employed by J. Grimm”—but ‘broad’ here means ‘wrong’ or ‘unscientific.’ There is no kreislauf in the case of initial k = h; only in a few of the nine series do we find three distinct stages (as in tres, three, drei); here we have in Danish three stages, of which the third is a reversal to the first (tre); in E. mother we have five stages: t, þ, ð, d, (OE. modor) and again ð. Is there an “inherent connexion between the various processes of this shifting” too?
7 Probably under the influence of Humboldt, who wrote to him (September 1826): “Absichtlich grammatisch ist gewiss kein vokalwechsel.”
8 Humboldt’s relation to Bopp’s general ideas is worth studying; see his letters to Bopp, printed as Nachtrag to S. Lefman’s Franz Bopp, sein leben und seine wissenschaft (Berlin, 1897). He is (p. 5) on the whole of Bopp’s opinion that flexions have arisen through agglutination of syllables, the independent meaning of which was lost; still, he is not certain that all flexion can be explained in that way, and especially doubts it in the case of ‘umlaut,’ under which term he here certainly includes ‘ablaut,’ as seen by his reference (p. 12) to Greek future stalô from stéllō; he adds that “some flexions are at the same time so insignificant and so widely spread in languages that I should be inclined to call them original; for example, our i of the dative and m of the same case, both of which by their sharper sound seem intended to call attention to the peculiar nature of this case, which does not, like the other cases, denote a simple, but a double relation” (repeated p. 10). Humboldt doubts Bopp’s identification of the temporal augment with the a privativum. He says (p. 14) that cases often originate from prepositions, as in American languages and in Basque, and that he has always explained our genitive, as in G. manne-s, as a remnant of aus. This is evidently wrong, as the s of aus is a special High German development from t, while the s of the genitive is also found in languages which do not share in this development of t. But the remark is interesting because, apart from the historical proof to the contrary which we happen to possess in this case, the derivation is no whit worse than many of the explanations resorted to by adherents of the agglutinative theory. But Humboldt goes on to say that in Greek and Latin he is not prepared to maintain that one single case is to be explained in this way. Humboldt probably had some influence on Bopp’s view of the weak preterit, for he is skeptical with regard to the did explanation and inclines to connect the ending with the participle in t.
9 Humboldt seems to be the inventor of this term (1821; see Streitberg, IF 35. 191).
10 It has been objected to the use of Aryan in this wide sense that the name is also used in the restricted sense of Indian + Iranic; but no separate name is needed for that small group other than Indo-Iranic.
11 In Lefmann’s book on Bopp, pp. 292 and 299, there are some interesting quotations on this point.
12 For example, the correct appreciation of Scandinavian o sounds and especially the recognition of syllables without any vowel, for instance, in G. mittel, schmeicheln, E. heaven, little; this important truth was unnoticed by linguists till Sievers in 1876 called attention to it and Brugmann in 1877 used it in a famous article.
13 A young German linguist, to whom I sent the pamphlet early in 1886, wrote to me: “Wenn man sich den spass machte und das ding übersetzte mit der bemerkung, es sei vor vier jahren erschienen, wer würde einem nicht trauen? Merkwürdig, dass solche sachen so unbemerkt, ‘dem kleinen veilchen gleich,’ dahinschwinden können.” A short time afterwards the pamphlet was reprinted with a short preface by Vilh. Thomsen (Copenhagen, 1886).
14 In numerous papers in North Am. Review and elsewhere, and finally in the pamphlet Max Müller and the Science of Language, a Criticism (New York, 1892). Müller’s reply to the earlier attacks is found in Chips from a German Workshop, vol. iv.
15 Who was the discoverer of the palatal law? This has been hotly discussed, and as the law was in so far anticipated by other discoveries of the ’seventies as to be “in the air,” it is perhaps futile to try to fix the paternity on any single man. However, it seems now perfectly clear that Vilhelm Thomsen was the first to mention it in his lectures (1875), but unfortunately the full and able paper in which he intended to lay it before the world was delayed for a couple of years and then kept in his drawers when he heard that Johannes Schmidt was preparing a paper on the same subject: it was printed in 1920 in the second volume of his Samlede Afhandlinger (from the original manuscript). Esaias Tegnér had found the law independently and had printed five sheets of a book De ariska språkens palataler, which he withdrew when he found that Collitz and de Saussure had expressed similar views. Karl Verner, too, had independently arrived at the same results; see his Afhandlinger og Breve, 109 ff., 305.
16 “Es ist besser, bei solchen versuchen zu irren als gar nicht darüber nachzudenken,” Curtius, K 145.
17 In this book the age of a child is indicated by stating the number of years and months completed: 1.6 thus means “in the seventh month of the second year,” etc.
18 An American child said autonobile [ɔtənobi·l] with partial assimilation of m to the point-stop t.
19 Cf. Beach-la-Mar, below, Ch. XII § 1.
20 Cf. below on the disappearance of the word son because it sounds like sun (Ch. XV. § 7).
21 Cf. the fuller treatment of this question in GS ch. ix.
22 H. G. Wells writes (Soul of a Bishop, 94): “He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely above the threshold of his conscious thought.” Here we see the wrong interpretation of the preposition over dragging with it the synonym above.
23 Women know
The way to rear up children, (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words,
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles: children learn by such
Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play
And get not over-early solemnized...
Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well
—Mine did, I know—but still with heavier brains,
And wills more consciously responsible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly.
Elizabeth Browning: Aurora Leigh, 10.
24 This is not the place to speak of the way in which prevalent methods of teaching foreign languages can be improved. A slavish copying of the manner in which English children learn English is impracticable, and if it were practicable it would demand more time than anyone can devote to the purpose. One has to make the most of the advantages which the pupils possess over babies, thus, their being able to read, their power of more sustained attention, etc. Phonetic explanation of the new sounds and phonetic transcription have done wonders to overcome difficulties of pronunciation. But in other respects it is possible to some extent to assimilate the teaching of a foreign language to the method pursued by the child in its first years: one should not merely sprinkle the pupil, but plunge him right down into the sea of language and enable him to swim by himself as soon as possible, relying on the fact that a great deal will arrange itself in the brain without the inculcation of too many special rules and explanations. For details I may refer to my book, How to Teach a Foreign Language (London, George Allen and Unwin).
25 Hence, also, the second or third child in a family will, as a rule, learn to speak more rapidly than the eldest.
26 I translate this from Ido, see The International Language, May 1912.
27 I have collected a bibliographical list of such ‘secret languages’ in Nord. Tidsskrift f. Filologi, 4r. vol. 5.
28 I subjoin a few additional examples. Basque aita ‘father,’ ama ‘mother,’ anaya ‘brother’ (Zeitsch. f. rom. Phil. 17, 146). Manchu ama ‘father,’ eme ‘mother’ (the vowel relation as in haha ‘man,’ hehe ‘woman,’ Gabelentz, S 389). Kutenai pa· ‘brother’s daughter,’ papa ‘grandmother (said by male), grandfather, grandson,’ pat! ‘nephew,’ ma ‘mother,’ nana ‘younger sister’ (of girl), alnana ‘sisters,’ tite ‘mother-in-law,’ titu ‘father’ (of male)—(Boas, Kutenai Tales, Bureau of Am. Ethnol. 59, 1918). Cf. also Sapir, “Kinship Terms of the Kootenay Indians” (Amer. Anthropologist, vol. 20). In the same writer’s Yana Terms of Relationship (Univ. of California, 1918) there seems to be very little from this source.
29 Tata is also used for ‘a walk’ (to go out for a ta-ta, or to go out ta-tas) and for ‘a hat’—meanings that may very well have developed from the child’s saying these syllables when going out or preparing to go out.
30 The Swede Bolin says that his child said tatt-tatt, which he interprets as tack, even when handing something to others.
31 The views advanced in § 8 have some points in contact with the remarks found in Stern’s ch. xix, p. 300, only that I lay more stress on the arbitrary interpretation of the child’s meaningless syllables on the part of the grown-ups, and that I cannot approve his theory of the m syllables as ‘centripetal’ and the p syllables as ‘centrifugal affective-volitional natural sounds.’ Paul (P § 127) says that the nursery-language with its bowwow, papa, mama, etc., “is not the invention of the children; it is handed over to them just as any other language”; he overlooks the share children have themselves in these words, or in some of them; nor are they, as he says, formed by the grown-ups with a purely pedagogical purpose. Nor can I find that Wundt’s chapter “Angebliche worterfindung des kindes” (S 1. 273-287) contains decisive arguments. Curtius (K 88) thinks that Gr. patēr was first shortened into pâ and this then extended into páppa—but certainly it is rather the other way round.
32 The same inconsistency is found in Dauzat, who in 1910 thought that nothing, and in 1912 that nearly everything, was due to imperfect imitation by the child (V 22 ff., Ph 53, cf. 3). Wechssler (L p. 86) quotes passages from Bremer, Passy, Rousselot and Wallensköld, in which the chief cause of sound changes is attributed to the child; to these might be added Storm (Phonetische Studien, 5. 200) and A. Thomson (IF 24, 1909, p. 9), probably also Grammont (Mél. linguist. 61). Many writers seem to imagine that the question is settled when they are able to adduce a certain number of parallel changes in the pronunciation of some child and in the historical evolution of languages.
33 See E. Herzog, Streitfragen der roman. philologie, i. (1904), p. 57—I modify his symbols a little.
34 In Russian Marfa, Fyodor, etc., we also have f corresponding to original þ, but in this case it is not a transition within one and the same language, but an imperfect imitation on the part of the (adult!) Russians of a sound in a foreign language (Greek th) which was not found in their own language.
35 Reduplications and assimilations at a distance, as in Fr. tante from the older ante (whence E. aunt, from Lat. amita) and porpentine (frequent in this and analogous forms in Elizabethan writers) for porcupine (porkepine, porkespine) are different from the ordinary assimilations of neighbouring sounds in occurring much less frequently in the speech of adults than in children; cf., however, below, Ch. XV 4.
36 Karl Sundén, in his diligent and painstaking book on Elliptical Words in Modern English (Upsala, 1904) [i.e. clipped proper names, for common names are not treated in the long lists given], mentions only two examples of surnames in which the final part is kept (Bart for Islebart, Piggy for Guineapig, from obscure novels), though he has scores of examples in which the beginning is preserved.
37 It is often said that stress is decisive of what part is left out in word-clippings, and from an a priori point of view this is what we should expect. But as a matter of fact we find in many instances that syllables with weak stress are preserved, e.g. in Mac(donald), Pen(dennis), the Cri, Vic, Nap, Nat for Nathaniel (orig. pronounced with [t], not [þ]), Val for Percival, Trix, etc. The middle is never kept as such with omission of the beginning and the ending; Liz (whence Lizzy) has not arisen at one stroke from Elizabeth, but mediately through Eliz. Some of the adults’ clippings originate through abbreviations in writing, thus probably most of the college terms (exam, trig, etc.), thus also journalists’ clippings like ad for advertisement, par for paragraph; cf. also caps for capitals. On stump-words see also below, Ch. XIV, §§ 8 and 9.
38 See my MEG ii. 5. 6, and my paper on “Subtraktionsdannelser,” in Festskrift til Vilh. Thomsen, 1894, p. 1 ff.
39 Semantic changes through ambiguous syntactic combinations have recently been studied especially by Carl Collin; see his Semasiologiska studier, 1906, and Le Développement de Sens du Suffixe -ATA, Lund, 1918, ch. iii and iv. Collin there treats especially of the transition from abstract to concrete nouns; he does not, as I have done above, speak of the rôle of the younger generation in such changes.
40 I know perfectly well that in these and in other similar words there were reasons for the original word disappearing as unfit (shortness, possibility of mistakes through similarity with other words, etc.). What interests me here is the fact that the substitute is a word of the nursery.
41 “Einige namentlich in der ältern litteratur vorkommende angaben über kinder, die sich zusammen aufwachsend eine eigene sprache gebildet haben sollen, sind wohl ein für allemal in das gebiet der fabel zu verweisen” (S 1. 286).
42 Cf. against the assumption of Keltic influence in this instance Meyer-Lübke, Die Romanischen Sprachen, Kultur der Gegenwart, p. 457, and Ettmayer in Streitberg’s Gesch. 2. 265. H. Mutschmann, Phonology of the North-Eastern Scotch Dialect, 1909, p. 53, thinks that the fronting of u in Scotch is similar to that of Latin ū on Gallic territory, and like it is ascribable to the Keltic inhabitants: he forgets, however, that the corresponding fronting is not found in the Keltic spoken in Scotland. Moreover, the complicated Scotch phenomena cannot be compared with the French transition, for the sound of [u] remains in many cases, and [i] generally corresponds to earlier [o], whatever the explanation may be.
43 Curiously enough, Feist uses this argument himself against Hirt in his earlier paper, PBB 37. 121.
44 Feist, on the other hand (PBB 36. 329), makes the Kelts responsible for the shift from p to f, because initial p disappears in Keltic: but disappearance is not the same thing as being changed into a spirant, and there is no necessity for assuming that the sound before disappearing had been changed into f. Besides, it is characteristic of the Gothonic shift that it affects all stops equally, without regard to the place of articulation, while the Keltic change affects only the one sound p.
[45] ME. knowleche, stonës [stɔ·nes], off, with [wiþ] become MnE. knowledge, stones [stounz], of [ɔv, əv], with [wið], etc.; cf. also possess, discern with [z], exert with [gz], but exercise with [ks]. See my Studier over eng. kasus, 1891, 178 ff., now MEG i. 6. 5 ff., and (for the phonetic explanation) LPh p. 121.
46 Sharp tenues and aspirated tenues may alternate even in the life of one individual, as I have observed in the case of my own son, who at the age of 1.9 used the sharp French sounds, but five months later substituted strongly aspirated p, t, k, with even stronger aspiration than the usual Danish sounds, which it took him ten or eleven months to learn with perfect certainty.
47 I use the terms loan-words and borrowed words because they are convenient and firmly established, not because they are exact. There are two essential respects in which linguistic borrowing differs from the borrowing of, say, a knife or money: the lender does not deprive himself of the use of the word any more than if it had not been borrowed by the other party, and the borrower is under no obligation to return the word at any future time. Linguistic ‘borrowing’ is really nothing but imitation, and the only way in which it differs from a child’s imitation of its parents’ speech is that here something is imitated which forms a part of a speech that is not imitated as a whole.
48 The etymology of this name is rather curious: Portuguese bicho de mar, from bicho ‘worm,’ the name of the sea slug or trepang, which is eaten as a luxury by the Chinese, was in French modified into bêche de mer, ‘sea-spade’; this by a second popular etymology was made into English beach-la-mar as if a compound of beach.
My sources are H. Schuchardt, KS v. (Wiener Academie, 1883); id. in ESt xiii. 158 ff., 1889; W. Churchill, Beach-la-Mar, the Jargon or Trade Speech of the Western Pacific (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1911); Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark (Mills & Boon, London, 1911?), G. Landtman in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (Helsingfors, 1918, p. 62 ff. Landtman calls it “the Pidgin-English of British New Guinea,” where he learnt it, though it really differs from Pidgin-English proper; see below); “The Jargon English of Torres Straits” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. iii. p. 251 ff., Cambridge, 1907.
49 Similarly the missionary G. Brown thought that tobi was a native word of the Duke of York Islands for ‘wash,’ till one day he accidentally discovered that it was their pronunciation of English soap.
50 There are many specimens in Charles G. Leland, Pidgin-English Sing-Song, or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect, with a Vocabulary (5th ed., London, 1900), but they make the impression of being artificially made-up to amuse the readers, and contain a much larger proportion of Chinese words than the rest of my sources would warrant. Besides various articles in newspapers I have used W. Simpson, “China’s Future Place in Philology” (Macmillan’s Magazine, November 1873) and Dr. Legge’s article “Pigeon English” in Chambers’s Encyclopædia, 1901 (s.v. China). The chapters devoted to Pidgin in Karl Lentzner’s Dictionary of the Slang-English of Australia and of some Mixed Languages (Halle, 1892) give little else but wholesale reprints of passages from some of the sources mentioned above.
51 See An International Idiom. A Manual of the Oregon Trade Language, or Chinook Jargon, by Horatio Hale (London, 1890). Besides this I have used a Vocabulary of the Jargon or Trade Language of Oregon [by Lionnet] published by the Smithsonian Institution (1853), and George Gibbs, A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon (Smithsonian Inst., 1863). Lionnet spells the words according to the French fashion, while Gibbs and Hale spell them in the English way. I have given them with the continental values of the vowels in accordance with the indications in Hale’s glossary.
52 See Martius, Beitr. zur Ethnogr. und Sprachenkunde Amerikas (Leipzig, 1867), i. 364 ff. and ii. 23 ff.
53 “Ai is the man’s diphthong, and soundeth full: ei, the woman’s, and soundeth finish [i.e. fineish] in the same both sense, and vse, a woman is deintie, and feinteth soon, the man fainteth not bycause he is nothing daintie.” Thus what is now distinctive of refined as opposed to vulgar pronunciation was then characteristic of the fair sex.
54 There are great differences with regard to swearing between different nations; but I think that in those countries and in those circles in which swearing is common it is found much more extensively among men than among women: this at any rate is true of Denmark. There is, however, a general social movement against swearing, and now there are many men who never swear. A friend writes to me: “The best English men hardly swear at all.... I imagine some of our fashionable women now swear as much as the men they consort with.”
55 “Où femme y a, silence n’y a.” “Deux femmes font un plaid, trois un grand caquet, quatre un plein marché.” “Due donne e un’ oca fanno una fiera” (Venice). “The tongue is the sword of a woman, and she never lets it become rusty” (China). “The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word” (Jutland).
56 The uniformity in the speech of the whole Roman Empire during the first centuries of our Christian era was kept up, among other things, through the habit of removing soldiers and officials from one country to the other. This ceased later, each district being left to shift more or less for itself.
57 “Dass unsere ältesten vorfahren sich das sprechen erstaunlich unbequem gemacht haben,” Delbrück, E 155.
58 Sometimes appearances may be deceptive: when [nr, mr] become [ndr, mbr], it looks on the paper as if something had been added and as if the transition therefore militated against the principle of ease: in reality, the old and the new combinations require exactly the same amount of muscular activity, and the change simply consists in want of precision in the movement of the velum palati, which comes a fraction of a second too soon. If anything, the new group is a trifle easier than the old. See LPh 5. 6 for explanation and examples (E. thunder from þunor sb., þunrian vb.; timber, cf. Goth. timrian, G. zimmer, etc.).
59 This is rendered most clear by my ‘analphabetic’ notation (α means lips, β tip of tongue, δ soft palate, velum palati, and ε glottis; 0 stands for closed position, 1 for approximation, 3 for open position); the three sound combinations are thus analysed (cf. my Lehrbuch der Phonetik):
| p | n | p | m | m | n | |
| α | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| β | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| δ | 0 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| ε | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
60 The only clear cases of saving of time are those in which long sounds are shortened, and even they must be looked upon as a saving of effort.
61 In the reprint in Samlede Afhandlinger, ii. 417 (1920), a few lines are added in which Thomsen fully accepts the explanation which I gave as far back as 1886.
62 The above remarks are condensed from the argument in ChE 38 ff. Note also what is said below (Ch. XIX § 13) on the loss of Lat. final -s in the Romanic languages after it had ceased to be necessary for the grammatical understanding of sentences.
63 Against this it has been urged that Fr. oncle has not preserved the stem syllable of Lat. avunculus particularly well. But this objection is a little misleading. It is quite true that at the time when the word was first framed the syllable av- contained the main idea and -unculus was only added to impart an endearing modification to that idea (‘dear little uncle’); but after some time the semantic relation was altered; avus itself passed out of use, while avunculus was handed down from generation to generation as a ready-made whole, in which the ordinary speaker was totally unable to suspect that av- was the really significative stem. He consequently treated it exactly as any other polysyllable of the same structure, and avun- (phonetically [awuŋ, auuŋ]) was naturally made into one syllable. Nothing, of course, can be protected by a sense of its significance unless it is still felt as significant. That hardly needs saying.
64 Compare also the results of the same principle seen in writing. In a letter a proper name or technical term when first introduced is probably written in full and very distinctly, while afterwards it is either written carelessly or indicated by a mere initial. Any shorthand-writer knows how to utilize this principle systematically.
65 “His pronunciation of some words is so distinct that an idea crossed me once that he might be an actor” (Shaw, Cashel Byron’s Profession, 66).
66 Dickens, D. Cop. 2. 149 neverberrer, 150 I’mafraid you’renorwell (ib. also r for n: Amigoarawaysoo, Goori = Good night). | Our Mut. Fr. 602 lerrers. | Thackeray, Newc. 163 Whas that? | Anstey, Vice V. 328 shupper, I shpose, wharriplease, say tharragain. | Meredith, R. Feverel 272 Nor a bir of it. | Walpole, Duch. of Wrex. 323-4 nonshensh, Wash the matter? | Galsworthy, In Chanc. 17 cursh, unshtood’m. Cf. also Fijn van Draat, ESt 34. 363 ff.
67 The inconveniences arising from having many homophones in a language are eloquently set forth by Robert Bridges, On English Homophones (S.P.E., Oxford, 1919)—but I would not subscribe to all the Laureate’s views, least of all to his practical suggestions and to his unjustifiable attacks on some very meritorious English phoneticians. He seems also to exaggerate the dangers, e.g. of the two words know and no having the same sound, when he says (p. 22) that unless a vowel like that in law be restored to the negative no, “I should judge that the verb to know is doomed. The third person singular of its present tense is nose, and its past tense is new, and the whole inconvenience is too radical and perpetual to be received all over the world.” But surely the rôle of these words in connected speech is so different, and is nearly always made so clear by the context, that it is very difficult to imagine real sentences in which there would be any serious change of mistaking know for no, or knows for nose, or knew for new. I repeat: it is not homophony as such—the phenomenon shown in the long lists lexicographers can draw up of words of the same sound—that is decisive, but the chances of mistakes in connected speech. It has been disputed whether the loss of Gr. humeîs, ‘ye,’ was due to its identity in sound with hemeîs, ‘we’; Hatzidakis says that the new formation eseîs is earlier than the falling together of e and u [y] in the sound [i]. But according to Dieterich and C. D. Buck (Classical Philology, 9. 90, 1914) the confusion of u and i or e dates back to the second century. Anyhow, all confusion is now obviated, for both the first and the second persons pl. have new forms which are unambiguous: emeîs and eseîs or seîs.
68 The NED has not arrived at this explanation; it says: “Peer is not a phonetic development of pire, and cannot, so far as is at present known, be formally identified with that word”; “the verbs keek, peek, and peep are app. closely allied to each other. Kike and pike, as earlier forms of keek and peek, occur in Chaucer; pepe, peep is of later appearance.... The phonetic relations between the forms pike, peek, peak, are as yet unexplained.”
69 See, for instance, the following strong expressions: “Une langue est sans cesse rongée et menacée de ruine par l’action des lois phonétiques, qui, livrées à elles-mêmes, opéreraient avec une régularité fatale et désagrégeraient le système grammatical.... Heureusement l’analogie (c’est ainsi qu’on désigne la tendance inconsciente à conserver ou recréer ce que les lois phonétiques menacent ou détruisent) a peu à peu effacé ces différences... il s’agit d’une perpétuelle dégradation due aux changements phonétiques aveugles, et qui est toujours ou prévenue ou réparée par une réorganisation parallèle du système” (Bally, LV 44 f.).
70 Some speakers will say [su·] in Susan, supreme, superstition, but will take care to pronounce [sju·] in suit, sue. Others are more consistent one way or the other.
71 I.e. “With confused and indistinct articulation; also, with a husky or hoarse voice”—NED.
72 Even in speaking a foreign language one may unconsciously apply phonetic correspondences; a countryman of mine thus told me that he once, in his anger at being charged an exorbitant price for something, exclaimed: “Das sind doch unblaue preise!”—coining in the hurry the word unblaue for the Danish ublu (shameless), because the negative prefix un- corresponds to Dan. u-, and au very often stands in German where Dan. has u (haus = hus, etc.). On hearing his own words, however, he immediately saw his mistake and burst out laughing.
73 With regard to Lat. signum it should be noted that it is by others explained as coming from Lat. secare and as meaning a notch.
74 It is, of course, impossible to say how great a proportion of the etymologies given in dictionaries should strictly be classed under each of the following heads: (1) certain, (2) probable, (3) possible, (4) improbable, (5) impossible—but I am afraid the first two classes would be the least numerous. Meillet (Gr 59) has some excellent remarks to the same effect; according to him, “pour une étymologie sûre, les dictionnaires en offrent plus de dix qui sont douteuses et dont, en appliquant une méthode rigoureuse, on ne saurait faire la preuve.”
75 Westphalian also has hoppen ‘zurückweichen,’ ESt. 54. 88.
76 Lewis Carrol’s ‘portmanteau words’ are, of course, famous.
77 Speculation has been rife, but without any generally accepted results, as to the relation between plumbum and words for the same metal in cognate languages: Gr. molibos, molubdos and similar forms, Ir. luaide, E. lead (G. lot, ‘plummet, half an ounce’), Scand. bly, OSlav. olovo, OPruss. alwis; see Curtius, Prellwitz, Boisacq, Hirt Idg. 686, Schrader Sprachvergl. u. Urgesch., 3d. ed., ii. 1. 95; Herm. Möller, Sml. Glossar 87, says that molibos and plumbum are extensions of the root m-l ‘mollis esse’ and explains the difference between the initial sounds by referring to multum: comp. plus—certainly most ingenious, but not convincing. Some of these words may originally have been echo-words for the plumping plummet.
78 I have discussed this more in detail and added other m-words of a somewhat related character in Studier tillegnade E. Tegnér, 1918, p. 49 ff.
79 Quoted here from John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, 1668, p. 448: Wilkins there subjects Bacon’s saying to a crushing criticism, laying bare a great many radical deficiencies in Latin to bring out the logical advantages of his own artificial ‘philosophical’ language.
80 Cf. also what Paul says (P 144) about one point in German grammar (strong and weak forms of adjectives): “But the difficulty of the correct maintenance of the distinction is shown in numerous offences made by writers against the rules of grammar”—of course, not only by writers, but by ordinary speakers as well.
81 It has often been pointed out how Great Britain has ‘blundered’ into creating her world-wide Empire, and Gretton, in The King’s Government (1914), applies the same view to the development of governmental institutions.
82 In the realm of significations he sees the ‘humanization’ of language exclusively in the development of abstract terms. An important point of disagreement between Baudouin and myself is in regard to morphology, where he sees only ‘oscillations’ in historical times, in which he is unable to discover a continuous movement in any definite direction, while I maintain that languages here manifest a definite progressive tendency.
83 On the other hand, it is not, perhaps, fair to count the number of syllables, as these may vary very considerably, and some languages favour syllables with heavy consonant groups unknown in other tongues. The most rational measure of length would be to count the numbers of distinct (not sounds, but) articulations of separate speech organs—but that task is at any rate beyond my powers.
84 Thus also the corresponding Lat. jecur by ficatum, Fr. foie.
85 This ungainly repetition is frequent in the Latin of Roman law, e.g. Digest. IV. 5. 2, Qui quæve... capite diminuti diminutæ esse dicentur, in eos easve... iudicium dabo. | XLIII. 30, Qui quæve in potestate Lucii Titii est, si is eave apud te est, dolove malo tuo factum est quominus apud te esset, ita eum eamve exhibeas. | XI. 3, Qui servum servam alienum alienam recepisse persuasisseve quid ei dicitur dolo malo, quo eum eam deteriorem faceret, in eum, quanti ea res erit, in duplum iudicium dabo. I owe these and some other Latin examples to my late teacher, Dr. O. Siesbye. From French, Nyrop (Kongruens, p. 12) gives some corresponding examples: tous ceux et toutes celles qui, ayant été orphelins, avaient eu une enfance malheureuse (Philippe), and from Old French: Lors donna congié à ceus et à celes que il avoit rescous (Villehardouin).
86 If instead of omnium veterum I had chosen, for instance, multorum antiquorum, the meaning of masculine gender would have been rendered four times: for languages, especially the older ones, are not distinguished by consistency.
87 The change of the initial sound of the reminder belonging to the adjective is explained through composition with a ‘relative particle’ a; au becoming o, and ai, e. The numbers within parentheses refer to the numbers of Bleek’s classes. Similar sentences from Tonga are found in Torrend’s Compar. Gr. p. 6 f.
88 This protecting consonant was dropped in pronunciation at a later period.
89 Why so? Did sheep and cows also begin with vowels only, adding b and m afterwards to make up their bah and moo?
90 The examples taken from Gabelentz’s Grammar and an article in Techmer’s Internat. Zeitschrift I.
91 I must also mention A. Conrady, Eine indochinesische Causativ-denominativ-bildung (Leipzig, 1896), in which Lepsius’s theory is carried a great step further and it is demonstrated with very great learning that many of the tone relations (a well as modifications of initial sounds) of Chinese and kindred languages find their explanation in the previous existence of prefixes which are now extinct, but which can still be pointed out in Tibetan. Though I ought, therefore, to have spoken of prefixes instead of ‘flexional endings’ above, p. 371, the essence of the contention that prehistoric Chinese must have had a polysyllabic and non-isolating structure is thus borne out by the researches of competent specialists in this field.
92 Madvig Kl 170, Max Müller L 1. 271, Whitney OLS 1. 283, G 124, Paul P 1st ed. 181, repeated in the following editions, see 4th, 1909, 350 and 347, 349; Brugmann VG 1889, 2. 1 (but in 2nd ed. this has been struck out in favour of hopeless skepticism), Schuchardt, Anlass d. Volapüks 11, Gabelentz Spr 189, Tegnér SM 53, Sweet, New Engl. Gr. § 559, Storm, Engl. Phil. 673, Rozwadowski, Wortbildung u. Wortbed., Uhlenbeck, Karakt. d. bask. Gramm. 24, Sütterlin WGS 1902, 122, Porzezinski, Spr 1910, 229.
93 Two explanations of this formative element were given by the old school: according to Schleicher C § 290, it was the root ja of the relative pronoun; according to Curtius and others it was the root i ‘to go,’ Greek fer-o-i-mi being analyzed as ‘I go to bear,’ whence, by an easy (?) transition, ‘I should like to bear,’ etc.
94 Cf. Sommer, Lat. 528, and on Armenian and Tokharian r forms MSL 18. 10 ff. and Feist KI 455. But it must not be overlooked that H. Pedersen (KZ 40. 166 ff.) has revived and strengthened the old theory that r in Italic and Keltic is an original se.
95 If s was a definite article, why should it be used only with some stems and not with others? Why should neuters never require a definite article?
96 While it is difficult to see the relation between a demonstrative pronoun or a deictic particle and genitival function, it would be easy enough to understand the latter if we started from a possessive pronoun (ejus, suus), and, curiously enough, we find this very sound s used as a sign for the genitive in two independent languages, starting from that notion. In Indo-Portuguese we have gobernadors casa ‘governor’s house,’ from gobernador su casa (above, Ch. XI § 12, p. 213), and in the South-African ‘Taal’ the usual expression for the genitive is by means of syn, which is generally shortened into se (s) and glued enclitically to the substantive, even to feminines and plurals: Marie-se boek ‘Maria’s book,’ di gowweneur se hond ‘the governor’s dog’ (H. Meyer, Die Sprache der Buren, 1901, p. 40, where also the confusion with the adjective ending -s, in Dutch spelt -sch, is mentioned. For the construction compare G. dem vater sein hut and others from various languages; cf. the appendix on E. Bill Stumps his mark in ChE 182 f.).
97 Cf. Lloyd George’s speech at Dundee (The Times, July 6, 1917): “The Government will not permit the burdens of the country to be increased by what is called ‘profiteering.’ Although I have been criticized for using that word, I believe on the whole it is a rather good one. It is profit-eer-ing as distinguished from profit-ing. Profiting is fair recompense for services rendered, either in production or distribution; profiteering is an extravagant recompense given for services rendered. I believe that unfair in peace. In war it is an outrage.”
98 Bleek is here thinking of classes like those of the Bantu languages, which have nothing to do with sex.
99 For bibliography and criticism see Wheeler in Journ. of Germ. Philol. 2. 528 ff., and especially Josselin de Jong in Tijdschr. v. Ned. Taal-en Letterk. 29. 21 ff., and the same writer’s thesis De Waardeeringsonderscheiding van levend en levenloos in het Indogermaansch vergel. m. hetzelfde verschijnsel in Algonkin-talen (Leiden, 1913). Cf. also Hirt GDS 45 ff.
100 “Inner and essential connexion between idea and word... there is none, in any language upon earth,” says Whitney L 32.
101 I have learnt very little from the discussion which followed Wundt’s remarks on the subject (S 1. 312-347); see Delbrück Grfr 78 ff., Sütterlin WSG 29 ff., Hilmer Sch 10 ff.
102 Schuchardt, KS 5. 12, Zs. f. rom. Phil. 33. 458, Churchill B 53, Sandfeld-Jensen, Nationalfølelsen 14, Lentzner, Col. 87, Simonyi US 157, The Outlook, January 1910, New Quarterly Mag., July 1879.
103 F, for instance, in fop, foozy, fogy, fogram (old), all of them more or less variants of fool.
104 The preceding paragraphs on the symbolic value of i are an abstract of a paper which will be printed in Philologica, vol. i.
105 Benfey Gesch 791, Misteli 539, Wundt S 1. 331 (but his examples from out-of-the-way languages must be used with caution, and curiously enough he thinks that the phenomenon is limited to primitive languages and is not found in Semitic or Aryan languages), GRM 1. 638, Simonyi US 255, Meinhof, Ham 20.
106 I must confess that I find nothing symbolical in glas and very little in fouet (though the verb fouetter has something of the force of E. whip). On the whole, much of what people ‘hear’ in a word appears to me fanciful and apt to discredit reasonable attempts at gaining an insight into the essence of sound symbolism; thus E. Lerch’s ridiculous remark on G. loch in GRM 7. 101: “loch malt die bewegung, die der anblick eines solchen im beschauer auslöst, durch eine entsprechende bewegung der sprachwerkzeuge, beginnend mit der liquida zur bezeichnung der rundung und endend mit dem gutturalen ch tief hinten in der gurgel.”
107 It may not be superfluous expressly to point out that there is no contradiction between what is said here on the disappearance of tones and the remarks made above (Ch. XIX § 4) on Chinese tones. There the change wrought in the meaning of a word by a mere change of tone was explained on the principle that the difference of meaning was at an earlier stage expressed by affixes, the tone that is now concentrated on one syllable belonging formerly to two syllables or perhaps more. But this evidently presupposes that each syllable had already some tone of its own—and that is what in this chapter is taken to be the primitive state. Word-tones were originally frequent, but meaningless; afterwards they were dropped in some languages, while in others they were utilized for sense-distinguishing purposes.
108 On the lack of abstract and general terms in savage languages, see also Ginneken LP 108 and the works there quoted.
109 Of course, if instead of look upon and outcome we had taken the corresponding terms of Latin root, consider and result, the metaphors would have been still more dead to the natural linguistic instinct.
110 From the experience I had with my previous book, Progress, from which this chapter has, with some alterations and amplifications, passed into this volume, I feel impelled here to warn those critics who do me the honour to mention my theory of the origin of language, not to look upon it as if it were contained simply in my remarks on primitive love-songs, etc., and as if it were based on a priori considerations, like the older speculative theories. What I may perhaps claim as my original contribution to the solution of this question is the inductive method based on the three sources of information indicated on p. 416, and especially on the ‘backward’ consideration of the history of language. Some critics think they have demolished my view by simply representing it as a romantic dream of a primitive golden age in which men had no occupation but courting and singing. I have never believed in a far-off golden age, but rather incline to believe in a progressive movement from a very raw and barbarous age to something better, though it must be said that our own age, with its national wars, world wars and class wars, makes one sometimes ashamed to think how little progress our so-called civilization has made. But primitive ages were probably still worse, and the only thing I have felt bold enough to maintain is that in those days there were some moments consecrated to youthful hilarity, and that this gave rise, among other merriment, to vocal play of such a character as closely to resemble what we may infer from the known facts of linguistic history to have been a stage of language earlier than any of those accessible to us. There is no ‘romanticism’ (in a bad sense) in such a theory, and it can only be refuted by showing that the view of language and its development on which it is based is erroneous from beginning to end.