53. The Biological and Historical Nature of Language
It is a truism, but one important never to forget in the study of man, that the faculty of speech is innate, but every language wholly acquired. Moreover, the environment of which languages are the product is not a natural one, that is, geographic or climatic, but social. All words and speech forms that are learned—and they constitute almost the complete mass of language—are imitated directly from other human beings. Those new forms that from time to time come into use rest on existing speech material, are shaped according to tendencies already operative although perhaps more or less hidden, cannot generally be attributed, as regards origin, or at least entire origin, to single individuals; in short, present a history similar to that of inventions and new institutions. Language thus is a superorganic product; which of course does not contradict—in fact implies—that it rests on an organic basis.
The “speech” of the animals other than man has something in common with human languages. It consists of sounds produced by the body, accompanied by certain mental activities or conditions, and capable of arousing certain definite responses in other individuals of the species. It differs from human speech in several fundamental particulars. First of all, the cries and calls and murmurs of the brutes appear to be wholly instinctive. A fowl raised alone in an incubator will peep and crow or cluck as it will scratch and peck. A dog reared by a foster cat will bark, or growl, or whine, or yelp, when it has attained the requisite age, and on application of the proper stimulus, as he will wag or crouch or hunt or dig, and no differently from the dog brought up in association with other dogs. By contrast, the Japanese infant turned over to American foster parents never utters or knows a single Japanese word, learns only English, and learns that as well as do his Caucasian step-brothers. Evidently then, animal speech is to all intents wholly organic and not at all “social” in the sense of being superorganic. If this summary is not absolutely exact, it departs from the truth only infinitesimally.
Further, animal speech has no “meaning,” does not serve as a vehicle of “communication.” The opposite is often assumed popularly, because we anthropomorphize. If it is said that a dog’s growl “means” anger, and that his bark “communicates” suspicion or excitement to his fellows, the words are used in a sense different from their significance when we say that the term red “means” the color at one end of the spectrum, or that a message of departure “communicates” information. The animal sounds convey knowledge only of subjective states. They “impart” the fact that the utterer feels anger, excitement, fear, pain, contentment, or some other affect. They are immediate reflex responses to a feeling. They may be “understood” in the sense that a sympathetic feeling is evoked or at any rate mobilized; and thereby they may lead or tend to lead to action by the hearers. In the same way, any man instinctively “understands” the moan of a fellow human being. But the moan does not tell whether the pain is of a second’s or a week’s duration, due to a blow or to gas in the bowel, to an ulcerated tooth or to mental anguish. There is no communication of anything objective, of ideas as distinct from feelings, as when we say red or break or up or water. Not one of these simple concepts can be communicated as such by any brute speech.
One consequence is the “arbitrariness” of human speech. Why should the sound-cluster red denote that particular color rather than green? Why does the same word often designate quite distinct ideas in different languages—the approximate sound group lay meaning “milk” in French; lass “a girl” in English, “tired” in French, “allow” in German? Such facts are physiologically arbitrary; just as it is physiologically arbitrary and organically meaningless that Americans live in a republic and Britons under a monarchy, or that they turn respectively to the right and left on the road. Phenomena like these have other social, cultural, or superorganic phenomena as their immediate causes or antecedents. In the light of such antecedents, viewed on the level of history, these phenomena are intelligible: we know why the United States is a republic, we can trace the development of words like lay and lass. It is only from the biological plane that such facts seem insignificant or arbitrary.