“It is a law universally illustrated by organizations of every kind, that, in proportion as there is to be efficiency, there must be specialization, both of structure and function—specialization which, of necessity, implies accompanying limitation.”—Herbert Spencer.
The review given in the preceding chapter of the opinions held by others on language and its science or philosophy will have prepared the way for an independent inquiry into the nature and objects of linguistic science. Before, however, we can discuss the limits and character of the science we must have a clear idea of the subject-matter with which it deals. Most of us, no doubt, have a rough-and-ready definition to give of language; but science requires something more than rough-and-ready definitions, and the discordant views as to the scope and meaning of the science of language which have come before us in the foregoing pages are plain evidence that an accurate definition of language is not so easy as would at first sight appear.
Provisionally, however, we may define language as consisting of certain modulations of the voice, variously combined and arranged, which serve as symbols for the thoughts or feelings we wish to express. The sounds that we utter must have a meaning before they can become language, otherwise they will be mere cries or gibberish, less worthy of the name of language than even the howling of the dog upon the prairie or the wild song of the forest-bird. Language is the outward expression and embodiment of thought—the garment, so to speak, with which the mind clothes itself when it would reveal itself to another or even, it may be, to itself. The words of a foreign tongue form a language only for those who understand what they signify: for those who do not they are but empty sounds, the idle murmur of a “barbarous” jargon. “The language of birds” was discovered to the Eastern sage alone: to all others the notes of the nightingale and the thrush were as the plashing of the waterfall and the drowsy humming of the bees. “Lessons in running brooks” may indeed be read by the mind, but it is the mind itself that puts them there, and only in so far as it creates a meaning for them does it create also the language in which they speak.
It is evident that our thoughts could be represented by other symbols than sounds. The first and most familiar instance that rises to our minds is writing, though writing symbolizes thoughts only indirectly, its immediate office being to symbolize sounds. There is a written language because there is previously a spoken language, and those who learn foreign tongues know well how detrimental the power of reading a language is when we wish to speak it: the language of the eye has to be translated into the language of the ear. Language can only be symbolized directly to the eye by hieroglyphics; but if our communication with one another depended upon hieroglyphic writing it would never be very extensive or progressive. To say nothing of its requiring time, writing materials, and skill in drawing, hieroglyphic writing can indicate objects alone with that clearness and certainty which language demands. It is hardly possible to represent in this way abstract ideas, verbs, or adjectives, so that what is denoted shall be recognized by another without previous instruction. Apart from these drawbacks, however, picture-writing has this advantage over spoken language, that its symbols are not mere arbitrary signs like sounds, but intelligible all the world over; and even the degenerated picture-writing of China, by preserving everywhere the same character for the same idea, has kept up a unity and spread a culture throughout the empire which would otherwise have been impossible among a people divided into many and diverse dialects.
Another means of symbolizing thought is “mathematical language,” which represents the calculations of the mathematician by written symbols such as 1, 2, 3, x, y, z. But such symbols are of late invention, and could not well be applied to express the daily concerns of life. Quite different is gesture-language, whereby our thoughts and emotions are represented by movements of the hands and other parts of the body. Most of our common needs could be expressed in this way, though gestures would be quite inadequate to represent the wants of a civilized community. Only such ideas as “I am hungry,” “let me drink,” “it is pleasant,” could be denoted by them. But, like picture-writing, gestures possess the great advantage of standing for the same ideas everywhere and among all men. The expression of pain or surprise, the threatening shake of the hand, the pointing of the finger, have the same message for the Negro as for the European. The traveller in a strange and unknown region is thrown back upon the language of gesture. Burton,[49] perhaps, exaggerates when he says that the Arapahos of North America, “who possess a scanty vocabulary, can hardly converse with one another in the dark,” and another reason may be given for this preference for the light; but the importance of gesture-language where other means of communication are wanting is too evident to need examples. Thus Fisher[50] tells us that the Comanches and neighbouring tribes have “a language of signs, by which all Indians and traders can understand one another; and they always make these signs when communicating among themselves.” To the same effect James[51] writes of the Kiawa-Kashaia Indians: “These nations, although constantly associating together and united under the influence of the Bear-Tooth, are yet totally ignorant of each other’s language, insomuch that it was no uncommon occurrence to see two individuals of different nations sitting upon the ground, and conversing freely by means of the language of signs. In the art of thus conveying their ideas they were thorough adepts; and their manual display was only interrupted at remote intervals by a smile, or by the auxiliary of an articulated word of the language of the Crow Indians, which to a very limited extent passes current among them.” Gesture-language is instinctive—the heritage, it may be, of the days before man acquired articulate language, or differed thus far from the brute beast: certain ideas call forth certain corresponding gestures, and we are not obliged to learn what gestures stand for particular ideas. Hence it is that even now spoken language is so largely accompanied by gesture. An excited speaker is likely to make much use of his hands; and we can often tell what a person is saying to us, though we do not hear him distinctly, by watching the play of his features. We know from the appearance of his face whether he is asking a question, whether he is angry, or whether he is dispirited. With the cultivation of articulate speech and confidence in the use of it, men become more phlegmatic in speaking, less inclined to have recourse to subsidiary helps. It is the awkward country girl whose “manners” have “not that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.” The preacher who addresses an audience of barristers does well to dispense with the gesticulation which is necessary to the mob-orator. According to M. Antoine d’Abbadie, an Abyssinian Galla marks the punctuation of his speech by the help of a leathern whip, a slight stroke denoting a comma, a harder one a semi-colon, a still harder one a full stop, while a note of admiration is represented by a furious cut through the air.[52] Even in this country, we have not to go far to find gesture-language employed in default of spoken language. Where the new system of observing the movements of the lips has not been introduced, the deaf and dumb can communicate with the outer world only by the help of gestures, though the gesture-language of the deaf and dumb, like phonetic writing, implies a previous spoken language. It is, therefore, to the instinctive gesture-language of the North American Indians what our system of writing is to hieroglyphics.
It will be noticed that under the general term of “gesture-language” we have included not only gesticulation, but also that play of feature and modulation of the voice which outlast gesticulation among a civilized people. Gesticulation can hardly form a universal language in the same way that play of feature and modulation of the voice can. Only in part have such gestures the same meaning for all men, and so serve to bridge over the gulf that divides articulate from inarticulate speech. Like play of feature and modulation of the voice, they are common to men and animals; but, unlike the latter, they are capable of receiving an arbitrary and conventional meaning. Helvétius, following in the track of Anaxagoras, asserted that we have become men through the possession of hands; had our arms terminated in a horse’s hoof, for instance, we should have been like the beasts that perish, wanderers and defenceless.[53] Indeed, it is quite conceivable that our forefathers would have remained contented with a gesture-language, had not the hands been wanted for other purposes. Food could not be prepared without them, whereas it was not until the desire of food was satisfied that the mouth was put to another use than that of asking for it.
Still the arbitrary element in gesture-language is very small compared with what it is in spoken language. Here beyond a few interjections, or possibly a few onomatopœic sounds, the whole body of symbols that stand for thought is purely conventional. The same combination of sounds may be used to denote very different ideas. There is no necessary connection between an idea and a word that represents it. It is as arbitrary as our making the sign 1 symbolize the idea of unity or the sign = the idea of equivalence. However well we may be acquainted with our own language, a foreign one will be wholly unintelligible to us until we have learnt it. Even natural sounds strike the ear of different individuals and nations in a totally different way. Exactly the same sound was intended to be reproduced in the “bilbit amphora” of Nævius,[54] the “glut glut murmurat unda sonans” of the Latin Anthology[55] and the puls of Varro; nay, as Dr. Farrar points out, even in the κόγξ and the βλώψ of the Greeks. The Persian bulbul has but little resemblance to the jugjug of Gascoigne, or the whitwhit of other writers; and yet all are attempts at imitating the note of the nightingale. The first word uttered by the children on whom Psammitikhus is said to have tried his famous experiment seemed to their keepers to be βέκ[ος], whereas we read in the great Papyrus Ebers, the standard work on Egyptian medicine compiled in the sixteenth century B.C., that if “a child on the day of birth ... says ni, it will live; if it says ba, it will die.” And only the last of these infantile cries bears any likeness to what we are told are the primitive and original utterances of childhood, ma, pa, and ta—utterances, by the way, which are only in part possible to the Mohawks and Hurons, who possess no labials.[56] So arbitrary and conventional must be the meanings we associate with the sounds of articulate speech, and so impossible is it to discover in them any signs of universal currency. There is no reason in the nature of things why the word book should represent what we mean when we look at the present volume; it might just as well be denoted by koob, or biblion, or liber; and if we chose we might always so denote it.
But although we might choose to do so, unless we could get other people to do the same, we should find ourselves unintelligible to our neighbours, and talking gibberish instead of a language. For the essential thing about a language is that it should be an instrument for the communication of our thoughts to others. There is no good in having symbols for our thoughts unless we wish our thoughts to become known to those about us. He who has no thoughts to communicate, no wants to be supplied, has no need of a language. But such a being, to use the words of Aristotle, is ἢ θηρίον ἢ θεός, “either a beast or a god;” or as we might, perhaps, render it in modern phraseology, either a hermit or an angel. The voiceless Yogi of India, or the Bernardine nun of southern France, is but as a dumb animal, or the hapless deaf-mute who has never been trained. The records of speech themselves testify to our instinctive recognition of the fact. The name Slave, for instance, by which so large a body of our Aryan kinsfolk have called themselves, means “the speaker,” in opposition to the “dumb” and unintelligible German; just as in Isaiah (xxxiii. 19), the Assyrians are a people “of a stammering tongue, that one cannot understand.” Man, indeed, comes from the root man, “to think;” but it is thinking for others, for the sake of embodying the thought in spoken utterance. The same root has produced μάντις, the “seer;” Μέντωρ and Minerva, whose counsels are for others, not for themselves; μηνύω, to “point out,” and moneo, to “advise;” μνή-μη, “recollection,” and memini, to “remember,” and mentio, “the bringing to mind” by mentioning in speech. Even in the Semitic idioms, zâcâr, “a man,” seems connected with zâcâr, “to remember,” just as the Latin mas is with μνήμη and memini. Language, in short, is the prerogative of man, distinguishing him from the brute beast, because it is the basis and bond of society. Man is “a social animal” in virtue of language; society could not exist without language any more than language could without society. The two are correlative terms, though it is for the sake of society that language has been formed. It is a social product, springing up with the first community, developing with the increasing needs of culture and civilization, and disappearing when the individual Robinson Crusoe is cast back on the island of primitive isolation.
But though it is a social product, it may also with strict truth be spoken of as growing up. A society never met together to make a language. To imagine this would be to revive the theories of the last century, which referred all society and government to a contract entered into by our remote forefathers. We do not call the present volume a book because we have made a formal agreement with our neighbours to do so, but because if we called it biblion or liber we should not be understood by the majority of them. The language which we speak is the heritage which has come down to us from the past, like the laws by which we are governed, or the habits and customs to which we conform. We represent our idea of a printed work by the word book, because we have been taught to do so by others, and those who taught us had been taught by others, and those again by others. But this process of teaching and learning implies a very slow and gradual change in the language that is being handed down. New words come into use as new objects and ideas have to be named, old words are forgotten, the pronunciation gets altered, and other changes hereafter to be described take place. And so, without any deliberate intention on the part of any individual or individuals, the whole character of a language comes in course of time to be transformed. Now and then, it is true, we can trace the invention of a wholly new word to an individual, like gas to the Dutch chemist van Helmont, or od force to Baron von Reichenbach; and still oftener of a new derivative like liberalize, introduced by the Marquis of Lansdowne, fatherland by Isaac Disraeli, incuriosité by Montaigne, urbanité by Balzac, or bienfaisance by the Abbé de Saint Pierre. But such words must be accepted by society, be ratified by the tacit agreement of the whole community, before they can become a part of living speech. Though gas has made its way into common use, blas, which van Helmont proposed at the same time to describe that property of the heavenly bodies whereby they regulate the changes of time, failed to commend itself to the general sense of the community, and so passed out of sight;[57] and such was also the fate of Balzac’s sériosité, of Malherbe’s dévouloir, and of Burke’s literator. In spite of his 262 works, and the grammars and vocabularies written to explain the jargon employed in them, Caramuel, a famous Spanish bishop of the seventeenth century, was unable to bequeath to posterity a single one of his numerous coinages. The “Cabalistic Grammar,” published at Brussels in 1642, and the “Audacious Grammar,” printed at Frankfurt twelve years later, remained unread and unknown, a monument of “cabalistic” dreams and “audacious” folly.[58] A paternal government may compel the acceptance of a foreign speech, in place of the familiar mother-tongue, like the rulers of Japan, who were said, a short time ago, to be meditating the substitution of English for the native language under pain of death. But even a government of this kind cannot invent a new grammar and a new dictionary; it can only borrow from others: and if we are to judge from the experiences of certain Oxford colleges where French was similarly enforced in the days of the Plantagenets, and Latin in those of the Commonwealth, the attempt, though backed by all the powers of State and Church, is likely to end in failure. Language must be the unconscious creation of the whole society, and the changes it undergoes must be equally that society’s unconscious work.
Now the sum of knowledge possessed by a society increases the longer the society exists and the more civilized it becomes. This increase of knowledge is reflected in the language; and hence languages grow fuller and richer—more developed, as it is termed—the longer they last. The further back we can trace a language, the poorer it is seen to be. Not only are words, or rather derivatives and compounds, wanting, but the words that exist embody but a few out of the many meanings which afterwards cluster around them. The dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon, of the Ormulum, or even of Chaucer, is scant and meagre compared with that at the disposal of a modern English writer. The dialects of savages, which most resemble what all languages originally were, have few words, because they have few ideas to express, and such ideas as are expressed are wonderfully simple. Thus, the Tasmanians, when they wanted to denote what we mean by “tall” and “round,” had to say “long legs” and “like a ball” or the “moon” or some other round object, eking out their scanty vocabulary by the help of gesture.[59] So, too, the New Caledonians cannot be brought to understand such ideas as those conveyed by yesterday and to-morrow, and the jungle Veddahs of Ceylon are unable to remember even the names they give to their wives, unless the latter be present.[60] After this, it is not surprising that, like the Dammaras of South Africa, they are unable to count, and, consequently, have no numerals in their language. According to Mr. Galton,[61] indeed, the Dammaras are able to count as far as three, though he adds that they discover the loss of an ox, “not by the number of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face that they know.” If two sticks of tobacco are “the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep and give him four sticks.” “Once,” he goes on to say, “while I watched a Dammara floundering hopelessly in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half-a-dozen of her new-born puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her; and her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present, or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over them, backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the comparison reflected no great honour on the man.”