Introduction to the science of language, Volume 1 (of 2)

by A. H. Sayce

The number of abstracts possessed by a language is a good gauge of its development. It is difficult for us to realize the mental struggles and the ages of previous preparation required for the discovery of those ideas which now seem to us so familiar. The day on which, according to the ancient legend, Pythagoras struck out the idea of the world, and named it κόσμος, summed up all the labours of Eastern philosophy and Greek thought before which the law and order of the universe at last lay revealed. It is to Anaxagoras, to Herakleitus, to Xenophanes that we owe those ideas of mind, of motion, of existence which form the groundwork of modern science. Nay, our own generation has witnessed the creation of more than one great abstract idea, henceforth to be the common property of mankind, through the word by which it is expressed. To have won for the race a single idea like that of natural selection is a higher glory than the conquests of a Cæsar. Man’s first work, according to the old Hebrew writer, was to give names to “every living creature;” and the Assyrian story of the Creation, with the profound conviction that chaos is there where language is not, begins its record with the words:

“At that time the heaven on high was unnamed;

In the earth below no name had been recorded:

And chaos unopened was their sire.”

The words by which we express such abstract and spiritual ideas as those of spirit, of virtue, or of intellect are all, when examined, found to have a purely sensuous origin. The spirit was but “the breath,” virtue “the quality of a man,” intellect “a choosing between.” We can only rise from the known to the unknown, from that which we perceive to that which is invisible. As the developing mind starts from the objects of sense, and passes over the bridge of analogy to objects of thought and reason, so, too, language, at the outset, had words only for the visible and the sensuous; and not until it called in the aid of metaphor could it express the higher imaginations of the soul. If we look closely into language, we may see how strewn it is with worn-out and forgotten metaphors. “They are,” as Carlyle has said, “its muscles and tissues and living integuments,” the aids whereby language can communicate something more than the things which we see and feel. Even among ourselves, there are few who can afford to dispense with the assistance of concrete illustration and metaphor when dealing with abstract subjects. They throw a halo of light around the impalpable objects of philosophic reasoning, and enable us to picture them before our minds. It is this picture-language, as we may call it, which gives so much of its charm to poetry, which made verse the first embodiment of literature, and lends to savage speech its poetical garb. The creations of mythology are in the main its work; and even modern science does not despise a “nature” which clothes itself with the attributes of humanity and of sex. It was the power possessed by language of rising from the concrete to the abstract that made the earliest hieroglyphic systems of writing possible, and which to this day enables the Chinaman to adapt his mode of writing to the introduction of new ideas. Like the Chinese lexicon, the multitudinous wealth of language can be traced back to a few and simple elements.

If we watch the first attempts of children to speak, we find that their wants and wishes are conveyed in a very small number of sounds, and that often a single word is made to express what we should represent by several. Now children, in spite of their inherited instinct of speech, are the best example we can have of the way in which the first men acquired their language, remembering only that the child nowadays has a complete language already framed for him, whereas the first men had to frame theirs for themselves. What the individual child now learns in a few years has been the laborious production of many a century and many a generation. But the child has still to learn it like his forefathers before him, and in learning it he may modify its sounds, its forms, or the meaning of its words, and so take part in bringing about what we call the growth of speech.

But it is not only by watching children that we can gain some idea of the way in which languages originally grew up. When we try to acquire a foreign tongue, not from books, but from conversation, we first pick up a few sentences and words, and then, by the help of these, endeavour to make our thoughts and wishes intelligible to others. But since the sentences and words we know are but few, we have to look about us for the simplest mode of expressing ourselves, and are obliged to make our expressions stand for many different ideas. Even then, however, our vocabulary is imperfect, and we often find ourselves wholly at a loss for any word by which to convey our meaning. Gestures are the only resource left to us, and it is by their help that we supplement our deficient knowledge of the spoken language. Indeed, the first words and sentences learnt at all may have been acquired by the same means. Travellers have drawn up vocabularies and phrase-books of the idioms of unknown tribes by pointing to objects or making use of gesticulations, and then observing what articulate sounds were associated with these movements by the persons addressed. It is a good example of the way in which gestures precede spoken language, and lead on to the latter. The same gestures are for the most part understood in the same sense among all the manifold races of men; a shake of the head signifies “no,” a pointing of the finger symbolizes “locality.” Gestures bridge over the gulf which separates inarticulate from articulate speech, and they are still a means of communication for the deaf-mute. But we must distinguish between gestures and that instinctive play of feature which Mr. Darwin has treated of in his work on the “Expression of the Emotions.” Gestures, in the proper sense of the term, are only partly the same for all races of men; no doubt the instinctive element preponderates in them, but we have to allow also for a certain element of conventionality. There is not the same physiological reason why a shake of the head should denote a negative as there is why a particular expression of the face should indicate pleasure, or pain, or surprise, or why a feeling of shame should bring a blush to the cheek. When we are told that the Veddahs of Ceylon are never seen to laugh, we at once infer that they have no sense of humour and no power of merriment. Gestures are rather a sign for the intellect than for the emotion, and since the same feeling must express itself similarly in the case of every one while the same thought need not, it is evident that that which expresses thought admits the element of conventionality more than that which expresses feeling. Pain must always be pain, and affect the nerves and muscles in the same way; what is thought of, on the contrary, may be conceived very differently, and represented in an equally varying manner. Hence it is that we share the play of feature with the brutes, whereas gestures—embodying as they do a rational rather than an emotional element—are for the most part peculiar to man. Man is man in virtue of language, and it was gestures that first made language possible.

But gestures alone are often but a poor resource for either the child or the traveller. They fail to express the meaning intended. Let us suppose a child, for example, to have been scratched by a cat, or frightened by a herd of cows. It can represent the pain it has suffered, or the terror it has experienced by gestures, but if it be unacquainted with the names of cat and cow, it can only point out those animals by imitating the sounds they utter; and miow and moo-moo become the nursery names for “cat” and “cow.” And what still goes on in the nursery was a general procedure in the childhood of mankind. The domestic cat was introduced into Egypt from Nubia in the time of the eleventh or twelfth dynasty, and the Egyptians forthwith called it the miau, a name which it still bears in China. Indeed, the French and German equivalents of “puss,” mimi and mitz, have the same origin as the miow of the nursery or of Egypt, though German could not refrain from borrowing the unmelodious ending of katz. Dr. Comrie states[62] that the natives of the north-east coast of Papua call the dog a “bow-wow,” and when first shown an iron axe named it din-din, from the sound which it seemed to make.[63] This imitation of natural sounds goes by the long and barbarous name of Onomatopœia, and though an attempt has been made to substitute “Imson” (imitatio son-i) for “onomatopœic word,” it has failed.[64] Now if we are to infer anything from the habits of the nursery, and of those savage tribes which best represent the infancy of mankind, onomatopœia must have played a large part in the formation of language. Its advocates have done much harm to what Professor Max Müller has happily termed “The Bow-wow Theory,” by endeavouring to trace back words as we now find them to an onomatopœic origin; but this does not prove that the theory when scientifically applied is false. It is true that there are few words like miow which can be immediately referred to an onomatopœic source; it is true also that articulate language begins with roots, from which its scientific student must derive its words; but it is equally true that a large proportion of these roots—or rather of what these roots presuppose—was formed by the help of onomatopœia. It is not only objects like a dog or an iron axe that the Papuans met by Dr. Comrie named from the sounds they made upon his ear; an action like that of “eating” was equally called nam-nam from the noise produced by the process. We who speak a highly developed language, the worn-out débris of which are more than sufficient for the creation of new words and forms, can hardly realize the influence of onomatopœia upon rude and uncivilized jargons. Of course it is not necessary that the imitation of natural sounds should be an exact one; indeed, that it never can be: all that is wanted is that the imitation should be recognizable by those addressed. The same natural sound, consequently, may strike the ear of different persons very differently, and so be represented in articulate speech in a strangely varying manner. Thus, as has been noted before, bilbit, glut-glut, and puls, are all attempts to represent the same sound. Just as colours strike differently upon the eyes of different men, so also do sounds upon their ears, and the poverty of primitive languages in terms to denote the colours is parallel to the imperfection with which they represented natural sounds.[65]

Besides gestures and onomatopœia, there is a third way in which we can make ourselves intelligible without knowing the articulate language of those to whom we are speaking. This is by making use of interjectional cries. Like the play of feature, interjectional cries are the same for all men; we all make much the same kind of exclamation when hurt, or angry, or surprised. They express our emotions, not our ideas; and since the main object of language is to express ideas, interjectional cries can have had but a small share in its formation. Here and there we can point to a few roots, like agh (ach) in Aryan, which seem to have this derivation; but before the root agh could become a root in the linguistic sense of the word, and give rise to a number of derivatives, it was needful for it to cease to be an interjection; that is to say, it had to express an idea, and not an emotion. Many of our modern interjections, like alas, lo, are words that once possessed a full conceptual meaning, but have lost their original signification, and been degraded to the level of mere emotional cries. So hard is it for language to admit anything which was not from the first significant in thought. Interjections remind us of the animal side of our nature, and they have forced their way into language only because that animal side must be represented to the mind. But in thus forcing their way they have ceased to be the simple utterances of pleasure and pain, and become expressive of conceivable states of feeling. Only in so far as the first men approached the brutes more nearly than we do, were interjectional cries likely to help them in building up the structure of speech. We may, however, include under the head of interjections those instinctive cries uttered by men when engaged in a common work, to which Professor Noiré would trace all roots whatsoever.[66] The sense of life and power that makes the child shout or the bird sing, and is the ultimate motive of human speech, causes us to beat time by the help of rhythmical utterances. And though the utterance be but a monotonous sing-song, it becomes a symbol and sign of the action it accompanies to all those who have taken part in it, and in course of time may pass into a word. How many of the roots of languages were formed in this way it is impossible to say, but when we consider that there is no modern word which we can derive from such cries as the sailor makes when he hauls a rope, or the groom when he cleans a horse, it does not seem likely that they can have been very numerous. Still they were probably more numerous than the roots formed from other interjectional cries.