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

by A. H. Sayce

Of scientific alphabets, also, the phonologist has now his choice. Putting aside Melville Bell’s “Visible Speech,” in which each character symbolizes by lines the action of the vocal organs in forming the sound it represents, the best are the well-known “Standard” and “Missionary Alphabets” of Lepsius and Max Müller, the alphabets of Ellis and Prince L-L. Bonaparte, and the alphabet of Sweet. Max Müller’s alphabet is founded on that of Sir W. Jones, and he brings with justice the charge against Lepsius’s “Standard Alphabet” that its physiological analysis is sometimes wrong, and that many of its characters have been found too complicated for use. Sweet’s alphabet has the advantage of avoiding new type, of having special signs for voice and whisper, for quantity and stress, force, pitch, and glide, and of indicating by a full stop the place of a “force-impulse.” Prince L-L. Bonaparte’s alphabet, however, as edited by Ellis, is the most complete; indeed, out of his 385 characters, there occur a few which have not been detected in any known language. The two last alphabets will be found in the Appendix to the present chapter.

It is possible that the phonograph may hereafter assist us in constructing a more perfect alphabet than is now possible. Just as Melville Bell’s letters have a physiological origin, so the letters of the alphabet of the future may be derived from the forms assumed by sounds on the sensitive plate of the phonograph. The phonautograph had already informed us that every sound we utter has a distinct shape and pattern; it only remained to apply this fact practically by the invention of the phonograph.

The phonautograph as constructed by Barlow, Léon Scott, and König, is made to record the sounds of the human voice by the help either of a pencil or of a gas-flame. The pencil is set in motion by a thin membrane, against which sounds and words are spoken, and draws on a cylinder covered with sand the curves which delineate the sounds uttered. When a gas-flame is employed, the forms assumed by it take the place of those drawn on the sand. In Edison’s phonograph the fact that the form of every sound can thus be imprinted on a tangible substance has been utilized for the reproduction of speech. A plate of tin-foil is folded round a revolving cylinder indented from one end to the other with a spiral groove. As the cylinder revolves the groove is kept constantly beneath a needle, which is attached to a membrane or sounding-board, against which the voice is impinged through a conical aperture: with each sound that is uttered the needle presses the tin-foil into the furrow below, imprinting upon it at the same time the form of the sound. By reversing the process the needle is made to travel once more over the indented tin-foil, and the sounding-board being thus set in motion reproduces the sounds originally spoken. Before the tin-foil is thus reduced to its original smoothness, a cast of it may be taken, and at any subsequent period another piece of tin-foil may receive the impression of the cast, and so reproduce the words which first caused the indentations. It is needless to point out the assistance which the phonograph is likely to render to phonology. It is still, of course, new and faulty, and unable, for instance, to reproduce sibilants; but it cannot fail to be improved and become almost as perfect a speaking-machine as the human throat itself. Already it has contributed some facts of importance to phonetic science. Thus we find that all sounds may be reproduced backwards by simply beginning with the last forms indented on the tin-foil, sociability, for example, becoming ytilibaishos. Diphthongs and double consonants may be reversed with equal clearness and precision, so that bite, which the phonograph pronounces bâ-eet, becomes tee-âb In this way we have learnt that the ch of cheque is really a double letter, the reversed pronunciation of the word being kesht.

The problem of reproducing human speech has thus been approached more successfully from the physical and acoustic side than from the physiological side, where it was attacked by Faber, Kempelen, and others. They attempted to construct instruments in which the vocal organs could be represented with the greatest exactness attainable, the lungs being replaced by a pair of bellows, the trachea by a hollow tube, and so on. But though these instruments spoke, it was not in human speech, or anything like it. The utmost they could do was to imitate the first utterances of a child, or the imperfect and laboured syllables of one who is learning a foreign tongue.

Nevertheless, it is not in the organs of the human voice any more than in the mechanism of a lifeless instrument that we have to discover the source and creator of speech. All that the vocal organs can do is to supply the skeleton into which the mind breathes the breath of life. Unmeaning sounds do not constitute language: until a signification has been put into them, the sounds that have been described and analyzed are no better than the singing of the birds, the stirring of the trees, or even the dead utterances of a machine. Phonology, like anatomy, deals only with the dry bones which have yet to be clothed upon with living flesh.

But by its very nature a science of meanings, sematology, as it has been named, can never have the same certitude, the same exactness, as a science of sounds. The laws of sematology are far less distinct and invariable; significant change cannot be reduced to the same set of fixed rules as phonetic change. The phenomena with which sematology deals are too complicated, too dependent on psychological conditions; the element of chance or conscious exertion of will seems to enter into them, and it is often left to the arbitrary choice of an individual to determine the change of meaning to be undergone by a word. Still this meaning must be accepted by the community before it can become part of language; unless it is so accepted it will remain a mere literary curiosity in the pages of a technical dictionary. And since its acceptance by the community is due to general causes, influencing many minds alike, it is possible to analyze and formulate these causes, in fact, to refer significant change to certain definite principles, to bring it under certain definite generalizations. Moreover, it must be remembered that the ideas suggested by most words are what Locke calls “mixed modes.” A word like just or beauty is but a shorthand note suggesting a number of ideas more or less associated with one another. But the ideas associated with it in one mind cannot be exactly those associated with it in another; to one man it suggests what it does not to another. So long as we move in a society subjected to the same social influences and education as ourselves we do not readily perceive the fact, since the leading ideas called up by the word will be alike for all; but it is quite otherwise when we come to deal with those whose education has been imperfect as compared with our own. A young speaker often imagines that he makes himself intelligible to an uneducated audience by using short and homely words; unless he also suits his ideas to theirs, he will be no better understood than if he spoke in the purest Johnsonese. If we are suddenly brought into contact with experts in a subject we have not studied, or dip into a book on an unfamiliar branch of knowledge, we seem to be listening to the meaningless sounds of a foreign tongue. The words used may not be technical words; but familiar words and expressions will bear senses and suggest ideas to those who use them which they will not bear to us. It is impossible to convey in a translation all that is meant by the original writer. We may say that the French juste answers to the English just, and so it does in a rough way; but the train of thoughts associated with juste is not that associated with just, and the true meaning of a passage may often depend more on the associated thoughts than on the leading idea itself. Nearly every word, in fact, may be described as a complex of ideas which is not the same in the minds of any two individuals, its general meaning lying in the common ideas attached to it by all the members of a particular society. The significations, therefore, with which the comparative philologist has to concern himself, are those unconsciously agreed upon by a body of men, or rather the common group of ideas suggested by a word to all of them alike. Here, again, some general causes must be at work which may yet be revealed by a careful analysis. The comparative philologist has not to trouble himself, like the classical philologist, with discovering the exact ideas connected with a word by some individual author; it is the meaning of words as they are used in current speech, not as they illustrate the idiosyncrasies of a writer, which it is his province to investigate.

“The genealogies of words,” says Pott,[218] “are the genealogies of concepts.” As in phonology we have the growth or decay of sounds, so in sematology we have the growth or decay of ideas. The three principles of linguistic change, imitation, emphasis and laziness, are incessantly at work on the meanings as well as upon the sounds of words. Analogy is ever lending them new senses, and the metaphorical senses may come to be used to the utter forgetfulness of the original one. The Latin who spoke of his “mind” or “soul” as animus had altogether forgotten that at the outset animus was merely the “wind” or “breath.” Here analogy or imitation is helped by laziness, which makes us forget a little-used meaning. Impertinent has almost lost its prior and proper signification, and our children will have to seek it in the records of an obsolescent literature. But a dead meaning may again rise to life; the early meaning of a word, whether recovered from books or from the fresh spring of a local dialect, may once more impress itself upon a community anxious to emphasize and mark out an idea by an unfamiliar term.

Professor Whitney[219] has summed up significant change under the two heads of specialization of general terms and generalization of special terms, but a more thorough-going attempt to determine its laws and distinguish its causes has been made by Pott.[220] First of all, he points out, words may be more accurately defined either by widening or by narrowing their signification. While in the Neo-Latin languages caballus, “a nag,” has taken the wider meaning of “horse” in general, under the form of cavallo or cheval, the modern Greek ἄλογον is no longer the “irrational beast,” but is narrowed into the specific sense of “horse.” Like our deer, which once meant “wild animals” generally (German thier), so emere has narrowed its primary signification of “taking” into the special one of “buying.” But, on the other hand, when we speak of “going to town,” it is not “town” in general or any town whatsoever that is meant, but London alone.

Then, secondly, there is metaphor, with its ceaseless play upon speech. Language is the treasure-house of worn-out similes, a living testimony to the instinct of man to find likeness and resemblance in all he sees. The Tasmanians, who had no general terms, had yet the power of seeing resemblances between things: though they could not form the concept “round,” they said “like the moon” or some other round object. All the words which have a spiritual or moral meaning go back to a purely sensuous origin: Divus, Deus, Dieu was once “the bright sky;” soul was nothing but the “heaving” sea. It is only by likening such ideas to the objects of sense that we can imagine them at all, or convey a hint of our meaning to others. The vocabulary of a language on its significant side grows by metaphor and analogy. We have only to take a word like post, once the Latin positum, “what is fixed” or “placed,” and trace it through its many derived meanings of “stake,” “position,” “office,” “station,” “public medium of correspondence,” and “receptacle for letters,” to see how endless are the shades of colour which a single word may catch from those with which it is associated. To know the idioms of a language and the conditions under which its speakers live, is often to know the history of the changes in signification undergone by its vocabulary. The mere expression “send to the post” gave to the word post its last meaning of a building in which letters are deposited and sorted, and the conditions of schoolboy life are a clue to many of the metaphorical uses of words which bear quite another meaning in school life from what they do in ordinary language. Where else but in a country of examinations could “pass” signify to go through an examination with success? Each craft, each industry has its own store of technical words, many of which are merely words in common use employed in particular senses intelligible only to those who belong to it.