“Tigrides indomitæ rancant[108] rugiuntque leones.”
What this peculiar sound may be, we do not know, but can hardly reconcile this suggestion of Nodier with the statement, that the name,[109] Hott-en-tot is itself onomatopœian, having been given by the first Dutch settlers, because this click would sound to a stranger like a perpetual repetition of the syllables hot and tot. It is a curious fact that Palamedes is said to have learnt, from the noise of cranes, the four letters which he added to the Greek alphabet; and it is certainly a confirmation of these remarks, that although no language possesses in its alphabet a power of expressing every possible articulation, yet no nation’s language is quite deficient in the power of expressing, by imitation, the cries of its indigenous animals.
It is wonderful that the knowledge and observation of facts like these did not lead the philologists of antiquity to a solution of their disputes about the natural or conventional origin of languages. The age of Psammetichus evinced its interest in the question, and if it had been content to observe its own experiment, instead of making it the prop to a “foregone conclusion,” philosophers might have agreed, long ago, in believing, that man was assisted by nature in the development of his implanted powers, and that, like every infant of his race, he framed into living speech the sounds by which his senses were first impressed.[110] When the first man gave names to the animals, which, as we have already seen, he was enabled to do by the reasonable use of his own faculties, and not at the dictation of a voice from heaven, he could not have been guided by any principle so obvious, so easy, or so appropriate as an artistic reproduction of the sounds which they uttered.
But how, it may be asked, is the voice capable of rendering even the feeblest echo of all the myriad utterances of the earth and air, the voices of the desert and mountain,—
“The echoes of illimitable forests,
The murmur of unfathomable seas”?
We answer that the imitation is not, and does not profess to be a dull, dead, passive echo of the sound, but of the impression produced by it upon the sentient being; it is not a mere spontaneous repercussion of the perception received; but a repercussion modified organically by the configurations of the mouth, and ideally by the nature of the analogy perceived between the sound and the object it expressed. “The organs of that wonderful musical instrument, the mouth, are the throat, the palate, the tongue, the teeth, the lips.[111] This then is the subjective organon of language, the physiological vehicle for that proto-plastic art, speech, which combines architecture and music, the plastic and the picturesque. Johannes Müller has developed this physiologically, Sir John Herschell acoustically.” The mere power of imitation would not have helped mankind a single step towards language any more than it has helped the parrot or the jay,[112] had it not been for the infinitely nobler faculty which enabled us to perceive the meaning of the sounds we uttered, and to use them as the signs of our inward conceptions,—a faculty which has implanted in language its principle of development, and which constitutes the distinction between the chatterings of a jackdaw and the eloquence of a man.
This alone is a clear proof, if proof were wanted, that language is the result of intelligence, as well as of instinct; and that the human reason was not a gradual acquisition of a once brutish race.
But though the power of imitation by the voice of the sounds of the unintelligent creation be small in comparison with those other powers which constitute our pre-eminence, yet how perfect is that gift in itself,—how wondrous the organism by which it is effected! The mouth is admirably framed for intelligent and harmonious utterance; it is at once an organ, and a flute,—a trumpet and a harp. Its sublime construction will make it the eternal despair of mechanicians, and the songs which it can modulate, are superior to all the melodies of artificial music. The intelligence of man enables him alone to use this glorious instrument, as God intended it to be used. “Il avait,” says M. Nodier, “dans ses poumons un soufflet intelligent et sensible, dans ses lèvres un limbe épanoui, mobile, extensible, rétractile, qui jette le son, qui le modifie, qui le renforce, qui l’assouplit, qui le contraint, qui le voile, qui l’éteint; dans sa langue un marteau souple, flexible, onduleux, qui se replit, qui s’accourcit, qui s’étend; qui se meut, et qui s’enterpose entre ses valves, selon qu’il convient retenir ou d’épancher la voix, qui attache ses touches avec âpreté ou qui les effleure avec mollesse; dans ses dents un clavier ferme, aigu, strident; à son palais un tympan grave et sonore: luxe inutile pourtant, s’il n’avait pas eu la pensée; et celui qui a fait ce qui est n’a jamais rien fait d’inutile.—L’homme parla parce qu’il pensait.”
The plain elementary sounds of which the human voice is capable are about twenty; and yet it has been calculated by the mathematician Tacquet, that one thousand million writers, in one thousand million years, could not write out all the combinations of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each of them were daily to write out forty pages of them, of which each page should contain different orders of the twenty-four letters. Of course, a very small number only of these permutations are at all required for every purpose of life. “And thus it is,” says the ingenious author of[113]Hermes, “that to principles apparently so trivial as about twenty plain elementary sounds, we owe that variety of articulate voices, which have been sufficient to explain the sentiments of so innumerable a multitude, as all the present and past generations of men.”