Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

“The making of words as distinct from sentences was a long and laborious process, and there are many languages, like those of North America, in which the process has hardly yet begun. A dictionary is the result of reflection, and ages must elapse before a language can enter upon its reflective stage.”[227]

Or, to give only one more quotation, as Professor Max Müller says, “it is difficult for us to think in Chinese, or in any radical language, without transferring to it our categories of thought. But if we watch the language of a child, which is really Chinese spoken in English, we see that there is a form of thought, and of language, perfectly rational and intelligible to those who have studied it, in which, nevertheless, the distinction between noun and verb, nay, between subject and predicate, is not yet realized.”[228]

Starting, then, from this undifferentiated condition of language, let us next see how the “parts of speech” became evolved.

There appears to be no doubt that one of the earliest parts of speech to become differentiated was the pronoun. Moreover, all the pronouns (or “pronominal elements”) as originally differentiated were indistinguishable from what we should now call adverbs; and they were all concerned with denoting relations of place.[229] No exception to this general statement can be made even as regards the personal pronouns. “Hic, iste, ille, are notoriously a sort of correlatives to ego, tu, sui, and, if the custom of the languages had allowed it, might, on every occasion, be substituted for them.”[230] Now, there is very good reason to conclude that these pronominal adverbs, or adverbial pronouns, were in the first instance what may be termed articulate translations of gesture-signs—i.e. of a pointing to place-relations. I being equivalent to this one, he or she or it to that one, &c., we find it easy to supply the indicative gestures out of which these denotative terms arose; and although we are not now able to supply the phonetic source of these highly ancient “pronominal” or “demonstrative elements,” it is easy to imagine that they may have arisen in the same apparently spontaneous way as very young children will now devise arbitrary sounds, both as proper names and as adverbs of position. That we should not err in thus comparing the grade of mental evolution exhibited by the earliest framers of spoken language with that of a young child, is rendered apparent by the additional and highly interesting fact, that, just as a young child begins by speaking of the Ego in the third person, so it was with early man in his use of personal pronouns. “Man regarded himself as an object before he learnt to regard himself as a subject; and hence ‘the objective cases of the personal as well as of the other pronouns are always older than the subjective;’ and the Sanskrit mâm, ma (Greek [Greek: me], Latin me) is earlier than aham ([Greek: egôn] and ego).”[231]

Lest it should be thought that I am assuming too much in thus referring the origin of pronominal elements to gesture-signs, I will here quote the opinion of Professor Max Müller, who of all philologists is least open to suspicion of bias towards my side of the present argument. Speaking of these “demonstrative elements, which point to an object in space and time, and express what we now express by then, this [= I], that [= there, he, she, it, &c.], near, far, above, below, &c.;” he says, “in their primitive form and intention they are addressed to the senses rather than to the intellect: they are sensuous, not conceptual.”[232] And elsewhere he adds, “I see no reason why we should not accept them as real survivals of a period of speech during which pantomime, gesture, pointing with the fingers to actual things were still indispensable ingredients of all conversation.”[233] Again, “it was one of the characteristic features of Sanskrit, and the other Aryan languages, that they tried to distinguish the various applications of a root by means of what I have called demonstrative roots or elements. If they wished to distinguish the mat as the product of their handiwork, from the handiwork itself, they would say ‘Platting—there;’ if they wished to encourage the work they would say, ‘Platting—they, or you, or we.’ We found that what we call demonstrative roots or elements must be considered as remnants of the earliest and almost pantomimic phase of language, in which language was hardly as yet what we mean by language, namely logos, a gathering, but only a pointing.”[234]

It is the opinion of some philologists, however, that these demonstrative elements were probably “once full or predicative words, and that if we could penetrate to an earlier stage of language, we should meet with the original forms of which they are the maimed half-obliterated representatives.”[235] But as even these philologists do not question that all originally “predicative words” would be found to have had their predicative value determined by gesture, “if we could penetrate to an earlier stage of language,” the question whether such demonstrative elements as have come down to us were or were not themselves of originally predicative value, is not of vital importance in the present connection. For there is no doubt that pronominal elements which really were aboriginal as such, depended on accompanying gesture-signs for a conveyance of their predicative meaning; and although, as we might expect, there is a necessary absence of proof in particular cases whether these elements have come down to us in a practically aboriginal form, or whether they have done so as the worn-out remnants of independently predicative words, the general principles on which we are now engaged are not really affected by any such philological uncertainties in matters of detail. For even the authority just quoted as doubting whether we have evidence enough to conclude that demonstrative elements which have come down to us were never themselves predicative words, elsewhere says of early predicative utterance in general,—“It is certain that there was a time in the history of speech when the articulate, or semi-articulate, sounds uttered by primitive man were made the significant representatives of thought by the gestures with which they were accompanied; and this complex of sound and gesture—a complex in which, be it remembered, the sound had no meaning apart from the gesture—was the earliest sentence.”[236] And, after giving examples from languages of Further India, he adds,—“But an inflectional language does not permit us to watch the word-making process so clearly as do those savage jargons, in which a couple of sounds, like the Grebo ni ne, signify ‘I do it,’ or ‘You do not,’ according to the context and the gestures of the speaker. Here by degrees, with the growth of consciousness and the analysis of thought, the external gesture is replaced by some portion of the uttered sounds which agrees in a number of different instances, and in this way the words by which the relations of grammar are expressed came into being. A similar process has been at work in producing those analogical terminations whereby our Indo-European languages adapt a word to express a new grammatical relation.”

Therefore, not unduly to multiply quotations, we may take it as the now established doctrine of philology that, as even this more sceptical authority puts it, “Grammar has grown out of gesture and gesticulation.”[237] Later on I will show in how interesting a manner early forms of articulate utterance follow in their structure the language of gesture already treated of in a previous chapter. It was for the sake of displaying this resemblance that I there occupied so much space with the syntax of gesture-language; and, therefore, it will now be my object to trace the family likeness between the constructions of primitive modes of utterance, and those of the parent gestures from which these constructions have been directly inherited. But in order to do this more completely, we must first consider the philology of predicative words.

The parts of speech which are primarily concerned in predication, and which, therefore, may be called par excellence predicative words, are substantives, adjectives, and verbs. I will, therefore, begin by briefly stating what is known touching the evolution of these parts of speech.

We have abundant evidence to show that originally there was no distinction between substantives and adjectives, or object-words and quality-words. Nor is this at all surprising when we remember that even in fully developed forms of speech one and the same word may stand as a substantive or an adjective according to its context. “Cannon” in “cannonball,” or “pocket” in “pocket-book,” &c., are adjectives in virtue of position—i.e. of apposition with the substantives which they thus serve to qualify.