It should also be noticed that we must suppose the original human being, who had never as yet spoken, to have been absolutely unable to reutter at his will any form of speech which he had chanced to produce. He would slowly and gradually, after repeatedly hearing the sound, acquire the capacity for reproducing it. The children of our own day hear a certain number of definite and limited sounds repeated by persons in whom identical motory sensations have developed.
We are driven, therefore, to assume that language must have begun with a confused utterance of the most varying and uncertain articulations, such as we never find combined in any real language. We may thus gather that the consistency in motory sensation necessary to a language must have been very slow in developing.
The result, then, at which we arrive is that no motory sensation can attain to a definite form and consistency except for such sounds as are favoured by their natural conditions. The sounds most open to be acted on by such conditions are those immediately resulting from the attempt to express natural feelings; in the endeavour to express these, nature, which prompted the feelings, must have prompted some uniformity of utterance. The traditional language must at its outset have contented itself with comparatively few sound signs, even though a large quantity of different sounds were, on different occasions, uttered by the different individuals.
The process of utterance must have been long and tedious before anything worthy to be called a language could come into existence. A language cannot be produced until individuals belonging to the same linguistic community have begun to store up in memory the product of their original creations. When they can draw upon their memory at will, and can count upon reproducing the same sound-groups to represent the same ideas, and can likewise count upon these sound-groups being understood in the same sense, then, and not till then, can we speak of language in any true sense.
If this be the true test of the existence of a language, it is no doubt true that we must admit that many beasts possess language. Their calls of warning or of enticement are clearly traditional, and are learnt from those around them. They utter the same cries to express the same emotions, and this consistently. But the language of beasts suffices only for the expression of a simple and definite feeling. The language of man consists in the grouping of several words so as to form a sentence. Man thus develops the power of advancing beyond simple intuition, and of pronouncing judgment on what is not before him.
CHAPTER X.
ON ISOLATION AND THE REACTION AGAINST IT.
The process of forming our modal and material groupings of ideas, and of the terms which we use to express those ideas, is essentially a subjective one, and is, as such, productive of results which would seem at first sight to be incapable of scientific generalisation. Within the limits, however, of any given linguistic community, the elements of which such groups can be formed are identical, and—with all possible divergence of width and depth of intellectual development in the members of that community—there is a certain uniformity in the manner in which each individual member employs that part of the common stock of ideas and terms of which he is master. Hence it inevitably follows that the groups which are formed will, IF THE AVERAGE be taken, prove about equal, and we are thus justified in abstracting from the individual, and in generalising concerning such grouping at any given period, in exactly the same manner as we do in speaking of the language of a community or of the pronunciation of a given word by a community. In this process, we may for our purpose neglect individual peculiarities or deviations from that abstract and always somewhat arbitrary norm.
And just as the language of any two periods of time shows that differences arise which permeate the whole, so, if we compare the groupings of which we can prove the existence in former times by the influence they exerted on the preservation or destruction of different forms in the language with those we can observe at present in our own linguistic consciousness, or with those which were prevalent at any other period of time, we notice (1) that what formerly was naturally connected by every member of the linguistic community is no longer felt to belong together, and (2) that what once formed part of different and disconnected groups has been joined together.
It is the former of these two events which we have to discuss in this chapter:[87] its chief causes are change in sound and change in, or development of, signification. The effects of the latter in isolating more or less completely some word or some particular use or combination of any word from the group with which, owing to parallelism in meaning, it was once connected, we have already illustrated in Chapter IV. Sound-change has or may have similar effects, and even the influence of analogy, which, as we have seen in Chapter V., is mainly effectual in restoring or maintaining the union between the members of a group, sometimes contributes to the opposite effect when any one particular member happens, from whatever cause it may be, to be excluded from its operation.