It is not at all probable that a system of gesture-language was ever employed by any primitive people, prior or in preference to vocal language. To communicate by signs requires no little skill and implies a degree of artifice and forethought far beyond that required in vocal or emotional language. Long before a child arrives at the point of intelligence necessary for conveying thought by signs, it is well advanced in a vocal language of its own.
In mythology, language assumes personality and independence. Often the significance of the word becomes the essential idea. Zeus, from meaning simply sky, becomes god of the sky; Eos, originally the dawn, is made the goddess of the opening day. Not the idea but the expression of the idea becomes the deity. And so, by these creations of fancy, the imagination expands; in the embodiment of the idea, the mind enlarges with its own creation. Then yet bolder metaphors are thrown off like soap-bubbles, which no sooner take form in words than they are also deified. Thus soul and thought and speech act and react on one another, all the evolutions of conception seeking vent in sound or speculation; and thus language, the expression of mind, and mythology, the expression of soul, become the exponents of divine humanity.
But what then is Language, what is Myth, and whence are they? Broadly, the term language may be applied to whatever social beings employ to communicate passion or sentiment, or to influence one another; whatever is made a vehicle of intelligence, ideographic or phonetic, is language. In this category may be placed, as we have seen, gestures, both instinctive and artificial; emotional expression, displayed in form or feature; vocal sounds, such as the cries of birds, the howling of beasts. Indeed, language is everywhere, in everything. While listening to the rippling brook, the roaring sea, the murmuring forest, as well as to the still small voice within, we are but reading from the vocabulary of nature.
Thus construed, the principle assumes a variety of shapes, and may be followed through successive stages of development. In fact, neither form nor feature can be set in motion, or even left in a state of repose, without conveying intelligence to the observer. The countenance of man, whether it will or not, perpetually speaks, and speaks in most exquisite shades of significance, and with expression far more delicate than that employed by tongue or pen. The face is the reflex of the soul; a transparency which glows with light, divine or devilish, thrown upon it from within. It is a portrait of individual intelligence, a photograph of the inner being, a measure of innate intelligence. And in all pertaining to the actions and passions of mankind, what can be more expressive than the language of the emotions? There are the soft, silent wooings of love, the frantic fury of hate, the dancing delirium of joy, the hungry cravings of desire, the settled melancholy of dead hopes. But more definitely, language is articulate human speech or symbolic expression of ideas.
How man first learned to speak, and whence the power of speech was originally derived, are questions concerning which tradition is uncommunicative. Even mythology, which attempts the solution of supernatural mysteries, the explanation of all phenomena not otherwise accounted for, has little to say as to the genesis of this most potential of all human powers.
Many theories have been advanced concerning the origin of language. Some of them are exploded; others in various stages of modification remain, no two philologists thinking exactly alike. The main hypotheses are three; the subordinate ones are legion. Obviously, speech must be either a direct, completed gift of the Creator, with one or more independent beginnings; or a human invention; or an evolution from a natural germ.
Schleicher conceives primordial language to be a simple organism of vocal gestures; Gould Brown believes language to be partly natural and partly artificial; Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart give to man the creation and development of speech by his own artificial invention. According to Herodotus, the Phrygians and the Egyptians disputed over the question of the antiquity of their languages. Psammetichus thereupon confided two babes to the care of goats, apart from every human sound. At the end of two years they were heard to pronounce the word bekos, the Phrygian for bread. The Phrygians therefore claimed for their language the seniority.
SCIENCE OF PHILOLOGY.
In ancient times it was thought that there was some one primeval tongue, a central language from which all the languages of the earth radiated. The Sythic, Ethiopic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, and other languages advanced claims for this seniority. Plato believed language to be an invention of the gods, and by them given to man. Orthodox religionists did not hesitate to affirm that Hebrew, the language of Paradise, was not only given in a perfected state to man, but was miraculously preserved in a state of purity for the chosen Israel. After the dispersion from Babel, such nations as relapsed into barbarism became barbaric in speech. And in the roots of every dialect of both the old world and the new, the Fathers were able to discern Hebrew analogies sufficient to confirm them in their dogma. Indeed other belief was heresy.
There were others who held that, when gesture-language and the language of the emotions were found insufficient for the growing necessities of man, by common consent, it was agreed that certain objects should be represented by certain sounds, and that so, when a word had been invented for every object, language was made.