In human beings language, it is clear, may attain extraordinary refinement and complexity, and may convey extremely fine shades and subtleties of emotion or idea. This results from the fact that man is born with a vocal apparatus far superior in development to that of any of the animals.
It is pretty clear that the mutant man, when thrown off from the primate stock, sprang forth with a vocal apparatus different from that of the parent stock, and possessing abundant richness in reflexes, even far surpassing that found in the bird. It is interesting to observe, too, in this connection, that within the narrow space occupied by the vocal apparatus we have a system of muscular mechanisms which has within it, looking at it now as a whole, the same possibilities of habit formation that we find in the remaining portion of bodily musculature.... It is probable that in a few years we shall undertake the study of such habits from exactly the same standpoint that we now employ in studies upon the acquisition of skill in the human being.[2]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., pp. 323-24.]
The human baby starts its expressive habits by emitting with wide-open mouth an undifferentiated shriek of pain. A little later it yells in the same way at any kind of discomfort. It begins before the end of the first year to croon when it is contented. As it grows older it begins to make different sounds when it experiences different emotions. And with remarkable rapidity its repertoire of articulatory movements has greatly increased.
Speech that begins in the child as a mere vague vocal expression of emotion soon begins to exhibit a marked element of mimicry. The child begins to associate the words uttered by his nurse or parents with the specific objects they point to. He comes to connect "milk," "sleep," "mother" with the experiences to which they correspond. The child thus learns to react to certain sounds as significant of certain experiences. Unlike Adam, he does not have to give names to animals, or for that matter to anything else on earth. They all have specific names in the particular language in which he happens to be brought up. In the case of other habits, largely through trial and error, he learns to associate given sounds expressed by other people about him with given experiences, pleasant or unpleasant. He learns further to imitate, so far as possible, these sounds, as a means of more precisely communicating his wants or securing their fulfillment.
In this connection students of language frequently have raised the question of how man first came to associate a given sound-sequence with a given experience. Like fire, language was once conceived to be a divine gift. Another theory postulated a genius who took it into his head to give the things of earth their present inevitable names. One other theory equally dubious held that language started in onomatopoetic expressions like "Bow-wow," for dog. Still another hypothesis once highly credited held that the sounds first uttered were the immediate and appropriate expressions called out by particular types of emotional experience. The validity of the last two theories has been rendered particularly dubious. The very instances of imitative words cited, words like "cuckoo," "crash," "flash," were, in their original forms, quite other than they are now. And that words are not immediately apposite expressions of the emotions which they represent, has been generally recognized. In gesture language, the gesture has to remain fairly imitative or expressive to be intelligible. But an examination of half a dozen casual words in contemporary languages shows how arbitrary are the signs used, and how little appositeness or relevance they bear in their sound to the sense which they represent. The detailed study of the perfectly regular changes that so largely characterize the evolution of language, have revealed the inadequacy of any of these views. There seems to be, in fact, no explanation of the origin of the language any more than there is of the origin of life. All that linguistic science can do is to reveal the history of language. And in this history, human language stands revealed as a highly refined development of the crude and undifferentiated expressions which, under emotional stress, are uttered by all the animals.
Language as a social habit. Language, as has repeatedly been pointed out, is essentially social in character. It is, in the first place, primarily an instrument of communication between individuals, and is cultivated as such. In human speech, interjections like "Oh!" or "Ah!" are still involuntary escapes of emotion, but language develops as a vehicle of communication to others rather than as a mere emotional outlet for the individual. Even if it were possible for the mythical man brought up in solitude on a desert island to have a language, it is questionable whether he would use it. Since language is a way of making our wants, desires, information known to others, it is stimulated by the presence of and contact with others. Excess vitality may go into shouting or song,[1] but language as an instrument of specific utterance comes to have a more definite use and provocation. Man, as already pointed out, is a highly gregarious animal, and language is his incomparable instrument for sharing his emotions and ideas and experience with others. The whole process of education, of the transmission of culture from the mature to the younger members of a society, is made possible through this instrument, whereby achievements and traditions are preserved and transmitted in precise and public terms.
[Footnote 1: Human song is by some linguistic experts, including Bloomfield, held to have originated in the chant of rhythmic labor, as in rowing or threshing.]
Secondly, language is social in that, for the individual at least, it is socially acquired. The child first imitates sounds without any consciousness of their meaning, just as he imitates other actions in sheer "physiological sympathy." But he learns soon, by watching the actions of other people, that given sounds are always performed when these others do given actions. He learns that some sounds are portents of anger and punishment; still others of satisfaction and pleasure. He learns soon to specify his utterances, to use sounds as specific stimuli, to attain through other people specific satisfactions. The child is born with a flexible set of reflexes. In which way they shall be developed depends entirely on the accident of the child's environment. Whether he shall call it "bread" or "pain" or "brod," depends on the particular social environment in which he from the first hears that particular item of experience referred to. A child of American missionaries in Turkey picks up the language of that country as well as that of his own. An English child brought up under a French nurse may learn with perfect ease the foreign tongue, and to the exclusion of that of his native country. Indeed, so completely subject is one in this regard to one's early environment, that it is not only difficult in later life to acquire a new pronunciation, but one finds it impossible to breathe freely, as it were, in the whole psychological atmosphere of a foreign language. Its grammatical categories, its spelling, its logic seem hopelessly irrational. It was perfectly natural of the Englishman in the story, when he was told that the French called it "pain," to insist, "Well, it's bread, anyhow." Many a reader of a foreign language which has become habitual can still not refrain from translating, as he reads, what seem to him irrational idioms into the familiar, facile, and sensible modes of his native tongue.
Language and mental life. The connection of language with thought has repeatedly been noted. It has even been questioned whether thought in any effective sense is possible without words. In general it may be said that thinking demands clean-cut and definite symbols to work with, and that language offers these in incomparable form. A word enables one to isolate in thought the dominant elements of an experience and prevents them from "slipping through one's fingers."