Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

by Otto Jespersen

First, as to the language of children. Some biologists maintain that the development of the individual follows on the whole the same course as that of the race; the embryo, before it arrives at full maturity, will have passed through the same stages of development which in countless generations have led the whole species to its present level. It has, therefore, occurred to many that the acquisition by mankind at large of the faculty of speech may be mirrored to us in the process by which any child learns to communicate its thoughts by means of its vocal organs. Accordingly, children’s language has often been invoked to furnish illustrations and parallels of the process gone through in the formation of primitive language. But many writers have been guilty of an erroneous inference in applying this principle, inasmuch as they have taken all their examples from a child’s acquisition of an already existing language. The fallacy will be evident if we suppose for a moment the case of a man endeavouring to arrive at the evolution of music from the manner in which a child is nowadays taught to play on the piano. Manifestly, the modern learner is in quite a different position to primitive man, and has quite a different task set him: he has an instrument ready to hand, and melodies already composed for him, and finally a teacher who understands how to draw these tunes forth from the instrument. It is the same thing with language: the task of the child is to learn an existing language, that is, to connect certain sounds heard on the lips of others with the same ideas that the speakers associate with them, but not in the least to frame anything new. No; if we are seeking some parallel to the primitive acquisition of language, we must look elsewhere and turn to baby language as it is spoken in the first year of life, before the child has begun to ‘notice’ and to make out what use is made of language by grown-up people. Here, in the child’s first purposeless murmuring, crowing and babbling, we have real nature sounds; here we may expect to find some clue to the infancy of the language of the race. And, again, we must not neglect the way children have of creating new words never heard before, and often of attaching a sense to originally meaningless conglomerations of sound.

As for the languages of contemporary savages, we may in some instances take them as typical of more primitive languages than those of civilized nations, and therefore as illustrating a linguistic stage that is nearer to that in which speech originated. Still, inferences from such languages should be used with great caution, for it should never be forgotten that even the most backward race has many centuries of linguistic evolution behind it, and that the conditions therefore may, or must, be very different from those of primeval man. The so-called primitive languages will therefore in the following sections be only invoked to corroborate conclusions at which it is possible to arrive from other data.

The third and most fruitful source from which to gather information of value for our investigation is the history of language as it has been considered in previous chapters of this work. While the propounders of the theories of the origin of speech mentioned above made straight for the front of the lion’s den, we are like the fox in the fable, who noticed that all the traces led into the den and not a single one came out; we will therefore try and steal into the den from behind. They thought it logically correct, nay necessary, to begin at the beginning; let us, for variety’s sake, begin with languages accessible at the present day, and let us attempt from that starting-point step by step to trace the backward path. Perhaps in this way we may reach the very first beginnings of speech.

The method I recommend, and which I think I am the first to employ consistently, is to trace our modern twentieth-century languages as far back in time as history and our materials will allow us; and then, from this comparison of present English with Old English, of Danish with Old Norse, and of both with ‘Common Gothonic,’ of French and Italian with Latin, of modern Indian dialects with Sanskrit, etc., to deduce definite laws for the development of languages in general, and to try and find a system of lines which can be lengthened backwards beyond the reach of history. If we should succeed in discovering certain qualities to be generally typical of the earlier as opposed to the later stages of languages, we shall be justified in concluding that the same qualities obtained in a still higher degree in the earliest times of all; if we are able within the historical era to demonstrate a definite direction of linguistic evolution, we must be allowed to infer that the direction was the same even in those primeval periods for which we have no documents to guide us. But if the change witnessed in the evolution of modern speech out of older forms of speech is thus on a larger scale projected back into the childhood of mankind, and if by this process we arrive finally at uttered sounds of such a description that they can no longer be called a real language, but something antecedent to language—why, then the problem will have been solved; for transformation is something we can understand, while a creation out of nothing can never be comprehended by human understanding.

This, then, will be the object of the following rapid sketch: to search the several departments of the science of language for general laws of evolution—most of them have already been discussed at some length in the preceding chapters—then to magnify the changes observed, and thus to form a picture of the outer and inner structure of some sort of speech more primitive than the most primitive language accessible to direct observation.

XXI.—§ 4. Sounds.

First, as regards the purely phonetic side of language, we observe everywhere the tendency to make pronunciation more easy, so as to lessen the muscular effort; difficult combinations of sounds are discarded, those only being retained which are pronounced with ease (see Ch. XIV § [6] ff.). Modern research has shown that the Proto-Aryan sound-system was much more complicated than was imagined in the reconstructions of the middle of the nineteenth century. In most languages now only such sounds are used as are produced by expiration, while inbreathed sounds and clicks or suction-stops are not found in connected speech. In civilized languages we meet with such sounds only in interjections, as when an inbreathed voiceless l (generally with rhythmic variations of strength and corresponding small movements of the tongue) is used to express delight in eating and drinking, or when the click inadequately spelt tut is used to express impatience. In some very primitive South African languages, on the other hand, clicks are found as integral parts of words; and Bleek has rendered it probable that in former stages of these languages they were in more extensive use than now. We may perhaps draw the conclusion that primitive languages in general were rich in all kinds of difficult sounds.

The following point is of more far-reaching consequence. In some languages we find a gradual disappearance of tone or pitch accent; this has been the case in Danish, whereas Norwegian and Swedish have kept the old tones; so also in Russian as compared with Serbo-Croatian. In the works of old Indian, Greek and Latin grammarians we have express statements to the effect that pitch accent played a prominent part in those languages, and that the intervals used must have been comparatively greater than is usual in our modern languages. In modern Greek and in the Romanic languages the tone element has been obscured, and now ‘stress’ is heard on the syllable where the ancients noted only a high or a low tone. About the languages spoken nowadays by savage tribes we have generally very little information, as most of those who have made a first-hand study of such languages have not been trained to observe and to describe these delicate points; still, there is of late years an increasing number of observations of tone accents, for instance in African languages, which may justify us in thinking that tone plays an important part in many primitive languages.[107]

So much for word tones; now for the sentence melody. It is a well-known fact that the modulation of sentences is strongly influenced by the effect of intense emotions in causing stronger and more rapid raisings and sinkings of the tone. “All passionate language does of itself become musical—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song” (Carlyle). “The sounds of common conversation have but little resonance; those of strong feeling have much more. Under rising ill-temper the voice acquires a metallic ring.... Grief, unburdening itself, uses tones approaching in timbre to those of chanting; and in his most pathetic passages an eloquent speaker similarly falls into tones more vibratory than those common to him.... While calm speech is comparatively monotonous, emotion makes use of fifths, octaves, and even wider intervals” (H. Spencer).