There was another reason for the richness of the vocabulary of primitive man: his superstition about words, which made him avoid the use of certain words under certain circumstances—during war, when out fishing, during the time of the great cultic festivals, etc.—because he feared the anger of gods or demons if he did not religiously observe the rules of the linguistic tabu. Accordingly, in many cases he had two or more sets of words for exactly the same notions, of which later generations as a rule preserved only one, unless they differentiated these words by utilizing them to discriminate objects that were similar but not identical.
XXI.—§ 11. Poetry and Prose.
On the whole the development of languages, even in the matter of vocabulary, must be considered to have taken a beneficial course; still, in certain respects one may to some extent regret the consequences of this evolution. While our words are better adapted to express abstract things and to render concrete things with definite precision, they are necessarily comparatively colourless. The old words, on the contrary, spoke more immediately to the senses—they were manifestly more suggestive, more graphic and pictorial: while to express one single thing we are not unfrequently obliged to piece the image together bit by bit, the old concrete words would at once present it to the hearer’s mind as a whole; they were, accordingly, better adapted to poetic purposes. Nor is this the only point in which we see a close relationship between primitive words and poetry.
If by a mental effort we transport ourselves to a period in which language consisted solely of such graphic concrete words, we shall discover that, in spite of their number, they would not suffice, taken all together, to cover everything that needed expression; a wealth in such words is not incompatible with a certain poverty. They would accordingly often be required to do service outside of their proper sphere of application. That a figurative or metaphorical use of words is a factor of the utmost importance in the life of all languages is indisputable; but I am probably right in thinking that it played a more prominent part in old times than now. In the course of ages a great many metaphors have lost their freshness and vividness, so that nobody feels them to be metaphors any longer. Examine closely such a sentence as this: “He came to look upon the low ebb of morals as an outcome of bad taste,” and you will find that nearly every word is a dead metaphor.[109] But the better stocked a language is with those ex-metaphors which have become regular expressions for definite ideas, the less need there is for going out of one’s way to find new metaphors. The expression of thought therefore tends to become more and more mechanical or prosaic.
Primitive man, however, on account of the nature of his language, was constantly reduced to using words and phrases figuratively: he was forced to express his thoughts in the language of poetry. The speech of modern savages is often spoken of as abounding in similes and all kinds of figurative phrases and allegorical expressions. Just as in the literature transmitted to us poetry is found in every country to precede prose, so poetic language is on the whole older than prosaic language; lyrics and cult songs come before science, and Oehlenschläger is right when he sings (in N. Møller’s translation):
Thus Nature drove us; warbling rose
Man’s voice in verse before he spoke in prose.
XXI.—§ 12. Emotional Songs.
If we now try to sum up what has been inferred about primitive speech, we see that by our backward march we arrived at a language whose units had a very meagre substance of thought, and this as specialized and concrete as possible; but at the same time the phonetic body was ample; and the bigger and longer the words, the thinner the thoughts! Much cry and little wool! No period has seen less taciturn people than the first framers of speech; primitive speakers were not reticent and reserved beings, but youthful men and women babbling merrily on, without being so very particular about the meaning of each word. They did not narrowly weigh every syllable—what were a couple of syllables more or less to them? They chattered away for the mere pleasure of chattering, resembling therein many a mother of our own time, who will chatter away to baby without measuring her words or looking too closely into the meaning of each; nay, who is not a bit troubled by the consideration that the little deary does not understand a single word of her affectionate eloquence. But primitive speech—and we return here to an idea thrown out above—still more resembles the speech of little baby himself, before he begins to frame his own language after the pattern of the grown-ups; the language of our remote forefathers was like that ceaseless humming and crooning with which no thoughts are as yet connected, which merely amuses and delights the little one. Language originated as play, and the organs of speech were first trained in this singing sport of idle hours.
Primitive language had no great store of ideas, and if we consider it as an instrument for expressing thoughts, it was clumsy, unwieldy and ineffectual; but what did that matter? Thoughts were not the first things to press forward and crave for expression; emotions and instincts were more primitive and far more powerful. But what emotions were most powerful in producing germs of speech? To be sure not hunger and that which is connected with hunger: mere individual self-assertion and the struggle for material existence. This prosaic side of life was only capable of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections, howls of pain and grunts of satisfaction or dissatisfaction; but these are isolated and incapable of much further development; they are the most immutable portions of language, and remain now at essentially the same standpoint as thousands of years ago.