Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

by Otto Jespersen

No jarkman, be he high or low;

No dummerar or romany ...

Nor any other will I suffer.

In the cultic and ceremonial songs of savage tribes in many parts of the world this is a prominent trait: it seems, indeed, to be universal. Even with us the thoughts associated with singing are generally neither very clear nor very abstruse; like humming or whistling, singing is often nothing more than an almost automatic outcome of a mood; and “What is not worth saying can be sung.” Besides, it has been the case at all times that things transient and trivial have found readier expression than Socratic wisdom. But the frivolous use tuned the instrument, and rendered it little by little more serviceable to a multiplicity of purposes, so that it became more and more fitted to express everything that touched human souls.

Men sang out their feelings long before they were able to speak their thoughts. But of course we must not imagine that “singing” means exactly the same thing here as in a modern concert hall. When we say that speech originated in song, what we mean is merely that our comparatively monotonous spoken language and our highly developed vocal music are differentiations of primitive utterances, which had more in them of the latter than of the former. These utterances were at first, like the singing of birds and the roaring of many animals and the crying and crooning of babies, exclamative, not communicative—that is, they came forth from an inner craving of the individual without any thought of any fellow-creatures. Our remote ancestors had not the slightest notion that such a thing as communicating ideas and feelings to someone else was possible. They little suspected that in singing as nature prompted them they were paving the way for a language capable of rendering minute shades of thought; just as they could not suspect that out of their coarse pictures of men and animals there should one day grow an art enabling men of distant countries to speak to one another. As is the art of writing to primitive painting, so is the art of speaking to primitive singing. And the development of the two vehicles of communication of thought presents other curious and instructive parallels. In primitive picture-writing, each sign meant a whole sentence or even more—the image of a situation or of an incident being given as a whole; this developed into an ideographic writing of each word by itself; this system was succeeded by syllabic methods, which had in their turn to give place to alphabetic writing, in which each letter stands for, or is meant to stand for, one sound. Just as here the advance is due to a further analysis of language, smaller and smaller units of speech being progressively represented by single signs, in an exactly similar way, though not quite so unmistakably, the history of language shows us a progressive tendency towards analyzing into smaller and smaller units that which in the earlier stages was taken as an inseparable whole.

One point must be constantly kept in mind. Although we now regard the communication of thought as the main object of speaking, there is no reason for thinking that this has always been the case; it is perfectly possible that speech has developed from something which had no other purpose than that of exercising the muscles of the mouth and throat and of amusing oneself and others by the production of pleasant or possibly only strange sounds. The motives for uttering sounds may have changed entirely in the course of centuries without the speakers being at any point conscious of this change within them.

XXI.—§ 14. Approach to Language.

We get the first approach to language proper when communicativeness takes precedence of exclamativeness, when sounds are uttered in order to ‘tell’ fellow-creatures something, as when birds warn their young ones of some imminent danger. In the case of human language, communication is infinitely more full and rich and elaborate; the question therefore is a very complex one: How did the association of sound and sense come about? How did that which originally was a jingle of meaningless sounds come to be an instrument of thought? How did man become, as Humboldt has somewhere defined him, “a singing creature, only associating thoughts with the tones”?

In the case of an onomatopoetic or echo-word like bow-wow and an interjection like pooh-pooh the association was easy and direct; such words were at once employed and understood as signs for the corresponding idea. But this was not the case with the great bulk of language. Here association of sound with sense must have been arrived at by devious and circuitous ways, which to a great extent evade inquiry and make a detailed exposition impossible. But this is in exact conformity with very much that has taken place in recent periods; as we have learnt in previous chapters, it is only by indirect and roundabout ways that many words and grammatical expedients have acquired the meanings they now have, or have acquired meaning where they originally had none. Let me remind the reader of the word grog (p. [308]), of interrogative particles (p. [358]), of word order (p. [356]), of many endings (Ch. XIX § [13] ff.), of tones (Ch. XIX § [5]), of the French negative pas, of vowel-alternations like those in drink, drank, drunk, or in foot, feet, etc. Language is a complicated affair, and no more than most other human inventions has it come about in a simple way: mankind has not moved in a straight line towards a definitely perceived goal, but has muddled along from moment to moment and has thereby now and then stumbled on some happy expedient which has then been retained in accordance with the principle of the survival of the fittest.