Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

by Otto Jespersen

The normative way of viewing language is fraught with some great dangers which can only be avoided through a comprehensive knowledge of the historic development of languages and of the general conditions of linguistic psychology. Otherwise, the tendency everywhere is to draw too narrow limits for what is allowable or correct. In many cases one form, or one construction, only is recognized, even where two or more are found in actual speech; the question which is to be selected as the only good form comes to be decided too often by individual fancy or predilection, where no scientific tests can yet be applied, and thus a form may often be proscribed which from a less narrow point of view might have appeared just as good as, or even better than, the one preferred in the official grammar or dictionary. In other instances, where two forms were recognized, the grammarian wanted to give rules for their discrimination, and sometimes on the basis of a totally inadequate induction he would establish nice distinctions not really warranted by actual usage—distinctions which subsequent generations had to learn at school with the sweat of their brows and which were often considered most important in spite of their intrinsic insignificance. Such unreal or half-real subtle distinctions are the besetting sin of French grammarians from the ‘grand siècle’ onwards, while they have played a much less considerable part in England, where people have been on the whole more inclined to let things slide as best they may on the ‘laissez faire’ principle, and where no Academy was ever established to regulate language. But even in English rules are not unfrequently given in schools and in newspaper offices which are based on narrow views and hasty generalizations. Because a preposition at the end of a sentence may in some instances be clumsy or unwieldy, this is no reason why a final preposition should always and under all circumstances be considered a grave error. But it is of course easier for the schoolmaster to give an absolute and inviolable rule once and for all than to study carefully all the various considerations that might render a qualification desirable. If the ordinary books on Common Faults in Writing and Speaking English and similar works in other languages have not even now assimilated the teachings of Comparative and Historic Linguistics, it is no wonder that the grammarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with whom we are here concerned, should be in many ways guided by narrow and insufficient views on what ought to determine correctness of speech.

Here also the importance given to the study of Latin was sometimes harmful; too much was settled by a reference to Latin rules, even where the modern languages really followed rules of their own that were opposed to those of Latin. The learning of Latin grammar was supposed to be, and to some extent really was, a schooling in logic, as the strict observance of the rules of any foreign language is bound to be; but the consequence of this was that when questions of grammatical correctness were to be settled, too much importance was often given to purely logical considerations, and scholars were sometimes apt to determine what was to be called ‘logical’ in language according to whether it was or was not in conformity with Latin usage. This disposition, joined with the unavoidable conservatism of mankind, and more particularly of teachers, would in many ways prove a hindrance to natural developments in a living speech. But we must again take up the thread of the history of linguistic theory.

I.—§ 3. Eighteenth-century Speculation. Herder.

The problem of a natural origin of language exercised some of the best-known thinkers of the eighteenth century. Rousseau imagined the first men setting themselves more or less deliberately to frame a language by an agreement similar to (or forming part of) the contrat social which according to him was the basis of all social order. There is here the obvious difficulty of imagining how primitive men who had been previously without any speech came to feel the want of language, and how they could agree on what sound was to represent what idea without having already some means of communication. Rousseau’s whole manner of putting and of viewing the problem is evidently too crude to be of any real importance in the history of linguistic science.

Condillac is much more sensible when he tries to imagine how a speechless man and a speechless woman might be led quite naturally to acquire something like language, starting with instinctive cries and violent gestures called forth by strong emotions. Such cries would come to be associated with elementary feelings, and new sounds might come to indicate various objects if produced repeatedly in connexion with gestures showing what objects the speaker wanted to call attention to. If these two first speaking beings had as yet very little power to vary their sounds, their child would have a more flexible tongue, and would therefore be able to, and be impelled to, produce some new sounds, the meaning of which his parents would guess at, and which they in their turn would imitate; thus gradually a greater and greater number of words would come into existence, generation after generation working painfully to enrich and develop what had been already acquired, until it finally became a real language.

The profoundest thinker on these problems in the eighteenth century was Johann Gottfried Herder, who, though he did little or nothing in the way of scientific research, yet prepared the rise of linguistic science. In his prize essay on the Origin of Language (1772) Herder first vigorously and successfully attacks the orthodox view of his age—a view which had been recently upheld very emphatically by one Süssmilch—that language could not have been invented by man, but was a direct gift from God. One of Herder’s strongest arguments is that if language had been framed by God and by Him instilled into the mind of man, we should expect it to be much more logical, much more imbued with pure reason than it is as an actual matter of fact. Much in all existing languages is so chaotic and ill-arranged that it could not be God’s work, but must come from the hand of man. On the other hand, Herder does not think that language was really ‘invented’ by man—although this was the word used by the Berlin Academy when opening the competition in which Herder’s essay gained the prize. Language was not deliberately framed by man, but sprang of necessity from his innermost nature; the genesis of language according to him is due to an impulse similar to that of the mature embryo pressing to be born. Man, in the same way as all animals, gives vent to his feelings in tones, but this is not enough; it is impossible to trace the origin of human language to these emotional cries alone. However much they may be refined and fixed, without understanding they can never become human, conscious language. Man differs from brute animals not in degree or in the addition of new powers, but in a totally different direction and development of all powers. Man’s inferiority to animals in strength and sureness of instinct is compensated by his wider sphere of attention; the whole disposition of his mind as an unanalysable entity constitutes the impassable barrier between him and the lower animals. Man, then, shows conscious reflexion when among the ocean of sensations that rush into his soul through all the senses he singles out one wave and arrests it, as when, seeing a lamb, he looks for a distinguishing mark and finds it in the bleating, so that next time when he recognizes the same animal he imitates the sound of bleating, and thereby creates a name for that animal. Thus the lamb to him is ‘the bleater,’ and nouns are created from verbs, whereas, according to Herder, if language had been the creation of God it would inversely have begun with nouns, as that would have been the logically ideal order of procedure. Another characteristic trait of primitive languages is the crossing of various shades of feeling and the necessity of expressing thoughts through strong, bold metaphors, presenting the most motley picture. “The genetic cause lies in the poverty of the human mind and in the flowing together of the emotions of a primitive human being.” Another consequence is the wealth of synonyms in primitive language; “alongside of real poverty it has the most unnecessary superfluity.”

When Herder here speaks of primitive or ‘original’ languages, he is thinking of Oriental languages, and especially of Hebrew. “We should never forget,” says Edward Sapir,[1] “that Herder’s time-perspective was necessarily very different from ours. While we unconcernedly take tens or even hundreds of thousands of years in which to allow the products of human civilization to develop, Herder was still compelled to operate with the less than six thousand years that orthodoxy stingily doled out. To us the two or three thousand years that separate our language from the Old Testament Hebrew seems a negligible quantity, when speculating on the origin of language in general; to Herder, however, the Hebrew and the Greek of Homer seemed to be appreciably nearer the oldest conditions than our vernaculars—hence his exaggeration of their ursprünglichkeit.”

Herder’s chief influence on the science of speech, to my mind, is not derived directly from the ideas contained in his essay on the actual origin of speech, but rather indirectly through the whole of his life’s work. He had a very strong sense of the value of everything that had grown naturally (das naturwüchsige); he prepared the minds of his countrymen for the manysided receptiveness of the Romanticists, who translated and admired the popular poetry of a great many countries, which had hitherto been terræ incognitæ; and he was one of the first to draw attention to the great national value of his own country’s medieval literature and its folklore, and thus was one of the spiritual ancestors of Grimm. He sees the close connexion that exists between language and primitive poetry, or that kind of spontaneous singing that characterizes the childhood or youth of mankind, and which is totally distinct from the artificial poetry of later ages. But to him each language is not only the instrument of literature, but itself literature and poetry. A nation speaks its soul in the words it uses. Herder admires his own mother-tongue, which to him is perhaps inferior to Greek, but superior to its neighbours. The combinations of consonants give it a certain measured pace; it does not rush forward, but walks with the firm carriage of a German. The nice gradation of vowels mitigates the force of the consonants, and the numerous spirants make the German speech pleasant and endearing. Its syllables are rich and firm, its phrases are stately, and its idiomatic expressions are emphatic and serious. Still in some ways the present German language is degenerate if compared with that of Luther, and still more with that of the Suabian Emperors, and much therefore remains to be done in the way of disinterring and revivifying the powerful expressions now lost. Through ideas like these Herder not only exercised a strong influence on Goethe and the Romanticists, but also gave impulses to the linguistic studies of the following generation, and caused many younger men to turn from the well-worn classics to fields of research previously neglected.

I.—§ 4. Jenisch.

Where questions of correct language or of the best usage are dealt with, or where different languages are compared with regard to their efficiency or beauty, as is done very often, though more often in dilettante conversation or in casual remarks in literary works than in scientific linguistic disquisitions, it is no far cry to the question, What would an ideal language be like? But such is the matter-of-factness of modern scientific thought, that probably no scientific Academy in our own days would think of doing what the Berlin Academy did in 1794 when it offered a prize for the best essay on the ideal of a perfect language and a comparison of the best-known languages of Europe as tested by the standard of such an ideal. A Berlin pastor, D. Jenisch, won the prize, and in 1796 brought out his book under the title Philosophisch-kritische vergleichung und würdigung von vierzehn ältern und neuern sprachen Europens—a book which is even now well worth reading, the more so because its subject has been all but completely neglected in the hundred and twenty years that have since intervened. In the Introduction the author has the following passage, which might be taken as the motto of Wilhelm v. Humboldt, Steinthal, Finck and Byrne, who do not, however, seem to have been inspired by Jenisch: “In language the whole intellectual and moral essence of a man is to some extent revealed. ‘Speak, and you are’ is rightly said by the Oriental. The language of the natural man is savage and rude, that of the cultured man is elegant and polished. As the Greek was subtle in thought and sensuously refined in feeling—as the Roman was serious and practical rather than speculative—as the Frenchman is popular and sociable—as the Briton is profound and the German philosophic—so are also the languages of each of these nations.”