It was advisable to recall these mixed states in which articulate language had not yet left its primitive vein. They are transitional forms between pure pantomime and the moment when speech conquered its complete independence.
II.
In passing from the origin of speech to the study of its development, we enter upon firmer ground. Although this development has not occurred uniformly in every race, and the linguists—who are here our guides—do not always agree in fixing its phases, it is nevertheless the surest indication of the march of the human mind in its self-analysis in passing from extreme confusion to deliberate differentiation; while the materials are sufficiently abundant to admit of an objective study of intellectual psychogenesis, based upon language.
This attempt has nothing in common with the “general or philosophical grammar” of the beginning of this century. The Idealogues who founded this had the pretension, while taking language as their basis, to analyse the fundamental categories of intelligence: substance, quality, action, relation. A laudable enterprise, but one which, by reason of the method employed, could only be abortive. Knowing only the classical or modern languages, the products of a long civilisation, they had no suspicion of the embryonic phases; accordingly, they made a theoretical construction, the work of logicians rather than of psychologists. Any positive genetic investigation was inaccessible to them; they were lacking in material, and in instruments. If by a comparison borrowed from geology, the adult languages are assimilated to the quaternary layer; the tertiary, secondary, and primary strata will correspond with certain idioms of less and less complexity, which themselves contain the fossils of psychology. These lower forms—the semi-organised or savage languages which are a hundred times more numerous than the civilised languages—are now familiar to us; hence there is an immense field for research and comparison. This retrogression to the primitive leads to a point that several linguists have designated by a term borrowed from biology: it is the protoplasmic state “without functions of grammatical categories” (Hermann Paul). How is it that speech issued from this undifferentiated state, and constituted little by little its organs and functions? This question is interesting to the linguist on certain sides, to the psychologist on others. For us it consists in seeking how the human mind, through long groping, conquered and perfected its instrument of analysis.
I. At the outset of this evolution, which we are to follow step by step, we find the hypothesis of a primitive period, that of the roots so called, and it is worth our while to pause over this a little. Roots—whatever may be our opinion as to their origin—are in effect general terms. But in what sense?
Chinese consists of 500 monosyllables which, thanks to varieties of intonation, sufficed for the construction of the spoken language; Hebrew, according to Renan, has about 500 roots; for Sanskrit there is no agreement. According to a bold hypothesis of Max Müller, it is reducible to 121, perhaps less, and “these few seeds have produced the enormous intellectual vegetation that has covered the soil of India from the most distant antiquity to the present day.”[52] Whatever their number may be, the question for us reduces itself into knowing their primitive intellectual content, their psychological value. Here we are confronted by two very different theses. For one camp, roots are a reality; for the other, they are the simple residuum of analysis.
“Roots are the phonetic types produced by a force inherent in the human mind; they were created by nature,” etc., etc. Thus speaks Max Müller. Whitney, who is rarely of the same mind, says, notwithstanding, that all the Indo-European languages are descended from one primitive, monosyllabic language, “that our ancestors talked with one another in simple syllables indicative of ideas of prime importance, but wanting all designation of their relations.”
In the other camp it is sustained that roots are the result of learned analysis, but that there is nothing to prove that they really existed (Sayce); that they are reconstructed by comparison and generalisation; that, e. g., in the Aryan languages, roots bear much the same relation to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin words as Platonic ideas to the objects of the real world (Bréal). It has been calculated that the number of articulate sounds which the human voice is capable of producing amounts to three hundred and eighty-five. These sounds, for physiological reasons, constitute a fundamental theme in the various words created by man. Later on, linguists in comparing the vocables used in different languages, established the frequent recurrence of certain sounds common to several words. These have been isolated, but we must not see in them aught besides extracts. Moreover, “the first stammerings of man have nothing in common with phonetic types so arrested in form and abstract in signification, as dhâ, to place, vid, to see, man, to think, and other analogous words.”
To sum up. In the first thesis roots come into existence, ab initio; words are derived from them by reduplication, flexions, affixes, suffixes, etc.; they are the trunk upon which a whole swarm of languages has proliferated.
In the second thesis, words come first; then the common element disengaged by analysis, but which never existed as such in the pure and primitive condition.