Immediately after this, Professor Romanes dwells on what he calls the interesting feature of all roots being verbs. This is simply a contradiction in terms. In giving the meaning of roots scholars generally employ the infinitive or the participle, to go, or going, but they have stated again and again that a root ceases to be a root as soon as it is used in a sentence, either as a subject or as a predicate, either as a noun or a verb. All his arguments therefore that archaic words, expressive of actions, would have stood a better chance of surviving as roots than those which may have been expressive of objects, are simply out of place. The question whether verbs came first or nouns, may be argued ad infinitum, quite as much as the question whether the egg came first or the chicken. Every sentence requires a subject as well as a predicate. If Professor Romanes approves of my saying that roots stood for any part of speech, just as the monosyllabic expressions of children do, I can only say that if I ever said so, I expressed myself incorrectly. A root never stands for any part of speech, because as soon as it is a part of speech, it is no longer a root.
After that, Professor Romanes returns once more to his statement that the roots of Aryan speech are not the aboriginal elements of language, as first spoken by man. Why deny what has never been asserted? I know nothing of the language as first spoken by man. I say with Steinthal, 'Who was present when the first sound of language burst forth from the breast of the first man, as yet dumb?' All that we, the students of language, undertake to do is to take language as we find it, to analyse it, and to reduce it to its simplest component elements. What we cannot analyse, we leave alone. The utmost we venture to do is to suggest an hypothesis as to the possible origin of these elements. Of the Homo alalus, the speechless progenitor of Homo sapiens, with whom Professor Romanes seems so intimately acquainted, students of human speech naturally know nothing. Professor Romanes assures us (p. 211) that the reducing of language to a certain small number of roots, and the fact that all the roots of language are expressive of general and generic ideas, yield no support whatever to the doctrine either, that these roots were themselves the aboriginal elements of language, or, a fortiori, that the aboriginal elements of language were expressive of general ideas. He evidently does not see that we are speaking of two quite different things. I am speaking of the facts of language, he is speaking of the postulates of a biological theory which may be right or wrong, but which certainly derives no support whatever from the Science of Language. If, like Professor Romanes, we begin with the 'immense presumption that there has been no interruption in the developmental process in the course of psychological history,' the protest of language counts for nothing; the very fact that no animal has ever formed a language, is put aside simply as an unfortunate accident. But to students to whom facts are facts, immense presumptions count for nothing: on the contrary they are looked upon as the most dangerous merchandise and most likely to lead to shipwreck and ruin.
Instead of closing with these facts, Professor Romanes tries to show that those who try to explain them are not always consistent. That may be so, and I should be sorry indeed if my latest views were not more advanced and more correct than those which I expressed forty years ago. But very often where Professor Romanes sees inconsistency, there is none at all.
Speaking of roots in my "Science of Thought," I said: 'Although during the time when the growth of language becomes historical and most accessible, therefore, to our observation, the tendency certainly is from the general to the special, I cannot resist the conviction that before that time there was a pre-historic period during which language followed an opposite direction. During that period, roots beginning with special meanings, (though, of course, always general in character) became more and more generalised, and it was only after reaching that stage, that they branched off again into special channels.'
The observation which I recorded in these words, was simply this, that a root meaning originally to yawn, may in time assume the meaning of opening, while during a latter period, a root meaning to open, may come to be used in the more special sense of yawning. Facts are there to prove this. But whether a root expresses the act of yawning or opening, it remains general and conceptual in either case, though the intension of the concept may be smaller or larger. Where Professor Romanes sees inconsistency, he only shows that he has not apprehended the drift of my remarks.
When all the facts of real language are against him, Professor Romanes betakes himself to baby-language. Here he is safe, and he knows quite well, why I refuse to argue with him or any other philosopher either in the nursery, or in the menagerie, either about Mamma and Papa, or about 'Poor Polly.' But if all he wants is to prove the possibility of onomatopœia, he could have found much ampler evidence in my own laboratory, only with this restriction that, after we have analysed these onomatopœic words which in some languages are far more numerous than even Professor Romanes seems to be aware of, we are only on the threshold of the real problem, namely how to deal with real language, that is, with those conceptual words which cannot be traced back to natural sounds or interjections.
Professor Romanes appeals to philology in support of his theory, and, to use a favorite phrase of his own, to philology let him go! It was long considered an irrefragable proof in support of the onomatopœic theory that thunder was called thunder. People imagined they heard the rumbling noise of the clouds echoed in the sound of thunder. However, the word was taken to pieces by comparative philologists, thunder was found out to be closely connected with the Latin tonitru and the Sanskrit tanyatu, and there could be no doubt that these words were all derived from the root TAN, to stretch, from which the Greek τόνος, stretching, tension, and tone. Thunder, therefore, was clearly shown to owe its origin to this root TAN, in which there is very little trace of distant rumble. But what does Professor Romanes do? He appeals in his distress to Archdeacon Farrar, who is reported to have said that the word thunder, even if not originally onomatopœic, became so from a feeling of the need that it should be! Now, this fairly takes away one's breath, and I cannot believe that Professor Romanes could have used this argument seriously. He begins by maintaining that words are formed by imitation of natural sounds. He quotes thunder as a case in point. He is told by comparative philologists that thunder is derived from a root TAN, to stretch. He does not attempt to deny this, but he appeals to Archdeacon Farrar, who says that the word became afterwards onomatopœic, from a feeling of the need that it should be so. If that is not shirking the question, I do not know what is. Suppose it were true that thunder had been supposed to be an imitation of a rumbling noise by those who, like Professor Romanes, are convinced that all words must be more or less onomatopœic. What in all the world has that to do with the real origin of the word? We want to know how the word thunder came to be, and we are told, if it was not onomatopœic, it ought to have been so, nay that by certain ignorant people it was supposed to be so. This goes beyond the limits of what is allowed in any serious discussion.
But Professor Romanes attempts a still greater triumph in forensic adroitness, when he suddenly turns round and declares himself altogether convinced by the theory proposed by Noiré and myself, though at the same time placing it on a level with the Bow-wow and Pooh-pooh theories. Now the fact is, that both Noiré and myself have been most anxious to show the fundamental difference between these two exploded theories and our own. The theory which I, for clearness' sake, was quite willing to call the Yo-he-ho theory, is the very opposite of what Noiré called the Synergastic theory. Those who appeal to words like thunder as derived from the rumbling sound in the clouds, without any conceptual root standing between our conceptual word thunder and these unconceptual noises, hold the Bow-wow theory. Those who hold that fiend is derived direct from the interjection fie, without any conceptual root standing between the unconceptual fie and the conceptual word fiend, hold the Pooh-pooh theory. Those who would derive to heave and to hoist from sounds like Yo-he-ho would hold what may be called the Yo-he-ho theory. I have never denied that there are some words in every language which may be so explained.
But what similarity is there between these theories and our own? We begin with the fact that the great bulk of a language consists of words, derived, according to the strictest rules, not from cries, but from articulate roots. No one denies this. We follow this up with a second fact, that nearly all these roots express acts of men. No one denies that. We then propound an hypothesis that possibly the phonetic elements of these roots may be the remnants of utterances such as even now sailors make when rowing, soldiers when marching, builders in pulling and lifting, and that as expressing originally the consciousness of such repeated acts, performed in common, these roots would fulfil what is wanted, they would express conceptual thought, such as beating, cutting, rubbing, binding, and all the other 121 concepts from which, as a matter of fact, all the words that fill our dictionaries have been derived. Those who cannot see the difference between a man, or, for all that, between a mocking bird, saying Cuckoo, and a whole community fixing on the sound of TAN, as differentiated by various suffixes and prefixes, and expressing the concept of stretching in such words as tonos, tone, tonitru, thunder, tanu, tenuis, thin, should not meddle with the Science of Language.
Observations, for instance, on the language of children, or on what I call Nursery psychology, are very interesting and may be useful for other purposes. But what have they to do with the problem of the origin of language? The two problems, how a child learns to speak English, and how language was elaborated for the first time, are as remote from each other as the two poles. The one is perfectly clear, though it may vary in different children. No child makes its language, it simply accepts what has been made. What we are concerned with is, how each word was originally made, how the first impulse to speech was given, what were the rough materials out of which words were shaped, how words assumed different meanings by becoming specialised or generalised, or by being used metaphorically—how, in the end, some words became purely formal, and served as the grammatical articulations of human speech. What has that to do with a child learning to say Bread or Milk, or with a parrot learning to say Poor Polly? We might as well try to study the geological stratification of the earth from watching the layers of a wedding-cake. I know quite well that every philosopher, when he becomes a father thinks that he may discover the origin of language in his nursery. The books which owe their origin to these paternal experiments are endless. But they have thrown hardly one ray of pure light on the dark problem of the origin and evolution of human speech. That problem, if it can be solved at all, can only be solved by a careful analysis of language, such as it exists in the immense varieties of spoken languages all over the globe. This is the work which the Science of Language has carried out for nearly a century, and which will occupy the minds of many students and philosophers for centuries to come.