# Language and the Study of Language/Lecture XI

LECTURE XI.
In the last lecture, we took up and considered certain matters which seemed naturally to present themselves to our attention in connection with our survey of the divisions and characteristics of human speech. We first examined the various systems of classification of languages, according to morphological form or to general rank, weighing briefly the value of the distinctions upon which they are founded; and we arrived at the conclusion that no other mode of classification has anything like the same worth with the genetical, or that which groups dialects together by their historical relationship. We then passed on to the subject of the general relations between linguistic science and ethnology, the history of human races. We saw that between the study of language and that of physical characteristics, as tests of race, there can be no discordance and jealousy, but only an honourable emulation and mutual helpfulness; that each, feeling its own limitations and imperfections, needs and seeks the assistance of the other; claiming, also, all the aid which recorded ​history can furnish, and all that can be derived from archæology, to correct and confirm its conclusions. So intricate and difficult of solution is the problem set before us in the beginnings of history, the origin and ultimate connections of races, that, as we have good reason to fear, our utmost efforts, our most cunning combinations of all attainable evidence, from whatever sources derived, will never bring us to a distinct and confident answer. For a little way, history and tradition are our chief guides; then, the study of language conducts us somewhat farther, although with feebler and more uncertain steps; while physical science claims to give us a few glimpses, we know not yet of what reach or sweep, into a still remoter past. And as, in investigations of this trying character, it is of no small consequence to know what are the limits and defects of the evidence with which we are dealing, that we may not waste our strength, and prepare for ourselves bitter disappointment, by searching for conclusions where none can possibly be found, we entered upon an inquiry as to whether it was within the province of linguistic science to determine the vexed question of the unity or multiplicity of the human race; and we found that this was not the case. The beginnings of language, in at least a part of the recognized families of languages, are too much covered up and hidden under the products of later growth for our eyes ever to distinguish them with any even tolerable approach to certainty; and the correspondences which have been already, or may be hereafter, pointed out between the linguistic material of different languages, now reckoned as belonging to diverse families, may be so plausibly explained as the effects of chance that they can never be accepted as the sure result and sign of a common linguistic tradition. Our conclusion here was, that human languages might well have become as different as we now find them to be, even though all of them descended from the rudimentary and undeveloped dialect of some single original family or tribe; while, on the other hand, considering the acknowledged unity in diversity of human nature, we should not expect to find languages any more unlike than they actually are, if there had been a separate Adam and Eve for each one of a dozen or more human races.
​Whether physical science will ever reach a more definite decision of the same question is at present, at least, very doubtful: its tendency seems now to be toward establishing such a capacity of mutation in species as would explain all the tribes of men as possible varieties of one type; without, of course, at the same time disproving the possibility of their independent origin. It is likely enough that we may, at some time, reach a point where we shall be able to say that, upon the whole, the weight of probability is upon this side, or upon that: anything more certain and categorical we can hardly venture to look for. Happily, the question is one of little practical consequence: the brotherhood of men, the obligation of mutual justice and mutual kindness, rests upon the possession of a common nature and a common destiny, not upon the tie of fleshly relationship. Those who would justify their oppression of a whole race of their fellow-beings by an alleged proof of its descent from other ancestors than their own are not less perverse—more perverse they could not well be—than those who wonld sanctify it as the execution of a curse pronounced by a drunken patriarch upon a portion of his own offspring. It is as shameful to attempt to press science as religion into the service of organized injustice.
But if linguistic science must thus observe a modest silence with regard to the origin of the human race, what has it to say respecting the origin of language itself? This is an inquiry to which we have made a near approach at one and another point in our discussions hitherto, but which we have carefully refrained from grappling with seriously. It has not lain in the direct line of our investigations. We have been engaged in analyzing and examining the recorded facts of language, in order to find what answer we could to our leading question, "why we speak as we do?" and we have been brought at last to the recognition of certain elements called roots, which we clearly see to have been the germs whence the whole development of speech has proceeded, but which we do not dare affirm to have been absolutely the first utterances of speaking men. These, then, are the historical beginnings of speech; and historical research will ​take us no farther. The question as to what were the actual first utterances, and how they were produced, must be decided, if at all, in another way—by general considerations and analogies, by inferences from the facts of human nature and the facts of language, taken together, and from their relations to one another. It falls within the province rather of linguistic philosophy, as a branch of anthropology, than of the historical science of language. But the subject is one of such interest, and for the proper discussion of which our historical investigations so directly prepare the way, that we cannot refrain from taking it up. It may be that we shall find no sharp-cut and dogmatic answer to our inquiries respecting it, but we may hope at least so to narrow down the field of uncertainty and conjecture as to leave the problem virtually solved.
We may fairly claim, in the first place, that the subject has been very greatly simplified, stripped of no small part of its difficulty and mystery, by what has already been proved as to the history of speech. Did we find no traces of a primitive condition of language different from its later manifestations, did it appear to us as from the very beginning a completely developed apparatus, of complicated structure, with distinct signs for objects, qualities, activities, and abstract conceptions, with its mechanism for the due expression of relations, and with a rich vocabulary—then might we well shrink back in despair from the attempt to explain its origin, and confess that only a miracle could have produced it, that only a superhuman agency could have placed it in human possession. But we have seen that the final perfection of the noblest languages has been the result of a slow and gradual development, under the impulse of tendencies, and through the instrumentality of processes, which are even yet active in every living tongue; that all this wealth has grown by long accumulation out of an original poverty; and that the actual germs of language were a scanty list of formless roots, representing a few of the most obvious sensible acts and phenomena appearing in ourselves, our fellow-creatures, and the nature by which we are surrounded. We have now left us only the comparatively easy task of satisfying ​ourselves how men should have come into possession of these humble rudiments of speech.
And our attention must evidently first be directed to the inquiry whether those same inventive and shaping powers of man which have proved themselves capable of creating out of monosyllabic barrenness the rich abundance of inflective speech were not also equal to the task of producing the first poor hoard of vocables. There are those who insist much on what they are pleased to term the divine origin of language; who think it in some way derogatory to the honour of the Creator to deny that he devised roots and words, and, by some miraculous and exceptional agency, put them ready-made into the mouths of the first human beings. Of such we would ask whether, after all, language can be in this sense only a divine gift to man; whether the hand of the Creator is any the less clearly to be seen, and need be any the less devoutly acknowledged, in its production, if we regard man himself as having been created with the necessary impulses and the necessary capacities for forming language, and then as having possessed himself of it through their natural and conscious workings. Language, articulate speech, is a universal and exclusive characteristic of man: no tribe of human kind, however low, ignorant, and brutish, fails to speak; no race of the lower animals, however highly endowed, is able to speak: clearly, it was just as much a part of the Creator's plan that we should talk as that we should breathe, should walk, should eat and drink. The only question is, whether we began to talk in the same manner as we began to breathe, as our blood began to circulate, by a process in which our own will had no part; or, as we move, eat, clothe and shelter ourselves, by the conscious exertion of our natural powers, by using our divinely-given faculties for the satisfaction of our divinely-implanted necessities.
That the latter supposition is fully sufficient to account for our possession of speech cannot with any show of reason be denied. Throughout its whole traceable history, language has been in the hands of those who have spoken it, for manifold modification, for enrichment, for adaptation to the varying ends of a varying knowledge and experience; nineteen ​twentieths, at the least, of the speech we speak is demonstrably in this sense our own work; why should the remaining twentieth be thought otherwise? It is but a childish philosophy which can see no other way to make out a divine agency in human language than by regarding that agency as specially and miraculously efficient in the first stage of formation of language. We may fairly compare it with the wisdom of the little girl who, on being asked who made her, replied; "God made me a little baby so high" (dropping her hand to within a foot of the floor) "and I grew the rest." The power which originates is not to be separated from that which maintains and develops: both are one, one in their essential nature, one in their general mode of action. We might as well claim that the letters of the alphabet, that the simple digits, must have been miraculously revealed, for elements out of which men should proceed to develop systems of writing and of mathematical notation, as that the rudiments of spoken speech, the primitive signs of mental conceptions, must have had such an origin.
In short, our recognition of language as an institution, as an instrumentality, as no integral system of natural and necessary representatives of thought, inseparable from thought or spontaneously generated by the mind, but, on the contrary, a body of conventional signs, deriving their value from the mutual understanding of one man with another; and, farther, our recognition of the history of this institution as being not a mere succession of changes wrought upon something which still remains the same in essential character, but a real development, effected by human forces, whose operations we can trace and understand—these take away the whole ground on which the doctrine of the divine origin of language, as formerly held, reposed. The origin of language is divine, in the same sense in which man's nature, with all its capacities and acquirements, physical and moral, is a divine creation; it is human, in that it is brought about through that nature, by human instrumentality.
It is hardly necessary to make any farther reference to an objection, already once alluded to, which some minds may ​be tempted to raise against our whole construction of the course of linguistic history out of the evidences of composition, phonetic corruption, transfer of meaning, and the other processes of linguistic growth, which we find in all the material of human speech. The inquiry, namely, has sometimes been raised, whether it was not perfectly possible for the Creator to frame and communicate to mortals a primitive language filled with such apparent signs of previous development, as well as one which should have the aspect of a new creation. Of course, must be our reply; nothing is theoretically impossible to Omnipotence: but to suppose that it has pleased God to work thus is to make the most violent and inadmissible of assumptions, one which imputes to him a wholly degrading readiness to trifle with, even to deliberately mislead and deceive, the reason which he has implanted in his creatures. It is precisely of a piece with the suggestion once currently thrown out, when the revelations of geology were first beginning to be brought to light, that fossils and stratifications and such like facts proved nothing; since God, when he made the rocks, could just as well have made them in this form and with these contents as otherwise. With men who can seriously argue upon such assumptions it is simply impossible to discuss a historical question: all the influences of historical science are thrown away upon them; they are capable of believing that a tree which they have not themselves seen spring up from the seed was created whole in the state in which they find it, without gradual growth; or even that a house, a watch, a picture, were produced just as they are, by the immediate action of almighty power.
We may here fittingly follow out a little farther an analogy more than once suggested in our preceding discussions, and one which, though some may deem it homely and undignified, is genuine and truly illustrative, and therefore not wanting in instruction: it is the analogy between language and clothing and shelter, as alike results of men's needs and men's capacities. Man was not created, like the inferior races, with a frame able to bear all the vicissitudes of climate to which he should be subjected; nor yet with a ​natural protective covering of hair or wool, capable of adapting itself to the variety of the seasons: every human being is born into the world naked and cringing, needing protection against exposure and defence from shame. Gifted is man, accordingly, with all the ingenuity which he requires in order to provide for this need, and placed in the midst of objects calculated to answer to his requirements, suitable materials for his ingenuity to work upon ready to his hand. And hence, it is hardly less distinctively characteristic of man to be clad than to speak; nor is any other animal so universally housed as he. Clothing began with the simplest natural productions, with leaves and bark, with skins of wild animals, and the like; as shelter with a cave, a hole in the ground, the hollow of a tree, a nest of interwoven branches. But ingenuity and taste, with methods perfected and handed down from generation to generation, made themselves, more and more, ministers to higher and less simple needs; the craving after comfort, ease, variety, grace, beauty, sought satisfaction; and architecture by degrees became an art, and dress-making a handicraft, each surrounded by a crowd of auxiliary arts and handicrafts, giving occupation to no insignificant part of the human race, calling into action some of its noblest endowments, and bringing forth forms of elegance and beauty—embodiments of conceptions, realizations of ideals, produced by long ages of cultivation, and capable neither of being conceived nor realized until after a protracted course of training. So was it also with language. Man was not created with a mere gamut of instinctive cries, nor yet with a song like the bird's, as the highest expression of his love and enjoyment of life: he had wants, and capacities of indefinite improvement, which could be satisfied and developed only through means of speech; nor was he treated by nature with a disappointing and baffling niggardliness in respect to them; he was furnished also with organs of speech, and the power to apply their products to use in the formation of language. His first beginnings were rude and insufficient, but the consenting labour of generations has perfected them, till human thought has been clothed in garments measurably worthy of it, and an edifice of speech has ​been erected, grander, more beautiful, and more important to our race than any other work whatever of its producing. There are races yet living whose scanty needs and inferior capacities have given them inferior forms of speech, as there are races which have not striven after, or been able to contrive, any but the rudest raiment, the meanest shelter. But the child now born among us is dressed in the products of every continent and every clime, and housed, it may be, in an edifice whose rules of construction have come down from Egypt and Greece, through generations of architects and craftsmen; as he is also taught to express himself in words and forms far older than the pyramids, and elaborated by a countless succession of thinkers and speakers.
This comparison might profitably be drawn out in yet fuller detail, but I forbear to urge it farther, or to call attention to any other of the aspects in which it may be made to cast light upon the development of speech. Enough has been said, as I hope, to make plain that the assumption of miraculous intervention, of superhuman agency, in the first production of speech, is, so far as linguistic science is concerned, wholly gratuitous, called for by nothing which is brought to light by our study of language and of its relations to the nature and history of man.
It is next of primary and fundamental importance that we make clear to ourselves what is the force directly and immediately impelling to the production of speech. Speech, we know, is composed of external audible signs for internal acts, for conceptions—for ideas, taking that word in its most general sense. But why create such signs? The doctrine, now, is by no means uncommon, that thought seeks expression by an internal impulse; that it is even driven to expression by an inward necessity; that it cannot be thought at all without incorporation in speech; that it tends to utterance as the fully matured embryo tends to burst its envelop, and to come forth into independent life. This doctrine is, in my view, altogether erroneous: I am unable to see upon what it is founded, if not upon arbitrary assumption, combined with a thorough misapprehension of the relation between thought and its expression. It is manifestly ​opposed to all the conclusions to which we have been thus far led by our inquiries into the nature and office of speech. Speech is not a personal possession, but a social; it belongs, not to the individual, but to the member of society. No item of existing language is the work of an individual; for what we may severally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employed by our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community. That is a word, no matter what may be its origin, its length, its phonetic form, which is understood in any community, however limited, as the sign of an idea; and their mutual understanding is the only tie which connects it with that idea. It is a sign which each one has acquired from without, from the usage of others; and each has learned the art of intimating by such signs the internal acts of his mind. Mutual intelligibility, we have seen, is the only quality which makes the unity of a spoken tongue; the necessity of mutual intelligibility is the only force which keeps it one; and the desire of mutual intelligibility is the impulse which called out speech. Man speaks, then, primarily, not in order to think, but in order to impart his thought. His social needs, his social instincts, force him to expression. A solitary man would never frame a language. Let a child grow up in utter seclusion, and, however rich and suggestive might be the nature around him, however full and appreciative his sense of that which lay without, and his consciousness of that which went on within him, he would all his life remain a mute. On the other hand, let two children grow up together, wholly untaught to speak, and they would inevitably devise, step by step, some means of expression for the purpose of communication; how rudimentary, of what slow growth, we cannot tell—and, however interesting and instructive it would be to test the matter by experiment, humanity forbids us ever to hope or desire to do so; doubtless the character of the speech produced would vary with difference of capacity, with natural or accidental difference of circumstances: but it is inconceivable that human beings should abide long in each other's society without efforts, and successful efforts, at intelligent interchange of ​thought. Again, let one who had grown up even to manhood among his fellows, in full and free communication with them, be long separated from them and forced to live in solitude, and he would unlearn his native speech by degrees through mere disuse, and be found at last unable to converse at all, or otherwise than lamely, until he had recovered by new practice his former facility of expression. While a Swiss Family Robinson keep up their language, and enrich it with names for all the new and strange places and products with which their novel circumstances bring them in contact, a Robinson Crusoe almost loses his for lack of a companion with whom to employ it. We need not, however, rely for this conclusion upon imaginary cases alone. It is a well-known fact that children who are deprived of hearing even at the age of four or five years, after they have learned to speak readily and well, and who are thus cut off from vocal communication with those about them, usually forget all they had learned, and become as mute as if they had never acquired the power of clothing their thoughts in words. The internal impulse to expression is there, but it is impotent to develop itself and produce speech: exclusion from the ordinary intercourse of man with man not only thwarts its progress, but renders it unable to maintain itself upon the stage at which it had already arrived.
Language, then, is the spoken means whereby thought is communicated, and it is only that. Language is not thought, nor is thought language; nor is there a mysterious and indissoluble connection between the two, as there is between soul and body, so that the one cannot exist and manifest itself without the other. There can hardly be a greater and more pernicious error, in linguistics or in metaphysics, than the doctrine that language and thought are identical. It is, unfortunately, an error often committed, both by linguists and by metaphysicians. "Man speaks because he thinks" is the dictum out of which more than one scholar has proceeded to develop his system of linguistic philosophy. The assertion, indeed, is not only true, but a truism; no one can presume to claim that man would speak if he did not think: but no fair logical process can derive any momentous ​conclusions from so loose a premise. So man would not wear clothes if he had not a body; he would not build spinning mules and jennies if cotton did not grow on bushes, or wool on sheep's backs; yet the body is more than raiment, nor do cotton-bushes and sheep necessitate wheels and water-power. The body would be neither comfortable nor comely, if not clad; cotton and wool would be of little use, but for machinery making quick and cheap their conversion into cloth; and, in a truly analogous way, thought would be awkward, feeble, and indistinct, without the dress, the apparatus, which is afforded it in language. Our denial of the identity of thought with its expression does not compel us to abate one jot or tittle of the exceeding value of speech to thought; it only puts that value upon its proper basis.
That thought and speech are not the same is a direct and necessary inference, I believe, from more than one of the truths respecting language which our discussions have already established; but the high importance attaching to a right understanding of the point will justify us in a brief review of those truths in their application to it. In the first place, we have often had our attention directed to the imperfection of language as a full representation of thought. Words and phrases are but the skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, light touches of a skilful sketcher's pencil, to which the appreciative sense and sympathetic mind must supply the filling up and colouring. Our own mental acts and states we can review in our consciousness in minute detail, but we can never perfectly disclose them to another by speech; nor will words alone, with whatever sincerity and candour they may be uttered, put us in possession of another's consciousness. In anything but the most objective scientific description, or the driest reasoning on subjects the most plain and obvious, we want more or less knowledge of the individuality of the speaker or writer, ere we can understand him intimately; his style of thought and sentiment must be gathered from the totality of our intercourse with him, to make us sure that we penetrate to the central meaning of any word he utters; and such study may enable us to find deeper and deeper significance in expressions that once seemed trivial or ​commonplace. A look or tone often sheds more light upon character or intent than a flood of words could do. Humour, banter, irony, are illustrations of what tone, or style, or perceived incongruity can accomplish in the way of impressing upon words a different meaning from that which they of themselves would wear. That language is impotent to express our feelings, though often, perhaps, pleaded as a form merely, is also a frequent genuine experience; nor is it for our feelings alone that the ordinary conventional phrases, weakened in their force by insincere and hyperbolical use, are found insufficient: apprehensions, distinctions, opinions, of every kind, elude our efforts at description, definition, intimation. How often must we labour, by painful circumlocution, by gradual approach and limitation, to place before the minds of others a conception which is clearly present to our own consciousness! How often, when we have the expression nearly complete, we miss a single word that we need, and must search for it, in our memories or our dictionaries, perhaps not finding it in either! How different is the capacity of ready and distinct expression in men whose power of thought is not unlike! he whose grasp of mind is the greatest, whose review of the circumstances that should lead to a judgment is most comprehensive and thorough, whose skill of inference is most unerring, may be, much more than another of far weaker gifts, awkward and clumsy of speech. How often we understand what one says better than he himself says it, and correct his expression, to his own gratification and acceptance. And if all the resources of expression are not equally at the command of all men of equal mental force and training, so neither are they, at their best, adequate to the wealth of conception of him who wields them; that would be but a poorly stored and infertile mind which did not sometimes feel the limited capacity of language, and long for fuller means of expression.
But again, the variety of expression of which the same thought admits is an insuperable difficulty in the way of the identification we are opposing. To recur once more to an illustration of which we have already made us—I form and utter, for instance, the thought, fish like water. How ​nearly bare this phrase is of all indication of relations between the principal ideas, how ambiguous it is, but for the tone, the connection, the circumstances in which it is used, was pointed out before. If I say "fish, like water-rats, swim in rivers," or "fish-like water-snakes abound here," I have variously changed the elements of thought which these words indicate, without any corresponding change of their form. Were I, now, an ancient Roman, the words in which I should have put my first thought would be pisces amant aquam. Here, not only are the signs totally different, but a host of things are distinctly expressed which before were left to be inferred from the sum and surroundings of the statement. Pisces is marked not only as being a noun and nothing else, but a noun in a certain case of the plural number; amant is not less clearly a verb, and to be made nowhere but in the third person plural of the present indicative active; while aquam shows by its form that it is used as the direct object of the preceding verb, and that in all connections it is to be treated as a feminine word. If, again, I were a Frenchman, I should have said, les poissons aiment l'eau, literally, 'the fishes love the water.' Here nearly all the expressions of relation which the Latin words conveyed are lost again; in part, they are left to inference, as in English; in part, they are intimated by the two independent relational words, articles; which, moreover, point out a new relation, that of class (fish in general, not some fish only), not hinted at in either of the other phrases. The Chinese would embody the same sense in still other words, which would be even more barren than our English of any indication of relations except such as is signified by the respective position of the words and the requirements of the situation. Other languages, in expressing the same idea, would indicate yet other distinctions and relations: one, perhaps, has a different word for fish when living from that which denotes them when dead, or prepared for eating; another signifies the fondness which fish have for their native element by one term, and the higher affections of more rational beings by another; and so on. There is thus a very considerable discordance between the various equivalent ​phrases, as to how much and what is expressed in the words signifying the three radical ideas, of fish, liking, and water, as to how much is expressed besides those ideas, and as to how it is expressed; and, at the same time, a total discordance between the sounds used to indicate the various elements. And yet, so far as we can judge, the thought expressed is in every instance the very same: certainly, there is no difference of thought corresponding to or measured by the difference of expression. Each speaker's intent, were he called upon to explain it fully, would be found to agree with that of the rest; only his uttered words directly signify a part, and leave the rest to be filled in by the mind of the hearer. How, now, can any one possibly maintain that thought and speech are one and the same, when identity of thought can consist with so much diversity of speech?
Look, once more, at the nature of the tie which, as repeatedly pointed out, connects any one of the spoken signs we use with the conception it represents. I learned the word fish at an early period of my life from my instructors, and associated it so intimately with a certain idea that the two are in my mind well-nigh inseparable: I cannot hear fish without having the corresponding thing called up in my imagination, nor utter it without calling up the same in the imagination of every person who has been taught as I was; nor, again, does any one of us ordinarily form the conception of a fish without at the same time having the audible complex of sounds, fish, uttered to the mind's ear. In later life, I have learned and associated with the same conception other words, as piscis, poisson, ichthūs (Greek), and so forth; any one of these I can call up at will, and employ in place of fish, when circumstances make it desirable. That I here use fish is simply for the reason that I am addressing myself to those who have mastered this sign, understand it readily, and are accustomed to employ it; the conventional usage of the community to which I belong, not anything in the character of my thought, imposes the necessity upon me: if I went to France, I should substitute the sign poisson for precisely the same reason. And I might stay so long in France, and say ​and hear poisson so often, that it should become more intimately associated with its conception than fish, and should come more readily and naturally than the latter into my mind on presentation of the conception: I should then have learned, as we phrase it, to think in French instead of English. How futile, I say again, to talk of such a thing as identity between thought and the expression which sits so loosely upon it, and can be so easily shifted! As well compare the house of the hermit-crab—which, born soft and coverless, takes refuge in the first suitable shell which chance throws in its way, and thenceforth makes that its home, unless convenience and opportunity lead it to move to another—with that of the turtle, whose horny covering is a part of its own structure, and cannot be torn off without destruction of its life.
Is there not, in fact, something approaching to palpable absurdity in the doctrine that words and thoughts are identical, that the mind thinks words? Words are not mental acts; they are combinations of sounds, effects produced upon the auditory nerve by atmospheric vibrations, which are brought about by physical agencies—agencies set in operation, it is true, by acts of volition, but whose products are no more mental than are pantomimic motions voluntarily made with the fingers. We know well, indeed, that there is a language composed of such motions instead of uttered words: namely, the language taught as means of communication and expression to those whose ear is numb to the ordinary signs of thought. Nothing brings more distinctly to light the true nature of language, as a system of arbitrary signs for thought, learned and made auxiliary to the processes of thought, than a consideration of the modes of speech practised by the deaf and dumb: whether their general language, which intimates ideas by significant gestures, possessing in the main a certain degree of evident relevancy, but conventional in their special application; or their finger-speech, that most strange and anomalous mode of representation of ideas at second hand, by wholly arbitrary contortions of certain appendages of the body, standing for another kind of signs, namely articulate sounds, of the true nature of ​which these unfortunate beings cannot form the slightest conception. But either of these kinds of language, or their combination, answers for the deaf-mute the same purpose that our speech answers for us, and in the same way, only in an inferior degree, owing to the comparative imperfection of the instrumentality—although the question may be seriously raised, whether it be not nearly or quite as effective a means of expression and aid of thought as is a rude and rudimentary spoken language like the Chinese. If, then, thought and language are identical, thought and pantomime are not less so; if we think words, the mute must think finger-twists: and who will venture seriously to maintain a proposition so manifestly preposterous?
But if we must thus deny that, in any admissible sense of the expression, language is thought, it still remains for us to inquire whether thought is not co-extensive with and dependent upon language; whether we can think otherwise than in and by words. The claim is sometimes roundly made, that "general ideas and words are inseparable; that the one cannot exist without the other;" that, "without words, not even such simple ideas as white or black can for a moment be realized." Let us examine for a moment this last assertion, and see whether it be well founded. Suppose, for instance, that there occurred but a single white substance, namely snow, in the nature by which we are surrounded: it is both possible and altogether likely that, while we had a name for the substance, we should have none for the colour: and yet, we should not therefore any the less apprehend that colour, as distinct from those of other objects; even as we now apprehend a host of shades of blue, green, red, purple, for which we possess no specific appellations. We conceive of them, we are able to recognize them at sight, but their practical value is not sufficient to lead us to name them separately. If, then, on going southward, we made acquaintance with cotton, we should not fail to notice and fully to realize its accordance with snow in the quality of whiteness, even though we had no name for the quality. On the contrary, we should certainly proceed to call cotton "snowy," for the precise reason that we did notice the correspondence ​of the two in colour; and, as we went on to meet with other substances of like hue, we should call them "snowy" also; and at length—particularly, if we had left the zone of snow behind us—snowy would come to mean in our use what white does now, and snowiness would signify 'whiteness.' We should have supplied the deficiency of our vocabulary in this regard, not because we could not form a conception of the colour without the name, but because we had found it practically convenient to give a name to the conception we had formed. The example is a typical one; it illustrates the universal process of names-giving, in all its forms and in all ages. Our primitive ancestors were not unable to apprehend the existence and office of the earth's satellite until they had devised for her the appellation of 'measurer;' and, if she had a yet earlier title, it was given her in like manner, for some quality distinctly perceived in her. We always make a new word, or bestow upon an old word a new meaning, because we have an idea that wants a sign. To maintain that the idea waits for its generation until the sign is ready, or that the generation of the idea and of the sign is a simple and indivisible process, is much the same thing as to hold, since infants cannot thrive in this climate without clothing and shelter, that no child is or can be born until a layette and a nursery are ready for its use, or that along with each child are born its swaddling-clothes and a cradle!
It must be farther conceded, then, that the operations of mind are at least so far independent of language that thought is able to reach out in every direction a step beyond the border of speech; to conquer, bit by bit, new territory for speech to occupy and hold in possession. But our earlier reasonings and examples have shown that there is no small degree of incommensurability between the two in other respects also, that we do not and cannot always precisely communicate what we are conscious of having in our minds, and that, of what we call our expression, a part consists merely in so disposing a framework of words that those who hear us are enabled to infer much more than we really express, and much more definitely than we express it. That we ordinarily think with words may be true; but I imagine that the ​extent to which we do so, and the necessity of the accompaniment, are both apt to be considerably exaggerated. When we think most elaborately and most reflectively, then we formulate our thoughts as if we were speaking or writing them; but we need not always think in that style. If I hold up two sticks together, to see which is the longer, my comparison and conclusion are assuredly, both of them, independent of any use of language, spoken or conceived of. When I taste a bit of strong sea-duck, which has been put upon my plate for mallard, my perception of its flavour and my judgment that "the bird is fishy" are wholly instantaneous, and simple mental acts: I may then proceed to state my judgment, either to myself or to others, in whatever style of elaboration I may choose. This, if I mistake not, is the normal order of procedure: the mental act is momentary, its formulation in words occupies time; we have our thought to start with, and then go on to give it deliberate expression. The operation of thinking in words is a double one; it consists of thinking and of putting the thought into words; we conceive the thought and conceive also its expression. That, when we turn our attention full upon our own minds, we read there the act and its expression together, does not necessarily prove more than the intimacy of the association we have established between our conceptions and their signs, and the power over us of the habit of expression. Every deliberate thought, doubtless, goes through the mind of the deaf-mute accompanied by an image of the dactylic writhings which would be his natural mode of expressing it; but his mental action is not slavishly dependent upon such an external auxiliary.
The only way, in fact, to prove the necessary connection and mutual limitation of thought and speech is to lay down such a definition of the former as excludes everything which ​is not done by means of the latter. If thought is only that kind of mental action which is performed in and through words, all other being mere—what shall we call it?—preliminary and preparatory to thought, the question becomes simply a verbal one, and is settled. But it were futile to attempt thus to narrow the application of the term. Apprehension of generals and particulars, comparison, distinction, inference, performed under the review of consciousness, capable of being remembered and applied to direct the conduct of life—these are the characteristics of the action of mind, in every grade; where they are present, there is thought. And who will dare to deny even to the uninstructed deaf-mute the possession of ideas, of cognitions multitudinous and various, of power to combine observations and draw conclusions from them, of reasonings, of imaginings, of hopes? Who will say, then, that he does not think, though his thinking faculty has not yet been trained and developed by the aid of a system of signs? But neither can we refuse to believe that some of the lower animals have a capacity of thinking, although they are incapable of the production of any signs of their ideas which we may venture to dignify by the name of language. A dog, for instance, as surely apprehends the general ideas of a tree, a man, a piece of meat, cold and heat, light and darkness, pleasure and pain, kindness, threatening, barking, running, and so on, through the whole range, limited as compared with ours, of matters within his ken, as if he had a word for each. He can as clearly form the intention "I mean to steal that bone, if its owner turns his back and gives me a fair chance," as if he said it to himself in good English. He can draw a complex of syllogisms, when applying to present exigencies the results of past experience, and can determine "that smoking water must be hot, and I shall take good care not to put my foot into it"—that is to say, "water that smokes is hot; this water smokes; therefore, this water is hot: hot water hurts; this water is hot; ergo, it will hurt my foot." He is, to be sure, far enough from being able to put his process of thought into that shape; but so is many a human being who can not only draw the conclusion with unerring judgment, ​but also state it with perfect intelligibility. That the dog and many other animals make no very distant approach to a capacity for language is shown farther by their ability to understand and obey what is said to them. They are able so distinctly to associate certain ideas with the words we utter as to govern their actions accordingly. Even the dull ox knows which way to turn when his driver cries gee or haw to him; and the exceeding intelligence with which some dogs will listen to directions, and even overhear conversation, has been the subject of many striking and authentic anecdotes. It is vain and needless to deny a correspondence up to a certain point between men and other animals in regard to the phenomena of mental activity, as well as the other phenomena connected with animal life, like digestion, motion, enjoyment and suffering. But their power of thinking is not, like ours, capable of free and indefinite development by education, whereof language is the chief means, as it is the sign also of a capacity for it. There is, it need not be doubted, no small difference between the thought of the most intelligent of the lower races, and that of the least cultivated speechless human being. Yet what a chaos of unanalyzed conceptions, undefined impressions, and unreasoned conclusions the mind of every one of us would be without speech, it is well-nigh impossible for us to have even a faint idea—for us who have so long enjoyed the advantage of expression, and so accustomed ourselves to lean upon it, that we can now even differ and dispute as to whether thought and its instrument are not one and the same thing. The mental action of the wholly wild and untrained man is certainly less unlike to that of the beast than to that of the man who has been educated by the acquisition and use of language. The distinction of the two former is mainly that of potentiality; they are like the fecundated and the unfecundated egg: the one can develop into organized life; the other cannot. Let us look at an illustration which shall set forth both their correspondence and their difference.
It has been often remarked that the crow has a capacity to count, up to a certain number. If two hunters enter a hut and only one comes out, he will not be allured near the place ​by any bait, however tempting; the same will be the case, if three enter and two come out, or if four enter and three come out—and so on, till a number is reached which is beyond his arithmetic; till he cannot perceive that one has been left behind, and so is led to venture within reach of the hidden gun, to his destruction. Something very like this would be true of men, without language. Open for the briefest instant a hand with one corn in it, and then again with two, and any one who has an eye can tell the difference; so with two and three, with three and four—and so on, up to a limit which may vary with the quickness of eye and readiness of thought of the counter, results of his natural capacity or of his training, but which is surely reached, and soon. Open the hand, for instance, with twenty corns, then drop one secretly and open it again, and the surest eye that ever looked could not detect the loss. Or put near one another two piles or rows, one of nineteen, the other of twenty, and it would be not less impracticable to distinguish them by immediate apprehension. But here appears the discordance between the human mind and that of the brute. The crow would never find out that the heap of twenty is greater than that of nineteen; the man does it without difficulty: he analyzes or breaks up both into parts, say of four corns each, the numerical value of which he can immediately apprehend, as well as their number; and he at last finds a couple of parts, whereof both he and the crow could see that the one exceeds the other.
In this power of detailed review, analysis, and comparison, now, lies, as I conceive, the first fundamental trait of superiority of man's endowment. But this is not all. This would merely amount to a great and valuable extension of the limits of immediate apprehension; whereas the crow knows well that three corns are more than two corns, man would be able also to satisfy himself, in every actual case which should arise, that twenty corns are more than nineteen corns, or a hundred corns than ninety-nine corns; and he would be able to make an intelligent choice of the larger heap where a crow might cheat himself through ignorance. So much is possible without language, nor would it alone ever lead to ​the possession of language. In order to this, another kind of analysis is necessary, an analysis which separates the qualities of a thing from the thing itself, and contemplates them apart. The man, in short, is able to perceive, not only that three corns are more than two corns, but that three are more than two—a thing that the bird neither does nor can do. Such a perception makes language possible—for language-making is a naming of the properties of things, and of things themselves through those properties—and, combined with the other power which we have just noticed, it creates the possibility also of an indefinite progression in thinking and reasoning by means of language. Signs being found for the conceptions 'one,' 'two,' 'three,' and so on, we can proceed to build them up into any higher aggregate that we choose, following each step of combination by a sign, and with that sign associating the result of the process that made it, so as to be effectually relieved of the necessity of performing the process over again in each new case. Thus, from the recognition that three is more than two, that two and one are three, that twice two is four—all which truths are virtually within reach of the crow, since he would determine aright any practical question that involved them—we rise to the recognition that twenty is more than nineteen, that fifteen and five are twenty, that seven times seven are forty-nine, or ten times ten are a hundred: and these are truths which we could only reach by means of language; they are inferences, circuitously arrived at, and made by means of language not less manageable than the simpler truths which are matters of direct synthetic apprehension. He who, having learned only to count, constructs for his own use a multiplication-table, has to work onward from step to step in somewhat the same way as he who has no speech; but every product that he attains and fixes in memory with its factors, is an acquisition made once for all. Indefinite progress is thus ushered in; every new result of mathematical reasoning is rendered capable of being handled, and the whole career of mathematical science is initiated. Yet not to be carried on by words alone. The most skilful mathematician cannot perform any of the more complicated processes ​of calculation with signs merely uttered or conceived of as uttered; he must write down his equations and series, and work out painfully, in long rows of figures, his numerical results: for, though all was implied in his first assumption, as evolved according to the unvarying relations of numbers, and the principles of mathematical reasoning, he is unable to grasp the various quantities with his mind, and to follow out unerringly the successive steps of the processes, without recording each as he takes it. It is none the less true, however, that the whole work is a mental one: mathematical quantities are identical neither with the written figures and symbols, nor with the spoken signs; nor is mathematical reasoning dependent for its existence upon the one or the other; both are kindred instrumentalities, whereby the mind is enabled to accomplish what would otherwise be wholly beyond its power.
The main truths which we have to accept as touching the relation of language to thought are, I think, brought out by this illustration. It is, indeed, an extreme illustration on the side of the indispensability of language. For no other class of conceptions are so eminently abstract as are the mathematical, none so wholly dependent upon spoken and written signs and symbols. They are so essentially ideal in their character, so divorcible from concrete objects, that they can be worked with mechanically, can be put together and taken apart without constant reference to real conditions—though only according to rules and methods ultimately founded on concrete exemplification, on immediate synthetic apprehensions which are capable of being grasped by minds lower than human. Yet, even here, the signs are merely the instruments of thought, and created by it. The symbols of the calculus are not more truly the device of the masterminds which, exalted upon the vantage-ground of their own and others' previous studies, apprehended the higher and more recondite relations involved in this new mode of mathematical reasoning, than the whole nomenclature of numbers is the gradually elaborated work of men who saw and felt impelled to signify the simpler and more fundamental relations, those which seem to lie within the reach of every ​intellect. That, however, they are not so easily attained, that not a little time and reflection, and some special insight, were required for generating even an ordinary system of numeration, is clearly shown by the facts of language. There are dialects that name no higher numbers than 'three' or 'four:' all beyond is an undistinguished "many," the definite relations of which are as unmanageable by the speakers of those dialects as if they were speechless. Many others have not risen to the apprehension of a hundred; the Indo-European race, before its dispersion, had apparently formed no word for 'thousand;' the Greek popular mind had distinctly conceived no higher group than 'ten thousand' (myriad). We have ourselves given names only to a few of the first numbers in that infinite series which, having once hit upon the method of decimal multiplication and notation, we are capable of apprehending and of managing. And what more significant mark of the externality of the whole system of numerical names and signs could we ask to find than its decimal character, which, as every one knows, is altogether based upon the wholly irrelevant circumstance of the number of our fingers, those ready aids to an unready reckoner? Had we chanced to possess six digits on each hand, our series of arithmetical "digits" would also be twelve, and we should now be rejoicing in the use of a duodecimal system—the superior advantages of which in many respects are generally acknowledged.
In every department of thought, the mind derives from the possession of speech something of the same advantage, and in the same way, as in mathematical reasoning. The idea which has found its incarnation in a word becomes thereby a subject of clearer apprehension and more manageable use: it can be turned over, compared, limited, placed in distinct connection with other ideas; more than one mind, more than one generation of minds, can work at it, giving it shape, and relation, and significance. In every word is recorded the result of a mental process, of abstraction or of combination; which process, being thus recorded, can be taught along with its sign, or its result can be used as a step to something higher or deeper. There are grades of thought, ​spheres of ratiocination, where our minds could hardly work at all without the direct aid of language; as there are also those where they could not surely hold and follow the chain of reason and deduction without the still further assistance afforded by writing down the argument. It may be freely conceded that such mental processes as we are in the constant habit of performing would be too difficult for us to cempass without words—as they certainly also lie far beyond what would have been our mental reach had we not been trained through the use of language to orderly thought, and enriched with the wealth of mental acquisitions accumulated by our predecessors and stored up in words. But this is a very different thing from acknowledging that thought is impossible without language. So, also, to build steam-engines and tubular-bridges, to weave satins and Brussels carpets, to tunnel mountains, to fill up valleys, is impossible without the aid of complicated and powerful machinery; yet we do not on that account deny all power and efficiency to the bare human hands. On the contrary, we see clearly that machinery is, in every part and parcel, ultimately the work of human hands, which can do wondrous things without it, if still more wondrous with it. Language, like manner, is the instrument of thought, the machinery with which the mind works; an instrument by which its capacity to achieve valuable results is indefinitely increased, but which, far from being identical with it, is one of its own products; with and by which it works with freedom, depending upon it now more, now less, according to circumstances—as the matter in hand, the style of elaboration, the deliberation required or permitted; and fully able to carry on the same operations with instrumentalities greatly differing in completeness and inherent adaptation to their purpose.
Our conclusion stands fast, then, that thought is anterior to language, and independent of it; it is not compelled to find expression in order to be thought. The immense and incalculable advantage which it gains from its command of speech is something incidental: something intended, indeed, and a necessary implication in the gift of speech to the human race; yet coming as a consequence of something else, ​growing out of that communication which men must and will have with their fellows. True it is that the individual mind, without language, would be a dwarfed and comparatively powerless organ: but this means simply that man could develop his powers, and become what he was meant to be, only in society, by converse with his fellows. He is by his essential nature a social being, and his most precious individual possession, his speech, he gets only as a social being. The historical beginnings of speech, therefore, were no spontaneous outbursts, realizing to the mind of the utterer the conceptions with which he was swelling; they were successful results of the endeavour to arrive at signs by which those conceptions should be called up also in the minds of others.
These considerations, if I am not mistaken, will be found to relieve the remaining part of the problem we are considering of not a little of its perplexity. Recognizing the external and non-essential nature of the bond which unites every constituent of language to the idea represented by it, and also the external nature of the force which brings about the genesis of the sign, we are enabled to reduce the inquiry to this form: how should the first language-makers, human beings gifted like ourselves, with no exceptional endowments, but with no disabilities other than that of the non-development of their inherent capacities, have naturally succeeded in arriving at the possession of signs by which they could understand one another? Before we take up and examine the theories which have been proposed to explain the first processes of sign-making, however, we must look for a moment at one or two preliminary points, of a more general character.
Our first point concerns the office of the voice as instrument of expression. If the tie between idea and sign be so loose, it may be asked, why is the sign always a spoken one, and language, as we use the term, a body solely of articulated utterances? In answering this, it is sufficient to point out the superior convenience and availability of spoken signs, as compared with those of any other kind. These qualities, and these alone, designate the voice to its office. There is ​no necessary connection between mental acts and vocal utterances. The one thing necessary is, that thought, tending irresistibly toward expression under the impulse to communication, should find the means of intelligibly expressing itself. With the mental powers and social tendencies which men have, they would, even if unendowed with voice, have nevertheless put themselves in possession of language—language less perfect and manageable, to be sure, than is our present speech; but still, real language. Resort, doubtless, would first have been had to gesture: it is hardly less natural to men to use their hands than their tongues to help the communication of their ideas; the postures of the body, the movements of the face, can be made full of significance; the resources of pantomime are various and abundant, and constitute a means of expression often successfully employed, between those who are unacquainted with the conventional signs of one another's spoken language. Those human beings whose vocal powers are rendered useless by the deadness of their ears learn a pantomimic language which answers their needs, both of communication and of mental training, in no stinted measure. It has, indeed, its limitations and defects; but what it might be made, if it were the only means of communication attainable by men, and were elaborated by the consenting labour of generations, as spoken speech has been, we perhaps are slow to realize. I do not doubt that it might far exceed, both in wealth of resources and in distinct apprehensibility, many an existing spoken language, might ally itself with a mode of writing, and become an efficient means and aid of human progress. How easy a language of gestures is to acquire, and how natural to use, is clearly shown by the fact that the fully endowed children of the instructors in deaf-and-dumb asylums, brought up among those who employ both it and the spoken tongue, are accustomed to learn the former first, and to avail themselves of it in preference to the other, till long after the time when other children usually talk freely. It is past all reasonable question that, in the earliest communication between human beings, gesture long played a considerable, if not the principal, part, and that our race learned only by ​degrees the superior capacities of spoken signs, and by degrees worked them out to a sufficiency for all the ordinary needs of expression; when gesture was relegated to the department of rhetoric, to the office of giving individual colouring and intensity to intellectual expression—as, in all well-developed languages, has been the case with tone also. We do not need to enter here into any detailed inquiry as to the modes and reasons of the special adaptedness of vocal utterance to the uses of expression. The fact is palpable, recognized by every mind, and illustrated by the whole history of human communication. We feel that those who learn to talk well without speaking are to be compared with the mutilated beings who, deprived of hands, learn to make their feet do the ordinary and natural work of hands. Many of us have seen toys constructed, figures cut out, pictures painted by such beings, with the help of instruments grasped by the toes, which we who possess the most supple of fingers might try in vain to imitate: and in the possibility of such things we note the controlling power of the true actor, the human mind and soul, which, in the direction of its special gifts, can work out beautiful and wonderful results with instrumentalities that appear to us awkward, feeble, and inefficient. The voice, the articulating power, was the appointed and provided means of supplying the chief want of man's social nature, language; and no race of men fails to show, by its possession of articulate speech, that the provision was one natural, recognizable, and sufficient.
Our second point concerns the general class of ideas which should have first found incorporation in speech. What we are brought by our historical analysis of language to recognize as the beginnings of speech was set forth in the seventh lecture. Roots, directly significant of quality or action, were there shown to be the starting-points, the germs, of our whole vast system of nomenclature, for qualities, beings, and relations. Many minds, however, find a difficulty in accepting such a result. They are unwilling to believe that language can have begun with the expression of anything so abstract as a quality; they feel as if the first words must have been designations for concrete things, for the ​familiar objects of primitive life. The source of their difficulty lies in the fact that they would confound the prima denominata, the things first named, with the prima cognita, the things first cognized, apprehended by the mind, either as individuals or as classes. In truth, however, the two are quite distinct. It is not to be doubted that concrete things are first recognized, distinguished, and classified, in the earliest synthetic operations of the intelligence; so are they also in the inferior intelligences of the lower animals; but these synthetic cognitions do not and cannot lead to language. Language begins with analysis, and the apprehension of characteristic qualities. Not what the mind first consciously contemplated, but what was most readily capable of being intelligibly signified, determined the earliest words. Now a concrete object, a complex existence, is just as much out of the immediate reach of the sign-making faculty as is a moral act or an intellectual relation. As, during the whole history of language, designations of the latter classes of ideas have been arrived at through the medium of names for physical acts and relations, so have appellations for the former been won by means of their perceived characteristics. No etymologist feels that he has traced out the history of any concrete appellation till he has carried it back to a word expressive of quality. We saw in the third lecture that, when we would make a name for a thing, we have recourse always to its qualities; we take some general word designating one of its distinguishing properties, and limit it to signifying the thing itself (as when we derived board from broad, moon from measuring, smith from smoothing); or else we identify by some common property or properties, or connect by some other equivalent tie of association, the thing to be named with another thing already named, and call it by the latter's title (as in deriving Jupiter's moons from moon, Board of Trade from board, Smiths from smith). Let any one of us, even now, after all our long training in the expression of our conceptions, attempt to convey to another person his idea of some sensible thing, and he will inevitably find himself reviewing its distinctive qualities, and ​selecting those which he shall intimate, by such signs as he can make intelligible: there is no other way in which we can make a definition or description, whether for our own use or for that of anybody else. If, for example, a dog is the subject of our effort, we compare our conception of him with those of other sensible objects, and note its specific differences—as his animality, shape, size, disposition, voice. This is so essentially a human procedure that we cannot conceive of the first makers of language as following any other. Then, in finding a designation, it would be impossible to include and body forth together the sum of observed qualities: in the first instance, not less than in all after time, some one among them would necessarily be made the ground of appellation. The sign produced would naturally vary with the instrumentality used to produce it, and the sense to which it was addressed: in the instance which we have supposed, if the means of communication were writing, it would probably be the outline figure of a dog; if gesture, an imitation of some characteristic visible act, like biting, or wagging the tail; if the voice, not less evidently an imitation of the audible act of barking: the dog's primal designation would be bow-wow, or something equivalent to it. But in this designation would be directly intimated the act; the actor would be suggested by implication merely: bow-wow, as name for 'dog,' would literally mean 'the animal that bow-wows.' So in the case of a word like splash, used to imitate and call up before the mind the fall of a stone into water—the collision of the stone and the water would be the immediate suggestion; but a natural act of association might make the sign mean the stone, or the water, or the act of throwing, or the fall. One sign would turn more readily to the designation of a property or action, another to that of a concrete thing, an actor, according to the nature of each, and the exigencies of practical use as regarded it; but both would be inherently a kind of indifferent middle, capable of conversion to either purpose: and, in the poverty of expression and indistinctness of analysis belonging to the primitive stage of linguistic growth, would doubtless bear various offices at ​once. In short, they would be such rudiments of speech, rather than parts of speech, as we have already found the radical elements of language to be.
Thus we see that the necessary conditions of the act of production of our language, as being the creation of a spoken sign for mutual intelligence between speaker and hearer, determine the kind of significance belonging to the first produced words. An acted sign, and a language of such, would have been of the same quality. While, on the other hand, a language of written characters, beginning with pictorial signs, would be of a very different structure: its first words would be designations of concrete sensible objects—since drawings are fitted to suggest concrete objects rather than their individual qualities—and, from these, designations of qualities would have to be arrived at by secondary processes.
Our reasonings have now at length brought us very near to a positive conclusion respecting the mode of genesis of even the first beginnings of spoken speech. But, rather than follow them farther, to a yet more definite result, we will proceed to examine the various theories that have been framed to explain how men should have found out what their voice was given them for, and should have begun to apply it to its proper uses, producing with it significant words.
Of such theories there are three which are especially worthy of note. The first holds that the earliest names of objects and actions were produced by imitation of natural sounds: animals, for instance, were denominated from their characteristic utterances, as, with us, the cuckoo is so named: the dog was called a bow-wow, the sheep a baa, the cow a moo, and so on; while the many noises of inanimate nature, as the whistling of the wind, the rustling of leaves, the gurgling and splashing of water, the cracking and crashing of heavy falling objects, suggested in like manner imitative utterances which were applied to designate them; and that by such means a sufficient store of radical words was originated to serve as the germs of language. This is called the onomatopoetic theory. The second is to this effect: that the natural sounds which we utter when in a state of excited feeling, the oh's and ah's, the pooh's and pshaw's, are the ​ultimate beginnings of speech. This is styled the interjectional theory. A recent writer of great popularity, Professor Max Müller, entirely rejects both these, stigmatizing them as "the bow-wow theory" and "the pooh-pooh theory" respectively, and adopts from a German authority (Professor Heyse, of Berlin) a third, which is, abridged from his own statement, as follows: "There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. Each substance has its peculiar ring.... It was the same with man, the most highly organized of nature's works"—and so on. Man possessed an instinctive "faculty for giving articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind." But "this creative faculty, which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled," etc. This, in its turn, has been very appositely termed "the ding-dong theory."
What value we have to attribute to these various theories is readily to be inferred from the principles already laid down and established. The third may be very summarily dismissed, as wholly unfounded and worthless. It is, indeed, not a little surprising to see a man of the acknowledged ability and great learning of Professor Müller, after depreciating and casting ridicule upon the views of others respecting so important a point, put forward one of his own as a mere authoritative dictum, resting it upon nothing better than a fanciful comparison which lacks every element of a true analogy, not venturing to attempt its support by a single argument, instance, or illustration, drawn from either the nature or the history of language. He tells us, virtually, that man was at the outset a kind of bell; and that, when an idea struck him, he naturally rang. We wonder it was not added that, like other bells, he naturally rang by the tongue: this would have been quite in keeping with the rest, and would merely have set more plainly before our minds the real character of the whole theory. It fully implies the doctrine, which we have shown above to be erroneous, that ​thought tends to burst into expression by an internal impulse, instead of under an external inducement; and with this it couples the gratuitous assumption that the impulse ceased to act when a first start had thus been given to the development of human speech. In effect, it explains the origin of language by a miracle, a special and exceptional capacity having been conferred for the purpose upon the first men, and withdrawn again from their descendants. The formation of language is never over in any such manner as should release an instinct like this from farther service, if it really existed in human nature. New cognitions and deductions still thrill through the brains of men, yet without setting their tongues swinging, any more than their fingers working. In all our investigations of language, we find nothing which should lead us to surmise that an intellectual apprehension could ever, by an internal process, become transmuted into an articulated sound or complex of sounds. We do, indeed, see that what strongly affects the emotional nature prompts utterance, as it also prompts gesture: fear, surprise, joy, lead to exclamations; and delight at a new cognition might iind vent in an interjection; but this interjection would express the delight, not the cognition; if language commenced in such a way, the historical beginnings of speech would be names of emotions, not of the qualities of objects.
The fatal weakness of such attempts as this to explain the earliest steps in the formation of language lies in the fact that they would fain discover there some force at work differing entirely from that which directs the whole aftercourse of linguistic development. We, on the contrary, having fully recognized the truth that all language-making, through the long recorded periods of linguistic history, consists in a succession of attempts to find an intelligible sign for a conception which the mind has formed and desires to communicate, must look to find the same principle operative also at the very outset of that history.
Regarding the matter in this light, we shall not fail to see clearly what and how much value we are to ascribe to the other two theories, the onomatopoetic and the interjectional. ​Each of them furnishes a good and sufficient explanation of a part of the facts for which we are seeking to account, since each suggests available means by which the first speakers should have arrived at mutually intelligible signs. Especially great and undeniable are the capabilities of the onomatopoetic principle. We saw in one of our recent illustrations that, since qualities or acts are the immediate objects of the first designations, and since the voice is the appointed means of designating, audible acts, utterances or accompanying noises, would be most naturally chosen to be designated. That words have been and may be formed through the medium of imitation of natural sounds is palpably true; every language has such to show in its vocabulary. That, for example, an animal can be named from its cry, and the name thus given generalized and made fertile of derivatives, is shown by such a word as cock, which is regarded by etymologists as an abbreviated imitation of chanticleer's cock-a-doodle-doo! and from which come, by allusion to the bird's pride and strut, the words coquette, cockade, the cock of a gun, to cock one's eye, to cock the head on one side, a cocked hat, and so on. Through all the stages of growth of language, absolutely new words are produced by this method more than by any other, or even almost exclusively; there is also to be seen an evident disposition to give an imitative complexion to words which denote matters cognizable by the ear; the mind pleases itself with bringing about a sort of agreement between the sign and the thing signified. Both theory and observed fact, therefore, unite to prove the imitative principle more actively productive than any other in the earliest processes of language-making. But neither is a noteworthy degree of importance to be denied to the exclamatory or interjectional principle. It is, beyond all question, as natural for the untaught and undeveloped man to utter exclamations, as to make gestures, expressive of his feelings; and as, in the absence of a voice, the tendency to gesture might have been fruitful in suggesting a language of significant motions, so we may most plausibly suppose that the tendency to exclaim was not without value in aiding men to realize that they had in their voices that which was capable ​of being applied to express the movements of their spirits. Perhaps the principal contribution of exclamations to the origin of language was made in this way, rather than by the furnishing of actual radical elements: for the latter work, their restricted scope, their subjective character, their infertility of relations, would render them less fitted.
There is no real discordance between the onomatopoetic and interjectional theories, nor do the advocates of either, it is believed, deny or disparage the value of the other, or refuse its aid in the solution of their common problem. The definition of the onomatopoetic principle might be without difficulty or violence so widened that it should include the interjectional. We must, indeed, beware of restricting its action too narrowly. It is by no means limited to a reproduction of the sounds of animate and inanimate nature: it admits also a kind of symbolical representation—as an intimation of abrupt, or rapid, or laborious, or smooth action by utterances making an analogous impression upon the ear. A yet more subjective symbolism has been sought for among some of the earlier constituents of speech; it has been suggested, for example, not without a certain degree of plausibility, that the pronominal root of the first person in the Indo-European (and in many other) languages, ma (our me), has in its internality of formation, its utterance with closed lips, as if shutting out the external world, a peculiar adaptedness to express one's own personality; and that the demonstrative ta (which has become our that) was prompted by the position it calls for in the tongue, which is thrust forward in the mouth, as it were to point out the object indicated. Very little of this kind, if anything at all, can be satisfactorily made out in the material of language; that, however, some degree of such subjective correspondence, felt more distinctly in certain cases, less so in others, may have sometimes suggested to a root-proposer, by a subtile and hardly definable analogy, one particular complex of sounds rather than another, as the representative of an idea for which he was seeking expression, need not be absolutely denied. Only, in admitting it, and seeking for traces of its influence, we must beware of approximating in any degree to that wildest and most ​absurd of the many vagaries respecting language, the doctrine of the natural and inherent significance of articulate sounds.
It is quite unnecessary that we should attempt to determine the precise part played by these principles, or these different forms of the onomatopoetic principle, in generating the germs of speech. We cannot go far astray, either in overestimating or in underestimating the value of each one of them, if we bear always distinctly in mind the higher principle under which they all alike exercised their influence: namely, that the language-makers were not attempting to make a faithful depiction of their thought, but only to find for it a mutually intelligible sign; and that everything which conduced to such intelligibility would have been, and was, resorted to, and to an extent dependent on its degree of adaptedness to the purpose—the extent being a fair matter for difference of opinion, and for ascertainment by further detailed investigation, both theoretical and historical. There are many ideas which would be much more clearly intimated by a gesture, a grimace, or a tone, than by a word; and, as has been already remarked, we cannot doubt that tones, grimaces, and gestures constituted no small portion of the first sign-language, both as independently conveying meaning, and as helping to establish the desired association between articulate signs and the ideas which they were intended to signify. Language, indeed, never fully outgrows the need of their assistance: it is only the most highly developed and cultivated tongues, wielded by the most skilful writers, that can make a written passage, even when addressed to the intellect alone, as clear and effective as the same would be when well uttered, with the addition of due emphasis and inflection: and where the emotions and passions are appealed to, we have the opinion of one of the greatest word-artists of antiquity (Demosthenes) that "action" is far more than words.
We are not, of course, to look upon the imitative signs of which we have been treating as servile copies of natural sounds, or their exact reproductions. Nothing of that kind is either called for or possible. Inarticulate noises are not ​faithfully representable by articulate, nor is more than a distant likeness needed in the sign that shall suggest and recall them. The circumstances in which a new word is generated and used contribute no small part toward its correct apprehension, in the first, as in all the after-stages of linguistic growth. The most violent mutilations of form, the most absurd confusions of meaning, committed upon words by very young children, when just learning to talk, do not prevent those who are familiar with them from understanding which of their contracted circle of ideas they are intending to signify: and many a change almost as violent, or a transfer almost as distant, has made part of the regular history of speech, being justified by the exigency that called it forth, and explained by the suggestive conditions of the case. The process of language-making was always in a peculiar sense a tentative one; a searching after and experimental proposal of signs thenceforth to be associated with conceptions. There was not less eagerness and intelligence on the part of the hearer to catch and apprehend than on that of the speaker to communicate; the impulse to a mutual understanding was so strong as to make even a modicum of connection between sign and sense sufficient for its purpose. A wide range of possibilities was thus opened for the designation of any given idea, even though resting upon the same onomatopoetic ground: as, indeed, the present facts of language show us no little variety and dissimilarity in the confessedly imitative names of the same objects.
That distinct and unequivocal signs of onomatopoetic action are not abundantly to be recognized among the earliest traceable constituents of our language is no valid argument against the truth of that view of the origin of speech which we have been defending. It has been a common weakness with the upholders of the onomatopoetic theory, and one which more than anything else, perhaps, has tended to discredit them and it with linguistic scholars, that they claim to point out too much in detail, endeavouring to find imitative etymologies where a more thorough comprehension of the facts and a sounder and less prepossessed judgment see an origin of another and less immediate character. But their ​doctrine is so impregnably founded in the properly understood facts of linguistic history, and in the necessary conditions and forces of its earliest period, that they can well afford to be modest, and even reserved, in their attempts to explain particulars. Always and everywhere in language, as we have abundantly seen in our earlier inquiries into the processes of linguistic growth, when once the mutually intelligible sign is found, its origin is liable to be forgotten and obscured. There was doubtless a period in the progress of speech when its whole structure was palpably onomatopoetic; but not a long one: the onomatopoetic stage was only a stepping-stone to something higher and better. Especially, perhaps, was this the case in the language of our own branch of the human race, whose nobler endowments must have begun very early their career of superior development. If we could trace the roots of the other families of language back to the same remote stage, we might find in some of them more evident traces of the primal imitative condition; we may even yet find the same principle dominant to a much higher degree through the whole history of one or other of those families than in our own.
How many may have been the individual proposals of signs which were made ineffectively, to be disregarded or soon forgotten again, or how many the special signs which gained a certain currency in the minor groups of the language-making community, but failed to win that general acceptance which should make them the germs of a transmitted and perpetuated language, we do not and cannot know. Nor can we know how numerous, or of what social constitution, or in what condition of life, was the community which thus formed the speech of a linguistic family or of the whole human race; nor how rapid was the accumulation of uttered words of general intelligibility, nor how great the store gathered by direct imitative process, nor how long the period during which they and their like were made to answer the purposes of communication, anterior to the beginning of structural development. On all such topics as these—as we have found occasion to remark before (in the seventh lecture), when treating of similar subjects—even our guesses ​are now worth nothing, or so nearly nothing as not to deserve recording. But we have no reason to suppose that any language of roots alone was ever otherwise than scanty and feeble; those are greatly mistaken who imagine that the beginnings of speech were produced in a profusion, a superfluity, which later times have rather tempered down and economized than increased. We can see clearly also that the imitative principle, on the one hand, has its natural limits, and, on the other hand, would soon begin to admit the concurrence of a new principle of word-making: namely, the differentiation and various adaptation of the signs already established in use. There would come a time, before very long, when a designation of certain ideas would be more easily won out of existing material than by the creation of new; and this facility would rapidly increase as the body of accepted expression was augmented; until finally the condition of things was reached which we find prevailing during the historical periods of language, when additions to our store of expression are almost exclusively elaborated out of modes of expression in previous use, and onomatopœia is resorted to only in rare and exceptional cases.
The imitative principle is limited in kind as well as in extent of action, and it may sometime become a practical inquiry what were the individual conceptions to which the first signs were fitted. In the present state of advancement of linguistic science, as also of our knowledge of the earliest human conditions, such an investigation, though an interesting one, would doubtless lead to no valuable result.
The view of language and of its origin which has been here set forth will, as I well know, be denounced by many as a low view: but the condemnation need not give us much concern. It is desirable to aim low, if thereby one hits the mark; better humble and true than high-flown, pretentious, and false. A considerable class of linguistic scholars, fearful lest they should not otherwise make out language to be a sufficiently exalted and sacred thing, confound it with thought, and arrogate to the instrumentality a part of the attributes which belong only to the agent; thus becoming involved in inconsistencies and absurdities, or blinding ​themselves and those who depend upon them with mystical dogmas, irreducible to the language of fact and common sense. Mind and its operations are full of real mystery; in language, there are no mysteries, but only the obscurities and difficulties inseparable from the rise and development of the oldest and most important of all human institutions.
* ↑ Indeed, I know that the children of a late principal of the Hartford deaf-and-dumb asylum, who had grown up in the asylum, and knew the peculiar language of the inmates as familiarly as their English, could always tell what their father was thinking of, as he walked up and down in meditation, by watching his hands: his fingers involuntarily formed the signs which were associated in his mind with his subjects of thought; while at the same time, doubtless, he imagined also their spoken signs.
* ↑ In his Lectures on the Science of Language, first series, last lecture.