THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. * Ma. FARRAR'S Essay has the great
merit of being exactly what it professes to be, and we cannot better indicate its general charac- ter in a few lines than by quoting the first two sentences of his preface. "I wish," he says," "this little book to be in every respect as unpretending as possible ; I do not presume to represent myself as an original investigator, nor do I aspire to a greater dis- tinction than that of representing clearly and intelligently the views of those distinguished writers who have made the study of philology the chief pursuit of their lives." This distinction he has fairly achieved, and it is no slight one in our estimation. He has done what no one before him had attempted, and has filled up
in a very masterly manner a place that had been too long vacant in the popular literature of science. He has summarized the main results of a vast amount ef erudite research and induction, at the same time indicating the processes by which those results were arrived at ; and this he has done so clearly and intelli- gently," that his book will be read with pleasure by those to whom its subject is wholly new, and will command the respect of proficients in philology. As a popular introduction to the science, it is among the best books in any language, and is unique in our own.
The cosmogony and creation of the world, as Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson has justly remarked, have puzzled philosophers in all ages. The origin of language has been a riddle as perplexing and as long pondered; and it is only within recent times that the true way of solving either mystery has been comprehended and pursued. The earlier guessers occupied themselves with building systems before they had collected facts ; modern inquirers pursue the converse method, and it rewards them with inestimable dis- coveries. Philology is but. an infant science, and yet already it has thrown new light on many of the most perplexing problems of religion history, and ethnography ; for "so permanent are the creations of speech, so invariable and ascertainable are the laws of its mutation, that the geologist is less clearly able to describe the convulsions of the earth's strata than the philologist to point out, by the indications of language, the undoubted traces of a nation's previous life." It was not, however, until the languages of India, and above all Sanskrit, had become known through the establishment of our dominion in the East, that sufficient data ex- isted for the elaboration of any consistent or exhaustive theory of the origin of language. The most prominent of the old arbitrary theories were these three-1. That language was innate and or- ganic. 2. That it was the result partly of imitation, and partly of convention. 3. That it was revealed. Our author's con- clusion respecting them is "that none of these theories is in itself wholly true or adequate, yet that each of them has a partial value, and that they are not so irreconcilably opposed to each other as might at first sight be imagined."
The theory that language was innate and organic, is in other words, that just as the dog barks, the cock crows, and the lion roars without teaching, study, or concert with other dogs, cocks and lions but solely by the intrinsic force of their organization, so did articulate speech issue spontaneously from the lips of primeval mankind. A natural inference from this theory was, that if a child were entirely secluded from human contact, he would speak instinctively the primitive language of his kind ; and according to Herodotns, the experiment was actually made by Psammetichus, King of Egypt. Two new born infanta were shut up with a she goat, and at the end of two years, having never yet heard a human. voice, they stretched out their hands to the shepherd who visited. them, and uttered the word " Bekos," which in the Phrygian language meant bread. Hence it was concluded that Phrygian was the primitive language, and the Phrygians the most ancient of people. "There is in this story such a delicious naïveté, that one could hardly expect that it would have happened in any ex- cept very early ages. It can, however, be parallelled by the popular opinion which attributed the same experiment to James IV. and Frederick II. in the Middle Ages." The infants upon whom it was tried by the Scotch King were shut up with a dumb man, and spoke Hebrew spontaneously. This was quite in accord- ance with one of the vulgar errors which had to be exploded even in the time of Sir Thomas Browne, for in this instance biblical speculations prevailed over the tendency which almost every nation has shown to regard its own language as the primitive one.
• An Essay on the Origin of Languages. Based on Modern Researches, and especially on the Works of M. Henan. By Frederick W. Farrar, M.A. Published by Murray.
I3ecanus believed that Low Dutch was spoken in Paradise, but it would not have been good for him to proclaim that opinion in Wales or in Celtic Ireland.
Another inference from the supposed innate and organic nature of language was, that words are "not only a sign of the thing intended by them, but in some way partake of its nature, and express and symbolize something of its idea Whoever, therefore, knew the names knew also the things which the name implied." This was the opinion of Plato and of the majority of the Greek schools, and a similar belief seems to underlie the extreme anxiety and curiosity of savages to learn the name of any article previously unknown to them. But this belief will not stand the test of any comparison with facts ; the theory on which it rests is even disproved by this one fact that there remain no traces of an arti- culate language of man, innate or organic, though some relic of it must certainly have been left had it ever existed. The only in- nate and organic language of man which can be compared with the vocal utterances of lower animals, are those instinctive sounds of sobbing, moaning, laughing, and so forth, by which he gives relief or expression to his physical sensations.
The second theory, that language was the result partly of imitation and partly of convention, was adopted by Aristotle in its simplest form. The Epicureans superadded to it the assump- tion that, after a period of mutism and almost bestial degradation, mankind gradually acquired the faculty of speech by observation of the sounds of nature. Of this theory, our author says, that like most which have met with any amount of acceptance, it con- tains a germ of truth. "It originated from the onomatopmic character of a large part of all languages ; but we reject the con- clusion drawn from this fact. That man produced a large or very large part of his vocabulary by an imitation of natural sounds is entirely true, but that the idea of speech was created in him by the hearing of those sounds we believe to be eminently false." This theory, however' found especial favour among the philosophers of the eighteenth century, but nothing can be more arbitrary and inconclusive. It leaves wholly untouched the very knot of the difficulty it proposes to solve ; for even were it granted that inarticulate cries, gestures, and imitative sounds sufficed during an indefinite period for the wants of nascent humanity, there would still be left wholly unexplained "the first step by which unarticulated sounds, the merely passive echoes of blind instincts or outward phenomena could develop into the expression of thought."
In rejecting the third theory—that language is due to direct revelation—Mr. Farrar utters "a strong protest against the bar- rier placed in the way of all honest scientific inquiry by the timid prejudices of that class which tyrannizes over public opinion "—
" In general, those who maintain the literal revelation of language, and reject its human origin, are the direct successors of those theologians who have so long opposed every discovery in science, and rejected the plainest deductions of geometry and logic. They intrude into a sphere in which they have no knowledge and no place ; their argunents are neither scien- tific nor reasonable ; they are not reasons but assertions' not conclusions but idle and groundless prejudices. It has been well said that they pertain to an order of ideas and interests which science repudiates, and with which she has nothing to do. Ignorance has no claim to a hearing even when she speaks ex cathedra."
The notion of a direct revelation of language involves many absurdities, the foremost of which is that along with the verbal signs of ideas the ideas themselves must have been revealed; otherwise, the former would have been useless incumbrances, until man had subsequently attached to them certain significa- tions gathered from his experience. It would have been easier for him to make the words as the occasion for them arose. It is certain that the development of language from a very small nucleus can be traced historically, and therefore there is no ground even of probability for the hypothesis of any previous revealed language. . It is equally improbable that the primitive language (divine as on this supposition it must have been) should have been suffered either by God or man to degenerate into barbarous and feeble jargons. The very passage in Genesis, which has been relied on by those who perversely look in the Bible for scientific truths, implies the very reverse of what they would infer from it. It does not say that God named the animals, but that Adam named them, and whatsoever he named every living creature that was the name thereof.
The conclusion from all the preceding considerations is that language is neither innate nor organic ; nor a mechanical inven- tion, nor an external gift of revelation ; but "a natural faculty swiftly developed by a powerful instinct the result of intelligence and human freedom, which have no place in purely organic func- tions" (Heyse). it was "the living product of the whole inner man" (Schlegel). It was "not a gift bestowed ready formed on man, but something coming from himself" (W. v. Humboldt). It is "essentially human ; it owes to our full liberty both its origin and its progress; it is our history, our heritage" (Grimm). Little of our allotted space remains open to us, and as yet we have but just advanced beyond the threshold of the inquiry, having only demonstrated what the origin of language was not. What it was, and what were the means, the laws, and the history of its development, are much more complex questions ; and to these by far the greater portion of Mr. Farrar's volume is devoted. Unwillingly do we leave all but a fraction of its rich matter wholly untouched, while we briefly- indicate some of the points it establishes. It is Mr. Farrar's well-grounded, belief that all the primary elements were imitative, and sprang from one or the other of two totally distinct sources—onomatopcea and interjec- tion. The first of these two is an imitation of the sounds of external nature, and from it were obtained the great majority of primitive roots ; the rest were derived from sounds by which mankind express natural emotions. If any of our readers are inclined to doubt that the elements of human speech could have been supplied in sufficient abundance from these two sources alone, we refer them to Mr. Wedgwood's admirable .Entymological Dictionary for astonishing evidence of the vast number of words which may be ultimately deduced from a single onomatopsea, or interjectional sound. Analogy and metaphor are the wonder- working instruments by which a few imitative sounds have been modified so as to express an infinity of meanings, including even the most abstract. Victor Cousin has instanced the pronoun "I" and the verb "to be" as words which are primitive, indecom- posible, and irreducible in every language with which he is acquainted—as words which represent nothing whatever except the meaning conventionally attached to them, and have no con- nexion with sensible images. The case seems a strong one against the imitative origin of language ; and yet it has been clearly proved that these very words are derived from the very earliest and simplest of all sensations ; for originally the first, second, and third pronouns denoted respectively here, near to here and there ; and what, we may ask with Bunsen, "is be' in all languages but the spiritualization of walking, or standing or eating :2 The genesis of the very numerals, which stand for the most purely abstract conceptions, can be traced with no less certainty to ideas of sense. In Sanskrit and Greek the first three numerals were identical with the three personal pronouns, and implied, like them, three several ideas of place, so that the modern vulgarism of " number one," as a synonym for the first person, exhibits an unconscious return to the ideas of primeval antiquity. lathe same languages, the word "four" implies 1+3 ; " five " is radically allied to the word " hand ;" "ten" means two hands, and so forth. In Greenland, the word for twenty is "a man "
e. fingers + toes=20), and for 100 the word as fire men, &c.
Previous page
