XXI.—§ 12. Emotional Songs.
If we now try to sum up what has been inferred about primitive speech, we see that by our backward march we arrived at a language whose units had a very meagre substance of thought, and this as specialized and concrete as possible; but at the same time the phonetic body was ample; and the bigger and longer the words, the thinner the thoughts! Much cry and little wool! No period has seen less taciturn people than the first framers of speech; primitive speakers were not reticent and reserved beings, but youthful men and women babbling merrily on, without being so very particular about the meaning of each word. They did not narrowly weigh every syllable—what were a couple of syllables more or less to them? They chattered away for the mere pleasure of chattering, resembling therein many a mother of our own time, who will chatter away to baby without measuring her words or looking too closely into the meaning of each; nay, who is not a bit troubled by the consideration that the little deary does not understand a single word of her affectionate eloquence. But primitive speech—and we return here to an idea thrown out above—still more resembles the speech of little baby himself, before he begins to frame his own language after the pattern of the grown-ups; the language of our remote forefathers was like that ceaseless humming and crooning with which no thoughts are as yet connected, which merely amuses and delights the little one. Language originated as play, and the organs of speech were first trained in this singing sport of idle hours.
Primitive language had no great store of ideas, and if we consider it as an instrument for expressing thoughts, it was clumsy, unwieldy and ineffectual; but what did that matter? Thoughts were not the first things to press forward and crave for expression; emotions and instincts were more primitive and far more powerful. But what emotions were most powerful in producing germs of speech? To be sure not hunger and that which is connected with hunger: mere individual self-assertion and the struggle for material existence. This prosaic side of life was only capable of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections, howls of pain and grunts of satisfaction or dissatisfaction; but these are isolated and incapable of much further development; they are the most immutable portions of language, and remain now at essentially the same standpoint as thousands of years ago.
If after spending some time over the deep metaphysical speculations of a number of German linguistic philosophers you turn to men like Madvig and Whitney, you are at once agreeably impressed by the sobriety of their reasoning and their superior clearness of thought. But if you look more closely, you cannot help thinking that they imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image as serious and well-meaning men endowed with a large share of common-sense. By their laying such great stress on the communication of thought as the end of language and on the benefit to primitive man of being able to speak to his fellow-creatures about matters of vital importance, they leave you with the impression that these “first framers of speech” were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely business and matter-of-fact side of life; indeed, according to Madvig, women had no share in the creating of language.
In opposition to this rationalistic view I should like, for once in a way, to bring into the field the opposite view: the genesis of language is not to be sought in the prosaic, but in the poetic side of life; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry play and youthful hilarity. And among the emotions which were most powerful in eliciting outbursts of music and of song, love must be placed in the front rank. To the feeling of love, which has left traces of its vast influence on countless points in the evolution of organic nature, are due not only, as Darwin has shown, the magnificent colours of birds and flowers, but also many of the things that fill us with joy in human life; it inspired many of the first songs, and through them was instrumental in bringing about human language. In primitive speech I hear the laughing cries of exultation when lads and lasses vied with one another to attract the attention of the other sex, when everybody sang his merriest and danced his bravest to lure a pair of eyes to throw admiring glances in his direction. Language was born in the courting days of mankind; the first utterances of speech I fancy to myself like something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale.[110]
XXI.—§ 13. Primitive Singing.
Love, however, was not the only feeling which tended to call forth primitive songs. Any strong emotion, and more particularly any pleasurable excitement, might result in song. Singing, like any other sort of play, is due to an overflow of energy, which is discharged in “unusual vivacity of every kind, including vocal vivacity.” Out of the full heart the mouth sings! Savages will sing whenever they are excited: exploits of war or of the chase, the deeds of their ancestors, the coming of a fat dog, any incident “from the arrival of a stranger to an earthquake” is turned into a song; and most of these songs are composed extempore. “When rowing, the Coast negroes sing either a description of some love intrigue or the praise of some woman celebrated for her beauty.” The Malays beguile all their leisure hours with the repetition of songs, etc. “In singing, the East African contents himself with improvising a few words without sense or rime and repeats them till they nauseate.” (These quotations, and many others, are found in Herbert Spencer’s Essay on the Origin of Music, with his Postscript.) The reader of Karl Bücher’s painstaking work Arbeit und Rhythmus (2te aufl. 1899) will know from his numerous examples and illustrations what an enormous rôle rhythmic singing plays in the daily life of savages all over the world, how each kind of work, especially if it is done by many jointly, has its own kind of song, and how nothing is done except to the sound of vocal music. In many instances savages are mentioned as very expert in adapting the subjects of their songs to current events. Nor is this sort of singing on every and any occasion confined to savages; it is found wherever the indoor life of civilization has not killed all open-air hilarity; formerly in our Western Europe people sang much more than they do now. The Swedish peasant Jonas Stolt (ab. 1820) writes: “I have known a time when young people were singing from morning till eve. Then they were carolling both out- and indoors, behind the plough as well as at the threshing-floor and at the spinning-wheel. This is all over long ago: nowadays there is silence everywhere; if someone were to try and sing in our days as we did of old, people would term it bawling.”
The first things that were expressed in song were, to be sure, neither deep nor wise; how could you expect it? Note the frequency with which we are told that the songs of savages consist of or contain totally meaningless syllables. Thus we read about American Indians that “the native word which is translated ‘song’ does not suggest any use of words. To the Indian, the music is of primal importance; words may or may not accompany the music. When words are used in song, they are rarely employed as a narrative, the sentences are not apt to be complete” (Louise Pound, Mod. Lang. Ass. 32. 224), and similarly: “Even where the slightest vestiges of epic poetry are missing, lyric poetry of one form or another is always present. It may consist of the musical use of meaningless syllables that sustain the song; or it may consist largely of such syllables, with a few interspersed words suggesting certain ideas and certain feelings; or it may rise to the expression of emotions connected with warlike deeds, with religious feeling, love, or even to the praise of the beauties of nature” (Boas, International Journ. Amer. Ling. 1. 8). The magic incantations of the Greenland Eskimo, according to W. Thalbitzer, contain many incomprehensible words never used outside these songs (but have they ever been real words?), and the same is said about the mystic religious formulas of Maoris and African negroes and many other tribes, as well as about the old Roman hymns of the Arval Brethren. The mere joy in sonorous combinations here no doubt counts for very much, as in the splendid but meaningless metrical lists of names in the Old Norse Edda, and in many a modern refrain, too. Let me give one example of half (or less than half) understood strings of syllables from “The Oath of the Canting Crew” (1749, Farmer’s Musa Pedestris, 51):
In the cultic and ceremonial songs of savage tribes in many parts of the world this is a prominent trait: it seems, indeed, to be universal. Even with us the thoughts associated with singing are generally neither very clear nor very abstruse; like humming or whistling, singing is often nothing more than an almost automatic outcome of a mood; and “What is not worth saying can be sung.” Besides, it has been the case at all times that things transient and trivial have found readier expression than Socratic wisdom. But the frivolous use tuned the instrument, and rendered it little by little more serviceable to a multiplicity of purposes, so that it became more and more fitted to express everything that touched human souls.
Men sang out their feelings long before they were able to speak their thoughts. But of course we must not imagine that “singing” means exactly the same thing here as in a modern concert hall. When we say that speech originated in song, what we mean is merely that our comparatively monotonous spoken language and our highly developed vocal music are differentiations of primitive utterances, which had more in them of the latter than of the former. These utterances were at first, like the singing of birds and the roaring of many animals and the crying and crooning of babies, exclamative, not communicative—that is, they came forth from an inner craving of the individual without any thought of any fellow-creatures. Our remote ancestors had not the slightest notion that such a thing as communicating ideas and feelings to someone else was possible. They little suspected that in singing as nature prompted them they were paving the way for a language capable of rendering minute shades of thought; just as they could not suspect that out of their coarse pictures of men and animals there should one day grow an art enabling men of distant countries to speak to one another. As is the art of writing to primitive painting, so is the art of speaking to primitive singing. And the development of the two vehicles of communication of thought presents other curious and instructive parallels. In primitive picture-writing, each sign meant a whole sentence or even more—the image of a situation or of an incident being given as a whole; this developed into an ideographic writing of each word by itself; this system was succeeded by syllabic methods, which had in their turn to give place to alphabetic writing, in which each letter stands for, or is meant to stand for, one sound. Just as here the advance is due to a further analysis of language, smaller and smaller units of speech being progressively represented by single signs, in an exactly similar way, though not quite so unmistakably, the history of language shows us a progressive tendency towards analyzing into smaller and smaller units that which in the earlier stages was taken as an inseparable whole.
One point must be constantly kept in mind. Although we now regard the communication of thought as the main object of speaking, there is no reason for thinking that this has always been the case; it is perfectly possible that speech has developed from something which had no other purpose than that of exercising the muscles of the mouth and throat and of amusing oneself and others by the production of pleasant or possibly only strange sounds. The motives for uttering sounds may have changed entirely in the course of centuries without the speakers being at any point conscious of this change within them.
XXI.—§ 14. Approach to Language.
We get the first approach to language proper when communicativeness takes precedence of exclamativeness, when sounds are uttered in order to ‘tell’ fellow-creatures something, as when birds warn their young ones of some imminent danger. In the case of human language, communication is infinitely more full and rich and elaborate; the question therefore is a very complex one: How did the association of sound and sense come about? How did that which originally was a jingle of meaningless sounds come to be an instrument of thought? How did man become, as Humboldt has somewhere defined him, “a singing creature, only associating thoughts with the tones”?
In the case of an onomatopoetic or echo-word like bow-wow and an interjection like pooh-pooh the association was easy and direct; such words were at once employed and understood as signs for the corresponding idea. But this was not the case with the great bulk of language. Here association of sound with sense must have been arrived at by devious and circuitous ways, which to a great extent evade inquiry and make a detailed exposition impossible. But this is in exact conformity with very much that has taken place in recent periods; as we have learnt in previous chapters, it is only by indirect and roundabout ways that many words and grammatical expedients have acquired the meanings they now have, or have acquired meaning where they originally had none. Let me remind the reader of the word grog (p. 308), of interrogative particles (p. 358), of word order (p. 356), of many endings (Ch. XIX § 13 ff.), of tones (Ch. XIX § 5), of the French negative pas, of vowel-alternations like those in drink, drank, drunk, or in foot, feet, etc. Language is a complicated affair, and no more than most other human inventions has it come about in a simple way: mankind has not moved in a straight line towards a definitely perceived goal, but has muddled along from moment to moment and has thereby now and then stumbled on some happy expedient which has then been retained in accordance with the principle of the survival of the fittest.
We may perhaps succeed in forming some idea of the most primitive process of associating sound and sense if we call to mind what was said above on the signification of the earliest words, and try to fathom what that means. The first words must have been as concrete and specialized in meaning as possible. Now, what are the words whose meaning is the most concrete and the most specialized? Without any doubt proper names—that is, of course, proper names of the good old kind, borne by and denoting only one single individual. How easily might not such names spring up in a primitive state such as that described above! In the songs of a particular individual there would be a constant recurrence of a particular series of sounds sung with a particular cadence; no one can doubt the possibility of such individual habits being contracted in olden as well as in present times. Suppose, then, that “in the spring time, the only pretty ring time” a lover was in the habit of addressing his lass “with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.” His comrades and rivals would not fail to remark this, and would occasionally banter him by imitating and repeating his “hey-and-a-ho-and-a-hey-nonino.” But when once this had been recognized as what Wagner would term a person’s ‘leitmotiv,’ it would be no far cry from mimicking it to using the “hey-and-a-ho-and-a-hey-nonino” as a sort of nickname for the man concerned; it might be employed, for instance, to signal his arrival. And when once proper names had been bestowed, common names (or nouns) would not be slow in following; we see the transition from one to the other class in constant operation, names originally used exclusively to denote an individual being used metaphorically to connote that person’s most characteristic peculiarities, as when we say of one man that he is a ‘Crœsus’ or a ‘Vanderbilt’ or ‘Rockefeller,’ and of another that he is ‘no Bismarck.’ A German schoolboy in the ’eighties said in his history lesson that Hannibal swore he would always be a Frenchman to the Romans. This is, at least, one of the ways in which language arrives at designations of such ideas as ‘rich,’ ‘statesman’ and ‘enemy.’ From the proper name of Cæsar we have both the Russian tsar’ and the German kaiser, and from Karol (Charlemagne) Russian korol’ ‘king’ (also in the other Slav languages) and Magyar király. Besides being designations for persons, proper names may also in some cases come to mean tools or other objects, originally in most cases probably as a term of endearment, as when in thieves’ slang a crowbar or lever is called a betty or jemmy; E. derrick and dirk, as well as G. dietrich, Dan. dirk, Swed. dyrk, is nothing but Dietrich (Derrick, Theodoricus), and thus in innumerable instances. In the École polytechnique in Paris there are many words of the same character: bacha ‘cours d’allemand’ from a teacher, M. Bacharach, borius ‘bretelles’ from General Borius, malo ‘éperon’ from Captain Malo, etc. (MSL 15. 179). Pamphlet is from Pamphilet, originally Pamphilus seu de Amore, the name of a popular booklet on an erotic subject. Compare also the history of the words bluchers, jack (boot-jack, jack for turning a spit, a pike, etc., also jacket), pantaloon, hansom, boycott, to burke, to name only a few of the best-known examples.
XXI.—§ 15. The Earliest Sentences.
Again, we saw above that the further back we went in the history of known languages, the more the sentence was one indissoluble whole, in which those elements which we are accustomed to think of as single words were not yet separated. Now, the idea that language began with sentences, not with words, appears to Whitney (Am. Journ. of Philol. 1. 338) to be, “if capable of any intelligent and intelligible statement, a fortiori, too wild and baseless to deserve respectful mention” (cf. also Madvig Kl 85). But the absurdity appears only if we think of sentences like those found in our languages, consisting of elements (words) capable of being used in other combinations and there forming other sentences: this seems to be what Gabelentz (Spr 351) imagines; but it is not so wild to imagine as the first beginning something which can be translated into our languages by means of a sentence, but which is not ‘articulated’ in the same way as such a sentence; we translate or explain the dental click (‘tut’) by means of the sentence ‘that is a pity,’ but the interjection is not in other respects a grammatical ‘sentence.’ Or we may take an illustration from the modern use of a telegraphic code: if suzaw means ‘I have not received your telegram,’ or sempo ‘reserve one single room and bath at first-class hotel’—we have unanalyzable wholes capable of being rendered in complete sentences, but not in every way analogous to these sentences.
Now, it is just units of this character (though not, of course, with exactly the same kind of meaning as the two code words) whose genesis we can most easily imagine on the supposition of a primitive period of meaningless singing. If a certain number of people have together witnessed some incident and have accompanied it with some sort of impromptu song or refrain, the two ideas are associated, and later on the same song will tend to call forth in the memory of those who were present the idea of the whole situation. Suppose some dreaded enemy has been defeated and slain; the troop will dance round the dead body and strike up a chant of triumph, say something like ‘Tarara-boom-de-ay!’ This combination of sounds, sung to a certain melody, will now easily become what might be called a proper name for that particular event; it might be roughly translated, ‘The terrible foe from beyond the river is slain,’ or ‘We have killed the dreadful man from beyond the river,’ or, ‘Do you remember when we killed him?’ or something of the same sort. Under slightly altered circumstances it may become the proper name of the man who slew the enemy. The development can now proceed further by a metaphorical transference of the expression to similar situations (‘There is another man of the same tribe: let us kill him as we did the first!’) or by a blending of two or more of these proper-name melodies. How this kind of blending may lead to the development of something like derivative affixes may be gathered from our chapter on Secretion; it may also result in parts of the whole melodic utterance being disengaged as something more like our ‘words.’ From the nature of the subject it is impossible to give more than hints, but I seem to see ways by which primitive ‘lieder ohne worte’ may have become, first, indissoluble rigmaroles, with something like a dim meaning attached to them, and then gradually combinations of word-like smaller units, more and more capable of being analyzed and combined with others of the same kind. Anyhow, this theory seems to explain better than any other the great part which fortuitous coincidence and irregularity always play in that part of any language which is not immediately intelligible, thus both in lexical and grammatical elements.
Primitive man came to attach meaning to what were originally rambling sequences of syllables in pretty much the same way as the child comes to attach a meaning to many of the words he hears from his elders, the whole situation in which they are heard giving a clue to their interpretation. The difference is that in the latter case the speaker has already associated a meaning with the sound; but from the point of view of the hearer this is comparatively immaterial: the savage of a far-distant age hearing some syllables for the first time and the child hearing them nowadays are in essentially the same position as to their interpretation. Parallels are also found in the words of the mamma class (Ch. VIII § 8), in which hearers give a signification to something pronounced unintentionally, the same syllables being then capable of serving afterwards as real words. If one of our forebears on some occasion accidentally produced a sequence of sounds, and if the people around him were seen (or heard) to respond appreciatively, he would tend to settle on the same string of sounds and repeat it on similar occasions, and in this way it would gradually become ‘conventionalized’ as a symbol of what was then foremost in his and in their minds. As in agriculture primitive man reaped before he sowed, so also in his vocal outbursts he first reaped understanding, and then discovered that by intentionally sowing the same seed he was able to call forth the same result. And as with corn, he would slowly and gradually, by weeding out (i.e. by not using) what was less useful to him, improve the quality, till finally he had come into possession of the marvellous, though far from perfect, instrument which we now call our language. The development of our ordinary speech has been largely an intellectualization, and the emotional quality which played the largest part in primitive utterances has to some extent been repressed; but it is not extinct, and still gives a definite colouring to all passionate and eloquent speaking and to poetic diction. Language, after all, is an art—one of the finest of arts.
XXI.—§ 16. Conclusion.
Language, then, began with half-musical unanalyzed expressions for individual beings and solitary events. Languages composed of, and evolved from, such words and quasi-sentences are clumsy and insufficient instruments of thought, being intricate, capricious and difficult. But from the beginning the tendency has been one of progress, slow and fitful progress, but still progress towards greater and greater clearness, regularity, ease and pliancy. No one language has arrived at perfection; an ideal language would always express the same thing by the same, and similar things by similar means; any irregularity or ambiguity would be banished; sound and sense would be in perfect harmony; any number of delicate shades of meaning could be expressed with equal ease; poetry and prose, beauty and truth, thinking and feeling would be equally provided for: the human spirit would have found a garment combining freedom and gracefulness, fitting it closely and yet allowing full play to any movement.
But, however far our present languages are from that ideal, we must be thankful for what has been achieved, seeing that—