Before we inquire into abstraction, as fixed and expressed in words,—whether such words are the complement of an actual or possible representation, or exist alone in consciousness, as complete substitutes,—it is indispensable that we should study the origin, and still more the evolution, of this new factor. Although many linguists resolutely abstain from considering the origin of speech (which is certainly, like all other genetic problems, beyond the grasp of psychology), the question is so intimately allied with that of the evolution of articulate language, allied again in itself with the progressive development of abstraction and of generalisation, that we should not be justified in withholding a brief summary of the principal hypotheses relating to this subject, while limiting ourselves to the most recent.
I.
Launching forth then into this region of conjecture—do we, in the first place, find among some animals, signs and means of communication which for them are the equivalents of language? In considering this point it matters little whether or no we accept the evolutionary thesis. It must not be forgotten, in fact, that the problem of the origin of speech is only a particular case of the origin of language in general: speech being but one species among several others of the facultas signatrix, which can only be manifested in the lower animals in its humblest form.
There can be no doubt that pain, joy, love, impatience, and other emotional states are translated by proper signs, easy to determine. Our problem, however, is different; we are concerned with signs of the intellectual, not of the affective, life. In other words, can certain animals transmit a warning, or an order, to their fellows? Can they muster them for a co-operative act, and make themselves intelligible? Although the interpretation is necessarily open to the suspicion of anthropomorphism, it is difficult not to recognise a sort of language in certain acts of animal life. Is it a priori probable that animals, which form stable and well-organised societies, should be bereft of all means of intercommunication and comprehension?
With regard to ants, we learn from such observers as Kirby and Spence, Huber, Franklin, that they employ a system of signs. To elucidate this point, Lubbock undertook a series of patient experiments, certain of which may be quoted.[42] He pinned down a dead fly so that no ant could carry it off. The first that came made vain attempts to remove it. It then went to the ant-hill and brought seven others to the rescue, but hurried imprudently in front of them. “Seemingly only half awake,” they lost the track and wandered alone for twenty minutes. The first returned to the nest and brought back eight, who, so soon as they were left behind by the guide, turned back again. During this time the band of seven (or at least some of them) had discovered the fly, which they tore in pieces and carried off to the nest. The experiment was several times repeated, with different species, and always with the same result. Lubbock concluded that ants were able to communicate their discoveries, but without indicating locality. In another experiment he placed three glasses at a distance of thirty inches from a nest of ants. One of the glasses contained two or three larvæ, the second three hundred to six hundred, the third none at all. He connected the nest with the glasses by means of three parallel tapes, and placed one ant in the glass with many larvæ and another ant in that with two or three. Each of them took a larva and carried it to the nest, returning for another, and so on. After each journey he put another larva into the glass with only two or three larvæ, to replace that which had been removed, and every stranger brought was imprisoned until the end of the experiment. Were the number of visits to all three glasses the same? And if not, which of the two glasses containing larvæ received the greater number of visitors? A difference in number would seem to be conclusive as proving power of communication. The result was that during forty-seven and a half hours two hundred and fifty-seven friends were brought by the ants having access to the glass containing numerous larvæ, while during an interval of fifty-three hours there were only eighty strange visitors to the glass containing two or three larvæ; there were no visits to the glass containing none. Communication for bees as for ants, appears to be made by rubbing the antennæ. If the queen is carried off in a hive, some of the bees are sure to discover it before long. They become greatly agitated, and run about the hive frantically, touching any companions they meet with their crossed antennæ, and thus spreading the news through the whole community. The bee-hunters in America discover them by choosing a clearing where they catch a few wandering bees, which are then gorged with honey and suffered to fly when replete. These bees return with a numerous escort. The same process is repeated with the new comers, and by observing the direction which they follow at their departure, the nest is discovered.
As regards the higher animals, the truth (notwithstanding the exaggerations of G. Leroy—who asserts that when they hunt together, wait for one another, find each other again, and give mutual aid, “these operations would be impossible without conventions that could only be communicated in detail by means of an articulate language [sic]”) is that we know singularly little about them. It is certain that, in addition to sounds that translate their emotions, many species have other means of communication. According to Romanes[43] the more intelligent dogs have the faculty of communicating with one another, by the tone of barking, or by gesture, such simple ideas as “follow me.” This gesture is invariably the same; being a contact of heads with a motion between a rub and a butt, and always resulting in a definite but never complex course of action. In a troop of reindeer the leader makes one sign for the halt, another for the march forward, hitting the laggards one after another with his horns. Monkeys are known to produce various sounds (the gibbon compasses a complete octave), and several species will meet and hold a kind of conversation. Unfortunately, notwithstanding recent researches, we have only vague and doubtful data in regard to monkey language.
We know finally, that certain birds are able to articulate, and possess all the material conditions of speech, the faculty being indeed by no means uncommon. Parrots do even more; there is no doubt that they can apply words, parts of sentences, and airs, to persons, things, or definite events, without varying the application, which is always the same.[44] Association by contiguity sufficiently explains this fact, but, granting that they do not as a rule make a right intellectual use of articulate sounds, they seem in certain instances to attach to them the value of a sign. Romanes actually observed a more extraordinary case, implying generalisation, with apposition of a sound. In the first instance, one of his parrots imitated the barking of a terrier which lived in the house. Later on, this barking became a denotative sound, the proper name of the dog; for the bird barked as soon as it saw the terrier. Finally, at a still later stage, it got into the habit of barking when any dog, known or unknown, came into the house; but ceased to bark at the terrier. While distinguishing individuals it therefore perceived their resemblance. “The parrot’s name for an individual dog became extended into a generic name for all dogs.”[45]
In short, the language of animals—so far as we know it—exhibits a very rudimentary development, by no means proportionate to that of the logic of images, and highly inferior to that of analytical gesture. It throws no light, notwithstanding all that has been said, upon the problem of the origin of speech.
In respect to this subject, which has excited human curiosity for centuries without satiation, there appear to me (when we have eliminated old or abandoned hypotheses) to be only two theories which have any solidity: the one presupposes instinct; the other a slow evolution.
I. It must be remarked that if the partisans of the first theory seem at the outset to have frankly admitted innate disposition (the fundamental characteristic of instinct), it is more difficult to distinguish between some of the later writers and the evolutionists.
Thus it has been said: speech is a necessary product in which neither reflexion nor will participate, and which is derived from a secret instinct in man (Heyse). Renan sustained a similar thesis. For Max Müller, “man is born speaking, as he is born thinking; speech marks the transition from (concrete) intuitions to ideas; it is a fact in the development of the mind; it is created with no distinct consciousness of means and end.” For Steinthal, on the contrary, “language is neither an invention nor an innate product; man creates it himself, but it is not begotten of the reflecting mind.” Through all these formulæ, and others somewhat tinged with mysticism, we can discover but one point of fact, analogous to that which states that it is in the nature of the bee to form its comb, of the spider to weave its web. The last word of the enigma is unconscious activity, and whether directly, or by evasions, this school must return to innate faculties.
A somewhat recent theory,—that of L. Noiré,[46]—is distinct from the foregoing. In these, speech is the direct (although, it is true, unconscious) expression of intelligence; for Noiré, on the other hand, it is the outcome of will. “Language is the result of association, of community of feeling, of a sympathetic activity which, at the outset, was accompanied by sounds...; it is the child of will and not of sensation.” Speech is derived from community of action, from the collaboration of primitive men, from the common use of their activities. When our muscles are in action, we feel it a relief to utter sounds. The men who work together, the peasants who dig or thresh the grain, sailors rowing, soldiers marching, emit more or less vibrant articulations, sounds, exclamations, humming, songs, etc. These sounds present the requisite characters of the constitution of articulate language; they are common to all; they are intelligible, being associated by all with the same acts. Action, according to Noiré, is the primitive element in all language. Human labor is the content of primitive roots; to cut, knock, dig, hollow, weave, row, etc. Although Max Müller adhered almost unreservedly to this hypothesis, it has, like all others, encountered much criticism which we need not dwell on. Is it probable, it has been asked, that the first names should have been for acts only, not for objects? How explain the synonyms and homonyms so frequent in primitive language? etc.
II. The hypothesis of a progressive evolution of speech, while dating from antiquity, has only taken a consistent form in our own days, under the influence of transformist doctrines. The work of anthropologists and of linguists, above all of the former, it finds support in the study of inferior idioms and of the comparative method. Its fundamental thesis is that articulate language is the result of a long elaboration, lasting for centuries, in which we may with some probability reconstitute the stages. While its authors are not in complete agreement it may be said that, generally speaking, they admit three periods: the cry, vocalisation, articulation.
The cry is the primordial fact, the pure animal language, a simple vocal aspiration, without articulation. It is either reflex, expressing needs and emotions, or, at a stage higher, intentional (to call, warn, menace, etc.). It has been said that the speechlessness of animals is due to the imperfection of their auditory[?] organs, and want of organic correspondence between their acoustic images and the muscular movements that produce sound: but the cause of this aphasia must also, and above all, be referred to their weak cerebral development; this applies also to primitive man. “What function could words have fulfilled when the anthropoid of the Neanderthal or the Naulette roamed, naked and solitary, from ditch to ditch, through the thick atmosphere, over marshy soil, stone in hand, seeking edible plants or berries, or the trail of females as savage as himself?”[47] It is intelligence that creates its instruments, as well speech as all the rest.
Vocalisation (emission of vowels only) does not in itself contain the essential elements of speech. Many animals practise it; our vowels, long or short, even our diphthongs, can readily be recognised in the voice of different species (dog, cat, horse, birds in large numbers, etc.). In the child, it succeeds the period of the simple cry; and since it is admitted that the development of the individual hints at that of the race; that, moreover, many primitive languages or rudimentary idioms (as such, near the time of their origin) are very rich in vowels,—it has been concluded that there existed a longer or shorter period intermediate between those of the cry and of articulation (this thesis has close affinities with the theory of Darwin, Spencer, etc., which has been rejected by other evolutionists); that speech is derived from song, intellectual language from emotional language; in other words, that man could sing before he could speak. Various facts are alleged in support of this theory: (1) In monosyllabic languages, which are generally held to be the most ancient, the accent plays a cardinal rôle; the same syllable, according to the tone which accompanies it, takes on the most widely different meanings. Such is the case of the Chinese. In Siamese, hă = to seek; hâ = plague; hà = five. (2) Other languages in which intonation is of less importance, are nevertheless in close relation with song, and by reason of their vocabulary and of the grammatical construction, modulation is necessary for giving a complete sense to the words and phrases. (3) Even in our own languages, which are completely dissociated from song, the voice is not even in tone; it can be greatly modified according to circumstances. Helmholtz showed that for such banal phrases as “I have been for a walk,” “Have you been for a walk?” the voice drops a quarter-tone for the affirmation, and rises a fifth for the interrogation. H. Spencer called attention to several facts of the same order, all commonplace. (4) The impassioned language of emotion resembles song: the voice returns to its original form; “it tends,” according to Darwin, “to assume a musical character, in virtue of the principle of association.”
Whatever may be the force of this reasoning, conclusive for some, doubtful for others, the conditions necessary to the existence of speech arose with articulation only, consonants being its firmest element. The origin of speech has been much disputed. Romanes invokes natural selection: “The first articulation probably consisted in nothing further than a semiotic breaking of vocal tones, in a manner resembling that which still occurs in the so-called chattering of monkeys,—the natural language for the expression of their mental states.”[48] It should, however, be noted that the question, under this form, has merely a physiological interest. The voice is as natural to man as are the movements of his limbs; between simple voice and articulate voice there is but the same distance as between the irregular movements of the limbs of the newly born, and such well-co-ordinated movements as walking. Articulation is merely one of the forms of expression: it is so little human that it is met with, as we have seen, among many of the lower animals. The true psychological problem lies elsewhere: in the employment of articulate sounds as objective signs, and the attaching of these to objects with which they are related by no natural tie.
Geiger in his Ursprung der Sprache (1878) brought forward a hypothesis which has been sustained by other authors. It may be summed up as follows: words are an imitation of the movements of the mouth. The predominant sense in man is that of sight; man is pre-eminently visual. Prior to the acquisition of speech, he communicated with his fellows by the aid of gestures, and movements of the mouth and face; he appealed to their eyes. Their facial “grimaces,” fulfilled and elucidated by gesture, became signs for others; they fixed their attention on them. When articulate sounds came into being, these lent themselves to a more or less conventional language by reason of their acquired importance. For support of this hypothesis, we are referred to the case of non-educated deaf-mutes. These invent articulate sounds (which of course they cannot hear), and use them to designate certain things. While many of these words appear to be an arbitrary creation (e. g., ga = one, ricke = I will not, etc.), others result from the imitation by their mouth of the movements perceived on the mouth of others. Such are mumm = to eat; chip = to drink; be-yr = barking of a dog, etc.[49] Why should primitive man have done less than the deaf-mute, when he not only saw the movements but heard the sounds to boot?
To conclude with a subject in which individual hypotheses abound, and which for us is only of indirect interest, we may summarise the sketch given recently enough (1888) by one of the principal partisans of the evolutionary theory:
“Starting from the highly intelligent and social species of anthropoid ape as pictured by Darwin, we can imagine that this animal was accustomed to use its voice freely for the expression of its emotions, uttering of danger-signals, and singing. Possibly enough also it may have been sufficiently intelligent to use a few imitative sounds; and certainly sooner or later the receptual life of this social animal must have advanced far enough to have become comparable with that of an infant at about two years of age. That is to say, this animal, although not yet having begun to use articulate signs, must have advanced far enough in the conventional use of natural signs (or signs with a natural origin in tone and gesture, whether spontaneous only or intentionally imitative) to have admitted of a tolerably free exchange of receptual ideas, such as would be concerned in animal wants, and even, perhaps, in the simplest forms of co-operative action. Next, I think it probable that the advance of receptual intelligence which would have been occasioned by this advance in sign-making, would in turn have led to a further development of the latter,—the two thus acting and reacting on each other until the language of tone and gesture became gradually raised to the level of imperfect pantomime, as in children before they begin to use words. At this stage, however, or even before it, I think very probably vowel-sounds must have been employed in tone-language, if not also a few of the consonants. Eventually the action and reaction of receptual intelligence and conventional sign-making must have ended in so far developing the former as to have admitted of the breaking up (or articulation) of vocal sounds, as the only direction in which any further improvement of vocal sign-making was possible. I think it not improbable that this important stage in the development of speech was greatly assisted by the already existing habit of articulating musical notes, supposing our progenitors to have resembled the gibbons or the chimpanzees in this respect. But long after this first rude beginning of articulate speech, the language of tone and gesture would have continued as much the most important machinery of communication. Even if we were able to strike in again upon the history thousands of years later, we should find that pantomime had been superseded by speech. I believe it was an inconceivably long time before this faculty of articulate sign-making had developed sufficiently far to begin to starve out the more primitive and natural systems; and I believe that, even after this starving-out process did begin, another inconceivable lapse of time must have been required for such progress to have eventually transformed Homo alalus into Homo sapiens.”[50]
Among all these hypotheses we may choose or not choose; and while we have dwelt briefly on this debated problem, whose literature is copious, we may yet have said too much on what is mere conjecture.
One certain fact remains, that—notwithstanding the theory by which speech is likened to an instinct breaking forth spontaneously in man—it was at its origin so weak, so inadequate and poor, that it perforce leaned upon the language of gesture to become intelligible. Specimens of this mixed language are still surviving among inferior races that have nothing in common between them, inhabiting regions of the earth with no common resemblances.
In some cases speech coexists with the language of action (Tasmanians, Greenlanders, savage tribes of Brazil, Grebos of Western Africa, etc.). Gesture is here indispensable for giving precision to the vocal sounds; it may even modify the sense. Thus, in one of these idioms, ni ne signifies “I do it,” or “You do it,” according to the gesture of the speaker. The Bushman vocabulary is so incomplete and has to be reinforced by so many mimic signs, that it cannot be understood in the dark. In order to converse at night, the tribe is obliged to gather round the fire.
In other cases, speech coexists with inarticulate sounds (Fuegians, Hottentots, certain tribes of North America) which travellers have compared, respectively, to clinking and clapping. These sounds have been classified according to the physiological process by which they are produced, into four (or even six) species: dental, palatal, cerebral, lateral; it is impossible to translate them by an articulated equivalent. “Their clappings survive,” says Sayce, “as though to show us how man, when deprived of speech, can fix and transmit his thought by certain sounds.” Among the Gallas, the orator haranguing the assembly marks the punctuation of his discourse by cracking a leather thong. The blow, according to its force, indicates a comma, semi-colon, or stop; a violent blow makes an exclamation.[51]
It was advisable to recall these mixed states in which articulate language had not yet left its primitive vein. They are transitional forms between pure pantomime and the moment when speech conquered its complete independence.
II.
In passing from the origin of speech to the study of its development, we enter upon firmer ground. Although this development has not occurred uniformly in every race, and the linguists—who are here our guides—do not always agree in fixing its phases, it is nevertheless the surest indication of the march of the human mind in its self-analysis in passing from extreme confusion to deliberate differentiation; while the materials are sufficiently abundant to admit of an objective study of intellectual psychogenesis, based upon language.
This attempt has nothing in common with the “general or philosophical grammar” of the beginning of this century. The Idealogues who founded this had the pretension, while taking language as their basis, to analyse the fundamental categories of intelligence: substance, quality, action, relation. A laudable enterprise, but one which, by reason of the method employed, could only be abortive. Knowing only the classical or modern languages, the products of a long civilisation, they had no suspicion of the embryonic phases; accordingly, they made a theoretical construction, the work of logicians rather than of psychologists. Any positive genetic investigation was inaccessible to them; they were lacking in material, and in instruments. If by a comparison borrowed from geology, the adult languages are assimilated to the quaternary layer; the tertiary, secondary, and primary strata will correspond with certain idioms of less and less complexity, which themselves contain the fossils of psychology. These lower forms—the semi-organised or savage languages which are a hundred times more numerous than the civilised languages—are now familiar to us; hence there is an immense field for research and comparison. This retrogression to the primitive leads to a point that several linguists have designated by a term borrowed from biology: it is the protoplasmic state “without functions of grammatical categories” (Hermann Paul). How is it that speech issued from this undifferentiated state, and constituted little by little its organs and functions? This question is interesting to the linguist on certain sides, to the psychologist on others. For us it consists in seeking how the human mind, through long groping, conquered and perfected its instrument of analysis.
I. At the outset of this evolution, which we are to follow step by step, we find the hypothesis of a primitive period, that of the roots so called, and it is worth our while to pause over this a little. Roots—whatever may be our opinion as to their origin—are in effect general terms. But in what sense?
Chinese consists of 500 monosyllables which, thanks to varieties of intonation, sufficed for the construction of the spoken language; Hebrew, according to Renan, has about 500 roots; for Sanskrit there is no agreement. According to a bold hypothesis of Max Müller, it is reducible to 121, perhaps less, and “these few seeds have produced the enormous intellectual vegetation that has covered the soil of India from the most distant antiquity to the present day.”[52] Whatever their number may be, the question for us reduces itself into knowing their primitive intellectual content, their psychological value. Here we are confronted by two very different theses. For one camp, roots are a reality; for the other, they are the simple residuum of analysis.
“Roots are the phonetic types produced by a force inherent in the human mind; they were created by nature,” etc., etc. Thus speaks Max Müller. Whitney, who is rarely of the same mind, says, notwithstanding, that all the Indo-European languages are descended from one primitive, monosyllabic language, “that our ancestors talked with one another in simple syllables indicative of ideas of prime importance, but wanting all designation of their relations.”
In the other camp it is sustained that roots are the result of learned analysis, but that there is nothing to prove that they really existed (Sayce); that they are reconstructed by comparison and generalisation; that, e. g., in the Aryan languages, roots bear much the same relation to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin words as Platonic ideas to the objects of the real world (Bréal). It has been calculated that the number of articulate sounds which the human voice is capable of producing amounts to three hundred and eighty-five. These sounds, for physiological reasons, constitute a fundamental theme in the various words created by man. Later on, linguists in comparing the vocables used in different languages, established the frequent recurrence of certain sounds common to several words. These have been isolated, but we must not see in them aught besides extracts. Moreover, “the first stammerings of man have nothing in common with phonetic types so arrested in form and abstract in signification, as dhâ, to place, vid, to see, man, to think, and other analogous words.”
To sum up. In the first thesis roots come into existence, ab initio; words are derived from them by reduplication, flexions, affixes, suffixes, etc.; they are the trunk upon which a whole swarm of languages has proliferated.
In the second thesis, words come first; then the common element disengaged by analysis, but which never existed as such in the pure and primitive condition.
Whether the one opinion or the other be adopted, I see no conclusion to be drawn from it save that the first terms designated qualities or manners of being, varying with the race. The first thesis seems the more apt in revealing to us the primitive forms of abstraction and generalisation. If it be selected despite its fragility, one finds in the list of roots (even when most reduced) an extraordinary mixture of terms applied to the most disparate things (e. g., tears, break, measure, milk, to choose, to clean, to vomit, cold, to fear, etc.). To assert with Max Müller (from whom I borrow the preceding terms) that “these are the one hundred and twenty-one original concepts, the primitive intellectual baggage of the Aryan family” is to employ an unfortunate formula, for nothing could less resemble concepts than the contents of this list. If the second thesis be adopted, the root then being nothing but “the exposed kernel of a family of words,” “a phonogram,” analogous to composite photographs, formed like these by a condensation of the similarities between several terms, then clearly primitive abstraction and generalisation must be sought in words, and not in roots.[53]
II. Leaving this question which, from its relation to that of the origin of speech, shares in the same obscurity, we have further to ask if the primitive terms (whatever nature be attributed to them) were, properly speaking, words or phrases? Did man initially give utterance to simple denominations, or to affirmations and negations? On this point all linguists seem to be in agreement. “Speech must express a judgment.” In other words it is always a phrase. “Language is based on the phrase, not on the single word: we do not think by means of words, but by means of phrases.”[54]
This phrase may be a single word,—or composite, formed by confusion of words as in the so-called agglutinative, polysynthetic, holophrastic languages,—or two words, subject and attribute; or three distinct words, subject, attribute, and copula; but beneath all these forms the fundamental function is unalterably to affirm or deny.
The same remark has been made of children. “We must,” says Preyer, “reject the general notion that children first employ substantives, and afterwards verbs. My son, at the age of twenty-three months first used an adjective to express a judgment, the first which he enunciated in his maternal tongue; he said heiss (hot) for ‘the milk is too warm.’” Later on, the proposition was made in two words: heim-mimi, ‘I want to go home and drink some milk’ (heim = home, mimi = milk). Taine and others have cited several observations of the same order.[55]
According to some authors, all language that has reached complete development has perforce passed through the three successive periods of monosyllabism, polysynthetism, and analysis; so that the idioms that remain monosyllabic or agglutinative would correspond to an arrest in development. To others, this is a hypothesis, only, to be rejected. However this may be (and it is not a question that we need to examine), it seems rash to assert, with Sayce, “that the division of the phrase into two parts, subject and predicate, is a pure accident, and that if Aristotle had been Mexican (the Aztec language was polysynthetic), his system of logic would have assumed a totally different form.” The appearance and evolution of analytical language is not pure accident, but the result of mental development. It is impossible to pass from synthesis to analysis without dividing, separating, and arraying the isolated parts in a certain order. The logic of a Mexican Aristotle might have differed from our own in its form; but it could not have constituted itself without fracture of its linguistic mould, without setting up a division, at least in theory, between the elements of the discourse. The unconscious activity by which certain idioms made towards analysis, and passed from the period of envelopment to that of development, imposed upon them a successive order. Polysynthetic languages have been likened to the performance of children who want to say everything at once, their ideas all surge up together and form a conglomeration.[56] Evidently this method must be given up, or we must renounce all serious progress in analysis.
To sum up the psychological value of the phrase, independently of its multiple forms, we may conclude by the following remarks of Max Müller:
“We imagine that language is impossible without sentences, and that sentences are impossible without the copula. This view is both right and wrong. If we mean by sentence an utterance consisting of several words, and a subject, and a predicate, and a copula, it is wrong.... When the sentence consists only of subject and predicate, we may say that a copula is understood, but the truth is that at first it was not expressed, it was not required to be expressed; in primitive languages it was simply impossible to express it. To be able to say vir est bonus, instead of vir bonus, is one of the latest achievements of human speech.”[57]
III.
The evolution of speech, starting from the protoplasmic state without organs or functions, and acquiring them little by little, proceeding progressively from indefinite to definite, from fluid to fixed state, can only be sketched in free outline. In details it falls within neither our subject nor our cognisance. But the successive points of this differentiation, which creates grammatical forms, and parts of discourse, are under an objective form the history of the development of intelligence, inasmuch as it abstracts, generalises, analyses, and tends towards an ever-growing precision. The completely developed languages—and we are speaking only of such—bear throughout the print of the unconscious labor that has fashioned them for centuries: they are a petrified psychology.
We must return to the roots or primitive terms, whatever may be their nature. Two distinct categories are generally admitted: pronominal or demonstrative roots, verbal or predicative roots.
The first form a small group that properly indicate rather the relative position of the speaker, than any concrete quality. They are equivalent to here, there, this, that, etc. They are few in number, and very simple in their phonetic relations: a vowel or vowel followed by a consonant. Many linguists refuse to admit them as roots, and think they have dropped from the second class by attenuation of meaning.[58] Possibly they are a survival of gesture language.
The second (verbal or predicative) is the only class that interests us. These have swarmed in abundance. They indicate qualities or actions; that is the important point. The first words denominated attributes or modes of being; they were adjectives, at least in the measure in which a fixed and rigid terminology can be applied to states in process of forming. Primitive man was everywhere struck with the qualities of things, ergo words were all originally appellative. They expressed one of the numerous characteristics of each object; they translated a spontaneous and natural abstraction: another proof of the precocious and indispensable nature of this operation. From its earliest developments intelligence has tended to simplify, to substitute the part for the whole. The unconscious choice of one attribute among many others depends on various causes; doubtless on its predominance, but above all on the interest it has for man. “A people,” remarks Renan, “have usually many words for what most interests them.” Thus, in Hebrew, we find 25 synonyms for the observance of the law; 14 for faith in God; 11 for rain, etc. In Arabic, the lion has 500 names, the serpent 200, money more than 80; the camel has 5,744, the sword 1,000 as befits a warrior race. The Lapp whose language is so poor, has more than 30 words to designate the reindeer, an animal indispensable to his life.[59] These so-called synonyms each denominate a particular aspect of things; they witness to the abundance of primitive abstractions.
This apparent wealth soon becomes an embarrassment and an encumbrance. Instead of 100 distinct terms, one generic substantive, plus one or two epithets, would suffice. But the substantive was not born of the deliberate desire to obviate this inconvenience. It is a specialisation, a limitation of the primitive meaning. Little by little the adjective lost its qualificative value, to become the name of one of the objects qualified. Thus in Sanskrit dêva (shining) finally signified the god; sourya (the dazzling) became the sun; akva (rapid) the name of a horse, etc. This metamorphosis of adjective into substantive by a specialisation of the general sense occurs even in our actual languages; as, e. g., when we say in French un brilliant (diamond); le volant (of a machine); un bon (of bread, counting-house, bank, etc.). What is only an accident now was originally a constant process.[60] Thus the substantive was derived from the primitive adjective; or rather, within the primitive organism, adjective-substantive, a division has been produced, and two grammatical functions constituted.
Many other remarks could be made on the determination of the substantive by inflexions, declensions, the mark of the gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); I shall confine myself to what concerns number, since we are proposing to consider numeration under all its aspects. Nothing appears more natural and clear-cut than the distinction between one and several; as soon as we exceed pure unity, the mother of numbers, plurality appears to us to be homogeneous in all its degrees. It has not been so from the beginning. This is proved by the existence of the dual in an enormous number of languages: Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, Hottentot, Australian, etc. One, two, were counted with precision; the rest was vague. According to Sayce, the word “three” in Aryan language at first signified “what goes beyond.” It has been supposed that the dual was at first applied to the paired parts of the body: the eyes, the arms, the legs. Intellectual progress caused it to fall into disuse.
At the close of the period of first formation which we have been considering, the sentence was only a defaced organism reproduced by one of the following forms: (1) that; (2) that shining; (3) that sun, that shining.[61] The verb is still absent.
With it we enter on the period of secondary formation. It was long held to be an indisputable dogma that the verb is the word par excellence (verbum), the necessary and exclusive instrument of an affirmation. Yet there are many inferior idioms which dispense with it, and express affirmation by crude, roundabout processes, with no precision,—most frequently by a juxtaposition: snow white = the snow is white; drink me wine = I drink (or shall drink) wine, etc. Plenty of examples can be found in special works.
In fact, the Indo-European verb is, by origin, an adjective (or substantive) modified by a pronoun: Bharâmi = carrier-me, I carry. It is to be regretted that we cannot follow the details of this marvellous construction,—the result of unconscious and collective labor that has made of the verb a supple instrument, suited for all expressions, by the invention of moods, voices, and tenses. We may note that, as regards tenses, the distinction between the three parts of duration (which seems to us so simple) appears to have been established very slowly. Doubtless it can be asserted that it existed, actually, in the mind of primitive man, but that the imperfection of his verbal instrument failed in translating it. However this may be, it is a moot point whether the verb, at the outset, expressed past or present. It seems at first to have translated a vague conception of duration, of continuity in action; it was at first “durative,” a past which still continues, a past-present. The adjective notion contained in the verb, indefinitely as to time, only became precise by little and little. The distinction between the moments of duration did not occur by the same process in all languages, and in some, highly developed, otherwise like the Semitic languages, it remained very imperfect.[62]
The main point was to show how the adjective-substantive, modified by the adjunction of pronominal elements, constituted another linguistic organ, and losing its original mark little by little, became the verb with its multiple functions. The qualificatory character fundamental to it makes of it an instrument proper to express all degrees of abstraction and generalisation from the highest to the lowest, to run up the scale of lower, medium, and higher abstractions. Ex., to drink, eat, sleep, strike;—higher, to love, pray, instruct, etc.; higher still, to act, exist, etc. The supreme degree of abstraction, i. e., the moment at which the verb is most empty of all concrete sense, is found in the auxiliaries of the modern analytical languages. These, says Max Müller, occupy the same place among the verbs, as abstract nouns among the substantives. They date from a later epoch, and all had originally a more material and more expressive character. Our auxiliary verbs had to traverse a long series of vicissitudes, before they reached the desiccated, lifeless form that makes them so appropriate to the demands of our abstract prose. Habere, which is now employed in all Roman languages to express simply a past time, at first signified “to hold fast,” “to retain.”
The author continues, retracing the history of several other auxiliary verbs. Among them all there is one that merits particular mention on account of its divagations: this is the verb être, verb par excellence, verb substantive, unique; direct or understood expression of the existence that is everywhere present. The monopoly of affirmation, and even the privilege of an immaterial origin have been attributed to it.[63] In the first place, it is not met with under any form in certain languages which supplement its absence by divers processes. In the second, it is far from being primitive; it is derived, according to the idioms, from multiple and sufficiently discordant elements: to breathe, live, grow (Max Müller); to breathe, grow, remain, stand upright (stare) (Whitney).
Hitherto we have examined only the stable, solid parts of speech. There remain such as are purely transitive, translating a movement of thought, expressive of relation. Before we study these under their linguistic form, it is indispensable to take up the standpoint of pure psychology, and to know in the first place what is the nature of a relation. This can the less be avoided inasmuch as the question has scarcely been treated of, save by logicians, or after their fashion, and many very complete treatises of psychology do not bestow on it a single word.[64]
“A relation,” says Herbert Spencer, “is a state of consciousness which unites two other states of consciousness.” Although a relation is not always a link in the rigorous sense, this definition has the great advantage of presenting it as a reality, as a state existing by itself, not a zero, a naught of consciousness. It possesses intrinsic characters: (1) It is indecomposable. There are in consciousness greater and less states; the greater (e. g., a perception) are composite, hence accessible to analysis; they occupy an appreciable and measurable time. The lesser (relation) are naturally beyond analysis; rapid as lightning, they appear to be outside time. (2) It is dependent. Remove the two terms with which it is intercalated, and the relation vanishes; but it must be noted that the terms themselves presuppose relations; for, according to Spencer’s just remark, “There are neither states of consciousness without relations, nor relations without states of consciousness.” In fact: to feel or think a relation, is to feel or think a change.
But this psychical state may be studied otherwise than by internal observation, and the subsequent interpretation. It lends itself to an objective study, because it is incarnated in certain words. When I say, red and green, red or green, there are in either case, not two, but three states of consciousness; the sole difference is in the intermediate state which corresponds with an inclusion or an exclusion. So, too, all our prepositions and conjunctions (for, by, if, but, because) envelop a mental state, however attenuated. The study of languages teaches us that the expression of relations is produced in two ways, forming, as it were, two chronological layers.
The most ancient is that of the cases or declensions: a highly complex mechanism, varying in marked degree with the idioms, and consisting in appositions, suffixes, or modifications of the principal theme.
But these relations have only acquired their proper linguistic organ, specialised for this function, by means of prepositions and conjunctions. They are wanting in many languages; gesture being then substituted for them. The principal parts of the discourse are solitary, juxtaposed without links after the manner of the phrases used by children. Others, somewhat less poor, have only two conjunctions: and, but. In short, the terms on which devolved the expression of relations are of late formation, as it were, organs de luxe. In the analytical languages, prepositions and conjunctions are nouns or pronouns diverted from their primitive acceptation, which have acquired a value expressive of transition, condition, subordination, co-ordination, and the rest. The psychological notion common to the greater number, if not to all, is that of a movement. “All relations expressed by prepositions can be referred to repose, and to movement in space and time, i. e., to those with which the locative, accusative (movement of approximation) and ablative (movement of departure) correspond in declension.”[65] It may be admitted that this consciousness of movement, of change, which is no more, fundamentally, than the sense of different directions of thought, belongs less to the category of clear notions than to that of subconscious states, of tendencies, of actions, which explains why the terms of relation are wholly wanting, or rare, and only conquered their autonomy at a late period.
With these, the progressive work of differentiation is accomplished. Discourse has now its materials and its cement; it is capable of complex phrases wherein all is referred and subordinated to a principal state, contrary to those ruder essays which could only attain to simple phrases, denuded of connective apparatus.
We have rapidly sketched this labor of organogenesis, by which language has passed from the amorphous state to the progressive constitution of specialised terms and grammatical functions: an evolution wholly comparable with that which, in living bodies, starts from the fecundated ovule, to attain by division of labor among the higher species to a fixed adjustment of organs and functions. “Languages are natural organisms, which, without being independent of human volition, are born, grow, age, and die, according to determined laws.” (Schleicher.) They are in a state of continuous renovation, of acquisition, and of loss. In civilised languages, this incessant metamorphosis is partially checked by enforced instruction, by tradition, and respect for the great literary works. In savage idioms where these coercive measures are lacking, the transformation at times occurs with such rapidity that they become unrecognisable at the end of a few generations.
Spoken language, as a psycho-physiological mechanism, is regulated in its evolution by physiological and psychological laws.
Among the former (with which we are not concerned), the principal is the law of phonetic alteration, consisting in the displacement of an articulation in a determined direction. It is dependent on the vocal organ; thus, after the Germanic invasion, the Latin which this people spoke fell again under the power of physiological influences which modified it profoundly.
Among the latter, the principal is the law of analogy, the great artisan in the extension of languages. It is a law of economy, the basis of which is generalisation, the faculty of seizing on real or supposed resemblances. The word remains invariable, but the mind gives it different applications: it is a mask covering in turn several faces. It suffices to open a dictionary to see how ingenious and perilous is this unconscious labor. Such a word has only a few lines; it has no brilliant record. Such another fills pages; first we see it in its primitive sense; then—from analogy to analogy—from accident to accident—it departs from it more and more, and ends by having quite a contrary meaning.[66] Hence it has been said that “the object of a true etymology is to discover the laws that have regulated the evolution of thought.” Among primitive people, the process that entails such deviations from the primitive sense, is sometimes of striking absurdity; or at least appears to us as such by reason of the strange analogies that serve the extension of the word. Thus: certain Australian tribes gave the names of mussels (muyum), to books because they open and close like shell-fish; and many other no less singular facts could be cited. Much more might be said as to the rôle of analogy, but we must adhere to our subject.
In conclusion: it is to be regretted that linguistic psychology attracts so few people, and that many recent treatises on psychology, excellent on all other points, do not devote a single line to language. Yet this study, especially if comparative, from the lowest to the most subtle forms, would throw at least as much light on the mechanism of the intelligence as other highly accredited processes. Physiological psychology is much in vogue, since it is rightly concluded that if the facts of biology, normal and morbid, are being studied by naturalists and physicians, they are available to psychologists also, under another aspect. So too for languages: comparative philology has its own aim, psychology another, proper to it. It is incredible that any one who, with sufficient linguistic equipment, should devote himself to the task, would fail to find adequate return for his labors.