Chapter I: Theories of Language (3)

Steinthal is the modern representative of the school of W. von Humboldt. Language, he holds, is an activity, an ἐνέργεια, everlastingly “becoming.” It has “broken forth” necessarily from the human mind when the conditions for its production were present, and in order, therefore, to discover the origin and nature of language, we must know the mental condition which preceded its creation. It originated through the unconscious action of psychological laws, without being willed into existence. The same instinctive laws still operate when a child is learning to speak: the learning is not a conscious effort, and in the very act of learning speech is being created anew. But these laws will only operate in a community, the first condition for the “birth” of language being that men should be united together in a common society. Hence the need of a psychological ethnology which should deal with the psychological phænomena, not of the individual, but of the race. This alone will enable us to penetrate to that “inner form of language” which Humboldt failed to recognize, but which constitutes language in a far more real sense than phonology can ever do. This inner form of language is neither more nor less than “apperception,” or a perception of the relations between allied apprehensions, and is also described by Lazarus as a “condensation of thought.”

Steinthal’s writings have proved as suggestive to other scholars as those of Humboldt, but their effect is marred by a want of clearness, as well as by an exaggerated use of the _à priori_ method. In opposing the tendency to make phonology synonymous with the science of language, Steinthal goes much too far on the opposite side. Instead of using psychology to control the conclusions of comparative philology, he deduces philological conclusions from assumed psychological facts. Not psychology, but comparative philology, can lead us to the first beginnings of language, and raise the veil that covers its origin. The error, however, which lies at the bottom of Steinthal’s reasonings is, as in the case of Heyse, the ambiguous use of the term language. Speaking, but not language, may be described as an activity. So, too, the faculty of speech may be said to be instinctive, which language certainly cannot be. To assert that a child learns to speak without conscious effort depends again upon an ambiguous use of the word conscious: as a matter of fact the child learns to speak in much the same way as the adult learns a foreign language. Nor is it more than a questionable metaphor to speak of language as “breaking forth” or being “born.” Primitive man framed his earliest speech with labour and difficulty; no doubt certain mental and physical conditions were pre-supposed by the process, but no amount of psychological, even when conjoined with physiological, study will tell us what these were: in order to discover them we must question the records of speech itself. Steinthal has been misled, like his predecessors, by a false conception of the roots of language: he has pictured them to himself as so many mental germs thrown off spontaneously by the mind, and forthwith forming a language; and since these germs have a verbal signification in the Aryan family of speech, he has further identified them with the concepts of the mind. But roots are not words, and words are not concepts.

Opposed to Steinthal is the school which groups the science of language with the physical sciences, and of which Schleicher, with his modern follower, Hovelacque, may be considered the representative. It may be traced back to Bopp and Grimm, the one with his microscopic analysis of the suffixes and belief in the mechanical origin of inflection out of a previous composition of independent words, and the other with his engrossing regard for phonology and adherence to Bopp’s theory of a primitive language of roots. Jacob Grimm’s views may be best gathered from his treatise “Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache” (1851).[36] In this he begins by comparing the science of language with the investigation of natural history, the attempt to discover the origin of speech being analogous to that of discovering the laws of the production of animals or the growth of plants. Like Goethe, Grimm inclines to believe that mankind started from several separate pairs: at all events, the distinction of gender in the noun implies the influence of the female sex. Language has passed through three different stages, the last being the analytic, the middle the inflectional, and the earliest that of the determination and composition of monosyllabic roots. It is a purely human work, “emanating immediately from human thought,” and, as such, the key to all human history. The first words, which are identified with Aryan roots, were invented by a sort of “wonderful instinct.” The several vowels and consonants have each a particular force and significancy, _l_, for instance, expressing softness, _r_ roughness, and in settling what vowel or consonant should be taken to denote some special verbal idea, the “inventor” of speech had for the most part to consult his own “arbitrary choice.” Language, in short, is a human invention, determined by the natural significance of different articulate sounds; its growth means the composition and decay of these various sounds. In order to discover what it is, we have only to investigate the history of this composition and decay—that is, the nature and history of phonology. It is no wonder, therefore, that Grimm started by comparing the comparative philologist to the student of natural history, and imagined that the phænomena of all human speech could be learned from the examination of the Aryan family. It is needless to point out the unverified assumption which underlies the notion that each articulate sound has a particular significancy, or the inconsistency of this view with the admission of human volition in the first invention of verbs. Grimm’s attempt to discover the origin of language was a failure; it amounted to stating that roots have a particular meaning because that meaning is “natural” to them, and where this tautological explanation seemed insufficient, to introducing human caprice. But human caprice in the case of the origin of language stands on the same footing as the old theory of a social contract. It was all very well for one primæval man to determine that a particular sound should represent a particular verbal notion, but how was he to communicate the fact to his neighbours?

Grimm, however, merely prepared the way for Schleicher. In the three works in which he most clearly sets forth his views on the nature and origin of language,[37] Schleicher affirms that language is a natural organism possessed of a separate existence, and as little subject to the will of the individual as the power of changing its song to the will of the nightingale. The growth and decay of language is in accordance with fixed immutable laws. Its existence as an organism is due to its being the audible manifestation or symptom of certain material relations in the constitution of the brain and vocal organs, and is consequently determined solely by those external conditions of climate, food, inherited instincts, and the like, which influence our nervous and muscular system. History and the science of language have nothing to do with one another. Like the phænomena of chemistry or physiology, the phænomena of language must be regarded as so many material facts which can only be the subject-matter of a physical science. The science of language, in short, is neither more nor less than phonology; the signification of words is either incapable of scientific treatment, or else, like their pronunciation, a mere result of determinable nervous action. The language we speak is conditioned by our bodily organization and antecedents. An European can only become a real master of Chinese by ceasing to be an European and becoming, mentally and physically, a Chinaman. Language, being in no way subject to human volition, follows its own necessary laws of growth and development. The inflectional tongues have grown out of the agglutinative, the agglutinative out of the isolating, and the isolating are to be identified with that primæval language of roots which is reached by analysis in the Aryan group. The acquisition of this root-language created man; the primates, who were less favoured by circumstances than their brethren, and consequently did not develop speech, fell back into the condition of anthropoid apes. Hence the importance of the science of language for the Darwinian theory. Not only do we see language developing by slow degrees from the simple to the complex by the aid of natural selection, but it is through language alone that man is separated from the brute; so that before the beginning of language—a beginning which linguistic science can demonstrate with certainty—man was in no way distinguishable from the other primates. Language thus becomes the most important, it may be said the sole, test of race and lineage. The Ethiopian can change his skin sooner than his mother-tongue. The languages of the world cannot be carried back to a single source. There are at least as many original languages as existing families of speech. The resemblances detected between them are due to geographical position; the nearer they were to one another at the outset, the more the speakers were subjected to the same external influences, the greater will be their similarity. A time comes when the creation of languages ceases, and is replaced by the entrance of a race into history. It is before this period, therefore, that the external influences, the geographical conditions, will have to act.

Schleicher’s views, it will be seen, are based on the false assumption that language is an actual entity existing apart from the minds and the mouths of its speakers. In the course of his argument he found himself forced to adopt a position somewhat inconsistent with this assumption. If language is a symptom of the brain and vocal organs, it can hardly be described as an independent organism. In so far as phonology is concerned,—that part of language, namely, which depends on the vocal organs,—the physiological laws which determine it can be ascertained in the same way and with the same certainty as the other laws of physiology; but mere phonetic sounds do not become language until they embody a signification; and though it may be quite true that every act of thought is preceded by a change in the molecules of the brain, yet this change is altogether unknown to us, and our only way of discovering the laws and principles of language is by questioning language itself, not by investigating the alterations undergone by the material of the brain. The morphologic facts of language must be studied in the same way as the facts of sociology, of psychology, or of any other science that has to do with the mind. The science of language, taken as a whole, cannot be counted among the physical sciences. To identify it with phonology is to identify the whole with its part. Unless we treat language historically, its study becomes little more than a dry enumeration of the several languages of the globe and their distinctive peculiarities. Not being an independent entity, it cannot follow necessary laws of its own. The laws of its life and growth are really the laws which govern the action of society in a particular direction. To speak of the impossibility of thoroughly mastering a foreign language is absurd. The same difficulty a member of one community finds in transforming himself into a member of another community recurs in the case of language, but the fact that an English child born in India will speak Hindustani as his native tongue, is sufficient to show that the power of speaking a special language does not depend on a special organization and ancestry. Language is the creation of society. An individual speaks a certain language because he belongs to a certain society. As we shall see hereafter, language is no test of race; only of social contact. As for the primæval root-language, we have no proof that it ever existed, and to confound it with a modern isolating language is simply erroneous. Equally unproved is the belief that isolating dialects develop into agglutinative, and agglutinative into inflectional. At all events, the continued existence of isolating tongues like the Chinese, or of agglutinative tongues like the Magyár and Turkish, shows that the development is not a _necessary_ one. Not less difficult to prove is the fancy that there are two periods in the life of speech—one in which men are giving themselves up to the production of language, the other when they are creating history. There is merely an analogy between the action of natural selection in language and natural selection in the organic world. The science of language can tell us nothing of the descent of man. Man, it is true, is man in virtue of language; but, on the other hand, he must have been man to create language.

Bréal, the leading French philologist, gave at one time a qualified approval to the essential part of Schleicher’s theories, and their chief advocate at present is another French scholar, Abel Hovelacque. He has availed himself of Broca’s investigations, according to which the organ of language must be placed in the left (more rarely the right) cerebral hemisphere in the posterior half of the third frontal convolution. Hovelacque’s work on the science of language[38] exhibits the defects of Schleicher’s theory of language, as it contains little more than a catalogue of the various families of speech with their distinguishing characteristics. The physical theory of language allows for little more than what may be called a natural history treatment of it; the action of emphasis and analogy, of phonetic decay and dialectic growth, and all the other questions involved in a morphologic and historical treatment of speech are necessarily ignored. Faidherbe, another French follower of Schleicher, endeavours to bridge over the gulf between man and the ape by pointing on the one side to the inarticulate clicks of the Bushman, and on the other to the six different sounds uttered by the _cebus azaræ_ of Paraguay when excited, which arouse corresponding emotions in other members of the same species.[39] Bleek[40] with Häckel’s help had already traced the utterances of speech to the cries of the anthropoid apes, and laid down that articulate language is distinguished from inarticulate by being broken up and mobilized. The germ of the suggestion was given by Steinthal, who first pointed out that language approaches its ideal the more analytic it is; sounds, like ideas, become articulate when they cease to be indefinite and indistinct. Bleek holds that the imitation of instinctive sounds made by others to express certain emotions first reminded the earliest men of the same feelings in themselves which had prompted them to the same kinds of utterance, and so led them to compare and distinguish the feeling and its vocal sign, the outward utterance and the inward signification. Language is thus of interjectional origin, helped by the imitative instinct, and language in the course of its development created and moulded thought.

Like Bréal, Max Müller inclines to regard the science of language as a physical rather than as a historical one, and would compare it with geology so far as its method is concerned. He, too, holds that language is the creator of conceptual thought; without the word, without the bond or memorandum which is to keep our individual impressions together, a general idea, and consequently reasoned thought, would have been impossible. Apart from inherited instincts, the deaf-mute, like the infant, has only the capability for thought so long as he is unprovided with a language of some sort. No theory, whether onomatopœic or interjectional or otherwise, which has attempted to explain the origin of language has succeeded in its task; for language is environed on all sides by the barrier of roots, and in roots alone we must seek its origin. How these roots may themselves have originated we do not know; probably onomatopœia and the reflex action of sounds excited by a common action had much to do with it; but the science of human speech is concerned only with the question of the origin of language, not with that of the origin of roots. The roots, however, once constituted a real language which may be compared with the Chinese of to-day, and which in certain instances passed through an agglutinative into an inflectional stage of development. The roots were, for the most part, not monosyllabic; whether there was one common stock of roots at the beginning, or an indefinite number of stocks, we have no means of determining. What we know is that dialects precede languages, that out of the many comes the one, and that in the drifting desert of human speech, only three or four families, like the Aryan, the Semitic, or the Ugro-Altaic, have been able to establish themselves. At the bottom of Max Müller’s theory of language seems to lie the philosophic postulate that the universal precedes the particular; the roots of language are so many “phonetic types,” so many universals, out of which the manifold forms and words of living speech have been developed. They constitute the background of those concepts whereon the structure of thought has been reared. With the mythopœic epoch of speech all was changed. Then the particular came to precede and create the universal, and out of individual words which had lost their original meaning were built up the myths of Greece and Rome. In each case the process was an unconscious one; the will of the single man can no more change the tendencies and growth of language than it can change the force of the winds. Max Müller thus stands midway between Schleicher and Steinthal.

Side by side with the school of Schleicher there has sprung from the doctrines of Bopp what may be termed the common-sense school of philologists. As perhaps is natural, it is mainly in practical America and England that the school has found its adherents, among whom Whitney may be considered its most prominent representative. He states the theories (as opposed to the method and philological facts) of Bopp in their clearest and most extreme form, and does not shrink from carrying them out to their logical conclusions. Thus it is affirmed that the first men spoke in monosyllabic roots, which by means of composition passed into an agglutinative form of speech, and that again, in a similar way, into inflection. All flection may be analyzed into a preceding agglutination, and all agglutination into a preceding juxtaposition of roots, the latter being both predicative and pronominal. Whitney holds that language is an institution like government, and that it is absolutely dependent on the human will, determined only by the necessities of society. The phonetic forms and meanings of words are assigned to them by the conscious or unconscious action of a community. Language is, in all strictness, a human invention, in which onomatopœia probably played a large part. Its science consequently will be a historical one. Thought is prior to language; language therefore did not create thought, nor can it be treated as a separate organism existing apart from its speakers. The origin of language is explained very simply by the need of intercommunication between those who first used it, and since it is always the expression and sign of thought, we may call them, with perfect accuracy, its inventors. Just as thought which is universal precedes language, so a single parent-speech precedes dialects.

Whitney’s views, however, require too many still unproved assumptions to be received as ascertained truths; the existence of a parent-speech, for instance, being as hypothetical as the transition of one form of speech into another. Too little regard also is paid to the physiological side of language, that side which connects it with the physical sciences; while too much influence is assigned to the human will in its formation. It cannot with any real strictness be termed an institution, because an institution has often been founded or changed by an individual, and over language the individual has no such power. Whitney attributes too much design, too much volition, to the formation of speech; the need of intercommunication alone will not explain its origin, since we may ask, How did this need arise, and how were the means of supplying it communicated? However much language may now be defined as the expression of thought, it was not so at first, when conceptual thought was made possible only by the help of language; and even now language is rather the embodiment, however imperfect, than the sign of thought. The stress, moreover, laid upon the element of volition in the production of speech is inconsistent with the idea that mere juxtaposition and phonetic decay could have effected that change in the way of viewing things and their relations which is involved in the transition from one form of speech to the other.

The problem of the origin of language was taken up from a wholly different point of view by Lazarus Geiger.[41] He traced it to the instinct of imitation so deeply implanted in the nature of man. The expression of feeling, of pain and pleasure, of anger and love was indicated partly by corresponding cries, partly by the muscular movements of the face, which might or might not accompany them. The imitation of these movements on the part of a second person caused a particular gesture and the cry that accompanied it to be associated with the idea of passion, pleasure, or pain that had given rise to it. Gradually the gesture was merged in the cry, and the cry was changed into a root or word. Each root was, therefore, at the outset, an embodiment and symbol of an action. Hence it is that the roots to which language can be traced back are all verbal, all expressive of movement and action. Since the publication of Geiger’s book, the whole subject of the “Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals” has been elaborately worked out by Mr. Darwin in a special work, while Benfey has independently pointed out how large an influence the physical accessories of speech must have originally had in putting sense and significancy into the sounds associated with them.[42] Looks, gestures, and the modulation of the voice are common to man and the lower animals, but whereas the import of looks and the modulation of the voice agrees all over the world, that of gestures does so only in part. How, then, could gestures have the same unambiguous meaning for others which Geiger’s theory would demand? The answer is given by Ludwig Noiré, who takes up and completes the theory of his master. The weak point in the latter is that it makes language, which is essentially a social product, the creation of the individual. Noiré, in a volume at once singularly lucid and suggestive,[43] successfully meets the difficulty. He recalls the rhythmical cries or sounds which a body of men will make when engaged in a common work, and which seem the product of a common impulse. We are all familiar with the cries of sailors when hauling a rope or pulling the oar; with the shout of the Eastern vintagers as they beat time in the wine-press; or with the yell of savages when they attack a foe. In such cries and shouts as these Noiré would discover the beginnings of speech. They seemed called forth by the work in which men were engaged for a common purpose, and so became to them the expression and symbol of it. Once established as intelligible symbols, they constituted those roots which are at once the earliest form of language and the germs out of which all future language has grown. Hence it is that roots denote actions and not objects; hence, too, the fact that the sense of sight must be regarded as the first stepping-stone to speech. Like Geiger, Noiré is a philosopher rather than a philologist, and his explanation of Aryan roots and their connection with one another frequently contravenes the laws of scientific etymology. Nor can his identification of roots and words be admitted, or the actual existence at any time of the hypothetical roots of the Aryan tongues. But his theory doubtless explains the origin of much that is in speech, though it does not explain everything. Onomatopœia is not excluded from sharing in the creation of language, nor can we refuse to recognize the interjectional source of certain roots and words. But even if it will not solve the whole problem, Noiré’s theory clears up the origin of that part of speech which has hitherto appeared hardest to explain. Like the song of the birds, the language of man, too, is instinctive and necessary, called forth by a sense of life and energy, by a common participation in a common work.

Outside the school of Bopp stands a group of scholars of whom the best known are Scherer, Westphal, and Ludwig. They agree in rejecting Bopp’s analysis of Aryan grammar and his derivation of flection from a previous agglutination. Grammatical analysis has doubtless been pushed much too far both by Bopp and by his pupils, and the protest raised against it, although needlessly indiscriminating, has done considerable good. Westphal has recourse to the old trappings of pre-scientific philology, pleonastic letters, apocope, and so forth, and lays down common “logical categories” of flection for both the Aryan and the Semitic families.[44] He defines language as “the embodiment of the content of the human consciousness,” and holds that its object is to reduce the individualism of nature to a unity of conception. What is given as separate and individual is unified by thought and language, and the development of language is in accordance with this process of unification. The process, or “movement,” of consciousness finds its expression in the corresponding movement of speech; just as thought sums up the individual parts of any perception under a single concept, so language sums up the individual parts of phonetic utterance under the sentence. The result of this movement is the evolution of the verb and the completion of organized speech. Sound and concept are brought together by the common element of “movement,” a curious return to the κίνησις of Aristotle. It is evident, however, that Westphal rather restates the phænomena of language in metaphysical language than really explains them, while his entire rejection of Bopp’s method and results makes criticism difficult.

Ludwig, like Westphal, rejects the current theory of flection, but substitutes for it another which can not only be supported by facts, but is also not inconsistent with the method founded by Bopp. Flection, he believes, is the result not of agglutination, but of adaptation, certain unmeaning terminations of existing words being selected to express new grammatical relations when they first dawned upon the mind.[45] Ludwig’s view seems to have met with partial acceptation among some of the younger French philologists, and it is supported by Bergaigne’s researches into the nature of the case-suffixes.[46] The analysis of the latter has always been a stumbling-block in the way of the current theory; Bergaigne has made it clear that they were either the terminations of abstract nouns or else suffixes which have been adapted in different words to the expression of very different meanings. On the other hand, Ludwig’s theory fails when applied to the verb, and we still need an explanation of the manner in which the same select number of meaningless terminations came to be attached to so large a variety of words. But the advocates of the agglutination hypothesis have the same difficulty to contend against when they deal with the stem-suffixes.

In pursuance of Bopp’s method, but independently of the distinctive theories of his school, Waitz, the anthropologist, has propounded a new theory of language.[47] As we do not think in words, but in sentences, and as language is the expression and embodiment of thought, it is clear that the unit of language must be the sentence and not the word. The words which compose a sentence are related to one another in the same way as the several elements of an idea, or of an action as reproduced in thought, and can only be decomposed and separated by conscious analysis. Consequently the incorporating languages of America, in which an individual action is represented by a single sentence pronounced as one word, are a survival of the primitive condition of language everywhere. It is only gradually that the different parts of speech are distinguished in the sentence, and words formed by breaking up its co-ordinated elements into separate and independent wholes. Originally words could as little be used alone and without relation as our own suffixes _ly_ or _ness_. The agglutinative tongues in which the subordinate parts of a sentence are brought into duly dependent relation to the principal concept are more highly advanced than the inflectional, the “fundamental idea of which is that the principal and the subordinate elements of thought (_Vorstellung_) remain independent and separate, and never coalesce into a single word.” This principle of flection, however, can never be logically carried out, since the relations of the central idea expressed by the suffixes are themselves a kind of subordinate conception; if _amatis_ is right where the personal pronoun is treated as a suffix, then _amator bonus_, where the attribute _bonus_ is regarded as a subordinate, and therefore separate, conception, must be wrong. An isolating language like the Chinese stands on the highest level of development, since here the sentence has been thoroughly analyzed and each member of it rendered clear and distinct, their relations to one another being determined by position alone. Chinese therefore has given concrete expression in language to the philosophic analysis of ideas. Waitz’s view would harmonize with the antiquity and civilization of Chinese much better than the ordinary one, as well as with its resemblance to English and other modern analytical languages; and it is to be noticed that Steinthal, when speaking of Chinese, describes it as a language in which the real words are the sentences or groups of subordinated vocables. Waitz’s theory of speech is the theory of an anthropologist who, as the student of the master-science, is better able to decide upon the origin of language than the comparative philologist with whom the existence of language has to be assumed. No science can of itself discover the genesis of its subject-matter. Friedrich Müller attaches himself to Waitz when he says:[48] “We disagree with Schleicher and his school in this one point, that the individual independent word is not the unity for us that it is for him, but rather the sentence—the shortest expression of thought.” As he goes on to observe, only the context—that is, the whole sentence—can determine whether _musas_, for example, is to be taken as the accusative plural of a noun or, like _amas_, the second person singular of a verb.

Philological opinion is therefore seen to be still divided upon certain points. But such division of opinion is a healthy sign of life and progress in the new science. It is only by the conflict and discussion of theories that truth can finally be reached, and the many controversies excited by the science of language show how broadly and deeply the foundations of the science are being laid. On the phonological side the progress has been greatest and most certain; morphology and the investigation of roots still lag behind; comparative syntax is but beginning to be handled; and sematology, the science of meanings, has hardly been touched. But the method inaugurated by Bopp remains unshaken, the main conclusions he arrived at hold their ground, and the existence of the Aryan family of speech, with all its consequences, is one of the facts permanently acquired for science. True, there are many questions still to be settled. It is still disputed whether the science of language is a historical or a physical one; whether language is an independent organism obeying fixed and necessary laws of its own or an “institution” controllable by the will of man; whether phonology is to exclude all other departments of the science when the nature of the latter is discussed; whether roots ever constituted a real language or are merely the ultimate elements into which words may be decomposed; whether the flectional stage of language springs from the agglutinative, and this again from the isolating; whether the languages of the world are the selected residuum of infinite attempts at speech or have flowed from one or two common sources; whether dialects precede languages or languages dialects; whether conceptual thought has created language or language has created conceptual thought; whether, finally, the word or the sentence is the true unit of speech. But with all this diversity of opinion there is a yet greater unanimity. There is no scientific philologist who doubts the indispensable value of phonology and the absolute strictness of its laws; who questions the axiom that roots are the ultimate elements of articulate speech, the barrier between man and brute, and that no etymology is worth anything which does not repose upon them; who would compare the words of one family of speech with the words of another in the easy-going fashion of a præ-scientific age; or who would shut his eyes to the light already shed on the history of the human mind and the riddle of mythology by the study of the records of speech. Language is the reflexion of the thoughts and beliefs of communities from their earliest days; and by tracing its changes and its fortunes, by discovering the origin and history of words and their meanings, we can read those thoughts and beliefs with greater certainty and minuteness than had they been traced by the pen of the historian, or even if

“Supera bellum Thebanum et funera Troiæ
... alias alii quoque res cecinere poetæ.”