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Man And His Ancestor: A Study In Evolution, a non-fiction book by Charles Morris |
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Chapter 7. The Origin Of Language |
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_ CHAPTER VII. THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE One of the characteristics of man, of which we spoke as among those to which his high development is due, is that of language. There is nothing that has had more to do with the mental progress of the human race than facility in the communication of thought, and in this vocal language is the principal agent and in the fullest measure is the instrument of the mind. Human speech has, in these modern times, become remarkably expressive, indicating all the conditions, relations, and qualities, not only of things, but of thoughts and ideal conceptions. And the utility of language has been enormously augmented by the development of the arts of writing and printing. Originally thought could only be communicated by word of mouth and transmitted by the aid of the memory. Now it can be recorded and kept indefinitely, so that no useful thought of able thinkers need be lost, but every valuable idea can be retained as an educative influence through unnumbered ages. In this instrumentality, which has been of such extraordinary value to man, the lower animals are strikingly deficient. They are not quite devoid of vocal language, though it is doubtful if any of the sounds made by them have a much higher linguistic office than that of the interjection. But emotional sounds, to which these belong, are not destitute of value in conveying intelligence. They embrace cries of warning, appeals to affection, demands for help, calls for food supplies, threats, and other indications of passion, fear, or feeling. And the significance of these vocal sounds to animals may often be higher than we suppose. That is, they may not be limited to the vague character of the interjection, but may occasionally convey a specific meaning, indicative of some object or some action. In other words, they may advance from the interjection toward the noun or the verb, and approach in value the verbal root, a sound which embraces a complete proposition. Thus a cry of warning may be so modulated as to indicate to the hearer, "Beware, a lion is coming!" or to convey some other specific warning. We know that accent or tone plays a great part in Chinese speech, the most primitive of existing forms, a variation in tone quite changing the meaning of words. The same may be the case with the sounds uttered by animals to a much greater extent than we suppose. We know this to be the case with some of the birds. The common fowl of our poultry yards has a variety of distinct calls, each understood by its mates, while special modulations of some call or cry are not uncommon among birds. The mammalia are not fluent in vocal powers, their range of tones being limited, yet they certainly convey definite information to one another. Recent observers have come to the conclusion that the apes do, to a certain extent, talk with one another. The experiments to prove this have not been very satisfactory, yet they seem to indicate that the woodland cries of the apes possess a certain range of definite meaning. We are utterly ignorant of what powers of speech the man-ape possessed. It must, in its developed state as a land-dwelling, wandering, and hunting biped, have needed a wider range of utterance than during its arboreal residence. It was exposed to new dangers, new exigencies of life affected it, and its old cries very probably gained new meanings, or new cries were developed to meet new perils or conditions. In this way a few root words may have been gained, rising above the value of the interjection, and expressing some degree of definite meaning, though still at the bottom of the scale of language, the first stepping stones from the vague cry toward the significant word. Between this stage and that of human language an immense gap supervenes, a broad abyss which it seems at first sight impossible to bridge. As the facts stand, however, it has been largely bridged by man himself. Side by side with the highly intricate languages which now exist, are various primitive forms of speech which take us far back toward the origin of human language. So advanced a people as the Chinese speak a language practically composed of root words, the higher forms of expression being attained by simple devices in the combination of these primitive word forms. The same may be said, in a measure, of ancient Egyptian speech. We can conceive of an early state of affairs in which these devices of word compounding were not yet employed, and in which each word existed as a separate expression, unmodified by association with any other word. Among the savage races of the earth very crude forms of language often exist, the methods of associating words into sentences being of the simplest character, though few surpass the Chinese in simplicity of system. But all this represents an advanced stage of language evolution, a development of thought and its instrument which has taken thousands of years to complete. We cannot fairly judge from it what the speech of primitive man may have been, for in every case there has been a long process of development; aided, no doubt, in many cases, by educative influences acting from the more advanced upon the speech of the less advanced races. If we seek to analyze any of these languages, the most intricate as well as the least advanced, we find ourselves in most instances able to isolate the root word as the basic element of speech. From this simple form all the more developed forms seem to have arisen. Take away their combining devices, and the root words fall apart like so many beads of speech, each with a defined significance of its own and fully capable of existing by itself. The Aryan and the Chinese especially offer themselves to this analytic method. Strip off the suffixes and affixes from Aryan words, get down to the germinal forms from which these words have grown, isolate these germs of speech, and we find ourselves in a language of root forms, each of which has grown vague and wide in significance as the modifying elements that limited its meaning have been removed. In the Chinese the problem is a much simpler one. We need simply to take the existing words out of their place in the sentence and let them stand alone, and we have root words at first hand. We may go through the whole range of human speech and, with more or less difficulty, arrive at a similar result. In short, the evidence seems conclusive that the language of mankind began in the use of isolated words of vague and broad significance, and that all the subsequent development of language consisted in the combination of these words, with a modification and limitation of their meaning, the families of speech differing principally in the method of combination devised. It must, indeed, be said that in isolating the root forms of modern languages we reach conditions still far removed from those of primitive speech. These roots are in a measure packed with meaning. Time has added to their significance, and they lack the simplicity they probably once possessed. In particular, they have gained ideal senses, entered in a measure into that broad language of the mind which has been gradually added to the language of outer nature. The recognition of the existence of mind and thought doubtless came somewhat late in human development. Man long knew only his body and the world that surrounded it. Step by step only did he discover his mind. And when it became necessary to speak of mental conditions, no new language was invented, but old words were broadened to cover the new conditions. The mind is analogous to the body in its operations, ideas are analogues of things, and it was usually necessary only to add to the physical significance of words the corresponding ideal significance. In this way a secondary language slowly grew up, underlying and subtending the primary language, until the words invented to express the world of things were employed to include as vast a world of thoughts. In getting down, then, to the language of primitive man we are obliged to divest the root forms of speech of all this ideal significance, and confine them to their physical meanings. In dealing with the languages of the least advanced existing tribes of mankind, indeed, little of this is requisite. The language of the mind with them has not yet begun its growth or is in its first simple stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from which they emerged. It is to the ability to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes of speech. Thus a native of the Society Islands, while able to say "dog's tail," "sheep's tail," etc., has no separate word for tail. He cannot abstract the general term from its immediate relations. In the same way the uncivilized Malay has twenty different words to express striking with various objects, as with thick or thin wood, a club, the fist, the palm, etc., but he has no word for "striking" as an isolated thought. We find the same deficiency in the speech of the American Indians. A Cherokee, for instance, has no word for "washing," but can express the different kinds of washing by no less than thirteen distinct words. All this indicates a primitive stage in the evolution of language, one in which every word had its immediate and local application, while in each word a whole story was told. The power of dividing thought into its separate elements was not yet possessed. As thought progressed men got from the idea of "dog" to that of "dog's tail." They could not think of the part without the whole. Then they reached a word for "dog's tail wags." But the idea of "wags" as an abstract motion was beyond their powers of thought. They could not think of action, but only of some object in action. The language of the American Indians was an immediate derivation from this mode of word formation, every proposition, however intricate it might be, constituting a single word, whose component parts could not be used separately. The mode of speech here indicated is one form of development of the root. Other forms are the compounding of the Chinese and the Mongolian and the inflection of the Aryan and the Semitic, all pointing directly back to the root form as their unit of growth. The inference to be drawn from all this is that the language of primitive man consisted of isolated words, sounds which may originally have been mere cries or calls, but which gradually gained some definiteness of meaning, as signifying some of the varied conditions of the outer world. This is the conclusion to which philologists have now very generally come. The recognition that language consists of root words, variously modified and combined, leads back irresistibly to a period in which those roots had not yet begun to be modified and combined. The roots are the hard, persistent things in human speech. Grammatical expedients are the net in which these roots have been caught and confined. Free them from the net, and it falls to pieces, while the roots remain intact, the solid and persistent primitive germs of speech. Yet in isolating root language as the basis of grammatical language we go far toward closing the gap between animal and human speech. It is still, doubtless, of considerable width, yet the distinction is no longer one of kind, but is simply one of degree. Primitive man had a much greater scope of language than is possessed by any of the lower animals, and the vocal sounds used had a clearer and more definite significance; but their nature was the same. They doubtless began in calls and cries like those in use by animals, and though these had increased in number and gained more distinct meanings, the difference in character was not great. In short, the analytic method employed by modern philologists has gone far to remove the supposed vast distinction between brute and human speech, and has traced back the language of man to a stage in which it is nearly related in character to the language of animals. The distinction has been brought down to one of degree, scarcely one of kind. A direct and simple process of evolution was alone needed to produce it, and through that evolution man undoubtedly passed in his progress upward from his ancestral stage. The language of the lower animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems to have at first agreed with them. The infant begins its vocal utterances with simple cries; only at a later age does it begin to articulate. If we may judge from the development of language in the child, man began to speak with the use of sounds native to the vocal organs, and progressed by a process of imitation, endeavoring to reproduce the sounds heard around him: the voices of animals, the sounds of nature, etc. This tendency to imitate is not peculiar to man. It exists in many birds, and in some attains a marked development. The mocking bird, for instance, has an extraordinary flexibility of the vocal organs and power of imitating the voices of other birds. The parrot and some other birds go farther in this direction, being capable of using articulate language and clearly repeating words used by man. None of the mammalia possess this facility. It is not found in the apes, and probably was not possessed by the ancestor of man. But it is not difficult to believe that in the efforts of the latter to gain a greater variety of vocal utterance, its organs of speech became more flexible, and in time it gained the power of articulation. There are races of existing men whose powers of language seem still in the transition stage between articulate and inarticulate speech. This seems the case with the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa, whose vocal utterances consist largely of a series of peculiar clicks that are certainly not articulate speech, though on the road toward it. The Pygmies of the Central African forests seem similarly to occupy an intermediate position in the development of language. Those who have endeavored to talk with them speak of their utterance as being inarticulate in sound. It appears to be a sort of link between articulate and inarticulate speech. In short, the great abyss which was of old thought to lie between the languages of man and the lower animals has largely vanished through the labors of philologists, and we can trace stepping-stones over every portion of the wide gap. The language of man has not alone been evidently a product of evolution, but also one of development from the vocal utterances of the lower animals; and the man-ape, in its slow and long progress from brute into man, seems to have gradually developed that noble instrument of articulate speech which has had so much to do with subsequent human progress. _ |
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