WORDS AND THEIR WAYS

IN ENGLISH SPEECH

ABBREVIATIONS

WORDS AND THEIR WAYS

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

THE expression of our thoughts by means of language is a practice of so long standing that we accept it almost as an instinctive performance. Nobody can remember when or how he learned to talk. Indeed, it is seldom possible to recall even those moments in later life when, after the art of speech had been acquired, we became familiar with particular words which, as we know well enough, must have been from time to time added to our personal vocabulary. We can, to be sure, remember when we were first introduced to the technical language of some particular science, as mathematics or medicine or political economy. We may even recollect the person from whom we first heard a new phrase which has since become a part of our habitual stock. And all of us are aware of specific additions to our vocabulary from that ephemeral element in everyday speech known as 'slang,' which is constantly providing us with strange terms that force themselves upon our attention because everybody employs them, and that rapidly die out only to be replaced by equally grotesque novelties. But the sum-total of our retrospect accounts for only the minutest fraction of

our whole outfit of words and phrases. And were it not for our observation of infants, who cannot speak at all, and of young children, who are painfully learning the art of speech, we should inevitably believe that the expression of our thoughts in language was spontaneous action, quite independent of our own will and exertions, like breathing or the circulation of the blood.

Yet no phenomenon is more amazing than that of speech. Nor can any process be imagined more complicated than that by which the vocabulary of a highly developed language, like English, comes into existence and fits itself to the multifarious needs of civilized man in the utterance of thought and emotion. If to the process of oral speech we add the corollary processes of reading and writing, we have a series of phenomena which no thinking man can contemplate without a kind of awe.

Language is the expression of thought by means of words; that is, by means of signs of a peculiar sort made with the vocal organs. Since the tongue is one of the most important of these organs, and since we are habitually conscious of using it in articulation, we often call our language our tongue,' — and the word language itself is derived, through the French, from lingua, the Latin name for that organ.1

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The origin of language is an unsolved problem. It was once supposed that man was created a talking animal; that is to say, that he could speak immediately on his creation, through a special faculty inherent in his very nature. Some scholars maintained that our first parents were instructed in the rudiments of speech by God himself, or that language in esse was a gift bestowed by the deity

1 M. E. langage, from Fr. langage, from L. lingua.

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immediately after Adam was created. Along with these opinions went, in former times, the opinion that Hebrew, the language of the Jewish Scriptures, was the primitive tongue of mankind. None of these views are now in favor, either with theologians or with philologists. However we conceive the first man to have come into existence, we are forced to believe that language as we know it was a human invention. Not language itself, but the inherent power to frame and develop a language was the birthright of man. This result, it will be seen, is purely negative. It defines what the origin of language was not, but it throws no light on the question what it was, and no satisfactory answer to the question has ever been proposed. Some scholars believe that human speech originated in man's attempt to imitate the sounds of nature, as if a child should call a dog bow-wow,' or a cow 'moo.' No doubt such imitation accounts for a certain number of words in our vocabulary, but there are great difficulties in carrying out the theory to its ultimate results. All that can be said is that the bow-wow theory,' as it is jocosely called, has never been driven from the field. Another view, which may be traced without any great difficulty to Herder's attempt to explain the speech of animals,' has found a warm defender in Max Müller. According to this view, which has a specious appearance of philosophical profundity, the utterances of primitive man were the spontaneous result, by reflex action, of impressions produced upon him by various external phenomena. Though the 'ding-dong theory,' as it is derisively called, is now discredited, and, in its entirety, is hardly susceptible of intelligible statement, it may, after all, contain a grain of truth.

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Another partly discredited theory seeks the origin of