Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/804

768 PHILOLOGY or act of anything outside ourselves, if even rudely imi tated, is to us an effective reminder and awakener of con ception. We have no reason to question that such -were the suggestions of the beginnings of uttered expression. The same means have made their contributions to language even down to our own day ; we call words so produced " onomatopoetic " (i.e., "name-making" ), after the example of the Greeks, who could not conceive that actually new additions to language should be made in any other way. What and how wide the range of the imitative principle, and what amount of language -signs it was capable of yielding, is a subject for special investigation or rather, of speculation, since anything like exact knowledge in regard to it will never be attained ; and the matter is one of altogether secondary consequence ; it is sufficient for our purpose that enough could certainly be won in this way to serve as the effective germs of speech. All the natural means of expression are still at our command, and are put to more or less use by us, and their products are as intelligible to us as they have been to any generation of our ancestors, back to the very first. They are analogous also to the means of communication of the lower animals ; this, so far as Ave know, consists in observing and interpreting one another s movements and natural sounds (where there are such). But language is a step beyond this, and different from it. To make language, the intent to signify must be present. A cry wrung out by pain, or a laugh of amusement, though intelligible, is not language ; cither of them, if consciously reproduced in order to signify to another pain or pleasure, is language. So a cough within hearing of any one attracts his attention ; but to cough, or to produce any other sound, articulate or inarticulate, for the purpose of attracting another s attention, is to commit an act of language- making, such as in human history preceded in abundance the establishment of definite traditional signs for concep tions. Here begins to appear the division between human language and all brute expression ; since we do not know that any animal but man ever definitely took this step. It would be highly interesting to find out just how near any come to it ; and to this point ought to be especially directed the attention of those who are investigating the communication of the lower animals in its relation to human communication. Among the animals of highest intelligence that associate with man and learn something of his ways, a certain amount of sign-making expressly for communication is not to be denied ; the dog that barks at a door because he knows that somebody will come and let him in is an instance of it ; perhaps, in wild life, the throwing out of sentinel birds from a flock, whose warning cry shall advertise their fellows of the threat of danger, is as near an approach to it as is anywhere made. But the actual permanent beginnings of speech are only reached when the natural basis is still further abandoned, and signs begin to be used, not because their natural . . ....... suggestiveness is seen in them, but by imitation, from the example of others who have been observed to use the same sign for the same purpose. Then for the first time the means of communication becomes something to be handed down, rather than made anew by each individual ; it takes on that traditional character which is the essential char acter of all human institutions, which appears not less in the forms of social organization, the details of religious ceremonial, the methods of art and the arts, than in lan guage. That all existing speech, and all known recorded speech, is purely traditional, cannot at all be questioned. It is proved even by the single fact that for any given conception there are as many different spoken signs as there are languages say a thousand (this number is rather far within than beyond the truth), each of them intelli gible to him who has learned to use it and to associate it with the conception to which it belongs, but unintelligible to the users of the nine hundred and ninety-nine other signs, as these are all unintelligible to him ; unless, indeed, he learn a few of them also, even as at the beginning he learned the one that he calls his own. What single sign, and what set of signs, any individual shall use, depends upon the community into the midst of which he is cast, by birth or other circumstances, during his first years. That it does not depend upon his race is demonstrated by facts the most numerous and various ; the African whoso purity of descent is attested by every feature is found all over the world speaking just that language, or jargon, into the midst of which the fates of present or former slavery have brought his parents ; every civilized community contains elements of various lineage, combined into one by unity of speech ; and instances are frequent enough where whole nations speak a tongue of which their ancestors knew nothing : for example, the Celtic Gauls and the Germanic Normans of France speak the dialect of a geographically insignificant district in central Italy, while we ourselves can hardly utter a sentence or write a line without bringing in more or less of that same dialect. There is not an item of any tongue of which we know any thing that is " natural " expression, or to the possession of which its speaker is brought by birth instead of by education ; there is even very little that is traceably founded on such natural expression ; everywhere #cris or human attribution reigns supreme, and the original <r<ris or natural significance has disappeared, and is only to be found by theoretic induction (as we have found it above). It seems to some as if a name like cur/coo (one of the most striking available cases of onomatopoeia) were a " natural " one ; but there is just as much #eo-is in it as in any other name ; it implies the observation of an aggregate of qualities in a certain bird, and the selection of one among them as the convenient basis of a mutual understanding when the bird is in question ; every animal conspicuous to us must have its designation, won in one way or another ; and in this case, to imitate the characteristic cry is the most available way. If anything but convenience and availability were involved, all our names for animals would have to be and to remain imitations of the sounds they make. That the name of rMr7,-oo is applied also to the female and young, and at other than the singing season, and then to related species which do not make the same sound all helps to show the essentially conventional character of even this name. An analogous process of elimination of original meaning, and reduction to the value of conventional designation merely, is to be seen in every part of language, throughout its whole history. Since men ceased to derive their names from signs having a natural suggestiveness, and began to make them from other names already in use with an understood value, every new name has had its etymology and its historical occasion as, for example, the name quarantine from the two -score (quarantaine) of days of precautionary confinement, or volume from its being rolled up, or book from a beech-wood staff, or copper from Cyprus, or lunacy from a fancied influence of the moon, or priest from being an older (Trpecr/^vrepos) person, or butterfly from the butter-yellow colour of a certain common species : every part of our language, as of every other, is full of such examples but, when once the name is applied, it belongs to that to which it is applied, and no longer to its relatives by etymology ; its origin is neglected,, and its form may be gradually changed beyond recognition, or its meaning so far altered that comparison with the original shall seem a joke or an absurdity. This is a regular and essential part of the process of name-making in all human speech, and from