The life and growth of language : an outline of linguistic science

Front matter

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Chapter I. Introductory : The Problems Of The Science Of Lan- Guage

Definition of language. Man its universal and sole possessor. Variety of languages. The study of language; aim of this volume.

_ Lanevacr may be briefly and comprehensively defined as the means of expression of human thought.

In a wider and freer sense, everything that bodies forth thought and makes it apprehensible, in whatever way, is called language; and we say, properly enough, that the men of the Middle Ages, for example, speak to us by the great architectural works which they have left behind them, and which tell us very plainly of their genius, their piety, and their valor. But for scientific purposes the term needs restriction, since it would apply else to nearly all human action and product, which discloses the thought that gives it birth. Language, then, signifies rather certain instrumentalities whereby men consciously and with intention represent their thought, to the end, chiefly, of making it known to other men: it is expression for the sake of communication.

The instrumentalities capable of being used for this purpose, and actually more or less used, are various: gesture and grimace, pictorial or written signs, and

9 INTRODUCTORY.

uttered or spoken signs: the first two addressed to the eye, the last to the ear. The first is chiefly employed by mutes—though not in its purjty, inasmuch as these unfortunates are wont to be trained and taught by those who speak, and their visible signs are more or less governed by habits born of utterance; going even so far as slavishly to represent the sounds of speech. The second, though in its inception a free and independent means of expression, yet in its historical development becomes linked as a subordinate to speech, and even finds in that subordination its highest perfection and greatest usefulness." The third is, as things actually are in the world, infinitely the most important; insomuch that, in ordinary use, “language” means utterance, and utterance only. And so we shall understand it here: language, for the purposes of this discussion, is the body of uttered and audible signs by which in human society thought is principally expressed, gesture and writing being its subordinates and auxiliaries.’

Of such spoken and audible means of expression no human community is found destitute. From the highest races to the lowest, all men speak; all are able to interchange such thoughts as they have. Language, then, appears clearly ‘ natural” to man; such are his endowments, such his circumstances, such his history one or all of these—that it is his invariable possession.

Moreover, man is the sole possessor of language. It is true that a certain degree of power of communication, sufficient for the infinitely restricted needs of their gregarious intercourse, is exhibited also by some

‘See the author’s “ Language and the Study of Language,” p. 448 seg. ; and his “ Oriental and Linguistic Studies,” ii. 198-196.

? Their natural and historical relations will be further treated of in chapter xiv. *

DIVERSITY OF HUMAN LANGUAGE. 3 of the lower animals. Thus, the dog’s bark and howl signify. by their difference, and each by its various style and tone, very different things; the domestic fowl has a song of quiet enjoyment of life, a clutter of excitement and alarm, a cluck of maternal anticipation or care, a cry of warning—and so on. But these are not only greatly inferior in their degree to human language ; they are also so radically diverse in kind from it, that the same name cannot justly be applied to both. Language is one of the most marked and conspicuous, as well as fundamentally characteristic, of the faculties of man.

Nevertheless, while human language is thus one as contrasted with brute expression, it is in itself of a variety which is fairly to be termed discordance. It is a congeries of individual languages, separate bodies of audible signs for thought, which, reckoning even those alone of which the speakers are absolutely unintelligible to one another, are very numerous. These languages differ among themselves in every degree. Some are so much alike that their users can with sufficient trouble and care come to understand one another ; of others, even a superficial examination shows abundant correspondences; of yet others, similar points of accordance are rarer, and only discoverable by practised study and research ; and a great. number are to all appearance wholly diverse—and often, not only diverse in respect to the actual signs which they use for their various conceptions, but also as to their whole structure, the relations which they signify, the parts of speech they recognize. And this diversity does not aczord with differences of intellectual capacity among the speakers: individuals of every degree of gift are found using, each according to his power, the same

4 INTRODUCTORY.

identical dialect; and souls of kindred calibre in differ. ent societies can hold no communion together. Nor does it accord with geographical divisions ; nor yet, in its limits and degrees, with the apparent limits of races. Not seldom, far greater race-differences are met with among the speakers of one language, or of one body of resembling languages, than between those who use dialects wholly unlike one another.

These, and their like, are the problems which occupy the attention of those who pursue the science of language, or linguistic science. That science strives to comprehend language, both in its unity, as a means of human expression and as distinguished from brute communication, and in its internal variety, of material and structure. It seeks to discover the cause of the resemblances and differences of languages, and to effect a classification of them, by tracing out the lines of resemblance, and drawing the limits of difference. It seeks to determine what language is in relation to thought, and how it came to sustain this relation; what keeps up its life and what has kept it in existence in, past time, and even, if possible, how it came into existence at all. It seeks to know what language is worth to the mind, and what has been its part in the development of our race. And, less directly, it seeks to learn and set forth what it may of the history of human development, and of the history of races, their movements and connections, so far as these are to be read in the facts of language. .

No reflecting and philosophizing people has ever been blind to the exceeding interest of problems like these, or has failed to offer some contribution toward their solution. Yet the body of truth discovered in earlier times has been so small, that the science of lan-

THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 5 guage is to be regarded as a modern one, as much so as geology and chemistry ; it belongs, like them, to the nineteenth century. To review its history is no part of our present task; no justice could be done the subject within the space that could be spared it in this volume; and the few words that we can bestow upon it will be better said in the last chapter than here. Although of so recent growth, the science of language is already one of the leading branches of modern inquiry. It is not less comprehensive in its material, definite in its aims, strict in its methods, and rich and fruitful in its results, than its sister sciences. Its foundations have been laid deep and strong in the thorough analysis of many of the most important human tongues, and the careful examination and classification of nearly all the rest. It has yielded to the history of mankind as a whole, and to that of the different races of men, definite truths and far-reaching glimpses of truth which could be won in no other way. It is bringing about a re-cast of the old methods of teaching even familiar _ and long-studied languages, like the Latin and Greek ; it is drawing forward to conspicuous notice others of which, only a few years ago, hardly the names were known. It has, in short, leavened all the connected branches of knowledge, and worked itself into the very structure of modern thought, so that no one who hears or reads‘can help taking some cognizance of it. No educated person can afford to lack a clear conception of at least a brief connected outline of a science possessing such claims to attention.

The design of this volume, accordingly, is to draw out and illustrate the principles of linguistic science, and to set forth its results, with as much fullness as the limited space at command shall allow. The study is

6 | INTRODUCTORY.

not yet so developed and established as not to include subjects respecting which opinions still differ widely and deeply. But direct controversy will be avoided ; and the attempt will be made to construct an argument which shall commend itself to acceptance by the coherence of its parts and the reasonableness of its conclusions. In accordance with the plan of the series of treatises into which this enters as a member, simplicity and popular apprehensibility will be everywhere aimed at. To start from obvious or familiar truths, to exemplify by well-known facts, will be found, it is believed, the best way to arrive with assurance at the wtimate results sought after. The prime facts of language lie, as it were, within the easy grasp of every man who speaks—yet more, of every man who has studied other languages than his own—and to direct intelligent attention toward that which is essential, to point out the general in the midst of the particular and the fundamental underneath the superficial, in matters of common knowledge, is a method of instruction which cannot but bear good fruit.

CELAP TE Re LI:

HOW EACH INDIVIDUAL ACQUIRES HIS LANGUAGE: LIFE OF LANGUAGE.

Language learned, not inherited or made, by the individual ; process of children’s learning to speak; what this involves, outside the province of the linguistic student. Origin of particular words. Character of a word as sign for a conception. Mental training in learning language ; determination of the inner form of language from without; constraint and advantage in the process. Acquisition of a second language, or of more than one; learning even of native speech a never-ending process. Imperfection of the word as sign; language only the apparatus of thought.

Tuere can be asked respecting language no other question of a more elementary and at the same time of a more fundamentally important character than this: how is language obtained by us? how does each speaking individual become possessed of his speech? Its true answer involves and determines well-nigh the whole of linguistic philosophy.

There are probably few who would not at once reply that we learn our language; it is taught us by those among whom our lot is cast in childhood. And this obvious and common-sense answer is also, as we shall find on a more careful and considerate inquiry, the correct one. We have to look to see what is implied in it.

In the first place, it sets aside and denies two other conceivable answers: that language is a race-characteristic, and, as such, inherited from one’s ancestry, along with color, physical constitution, traits of character, and the like ; and that it is independently produced by each individual, in the natural course of his bodily and mental growth.

Against both these excluded views of the acquisition of language may be brought such an array of facts so familiar and undeniable that they cannot be seriously upheld. Against the theory of a language as a racecharacteristic may be simply set, as sufficient rebutting evidence, the existence of a community like the American, where there are in abundance descendants of African, of Irish, of German, of southern European, of Asiatic, as well as of English ancestors, all using the same dialect, without other variety than comes of differences of locality and education, none showing a trace of any other “mother-tongue” or “native speech.” But the world is full of such cases, on the small scale and on the large. Any child of parents living in a forcign country grows up to speak the foreign speech, unless carefully guarded from doing so 3 or, it speaks both this and the tongue of its parents, with equal readiness. The children of missionary families furnish the most striking examples of this class: no matter where they may be in the world, among what remotely kindred or wholly unrelated dialects, they acquire the local speech as “naturally” as do the children of the natives. And it is only necessary that the child of English or German or Russian parents, born in their native country, should (as is often done) be put with a French nurse, and hear French alone spoken about it, and it will grow up to speak French first and f . \ te ha ea

LANGUAGE NOT INHERITED. 9

French only, just as if it were a French child. And what is French, and who are its speakers? The mass of the people of France are Celts by descent, with characteristic Celtic traits which no mixture or education has been able to obliterate ; but there is hardly an appreciable element of Celtic in the French language ; this is almost purely a Romanic dialect, a Egdern representative of the ancient Latin. There are few unmixed languages in the world, as there are few unmixed races ; but the one mixture does not at all determine the other, or measure it. The English is a very striking proof of this; the preponderating French-Latin element in our vocabulary gets its most familiar and indispensable part from the Normans, a Germanic race, who got it from the French, a Celtic race, who got it from the Italians, among whom the Latin-speaking community were at first a very insignificant element, numerically. It is useless to bring up further examples ; the force of those here given will be sufficiently supported by our later inquiry into the actual eee of acquisition of language.

So far as the other theory, that of independent production by each person of his own speech, implies that each inherits from his ancestors a physical constitution which makes him develop unconsciously the same speech as theirs, it is virtually coincident with the first theory, and the same facts tell with crushing weight against it; so far as it is meant to imply that there is a general likeness in intellectual constitution between members of the same community which leads them to frame accordant systems of expression, it is equally without support from facts; for the distribution of human dialects is as irreconcilable with that of natural capacity and bent as with that of physical form among human beings. Every varicty of gift is found among those who employ, each with his own degree of skill and capacity, the same speech ; and souls of commensurate calibre in different communities are unable to have intercourse together.

We come, then, to consider directly the process by which the child becomes able to speak a certain language—a process sufficiently under every one’s observation to allow of general and competent criticism of any attempted description of it. We cannot, it is true, follow with entire comprehension all the steps of evolution of the infantile and childish powers ; but we can understand them well enough for our purpose.

The first thing which the child has to learn, before speech is possible, is to observe and distinguish ; to recognize the persons and things about him, in their concrete individuality, and to notice as belonging to”

them some of their characteristic qualities and acts. This is a very brief description of a very intricate psychological process—which, however, it does not belong to the student of language to draw out in greater detail. There is involved in it, we may further remark , in passing, nothing which some of the lower animals may not achieve. At the same time, the child is exercising his organs of utterance, and gaining conscious command of them, partly by a mere native impulse to the exertion of all his native powers, partly by imitation of the sound-making persons about him: the child brought up in solitude would be comparatively silent. This physical process is quite analogous with the training of the hands: for some six months the child tosses them about, he knows not how or why; then he begins to notice them and work them under command, till at length he can do by conscious volition whatever is a “~ ‘ ‘ a ee eee a

LEARNING TO SPEAK. 11 within their power. Control and management of the organs of utterance comes much more slowly ; but the time arrives when the child can imitate at least some of the audible as well as the visible acts of others; can reproduce a given sound, asa given gesture. But before this, he has learned to associate with some of the objects familiar to him the names by which they are called; a result of much putting of the two together on the part of his instructors. Here is seen more markedly, at least in degree, the superiority of human endowment. The association in question is doubtless at the outset no easy thing, even for the child ; he does not readily catch the idea that a set of sounds belongs to and represents a thing—any more than, when older, the idea that a series of written characters represents a word; but their connection is set so often and so distinctly before him as to be learned at last, just as the connection is learned between sugar and pleasure to the taste, between a rod and retribution for misbehavior. And every child begins to know things by their names long before he begins to call them. The next step is to imitate and reproduce the familiar name, usually at first in the most imperfect way, by a mere hint of the true sound, intelligible only to the child’s constant attendants ; and when that step is taken, then for the first time is made a real beginning of the acquisition of language.

Though not all children start with the acquisition of precisely the same words, yet their limit of variety is but a narrow one. We may take as fair examples of at least the very early ones the childish names for ‘father’ and ‘mother, namely papa and mamma, and the words water, milk, good. And we have to notice especially both how wholly external is the process which makes the child connect these particular names with their respective ideas, and how empirical and imperfect are the ideas themselves. What is really implied in papa and mamma, the child does not in the least know ; to him they are only signs for certain loving and caring individuals, distinguished most conspicuously by differences of dress; and the chance is (and it not seldom chances) that he will give the same names to other individuals showing like diilerences ; the real relation of male and female parent to child he comes to comprehend only much later—not to speak of the physiological mysteries involved in it, which no man yet comprehends. As little does he understand the real nature of water and milk; he knows no more than that, among the liquids (that name, to be sure, comes much later, but not till long after the child has realized the distinction of liquid and solid) constantly brought before him there are two which he readily distinguishes, by look and by taste, and to which other people give these names ; and he follows their example. The names are provisional, convenient nuclei for the gathering of more knowledge about ; where the liquids come from will be learned by and by, and their chemical constitution, perhaps, in due time. As for good, the first association of the term is probably with what has a pleasant taste; then what is otherwise agreeable comes to be comprehended under the same name; it gets applied to behavior which is agreeable to the parents, as judged by a standard which the child himself is far from understanding—and this transfer to a moral sphere is by no means an easy one; as he grows up, the child is (perhaps) all the time learning to distinguish more accurately between good and bad; but he is likely to be at the last baffled by finding that the

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LEARNING TO SPEAK. 13 wisest heads in the world have been and are irreconcilably at variance as to what good really means— whether it implies only utility, or an independent and absolute principle.

These are only typical examples, fairly illustrating the whole process of speech-getting. The child begins as a learner, and he continues such. ‘There is continually in presence of his intellect more and better than he can grasp. By words he is made to form dim conceptions, and draw rude distinctions, which after experience shall make truer and more distinct, shall deepen, explain, correct. He has no time to be original; far more rapidly than his crude and confused impressions can crystallize independently into shape, they are, under the example and instruction of others, centred and shaped about certain definite points. So it goes on indefinitely. The young mind is always learning words, and things through words; in all other cases as really, if not so obviously, as when, by description and picture or by map and plan, it is led to form some inaccurate half-conception of the animal dzon or the city Peking. The formal distinctions made by the inflectional system of even so simple a language as English, and by words of relation, are at first out of the child’s reach. He can grasp and wield only the grosser elements of speech. He does not apprehend the relation of one and more than one clearly enough to use the two numbers of nouns; the singular has to do duty for both; and so also the root-form of the verb, to the neglect of persons, tenses, and moods. It is an era in his education when he first begins to employ preterits and plurals and their like. So with the pronouns. He is slow to catch the trick of those shifting names, applied to persons according as they are speaking, spoken to, or spoken of; he does not see why each should not have an own name, given alike in all situations: and he speaks of himself and others by such a name and such only, or blunders sorely in trying to do otherwise— till time and practice set him right."| Thus, in every respect, language is the expression of matured and practised thought, and the young learner enters into the use of it as fast as natural capacity and favoring circumstances enable him to do so. Others have observed, and classified, and abstracted; he only reaps the fruit of their labors. It is precisely as when the child studies mathematics ; he goes over and appropriates, step by step, what others have wrought out, by means of word and sign and symbol; and he thus masters ina few years what it has taken generations and ages to produce, what his unaided intellect could never have produced; what, perhaps, he could never independently have produced a single item of, having just mental force enough to follow and acquire it: though also, perhaps, he has capacity to increase it by and by, adding something new for those to learn who come after him—even as the once educated speaker may come to add, in one way and another (as will be pointed out later), new stores of expression to language.

In all this, now, is involved infinitely more than linguistic science has any call to deal with and explain. Let us consider, for example, the word green. Its presence in our vocabulary implies first the physical cause of the color, wherein is involved the whole theory of optics: and this concerns the physicist ; it is for him to talk of the ether and its vibrations, and of the fre-

1The amount of sapient philosophy which has been aimlessly expended on this simple fact—as if it involved the metaphysical distinction of the ego and the non-eyo—is something truly surprising.

WHAT IS INVOLVED IN SPEAKING. 15 quency and length of the waves which produce the sensation of greenness. Then there is the structure of the eye: its wondrous and mysterious sensitiveness to just this kind of vibration, the apparatus of nerves which conveys the impression to the brain, the cerebral structure which receives the impression : to treat of all this is the duty of the physiologist. His domain borders and overlaps that of the psychologist, who has to tell us what he can of the intuition and resulting conception, considered as mode and product of mental action, of the power of apprehension and distinction and abstraction, and of the sway of consciousness over the whole. Then, in the hearing of the word green is involved the wonderful power of audition, closely akin with that of vision: another sensitive apparatus, which notes and reports another set of vibratory waves, in another vibrating medium: it falls, like vision, into the hands of the physicist and physiologist. They, too, have to do with the organs of utterance, which produce the audible vibration; with their obedience to the directions of the will: directions given but not executed under the review of consciousness, and implying that control of the mind over the muscular apparatus of the body which is by no means the least of mysteries. We might go on indefinitely thus, noticing what is included in the simplest linguistic act ; and -behind all would lie as a background the great mystery of existence and its cause, which no philosophy has yet been able to do more than recognize. Every part of this is of interestand importance to the linguistic scholar, but each in its own way and degree; and his specific and central business is with none of it, but rather with something else. This, namely: there exists an uttered and audible sign, green, by which, in a certain community, are 5 :

designated a certain class of kindred shades among the infinitely varied hues of nature and of art; and every person who, by birth or by immigration or as a visitor (a bodily visitor, or only 2 mental one, as student of its literature), comes into the community in question, learns to associate that sign with the given group of shades, and to understand and employ it as designating them; and he learns to classify the infinity of hues under that and certain other signs, of like nature and use. About this pivotal fact all the other matters involved fall into position as more or less nearly auxiliary; from it as point of view they are judged and have their value estimated. Language, both in its single items and as a whole, is primarily the sign of the idea, the sign with its accompanying idea; and to take any other department of the questions involved as the central one is to throw the whole into a false position, dis- .

torting the proportions and relations of every part. And, as the science of language seeks after causes, endeavors to explain the facts of language, the primary inquiry respecting this fact is: how came this sign to be thus used? what is the history of its production and application ? and even, what is its ultimate origin and — the reason of it ? provided we can reach so far.

For there is, recognizably and traceably, a time when and a reason why many of our words came into use as signs for the ideas they represent. For example, a certain other shade of color, a peculiar red, was produced (with more, of its kind) not many years ago, as result of the chemical manipulation of coal tar, and was, reflectively and artificially, called by its inventor magenta, after the name of a place which a great battle had recently made famous. The word magenta is just as real and legitimate a part of the English language ae eee

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HISTORY OF WORDS. 1"

as green, though vastly younger and less important ; and those who acquire and use the latter do so in precisely the same manner as the former, and generally with equal ignorance and unconcern as to its origin. The word gas is of much longer standing and wider use with us, and has its respectable family of derivatives and compounds—as gaseous, gasify, gas-pipe—and even its colloquial figurative uses—as when we call an empty and sophistical but ready talker gasky ; but it was the wholly arbitrary invention of a Dutch chemist (Van Helmont), about a. p. 1600. Science was at that time getting so far along as to begin to form the distinct conception of an aériform or gaseous condition of existence of matter; and this name chanced to be introduced and supported in a way that commended it to general acceptance ; and so it became the name, and for all Europe. The young now for thé most part know it first as the title of a certain kind of gas, made practically useful in giving light; but by and by, if fairly educated, they are led in connection with the word to form for themselves the scientific idea of which this is the sign. To trace the history of these two vocables is to inform ourselves as to the time and the circumstances of production of the aniline colors, and as to the taking of a certain important step forward in scientific thinking. We cannot follow so clearly toward or to its source the word green, because it is vastly older, reaching back far beyond the period of literary record; but we do seem to arrive by inference at a connection of it with our word grow, and at seeing that a green thing was named from its being a growing thing ; and this is a matter of no small inter est as bearing on the history of the word.