LANGUAGE
The differentia of man--the quality that marks him off from the other
animal kinds--is undoubtedly the power of articulate speech. Thereby
his mind itself becomes articulate. If language is ultimately a
creation of the intellect, yet hardly less fundamentally is the
intellect a creation of language. As flesh depends on bone, so does
the living tissue of our spiritual life depend on its supporting
framework of steadfast verbal forms. The genius, the heaven-born
benefactor of humanity, is essentially he who wrestles with "thoughts
too deep for words," until at last he assimilates them to the scheme
of meanings embodied in his mother-tongue, and thus raises them
definitely above the threshold of the common consciousness, which is
likewise the threshold of the common culture.
There is good reason, then, for prefixing a short chapter on language
to an account of those factors in the life of man that together stand
on the whole for the principle of freedom--of rational self-direction.
Heredity and environment do not, indeed, lie utterly beyond the range
of our control. As they are viewed from the standpoint of human history
as a whole, they show each in its own fashion a certain capacity to
meet the needs and purposes of the life-force halfway. Regarded
abstractly, however, they may conveniently be treated as purely
passive and limiting conditions. Here we are with a constitution not
of our choosing, and in a world not of our choosing. Given this
inheritance, and this environment, how are we, by taking thought and
taking risks, to achieve the best-under-the-circumstances? Such is
the vital problem as it presents itself to any particular generation
of men.
The environment is as it were the enemy. We are out to conquer and
enslave it. Our inheritance, on the other hand, is the impelling force
we obey in setting forth to fight; it tingles in our blood, and nerves
the muscles of our arm. This force of heredity, however, abstractly
considered, is blind. Yet, corporately and individually, we fight with
eyes that see. This supervening faculty, then, of utilizing the light
of experience represents a third element in the situation; and, from
the standpoint of man's desire to know himself, the supreme element.
The environment, inasmuch as under this conception are included all
other forms of life except man, can muster on its side a certain amount
of intelligence of a low order. But man's prerogative is to dominate
his world by the aid of intelligence of a high order. When he defied
the ice-age by the use of fire, when he outfaced and outlived the
mammoth and the cave bear, he was already the rational animal, _homo
sapiens_. In his way he thought, even in those far-off days. And
therefore we may assume, until direct evidence is forthcoming to the
contrary, that he likewise had language of an articulate kind. He tried
to make a speech, we may almost say, as soon as he had learned to stand
up on his hind legs.
Unfortunately, we entirely lack the means of carrying back the history
of human speech to its first beginnings. In the latter half of the
last century, whilst the ferment of Darwinism was freshly seething,
all sorts of speculations were rife concerning the origin of language.
One school sought the source of the earliest words in imitative sounds
of the type of bow-wow; another in interjectional expressions of the
type of tut-tut. Or, again, as was natural in Europe, where, with the
exception of Basque in a corner of the west, and of certain Asiatic
languages, Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish, on the eastern border, all
spoken tongues present certain obvious affinities, the comparative
philologist undertook to construct sundry great families of speech;
and it was hoped that sooner or later, by working back to some
linguistic parting of the ways, the central problem would be solved
of the dispersal of the world's races.
These painted bubbles have burst. The further examination of the forms
of speech current amongst peoples of rude culture has not revealed
a conspicuous wealth either of imitative or of interjectional sounds.
On the other hand, the comparative study of the European, or, as they
must be termed in virtue of the branch stretching through Persia into
India, the Indo-European stock of languages, carries us back three
or four thousand years at most--a mere nothing in terms of
anthropological time. Moreover, a more extended search through the
world, which in many of its less cultured parts furnishes no literary
remains that may serve to illustrate linguistic evolution, shows
endless diversity of tongues in place of the hoped-for system of a
few families; so that half a hundred apparently independent types must
be distinguished in North America alone. For the rest, it has become
increasingly clear that race and language need not go together at all.
What philologist, for instance, could ever discover, if he had no
history to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modern
French, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by way
of blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquest
caused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtic
tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, ousted
some earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to the still
surviving Basque; though it is not in the least necessary, therefore,
to suppose that the Celtic-speaking invaders wiped out the previous
inhabitants of the land to a corresponding extent. Races, in short,
mix readily; languages, except in very special circumstances, hardly
at all.
Disappointed in its hope of presiding over the reconstruction of the
distant past of man, the study of language has in recent years tended
somewhat to renounce the historical--that is to say,
anthropological--method altogether. The alternative is a purely
formal treatment of the subject. Thus, whereas vocabularies seem
hopelessly divergent in their special contents, the general apparatus
of vocal expression is broadly the same everywhere. That all men alike
communicate by talking, other symbols and codes into which thoughts
can be translated, such as gestures, the various kinds of writing,
drum-taps, smoke signals, and so on, being in the main but secondary
and derivative, is a fact of which the very universality may easily
blind us to its profound significance. Meanwhile, the science of
phonetics--having lost that "guid conceit of itself" which once led
it to discuss at large whether the art of talking evolved at a single
geographical centre, or at many centres owing to similar capacities
of body and mind--contents itself now-a-days for the most part with
conducting an analytic survey of the modes of vocal expression as
correlated with the observed tendencies of the human speech-organs.
And what is true of phonetics in particular is hardly less true of
comparative philology as a whole. Its present procedure is in the main
analytic or formal. Thus its fundamental distinction between isolating,
agglutinative and inflectional languages is arrived at simply by
contrasting the different ways in which words are affected by being
put together into a sentence. No attempt is made to show that one type
of arrangement normally precedes another in time, or that it is in
any way more rudimentary--that is to say, less adapted to the needs
of human intercourse. It is not even pretended that a given language
is bound to exemplify one, and one alone, of these three types; though
the process known as analogy--that is, the regularizing of exceptions
by treating the unlike as if it were like--will always be apt to
establish one system at the expense of the rest.
If, then, the study of language is to recover its old pre-eminence
amongst anthropological studies, it looks as if a new direction must
be given to its inquiries. And there is much to be said for any change
that would bring about this result. Without constant help from the
philologist, anthropology is bound to languish. To thoroughly
understand the speech of the people under investigation is the
field-worker's master-key; so much so, that the critic's first
question in determining the value of an ethnographical work must always
be, Could the author talk freely with the natives in their own tongue?
But how is the study of particular languages to be pursued successfully,
if it lack the stimulus and inspiration which only the search for
general principles can impart to any branch of science? To relieve
the hack-work of compiling vocabularies and grammars, there must be
present a sense of wider issues involved, and such issues as may
directly interest a student devoted to language for its own sake. The
formal method of investigating language, in the meantime, can hardly
supply the needed spur. Analysis is all very well so long as its
ultimate purpose is to subserve genesis--that is to say, evolutionary
history. If, however, it tries to set up on its own account, it is
in danger of degenerating into sheer futility. Out of time and history
is, in the long run, out of meaning and use. The philologist, then,
if he is to help anthropology, must himself be an anthropologist, with
a full appreciation of the importance of the historical method. He
must be able to set each language or group of languages that he studies
in its historical setting. He must seek to show how it has evolved
in relation to the needs of a given time. In short, he must correlate
words with thoughts; must treat language as a function of the social
life.
* * * * *
Here, however, it is not possible to attempt any but the most general
characterization of primitive language as it throws light on the
workings of the primitive intelligence. For one reason, the subject
is highly technical; for another reason, our knowledge about most types
of savage speech is backward in the extreme; whilst, for a third and
most far-reaching reason of all, many peoples, as we have seen, are
not speaking the language truly native to their powers and habits of
mind, but are expressing themselves in terms imported from another
stock, whose spiritual evolution has been largely different. Thus it
is at most possible to contrast very broadly and generally the more
rudimentary with the more advanced methods that mankind employs for
the purpose of putting its experience into words. Happily the careful
attention devoted by American philologists to the aboriginal languages
of their continent has resulted in the discovery of certain principles
which the rest of our evidence, so far as it goes, would seem to stamp
as of world-wide application. The reader is advised to study the most
stimulating, if perhaps somewhat speculative, pages on language in
the second volume of E.J. Payne's _History of the New World called
America_; or, if he can wrestle with the French tongue, to compare
the conclusions here reached with those to which Professor Levy-Bruhl
is led, largely by the consideration of this same American group of
languages, in his recent work, _Les Fonctions Mentales dans les
Societes Inferieures_ ("Mental Functions in the Lower Societies").
If the average man who had not looked into the matter at all were asked
to say what sort of language he imagined a savage to have, he would
be pretty sure to reply that in the first place the vocabulary would
be very small, and in the second place that it would consist of very
short, comprehensive terms--roots, in fact--such as "man," "bear,"
"eat," "kill," and so on. Nothing of the sort is actually the case.
Take the inhabitants of that cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, whose
culture is as rude as that of any people on earth. A scholar who tried
to put together a dictionary of their language found that he had got
to reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressing
a large number of forms of lesser importance. And no wonder that the
tally mounted up. For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, some
containing four syllables, to express what for us would be either "he"
or "she"; then they had two names for the sun, two for the moon, and
two more for the full moon, each of the last-named containing four
syllables and having no element in common. Sounds, in fact, are with
them as copious as ideas are rare. Impressions, on the other hand,
are, of course, infinite in number. By means of more or less significant
sounds, then, Fuegian society compounds impressions, and that somewhat
imperfectly, rather than exchanges ideas, which alone are the currency
of true thought.
For instance, I-cut-bear's-leg-at-the-joint-with-a-flint-now
corresponds fairly well with the total impression produced by the
particular act; though, even so, I have doubtless selectively reduced
the notion to something I can comfortably take in, by leaving out a
lot of unnecessary detail--for instance, that I was hungry, in a hurry,
doing it for the benefit of others as well as myself, and so on. Well,
American languages of the ruder sort, by running a great number of
sounds or syllables together, manage to utter a portmanteau
word--"holophrase" is the technical name for it--into which is packed
away enough suggestions to reproduce the situation in all its detail,
the cutting, the fact that I did it, the object, the instrument, the
time of the cutting, and who knows what besides. Amusing examples of
such portmanteau words meet one in all the text-books. To go back to
the Fuegians, their expression _mamihlapinatapai_ is said to mean "to
look at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which
both parties desire but are unwilling to do." Now, since exactly the
same situation never recurs, but is partly the same and partly
different, it is clear that, if the holophrase really tried to hit
off in each case the whole outstanding impression that a given
situation provoked, then the same combination of sounds would never
recur either; one could never open one's mouth without coining a new
word. Ridiculous as this notion sounds, it may serve to mark a downward
limit from which the rudest types of human speech are not so very far
removed. Their well-known tendency to alter their whole character in
twenty years or less is due largely to the fluid nature of primitive
utterance; it being found hard to detach portions, capable of repeated
use in an unchanged form, from the composite vocables wherein they
register their highly concrete experiences.
Thus in the old Huron-Iroquois language _eschoirhon_ means
"I-have-been-to-the-water," _setsanha_ "Go-to-the-water,"
_ondequoha_ "There-is-water-in-the-bucket," _daustantewacharet_
"There-is-water-in-the-pot." In this case there is said to have been
a common word for "water," _awen_, which, moreover, is somehow
suggested to an aboriginal ear as an element contained in each of these
longer forms. In many other cases the difficulty of isolating the
common meaning, and fixing it by a common term, has proved too much
altogether for a primitive language. You can express twenty different
kinds of cutting; but you simply cannot say "cut" at all. No wonder
that a large vocabulary is found necessary, when, as in Zulu, "my
father," "thy father," "his-or-her-father," are separate
polysyllables without any element in common.
The evolution of language, then, on this view, may be regarded as a
movement out of, and away from, the holophrastic in the direction of
the analytic. When every piece in your play-box of verbal bricks can
be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts
of ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions
to your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and still
more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building. Ideally,
words should be individual and atomic. Every modification they suffer
by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tacked
on to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrifice
of distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly,
even whilst employing the clearest type of language; though in such
a case it is very hard to do so without being quickly brought to book.
On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain to a high degree of
clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that
tends towards wordlessness--that is to say, is relatively deficient
in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts. Wordless
thinking is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its somewhat
restricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, as
it were, of a clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact that the words
are crystallized into permanent shape invests them with a suggestion
of interrupted continuity, an overtone of un-utilized significance,
that of itself invites the mind to play with the corresponding fringe
of meaning attaching to the concepts that the words embody.
It would prove an endless task if I were to try here to illustrate
at all extensively the stickiness, as one might almost call it, of
primitive modes of speech. Person, number, case, tense, mood and
gender--all these, even in the relatively analytical phraseology of
the most cultured peoples, are apt to impress themselves on the very
body of the words of which they qualify the sense. But the meagre list
of determinations thus produced in an evolved type of language can
yield one no idea of the vast medley of complicated forms that serve
the same ends at the lower levels of human experience. Moreover, there
are many other shades of secondary and circumstantial meaning which
in advanced languages are invariably represented by distinct words,
so that when not wanted they can be left out, but in a more primitive
tongue are apt to run right through the very grammar of the sentence,
thus mixing themselves up inextricably with the really substantial
elements in the thought to be conveyed. For instance, in some American
languages, things are either animate or inanimate, and must be
distinguished accordingly by accompanying particles. Or, again, they
are classed by similar means as rational or irrational; women, by the
bye, being designated amongst the Chiquitos by the irrational sign.
Reverential particles, again, are used to distinguish what is high
or low in the tribal estimation; and we get in this connection such
oddities as the Tamil practice of restricting the privilege of having
a plural to high-caste names, such as those applied to gods and human
beings, as distinguished from the beasts, which are mere casteless
"things." Or, once more, my transferable belongings, "my-spear," or
"my-canoe," undergo verbal modifications which are denied to
non-transferable possessions such as "my-hand"; "my-child," be it
observed, falling within the latter class.
Most interesting of all are distinctions of person. These cannot but
bite into the forms of speech, since the native mind is taken up mostly
with the personal aspect of things, attaining to the conception of
a bloodless system of "its" with the greatest difficulty, if at all.
Even the third person, which is naturally the most colourless, because
excluded from a direct part of the conversational game, undergoes
multitudinous leavening in the light of conditions which the primitive
mind regards as highly important, whereas we should banish them from
our thoughts as so much irrelevant "accident." Thus the Abipones in
the first place distinguished "he-present," _eneha_, and
"she-present," _anaha_, from "he-absent" and "she-absent." But
presence by itself gave too little of the speaker's impression. So,
if "he" or "she" were sitting, it was necessary to say _hiniha_ and
_haneha_; if they were walking and in sight _ehaha_ and _ahaha_, but,
if walking and out of sight, _ekaha_ and _akaha_; if they were lying
down, _hiriha_ and _haraha_, and so on. Moreover, these were all
"collective" forms, implying that there were others involved as well.
If "he" or "she" were alone in the matter, an entirely different set
of words was needed, "he-sitting (alone)" becoming _ynitara_, and so
forth. The modest requirements of Fuegian intercourse have called more
than twenty such separate pronouns into being.
Without attempting to go thoroughly into the efforts of primitive
speech to curtail its interest in the personnel of its world by
gradually acquiring a stock of de-individualized words, let us glance
at another aspect of the subject, because it helps to bring out the
fundamental fact that language is a social product, a means of
intersubjective intercourse developed within a society that hands on
to a new generation the verbal experiments that are found to succeed
best. Payne shows reason for believing that the collective "we"
precedes "I" in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in
America and elsewhere, "we" may be inclusive and mean "all-of-us,"
or selective, meaning "some-of-us-only." Hence, we are told, a
missionary must be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must use
the inclusive "we" in saying "we have sinned," lest the congregation
assume that only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in praying, he must
use the selective "we," or God would be included in the list of sinners.
Similarly, "I" has a collective form amongst some American languages,
and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective
form is used only in special cases. Thus if the question be "Who will
help?" the Apache will reply "I-amongst-others," "I-for-one"; but,
if he were recounting his own personal exploits, he says _sheedah_,
"I-by-myself," to show that they were wholly his own. Here we seem
to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual
self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more
normal attitude of mind.
Another illustration of the sociality engrained in primitive speech
is to be found in the terms employed to denote relationship.
"My-mother," to the child of nature, is something more than an ordinary
mother like yours. Thus, as we have already seen, there may be a special
particle applying to blood-relations as non-transferable possessions.
Or, again, one Australian language has special duals, "we-two," one
to be used between relations generally, another between father and
child only. Or an American language supplies one kind of plural suffix
for blood-relations, another for the rest of human beings. These
linguistic concretions are enough to show how hard it is for primitive
thought to disjoin what is joined fast in the world of everyday
experience.
No wonder that it is usually found impracticable by the European
traveller who lacks an anthropological training to extract from
natives any coherent account of their system of relationships; for
his questions are apt to take the form of "Can a man marry his deceased
wife's sister?" or what not. Such generalities do not enter at all
into the highly concrete scheme of viewing the customs of his tribe
imposed on the savage alike by his manner of life and by the very forms
of his speech. The so-called "genealogical method" initiated by Dr.
Rivers, which the scientific explorer now invariably employs, rests
mainly on the use of a concrete type of procedure corresponding to
the mental habits of the simple folk under investigation. John, whom
you address here, can tell you exactly whether he may, or may not,
marry Mary Anne over there; also he can point out his mother, and tell
you her name, and the names of his brothers and sisters. You work round
the whole group--it very possibly contains no more than a few hundred
members at most--and interrogate them one and all about their
relationships to this and that individual whom you name. In course
of time you have a scheme which you can treat in your own analytic
way to your heart's content; whilst against your system of reckoning
affinity you can set up by way of contrast the native system; which
can always be obtained by asking each informant what relationship-terms
he would apply to the different members of his pedigree, and,
reciprocally, what terms they would each apply to him.
* * * * *
Before closing this altogether inadequate sketch of a vast and
intricate subject, I would say just one word about the expression of
ideas of number. It is quite a mistake to suppose that savages have
no sense of number, because the simple-minded European traveller,
compiling a short vocabulary in the usual way, can get no equivalent
for our numerals, say from 5 to 10. The fact is that the numerical
interest has taken a different turn, incorporating itself with other
interests of a more concrete kind in linguistic forms to which our
own type of language affords no key at all. Thus in the island of Kiwai,
at the mouth of the Fly River in New Guinea, the Cambridge Expedition
found a whole set of phrases in vogue, whereby the number of subjects
acting on the number of objects at a given moment could be concretely
specified. To indicate the action of two on many in the past, they
said _rudo_, in the present _durudo_; of many on many in the past _rumo_,
in the present _durumo_; of two on two in the past, _amarudo_, in the
present _amadurudo_; of many on two in the past _amarumo_; of many
on three in the past _ibidurumo_, of many on three in the present
_ibidurudo_; of three on two in the present, _amabidurumo_, of three
on two in the past, _amabirumo_, and so on. Meanwhile, words to serve
the purpose of pure counting are all the scarcer because hands and
feet supply in themselves an excellent means not only of calculating,
but likewise of communicating, a number. It is the one case in which
gesture-language can claim something like an independent status by
the side of speech.
For the rest, it does not follow that the mind fails to appreciate
numerical relations, because the tongue halts in the matter of
symbolizing them abstractly. A certain high official, when presiding
over the Indian census, was informed by a subordinate that it was
impossible to elicit from a certain jungle tribe any account of the
number of their huts, for the simple and sufficient reason that they
could not count above three. The director, who happened to be a man
of keen anthropological insight, had therefore himself to come to the
rescue. Assembling the tribal elders, he placed a stone on the ground,
saying to one "This is your hut," and to another "This is your hut,"
as he placed a second stone a little way from the first. "And now where
is yours?" he asked a third. The natives at once entered into the spirit
of the game, and in a short time there was plotted out a plan of the
whole settlement, which subsequent verification proved to be both
geographically and numerically correct and complete. This story may
serve to show how nature supplies man with a ready reckoner in his
faculty of perception, which suffices well enough for the affairs of
the simpler sort of life. One knows how a shepherd can take in the
numbers of a flock at a glance. For the higher flights of experience,
however, especially when the unseen and merely possible has to be dealt
with, percepts must give way to concepts; massive consciousness must
give way to thinking by means of representations pieced together out
of elements rendered distinct by previous dissection of the total
impression; in short, a concrete must give way to an analytic way of
grasping the meaning of things. Moreover, since thinking is little
more or less than, as Plato put it, a silent conversation with oneself,
to possess an analytic language is to be more than half-way on the
road to the analytic mode of intelligence--the mode of thinking by
distinct concepts.
If there is a moral to this chapter, it must be that, whereas it is
the duty of the civilized overlords of primitive folk to leave them
their old institutions so far as they are not directly prejudicial
to their gradual advancement in culture, since to lose touch with one's
home-world is for the savage to lose heart altogether and die; yet
this consideration hardly applies at all to the native language. If
the tongue of an advanced people can be substituted, it is for the
good of all concerned. It is rather the fashion now-a-days amongst
anthropologists to lay it down as an axiom that the typical savage
and the typical peasant of Europe stand exactly on a par in respect
to their power of general intelligence. If by power we are to understand
sheer potentiality, I know of no sufficient evidence that enables us
to say whether, under ideal conditions, the average degree of mental
capacity would in the two cases prove the same or different. But I
am sure that the ordinary peasant of Europe, whose society provides
him, in the shape of an analytic language, with a ready-made instrument
for all the purposes of clear thinking, starts at an immense advantage,
as compared with a savage whose traditional speech is holophrastic.
Whatever be his mental power, the former has a much better chance of
making the most of it under the given circumstances. "Give them the
words so that the ideas may come," is a maxim that will carry us far,
alike in the education of children, and in that of the peoples of lower
culture, of whom we have charge.