Cresollius, writing in 1620, was strongly in favor of giving
precedence to gesture. He says, "Man, full of wisdom and divinity,
could have appeared nothing superior to a naked trunk or block had he
not been adorned with the hand as the interpreter and messenger of
his thoughts." He quotes with approval the brother of St. Basil in
declaring that had men been formed without hands they would never have
been endowed with an articulate voice, and concludes: "Since, then,
nature has furnished us with two instruments for the purpose of
bringing into light and expressing the silent affections of the
mind, language and the hand, it has been the opinion of learned and
intelligent men that the former would be maimed and nearly useless
without the latter; whereas the hand, without the aid of language, has
produced many and wonderful effects."
Rabelais, who incorporated into his satirical work much true learning
and philosophy, makes his hero announce the following opinion:
"Nothing less, quoth Pantagruel [Book iii, ch. xix], do I believe than
that it is a mere abusing of our understandings to give credit to
the words of those who say that there is any such thing as a natural
language. All speeches have had their primary origin from the
arbitrary institutions, accords, and agreements of nations in their
respective condescendments to what should be noted and betokened
by them. An articulate voice, according to the dialecticians, hath
naturally no signification at all; for that the sense and meaning
thereof did totally depend upon the good will and pleasure of the
first deviser and imposer of it."
Max Mueller, following Professor Heyse, of Berlin, published an
ingenious theory of primitive speech, to the effect that man had a
creative faculty giving to each conception, as it thrilled through his
brain for the first time, a special phonetic expression, which faculty
became extinct when its necessity ceased. This theory, which makes
each radical of language to be a phonetic type rung out from the
organism of the first man or men when struck by an idea, has been
happily named the "ding-dong" theory. It has been abandoned mainly
through the destructive criticisms of Prof. W.D. WHITNEY, of Yale
College. One lucid explanation by the latter should be specially
noted: "A word is a combination of sounds which by a series of
historical reasons has come to be accepted and understood in a certain
community as the sign of a certain idea. As long as they so accept
and understand it, it has existence; when everyone ceases to use and
understand it, it ceases to exist."
Several authors, among them Kaltschmidt, contend that there was
but one primitive language, which was purely onomatopoeic, that
is, imitative of natural sounds. This has been stigmatized as the
"bow-wow" theory, but its advocates might derive an argument from the
epithet itself, as not only our children, but the natives of Papua,
call the dog a "bow-wow." They have, however, gone too far in
attempting to trace back words in their shape as now existing to any
natural sounds instead of confining that work to the roots from which
the words have sprung.
Another attempt has been made, represented by Professor Noire, to
account for language by means of interjectional cries. This Max
Mueller revengefully styled the "pooh-pooh" theory. In it is included
the rhythmical sounds which a body of men make seemingly by a common
impulse when engaged in a common work, such as the cries of sailors
when hauling on a rope or pulling an oar, or the yell of savages in an
attack. It also derives an argument from the impulse of life by which
the child shouts and the bird sings. There are, however, very few
either words or roots of words which can be proved to have that
derivation.
Professor SAYCE, in his late work, _Introduction to the Science of
Language, London_, 1880, gives the origin of language in gestures,
in onomatopoeia, and to a limited extent in interjectional cries.
He concludes it to be the ordinary theory of modern comparative
philologists that all languages are traced back to a certain number
of abstract roots, each of which was a sort of sentence in embryo,
and while he does not admit this as usually presented, he believes
that there was a time in the history of speech, when the articulate
or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primitive men were made the
significant representations of thought by the gestures with which
they were accompanied. This statement is specially gratifying to the
present writer as he had advanced much the same views in his first
publication on the subject in the following paragraph, now reproduced
with greater confidence:
"From their own failures and discordancies, linguistic scholars have
recently decided that both the 'bow-wow' and the 'ding-dong' theories
are unsatisfactory; that the search for imitative, onomatopoeic, and
directly expressive sounds to explain the origin of human speech has
been too exclusive, and that many primordial roots of language have
been founded in the involuntary sounds accompanying certain actions.
As, however, the action was the essential, and the consequent
or concomitant sound the accident, it would be expected that a
representation or feigned reproduction of the action would have been
used to express the idea before the sound associated with that
action could have been separated from it. The visual onomatopoeia of
gestures, which even yet have been subjected to but slight artificial
corruption, would therefore serve as a key to the audible. It is also
contended that in the pristine days, when the sounds of the only words
yet formed had close connection with objects and the ideas directly
derived from them, signs were as much more copious for communication
than speech, as the sight embraces more and more distinct
characteristics of objects than does the sense of hearing."
_CONCLUSIONS._
The preponderance of authority is in favor of the view that man, when
in the possession of all his faculties, did not choose between voice
and gesture, both being originally instinctive, as they both are now,
and never, with those faculties, was in a state where the one was used
to the absolute exclusion of the other. The long neglected work of
Dalgarno, published in 1661, is now admitted to show wisdom when he
says: "_non minus naturale fit homini communicare in_ Figuris _quam_
Sonis: _quorum utrumque dico homini_ naturale." With the voice man
at first imitated the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he
exhibited actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions,
and distances, and their derivatives. It would appear from this
unequal division of capacity that oral speech remained rudimentary
long after gesture had become an art. With the concession of all
purely imitative sounds and of the spontaneous action of the vocal
organs under excitement, it is still true that the connection between
ideas and words generally depended upon a compact between the
speaker and hearer which presupposes the existence of a prior mode of
communication. That was probably by gesture, which, in the apposite
phrase of Professor SAYCE, "like the rope-bridges of the Himalayas or
the Andes, formed the first rude means of communication between man
and man." At the very least it may be gladly accepted provisionally as
a clue leading out of the labyrinth of philologic confusion.
For the purpose of the present paper there is, however, no need of an
absolute decision upon the priority between communication of ideas by
bodily motion and by vocal articulation. It is enough to admit that
the connection between them was so early and intimate that gestures,
in the wide sense indicated of presenting ideas under physical forms,
had a direct formative effect upon many words; that they exhibit the
earliest condition of the human mind; are traced from the remotest
antiquity among all peoples possessing records; are generally
prevalent in the savage stage of social evolution; survive agreeably
in the scenic pantomime, and still adhere to the ordinary speech of
civilized man by motions of the face, hands, head, and body, often
involuntary, often purposely in illustration or for emphasis.
It may be unnecessary to explain that none of the signs to be
described, even those of present world-wide prevalence, are presented
as precisely those of primitive man. Signs as well as words, animals,
and plants have had their growth, development, and change, their
births and deaths, and their struggle for existence with survival of
the fittest. It is, however, thought probable from reasons hereinafter
mentioned that their radicals can be ascertained with more precision
than those of words.