Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/102

 movements. For this reason the conception of natural objects evolve in such a remarkably roundabout manner from the conception of some human activity, which in one way or other called attention to them, and often brings something that is only a distant approximation to them. So the tree is something stripped of its bark, the earth something ground, the corn which grows on it something without the husk. Thus earth and sea, nay, even the clouds, the heavens themselves, emerge from the same root concept of something ground ("Der Ursprung der Sprache," pp. 151–3).

This course of the development of language is not astonishing if we grasp the fact that the first duty of language was the mutual understanding of men in common activities and common movements. This rôle of language as a help in the process of production makes it clear why language had originally so few descriptions of colour. Gladstone and others have concluded from that that the Homeric Greeks and other primitive peoples could only distinguish few colours. Nothing would be more fallacious. Experiments have shown that barbarian peoples have a very highly developed sense of colour. But their colour technic is only slightly developed, the number of colours which they can produce is small, and thence the number of their descriptions of colour is small.

"When man gets so far as to apply a colouring material then the name of this colouring material, easily takes on an adjectival character for him. In this way arises the first names of colours." (Grant Allen, "The Colour Sum," p. 254.)

Grant Allen points to the fact that even to-day the names of colours increase as the technique of colour grows. The names of the colours serve first the purpose of technic and not that of describing nature.

The development of language is not to be understood without the development of the method of production. From this latter it depends whether a language is to remain the dialect of a tiny tribe or become a world language, spoken by a hundred million men.