Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/448

426 once. In short, they would be such rudiments of speech, rather than parts of speech, as we have already found the radical elements of language to be.

Thus we see that the necessary conditions of the act of production of our language, as being the creation of a spoken sign for mutual intelligence between speaker and hearer, determine the kind of significance belonging to the first produced words. An acted sign, and a language of such, would have been of the same quality. While, on the other hand, a language of written characters, beginning with pictorial signs, would be of a very different structure: its first words would be designations of concrete sensible objects—since drawings are fitted to suggest concrete objects rather than their individual qualities—and, from these, designations of qualities would have to be arrived at by secondary processes.

Our reasonings have now at length brought us very near to a positive conclusion respecting the mode of genesis of even the first beginnings of spoken speech. But, rather than follow them farther, to a yet more definite result, we will proceed to examine the various theories that have been framed to explain how men should have found out what their voice was given them for, and should have begun to apply it to its proper uses, producing with it significant words.

Of such theories there are three which are especially worthy of note. The first holds that the earliest names of objects and actions were produced by imitation of natural sounds: animals, for instance, were denominated from their characteristic utterances, as, with us, the cuckoo is so named: the dog was called a bow-wow, the sheep a baa, the cow a moo, and so on; while the many noises of inanimate nature, as the whistling of the wind, the rustling of leaves, the gurgling and splashing of water, the cracking and crashing of heavy falling objects, suggested in like manner imitative utterances which were applied to designate them; and that by such means a sufficient store of radical words was originated to serve as the germs of language. This is called the onomatopoetic theory. The second is to this effect: that the natural sounds which we utter when in a state of excited feeling, the oh's and ah's, the pooh's and pshaw's, are the