Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/450

428 thought tends to burst into expression by an internal impulse, instead of under an external inducement; and with this it couples the gratuitous assumption that the impulse ceased to act when a first start had thus been given to the development of human speech. In effect, it explains the origin of language by a miracle, a special and exceptional capacity having been conferred for the purpose upon the first men, and withdrawn again from their descendants. The formation of language is never over in any such manner as should release an instinct like this from farther service, if it really existed in human nature. New cognitions and deductions still thrill through the brains of men, yet without setting their tongues swinging, any more than their fingers working. In all our investigations of language, we find nothing which should lead us to surmise that an intellectual apprehension could ever, by an internal process, become transmuted into an articulated sound or complex of sounds. We do, indeed, see that what strongly affects the emotional nature prompts utterance, as it also prompts gesture: fear, surprise, joy, lead to exclamations; and delight at a new cognition might iind vent in an interjection; but this interjection would express the delight, not the cognition; if language commenced in such a way, the historical beginnings of speech would be names of emotions, not of the qualities of objects.

The fatal weakness of such attempts as this to explain the earliest steps in the formation of language lies in the fact that they would fain discover there some force at work differing entirely from that which directs the whole aftercourse of linguistic development. We, on the contrary, having fully recognized the truth that all language-making, through the long recorded periods of linguistic history, consists in a succession of attempts to find an intelligible sign for a conception which the mind has formed and desires to communicate, must look to find the same principle operative also at the very outset of that history.

Regarding the matter in this light, we shall not fail to see clearly what and how much value we are to ascribe to the other two theories, the onomatopoetic and the interjectional.