Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/453

XI.] absurd of the many vagaries respecting language, the doctrine of the natural and inherent significance of articulate sounds.

It is quite unnecessary that we should attempt to determine the precise part played by these principles, or these different forms of the onomatopoetic principle, in generating the germs of speech. We cannot go far astray, either in overestimating or in underestimating the value of each one of them, if we bear always distinctly in mind the higher principle under which they all alike exercised their influence: namely, that the language-makers were not attempting to make a faithful depiction of their thought, but only to find for it a mutually intelligible sign; and that everything which conduced to such intelligibility would have been, and was, resorted to, and to an extent dependent on its degree of adaptedness to the purpose—the extent being a fair matter for difference of opinion, and for ascertainment by further detailed investigation, both theoretical and historical. There are many ideas which would be much more clearly intimated by a gesture, a grimace, or a tone, than by a word; and, as has been already remarked, we cannot doubt that tones, grimaces, and gestures constituted no small portion of the first sign-language, both as independently conveying meaning, and as helping to establish the desired association between articulate signs and the ideas which they were intended to signify. Language, indeed, never fully outgrows the need of their assistance: it is only the most highly developed and cultivated tongues, wielded by the most skilful writers, that can make a written passage, even when addressed to the intellect alone, as clear and effective as the same would be when well uttered, with the addition of due emphasis and inflection: and where the emotions and passions are appealed to, we have the opinion of one of the greatest word-artists of antiquity (Demosthenes) that "action" is far more than words.

We are not, of course, to look upon the imitative signs of which we have been treating as servile copies of natural sounds, or their exact reproductions. Nothing of that kind is either called for or possible. Inarticulate noises are not