Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/459

Rh now we perceived that the same qualities had attached from the very outset to the signs chosen for expression; that, as there is at present no internal and necessary reason why we employ one particular complex of sounds rather than another as the representative of a particular idea, so there had never been any such reason; that words never meant thoughts, but always simply designated them. It had formerly appeared to us that, although there has been in every case an etymological reason for a word, this reason is one of convenience only, founded in the prior acquisitions and habitudes of the word-makers; efficient, indeed, at the moment of origination of the word, whose association with the intended meaning it is instrumental in initiating, but idle when the association has once been formed, and therefore soon neglected by the language-users, and often forgotten beyond power of recovery—and now we were brought to acknowledge that the very first words had only a similar reason, being such utterances as the natural endowments and habits of man, his imitative faculty and his tendency to exclaim, made the feasible means of arriving at a mutual comprehension between utterer and listener. Onomatopœia, in all its varieties of application, thus came in at the outset, aided and supplemented by tone and gesture, to help the language-makers to find intelligible signs, but ceased to control the history of each sign when once this had become understood and conventionally accepted; while the productive efficiency of the principle gradually diminished and died out as a stock of signs was accumulated sufficient to serve as the germs of speech, and to increase by combination and differentiation. Thus, as mutual intelligibility had been before proved to be the only test of the unity of language, and its necessity the force that conserved linguistic unity, it was further demonstrated that the desire to understand and be understood by one another was the impulse which acted directly to call forth language. In all its stages of growth alike, then, speech is strictly a social institution; as the speaking man, when reduced to solitude, unlearns its use, so the solitary man would never have formed it. We may extol as much as we please, without risk of exaggeration, the