Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/178

 CHAPTER V.

EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

Element of directly expressive Sound in Language — Test by independent correspondence in distinct languages — Constituent processes of Language — Gesture — Expression of feature, &c. — Emotional Tone — Articulate sounds, vowels determined by musical quality and pitch, consonants — Emphasis and Accent — Phrase-melody, Recitative — Sound-Words — Interjections — Calls to Animals — Emotional Cries — Sense-Words formed from Interjections — Affirmative and Negative particles, &c.

carrying on the enquiry into the development of culture, evidence of some weight is to be gained from an examination of Language. Comparing the grammars and dictionaries of races at various grades of civilization, it appears that, in the great art of speech, the educated man at this day substantially uses the method of the savage, only expanded and improved in the working out of details. It is true that the languages of the Tasmanian and the Chinese, of the Greenlander and the Greek, differ variously in structure; but this is a secondary difference, underlaid by a primary similarity in method, namely, the expression of ideas by articulate sounds habitually allotted to them. Now all languages are found on inspection to contain some articulate sounds of a directly natural and directly intelligible kind. These are sounds of interjectional or imitative character, which have their meaning not by inheritance from parents of adoption from foreigners, but by being taken up directly from the world of sound into the world of sense. Like pantomimic gestures, they are capable of conveying their meaning of themselves, without reference to the