Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/153

 LANGUAGE 147 maintain, like T. Hewitt Key in his "Language, its Origin and Development" (London, 1874), that " the Mosaic account expressly assigns the immediate invention to Adam." Steinthal's objection to the theory of the divine origin of language, namely, that if language had been created in' the first human beings, their children could not have gained possession of it, for the reason that what God gives to one as a special endowment no other is able to learn from him, is an argument beyond human reason either to accept or to refute. Benfey says (Geschich- te der Sprachwissenschaft, &c., Munich, 1869) that the question of the origin of language lies beyond the province of the science of language, and belongs to the natural sciences. He argues that if these establish that mankind is not the offspring of a single human couple, it will be impossible to uphold the doctrine of the ori- ginal unity of all human speech ; and that if they prove that man could not have appeared upon earth otherwise than as a single couple, it will be impossible to establish the original diversity of speech, unless it be assumed that the first human beings were speechless. Many authorities now hold that man was originally speechless, and Jager, Bleek, Schleicher, Fr. Mtiller, and others, have recently attempted to explain the origin of language after the Dar- winian theory of development. The fact that at least nineteen twentieths of speech is de- monstrably man's own work, has led Prof. Whitney to ask ("Language and the Study of Language," New York, 1867), "Why should the remaining twentieth be thought other- wise?" Those who consider language an art handed down and developed from generation to generation, and who hold that in retracing its history we must arrive at a generation which could not speak, nevertheless experience great difficulties in theorizing on the natural causes and the nature of the beginnings of language. The ancients held the theory that words were originally formed by imitations of natural sounds. They called this principle of coining words onomatopoeia, word-making. (See Lersch, Sprachphilosophie der Alten, Bonn, 1838-'41.) It cannot be denied that every language has a stock of words which are imita- tions of sounds given out by certain things or animate beings. The cuckoo, the peewit, the whip-poor-will of North America, and the tuco- tuco of South America, are irresistible examples of this law. But, says Hewitt Key, here one is at once met by the objection that though such an origin is readily conceived in the case of giving names to living creatures, or to those acts which have their special, noise, as scratch- ing, thumping, hissing, yet how can provision be made for terms which belong to the other senses, as for example that of the eye, and still more for the conceptions of the mind? Such objections are not considered unanswerable. The noise whirr is believed to serve as a nat- ural symbol of the idea of revolution, and thus the German has wirren, to twist, the French mrer, the English veer, and to wear (of a ship). The same sound forms an important part of whirl, whorl, world (the round globe), warp, worm in the double sense of the wriggling creature so called and the helix of a screw, and wort in the sense of root, as spiderwort. It is also heard in the initial letters of writhe, wreath, wrench, wrest, wring, wrist, wriggle, wrap, wry. Similar examples of the recur- rence of natural sounds in numerous words expressive of abstract or concrete ideas, seem- ingly remote from the original ideas connected with such sounds, may be found in all known languages. Of course it is not maintained, as Blackie expressly says in his Iforce Hellenic, (London, 1874), that all current words are to be explained on this principle alone. It is maintained only that the original stock of which language was made up consisted of such roots, and that a large proportion of them, after the changes of thousands of years, bear -their origin distinctly on their face. Max Mtil- ler. ridiculed this view of language, generally known as the mimetic theory, as " the bow- wow theory," without being able to disprove the justice of its application. In his " Lectures ' on the Science of Language" (London, 1863), he advocates another theory, namely, that man was endowed with a creative faculty which gave to various conceptions phonetic expres- sions, and hence that there were at first only a few roots of words expressive of general ideas, under which man classified his particular or spe- cial ideas, so that such class of words retains in all languages some phonetic type. This mystic doctrine of " phonetic types," first propound- ed by Heyse, to which for a time, after Max Mtiller's elaboration, great favor was shown, has now been generally discarded, and even by Max Muller himself. It is evident to every sober thinker, says Wilkins in the " Essays and Addresses by Professors and Lecturers of the Owens College, Manchester " (London, 1874), that the solution of the problem of the origin- of language must reside "in some operation of the imitative principle, quickened in all proba- bility by circumstances which we are able to a certain extent to reconstruct, and aided, at first very largely, but always in lessening measure, by the language of sign and gesture." The onomatopoetic or mimetic theory is greatly assisted by, or rather includes, the interjec- tional or exclamatory theory, elaborated by Wedgwood in his " Origin of Language" (Lon- don, 1866). For example, the interjection jfo / pfui ! is in all probability the physical effect of disgust at an offensive smell, which makes us close the passage of the nose and breathe strongly through the compressed lips faugh ! and hence the Icelandic fui, putridity, with the adjective /M^, foul, and our secondary adjective fulsome. It has been justly observed that a considerable number of the so-called interjec- tions are but imperatives of verbs, often greatly abbreviated ; nevertheless, it must be acknowl- edged that the mimetic and exclamatory theories