any sound of which the originating cause or the circumstances of production are known, brings up of course before the conception that sound, along with the originator, or circumstances of origination, or whatever else may be naturally associated with it. There are two special directions in which this mode of sign making is fruitful: imitation of the sounds of external nature (as the cries of animals and the noises of inanimate objects when in motion or acted on by other objects) and imitation of human sounds. The two are essentially one in principle, although by some held apart, or even opposed to each other, as respectively the imitative or onomatopoetic and the exclamatory or interjectional beginnings of speech; they differ only in their spheres of significance, the one being especially suggestive of external objects, the other of inward feelings. There are natural human tones, indicative of feeling, as there are natural gestures, poses, modes of facial expression, which either are iminediately intelligible to us (as is the warning cry of the hen to the dayold chicken), or have their value taught us by our earliest experiences. If we hear a cry of joy or a shriek of pain, a laugh or a groan, we need no explanation in words to tell us what it signihes any more than when we see a sad face or a drooping attitude. So also the characteristic cry or act of anything outside ourselves, if even rudely imitated, is to us an effective reminder and awakener of conception. We have no reason to question that such were the suggestions of the beginnings of uttered expression. The same means have made their contributions to language even down to our own day; we call words so produced “onomatopoetic” (i.e. “name-making”), after the example of the Greeks, who could not conceive that actually new additions to language should be made in any other way. What and how wide the range of the imitative principle, and what amount of language-signs it was capable of yielding, is a subject for special investigation—or rather, of speculation, since anything like exact knowledge in regard to it will never be attained, and the matter is one of altogether secondary consequence; it is sufficient for our purpose that enough could certainly be won in this way to serve as the effective germs of speech.
All the natural means of expression are still at our command, and are put to more or less use by us, and their products are as intelligible to us as they have been to any generation of our ancestors, back to the very first. They are analogous also to the means of communication of the lowerLanguage animals, this, so far as we know, consists in observing and interpreting one another’s movements and natural sounds (where there are such). But language is a step beyond this, and different from it. To make language, the intent to signify must be present. A cry wrung out by pain, or a laugh of amusement, though intelligible, is not language; either of them, if consciously reproduced in order to signify to another pain or pleasure, is language. So a cough within hearing of any one attracts his attention; but to cough, or to produce any other sound, articulate or inarticulate, for the purpose of attracting another’s attention, is to commit an act of language-making, such as in human history preceded in abundance the establishment of definite traditional signs for conceptions. Here begins to appear the division between human language and all brute expression, since we do not know that any animal but man ever definitely took this step. It would be highly interesting to find out just how near any come to it, and to this point ought to be especially directed the attention of those who are investigating the communication of the lower animals in its relation to human communication. Among the animals of highest intelligence that associate with man and learn something of his ways, a certain amount of sign-making expressly for communication is not to be denied, the dog that barks at a door because he knows that somebody will come and let him in is an instance of it, perhaps, in wild life, the throwing out of sentinel birds from a flock, whose warning cry shall advertise their fellows of the threat of danger, is as near an approach to it as is anywhere made
But the actual permanent beginnings of speech are only
reached when the natural basis is still further abandoned, and
signs begin to be used, not because their natural suggestiveness
is seen in them, but by imitation, from the
example of others who have been observed to use Language
Conventional.
same sign for the same purpose. Then for the
first time the means of communication becomes something
to be handed down, rather than made anew by each individual,
it takes on that traditional character which is the
essential character of all human institutions, which appears not
less in the forms of social organization, the details of religious
ceremonial, the methods of art and the arts. than in language.
That all existing speech, and all known recorded speech, is
purely traditional, cannot at all be questioned. It is proved
even by the single fact that for any given conception there are
as many different spoken signs as there are languages—say a
thousand (this number is rather far within than beyond the
truth), each of them intelligible to him who has learned to use
it and to associate it with the conception to which it belongs,
but unintelligible to the users of the nine hundred and ninety nine
other signs, as these are all unintelligible to him; unless,
indeed, he learn a few of them also, even as at the beginning he
learned the one that he calls his own. What single sign, and
what set of signs any individual shall use, depends upon the
community into the midst of which he is cast, by birth or other
circumstances, during his first years. That it does not depend
upon his race is demonstrated by facts the most numerous and
various; the African whose purity of descent is attested by every
feature is found all over the world speaking just that language,
or jargon, into the midst of which the fates of present or former
slavery have brought his parents; every civilized community
contains elements of various lineage, combined into one by
unity of speech; and instances are frequent enough where whole
nations speak a tongue of which their ancestors knew nothing;
for example, the Celtic Gauls and the Germanic Normans of
France speak the dialect of a geographically insignificant district
in central Italy, while we ourselves can hardly utter a sentence
or write a line without bringing in more or less of that same
dialect. There is not an item of any tongue of which we know
anything that is “natural” expression, or to the possession of
which its speaker is brought by birth instead of by education;
there is even very little that is trace ably founded on such
natural expression; everywhere θέσις or human attribution
reigns supreme, and the original θύσις or natural significance
has disappeared and is only to be found by theoretic induction
(as we have found it above). It seems to some as if a name like
cuckoo (one of the most striking available cases of onomatopoeia)
were a “natural” one; but there is just as much θέσις in it as
in any other name, it implies the observation of an aggregate of
qualities in a certain bird, and the selection of one among them
as the convenient basis of a mutual understanding when the bird
is in question; every animal conspicuous to us must have its
designation, won in one way or another; and in this case to
imitate the characteristic cry is the most available way. If
anything but convenience and availability were involved, all
our names for animals would have to be and to remain imitations
of the sounds they make. That the name of cuckoo is applied
also to the female and young, and at other than the singing
season, and then to related species which do not make the same
sound-all helps to show the essentially conventional character
of even this name. An analogous process of elimination of
original meaning, and reduction to the value of conventional
designation merely, is to be seen in every part of language
throughout its whole history. Since men ceased to derive their
names from signs having a natural suggestiveness, and began
to make them from other names already in use with an understood
value, every new name has had its etymology and its
historical occasion—as, for example, the name quarantine from
the two-score (quarantaine) of days of precautionary confinement,
or volume from its being rolled up, or book from a beechwood
staff, or copper from Cyprus, or lunacy from a fancied
influence of the moon, or priest from being an older (πρεβύτερος)
person, or butterfly from the butter-yellow colour of a certain
