Chapter 5

LANGUAGE

The differentia of man--the quality that marks him off from the other animal kinds--is undoubtedly the power of articulate speech. Thereby his mind itself becomes articulate. If language is ultimately a creation of the intellect, yet hardly less fundamentally is the intellect a creation of language. As flesh depends on bone, so does the living tissue of our spiritual life depend on its supporting framework of steadfast verbal forms. The genius, the heaven-born benefactor of humanity, is essentially he who wrestles with "thoughts too deep for words," until at last he assimilates them to the scheme of meanings embodied in his mother-tongue, and thus raises them definitely above the threshold of the common consciousness, which is likewise the threshold of the common culture.

There is good reason, then, for prefixing a short chapter on language to an account of those factors in the life of man that together stand on the whole for the principle of freedom--of rational self-direction. Heredity and environment do not, indeed, lie utterly beyond the range of our control. As they are viewed from the standpoint of human history as a whole, they show each in its own fashion a certain capacity to meet the needs and purposes of the life-force halfway. Regarded abstractly, however, they may conveniently be treated as purely passive and limiting conditions. Here we are with a constitution not of our choosing, and in a world not of our choosing. Given this inheritance, and this environment, how are we, by taking thought and taking risks, to achieve the best-under-the-circumstances? Such is the vital problem as it presents itself to any particular generation of men.

The environment is as it were the enemy. We are out to conquer and enslave it. Our inheritance, on the other hand, is the impelling force we obey in setting forth to fight; it tingles in our blood, and nerves the muscles of our arm. This force of heredity, however, abstractly considered, is blind. Yet, corporately and individually, we fight with eyes that see. This supervening faculty, then, of utilizing the light of experience represents a third element in the situation; and, from the standpoint of man's desire to know himself, the supreme element. The environment, inasmuch as under this conception are included all other forms of life except man, can muster on its side a certain amount of intelligence of a low order. But man's prerogative is to dominate his world by the aid of intelligence of a high order. When he defied the ice-age by the use of fire, when he outfaced and outlived the mammoth and the cave bear, he was already the rational animal, _homo sapiens_. In his way he thought, even in those far-off days. And therefore we may assume, until direct evidence is forthcoming to the contrary, that he likewise had language of an articulate kind. He tried to make a speech, we may almost say, as soon as he had learned to stand up on his hind legs.

Unfortunately, we entirely lack the means of carrying back the history of human speech to its first beginnings. In the latter half of the last century, whilst the ferment of Darwinism was freshly seething, all sorts of speculations were rife concerning the origin of language. One school sought the source of the earliest words in imitative sounds of the type of bow-wow; another in interjectional expressions of the type of tut-tut. Or, again, as was natural in Europe, where, with the exception of Basque in a corner of the west, and of certain Asiatic languages, Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish, on the eastern border, all spoken tongues present certain obvious affinities, the comparative philologist undertook to construct sundry great families of speech; and it was hoped that sooner or later, by working back to some linguistic parting of the ways, the central problem would be solved of the dispersal of the world's races.

These painted bubbles have burst. The further examination of the forms of speech current amongst peoples of rude culture has not revealed a conspicuous wealth either of imitative or of interjectional sounds. On the other hand, the comparative study of the European, or, as they must be termed in virtue of the branch stretching through Persia into India, the Indo-European stock of languages, carries us back three or four thousand years at most--a mere nothing in terms of anthropological time. Moreover, a more extended search through the world, which in many of its less cultured parts furnishes no literary remains that may serve to illustrate linguistic evolution, shows endless diversity of tongues in place of the hoped-for system of a few families; so that half a hundred apparently independent types must be distinguished in North America alone. For the rest, it has become increasingly clear that race and language need not go together at all. What philologist, for instance, could ever discover, if he had no history to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modern French, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by way of blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquest caused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtic tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, ousted some earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to the still surviving Basque; though it is not in the least necessary, therefore, to suppose that the Celtic-speaking invaders wiped out the previous inhabitants of the land to a corresponding extent. Races, in short, mix readily; languages, except in very special circumstances, hardly at all.

Disappointed in its hope of presiding over the reconstruction of the distant past of man, the study of language has in recent years tended somewhat to renounce the historical--that is to say, anthropological--method altogether. The alternative is a purely formal treatment of the subject. Thus, whereas vocabularies seem hopelessly divergent in their special contents, the general apparatus of vocal expression is broadly the same everywhere. That all men alike communicate by talking, other symbols and codes into which thoughts can be translated, such as gestures, the various kinds of writing, drum-taps, smoke signals, and so on, being in the main but secondary and derivative, is a fact of which the very universality may easily blind us to its profound significance. Meanwhile, the science of phonetics--having lost that "guid conceit of itself" which once led it to discuss at large whether the art of talking evolved at a single geographical centre, or at many centres owing to similar capacities of body and mind--contents itself now-a-days for the most part with conducting an analytic survey of the modes of vocal expression as correlated with the observed tendencies of the human speech-organs. And what is true of phonetics in particular is hardly less true of comparative philology as a whole. Its present procedure is in the main analytic or formal. Thus its fundamental distinction between isolating, agglutinative and inflectional languages is arrived at simply by contrasting the different ways in which words are affected by being put together into a sentence. No attempt is made to show that one type of arrangement normally precedes another in time, or that it is in any way more rudimentary--that is to say, less adapted to the needs of human intercourse. It is not even pretended that a given language is bound to exemplify one, and one alone, of these three types; though the process known as analogy--that is, the regularizing of exceptions by treating the unlike as if it were like--will always be apt to establish one system at the expense of the rest.

If, then, the study of language is to recover its old pre-eminence amongst anthropological studies, it looks as if a new direction must be given to its inquiries. And there is much to be said for any change that would bring about this result. Without constant help from the philologist, anthropology is bound to languish. To thoroughly understand the speech of the people under investigation is the field-worker's master-key; so much so, that the critic's first question in determining the value of an ethnographical work must always be, Could the author talk freely with the natives in their own tongue? But how is the study of particular languages to be pursued successfully, if it lack the stimulus and inspiration which only the search for general principles can impart to any branch of science? To relieve the hack-work of compiling vocabularies and grammars, there must be present a sense of wider issues involved, and such issues as may directly interest a student devoted to language for its own sake. The formal method of investigating language, in the meantime, can hardly supply the needed spur. Analysis is all very well so long as its ultimate purpose is to subserve genesis--that is to say, evolutionary history. If, however, it tries to set up on its own account, it is in danger of degenerating into sheer futility. Out of time and history is, in the long run, out of meaning and use. The philologist, then, if he is to help anthropology, must himself be an anthropologist, with a full appreciation of the importance of the historical method. He must be able to set each language or group of languages that he studies in its historical setting. He must seek to show how it has evolved in relation to the needs of a given time. In short, he must correlate words with thoughts; must treat language as a function of the social life.

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Here, however, it is not possible to attempt any but the most general characterization of primitive language as it throws light on the workings of the primitive intelligence. For one reason, the subject is highly technical; for another reason, our knowledge about most types of savage speech is backward in the extreme; whilst, for a third and most far-reaching reason of all, many peoples, as we have seen, are not speaking the language truly native to their powers and habits of mind, but are expressing themselves in terms imported from another stock, whose spiritual evolution has been largely different. Thus it is at most possible to contrast very broadly and generally the more rudimentary with the more advanced methods that mankind employs for the purpose of putting its experience into words. Happily the careful attention devoted by American philologists to the aboriginal languages of their continent has resulted in the discovery of certain principles which the rest of our evidence, so far as it goes, would seem to stamp as of world-wide application. The reader is advised to study the most stimulating, if perhaps somewhat speculative, pages on language in the second volume of E.J. Payne's _History of the New World called America_; or, if he can wrestle with the French tongue, to compare the conclusions here reached with those to which Professor Levy-Bruhl is led, largely by the consideration of this same American group of languages, in his recent work, _Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Societes Inferieures_ ("Mental Functions in the Lower Societies").

If the average man who had not looked into the matter at all were asked to say what sort of language he imagined a savage to have, he would be pretty sure to reply that in the first place the vocabulary would be very small, and in the second place that it would consist of very short, comprehensive terms--roots, in fact--such as "man," "bear," "eat," "kill," and so on. Nothing of the sort is actually the case. Take the inhabitants of that cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, whose culture is as rude as that of any people on earth. A scholar who tried to put together a dictionary of their language found that he had got to reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressing a large number of forms of lesser importance. And no wonder that the tally mounted up. For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, some containing four syllables, to express what for us would be either "he" or "she"; then they had two names for the sun, two for the moon, and two more for the full moon, each of the last-named containing four syllables and having no element in common. Sounds, in fact, are with them as copious as ideas are rare. Impressions, on the other hand, are, of course, infinite in number. By means of more or less significant sounds, then, Fuegian society compounds impressions, and that somewhat imperfectly, rather than exchanges ideas, which alone are the currency of true thought.

For instance, I-cut-bear's-leg-at-the-joint-with-a-flint-now corresponds fairly well with the total impression produced by the particular act; though, even so, I have doubtless selectively reduced the notion to something I can comfortably take in, by leaving out a lot of unnecessary detail--for instance, that I was hungry, in a hurry, doing it for the benefit of others as well as myself, and so on. Well, American languages of the ruder sort, by running a great number of sounds or syllables together, manage to utter a portmanteau word--"holophrase" is the technical name for it--into which is packed away enough suggestions to reproduce the situation in all its detail, the cutting, the fact that I did it, the object, the instrument, the time of the cutting, and who knows what besides. Amusing examples of such portmanteau words meet one in all the text-books. To go back to the Fuegians, their expression _mamihlapinatapai_ is said to mean "to look at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do." Now, since exactly the same situation never recurs, but is partly the same and partly different, it is clear that, if the holophrase really tried to hit off in each case the whole outstanding impression that a given situation provoked, then the same combination of sounds would never recur either; one could never open one's mouth without coining a new word. Ridiculous as this notion sounds, it may serve to mark a downward limit from which the rudest types of human speech are not so very far removed. Their well-known tendency to alter their whole character in twenty years or less is due largely to the fluid nature of primitive utterance; it being found hard to detach portions, capable of repeated use in an unchanged form, from the composite vocables wherein they register their highly concrete experiences.

Thus in the old Huron-Iroquois language _eschoirhon_ means "I-have-been-to-the-water," _setsanha_ "Go-to-the-water," _ondequoha_ "There-is-water-in-the-bucket," _daustantewacharet_ "There-is-water-in-the-pot." In this case there is said to have been a common word for "water," _awen_, which, moreover, is somehow suggested to an aboriginal ear as an element contained in each of these longer forms. In many other cases the difficulty of isolating the common meaning, and fixing it by a common term, has proved too much altogether for a primitive language. You can express twenty different kinds of cutting; but you simply cannot say "cut" at all. No wonder that a large vocabulary is found necessary, when, as in Zulu, "my father," "thy father," "his-or-her-father," are separate polysyllables without any element in common.

The evolution of language, then, on this view, may be regarded as a movement out of, and away from, the holophrastic in the direction of the analytic. When every piece in your play-box of verbal bricks can be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts of ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions to your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and still more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building. Ideally, words should be individual and atomic. Every modification they suffer by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tacked on to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrifice of distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly, even whilst employing the clearest type of language; though in such a case it is very hard to do so without being quickly brought to book. On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain to a high degree of clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that tends towards wordlessness--that is to say, is relatively deficient in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts. Wordless thinking is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its somewhat restricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, as it were, of a clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact that the words are crystallized into permanent shape invests them with a suggestion of interrupted continuity, an overtone of un-utilized significance, that of itself invites the mind to play with the corresponding fringe of meaning attaching to the concepts that the words embody.

It would prove an endless task if I were to try here to illustrate at all extensively the stickiness, as one might almost call it, of primitive modes of speech. Person, number, case, tense, mood and gender--all these, even in the relatively analytical phraseology of the most cultured peoples, are apt to impress themselves on the very body of the words of which they qualify the sense. But the meagre list of determinations thus produced in an evolved type of language can yield one no idea of the vast medley of complicated forms that serve the same ends at the lower levels of human experience. Moreover, there are many other shades of secondary and circumstantial meaning which in advanced languages are invariably represented by distinct words, so that when not wanted they can be left out, but in a more primitive tongue are apt to run right through the very grammar of the sentence, thus mixing themselves up inextricably with the really substantial elements in the thought to be conveyed. For instance, in some American languages, things are either animate or inanimate, and must be distinguished accordingly by accompanying particles. Or, again, they are classed by similar means as rational or irrational; women, by the bye, being designated amongst the Chiquitos by the irrational sign. Reverential particles, again, are used to distinguish what is high or low in the tribal estimation; and we get in this connection such oddities as the Tamil practice of restricting the privilege of having a plural to high-caste names, such as those applied to gods and human beings, as distinguished from the beasts, which are mere casteless "things." Or, once more, my transferable belongings, "my-spear," or "my-canoe," undergo verbal modifications which are denied to non-transferable possessions such as "my-hand"; "my-child," be it observed, falling within the latter class.

Most interesting of all are distinctions of person. These cannot but bite into the forms of speech, since the native mind is taken up mostly with the personal aspect of things, attaining to the conception of a bloodless system of "its" with the greatest difficulty, if at all. Even the third person, which is naturally the most colourless, because excluded from a direct part of the conversational game, undergoes multitudinous leavening in the light of conditions which the primitive mind regards as highly important, whereas we should banish them from our thoughts as so much irrelevant "accident." Thus the Abipones in the first place distinguished "he-present," _eneha_, and "she-present," _anaha_, from "he-absent" and "she-absent." But presence by itself gave too little of the speaker's impression. So, if "he" or "she" were sitting, it was necessary to say _hiniha_ and _haneha_; if they were walking and in sight _ehaha_ and _ahaha_, but, if walking and out of sight, _ekaha_ and _akaha_; if they were lying down, _hiriha_ and _haraha_, and so on. Moreover, these were all "collective" forms, implying that there were others involved as well. If "he" or "she" were alone in the matter, an entirely different set of words was needed, "he-sitting (alone)" becoming _ynitara_, and so forth. The modest requirements of Fuegian intercourse have called more than twenty such separate pronouns into being.

Without attempting to go thoroughly into the efforts of primitive speech to curtail its interest in the personnel of its world by gradually acquiring a stock of de-individualized words, let us glance at another aspect of the subject, because it helps to bring out the fundamental fact that language is a social product, a means of intersubjective intercourse developed within a society that hands on to a new generation the verbal experiments that are found to succeed best. Payne shows reason for believing that the collective "we" precedes "I" in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere, "we" may be inclusive and mean "all-of-us," or selective, meaning "some-of-us-only." Hence, we are told, a missionary must be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must use the inclusive "we" in saying "we have sinned," lest the congregation assume that only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in praying, he must use the selective "we," or God would be included in the list of sinners. Similarly, "I" has a collective form amongst some American languages, and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases. Thus if the question be "Who will help?" the Apache will reply "I-amongst-others," "I-for-one"; but, if he were recounting his own personal exploits, he says _sheedah_, "I-by-myself," to show that they were wholly his own. Here we seem to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more normal attitude of mind.

Another illustration of the sociality engrained in primitive speech is to be found in the terms employed to denote relationship. "My-mother," to the child of nature, is something more than an ordinary mother like yours. Thus, as we have already seen, there may be a special particle applying to blood-relations as non-transferable possessions. Or, again, one Australian language has special duals, "we-two," one to be used between relations generally, another between father and child only. Or an American language supplies one kind of plural suffix for blood-relations, another for the rest of human beings. These linguistic concretions are enough to show how hard it is for primitive thought to disjoin what is joined fast in the world of everyday experience.

No wonder that it is usually found impracticable by the European traveller who lacks an anthropological training to extract from natives any coherent account of their system of relationships; for his questions are apt to take the form of "Can a man marry his deceased wife's sister?" or what not. Such generalities do not enter at all into the highly concrete scheme of viewing the customs of his tribe imposed on the savage alike by his manner of life and by the very forms of his speech. The so-called "genealogical method" initiated by Dr. Rivers, which the scientific explorer now invariably employs, rests mainly on the use of a concrete type of procedure corresponding to the mental habits of the simple folk under investigation. John, whom you address here, can tell you exactly whether he may, or may not, marry Mary Anne over there; also he can point out his mother, and tell you her name, and the names of his brothers and sisters. You work round the whole group--it very possibly contains no more than a few hundred members at most--and interrogate them one and all about their relationships to this and that individual whom you name. In course of time you have a scheme which you can treat in your own analytic way to your heart's content; whilst against your system of reckoning affinity you can set up by way of contrast the native system; which can always be obtained by asking each informant what relationship-terms he would apply to the different members of his pedigree, and, reciprocally, what terms they would each apply to him.

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Before closing this altogether inadequate sketch of a vast and intricate subject, I would say just one word about the expression of ideas of number. It is quite a mistake to suppose that savages have no sense of number, because the simple-minded European traveller, compiling a short vocabulary in the usual way, can get no equivalent for our numerals, say from 5 to 10. The fact is that the numerical interest has taken a different turn, incorporating itself with other interests of a more concrete kind in linguistic forms to which our own type of language affords no key at all. Thus in the island of Kiwai, at the mouth of the Fly River in New Guinea, the Cambridge Expedition found a whole set of phrases in vogue, whereby the number of subjects acting on the number of objects at a given moment could be concretely specified. To indicate the action of two on many in the past, they said _rudo_, in the present _durudo_; of many on many in the past _rumo_, in the present _durumo_; of two on two in the past, _amarudo_, in the present _amadurudo_; of many on two in the past _amarumo_; of many on three in the past _ibidurumo_, of many on three in the present _ibidurudo_; of three on two in the present, _amabidurumo_, of three on two in the past, _amabirumo_, and so on. Meanwhile, words to serve the purpose of pure counting are all the scarcer because hands and feet supply in themselves an excellent means not only of calculating, but likewise of communicating, a number. It is the one case in which gesture-language can claim something like an independent status by the side of speech.

For the rest, it does not follow that the mind fails to appreciate numerical relations, because the tongue halts in the matter of symbolizing them abstractly. A certain high official, when presiding over the Indian census, was informed by a subordinate that it was impossible to elicit from a certain jungle tribe any account of the number of their huts, for the simple and sufficient reason that they could not count above three. The director, who happened to be a man of keen anthropological insight, had therefore himself to come to the rescue. Assembling the tribal elders, he placed a stone on the ground, saying to one "This is your hut," and to another "This is your hut," as he placed a second stone a little way from the first. "And now where is yours?" he asked a third. The natives at once entered into the spirit of the game, and in a short time there was plotted out a plan of the whole settlement, which subsequent verification proved to be both geographically and numerically correct and complete. This story may serve to show how nature supplies man with a ready reckoner in his faculty of perception, which suffices well enough for the affairs of the simpler sort of life. One knows how a shepherd can take in the numbers of a flock at a glance. For the higher flights of experience, however, especially when the unseen and merely possible has to be dealt with, percepts must give way to concepts; massive consciousness must give way to thinking by means of representations pieced together out of elements rendered distinct by previous dissection of the total impression; in short, a concrete must give way to an analytic way of grasping the meaning of things. Moreover, since thinking is little more or less than, as Plato put it, a silent conversation with oneself, to possess an analytic language is to be more than half-way on the road to the analytic mode of intelligence--the mode of thinking by distinct concepts.

If there is a moral to this chapter, it must be that, whereas it is the duty of the civilized overlords of primitive folk to leave them their old institutions so far as they are not directly prejudicial to their gradual advancement in culture, since to lose touch with one's home-world is for the savage to lose heart altogether and die; yet this consideration hardly applies at all to the native language. If the tongue of an advanced people can be substituted, it is for the good of all concerned. It is rather the fashion now-a-days amongst anthropologists to lay it down as an axiom that the typical savage and the typical peasant of Europe stand exactly on a par in respect to their power of general intelligence. If by power we are to understand sheer potentiality, I know of no sufficient evidence that enables us to say whether, under ideal conditions, the average degree of mental capacity would in the two cases prove the same or different. But I am sure that the ordinary peasant of Europe, whose society provides him, in the shape of an analytic language, with a ready-made instrument for all the purposes of clear thinking, starts at an immense advantage, as compared with a savage whose traditional speech is holophrastic. Whatever be his mental power, the former has a much better chance of making the most of it under the given circumstances. "Give them the words so that the ideas may come," is a maxim that will carry us far, alike in the education of children, and in that of the peoples of lower culture, of whom we have charge.