HUMAN SPEECH 53 



be deductive in method ; hence, however plausible or ingenious in them- 

 selves, they have at best a merely speculative, not a genuinely scientific 

 interest. We may therefore dispense with anything like a detailed 

 inquiry into or criticism of these theories. Two of the most popular 

 of them may be respectively termed the onomatopoetic or sound-imita- 

 tive and the exclamatory theories. According to the former, the first 

 words of speech were onomatopoetic in character, that is, attempts to 

 imitate by the medium of the human organs of speech, the various cries 

 and noises of the animate and inanimate world. Thus, the idea of a 

 " hawk " would come to be -expressed by an imitative vocable based on 

 the actual screech of that bird ; the idea of a " rock " might be expressed 

 by a combination of sounds intended in a crude way to reproduce the 

 noise of a rock tumbling down hill or of a rock striking against the butt 

 of a tree; and so on indefinitely. In course of time, as these imitative 

 words by repeated use became more definitely fixed in phonetic form, 

 they would tend to take on more and more the character of conventional 

 sound-symbols, that is of words, properly speaking. The gradual pho- 

 netic modifications brought on in the further course of time would 

 finally cause them to lose their original onomatopoetic form. It may 

 be freely granted that many words, particularly certain nouns and verbs 

 having reference to auditory phenomena, may have originated in this 

 way; indeed, many languages, among them English, have at various 

 times, up to and including the present, made use of such onomatopoetic 

 words. It is difficult, however, to see how the great mass of a vocab- 

 ulary, let alone a complex system of morphology and syntax, could have 

 arisen from an onomatopoetic source alone. The very fact that 

 onomatopoetic words of relatively recent origin are found here and 

 there in sharp contrast to the overwhelmingly larger non-onomatopoetic 

 portion of the language accentuates, if anything, the difficulty of a gen- 

 eral explanation of linguistic origins by means of the onomatopoetic 

 theory. 



The exclamatory theory, as its name implies, would find the 

 earliest form of speech in reflex cries of an emotional character. These 

 also, like the hypothetical earliest words of imitative origin, would in 

 course of time become conventionalized and sooner or later so modified 

 in phonetic form as no longer to betray their exclamatory origin. The 

 criticisms urged against the onomatopoetic theory apply with perhaps 

 even greater force to the exclamatory one. It is, if anything, even more 

 difficult here than in the former case to see how a small vocabulary 

 founded on reflex cries could develop into such complex linguistic sys- 

 tems as we have actually to deal with. It is further significant that 

 hardly anywhere, if at all, do the interjections play any but an incon- 

 siderable, almost negligible, part in the lexical or grammatical ma- 

 chinery of language. An appeal to the languages of primitive peoples 



