54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



in order to find in them support for either of the two theories referred 

 to is of little or no avail. Aside from the fact that their elaborateness 

 of structure often seriously militates against our accepting them as 

 evidence for primitive conditions, we do not on the whole find either 

 the onomatopoetic or exclamatory elements of relatively greater impor- 

 tance in them than elsewhere. Indeed the layman would be often sur- 

 prised, not to say disappointed, at the almost total absence of onomato- 

 poetic traits in many American Indian languages, for instance. In 

 Chinook and related dialects of the lower course of the Columbia, ono- 

 matopoesis is developed to a more than usual extent, yet, as though to 

 emphasize our contention with an apparent paradox, hardly anywhere 

 is the grammatical mechanism of a subtler, anything but primitive 

 character. We are forced to conclude that the existence of onomato- 

 poetic and exclamatory features is as little correlated with relative 

 primitiveness as we have found the use of gesture to be. As with the 

 two theories of origin we have thus briefly examined, so it will be 

 found to be with other theories that have been suggested. They can 

 not, any of them, derive support from the use of the argument of sur- 

 vivals in historically known languages; they all reduce themselves to 

 merely speculative doctrines. 



So much for general considerations on language history. Eeturn- 

 ing to the gradual process of change which has been seen to be charac- 

 teristic of all speech, we may ask ourselves what is the most central or 

 basic factor in this never-ceasing flux. Undoubtedly the answer must 

 be : phonetic change or, to put it somewhat more concretely, minute or 

 at any rate relatively trivial changes in pronunciation of vowels and 

 consonants which, having crept in somehow or other, assert themselves 

 more and more and end by replacing the older pronunciation, which 

 becomes old-fashioned and finally extinct. In a general way we can 

 understand why changes in pronunciation should take place in the 

 course of time by a brief consideration of the process of language learn- 

 ing. Eoughly speaking, we learn to speak our mother-tongue by 

 imitating the daily speech of those who surround us in our childhood. 

 On second thoughts, however, it will be seen that the process involved 

 is not one of direct imitation, but of indirect imitation based on infer- 

 ence. Any given word is pronounced by a succession of various more 

 or less complicated adjustments of the speech organs. These adjust- 

 ments or articulations give rise to definite acoustic effects, effects which, 

 in their totality, constitute speech. Obviously, if the child's imitative 

 efforts were direct, it would have to copy as closely as possible the speech 

 articulations which are the direct source of what it hears. But it is 

 still more obvious that these speech articulations are largely beyond the 

 power of observation and hence imitation. It follows that the actual 

 sounds, not the articulations producing them, are imitated. This 



