CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 169 



very keen sense of form and attitude. He may have com- 

 municated largely by gesture, depending in part on cries of 

 alarm or anger or imitative sounds for concrete things. Max 

 Miiller suggested three ways in which speech arose: first, 

 by the imitation of the sounds of animals, the so-called 

 "bow-wow" method; second, by interjections, instinctive 

 utterances called up by sensations or feelings, the "pooh- 

 pooh" method; third, by the natural phonetic accompani- 

 ment of acts performed in common, which came to stand 

 for verbs denoting the acts themselves, as heave or haul, the 

 "yo-he-ho" method. All three theories used together explain 

 in large part the origin of words in primitive languages, but 

 the explanation is not all-inclusive. Otto Jespersen proposed 

 that languages be traced backward to the earliest possible 

 sources from which a theoretical line could be projected 

 into the remote past. At the most primitive existing lan- 

 guage-levels one finds very long conglomerates of sound, in 

 contrast to the monosyllabic origin usually postulated. Early 

 man may have been a very lively babbler, singing primitive 

 chants, and full of meaningless chatter, perhaps not unhke 

 the noisy chatter of many monkeys. He probably took real 

 pleasure in just making sounds (and who would deny that 

 man still does), and with some of these sounds he came to 

 identify individuals, and objects in nature, and activities. He 

 combined words and gestures, as he also still does, and may 

 have first used the sound identified with an animal (the 

 word as a noun) and indicated the coming and going by ap- 

 propriate signs. It was much later that he acquired the 

 ability to indicate action and relationship in a formal 

 manner. 



That pre-man was probably a babbler, a noisy vocalizer, 

 is indicated by his close primate cousins, particularly the 

 gibbon and the chimpanzee. The gibbon is an incessant, 

 high-volume loudmouth, but it is not in this alone that he is 

 remarkable. Boutan was able to distinguish fourteen differ- 

 ent vocalizations in gibbons: fivt for states of pleasure and 



