VARIETIES OF HUMAN SPEECH — SAPIR. 581 



In spite of the fact that, as we have seen, no tangible e^adence can 

 be brought to bear on the ultimate origin or origins of speech, many .at- 

 tempts have been made, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth 

 century, when it was more common for historical and philosoj^hical 

 problems of extreme difficulty to be attacked with alacrity, to point 

 out the way in which human speech originated or at least might have 

 originated. From the very nature of the case these attempts could 

 not but be deductive in method; hence, however plausible or in- 

 genious in themselves, 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-imitative and the exclamatory theories. 

 According to the former, the first words of speech were onomato- 

 poetic 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 imi- 

 tative words by repeated use became more definitely fixed in phonetic 

 form, they would tend to take on more and more the character of con- 

 ventional sound symbols; that is, of words, properly spealdng. The 

 gradual phonetic 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 cer- 

 tain 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 vocabulary, let alone a complex system 

 of morphology and syntax, could have arisen from an onomato- 

 poetic 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 difficidty of a general explana- 

 tion of linguistic origins by means of th(^. 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 modi- 

 fied in phonetic form as no longer to betray their exclamatory origui. 

 85360°— SM 1912 38 



