582 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



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 systems as we have actually to deal Avith. It is further 

 significant that hardly anywhere, if at all, do the interjections play 

 any but an inconsiderable, almost negligible, part m the lexical or 

 grammatical machinery of language. An appeal to the languages of 

 primitive peoples 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 jirimitive conditions, we do not 

 on the whole find either the onomatopoetic or exclamator}' elements 

 of relatively greater importance in them than elsewhere. Indeed 

 the layman would be often surprised, not to say disappointed, at the 

 almost total absence of onomatopoetic traits in many American 

 Indian languages for instance. In Chinook and related dialects of 

 the lower course of the Columbia, onomatopoesis is developed to a 

 more than usual extent, 3^et, as though to emphasize our contention 

 with an apparent paradox, hardly anywhere is the grammatical 

 mechanism of a subtler, anytliing but primitive character. We are 

 forced to conclude that the existence of onomatopoetic and exclama- 

 tory features is as little correlated with relative primitiveness as we 

 have found the use of gesture to be. As with the two theories of 

 origiii 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 survivals in 

 historically known languages; they all reduce themselves to merely 

 speculative doctrmes. 



So much for general considerations on language history. Return- 

 mg 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 wliich, 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 m pronunciation 

 should take place in the course of time by a brief consideration 

 of the process of language learning. Roughly 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 mvolved is not one of direct 

 imitation, but of indirect imitation based on inference. Any given 



