THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE ' 



By R. L. Jones 



Research Laboratories of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 

 and the Western Electric Company, Incorporated 



Primitive man, when he wished to communicate, probably ex- 

 pressed himself by grimaces, vocal sounds, and gestures. Although 

 each of these three agencies is still somewhat employed, the combi- 

 nation of voice and ear has been subconsciously evolved and has 

 survived as economical, most flexible in its capacity for variation, 

 and superior in perceptibility. 



According to modern philologists, early utterances were song- 

 like and poetic accompaniments of excited or pleasurable emotion, 

 rich in sound and rhythm but without very definite meaning. The 

 motives for utterance gradually changed, the process of associating 

 sense with sound began, and speech and song came to be differ- 

 entiated. 



Primitive languages, in general, consisted mostly of long words 

 Avith many difficult sounds. Certain exclamatory sounds came 

 readily to designate personal feelings. Echo words, mimicing na- 

 ture, came to designate natural sounds or the manner or source of 

 their production. Names of persons and objects were an early 

 development. Most words, however, have had a more obscure and 

 complex history. Evolution has tended to shorten word forms and 

 to drop sounds hard to pronounce or to hear. 



As man's powers of analysis have developed language has become 

 more flexible and capable of greater range of expression. The 

 grammar of language in general has become simpler and more sys- 

 tematic. 



Men in different parts of the earth have evolved differentiated 

 languages, any one of which is now based hardly at all upon natural 

 suggestiveness but rather upon traditional understandings gradually 

 accumulated. Each language has its own system of elementary 



1 Presented before the foUowing sections of the American Institute of Electi-ical Engi- 

 neers : Milwaukee Section, Jan. 11, 1923 ; Cleveland Section, Jan. 23, 1923 ; Washington 

 Section, Feb. 13, 1923. Reprinted by permission from Journal of the American Institute 

 of Electrical Engineers, April, 1924. 



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