VII THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF SPEECH 117 



them. But this is merely the beginning and rudiment 

 of a much wider subject, and gives us no adequate con- 

 ception of the range and interest of the great principle 

 of speech-expression, as exhibited both in the varied forms 

 of indirect imitation, but more especially by what may be 

 termed speech or mouth-gesture. During my long- 

 residence among many savage or barbarous people I first 

 observed some of these mouth-gestures, and have been 

 thereby led to detect a mode of natural expression by 

 words which is, I believe, to a large extent new, and which 

 opens up a much wider range of expressiveness in speech 

 than has hitherto been possible, giving us a clue to the 

 natural meaning of whole classes of words which are 

 usually supposed to be purely conventional. 



Mouth- gestures. 



My attention was first directed to this subject by 

 noticing that, when Malays were talking together, they 

 often indicated direction by pouting out their lips. They 

 would do this either silently, referring to something 

 already spoken or understood, but more frequently when 

 saying clisdna (there) or itu (that), thus avoiding any 

 further explanation of what was meant. At the time, I 

 did not see the important bearing of this gesture; but 

 many years afterwards, when paying some attention to 

 the imitative origin of language, it occurred to me that 

 while pronouncing the words in question, impressively, 

 the mouth would be opened and the lips naturally pro- 

 truded, while the same thing would occur with our cor- 

 responding English words there and that ; and when I saw 

 further that the French la and cela, and the German da 

 and das, had a similar open-mouthed pronunciation, it 

 seemed probable that an important principle was in- 

 volved.^ 



The next step was made on meeting with the statement, 

 that there was no apparent reason why the word go should 



^ The botanical explorer, Martins, describes lip-pointing as used 

 by certain Brazilian tribes, but he does not seem to have connected ic 

 with the character of the word accompanying the gesture, or to 

 have drawn any conclusions from it. 



