REDUPLICATION OF SOUNDS 



history of the language, by fusion of the elements together, 

 and by virtue of the tendency to alteration in the roots, was 

 produced dhadhdmi (in Sanskrit dddlidmi, Old Bactrian 

 dadhdmi, Greek riByiu, Old High German tdm, tuom for 

 titdmi, modern High German, thue)." 



I think the above completely justifies me in speaking of 

 the sounds uttered by blackbirds as their language. " Dag, 

 dag, dag," is as good a sound as " dha, dha, dha," not distin- 

 guished from the latter as an " imitative sound " or a " sound- 

 gesture." We may conclude that it means in general, ' Take 

 care ! Danger ! " but with a special tone and in a certain suc- 

 cession it probably means distinctly " Cats ! " uttered in 

 another way, perhaps " Owl ! " or " Crow ! " and in any case the 

 variation of the same "word" which the blackbirds utter 

 every evening has a meaning quite different, for then the 

 other birds take no notice of the cry. 



Thus, just as in the lower stages of human speech, the 

 development, the complexity of language in birds evidently 

 just proceeds from the repetition of sounds. By different 

 modes of repetition and by differences of tone in addition a 

 variety of things can be expressed. But in the language of 

 blackbirds, as in the higher stage of evolution of human lan- 

 guage, the further step has been taken of adding another 

 sound at the end of a repetition, in the cry, " diridiridirirollo." 

 Thus all the elements necessary to the development of the 

 most perfect language are present. The drum-language of the 

 negroes of the Cameroons shows how much can be said 

 merely by variations in the repetition and in the loudness of 

 a single tone, which is less than an uttered sound. Thus 

 flexibility of speech is not always so complete a criterion of 

 mental capacity as we are accustomed to assume without 

 further reflection. The want of flexible speech is wanting in 

 the anthropomorphous apes, not because their brains are too 

 lowly organised, but because their laryngeal mechanisms are 



