JHOOrS OF LANGUAGE. 29 1 



no adequate reason for arbitrarily excluding the possibility of 

 arbitrary invention. If even civilized children, who are not 

 under the discipline of the "mother of invention," will coin 

 a language of their own in which the element of onomatopoeia 

 is barely traceable;* and if uneducated deaf-mutes will 

 spontaneously devise articulate sounds which are necessarily 

 destitute of any imitative origin ; f I do not see why it should 

 be held antecedently impossible that primitive man can have 

 found any other means of word-formation than that which 

 is supplied by mimicry. Therefore, while I fully agree with 

 Professor Wundt in holding that the question before us is 

 one to be dealt with by psychology rather than philology 

 (seeing that language cannot record the conditions of its 

 own birth, and that so many causes have been at work to 

 obliterate aboriginal' onomatopoeia), I cannot follow him 

 where he argues that on grounds of psychology there is no 

 room for any other inference than that the principle of 

 onomatopoeia in its widest sense must have constituted the 

 sole origin of significant articulation. % 



We have already seen that even the most imitative of 

 vocalists, the talking birds, will invent wholly arbitrary sounds 

 as denotative names,§ and it would be psychologically absurd 

 to suppose that they are superior to what primitive man must 

 have been in the matter of finding expedients for semiotic 

 utterance. Again, the clicks of Hottentots and Bushmen, 

 whatever we suppose their origin to have been, certainly 

 cannot have had that origin in onomatopoeia ; and no less 

 certainly, as Professor Saycc remarks, they still survive to 

 show how the utterances of speechless man could be made to 

 embody and convey ideas. || Lastly, on the general principle 

 that the development of the individual furnishes information 

 touching the development of the race, it is highly significant 



* See above, pp. 138-144. 



t .See above, pp. 121, 122. 



X See Vorlesitngen, ijt'c., ii. 394, 395. 



§ See above, pp. 132-136. 



1! Jntroditction to the Science 0/ Lain-iuigc, ii. 302. 



