Feb. G, 1S85.] 



. KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



107 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 



By Ada S. Ballin. 

 111. 



ALREADY ill the early part of the fourth century u.c. 

 philosophers were busy with spcculutious on the 

 subject of language and its relation to thought. The 

 questions which most agitated their minds were, " Have 

 words an innate relation to their meanings ? " and " Did 

 •words have their origin in nature or convention ? ' and it was 

 evidently the fashion then, as now, among a certain school of 

 thinkers, to maintain that language was a divine gift, and, 

 therefore, necessarily perfect ; for in his " Dialogue of Cra- 

 tylu.<!," Plato, speaking through the mouth of Socratep, 

 ridicules the idea of calling in the gods to solve linguistic 

 problems, as actors drag them in on the stage to get them 

 out of a difficulty. lie thinks it better to derive words 

 from some barbarous ) eople, or frankly allow that antiquity 

 has cast a veil over them, which i)revents us from clearly 

 investigating them, than to say, " The gods gave the first 

 names, and, therefore, they are right." 



It would seem from this passage that Plato had some 

 idea of the origin of language in the developing mind of 

 man; and if we pass from Greece to Kome, and skip three 

 centuries and ahalf, from Plato to Horace, we lind that 

 the ancients had become familiar with a thcoiy of the 

 development of man and language which is practically the 

 same as that which in this nineteenth century of our.s ia 

 associated with the great name of Darwin. 



Two thousand years ago, Horace, in one of his Satires,* 

 set forth much the same view of the origin of civilisation 

 and language as that which I advocated iu my last article. 

 The passage is one of very great interest, and I quote it in 

 full from the racy translation of an anonymous writer in 

 the seventeenth century, who seems to have thoroughly 

 caught the spirit of the Roman pcet : — 



Wlicn in former lime 

 Mankind, which of all creatures is the prime. 

 Crept ont of mother earth, they were a kind 

 Of dumb and nasty cattle, which inclined 

 To brawl for mast,t and dens to lodge in too ; 

 With nails and fists. And next with clubs ; and so 

 In length of time they fought with spears and swords, 

 Which need had taught them how to make ; till words 

 And names by them invented were, whereby 

 They did their sense and voicesj signify 

 Unto each other. Then they did begin 

 To build them forts to dwell with safety in ; 

 Then they enacted laws. . . 



Primitive man, although, as Horace says, " he, of all 

 creatures was the prime," was, we may imagine, but a 

 little superior to other creatures ; time, and the sharp 

 stimulus of necessity, were required to bring him up to that 

 standard which corresponds to our definition of man at 

 the present day, when he ia frequently defined as " the 

 speaking animal," for there seems to have been a period of 

 his existence when, if we are to maintain the truth of that 

 definition, man was not man at all. If this be granted, it 

 must be allowed that there was a point at which an animal 

 having certain human characteristics became man, and 

 that that point was the time when first sounds were used 

 as the signs or marks of actions or things. 



At this period of his existence man was probably far 

 inferior to the lowest savage now on the face of the earth ; 

 but even to a modern savage, whose intellect is undeveloped 

 and whose ideas are few, a language complete as we know it 

 would be a useless encumbrance. If an attempt were made 

 to teach him such a one, he would adopt those words which 



* Lib. 1 : 3 J 99, et seq. + Food. J Opinions. 



served to ex])ress his own simple iJens, and all other ex- 

 pressions would be ignored by him, and, in cour.sc of time, 

 lost. Thus, if wo were to imagine a perfect language 

 bestowed ujion the primitive man, we can easily conceive 

 that it would very soon have ceased to have been a perfect 

 language, being lopptd down to his requirements, and 

 having to grow up again in the course of ages to suit the 

 necessities of ins successors. 



It is better, therefore, from every point of v'w.w, to treat 

 language simply as one of the phenomena of evolution 

 which began so many thousands of years ago that we can 

 only guess at its earliest phases, and is still developing, side 

 by side with all other phenomena in that wonderful jrogiess 

 from the lower to the higher life. 



Language has progressed from simple to complex, and 

 our guesses at its earliest phases are greatly assisted by a 

 study of its simplest contemporaneous phases, 'fhese we 

 iiud among savages, young children, idiot-i, and the deaf 

 and dumb, all of whom express certain thoughts by means 

 of inarticulate cries and of gestures. 



There can be little doubt that the lower animals ah-o 

 make themselves understood to a certain extent in the 

 same way. 



Darwin says that in Paraguay the Cebus Azara; when 

 excited, utters at least six distinct sounds, which excite in 

 other monkeys similar emotions,"* and other monkeys, 

 from their moiic of action, seem to show that they have 

 some means of communication. 



A writer in a contemporary, after expressing the belief 

 that dogs have the power of makiug themselves understood 

 by diflerent tones and quality in their barks, says : — 



I am also convinced that birds can eiinally do so by varied 

 tones. In my early d.ays an old keeper used to say, when he lieard 

 blackbirds giving alarm by tlieir cries, " That is for a fox, cat, or 

 liawk," and on every occasion when I accompanied him to the 

 cover I found his surmises wore quite correct. Again, wlien a pet 

 buUliuch belonging to me is indignant at not being let. out as soon 

 as he wishes in the morning, he lets us know by one call, and when 

 he is taken up to be petted he makes another call, but invariably 

 the same call on the same occasion. 



In the case of still more insignificant creatures, Sir John 

 Lubbock has been led by his caref uUyqiursued observations 

 and experiments to believe that ants communicate with one 

 another by means of their antenn:e, and their unanimity of 

 action certainly seems only to be explicable on some such 

 hypothesis. 



In short, the majority of animals utter sounds and per- 

 form movements which probably serve as a rough means of 

 communication ; for we cannot believe that these actions 

 take place without sorue purpose, and it is diflicult to 

 assign any other for them. 



When we speak of the " dumb animals," then, it can only 

 be in the sense in which, r T the world over, men have 

 called those dumb whose f.j > ch they could not themselves 

 under.staiid. Thus the tr.nellers of the past used to 

 describe the language of those with whom they met as in- 

 articulate, and more like the noises made by animals than 

 anything else ; yet tliey said that they made very expres- 

 sive signs. Sophocles uses the word ar/Iossos — tongueless 

 ■ — to mean foreigner, implying that all the world who could 

 not .speak Greek were practically dumb. 



In the same way to this very day the Russians call the 

 Germans Njemez — speechless — the word vjcmou meaning 

 dumb. 



The ancient geographer, Pompinius Mela, said that, " in 

 Ethiopia were dumb people, those who .sign with the head 

 instead of speaking ; others whose tongues make no sound ; 

 and others without tongues, t And Pliny, taking a similar 



Descent of Man," vol. i., p. 53. 



tin., 9. 



