CHAPTER VII 



THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF SPEECH ; OR, MOUTH-GESTURE 

 AS A FACTOR IN THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 



THE science of language, as treated by its modern stu- 

 dents and professors, is so largely devoted to tracing the 

 affinities and the laws of growth and modification of 

 existing and recently extinct languages, that some of the 

 essential characteristics of human speech have been ob- 

 scured, and the features that contribute largely to its inhe- 

 rent intelligibility overlooked. Philologists have discovered, 

 as the result of long and laborious research, what they 

 hold to be the roots or fundamental units of each of the 

 great families of language ; but these roots themselves 

 are supposed to be for the most part conventional, or, if 

 they had in the very beginning of language any natural 

 meaning, this is held to have been so obscured by succes- 

 sive changes of form and structure as to be now usually 

 undiscoverable. As regards a considerable number of 

 the words which occur under various forms in a variety of 

 languages, and which seem to have a common root, this 

 latter statement may be true, but it is by no means always, 

 and perhaps not even generally, true. In our own lan- 

 guage, and probably in all others, a considerable number 

 of the most familiar words are so constructed as to pro- 

 claim their meaning more or less distinctly, sometimes by 

 means of imitative sounds, but also, in a large number of 

 cases, by the shape or the movements of the various parts 

 of the mouth used in pronouncing them, and by pecu- 

 liarities in breathing or in vocalisation, which may express 

 a meaning quite independent of mere sound-imitation. 



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