The positive part of the science of language having pushed inquiry hack until it arrives at monosyllabic roots that admit of no further analysis, there stops, as at the legiti mate boundary of its province. It assumes the existence of a certain store of crude or primary matter, and merely concerns itself with how out of this matter, as we know it, has been built or has grown up But a question yet remains, which, although it can never receive but a conjectural answer, has a wonderful fascination for the speculative mind, and was, in fact, the question with which all inquiries into langvage began; the question, namely: Ilow did language take a beginning at all? how came this primitive material of language, these significant roots, into existence? The answer may be thus conceived: To speak is it necessity of man's rational and emotional nature; Le speaks because he thinks and feels. When the mind receives an impression or intuition, by an Instinctive impulse of the nature of reflex action, sonic outward expressimi—a gesture or vocal sound—breaks forth, which by association becotnes a sign or symbol, to the indi vidual and to his associates, of the impression or idea that gave it birth. Associated at first with individual impressions and objects, these sounds, by the process of abstraction, which is pre-eminently is human faculty, would gradually come to represent more gener alized impressions—would become words, as distinguished from mere animal sounds. The necessity of words to think in is much insisted on hy speculators on this subject as being the motive-power in the generation of language; and no doubt it is true that, with out language, thought could advance but little,.if at all, beyond what is manifested by the broils. But when they argue as if this necessity of having, his ideas objectively depicted in order to exercise his own reason, would impel an individual man to construct a language for his own use, they make the unwarranted assumption that, under any cir cumstances, even though he grew up from infancy in solitude, the thinking powers of a human being must necessarily develop themselves. The necessarily few facts that bear on the case look the other way.. Kaspar Bauser (q.V.), instead of elaborating a system of symbols of thought for himself, bad forgotten what he had once possessed; his facul ties of thought and of speech seem to have been simultaneously arrested. 01 servation seems to favor the opinion, that man in solitude—if lie could exist in solitude—would be as mute as the lower animals. The social nature of man helped to give birth to the germs of speech, no less than his rational nature; an instinctive desire to give a sensible sign of his impressions to his fellows, was perhaps the primary impulse; the aid thus given io iris own thinking powers, a secondary result. Be this as it may it seems reason able to assume, as it has been well put by Steinthal, that " at the origin of humanity, the soul and the body were in such mutual dependence that all the emotions of the soul 11:1(1 their echo in the body, principally in the organs of respiration and the voice. This sympathy of soul and body, still found in the infant and the savage, was intimate and fruitful in the primitive man; each intuition woke in him an accent or a sound."—Far rar, Origin of Lang.
Were those sounds, then, guided by chance or caprice? or if not, what determined particular articulations to be associated with particular objects or ideas? Any mystic innate correspondence between sounds and things is out of the question; but what more reasonable than to suppose that the natural sounds emitted by so many things, animate and inanimate, should suggest the character of the articulations which the ideas of the things called forth—not so as to produce exact imitations, whirl it is not of the nature of articulate sounds to be, but such resemblances as would suffice for association. See ONOMATONEIA. In the case of ideas unconnected with any natural sound names would readily he suggested in many cases by analogies, real or fancied, with things that were attended by sounds. We can see, again, a physiological fitness in the articulation &la,
to stand, with the idea of stability; with the attitude, the organs involuntarily assume the position with which this syllable is emitted. Similar instances might be multiplied. We are not to suppose that the same thing would suggest the same sound to all or even to the same individual at all times. The language-making faculty in the flush of its spring would throw out a multitude of names for the same thing (synonyms), as well as apply the same name to many different things (homonyms); but by a process of natural elimination. those only would survive that were felt best to answer the purposes of speech. The abstracting faculty would also soon dissociate them from the concrete indi vidual objects that first suggested them, and convert them into symbols of the prominent attributes of whole classes. It is these generalized names, syllables significant of such general simple notions as seeing, moving, running, shining, striking, cutting, or being sharp. that, by a kind of inverse process, became the roots of language as it now exists. A syllable expressive of a sings prominent attribute forms the foundation of the names of a whole class of objects, the specific differences marked by other significant syllables joined on to it. See Room. In some such way, by the unconscious working of man's intellectual nature, we may conceive language to have grown out of the exclama tory or interjectional stage into the rational structure that we now admire. This theory of the origin of roots, together with the constant operation of phonetic change, accounts; for the absence of all traces of onomatopcnia in the great bulk of the words of language, and seems to meet the.objections of Max and other philologists to the onamatopode theory.
With regard to these primary or radical words it is only necessary to observe here that they are all significant of sensible or physical ideas and expressions for immaterial conceptions are derived from theta by metaphor. How, from a comparatively few roots of this kind, the vocabulary of the richest language may grow, is further illustrated in the article RooT.
Another speculative question regards the length of time that language must have taken to advance from the rudimentary stage to the state hrwhich it is found in the earli est records. Bunsen assigns 20,000 years as the lowest limit; but it is evident that the same uncertainty must always rest on this question as on the corresponding one in geology.
Separate points of philology will be found treated under a variety of heads. See —besides the articles already referred to—ALPHABET; the several letters, A, B, GENITIVE; NOUN; A.DVERB ; PRONOUN; DIALECT; PERSIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERA. TORE ; SEMITIC LANGUAGES; (MC. " The literature of the new science of language is already rich; but much of it is scat tered through the transactions of societies and periodicals. Of separate works of a com prehensive kind, in addition to those already named, we may mention, in German, Schleicher. Die Sprachen Earopas (Bonn, 1850), and Veryleichende Grammatik der indo Ger. Spretchen (2 yols.,Weima•, 1861); J. Grimm, Ueber den Cirsprung der Sprache (Ber. 1852); Diez, Etymol.Worterbuch der Romanischen Sprachen (21 ed. Bonn, 1851), and Ver. gleichende Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen (3 vols. Bonn, 1836-42); translations of both works into English have been published by Williams and Norgate (1864). Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft (Ber. 1836); Steinthal, Die Classification der Sprachen (Ber. 1856); and Der U•sprung der Spree/ut (Bur. 1831). In French, Penan, Ifistaire Gimerate at Systeme compare des Langues Sem•tiques (3d ed. Paris, 1863); and De l'Origine du Lan guage (3d ed. Paris, 1833); Pieta, Les Origines Indo-Europeennes (Paris, 1859).