SPEECH, Genesis of, or the Origin of Language.* Of these alternative titles the latter is the broader, since °language* is used of the expressive movements of any part of the body (compare the term Gesture Lan guage), while °speech° is applied only to ex pressive movements of the vocal organs. The term °Genesis') is more appropriate than °ori gin,* because the latter implies that speech proceeded from a condition in which speech did not exist, whereas, go back as far as we may in the evolution of animal life, we shall never find a stage in which all of the essential ele ments of speech are absent. °Genesis* on the other hand suggests the earlier stages of a long and continuous process of development that eventually led to the present highly complex forms of human speech. The phrase ''Origin of Languages* sometimes occurs to express the fact that many languages doubtless arose inde pendently in primitive times. The general problem involves two main questions: (1) What was the genesis of the speech move ments? (2) How did the speech movements. come to be expressive of thought, i.e., of sen sations (ideas) and feeling (emotions)? There is really a third question involved: what is the genesis of the ideas and emotions? While ideas and feelings are thought of not as language but as that which is expressed by lan guage, yet it should be remembered that the sensations of sound, the kinesthetic sensations and the mental pictures written and printed words. all of which are indisputably a part of language, are mental processes of essentially the same type as those other ideas which we usually call thought. As a matter of fact the problem of the genesis of speech has usu ally been confined to the second of the above questions, the other two being left as prelimi nary problems to the physiologist and the psy chologist. As a matter of fact all three are essentially psychological problems.
It is generally held by psychologists that every emotion and probably every other mental state tends to pass over at once into movement. By virtue of the necessary relationship existing between the mental state and the movement the latter becomes symbolic of the former, i.e., the
movement is an expressive movement. The connection between the nervous state and move ment is very ancient, or, at least, has very primi tive antecedents. The simplest monocellular ani mals, such as the paramecium, which has not even an especially developed nervous system, responds consistently by certain definite move ments to certain definite stimuli, and even plants possess irritability: that is, response to environment by movement,— which movement is less in plants than in animals primarily, as it would seem, because their cell walls are more rigid than those of animals. Movements of the speech organs (and speech organs similar to those of man occur in nearly all the air breathing animals of higher rank than the am phibians) are under the same kind of nervous control as all other muscular movements. As the movements of all animals and even of plants are primarily life-serving movements, it is natu ral to suppose that all movements had their ori gin in responses to environment of such a char acter as to continue the life process. A plant turns to the light, which is the source of the energy by which it makes its food; the para mecium swims away from a poisoned area in the water and moves toward its food. Perhaps chemical and mechanical laws account for these movements. In the case of the lowest animals that possess lungs and a larynx the power of movement is already very highly developed and specialized and under the control of a highly developed nervous system. All animals that possess a larynx make with it movements which produce air vibrations of a- frequency within the range that is appreciable through the ear as sound. Birds and quadrupeds pro duce loud and complex sounds which appear to play an important part in lives of these ani mals. Undoubtedly man inherited from his pre-human ancestors the power of producing sounds by the movements of his laryngeal and breathing muscles. The range of sounds which animals are capable of producing with their vocal organs is far greater than has usually been supposed. This fact is fully established in the case of apes, which have been more fully investigated in this respect.