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CHAPTER VI.

LANGUAGE AND WRITING.

I. THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH.

HAD primitive man an articulate language or no? Had he at least the power of creating ic? It is, in my opinion, an error to assert that primitive man was destitute of speech, as Russell Wallace maintains (Pithecanthropus alalus), and as certain Darwinists still think.' 'Language must have appeared on earth simultaneously with man,' as M. Emile Burnouf admirably says, and it was not preceded by a long silence; for the cause which produced this silence would have prevented it from being broken, and nothing short of a miracle could have put an end to it.' Now, as we have more than once said, we put no faith in such miracles; but we believe in the admirable laws which modern science has revealed to us, and which preside at the birth and organisation of languages as at those of societies. We believe that languages themselves are organisms which have their life in embryo, their infancy, their ripe age, their changes, their distant and repeated migrations, their decadence and death. We are firmly convinced that speech is a natural attribute of our intellectual being, a faculty inherent in our nature, a necessity at once psychological and physiological. We speak, not

From the fact that microcephalous human beings do not speak, Carl Vogt concludes that they present an instance of atavism, a return towards the Simian stock whence the entire human race is sprung. Microcephaly is an abnormal phenomenon which may be rudely explained by the theory of arrested development, without the necessity of seeking to account for it by atavism, still less by a return to the supposed Simio-human type.

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merely because we possess all the organs adapted to the emission of articulate sounds, but still more, and principally, because we feel the need of speaking. We see a proof of this in the child who talks to her dolls, the boy to his tin soldiers in battle array, the mother to her new-born child. The need of communication with our fellowcreatures is so important an element in the origin of language, that the child brought up in complete solitude remains dumb. The savage of Aveyron was an instance of this fact.

We speak as the nightingale sings in the spring, as the horse neighs, with this difference, that their language is purely instinctive, and can be transmitted by physiological heredity, while ours is partly the product of instinct, but still more that of our intelligence, and is only transmitted by the teaching imparted by one generation to the next. In a word, as Sir John Lubbock justly observes, 'Languages are human in the sense that they are the work of man; divine in the sense that man in creating them made use of a faculty with which Providence had endowed him.' Another profound and essential difference is that the natural language of animals is only understood, with few exceptions, by the single species to which they belong We, on our part, are possessed of universal languagesmusic, painting, sculpture, for instance. Besides, our languages are almost infinite in variety and complexity (the Basque and American tongues, &c.2), six hundred dialects

'The learned works of Darwin, Taine, Perez, &c., tend to show that the origin and development of language should be studied in the child and not in the adult man.

2 Carl Vogt's theory is well known. It explains the differences in languages by the forms of the skull, and consequently of the brain itself. Abstract terms, the fruit of a great reflective power, belong to those races with an upright forebead, which indicates a considerable development in the anterior cerebral lobes. The idioms of races with a rounded occiput, which indicates a great development of the cervicle, an organ which regulates the movements, are distinguished by their variety of intonation and richness in concrete terms. The idea of the learned Swiss naturalist is certainly original; its truth remains to be proved, and I, for my part, much doubt whether the Greek language has a greater variety of intonation than the Hottentot. The cervicle has been endowed by physiologists with so mary attributes

are reckoned in Europe alone, more than 1,200 in America (Wilson), and we are far from being acquainted with all the idioms of Asia, Africa, and Polynesia. Lastly, the same language undergoes infinite modifications according to time and place. The song of the Thracian nightingales, although somewhat improved, says the legend, by the lyre of Orpheus, was probably similar in every respect to that of the nightingale of our thickets. The language of Marot, on the other hand, is not that of Ronsard, still less that of Lamartine.

Besides cries, modulations of the voice (song without articulate words), gestures, motions, and attitudes of the body, prosopose (movement of the facial muscles), which express our emotions, our desires, our passions, our ideas, we have in addition to these forms of expression, which we possess in common with animals, the laugh, expressive of joy,' the unspoken yet moving language of the fine arts, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. We speak by means of stone, marble, bronze, colours, musical sounds; of hieroglyphics, writing, ribbons (the quipus of Peru), flowers, cyphers, algebraical signs, and even by means of electric wires, which bear our thoughts in an instant of time across the solitude of the desert and vast

expanse of the ocean. Lately we have learnt to do yet more; we can send our words to a distance, no longer by representing them to the sight by alphabetic or other conventional signs, but with all the intonations of the voice, its variations, tenderness, and whisperings. Yet further, a new wonder of science enables us to reproduce at will, not only the sounds of our own voice, but also those of the voice of others. What anthropomorphic ape ever conceived the idea of such inventions?

While recognising that articulate language is a special faculty of man, Darwin believes it not impossible that it seems hardly necessary to give it yet another which is anything but proved.

If a Simian ancestor has really transmitted to us the germ of the faculties which we now possess, how could he endow us with that which he had not himself-the laugh, articulate language, the gift for the fine arts, &c. ?

ANCIENT LANGUAGES.

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that it may have been transmitted to him by a Simian ancestor. But he gives very insufficient proof in support of so bold an assertion. Monkeys,' he says, tainly understand much of what is said to them by man, and as in a natural condition they are able to utter cries to warn their companions of danger, it does not appear to me incredible that some more sagacious ape may have conceived the idea of imitating the howling of a wild beast in order to warn his fellows of the species of danger which threatened them. A fact of this kind would indicate the first step towards the formation of a language' (Descent of Man,' p. 59). This is all very well, but what has become of this ancestor, our clever precursor, and why does no anthropomorphic ape of our own day still make use of an articulate language?

II. SUPPOSED CHARACTERISTICS OF PRIMITIVE TONGUES.

Hebrew is no longer believed to be the most ancient of human languages. Sanskrit itself has been dethroned by the Zend Avesta,' the sacred book of the Magi. As regards Europe, the tongues of the Finns and the Basques long enjoyed great favour in the eyes of the most learned philologists as the primitive European languages. Humboldt even asserted that Basque was strictly speaking the only European tongue, that which has undergone the least modification, and has retained the most of its original structure, a clear proof in his eyes of the great antiquity of the Iberian people by whom it is spoken. The opinion of the famous German philosopher has been widely adopted. Whitney himself considers the Basque language as the sole surviving relic and witness of an aboriginal western European population, dispossessed by the intrusive Indo-European tribes. It stands entirely alone, no kindred having yet been found for it in any part of the world (Life and Growth of Language,' p. 212).

Now M. Bladé has shown that the Basques were not an Iberian people, since this word is a purely geographical and not ethnological term, applicable only to that part of

the population of the Spanish peninsula which had settled on the banks of the Iberus or Ebro. Moreover, M. Bladé has proved that, contrary to the assertions of Humboldt, the Basque tongue has changed since the fifteenth century to such a degree that it is impossible to explain the text of that time. Now this text is the earliest literary monument of that language, which is doubtless far more ancient, but, nevertheless, recent enough, since it is only known beyond the Pyrenees from the twelfth century, and on this side from the thirteenth.

M. Broca, however, agrees with Humboldt in considering Basque to be the only truly indigenous European language; and he believes it to be the most ancient of all those now spoken in our continent. The Finnish language, allied to the Basque in the opinion of some philologists, has in his opinion no analogy with it, unless it be in the well-known negative character of being an uninflected tongue. Whatever may have been said to the contrary, Basque offers also no analogy with the American dialects, nor with the Berber of Northern Africa. M. Broca considers the Basque language to be an Iberian idiom formerly spoken with dialects of the same family in Aquitaine, in the whole of the Spanish peninsula, aud even throughout western Europe. The introduction of the Aryan tongues of Asia with the people who spoke them caused these Iberian dialects to disappear in succession; the Basque alone persisted, and hence it still forms an isolated spot in the midst of the domain occupied in Europe by Aryan or Turanian languages of an undoubtedly Asiatic origin.

M. Virchow, on the other hand, is disposed to conclude, from the likeness he sees between the skulls of the Guanchos of the Canary Isles and those of the modern Basques, that the latter and their language belong to the ace proper to those ancient islands of which the Canaries are the last remains. But besides the fact that identity of language cannot be logically concluded from the similiarity of the skulls, and conversely, the Prussian savant himself observes that the time is not ripe for a well estab

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