The Life and Growth of Language

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIV. NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. Language an acquisition, a part of culture. Its universality among men; limitation to man; difference between human and other means of expression. Communication the direct motive to the production of speech; this the conscious and determining clement in all languagehistory. Natural cries as basis of the development; question as to their nature and range; postulation of instinctive articulate utterances uncalled for. Use of the voice as principal means of expression. Imitative element in the beginnings of speech; range and limits of onomatopoeic expression. The doctrine of roots. Sufficiency of this view of the origin of language; the opposing miraculous theory. Capacity involved in language-making; difference in this respect between men and lower animals. Relation of language to development of man; rate and manner of its growth. Ode examination of the history of language, of its mode of transmission, preservation, and alteration, has shown us clearly enough what we are to hold respecting its nature. It is not a faculty, a capacity; it is not an immediate exertion of the thinking power; it is a mediate product and an instrumentality. To many, superficial or prejudiced, inquirers this seems an unsatisfactory even a low, view; but it is because they confound together two very different senses of the word language. Man possesses, as one of his most marked and distinctive characteristics, a faculty or capacity of speech--or, more LANGUAGE AS CAPACITY AND AS PRODUCT. 270 accurately, various faculties and capacities which lead inevitably to the production of speech; but the faculties are one thing, and their elaborated products are another and very different one. So man has a capacity for art, for the invention of inst...