Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.
Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India
❝Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.❞
‒Rita Mae Brown
It’s hard to imagine a cultural phenomenon that’s more important than the development of language. And yet no human attribute offers less conclusive evidence regarding its origins. The absence of such evidence certainly hasn’t discouraged speculation about the origins of language. Regardless of the origin of language, the fact remains that there are over 5,000 mutually unintelligible forms of human speech used on Earth today. And, although many are radically different from one another in structure–the differences are superficial since each and every one of these languages can be used creatively.
Concerning the origin of the first language, there are two main hypotheses, or beliefs. Neither can be proven or disproved given present knowledge.
1) Belief in divine creation. Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift of the gods to humans. The most familiar is found in Genesis 2:20, which tells us that Adam gave names to all living creatures. This belief predicates that humans were created from the start with an innate capacity to use language.
2) Natural evolution hypothesis. At some point in their evolutionary development humans acquired a more sophisticated brain which made language invention and learning possible. In other words, at some point in time humans evolved a language acquisition device, whatever this may be in real physical terms. The simple vocalizations and gestures inherited from our primate ancestors then quickly gave way to a creative system of language–perhaps within a single generation or two.
In the beginning was the word, for with it man became man. Without those strange noises called common nouns, thought was limited to individual objects or experiences sensorial – for the most part visually- remembered or conceived; presumably it could not think of classes as distinct from individual things, nor of qualities as distinct from objects, nor of objects as distinct from their qualities. Without words as class names one might think of this man, or that man; one could not think of Man, for the eye sees not Man but only men, not classes but particular things. Since all origins are guesses, the imagination has free play in picturing the beginnings of speech. Perhaps the first form of language- which may be defined as communication through signs- was the love call of one animal to another. In this sense the jungle, the woods and the prairie are alive with speech. Cries of warning or of terror, the call of the mother to the brood, the cluck and cackles of euphoric or reproductive ecstasy, the parliament of chatter from tree to tree, indicate the busy preparations made by animal kingdom for the august speech of man. A wild girl found living among animals in a forest near Chalons,France, had no other speech than hideous screeches and howls.
Language- Its animal background
The beginning of humanity came when some freak or crank, half animal and half man, squatted in a cave or in a tree, cracking his brain to invent the first common noun, the first sound-sign that would signify a group of like objects: houses that would mean all houses, man that would mean all men, light that would mean every light that ever shone on land or sea. From that moment the mental development of the race opened upon a new and endless road. For words are to thought what tools are to work; the product depends largely on the growth of the tools.(1) These living noises of the woods seem meaningless to our provincial ear; we are like the philosophical poodle Riquet, who says of M. Bergret: “Everything uttered by my voice means something; but from my master’s mouth comes much nonsense.” Whiteman and Craig discovered a strange correlation between the actions and the exclamations of pigeons; Dupont learned to distinguish twelve specific sounds used by fowl and doves, fifteen by dogs, and twenty-two by horned cattle; Garner found that the apes carried on their endless gossip with at least twenty different sounds, plus a repertory of gesture; and from these modest vocabularies a few steps bring us to the three hundred words that suffice some unpretentious men.(2)
Language-Its human origins
Gesture seems primary, speech secondary, in the earlier transmission of thought; and when speech fails, gesture comes again to the fore. Among the North American Indians, who had countless dialects, married couples were often derived from different tribes, and maintained communication and accord by gestures rather than speech; one couple known to Lewis Morgan used silent signs for three years. Gestures was so important in some Indian languages that the Arapahos, like some modern peoples, could hardly converse in the dark.(3) Perhaps the first human words were interjections, expressions of emotion as among animals; then demonstrative words accompanying gestures of direction; and imitative sounds that came in time to be the names of the objects or actions that they simulated. Even after indefinite millenniums of linguistic changes and complications every language still contains hundreds of imitative words- roar, rush, murmur, tremor, giggle, groan, hiss, heave, hum, cackle, etc. (4)The Tecuna tribe, of ancient Brazil, had a perfect verb for sneeze: haitschu.(5)Out of such beginning, perhaps, came the root-words of every language.Renan reduced all Hebrew words to five hundred roots, and Skeat nearly all European words to some four hundred stems.E.g.,divine is from Latin divus, which is from dues, Greek theos, Sanskrit deva, meaning god; in the Gypsy tongue the word for god, by a strange prank, becomes devel. Historically goes back to the Sanskrit root vid, to know; Greek oida, Latin video (see), French voir (see) German wissen (know), English to wit; plus the suffixes tor(as in autyor , prector, rhetor), ic, al, and ly (=like ). Again, the Sanskrit root ar, to plough, gives the Latin arare, Russian orati, English to ear the land, arable, art, oar, and perhaps the word Aryan- the ploughers.(6)
The languages of nature peoples are not necessarily primitive in any sense of simplicity; many of them are simple in vocabulary and structure, but some of them are as complex and wordy as our own, and more highly organized than Chinese.(7) Nearly all primitive tongues, however, limit themselves to the sensual and particular, and are uniformly poor in general or abstract terms. So the Australian natives had a name for a dog’s tail, and another name for a cow’s tail; but they had no name for tail in general.(8). The Tasmanians had separate names for specific trees, but no general name for tree; the Choctaw Indians had names for the black oak, the white oak and the red oak, but no name for oak, much less for tree. Doubtless many generations passed before the proper noun ended in the common noun. In many tribes there are no separate words for the colour as distinct from the colour object; no words for such abstractions as tone, sex, species, space, spirit, instinct, reason, quantity, hope, fear, matter, consciousness, etc.(9) Such abstract terms seem to grow in a reciprocal relation of cause and effect with the development of thought; they become the tools of subtlety and the symbols of civilization.
Bearing so many gifts to men, words seemed to them a divine boon and a sacred thing; they became the matter of magic formulas, more reverenced when most meaningless; and they still survive as sacred in mysteries where,e,g., the Word becomes Flesh. They made not only the clearer thinking, but for better social organization; they cemented the generations mentally, by providing a better medium for education and the transmission of knowledge and the arts; they created a new organ of communication, by which one doctrine or belief could mould a people into homogeneous unity. They opened new roads for the transport and traffic of ideas, and immensely accelerated the tempo, and enlarged the range and content, of life. Has any other invention ever equalled, in power and glory, the common noun?
Next to the enlargement of thought the greatest of these gifts of speech was education. Civilization is an accumulation, a treasure –house of arts and wisdom, manners and morals, from which the individual, in his development, draws nourishment for his mental life; without that periodical reacquisition of the racial heritage by each generation, civilization would die a sudden death. It owes its life to education.
Language- Its results. Education
Little or no use was made of writing in primitive education. Nothing surprises the natural man so much as the ability to communicate with one another, over great distances, by making black scratches upon a piece of paper.(10) Many tribes have learned to write by imitating their civilized exploiters, but some, as in northern Africa, have remained letter-less despite five thousand years of intermittent contact with literate nations. Simple tribes living for the most part in comparative isolation, and knowing the happiness of having no history, felt little need for writing. Their memories were all the stronger for having no written aids; they learned and retained, and passed on to their children by recitation, whatever seemed necessary in the way of historical record and cultural transmission. It was probably by committing such oral traditions and folk-lore to writing that literature began. Doubtless the invention of writing was met with a long and holy opposition, as something calculated to undermine morals and the race.
Language- Its results. Initiation
Of course we can only guess at the origins of this wonderful toy. Perhaps, as we shall see, it was a bye-product of pottery, and began as identifying “ trade marks” on vessels of clay. Probably a system of written signs was made necessary by the increase of trade among the tribes, and its first forms were rough and conventional pictures of commercial objects and amounts. As trade connected tribes of diverse languages, some mutually intelligible mode of record and communication became desirable. Presumably the numerals were among the earliest written symbols, usually taking the form of parallel marks representing the fingers; we still call them fingers when we speak of them as digits. Such words as five, the German funf and the Greek pente go back to root meaning hand;(11) so the Roman numerals indicated fingers, “V” represented an expanded hand, and “X” was merely two “V’ s” connected at their points. Writing was in its beginning- as still is in China and Japan- a form of drawing, an art. As men used gestures when they could not use words, so they used pictures to transmit their thoughts across time and space; every word and every letter known to us was once a picture, even as trade marks and the signs of the zodiac are to this day.The primeval Chinese pictures that preceded writing were called ku-wan- Literally, “gesture- picture.” Totam poles were pictograph writing; they were. As Mason suggests, tribal autographs. Some tribes used notched sticks to help the memory or to convey a message; others, like the Algonquin Indians, not only notched the sticks but painted figures upon them, making them into miniature totem poles; or perhaps these poles were notched sticks on a grandiose scale. The Peruvian Indians kept complex records, both of numbers and ideas, by knots and loops made in diversely colored cords; perhaps some light is shed upon the origins of South American Indians by the fact that a similar custom existed among the natives of the Eastern Archipelago and Polynesia Lao-tse calling upon the Chinese to return to simple life, proposed that they should go back to their primeval use of knotted cords.(12)
Language- Its results. Writing
More highly developed forms of writing appear sporadically among nature men. Hieroglyphics have been found on Easter Island, in the South Seas; and on one of the Caroline Islands a script has been found which consists of fifty-one syllabic signs, picturing figures and ideas.(13) Tradition tells how the priests and chiefs of Easter Island tried to keep to themselves all knowledge of writing, and how the people assembled annually to hear the tablets read; writing was obviously, in its earlier stages, a mysterious and holy thing, or sacred carving. We cannot be sure that these Polynesian scripts were not derived from some of the historic civilizations. In general writing is a sign of civilization, the least uncertain of the precarious distinctions between civilized and primitive men.
Literature is at first words rather than letters, despite its name; it arises as clerical chants of magic charms, recited usually by the priests, and transmitted orally from memory to memory. Carmina, as the Romans named poetry, meant both verses and charms; ode, among the Greeks, meant originally a magic spell; so did the English rune and lay, and the German Lied. Rhythm and meter, suggested, perhaps, by the rhythms of nature and bodily life, were apparently developed by magicians or shamans to preserve transmit and enhance the” magic incantations of the verse.”(14) The Greeks attributed the first hexameters to Delphic priests, who were believed to have invented the meter for use in oracles.(15) Gradually, out of these sacerdotal origins, the poet, the orator and the historian were differentiated and secularized: the orator as the official lauder of the king or solicitor of the deity; the historian as the recorder of the royal deeds; the poet as the singer of originally sacred chants, the formulator and preserver of heroic legends, and the musician who put his tales to music for the instruction of populace and kings. So the Fijians, the Tahitians and New Caledonians had official orators and narrators to make addresses on occasions of ceremony, and to incite the warriors of the tribe by recounting the deeds of their forefathers and exalting the unequalled glories of the nation’s past: how little do some recent historians differ from these. The Somali had professional poets who went from village to village singing songs, like medieval minnesingers and troubadours. Only exceptionally were these poems of love; usually they dealt with physical heroism, or the relations of parents and children.
REFERANCES
(1)’Ratzel, 34: Muller-Lyer, Social Development,50-3, 61
(2) Ibed46-9;Renard,57; Robinson. J.H.,735-740
(3)Lubbock,227, 339 ,342f
(4) Muller, Max, Lectures on the science of language,i,360
(5) Tylor,E.B., Anthropology, 125
(6) Muller Science of Languages,i,265,303n;39
(7) Venkateswara,S.V., Indian Culture through the ages vol I
(8) White,W.A., Mechanisms of Character Formation,83
(9) Lubbock, 353-4
(10) Ibid, 35
(11) Ibid, 299
(12) Mason.W,A., Ch.ii; Lubbock,35
(13) Mason.W,A., 146-54
(14) Briffault,i,18
(15) Spencer. Sociology,iii,218-26
OUR ORIENTAL HERITAGE- WillDurant ,72-78