rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_5a4a63b7-5bef-587d-8ec3-a95f9c21a633">251 "Man does not speak because he thinks. He speaks because the mouth and larynx communicate with the third frontal convolution of the brain. This material connection is the immediate cause of articulate speech."252 This is true in the sense that speech is not possible until the vocal organs are present, and are duly connected with the brain. "The specific cry, somewhat modified by the vocal resources of man, may have been sufficient for the humble vocabulary of the earliest ages, and there exists no gulf, no impassable barrier, between the language of birds, dogs, anthropoid apes, and human speech."253 "The warning or summoning cry, the germ of the demonstrative roots, is the parent of the names of number, sex, and distance; the emotional cry of which our interjections are but the relics, in combination with the demonstratives, prepares the outlines of the sentence, and already represents the verb and the names of states or actions. Imitation, direct or symbolical, and necessarily only approximative to the sounds of external nature, i.e. onomatopœia, furnished the elements of the attributive roots, from which arose the names of objects, special verbs, and their derivatives. Analogy and metaphor complete the vocabulary, applying to the objects, discerned by touch, sight, smell, and taste, qualifying adjectives derived from onomatopœia. Reason, then coming into play, rejects the greater part of this unmanageable wealth, and adopts a certain number of sounds which have already been reduced to a vague and generic sense, and by derivation, combination, and affixes, which are the root sounds, produces those endless families of words, related to each other in every degree of kindred, from the closest to the most doubtful, which grammar finally ranges in the categories known as the parts of speech."254 "That metaphor makes language grow is evident. It brings about connection between place, time, and sound ideas."255
138. Primitive dialects. The cebus azarae, a monkey of Paraguay, makes six distinct sounds when excited, which causes its comrades to emit similar sounds.256 The island Caribs have two distinct vocabularies, one of which is used by men and by women when speaking to each other, and by men when repeating, in oratio obliqua, some saying of the women. Their councils of war are held in a secret jargon into which women are never initiated.257 The men and women have separate languages, a custom which is noted also amongst the Guycurus and other peoples of Brazil.258 Amongst the Arawaks the difference between the languages of the sexes is not in regard to the use of words only, but also in regard to their inflection.259 The two languages are sometimes differentiated by a constant change, e.g. where in the man's language two vowels come together the woman's language intercalates a k.260 The Arawaks have words which only men may speak, and others which only women may speak.261 Dialectical variations are illustrated for us by facts which come under observation and report. Christian262 mentions an American negro castaway, who settled on Raven's Island with a native wife and children and a few relatives and servants. In forty years they had produced "a new and peculiar dialect of their own, broadening the softer vowels and substituting th or f for the original t sound in the parent ponapeian." Martius mentions that native boatmen in Brazil, who had grown up together, had each some little peculiarity of pronunciation. Such a difference would produce a dialect in case of isolation. On the other hand, the ecclesiastics adopted the Tupi language and made it a general language for the province of Gram Para, so that it was used in the pulpit until 1757 and is now necessary for intercourse in the interior.263 The Gauchos of central Uruguay speak Spanish with harsh rough accents. They change y and ll into the French j.264 Whitney and Waitz thought that all American languages proceeded from a single original one. Powell thought that they were "many languages, belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent unity of origin."265 Evidence is adduced, however, that "the same aboriginal peoples who named the waters of North America coined also the prehistoric geographical titles in South America."266 The Finns and Samoyeds are, from the standpoint of language, practically the same race. The two tongues present the highest development of the agglutinative process of the Ural-Altaic languages.267
139. Taking up and dropping languages. The way in which languages are taken up or dropped is also perplexing. Keane268 gives a list of peoples who have dropped one language and taken up another; he also gives a list of those who have changed physical type but have retained the same language. Holub269 mentions the Makololo, who have almost entirely disappeared, but their language has passed to their conquerors. It became necessary to the latter from the spread of their dominion and from their closer intercourse with the peoples south of the Zambesi, on account of which, "without any intentional interference by the rulers, a common and easily understood language showed itself indispensable." Almost every village in New Guinea has its own language, and it is said that in New Britain people who live thirty miles apart cannot understand each other.270
140. Pigeon dialects. The Germans find themselves at a disadvantage in dealing with aborigines because they have no dialect like pigeon English or the Coast Malay used by the Dutch.271 Many examples are given, from the Baltic region, of peasant dialects made in sport by subjecting all words to the same modification.272 Our own children often do this to English in order to make a secret language.
141. How languages grow. What we see in these cases is that, if we suppose men to have joined in coöperative effort with only the sounds used by apes and monkeys, the requirement of their interests would push them on to develop languages such as we now know. The isolating, agglutinative, incorporative, and inflectional languages can be put in a series according to the convenience and correctness of the logical processes which they embody and teach. The Semitic languages evidently teach a logic different from that of the Indo-European. It is a different way of thinking which is inculcated in each great family of languages. They represent stages in the evolution of thought or ways of thinking. The instance is one of those which best show us how folkways are built up and how they are pulled down. The agglutination of words and forms sometimes seems like a steady building process; again, the process will not go forward at all. "In the agglutinative languages speech is berry jam. In the inflectional languages each word is like a soldier in his place with his outfit."273 The "gooing" of a baby is a case of the poetic power in its blossoming exuberance. The accidental errors of pronunciation which are due to very slight individual variations in the form of the vocal organs are cases of individual contribution to the development of language. The baby words and individual mispronunciations which are taken up by a family and its friends, but never get further, show us how dialects grow. There are changes in language which are, "in their inception, inaccuracies of speech. They attest the influence of that immense numerical majority among the speakers of English who do not take sufficient pains to speak correctly, but whose blunders become finally the norm of the language."
