Natural language

“ The conception of man, not as a tool-using but as a tool-making animal, is clear, defined, and unassailable; probably if we could trace language to its sources, we should be able to draw the same line between natural sounds employed as a medium of communication, and the created word. Thus the arts which we can study may perhaps be taken to illustrate the origin of language, which we cannot study in this phase. ”

“ The signs by which objects are presented to us in perception, are the language of nature to man; and as, in many respects, it hath a great affinity with the language of man to man; so particularly in this, that both are partly natural and original, partly acquired by custom. Our original or natural perceptions are analogous to the natural language of man to man, of which we took notice in the 4th chapter ”

“ Developing, parallel to common language (which philosophers frequently call natural language) , different types of sign systems, humans utilize the latter's mediating force in order to increase the efficiency of their action. ”

“ The summary of the subject is admirable.
Chapters IV and V are devoted to "Language," which is of course considered as a problem of evolution. From the utterances of animals and the natural language of signs and gestures, and from emotional and imitative sounds, he proceeds to the origin of articulate language. The growth of meanings in articulate speech, abstract words, grammatical construction, and analytic and synthetic language, are then traced, with other important steps and elements of lingual development. ”

“ The teacher can here profitably spend a few minutes in showing how ideas may be communicated by Natural Language, the language of sighs, groans, gestures of the hands, attitudes of the body, expressions of the face, tones of the voice, etc. He can show that, in conversation, we sometimes couple this Natural Language of tone and gesture with our language of words, in order to make a stronger impression. ”

“ NATURAL LANGUAGE, consists in the use of those natural signs which different animals employ in communicating their feelings one to another. The meaning of these signs all perfectly understand by the principles of their nature. This language is common both to man and brute. The elements of natural language in man, may be reduced to three kinds ”

“ Now, language is just as much a natural growth as trees or rocks or human bodies, and it can have no more irregularities, even in the matter of spelling, than these have. Science would laugh at the notion of memorizing every individual form of rock. ”

“ All this may be true, but I hold that language is meant to be an instrument of communication, and that in the struggle for life, the most efficient instrument of communication must certainly carry the day, as long as natural selection, or, as we formerly called it, reason, rules the world. ”

“ Where language, through literacy as a generalized medium of interaction, maintained cultural distinctions, such as the ones embodied in our notions of perspective, resemblance, and narration, the new art experience introduced distinctions at the natural level, such as instinct, energy, choice, and change. ”

“ Second, we see the fundamental diversity of human language from that of the lower animals. The one is an endowment, natural, instinctive, alike in all individuals of the species, inelastic, unchanging; the other is an acquisition, a historical product, learned by each speaker, indefinitely various among individuals of the same race, and indefinitely variable and expansible. ”

“ And, moreover, its inmost fundamental web and the primary natural roots belong also to man’s original deep feeling of sympathy with outward nature, and therefore to fancy, unless perhaps some would prefer to ascribe them at once to the soul itself, as still more profoundly and intimately akin to nature. To the reason, on the other hand, language owes its logical order, and its grammatical forms and laws of construction. ”

“ It is, of course, natural and essential to a living language that such shades and varieties of meaning should evolve themselves, although they are incidentally a source of ambiguity and subtle traps for careless logic ”

“ In the greater number of instances, they may be traced to some natural and universal associations of ideas, founded in the common faculties, common organs, and common condition of the human race.... According to the different degrees of intimacy and strength in the associations on which the transitions of language are founded, very different effects may be expected to arise. ”

“ Languages grow like mushrooms, or lilies, or bears, or human bodies. Like these they have occult and profound laws which we can never hope to penetrate,―which are known only to the creator of all things existent. But as in botany and zoölogy and physiology we may observe and classify our observations, so we may observe a language, classify our observations, and create an empirical science of word-formation. ”

“ Is the language scientific, or is it, as we say, literary?—that is, the language of poetry and emotion, approximative language, thrown out, as it were, at certain great objects which the human mind augurs and feels after, but not language accurately defining them? Popular religion says, we know, that the language is scientific ”

“ And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to [126] thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression. ”

“ All life and nature speak just as we speak. How easy it ought to be for us to speak just as nature speaks. And when our abstract notions are put in concrete expression, or presented as a picture, how easy it would seem, by these simple variations of voice, to speak the language of that picture, telling the length, breadth, action, color, values, spirit of it. That it is a task makes it worth while. It affords infinite variety, and endless delight. ”

“ It is true, also, that if you consult the works of the most distinguished modern philosophers you will find that whenever they speak of language, they take it for granted that language is a human invention, that words are artificial signs, and that the varieties of human speech arose from different nations agreeing on different sounds as the most appropriate signs of their different ideas. ”

“ You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulæ, and with every term in relations of exact logical consistency with every other. It will be a language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and all its constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable from every other word in sound as well as spelling. ”

“ It is thus that it has become “scientific” to analyze language as itself a commanding element in man’s life. The history of word-roots, their modification under the influences of changes wrought in the vocal organs by habit or by climate, the laws of phonetic change to which they are obedient, and their persistence under all disguises of dialect, as if they13 were full of a self-originated life, a self-directed energy of influence, is united with the study of grammatical forms in the construction of scientific conceptions of the evolution and uses of human speech. ”

“ But I need hardly say that I did not lose sight, therefore, of the intellectual and historical character of language; and I may here express my conviction that the Science of Language will yet enable us to withstand the extreme theories of the evolutionists, and to draw a hard and fast line between spirit and matter, between man and brute. ”

“ Having thus explained the manner in which I intend to treat the science of language, I hope in my next lecture to examine the objections of those philosophers who see in language nothing but a contrivance devised by human skill for the more expeditious communication of our thoughts, and who would wish to see it treated, not as a production of nature, but as a work of human art. ”

“ Our language is either mechanical, atomistic or dynamic. The genuinely poetic language should, however, be organic and lively. How often does one feel the poverty of words to hit on several ideas in a single stroke. ”

“ In other words, we notice that while language constituted a projection of the human being in the conventions of abstract systems of expression, representation, and communication, it also exercised an impoverishing function in that it excluded the wealth of senses-possibly including common sense-and the signs addressing them. Language made of us one monolithic entity. ”

“ This being so, the more tap-roots a language sends down into the soil of life, and the more varied the strata of human experience from which it draws its nourishment, whether of vocabulary or idiom, the more perfect will be its potentialities as a medium of expression. ”

“ So it is only by our ability to analyze roots—the compound constituents of Language—into the prime elements which have, except rarely, no distinctive and individual embodiment in it, that we can hope to gain a clear comprehension of the nature of Language itself, or of its most primitive concrete or composite foundations. ”

“ Hence that science which makes known the nature and structure of speech, and immediately concerns the correct and elegant use of language, while it surpasses all the conceptions of the stupid or unlearned, and presents nothing that can seem desirable to the sensual and grovelling, has an intrinsic dignity which highly commends it to all persons of sense and taste, and makes it most a favourite with the most gifted minds. ”

“ What is it that constitutes and makes man what he is? What is it but his power of language—that language giving him the means of recording his experience—making every generation somewhat wiser than its predecessor,—more in accordance with the established order of the universe? ”

“ The differentiation introduced above among pre-language notations, emerging languages, emerging systems of writing, and dying languages is simultaneously a differentiation of kinds and types of human expression, interaction, and interpretation of everything humans use to acknowledge their reality in the world they live in. Drawing attention to oneself or to others does not require language. ”

“ But after all, this is only what may be called a variety of expression, the same general idea being differently brought out, just as in speech the same thoughts are displayed in various idioms. All arts and all machines are but dialects of one language—reasonings and conclusions in tangible forms and figures—a universal speech, understood by all men. ”

“ We must conversely, as soon as the idea arises in our mind, associate with it a mental image of the word, and by means of this image we must innervate our articulatory apparatus so as to reproduce the word as physical sound. To read or to write a language other elements still must be introduced. But it is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so complicated as to call into play almost all the elementary powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination, association, judgment, and volition. ”

“ Argumentation
When we pause to look about us and to realize what things are really going on, we discern that everyone is talking and writing. Perhaps we wonder why this is the case. Nature is said to be economical. She would hardly have us make so much effort and use so much energy without some purpose, and some purpose beneficial to us. So we determine that the purpose of using language is to convey meaning, to give ideas that we have to someone else. ”

“ Given so small a number of graphic and demonstrative roots as would hardly suffice to express the commonest wants of human beings, to produce an instrument that shall render the faintest shades of feeling and thought;—given a vague infinitive or a stern imperative, to derive from it such moods as an optative or subjunctive, and tenses as an aorist or paulo-post future;—given incoherent utterances, to arrange them into a system where all is uniform and [pg 309] regular, all combined and harmonious;—such is the work of the human mind which we see realized in “language.” ”

“ The nature of a living language is contrary to any such fixed state.
Language, if it is to reflect the mentality of the masses using it, must be capable of accommodation, of adaptability, and of flexibility in the meanings of its parts. ”

“ Orality is associated with fixed frames of existence and practical life. The culture of the written word resulted from the introduction of a variable frame of existence, within which a new pragmatic framework, corresponding to a growing scale of human activity, required a stable outline of language. ”

“ This knowledge of the underlying laws of speech should determine the mode of the combination of Elementary Sounds into Syllables and Words, and of Words into Sentences naturally expressive of given conceptions or ideas. Such a language would rest on discovery, in that precise sense in which discovery differs from invention, and would have in itself infinite capacities and powers of expression, and again of suggesting thought; and might perhaps come to be recognized as the most stupendous discovery to which the human intellect is capable of attaining. ”

“ Thinking beings conceive ideas of things.
Those who employ language adopt sounds or signs to convey those ideas to others.
[41] On these obvious principles rest the whole superstructure of all language, spoken or written. Objects are presented to the mind, impressions are there made, which, retained, constitute the idea, and, by agreement, certain words are employed as the future signs or representations of those ideas. ”