Man And His Ancestor: A Study In EvolutionMorris, Charles
Science
Man And His Ancestor: A Study In Evolution
Morris, Charles
Human beings -- Origin
If we seek to analyze any of these languages, the most intricate as well
as the least advanced, we find ourselves in most instances able to
isolate the root word as the basic element of speech. From this simple
form all the more developed forms seem to have arisen. Take away their
combining devices, and the root words fall apart like so many beads of
speech, each with a defined significance of its own and fully capable of
existing by itself. The Aryan and the Chinese especially offer
themselves to this analytic method. Strip off the suffixes and affixes
from Aryan words, get down to the germinal forms from which these words
have grown, isolate these germs of speech, and we find ourselves in a
language of root forms, each of which has grown vague and wide in
significance as the modifying elements that limited its meaning have
been removed. In the Chinese the problem is a much simpler one. We need
simply to take the existing words out of their place in the sentence and
let them stand alone, and we have root words at first hand. We may go
through the whole range of human speech and, with more or less
difficulty, arrive at a similar result. In short, the evidence seems
conclusive that the language of mankind began in the use of isolated
words of vague and broad significance, and that all the subsequent
development of language consisted in the combination of these words,
with a modification and limitation of their meaning, the families of
speech differing principally in the method of combination devised.
It must, indeed, be said that in isolating the root forms of modern
languages we reach conditions still far removed from those of primitive
speech. These roots are in a measure packed with meaning. Time has added
to their significance, and they lack the simplicity they probably once
possessed. In particular, they have gained ideal senses, entered in a
measure into that broad language of the mind which has been gradually
added to the language of outer nature. The recognition of the existence
of mind and thought doubtless came somewhat late in human development.
Man long knew only his body and the world that surrounded it. Step by
step only did he discover his mind. And when it became necessary to
speak of mental conditions, no new language was invented, but old words
were broadened to cover the new conditions. The mind is analogous to the
body in its operations, ideas are analogues of things, and it was
usually necessary only to add to the physical significance of words the
corresponding ideal significance. In this way a secondary language
slowly grew up, underlying and subtending the primary language, until
the words invented to express the world of things were employed to
include as vast a world of thoughts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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