بخش ۸: شکل گیری و آفرینش گفتار
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FORMATION AND THE CREATION OF SPEECH
In the beginning was the word, and the word was God,
JoHN i, 3
In order to understand the essential quality of the poet and the poetic art, we have to take account of the material in which the artist works far more than we need to do in the case of the arts of plastic and picture. For this material, language, is itself a purely human creation, which had a birth and development of its own before it was used in poetry; and this we can only understand as a creative process. Although we need not enter in detail into the problem of the birth of language, to solve which attempts have been made from the most varied angles of approach,’ we must — at least so far as lies within the framework of our investigations into the creative impulse of man—try to throw some light on this speech-creative power and on the significance of expression in word in the history of culture. In one point modern research is more or less unanimous: that the most vital elements in our culture — the making of fire, agriculture, domestication of animals, measurement of time, observation of the stars — originate in the satisfaction not of practical, but of religious, supersensible, and ideological needs. The same seems to be true of language, as to which recent study more and more rejects the obvious theory that it arose in the need to make oneself understood. But here, as so frequently elsewhere, the deeper understanding of cultural significance comes, not out of the narrower sphere of language study and from the professional philologist, but from borderlands and borderland-study: in this case from mythology and epistemology.
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1 For a general survey,see Fritz Specht: Die Sprache und ibr Ursprung (Berlin, 1921) and the more recent Human Speech, by Sir R. Paget (New York, 1930).
There are two works in particular which were valuable in our discussion of metaphor and are equally so for the mythical significance of language: Fritz Mauthner’s Beitrige zu einer Kritik der Sprache* and Ernst Bocklen’s Die Entstehung der Sprache im Lichte des Mythos. A third work, by Ernst Vossler, which deals with the creation and development of speech (Sprachschépfung und Entwicklung; Heidelberg, 1903), we shall return to when we have dealt adequately with its mythic character. For what interests us most to begin with is that two works that start from such opposite standpoints as those of Mauthner and Bocklen should be in such surprising agreement in conceiving not only of the word as a mythic form, but of language itself, even the whole formation of language, as one vast metaphorical comprehension of the world. Before summarizing the views of the two authors on this, we must make it clear that we have nothing to do with the special intention and purpose of either work —the one (Mauthner’s) setting out to show that language is inefficient as an epistomological instrument, since its essence is mythological and not logical, and the other (Bécklen’s) to prove from language that all myth originates in the moon, which is of less importance to us than his successful proof of the mythic character of language in general, which found truly pristine expression in myth. To this mythological character of language belongs the personifying tendency, of course, but also the metaphorical. As Mauthner says (II, 450), this grew out of human thought alone and still grows only “through the transference (ueragépew) of a completed word to an incomplete impression — that is, through comparison, through the eternal a-peu-prés, the eternal paraphrasing and verbal picturing, which constitutes at once the artistic power and the logical weakness of language.
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1 Three volumes: 1, Zur Sprache und Psychologie; IL, S prachwissenschaft; Il, Zur Grammatik und Logik (Stuttgart, 1g0r onwards). Incidentally I would refer in this context to the suggestive work of R. Kleinpaul, although it has been criticized as unacademic (especially: Volkspsychologie. Das Seelenleben im Spiegel der Sprache; Berlin, 1914).
The two or the hundred meanings of a word or a concept are so many metaphors or pictures, and since there is not a single word of which we know the original meaning, no word has any but a metaphorical meaning.” Mauthner then shows how throughly we are broken in to this habit in that we never see anything wrong in “figuratively applying mutually antagonistic words, drawn from almost opposite spheres,” to our most essential ideas, as, for instance, “when we describe time with spatial expressions (for example, long and short), or a musical tone by spatial or colour ideas.” But he goes further and argues that metaphor, which is the means of languagegrowth, may perhaps have been its actual source, in the sense that metaphor may once have linked concepts of time and space on the one side to notions of sound on the other, just as nowadays it links actual experiences. “If we are in a foreign country and, not knowing its language, want to express bigness, we shall open our arm wide; if the opposite, we shall press the palms of the hands together. Now suppose the whole vocal apparatus desired to share in the gesture; suppose the glottis and the mouth pressed themselves together to articulate an ‘i’ in imitation of a small space, or opened wide into an ‘0’ to imitate a big one. May we not say that, even at that stage, there is metaphor? And what if, then, the sound were transferred from space to time, to colour, and so on?” Bécklen too, like many other investigators, believes that language was originally of gesture and therefore soundless, and further that an imitative activity led to the genesis of language; but he differs from all other students in his assumption that the object first imitated was the moon. Although he adduces a mass of material not only for the relation of moon and mouth (Mond-Mund, the moon-face), but for the extensive influence of moon-mythology generally, the impression we get from him is not so much that we are in the presence of inclusive and conclusive work as that these are studies preliminary to deeper research. Be that as it may, we do find, in the formation of language as hitherto in every creative act, the element of imitation being used for explanation, and certainly this fact does make some points intelligible, at least in regard to a particular stage of development. Hence, for example, the onomatopoetic theory, whose founder, Herder, tried to explain language as originally the imitation of sounds. The names of animals are usually adduced as evidence one way or the other in this connexion. Actually there are, on the whole, very few onomatopoetic animal names such as cuckoo; dogs are not named bow-wows nor sheep baa-baas; and occasional support, such as the fact that a cat in Chinese really is “ miuh,” a goat in Greenlandic “ mek-mek,” and a sheep in Botokudian “ mah-mah,” does not validate the theory — poetic rather than scientific — of Herder. For the rest, the theory is only a special by-product of the typically Romantic attitude, which, schooled in the study of the collective creations of art (such as myth, national epic, and language-formation), assigned a more important place to the emotional than to the intellectual. And even Mauthner is deeply influenced in his critique of the intellectual values in language by Hamann, Herder, Humboldt, and Jacobi. In opposition to this there is the philosophic conception of language-formation, which we find first in Greece and which emphasizes not so much the naturalistic imitativeness as its human creativity, which in fact is what most interests us here: According to the account of the neo-Platonist Proclus, names were for Pythagoras pictures of Being, a sort of model of the “intelligible ideas”; and Heraclitus also declared that words resembled pictures of what was intuited. Other sayings make it clear that this was not a mere onomatopeeic tone-picturing. Democritus called names sounding pictures made by the gods themselves; and according to the Cratylus of Plato, which is a locus classicus for the views of antiquity on the origin of language, a name is an imitation of a thing through the medium of the voice; and, moreover, it is the “ essence” of a thing that is imitated in letters and syllables. While music and painting only express the external aspect of things, language starts from the inner being of what is expressed. In the Protagoras, again, we see the conscious intention in the production of sounds, and the part played by lips and tongue, quite clearly emphasized. Now, while the onomatoperists believed that what was imitated was the sound heard in nature, modern theory has unanimously and entirely rejected this in favour of the mimetic explanation. This involves something more than the mere assertion that there is reproduction of gesture in sounds. The real question is why man adopted just these methods of imitation — that is, why these particular movements of articulation came to correspond with the particular sounds. Wundt says (Sprache, II, 635) that if there is any adaptation between language and what it expresses, it cannot lie in the speaker’s adapting the sound, but can only consist in his adapting his articulationmovements to the impression or, rather, to the ideas and feelings called forth in us by that impression. The essential in original utterance is therefore not the sound but the gesture — which is itself, however, only a special form of mimic action.
Bocklen is, however, justified in asking for what reason a “ sound-gesture”” was added to the mimic and pantomimic motions. His book gives an answer which is of interest to us, because it emphasizes the creative or imitatively creative (Nachschépferisch) element of speech-formation far more than any other theory does so. He secks to prove that what the creators of language imitated was no sound, certainly no sound perceived by human ear, in fact nothing earthly at all, but the phases of the moon. Without subscribing to this particular assertion, it does agree in an extraordinary way with the “ imitation” which we have found to exist for all creative processes, the imitation of something unearthly, heavenly, imagined, or abstracted. So here too we may take the moon to be only the symbol of man’s immortality-urge, which he tries to satisfy through speech as well as in other ways. But the imitation in sound of something unheard must be regarded as a creative achievement. In so far as it is imitation of something seen or thought, it can have only the same intent as every other kind of imitation: namely, to identify itself with what it imitates, but, more than that, to dominate it and make itself independent of it. This is, however, the formula for all creating, which, fundamentally, aims, not at a duplication, but at a substitution. By creating, man makes himself independent of that which exists, or at least he makes a very considerable effort to do so; so far as speech is concerned we can see it in name-magic. Thus even the oldest form of speech is, as Bocklen says, akin to prayer, being not merely an invocation of God or a medium for communication with God, but an actual being God —“a vehicle for the soul on which one can rise truly and actually and unite oneself there and then with the deity —in which is found a pledge for the eternal union which follows after death ” (op. cit. p. 80). Bocklen adduces, in support of this view, the belief that the air extruded in speech carries upward the movements of tongue and lips which we make in honour of the deity —a thought that was worked out by the Greek philosophers, lived on in the Pneuma-doctrine, and remains effective to this day in our physical theories of sound-waves. If it is hard to accustom oneself to the idea that language did not proceed from the imitation of natural sounds or (probably) from anything earthly at all, it is still harder to swallow the notion that it did not originate as a means of making oneself understood. Yet many philologists, and Mauthner most unequivocally, have come out at this view. But if this is true, then language Was not originally something collective, but a purely expressive and individual function — in a word, an art, which at first (like primitive body-ornament) helped the ego to magnify itself and to dominate its world-around. W. von Humboldt was, I think, the first to attempt a scientific justification for the view that language is an artistic expression, and for this purpose he invented the now famous idea of the “ inner speechform — by which he understood, in contrast to the outer sound-form of the various languages, the peculiar way in which language does adapt itself formally to its purpose of expressing ideas." More recently Karl Vossler (op. cit.) has characterized the individually artistic aspect of language-formation in the proposition that language as such undergoes no development, but is produced anew and in every case differently, by everyone who gives expression in language to a mental impression. According to this view, the forms of expression in language must be studied without regard to the practical aspect, as creation or art—in a word, aesthetically. In so far as language does become a practical medium of intercourse between individuals, it is no longer an individual but a collective work, which takes empirical reality into account and is rigid or mutable according to the cultural needs of the language-community. In this second sense, which Vossler distinguishes sharply from the first, we have no longer a creation, but something that we must regard as development. This view, together with the religious origin of language, would give a good explanation of a fact which has caused the philologists much trouble: namely, the repeatedly observed fact that the meaning of words undergoes a gradual deterioration—as may, indeed, be observed right into the latest development of a language. Bocklen explains this fact by the gradual “ secularization” of language, which was at first religious and whose profanation was forbidden. We may add a further psychological motive, that language was not originally intended for understanding at all —in fact, was regarded as the peculiar property of the individual, for the attainment of personal immortality in the unio mystica, so that part of its magical value would be lost by communicating it to others. In every case, therefore, the profanation of language to everyday use was reflected in a profanation of the meaning of words which had once had a sacred, because creative, force. In order to understand this, we must return to the individual element in the development and use of language, which explains how the self-creative power of language continues effectual right into the most complicated forms.
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1 Uther die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues; Gesammelte Werke, AkademieAusg., VII.
But there is another attempted explanation of the origin of language with which we must first deal — that which asks us to regard once more the sexual impulse as the creative principle of language. This is Hans Sperber’s study “ on the influence of sexual forces in the origin and development of language,” * which brilliantly synthesizes the views of earlier theorists concerning the sex-call and the collective work-call by linking these in with the activities of tool-using, which, according to Sperber, had a sexual emphasis and was therefore accompanied by attracting sounds. He appeals, in support, to the primitive mattock-agriculture, but we know so very little of this that in the main he is forced to resort to the highly developed symbolism of ordinary agriculture,” which seems to me rather to be the outcome of language than to have contributed to its formation. If it comes to that, it is more likely in association with primitive methods of making fire that sex symbolism may have influenced the formation of words — the more as we find the discovery of fire associated in myths, to be mentioned later, with the discovery of language. But Sperber’s theory has anyhow too narrow a basis to be admitted as a general theory of language-formation, and therefore, in the practical part, he limits himself to showing the power of expanding their meanings that is possessed by sexual words, and especially verbs with the root meaning of “coire.” But it seems inadmissible to use this fact (which incidentally does not need Sperber’s proof) as a foundation for the origin of language, especially if we restrict ourselves to modern languages and dialects. There are objections not only of fact, but of method. Not only do we find in primitive languages far more words for other processes and activities than for the more or less undifferentiated sex-act;* but primitive implements themselves were not (or in any case not merely) sexual symbols,but rather projections of parts of the human body, and, above all, of the hand.
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1 Imago, I (1912).
2A. Dieterich: Muster Erde (1905), a work on which Sperber largely bases himself.
3 As one example out of many: in the grammar of the Ewe language, Westermann mentions that the adverbs which qualify movement (like walking, swimming, driving) usually admit of thirty or more specifications of this one activity.
Ernst Kapp — probably the first to do so — thus exposes the idea in his Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (1877):* in his technical inventions, where if anywhere man nevertheless unconsciously transfers various functional relations and normal conditions of his bodily structure to the instruments of his hand, it is only after the event that he becomes conscious of the fact that his mechanisms came into being on an organic model, that his understanding of his own organism comes only by way of analogy with the mechanisms that are seemingly independent, but really free adaptations of it.” August Schmarsow ° has used this idea for the understanding of primitive art-forms in order to prove the priority of body-ornament over objectornament. “ The connexion [of the tools] with the movements of man’s body and the performance of his organs endows the object thus created with a permanent attitude, so that many of them, even when they lie unused, give us the impression of a dissociated member.” And Scheltema sees in the transition from body-ornament to the decoration of objects nothing but the “ spiritual parallel and explanatory amplification of the transition, so vastly important for human culture, from the natural organism to its self-expansion in the instrument.” * In addition to these considerations of cultural history there is a further linguistic argument, whether, or to what extent (especially as denoting some part of the body), the verb and not the substantive was the original form of speech. We will leave this for the moment and turn to the sex hypothesis. For the reasons already mentioned, I would rather see in Sperber’s facts the expression of an already existing speech-creative force than a root from which speech sprang.
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1In the same year appeared Noiré’s work on the origin of language, in which he emphasized the importance of primitive methods of work which are assisted by ancillary cries for the growth of language. His book on implements and their significance appeared in 1880.
2 The way in which this primitive anthropomorphism survives into the most complicated machinery is seen in two books that are of interest for the problem of art: A. Klima: Die Technik im Lichte der Karikatur (Vienna, 1913), and H. Wettich: Die Maschine in der Karikatur (Berlin, 1916).
3 Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft, p. 136; and Zeitschrift fur Aesth., 1910.
4 Die altnordische Kunst (1923), p. 30.In other words, I am disposed to assume, in conformity with the general view adopted in this book, that what we have to deal with is not a growth of language out of sex-acts or sexual activity, but a comparatively late sexualization of language as a manifestation of the human creative urge which gradually usurps the parenthood of everything by bringing sexual connotations into its nomenclature. This sexualization of language is itself, then, a metaphorical way of expressing a “just-like”; that is, it gives name-forms to everything that man creates, “just as if” they were produced from him as the child is.* If in what follows we develop and support this view in detail,
we do so less as a matter of linguistics (which do not concern us here very much) than with a view to elucidating the human creative urge in this sphere also, the high importance of which is not confined to the cultural, but extends to artistic development in general. We have here a telling instance of the secondary réle which sex plays in human creativity, which flows from other sources, though it may easily (for the reasons mentioned) become sexualized later on. It is very tempting, of course, to adduce the existence of genders in almost all modern languages as evidence of the sexual origin of language; but such a conclusion is so superficial that even Sperber, in his attempt to prove that sexual origin, scorns it and argues against it in the form of one of its chief exponents, Rudolf Kleinpaul.
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1 in our study of the names of parts of the body we saw that there is no preference among primitive or civilized peoples for the sex-organs over other parts of the body which seem to them more important. Rather, the universal tendency to apply euphemistically to the sex-organs the name of other parts, especially the foot, leg, hand, or even knee, seems to point to an opposite process to that of sex-emphasis; and, in my view, this is to be associated with the primitive idea of the soul and its denial of sexual immortality (see Seelenglaube und Psychologée: chapter on ‘The Age of Sex’’). The sexualization which is here discussed would then belong to that particular period in the history of peoples wherein not only language but all ideologies (with the institutions based on them) take on a sex-tone.
2 Kleinpaul: Die Ratsel der Sprache.
This rebutting argument of his proves for our living languages what Powell had already established as a result of his thorough investigation of Indian languages: *“The student of linguistics must get entirely out of his head the idea that gender is merely a distinction of sex. In the North American Indian languages (and probably in the Bantu and the Indo-European also) gender is usually a classification-method.” We find the classification of “higher” and “lower” beings, that presently became one of “ male” and “ female” in the Semitic languages, which, even thus early, breathe the moral outlook of the East. Here too the primitives disclose to us the deeper sources, for (according to Powell) the main principle of their classification is to divide the animate and inanimate objects. Thus the inclusion of primitive languages within the scope of our study has shown this phenomenon of grammatical genders to be but a part of a much wider and more complex system of classification; and this makes it all the more interesting to follow the phenomena of transition. Opposed to the two-gender system of Semitic and Hamitic languages and the three-gender system of the Indo-European, we have the Indian classification that we have just been discussing, based chiefly on the distinction of “soul” and “ no-soul” (living and non-living), though, it is true, there attaches itself to this a certain valuation as “ personal” and “impersonal,” which reappears in the distinction of masculine and feminine. Most interesting of all are the transitional languages which show the beginning of the sexualization side by side with the old basis of classification. According to Meinhof,’ the developed system of the Bantu languages has more than twenty classes with special prefixes; and between them and our two-gender system we have, for instance, the Hamitic Ful,’ in which, above the old classification of nouns, we have an overlying new system with only four headings: persons, things, big, and small, whence, as the big pass into the class of persons, and the small into that of things, a twofold system is developed, corresponding to our division into masculine and feminine.
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1 Powell: The Evolution of Language, Report, I, 9.
2 Grundzsige einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen (1906).
3 Idem: Sprachen der Hamiten (1912), pp. 22, 42.
This gives us a glimpse into the valuation-principle which eventually identifies persons, living, big, and important things with man, and non-living, small, and unimportant things with woman.’ This gives us an exact parallel to the totemistic system, discussed earlier, which does not stop with the prohibitions regarding certain women (exogamy) or animals (totem), but assigns values to everything in the world by division into good and bad. The only problem here is: why does woman always come into the class of the evil, the dangerous, and the less valuable? As I have explained, this arises from the individual’s urge to eternalize himself personally, an urge which is threatened by sexual propagation, of which woman is the representative; and so woman passes into what I have called the Not-I class, which includes dangerous as well as unimportant (and neutral) things. Sexuality, then, seems to have come into the formation of language comparatively late, and we can equally say that it played nothing like the part that Sperber assigns to it in its genesis. Not only in children, but also in primitive man, the mouth, rather than the sex-organs, plays the most important part in language-development. The mouth, as has already been mentioned, is used not only as an instrument of speech, but as a mimetic organ of gesticulation, which carries us from the movements of crying and sucking to the formation of sounds and words.” Sound-gesture therefore belongs to a very early stage of development, because it is already determined in part by natural life-functions and leads very soon to a general gesture-language * in which the individual expresses himself at first, physioplastically, without even wishing to be understood; here the mouth, being the most important life-sustaining organ, functions as the organ of gestures which have the character of sounds.
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1 In Bedauye this is still quite clear, Thus, a cow is masculine because in these lands it is the chief support of ordinary existence; the flesh is, however, feminine because relatively to the whole cow it is of less importance (Reinisch: Die Bedauyesprache, 11; Vienna, 1893; p. 59). It is a subject with which Ernst Cassierer has dealt lin detail, but unfortunately only from the phenomenological standpoint. Cf. besides the short essay above mentioned: Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken (Leipzig, 1922), and his large three-volume work: Philosophie de + symbolischen Formen: 1, Die Sprache; 11, Der Mythos; IIL, Phanomenologie der Erkenntnis ;
2 Spielrein: ‘' Die Entstehung der kindlichen Worte Mama und Papa,"’ Imago, VIII (1922).
3 One stage of gesture-language in the development of the child is dealt with also by S. Ferenczi in his: Entwicklungsstufen des Wirklichkeitssinnes”’ Cnternationale Zeitschrift fiir Psychoanalyse, I (913).
But we cannot follow these oral sound-gestures to the stage of language-formation without having first referred to a second bodily organ which has played as great, in primitive times perhaps a greater, part: namely, the hand. Even if Sperber were right in maintaining that all implements were sexualized, this would still presuppose a corresponding sexualization of the hand, since the hand not only controls the implement, but was the original model for it. Without having to decide here if the hand — “ the human organ of culture” — is a new acquisition of man or an original possession which the other primates lost,’ there can be no doubt that it was the archetype of the implement, any more than that it is the most important organ for the language of gesture. Both ideas have been worked out in the wide sweep of Paul Alsberg’s Das Menschheitsriitsel (Dresden, 1922), in which he sees the characteristic quality of the development of man, as man, in an everincreasing “elimination of the body,” accompanied by a simultaneous replacement of the eliminated parts by one or another tool. In this process of development, which affects the spiritual as well as the technical achievement of man, the hand, at least to start with, played the most important part. Alsberg maintains that its development into an implement, as in throwing stones, even precedes the upright gait and certainly the perfection of the brain. But the later appearance of word- and idea-formation, too, Alsberg regards, like the elimination of the body, as the creation of an instrument; for the word and the concept, which are the basic elements of language and intelligence, are also extra-corporeal (artificial) means towards that elimination.
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1 Even Lower Palzolithic has, as the typical form of its tools, a stone of the form and size of the human hand. It looks as if they had wanted to translate into the more efficient stone (the ‘* Faustkeil’’) the hand, which is the natural and universal tool of man. Schuchhardt, op. cit., p. 11.
2 The view supported, as is well known, by H. Klaatsch (Die Entstehung und Erwerbung der Menschenmerkmale in Abderhalden’s Fortschritten; Berlin, 1913).
Before we proceed to deduce, if only suggestively, the language, like other developments, from manual gestures, we must return once again to this question of sexuality and the réle which, according to Sperber, it plays in language-formation. His view depends on the psycho-analytical assumption that all pleasure has a sexual character, a thesis that we cannot here discuss. I will refer only to what has been said about zsthetic pleasure and the other well-known sources of pleasure which originate in the avoidance of tensions and the release from inner pressure. The fact, however, that sex-satisfaction has this character, of release from tension and pressure, is no justification for calling all pleasure sexual, but seems to me to point rather to the opposite view, as I explained in connexion with esthetic pleasure. However that may be, I produced in 1925 a commentary on the problem which concerns us here — that of the relation of hand and mouth to sexuality —to which I should like to refer now," since, though it still remains wholly within the cadre of the psycho-analytical mode of thought, it points to things so far outside that cadre that we can link on to it here. In the analytical study of the genesis of the purely genital libido in the individual I found that it is very little developed at first in the child and gradually increases through positive accessions in the activity and the erotic of the mouth. The intermediary between the mouth and the genitals I found, also from observations, to be the hand, which in sucking and in masturbation seems to play the same constructively important part that Alsberg (from quite other premisses) showed it to have played in the history of culture. Even if at a more advanced stage of artistic development there was an erotic emphasis placed on hand or mouth —as Hermann? assumes in his commentaries on the individual genesis of the artistic impulse — yet at any rate in the beginning the opposite process, the transference of activity or energy from mouth or hand to the genitals, seems to occur.
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1'The Genesis of Genitality’’ (Psychoanalytic Review, 1925), incorporated in Genetische Psychologie, Part I (1927).
2 Imre Hermann has published in Imago, VIII (1922) and X (1924), studies of the drawing faculty, in which he stresses the erotic significance of the hand in artistic sublimation.”’
But I think it is at least doubtful if this transferred energy can be called a “ libido” in the psycho-analytical sense, because the term may readily and erroneously suggest that the later process is what underlies the primary also.
We will pass over this problem here, as being one of general human energetics, and turn to the importance of the hand for human development and especially for the formation of language — which is confirmed both for the individual and for culture generally. In order to give (to what is in the first place a general investigation) a definite relation to our problem, let us remark at once that the dominant and creative function of the hand is still retained in the plastic arts — for example by the painter and sculptor — while the poet, at least in origin, derives from the speech-creative function of the mouth, though later he reverts to the hand when he writes — a process which could be followed right to the difference of written and conversational language and would throw an interesting light on the part played by hand-ideology in the development of written language. But even the spoken word seems to be influenced by the hand and the language of gesture, far more deeply than one imagines, and the study of primitive language and its social milieu in particular is convincing as to all language-formation being derived in part from the hand and its expressive movements. It would be hard to decide if this was already true of words descriptive of an object or only for the primitive sentence; but in any case the mouth in itself originally possessed only a physioplastic expressiveness, whereas probably all genuine naming and certainly all verbal description of activity derive from the sphere of the hand. Almost all observers agree about the pictorial quality of primitive language.’ “The Klamath language, which may be taken as representative of a very widespread family of languages in North America, obeys a very definite tendency which Gatschet (The Klamath Language, p. 460) calls pictorial — that is, the need to speak concretely, in pictures, to draw or paint what one wants to express.”
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1 Material relating to primitive languages from Lévy-Bruhl’s excellent work: Les Fonctions mentales dans les socittts inférieures (Paris, 1910).
We will leave out of account the significance of the eye, which L. Geiger * puts in the first place as an essential speech-forming factor, and will emphasize in this pictorial tendency — which is found in others besides primitive languages — the drawing or tracing element, which continues right into even the most abstract formation of concepts, as indeed the very name of these, including, as it does, the notion of seizing or grasping (4egreifen, comprehend, etc.) testifies. In an important work on “Manual Concepts” F. H. Cushing* has pointed to the connexions of the speech expressed by movements of the hand with the oral languages. Observers of primitive man have continually emphasized the part played by signs not only as a means of understanding apart from sound-language, but as an actual part of that sound-language. Thus in the case of the Halkomele of British Columbia we may assert boldly that at least a third of the meaning of their words and sentences is expressed by this auxiliary of primitive speech, gesture, and differences of intonation.’ This is true, however, not only of primitive peoples, but of, to a greater or less extent, our own cultural area—Semites and Southerners *‘— because the language of gesture is not merely an auxiliary of speech but a language of its own, which may have preceded the formation of syllables. and certainly developed along with it. The hand, however, not only is the organ which first grasps a thing before it can be grasped in words, but also carries the objects thus repictured, like a food, to the mouth, which then works them over verbally (we ourselves still make corresponding movements of the mouth when we write). Now, in this there is being expressed a quality of language which, so far from being the result of a desire to communicate, implies a directly opposite tendency towards incorporation, the intuition being not only to grasp the objects of the external world — that is, to dominate them — but actually to make them part of the ego.
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1 Geiger (Ursprung der Sprache) calls man the ‘‘eye-animal
2 FH:Cushing (manual concept: American Anthropologist, V, pp. 291 et seq.).
1, EXXIV, - a nographical Reports. . . Halkomelan, British Columbia,”’ J. A. Carl Sittl: Die Gebarden der Griechen und Romer (Leipzig, 1890).
This originally possessive character of language is still very clear in the Melanesian and Micronesian group of languages. All parts of one’s own body and all that concerns it, such as eating and the like, are defined by a sufix which, like our possessive pronoun, expresses the fact of “ belonging ” to our ego.’ Moreover, in many of the North American languages there are no words for eye, hand, arm, and other parts or organs of the body in themselves; they are always associated with a pronoun, added to or included in them and indicating my eye, thy hand, his hand (Lévy-Bruhl, op. cit., p. 143). This peculiarity is found among many other peoples and, moreover, appears quite generally in the terminations of words describing relationship. This possessive intrusion into language, together with the strongly individual character of the language of gesture, gives, specially to primitive languages, an individualist tone which even Lévy-Bruhl has to admit, though it does not exactly support his theory of language as a social phenomenon dependent on a collective cast of mind. Dr. Peschuél-Loesche says of Loango: * “Everyone manipulates the language in his own way; it might be truer to say that each man’s mouth utters language according to the circumstances and mood he is in. A language of this sort —I cannot find any better comparison than this rather unlovely one —is as free and natural as the utterances of animals, which are equally understood.” LévyBruhl says to the same effect that “ words are not something rigid and fixed once for all; vocal gesture is, like that of the hand, a description, a drawing, a vivid expression of the action or object in question. In the Ronga language there is a genus of words which the writers of Bantu grammars call in general interjections or onomatopoetics. These are vocables, mostly of one syllable, by which the natives express a sudden immediate impression that has been called forth by a play, a tone, or an idea or by which they describe a movement, an appearance, a noise.
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1 Parkinson: Thirty Years in the South Seas, p. 730.
2 Die Loango-Expedition, Ul, 2, pp- 91-5.
They succeed in this way in giving shades of meaning which a quieter speech could not express. In addition, these little words have given rise to numerous verbs and would deserve mention even if only on that account.” That these soundpictures (in which the language of the Ewe is also very rich) are not proper onomatopoetics follows not only from the examples adduced by Westermann (op. cit.), but also from the individual emphasis that Junod has stressed: “ Yet we must admit that the use of these descriptive adverbs varies greatly with each individual, and some natives sprinkle their language to such an extent with them that they are unintelligible to anyone who is not initiated. They even invent new ones. Yet many of these words have been really incorporated in the language and are now generally intelligible.” * Here we have an example of a collective everyday language, which is universally understood, actually growing out of that individual “spoken gesture ” of which the forceful originality still rings out in the language of high poesy (“poetic licence,” as WE say). However we may picture the development of language into a collective medium of understanding, it seems at least certain that expression in language was originally, as it still is with children before they learn to talk, purely subjective and served as a discharge of inner tension. In a short but valuable essay, supplementing Sperber’s theory, Adalbert Berny * has exhibited in some well-chosen examples the part played by physioplastic elements in early language-formation. He also starts with the mouth as the real organ for language-formation and takes as the earliest creations of language the sound-pictures which belong to the sphere of eating and breathing. If we try to evaluate psychologically these linguistic observations, the conclusions that we have already come to about the part played by mouth and hand enable us to see the basic difference between the individual expression-sound and the collective communicationspeech.
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1 Junod: Grammaire Ronga, p. 197. 2" Zur Hypothese des sexuellen Ursprungs der Sprache,"’ Imago, I (1913).
We mentioned above that the things which the hand grasps are also carried by it to the mouth, which takes them up and copies them. In this sense the individual sound-formation corresponds more or less to an incorporation of the indicated objects by the mouth, while the collectivizing of language to serve as a medium of understanding is more like a giving-out, or throwing-out of what has been previously taken in — as indeed the accompanying hand-gesture often shows.’ This double character of language as a subjective means of expression and a collective medium of understanding occurs again in the highest form of language and, in fact, is the essence of art-work in general. This basic relation of the individual to the whole we have already seen, creatively represented, in the myths of the sacrifice of man for the construction of the universe; but there is also a special group of myths in which, as it seems to me, the conflict between the individual and collective use of language is depicted. Most of these traditions, which Bocklen (op. cit.) has collected, come from primitive peoples among whom language has retained its pristine form and function. Almost all these language-myths deal less with the origin of language than with that of the difference of languages — like the story of the Tower of Babel —and in particular with the complete loss of language as the penalty of some sin of man. This sin seems to me everywhere to relate to an individualist separating-off which the myth, being a collective product, punishes by the loss of common intelligibility; on the other hand, these mythical stories show the resistance that the individual puts up against the profanation of language intoa medium of communication, since here, as always, the individual, in profiting by collectivization, has to sacrifice also certain personal advantages.
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1In my latest work, on the Technik der Psychoanalyse (Vol. III, 1931), I was able to show the therapeutic character of the giving-out effect of this ‘expression,’ which is also the basic element of confession (p. 95).
Among these forfeits is the magical — that is, the creative (or destructive) — use of language, which for this reason is in later times kept secret by its adepts so that its efficacy may not be lost to them through profanation. This struggle to win a language of one’s own, which every child to this day passes through, can be traced in discourse from the peculiar elevated language of prayer and poetry, via the secret language of sect and profession, right into the specific language of a people or a nation.’ The interpretation, suggested by myths, that there had been originally only one language, and that differentiation had come as a punishment for some sin, is certainly of little help for the historical understanding of language-development. It must rather be looked upon as the tendentious invention of peoples who were trying, in pursuance of the national immortality-ideologies, to retain the special qualities of their mother tongue and hence rejected the general world-language. With that we come to realize that the various languages of different people are treated by the myth simply as an unwanted individualization, in the same way as the language oddities of the individual are treated within his own community. It is only when this individual is capable of helping the community by his individual creation of words, as the magician helps the primitive, the priest the higher, and the poet the highest stage of culture, that his art of speech is freed from the suspicion of personal misuse and becomes generally accessible. The myths also represent, apart from their content, the effort to save (at least in metaphorical form) this magical power of the individual, which has been lost through the profanation of his language — which later was to be taken under the fostering care of the poetic art. Berny speaks justly of man’s “ exaggeration of the value of language” in fancying that “the right name will call a thing into being.” But it is only in the case of concrete objects that this is illusory, for, after all, it leads to the word-spell and to the effort to exercise magical influence through the word.
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1 See, on this, Fritz Mauthner: Muttersprache und Vaterland (Leipzig, 1920).
This word-magic, incidentally, is probably preceded by picture-magic, which we may regard as the prelude to writing.’ As far as ideologies are concerned, this over-valuation of language not only is justified, but leads to an intoxication of words, which is akin to that of creativity, and which is seen also in the mystic ecstasy of prayer or the pathological condition of extreme polyglot. In fact, do not the ideologies, which include at an early stage the belief in a soul and later the macrocosmic immortality-myths, owe their existence to the word and are they not made possible only by language? For language was not only the first physioplastic creation of man, but his first self-creative achievement in a truly artistic sense. All other creativity was, if not imitation in the naturalistic sense, at any rate a deliberate follow-up of something already existent for the purpose of controlling it. But in language man made something new which had creative force in itself, and it was this something that in fact transformed the world in a human sense. And not only that, but it brought forth a new world, that of ideology. Language, however, was not only the beginning of artistic creation, but has been its highest peak; for it had not during its career to pass through the stages from the belly- to the head-culture, but appeared instantaneously as one of the earliest achievements of the latter, which thereafter was enabled by it, and it alone, to become a genuinely spiritual culture. Before we pass in the next chapter to discuss the particular effects of this process in poetry, we have still to mention a primitive motif which occurs as an essential element in language-myths.
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1 Writing, in the sense of imaginative expression through an ideograph, existed of course long before men wrote in letters proper. It seems otiose to enter into any argument as to whether the so-called ‘‘ Azilian signs’’ on the rocks of the Late Stone Age ought or ought not to be regarded as the beginning of picture-writing, since in any case they possess meaning (as is evidenced by the signs on the Australian boomerang and by tattoo-painting, which Taylor calls a ‘‘script.'’ Painting and script are in fact difficult to separate at first, both being just ways in which man sought to express something, to ‘‘say’’ something (see W. Paulcke: Die Ur-Anfange der Bildschrift in der Alt-Steingeit; Stuttgart, 1923; also the more recent work of H. Wirth: Der Aufgang der Menschheit, 1; Jena, 1928).
This is eating, which certainly represents a pre-linguistic function of the mouth and, as the only connexion with the belly-culture, represents an obstacle to speechdevelopment in the mythic sense. It seems as though this profane and extremely individual use of the mouth for eatingpurposes impeded its development into a spiritual organ of expression; herein once more the difference between egoistic absorption and collective expression may have played a part. The association which the myths of the Indians and Australians (Bocklen, op. cit., pp. 136, 145 et seq.) assume between the loss of a language (or of the means of communication) and indulgence in human flesh cannot, in my opinion, be accounted for historically as a condemnation of cannibalism, but must be taken symbolically. For the consumption of human flesh was not a mode of nourishment, but rather something esoteric in the nature of unio mystica —that is, the appropriation of the other’s soul for the strengthening of one’s own ego. As against these, we have myths still surviving in our own fairy-stories in which man learns languages from animals, as Siegfried learns the language of birds through drinking dragon’s blood. Whether these myths which introduce the bird as the bringer of language originally included the eating of the birds we do not know; but we have the Vedic Gandharva, the Persian Simurg, the Mexican Bird of the Flood, and the Samoan Tuli figuring as teachers of language. The last even gave designations to the parts of the human body: these the devil made from worms, but the bird named after itself, beginning with the head. \n this part played by the bird of saviour by language we can hardly do other than see the influence of a pretty highly developed idea of the soul, which has already risen from the materialistic worm-soul state to the notion of a spirit hovering in heaven — this being at once the precondition and the consequence of language-development. We have a further light on this motif of the confusion of tongues because of eating in certain myths of primitive peoples, in which indulgence in human flesh is punished by complete loss of speech. This certainly is connected with the silence of the dead and expresses the fear of the eater that he may have absorbed, along with the other qualities of the dead that he wanted, that of his “being dead” as well. But this identification with the dead is more than a punishment; it represents the entry into immortality: * in death all have once more the same language. This is probably the meaning of a myth of the Navajos, “who had all spoken the same language under the earth, but when they came above ground each into his own dwelling, had soon so many dialects that hardly anyone could understand anyone else.’ In this case individuation is manifestly the language-separating influence; and similarly an Australian tradition shows us the growth of language in association with the dismemberment motif. “An old woman called Wururi, who went out in the night with a big stick and extinguished the fire, had died and the peoples were devouring the corpse. The southern races came first and ate the flesh, and thus obtained a clear language; the eastern races came second and ate the upper entrails and spoke somewhat differently (presumably less clearly), and for the northern there was nothing left but the intestines, and their talk was still more different.” * This myth seems to crystallize a whole linguistic theory which connects the higher development of language with the eating of the worthier bodily parts — another evidence of the lesser value attributed to the lower body. More important, however, is the fact that the eating of human flesh in this case brings with it the discovery of language; yet we should note that it is the corpse of a woman that died, while in the other traditions of the Iroquois and Dog-rib Indians the confusion of language follows on the eating of a man who has been killed like an animal.
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1 This also explains the widespread custom of imposing silence — that is, renunciation of life—on widows. We have this in a still more radical form in the Indian practice of suttee. According to Spencer and Gillen, the Australian widow is often obliged to remain silent for twelve months, during which time she makes herself understood by the language of gesture.
2 Knortz: Marchen und Sagen der nordamerikanischen Indianer (1871), pp. 256 et seq. 3Steinthal: Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, p. 9.
This draws our attention to the fact that the distinction may really be between violent and natural death, and not between man and animal; for in general animals are identified with or even placed above men. Even in our own stories and fables animals talk; and primitive man had many more scruples than we have about killing and eating them. It is very probable, though of course it cannot be proved, that this religious significance of animals, which goes through all cultural history, originated in prehistoric times. And even if the —artistically highly developed—animal drawings of palzolithic man had nothing to do with reincarnation ideas, they are yet an impressive proof of the veneration of animals which points far beyond the merely practical use of the animal for cave-man’s food and clothing. Nor is it likely that man was originally an eater of meat; and certain traditions, especially among primitive peoples, leave no doubt that the killing of animals for food, “good hunting,” was not so simple an achievement as it is to the modern sportsman with his gun. | am not referring to the fact that he had not the same weapons or knowledge of the animal kingdom, but to the psychical difficulties in the way of his killing the animal when he felt himself one with it. Even in modern times Frobenius records the magic ceremonies which his native carriers performed before the killing of their prey; and these were not, as one might suppose, charms for obtaining luck, but rather a charm for the avoidance of the bad luck that might follow from the killing —in fact, a sort of permission is obtained by the hunter from his prey for killing him. This seemingly paradoxical interpretation of the magical hunting ceremonies in which the animal, drawn in the sand, is “killed” in advance by arrows or spears driven into it, fits the primitive mind far more closely than any notion of ensuring luck in the chase; even in modern hunting superstitions the purpose is much more to avoid bad luck than to induce good. And the reason why this bad luck may ensue is that the animal’s death, if it is not permitted by the animal itself, will be regarded as a murder to be avenged on the murderer.
This idea, which rests on the pre-animistic belief in metamorphosis, finds a touchingly naive expression in a myth of the Californian Indians, the Luiseno. This tribe (which incidentally lacks the usual products of Indian art) is said to have conceived the idea, on the occasion of a debate on the problem of whether men may die and live again, that stag would be good to eat — this in order to sidetrack the meeting’s attention. “ They talked about it with the stag, but he replied: No, he was a shaman and very powerful.” The story then describes how the stag was saved from being killed by the fact that he possessed himself all the magic by which men threatened to kill him, and was therefore even in this respect identical with men.’ It was not until he was shown a flint arrow that he gave in; here was something magic which he did not possess. In another remarkable story of the Yoghuts we are told that, after the transformation of two boys into stags, there was a stag-hunt, the killing, disembowelling, dividing, and consuming being described in such terms that Lublinski, who collected these myths, had the impression that “what was here represented was the first attempt at killing a stag for eating-purposes ” (op. cit. p. 48). The remark of the stag, that he was a mighty shaman — like the turning of the boys into stags — points already to an underlying metamorphosis idea; but, conformably to the soul-worm belief, the vehicle of the soul had to be animal and not human, and thus it came about that totemism made of this animal an ancestor. In any case, with this materialistic metamorphosis idea we have the paradox that in eating an animal man was in danger of eating his kin, which is not so in the case of a human enemy. Without entering into all the numerous and strange customs which result from this view, we will point out that this most primitive immortality-idea found expression also in the earliest form of artistic production. If the stone-age cavepaintings, as is generally assumed, served some magic purpose of the chase, there may also have been even then some such idea of a permission that forestalled the risk of evil effects on the hunter.
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1 Even today with Northern hunting tribes the victim when killed receives almost divine honours before it is cut up and eaten; the skull and skin are preserved, which recalls the plastic bear-figuring discovered a few years ago by Norbert Karteret in one of the less accessible caves of the Pyrenees.
That such “tender-hearted” thinking — produced though it was by a very egoistic motive indeed — may fairly be credited to primitive men is shown by a hunt motif which Frobenius has found in various parts of Africa. This is a line broken in many places which passes from a man, depicted in a hunting process, to the lower part of the body of a woman who is apparently praying. Frobenius gives the following interpretation to the drawing illustrated on page 23: “ The beginning and the course of the long line, on the other hand, is such that, remembering the term ‘uterine’ (that is, descended from the same womb), is still used in the European Hamitic group, I assume that this long line is an allegorical indication of the connexion of the two figures by the umbilical cord. Thus the female figure is not the wife, but the mother of the hunter,” praying for success in the chase.’ What interests us here, in connexion with such totemistic tales, is the hunt itself, which is indicated on the drawing by three animals brought into the picture along with the weapons of man; one of the animals is an ostrich. Now if the animal was as much the bearer of a human soul for the primitive African as it was for the American Indian, then what we have here is not a mere prayer for success in the chase, but an averting of the evil consequences that may flow from killing the animal. The cord would then symbolize, at this matriarchal stage of culture, the fact that the hunter, as a human being, is, too, a vessel of immortality as the animal is, which lessens his reverential distance from it, thus justifying his killing of it.’
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1 Leo Frobenius: Das unbekannte Afrika (Munich, 1923). The womb and navel-cord motif is also unmistakable, although already highly stylized, in a North African rockcarving (Fig. 8).
2 would also regard the fasts which with the Indians and other primitives usually precede the hunt as a rite of justification for the killing of animals for food.
This last example reminds us once again of the opposition between the mortal dependence on the mother and the continued existence of the human soul in the animal, which had its origin in the soul-worm. And the same fundamental an tithesis holds also for the development of language in the narrower sense, since the child learns the use of sounds, for purposes of understanding, in the first place from the mother and in relation to her (do we not say “ mother” tongue?). But along with it the originally subjective function of language as a means of personal expression survives, and this perhaps explains why, in myth, man learns the language of expression from the animals, which use sounds less for intelligibility than for the discharge of inner tensions. The privileged rdle of the bird is probably less closely connected with its sex-call than with its soul-significance it has both for nature-peoples like Indians and Australians and even for ourselves (the stork, etc.).’ For the soul-language which man makes within himself to express his feelings is and remains something other than the mother tongue which he uses for practical communication. In the higher forms of language, such as prayer, spell, song, and finally poetry, a more or less harmonious combination of expression and communication is achieved, though here too the really creative part lies in the personal expression, while the artistic achievement consists in putting this into generally intelligible form.
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1 It was no doubt the wisdom credited to birds on account of their soul-significance that suggested augury, which is a spiritual refinement of the more primitive inspection of entrails. The highest development of the augury theory, which is supposed to have come into Greece from Caria, is found among the Etruscans.
