Folkways. William Graham Sumner
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has a history of accidents which have befallen it, the beginnings of which are lost in the abyss of time.239 In the Middle Ages the word "Word" came to mean the Word of God with such distinctness that the romance languages adopted parabola, or derivatives from it, for "word."240 The students of linguistics recognize metaphor as another great mode of modifying the signification of words. By metaphor they mean the assembling of like things, and the selection and extirpation of unlike things.
136. Language and magic. Preuss offers an explanation of the origin of language which is interesting on account of its connection with the vast operation of magic: "Language owes its origin to the magic of tones and words. The difficulty of winning any notion about the beginnings of human speech lies in the fact that we cannot think of any cause which should give occasion for speech utterances. Such occasions are products of education, after language already existed. They are effects of language, not causes of it. … Language belongs, like play, dances, and fine arts, to the things which do not come on a direct line of development out of the instinctive satisfaction of life-needs and the other activities which create things of positive value, but it is the result of belief in magic, which prompted men to imitate noises made in labor, and other natural sounds, through a wide range, in order thereby to produce operations."241
137. Language is a case of mores. Whitney said that language is an institution. He meant that it is in the folkways, or in the mores, since welfare is connected with the folkways of language, albeit by some superstition. He adds: "In whatever aspect the general facts of language are viewed, they exhibit the same absence of reflection and intention."242 "No one ever set himself deliberately at work to invent or improve language—or did so, at least, with any valuable and abiding result. The work is all accomplished by a continual satisfaction of the needs of the moment, by ever yielding to an impulse and grasping a possibility, which the already acquired treasure of words and forms, and the habit of their use, suggest and put within reach."243 "Every single item of alteration, of whatever kind, and of whatever degree of importance, goes back to some individual or individuals who set it in circulation, from whose example it gained a wider and wider currency, until it finally won that general assent, which is alone required in order to make anything in language proper and authoritative."244 These statements might be applied to any of the folkways. The statements on page 46 of Whitney's book would serve to describe and define the mores. This shows to what an extent language is a case of the operation by which mores are produced. They are always devices to meet a need, which are imperceptibly modified and unconsciously handed down through the generations. The ways, like the language, are incorporeal things. They are borne by everybody and nobody, and are developed by everybody and nobody. Everybody has his little peculiarities of language. Each one has his peculiarities of accent or pronunciation and his pet words or phrases. Each one is suggesting all the time the use of the tricks of language which he has adopted. "Nothing less than the combined effort of a whole community, with all its classes and orders, in all its variety of characters, circumstances, and necessities, is capable of keeping in life a whole language."245 "Every vocable was to us [children] an arbitrary and conventional sign; arbitrary, because any one of a thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us and associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting use of the community of which we formed a part."246 "We do not, as children, make our language for ourselves. We get it by tradition, all complete. We think in sentences. As our language forms sentences, that is, as our mother-tongue thinks, so we learn to think. Our brain, our entire thought-status, forms itself by the mother-tongue, and we transmit the same to our children."247 Nature men have only petty coins of speech. They can express nothing great. They cannot compare, analyze, and combine. They are overwhelmed by a flood of details, in which they cannot discern the ruling idea. The material and sensual constitute their limits. If they move they have to get a new language. The American languages are a soft mass which changes easily if tribes separate, or as time goes on, or if they move their habitat.248 Sometimes measures are adopted in order to make the language unintelligible, as the Bushmen insert a syllable in a word to that end.249 "The language of nature peoples offers a faithful picture of their mental status. All is in flux. Nothing is fixed or crystallized. No fundamental thoughts, ideas, or ideals are present. There is no regularity, logic, principles, ethics, or moral character. Lack of logic in thinking, lack of purpose in willing or acting, put the mind of a nature man on a plane with that of our children. Lack of memory, antilogic, paradox, fantasy in mental action, correspond to capriciousness, levity, irresponsibility, and the rule of emotions and passions in practical action."250 "Man's language developed because he could make, not merely passive and mechanical associative and reproductive combinations of notions, like a beast, but because he had active, free, and productive apperceptions, which appear in creative fantasy and logical reflection."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.