The Origin of Language. The view that Plato ex-
pressed in Cratylus to the effect that language had been
originally invented by philosophers, seems to have been
implicit in most ancient thinking. In the Middle Ages
the question of the origin of language was hardly dis-
cussed. The Bible's story of the creation of man, and
of the confusion of men's tongues in Babel was not
put in doubt. In any case the historical perspective
was extremely short. The ancients looked upon Homer
as a representative of the youth of mankind, and Chris-
tians naturally looked upon Hebrew as Adam's lan-
guage and thus the original mother tongue of all.
Neither the Renaissance nor the bold philosophizing
of the seventeenth century brought any changes in
these matters. René Descartes did not discuss the origin
of language, nor did the Port-Royal grammarians. Their
whole argument, however, indicates an implicit as-
sumption, similar to Plato's, that language was invented
by rational men.
In the eighteenth century the time perspective was
gradually lengthened. E. B. de Condillac attempted to
outline the gradual development of language in human
society. But he did not commit himself to any definite
time scale. His more famous friend, J. J. Rousseau,
carried on the discussion in his prize essay on “The
Origin of the Inequality of Men” (1754). Rousseau
stressed the paradox that while language presupposes
society, the creation of human society presupposes the
existence of language. He therefore concluded that to
invent language in a state of nature must have taken
an infinite time.
The question raised by Rousseau was given full-
length treatment by James Burnett, Lord Monboddo,
whose six-volume Origin and Progress of Language was
published 1773-92. Monboddo also looked upon lan-
guage as an invention; there was, accordingly, a time
when man did not speak. Rousseau had tried to imagine
what that hypothetical state of nature was like. Mon-
boddo did better; he could actually show us man in
a state of nature: the ourang-outang, who cannot speak,
but has all the physical characteristics of man, and
therefore should be reckoned as belonging to the
human species.
Monboddo agreed with Rousseau that for a creature
like the ourang-outang to invent language must have
been extremely difficult. The first beginnings must have
been very crude. Again, Monboddo thought he could
produce actual illustrations, and held forth the lan-
guage of the Huron tribe in America, which, he said,
is so “irregular” that no grammar of it can be written.
Against this background it is not surprising that Mon-
boddo could not imagine that a language like Greek,
of whose absolute superiority he was convinced, could
have been created by ordinary or common people. He
felt his views were confirmed when he considered
Chinese, Sanskrit, and the language of the ancient
Egyptians. All those, he believed, must be the creation
of a literate community.
Monboddo admitted that there are barbarian peoples
with a civilized language. But that could be accounted
for by language mixture and corruption, similar to what
happened when Latin developed into the Romance
languages. In fact, Monboddo was inclined to think
that the ancient Egyptian language is the ultimate
origin of all the European languages—including
Hebrew—as well as of Sanskrit, whose similarity with
Greek he was aware of.
The work of Monboddo is a curious mixture of crank-
iness and common sense. But he is far from untypical
of his age. Above all, his idea that the highly inflected
languages, and especially Greek, represented the best
and highest type, continued to be an article of faith
among the Europeans all through their imperialistic
nineteenth century. Sanskrit was admired because it
was, if anything, even more perfect than Greek.
In the nineteenth century linguists turned away from
speculations on the origin of language. That was due
to the development of far more exact methods in com-
parative linguistics, concurrently with the development
of a more empirical attitude. Further, it came to be
realized that no extant language is grammatically
primitive. And last, there was Darwin's theory of evo-
lution, which led to the establishment of an immensely
extended time-scale. Language ceased to be looked
upon as an invention. It was the product of the biolog-
ical evolution of our species.
