Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    160/196 page 156
    CHAPTER X. HISTORY AND PSYCHOLOGY IN WORDS. There is a story that a society of learned philologists made it the first of its by-laws that no member would be allowed to contribute a paper on the origin of language. By this means only was it possible to shut off the vague theory-spinners and prevent unendurable boredom. To a great extent the reason for the rule still holds, because as yet we have hardly gathered facts sufficient to enable us to form any very clearly warranted induction as to the manner in which animalian cries become articulate and thought- conveying language. Noire has traced the beginnings of speech to what has been called the yo-he-ho theory—the cries of men working together. Similar guesses are the bow wow and the pooh-pooh theories or other imitative plans of the reproduction of sounds of animals or of inor¬ ganic nature, as well as of those of man himself when emo¬ tion passes into cries of various kinds.1 The creation of language by onomatopoietic methods is still a fact today, and in poetry the imitation of sounds by words is quite an art, as e. g. : “ Rend with tremendous sound your ears asunder, With gun, drum, trumpet, blunderbuss, and thunder.” “ I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses in a female mouth, And sounds as if it should be writ on satin With syllables that breathe of the sweet South ; 1 A writer, Mr. J. Donovan (Mind, July, 1892), contends that articulation origi¬ nated in the impassioned intonations of festal excitement. One cannot help feeling that before festival and religious dance came into being language must have become a pretty complete and satisfying instrument. H56)
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