NATURAL GENESIS AND TYPOLOGY OF PRIMORDIAL ONOMATOPOEIA
AND ABORIGINAL AFRICAN SOUNDS

(Pythagoras taught that 'number' was the wisest of all things, and next to that the 'namer.'[1])

Concerning the origin of language it may be briefly affirmed that very little is known, and nothing absolutely established. Also that the help to be derived from mere theorisers on the subject is chiefly negative. Hitherto the 'science of language' has been founded, and its origins have been discussed, without the ideographic symbols and the gesture-signs being ever taken into account.

The Aryanists have laboured to set the great pyramid of language on its apex in Asia, instead of its base in Africa, where we have now to seek for the veriest beginnings. My appeal is made to anthropologists, ethnologists, and evolutionists, not to mere philologists limited to the Aryan area, who, as non-evolutionists, have laid fast hold at the wrong end of things.

The inner African languages prove that words had earlier forms than those which have become the 'roots' of the Aryanists. For example, Max Muller has said that in the word asu (Sansk.), which denotes the vital breath, the original meaning of the root 'as' has been preserved. 'As, in order to give rise to such a noun as asu, must have meant to breathe; then to live; then to exist; and it must have passed through all these stages before it could have been used as the abstract auxiliary verb which we find not only in Sanskrit, but in all the Aryan languages. Unless this one derivative, asu, life, had been preserved in Sanskrit, it would have been impossible to guess the original material meaning of the root as, to be.'[2] Here the African languages show that asu, to breathe, is not a primary of speech; no vowel is primary in the earliest formation of words.

In Egyptian ses is to breathe, and in Africa beyond—

[p.236] The duplicated sound was first, because, as will be maintained, language originated in the conscious duplication and repetition of sounds. Ses (Eg.) also denotes the brood or breathing mare, a type of the gestator and mother of life, as Ses-Mut. And in inner Africa the mare is named—

Seses, a gnostic form of Tesas (Neith or Isis) is also the mother of breath. This is further corroborated by ziz (or zi) in Assyrian, for the inherent life or soul; and by zuza in Zulu Kaffir, applied to the breathing life of the unborn child. The Latin esse, to be has preserved both the s's found in ses, to breathe.

It has been asked, How did dā (Sanskrit) come to mean giving? Professor Noire holds that primitive man accidentally said 'dā'[3]. And there we have a 'root' of language! But dā is only a worn-down form of word found in Sanskrit. It is the Egyptian tâ, to give and take; also a gift. The full hieroglyphic word is tat, and it belongs to the stage of mere duplicated sounds and gesture-signs. It is written with the hand, which is the tat ideograph; English daddle for the fist; the inner African—

Long before the abstract idea of giving was conveyed by dā or tâ, the tat was presented in gesture-language with the offering, or in the act of offering. The hand, however, is not the only tat, tut, or t. Another hieroglyphic, ta (or tu), is the female mamma, Û, the English teat and titty; Welsh, did and teth; Basque, titia; Greek, titthe; Malayan, dada, and Hebrew dad, for the teat or breast. These forms of the name retain the ideographic sound of t t. The mammae-sign is the Egyptian feminine article the; also a name of food, and to drop. 'Tat-tat' is a sound that may have originated with the child in sucking. It is still made by the nurse when offering the mamma, the primordial giver of food, to the child. Moreover the dā personified in Sanskrit is the wife, corresponding to the Egyptian ta. Language certainly did not originate with the 'roots' of the Aryanists, which are the worn-down forms of earlier words. It did not begin with 'abstract roots,' nor with dictionary words at all, but with things, objects, gesture-signs, and involuntary sounds.

Comparative philology, working with words in their later phase, divorced from things, is responsible for the false inference (one amongst many) that until recent times, later than those of the Veda, the Avesta, the Hebrew, and Homeric writings—men were deficient in the perception of colour; that there was, in fact, a condition of myopia answering to their insanity of mythopmia. Geiger has even asserted that the language-maker must have been blue-blind[4]. Max Muller [p.237] has affirmed that the blue heaven does not appear in the Veda, the Avesta, or the Old Testament[5]. It is true that language did not commence by naming those mere appearances of things in which the comparative mythologists take such inordinate delight; true that colours are among those appearances and qualities, just as white is of wheat—when ground into flour. Many early languages have no word for blue as a colour, and yet blue as a thing may be found in them.

The Ja-jow-er-ong dialect of Australia uses the sky itself, 'woorer­woorer,' for blue. That was the thing.

In Maori and Mangaian there may be no name for blue as hue and tint; but this does not show that the people did not know the blue heaven from the white or red heaven when they saw it.

The 'Zulu' name signifies heaven, as The Blue. Hence, deep water is called zulu. Zulu ra, for the blue thing, literally means skyishness.

In Pazand the word açma denotes both stone and heaven, and, as shown by the Minokhird[6], heaven was identical with precious stone. The Hebrew heaven is the paved work of sapphire stone beneath the feet of the eternal[7]. Samu (Ass.) is both sky and blue. The Egyptian name for blue is khesbet; that is, lapis-lazuli. The Egyptian heaven was either the Blue Stone, the blue temper-tinted steel, or the blue sea overhead. The water above is the blue heaven, and in the Ritual the blue called the 'Upper Waters' is identified with the blue woof of heaven in the worship of Uat, goddess of the northern heaven[8].

If a language does not possess a word for blue as a colour, it may for a blue stone, and certainly will for water. A lesson in the primitive system of colour-naming may be learned from the Hottentot language in which the word for colour itself is isib, signifying form, shape, likeness, and appearance. Such a word includes various qualities and properties of things under one name. Yellow (hūni) means the ground-colour, the sandy soil; brown (gamab) is the vley-colour, i.e., the bottom of a dried-up pond; red (ava) is the blood-colour; grey (khan) is the colour of the Bos Elaphus; spotted (garu) means the leopard; white is egg-coloured; am for green, originally meant springing up and shooting forth like the verdure[9]. Hence when the rainbow is also called am the sense is not limited to the green-colour, because it likewise springs forth spontaneously. This serves to show how the primitive thinkers thought in things when distinguishing properties, qualities, or appearances how things first suggested the ideas that were afterwards conveyed by words; and how the more abstract forms of phenomena took names in language by means of the concrete—the unknown being expressed in typology by means of the known. [p.238] Power of perceiving qualities and distinguishing things did not depend on the possession of words to express shades of difference. Sweet could be distinguished from bitter when the one was only expressed by the mouth watering, and a smack of gustativeness; the other by spitting with the accompaniment of an interjection of repugnance. So far from 'conscious perception being impossible,' without a word for each colour, the one word uat (Eg.) for water does duty for several colours, for blue and green water, various paints, plants, and stones. Perception of different colours did not depend on divers words; one served with several determinatives in things. The early men thought in things and images where we think in words, or think we think. Plutarch says, 'They that have not learned the true sense of words will mistake also in the nature of things.'[10] So we may say that those who have not learned the true nature of things will mistake the sense of words.

Professor Sayce holds that there is 'no reason in the nature of things why the word book should represent the volume which might just as well be denoted by biblion.'[11] But the 'nature of things,' tells us the book was the tablet of beech-bark in Britain and the palm (buka) of Taht in Egypt. The biblion from bib (Eg.) to roll or be round, had been the roll of papyrus before it was the book. Indeed the oldest words can only tell the most important part of their history when re-related to things. Mere philology can never reach the origins for lack of determinatives.

The Egyptian 'kam' may be quoted to indicate the relationship of words to things. Kam signifies black; and Plutarch tells us the Egyptians applied the word to the dark of the eye[12], the mirror. The dark was the mother as reproducer of light. The pupil of the eye reproduces the image. To reproduce is to beget, hence 'kam,' also meant to form, to create. Here the word branches out in the region of things and modes of action; there being various means of forming and creating. Egypt was literally created by the Nile, and named kam, not merely as the black land! The sculptor forms and creates the image by carving; and 'kam' also signifies to carve. That which is carved may become the 'kam-hu' (Eg.) a joint of meat, or the 'cameo,' a carven image, the root for which word has never been found[13].* The word at first was but a wavering, wandering shadow of things which are the determinatives of its meanings that only become finally definite in the ideographical phase which the Aryanists have entirely ignored.

* Compare kamut (Eg.) to carve, or a carving. Kam also interchanges with kan, for carving in ivory.

There is no way of attaining the early standpoint and getting back to an origin for words except by learning once more to think in things, images, ideographs, hieroglyphics, and gesture-signs. The [p.239] primary modes of expression have now to be sought in their birthplace. In Africa only shall we find the most rudimentary articulation of human sounds, which accompanied gesture-signs and preceded verbal speech. The clicks, the formation of words by the duplication of sounds, the original types of expression, must be allowed to have been evolved in Africa until it can be shown how they came there otherwise. The African dialects, spread over vast spaces of country, point to an original unity in a language which may not he extant for the grammarian, and certainly will not now be discovered intact by the traveller. The earliest forms can only be found in the primary stratum of language, that is, in gesture-signs, the primitive modes of articulation, and in aboriginal sounds, although further connecting links of construction may be established. There is of course a kind of grammatical sequence in the order of gesture-signs.

From the present standpoint it would be idle to discuss whether the roots of language were at first verbal or nominal. Where should we begin? With which, or what language? In Maori, the same word at different times assumes the functions of several parts of speech. We also find that in languages like the old Egyptian and Chinese, the same word did duty as noun and verb or other parts of speech; and one word or sound had to serve at first for various uses, whether these are called the names of things and actions in one aspect, or 'parts of speech' in another. Gesture-language shows that verbs as words were the least wanted, and therefore the last named. Verbs would be first enacted before they were uttered in what we could recognise as speech. A cross is the hieroglyphic sign of verbs in general, and the hands were crossed in reckoning; the sexes crossed; the sun, moon and stars were observed to cross before there was a verb signifying to cross. A pair of feet going is the sign of the transitive verb to go (Í), and going portrayed in several forms preceded any abstract word for to go.

So far as gesture-language was primary, the verbs may have been first, but their signification was chiefly conveyed by the action. A Na-wa-gi-jig's story, in Ojibwa, told orally and with gesture-signs shows that gestures only were used to indicate the 'old man,' 'many,' 'happening,' 'quickly,' 'hatchet' (to cut), 'going,' 'starting,' 'wind blowing,' 'ice moving off,' 'to a distance,' 'cutting the ice,' 'it is so thick,' 'number two,' 'tired,' 'by turns,' 'together,' 'twisted three cords,' 'tied three together,' 'threw it out,' 'no go,' 'repeatedly,' 'drifted out,' 'we two,' 'nearly sundown.'

The analysis shows that the speaker who had words for his verbs and numbers naturally preferred to indicate these by gesture-signs, which were like the actions of an orator only they took the place of the words and made them unnecessary, because they had existed prior to such an application of words[14]. Also the reduction of the noun to [p.240] make the verb might be amply shown as in tat for the hand and ta to give. So paf or bab (Eg.) denotes the being as the breath, and bâ is the abstract verb to be, to be a breathing soul. As breathing was observed and breath was named earlier than soul or abstract being, this also shows the verb is a form of the noun reduced.

Possibly there is a mode of proving how things were named first, when we commence with the most primitive data in the birthplace of words. If we start from Africa, say, with the snake, this may tell us how the noun was extended in the verb stage, by means of the actions of the snake. In Egyptian, hef represents an African type-name for the reptile or insect that crawls with the heave-motion, as the viper, worm, and caterpillar. These were named in one aspect from their movement, whence heft, or heft (Eg.) to crawl by heaving; êfa, in Welsh, to cause motion or heaving. But, the snake also sloughed its skin; hence, ébu, in Kaffir, to slough, and havel, English, for the slough. Here 'hef' becomes a type-word for things that slough, or shed, as well as heave; hence, avel for the awn of barley. This process, which is merely hinted at, and which might be followed illimitably, will prove the priority of sounds and names for things, the actions of which were indicated by gesture-signs.

Also certain types of things equate on account of the unity of origin in the thing itself. Thus the dd (British) and tt or t (Eg.) are signs derived from the female mamma Û. This becomes our letter d. D is also the door, as daleth in Hebrew, and the door is another feminine symbol. T or d is the feminine article (Eg.); the ru is likewise a female type, the door of life, the mouth of utterance (¨); and tr, dl or dr furnish the name of the daleth and door. Breast and door, then, become one in letters because both are interchangeable images of the female sex, and because things preceded signs.

It may be that the beginning of verbal language with a few simple names for things, sensations and actions is indicated by the mystical value attached in later times to names; their primitive preciousness being reflected in their religious sacredness. The word nam (Eg.), to repeat, direct, and guide, gives a good account of the name and its object. The passage of the Osiris through the underworld is effected by his preserving all the mystical names in memory. Ra has 75 names, Osiris, 153[15].

Time was when the 'name' was the 'word' and so it remained embalmed in the religious origins when the 'word' (logos) was the 'name' personified. Names, or substantives, potentially contained all the other parts of speech. These have been continued from the earliest time to the present and remain more or less identifiable according to the principles of naming.

Nor need we marvel that words should retain their identity and likeness in languages the most remote from each other in time and [p.241] space, when we find how few they were at first and how faithfully they were preserved. The earliest races preserved them of necessity. 'Never change the barbarous names,' said the Chaldean oracle[16]. Also, the cry of the Greek writers was for the people to treasure up the 'barbarous' or foreign words in their language, although they might not know from whence these had been derived, nor what was their exact import. When pleading before the tribunal of eternal justice the Osirified deceased declares that among other saving virtues he has never altered a story in the telling of it. And such was the spirit in which the primitive races preserved their knowledge, customs, traditions, and words.

But we have to go beyond words to make a beginning at the stage where the act of sucking might have produced its own self-naming sound in the 'tt-tt' of the suckling.

The earliest verb would be indicated by the action; the first substantive by the sound accompanying the gesture or action. The gestures must have been simple, self-defining, and the sounds accompanying them would have a natural accord.

Some non-evolutionary writers on language, who, as the Egyptian priest said of the Greeks, wear the down of juvenility in their souls, appear to speak as if the origin of language itself depended on Grimm's Law. Indeed, one shallow reviewer of the previous volumes of this work thought it sufficient to condemn them if he put forth the foolish falsehood that the author had expressed supreme contempt for Grimm's Law.

Grimm having pointed out a law of diversity which governs the interchange of certain phonetics[17] his followers have further assumed the non-existence of a law of uniformity in an earlier stratum of language. But words did not have their beginning in any known form of the Aryan languages, and the proto-Aryan is unknown to them, excepting that which has been created by the evolutionists of the inner consciousness.

Whilst limiting their comparative diagnosis to this restricted area they confidently affirm that when two words are spelt alike in two different historic languages they cannot be the same; Grimm's Law forbids. Further research and a wider application of the comparative process might have taught them that it does nothing of the kind. Indeed, the true moral, the workable and profitable deduction, to be derived from Grimm's Law is that words do persist and retain the same signification in spite of, and not in consequence of the racial or the dialect differences that may be tabulated under that law.

The followers of Grimm have led men to believe that beyond the little Aryan oasis there is a desert world, trackless, chartless, limitless and that none but they could lead in the work of showing the way; towards which they have not yet advanced the second step. For [p.242] Grimm's Law has been to them the obliterator of landmarks throughout the range of the prehistoric past. According to the prevailing delusion and the preposterous pretensions of its advocates, it is not only unsound and non-scientific but positively pitiful for any one to compare the words and myths of two different languages which they have not previously proved to be grammatically allied; this being one of the 'first principles' of 'comparative philology.'

They have come to the conclusion that hardly any relation exists in language between the sound and the sense of words, whereas in the earliest stages both were one; and now the fundamental sense can only be found in that phase of unity. On the same kind of authority it would be unscientific and absurd to compare the gesture-signs of the North American Indians with those which survive in the Egyptian hieroglyphics until we have first demonstrated the grammatical affinity of the Algonquin and Egyptian languages. Thus stated the theory exposes its own exceeding futility.

In Grimm's Law—to use a very homely metaphor—philologists have found a fork and laid hold of it at the prong-end. The prongs are known to them, but the unity beyond is unknown and denied, because they have not reached the handle.

One writer says the Aryan and Semitic languages may have been originally connected, but there is no Grimm's Law which will allow us to prove this. He therefore assumes that connection and relationship can only be demonstrated by unlikeness. For Semitic let us substitute Kamitic, and a comparative vocabulary in these volumes will then show that the word-stock of Egyptian and Sanskrit must have been essentially the same in the proto-Aryan stage.

Prehistoric and pre-Aryan words have remained the same independently of later grammar or phonetic systems. Words coined when we had but ten letters or yet fewer sounds, survive in their primitive forms even when we have twenty-six. Addition did not always involve transliteration or supercession, any more with words than with races; whereas continual re-beginnings in language and in mythology are assumed by the non-evolutionist interpreters of the past.

But it is only by the aid of what is here designated as 'comparative typology' that we could ever reach the stages of language in which the unity of origin can be recoverable. Gesture-signs and ideographic symbols alone preserve the early language in visible figures. We are unable to get to the roots of all that has been pictured, printed, or written, except by deciphering the signs made primally by the early man. The latest forms of these have to be traced back to the first before we can know anything of the origins; these are the true radicals of language, without which the philologist has no final or adequate determinatives, and hitherto these have been left outside the range of discussion by Grimm, Bopp, Pictet, Muller, Fick, Schleicher, Whitney, and the rest of the Aryan school[18]. [p.243] Fuerst is another example of the men of 'letters' as opposed to ideographs. He asserts and reiterates at every letter that the Hebrew alphabet is not ideographic, and that each name is only employed or intended to represent the initial letter![19] This is an entire reversal of the fact; but the doctrine is prevalent in current philology, which has ignored the earliest sign-language altogether.

Wherever the ideographic signs of the oldest civilised nations can be compared evidence of the original unity becomes apparent, just as we find it in gesture-language. In fact, the farther we go back the nearer is our approach toward some central unity. From circumference to centre diversity diminishes and dwindles. Finally the most primitive customs, rites and ceremonies are the most universal, and these could not have proceeded from the circumference towards a centre of unity. The unity was first even as the diversity is final.

Grimm's Law does not tell us why certain letters are interchangeable in different languages and dialects, so that Zeus in Greek represents Deus in Latin, and Dyaus in Sanskrit. Neither can any of Grimm's followers. They only affirm that it is so, without knowing the διότι. In Hebrew and Chaldee the t and s are interchangeable. M and n are constantly permutable in language. In English the f and gh interchange, and are equivalents; to such an extent is this carried that the gh is also sounded as f in laugh and cough.

Here the Egyptian hieroglyphics constitute the connecting link between language in inner Africa and the Aryan phase or status out of it. The origin of Grimm's Law is made manifest in the earliest mode of speech, and the facts are patented, so to say, or stereotyped in the hieroglyphics. These show the ideographic phase of language which preceded the alphabetic.

For example, the builders-up of language backwards, who are able to start from a vowel as a 'root' (they do so with 'i' to go), assume that the word mand in Sanskrit is what they term a mere strengthening of a root mad. The hieroglyphics show that mand and mad (mat) are identical because an ideographic men preceded and deposited the consonant m; and the sign is readable as a men (ideographic and early) or a later phonetic m. Beyond Egypt, man is muntu in Wakamba, and in the neighbouring Wanika he is muta; but the sign of the idea, action, or person depicted by the 'men' ideograph is first, the syllabic mu is later, the letter m is last. So in the languages of the Gabon the names for the head run through muntue (in Kisama and Lubalo), ntu (in Nyombe and Musentandu), mutu (in Kanyika and others) and otu (in Mbamba). In these the ntu of the same group also implies the form in muntu, which modified into all three.

Grimm's Law is just as applicable to certain inner African groups of languages as to the Aryan. In the Bantu class the dialect differences and variations in phonology are manifested by the mb of [p.244] Swahili modifying into p in Makua; the ng (Swahili) into k (Makua). The t (Swahili) is represented by r (in Makua), and the f by k. Ch, hard, and s in Swahili, are represented by sh in Makua; whilst the t of neighbouring tongues is th in Makua[20].

Names were first given with and to ideographic signs. Thus a tat, ter, or tek deposits a phonetic t, and all meet to mingle at last in one letter t which may take the place of a dozen ideographs. Various signs of men are reducible to one phonetic m.

If we take the tes sign (tesh, tech or tek being variants) this deposits both a t and s in the hieroglyphic—and henceforth the t and s go their several ways in forming future words.

An ideographic hef will deposit both a phonetic h and f. In the hieroglyphics the snake is hef in an ideographic phase. In the phonetic stage the snake supplies the sign of f. The hef only will account for the Latin foemina being pronounced hoemina, as, according to De Roquefort[21], it was by the ancient Romans, or for similar interchanges of h and f.

The hieroglyphic mes ? will account for the Greek Σ being continued as a kind of m = s.

An 'original Aryan d' may be represented by l in Greek or Latin simply because there was an ideographic proto-Aryan del (its name remains in delta and daleth, which describe an ideographic d) or ter, as in Egyptian; our English door. The Hebrew letters aleph, beth, gimel, daleth continued that ideographic phase in their names as those of things which are yet identifiable. Here is an illustration.

The hieroglyphic ret 4 a cord used for tethering cattle when grazing, passed into the hieratic, Phoenician (or Hebraic) and Syriac letters as the teth, , , or . In Hebrew 'teth' signifies something twisted or tied, which the ret loop explains. In Egyptian this ret deposited a phonetic r. The same sign appears as the r called rat in an Irish alphabet. Thus the ideographic ret becomes an r in Egyptian and Irish, and a letter t in Phoenician and in other alphabets.

In the inscriptions exhumed by Davis[22] at Carthage, the Phoenician letters daleth and resh are two slightly varied shapes of the ret; and these are sufficiently like our own figure of four, 4 to show that it also is a form of the same original hieroglyphic. So the Coptic delta and lauda , which is r in Bashmuric, are two other variants of the ret; and delta has the numeral value of 4, in common with the Hebrew daleth. Ret (Eg.) denotes the figure, and one sign of the word is the footstool with four steps; another figure of 4. An ideographic ret will further account for the same figure or letter being ro in Coptic or Greek and d in the Gothic . Now the sign [p.245] in the letter stage would determine nothing respecting the origins; we must trace it back to the ideographic ret before we can discuss the origin or unity, and there the Phoenician letter is an Egyptian hieroglyphic which was continued in the ideographic phase as the Irish 'rat' or letter r.

The primary form of the sign (as well as of the word) is ideographic. This shows that when certain symbols are found in the Vei and Lolo hieroglyphics[23], which are alike to the eye and yet may be different in phonetic value, the bare fact will neither disprove nor determine their unity of origin. That must be sought in their ideographic values. In the process of reduction and distribution an ideographic del deposits both d and l as phonetics; an ideographic men deposits both m and n; an ideographic tek, which is a cross, both t and χ as two different crosses in the phase of letters; an ideographic kef both k and f; and so on through all the ideographic signs that passed into separate letters. Just as the ideographic pesh or peh, the rump of Pasht, the lioness, 6 became the letter shin in Syriac. We have a record of this process preserved in the traditions of the British Barddas, who tell us they began with ten original Ystorrinau, or ideographic signs, which Beli reduced to the value of letters, and then added six others, making sixteen in all.

But the original unity of various letters in the ideographic phase is afterwards shown by their being equivalent and permutable in later languages, whether at the beginning or end of a word. Thus tset, the inner African type-name of the hill, is continued as tset in Egyptian, where it becomes both set and tet, as in our Tut Hill. Set and tet are then interchangeable in the later languages. It is the same with the tser (רצ) hill, which becomes the ter (or tel) and set. In the Arabic group the number 8 is both temen and seme in Beran; damana in Wadai; and asmanye in Adirar.

One form of the ideographic uts (Eg.) is a palanquin. The word uts signifies to suspend, support, bear aloft. This is an ideographic original which will account for the Sanskrit ut, up, upwards and the Zend uz applied to upholding. It is the same with the equivalent terminals as in bit, Sanskrit, and biz (Old High German), to bite, and other instances in which the t or d of one language is represented by s or z in the other. If we take the variant tech this will account for the equivalent terminals t and ch in the English pit and pich, or bat and bak, as variants of one word. An ideographic kaf will account for the interchange of k and f in Swahili and Makua as well as in English. By this process of deriving the consonants singly from the ideographic phase in which they were dual or duplicated we can prove the proto-Aryan origins to be hieroglyphical and Kamite.

Beyond Egypt the inner African languages are yet in possession [p.246] of certain complex sounds that the European finds impossible or very difficult to reproduce. He can learn to make some of them singly, but cannot talk in clicks. Clicks have been detected out of Africa. Three clicks, heard in the Chinook, Texan, and other North American languages are described by Haldeman[24]. Two are found in the language of Guatemala, according to Bleek[25]. Klaproth[26] affirms that clicks occur in Circassian. Whitmee[27] distinguished clicks in some dialects spoken by the Negritos of Melanesia. But Africa is the true land of the clickers, as the Bushmen, Khoi-Khoi, Kaffirs, Gallas, and others; and this is the only known country of the clicking cynocephalus who was the predecessor of man. In addition to the clicks we find such sounds as ng, mb or mf, gb, kf, rl or lr, dlw, mhl, mni, and tsh with its variants tch, dzh, th, etc. The nasal ng bifurcates into n and g. In Fiji the letter q is sounded ng. Ng also modifies into nh and n. Lr is represented by l in one language, and r in another. Captain Burton sometimes renders the same sound by the r that others render by the l[28]. There is no distinction between r and l in the hieroglyphic ¨. Hence the necessity of going back to the birthplace of human sounds to reach the radicals of speech. Nothing short of inner Africa is of primary importance in the origins of language.

Captain Burton has remarked, that 'The Eafen, or Dahoman, a dialect of the great Yoruba family has, like the Egba or Abeokutan language, a G and a GB, the latter at first inaudible to our ears, and difficult to articulate without long practice.'[29] This gb with its variants, such as kf is one of the radicals of all languages. It might have been the first word formed of two different consonants, unless we except the 'ng' and tesh, it is so primitive and prevalent. Such an original is still implied, even in English, when the 'gh' of 'laugh' is sounded by an 'f.' The mb (or mfu) is likewise extant when the ancient Welsh m is sounded v, and the m and v are confused in the cuneiform language. The 'ng' persists in the Australian, Maori, Kaffir, and other languages as an initial sound, and with us as a terminal. It is represented by the Hebrew ayin ע, Egyptian nk, and the hieroglyphic ng of the British Coelbren staves.

Now the names of the goat and cow can be traced back to the inner African stage of pronunciation. The goat is

The accent in âbr denotes an abraded form. This we recover in the inner African name of the goat.

[p.247] Gb and km interchange, and in an earlier stage of articulation the goat is

The cow is

The Sanskrit gaus is said to be from a root gam. And the cow is called

The original African form that includes and accounts for the whole of these variants is found as

So is it with the name of the knee. This is either

and other African dialects. But the natives are not trying to talk Aryan!

These things were named in the stage of primitive pronunciation, when what we now know as consonants were sounded double as in 'ng' for the later n or g, and 'mb' for the later m or b, before they had been fully evolved, made out, and discreted into our single sounds.

It is at this depth of rootage we have to seek for the reason why m and b, n and g, t and s (or k), k and f, etc., became interchangeable in later language, and we shall find it is because they are twin from the birth as aboriginal sounds, first uttered by one effort, which were afterwards evolved, divided, and distinguished as two distinct phonetics or letters in later language.

The process here indicated is that of Nature herself elsewhere, one of dividing, discreting, and specializing on lines of variation from an original form of embryonic unity.

The 'origin of language' itself is not a problem to be attacked and solved by philosophical speculations like that of Dr. Noire. However happy the guess or ingenious the generalisation, it can only be one of the many may-have-beens to which there is no end. To know anything with certitude we must go back the way we came, along a track that only the evolutionist is free to pursue and explore.

[p.248] The formula—'No reason without speech; no speech without reason;' or 'without language no thought,' is equal to saying 'without clothes no man.' We know now that the dumb think[30], and that man had a gesture-language when he was otherwise dumb.

Darwin's work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and Colonel Mallery's contributions on the sign-language of the North American Indians are of more value here than all that has been written on the origin of language by philologists, philosophers, or metaphysicians. Speculations without the primary data can establish nothing; and these have never been collected and correlated by those who were evolutionists.

We are now able to affirm on evidence that there have been continuity and development from the first, in accordance with the laws of evolution, and that there was but one beginning for language, mythology, and symbolism, however numerous the missing intermediate forms or widely scattered the nearest links.

Fortunately Nature is very careful of the type when it is once evolved. In truth she seems to stereotype. Nothing is entirely lost or altogether effaced. In various ways we are still the contemporaries of primitive man. The Red Indian and Black African still pound and eat the seeds of grasses for their bread, as did the savage before the cereals were cultivated for corn.

The type of warfare that was founded when the monkeys first threw stones at each other has been continued ever since. It still dominates when the hundred-ton cannons hurl their ponderous shells. So has it been with other types, in gesture-language, in verbal speech and aboriginal sounds, in totemic customs, religious rites and primeval laws. There have been development and extension, but no one can point to entire re-beginnings.

Unity of origin in language was only possible when the human intelligence was too limited to disagree and diverge; and the race was a mental herd making the same signs and sounds for ages on ages, without choice in the matter or desire to differ. The name of the cock, for example, may be claimed to be self-conferred, and, according to the onomatopoeist, was so given and might be given at any time in any language or land. But this might be, this choice in the matter, if extended, would let in a deluge of individual differences which was not possible to a common origin. There could be no consensus of agreement if all mankind set up as conscious language makers according to the principle of imitation or onomatopoeia. There was but one stage at which the principle could have wrought in the creation of language; that was at the commencement.

The beginnings were not, as some writers on the subject would have us believe, like mere circles in the water or the air, which give their [p.249] impulsion and pass away. They are registered for us palpably as the rings in the oak, when we can once start from the centre. Many illustrations of this fact will be given, for it is the misfortune of my work that the thesis could not be substantiated or presented without a burdensome mass of verbal details.

Considering that the human form was evolved out of or thrown off from antecedent forms, and that man commenced as one link of the chain of being prolonged invisibly into the past, it may be assumed that for vast period of time he was but slightly growing in advance of his immediate predecessors; and that the means and modes of expression previously extant, were shared by him and continued in his primary stock of sounds. We may be sure there was no such chasm in nature as is perceptible between them now. On looking back we see a great gap or gulf, and are apt to ask where is the bridge? or how did man suddenly leap the gulf? Whereas there was no sudden large leap any more than there was a vast chasm, at the time, to be leaped. Fresh points of departure were then so fine as to be imperceptible now.

The cries of animals and birds constitute a limited language. The call of the partridge, the neighing of the horse, the low of the cow, the bleat of the lamb, the bark of the dog, are a current coinage of ascertained value, quotable for ever in their intercourse. These are understood and answered as the language of invitation and defiance, of want (or desire) and warning. That being so the cries are typical, and therefore on their way to becoming recognised as phonetic types. In fact they are recognised by the animals as phonetic types by which passions are expressed in sounds that evoke a kindred or responsive feeling, and this through a considerable range of manifestation. The cry of warning is well known in the rook's caw, the dog's bark, the monkey's chatter, when he utters the signal of danger to his fellows. The cebus azara of Paraguay is credited with uttering six different sounds, which are said to be capable of exciting corresponding emotions in its fellows of the same species[31].

At least man's predecessors uttered a language of warning and want, as the expression of protecting power and the need of protection—the voices of nurse and child—in sounds of physical sense that could be transmitted or imitated.

Man's earliest expression of gesture and sound was equally involuntary, or as we say, instinctive, and the first step toward the formulation of language was made when the natural interjections were consciously repeated on purpose to arrest attention. Conscious repetition of the same sound is the first visible phase in the morphology of words. We can explain certain evolutionary processes without being able to tell how or why consciousness unfolded, or even what is consciousness. [p.250] This, however, applies to the prehuman consciousness as well as to that of man.

Personally the present writer holds that the main difference between man and monkey consists in the growing rapport of a more inner relationship of life with the conscious cause and source of life, of which man himself becomes conscious, more or less, in the upward or inward course of his growth, as the child does of its mother; and that each form of animal life has its own particular relationship to life itself and carries its own abysmal light in the depths of its darkness, like the miner in the caverns of earth, or the Pyrosoma in unfathomed seas.

That, however, is not the side of phenomena or experience with which we are here concerned. Nor would it avail those who do not postulate such a consciousness before or beyond (or becoming) the human. But, we have only to start from the mimesis and clicks of the cynocephalus, and assume a slight increase of imitative power as a result of growth in man, to see how in presence of his deadly enemy the snake, for example, he might utter his sign of warning in an imitative manner. As already said, the cerastes snake or Puff-Adder became the letter f; which was a syllabic fu and an ideographic fuf our puff. Fu (Eg.) denotes puffing, swelling, dilating, and becoming large, vast, and extended with breath. The snake distended and 'fu-fu'd,' and thus made the sound that constitutes its name. This sound would be repeated as the human note of warning, together with an imitative gesture enacting the verb, or portraying the likeness of the thing signified by the sound, and such a representation made to eye and ear would belong to the very genesis of gesture-language. It would commence when the ape thrust out its mouth, as it does, and fu-fu-ed or blew at the snake; and when man imitated this action with intent, the language consisted in the man's becoming the living ideograph of the snake—for this is the fundamental principle of gesture-language; and here we may take a furtive glance and catch a glimpse of man's likeness to the monkey, just as Harold Transome recognized the likeness of his own face to that of his unknown father reflected sidewise in the mirror[32]. Naturally also when in conflict with each other or with their foes, the nascent race having command of sounds would to the puffing and hissing of snakes, the yell of the gorilla, the roar of the lion, or the voice of thunder, and thus turn their own terrors inside out to impose them on the enemy by means of representative noises, which have been more or less continued by the savage races and are still employed by them in battle.

Dogs, horses, and other animals are known to be so affected by fear and terror, also by cold, that their hair will stand erect. Of course terror will turn to cold. This action was involuntary at first, but with the resulting growth of the arrectores pili or involuntary muscles, [p.251] came the means of erecting the hair, bristles or spines at will, with the intention of striking terror.

The earliest natural manifestations that were produced independently of the will were afterwards turned to account and reproduced at will, when anger and heat took the place of fear and cold. So would it be with the voluntary production and development of the sounds that were at first involuntary. The earliest vocal signs ever made intentionally must have had a likeness in sound to the thing visibly imaged, in order that the mental link of connection between eye and ear might be established; and the onomatopoetic duplication of sounds would correspond audibly to the objective representation of ideas with gesture-signs. Conscious repetition of the same sound by imitation would constitute the earliest application of mind (or even the sense of want) to the primary matter of language. At this stage the sound of 'tt-tt' produced involuntarily by the nursling child, as a need of nature might have served the child of larger growth for thousands of years, as his sign in sound for food, eating, hunger, or as the invitation to eat, which is yet made by the nurse to her nursling in its own language, with the reduplicated lingual-dental click.

Voluntary reproduction of the sound first made instinctively and involuntarily would constitute the earliest phase of language. Intentional reduplication which turned the 'tut' of the child's smack into 'tut-tut-tut' as a sign of the want that created the intent; or the puff-adder's 'fuf' into 'fuf-fuf-fuf' as a sound of warning would be the first creative act in the morphology of words. But such simple sounds as 'tt-tt' 'fuf-fuf' 'rur-rur' 'mam-mam' may have existed and sufficed as the means of audible expression for other thousands of years before two different consonantal sounds were consciously combined to form one word.

When the sound of 'ka-ka' was added to 'fu-fu' and the resulting word kkf or kâf was evolved, then language in the modern sense was founded. We get the necessary glimpse of this earliest phase in the prevalence of the principle of duplication still manifest in the simplest and oldest of known languages and words.

But one fundamental mistake made in applying the onomatopoetic theory to language, is in supposing the primitive radicals of language to be words. Onomatopoeists like Canon Farrar[33] and Hensleigh Wedgwood[34] include words containing three different consonants, among those held to be copied on this principle. This shows no gauge of the problem, and leaves no room for the human evolution of sounds, without which their value could not have been sufficiently identified. When the magpie, raven, or parrot has had its tongue cut, and been taught to utter two different consonants in one sound, it can speak. But the natural and involuntary sounds are single, or they are not consciously combined; and these were the only sounds that preceded human speech. [p.252] Aeons of terrible toil must have been spent in the evolution of the earliest human sounds into a vocal coinage, during which man was getting his lungs inflated and his 'tongue cut' for talking; and when these were at length evolved, they had to be consciously combined and recombined to form words before language could exist according to the present acceptation of the term. Sounds like fu-fu, ka-ka, and ru-ru were common to man and animal. But no earlier animal than man ever consciously combined two different consonants; and language points back to the time when man himself could only produce and duplicate the same sound to form his few words.

We say the clock ticks each time the pendulum crosses; and it has been assumed that the word tick might be directly derived from the sound. But this tick is a word containing two different consonants, and not an onomatopoetic sound; that would be simple, like the nursery gack-gack, for the tick-tick. Tek in Egyptian is a measure of time, and means to cross as does the pendulum in the tick of time. Tick is one with touch. The touch may make a sound or it may not; the tick or touch of the pulse does not. Thus the word tick is not the mere expression of the sound.

The Shah of Persia laughed at the Tatar arrows that went 'ter-ter.' Here they seem to make the sound of ter or through as they tear through the air. But if the t and r had not already been combined in a word, the arrow would not have said 'ter.' The arrow is a ter by name. The hieroglyphic ter is a shoot or tree, and the shooting 'ter' that pierced through of itself was earlier than shooting with the arrows that were named from the shoot, and had been so named in Inner Africa, where the arrow is called—

other cutters through being—

In the hieroglyphics the ram and the goat are both named 'ba,' and the onomatopoeist would derive the sound of ba, directly from the animal ba; and if a non-evolutionist he would not question the capacity of the human being to utter the sound 'ba!' at any stage or time. But this could not be until man had evolved his labials or was able to bring his lips together. When it was first attempted to teach the Mohawks to pronounce words with p and b in them, they protested that it was too ridiculous to expect people to shut their mouths to speak. F is the inner African prototype of p and b. B and p, says Koelle, are sounded like f, and are only employed in a few languages which possess no real f[35]. Fuf-fuf and fu-fu would thus [p.253] precede the p and b of later language. The hieroglyphics show us the ba passing visibly into the ba. Nef or neb is represented by the snake (fa), and the ram (ba); one sign combines both in a snake with a ram's head! Read by the cerastes, this would be nef; by the ram it would be neb[36].

In the Mohawk stage of development homo could not have imitated the 'ba.' Nor is ba the earliest form of the name. Ba is common as a worn down inner African word. But the ram is called—

 The goat is named—

It seems evident that the ba or fa was only uttered at first by aid of a purchase or leverage on the nasal m or um, hence the well known 'mfa' and 'mba,' ba being a final deposit. The ba (Eg.), is a type of the breath which is faba or pefu, and these are interchangeable with mba and mfu. It is commonly asserted that the dog says 'bow-wow,' but that is a fallacy; no dog ever yet uttered the labial 'b.' It has also been said that the Egyptians and Chinese called the cat miau, a name that obviously would never have been applied to the dog; the miau being so evidently onomatopoetic. Yet miau is not limited to the cat nor is that the earliest form of the word. Mmâu (Eg.), is a type name for the beast; and this may be the cat, lion, or lynx; the original mau is maf or mmafu (Eg.), (whence maft) and in inner Africa the name of the dog is—

and numbers more.

The word relates primarily to opening the mouth, which is named miftou in Eregba; mombo, in Murundo, a variant of mfa; in the same language, for the dog. The mouth opens and divides in the two jaws when uttering the voice, and this same word is an inner African type-name for two, or twain, as the divided one. The wide-open mouth of the beast is the ideograph of the sound; as it is in rur (Eg.), the name of the hippopotamus, which also means to round out, as did the open mouth of the monster. On the Cold Coast the king's mouth, or spokesman, is called his 'mouf,'[37] and in English the 'muff' is originally the bad speaker. This will [p.254] explain why mbo in Bute, and mupio, in Afudu signify the greedy, open-mouthed, and devouring one.

The Amakosas applied the same type-name to the gun, which they call 'umpu.' This um is designated a prefix, and it is applied to any new word that may be introduced into the Kaffir dialects, but it belongs primarily to a primitive mode of articulating sounds; and these sounds were the prefixes in the sense of precursors to all later speech.

The earliest utterance here belongs to the primitive mode of articulating; the type-word includes the mau and ba in one, and they were deposited as two separate names for the cat and ram in a later and more distinct stage of utterance. We have to derive the earliest words from the primitive mode of producing sounds, which is more or less extant, for this aboriginal mfu or mpu still survives in our interjectional 'umph' as well as in the name of the dog itself which is amp in Ostiac and emp in Vogul.

The puff-adder could 'fu-fu,' the birds and frogs could 'ka-ka,' the thunder could crack-crack (or 'kak-kak,' as it must have been before the combination of k with ru, and is so in the Maori Ngaeke), but man alone could combine his nasal and guttural in one sound, as or turn his 'um' and 'fuff' into mfu; two of the most important sounds, we may now say words, of the inner African languages. It is unnecessary then to think of the pre-man as listening round like a modern onomatopoeist, or a schoolboy, imitating all he could. Imitation of each other's voices or sounds is very rare in the animal world, the mocking-bird being almost alone.

It is quite probable that no philologist nowadays would be able to make anything verbal out of the earliest articulated sounds that accompanied the gesture-signs of primitive man, such as the clicks, for example, and yet, as the acorn potentially encloses the future forest, these aboriginal sounds contained the germs of all the vocabularies extant. No natural sound, however, has really been lost in the process of artificial development.

Translators, in trying to catch the exact expression of the 'Oji' (Ashanti) name, have rendered it by nineteen different variants. The original African articulation here involved may be shown to include the ts, tch, tsh, tz, tk, th, ds, dsh, dz, dk, dj, and other sounds of some remote original that has descended and been modified on lines of variation. Koelle gives the sound of this ds as that of [p.255] ch in church[38], but there are many racial nuances in the expression of it. The same variants are to a considerable extent found in Chinese. For instance, the old sounds of cha are tsa and dak, and the variants of cha and t'ak are dso at Shangai, tsa, Chifu, and tso, Canton. A variant of chi is tszi or dszi; and djak is a variant of choh, just as it is in the inner African dialects. In Egyptian it is represented by tek, tesh, or tes. Many of the nineteen variants are extant in European phonetics, such as t, k, s, sh, ch, g, j, etc., which answer to the racial or other variations of the African phonology. Now the sound of a sneeze, when consciously copied, takes shape in some such utterance as techu (ch, as in change), or teshu. A child known to Hensleigh Wedgwood called his sister by the name of 'Atchoo,' on account of her sneezing[39].

The American Indians represent the sneeze by their 'haitshu,' 'atchiau,' 'atchiui,' etc.; and in the inner African languages, the sneeze, or to sneeze, is denoted by

Further, the nose, the organ of sneezing, is named.

The radical tes (or tsh) is employed in the Xhosa Kaffir language to express the sound of whispering; tsu is to whisper softly. This continues the relationship of sound to breath expressed by the sneeze.

The same radical that is inner African for the nose, the sneeze and for whispering may be detected in the name of the nose in the North American and other languages, as:—