Herder and the Philosophy of Language
HERDER: ESSAY ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 1772
In all aboriginal languages, vestiges of these sounds of nature are still to be heard
Children, like animals, utter sounds of sensation. But is not the language they learn from other humans a totally different language?
Condillac, with his hollow explanation of the origin of language, provided Rousseau, as we all know, with the occasion to get the question in our century off the ground again in his own peculiar way, that is, to doubt it.
Because sounds of emotion will never turn into a human language, does it follow that nothing else could ever have turned into it?
In lieu of instincts, other hidden forces must be dormant in it [the human infant] ...No, I am not jumping ahead. I do not suddenly ascribe to man - as an arbitrary qualitas occulta - a new power providing him with the ability to create language.
I do not ... proceed on the basis of arbitrary or social forces but from the general animal economy.
The sound of bleating perceived by a human soul as the distinguishing mark of the sheep became, by virtue of this reflection, the name of the sheep... And what is the entire human language other than a collection of such words?
These numerous unbearable fallacies ... The point here is that it is not the organization of the mouth that made language .. The point here is that it is not a scream of emotion, for not a breathing machine but a reflective soul invented language... Least of all is it agreement, an arbitrary convention of society".
Who can speak shapes? Who can sound colors?
There was a sound, the soul grasped for it, and there it had a ringing word.
The tree will be called the rustler, the west wind the fanner, the brook the murmurer - and there, all finished and ready, is a little dictionary.
The first vocabulary was thus collected from the sounds of the world. From every sounding being echoed its name
Feelings are interwoven in it; What moves is alive; what sounds speak
Whence comes to man the art of changing into sound what is not sound? What has a color, what has roundness in common with the name that might evolve from it ...? The protagonists of the supernatural origin of language have their answer ready-made: "Arbitrary! Who can search and understand God's reason for why green is called green and not blue?.. I trust no one will blame me if in this case I cannot understand the meaning of the word arbitrary. To invent a language out of one's brain, arbitrarily and without any basis of choice, is - at least for a human soul that wants to have a reason, some reason for everything - is no less of a torture than it is for a body to be caressed to death." ... An arbitrarily thought-out language is in all senses contrary to the entire analogy of man's spiritual forces.
For who can compare sound and color or phenomenon and feeling? We are full of such interconnections of the most different senses. ... What remarkable analogies of the most diverse senses ... in nature all the threads are one single tissue.
The soul, caught in the throng of such converging sensations and needing to create a word, reached out and grasped the word of an adjacent sense whose feeling flowed together with the first. Thus words arose for all senses.. Lightning does not sound ... a word will do it that gives the ear, with the help of an intermediate sensation, the feeling of suddenness and rapidity which the eye had of lightning. Words like smell, tone, sweet, bitter, sour, and so on, all sound as one feels, for what, originally, are the senses other than feeling?
The sensations unite and all converge in the area where the distinguishing traits turn into sounds. Thus, what man sees with his eye and feels by touch can also become soundable.
Extracts from: Herder Johann Gottfried. 1986 [1772] Essay on the Origin Of Language in On the Origin of Language Two essays. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Johann Gottfried Herder, pp. 87-166. Trans. with Afterwords by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
In all aboriginal languages, vestiges of these sounds of nature are still to be heard
Children, like animals, utter sounds of sensation. But is not the language they learn from other humans a totally different language?
Condillac, with his hollow explanation of the origin of language, provided Rousseau, as we all know, with the occasion to get the question in our century off the ground again in his own peculiar way, that is, to doubt it.
Because sounds of emotion will never turn into a human language, does it follow that nothing else could ever have turned into it?
In lieu of instincts, other hidden forces must be dormant in it [the human infant] ...No, I am not jumping ahead. I do not suddenly ascribe to man - as an arbitrary qualitas occulta - a new power providing him with the ability to create language.
I do not ... proceed on the basis of arbitrary or social forces but from the general animal economy.
The sound of bleating perceived by a human soul as the distinguishing mark of the sheep became, by virtue of this reflection, the name of the sheep... And what is the entire human language other than a collection of such words?
These numerous unbearable fallacies ... The point here is that it is not the organization of the mouth that made language .. The point here is that it is not a scream of emotion, for not a breathing machine but a reflective soul invented language... Least of all is it agreement, an arbitrary convention of society".
Who can speak shapes? Who can sound colors?
There was a sound, the soul grasped for it, and there it had a ringing word.
The tree will be called the rustler, the west wind the fanner, the brook the murmurer - and there, all finished and ready, is a little dictionary.
The first vocabulary was thus collected from the sounds of the world. From every sounding being echoed its name
Feelings are interwoven in it; What moves is alive; what sounds speak
Whence comes to man the art of changing into sound what is not sound? What has a color, what has roundness in common with the name that might evolve from it ...? The protagonists of the supernatural origin of language have their answer ready-made: "Arbitrary! Who can search and understand God's reason for why green is called green and not blue?.. I trust no one will blame me if in this case I cannot understand the meaning of the word arbitrary. To invent a language out of one's brain, arbitrarily and without any basis of choice, is - at least for a human soul that wants to have a reason, some reason for everything - is no less of a torture than it is for a body to be caressed to death." ... An arbitrarily thought-out language is in all senses contrary to the entire analogy of man's spiritual forces.
For who can compare sound and color or phenomenon and feeling? We are full of such interconnections of the most different senses. ... What remarkable analogies of the most diverse senses ... in nature all the threads are one single tissue.
The soul, caught in the throng of such converging sensations and needing to create a word, reached out and grasped the word of an adjacent sense whose feeling flowed together with the first. Thus words arose for all senses.. Lightning does not sound ... a word will do it that gives the ear, with the help of an intermediate sensation, the feeling of suddenness and rapidity which the eye had of lightning. Words like smell, tone, sweet, bitter, sour, and so on, all sound as one feels, for what, originally, are the senses other than feeling?
The sensations unite and all converge in the area where the distinguishing traits turn into sounds. Thus, what man sees with his eye and feels by touch can also become soundable.
Extracts from: Herder Johann Gottfried. 1986 [1772] Essay on the Origin Of Language in On the Origin of Language Two essays. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Johann Gottfried Herder, pp. 87-166. Trans. with Afterwords by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
posted by Ric Caric at 11:44 PM
3 Comments:
Hilarious and awesome all at once. Too bad this guy never heard the Swahili click dialect- he'd have had a field day or an anuerism one.
I like how he compares children and animals- did you hear the one about the king and the sheep boy? Supposedly, in some Prussian kingdom, a king had a child taken away from all humans except the man who took care of it, and ordered that man to keep strict silence. The ruler was hoping to discover the original language. The man who took care of the child eventually heard it saying "Maa", which, to the king, sounded like a word in Aramaic, which he decided was the original language all humans shared before the Tower of Babel fell.
The joke? The boy was kept in the sheep's pen by the shepherd to make sure no one ever talked to him. What sound do sheeps make?
Anyway, getting back to subject, I love how this man immediately stops what he's doing to say he's not giving man some "arbitrary qualitis occulta". That's somehow really funny to me, as in the old days of science and learning, almost every other discovery was totally new, and probably seemed *very* arbitrary at the same time.
Also, I enjoy his reasoning for language. We probably developed our word for wool when an ancient human put his or her hand on a sheep and went "wooo" because it was soft, and the name stuck.
Actually, probably not, but the thought tickles me anyway.
I've never really found myself critically thinking about the origin of language but now that's it has been brought to my attention it is a very good question. Each person has to have a different opinion on how languages began because many people have varying viewpoints on how this universe was created to begin with, much less how living things communicate with each other. It is really thought provoking how speech has changed and developed over thousands of years to bring us to our current place today. Unfortunately there are more questions than answers when considering language and how people in the past expressed themselves. Regardless I'm sure there are somewhat naturally sounds we make when we consider something funny, frightening, surprising, confusing, etc. and from what can see these are essentially universal. But something had to happen along the way to distinguish languages across international borders. Was it a divine being that created ways of communicating or is language virtually human made? I like the reference to arbitrary in this piece because through my business law class it became more evident than ever before that governments simply make up the rules as they go! There are many laws that are named after people because the law originated with an incident involving them. "Miranda" rights for example is named after a person who had a crazy situation that eventually led to a new bill/law. Are the words we speak today fundamentally just something someone else made up?
This seemed pretty interesting to me and I agree with some of what it says. I like the fact that is basically says in the beginning of human languages the word for something as basically the essence of what it was. If knew what it was then you KNEW what it was, if that makes sense.
But I really did enjoy this and it made me start to think about the words that we use today that don’t really have a meaning… at all. And how they came to be used and how they became to be so popular or even how we use words that mean one thing in a completely wrong context. Even the sarcasm behind the words we say today instead of just getting to the point we add a lot of fluff to everything. We try to make ourselves sound smarter, ditsy, the list is endless. So why make all this seem real when the trust is practically sitting right there in front of us all we have to do is spit it out!
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