"In the beginning was the word, for with it man became Man."

1 month ago 8

ARTICLE AD BOX

"In the beginning was the word, for with it man became man. Without those strange noises called common nouns, thought was limited to individual objects or experiences sensorily—for the most part visually—remembered or conceived; presumably it could not think of classes as distinct from individual things, nor of qualities as distinct from objects, nor of objects as distinct from their qualities.

"Without words as class names one might think of this man, or that man, or that [wo]man; one could not think of Man, for the eye sees not Man buy only men, not classes but particular things.

"The beginning of humanity came when some freak or crank, half animal and half man, squatted in a cave or in a tree, cracking his brain to invent the first common noun, the first sound-sign that would signify a group of objects: house that would mean all houses, man that would mean all men, light that would mean every light that ever shone on land or sea. From that moment the mental development of the race opened upon a new and endless road. For words are to thought what tools are to work; the product depends largely on the growth of the tools.
[...]
"The languages of nature peoples are not necessarily primitive in any sense of simplicity; many of them are simple in vocabulary and structure, but some of them are as complex and wordy as our own, and more highly organised than Chinese. Nearly all primitive tongues, however, limit themselves to the sensual and particular, and are uniformly poor in general or abstract terms. So the Australian natives had a name for a dog's tail, and another name for a cow's tail; but they had no name for tail in general. The Tasmanians had separate names for specific trees, but no general name for tree; the Choctaw Indians had names for black oak, the white oak and the red oak, but no name for oak, much less for tree. Doubtless many generations passed before the proper noun ended in the common noun. In many tribes there are no separate words for the colour as distinct from the coloured object; no words for such abstractions as tone, sex, species, space, spirit, instinct, reason, quantity, hope, fear, matter, consciousness, etc. Such abstract terms seem to grow in a reciprocal relation of cause and effect with the development of thought; they become the tools of subtlety and the symbols of civilisation."
~ Will Durant, from his classic book The Story of Civilisation: Our Oriental Heritage [hat tip Matthew Moore]

Read Entire Article