Mori Ōgai (real name Mori Rintarō, 1862–1922) was, before he was a novelist, an army surgeon back from study in Germany, a man whose trade was carrying European learning across into Japanese. One product of that trade is the short text we are about to read — the appendix to “The Origin of Language” (1889).
What this text is
The essay “The Origin of Language” itself was written by a junior associate of Ōgai’s, Emura (writing as Emura Gakujin, “the scholar Emura”). Gathering it into their magazine, Ōgai added his own thoughts at the end. He opens by stating as much:
This essay on the origin of language is the work of the scholar Emura. In gathering it into Mannengusa I believe it will not be wholly useless to append one or two thoughts of my own.
— Mori Ōgai, appendix to “The Origin of Language” (1889); working translation. Later quotations are from the same text.
Emura’s claim: sounds like an infant’s cries progress from simple to complex and eventually become the material of language. He offered several words as “evidence.” Ōgai takes this as “no easy problem for linguistics,” and briskly lays out, in Japanese, the debate on the origin of language then being fought over in Europe.
Ōgai’s move — split it in two first
What Ōgai works hardest at is sorting out the terms. Emura had lumped crying and mimicry together as “the raw material of language.” Ōgai cuts it in two.
For the convenience of the inquiry it may be well, for now, to keep the cry apart from the raw material of language.
He then borrows the terms of the German scholar Max Müller: everything to do with the cry of feeling becomes the “interjectional question of word-origin,” and the part to do with imitating sound the “onomatopoetic question” (onomatopoetisch). Ōgai carefully adds the pedigree of the word onomatopoeia: that its sense has shifted since Greek and invites misunderstanding; that scholars tried substitutes; that Müller himself called the interjectional view the “pah-pah theory” and the onomatopoetic the “wau-wau theory,” then withdrew the latter after complaints that it seemed to insult scholars. This fussiness about the history of a technical term is the translator Ōgai showing his hand.
The interjectional theory — does the cry become language?
Can the cry of feeling (German Schrei) be the origin of words as it stands? Ōgai lines up three figures on the “no” side.
Herder (18th century). However much you work the cry, it never becomes language. For language to begin you need, separately from the cry, an operation that lifts out a single sound and makes it a mark.
However the cry is altered, it never becomes language. Only by obtaining, separately, a single tone (Ton) and making it a mark (Merkmal) does language begin.
Jacob Grimm — the linguist Grimm, of the fairy tales. The cry makes whimpering and weeping, but not language. Language is won separately, together with thought.
The cry may make whimpering and weeping (wimmern, weinen), yet it never becomes language. Language is won separately — together with reflection (erworben).
Lazarus Geiger splits the cry in two. Seeing a thing and uttering from fear or want is the animal-cry (Tierschrei). Seeing a thing — above all seeing its movement — and uttering, so that the utterance forms the origin of a word, is the language-cry (Sprachschrei).
…that which is uttered on seeing a thing, and above all on seeing its movement, and which thereby forms the origin of a word, he calls the language-cry (Sprachschrei).
The mama-papa theory — where Ōgai sides
So how does Ōgai himself judge it? Emura’s “crying voice,” true, probably does not form the origin of words. But, Ōgai goes on:
The sounds a, u, and their combinations with b, p, m, d and the like are not ordinary cries. They are sounds an infant can produce early.
The vowels a and u, joined to the lip and tooth sounds b, p, m, d — that is, syllables like pa, ba, ma, da — are not the cries that escape on pain or hunger. They are sounds an infant can already make early, as its articulators develop. If these are to be called cries at all, “language-cry” is the fair name. And that these sounds, above all papa / mama, become the origin of words for “the parent,” is granted by many scholars. Ōgai cites the psychologist Wundt:
…Wundt’s book says that parents take up the sounds their child produces early and make them into words that point to themselves.
That is: the pa and ma an infant utters meaninglessly are picked up by the parent and fixed as a name — “me = papa / mama.” The word is not the child’s invention but the listener’s adoption.
The onomatopoetic theory — imitating the sound, or the feeling of the sound?
To the other pillar, the onomatopoetic (“bow-wow”) theory. “Onomatopoeia” sounds like the deliberate work of copying a noise exactly. Ōgai first dismisses the extreme case. The 18th-century figure Tiedemann held that language was “an invention contrived out of distress,” with sound-imitation (Schallnachahmung) one of its means. Today’s scholars think, rather, that onomatopoeia at the root of a word is not deliberate. Steinthal’s onomatopoeia theory runs:
Onomatopoeia does not imitate the sound; it imitates the feeling of the sound.
Not the noise itself but the feeling the noise stirs up. So impressions of sight and touch, too, enter the onomatopoeic range by way of feeling.
And Max Müller narrows the theory’s reach sharply. Onomatopoeic words are not many to begin with. Trace word-forms back under Grimm’s Law (below) and you find:
…one finds that most of what is ordinarily taken for onomatopoeic words is, on the whole, not onomatopoeic; and even those that must plainly be granted as onomatopoeic seldom form derivatives well.
The clearly onomatopoeic words, moreover, do not spin off derivatives — verbs, adjectives, abstract nouns — well. They never get woven into the mesh of the vocabulary.
Cuckoo and rooster — the worked example
Ōgai says that of Emura’s word-examples, all but “father, mother, eat” bear on the onomatopoeia problem, and he singles out the words in the rooster section. One caution, though: German Kuckuck is the cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), a different bird from the rooster (Gallus domesticus). Both names are onomatopoeic, and two series run through the Indo-European languages.
The closing warning — do not ignore language families
Ōgai ends with a caution: when you dig for a word’s origin, always ask whether the languages are of the same family or different ones. Indo-European (his term: “Indo-Germanic”), Japanese and Chinese are usually taken as different families.
That languages of different families share root-like elements is something very few scholars have hitherto conceded.
Almost no scholar grants that languages of different families share “root-like common elements” — that is, Ōgai is warning against the etymological parlour game of lining up unrelated languages and declaring words cognate “because they sound alike.” It was a methodological prohibition that 19th-century comparative linguistics fought to establish, and it still holds.
Why it is worth reading now
In 1889 Ōgai was 27. European origin-of-language theory had all but run its course, and stalled. Herder and Grimm both said the cry does not become language; the onomatopoetic theory was pared down by Müller; what remained was a narrow foothold like the mama-papa theory. The question “where did it begin?” had itself hit the limits of evidence.
About a quarter-century later, Saussure set the origin question aside and steered toward “how the system of a living language works” (see “Saussure and the Birth of Linguistics” and “langage · langue · parole”). Ōgai’s appendix records the landscape just before that turn, written in clear Japanese by an army surgeon fresh from Germany. You do not have to be a specialist to see, from here, exactly why the origin of language is such a hard problem.
Glossary
| Ōgai’s Japanese term | original / nickname | in today’s terms |
|---|---|---|
| 間投的語原論 | interjectional / “pooh-pooh” theory | language began from the cry of feeling |
| 繪聲的語原論 | onomatopoetisch / “bow-wow” theory (once wau-wau, withdrawn) | language began from imitating sounds |
| (mama-papa theory) | — | the parent adopts an infant’s early sounds as a name |
| 〔叫〕聲 | Schrei | the cry (Ōgai’s text uses a variant character) |
| 標識 | Merkmal | a mark, a distinguishing feature |
| 語音移動 | Lautverschiebung | Grimm’s Law (the Germanic consonant shift) |
| 印度日耳曼語 | Indo-Germanic | Indo-European |
For the whole of Saussure’s book, see “An Overview of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.” The question “what is language?” itself is taken up in “What Are Words?.”
