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Matter
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signs are ... the depictions of visible objects and could be nothing else; and by the same necessity, the first uttered signs were the imitations of audible sounds. To reproduce any sound, of which the originating cause or the circumstances of production are known, brings up of course before the conception that sound along with the originator or circumstances of origination or whatever else may be naturally associated with it. There are two special directions in which this mode of sign-making is fruitful imitation of the sounds of external nature .... and imitation of human sounds. The two are essentially one in principle .... There are natural human tones indicative of feeling .... which either are immediately intelligible to us .... or have their value taught us by our earliest experience. If we hear a cry of joy or a shriek of pain, a laugh or groan, we need no explanation in words to tell us what it signifies, any more than when we see a sad face or a drooping attitude. So also the characteristic cry or act of anything outside ourselves, if even rudely imitated, is to us an effective reminder and awakener of conception. We have no reas sto question that such were the suggestions of the beginnings of uttered expression”. Mīmāmsā theory about the relation of words to their objects having been determined not by human conventions but by some thing which was not under : man's complete control, is a form of an objectivist doctrine
and undoubtedly points to the earlier stage in the development of language which consisted of a number of imitative sounds only. Some have maintained on the contrary that all words have been definite and deliberate coinings by man. This may be going too far, but coinings and conventions have certainly been matters of fact in the history of the development of a language. Sievers, whom we have quoted above, says:-“This is a regular and essential part of the process of name-making in all human speech and from the very beginning of the history of speech: in fact .... the latter can only be said to have begun when this process was successfully initiated, when uttered signs began to be, what they have ever since continued to be,
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