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Figuring it Out: The Origin of Language and Anthropomorphism

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fmls/cql073

1471-6860

Ami M. Regier,

Language and cultural evolution

On nous fait du langage des prémiers hommes des langues de Geométres, et nous voyons que ce furent des langues de Poëtes. Cela dût être. On ne commença pas par raisoner mais par sentir. [The language of the first men is represented to us as the tongues of geometers, but we see that they were the tongues of poets. And so it had to be. One does not begin by reasoning, but by feeling.]1 This famous assertion from Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues (1753) here stands at the beginning of a story about conjectural histories of language. In particular, a number of eighteenth-century theories about the origins of language and poetry will form the material for my story and argument. It will begin by asking how and why the origin of language and poetry are so often identified with each other. The figural and conceptual strategies employed by the rhetoricians, philosophers and poets who advocate this conjunction reveal that the trope of anthropomorphism occupies a special place in the field of such linguistic theory and historiography. Anthropomorphism emerges not “just” as a rhetorical trope, but as a linguistic move with deep philosophical implications. This move is to be found in a number of theoretical texts of the period, from David Hume, via Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Hamann, to Johann Gottfried Herder. Framed by the link between the question of origin and the question of anthropomorphism (both as a trope and as a philosophico-theological problem), my discussion will attempt to formulate some of the central preoccupations resulting from this connection, and illustrate how British theorists of language, such as Thomas Blackwell, James Harris or Hugh Blair, attempt to solve them through various conjectural histories of linguistic progress.