LB456-457 鎮妃

LB456-457 鎮妃

LB p.456-457

This assumption led ...accept this belief in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, written in 1767. ” The earliest and latest accounts …represent mankind as assembled in troops and companies…[62]. Do not omit references and footnotes

“Man’ s use of language and articulate sound, like the shape and erect position of his body are to be considered as so many attributes of his nature: they are to be retained in his description, as the wing and the paw are in that of the eagle and the lion…”[63]

The exploration of man’s mind is not aided by the study of “a wild man caught in the woods, “ which would “teach us nothing important or new.,“ for the normal development of mental functions is dependent on society. The isolated individual would be defective just” as the anatomy of the eyes which had never received the impressions of light…would probably exhibit defects in the very structure…arising from their not being applied to their proper functions…”[64]. Apparently, Ferguson meant this not just as an analogy. Mental functions depend pm the body, “the temper of the heart and the intellectual operations of the mind, are in some measure, dependent on the state of the animal organs.”

Moreover:

“Society appears as old as the individual and the use of the tongue is as universal as that of the hand or the foot”[65].

Ferguson’s thinking demonstrates that the biological basis of language comes to occupy a central position, once the artificial barriers between mind and body, and man and society have been removed.
But for most thinkers in mid-eighteenth century, languages as a function of the mind was a problem for philosophical speculation. Although the natural and inherently biological basis of language has been mentioned, it played no role in the heated argument about the origin of language. The quarrel of whether man had invented language by application of his reason or whether it was God’s revelation could assume immense proportions without taking into consideration the biological basis of language. This was only possible because God and man’s reason were considered separated and above nature
[66].

The argument was resolved by Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744-1803) essay on “The Origin of Language, ” written in 1770. Herder proposed that language was the product of man’s reason and a part of it, but that both language and reason were natural to man [67].
This quarrel and its resolution exemplifies another aspect of language theory. None of the major participants had based their theoretical arguments on work with language, just as most of the proponents of a natural or physiological basis of language had been heretofore satisfied to subordinate their viewpoint philosophically. The concern with language theory had been shared by philosophers, theologians, poets, scientists and thinkers.
This was to change drastically in the nineteenth century, when language theories were to come from men whose work was dedicated to the study of language. In the first part of the century these men were primarily philologists and their efforts were directed at the examination of a particular language as the expression of a particular culture. The biological basis of language received little attention from them. Nevertheless, Frank Bopp(1787-1932) the founder of Indogermanic philology and Rasmus Rask(1787-1932) a student of Icelandic, recognized language as “ a natural object, its study resembling natural history” [68].
The biological basis of language became of great interest to quite another group of men; the physicians. To the first among them, the interest in language was not only derived from his encounter with patients who had a language disturbance, but also from his own difficulties with the study of languages as a youth [69].
Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) whose importance for the development of neuro-anatomy and neurophysiology has recently been reviewed [70] wanted to put an end to the “highhanded generations if the philosophers” who had regarded the functions of the soul without consideration for their biological basis [71]. He thought “ to be on firm ground: to say that the language of words in terms of its cause, is not just a product of our faculties”[72]. The internal faculties presiding over language were represented in the brain by organs. (As Gall assumed for all” drives, technical abilities, affections, passions, moral and intellectual functions”).
Language was common to man and animals. The latter supposedly had sufficient words for their own needs [73], The two faculties for language were the memory of words, and the sense for spoken language. Man had the natural language of gestures and interjections. The language of words. Gall considered arbitrary invented signs. Words are not the basis of intelligence, they only aid in its development [74]. Gall’s postulation of two simple language centers could not do justice to the complexity of language.
Jean Baptiste Bouillaud (1796-1881) picked up Gall’s ideas in consideration with cases of aphasia, already in 1825. His thoughts on language were based on his clinical experience, and language was defined in terms of the difficulties his aphasic patients showed in the expressions or understanding of singles words [75]. Most of the subsequent work... on aphasia …in the 19^th century. (P.458)