In all aboriginal languages, vestiges of these sounds of nature are still to be heard

Children, like animals, utter sounds of sensation. But is not the language they learn from other humans a totally different language?

Condillac, with his hollow explanation of the origin of language, provided Rousseau, as we all know, with the occasion to get the question in our century off the ground again in his own peculiar way, that is, to doubt it.

Because sounds of emotion will never turn into a human language, does it follow that nothing else could ever have turned into it?

In lieu of instincts, other hidden forces must be dormant in it [the human infant] ...No, I am not jumping ahead. I do not suddenly ascribe to man - as an arbitrary qualitas occulta - a new power providing him with the ability to create language.

I do not ... proceed on the basis of arbitrary or social forces but from the general animal economy.

The sound of bleating perceived by a human soul as the distinguishing mark of the sheep became, by virtue of this reflection, the name of the sheep... And what is the entire human language other than a collection of such words?

These numerous unbearable fallacies ... The point here is that it is not the organization of the mouth that made language .. The point here is that it is not a scream of emotion, for not a breathing machine but a reflective soul invented language... Least of all is it agreement, an arbitrary convention of society".

Who can speak shapes? Who can sound colors?

There was a sound, the soul grasped for it, and there it had a ringing word.

The tree will be called the rustler, the west wind the fanner, the brook the murmurer - and there, all finished and ready, is a little dictionary.

The first vocabulary was thus collected from the sounds of the world. From every sounding being echoed its name

Feelings are interwoven in it; What moves is alive; what sounds speak

Whence comes to man the art of changing into sound what is not sound? What has a color, what has roundness in common with the name that might evolve from it ...? The protagonists of the supernatural origin of language have their answer ready-made: "Arbitrary! Who can search and understand God's reason for why green is called green and not blue?.. I trust no one will blame me if in this case I cannot understand the meaning of the word arbitrary. To invent a language out of one's brain, arbitrarily and without any basis of choice, is - at least for a human soul that wants to have a reason, some reason for everything - is no less of a torture than it is for a body to be caressed to death." ... An arbitrarily thought-out language is in all senses contrary to the entire analogy of man's spiritual forces.

For who can compare sound and color or phenomenon and feeling? We are full of such interconnections of the most different senses. ... What remarkable analogies of the most diverse senses ... in nature all the threads are one single tissue.

The soul, caught in the throng of such converging sensations and needing to create a word, reached out and grasped the word of an adjacent sense whose feeling flowed together with the first. Thus words arose for all senses.. Lightning does not sound ... a word will do it that gives the ear, with the help of an intermediate sensation, the feeling of suddenness and rapidity which the eye had of lightning. Words like smell, tone, sweet, bitter, sour, and so on, all sound as one feels, for what, originally, are the senses other than feeling?

The sensations unite and all converge in the area where the distinguishing traits turn into sounds. Thus, what man sees with his eye and feels by touch can also become soundable.

Extracts from:
Herder Johann Gottfried. 1986 [1772] Essay on the Origin Of Language in On the Origin of Language Two essays. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Johann Gottfried Herder, pp. 87-166. Trans. with Afterwords by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.