How did Henry Drummond Explain Human Language?

How did Henry Drummond Explain Human Language? · Did Henry Drummond Have Any Other Hunch on Language?

He didn't. Here is a passage from The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, Chapter V, The Evolution of Language:

Into the problem, therefore, of how the infinite variety of words in a Language was acquired it is unnecessary to enter at length. Once the idea had dawned of expressing meaning by sounds, the formation of words and even of Languages is a mere detail. We have probably all invented words. Almost every family of children invents words of its own, and cases are known where quite considerable Languages have been manufactured in the nursery. When boys play at brigands and pirates they invent pass-words and names, and from mere love of secrets and mysteries concoct vocabularies which no one can understand but themselves.

Tolkien, as some may know, continued this game. And gave an intelligible ratio for what he was doing even as a child.

Now, the thing is, Tolkien as a child was rearranging words of the English language. That's Animalic. Even in the ensuing made up language, Nevbosh, while the word shapes were not English*, most words and all of the grammar was derived from English.

Only the third language he made, way past Nursery years, Naffarin, had a grammar of its own, like a real foreign language.**

We must conclude that Tolkien had reached the idea of "expressing meaning by sound" from being taught English as a child, and probably already had realised the existence of non-English languages as well, from actually being taught or at least told at this stage of French (back in Bloemfontein, he may have heard Afrikaans and Sesotho).

His expression already included:

• sentences or phrases composed of words of morphemes
• morphemes composed of phonemes
• phonemes having no meaning by themselves.

He invented other instances of that with the children he played with and later on his own, and much later shared with readers, but he didn't invent any of that. He was taught it.

It's amazing how the man who invented the phrase "God of the gaps" should have provided a gap which no scientist has so far closed. He just overlooked it.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Epiphany of the Lord
5—6.I.2026

* Example: "woc" for "cow" and "hoc" for "how". ** But not in extent of vocabulary.