Language and behavior.

4 T ITS most complex level, language may be viewed as a means -E*whereby goal-directed, social-adaptive and appetitive functions are performed. Under these conditions behavior and language become equivalents. It seems quite unavailing to inquire directly into the specific origin of phonetic verbal language, as by its nature sound phenomena are retained only as memory traces in the brain of the recipient and speaker. How ever, through a study of the origin of graphic forms, some insight into all verbal forms may be achieved. This derives from the fact that brain function, as nearly all other biological phenomena, is basically repetitive and conservative. Since the earliest known presentations of graphic verbal forms were indelibly inscribed in, or on, stone, clay, and other relatively indestruct able material, they are particularly well-suited for studies on the origin of language. These graphic verbal symbols appear to have arisen through generalizations of pictures which originally represented figures of common objects of the environment; i.e., as a direct representational form. In Figure 1, an extremely early picture writing in stone is shown: a foot, asteroid, and circle are depicted. The meaning of this inscription is not known, but it has been suggested that the symbols were an astronomical marker and that the action indicated might have been, "Stand here to see the stars and moon" m. More evidence of the pictorial origin of the symbols of verbal communication is observed in the material comprising Fig. 2. This is adapted from W. F. Albright's "Archeology of Pales tine" [2i. In this figure only the most obviously related pictures and sym bols were included. Among these symbols are configurations that are similar to those extant in the Egyptian hieroglyphic writings. Evidence that man's brain operates in a similar way, irrespective of the wide disparity of the geographic regions of productivity, is shown in the uses of pictures, particularly stylized heads, in Mayan and other Meso-American writings. Figure 3 is from F?rstemann's paper in the Bulletin of Ethnology (1911); it shows a portion of the glyphs in the famous Cross of Palenque. The elaborate forms of heads, hands, and other ornamental objects are noteworthy. In the Far East strong ele ments of early pictographic forms have persisted in the graphic verbal language of the modern era. From pictographic representations having sign value, or the property of denoting, written language developed to the phase where a picture no longer represented a specific object, but became related to a class of objects, or to a class of ideas. That is, the graphic form became an equiva lent ideographic symbol able to generate particular responses in a 502