Lectures on The Science of Language Part 16

Let us take another word for cave, which is _cavea_ or _caverna_. Here again Adam Smith would be perfectly right in maintaining that this name, when first given, was applied to one particular cave, and was afterwards extended to other caves. But Leibniz would be equally right in maintaining that in order to call even the first hollow _cavea_, it was necessary that the general idea of _hollow_ should have been formed in the mind, and should have received its vocal expression _cav_. Nay we may go a step beyond, for _cavus_, or hollow, is a secondary, not a primary, idea.

Before a cave was called _cavea_, a hollow thing, many things hollow had pa.s.sed before the eyes of men. Why then was a hollow thing, or a hole, called by the root _cav_? Because what had been hollowed out was intended at first as a place of safety and protection, as a cover; and it was called therefore by the root _ku_ or _sku_, which conveyed the idea of to cover.(340) Hence the general idea of covering existed in the mind before it was applied to hiding-places in rocks or trees, and it was not till an expression had thus been framed for things hollow or safe in general, that caves in particular could be designated by the name of _cavea_ or hollows.

Another form for _cavus_ was _koilos_, hollow. The conception was originally the same; a hole was called _koilon_ because it served as a cover. But once so used _koilon_ came to mean a cave, a vaulted cave, a vault, and thus the heaven was called _clum_, the modern _ciel_, because it was looked upon as a vault or cover for the earth.

It is the same with all nouns. They all express originally one out of the many attributes of a thing, and that attribute, whether it be a quality or an action, is necessarily a general idea. The word thus formed was in the first instance intended for one object only, though of course it was almost immediately extended to the whole cla.s.s to which this object seemed to belong. When a word such as _rivus_, river, was first formed, no doubt it was intended for a certain river, and that river was called _rivus_, from a root _ru_ or _sru_, to run, because of its running water. In many instances a word meaning river or runner remained the proper name of one river, without ever rising to the dignity of an appellative. Thus _Rhenus_, the Rhine, means river or runner, but it clung to one river, and could not be used as an appellative for others. The Ganges is the Sanskrit _Ganga_, literally the Go-go; a word very well adapted for any majestic river, but in Sanskrit restricted to the one sacred stream. The Indus again is the Sanskrit _Sindhu_, and means the irrigator, from _syand_, to sprinkle. In this case, however, the proper name was not checked in its growth, but was used likewise as an appelative for any great stream.

We have thus seen how the controversy about the _primum cognitum_ a.s.sumes a new and perfectly clear aspect. The first thing really known is the general. It is through it that we know and name afterwards individual objects of which any general idea can be predicated, and it is only in the third stage that these individual objects, thus known and named, become again the representatives of whole cla.s.ses, and their names or proper names are raised into appellatives.(341)

There is a petrified philosophy in language, and if we examine the most ancient word for name we find it is _naman_ in Sanskrit, _nomen_ in Latin, _namo_ in Gothic. This _naman_ stands for _gnaman_, which is preserved in the Latin _co-gnomen_. The _g_ is dropped as in _natus_, son, for _gnatus_. _Naman_, therefore, and name are derived from the root gna, to know, and meant originally that by which we know a thing.

And how do we know things? We perceive things by our senses, but our senses convey to us information about single things only. But to _know_ is more than to feel, than to perceive, more than to remember, more than to compare. No doubt words are much abused. We speak of a dog _knowing_ his master, of an infant _knowing_ his mother. In such expressions, to know means to recognize. But to know a thing, means more than to recognize it.

We know a thing if we are able to bring it, and any part of it, under more general ideas. We then say, not that we have a perception, but a conception, or that we have a general idea of a thing. The facts of nature are perceived by our senses; the thoughts of nature, to borrow an expression of Oersted's, can be conceived by our reason only.(342) Now the first step towards this real knowledge, a step which, however small in appearance, separates man forever from all other animals, is the _naming of a thing_, or the making a thing knowable. All naming is cla.s.sification, bringing the individual under the general; and whatever we know, whether empirically or scientifically, we know it only by means of our general ideas. Other animals have sensation, perception, memory, and, in a certain sense, intellect; but all these, in the animal, are conversant with single objects only. Man has sensation, perception, memory, intellect, and reason, and it is his reason only that is conversant with general ideas.(343)

Through reason we not only stand a step above the brute creation: we belong to a different world. We look down on our merely animal experience, on our sensations, perceptions, our memory, and our intellect, as something belonging to us, but not as const.i.tuting our most inward and eternal self. Our senses, our memory, our intellect, are like the lenses of a telescope. But there is an eye that looks through them at the realities of the outer world, our own rational and self-conscious soul; a power as distinct from our perceptive faculties as the sun is from the earth which it fills with light, and warmth, and life.

At the very point where man parts company with the brute world, at the first flash of reason as the manifestation of the light within us, there we see the true genesis of language. a.n.a.lyze any word you like, and you will find that it expresses a general idea peculiar to the individual to which the name belongs. What is the meaning of moon?-the measurer. What is the meaning of sun?-the begetter. What is the meaning of earth?-the ploughed. The old name given to animals, such as cows and sheep, was _pasu_, the Latin _pecus_, which means _feeders_. _Animal_ itself is a later name, and derived from _anima_, soul. This _anima_ again meant originally blowing or breathing, like spirit from _spirare_, and was derived from a root, _an_, to blow, which gives us _anila_, wind, in Sanskrit, and _anemos_, wind, in Greek. _Ghost_, the German _Geist_, is based on the same conception. It is connected with _gust_, with _yeast_, and even with the hissing and boiling _geysers_ of Iceland. _Soul_ is the Gothic _saivala_, and this is clearly related to another Gothic word, _saivs_,(344) which means the sea. The sea was called _saivs_ from a root _si_ or _siv_, the Greek _seio_, to shake; it meant the tossed-about water, in contradistinction to stagnant or running water. The soul being called _saivala_, we see that it was originally conceived by the Teutonic nations as a sea within, heaving up and down with every breath, and reflecting heaven and earth on the mirror of the deep.

The Sanskrit name for love is _smara_; it is derived from _smar_, to recollect; and the same root has supplied the German _schmerz_, pain, and the English _smart_.

If the serpent is called in Sanskrit _sarpa_, it is because it was conceived under the general idea of creeping, an idea expressed by the word _srip_. But the serpent was also called _ahi_ in Sanskrit, in Greek _echis_ or _echidna_, in Latin _anguis_. This name is derived from quite a different root and idea. The root is _ah_ in Sanskrit, or _anh_, which means to press together, to choke, to throttle. Here the distinguishing mark from which the serpent was named was his throttling, and _ahi_ meant serpent, as expressing the general idea of throttler. It is a curious root this _anh_, and it still lives in several modern words. In Latin it appears as _ango_, _anxi_, _anctum_, to strangle, in _angina_, quinsy,(345) in _angor_, suffocation. But _angor_ meant not only quinsy or compression of the neck; it a.s.sumed a moral import and signifies anguish or anxiety. The two adjectives _angustus_, narrow, and _anxius_, uneasy, both come from the same source. In Greek the root retained its natural and material meaning; in _eggys_, near, and _echis_, serpent, throttler. But in Sanskrit it was chosen with great truth as the proper name of sin. Evil no doubt presented itself under various aspects to the human mind, and its names are many; but none so expressive as those derived from our root, _anh_, to throttle. _Anhas_ in Sanskrit means sin, but it does so only because it meant originally throttling,-the consciousness of sin being like the grasp of the a.s.sa.s.sin on the throat of his victim. All who have seen and contemplated the statue of Laokoon and his sons, with the serpent coiled round them from head to foot, may realize what those ancients felt and saw when they called sin _anhas_, or the throttler. This _anhas_ is the same word as the Greek _agos_, sin. In Gothic the same root has produced _agis_, in the sense of _fear_, and from the same source we have _awe_, in awful, _i.e._ fearful, and _ug_, in _ugly_. The English _anguish_ is from the French _angoisse_, the Italian _angoscia_, a corruption of the Latin _angustiae_, a strait.

And how did those early thinkers and framers of language distinguish between man and the other animals? What general idea did they connect with the first conception of themselves? The Latin word _h.o.m.o_, the French _l'homme_, which has been reduced to _on_ in _on dit_, is derived from the same root which we have in _humus_, the soil, _humilis_, humble. _h.o.m.o_, therefore, would express the idea of a being made of the dust of the earth.(346)

Another ancient word for man was the Sanskrit _marta_,(347) the Greek _brotos_, the Latin _mortalis_ (a secondary derivative), our own _mortal_.

_Marta_ means "he who dies," and it is remarkable that where everything else was changing, fading, and dying, this should have been chosen as the distinguishing name for man. Those early poets would hardly have called themselves mortals unless they had believed in other beings as immortal.

There is a third name for man which means simply the thinker, and this, the true t.i.tle of our race, still lives in the name of _man_. _Ma_ in Sanskrit means to measure, from which you remember we had the name of moon. _Man_, a derivative root, means to think. From this we have the Sanskrit _manu_, originally thinker, then man. In the later Sanskrit we find derivatives, such as _manava_, _ma.n.u.sha_, _ma.n.u.shya_, all expressing man. In Gothic we find both _man_, and _mannisks_, the modern German _mann_ and _mensch_.

There were many more names for man, as there were many names for all things in ancient languages. Any feature that struck the observing mind as peculiarly characteristic could be made to furnish a new name. The sun might be called the bright, the warm, the golden, the preserver, the destroyer, the wolf, the lion, the heavenly eye, the father of light and life. Hence that superabundance of synonymes in ancient dialects, and hence that _struggle for life_ carried on among these words, which led to the destruction of the less strong, the less happy, the less fertile words, and ended in the triumph of _one_, as the recognized and proper name for every object in every language. On a very small scale this process of _natural selection_, or, as it would better be called, _elimination_, may still be watched even in modern languages, that is to say, even in languages so old and full of years as English and French.

What it was at the first burst of dialects we can only gather from such isolated cases as when Von Hammer counts 5744 words relating to the camel.(348)

The fact that every word is originally a predicate, that names, though signs of individual conceptions, are all, without exception, derived from general ideas, is one of the most important discoveries in the science of language. It was known before that language is the distinguishing characteristic of man; it was known also that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes; but that these two were only different expressions of the same fact was not known till the theory of roots had been established as preferable to the theories both of Onomatopoieia and of Interjections. But, though our modern philosophy did not know it, the ancient poets and framers of language must have known it. For in Greek language is _logos_, but _logos_ means also reason, and _alogon_ was chosen as the name, and the most proper name, for brute. No animal thinks, and no animal speaks, except man. Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.

And now I am afraid I have but a few minutes left to explain the last question of all in our science, namely-How can sound express thought? How did roots become the signs of general ideas? How was the abstract idea of measuring expressed by _ma_, the idea of thinking by _man_? How did _ga_ come to mean going, _stha_ standing, _sad_ sitting, _da_ giving, _mar_ dying, _char_ walking, _kar_ doing?

I shall try to answer as briefly as possible. The 400 or 500 roots which remain as the const.i.tuent elements in different families of language are not interjections, nor are they imitations. They are _phonetic types_ produced by a power inherent in human nature. They exist, as Plato would say, by nature; though with Plato we should add that, when we say by nature, we mean by the hand of G.o.d.(349) There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. Each substance has its peculiar ring. We can tell the more or less perfect structure of metals by their vibrations, by the answer which they give.

Gold rings differently from tin, wood rings differently from stone; and different sounds are produced according to the nature of each percussion.

It was the same with man, the most highly organized of nature's works.(350) Man, in his primitive and perfect state, was not only endowed, like the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoieia. He possessed likewise the faculty of giving more articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind. That faculty was not of his own making. It was an instinct, an instinct of the mind as irresistible as any other instinct.

So far as language is the production of that instinct, it belongs to the realm of nature. Man loses his instincts as he ceases to want them. His senses become fainter when, as in the case of scent, they become useless.

Thus the creative faculty which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled. The number of these _phonetic types_ must have been almost infinite in the beginning, and it was only through the same process of _natural elimination_ which we observed in the early history of words, that cl.u.s.ters of roots, more or less synonymous, were gradually reduced to one definite type. Instead of deriving language from nine roots, like Dr. Murray,(351) or from _one_ root, a feat actually accomplished by a Dr. Schmidt,(352) we must suppose that the first settlement of the radical elements of language was preceded by a period of unrestrained growth,-the spring of speech-to be followed by many an autumn.

With the process of elimination, or natural selection, the historical element enters into the science of language. However primitive the Chinese may be as compared with terminational and inflectional languages, its roots or words have clearly pa.s.sed through a long process of mutual attrition. There are many things of a merely traditional character even in Chinese. The rule that in a simple sentence the first word is the subject, the second the verb, the third the object, is a traditional rule. It is by tradition only that _ngo gin_, in Chinese, means a bad man, whereas _gin ngo_ signifies man is bad. The Chinese themselves distinguish between _full_ and _empty_ roots,(353) the former being predicative, the latter corresponding to our particles which modify the meaning of full roots and determine their relation to each other. It is only by tradition that roots become empty. All roots were originally full whether predicative or demonstrative, and the fact that empty roots in Chinese cannot always be traced back to their full prototypes shows that even the most ancient Chinese had pa.s.sed through successive periods of growth. Chinese commentators admit that all empty words were originally full words, just as Sanskrit grammarians maintain that all that is found in grammar was originally substantial. But we must be satisfied with but partial proofs of this general principle, and must be prepared to find as many fanciful derivations in Chinese as in Sanskrit. The fact, again, that all roots in Chinese are no longer capable of being employed at pleasure, either as substantives, or verbs, or adjectives, is another proof that, even in this most primitive stage, language points back to a previous growth. _Fu_ is father, _mu_ is mother; _fu mu_ parents; but neither _fu_ nor _mu_ is used as a root in its original predicative sense. The amplest proof, however, of the various stages through which even so simple a language as Chinese must have pa.s.sed is to be found in the comparatively small number of roots, and in the definite meanings attached to each; a result which could only have been obtained by that constant struggle which has been so well described in natural history as the struggle for life.

But although this sifting of roots, and still more the subsequent combination of roots, cannot be ascribed to the mere working of nature or natural instincts, it is still less, as we saw in a former Lecture, the effect of deliberate or premeditated art, in the sense in which, for instance, a picture of Raphael or a symphony of Beethoven is. Given a root to express flying, or bird, and another to express heap, then the joining together of the two to express many birds, or birds in the plural, is the natural effect of the synthetic power of the human mind, or, to use more homely language, of the power of putting two and two together. Some philosophers maintain indeed that this explains nothing, and that the real mystery to be solved is how the mind can form a synthesis, or conceive many things as one. Into those depths we cannot follow. Other philosophers imagine that the combination of roots to form agglutinative and inflectional language is, like the first formation of roots, the result of a natural instinct. Thus Professor Heyse(354) maintained that "the various forms of development in language must be explained by the philosophers as _necessary_ evolutions, founded in the very essence of human speech." This is not the case. We can watch the growth of language, and we can understand and explain all that is the result of that growth. But we cannot undertake to prove that all that is in language is so by necessity, and could not have been otherwise. When we have, as in Chinese, two such words as _kiai_ and _tu_, both expressing a heap, an a.s.sembly, a quant.i.ty, then we may perfectly understand why either the one or the other should have been used to form the plural. But if one of the two becomes fixed and traditional, while the other becomes obsolete, then we can register the fact as historical, but no philosophy on earth will explain its absolute necessity. We can perfectly understand how, with two such roots as _kuo_, empire, and _cung_, middle, the Chinese should have formed what we call a locative, _kuo cung_, in the empire. But to say that this was the only way to express this conception is an a.s.sertion contradicted both by fact and reason. We saw the various ways in which the future can be formed. They are all equally intelligible and equally possible, but not one of them is inevitable. In Chinese _?ao_ means to will, _ng_ is I; hence _ng ?ao_, I will. The same root _?ao_, added to _?iu_, to go, gives us _ng ?ao ?iu_, I will go, the first germ of our futures. To say that _ng ?ao ?iu_ was the necessary form of the future in Chinese would introduce a fatalism into language which rests on no authority whatever. The building up of language is not like the building of the cells in a beehive, nor is it like the building of St. Peter's by Michael Angelo. It is the result of innumerable agencies, working each according to certain laws, and leaving in the end the result of their combined efforts freed from all that proved superfluous or useless. From the first combination of two such words as _gin_, man, _kiai_, many, to form the plural _gin kiai_, to the perfect grammar of Sanskrit and Greek, everything is intelligible as the result of the two principles of growth which we considered in our second Lecture.

What is antecedent to the production of roots is the work of nature; what follows after is the work of man, not in his individual and free, but in his collective and moderating, capacity.

I do not say that every form in Greek or Sanskrit has as yet been a.n.a.lyzed and explained. There are formations in Greek and Latin and English which have hitherto baffled all tests; and there are certain contrivances, such as the augment in Greek, the change of vowels in Hebrew, the Umlaut and Ablaut in the Teutonic dialects, where we might feel inclined to suppose that language admitted distinctions purely musical or phonetic, corresponding to very palpable and material distinctions of thought. Such a supposition, however, is not founded on any safe induction. It may seem inexplicable to us why _bruder_ in German should form its plural as _bruder_; or _brother_, _brethren_. But what is inexplicable and apparently artificial in our modern languages becomes intelligible in their more ancient phases. The change of _u_ into _u_, as in _bruder_, _bruder_, was not intentional; least of all was it introduced to expressed plurality. The change is phonetic, and due to the influence of an _i_ or _j_,(355) which existed originally in the last syllable and which reacted regularly on the vowel of the preceding syllable; nay, which leaves its effect behind, even after it has itself disappeared. By a false a.n.a.logy such a change, perfectly justifiable in a certain cla.s.s of words, may be applied to other words where no such change was called for; and it may then appear as if an arbitrary change of vowels was intended to convey a grammatical change. But even into these recesses the comparative philologist can follow language, thus discovering a reason even for what in reality was irrational and wrong. It seems difficult to believe that the augment in Greek should originally have had an independent substantial existence, yet all a.n.a.logy is in favor of such a view. Suppose English had never been written down before Wycliffe's time, we should then find that in some instances the perfect was formed by the mere addition of a short _a_. Wycliffe spoke and wrote:(356) _I knowlech to a felid and seid us_; _i.e._ I acknowledge to have felt and said thus. In a similar way we read: _it should a fallen_; instead of "it should have fallen;" and in some parts of England common people still say very much the same: _I should a done it_. Now in some old English books this _a_ actually coalesces with the verb, at least they are printed together; so that a grammar founded on them would give us "to fall" as the infinitive of the present, _to afallen_ as the infinitive of the past. I do not wish for a moment to be understood as if there was any connection between this _a_, a contraction of _have_ in English, and the Greek augment which is placed before past tenses. All I mean is, that, if the origin of the augment has not yet been satisfactorily explained, we are not therefore to despair, or to admit an arbitrary addition of a consonant or vowel, used as it were algebraically or by mutual agreement, to distinguish a past from a present tense.

If inductive reasoning is worth anything, we are justified in believing that what has been proved to be true on so large a scale, and in cases where it was least expected, is true with regard to language in general.

We require no supernatural interference, nor any conclave of ancient sages, to explain the realities of human speech. All that is formal in language is the result of rational combination; all that is material, the result of a mental instinct. The first natural and instinctive utterances, if sifted differently by different clans, would fully account both for the first origin and for the first divergence of human speech. We can understand not only the origin of language, but likewise the necessary breaking up of one language into many; and we perceive that no amount of variety in the material or the formal elements of speech is incompatible with the admission of one common source.

The Science of Language thus leads us up to that highest summit from whence we see into the very dawn of man's life on earth; and where the words which we have heard so often from the days of our childhood-"And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech"-a.s.sume a meaning more natural, more intelligible, more convincing, than they ever had before.

And now in concluding this course of Lectures, I have only to express my regret that the sketch of the Science of Language which I endeavored to place before you, was necessarily so very slight and imperfect. There are many points which I could not touch at all, many which I could only allude to: there is hardly one to which I could do full justice. Still I feel grateful to the President and the Council of this Inst.i.tution for having given me an opportunity of claiming some share of public sympathy for a science which I believe has a great future in store; and I shall be pleased, if, among those who have done me the honor of attending these Lectures, I have excited, though I could not have satisfied, some curiosity as to the strata which underlie the language on which we stand and walk; and as to the elements which enter into the composition of the very granite of our thoughts.

APPENDIX.

[Transcriber's Note: The Appendix contains genealogical tables of the language families. In the original, they were displayed as wide landscape pages, which could not be rendered effectively in e-book format. The information in them has been reproduced here in textual paragraphs.]

No. 1. Genealogical Table of the Aryan Family of Languages.

The Aryan Family consists of two Divisions: The Southern Division, and the Norther Division.

The Southern Division consists of two Cla.s.ses: the Indic and Iranic.

The Indic Cla.s.s consists of the dead languages Prakrit and Pali, Modern Sanskrit, and Vedic Sanskrit, and the modern Dialects of India, and the Dialects of the Gipsies.

The Iranic Cla.s.s consists of the dead languages Parsi, Pehlevi, Cuneiform Inscriptions, Zend, and Old Armenian; the the living languages of Persia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Bokhara, Armenia, and Ossethi.

The Northern Division consists of six Cla.s.ses: Celtic, Italic, Illyric, h.e.l.lenic, Windic, and Teutonic.

The Celtic Cla.s.s consists of two Branches: Cymric and Gadhelic.

The Cymric Branch consists of the dead language Cornish, and the living languages of Wales and Brittany.

The Gadhelic Branch consists of the living languages of Scotland, Ireland, and Man.

The Italic Cla.s.s consists of the dead languages Oscan, Latin, and Umbrian, together called Lingua Vulgaris, or Langue d'oc and Langue d'oil, and the living languages of Portugal, Spain, Provence, France, and Italy.

The Illyric Cla.s.s consists of the living languages of Wallachia, the Grisons, and Albania.

The h.e.l.lenic Cla.s.s consists of the dead ????? languages, Doric, aeolic, Attic, and Ionic, and the living language of Greece.

The Windic Cla.s.s consists of three Branches: Lettic, South-East Slavonic, and West Slavonic.

The Lettic Branch consists of the dead language Old Prussian, and the living languages of Lithuania, Kurland and Livonia (Lettish).

The South-East Slavonic Branch consists of the dead language Ecclesiastical Slavonic, and the living languages of Bulgaria, Russia (Great, Little, White Russian), Illyria (Slovenian, Croatian, Servian).

The West Slavonic Branch consists of the dead languages Old Bohemian and Pel.a.b.i.an, and the living languages of Poland, Bohemian (Slovakian), and Lusatia.

The Teutonic Cla.s.s consists of three branches: High-German, Low-German, and Scandinavian.