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AN ESSAY
ON THE
ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE,

BASED ON MODERN RESEARCHES,

AND ESPECIALLY ON THE WORKS OF M. RENAN.

BY FREDERIC W. FARRAR, M.A.

LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

LONDON:

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1860.

LONDON:

BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

TO

RICHARD GARNETT, ESQ.,

OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM,

These Pages are Dedicated,

IN

REMEMBRANCE OF MANY ACTS OF HELP AND KINDNESS.

PREFACE.

I wish this little book to be in every respect as unpretending as possible. I do not presume to represent myself as an original investigator, nor do I aspire to a greater distinction than that of representing clearly and intelligently the views of those distinguished writers who have made the study of philology the chief pursuit of their lives.

While I have quoted my authorities for almost every statement of importance, I have generally used my own language, and even in those paragraphs which I have put between inverted commas I have so frequently abbreviated, expanded, or transposed, that the passages must not be criticised as though they had been intended for direct translations.

I do not think that I have ever borrowed from any writer, English, French, or German, without ample acknowledgment. I would not be so dishonest as to shine in borrowed plumes. If in one or two cases I have been guilty of apparent plagiarism it is certainly only from the works of those authors whom I cannot be considered to have robbed wilfully, because their writings are honourably referred to on almost every page. I wish this remark to apply especially to the very clear, learned, and beautiful treatises of M. Ernest Renan, to which I am largely indebted, and without which I should not have undertaken this work.

The questions here handled have always been to me full of interest; and these chapters have been chiefly written because I have invariably found that they are also full of interest to young learners. Should it be proved that I have rashly intruded on a task beyond my powers, no one will more regret this attempt than I shall myself.

The books of which I have made chief use in the following pages are

Grimm, Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache.

Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft.

Lersch, Die Sprachphilosophie der Alten.

Renan, De l’Origine du Langage.

Renan, Histoire Générale des Langues Sémitiques.

Charma, Essai sur le Langage.

Nodier, Notions de Linguistique.

Bunsen, Philosophy of Universal History.

Max Müller, Survey of Languages.

Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Européennes.

Garnett’s Philological Essays.

Dr. Donaldson’s Cratylus, and Varronianus.

It need scarcely be said, however, that I have read and consulted very many besides these, and indeed every book that I could obtain which seemed to bear directly upon the subject.

I will only add with M. Nodier—“J’ai écrit sur la Linguistique, parce que je ne connois aucun livre qui renferme les notions principales d’une manière claire, sous une forme accessible aux esprits simples, qui ne soit pas repoussante pour les esprits délicats.”

Falmouth,

Aug., 1860.

[CONTENTS.]

AN ESSAY

ON

THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

[CHAPTER I.]
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

“Sprache ist der volle Athem menschlicher Seele.”—Grimm.

Of all the faculties wherewith God has endowed his noblest creature, none is more divine and mysterious than the faculty of speech. It is the gift whereby man is raised above the beasts; the gift whereby soul speaks to soul; the gift whereby mere pulses of articulated air become breathing thoughts and burning words; the gift whereby we understand the affections of men and give expression to the worship of God; the gift whereby the lip of divine[1] inspiration uttering things simple and unperfumed and unadorned, reacheth with its passionate voice through a thousand generations by the help of God.

Language is the sum total of those articulate sounds which man, by the aid of this marvellous faculty of speech, has produced and accepted as the signs of all those inward and outward phenomena wherewith he is made acquainted by sense and thought. These signs are “those[2] shadows of the soul, those living sounds which we call words! and compared with them how poor are all other monuments of human power, or perseverance, or skill, or genius! They render the mere clown an artist, nations immortal, writers, poets, philosophers divine!” Let him who would rightly understand the grandeur and dignity of speech, meditate on the deep mystery involved in the revelation of the Lord Jesus as the Word of God.

No study is more rich in grand results than the study of language, and to no study can we look with greater certainty to elucidate the earliest history of mankind. For the roots of language[3] spring in the primitive liberty of human intelligence, and therefore its records bear on them the traces of human history. We read with deep interest the works of individual genius, and trace in them the life and character of the men on whom it has been bestowed; we toilfully examine the unburied monuments of extinct nations, and are rewarded for years of labour if we can finally succeed in gaining a feeble glimpse of their history by deciphering the unknown letters carved on the crumbling fragments of half-calcined stone; but in language we have the history not only of individuals but of nations; not only of nations but of mankind. For unlike music and poetry, which are the special privilege of the few, language[4] is the property of all, as necessary and accessible as the air we breathe. Of all that men have invented and combined; of all that they have produced or interchanged among themselves; of all that they have drawn from their peculiar organism, language is the noblest and most indispensible treasure. An immediate emanation of human nature, and progressing with it, language is the common blessing, the common patrimony, of mankind. It is an[5] admirable poem on the history of all ages; a living monument, on which is written the genesis of human thought. Thus “the ground[6] on which our civilisation stands is a sacred one, for it is the deposit of thought. For language, as it is the mirror, so is it the product of reason, and as it embodies thought, so is it the child of thought. In it are deposited the primordial sparks of that celestial fire, which, from a once bright centre of civilisation, has streamed forth over the inhabited earth, and which now already, after less than three myriads of years, forms a galaxy round the globe, a chain of light from pole to pole.”

Philology, the science which devotes itself to the study of language, has recently[7] arrived at results almost undreamed of by preceding centuries. Indeed, it received its most vigorous impulse from the acquaintance with the languages of India, and, above all, with Sanskrit, which, like so many other great blessings, directly resulted from our dominion in India. Already it has thrown new light on many of the most perplexing problems of religion, history, and ethnography; and, being yet but an infant science, it is in all probability destined to achieve triumphs, of which at present we can but dimly prophesy the consequences.[8]

Since the most ancient monuments of Sanskrit, Zend,[9] Hebrew, and in fact of all languages, are separated, perhaps by thousands of years from[9] the appearance of language (i.e., from the creation of the human race), it might seem impossible to throw any light on that most interesting of all considerations, the origin of language. And yet so permanent are the creations of speech, so invariable and ascertainable are the laws of its mutation, that the geologist is less clearly able to describe the convulsions of the earth’s strata than the philologist to point out, by the indications of language, the undoubted traces of a nation’s previous life. On the stone tablets of the universe, God’s own finger has written the changes which millions of years have wrought on the mountain and the plain; in the fluid air, which he articulates into human utterance, man has preserved for ever the main facts of his past history, and the main processes of his inmost soul. The sonorous wave, indeed, which transmits to our ears the uttered thought, reaches but a little distance, and then vanishes like the tremulous ripple on the surface of the sea; but, conscious of his destiny, man invented writing to give it perpetuity from age to age. Its short reach, its brief continuance, are the defects of the spoken word, but when graven on the stone or painted on the vellum it passes from one end of the earth to the other for all time; it conquers at once eternity and space.[10]

From the earliest ages the origin of language has been a topic of discussion and speculation, and a vast number of treatises have been written upon it. But it is only in modern times that we have collected sufficient data to admit of any consistent or exhaustive theory, and the earlier[11] writers contented themselves for the most part with building systems before they had collected facts.

There have been three main theories to account for the appearance of language, and it will be both interesting and instructive to pass them in brief review. They are:—1. That language was innate and organic. 2. That language was the result partly of imitation, and partly of convention. 3. That language was revealed. It will be seen from our consideration of them, that none of these theories is in itself wholly true or adequate, yet that each of them has a partial value, and that they are not so irreconcilably opposed to each other as might at first sight be imagined.

1. It was believed by the ancients generally, and perhaps by the majority of moderns, that language was innate and organic; i.e., a distinct creation synchronising with the creation of man. The inferences drawn from this supposition led men to regard words as “types of objective reality, the shadow of the body and the image reflected in the mirror.”[12] The words were supposed to be not only a sign of the thing intended by them, but in some way to partake of its nature, and to express and symbolise something of its idea. Hence the very notion of arbitrariness was well-nigh expelled from language, and there was supposed to be a deep harmony[13] between the physiological quality of the sound and its significance—between the combination and connection of sounds with the connection and combined relations of the things they represented. Whoever, therefore, knew the names, knew also the things which the names implied.[14] However strange and even ridiculous these views may appear to our somewhat superficial and unphilosophical age, it is far more difficult to understand them truly than to speak of them contemptuously, and they led to a reverence for the use of speech which reacted beneficially in producing careful writing and accurate thought.

The belief that language was innate led to the strange hallucination that if a child were entirely secluded from human contact, he would speak instinctively the primitive language of mankind. According to Herodotus, the experiment was actually made by Psammetichus, King of Egypt, who entrusted two new-born infants to a shepherd, with the injunction to let them suck a goat’s milk, and to speak no words in their presence, but to observe what word they would first utter. After two years the shepherd visited them, and they approached him, stretching[15] out their hands, and uttering the word βεκός. It was found that this vocable existed in the Phrygian language, and meant “bread;” whence it was sagely inferred that the Phrygians spoke the original language, and were the most ancient of people. There is in this story such a delicious naïveté, that one could hardly expect that it would have happened in any except very early ages. It can, however, be paralleled by the popular opinion which attributed the same experiment to James IV. and Frederic II.[16] in the Middle Ages. In the latter case the little unfortunates died for want of lullabies! Similarly, almost every nation has regarded its own language as the primitive one. One of the historians of St. Louis says that a deaf mute, miraculously healed at the king’s tomb, spoke, not in the language of Burgundy, where he was born, but in the language[17] of the capital. A similar belief seems to underlie the extreme anxiety and curiosity of savages to learn the name of any article hitherto unknown to them, as though the name had some absolute significance. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of that deep germ of truth which such fancies involve; but hints of it may be found in Holy[18] Scripture.

No doubt at first sight it appears that much might be said in favour of the innate and organic nature of language. Its beauty,[19] its diversity, its power, its diffusion over the whole surface of the globe, give it the supernatural air of a gift which man, so far from originating, can only ruin and destroy. We see that in favourable situations language, like vegetation, flourishes and blossoms, while elsewhere it fades and dies away as a plant loses its foliage when deprived of nourishment and light. It seems, too, to participate in that healing power of nature, which effaces rapidly all trace of wounds received. Like nature, it produces mighty results out of feeble resources—it is economical without avarice, and liberal without prodigality.

Again; do we not see that almost every living thing is endowed in infinite variety with the faculty of uttering sounds, and even of intercommunicating feelings?[20] The air is thrilled with the voice of birds, and some of them even possess a power of articulation, which among many nations is the distinctive[21] definition of man. Nay, fancy has attributed to animals a power of language in the age of gold—a power which under certain[22] circumstances they are supposed to be still allowed to exercise.

But this leads us to the true point of difference. The dog barks, as it barked[23] at the creation, and the crow of the cock is the same now as when it reached the ear of repentant Peter. The song of the nightingale, and the howl of the leopard, have continued as unchangeable as the concentric circles of the spider, and the waxen hexagon of the bee. The one as much as the other are the result of a blind though often perfect instinct. They are unalterable because they are innate, and the utterances of mankind would have been as unchangeable as those of animals, had they been in the same way the result not of liberty but of necessity. To the cries of animals we must compare, not man’s ever-varying language, but those instinctive sounds of weeping, sobbing, moaning—the changeless scream, sigh, or laughter—by which, since the creation, he has given relief or expression to his physical[24] sensations.

In point of fact—as a thousand experiments might have proved to Psammetichus—a new-born infant possesses the faculty of language, not actually, but only potentially. It is obvious that an Italian infant, picked up on the field of Solferino and carried to Paris, would not have spokenδυναμις Italian but French, and an English babe, carried off by the Caffirs, would find no difficulty in learning the rich language of Caffraria, with its five-and-twenty moods. For language is clearly learned by imitation. This is the intermediate link between the δύναμις and the ἔργον. When poor Kaspar Hauser tottered into the streets of Nuremberg, the only words he could say were, “I will be a soldier as my father was,” because those were the only words which he had heard in his miserable confinement. Doubtless, the Egyptian children pronounced the word βεκός, because it approached as nearly as possible to the bleating[25] of the goat by which they had been suckled.

Had there ever been an innate organic language, it is quite certain that it must have left some traces; for, as Dr. Latham observes, “language (as an instrument of criticism in ethnology) is the most permanent of the criteria of human relationships derivable from our moral constitution.” Talleyrand’s wicked witticism, that “language was given us to conceal our thoughts,” arose from the fact that it is used for that purpose on a thousand occasions. But although a man may “coin his face into smiles,” and utter a thousand honeyed words, his real sentiments will flash out sometimes in passionate gesture and rapid glance; and just in the same way, had there even been a language which was the organic expression of emotion, it is absolutely impossible that it should have wholly disappeared. That which is really implanted is for the most part unalterable.

2. Seeing, then, that positive experiment, as well as other considerations, disprove the inneity of language, other philosophers believed that it was simply conventional, and grew up gradually after a period of mutism. The Epicurean philosophy, deeply tainted with the error of man’s slow and toilsome development from a savage and almost bestial[26] condition, gave the problem the hardest of all material solutions. This school found in Lucretius its most splendid exponent, and the poet accounts for the appearance of speech as the gradual and instinctive endeavour to supply a want.[27] In short, words came because they were required, much in the same way that, according to the theory of Lamarck, organic peculiarities are the result of habit and instinct, so that the crane acquired a long neck and long legs by persevering attempts to fish. Lucretius compares language to the widely diverse sounds which animals emit to express different sensations, and, scornfully rejecting the theory of one Name-giver, asserts repeatedly that—

“Utilitas[27] expressit nomina rerum.”

It was generally believed by this school that man originally acquired the faculty of speech by an observation of the sounds of nature. The cries of animals, “the hollow murmuring wind and silver rain,” the sighing of the woods,

“The tongue of forests green and flowery wilds,”

these, it seems, were man’s[28] teachers in the power of articulation.

“The joyous birds shrouded in cheerful shade,

Their notes unto the voice attempted sweet;

Th’ angelical soft trembling voices made

To th’ instruments divine respondence meet,

With the base murmurs of the water’s fall;

The water’s fall with difference discreet,

Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;

The gentle warbling wind low answerëd to all.”[29]

Man, too, would endeavour to take his part in the divine harmony; he would translate into living and intelligent utterances the dim and sublime music of this unconscious hymn.

Like most theories that have met with any amount of acceptance, this belief contains a germ of truth. It originated from the onomatopœic character of a large part of all languages. But we reject the conclusion drawn from this fact. That man produced a large or very large part of his vocabulary by an imitation of natural sounds is entirely true, but that the idea of speech was created in him by the hearing of those sounds we believe to be eminently false. This theory, however, found especial favour among the philosophers of the eighteenth century, except that with them a mysterious convention seemed not even to require this natural basis. Maupertuis, Condillac, Rousseau, Volney, Nodier, Herder, Monboddo, and Dr. Smith,[30] all seem to believe in an original time when a few intonations, joined to gesture and expression of the face, sufficed for the wants of nascent humanity, and formed, in fact, a natural language; but in course of time this was found inadequate, and so “on convint,[31] on s’arrangea à l’aimable, et ainsi fut établi le langage artificiel ou articulé.” According to Monboddo the steps of the process were briefly as follows:—1, Inarticulate cries; 2, Gestures; 3, Imitative sounds; 4, An artificial language, formed by convention, and resulting from the necessities of the race. This language was originally poor and defective, but developed into richness, just as (to quote the simile of Adelung) the canoe of the savage has grown into the floating city of modern nations. All other conjectures are, however, eclipsed by Dr. Murray’s derivation of all the languages of Europe from nine onomatopœic syllables. These wondrous vocables[32] were:—1, Ag; 2, Bag; 3, Dwag; 4, Cwag; 5, Lag; 6, Mag; 7, Nag; 8, Rag; 9, Swag!!! M. Renan (who believes that all the parts of speech existed implicitly in the primitive language) may well remark that of all theories this is “the most false, or rather the least rich in truth;” and it may be known by its fruits, for the natural inference from it is either “that[33] thought is merely an affection of perishable matter (materialism), or that both are indiscriminately accidents of the one divine substance of the universe (pantheism).” It is true that language, though not the result of convention, tends to become[34] conventional in the process of time, but this very tendency is often a mark of decay and ruin, and a language is a noble and powerful instrument of thought in proportion as it keeps in view the motives and principles which originated the words of which it is composed.

3. The third main theory, which has found numberless supporters, is, that language is due to direct revelation. The tenacity of this belief was mainly due to the violent reaction of the spiritualist school in the nineteenth century against the systematising scepticism of their predecessors. It was warmly adopted by MM. de Bonald, de Maistre, De Lammenais, and others, and was in one sense a step forwards, for it recognised at least that “divine[35] spark which glows in all idioms even the most imperfect and uncultivated.” But this theory must likewise be rejected. It raises[36] men to the level of gods, as much as the former theory had degraded them to the rank of beasts. “Spiritualism contradicts nature, as materialism contradicts mind. It has reality and history against it as much as its opposite.”

This view opens considerations of such importance that we must subject it to a still more careful discussion.

We object, in the first place, to the difficulty and obscurity of the phrase. In one sense,[37] indeed—if we take it metaphorically,—it is perhaps the most exact expression to describe the wonderful apparition of human speech, which it rightly withdraws from the sphere of vulgar inventions. Language, as an immediate product of human powers, might perhaps, with more safety, be attributed to the Universal Cause, than to the particular action of human liberty. If by revelation be intended the spontaneous play of the human faculties, in this sense, God, having endowed man with all things requisite for the discovery of language, may, with near approximation to truth, be called its Author; but then, why make use of an expression so indirect and liable to be misunderstood, when others more natural and more philosophical might have been found to indicate the same[38] fact?

But, unhappily, M. de Bonald and others who urged this view took the expression literally, and made it not scientific but theological; not a disinterested[39] and independent conclusion drawn from induction, but a mere dogma of faith to be forced (like so many other false excrescences of theological tradition) upon the conscience of all Christians. In general, those who maintain the literal revelation of language, and reject its human origin, are the direct successors of those theologians who have so long opposed every discovery in science, and rejected the plainest deductions of geometry and logic. They intrude into a sphere in which they have no knowledge and no place; their arguments are neither scientific nor reasonable; they are not reasons but assertions; not conclusions but idle and groundless prejudices. It has been well said that they pertain to an order of ideas and interests which science repudiates, and with which she has nothing to do. Ignorance has no claim to a hearing even when she speaks ex cathedrâ.

Now what is meant by such an expression as the revelation of language rigorously understood? If, for instance, we take it materially, if we understand it to mean that a voice from heaven dictated to men the names of things—such a conception is so grossly[40] anthropomorphic, it is so utterly at variance with all scientific explanation, it is so irreconcileably opposed to all our ideas of the laws of nature, that it needs no refutation for one who is in the least degree initiated into the methods of modern criticism. Besides, as M. Cousin[41] has remarked, “it only removes the difficulty a step backwards without resolving it. For signs divinely invented would for us not be signs but things, which we should have been subsequently obliged to elevate into signs by attaching to them certain significations.” The revealed “term” would be a useless encumbrance unless it corresponded with some well understood conception; and therefore if words were revealed, conceptions must also have been implanted; and we are thus driven to the absurdity of supposing that anterior to all experience, we knew that which experience (i.e. an[42] actual relation of intelligence with that which is the object of intelligence) alone could teach us.

We have already said that these modern spiritualists considered the revelation of language to be a truth involved by the narrative of Genesis. In this they were the slaves of a false and narrow exegesis, which had not even the poor excuse of being literal. What is the true meaning of the sacred writer we shall endeavour to show further on; but we cannot here abstain from again uttering a strong protest against the barrier placed in the way of all honest scientific inquiry by the timid prejudices of that class which tyrannises over public opinion. When shall we learn to acquiesce practically in the belief which theoretically the most orthodox have long expressed, that it is a needless incongruity to look in the Bible for scientific truths which it does not profess to reveal? “Such[43] an attempt,” it has been well said, “has been a perversion of the purpose of a divine revelation, and cannot lead to any physical truth.”

Honesty all the more imperiously demands this remark, because here, as in a thousand other places, perverted by system and ignorance, we believe that the Bible rightly understood contains (not precise dogmas, but) the general indications of a sublime truth; and because it may be shown that in this particular instance its records accurately agree with the results of careful and laborious inquiry. Here, as often, the Bible does not clash with the conclusions of science, if taken to imply no more than what it categorically asserts. But the Bible is not the only source of information open to us, and if we are ever in any way to fill up “the vast lacunas which characterise that gigantic and mysterious epitaph of humanity engraved in the first chapters of Genesis,” we must do so not by ignorant and dogmatic assertions, but by humble sincerity and patient research.

If, then, language were revealed, the Bible is not only silent on such a revelation, but distinctly implies the reverse. We shall examine the narrative of Genesis (ii. 19, 20) farther on; but we must here stop to observe that where the Deity is represented as talking to Adam and other patriarchs, such passages must not be supposed to have any bearing on the question, as it is quite clear that they are only intended for an expressive anthropomorphism.[44] Even Luther, in his Commentary on Genesis, goes out of his way to prove that nothing material is intended in such phrases as God’s “speaking to” Adam, and that it would be as strange to suppose that they imply any[45] revelation of language, as it would be to infer the revelation of writing from the mention of the stone tables “written by the finger of God.” Writing also has been attributed directly to God’s external gift, although, as in the case of language, there is the clearest proof of its human origin and gradual perfectionment.

But we must not omit one or two positive arguments against this theory.

1. Had language been revealed, mankind at first would have been better situated than any of their posterity; and such a disposition is unlike the ordinary course of God’s just dealings.

2. So far from being “a pale image and feeble echo of splendours which have passed away from the scene of earth,” each human language bears in itself the most distinct traces of growth and progress—the marks of a regular development in accordance with definite laws—the successive traces of infancy, youth, maturity, and manhood. Though many existing languages, and even those of some savage nations are but “degraded and decaying fragments of nobler formations,” yet there are proofs as decisive that they rose to gradual perfection, as that they subsequently fell from perfection to decay.

3. If the spiritualist theory were true, it would be a most natural inference that the spiritual and abstract signification of roots is also the original one. But such an assumption (although it is made by Frederic Schlegel), “is contradicted by the history of every language of the world.”

4. It is equally improbable that God who revealed the primitive language, or man who received it, should have suffered it (divine, as on this supposition it must have been) to degenerate into barbarous and feeble jargons.

5. “The human faculties are competent to the formation of[46]language.” It is therefore totally unlike God’s methods, as observed in His works, to give directly what can be evolved mediately. For there is clearly no waste in the economy of Nature, no prodigality in the display of miracles. In the words of Grimm, “it seems contrary to the wisdom of God to impose the restraint of a created form on that which was destined to a free historic development.” At any rate, as a fact we can historically trace the development of language from a very small nucleus, and this being the case the supposition of any previous revealed language is a groundless and improbable hypothesis.[47]

Further arguments will appear as we proceed; but we must now point out the true meaning of the statement in Genesis, that “God brought all living creatures to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof.”[48] Now, merely remarking (by way of limitation) that the writer clearly supposed his own language to be that of Paradise, and that there is here no attempt to account for all[49] language, because he is speaking of a certain class of words only—we find in this narrative a profound verity clothed in a most beautiful and appropriate symbol: ‘We see man as the true nomenclator—man acting by his own peculiar faculties under the guide of the Deity. Philosophy[50] could find no more perfect figure to express her conclusions than this—God teaching man to speak as a father would a son.’ But to give this simple narrative a material explanation is to falsify at once both its letter and its spirit. On the other hand, “to say with the theologians that God had created language[51] as he had created man, and that language is not the act and work of man,” is to contradict not only reason but the Bible too. For be it observed, that the Bible distinctly confirms our arguments by saying, not that God named the animals, but that Adam named them, and that whatsoever he named every living creature that was the name thereof.

In short, language is “only divine in proportion to the divinity of our nature and our soul;” it is only a gift of God because the faculty naturally resulted from the physical and spiritual organism which God had created. This seems a more natural and philosophic supposition than the belief that even the embryonic germ of language was revealed. The exercise of the faculty in the original utterance of primitive words has ceased to be called into play because it has ceased to be required. We cannot now invent original words because there is no longer any necessity for doing so. In the same way—as is well known—a deaf mute when once instructed in an artificial language loses the quick instinctive power of creating intelligible natural signs.

We conclude, then, that language is neither innate and organic; nor a mechanical invention; nor an external gift of revelation;—but a natural faculty swiftly developed by a powerful instinct, the result of intelligence[52] and human freedom which have no place in purely organic[53] functions. It was “the living product of the whole[54] inner man.” It was “not[55] a gift bestowed ready formed to man, but something coming from himself.” It is “essentially[56] human; it owes to our full liberty both its origin and its progress; it is our history, our heritage.” Objectively considered, it was the result of organism: subjectively, the product of intelligence. It was “a primitive intuition, impersonal and yet influenced by individual genius;” in a word, its character is “at once[57] objective and subjective, at once individual and general, at once free and necessary, at once human and divine.”

That such a conclusion,[58] however much it may seem to savour of a weak eclecticism by combining all former theories, is yet in profound accordance with all the ascertained facts of language we shall hope to prove in the following chapter.

[CHAPTER II.]
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA OF SPEECH.

“Speech is morning to the mind;

It spreads the beauteous images abroad,

Which else lie dark and buried in the soul.”

From abstract and à priori considerations, we have arrived at the conclusion that language was achieved or created by the human race, by the unconscious or spontaneous exercise of divinely implanted powers; that it was a faculty analogous to and closely implicated with that of thought, and, like thought, developing itself with[59] the aid of time. The idea of speech was innate, and the evolution of that idea may be traced in the growth and history of language. It is most important to have a clear conception of the fact that this development did not result from an atomistic[60] reunion of parts, but from the vitality derived from an inward principle. Language was formed by a process not of crystalline accretion but of germinal development. Every essential part of language existed as completely (although only implicitly) in the primitive germ, as the petals of a flower exist in the bud before the mingled influences of the sun and the air have caused it to unfold.

Our belief thus arrived at—viz., that language was an achievement of the human genius which God implanted in the primeval man, a development of the faculty with which he endowed our race—does not at all necessitate the belief in a period when man was unable to communicate with man. The exercise of the faculty may have been rapid in that young and noble nature to a degree which now we cannot even conceive. A few imitative roots, uttered under the guidance of a divine instinct, and aided by the play of intelligence in movement and feature, would with wonderful ease grow into a language sufficient for the needs of a nascent humanity, and the living germ would soon bud and bourgeon by the very law of its production. Even if we were compelled to believe that this language was at first of the scantiest character, we see in this supposition nothing more absurd than in the certainty that knowledge and science, philosophy and art, are the slow, gradual, and toilsome conquests of an ever progressive race. It is now well understood that even the use of the senses has to be learnt,—that it is only by practice that we are able to discriminate distances in the variously-coloured surface which is all that we really see. Why should it then be unnatural to suppose that speech also was at first only implicitly bestowed on us, and that it required time and experience to develop fully the implanted capacity?

How far the growth of language was affected by external circumstances,—as, for instance, by the impress of individual minds, by the aristocracy or even autocracy of philosophic bodies, by the influence of sex, by the variations of climate, by the convulsions of history, by the slow change of religious or political convictions, and even by the laws of euphony and organisation, we may consider hereafter; but we must first of all enter on two very interesting preliminary inquiries, viz., 1, How did words first come to be accepted as signs at all? and, 2, By what processes did men hit upon the words themselves? Or, to put the questions differently: 1, How did various modulations of the human voice acquire any significance by being connected with outward or inward phenomena? and, 2, What special causes led in special cases to the choice of some particular modulations rather than of any other?

I am well aware that these questions may appear ridiculous to any one who is entirely unaccustomed to these branches of inquiry; and they may possibly be inclined to set the whole matter at rest by a dogmatism or a jeer. They will say perhaps:

“Here babbling Insight shouts in Nature’s ears

His last conundrum of the orbs and spheres;

There Self-inspection sucks his little thumb,

With ‘Whence am I?’ and ‘Wherefore did I come?’”[61]

With readers of such a temperament it is idle to reason, nor do we expect that, while the world lasts, ignorance will cease to take itself for knowledge, and denounce what it cannot understand. To others we will merely say that these inquiries have occupied, and are still occupying in an increasing degree, some of the most profound and sober intellects in Europe, and that (in the words of Plato) ‘wise men do not usually talk nonsense.’

With this remark, let us proceed to our first question: How came sounds—mere vibrations of the atmosphere—to be accepted as signs, i.e. to be used as words?

But (as one inquiry leads us back, perpetually, to another, even until “all things end in a mystery”), we must here again pause for a moment to ask what is a word? So vast an amount has been written in answer to this inquiry, that it is obviously impossible to do more than state the conclusion[62] we adopt, with a mere hint as to the ground on which we adopt it.

Horne Tooke maintained that words are “the names of things,” a definition most obviously inadequate; others have called them “the pictures of ideas,”[63] and although this definition is not without its value, yet the systematic perversion of the word “idea,” renders it insufficient. Harris devotes a chapter to establishing the definition that “Words are the symbols of ideas, both general and particular; yet, of the general, primarily, essentially, and immediately; of the particular only secondly, accidentally, and mediately.” But this is very questionable and cumbrous; and, on the whole, we believe that no better definition can be given than that of the late Mr. Garnett,[64] that words represent “conceptions founded on perceptions,” or “that words express the relations of things.” They do not and cannot express “an intrinsic meaning, constituting them the counterparts and equivalents of thought. They are nothing more, and can be nothing more, than signs of relations, and it is a contradiction in terms to affirm that a relation can be inherent.” “Our knowledge of beings,” says M. Peisse,[65] “is purely indirect, limited, relative; it does not reach to the beings themselves in their absolute reality and essences, but only to their accidents, their modes, their relations, their limitations, their differences, their qualities; all which are manners of conceiving and knowing, which not only do not impart to knowledge the absolute character which some persons attribute to it, but even positively exclude it. Matter (or existence, the object of sensible perception), only falls within the sphere of our knowledge through its qualities; mind only by its modifications; and these qualities and modifications are all that can be comprehended and expressed in the object. The object itself, considered absolutely, remains out of the reach of all perception.” It is an obvious inference that, as we can only talk of what we know, and as we can only know the relations of things, words are the medium of expressing (not the nature of things, which is incognisable), but the observed relations between things. They are revelations not of the outward, but of the inward,—not of the universe, but of the thoughts of man.

Leaving to metaphysicians all further discussion of this question, we again recur to our inquiry, How came words to be accepted as significant of these relations? Thought[66] and speech are inseparably connected; the very root of the word Man[67] implies, in Sanskrit, “a thinking being,” and it is well known that there is a close connection between “ratio” and “oratio,” and that ἄλογα ζῶα means animals, not only “without speech,” but “without reason.” Eloquence, in fact, is genius, and the greatest poet or orator is he who has most command over his native tongue.

It has even been a question with some philosophers whether thought is possible without speech,—whether, for instance, blind-deaf-mutes (like the American girl, Laura Bridgman), are capable[68] of exercising the faculty of reason until they have been taught an artificial method of expression?

Certain it is that the child begins to speak when it begins to think, and that its first intelligent perception of relations is followed by its first articulate utterances. We may illustrate this remark in an interesting manner. We find it stated in the Jadschurveda, that the first words uttered by the first man were, “I am myself,” and that, when called, he answered, “I am he.” With all due deference to the ancient philosopher who held this belief, we may safely assert that such a thing was impossible without some special interposition; for the growth of a sense of individuality is extremely slow, and comes to children long after their main perceptions. A poet—in whom nothing is more remarkable than his profound learning and metaphysical accuracy—truly says:

“The baby new to earth and sky,

What time his tender palm is prest

Against the circle of the breast,

Hath never thought that ‘This is I:’

But as he grows he gathers much,

And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’

And finds ‘I am not what I see,

And other than the things I touch.’”[69]

And this gives us at once the true explanation of the fact, that it is some time before a child learns to regard itself as a subject, and therefore, that it[70] objectises itself in all its language. It would say, not “I want an apple,” but “Charlie wants an apple;” not even “give me,”—so frequently as “give Charlie.” When Hamlet signs himself as ‘The machine that is to me Hamlet,’ he only shows, by an extreme instance, the remarkable difficulty that a man always has in mastering this very conception of individuality, which the Hindoo philosophy would seem to regard as a primitive intuition.

By these remarks we have greatly cleared the way for our explanation of the manner in which words originated;—an explanation[71] which is purely psychological, and which was first promulgated in this shape by M. Steinthal.

Man has the faculty of interpretation, or of using words for signs, as completely as he has the faculties of sight and hearing; and words are the means he employs for the exercise of the former faculty, just as the eye and the ear are employed as the organs of the latter.

The power of speech depends on the power of abstraction, i.e., of transforming intuitions into ideas.[72] Let us explain. At the sight of a horse galloping, or of a plain white with snow, the primitive man formed, at first, one undivided image; the motion and the horse, the field and the snow, were unseparated. But, by language, the act of running was distinguished from the creature that ran, and the colour separated from the thing coloured. Each of these two elements became fixed in an isolated word, and so the word dismembered the complete perception. But, from another point of view, the word is more extended than the presentation; e.g., the word “white” expresses not only an attribute of snow, but of all white objects; its meaning, then, is more abstract and indeterminate than that of “white snow.” Instead of only embracing an existence, or an object in an accidental state, a word represents the thing without its accidental characters, which are removed by abstraction, and indicates it under all the circumstances in which it may be placed.

The transformation, then, of intuitions into ideas, by the freedom and activity of the human intelligence, constitutes the essence of a word, although the speaker may be as unconscious of the process as he is of the organic mechanisms which give utterance to his thoughts.

I. ‘As for the conditions under which articulate language first appeared, M. Steinthal represents them as follows. At the origin of humanity the soul and the body were in such mutual dependence that all the emotions[73] of the soul had their echo in the body, principally in the organs of the respiration and the voice. This sympathy of soul and body, still found in the infant and the savage, was intimate and fruitful in the primitive man; each intuition awoke in him an accent or a sound.’ This was the first step; and in this fact lies the germ of truth contained in the doctrines of the analogists;[74] since there must have been some reason in the nature of things, why certain impressions or feelings were connected with certain sounds rather than with certain others. We may be totally unable to point out this connection in many cases, and even while recognising a natural relation between certain sounds of the human voice and certain material phenomena, we may deny the very possibility of such a relation between a spiritual phenomenon and its physical sign. And yet we feel a strong repugnance at allowing caprice or chance to have any considerable share in the origin of language. It can, at least, be fairly argued that there is nothing purely arbitrary in the work of the divine Demiurgus.

II. ‘Another law, which played a no less essential part in the creation of language, was the association[75] of ideas. In virtue of this law, the sound which accompanied an intuition, associated itself in the soul with the intuition itself, so closely that the sound and the intuition presented themselves to the consciousness as inseparable, and were equally inseparable in the recollection.’ This was the second step.

III. Finally, the word became a middle term of reminiscence, a tach between the external object and the inward impression. “The sound[76] became a word by forming a bond between the image obtained by the vision, and the image preserved in the memory; in other words, it acquired significance, and became an element of language. The image of the remembrance, and the image of the vision, are not wholly identical; e.g., I see a horse; no other horse that I have ever seen resembles it absolutely in colour, size, &c.: the general conception recalled by the word ‘horse’ involves only the abstracted[77] attributes common to all the animals of the same genus. It is this collection of common attributes that constitutes the significance of the sound.”

Thus M. Steinthal attributes the appearance of language to the unconscious action of psychological laws; and as these laws acted spontaneously in the first human beings, it is quite clear that these speculations involve no approval of the untenable Epicurean belief in a long period of mutism and savageness. We cannot but think that the beauty, ingenuity, and simplicity of these views will commend them to general acceptance.

We may here give one or two passing hints of the way in which these laws were influenced by organism.

One very simple fact is, that of course the impressions, &c., which come earliest would naturally be connected with the sounds that come earliest. For instance, the words for father and mother, which are alike half the world over, are, as we should have expected, formed of easy and simple[78] syllables; being indeed the first labial sounds of the infant lisping: had we found in any of them the letters which represent late-coming and difficult sounds,[79] we should have been justly surprised.

Again, Grimm[80] has remarked that the more ancient a language is, the more clearly do we find in it the distinction between masculine and feminine inflections. “Nothing,” adds M. Renan, “proves it more strongly than the to-us-inexplicable tendency which led the primitive nations to suppose a sex in all beings, even inanimate ones. A language, formed in our days, would suppress the gender[81] in all cases, except perhaps, those where men and women are concerned.” This peculiarity is doubtless due to the influence of women. In ancient times, the life of woman was far more widely separated than now from that of men; and even in later days, when they were dwarfed in the isolation of the gynæceum, we can easily understand how the peculiarities of their life would have influenced the language they employed. The difference between their idioms and those of men is still very incisive in some African dialects; and the fact that men in speaking to women are obliged to employ particular inflections, proves that those inflections must have been used by the women themselves. It is this which causes the strange difference between Sanskrit and Prâkrit; in the Hindoo dramas, Sanskrit is used by the men, Prâkrit by the women.

But the difference is due to the difference of organisation. If “a” and “i” are in all languages the vowels characteristic of the feminine, it is without doubt because those vowels are better suited to the feminine organ than the masculine sounds “o” and “ou.” A Hindoo commentator, explaining the 10th verse of the Third book of Manou,[82] where it is commanded to give to women sweet and agreeable names, recommends that in these names the letter “a” should predominate.

It is observable, too, that the influence of climate on language is in point of fact another result of the influence of organism. The idiom of Sybaris is not that of Sparta. The languages of the South are limpid, euphonic, and harmonious, as though they had received an impress from the transparency of their heaven, and the soft, sweet sounds of the winds that sigh among their woods. On the other hand, in the hirrients and gutturals, the burr and roughness of the Northern tongues, we catch an echo of the breaker bursting on their crags, and the crashing of the pine-branch over the cataract. Rousseau[83] has pointed to the fact that the languages of the rich and prodigal South, being the daughters of passion, are poetic and musical, while those of the North, the gloomy daughters of necessity, bear a trace of their hard origin, and express by rude sounds rude sensations. It is an additional argument against the existence of a language primitive, revealed, or innate, that every known language bears on itself the deep traces of predominant local influences. “It is for this reason that the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of nations are represented by Scripture as synchronous events in the magnificent history of Babel, which, perhaps, we may be permitted to regard as one of those sublime parables so frequent in the sacred books. This was the opinion of the great Leibnitz.”

These are but easy illustrations of a wide and difficult subject; but the influence of organism on language has not yet been very fully analysed, and many of the laws which philologists have advanced remain to some degree uncertain. Those who desire to follow the subject may find some very amusing illustrations in the pages of M. Nodier, one of which we have[84] relegated into the note.

[CHAPTER III.]
THE LAWS OF SPECIAL SIGNIFICANCE, OR THE CREATION OF ROOTS.

“Nommer par la mimologie, s’enrichir par la comparaison, les langues n’ont pas d’autre moyen: elles ne sortent pas de là.”—Nodier, p. 39.

From the general question as to the manner in which sounds acquired significance as words, we proceed to the longer and wider inquiry as to the causes which led to the choice of special sounds in special significations; or, in other words, we shall consider the origin of roots.[85]

When in the first chapter we proved that language was neither innate nor revealed, we proved implicitly that no words could be purely arbitrary.[86] The historic character of language,—the fact that in innumerable cases we can distinctly trace the laws which presided at the genesis of any particular word,—strongly confirms our à priori conclusion. The inference to be deduced from the labours of all the best philologists, is that of Ihre, “Non ut fungi nascuntur Vocabula.” We have no reason to believe that any elements of language were deduced from roots which of themselves had no significance; and the more rigorous and extensive the analysis to which even inflections are subjected, the more clear is the proof that they arise from the agglutination of separate and significant words. “We believe,” says one of the ablest of modern[87] inquirers, “that in language ex nihilo nihil fit; and we are at a loss to conceive how elements originally destitute of signification can determine the sense of anything with precision. To assume that they have no meaning, because we cannot always satisfactorily explain it, is only an argumentum ad ignorantiam.”

Nor must it be forgotten, that in endeavouring to prove that in language nothing is arbitrary, we are under a great disadvantage, because no existing language has come to us in its primitive form. Every language, even those which are most ancient, and have long since ceased to be spoken, bears in its records the traces of a more primitive condition. Words, of which the composition was originally clear, are worn and rubbed by the use of ages, like the pebbles which are fretted and rounded into shape and smoothness by the sea waves on a shingly beach; or to use the more appropriate image suggested by Goethe, their meaning is often worn away like the image and superscription of a coin. This process is so continuous, that it is quite hopeless to recover the original form of many words, or even to make a probable[88] guess at their origin.

Language always tends to become mechanical (i.e. unmeaning of itself) by corruption;[89] and to such an extent is this the case, that it is rather a matter of astonishment when, after the lapse of centuries, a word still retains the obvious traces of its original form. And yet in spite of this we can by induction discover from words themselves the main laws which influenced the formation of primitive speech.

The violent dislike which we instinctively feel to the use of a word entirely new to us, and of which we do not understand the source, is a matter of daily experience; and the tendency to give a meaning to adopted words by so changing them as to remove their seemingly arbitrary character has exercised a permanent and appreciable influence on every language. An instance or two will perhaps pave the way for a more ready acceptance of our subsequent remarks.

When we go into a ship or factory, and inquire the technical name of various parts of the machinery, we are either unable to use the names from not catching the pronunciation, or, in attempting to pronounce them we substitute for them other words of similar sound and more significance.

It often happens that gardeners become acquainted with new plants, or new species of old plants, that are brought to them under a foreign name; not understanding this name, they corrupt it into some word which sounds like it, and with which they are already familiar. To this source of corruption we owe such words as dandylion[90] (dent de lion), rosemary (ros marinus), gilly-flower (girofle), quarter sessions rose (des quatre saisons), Jerusalem artichoke (giresol) &c. For the same reason (the dislike of terms with which they are unacquainted) sailors corrupt Bellerophon into Billy Ruffian: and we have heard of a groom, who, having the charge of two horses called Othello and Desdemona, christened them respectively Old Fellow and Thursday Morning. Lamprocles, the name of a horse of Lord Eglintoun’s, was converted by the ring into “Lamb and Pickles.” The same principle may be seen at work among servants; we have heard a servant systematically use the word “cravat” for “carafe,” and astonish a gentleman by calmly asking him at luncheon, “If she should fill his cravat with water?”

The working of this tendency is all the more curious from the fact that very often the corrupted form of the word is wholly inappropriate, although significant. There is no doubt that, in most cases, we prefer a corruption, which is appropriate as well as significant, and we find instances[91] of this in such words as worm-wood (wermuth), cray-fish (écrévisse), lanthorn (laterna), belfry (beffroi), rakehell (racaille), beefeater (buffetier), verdigrease (verd de gris), sparrow-grass (asparagus), &c. Where, however, this is unattainable, we are well content with some significant corruption, for which we can invent or imagine a meaning even if we are unaware of the real explanation; as, for instance, in Charter House (Chartreuse), “to a cow’s thumb” = exactly (à la coutume), wiseacre (weissager), saltpetre (salpetra), &c. It is curious to find that in the desire to understand, at any rate in some degree, the words we use, the corrupted form often gives birth to a totally false explanation. Thus Dr. Latham mentions[92] that the corruption of Château Vert into Shotover has led to the legend that Little John shot over the hill of that name near Oxford. Similar instances are supplied by the legends of Veronica, and of St. Ursula with her eleven thousand virgins.

It may seem that we have, in the course of this chapter, made statements somewhat contradictory; viz., that it is the tendency of language to become mechanical (i.e., arbitrary and conventional) by corruption, and yet that there is an instinctive dislike to the use of new words which convey no intrinsic meaning to the mind of the speaker. If we argued from the instances adduced in the last pages, we might infer that language was originally arbitrary, and had been twisted into meaning by subsequent use. We must, however, draw attention to the fact that this latter phenomenon is only observable on the naturalisation of a word. A new word, however bright and perfect in itself, is like a strange coin upon which we look with suspicion, because we are unaccustomed to its appearance. But when a word is accepted and generally understood, when, in fact, it has become current, we are then indifferent to the amount of wear on the surface or even to the complete obliteration of its original significance; just in the same way as we do not trouble ourselves to observe a coin which is in common use, and pay no regard to the fact that its image is confused, and its superscription undecipherable. We might, for instance, find words which have passed through both processes. Let us suppose[93] that, in course of time, the word sherbet had become corrupted first into syrup, then into shrub; in this case we should have an exemplification of a word first appropriately corrupted into a familiar form in the course of naturalisation, and then re-corrupted into a purely mechanical[94] word, by the ordinary progress of language. We are therefore fairly entitled to infer from the dislike to the introduction of any sound as a word, when the sound is to the speaker an arbitrary one, that the same feeling must have operated at the dawning exercise of the faculty of speech; while from the indifference which we exhibit to the corruption of a word when it has once been currently received; we may give a reason for our inability to explain the origin of all primitive roots, even while we assume with confidence that every root was originally significative.

Language may be regarded as the union of words and grammar, of which words are analogous to matter, and grammar to form;[95] regarded in its form it was the expression of pure reason; in its matter it was only the reflex of sensuous life. The absence of any definite grammar constitutes an inorganic language like the Chinese. Those who have derived language exclusively from sensation are as much mistaken as those who have assigned to ideas a purely material origin. Sensation furnished the variable and accidental element, which might have been quite other than it is, (i.e., the words); but the grammar of a language, (the rational form, without which words could not have been a language), is its pure and transcendental element which gives to the result its truly human character. Words can no more form a language than sensations can produce a man. That which originates language, like that which originates thought, is the logical relation which the soul establishes between external things.

We may now state our belief that almost all primitive roots were obtained by Onomatopœia, i.e., by an imitation with the human voice of the sounds of inanimate nature. Onomatopœia sufficed to represent the vast majority of physical facts and external phenomena; and nearly all the words requisite for the expression of metaphysical and moral convictions were derived from these[96] onomatopœic roots by analogy and metaphor.

We have purposely modified our statement of these conclusions, because there is too great a tendency to general assertions, against which, as W. von Humboldt well remarked, science should be always on its guard. It is a saying of Schlegel’s, that, so great is the variety of procedure in different languages, that there is scarcely one language which might not be chosen to illustrate some particular hypothesis. For instance, the sole similarity between Chinese and Sanskrit rests in the fact that both aim at the same end, viz., the expression of thought. Thus onomatopœia is far from being found in all languages in the same degree, and it is much more observable in the Semitic than in the Indo-European family, in which, however ancient the word may be proved to be, it constantly bears witness to those poetic and philosophic instincts of our race which clearly prove that reason was not a slow and painful growth.

“Caprice has no influence in the formation of language.” Without believing in any universal, necessary, intrinsic connection between word and thing, we are forced to believe that there was, in every case, a subjective connection. The appropriateness of the word resided, not in the object named, for in this case there would have been a striking similarity in all the languages of the human race, but in the mind of the name-giver, who, of necessity, stamped the word with the impress of his own individuality. In direct proportion to the delicacy of his perceptions, was the fitness of the words he used; for those words expressed relations capable of being viewed in widely different aspects, so that the finer and more keen was the man’s power of perceiving analogies, the greater was his capacity for the expression of facts. The true formula is that “the connection between a word and its meaning is never necessary, and never arbitrary, but always results from a reasonable motive.”

But what the motives were, which in many cases led to the choice of particular sounds, it is beyond our power to conjecture or ascertain. The richness and delicacy of the appellative faculty in the savage and the infant must necessarily have existed in the primitive man, and, as it decayed with the decay of all necessity for its exercise, we are unable to point out, with any certainty, the tendencies by which it was actuated. There is no waste in the economy of nature; a faculty ceases when it is no longer required, just as the outer leaves which ensheathe the nascent germ wither and drop off when the germ has acquired sufficient vitality for its own preservation.

“Tecum habita” was not the motto of the early inhabitants of the earth. They lived with the external world. The cataract “haunted them like a passion,” and they heard voices in the dawning of the sun and the murmur of the wind. The heavens declared the glory of God, and the firmament showed his handiwork; day unto day uttered speech, and night showed knowledge unto night. The soul of the first man, to use the beautiful expression of Leibnitz, was a concentric mirror of nature, in the midst of whose works he lived. Language was the echo of nature in his individual consciousness. The action of the mind produced language by a spontaneous repercussion of the perceptions received.[97] It is the mind which creates and forms; but this power of the mind is one reacting only upon impressions received from the world without. The imitative power of language consists in an artistic imitation, not of things, but of the rational impression which an object produces by its qualities.

The fact, therefore, that the imitation is artistic, and is influenced by subjective considerations, would prevent us from being surprised or disappointed, if we do not always see the working of this principle, in cases where we should have expected it. In such words as the Hebrew Khâtzatz (קָצַץ), and Schephifoun (שְׁפִיפוֹן) we seem to hear the shearing off of the cut material, and the lithe rustle of the horned snake through the withered leaves. But words so remarkably suggestive are comparatively rare, and in most cases the imitation is more concealed. Nothing, however, more powerfully proves the tendency of language, in this respect, than the fact that words of a harsh meaning usually assume a rough, harsh form, and words that imply something sweet and tender seem to breathe the sensation they describe. The German word (entsetzen) “terror,” means, etymologically, a mere “displacement,” yet who does not see that it has caught an instinctive echo from the thing which it describes, which, in no degree, depends on association;—that, independently of imagination it betrays something harsh by its mere form. That there is a consonance between external sounds and the processes of the mind, is decisively shown by the fact that whole languages have thus caught the impress of the associations by which they have been evolved. In the soft and vowelled undersong of modern Italian, who does not recognise the result of climate and natural character? The Doric seems to recall to us the sound of martial flutes, while the Hebrew, in its stern and solemn pomp, tells like one vast onomatopœia, of the mighty mission which it was destined to accomplish; every single word of it seems to shine with that mysterious light which lent strange lustre to the letters of it on the gems of the sacerdotal robe. “When,” says M. Vinet, “you hear the vast word haschâmaïm, which names the heavens, unfold itself like a vast pavilion, your intelligence—before knowing what the word signifies—expects something magnificent; no mean object could have been named thus; it is better than an onomatopœia, although it is not one.”[98]

The exuberance and uncontrolled variety which characterises the primitive languages is a proof of the extraordinarily developed resources of the power of interpretation, or the faculty of converting sounds into signs, so long as the exercise of that faculty continued to be necessary. The richest idioms are always the most spontaneous and unconscious. It is obviously impossible for us, with our intellectual refinements and blunted senses, to rediscover the ancient harmony which existed between thought and sensation, between nature and man. As we are no longer obliged to create language, we have entirely lost a crowd of processes which tended to its elaboration. But among the early races there was a delicate tact, enabling them to seize on those attributes which were capable of supplying them with appellatives, the exquisite subtlety of which we are unable any longer to conceive.[99] They saw a thousand things at once, and indeed their language-creating faculty mainly consisted in a power of seizing upon relations. Our very civilisation has robbed us of this happy and audacious power. Nature spoke more to them than to us, or rather they found in themselves a secret echo which answered to all external voices, and returned them in articulations—in words. Hence those swift interchanges of meaning which we, with our less flashing intelligence, are almost unable to follow.[100] ‘Who can seize again those fugitive impressions of the naïfs creators of language in words which have undergone so many changes, and which are so far from their original acceptation? Who can rediscover the capricious paths which the imagination followed, and the associations of ideas which guided it, in that spontaneous work, wherein sometimes man, sometimes nature, reunited the broken thread of analogies, and wove their reciprocal actions into an indissoluble unity?’

Wherever the faculty of creating appellations is still required, we still find a capacity for its exercise. For instance, it has been asserted that “the day after an army has encamped in an unknown country all the important or characteristic places have their names without any convention having intervened.” We find an analogous case in the fact that the French and English, by common consent, called the Turks Bono Johnny; the exact reasons for such a nomenclature would be perhaps difficult to determine, and who shall say who first used or invented the term? yet it became current in a day or two. It is equally difficult to trace the history and origin of various popular phrases which every now and then have a brief run in ordinary phraseology.

A still more remarkable exemplification that the faculty of the original name-giver is not wholly lost to mankind may be seen in the secret, subtle, almost imperceptible, and sometimes quite unconscious analogies which give currency to a common nickname. At schools I have often known boys whose sobriquet was a vocable, in itself apparently meaningless and incapable of any circumstantial explanation, which was yet universally adopted, and was adopted because it presented some unintelligible appropriateness.[101] A modern prince is called Plomb-plomb, and known quite commonly by that designation: yet there is no such word as Plomb-plomb in the French language, and the very origin of the term is unknown to the majority of the Prince’s contemporaries. We may be quite sure, however, that the name involves either a lively onomatopœia or a striking allusion.[102]

[CHAPTER IV.]
ONOMATOPŒIA.[103]

“The sound must seem an echo to the sense.”—Pope.

Since the human voice is at once a sound and a sign, it was of course natural to take the sound of the voice as a sign of the sounds of nature.[104] In short, to recall a sound by its echo in the voice is as obviously natural a proceeding as to recall an object to the memory by drawing the picture of its form. In both cases we act upon the senses by means of imitation; and if the human race had not been endued with the organs of hearing doubtless a language for the eye would have been invented, just as Philomela, when deprived of her tongue, made known, by embroidery, her miserable tale. A word formed on the principle of imitation, is said to be formed by onomatopœia, and although the traces of such an origin are rapidly lost, yet amid the almost infinite modifications of which a few roots are capable, it is astonishing how vast a number of words may be ultimately deduced from a single onomatopœic sound.

How universal and instinctive the procedure is, may be observed among infants and savages.

In the nursery the onomatopœan sounds moo, baa, bow-wow, &c., are the steps by which the child passes gradually to the conception of cow, lamb, and dog. So in Swiss[105] bààgen is to bleat, and báágeli (in nursery language), a sheep. The very name cow, Germ. kuh, Sansks. gao, has a similar origin, as βοῦς, bos, ox, Sansks. uxan, probably has also. There is little doubt that the word, cat (Germ. katze), is an imitation of the sound made by a cat spitting, which is one of the most peculiar characteristics of the feline race. It must, however, be admitted that there is no sibilant in “kater.” We have all heard the story of the Englishman in China, who, wishing to know the contents of a dish which was lying before him, said inquiringly, “Quack, quack?” and received in answer, the word, “bow-wow!” These two imitations served all the purposes of a more lengthened conversation. It was probably, by a strictly analogous process, that an immense multitude of such roots was primitively formed.

Again, it is impossible to look over any list of words collected from the language of a savage community without recognising the extensive use of the same method.[106] The repetition of syllables is an almost certain sign of its working. Thus, Ai-ai is an imitation of the cry of the sloth, and tuco-tuco is the name of a small rodent in Buenos Ayres. Mr. Longfellow has supplied us with many such words from the languages of North America, in his poem of “Hiawatha,”—as Kahgahgee, the raven; Minnehaha laughing-water, &c. “In uncivilised languages,[106] the consciousness of the imitative character of certain words is sometimes demonstrated by their composition with verbs,[107] like say or do, to signify making a noise like that represented by the word in question. Thus, in Galla, from djeda, to say, or goda, to make or do, are formed cacak-djeda, to crack; trrr-djeda, to chirp; dadada-djeda, to beat; djamdjam-goda, to champ.”

We do not think that the extent to which onomatopœia may be proved to be an instrument of language has been sufficiently admitted. It was the most natural starting-point for the intelligence on its path towards expression. A nascent language enriches itself by ceaseless imitations of elementary sounds, animal cries, and the noises produced by mechanical contrivances, and we shall trace hereafter the innumerable applications in which such terms can be at once employed. Some writers even go so far as to assert that this is the only original principle of language, and that we even learned our first consonant from the bleating of the sheep, for which reason, according to Pierius Valerianus, a lamb was the hieroglyphical emblem of the verb! We have already rejected this extension of the theory; but, at the same time, we can readily believe the assertion, that the peculiarities of articulation in certain countries may be not only modified, but even originated by the existence of remarkable natural sounds in the countries where these peculiarities occur. It has been said, for instance, “that in some of the American languages, there are strident consonants evidently formed from the hiss of certain serpents unknown in our temperate regions, and that the click of the Hottentot dialects recalls a species of cry peculiar to the tigers which ranque.” The latter word is an onomatopœian, probably borrowed by Buffon from the Philomela of Albus Ovidius Juventinus, in which occurs the line:—

“Tigrides indomitæ rancant[108] rugiuntque leones.”

What this peculiar sound may be, we do not know, but can hardly reconcile this suggestion of Nodier with the statement, that the name,[109] Hott-en-tot is itself onomatopœian, having been given by the first Dutch settlers, because this click would sound to a stranger like a perpetual repetition of the syllables hot and tot. It is a curious fact that Palamedes is said to have learnt, from the noise of cranes, the four letters which he added to the Greek alphabet; and it is certainly a confirmation of these remarks, that although no language possesses in its alphabet a power of expressing every possible articulation, yet no nation’s language is quite deficient in the power of expressing, by imitation, the cries of its indigenous animals.

It is wonderful that the knowledge and observation of facts like these did not lead the philologists of antiquity to a solution of their disputes about the natural or conventional origin of languages. The age of Psammetichus evinced its interest in the question, and if it had been content to observe its own experiment, instead of making it the prop to a “foregone conclusion,” philosophers might have agreed, long ago, in believing, that man was assisted by nature in the development of his implanted powers, and that, like every infant of his race, he framed into living speech the sounds by which his senses were first impressed.[110] When the first man gave names to the animals, which, as we have already seen, he was enabled to do by the reasonable use of his own faculties, and not at the dictation of a voice from heaven, he could not have been guided by any principle so obvious, so easy, or so appropriate as an artistic reproduction of the sounds which they uttered.

But how, it may be asked, is the voice capable of rendering even the feeblest echo of all the myriad utterances of the earth and air, the voices of the desert and mountain,—

“The echoes of illimitable forests,

The murmur of unfathomable seas”?

We answer that the imitation is not, and does not profess to be a dull, dead, passive echo of the sound, but of the impression produced by it upon the sentient being; it is not a mere spontaneous repercussion of the perception received; but a repercussion modified organically by the configurations of the mouth, and ideally by the nature of the analogy perceived between the sound and the object it expressed. “The organs of that wonderful musical instrument, the mouth, are the throat, the palate, the tongue, the teeth, the lips.[111] This then is the subjective organon of language, the physiological vehicle for that proto-plastic art, speech, which combines architecture and music, the plastic and the picturesque. Johannes Müller has developed this physiologically, Sir John Herschell acoustically.” The mere power of imitation would not have helped mankind a single step towards language any more than it has helped the parrot or the jay,[112] had it not been for the infinitely nobler faculty which enabled us to perceive the meaning of the sounds we uttered, and to use them as the signs of our inward conceptions,—a faculty which has implanted in language its principle of development, and which constitutes the distinction between the chatterings of a jackdaw and the eloquence of a man.

This alone is a clear proof, if proof were wanted, that language is the result of intelligence, as well as of instinct; and that the human reason was not a gradual acquisition of a once brutish race.

But though the power of imitation by the voice of the sounds of the unintelligent creation be small in comparison with those other powers which constitute our pre-eminence, yet how perfect is that gift in itself,—how wondrous the organism by which it is effected! The mouth is admirably framed for intelligent and harmonious utterance; it is at once an organ, and a flute,—a trumpet and a harp. Its sublime construction will make it the eternal despair of mechanicians, and the songs which it can modulate, are superior to all the melodies of artificial music. The intelligence of man enables him alone to use this glorious instrument, as God intended it to be used. “Il avait,” says M. Nodier, “dans ses poumons un soufflet intelligent et sensible, dans ses lèvres un limbe épanoui, mobile, extensible, rétractile, qui jette le son, qui le modifie, qui le renforce, qui l’assouplit, qui le contraint, qui le voile, qui l’éteint; dans sa langue un marteau souple, flexible, onduleux, qui se replit, qui s’accourcit, qui s’étend; qui se meut, et qui s’enterpose entre ses valves, selon qu’il convient retenir ou d’épancher la voix, qui attache ses touches avec âpreté ou qui les effleure avec mollesse; dans ses dents un clavier ferme, aigu, strident; à son palais un tympan grave et sonore: luxe inutile pourtant, s’il n’avait pas eu la pensée; et celui qui a fait ce qui est n’a jamais rien fait d’inutile.—L’homme parla parce qu’il pensait.”

The plain elementary sounds of which the human voice is capable are about twenty; and yet it has been calculated by the mathematician Tacquet, that one thousand million writers, in one thousand million years, could not write out all the combinations of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each of them were daily to write out forty pages of them, of which each page should contain different orders of the twenty-four letters. Of course, a very small number only of these permutations are at all required for every purpose of life. “And thus it is,” says the ingenious author of[113]Hermes, “that to principles apparently so trivial as about twenty plain elementary sounds, we owe that variety of articulate voices, which have been sufficient to explain the sentiments of so innumerable a multitude, as all the present and past generations of men.”

But it may be objected that if we admit such latitude to the use of onomatopœia in the formation of language, we should find among all languages a much greater identity than actually exists in the terms expressive of physical facts. This by no means follows. We have already seen that words express the relations of things, and the relations of things are almost infinite, and especially must they have been so to the delicate senses of the youthful world. Let us take the instance of the thunder: the impression produced by it is by no means single and distinct. To one man it may appear like a dull rumble, to another like a sudden crackling explosion, and to a third as a breaking forth of flashing light. Hence come a multitude of names. Adelung professed to have collected 353 imitative appellations from the European languages alone; and it is not difficult to see that a similar[114] principle was at work in the Chinese ley (pronounced rey), the Greenland kallak, and the Mexican tlatlatnitzel. Similarly, “the explosion of a gun which an English boy imitates by the exclamation Bang-fire, is represented in French by Pouf! The neighing of a horse is expressed by the French hennir; Italian, nitrire; Spanish, rinchar, relinchar; German, wiehern; Swedish, wrena, wrenska; Dutch, runniken, ginniken, brieschen, words in which it is difficult to see a glimpse of resemblance, although we can hardly doubt that they all take their rise in the attempt at direct[115] representation of the same sound.” In the same way, no one will deny that “ding-dong,” and the word “bilbil,” to ring, in the Galla language, are onomatopœians to represent the sound of a bell, and yet the two have hardly an element in common.

It has been noticed that birds are often named on this principle; as night-jar, whip-poor-will, cock, cuckoo, crow, crane, crake, quail, curlew, jay, chough, owl, turtle, &c.; and where the bird has one very marked cry we find a great similarity in the names by which it is known. Take for instance the peetwit,[116] Scandinavian pee-weip, tee-whoap; French, dishuit; Dutch, kiewit; German, kiebitz; Swedish, kowipa. But we should not expect this to be the case when a bird has a great variety of different sounds. The nightingale, according to Bechstein, has twenty distinct articulations, and it is therefore not surprising that even in the European languages it is known under widely different names. And besides names which are derived from its song (e.g. bulbul), it might be called from some other attribute entirely distinct from this, as perhaps in the Latin name luscinia; although, if this be the case, it is interesting to see how imitation asserts its prerogative in the modern names[117] usignuolo (Italian), ruyseñol (Spanish), rossignol (French), rousinol (Portuguese), which are probably corruptions of the diminutive lusciniola, used by Plautus.

In some cases an onomatopœian root is so natural as to run through all families of languages; e.g. the root lh or lk to imitate the sound and action of licking, as Hebrew לָחַךְ; Arabic, lahika; Syriac, lah; λείχω, lingo, ligurio, lingua, leccare, lechen, lécher; it is the same with the roots grf to express gripping, kr to express crying, and many others. The practice is, however (as we have already remarked), far more prominent in the Semitic than in the Indo-European family, and this is the cause of the extraordinary richness of synonyms in Hebrew and Arabic for the expression of natural objects. It is said that in Arabic there are 500 names for the lion, 200 for the serpent, more than eighty for honey, 400 for sorrow, and (what is quite incredible unless every periphrasis be counted a name) no less than 1,000 for a sword. M. de Hammer, an unimpeachable authority, has, in a little treatise on the subject, counted also 5,744 words relating to the camel. The ancient Saxon is said to have had fifteen words for the sea; and if we allowed merely poetical expressions like “the blue,” we might say the same of modern English.

Wide dialectic variety naturally results from a nomadic life; and it is easy to see how this extraordinary exuberance of primitive language, and the uncontrolled rapidity with which it exercised its powers of nomenclature, would tend, while writing and literature were as yet unknown, to make mutually unintelligible the language of different tribes.[118] This confusion of speech would, of course, be the most powerful impediment in the course of ambition, and would tend to defeat the attempts to construct and perpetuate a universal empire. It may have been the providential agent to assert for the human race, “a nobler destiny than to become the footstool of a few families.” This is strikingly shadowed forth in the Scripture narrative of the builders of Babel, which many competent authorities have considered as applicable to only a single family of nations, and have regarded in the light rather of “a sublime emblem, than of a material verity.”

The confusion of tongues is not represented in Scripture as a punishment,[119] but as the providential prevention of an arrogant attempt to establish among mankind a spurious centre of unity. It seems to have frustrated the lawless thirst for power which actuated the tribe of Nimrod.[120] But even if regarded as a punishment, God’s punishments are but blessings in disguise. The dispersion of nations has acted as a stimulant to the powers of humanity, and has been the direct cause of a beneficial variety in thought and action; and in the same way the diversity of languages has proved to be (as we shall see hereafter) an indisputable advantage, by adding fresh lustre continually to those conceptions which by long habit become pale and dim. Yet this dispersion and diversity is but the accident of a fallen state, and in the renovated earth—(though it can never be while nations are in their present condition)—all men will perhaps speak the same perfect[121] universal speech.

There are two totally distinct points from which an imitative root can take its origin. The first is from an artistic reproduction of the sounds of the outer world; the second is from the expressions of fear or anger, of disgust or joy, which the impression of any event or spectacle may call forth in the human being. The first of these elements is the onomatopœic; the second, the interjectional. These two sources have not been kept sufficiently clear and distinct, and the latter especially has been by many philologists entirely overlooked. We will proceed to make some remarks on both. The instances which we shall select might be almost indefinitely extended, and even were they less numerous we might perhaps be allowed to use the words of President de Brosses, “La preuve connue d’un grand nombre de mots d’une espèce doit établir une précepte générale sur les autres mots de même espèce, à l’origine desquels on ne peut plus remonter.”

As instances of the words which have arisen from the interjectional element, i.e. from the sounds whereby we express natural emotions, we may mention the large group of words that spring from the root “ach,” ah! oh! as utterances of pain, as ἄχος, ἀχέω, achen, ache; or from the sound of groaning, as væ, wehe, woe, wail; or from an expression of disgust, as putere (Fr. puer), foul, fulsome; or from smacking the lips with pleasure, as γλύκυς, dulcis, geschmack, &c. This latter class is very widely extended, even in the Semitic languages, as we have already shown in the case of the root lk (see [p. 84]). From the expression of disgust and fear, we get awe, ugly, ἀγάομαι, ἀγάζομαι and their cognates; from shuddering, the roots of φρίσσω, bristle, hérisser, &c.; from the first sounds of infancy, we get babe, bambino, babble, and many more; from sounds of anger, “huff,” and others; lastly, from “prut,” a sound of arrogance, we get the word “proud,” “pride,” as in German, “trotzig,” haughty, from “trotz,”[122] an interjection of defiance and contempt.

The other class of onomatopœias is far more extensive, and embraces the widest possible range of inanimate sounds. They may be ranged under the following heads; and although the examples are all taken from the[123]English language, they might be paralleled in almost any other.

1. Animal sounds, as quack, cackle, roar, neigh, whinny, bellow, mew, pur, croak, caw, chatter, bark, yelp, &c.

2. Inarticulate human sounds, as laugh, cough, sob, sigh, moan, shriek, yawn, whoop, weep, &c.

3. Collision of hard bodies, represented by p, t, k; as clap, rap, tap, flap, slap, rat-tat, &c.

4. Collision of softer bodies, represented by b, d, g; as dab, dub, bob, thud, dub-a-dub, &c.

5. Motion through the air, represented by z, &c.; as whizz, buzz, sough, &c.

6. Resonance, represented by m, n, &c.; as clang, knell, ring, twang, clang, din, &c.

7. Motion of liquids, &c., represented by sibilants, as clash, splash, plash, dash, swash, &c.

These are but specimens of the wide extent of these words in a language by no means the most remarkable for its adoption of onomatopœia. There are even broad general laws by which the various degrees of intensity in sound are expressed by the modification of vowels. Thus, high notes are represented by i, low broad sounds by a, and the change of a or o to i has the effect of diminution, as we see by comparing the words clap, clip, clank, clink, pock, peck, cat, kitten, foal, filly, tramp, trip, nob, nipple, &c. Another way of diminishing intensity is to soften a final letter, as in tug, tow, drag, draw, swagger, sway, stagger, stay, &c. Reduplication of syllables is a mode of expressing continuance, as in murmur, &c., and this effect is also produced by the addition of r and l, as in grab, grapple, wrest, wrestle, crack, crackle, dab, dabble, &c.

It is easy to see from the above examples that the onomatopœia and the interjection are the points from which language has developed itself, and from which “two separate lines of concurrent and[124] simultaneous evolution have proceeded.” The manner in which the various parts of speech grew out of these elements, and which of them may be supposed to be logically or actually anterior to the rest, is a wide and difficult subject of inquiry on which much uncertainty must necessarily prevail, and with which we are here unconcerned.

There is no doubt that, for some reason or other, many of our English onomatopœians are regarded as in some degree beneath the dignity of words, and are supposed to partake of the nature of vulgarity.[125] Yet with great inconsistency the places in which poets have been most successful in producing “an echo of the sound to the sense” are generally regarded with especial favour. The classic poets used this ornament with the most fastidious good taste. Even the ancients had learned to admire the rhyming termination by which Homer faintly recalls the humming of the summer swarms, in the lines—

Ἠύτε ἔθνεα πολλὰ μελισσάων ἀδινάων

πέτρης ἐκ γλαφύρης ἀεὶ νεὸν ἐρχομενάων:

and yet they do not surpass the exquisite verses of a living poet:—

Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn;

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmur of innumerable bees.

Again, what can be more vivid than the marvellous way in which Homer recalls the snapping of a shattered sword, in—

Τριχθί τε καὶ τετραχθὶ διατρύφεν:

which is incomparably superior to the much-admired hemistich of Racine, “L’essieu crie et se rompt.” Both Homer and Virgil have imitated the rapid clatter of horses’ hoofs with equal felicity:—

Πολλὰ δ’ ἄναντα, κάταντα, πάραντά τε δόχμιά τ’ ἦλθον:

Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum:

and the verse[126] in which Dubartas endeavours to recall the manner in which the lark “shoots up and shrills in flickering gyres,” has met with numberless admirers.

The greatest of our modern poets, Mr. Tennyson, has perhaps been more unsparing and more successful in his use of this figure than any of his predecessors, and a few passages will show that onomatopœia judiciously used is capable of the noblest application. Take, for instance, the leap of a cataract, in—

Where the river sloped

To plunge in cataract, shattering on black blocks

Its breadth of thunder;

or the shock of a mélée, in—

The storm

Of galloping hoofs bare on the ridge of spears

And riders front to front, until they closed

In conflict with the crash of shivering points

And thunder....

And all the plain—brand, mace, and shaft, and shield

Shock’d, like an iron-clanging anvil banged

With hammers;

or the booming of the sea, in—

Roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves;

or, finally, what can be more perfect than the graphic power in which the picture of a fleet of glass wrecked on a reef of gold is called before us by the perfect adaptation of sound to sense, in the lines—

For the fleet drew near,

Touched, clinked, and clashed, and vanished.

Yet in all these cases we believe that it is to the language and not to the poet that the main credit is due. The language is the perfect instrument, and in the poet’s hands it is used with perfect power; but were it not for the original perfection of his instrument he would be unable to produce such rich and varied results; he would be unable to place the picture before the eye by bringing into play that swift and subtle law of association whereby a reproduction of the sounds at once recalls to the inner eye the images or circumstances with which they are connected. In every case the consummate art and skill of the writer consists simply in choosing the proper words for the thought which he wishes to express, which words are always the simplest. Appropriate[127] language is and always must be the most effective, and when a writer clearly goes out of his way to produce an effect he generally loses his effectiveness by abandoning simplicity. How much onomatopœia degenerates in a less skilful and artistic hand we might see in many instances, were not the selection of them an invidious task.

In short, an exquisite and instinctive taste can only decide on the extent to which this figure may be consciously used. We feel that Virgil was right in rejecting Ennius’s

At tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dicit,

as the imitation of a trumpet-blast; and none but a comic poet (like Swift) would use rub-a-dub, dub-a-dub in English to express the beating of a drum: and yet who was ever otherwise than delighted with the word τήνελλα, in which Archilochus imitated the twang of a harp-string, and which the Greeks used ever afterwards as an expression of joyous triumph? Again, none but a comedian could have ventured on so direct an imitation of sounds as βρεκεκεκέξ κοάξ κοάξ, and yet no one could object to the pretty line in which Ovid tries to produce the same impression:—

Quamquam sunt sub aquâ, sub aquâ maledicere tentant.

The misuse of language fails to produce the echo which its simple and natural use would not have failed to awake. In short, it is in many cases impossible to use language which shall be at once specific and appropriate without being forced to adopt imitative words. There is no style required in order to speak of the booming of the cannon, the twang of the bowstring, the hurtling of the arrow, the tolling or pealing of the bell, the rolling or throbbing of the drum, the sough or whisper of the breeze, because in each case the proper word is ready for us at once in the language which we speak, and if we are to speak naturally we can use no other. The harmonies of language arise mainly from this power of imitation, and a sensuous language is always energetic, poetic, passionate.

[CHAPTER V.]
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROOTS.

Language is like the minim immortal among the infusoria, which keeps splitting itself into halves.—Coleridge.

The most brilliant of modern philosophers, M. Victor Cousin, in endeavouring to refute the conclusion of Locke that all words draw their first origin from sensible ideas, adduces the pronoun “I” and the verb “to be” as words which are primitive, indecomposible, and irreducible in every language with which he is acquainted—as words which are pure signs, representing nothing whatever except the meaning conventionally attached to them, and having no connection with sensible ideas.

Whatever may become of M. Cousin’s general proposition, the instances which he has chosen to support it are very unfortunate, for it may be clearly proved that these words, abstract as they may appear, are yet derived from sensible images. An examination of them will therefore help us to gain a little insight into the origin of language, and perhaps strengthen our suspicion that even the most subjective words, which merely intimate intellectual relations, even the words which express the essential categories, may be ultimately proved to have a metaphorical and not a psychological origin. Such a conviction will by no means impair the dignity of language, or cast a slur on the majesty of thought; for if the entire lexicon of every language be capable of being reduced to a number of sensational roots, the no less important element of Grammar always remains as the indisputable result of the pure reason. And not only so, but even the possibility of accepting imitative roots as signs of the thing imitated, supposes (as M. Maine[128] de Biran acutely observes) the pre-existence of an activity superior to sensation, whereby the thinking being places himself outside the circle of impressions and images in order to signify and note them.

It might be supposed that the word by which a man characterises himself in relation to his own consciousness would be of a very mysterious and abstract character, because it must express the notion of individuality, which might be regarded as a very primary intuition. This, however, is far from being the case. Man regarded himself as an object before he learnt to regard himself as a subject, and hence “the objective cases of the personal as well as of the other pronouns are always older than the subjective,” and the Sanskrit mâm, ma (Greek με, Latin me) is earlier than aham (ἐγών, and ego). We might have conjectured this from the fact already noticed, that children learn to speak of themselves in the third person, i.e. regard themselves as objects long before they acquire the power of representing their material selves as the instrument of an abstract entity. A child[129] does not attain to the free use of the pronoun “I” until the acquisition of formal grammar outstrips the psychological growth. And the same takes place with other personal pronouns. Man’s primary consciousness of his own existence is nearly simultaneous with the belief that he is something separate from the not-me, the external world. But at first he would only regard this external world as an immense inseparable phenomenon, and it would be some time before he could “invest the[130] not-me with the powers of agency and will which we experience in ourselves.”

But whether the conception of individuality be regarded as coming early or late, so far is the pronoun “I” from involving any sublime intrinsic meaning, that it was originally a demonstrative monosyllable, indicative of a particular position. “In fact,” says Dr. Donaldson, “the primitive pronouns must have been very simple words, for the first and easiest articulations would naturally be adopted to express the primary intuition of space. These little vocables denote only the immediate relations of locality. It is reasonable to suppose that the primitive pronouns would be designations of here and there, of the subject and object as contrasted and opposed to one another. As soon as language becomes a medium of communication between two speaking persons, a threefold distinction at once arises between the here or subject, the there or object, and the person spoken to or considered as a subject in himself, though an object in regard to the speaker.” In other words, there are “three[131] primitive relations of position: here, near to here, and there, or juxtaposition, proximity, and distance. The three primitive articulations which are used (in Greek) to express these three relations of position, are the three primitive tenues, Π, Ϙ, Τ, pronounced pa, qua, ta, which we shall call the first, second, and third pronominal elements. The first pronominal element denoting juxtaposition, or here, is used to express (a) the first personal pronoun; (b) the first numeral; (c) the point of departure in motion. The second pronominal element denoting proximity, or near to the here, is used to express (a) the second personal pronoun; (b) the relative pronoun; (c) the reflexive pronoun. The third pronominal element, denoting distance, is used to express (a) the third personal pronoun; (b) negation; (c) separation.”[132] Thus, then, we find that even so metaphysical a conception as that of individuality is only expressed by an elementary word implying locality.

We see, therefore, that M. Cousin is mistaken in supposing that the pronouns at any rate were non-sensational in their origin, arising as they do from the very earliest and simplest of all sensations. And it is, perhaps, still more surprising to find that a similar origin can be traced even in the numerals, which involved the very triumph of abstraction; for, in using a numeral, “we strip things of all their sensible properties,[133] and consider them as merely relations of number, as members of a series, as perfectly general relations of place.” And yet abstract as they are, and, absolutely as we might suppose them to be removed from concrete objects of sense, it is a matter of certainty that their genesis can be traced. About the general result few philologists have any doubt, however much they may differ in their details. “I do[134] not think,” says M. Bopp, “that any language whatever has produced special original words for the particular designation of such compacted and peculiar ideas as three, four, five, &c.” Accordingly it has been proved that the three first numerals in Sanskrit and Greek are connected with the three personal pronouns, and originally implied here,[135] near to the here, and there; that the fourth[136] implies 1 + 3; that the fifth, as might have been expected, is connected with the same root as the word “hand;” that the tenth numeral means two hands, and so forth.

Still it might be supposed that the verb “to be,” predicating as it does the quality of existence, a conception so abstract that the profoundest metaphysicians and physiologists have been as yet wholly unable to find for it any tolerable definition, would resist all attempts at a reduction to any sensational root. If we are to look to a definition of “life” as being either undiscoverable, or else a discovery which can only be expected from the ultimate triumphs of science, surely we might suppose that here at least it is impossible to find a sensible idea as the root of the sublime verbs which are the means of representing life as an attribute. But we are all liable to the error of forming far too[137] high an estimate of the intrinsic vitality (the supposed occulta vis) of verbs in general. They contain no inherent powers which separate them from nouns, and their supposed distinctive character arises entirely out of their combination with a subject. The fancy (for instance) that “the root can ‘sing’ differs from can ‘song’ in the same degree that a magnetised steel bar differs from an ordinary one, or a charged Leyden jar from a discharged one,” is proved by minute analysis to be totally groundless. And the importance of the verb “to be” in particular has been greatly exaggerated, as though it were a necessary ingredient of every logical proposition. For in many languages the verb is wanting altogether, and its mere implication is quite sufficient for all logical purposes. “The verb-substantive,” observes Mr. Garnett (from whose most valuable Essay on the nature and analysis of the verb we have borrowed these suggestions), “if considered as necessary to vivify all connected speech and bind together the terms of every logical proposition, is much upon a footing with the phlogiston of the chemists of the last generation, regarded as a necessary pabulum of combustion—that is to say, Vox et præterea nihil.”

Whatever our à priori estimate of the power of the verb-substantive may be, its origin is traced by philology to very humble and material sources. The Hebrew verbs הָוָה (houa), or הָיָה (haia), may very probably be derived from an onomatopœia of respiration. The verb kama, which has the same sense, means primitively “to stand out,” and the verb koum,[138] to stand, passes into the sense of “being.” In Sanskrit, as-mi (from which all the verbs-substantive in the Indo-European languages are derived, as εἰμὶ, sum, am; Zend, ahmi; Lithuanic, esmi; Icelandic, em, &c.), is, properly speaking, no verbal root, but “a formation on the demonstrative pronoun sa, the idea meant to be conveyed being simply that of local presence.” And of the two other roots used for the same purpose, viz. bhu (φύω, fui, &c.), and sthâ (stare, &c.),[139] the first is probably an imitation of breathing, and the second notoriously a physical verb, meaning “to stand up.” May we not, then, ask with Bunsen, “What is ‘to be’ in all languages but the spiritualisation of walking or standing or eating?”

Perhaps if we were to try to think of any positive word which it would be impossible to derive from a root imitative of sound, it would be the word silence. And yet we believe that the root of even this word is a simple onomatopœia, and that it is connected with the sibilants (hush! whish! &c.), by which we endeavour to call attention to the fact that we desire to listen intently. It may help us to accept this etymology if we observe that the colloquialism “to be mum” undoubtedly arises[140] from an imitation of the sound by which we express the closing of the lips.

If we fully allow that a considerable number of roots have (and must have) sprung from the instinctive principle which we have been endeavouring to illustrate, we have gone very far to show what was the origin of language. For the permutations and combinations of which a very few roots[141] are capable, and the rich variety of applications of which each separate root admits, are almost inconceivable to any who have not, by a study of the subject, rendered themselves familiar with the processes of the human mind. Indeed, a superfluity of roots argues a feebleness of conception, and a superabundant vocabulary is an impediment to thought. In the Society Isles they have one word for the tail of a dog, another for the tail of a bird, and a third for the tail of a sheep, and yet for “tail” itself,[142]—“tail” in the abstract, they have no word whatever. Again, the Mohicans have words for wood-cutting, cutting the head, the arm, &c., and yet no verb meaning simply to cut. But all the specific words are comparatively of very little use; in point of fact they are encumbrances, rather than treasures. It is the sign of an advancing language to modify or throw away these superfluities of special terms. Thus the number of roots decreases continually; in Sanskrit, there are[143] 2,000; in Gothic, not more than 600; while 250 are said to be sufficient to supply the modern German with its 80,000 words.

The processes by which this retrenchment is carried on are the derivation, and composition of necessary and existing uses to supersede the continual invention of new ones. The laws by which these processes are effected are for the most part regular and universal, and the discovery of them constitutes the great reward of modern philology. But as our present inquiries are only of the most general and preliminary nature, we must confine ourselves here to giving one or two short and comparatively easy specimens of what we may term the elasticity or diffusiveness of roots.

We have already alluded to the root “ach,” as having been in all probability an onomatopœian which gives rise to a large number of cognate words in the Indo-European languages. It is at any rate interesting to observe how this root, however originated, suffices to express alike material sharpness, bodily sensations, and mental emotions. M. Garnett[144] gives the following brief list of examples:—“Ἄκω, ἄκανθα, ἀχὶς, αἰχμὴ, acuo, acus, acies; Teutonic, ekke (edge), ackes (axe); Icelandic, eggia, to sharpen, to exhort, to egg on; German, ecke, a corner; Bavarian, igeln, prurire (German, jucken; Scotch, yeuk; English, itch)—acken (to ache), ἄχος (grief); Anglo-Saxon, ege, fear—egeslich, horrible; Icelandic, ecki, sorrow; German, ekel, disgust; with very many more. It is possible that Anglo-Saxon ege, an eye, may be of the same family. Compare the Latin phrase, acies oculorum.”

Or, again, let us take the Sanskrit root dhu, to move about, to agitate. A list of the derivatives from this root in various Indo-European languages would fill several pages, but we will only supply one or two. First, then, we get the verbs θύω and θύνω, to rush, or move violently, with their derivatives, as θύελλα, a storm; θύννος, a thunny-fish (from its rapid, darting motion); θύσανος, a waving, fluttering tassel; θυιὰς, a bacchanal; θύρσος, the shaken thyrsus, or ivy-wreathed wand, the symbol of Bacchic frenzy; θορεῖν, to leap; θοῦρος, impetuous; ἀθύρω, to play; and among many others, θυμὸς, the mind, from the same property which struck the poet, in saying—

How swift is the glance of the mind!

Compared with the speed of its flight

E’en the tempest itself lags behind,

And the swift-speeding arrows of light!

From the same root we get θύω, to sacrifice, from the striking aspect of the rising and curling fumes, when the victim lay burning on the altar; θύμος, thyme, from the use made of that herb in fumigations; fumus, smoke; θυμέλη, the altar in the centre of the orchestra; and many more. Lastly, we may mention the curious word θοάζειν, which is used in the apparently contradictory senses of “to move hastily,” and “to sit.”[145]

The curious phenomenon presented by the latter word, of the same root serving for two directly opposite meanings, is one worthy of the greatest attention; and we believe that it has first been definitely noticed by modern philologists. “Contrast,” says Archdeacon Hare, “is a kind of relation;” and the suggestion of contrarieties may even be regarded as a primary law of the association of ideas. It is this principle which accounts for the apparently strange fact that opposite conditions are expressed by the same root slightly modified. Thus, to select some of the instances collected by Dr. Donaldson,[146] our own word “dear” has the two meanings of “prized,” because you have it, and “expensive,” because you want it; and “fast” has the opposite senses of “fixed” and “rapid.” Similarly, χρεία in Greek means both “use” and “need”; and λάω means both “to wish” and “to take;” while aio, αὐδάω, and καλέω, “I speak,” or “call,” are singularly like ἀΐω, audio, and κλύω, “I hear.”[147]

Another instance of the same peculiarity arises from the different objective or subjective relations which any phenomenon may present, some of which relations may be strongly contrasted; e.g., a “key” might derive its name either from opening or shutting. Thus, to adopt some of the cases mentioned by Mr. Garnett,[148] the numeral one gives rise to compounds of apparently opposite signification. From the Irish aon, “one,” we have aonach, “a waste,” and also “an assembly;” aontugadh, celibacy, and aontumadh, marriage. The Latin unicus implies singularity, but unitas implies association. “The concord of this discord is easily found, if we consider that the term one may either refer to one as an individual, or in the sense of an aggregate.” Similarly, it is not difficult to explain the apparent anomaly that σχόλη means both “school” and “leisure,” and that “lee” has very different acceptations in lee-side and lee-shore. Other examples might easily be found, all tending to prove that “as rays of light may be reflected and refracted in all possible ways from their primary direction, so the meaning of a word may be deflected from its original bearing in a variety of manners; and consequently we cannot well reach the primitive force of the term unless we know the precise gradations through which it has gone.”

It has been proved, then, in this chapter, that a few onomatopœic roots would give a sufficient basis on which to rear the largest superstructure of language, and we have shown how in some cases an imitative origin may be discovered even in words which might have been expected to defy analysis. Into the methods adopted in this rich variety of applications we must inquire more closely in the following chapter, but we must here remark that, as it was by the association of ideas that even the most heterogeneous and contrary relations were expressed by the same root, so the words themselves tend powerfully to establish new points of association, and to facilitate the astonishing rapidity of thought. By the aid of verbal signs we exercise an enormous power over all our faculties, for in repeating the sign we are enabled by the personal activity of our will to recall the image which it represents, and submit that image to our control.[149] Our sensations, transformed into thought, come and go at our bidding, and we extend and multiply them without limit.

Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise!

By virtue of an active imagination the fathers of the human race produced the mighty heritage of speech, and made the utterance of their lips a means of recalling their sensations and expressing their thoughts; in consequence of the activity of the imagination, our words become the tyrants of our convictions, and our phrases “often repeated, ossify the very organs of intelligence.”

Hence the blood of nations has often ere now been shed from an inability to see the synthesis of various truths in some single threadbare shibboleth of party; and a mistaken theory embalmed in a[150] widely-received word has retarded for centuries the progress of knowledge. For, as Bacon wisely says, “Men believe that their reason is lord over their words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a reciprocal and reactionary power over the intellect,” and that “words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”

There is one moral application of the truths we have been considering, which we should do well not to omit; it is the far-reaching danger of idle[151] or careless words; it is the solemn admonition—

Guard well thy thoughts, for thoughts are heard in Heaven!

[CHAPTER VI.]
METAPHOR.

“Die Sinnlichkeit erzeugt, auf der ersten stufe der Wortschöpfung, ein Abbild; die Einbildungskraft, auf der zweiten, ein Symbol; der Verstand, endlich, auf der dritten, ein Zeichen für das object.”—Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft, s. 95.

“Every language is a dictionary of faded metaphors.”—Richter.

If it be impossible for us to know any single particle of matter in itself; if we are unable to do more than express the relations of any single external phenomenon; how can we hope to give an accurate nomenclature to the noumena, the inward emotions, the immaterial conceptions, the abstract entities which we cannot touch or handle, and which have an existence only for the intellect and the heart? How can we make the modulations of the voice the symbols[152] for the passions of the soul?

In mathematics there is a line, known as the asymptote, which continually approaches to a curve, but, being produced for ever, does not cut it, though the distance between the asymptote and the curve becomes, in the course of this approach, less than any assignable quantity. Language, in relation to thought, must ever be regarded as an asymptote. They can no more perfectly coincide than any two particles of matter can be made absolutely to touch each other. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil.” Now, as ever, a curtain of shadow must hang between—

That hidden life, and what we see and hear.

No single virtue, no single faculty, no single spiritual truth, no single metaphysical conception, can be expressed without the aid of analogy or metaphor. Metaphor—the transference of a word from its usual meaning to an analogous one—is the intellectual agent of language, just as onomatopœia is the mechanical agent. Metaphor and catachresis (i.e., the use of the same word to express two different things which are supposed to present some analogy to each other, as when “sweet” is applied to sounds) have been called the two channels of expression which irrigate the wide field of human intelligence. By their means language, though poor in vocables, was rich in thought, and resembled in its power the one coin[153] of the Wandering Jew, which always sufficed for all his needs, and always took the impress of the sovereign regnant in the countries through which he passed.

We might have easily conjectured that such would be the case. “Man, by the action of all his faculties, is carried out of himself and towards the exterior world; the phenomena of the exterior world are those which strike him first, and those, therefore, are the ones which receive the first names, which names are, so to speak, tinted with the colours of the objects they express. But, afterwards, when man turns his attention inwards, he sees distinctly those intellectual phenomena, of which he had previously had only a confused perception, and when he wishes to express those new phenomena of the soul and of thought, analogy leads him to apply the signs which he is looking for to the signs which he already possesses; for analogy is the law of every nascent or developed language; hence come the metaphors into which analysis resolves the majority of the signs for the most abstract moral ideas.”[154]

To call things which we have never seen before by the name of that which appears to us most nearly to resemble them, is a practice of every-day life. That children at first call all men “father,” and all women “mother,” is an observation as old as Aristotle.[155] The Romans gave the name of Lucanian ox to the elephant, and camelopardus to the giraffe, just as the New Zealanders are stated to have called “horses” large dogs. The astonished Caffirs gave the name of cloud to the first parasol which they had seen; and similar instances might be adduced almost indefinitely. They prove that it is an instinct, if it be not a necessity to borrow for the unknown the names already used for things known.

But although we can absolutely trace this process in so many cases, that we are entitled to infer, with Locke, that every word expressing facts which do not fall under the senses, is yet ultimately derived from sensible ideas, we cannot expect to prove this in every particular instance. When a standard of value is once introduced among nations, it is almost always a coinage of the precious metals; but when public credit is firmly established, a paper currency is allowed freely to circulate. And so in language many terms have become purely arbitrary, and in themselves valueless, which now pass unquestioned in their conventional meaning, but have lost all traces of the process to which they owed their origin, and retain no longer the impress of the thought which they originally conveyed.

Illustrations are not far to seek; indeed, we can hardly utter a sentence which will not supply them, of which the very word “illustration” is itself an instance. Thus, in Hebrew, the words for “anger” and “the nose” are identical,[156] and even in Greek, πρᾷος τὴν ῥίνα, “gentle in nose,” is used for “of gentle disposition.” Every reader of the Bible will recognise that “a melting of the heart” is the metaphor for despair; a “loosening of the reins” for fear; a “high carriage of the head” for pride; “stiffness of neck” for obstinacy; “thirst” or “pallor” for fear; a “turning of the face” for favour. It is this word-painting, this eagerness[157] for graphic touches, that gives to Hebrew its vivid, picturesque, impetuous character. It is interesting to observe how necessary to them it became. Even when they have by long usage learnt to accept a special word as the sign of some moral sentiment or mental emotion, they love to add to it also a picture of the physical circumstance. This is the explanation of such apparent pleonasms, as “he opened his mouth and said,” “he answered and said,” “he was angry and his visage fell,” “he was angry and his visage was enflamed.” It is the result of that vital energy which enkindled the soul of prophets and poets; which exalted the intellect of a nation, fully conscious that it had a mighty mission to perform. Spontaneous imagery is the characteristic of all passionate thought.

The Hebrews were not the only nation which sought for open and confessed metaphors in their style, when the bright colours of the original picture-word had grown too dim to recall the image which they once presented. We feel instinctively that certain states of mind can only be described by a comparison with the natural appearance which offers the nearest analogy to them. “A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite. Flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expressions for knowledge and ignorance. Visible distance behind and before us is respectively our image of memory and of hope.”[158]

Again, to take the first group of English words which present themselves, what is “imagination” or “reflection” but the summoning up of a picture before the inward eye? What is “comprehension” but a grasping; “disgust” but an unpleasant taste; “insinuation” but a getting into the bosom of anything? Courage is “good heart;” “rectitude” a perpendicular position; “austerity” is dryness; “superciliousness” a raising of the eyebrow; “humility” is something cognate to the ground; “fortune” is the falling of a lot; “virtue” is that which becomes a man; “humanity” is the proper characteristic of our race; “courtesy” is borrowed from palaces; “calamity” is the hurrying of the wind among the reeds. What are “aversion”[159] and “inclination” but a turning away from, and a bending towards? “Error” is a wandering out of the way; “envy” is looking upon another with an evil eye; an “emotion” is a movement of the soul; “influence” recalls the ripple circling on the surface of a stream; “heaven” is the canopy heaved over our heads; “hell” is the hollow space beneath our feet; “religion” is a solemn study, or a binding, or a new[160] choice; an “angel” is a messenger; the “spirit” is but a breath of air.