lectures on the science of language 45

lectures on the science of language 45

Hence that superabundance of synonymes in ancient dialects, and

hence that _struggle for life_ carried on among these words, which led to

the destruction of the less strong, the less happy, the less fertile

words, and ended in the triumph of _one_, as the recognized and proper

name for every object in every language. On a very small scale this

process of _natural selection_, or, as it would better be called,

_elimination_, may still be watched even in modern languages, that is to

say, even in languages so old and full of years as English and French.

What it was at the first burst of dialects we can only gather from such

isolated cases as when Vón Hammer counts 5744 words relating to the

camel.(348)

 

The fact that every word is originally a predicate, that names, though

signs of individual conceptions, are all, without exception, derived from

general ideas, is one of the most important discoveries in the science of

language. It was known before that language is the distinguishing

characteristic of man; it was known also that the having of general ideas

is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes; but that

these two were only different __EXPRESSION__s of the same fact was not known

till the theory of roots had been established as preferable to the

theories both of Onomatopoieia and of Interjections. But, though our

modern philosophy did not know it, the ancient poets and framers of

language must have known it. For in Greek language is _logos_, but _logos_

means also reason, and _alogon_ was chosen as the name, and the most

proper name, for brute. No animal thinks, and no animal speaks, except

man. Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead

sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to

speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.

 

And now I am afraid I have but a few minutes left to explain the last

question of all in our science, namely—How can sound express thought? How

did roots become the signs of general ideas? How was the abstract idea of

measuring expressed by _mâ_, the idea of thinking by _man_? How did _gâ_

come to mean going, _sthâ_ standing, _sad_ sitting, _dâ_ giving, _mar_

dying, _char_ walking, _kar_ doing?

 

I shall try to answer as briefly as possible. The 400 or 500 roots which

remain as the constituent elements in different families of language are

not interjections, nor are they imitations. They are _phonetic types_

produced by a power inherent in human nature. They exist, as Plato would

say, by nature; though with Plato we should add that, when we say by

nature, we mean by the hand of God.(349) There is a law which runs through

nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. Each

substance has its peculiar ring. We can tell the more or less perfect

structure of metals by their vibrations, by the answer which they give.

Gold rings differently from tin, wood rings differently from stone; and

different sounds are produced according to the nature of each percussion.

It was the same with man, the most highly organized of nature’s

works.(350) Man, in his primitive and perfect state, was not only endowed,

like the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by

interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoieia. He possessed likewise

the faculty of giving more articulate __EXPRESSION__ to the rational

conceptions of his mind. That faculty was not of his own making. It was an

instinct, an instinct of the mind as irresistible as any other instinct.

So far as language is the production of that instinct, it belongs to the

realm of nature. Man loses his instincts as he ceases to want them. His

senses become fainter when, as in the case of scent, they become useless.

Thus the creative faculty which gave to each conception, as it thrilled

for the first time through the brain, a phonetic __EXPRESSION__, became

extinct when its object was fulfilled. The number of these _phonetic

types_ must have been almost infinite in the beginning, and it was only

through the same process of _natural elimination_ which we observed in the

early history of words, that clusters of roots, more or less synonymous,

were gradually reduced to one definite type. Instead of deriving language

from nine roots, like Dr. Murray,(351) or from _one_ root, a feat actually

accomplished by a Dr. Schmidt,(352) we must suppose that the first

settlement of the radical elements of language was preceded by a period of

unrestrained growth,—the spring of speech—to be followed by many an

autumn.

 

With the process of elimination, or natural selection, the historical

element enters into the science of language. However primitive the Chinese

may be as compared with terminational and inflectional languages, its

roots or words have clearly passed through a long process of mutual

attrition. There are many things of a merely traditional character even in

Chinese. The rule that in a simple sentence the first word is the subject,

the second the verb, the third the object, is a traditional rule. It is by

tradition only that _ngŏ ģin_, in Chinese, means a bad man, whereas _ģin

ngŏ_ signifies man is bad. The Chinese themselves distinguish between

_full_ and _empty_ roots,(353) the former being predicative, the latter

corresponding to our particles which modify the meaning of full roots and

determine their relation to each other. It is only by tradition that roots

become empty. All roots were originally full whether predicative or

demonstrative, and the fact that empty roots in Chinese cannot always be

traced back to their full prototypes shows that even the most ancient

Chinese had passed through successive periods of growth. Chinese

commentators admit that all empty words were originally full words, just

as Sanskrit grammarians maintain that all that is found in grammar was

originally substantial. But we must be satisfied with but partial proofs

of this general principle, and must be prepared to find as many fanciful

derivations in Chinese as in Sanskrit. The fact, again, that all roots in

Chinese are no longer capable of being employed at pleasure, either as

substantives, or verbs, or adjectives, is another proof that, even in this

most primitive stage, language points back to a previous growth. _Fu_ is

father, _mu_ is mother; _fu mu_ parents; but neither _fu_ nor _mu_ is used

as a root in its original predicative sense. The amplest proof, however,

of the various stages through which even so simple a language as Chinese

must have passed is to be found in the comparatively small number of

roots, and in the definite meanings attached to each; a result which could

only have been obtained by that constant struggle which has been so well

described in natural history as the struggle for life.

 

But although this sifting of roots, and still more the subsequent

combination of roots, cannot be ascribed to the mere working of nature or

natural instincts, it is still less, as we saw in a former Lecture, the

effect of deliberate or premeditated art, in the sense in which, for

instance, a picture of Raphael or a symphony of Beethoven is. Given a root

to express flying, or bird, and another to express heap, then the joining

together of the two to express many birds, or birds in the plural, is the

natural effect of the synthetic power of the human mind, or, to use more

homely language, of the power of putting two and two together. Some

philosophers maintain indeed that this explains nothing, and that the real

mystery to be solved is how the mind can form a synthesis, or conceive

many things as one. Into those depths we cannot follow. Other philosophers

imagine that the combination of roots to form agglutinative and

inflectional language is, like the first formation of roots, the result of

a natural instinct. Thus Professor Heyse(354) maintained that “the various

forms of development in language must be explained by the philosophers as

_necessary_ evolutions, founded in the very essence of human speech.” This

is not the case. We can watch the growth of language, and we can

understand and explain all that is the result of that growth. But we

cannot undertake to prove that all that is in language is so by necessity,

and could not have been otherwise. When we have, as in Chinese, two such

words as _kiai_ and _tu_, both expressing a heap, an assembly, a quantity,

then we may perfectly understand why either the one or the other should

have been used to form the plural. But if one of the two becomes fixed and

traditional, while the other becomes obsolete, then we can register the

fact as historical, but no philosophy on earth will explain its absolute

necessity. We can perfectly understand how, with two such roots as _kûŏ_,

empire, and _ćung_, middle, the Chinese should have formed what we call a

locative, _kŭŏ ćung_, in the empire. But to say that this was the only way

to express this conception is an assertion contradicted both by fact and

reason. We saw the various ways in which the future can be formed. They

are all equally intelligible and equally possible, but not one of them is

inevitable. In Chinese _ỳaó_ means to will, _ngò_ is I; hence _ngò ỳaó_, I

will. The same root _ỳaó_, added to _ḱiú_, to go, gives us _ngò ỳaó ḱiú_,

I will go, the first germ of our futures. To say that _ngò ỳaó ḱiú_ was

the necessary form of the future in Chinese would introduce a fatalism

into language which rests on no authority whatever. The building up of

language is not like the building of the cells in a beehive, nor is it

like the building of St. Peter’s by Michael Angelo. It is the result of

innumerable agencies, working each according to certain laws, and leaving

in the end the result of their combined efforts freed from all that proved

superfluous or useless. From the first combination of two such words as

_ģin_, man, _kiai_, many, to form the plural _ģin kiai_, to the perfect

grammar of Sanskrit and Greek, everything is intelligible as the result of

the two principles of growth which we considered in our second Lecture.

What is antecedent to the production of roots is the work of nature; what

follows after is the work of man, not in his individual and free, but in

his collective and moderating, capacity.

 

I do not say that every form in Greek or Sanskrit has as yet been analyzed

and explained. There are formations in Greek and Latin and English which

have hitherto baffled all tests; and there are certain contrivances, such

as the augment in Greek, the change of vowels in Hebrew, the Umlaut and

Ablaut in the Teutonic dialects, where we might feel inclined to suppose

that language admitted distinctions purely musical or phonetic,

corresponding to very palpable and material distinctions of thought. Such

a supposition, however, is not founded on any safe induction. It may seem

inexplicable to us why _bruder_ in German should form its plural as

_brüder_; or _brother_, _brethren_. But what is inexplicable and

apparently artificial in our modern languages becomes intelligible in

their more ancient phases. The change of _u_ into _ü_, as in _bruder_,

_brüder_, was not intentional; least of all was it introduced to expressed

plurality. The change is phonetic, and due to the influence of an _i_ or

_j_,(355) which existed originally in the last syllable and which reacted

regularly on the vowel of the preceding syllable; nay, which leaves its

effect behind, even after it has itself disappeared. By a false analogy

such a change, perfectly justifiable in a certain class of words, may be

applied to other words where no such change was called for; and it may

then appear as if an arbitrary change of vowels was intended to convey a

grammatical change. But even into these recesses the comparative

philologist can follow language, thus discovering a reason even for what

in reality was irrational and wrong. It seems difficult to believe that

the augment in Greek should originally have had an independent substantial

existence, yet all analogy is in favor of such a view. Suppose English had

never been written down before Wycliffe’s time, we should then find that

in some instances the perfect was formed by the mere addition of a short

_a_. Wycliffe spoke and wrote:(356) _I knowlech to a felid and seid þus_;

_i.e._ I acknowledge to have felt and said thus. In a similar way we read:

_it should a fallen_; instead of “it should have fallen;” and in some

parts of England common people still say very much the same: _I should a

done it_. Now in some old English books this _a_ actually coalesces with

the verb, at least they are printed together; so that a grammar founded on

them would give us “to fall” as the infinitive of the present, _to

afallen_ as the infinitive of the past. I do not wish for a moment to be

understood as if there was any connection between this _a_, a contraction

of _have_ in English, and the Greek augment which is placed before past

tenses. All I mean is, that, if the origin of the augment has not yet been

satisfactorily explained, we are not therefore to despair, or to admit an

arbitrary addition of a consonant or vowel, used as it were algebraically

or by mutual agreement, to distinguish a past from a present tense.

 

If inductive reasoning is worth anything, we are justified in believing

that what has been proved to be true on so large a scale, and in cases

where it was least expected, is true with regard to language in general.

We require no supernatural interference, nor any conclave of ancient

sages, to explain the realities of human speech. All that is formal in

language is the result of rational combination; all that is material, the

result of a mental instinct. The first natural and instinctive utterances,

if sifted differently by different clans, would fully account both for the

first origin and for the first divergence of human speech. We can

understand not only the origin of language, but likewise the necessary

breaking up of one language into many; and we perceive that no amount of

variety in the material or the formal elements of speech is incompatible with the admission of one common source.