THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE.
[Sidenote: The growth of language.]
We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and
houses which were ever made; we now turn aside and ask what were the
first of those immaterial instruments, those ‘aëriform, mystic’ legacies
which were handed down and gradually improved from the time of the
earliest inhabitants of our globe? Foremost among these, long anterior
to the ‘metallurgic and other manufacturing _skill_,’ comes language.
With us, in whose minds thought and speech are so bound together as to
be almost inseparable, the idea that language is an instrument which
through long ages has been slowly improved to its present perfection,
seems difficult of credit. We think of early man having the same ideas
and expressing them as readily as we do now; but this he could not
really have done. Not, indeed, that we have any reason to believe that
there was a time when man had no language at all; but it seems certain
that long ages were necessary before this instrument could be wrought to
the fineness in which we find it, and to which, in all the languages
with which we are likely to become acquainted, we are accustomed. A rude
iron knife or spear-head seems a simple and natural thing to make. But
we know that before it could be made iron had to be discovered, and the
art of extracting iron from the ore; and, as a matter of fact, we know
that thousands of years passed before the iron spear-head was a
possibility; thousands of years spent in slowly improving the weapons of
stone, and passing on from them to the weapons of bronze. So, too, with
language; simple as it seems at first sight to fit the word on to the
idea, and early as we ourselves learn this art, a little thought about
what language is will show us how much we owe to the ages which have
gone before.
[Sidenote: The two main classes of words ‘significant’ and
‘insignificant.’]
To understand fully the department of study called the science of
language considerable linguistic knowledge is necessary. But to grasp
many of the general principles of this science, and many of the most
important facts which it teaches, we do not need any such wide
knowledge. In fact, a little thoughtful examination of any single tongue
(his own, whichever it may be) would teach a person many things which
without thought he would be inclined to pass over as matters of course
or matters of no consequence. In truth, in this science of language what
we need, even before we need a very wide array of facts, is what is
called the scientific method in dealing with the facts which we possess.
But, again, this which we call the scientific method is really
represented by two qualities which have less pretentious
names--_observation_ and _common sense_.
Let us begin then by, so to say, challenging our own language, our
English as we find it to-day, and see what hints we can gain from it of
the formation of language as a whole and of its origin. An ounce of
information gained in this wise, by examination and the use of our own
common sense, is worth a much greater bulk of knowledge gained
second-hand from books, and merely remembered as facts divorced from
their causes.
Take any sentence, and place that, so to say, under a microscope, or
under the dissecting-knife--take the opening sentence of this chapter,
for example.
“We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and
houses that were ever made.”
Let us look at these few words alone.
The first thing we have to notice about this sentence, and any other
sentence almost that we could anywhere find, is that the words which
compose it fall into two distinct classes, the classes of what I will
call _meaning_ and _meaningless_, or significant and _in_-significant
words. In the first class fall the words _we_, _looked_, _man_,
_fashioning_, _implements_, _weapons_, _houses_, _made_. These I call
‘meaning’ or ‘significant’ words, because, if we isolate each one and
utter it alone, it will call up some image to the mind--_we_, _weapons_,
_fashioning_, _houses_, _made_, and so forth: the image may be pretty
clear or it may be (in the case of the verbs it is) somewhat hazy. But
in every case some image or some idea does rise before the mind when any
of these words is pronounced. _Have_ and _were_ I exclude for the moment
from either class. The words of the second class, then, from the
sentence chosen are--_upon_, _the_, _and_, _ever_. Of the first three,
at any rate, there can be no difficulty as to why they are classed as
the meaningless or insignificant words of the sentence. Isolated from
the words of the first class, _upon_, _the_, or _and_ can by no means
possibly call up any image or suggest any idea to the mind.
Now, if you take any implement whose manufacture the world has ever
seen, unless it be of the most primitive description imaginable, you
will find it really devisable into two parts, upon much the same
principle that we have here resolved our typical sentence into two
primary divisions; it will consist of the _essential_ part, the part
which _by itself_ would be useful, and the unessential adjunct which is
designed to assist the usefulness of the other portion, but which is
useless by itself--or if not useless by itself, it is useless for the
purposes for which the implement we are concerned with is made. All
handles meant to assist in the use of an implement, be it a stone axe or
a most elaborate modern weapon, form such an adjunct to the essential
part. Such useful and by comparison useless parts are the blade and the
handle of a knife, the barrel and the stock of a gun, the carrying
portion of the wheelbarrow and the wheel, the _share_--the shearing or
cutting portion of a plough--and the wooden framework; and so forth.
There is no need to multiply examples. Nor, I think, is there any need
to insist further how strictly analogous the two classes of words here
distinguished are to the two parts of any other implement invented by
man. It goes almost of course that the essential portion of any
implement is the portion which was invented first, that knife-blades
were invented before knife-handles, barrows before barrow-wheels, etc.
Wherefore it seems to follow of course that, of the two classes of words
whereof language consists--whereof all languages consist--the meaning
and the meaningless words, the first were the earliest invented or
discovered. This is the same as saying that language once consisted
altogether of words which had a definite meaning attaching to them even
when uttered by themselves, and consequently that the words of the
second class grew, so to say, out of the words of the first class.
These are the conclusions which a mere examination of a single language,
our own, under the guidance of observation and common sense, would force
upon us; always supposing our language to be a representative one. And
these conclusions are strengthened when we come to look a little into
the history of words, so far as we can trace it.
So far back, therefore, we may go in the history of language to a time
when all the words which men used were words which by themselves evoked
distinct ideas. Relegating these words, as far as we can, into the
classes which grammarians have invented for the different parts of
speech, we see that the significant words are all, as a rule, either
nouns (or _pro_-nouns), adjectives, or verbs; that the insignificant
words are, as a rule, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions--what, in
fact, are called _particles_, fragments of speech. I say, _as a rule_,
for both divisions. The pronouns and the auxiliary verbs, for example,
are very difficult to classify; and it depends rather on their use in
each individual sentence, to which division they are to be relegated.
[Sidenote: Origin of speech undiscoverable.]
But though we have now learnt to distinguish the words which by
themselves convey definite ideas, and those others whose meaning depends
upon the first class, we are as far as ever from understanding how
words, whether of one kind or the other, come to have the significance
which they have for us. _Book_--no sooner have we pronounced the word
than an _idea_ more or less distinct comes into our mind. The thought
and the sound seem inseparable, and we cannot remember the time when
they were not so. Yet the connection between the thought and the sound
is not necessary. In fact, a sound which generally comes connected with
one idea may--if we are engaged at the time upon a language not our
own--enter our minds, bringing with it an idea quite unconnected with
the first. _Share_ and _chère_, _plea_ and _plie_, _feel_ and _viel_
(German), are examples in point; and the same thing is shown by the
numerous sounds in our language which have two or more quite distinct
meanings, as for example--_ware_ and _were_, and (with most people)
_where_ too. _Rite_ and _right_ and _wright_ are pronounced precisely
alike; therefore there can be no reason why one sound should convey one
idea more than another. In other words, the idea and the sound have an
arbitrary, not a natural connection. We have been _taught_ to make the
sound ‘book’ for the idea book, but had we been brought up by French
parents the sound ‘livre’ would have seemed the natural one to make.
So that this wondrous faculty of speech has, like those other faculties
of which Carlyle speaks, been handed down on impalpable vehicles of
sound through the ages. Never, perhaps, since the time of our first
parents has one person from among the countless millions who have been
born had to invent for himself a way of expressing his thoughts in
words. This is alone a strange thing enough. Impossible as it is to
imagine ourselves without speech, we may ask the question--What should
we do if we were ever left in such a predicament? Should we have _any_
guide in fitting the sound on to the idea? _Share_ and _chère_, _feel_
and _viel_--among these unconnected notions is there _any_ reason why we
should wed our speech to one rather than another? Clearly there is no
reason. Yet in the case which we imagined of a number of rational beings
who had to invent a language for the first time, if they are ever to
come to an understanding at all there must be some common impulse which
makes more than one choose the same sound for a particular idea. How,
for instance, we may ask, was it with our first parents? They have
passed on to all their descendants for ever the idea of conveying
thought by sound, and all the great changes which have since come into
the languages of the world have been gradual and, so to say, natural.
But this first invention of the idea of speech is of quite another
character.
Here we are brought to the threshold of that impenetrable mystery ‘the
beginning of things,’ and here we must pause. We recognize this faculty
of speech as a thing mysterious, unaccountable, belonging to that
supernatural being, man. There must, one would think, have been and must
be in us a something which causes our mouth to echo the thought of the
heart; and originally this echo must have been spontaneous and natural,
the same for all alike. Now it is a mere matter of tradition and
instruction, the sound we use for the idea; but at first the two must
have had some subtle necessary connection, or how could one of our first
parents have known or guessed what the other wished to say? Just as
every metal has its peculiar ring, it is as though each impression on
the mind rang out its peculiar word from the tongue.[17] Or was it like
the faint tremulous sound which glasses give when music is played near?
The outward object or the inward thought called out a sort of mimicry, a
distant echo--not like, but yet born of the other--on the lips. These
earliest sounds may perhaps still sometimes be detected. In the sound
_flo_ or _flu_, which in an immense number of languages stands connected
with the idea of flowing and of rivers, do we not recognize some attempt
to catch the smooth yet rushing sound of water? And again, in the sound
_gra_ or _gri_, which is largely associated with the notion of grinding,
cutting, or scraping,[18] there is surely something of this in the
guttural harshness of the letters, which make the tongue grate, as it
were, against the roof of the mouth.
It does not, however, seem probable that the earliest words were mere
_imitations_ of the sounds produced by the objects they designed to
express, such as are some of the words of child-language whereby dogs
are called _bow-wows_ and lambs are called _baas_. Nor need we wonder at
this, when we note the principles upon which other sorts of
_language_--expressive actions, for instance--are conceived and used. If
we intend to express the idea of motion by an expressive gesture, we do
not make any copy of the mode of that motion. We say ‘Go,’ and we dart
out our hand, half to show that the person we are addressing is to go in
the direction which we point out, or that he is to keep away from us;
half, again, to give the idea of his movement by the rapidity of our
own. But if we wanted to convey this last idea by mere imitation we
should move our legs rapidly and not our arms.
It might be thought that the study of the gesture-language which has
been used by men, especially the gesture-language of deaf-mutes, who
have no other, would give us the best insight into the origin of
language among mankind. But in reality the results of such a study are
not very satisfactory; and for this reason, that the deaf-mute has in
every case been in contact with one or more persons who possessed
speech, and whose ideas were therefore entirely formed by the possession
and the inheritance of language. This inherited language they translate
into signs for the benefit of the deaf-mute, while the latter is still a
baby and incapable of inventing language; wherefore it, in its turn,
_inherits_ a language almost as much as its parent has done, though it
is a language of gesture and not of spoken words.[19] It is a fact,
however, that deaf-mutes who cannot hear the sounds they make, do
nevertheless articulate certain _sounds_ which they constantly associate
with the same ideas. These seem to bring us very near the
language-making faculty of man. Lists of these sounds have been made,
but they are not such that we can draw any conclusions touching the
natural or universal association of sound and sense.
[Sidenote: Growth of the ‘insignificant’ words out of the
‘significant.’]
The origin of human speech and the mode of its first operation are
therefore undiscoverable. We can place no measure to the rapidity with
which the first created man may have obtained his stock of words of our
first class; as Adam is described naming each one of the animals among
whom he lived. All these beginnings lie beyond the ken of linguistic
science. But even when he was furnished as fully as we choose to suppose
with a class of words which had a meaning of their own, there was still
the second class whose invention must have followed upon the invention
of the first. The adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, particles,--the
words which meant _to_, _and_, _at_, _but_, _when_,--these we have
already seen must as a whole have come into use later than the other
class of words.
This, then, we may fairly call the second stage in the growth of
language, the making of these auxiliary words to enforce the meaning of
the first class of words. And at the first moment it might seem
impossible to imagine how these words could ever have come into
existence. Given a certain word-making faculty, we can understand how
mankind got sounds to express such ideas as _man_, _head_, _hard_,
_red_. But how he could ever have acquired sounds to express such vague
notions as _at_, _by_, _and_, it is much less easy to conceive. A closer
observation, however, even of our own language, and a wider knowledge of
languages generally, lead to the conclusion that all the words of the
second class, the auxiliary words, sprang from words of the first class;
that every insignificant word has grown out of a word which had its own
significance; that, for instance, _with_, _by_, _and_, have descended
from roots (now lost) which, if placed alone, would have conveyed as
much idea to the mind as _pen_, _ink_, or _paper_ does to us.
This, I say, we should guess even from an examination of our own
language alone. For the process is still going on. Take the word _even_,
as used in the sentence which we have just written: ‘Even from an
examination.’ Here _even_ is an adverb, quite meaningless when used
alone, at least as an adverb; but if we see it alone it becomes another
word, an adjective, a meaning word, bringing before us the idea of two
things hanging level. ‘Even from’ is nonsense as an _idea_ with nothing
to follow it, but ‘even weights’ is a perfectly clear and definite
notion, and each of the separate words _even_ and _weights_ give us
clear and definite notions too. It is the same with _just_, which is
both adverb and adjective. ‘Just as’ brings no thought into the mind,
but ‘just man’ and _just_ and _man_, separately or together, do. _While_
or _whilst_ are meaningless; but, ‘a while,’ or ‘to while’--to
loiter--are full of meaning. In each case the meaningless word came from
the meaning word, and was first used as a sort of metaphor, and then the
metaphorical part was lost sight of. _Ago_ is a meaningless word by
itself, but it is really only a changed form of the obsolete word
_agone_, which was an old past participle of the verb ‘to go.’
And we might find many instances of words in the same process of
transformation in other languages. The English word _not_ is
meaningless, and just as much so are the French _pas_ and _point_ in the
sense of _not_; but in the sense of _footstep_, or _point_, they have
meaning enough. Originally _Il ne veut pas_ meant, metaphorically, ‘He
does not wish a step of your wishes,’ ‘He does not go a footstep with
you in your wish;’ _Il ne veut point_, ‘He does not go a point with you
in your wish.’ Nowadays all this metaphorical meaning is gone, except to
the eye of the grammarian. People recognize that _Il ne veut point_ is
rather stronger than _Il ne veut pas_, but it never occurs to them to
ask why.
There are so many of these curious examples that one is tempted to go on
choosing instances; but we confine ourselves to one more. Our word _yes_
is a word which by itself is quite incapable of calling up a picture in
our minds, but the word _is_ or ‘it is,’ though the idea it conveys is
very abstract, and, so to say, intangible--as compared, for instance,
with such verbs as _move_, _beat_--nevertheless belongs to the
‘significant’ class. Now, it happens that the Latin language used the
word _est_ ‘it is’ where we should now use the word ‘yes;’ and it still
further happens that our _yes_[20] is probably the same as the German
_es_, and was used in the same sense of _it is_ as well. Instead of the
meaningless word ‘yes’ the Romans used the word _est_ ‘it is,’ and our
own ancestors expressed the same idea by saying ‘it.’ Still more. It is
well known that French is in the main a descendant from the Latin, not
the Latin of Rome, but the corrupter Latin which was spoken in Gaul. Now
these Latin-speaking Gauls did not, for some reason, say _est_, ‘it is,’
for _yes_, as the Romans did; but they used a pronoun, either _ille_,
‘he,’ or _hoc_, ‘this.’ When, therefore, a Gaul desired to say ‘yes,’ he
nodded, and said _he_ or else _this_, meaning ‘He is so,’ or ‘This is
so.’ As it happens the Gauls of the north said _ille_, and those of the
south said _hoc_, and these words gradually got corrupted into two
meaningless words, _oui_ and _oc_. It is well known that the people in
the south of France were especially distinguished by using the word _oc_
instead of _oui_ for ‘yes,’ so that their ‘dialect’ got to be called the
_langue d’oc_, and this word Languedoc gave the name to a province of
France. Long before that time, however, we may be sure, both the people
of the _langue d’oil_, or _langue d’oui_, and those of the _langue d’oc_
had forgotten that their words for ‘yes’ had originally meant ‘he’ and
‘this.’
We can, from the instances above given, form a pretty good guess at the
way in which the auxiliary or meaningless class of sounds came into use
in any language. Each of these must once have had a distinct
significance by itself, then (getting meanwhile a little changed in form
probably) it gradually lost the separate meaning and became only a
particle of speech, only an adjunct to other words. In another way, we
may say that before man spoke of ‘on the rock’ or ‘under the rock’ he
must have used some expression like ‘head of rock,’ or more literally
‘head rock’ and ‘foot rock;’ and that as time went on, new words coming
into use for _head_ and _foot_, these earlier ones dropped down to be
mere adjuncts, and men forgot that they had ever been anything else.
Just so no ordinary Frenchman knows that his _oui_ and _il_ are both
sprung from the same Latin _ille_; nor does the ordinary Englishman
recognize that _ago_ is a past participle of ‘go;’ nor again, to take a
new instance, does, perhaps, the ordinary German recognize that his
_gewiss_, ‘certainly,’ is merely an abbreviation of the past participle
_gewissen_, ‘known.’
* * * * *
We have now followed the growth of language through
[Sidenote: Root-sounds.]
two of its stages, first, the coining of the principal or essential
parts of speech, the nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and secondly, the
coining at a later date of the auxiliary parts of speech, the
prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, and (where they exist) the
enclitics _the_ and _a_; these last, however, (_as separate words_,[21])
are wanting from a large number of languages. A third stage is the
variation of certain words to form out of them other words which are
nearly related in character to the first. We may speak of this process
as a process of ringing the changes upon certain _root-sounds_ to form a
series of words allied in sound and allied in sense also. We have
several instances of such groups of allied words in our own language.
_Fly_, _flee_, _flew_, _fled_, are words allied in sound and in sense.
In these cases the sound of the letters f-l constitutes what we may call
the root-sound. And it may be said at once that those languages are said
to be related in each of which a certain number of words can be traced
back to root-sounds which are common to the two or more tongues.
In the case of the vast majority of words, before we can begin by
comparing one word with another, or trying to discover the root-words of
several different languages, we have first to trace the history of these
words backwards, each in its own language, and find their most primitive
forms. But in tongues which are pretty nearly related we have often no
difficulty in seeing the similarity of corresponding words just as they
stand to-day. We have no difficulty, for instance, in seeing the
connection of the German _Knecht_ and our _knight_,[22] the German
_Nacht_ and our _night_, the German _Raum_ and our _room_; or, again,
the connection between the Italian _padre_ and the French _père_, the
Italian _tavola_ and the French (and English) _table_, etc.
But where the connection between languages is more distant, we have more
and more to go back to much simpler roots, in order to show the
relationship between them; and by a vast majority the primitive
root-sounds in any large family of languages are single syllables,
whereof the most constant parts are (as a rule) the consonants. So far
as our knowledge goes, we might think of man as beginning human speech
with a certain number of these simple root-sounds, and then proceeding
to ring the changes upon these root-sounds to express varieties in the
root-idea. Sometimes it is easy enough to trace the connection of ideas
between different words which have been formed out of the same
root-word. But sometimes this is not at all easy. Nor can we say why
this special sound has been adopted for any one notion more than for a
number of others to which it would have applied equally well. From a
root, which in Sanskrit appears in its most ancient form, as _mâ_, ‘to
measure,’ we get words in Greek and Latin which mean ‘to think;’ and
from the same root comes our ‘man,’ the person who measures, who
compares, _i.e._, who thinks, also our _moon_, which means ‘the
measurer,’ because the moon helps to measure out the time, the _months_.
But how arbitrary seems this connection between _man_ and _moon_! So,
too, our _crab_ is from the word _creep_, and means the animal that
creeps. But why this name should have been given to crab rather than to
ant and beetle it is impossible to say. So that there appears as little
trace of a reason governing the formation of words out of root-sounds as
there appeared in the adoption of root-sounds to express certain
fundamental ideas.
Thus equipped with his fixed root and the various words formed out of
it, man had the rough _material_ out of which to build up all the
elaborate languages which the world has known. And he continued his work
something in this fashion. As generation followed generation the
pronunciation of words was changed, as is constantly being done at the
present day. Our grandmothers pronounced ‘Rome,’ ‘Room,’ and ‘brooch,’
as it was spelt, and not as we pronounce it--‘broach.’ And let it be
remembered, before writing was invented, there was nothing but the
pronunciation to fix the word, and a new pronunciation was really a new
word. When there was no written form to petrify a word, these changes of
pronunciation were very rapid and frequent, so that not only would each
generation have a different set of words from their fathers, but
probably each tribe would be partly unintelligible to its neighbouring
tribes, just as a Somersetshire man is to a great extent unintelligible
to a man from Yorkshire. The first result of these changes would be the
springing up of that class of ‘meaningless’ words of which we spoke
above. Out of some significant words, such as ‘head’ and ‘foot,’ would
arise insignificant words similar to ‘over’ and ‘under.’ Such a change
could only begin when of two names each for ‘head’ and ‘foot’ one became
obsolete as a noun, and was only used adverbially. Then what had
originally meant, metaphorically, ‘head of rock’ and ‘foot of rock’[23]
might come to be used for ‘over’ and ‘under the rock,’ in exactly the
same way that the word _ago_, having changed its form from _agone_, has
become a ‘meaningless’ word to the Englishman of to-day.
And with the acquisition of the insignificant words a new and very
important process began. To understand
[Sidenote: Growth of inflexions.]
what it was we will, as we did before, begin by examining the formation
of some of the languages with which we are, probably, more or less
familiar. Let us note how very many more variations on the same root are
to be found in some languages than in others. On the root _dic_, which
in Latin expresses the notion of speaking, we have the variations
_dico_, _dixi_, _dicere_, _dictum_, _dictio_, _dicto_, _dicor_,
_dictor_, _dictator_, _dictatrix_, etc.; and yet this does not nearly
exhaust the list, for we have all the changes in the different tenses of
_dico_, _dicto_, _dicor_, etc., in the different cases of _dictio_,
_dictator_. dictatrix, etc. The languages which contain these numerous
variations upon one root are what are called the _inflected_ languages,
and the greater number of the changes which they make come under the
head of what grammarians call inflexions. These inflexions are of no
meaning in themselves, they have no existence even in themselves as
words. And yet what is curious is that they are the same for a great
number of different words; and they express the same _relative_ meaning
in the places where they stand whatever the word may be. If the _-nis_
of _dictionis_ expresses a certain idea relative to _dictio_, so does
the _-nis_ of _lectionis_ express the same idea relative to _lectio_,
the _-nis_ of _actionis_ the same idea relative to _actio_, and so
forth.
Or, to take an example from a modern inflected language, if the _-es_ of
_Mannes_, expresses a certain idea relative to _Mann_, so does the same
inflexion (_-es_ or _-s_) in _Hauses_, _Baums_, etc., relative to _Haus_
and _Baum_.
Now, how are we to explain this fact? Our grammars, it is true, take it
for granted, and give it us as a thing which requires no
explanation--the genitive inflexion is _-nis_ or _-es_, or whatever it
may be. That is all they tell us. But we cannot be content to take
anything of course. An explanation, however, is not difficult, and
follows, _almost_ of course, on the exercise of a little common sense.
If the _-es_ of Mannes, Hauses, Baumes (Baums) expresses the idea ‘of,’
then, at one time or another, _es_, or some root from which it is
derived, must have _meant_ ‘of.’ This explains easily and naturally
enough the inflexions in any inflected language. They have no meaning
now, but at one time they (or their original forms--their ancestors, so
to speak) had no doubt just as much meaning by themselves as our ‘of.’
And therefore the only difference between our use in England to-day, and
the ancestral use in a primitive language, was that we say ‘of [the]
man,’ and the ancestral language would have said ‘man-of,’ ‘house-of,’
etc. This accounts for the same genitive forms being used for so many
different words.
And that the same genitive forms are not used _throughout_ any language
is no real objection to this theory. If we say _dictionis_, _lectionis_,
but _musæ_, _rosæ_; if we say _Mannes_, _Hauses_, but _Blume_, _Rose_,
the only reason of these varieties is that the languages from which
these inflexions are derived possessed more than one word meaning ‘of,’
and that one of these words was attached to a certain series of nouns,
another word to another series.
This is the explanation which mere common sense would give of the origin
of inflexions in language, and further research, had we time to examine
the history of language more elaborately, would show that it was
_fundamentally_ the right explanation. The only correction which we
should have to make on this first and crude theory is explained a little
further on. Thus we see in this third stage of language a process very
closely analogous to the second. The second stage gave us the auxiliary
words, which have decayed so to say, out of the class of significant
words. The third stage gives us the auxiliary words joined on to the
significant ones, and in their turn decaying to become mere inflexions.
I have called this growth of inflexions the _third_ stage. It is the
_third great_ stage in the formation of language, and is the only other
stage distinguishable when we are examining what is called an inflected
language. And all the languages the general reader is likely to know
belong to this class. But when we turn to a wider study of the various
tongues in use among mankind we find that this process of forming
inflexions is a very slow one, that it, in its turn, has gone through
many stages. And it is, in fact, the different stages through which a
language has passed on its road to the formation of inflexions which
settles the class in which it is to be placed among the various tongues
spoken by mankind.
We shall soon understand what are these further stages in
language-formation. As far as we have been able to see at present, the
inflexion presents itself as something added on to the significant word
to give it a varied meaning. It is evidently therefore part of a new
process through which language has to go after it has completed its
original stock of sounds, namely, the formation of fresh words by
joining together two others which already exist. This is a process
which, no doubt, in some shape or other, began in the very earliest
ages, and which is to this day going on continually. The simpler form of
it is the joining together two words which are significant when they
stand alone to form a third word expressing a new idea; just as we have
joined ‘ant’ to ‘hill’ and formed _ant-hill_, which is a different idea
than either _ant_ or _hill_ taken alone. In the words _playful_,
_joyful_, again, we have the same process carried rather further. The
words mean simply play-full, ‘full of play,’ joy-full, ‘full of joy.’
But we do not in reality quite think of this meaning when we use them.
The termination _ful_ has become half-meaningless by itself, and in
doing so we observe it has slightly changed its original form.
But far more important in the history of language is the joining of the
meaningless or auxiliary words on to other words of the first, the
significant class, whereby in the course of time the inflexions of
language have been formed. Although _we_ always put the meaningless
qualifying word before the chief word, and say ‘on the rock,’ or ‘under
the rock,’ it is more natural to man, as is shown by all languages, to
put the principal idea first, and say ‘rock on,’ ‘rock under,’ the idea
_rock_ being of course the chief idea, the part of the rock, or position
in relation to the rock, coming after. So the first step towards forming
grammar was the getting a number of meaningless words, and joining them
on to the substantive, ‘rock,’ ‘rock-by,’ ‘rock-in,’ ‘rock-to,’ etc. So
with the verb. The essential idea in the verb is the action itself, the
next idea is the time or person in which the action takes place; and the
natural thing for man to do is to make the words follow that order. The
joining process would give us from _love_, the idea of loving, ‘love-I,’
‘love-thou,’ ‘love-he,’ etc.; and for the imperfect ‘love-was-I,’
‘love-was-thou,’ ‘love-was-he,’ ‘love-was-we,’ ‘love-was-ye,’
‘love-was-they;’ for perfect ‘love-have-I,’ ‘love-have-thou,’
‘love-have-he,’ etc. Of course, these are merely illustrations, but they
make the mode of this early joining process clearer than if we had
chosen a language where that process is actually found in its purity,
and then translated the forms into their English equivalents.
We have now arrived at a stage in the formation of language where both
_meaning_ and _meaningless_ words have been introduced, and where words
have been made up out of combinations of the two. We see at once that
with regard to meaningless words the use of them would naturally be
fixed very much by tradition and custom; and whereas there might be a
great many words standing for _ant_ and _hill_, and therefore a great
many ways of saying ant-hill, for the meaningless words, such as _under_
and _on_, there would probably be only a few words. The reason of this
is very plain. While all the separate synonyms for _hill_ expressed
different ways in which it struck the mind, either as being high, or
large, or steep, or what not, for _under_ and _on_, being meaningless
words not producing any _picture_ in the mind, only one word apiece or
one or two words could very well be in use. So long as _under_ and _on_
were significant words, meaning, perhaps, as we imagined, _head of_, or
_foot of_, there would be plenty of synonyms for them; but only one or
two out of all these would be handed down in their meaningless forms.
And it is this very fact which, as we have seen, accounts for all the
grammars of all languages, every one of those grammatical terminations
which we know so well in Latin and Greek, and German, having been
originally nothing else than meaningless words added on to modify the
words which still retained their meaning. We saw before that it was much
more natural for people to say ‘rock-on’ or ‘hand-in’ than ‘on the rock’
or ‘in the hand’--because rock and hand were the most important ideas
and came first into the mind, while _on_, _in_, etc., were only
subsidiary ideas depending upon the important ones. If we stop at rock
or hand without adding _on_ and _in_, we have still got something
definite upon which our thoughts can rest, but we could not possibly
stop at _on_ and _in_ alone, and have any idea in our minds at all. It
is plain enough therefore that, though we say ‘on the rock,’ we must
have the _idea_ of all the three words in our mind before we begin the
phrase, and therefore that our words do not follow the natural order of
our ideas; whereas rock-on, hand-in, show the ideas just in the way they
come into the mind.
It is a fact, then, that all case-endings arose from adding on
meaningless words to the end of the word, the noun or pronoun--_Mann_,
_des mann-es_, _dem Mann-e_; _hom-o_, _hom-inis_, _hom-ini_: the
addition to the root in every case was once a distinct word of the
auxiliary kind, or derived from such a word. The meanings of
case-endings such as these cannot, it is true, be discovered now, for
they came into existence long before such languages as German or Latin
were spoken, and their meanings were lost sight of in ages which passed
before history. But that time when the terminations which are
meaningless now had a meaning, and the period of transition between this
state and the state of a language which is full of grammatical changes
inexplicable to those who use them, form distinct epochs in the history
of every language. And it is just the same with verb-endings as with the
case endings--_ich bin_, _du bist_, really express the ‘I’ and ‘thou’
twice over, as the pronouns exist though hidden and lost sight of in the
_-n_ and _-st_ of the verb. In the case of verbs, indeed, we may without
going far give some idea of how these endings can be detected. We may
say at once that Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, French,
Italian, Spanish, German, English, Norse, Gaelic, Welsh, Lithuanian,
Russian, and other Slavonic languages are all connected together in
various degrees of relationship, all descended from one common ancestor,
some being close cousins, and some very distant. Now in Sanskrit ‘I am’
is thus declined:--
_as-mi_ I am.
_a-si_ thou art.
_as-ti_ he is.
_’-smas_ we are.
_’s-tha_ ye are.
_’s-anti_ they are.
By separating the root from the ending in this way we may the more
easily detect the additions to the root, and their meanings. _As_ is the
root expressing the idea of being, existing; _mi_ is from a root meaning
_I_ (preserved in _me_, Greek and Lat. _me_, _mi_, _m[ich]_, etc.); so
we get _as-mi_, am-I, or I am. Then we may trace this form of word
through a number of languages connected with the Sanskrit. The most
important part of _as-mi_, the consonants, are preserved in the Latin
_sum_, I am, from which, by some further changes come the French _suis_,
the Italian _sono_: the same word appears in our _a-m_, and in the Greek
_eimi_ (Doric _esmi_), I am. Next, coming to the second word, we see one
of the _s’s_ cut out, and we get _a-si_, in which the _a_ is the root,
and the _si_ the addition signifying _thou_. To this addition correspond
the final _s’s_ in the Latin _es_, French _es_--_tu es_, and the Greek
_eis_ (Doric _essi_). So, again, in _as-ti_, the _ti_ expresses he, and
this corresponds to the Latin _est_, French _est_, the Greek _esti_, the
German _ist_; in the English the expressive _t_ has been lost. We will
not continue the comparison of each word; it will be sufficient if we
place side by side the same tense in Sanskrit and in Latin,[24] and give
those who do not know Latin an opportunity of recognizing for themselves
the tense in its changed form in French or Italian:--
ENGLISH. SANSKRIT. LATIN.
I am _as-mi_ _sum_.
thou art _a-si_ _es_.
he is _as-ti_ _est_.
we are _’s-mas_ _sumus_.
ye are _’s-tha_ _estis_.
they are _’s-anti_ _sunt_.
The plural of the added portion we see contains the letters _m-s_, and
if we split these up again we get the separate roots _mi_ and _si_, so
that _mas_ means most literally ‘I,’ and ‘thou,’ and hence ‘we.’ In the
second person the Latin has preserved an older form than the Sanskrit,
_s-t_ the proper root-consonants for the addition part of the second
person plural, combining the ideas thou and he, from which, ye. The
third person plural cannot be so easily explained.
It will be seen that in the English almost all likeness to the Sanskrit
terminations has been lost. Our verb ‘to be’ is very irregular, being,
in fact, a mixture of several distinct verbs. The Anglo-Saxon had the
verb _beó_ contracted from _beom_ (here we have at least the _m-_ ending
for I), I am, _byst_, thou art, _bydh_, he is, and the same appear in
the German _bin_, _bist_. It is, of course, very difficult to trace the
remains of the meaningless additions in such advanced languages as ours,
or even in such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. Nevertheless, the reader
may find it not uninteresting to trace in the Latin through most of the
tenses of verbs these endings--_m_, for I, the first person; _s_, for
thou, the second person; _t_, for he, the third person; _m-s_, for I and
thou, we; _st_, for ye, thou and he, ye; _nt_, for they. And the same
reader must be content to take on trust the fact that other additions
corresponding to different tenses can also be shown or reasonably
guessed to have been words expressive by themselves of the idea which
belongs to the particular tense; so that where we have such a tense as--
_amabam_ I was loving,
_amabas_ thou wast loving,
_amabat_, _etc._ he was loving,
we may recognize the meaning of the component parts thus:--
_ama-ba-m_ love-was-I.
_ama-ba-s_ love-was-thou.
_ama-ba-t_ love-was-he.
Of course, really to show the way in which these meaningless additions
have been made and come to be amalgamated with the root, we should have
to take examples from a great number of languages in different stages of
development. But we have thought it easier, for mere explanation, to
take only such languages as were likely to be familiar to the reader,
and even to supplement these examples with imaginary ones--like
‘rock-on,’ ‘love-was-I,’ etc.--in English. For our object has been at
first merely to give an intelligible account of how language has been
formed, of the different stages it has passed through, and to leave to a
future time the question as to which languages of the globe have passed
through all these stages, and which have gone part of their way in the
formation of a perfect language. Between the state of a language in
which the meaning of all the separate parts of a word are recognized and
that state where they are entirely lost, there is an immense gap, that
indeed which separates the most from the least advanced languages of the
world.
[Sidenote: Monosyllabic Language.]
Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone through the
stage of forming meaningless words, and is therefore possessed of words
of both classes. They no longer say ‘head-of-rock’ or ‘foot-of-rock,’
but ‘rock-on’ and ‘rock-under.’ But there are still known languages in
which almost every syllable is a word, and where grammar properly
speaking is scarcely needed. For grammar, if we come to consider it
exactly, is the explanation of the meaning of those added syllables or
letters which have lost all natural meaning of their own. If each part
of the word were as clear and as intelligible as ‘rock-on’ we should
have no need of a grammar at all. A language of this sort is called a
monosyllabic or a radical language, not because the people only speak
in monosyllables, but because each word, however compound, can be split
up into monosyllables or _roots_, which have a distinctly recognizable
meaning. ‘Ant-hill-on’ or ‘love-was-I,’ are like the words of such a
language.
[Sidenote: Agglutinative language.]
The next stage of growth is where the meaning of the added parts has
been lost sight of, except when it is connected with the word which it
modifies; but where the essential word has a distinct idea by itself,
and without the help of any addition. Suppose, for instance, through
ages of change the ‘was I’ in our imaginary example got corrupted into
‘wasi,’ where _wasi_ had no meaning by itself, but was used to express
the first person of the past tense. The first person past of love would
be ‘love-wasi,’ of move ‘move-wasi,’ and so on, ‘wasi’ no longer having
a meaning by itself, but ‘love’ and ‘move’ by themselves being perfectly
understandable. Or, to take an actual declension from a Turanian
language,--
_bakar-im_ I regard,
_bakar-sin_ thou regardest,
_bakar_ he regards,
_bakar-iz_ we regard,
_bakar-siniz_ you regard,
_bakar-lar_ they regard,
where, as we see, the root remains entirely unaffected by the addition
of the personal pronoun.
A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative stage,[25]
because certain grammatical endings (like ‘wasi’) are merely as it were
glued on to a root to change its meaning, while the root itself remains
quite unaffected, and means neither less nor more than it did before.
[Sidenote: Inflected language.]
But, as ages pass on, the root and the addition get so closely combined
that neither of them alone has, as a rule, a distinct meaning, and the
language arrives at its third stage of grammar-formation. It is not
difficult to find examples of a language in this condition, for such is
the case with all the languages by which we are surrounded. All the
tongues which the majority of us are likely to study, almost all those
which have any literature at all, have arrived at this last stage, which
is called the inflexional. For instance, though we might divide
_actionis_ into two parts _actio_ and _nis_, and say that the former
contains the essential idea, and the addition the idea implied by the
genitive case, there are only a few Latin words with which such a
process is possible, and even in the case of _actio_ the separation is
somewhat misleading. In _homo_ the real root is _hom_, and the genitive
is not homo-nis but _hominis_. So, again, though we were able to
separate ‘asmi’ into two parts--‘as’ and ‘mi’--one expressing the idea
of being, the other the person ‘I,’ this distinction is the refinement
of the grammarian, and would never have been recognized by an ordinary
speaker of Sanskrit, for whom ‘asmi’ simply meant ‘I am,’ without
distinction of parts. In our ‘am’ the grammarian recognizes that the ‘a’
expresses existence, and the ‘m’ expresses I; but so completely have we
lost sight of this, that we repeat the ‘I’ before the verb. Just the
same in Latin. No Roman could have recognized in the ‘s’ of _sum_ ‘am’
and in the ‘m’ ‘I;’ for him _sum_ meant simply and purely ‘I am.’ It was
no more separable in his eyes than the French _êtes_ (Latin _estis_) in
_vous êtes_ is separable into a root ‘es,’ contracted in the French into
‘ê,’ meaning _are_, and an addition ‘tes’ signifying _you_. This, then,
is the last stage upon which language enters. It is called the
inflexional or inflected stage, because the different grammatical
changes are not now denoted by a mere addition to an intelligible word,
but by a change in the word itself. The root may in many cases remain
and be recognizable in its purity, but very frequently it is
unrecognizable, so that the different case-or tense-endings can no
longer be looked upon as additions, but as changes. Take almost any
Latin substantive, and we see this: _homo_, a man, the genitive is
formed by changing _homo_ into _hominis_, or, if we please, adding
something to the root _hom_--which has in itself no meaning; _musa_
changes into _musæ_; and so forth.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The five stages in the formation of language.]
And now to recapitulate. We have in tracing the growth of language
discovered first of all two stages whereby the material of the language
was formed: the class of what we have called the meaning or significant
words came into being, and out of this was formed the second class of
so-called meaningless or auxiliary words. These two stages were in the
main passed through before any known language came into existence; for
there is no known language which does not contain words of both these
classes; albeit the second stage is likewise a process which is still
going on, as in the examples chosen, where _even_ and _just_ pass from
being adjectives into _even_ and _just_ the adverbs, and the French
substantives _pas_ and _point_ take a like change of meaning.
These first two stages passed, there follow three other stages which go
to the formation of the grammar of a language: first the stage of merely
coupling words together, so as to form fresh words--the _monosyllabic_
state; then the stage in which one part of the additional word has lost
its meaning while the root-word remains unchanged--the stage called the
_agglutinative_ condition of language; and, finally the stage in which
the added portion has become to some extent absorbed into the
root-word--which last stage is the _inflected_ condition of a language.
When we have come to this inflexional state, the history of the growth
of language comes to an end. It happens indeed, sometimes, that a
language which has arrived at the inflected stage may in time come to
drop nearly all its inflexions. This has been the case with English and
French. Both are descended from languages which had elaborate
grammars--the Saxon and the Latin; but both, through an admixture with
foreign tongues and from other causes, have come to drop almost all
their grammatical forms. We show our grammar only in a few changes in
our ordinary verbs--the second and third persons singular, _thou goest_,
_he goes_; the past tense and the past participle, _use_, _used_; _buy_,
_bought_, etc.; in further variations in our auxiliary verb ‘to be;’ by
changes in our pronouns, _I_, _me_, _ye_, _you_, _who_, _whom_, etc.;
and by the ‘’s’ and ‘s’ of the possessive case and of the plural, and
the comparison of adjectives. The French preserve their grammar to some
extent in their pronouns, their adjectives, the plurals of their nouns,
and in their verbs. Instances such as these are cases of decay, and do
not find any place in the history of the growth of language.
We now pass on to examine where the growth of language has been fully
achieved, where it has remained only stunted and imperfect.