are really different. The vulgar tongue is a class dialect, and a
vulgarism is an element of the normal speech of low-class people,
just as ordinary dialect words are elements of the natural speech of
peasants in one particular district; slang words, on the other hand,
are words used in conscious contrast to the natural or normal speech:
they can be found in all classes of society in certain moods, and
on certain occasions when a speaker wants to avoid the natural or
normal word because he thinks it too flat or uninteresting and wants
to achieve a different effect by breaking loose from the ordinary
expression. A vulgarism is what will present itself at once to the
mind of a person belonging to one particular class; a slang word is
something that is wilfully substituted for the first word that will
present itself. The distinction will perhaps appear most clearly in the
case of grammar: if a man says _them boys_ instead of _those boys_,
or _knowed_ instead of _knew_, these are the normal forms of his
language, and he knows no better, but the educated man looks down upon
these forms as vulgar. Inversely, an educated man may amuse himself
now and then by using forms which he perfectly well knows are not the
received forms, thus _wunk_ from _wink_, _collode_ from _collide_,
_praught_ from _preach_ (on the analogy of _taught_); “We handshook and
_candlestuck_, as somebody said, and went to bed” (H. James). But, of
course, slang is more productive in the lexical than in the grammatical
portion of language. And there is something that makes it difficult in
practice always to keep slang and vulgar speech apart, namely, that
when a person wants to leave the beaten path of normal language he is
not always particular as to the source whence he takes his unusual
words, and he may therefore sometimes take a vulgar word and raise it
to the dignity of a slang word.
A slang word is at first individual, but may through imitation become
fashionable in certain sets; after some time it may either be accepted
by everybody as part of the normal language, or else, more frequently,
be so hackneyed that no one finds pleasure in using it any longer.
Slang words may first be words from the ordinary language used in a
different sense, generally metaphorically. Sometimes we meet with the
same figurative expression in the slang of various countries, as when
the ‘head’ is termed _the upper story_ (_upper loft_, _upper works_)
in English, _øverste etage_ in Danish, and _oberstübchen_ in German;
more often different images are chosen in different languages, as
when for the same idea we have _nut_ or _chump_ in English and _pære_
(‘pear’) in Danish, _coco_ or _ciboule_ (or _boule_) in French. Slang
words of this character may in some instances give rise to expressions
the origin of which is totally forgotten. In old slang there is an
expression for the tongue, _the red rag_; this is shortened into
_the rag_, and I suspect that the verb _to rag_, ‘to scold, rate,
talk severely to’ (“of obscure origin,” NED), is simply from this
substantive (cf. _to jaw_).
Secondly, slang words may be words of the normal language used in
their ordinary signification, but more or less modified in regard to
form. Thus we have many shortened forms, _exam_, _quad_, _pub_, for
_examination_, _quadrangle_, _public-house_, etc. Not unfrequently
the shortening process is combined with an extension, some ending
being more or less arbitrarily substituted for the latter part of
the word, as when _football_ becomes _footer_, and _Rugby football_
and _Association football_ become _Rugger_ and _Socker_, or when at
Cambridge a freshman is called a _fresher_ and a bedmaker a _bedder_.
In schoolboys’ slang (Harrow) there is an ending _-agger_ which may be
added instead of the latter part of any word; about 1885 Prince Albert
Victor when at Cambridge was nicknamed _the Pragger_; an Agnostic was
called a _Nogger_, etc. I strongly suspect that the word _swagger_ is
formed in the same way from _swashbuckler_. Another schoolboys’ ending
is _-g_: _fog_, _seg_, _lag_, for ‘first, second, last,’ _gag_ at
Winchester for ‘gathering’ (a special kind of Latin exercise). Charles
Lamb mentions from Christ’s Hospital _crug_ for ‘a quarter of a loaf,’
evidently from _crust_; _sog_ = sovereign, _snag_ = snail (old), _swig_
= swill; words like _fag_, _peg away_, and others are perhaps to be
explained from the same tendency. Arnold Bennett in one of his books
says of a schoolboy that his vocabulary comprised an extraordinary
number of words ending in _gs_: _foggs_, _seggs_, for first, second,
etc. It is interesting to note that in French argot there are similar
endings added to more or less mutilated words: _-aque_, _-èque_,
_-oque_ (Sainéan, _L’Argot ancien_, 1907, 50 and especially 57).
There is also a peculiar class of roundabout expressions in which
the speaker avoids the regular word, but hints at it in a covert way
by using some other word, generally a proper name, which bears a
resemblance to it or is derived from it, really or seemingly. Instead
of saying ‘I want to go to bed,’ he will say, ‘I am for Bedfordshire,’
or in German ‘Ich gehe nach Bethlehem’ or ‘nach Bettingen,’ in Danish
‘gå til Slumstrup, Sovstrup, Hvilsted.’ Thus also ‘send a person to
Birching-lane,’ i.e. to whip him, ‘he has been at Hammersmith,’ i.e.
has been beaten, thrashed; ‘you are on the highway to Needham,’ i.e. on
the high-road to poverty, etc. (Cf. my paper on “Punning or Allusive
Phrases” in _Nord. Tidsskr. f. Fil._ 3 r. 9. 66.)
The language of poetry is closely related to slang, in so far as both
strive to avoid commonplace and everyday expressions. The difference is
that where slang looks only for the striking or unexpected expression,
and therefore often is merely eccentric or funny (sometimes only
would-be comic), poetry looks higher and craves abiding beauty--beauty
in thought as well as beauty in form, the latter obtained, among other
things, by rhythm, alliteration, rime, and harmonious variety of vowel
sounds.
In some countries these forms tend to become stereotyped, and then may
to some extent kill the poetic spirit, poetry becoming artificiality
instead of art; the later Skaldic poetry may serve as an illustration.
Where there is a strong literary tradition--and that may be found
even where there is no written literature--veneration for the old
literature handed down from one’s ancestors will often lead to a
certain fossilization of the literary language, which becomes a shrine
of archaic expressions that no one uses naturally or can master without
great labour. If this state of things persists for centuries, it
results in a cleavage between the spoken and the written language which
cannot but have the most disastrous effects on all higher education:
the conditions prevailing nowadays in Greece and in Southern India
may serve as a warning. Space forbids me more than a bare mention of
this topic, which would deserve a much fuller treatment; for details
I may refer to K. Krumbacher, _Das Problem der neugriechischen
Schriftsprache_, Munich, 1902 (for the other side of the case see G. N.
Hatzidakis, _Die Sprachfrage in Griechenland_, Athens, 1905) and G. V.
Ramamurti, _A Memorandum on Modern Telugu_, Madras, 1913.
FOOTNOTES:
[65] “His pronunciation of some words is so distinct that an idea
crossed me once that he might be an actor” (Shaw, _Cashel Byron’s
Profession_, 66).
[66] Dickens, _D. Cop._ 2. 149 neverbe_rr_er, 150 I’mafraid
you’reno_r_well (ib. also _r_ for _n_: Amigoa_r_awaysoo, Goo_r_i = Good
night). | _Our Mut. Fr._ 602 le_rr_ers. | Thackeray, _Newc._ 163 _Whas_
that? | Anstey, _Vice V._ 328 _sh_upper, I _sh_pose, wha_rr_iplease,
say tha_rr_again. | Meredith, _R. Feverel_ 272 No_r_ a bi_r_ of it. |
Walpole, _Duch. of Wrex._ 323-4 non_sh_en_sh_, Wa_sh_ the matter? |
Galsworthy, _In Chanc._ 17 cur_sh_, un_sh_tood’m. Cf. also Fijn van
Draat, ESt 34. 363 ff.
[67] The inconveniences arising from having many homophones in a
language are eloquently set forth by Robert Bridges, _On English
Homophones_ (S.P.E., Oxford, 1919)--but I would not subscribe to
all the Laureate’s views, least of all to his practical suggestions
and to his unjustifiable attacks on some very meritorious English
phoneticians. He seems also to exaggerate the dangers, e.g. of the two
words _know_ and _no_ having the same sound, when he says (p. 22) that
unless a vowel like that in _law_ be restored to the negative _no_,
“I should judge that the verb _to know_ is doomed. The third person
singular of its present tense is _nose_, and its past tense is _new_,
and the whole inconvenience is too radical and perpetual to be received
all over the world.” But surely the rôle of these words in connected
speech is so different, and is nearly always made so clear by the
context, that it is very difficult to imagine real sentences in which
there would be any serious change of mistaking _know_ for _no_, or
_knows_ for _nose_, or _knew_ for _new_. I repeat: it is not homophony
as such--the phenomenon shown in the long lists lexicographers can
draw up of words of the same sound--that is decisive, but the chances
of mistakes in connected speech. It has been disputed whether the loss
of Gr. _humeîs_, ‘ye,’ was due to its identity in sound with _hemeîs_,
‘we’; Hatzidakis says that the new formation _eseîs_ is earlier than
the falling together of _e_ and _u_ [y] in the sound [i]. But according
to Dieterich and C. D. Buck (_Classical Philology_, 9. 90, 1914) the
confusion of _u_ and _i_ or _e_ dates back to the second century.
Anyhow, all confusion is now obviated, for both the first and the
second persons pl. have new forms which are unambiguous: _emeîs_ and
_eseîs_ or _seîs_.
[68] The NED has not arrived at this explanation; it says: “_Peer_
is not a phonetic development of _pire_, and cannot, so far as is at
present known, be formally identified with that word”; “the verbs
_keek_, _peek_, and _peep_ are app. closely allied to each other.
_Kike_ and _pike_, as earlier forms of _keek_ and _peek_, occur in
Chaucer; _pepe_, _peep_ is of later appearance.... The phonetic
relations between the forms _pike_, _peek_, _peak_, are as yet
unexplained.”
[69] See, for instance, the following strong expressions: “Une
langue est sans cesse rongée et menacée de ruine par l’action des
lois phonétiques, qui, livrées à elles-mêmes, opéreraient avec une
régularité fatale et désagrégeraient le système grammatical....
Heureusement l’analogie (c’est ainsi qu’on désigne la tendance
inconsciente à conserver ou recréer ce que les lois phonétiques
menacent ou détruisent) a peu à peu effacé ces différences ... il
s’agit d’une perpétuelle dégradation due aux changements phonétiques
aveugles, et qui est toujours ou prévenue ou réparée par une
réorganisation parallèle du système” (Bally, LV 44 f.).
[70] Some speakers will say [su·] in _Susan_, _supreme_,
_superstition_, but will take care to pronounce [sju·] in _suit_,
_sue_. Others are more consistent one way or the other.
[71] I.e. “With confused and indistinct articulation; also, with a
husky or hoarse voice”--NED.
[72] Even in speaking a foreign language one may unconsciously apply
phonetic correspondences; a countryman of mine thus told me that he
once, in his anger at being charged an exorbitant price for something,
exclaimed: “Das sind doch _unblaue_ preise!”--coining in the hurry the
word _unblaue_ for the Danish _ublu_ (shameless), because the negative
prefix _un-_ corresponds to Dan. _u-_, and _au_ very often stands in
German where Dan. has _u_ (_haus_ = _hus_, etc.). On hearing his own
words, however, he immediately saw his mistake and burst out laughing.
_BOOK IV_
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE
CHAPTER XVI
ETYMOLOGY
§ 1. Achievements. § 2. Doubtful Cases. § 3. Facts, not Fancies. § 4.
Hope. § 5. Requirements. § 6. Blendings. § 7. Echo Words. § 8. Some
Conjunctions. § 9. Object of Etymology. § 10. Reconstruction.
XVI.--§ 1. Achievements.
Few things have been more often quoted in works on linguistics than
Voltaire’s _mot_ that in etymology vowels count for nothing and
consonants for very little. But it is now said just as often that the
satire might be justly levelled at the pseudo-scientific etymology of
the eighteenth century, but has no application to our own times, in
which etymology knows how to deal with both vowels and consonants,
and--it should be added, though it is often forgotten--with the
meanings of words. One often comes across outbursts of joy and pride in
the achievements of modern etymological science, like the following,
which is quoted here _instar omnium_: “Nowadays etymology has got past
the period of more or less ‘happy thoughts’ (glücklichen einfälle) and
has developed into a science in which, exactly as in any other science,
serious persevering work must lead to reliable results” (H. Schröder,
_Ablautstudien_, 1910, X; cf. above, Max Müller and Whitney, p. 89).
There is no denying that much has been achieved, but it is equally true
that a skeptical mind cannot fail to be struck with the uncertainty of
many proposed explanations: very often scholars have not got beyond
‘happy thoughts,’ many of which have not even been happy enough to have
been accepted by anybody except their first perpetrators. From English
alone, which for twelve hundred years has had an abundant written
literature, and which has been studied by many eminent linguists, who
have had many sister-languages with which to compare it, it would be
an easy matter to compile a long list of words, well-known words of
everyday occurrence, which etymologists have had to give up as beyond
their powers of solution (_fit_, _put_, _pull_, _cut_, _rouse_, _pun_,
_fun_, _job_). And equally perplexing are many words now current all
over Europe, some of them comparatively recent and yet completely
enigmatic: _race_, _baron_, _baroque_, _rococo_, _zinc_.
XVI.--§ 2. Doubtful Cases.
Or let us take a word of that class which forms the staple subject
of etymological disquisitions, one in which the semantic side is
literally as clear as sunshine, namely the word for ‘sun.’ Here we
have, among others, the following forms: (1) _sun_, OE. _sunne_, Goth.
_sunno_; (2) Dan., Lat. _sol_, Goth. _sauil_, Gr. _hḗlios_; (3) OE.
_sigel_, _sægl_, Goth. _sugil_; (4) OSlav. _slǔnǐce_, Russ. _solnce_
(now with mute _l_). That these forms are related cannot be doubted,
but their mutual relation, and their relation to Gr. _selḗnē_, which
means ‘moon,’ and to OE. _swegel_ ‘sky,’ have never been cleared up.
Holthausen derives _sunno_ from the verb _sinnan_ ‘go’ and OE. _sigel_
from the verb _sigan_ ‘descend, go down’--but is it really probable
that our ancestors should have thought of the sun primarily as the one
that goes, or that sets? The word _south_ (orig. *_sunþ_; the _n_ as
in OHG. _sund_ is still kept in Dan. _sønden_) is generally explained
as connected with _sun_, and the meaning ‘sunny side’ is perfectly
natural; but now H. Schröder thinks that it is derived from a word
meaning ‘right’ (OE. _swiðre_, orig. ‘stronger,’ a comparative of the
adj. found in G. _geschwind_), and he says that the south is to the
right when you look at the sun at sunrise--which is perfectly true, but
why should people have thought of the south as being to the right when
they wanted to speak of it in the afternoon or evening?
Let me take one more example to show that our present methods, or
perhaps our present data, sometimes leave us completely in the lurch
with regard to the most ordinary words. We have a series of words which
may all, without any formal difficulties, be referred to a root-form
_seqw-_. Their significations are, respectively--
(1) ‘say,’ E. _say_, OE. _secgan_, ON. _segja_, G. _sagen_, Lith.
_sakýti_. To this is referred Gr. _énnepe_, _eníspein_, Lat.
_inseque_ and possibly _inquam_.
(2) ‘show, point out,’ OSlav. _sočiti_, Lat. _signum_.
(3) ‘see,’ E. _see_, OE. _seon_, Goth. _saihwan_, G. _sehen_, etc.
(4) ‘follow,’ Lat. _sequor_, Gr. _hépomai_, Skr. _sácate_. Here
belongs Lat. _socius_, OE. _secg_ ‘man,’ orig. ‘follower.’
Now, are these four groups ‘etymologically identical’? Opinions differ
widely, as may be seen from C. D. Buck, “Words of Speaking and Saying”
(_Am. Journ. of Philol._ 36. 128, 1915). They may be thus tabulated, a
comma meaning supposed identity and a dash the opposite:
1, 2-3, 4 Kluge, Falk, Torp.
1, 2, 3-4 Brugmann.
1, 2, 3, 4 Wood, Buck.[73]
For the transition in meaning from ‘see’ to ‘say’ we are referred
to such words as _observe_, _notice_, G. _bemerkung_, while in
G. _anweisen_, and still more in Lat. _dico_, there is a similar
transition from ‘show’ to ‘say.’ Wood derives the signification
‘follow’ from ‘point out,’ through ‘show, guide, attend.’ With regard
to the relation between 3 and 4, it has often been said that to see is
to follow with the eyes. In short, it is possible, if you take some
little pains, to discover notional ties between all four groups which
may not be so very much looser than those between other words which
everybody thinks related. And yet? I cannot see that the knowledge we
have at present enables us, or can enable us, to do more than leave
the mutual relation of these groups an open question. One man’s guess
is just as good as another’s, or one man’s yes as another man’s no--if
the connexion of these words is ‘science,’ it is, if I may borrow
an expression from the old archæologist Samuel Pegge, _scientia ad
libitum_. Personal predilection and individual taste have not been
ousted from etymological research to the extent many scholars would
have us believe.
Or we may perhaps say that among the etymologies found in dictionaries
and linguistic journals some are solid and firm as rocks, but others
are liquid and fluctuate like the sea; and finally not a few are in
a gaseous state and blow here and there as the wind listeth. Some of
them are no better than poisonous gases, from which may Heaven preserve
us![74]
XVI.--§ 3. Facts, not Fancies.
As early as 1867 Michel Bréal, in an excellent article (reprinted
in M 267 ff.), called attention to the dangers resulting from the
general tendency of comparative linguists to “jump intermediate steps
in order at once to mount to the earliest stages of the language,”
but his warning has not taken effect, so that etymologists in dealing
with a word found only in comparatively recent times will often try to
reconstruct what might have been its Proto-Aryan form and compare that
with some word found in some other language. Thus, Falk and Torp refer
G. _krieg_ to an Aryan primitive form *_grêigho-_, *_grîgho-_, which is
compared with Irish _bríg_ ‘force.’ But the German word is not found
in use till the middle period; it is peculiar to German and unknown in
related languages (for the Scandinavian and probably also the Dutch
words are later loans from Germany). These writers do not take into
account how improbable it is that such a word, if it were really an
old traditional word for this fundamental idea, should never once have
been recorded in any of the old documents of the whole of our family of
languages. What should we think of the man who would refer _boche_, the
French nickname for ‘German’ which became current in 1914, and before
that time had only been used for a few years and known to a few people
only, to a Proto-Aryan root-form? Yet the method in both cases is
identical; it presupposes what no one can guarantee, that the words in
question are of those which trot along the royal road of language for
century after century without a single side-jump, semantic or phonetic.
Such words are the favourites of linguists because they have always
behaved themselves since the days of Noah; but others are full of the
most unexpected pranks, which no scientific ingenuity can discover if
we do not happen to know the historical facts. Think of _grog_, for
example. Admiral Vernon, known to sailors by the nickname of “Old Grog”
because he wore a cloak of grogram (this, by the way, from Fr. _gros
grain_), in 1740 ordered a mixture of rum and water to be served out
instead of pure rum, and the name was transferred from the person to
the drink. If it be objected that such leaps are found only in slang,
the answer is that slang words very often become recognized after some
time, and who knows but that may have been the case with _krieg_ just
as well as with many a recent word?
At any rate, facts weigh more than fancies, and whoever wants to
establish the etymology of a word must first ascertain all the
historical facts available with regard to the place and time of its
rise, its earliest signification and syntactic construction, its
diffusion, the synonyms it has ousted, etc. Thus, and thus only, can
he hope to rise above loose conjectures. Here the great historical
dictionaries, above all the Oxford _New English Dictionary_, render
invaluable service. And let me mention one model article outside
these dictionaries, in which Hermann Möller has in my opinion given a
satisfactory solution of the riddle of G. _ganz_: he explains it as a
loan from Slav _konǐcǐ_ ‘end,’ used especially adverbially (perhaps
with a preposition in the form _v-konec_ or _v-konc_) ‘to the end,
completely’; Slav _c_ = G. _z_, Slav _k_ pronounced essentially as
South G. _g_; the gradual spreading and various significations and
derived forms are accounted for with very great learning (_Zs. f. D.
Alt._ 36. 326 ff.). It is curious that this article should have been
generally overlooked or neglected, though the writer seems to have met
all the legitimate requirements of a scientific etymology.
XVI.--§ 4. Hope.
I have endeavoured to fulfil these requirements in the new explanation
I have given of the word _hope_ (Dan. _håbe_, Swed. _hoppas_, G.
_hoffen_), now used in all Gothonic tongues in exactly the same
signification. Etymologists are at variance about this word. Kluge
connects it with the OE. noun _hyht_, and from that form infers that
Gothonic *_hopôn_ stands for *_huqôn_, from an Aryan root _kug_; he
says that a connexion with Lat. _cupio_ is scarcely possible. Walde
likewise rejects connexion between _cupio_ and either _hope_ or
Goth. _hugjan_. To Falk and Torp _hope_ has probably nothing to do
with _hyht_, but probably with _cupio_, which is derived from a root
*_kup_ = _kvap_, found in Lat. _vapor_ ‘steam,’ and with a secondary
form *_kub_, in _hope_, and *_kvab_ in Goth. _af-hwapjan_ ‘choke’--a
wonderful medley of significations. H. Möller (_Indoeur.-Semit.
sammenlignende Glossar._ 63), in accordance with his usual method,
establishes an Aryo-Semitic root *_k̑-u̯-_, meaning ‘ardere’ and
transferred to ‘ardere amore, cupiditate, desiderio,’ the root being
extended with _b-_: _p-_ in _hope_ and _cupio_, with _gh-_ in Goth.
_hugs_, and with _g̑-_ in OE. _hyht_. Surely a typical example of the
perplexity of our etymologists, who disagree in everything except
just in the one thing which seems to me extremely doubtful, that
_hope_ with the present spiritual signification goes back to common
Aryan. Now, what are the real facts of the matter? Simply these, that
the word _hope_ turns up at a comparatively late date in historical
times at one particular spot, and from there it gradually spreads to
the neighbouring countries. In Denmark (_håb_, _håbe_) and in Sweden
(_hopp_, _hoppas_) it is first found late in the Middle Ages as a
religious loan from Low German _hope_, _hopen_. High German _hoffen_
is found very rarely about 1150, but does not become common till a
hundred years later; it is undoubtedly taken (with sound substitution)
from Low German and moves in Germany from north to south. Old Saxon
has the subst. _tō-hopa_, which has probably come from OE., where we
have the same form for the subst., _tō-hopa_. This is pretty common
in religious prose, but in poetry it is found only once (Boet.)--a
certain indication that the word is recent. The subst. without _tō_
is comparatively late (Ælfric, ab. 1000). The verb is found in rare
instances about a hundred years earlier, but does not become common
till later. Now, it is important to notice that the verb in the old
period never takes a direct object, but is always connected with the
preposition _tō_ (compare the subst.), even in modern usage we have
_to hope to_, _for_, _in_. Similarly in G., where the phrase was _auf
etwas hoffen_; later the verb took a genitive, then a pronoun in the
accusative, and finally an ordinary object; in biblical language we
find also _zu gott hoffen_. Now, I would connect our word with the
form _hopu_, found twice as part of a compound in _Beowulf_ (450 and
764), where ‘refuge’ gives good sense: _hopan to_, then, is to ‘take
one’s refuge to,’ and _to-hopa_ ‘refuge.’ This verb I take to be at
first identical with _hop_ (the only OE. instance I know of this is
Ælfric, _Hom._ 1. 202: _hoppode ongean his drihten_). We have also one
instance of a verb _onhupian_ (_Cura Past._ 441) ‘draw back, recoil,’
which agrees with ON. _hopa_ ‘move backwards’ (to the quotations in
Fritzner may be added Laxd. 49, 15, þeir Osvígssynir hopudu undan).[75]
The original meaning seems to have been ‘bend, curb, bow, stoop,’
either in order to leap, or to flee, from something bad, or towards
something good; cf. the subst. _hip_, OE. _hype_, Goth. _hups_, Dan.
_hofte_, G. _hüfte_, Lat. _cubitus_, etc. (Holthausen, _Anglia Beibl._,
1904, 350, deals with these words, but does not connect them with
_hop_, _-hopu_, or _hope_.) The transition from bodily movement to the
spiritual ‘hope’ may have been favoured by the existence of the verb
OE. _hogian_ ‘think,’ but is not in itself more difficult than with,
e.g., Lat. _ex(s)ultare_ ‘leap up, rejoice,’ or Dan. _lide på_ ‘lean
to, confide in, trust,’ _tillid_ ‘confidence, reliance’; and a new
word for ‘hope’ was required because the old _wen_ (Goth. _wens_), vb.
_wenan_, had at an early age acquired a more general meaning ‘opinion,
probability,’ vb. ‘suppose, imagine.’ The difficulty that the word for
‘hope’ has single or short _p_ (in Swed., however, _pp_), while _hop_,
OE. _hoppian_, has double or long _p_, is no serious hindrance to our
etymology, because the gemination may easily be accounted for on the
principle mentioned below (Ch. XX § 9), that is, as giving a more vivid
expression of the rapid action.
XVI.--§ 5. Requirements.
It is, of course, impossible to determine once for all by hard-and-fast
rules how great the correspondence must be for us to recognize two
words as ‘etymologically identical,’ nor to say to which of the two
sides, the phonetic and the semantic, we should attach the greater
importance. With the rise of historical phonology the tendency has been
to require exact correspondence in the former respect, and in semantics
to be content with more or less easily found parallels. One example
will show how particular many scholars are in matters of sound. The
word _nut_ (OE. _hnutu_, G. _nuss_, ON. _hnot_, Dan. _nød_) is by Paul
declared “not related to Lat. _nux_” and by Kluge “neither originally
akin with nor borrowed from Lat. _nux_,” while the NED does not even
mention _nux_ and thus must think it quite impossible to connect it
with the English word. We have here in two related languages two
words resembling each other not only in sound, but in stem-formation
and gender, and possessing exactly the same signification, which is
as concrete and definite as possible. And yet we are bidden to keep
them asunder! Fortunately I am not the first to protest against such
barbarity: H. Pedersen (KZ n.f. 12. 251) explains both words from
*_dnuk-_, which by metathesis has become *_knud-_, while Falk and Torp
as well as Walde think the latter form the original one, which in Latin
has been shifted into *_dnuk-_. Which of these views is correct (both
may be wrong) is of less importance than the victory of common sense
over phonological pedantry.
There are two explanations which have had very often to do duty where
the phonological correspondence is not exact, namely root-variation
(root-expansion with determinatives) and apophony (ablaut). Of
the former Uhlenbeck (PBB 30. 252) says: “The theory of root
determinatives no doubt contains a kernel of truth, but it has only
been fatal to etymological science, as it has drawn the attention from
real correspondences between well-substantiated words to delusive
similarities between hypothetical abstractions.” Apophony inspires
more confidence, and in many cases offers fully reliable explanations;
but this principle, too, has been often abused, and it is difficult
to find its true limitations. Many special applications of it appear
questionable; thus, when G. _stumm_, Dan. _stum_, is explained as an
apophonic form of the adj. _stam_, Goth. _stamms_, from which we have
the verb _stammer_, G. _stammeln_, Dan. _stamme_: is it really probable
that the designation of muteness should be taken from the word for
stammering? This appears especially improbable when we consider that
at the time when the new word _stumm_ made its appearance there was
already another word for ‘mute,’ namely _dumm_, _dumb_, the word which
has been preserved in English. I therefore propose a new etymology:
_stumm_ is a blending of the two synonyms _still(e)_ and _dum(b)_,
made up of the beginning of the one and the ending of the other word;
through adopting the initial _st-_ the word was also associated with
_stump_, and we get an exact correspondence between _dumm_, _dum_,
_stumm_, _stum_, applied to persons, and _dumpf_, _stumpf_, Dan.
_dump_, _stump_, applied to things. Note that in those languages (G.,
Dan.) in which the new word _stum(m)_ was used, the unchanged _dum(m)_
was free to develop the new sense ‘stupid’ (or was the creation
of _stum_ occasioned by the old word tending already to acquire
this secondary meaning?), while _dumb_ in English stuck to the old
signification.
XVI.--§ 6. Blendings.
Blendings of synonyms play a much greater rôle in the development of
language than is generally recognized. Many instances may be heard in
everyday life, most of them being immediately corrected by the speaker
(see above, XV § 4), but these momentary lapses cannot be separated
from other instances which are of more permanent value because they
are so natural that they will occur over and over again until speakers
will hardly feel the blend as anything else than an ordinary word.
M. Bloomfield (IF 4. 71) says that he has been many years conscious
of an irrepressible desire to assimilate the two verbs _quench_ and
_squelch_ in both directions by forming _squench_ and _quelch_, and
he has found the former word in a negro story by Page. The expression
‘irrepressible desire’ struck me on reading this, for I have myself in
my Danish speech the same feeling whenever I am to speak of tending
a patient, for I nearly always say _plasse_ as a result of wavering
between _pleje_ [_plaiə_] and _passe_. Many examples may be found in
G. A. Bergström, _On Blendings of Synonymous or Cognate Expressions
in English_, Lund, 1906, and Louise Pound, _Blends, Their Relation
to English Word Formation_, Heidelberg, 1914. But neither of these
two writers has seen the full extent of this principle of formation,
which explains many words of greater importance than those nonce words
which are found so plentifully in Miss Pound’s paper. Let me give some
examples, some of them new, some already found by others:
_blot_ = _bl_emish, _bl_ack + sp_ot_, p_lot_, d_ot_; there is also an
obsolete sp_lot_.
_blunt_ = _bl_ind + st_unt_.
_crouch_ = _cr_inge, _cr_ook, _cr_awl, †_crou_k + _couch_.
_flush_ = _fl_a_sh_ + b_lush_.
_frush_ = _fr_og + th_rush_ (all three names of the same disease in
a horse’s foot).
_glaze_ (Shakespeare) = _gla_re + _gaze_.
_good-bye_ = _good_-night, _good_-morning + _godbye_ (God be with ye).
_knoll_ = _kn_e_ll_ + t_oll_.
_scroll_ = _scrow_ + _roll_.
_slash_ = _sl_ay, _sl_ing, _sl_at + g_ash_, d_ash_.
_slender_ = _sl_ight (_sl_im) + t_ender_.
Such blends are especially frequent in words expressive of sounds or in
some other way symbolical, as, for instance:
_flurry_ = _fl_ing, _fl_ow and many other _fl_-words + h_urry_ (note
also sc_urry_).
_gruff_ = _gru_m, _gr_im + _rough_.
_slide_ = _sl_ip + g_lide_.
_troll_ = _tr_i_ll_ + _roll_ (in some senses perhaps rather from
_tr_ead, _tr_undle + _roll_).
_twirl_ = _tw_ist + _whirl_.
In slang blends abound, e.g.:
_tosh_ (Harrow) = _t_ub + w_ash_. (Sometimes explained as _toe-wash_.)
_blarmed_ = _bl_a_med_, _bl_essed and other _bl_-words + d_arned_
(damned).
_be danged_ = _da_mned + h_anged_.
_I swow_ = _swe_ar + v_ow_.
_brunch_ = _br_eakfast + l_unch_ (so also, though more rarely
_brupper_ (... + s_upper_), _tunch_ (_t_ea + l_unch_), _tupper_ =
_t_ea + s_upper_).[76]
XVI.--§ 7. Echo-words.
Most etymologists are very reluctant to admit echoism; thus Diez
rejects onomatopœic origin of It. _pisciare_, Fr. _pisser_--an
echo-word if ever there was one--and says, “One can easily go too far
in supposing onomatopœia: as a rule it is more advisable to build on
existing words”; this he does by deriving this verb from a non-existing
*_pipisare_, _pipsare_, from _pipa_ ‘pipe, tube.’ Falk and Torp refer
_dump_ (Dan. _dumpe_) to Swed. _dimpa_, a Gothonic root _demp_,
supposed to be an extension of an Aryan root _dhen_: thus they are too
deaf to hear the sound of the heavy fall expressed by _um(p)_, cf. Dan.
_bumpe_, _bums_, _plumpe_, _skumpe_, _jumpe_, and similar words in
other languages.
It may be fancy, but I think I hear the same sound in Lat. _plumbum_,
which I take to mean at first not the metal, but the plummet that
was dumped or plumped into the water and was denominated from the
sound; as this was generally made of lead, the word came to be used
for the metal. Most etymologists take it for granted that _plumbum_
is a loan-word, some being honest enough to confess that they do not
know from what language, while others without the least scruple or
hesitation say that it was taken from Iberian: our ignorance of that
language is so deep that no one can enter an expert’s protest against
such a supposition.[77] But if my hypothesis is right, the words
_plummet_ (from OFr. _plommet_, a diminutive of _plomb_) as well as the
verb Fr. _plonger_, whence E. _plunge_, from Lat. *_plumbicare_, are
not only derivatives from _plumbum_ (the only thing mentioned by other
scholars), but also echo-words, and they, or at any rate the verb, must
to a great extent owe their diffusion to their felicitously symbolic
sound. In a novel I find: “Plump went the lead”--showing how this sound
is still found adequate to express the falling of the lead in sounding.
The NED says under the verb _plump_: “Some have compared L. _plumbare_
... to throw the lead-line ... but the approach of form between
_plombar_ and the LG. _plump-plomp_ group seems merely fortuitous”
(!). I see sound symbolism in _all_ the words _plump_, while the NED
will only allow it in the most obvious cases. From the sound of a body
plumping into the water we have interesting developments in the adverb,
as in the following quotations: I said, _plump_ out, that I couldn’t
stand any more of it (Bernard Shaw) | The famous diatribe against
Jesuitism points _plumb_ in the same direction (Morley) | fall _plum_
into the jaws of certain critics (Swift) | Nollie was a _plumb_ little
idiot (Galsworthy). In the last sense ‘entirely’ it is especially
frequent in America, e.g. They lost their senses, _plumb_ lost their
senses (Churchill) | she’s _plum_ crazy, it’s _plum_ bad, etc. Related
words for fall, etc., are _plop_, _plout_, _plunk_, _plounce_. Much
might also be said in this connexion of various _pop_ and _bob_ words,
but I shall refrain.
XVI.--§ 8. Some Conjunctions.
Sometimes obviously correct etymologies yet leave some psychological
points unexplained. One of my pet theories concerns some adversative
conjunctions. Lat. _sed_ has been supplanted by _magis_: It. _ma_,
Sp. _mas_, Fr. _mais_. The transition is easily accounted for; from
‘more’ it is no far cry to ‘rather’ (cf. G. _vielmehr_), which can
readily be employed to correct or gainsay what has just been said.
The Scandinavian word for ‘but’ is _men_, which came into use in the
fifteenth century and is explained as a blending of _meden_ in its
shortened form _men_ (now _mens_) ‘while’ and Low German _men_ ‘but,’
which stands for older _niwan_, from the negative _ni_ and _wan_
‘wanting’; the meaning has developed through that of ‘except’ and the
sound is easily understood as an instance of assimilation. The same
phonetic development is found in Dutch _maar_, OFris. _mar_, from _en
ware_ ‘were not,’ the same combination which has yielded G. _nur_.
Thus we have four different ways of getting to expressions for ‘but,’
none of which presents the least difficulty to those familiar with the
semantic ways of words. But why did these various nations seize on new
words? Weren’t the old ones good enough?
Here I must call attention to two features that are common to these
new conjunctions, first their syntactic position, which is invariably
in the beginning of the sentence, while such synonymous words as Lat.
_autem_ and G. _aber_ may be placed after one or more words; then their
phonetic agreement in one point: _magis_, _men_, _maar_ all begin
with _m_. Now, both these features are found in two words for ‘but,’
about whose etymological origin I can find no information, Finnic
_mutta_ and Santal _menkhan_, as well as in _me_, which is used in the
_Ancrene Riwle_ and a few other early Middle English texts and has been
dubiously connected with the Scandinavian (and French?) word. How are
we to explain these curious coincidences? I think by the nature of the
sound [m], which is produced when the lips are closed while the tongue
rests passively and the soft palate is lowered so as to allow air to
escape through the nostrils--in short, the position which is typical
of anybody who is quietly thinking over matters without as yet saying
anything, with the sole difference that in his case the vocal chords
are passive, while they are made to vibrate to bring forth an _m_.
Now, it very often happens that a man wants to say something, but has
not yet made up his mind as to _what_ to say; and in this moment of
hesitation, while thoughts are in the process of conception, the lungs
and vocal chords will often be prematurely set going, and the result
is [m] (sometimes preceded by the corresponding voiceless sound),
often written _hm_ or _h’m_, which thus becomes the interjection of
an unshaped contradiction. Not infrequently this [m] precedes a real
word; thus _M’yes_ (written in this way by Shaw, _Misalliance_ 154, and
Merrick, _Conrad_ 179) and Dan. _mja_, to mark a hesitating consent.
This will make it clear why words beginning with _m_ are so often
chosen as adversative conjunctions: people begin with this sound and go
on with some word that gives good sense and which happens to begin with
_m_: _mais_, _maar_. The Dan. _men_ in the mouth of some early speakers
is probably this [m], sliding into the old conjunction _en_, just as
_myes_ is _m_ + _yes_; while other original users of _men_ may have
been thinking of _men_ = _meden_, and others again of Low German _men_:
these three etymologies are not mutually destructive, for all three
origins may have concurrently contributed to the popularity of _men_.
Modern Greek and Serbian _ma_ are generally explained as direct loans
from Italian, but may be indigenous, as may also dialectal Rumanian
_ma_ in the same sense, for in the hesitating [m] as the initial sound
of objections we have one of those touches of nature which make the
whole world kin.[78]
XVI.--§ 9. Object of Etymology.
What is the object of etymological science? “To determine the true
signification of a word,” answers one of the masters of etymological
research (Walde, _Lat. et. Wörterb._ xi). But surely in most cases that
can be achieved without the help of etymology. We know the true sense
of hundreds of words about the etymology of which we are in complete
ignorance, and we should know exactly what the word _grog_ means, even
if the tradition of its origin had been accidentally lost. Many people
still believe that an account of the origin of a name throws some light
on the essence of the thing it stands for; when they want to define
say ‘religion’ or ‘civilization,’ they start by stating the (real or
supposed) origin of the name--but surely that is superstition, though
the first framers of the name ‘etymology’ (from Gr. _etumon_ ‘true’)
must have had the same idea in their heads. Etymology tells us nothing
about the things, nor even about the present meaning of a word, but
only about the way in which a word has come into existence. At best, it
tells us not what _is_ true, but what _has been_ true.
The overestimation of etymology is largely attributable to the
“conviction that there can be nothing in language that had not an
intelligible purpose, that there is nothing that is now irregular that
was not at first regular, nothing irrational that was not originally
rational” (Max Müller)--a conviction which is still found to underlie
many utterances about linguistic matters, but which readers of the
present volume will have seen is erroneous in many ways. On the whole,
Max Müller naïvely gives expression to what is unconsciously at the
back of much that is said and believed about language; thus, when he
says (L 1. 44): “I must ask you at present to take it for granted
that everything in language had originally a meaning. As language
can have no other object but to express our meaning, it might seem
to follow almost by necessity that language should contain neither
more nor less than what is required for that purpose.” Yes, so it
would if language had been constructed by an omniscient and omnipotent
being, but as it was developed by imperfect human beings, there is
every possibility of their having failed to achieve their purpose and
having done either more or less than was required to express their
meaning. It would be wrong to say that language (i.e. speaking man)
created first what was strictly necessary, and afterwards what might
be considered superfluous; but it would be equally wrong to say that
linguistic luxuries were always created before necessaries; yet that
view would probably be nearer the truth than the former. Much of
what in former ages was felt to be necessary to express thoughts was
afterwards felt as pedantic crisscross and gradually eliminated; but at
all times many things have been found in language that can never have
been anything else but superfluous, exactly as many people use a great
many superfluous gestures which are not in the least significant and
in no way assist the comprehension of their intentions, but which they
somehow feel an impulse to perform. In language, as in life generally,
we have too little in some respects, and too much in others.
XVI.--§ 10. Reconstruction.
Kluge somewhere (PBB 37. 479, 1911) says that the establishment of
the common Aryan language is the chief task of our modern science
of linguistics (to my mind it can never be more than a fragment of
that task, which must be to understand the nature of language), and
he thinks optimistically that “reconstructions with their reliable
methods have taken so firm root that we are convinced that we know the
common Aryan _grundsprache_ just as thoroughly as any language that
is more or less authenticated through literature.” This is a palpable
exaggeration, for no one nowadays has the courage of Schleicher to
print even the smallest fable in Proto-Aryan, and if by some miraculous
accident we were to find a text written in that language we may be sure
it would puzzle us just as much as Tokharian does.
Reconstruction has two sides, an outer and an inner. With regard to
sounds, it seems to me that very often the masters of linguistics treat
us to reconstructed forms that are little short of impossible. This
is not the place to give a detailed criticism of the famous theory of
‘nasalis sonans,’ but I hope elsewhere to be able to state why I think
this theory a disfiguring excrescence on linguistic science: no one has
ever been able to find in any existing language such forms as _mnto_
with stressed syllabic [n], given as the old form of our word _mouth_
(Falk and Torp even give _stmnto_ in order to connect the word with Gr.
_stóma_), or as _dkmtóm_ (whence Lat. _centum_, etc.) or _bhrghnti̯es_
or _gu̯mskete_ (Brugmann). Not only are these forms phonetically
impossible, but the theory fails to explain the transitions to the
forms actually existing in real languages, and everything is much
easier if we assume forms like [ʌm, ʌn] with some vowel like that of E.
_un-_. The use in Proto-Aryan reconstructions of non-syllabic _i_ and
_u_ also in some respects invites criticism, but it will be better to
treat these questions in a special paper.
Semantic reconstruction calls for little comment here. It is evident
from the nature of the subject that no such strict rules can be given
in this domain as in the domain of sound; but nowadays scholars are
more realistic than formerly. Most of them will feel satisfied when
_moon_ and _month_ are associated with words having the same two
significations in related languages, without indulging in explanations
of both from a root _me_ ‘to measure’; and when our _daughter_ has
been connected with Gr. _thugáter_, Skt. _duhitár_ and corresponding
words in other languages, no attempt is made to go beyond the meaning
common to these words ‘daughter’ and to speculate what had induced our
ancestors to bestow that word on that particular relation, as when
Lassen derived it from the root _duh_ ‘to milk’ and pictured an idyllic
family life, in which it was the business of the young girls to milk
the cows, or when Fick derived the same word from the root _dheugh_
‘to be useful’ (G. _taugen_: ‘wie die _magd_, _maid_ von _mögen_’),
as if the daughters were the only, or the most, efficient members of
the family. Unfortunately, such speculations are still found lingering
in many recent handbooks of high standing: Kluge hesitates whether to
assign the word _mutter_, _mother_, to the root _ma_ in the sense ‘mete
out’ or in the sense found in Sanskrit ‘to form,’ used of the fœtus in
the womb. A resigned acquiescence in inevitable ignorance and a sense
of reality should certainly be characteristics of future etymologists.
FOOTNOTES:
[73] With regard to Lat. _signum_ it should be noted that it is by
others explained as coming from Lat. _secare_ and as meaning a notch.
[74] It is, of course, impossible to say how great a proportion of the
etymologies given in dictionaries should strictly be classed under
each of the following heads: (1) certain, (2) probable, (3) possible,
(4) improbable, (5) impossible--but I am afraid the first two classes
would be the least numerous. Meillet (Gr 59) has some excellent remarks
to the same effect; according to him, “pour une étymologie sûre, les
dictionnaires en offrent plus de dix qui sont douteuses et dont, en
appliquant une méthode rigoureuse, on ne saurait faire la preuve.”
[75] Westphalian also has _hoppen_ ‘zurückweichen,’ ESt. 54. 88.
[76] Lewis Carrol’s ‘portmanteau words’ are, of course, famous.
[77] Speculation has been rife, but without any generally accepted
results, as to the relation between _plumbum_ and words for the same
metal in cognate languages: Gr. _molibos_, _molubdos_ and similar
forms, Ir. _luaide_, E. _lead_ (G. _lot_, ‘plummet, half an ounce’),
Scand. _bly_, OSlav. _olovo_, OPruss. _alwis_; see Curtius, Prellwitz,
Boisacq, Hirt Idg. 686, Schrader _Sprachvergl. u. Urgesch._, 3d. ed.,
ii. 1. 95; Herm. Möller, _Sml. Glossar_ 87, says that _molibos_ and
_plumbum_ are extensions of the root _m-l_ ‘mollis esse’ and explains
the difference between the initial sounds by referring to _multum_:
comp. _plus_--certainly most ingenious, but not convincing. Some of
these words may originally have been echo-words for the plumping
plummet.
[78] I have discussed this more in detail and added other _m_-words of
a somewhat related character in _Studier tillegnade E. Tegnér_, 1918,
p. 49 ff.
CHAPTER XVII
PROGRESS OR DECAY?
§ 1. Linguistic Estimation. § 2. Degeneration? § 3. Appreciation of
Modern Tongues. § 4. The Scientific Attitude. § 5. Final Answer. § 6.
Sounds. § 7. Shortenings. § 8. Objections. Result. § 9. Verbal Forms.
§ 10. Synthesis and Analysis. § 11. Verbal Concord.
XVII.--§ 1. Linguistic Estimation.
The common belief of linguists that one form or one expression is
just as good as another, provided they are both found in actual use,
and that each language is to be considered a perfect vehicle for
the thoughts of the nation speaking it, is in some ways the exact
counterpart of the conviction of the Manchester school of economics
that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds if
only no artificial hindrances are put in the way of free exchange, for
demand and supply will regulate everything better than any Government
would be able to. Just as economists were blind to the numerous cases
in which actual wants, even crying wants, were not satisfied, so also
linguists were deaf to those instances which are, however, obvious
to whoever has once turned his attention to them, in which the very
structure of a language calls forth misunderstandings in everyday
conversation, and in which, consequently, a word has to be repeated
or modified or expanded or defined in order to call forth the idea
intended by the speaker: he took his stick--no, not John’s, but _his
own_; or: I mean _you_ in the plural (or, you all, or you girls);
no, a _box on the ear_; _un dé à jouer, non pas un dé à coudre_;
nein, ich meine _Sie persönlich_ (with very strong stress on _Sie_),
etc. Every careful writer in any language has had the experience
that on re-reading his manuscript he has discovered that a sentence
which he thought perfectly clear when he wrote it lends itself to
misunderstanding and has to be put in a different way; sometimes he
has to add a clarifying parenthesis, because his language is defective
in some respect, as when Edward Carpenter (_Art of Creation_ 171), in
speaking of the deification of the Babe, writes: “It is not likely
that Man--the human male--left to himself would have done this; but to
woman it was natural,” thus avoiding the misunderstanding that he was
speaking of the whole species, comprising both sexes. Herbert Spencer
writes: “Charles had recently obtained--a post in the Post Office I
was about to say, but the cacophony stopped me; and then I was about
to say, an office in the Post Office, which is nearly as bad; let me
say--a place in the Post Office” (_Autobiogr._ 2. 73--but of course
the defect is not really one of sound, as implied by the expression
‘cacophony,’ but one of signification, as both words _post_ and
_office_ are ambiguous, and the attempted collocation would therefore
puzzle the reader or hearer, because the same word would have to be
apprehended in two different senses in close succession). Similar
instances might be alleged from any language.
No language is perfect, but if we admit this truth (or truism), we must
also admit by implication that it is not unreasonable to investigate
the relative value of different languages or of different details
in languages. When comparative linguists set themselves against the
narrowmindedness of classical scholars who thought Latin and Greek the
only worthy objects of study, and emphasized the value of all, even the
least literary languages and dialects, they were primarily thinking
of their value to the scientist, who finds something of interest in
each of them, but they had no idea of comparing the relative value of
languages from the point of view of their users--and yet the latter
comparison is of much greater importance than the former.
XVII.--§ 2. Degeneration?
People will often use the expressions ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ in
connexion with language, but most linguists, when taken to task, will
maintain that these expressions as applied to languages should be used
without the implication which is commonly attached to them when used
of other objects, namely, that there is a progressive tendency towards
something better or nearer perfection. They will say that ‘evolution’
means here simply changes going on in languages, without any judgment
as to the value of these changes.
But those who do pronounce such a judgment nearly always take the
changes as a retrogressive rather than a progressive development:
“Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration,”
said Dr. Samuel Johnson in the Preface to his Dictionary, and the same
lament has been often repeated since his time. This is quite natural:
people have always had a tendency to believe in a golden age, that
is, in a remote past gloriously different to the miserable present.
Why not, then, have the same belief with regard to language, the more
so because one cannot fail to notice things in contemporary speech
which (superficially at any rate) look like corruptions of the ‘good
old’ forms? Everything ‘old’ thus comes to be considered ‘good.’
Lowell and others think they have justified many of the commonly
reviled Americanisms if they are able to show them to have existed in
England in the sixteenth century, and similar considerations are met
with everywhere. The same frame of mind finds support in the usual
grammar-school admiration for the two classical languages and their
literatures. People were taught to look down upon modern languages as
mere dialects or _patois_ and to worship Greek and Latin; the richness
and fullness of forms found in those languages came naturally to be
considered the very _beau idéal_ of linguistic structure. Bacon gives
a classical expression to this view when he declares “ingenia priorum
seculorum nostris fuisse multo acutiora et subtiliora” (_De augm.
scient._[79]). To men fresh from the ordinary grammar-school training,
no language would seem really respectable that had not four or five
distinct cases and three genders, or that had less than five tenses
and as many moods in its verbs. Accordingly, such poor languages
as had either lost much of their original richness in grammatical
forms (_e.g._ French, English, or Danish), or had never had any, so
far as one knew (_e.g._ Chinese), were naturally looked upon with
something of the pity bestowed on relatives in reduced circumstances,
or the contempt felt for foreign paupers. It is well known how in
West-European languages, in English, German, Danish, Swedish, Dutch,
French, etc., obsolete forms were artificially kept alive and preferred
to younger forms by most grammarians; but we see exactly the same
point of view in such a language as Magyar, where, under the influence
of the historical studies of the grammarian Révai, the belief in
the excellence of the ‘veneranda antiquitas’ as compared with the
corruption of the modern language has been prevalent in schools and in
literature. (See Simonyi US 259; cf. on Modern Greek and Telugu above,
p. 301.)
Comparative linguists had one more reason for adopting this manner of
estimating languages. To what had the great victories won by their
science been due? Whence had they got the material for that magnificent
edifice which had proved spacious enough to hold Hindus and Persians,
Lithuanians and Slavs, Greeks, Romans, Germans and Kelts? Surely it
was neither from Modern English nor Modern Danish, but from the oldest
stages of each linguistic group. The older a linguistic document was,
the more valuable it was to the first generation of comparative
linguists. An English form like _had_ was of no great use, but Gothic
_habaidedeima_ was easily picked to pieces, and each of its several
elements lent itself capitally to comparison with Sanskrit, Lithuanian
and Greek. The linguist was chiefly dependent for his material on
the old and archaic languages; his interest centred round their
fuller forms: what wonder, then, if in his opinion those languages
were superior to all others? What wonder if by comparing _had_ and
_habaidedeima_ he came to regard the English form as a mutilated and
worn-out relic of a splendid original? or if, noting the change from
the old to the modern form, he used strong language and spoke of
degeneration, corruption, depravation, decline, phonetic decay, etc.?
The view that the modern languages of Europe, Persia and India are far
inferior to the old languages, or the one old language, from which
they descend, we have already encountered in the historical part of
this work, in Bopp, Humboldt, Grimm and their followers. It looms very
large in Schleicher, according to whom the history of language is all a
Decline and Fall, and in Max Müller, who says that “on the whole, the
history of all the Aryan languages is nothing but a gradual process of
decay.” Nor is it yet quite extinct.
XVII.--§ 3. Appreciation of Modern Tongues.
Some scholars, however, had an indistinct feeling that this
unconditional and wholesale depreciation of modern languages could
not contain the whole truth, and I have collected various passages,
nearly always of a perfunctory or incidental character, in which these
languages are partly rehabilitated. Humboldt (Versch 284) speaks of
the modern use of auxiliary verbs and prepositions as a convenience
of the intellect which may even in some isolated instances lead to
greater definiteness. On Grimm see above, p. 62. Rask (SA 1. 191) says
that it is possible that the advantages of simplicity may be greater
than those of an elaborate linguistic structure. Madvig turns against
the uncritical admiration of the classical languages, but does not
go further than saying that the modern analytical languages are just
as good as the old synthetic ones, for thoughts can be expressed in
both with equal clearness. Kräuter (_Archiv f. neu. spr._ 57. 204)
says: “That decay is consistent with clearness and precision is shown
by French; that it is not fatal to poetry is seen in the language
of Shakespeare.” Osthoff (_Schriftspr. u. Volksmundart_, 1883, 13)
protests against a one-sided depreciation of the language of Lessing
and Goethe in favour of the language of Wulfila or Otfried, or vice
versa: a language possesses an inestimable charm if its phonetic system
remains unimpaired and its etymologies are transparent; but pliancy of
the material of language and flexibility to express ideas is really no
less an advantage; everything depends on the point of view: the student
of architecture has one point of view, the people who are to live in
the house another.
Among those who thus half-heartedly refused to accept the downhill
theory to its full extent must be mentioned Whitney, many passages in
whose writings show a certain hesitation to make up his mind on this
question. When speaking of the loss of old forms he says that “some
of these could well be spared, but others were valuable, and their
relinquishment has impaired the power of expression of the language.”
To phonetic corruption we owe true grammatical forms, which make the
wealth of every inflective language; but it is also destructive of the
very edifice which it has helped to build. He speaks of “the legitimate
tendency to neglect and eliminate distinctions which are practically
unnecessary,” and will not admit “that we can speak our minds any
less distinctly than our ancestors could, with all their apparatus of
inflexions”; gender is a luxury which any language can well afford to
dispense with, but language is impoverished by the obliteration of
the subjunctive mood. The giving up of grammatical endings is akin to
wastefulness, and the excessive loss in English makes truly for decay
(L 31, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, 85; G 51, 105, 104).
XVII.--§ 4. The Scientific Attitude.
Why are all such expressions either of depreciation or of partial
appreciation of the modern languages so utterly unsatisfactory? One
reason is that they are so vague and dependent on a general feeling
of inferiority or the reverse, instead of being based on a detailed
comparative estimation of real facts in linguistic structure. If,
therefore, we want to arrive at a scientific answer to the question
“Decay or progress?” we must examine actual instances of changes,
but must take particular care that these instances are not chosen at
random, but are typical and characteristic of the total structure of
the languages concerned. What is wanted is not a comparison of isolated
facts, but the establishment of general laws and tendencies, for only
through such can we hope to decide whether or no we are justified in
using terms like ‘development’ and ‘evolution’ in linguistic history.
The second reason why the earlier pronouncements quoted above do not
satisfy us is that their authors nowhere raise the question of the
method by which linguistic value is to be measured, by what standard
and what tests the comparative merits of languages or of forms are to
be ascertained. Those linguists who looked upon language as a product
of nature were by that very fact precluded from establishing a rational
basis for determining linguistic values; nor is it possible to find one
if we look at things from the one-sided point of view of the linguistic
historian. An almost comical instance of this is found when Curtius
(_Sprachwiss. u. class. phil._ 39) says that the Greek accusative
_póda_ is better than Sanskrit _padam_, because it is possible at once
to see that it belongs to the third declension. What is to be taken
into account is of course the interests of the speaking community,
and if we consistently consider language as a set of human actions
with a definite end in view, namely, the communication of thoughts
and feelings, then it becomes easy to find tests by which to measure
linguistic values, for from that point of view it is evident that THAT
LANGUAGE RANKS HIGHEST WHICH GOES FARTHEST IN THE ART OF ACCOMPLISHING
MUCH WITH LITTLE MEANS, OR, IN OTHER WORDS, WHICH IS ABLE TO EXPRESS
THE GREATEST AMOUNT OF MEANING WITH THE SIMPLEST MECHANISM.
The estimation has to be thoroughly and frankly _anthropocentric_.
This may be a defect in other sciences, in which it is a merit on the
part of the investigator to be able to abstract himself from human
considerations; in linguistics, on the contrary, on account of the very
nature of the object of study, one must constantly look to the human
interest, and judge everything from that, and from no other, point of
view. Otherwise we run the risk of going astray in all directions.
It will be noticed that my formula contains two requirements: it
demands a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of effort. Efficiency
means expressiveness, and effort means bodily and mental labour, and
thus the formula is simply one of modern energetics. But unfortunately
we are in possession of no method by which to measure either
expressiveness or effort exactly, and in cases of conflict it may be
difficult to decide to which of the two sides we are to attach the
greater importance, how great a surplus of efficiency is required to
counterbalance a surplus of exertion, or inversely. Still, in many
cases no doubt can arise, and we are often able to state progress,
because there is either a clear gain in efficiency or a diminution of
exertion, or both.
There is one objection which is likely to present itself to many of my
readers, namely, that natives handle their language without the least
exertion or effort (cf. XIV § 6, p. 262). Madvig (1857, 73 ff. = Kl 260
ff.) admits that a simplification in linguistic structure will make
the language easier to learn for foreigners, but denies that it means
increased ease for the native. Similarly Wechssler (L 149) says that
“der begriff der schwierigkeit und unbequemheit für die einheimischen
nicht existiert.” I might quote against him his countryman Gabelentz,
who expressly says that the difficulties of the German languages are
felt by natives, a view that is endorsed by Schuchardt in various
places.[80] To my mind there is not the slightest doubt that different
languages differ very much in easiness even to native speakers. In the
chapters devoted to children we have already seen that the numerous
mistakes made by them in every possible way testify to the labour
involved in learning one’s own language. This labour must naturally be
greater in the case of a highly complicated linguistic structure with
many rules and still more exceptions to the rules, than in languages
constructed simply and regularly.
Nor is the difficulty of correct speech confined to the first mastering
of the language. Even to the native who has spoken the same language
from a child, its daily use involves no small amount of exertion.
Under ordinary circumstances he is not conscious of any exertion
in speaking; but such a want of conscious feeling is no proof that
the exertion is absent. And it is a strong argument to the contrary
that it is next to impossible for you to speak correctly if you are
suffering from excessive mental work; you will constantly make slips in
grammar and idiom as well as in pronunciation; you have not the same
command of language as under normal conditions. If you have to speak
on a difficult and unfamiliar subject, on which you would not like to
say anything but what is to the point or strictly justifiable, you
will sometimes find that the thoughts themselves claim so much mental
energy that there is none left for speaking with elegance, or even
with complete regard to grammar: to your own vexation you will have a
feeling that your phrases are confused and your language incorrect. A
pianist may practise a difficult piece of music so as to have it “at
his fingers’ ends”; under ordinary circumstances he will be able to
play it quite mechanically, without ever being conscious of effort;
but, nevertheless, the effort is there. How great the effort is appears
when some day or other the musician is ‘out of humour,’ that is, when
his brain is at work on other subjects or is not in its usual working
order. At once his execution will be stumbling and faulty.
XVII.--§ 5. Final Answer.
I may here anticipate the results of the following investigation and
say that in all those instances in which we are able to examine the
history of any language for a sufficient length of time, we find that
languages have a progressive tendency. But if languages progress
towards greater perfection, it is not in a bee-line, nor are all the
changes we witness to be considered steps in the right direction. The
only thing I maintain is that _the sum total of these changes, when
we compare a remote period with the present time, shows a surplus of
progressive over retrogressive or indifferent changes_, so that the
structure of modern languages is nearer perfection than that of ancient
languages, if we take them as wholes instead of picking out at random
some one or other more or less significant detail. And of course it
must not be imagined that progress has been achieved through deliberate
acts of men conscious that they were improving their mother-tongue.
On the contrary, many a step in advance has at first been a slip
or even a blunder, and, as in other fields of human activity, good
results have only been won after a good deal of bungling and ‘muddling
along.’[81] My attitude towards this question is the same as that of
Leslie Stephen, who writes in a letter (_Life_ 454): “I have a perhaps
unreasonable amount of belief, not in a millennium, but in the world on
the whole blundering rather forwards than backwards.”
Schleicher on one occasion used the fine simile: “Our words, as
contrasted with Gothic words, are like a statue that has been rolling
for a long time in the bed of a river till its beautiful limbs have
been worn off, so that now scarcely anything remains but a polished
stone cylinder with faint indications of what it once was” (D 34). Let
us turn the tables by asking: Suppose, however, that it would be quite
out of the question to place the statue on a pedestal to be admired;
what if, on the one hand, it was not ornamental enough as a work of
art, and if, on the other hand, human well-being was at stake if it was
not serviceable in a rolling-mill: which would then be the better--a
rugged and unwieldy statue, making difficulties at every rotation, or
an even, smooth, easygoing and well-oiled roller?
After these preliminary considerations we may now proceed to a
comparative examination of the chief differences between ancient and
modern stages of our Western European languages.
XVII.--§ 6. Sounds.
The student who goes through the chapters devoted to sound changes
in historical and comparative grammars will have great difficulty
in getting at any great lines of development or general tendencies:
everything seems just haphazard and fortuitous; a long _i_ is here
shortened and there diphthongized or lowered into _e_, etc. The history
of sounds is dependent on surroundings in many, though not in all
circumstances, but surroundings do not always act in the same way;
in short, there seem to be so many conflicting tendencies that no
universal or even general rules can be evolved from all these ‘sound
laws.’ Still less would it seem possible to state anything about the
comparative value of the forms before and after the change, for it does
not seem to matter a bit for the speaking community whether it says
_stān_ as in Old English or _stone_ as now, and thus in innumerable
cases. Nay, from one point of view it may seem that any change
militates against the object of language (cf. Wechssler L 28), but this
is true only of the very moment when the change sets in while people
are accustomed to the old sound (or the old signification), and even
then the change is only injurious provided it impedes understanding or
renders understanding less easy, which is far from always being the
case.
There is one scholar who has asserted the existence of a universal
progressive tendency in languages, or, as he calls it, a humanization
of language, namely Baudouin de Courtenay (_Vermenschlichung der
Sprache_, 1893). He is chiefly thinking of the sound system,[82] and he
maintains that there is a tendency towards eliminating the innermost
articulations and using instead sounds that are formed nearer to the
teeth and lips. Thus some back (postpalatal, velar) consonants become
_p_, _b_, while others develop into _s_ sounds; cf. Slav _slovo_
‘word’ with Lat. _cluo_, etc. Baudouin also mentions the frequent
palatalization of back consonants, as in French and Italian _ce_, _ci_,
_ge_, _gi_, but as this is due to the influence of the following front
vowel, it should not perhaps be mentioned as a universal tendency of
human language. It is further said that throat sounds, which play
such a great rôle in Semitic languages, have been discarded in most
modern languages. But it may be objected that sometimes throat sounds
do develop in modern periods, as in the Danish ‘stød’ and in English
dialectal _bu’er_ for _butter_, etc. A universal tendency of sounds
to move away from the throat cannot be said to be firmly established;
but for our purpose it is more important to say that even were it
true, the value of such a tendency for the speaking community would
not be great enough to justify us in speaking of progress towards a
truly ‘human’ language as opposed to the more beastlike language of
our primeval ancestors. It is true that Baudouin (p. 25) says that it
is possible to articulate in the front and upper part with less effort
and with greater precision than in the interior and lower parts of
the speaking apparatus, but if this is true with regard to the mouth
proper, it cannot be maintained with regard to the vocal chords, where
very important effects may be produced in the most precise way by
infinitely little exertion. Thus in no single point can I see that
Baudouin de Courtenay has made out a strong case for _his_ conception
of ‘humanization of language.’
XVII.--§ 7. Shortenings.
But there is another phonetic tendency which is much more universal
and infinitely more valuable than the one asserted by Baudouin de
Courtenay, namely, the tendency to shorten words. Words get shorter
and shorter in consequence of a great many of those changes that we
see constantly going on in all languages: vowels in weak syllables are
pronounced more and more indistinctly and finally disappear altogether,
as when OE. _lufu_, _stānas_, _sende_, through ME. _luve_, _stanes_,
_sende_ with pronounced _e_’s, have become our modern monosyllables
_love_, _stones_, _send_, or when Latin _bonum_, _homo_, _viginti_
have become Fr. _bon_, _on_, _vingt_, and Lat. _bona_, _hominem_,
Fr. _bonne_, _homme_, where the vowel was kept, because it was _a_
or protected by the consonant group, but has now also disappeared in
normal pronunciation. Final vowels have been dropped extensively in
Danish and German dialects, and so have the _u_’s and _i_’s in Russian,
which are now kept in the spelling merely as signs of the quality of
the preceding consonant. It would be easy to multiply instances. Nor
are the consonants more stable; the dropping of final ones is seen most
easily in Modern French, because they are retained in spelling, as in
_tout_, _vers_, _champ_, _chant_, etc. In the two last examples two
consonants have disappeared, the _m_ and _n_, however, leaving a trace
in the nasalized pronunciation of the vowel, as also in _bon_, _nom_,
etc. Final _r_ and _l_ often disappear in Fr. words like _quatre_,
_simple_, and medial consonants have been dropped in such cases as
_côte_ from _coste_, _bête_ from _beste_, _sauf_ [so·f] from _salvo_,
etc. We have corresponding omissions in English, where in very old
times _n_ was dropped in such cases as _us_, _five_, _other_, while
the German forms _uns_, _fünf_, _ander_ have kept the old consonants;
in more recent times _l_ was dropped in _half_, _calm_, etc., _gh_ [x]
in _light_, _bought_, etc., and _r_ in the prevalent pronunciation of
_warm_, _part_, etc. Initial consonants are more firmly fixed in many
languages, yet we see them lost in the E. combinations _kn_, _gn_,
_wr_, where _k_, _g_, _w_ used to be sounded, e.g. in _know_, _gnaw_,
_wrong_. Consonant assimilation means in most cases the same thing as
dropping of one consonant, for no trace of the consonant is left, at
any rate after the compensating lengthening has been given up, as is
often the case, e.g. in E. _cupboard_, _blackguard_ [kʌbəd, blæga·d].
So far we have given instances of what might be called the most regular
or constant types of phonetic change leading to shorter forms; but
the same result is the natural outcome of a process which occurs more
sporadically. This is haplology, by which one sound or one group of
sounds is pronounced once only instead of twice, the hearer taking it
through a kind of acoustic delusion as belonging both to what precedes
and to what follows. Examples are _a goo(d) deal_, _wha(t) to do_,
_nex(t) time_, _simp(le)ly_, _England_ from _Englaland_, _eighteen_
from OE. _eahtatiene_, _honesty_ from _honestete_, _Glou(ce)ster_,
_Worcester_ [wustə], familiarly _pro(ba)bly_, vulgarly _lib(ra)ry_,
_Febr(uar)y_. From other languages may be quoted Fr. _cont(re)rôle_,
_ido(lo)lâtre_, _Neu(ve)ville_, Lat. _nu(tri)trix_, _sti(pi)pendium_,
It. _qual(che)cosa_, _cosa_ for _che cosa_, etc. (Cf. my LPh 11. 9.)
The accumulation through centuries of such influences results in those
instances of seemingly violent contractions with which every student of
historical linguistics is familiar. One classical example has already
been mentioned above, E. _had_, corresponding to Gothic _habaidedeima_;
other examples are _lord_, with its three or four sounds, which was
formerly _laverd_, and in Old English _hlāford_; the old Gothonic form
of the same word contained indubitably as many as twelve sounds; Latin
_augustum_ has in French through _aoust_ become _août_, pronounced [au]
or even [u]; Latin _oculum_ has shrunk into four sounds in Italian
_occhio_, three in Spanish _ojo_, and two in Fr. _œil_; It. _medesimo_,
Sp. _mismo_ and Fr. _même_ represent various stages of the shrinking of
Lat. _metipsimum_; cf. also Fr. _ménage_ from _mansion-_ + _-aticum_.
Primitive Norse _ne veit ek hvat_ ‘not know I what’ has become Dan.
_noget_ ‘something,’ often pronounced [no·ð] or [nɔ·ð].
In all these cases the shortening process has taken centuries, but
we have other instances in which it has come about quite suddenly,
without any intermediate stages, namely, in those stump-words which
we have already considered (Ch. IX § 7; cf. XIV § 12 on corresponding
syntactical shortenings).
XVII.--§ 8. Objections. Result.
There cannot therefore be the slightest doubt that the general
tendency of all languages is towards shorter and shorter forms: the
ancient languages of our family, Sanskrit, Zend, etc., abound in
very long words; the further back we go, the greater the number of
_sesquipedalia_. It cannot justly be objected that we see sometimes
examples of phonetic lengthenings, as in E. _sound_ from ME. _soun_,
Fr. _son_, E. _whilst_, _amongst_ from ME. _whiles_, _amonges_;
a similar excrescence of _t_ after _s_ is seen in G. _obst_,
_pabst_, Swed. _eljest_ and others; after _n_, _t_ is added in G.
_jemand_, _niemand_ (two syllables, while there is nothing added to
the trisyllabic _jedermann_)--for even if such instances might be
multiplied, their number and importance is infinitely smaller than
those in the opposite direction. (On the seeming insertion of _d_ in
_ndr_, see p. 264, note). In some cases we witness a certain reaction
against word forms that are felt to be too short and therefore too
indistinct (see Ch. XV § 1, XX § 9), but on the whole such instances
are few and far between: the prevailing tendency is towards shorter
forms.
Another objection must be dealt with here. It is said that it is only
the purely phonetic development that tends to make words shorter,
but that in languages as wholes words do not become shorter, because
non-phonetic forces counteract the tendency. In modern languages we
thus have some analogical formations which are longer than the forms
they have supplanted, as when _books_ has one sound more than OE.
_bēc_, or when G. _bewegte_ takes the place of _bewog_. Further, we
have in modern languages many auxiliary words (prepositions, modal
verbs) in places where they were formerly not required. That this
objection is not valid if we take the whole of the language into
consideration may perhaps be proved statistically if we compute the
length of the same long text in various languages: the Gospel of St.
Matthew contains in Greek about 39,000 syllables, in Swedish about
35,000, in German 33,000, in Danish 32,500, in English 29,000, and in
Chinese only 17,000 (the figures for the Authorized English Version
and for Danish are my own calculation; the other figures I take from
Tegnér SM 51, Hoops in _Anglia_, _Beiblatt_ 1896, 293, and Sturtevant
LCh 175). In comparing these figures it should even be taken into
consideration that translations naturally tend to be more long-winded
and verbose than the original, so that the real gain in shortness may
be greater than indicated.[83]
Next, we come to consider the question whether the tendency towards
shorter forms is a valuable asset in the development of languages or
the reverse. The answer cannot be doubtful. Take the old example,
English _had_ and Gothic _habaidedeima_: the English form is
preferable, on the principle that anyone who has to choose between
walking one mile and four miles will, other things being equal, prefer
the shorter cut. It is true that if we take words to be self-existing
natural objects, _habaidedeima_ has the air of a giant and _had_ of
a mere pigmy: this valuation lies at the bottom of many utterances
even by recent linguistic thinkers, as when Sweet (H 10) speaks of
the vanishing of sounds as “a purely destructive change.” But if we
adopt the anthropocentric standard which has been explained above, and
realize that what we call a word is really and primarily the combined
action of human muscles to produce an audible effect, we see that the
shortening of a form means a diminution of effort and a saving of time
in the communication of our thoughts. If, as it is said, _had_ has
suffered from wear and tear in the long course of time, this means that
the wear and tear of people now using this form in their speech is less
than if they were still encumbered with the old giant _habaidedeima_.
Voltaire was certainly very wide of the mark when he wrote: “C’est le
propre des barbares d’abréger les mots”--long and clumsy words are
rather to be considered as signs of barbarism, and short and nimble
ones as signs of advanced culture.
Though I thus hold that the development towards shorter forms of
expression is _on the whole_ progressive, i.e. beneficial, I should not
like to be too dogmatic on this point and assert that it is _always_
beneficial: shortness may be carried to excess and thus cause obscurity
or difficulty of understanding. This may be seen in the telegraphic
style as well as in the literary style of some writers too anxious to
avoid prolixity (some of Pope’s lines might be quoted in illustration
of the classical: brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio). But in the case of
the language of a whole community the danger certainly is very small
indeed, for there will always be a natural and wholesome reaction
against such excessive shortness. There is another misunderstanding
I want to guard against when saying that the shortening makes on the
whole for progress. It must not be thought that I lay undue stress on
this point, which is after all chiefly concerned with a greater or
smaller amount of physical or muscular exertion: this should neither be
underrated nor overrated; but it will be seen that neither in my former
work nor in this does the consideration of this point of mere shortness
or length take up more than a fraction of the space allotted to the
more psychical sides of the question, to which we shall now turn our
attention and to which I attach much more importance.
XVII.--§ 9. Verbal Forms.
We may here recur to Schleicher’s example, E. _had_ and Gothic
_habaidedeima_. It is not only in regard to economy of muscular
exertion that the former carries the day over the latter. _Had_
corresponds not only to _habaidedeima_, but it unites in one short form
everything expressed by the Gothic _habaida_, _habaides_, _habaidedu_,
_habaideduts_, _habaidedum_, _habaideduþ_, _habaidedun_, _habaidedjau_,
_habaidedeis_, _habaidedi_, _habaidedeiwa_, _habaidedeits_,
_habaidedeima_, _habaidedeiþ_, _habaidedeina_--separate forms for
two or three persons in three numbers in two distinct moods! It is
clear, therefore, that the English form saves a considerable amount
of brainwork to all English-speaking people--not only to children,
who have fewer forms to learn, but also to adults, who have fewer
forms to choose between and to keep distinct whenever they open their
mouths to speak. Someone might, perhaps, say that on the other hand
English people are obliged always to join personal pronouns to their
verbal forms to indicate the person, and that this is a drawback
counterbalancing the advantage, so that the net result is six of
one and half a dozen of the other. This, however, would be a very
superficial objection. For, in the first place, the personal pronouns
are the same for all tenses and moods, but the endings are not.
Secondly, the possession of endings does not exempt the Goths from
having separate personal pronouns; and whenever these are used, as is
very often the case in the first and second persons, those parts of
the verbal endings which indicate persons are superfluous. They are
no less superfluous in those extremely numerous cases in which the
subject is either separately expressed by a noun or is understood from
the preceding proposition, thus in the vast majority of the cases of
the third person. If we compare a few pages of Old English prose with
a modern rendering we shall see that in spite of the reduction in the
latter of the person-indicating endings, personal pronouns are not
required in any great number of sentences in which they were dispensed
with in Old English. So that, altogether, the numerous endings of the
older languages must be considered uneconomical.
If Gothic, Latin and Greek, etc., burden the memory by the number
of their flexional endings, they do so even more by the many
irregularities in the formation of these endings. In all the languages
of this type, anomaly and flexion invariably go together. The
intricacies of verbal flexion in Latin and Greek are well known, and
it requires no small amount of mental energy to master the various
modes of forming the present stems in Sanskrit--to take only one
instance. Many of these irregularities disappear in course of time,
chiefly, but not exclusively, through analogical formations, and though
it is true that a certain number of new irregularities may come into
existence, their number is relatively small when compared with those
that have been removed. Now, it is not only the forms themselves that
are irregular in the early languages, but also their uses: logical
simplicity prevails much more in Modern English syntax than in either
Old English or Latin or Greek. But it is hardly necessary to point out
that growing regularity in a language means a considerable gain to all
those who learn it or speak it.
It has been said, however, by one of the foremost authorities on the
history of English, that “in spite of the many changes which this
system [i.e. the complicated system of strong verbs] has undergone
in detail, it remains just as intricate as it was in Old English”
(Bradley, _The Making of English_ 51). It is true that the way in
which vowel change is utilized to form tenses is rather complicated
in Modern English (_drink_ _drank_, _give_ _gave_, _hold_ _held_,
etc.), but otherwise an enormous simplification has taken place. The
personal endings have been discarded with the exception of _-s_ in
the third person singular of the present (and the obsolete ending
_-est_ in the second person, and then this has been regularized,
_thou sangest_ having taken the place of _þu sunge_); the change of
vowel in _ic sang_, _þu sunge_, _we sungon_ in the indicative and _ic
sunge_, _we sungen_ in the subjunctive has been given up, and so has
the accompanying change of consonant in many cases. Thus, instead of
the following forms, _cēosan_, _cēose_, _cēoseþ_, _cēosaþ_, _cēosen_,
_cēas_, _curon_, _cure_, _curen_, _coren_, we have the following modern
ones, which are both fewer in number and less irregular: _choose_,
_chooses_, _chose_, _chosen_--certainly an advance from a more to a
less intricate system (cf. GS § 178).
An extreme, but by no means unique example of the simplification found
in modern languages is the English _cut_, which can serve both as
present and past tense, both as singular and plural, both in the first,
second and third persons, both in the infinitive, in the imperative,
in the indicative, in the subjunctive, and as a past (or passive)
participle; compare with this the old languages with their separate
forms for different tenses, moods, numbers and persons; and remember,
moreover, that the identical form, without any inconvenience being
occasioned, is also used as a noun (_a cut_), and you will admire the
economy of the living tongue. A characteristic feature of the structure
of languages in their early stages is that each form contains in
itself several minor modifications which are often in the later stages
expressed separately by means of auxiliary words. Such a word as Latin
_cantavisset_ unites into one inseparable whole the equivalents of six
ideas: (1) ‘sing,’ (2) pluperfect, (3) that indefinite modification
of the verbal idea which we term subjunctive, (4) active, (5) third
person, and (6) singular.
XVII.--§ 10. Synthesis and Analysis.
Such a form, therefore, is much more concrete than the forms found in
modern languages, of which sometimes two or more have to be combined
to express the composite notion which was rendered formerly by one.
Now, it is one of the consequences of this change that it has become
easier to express certain minute, but by no means unimportant, shades
of thought by laying extra stress on some particular element in the
speech-group. Latin _cantaveram_ amalgamates into one indissoluble
whole what in E. _I had sung_ is analysed into three components, so
that you can at will accentuate the personal element, the time element
or the action. Now, it is possible (who can affirm and who can deny
it?) that the Romans could, if necessary, make some difference in
speech between _cántaveram_ (non saltaveram) ‘I had _sung_,’ and
_cantaverám_ (non cantabam), ‘I _had_ sung’; but even then, if it was
the personal element which was to be emphasized, an _ego_ had to be
added. Even the possibility of laying stress on the temporal element
broke down in forms like _scripsi_, _minui_, _sum_, _audiam_, and
innumerable others. It seems obvious that the freedom of Latin in
this respect must have been inferior to that of English. Moreover,
in English, the three elements, ‘I,’ ‘had,’ and ‘sung,’ can in
certain cases be arranged in a different order, and other words can
be inserted between them in order to modify and qualify the meaning
of the sentence. Note also the conciseness of such answers as “Who
had sung?” “I had.” “What had you done?” “Sung.” “I believe he has
enjoyed himself.” “I know he has.” And contrast the Latin “Cantaveram
et saltaveram et luseram et riseram” with the English “I had sung and
danced and played and laughed.” What would be the Latin equivalent of
“Tom never _did_ and never _will_ beat me”?
In such cases, analysis means suppleness, and synthesis means rigidity;
in analytic languages you have the power of kaleidoscopically arranging
and rearranging the elements that in synthetic forms like _cantaveram_
are in rigid connexion and lead a Siamese-twin sort of existence. The
synthetic forms of Latin verbs remind one of those languages all over
the world (North America, South America, Hottentot, etc.) in which such
ideas as ‘father’ or ‘mother’ or ‘head’ or ‘eye’ cannot be expressed
separately, but only in connexion with an indication of _whose_
father, etc., one is speaking about: in one language the verbal idea
(in the finite moods), in the other the nominal idea, is necessarily
fused with the personal idea.
XVII.--§ 11. Verbal Concord.
This formal inseparability of subordinate elements is at the root
of those rules of concord which play such a large rôle in the older
languages of our Aryan family, but which tend to disappear in the
more recent stages. By concord we mean the fact that a secondary word
(adjective or verb) is made to agree with the primary word (substantive
or subject) to which it belongs. Verbal concord, by which a verb is
governed in number and person by the subject, has disappeared from
spoken Danish, where, for instance, the present tense of the verb
meaning ‘to travel’ is uniformly _rejser_ in all persons of both
numbers; while the written language till towards the end of the
nineteenth century kept up artificially the plural _rejse_, although
it had been dead in the spoken language for some three hundred years.
The old flexion is an article of luxury, as a modification of the idea
belonging properly to the subject is here transferred to the predicate,
where it has no business; for when we say ‘mændene rejse’ (die männer
reisen), we do not mean to imply that they undertake several journeys
(cf. Madvig Kl 28, _Nord. tsk. f. filol._, n.r. 8. 134).
By getting rid of this superfluity, Danish has got the start of the
more archaic of its Aryan sister-tongues. Even English, which has
in most respects gone farthest in simplifying its flexional system,
lags here behind Danish, in that in the present tense of most verbs
the third person singular deviates from the other persons by ending
in _-s_, and the verb _be_ preserves some other traces of the old
concord system, not to speak of the form in _-st_ used with _thou_ in
the language of religion and poetry. Small and unimportant as these
survivals may seem, still they are in some instances impediments to
the free and easy expression of thought. In Danish, for instance,
there is not the slightest difficulty in saying ‘enten du eller jeg
har uret,’ as _har_ is used both in the first and second persons
singular and plural. But when an Englishman tries to render the same
simple sentiment he is baffled; ‘either you or I _are_ wrong’ is felt
to be incorrect, and so is ‘either you or I _am_ wrong’; he might say
‘either you are wrong, or I,’ but then this manner of putting it, if
grammatically admissible (with or without the addition of _am_), is
somewhat stiff and awkward; and there is no perfectly natural way out
of the difficulty, for Dean Alford’s proposal to say ‘either you or I
_is_ wrong’ (_The Queen’s Engl._ 155) is not to be recommended. The
advantage of having verbal forms that are no respecters of persons is
seen directly in such perfectly natural expressions as ‘either you or
I must be wrong,’ or ‘either you or I may be wrong,’ or ‘either you or
I began it’--and indirectly from the more or less artificial rules of
Latin and Greek grammars on this point; in the following passages the
Gordian knot is cut in different ways:
Shakespeare _LLL_ V. 2. 346 Nor God, nor I, _delights_ in perjur’d men
| id. _As_ I. 3. 99 Thou and I _am_ one | Tennyson _Poet. W._ 369 For
whatsoever knight against us came Or I or he _have_ easily overthrown
| Galsworthy _D_ 30 _Am_ I and all women really what they think us? |
Shakespeare _H4B_ IV. 2. 121 Heauen, and not wee, _haue_ safely fought
to day (Folio, where the Quarto has: God, and not wee, _hath_....)
The same difficulty often appears in relative clauses; Alford (l.c.
152) calls attention to the fact of the Prayer Book reading “Thou art
the God that _doeth_ wonders,” whereas the Bible version runs “Thou art
the God that _doest_ wonders.” Compare also:
Shakespeare _As_ III. 5. 55 ’Tis not her glasse, but you that
_flatters_ her | id. _Meas._ II. 2. 80 It is the law, not I, _condemne_
your brother | Carlyle _Fr. Rev._ 38, There is none but you and I that
_has_ the people’s interest at heart (translated from: Il n’y a que
vous et moi qui _aimions_ le peuple).
In all such cases the construction in Danish is as easy and natural
as it generally is in the English preterit: “It was not her glass,
but you that flattered her.” The disadvantage of having verbal forms
which enforce the indication of person and number is perhaps seen most
strikingly in a French sentence like this from Romain Rolland’s _Jean
Christophe_ (7. 221): “Ce mot, naturellement, ce n’est ni toi, ni moi,
qui _pouvons_ le dire”--the verb agrees with that which _cannot_ be the
subject (we)! For what is meant is really: ‘celui qui peut le dire, ce
n’est ni moi ni toi.’
FOOTNOTES:
[79] Quoted here from John Wilkins, _An Essay towards a Real Character
and a Philosophical Language_, 1668, p. 448: Wilkins there subjects
Bacon’s saying to a crushing criticism, laying bare a great many
radical deficiencies in Latin to bring out the logical advantages of
his own artificial ‘philosophical’ language.
[80] Cf. also what Paul says (P 144) about one point in German grammar
(strong and weak forms of adjectives): “But the difficulty of the
correct maintenance of the distinction is shown in numerous offences
made by writers against the rules of grammar”--of course, not only by
writers, but by ordinary speakers as well.
[81] It has often been pointed out how Great Britain has ‘blundered’
into creating her world-wide Empire, and Gretton, in _The King’s
Government_ (1914), applies the same view to the development of
governmental institutions.
[82] In the realm of significations he sees the ‘humanization’ of
language exclusively in the development of abstract terms. An important
point of disagreement between Baudouin and myself is in regard to
morphology, where he sees only ‘oscillations’ in historical times, in
which he is unable to discover a continuous movement in any definite
direction, while I maintain that languages here manifest a definite
progressive tendency.
[83] On the other hand, it is not, perhaps, fair to count the number of
_syllables_, as these may vary very considerably, and some languages
favour syllables with heavy consonant groups unknown in other tongues.
The most rational measure of length would be to count the numbers of
distinct (not sounds, but) articulations of separate speech organs--but
that task is at any rate beyond _my_ powers.
CHAPTER XVIII
PROGRESS
§ 1. Nominal Forms. § 2. Irregularities Original. § 3. Syntax. § 4.
Objections. § 5. Word Order. § 6. Gender. § 7. Nominal Concord. § 8.
The English Genitive. § 9. Bantu Concord. § 10. Word Order Again.
§ 11. Compromises. § 12. Order Beneficial? § 13. Word Order and
Simplification. § 14. Summary.
XVIII.--§ 1. Nominal Forms.
In the flexion of substantives and adjectives we see phenomena
corresponding to those we have just been considering in the verbs.
The ancient languages of our family have several forms where modern
languages content themselves with fewer; forms originally kept distinct
are in course of time confused, either through a phonetic obliteration
of differences in the endings or through analogical extension of the
functions of one form. The single form _good_ is now used where OE.
used the forms _god_, _godne_, _gode_, _godum_, _godes_, _godre_,
_godra_, _goda_, _godan_, _godena_; Ital. _uomo_ or French _homme_ is
used for Lat. _homo_, _hominem_, _homini_, _homine_--nay, if we take
the spoken form into consideration, Fr. [ɔm] corresponds not only
to these Latin forms, but also to _homines_, _hominibus_. Where the
modern language has one or two cases, in an earlier stage it had three
or four, and still earlier seven or eight. The difficulties inherent
in the older system cannot, however, be measured adequately by the
number of forms each word is susceptible of, but are multiplied by the
numerous differences in the formation of the same case in different
classes of declension; sometimes we even find anomalies which affect
one word only.
Those who would be inclined to maintain that new irregularities may
and do arise in modern languages which make up for whatever earlier
irregularities have been discarded in the course of the historical
development will do well to compile a systematic list of _all_ the
flexional forms of two different stages of the same languages, arranged
exactly according to the same principles: this is the only way in which
it is possible really to balance losses and profits in a language.
This is what I have done in my _Progress in Language_ § 111 ff.
(reprinted in ChE § 9 ff.), where I have contrasted the case systems
of Old and Modern English: the result is that the former system takes
7 (+ 3) pages, and the latter only 2 pages. Those pages, with their
abbreviations and tabulations, do not, perhaps, offer very entertaining
reading, but I think they are more illustrative of the real tendencies
of language than either isolated examples or abstract reasonings, and
they cannot fail to convince any impartial reader of the enormous gain
achieved through the changes of the intervening nine hundred years in
the general structure of the English language.
For our general purposes it will be worth our while here to quote what
Friedrich Müller (Gr i. 2. 7) says about a totally different language:
“Even if the Hottentot distinguishes ‘he,’ ‘she’ and ‘it,’ and strictly
separates the singular from the plural number, yet by his expressing
‘he’ and ‘she’ by one sound in the third person, and by another in
the second, he manifests that he has no perception at all of our two
grammatical categories of gender and number, and consequently those
elements of his language that run parallel to our signs of gender and
number must be of an entirely different nature.” Fr. Müller should
not perhaps throw too many stones at the poor Hottentots, for his own
native tongue is no better than a glass house, and we might with equal
justice say, for instance: “As the Germans express the plural number
in different manners in words like _gott--götter_, _hand--hände_,
_vater--väter_, _frau--frauen_, etc., they must be entirely lacking in
the sense of the category of number.” Or let us take such a language as
Latin; there is nothing to show that _dominus_ bears the same relation
to _domini_ as _verbum_ to _verba_, _urbs_ to _urbes_, _mensis_ to
_menses_, _cornu_ to _cornua_, _fructus_ to _fructūs_, etc.; even in
the same word the idea of plurality is not expressed by the same method
for all the cases, as is shown by a comparison of _dominus--domini_,
_dominum--dominos_, _domino--dominis_, _domini--dominorum_. Fr. Müller
is no doubt wrong in saying that such anomalies preclude the speakers
of the language from conceiving the notion of plurality; but, on the
other hand, it seems evident that a language in which a difference so
simple even to the understanding of very young children as that between
one and more than one can only be expressed by a complicated apparatus
must rank lower than another language in which this difference has a
single expression for all cases in which it occurs. In this respect,
too, Modern English stands higher than the oldest English, Latin or
Hottentot.
XVIII.--§ 2. Irregularities Original.
It was the belief of the older school of comparativists that each
case had originally one single ending, which was added to all
nouns indifferently (e.g. _-as_ for the genitive sg.), and that the
irregularities found in the existing oldest languages were of later
growth; the actually existing forms were then derived from the supposed
unity form by all kinds of phonetic tricks and dodges. Now people have
begun to see that the primeval language cannot have been quite uniform
and regular (see, for instance, Walde in Streitberg’s _Gesch._, 2.
194 ff.). If we look at facts, and not at imagined or reconstructed
forms, we are forced to acknowledge that in the oldest stages of our
family of languages not only did the endings present the spectacle of
a motley variety, but the kernel of the word was also often subject
to violent changes in different cases, as when it had in different
forms different accentuation and (or) different apophony, or as when
in some of the most frequently occurring words some cases were formed
from one ‘stem’ and others from another, for instance, the nominative
from an _r_ stem and the oblique cases from an _n_ stem. In the common
word for ‘water’ Greek has preserved both stems, nom. _hudōr_, gen.
_hudatos_, where _a_ stands for original [ən]. Whatever the origin
of this change of stems, it is a phenomenon belonging to the earlier
stages of our languages, in which we also sometimes find an alteration
between the _r_ stem in the nominative and a combination of the _n_
and the _r_ stems in the other cases, as in Lat. _jecur_ ‘liver,’
_jecinoris_; _iter_ ‘voyage,’ _itineris_, which is supposed to have
supplanted _itinis_, formed like _feminis_ from _femur_. In the later
stages we always find a simplification, one single form running through
all cases; this is either the nominative stem, as in E. _water_, G.
_wasser_ (corresponding to Gr. _hudōr_), or the oblique case-stem,
as in the Scandinavian forms, Old Norse _vatn_, Swed. _vatten_, Dan.
_vand_ (corresponding to Gr. _hudat-_), or finally a contaminated form,
as in the name of the Swedish lake _Vättern_ (Noreen’s explanation),
or in Old Norse and Dan. _skarn_ ‘dirt,’ which has its _r_ from a form
like the Gr. _skōr_, and its _n_ from a form like the Gr. genitive
_skatos_ (older [skəntos]). The simplification is carried furthest in
English, where the identical form _water_ is not only used unchanged
where in the older languages different case forms would have been used
(‘the water is cold,’ ‘the surface of the water,’ ‘he fell into the
water,’ ‘he swims in the water’), but also serves as a verb (‘did you
water the flowers?’), and as an adjunct as a quasi-adjective (‘a water
melon,’ ‘water plants’).
In most cases irregularities have been done away with in the way here
indicated, one of the forms (or stems) being generalized; but in other
cases it may have happened, as Kretschmer supposes (in Gercke and
Norden, _Einleit. in die Altertumswiss._, I, 501) that irregular flexion
caused a word to go out of use entirely; thus in Modern Greek _hêpar_
was supplanted by _sukōti_,[84] _phréar_ by _pēgadi_, _húdōr_ by
_neró_, _oûs_ by _aphtí_ (= _ōtíon_), _kúōn_ by _skullí_; this possibly
also accounts for _commando_ taking the place of Lat. _jubeo_.
Some scholars maintain that the medieval languages were more regular
than their modern representatives; but if we look more closely into
what they mean, we shall see that they are not speaking of any
regularity in the sense in which the word has here been used--the only
regularity which is of importance to the speakers of the language--but
of the regular correspondence of a language with some earlier language
from which it is derived. This is particularly the case with E.
Littré, who, in his essays on _L’Histoire de la Langue Française_,
was full of enthusiasm for Old French, but chiefly for the fidelity
with which it had preserved some features of Latin. There was thus the
old distinction of two cases: nom. sg. _murs_, acc. sg. _mur_, and
in the plural inversely nom. _mur_ and acc. _murs_, with its exact
correspondence with Latin _murus_, _murum_, pl. _muri_, _muros_. When
this ‘règle de _l_’s’ was discovered, and the use or omission of _s_,
which had hitherto been looked upon as completely arbitrary in Old
French, was thus accounted for, scholars were apt to consider this as
an admirable trait in the old language which had been lost in modern
French, and the same view obtained with regard to the case distinction
found in other words, such as OFr. nom. _maire_, acc. _majeur_, or nom.
_emperere_, acc. _emperëur_, corresponding to the Latin forms with
changing stress, _májor_, _majórem_, _imperátor_, _imperatórem_, etc.
But, however interesting such things may be to the historical linguist,
there is no denying that to the users of French the modern simpler
flexion is a gain as compared with this more complex system. “Des
sprachhistorikers freud ist des sprachbrauchers leid,” as Schuchardt
somewhere shrewdly remarks.
XVIII.--§ 3. Syntax.
There were also in the old languages many irregularities in the
syntactic use of the cases, as when some verbs governed the genitive
and others the dative, etc. Even if it may be possible in many
instances to account historically for these uses, to the speakers of
the languages they must have appeared to be mere caprices which had
to be learned separately for each verb, and it is therefore a great
advantage when they have been gradually done away with, as has been
the case, to a great extent, even in a language like German, which has
retained many old case forms. Thus verbs like _entbehren_, _vergessen_,
_bedürfen_, _wahrnehmen_, which formerly took the genitive, are now
used more and more with the simple accusative--a simplification which,
among other things, makes the construction of sentences in the passive
voice easier and more regular.
The advantage of discarding the old case distinctions is seen in the
ease with which English and French speakers can say, e.g., ‘with or
without my hat,’ or ‘in and round the church,’ while the correct
German is ‘mit meinem hut oder ohne denselben’ and ‘in der kirche und
um dieselbe’; Wackernagel writes: “Was in ihm und um ihn und über
ihm ist.” When the prepositions are followed by a single substantive
without case distinction, German, of course, has the same simple
construction as English, e.g. ‘mit oder ohne geld,’ and sometimes
even good writers will let themselves go and write ‘um und neben dem
hochaltare’ (Goethe), or ‘Ihre tochter wird meine frau mit oder gegen
ihren willen’ (these examples from Curme, _German Grammar_ 191). Cf.
also: ‘Ich kann deinem bruder nicht helfen und ihn unterstützen.’
Many extremely convenient idioms unknown in the older synthetic
languages have been rendered possible in English through the doing away
with the old case distinctions, such as: Genius, demanding bread, is
given a stone after its possessor’s death (Shaw) (cf. my ChE § 79) | he
was offered, and declined, the office of poet-laureate (Gosse) | the
lad was spoken highly of | I love, and am loved by, my wife | these
laws my readers, whom I consider as my subjects, are bound to believe
in and to obey (Fielding) | he was heathenishly inclined to believe in,
or to worship, the goddess Nemesis (id.) | he rather rejoiced in, than
regretted, his bruise (id.) | many a dun had she talked to, and turned
away from her father’s door (Thackeray) | their earthly abode, which
has seen, and seemed almost to sympathize in, all their honour (Ruskin).
XVIII.--§ 4. Objections.
Against my view of the superiority of languages with few case
distinctions, Arwid Johannson, in a very able article (in IF I, see
especially p. 247 f.), has adduced a certain number of ambiguous
sentences from German:
Soweit die deutsche zunge klingt und _gott_ im himmel lieder singt
(is _gott_ nominative or dative?) | Seinem landsmann, dem er in
seiner ganzen bildung ebensoviel verdankte, wie _Goethe_ (nominative
or dative?) | Doch würde die gesellschaft _der Indierin_ (genitive
or dative?) lästig gewesen sein | Darin hat Caballero wohl nur einen
konkurrenten, die Eliot, _welche_ freilich _die spanische dichterin_
nicht ganz erreicht | Nur Diopeithes feindet insgeheim dich an und
_die schwester_ des Kimon und _dein weib_ Telesippa. (In the last two
sentences what is the subject, and what the object?)
According to Johannson, these passages show the disadvantages of doing
away with formal distinctions, for the sentences would have been clear
if each separate case had had its distinctive sign; “the greater the
wealth of forms, the more intelligible the speech.” And they show, he
says, that such ambiguities will occur, even where the strictest rules
of word order are observed. I shall not urge that this is not exactly
the case in the last sentence if _die schwester_ and _dein weib_ are to
be taken as accusatives, for then _an_ should have been placed at the
very end of the sentence; nor that, in the last sentence but one, the
mention of George Eliot as the ‘konkurrent’ of Fernan Caballero seems
to show a partiality to the Spanish authoress on the part of the writer
of the sentence, so that the reader is prepared to take _welche_ as the
nominative case; _freilich_ would seem to point in the same direction.
But these, of course, are only trifling objections; the essential point
is that we must grant the truth of Johannson’s contention that we have
here a flaw in the German language; the defects of its grammatical
system may and do cause a certain number of ambiguities. Neither is
it difficult to find the reasons of these defects by considering the
structure of the language in its entirety, and by translating the
sentences in question into a few other languages and comparing the
results.
First, with regard to the formal distinctions between cases, the really
weak point cannot be the fewness of these endings, for in that case
we should expect the same sort of ambiguities to be very common in
English and Danish, where the formal case distinctions are considerably
fewer than in German; but as a matter of fact such ambiguities are
more frequent in German than in the other two languages. And, however
paradoxical it may seem at first sight, one of the causes of this is
the greater wealth of grammatical forms in German. Let us substitute
other words for the ambiguous ones, and we shall see that the
amphibology will nearly always disappear, because most other words will
have different forms in the two cases, e.g.:
Soweit die deutsche zunge klingt und _dem allmächtigen_ (or, _der
allmächtige_) lieder singt | Seinem landsmann, dem er ebensoviel
verdankte, wie _dem grossen dichter_ (or, _der grosse dichter_) |
Doch würde die gesellschaft _des Indiers_ (or, _dem Indier_) lästig
gewesen sein | Darin hat Calderon wohl nur einen konkurrenten,
Shakespeare, _welcher_ freilich _den spanischen dichter_ nicht
erreicht (or, _den_ ... _der spanische dichter_ ...) | Nur Diopeithes
feindet dich insgeheim an, und _der bruder_ des Kimon und _sein
freund_ T. (or, _den bruder_ ... _seinen freund_).