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THE STUDY OF WORDS
ON THE STUDY OF WORDS
BY
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D.
ARCHBISHOP
'Language is the armoury of the human mind, and at once contains the
trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future, conquests'
--COLERIDGE
'Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools!'--SHAKESPEARE
TWENTIETH EDITION revised by
THE REV. A. L. MAYHEW
Joint Author of 'The Concise Middle English Dictionary'
PREFACE TO THE TWENTIETH EDITION.
In all essential points this edition of The Study of Words is the same
book as the last edition. The aim of the editor has been to alter as
little of Archbishop Trench's work as possible. In the arrangement of
the book, in the order of the chapters and paragraphs, in the style, in
the general presentation of the matter, no change has been made. On the
other hand, the work has been thoroughly revised and corrected. A great
deal of thought and labour has of late been bestowed on English
philology, and there has been a great advance in the knowledge of the
laws regulating the development of the sounds of English words, and the
result has been that many a derivation once generally accepted has had
to be given up as phonetically impossible. An attempt has been made to
purge the book of all erroneous etymologies, and to correct in the text
small matters of detail. There have also been added some footnotes, in
which difficult points are discussed and where reference is given to
recent authorities. All editorial additions, whether in the text or in
the notes, are enclosed in square brackets. It is hoped that the book
as it now stands does not contain in its etymological details anything
inconsistent with the latest discoveries of English scholars.
A. L. MAYHEW.
WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD: _August_, 1888.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
These lectures will not, I trust, be found anywhere to have left out of
sight seriously, or for long, the peculiar needs of those for whom they
were originally intended, and to whom they were primarily addressed. I
am conscious, indeed, here and there, of a certain departure from my
first intention, having been in part seduced to this by a circumstance
which I had not in the least contemplated when I obtained permission to
deliver them, by finding, namely, that I should have other hearers
besides the pupils of the Training-School. Some matter adapted for
those rather than for these I was thus led to introduce--which
afterwards I was unwilling, in preparing for the press, to remove; on
the contrary adding to it rather, in the hope of obtaining thus a
somewhat wider circle of readers than I could have hoped, had I more
rigidly restricted myself in the choice of my materials. Yet I should
greatly regret to have admitted so much of this as should deprive these
lectures of their fitness for those whose profit in writing and in
publishing I had mainly in view, namely schoolmasters, and those
preparing to be such.
Had I known any book entering with any fulness, and in a popular manner,
into the subject-matter of these pages, and making it its exclusive
theme, I might still have delivered these lectures, but should scarcely
have sought for them a wider audience than their first, gladly leaving
the matter in their hands, whose studies in language had been fuller
and riper than my own. But abundant and ready to hand as are the
materials for such a book, I did not; while yet it seems to me that the
subject is one to which it is beyond measure desirable that their
attention, who are teaching, or shall have hereafter to teach, others
should be directed; so that they shall learn to regard language as one
of the chiefest organs of their own education and that of others. For I
am persuaded that I have used no exaggeration in saying, that for many
a young man 'his first discovery that words are living powers, has been
like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of
another sense, or the introduction into a new world,'--while yet all
this may be indefinitely deferred, may, indeed, never find place at all,
unless there is some one at hand to help for him, and to hasten the
process; and he who so does, will ever after be esteemed by him as one
of his very foremost benefactors. Whatever may be Horne Tooke's
shortcomings (and they are great), whether in details of etymology, or
in the philosophy of grammar, or in matters more serious still, yet,
with all this, what an epoch in many a student's intellectual life has
been his first acquaintance with _The Diversions of Purley_. And they
were not among the least of the obligations which the young men of our
time owed to Coleridge, that he so often himself weighed words in the
balances, and so earnestly pressed upon all with whom his voice went
for anything, the profit which they would find in so doing. Nor, with
the certainty that I am anticipating much in my little volume, can I
refrain from quoting some words which were not present with me during
its composition, although I must have been familiar with them long ago;
words which express excellently well why it is that these studies
profit so much, and which will also explain the motives which induced
me to add my little contribution to their furtherance:
'A language will often be wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even
than the wisest of those who speak it. Being like amber in its efficacy
to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber in
embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, although one is
not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. Sometimes it locks up
truths, which were once well known, but which, in the course of ages,
have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds
the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned,
the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of
divination. A meditative man cannot refrain from wonder, when he digs
down to the deep thought lying at the root of many a metaphorical term,
employed for the designation of spiritual things, even of those with
regard to which professing philosophers have blundered grossly; and
often it would seem as though rays of truth, which were still below the
intellectual horizon, had dawned upon the imagination as it was looking
up to heaven. Hence they who feel an inward call to teach and enlighten
their countrymen, should deem it an important part of their duty to
draw out the stores of thought which are already latent in their native
language, to purify it from the corruptions which Time brings upon all
things, and from which language has no exemption, and to endeavour to
give distinctness and precision to whatever in it is confused, or
obscure, or dimly seen'--_Guesses at Truth, First Series_, p. 295.
ITCHENSTOKE: Oct. 9, 1851.
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE
LECTURE II. ON THE POETRY IN WORDS
LECTURE III. ON THE MORALITY IN WORDS
LECTURE IV. ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS
LECTURE V. ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS
LECTURE VI. ON THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS
LECTURE VII. THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS
INDEX OF WORDS
ON THE STUDY OF WORDS
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
There are few who would not readily acknowledge that mainly in worthy
books are preserved and hoarded the treasures of wisdom and knowledge
which the world has accumulated; and that chiefly by aid of books they
are handed down from one generation to another. I shall urge on you in
these lectures something different from this; namely, that not in books
only, which all acknowledge, nor yet in connected oral discourse, but
often also in words contemplated singly, there are boundless stores of
moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid
up--that from these, lessons of infinite worth may be derived, if only
our attention is roused to their existence. I shall urge on you how
well it will repay you to study the words which you are in the habit of
using or of meeting, be they such as relate to highest spiritual things,
or our common words of the shop and the market, and of all the familiar
intercourse of daily life. It will indeed repay you far better than you
can easily believe. I am sure, at least, that for many a young man his
first discovery of the fact that words are living powers, are the
vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves, has
been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of
another sense, or the introduction into a new world; he is never able
to cease wondering at the moral marvels that surround him on every side,
and ever reveal themselves more and more to his gaze.
We indeed hear it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of
admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more
mischievous one; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of
the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that
with larger knowledge it would cease; while, in truth, for once that
ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should
perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us, a
hundred, nay, a thousand times, it prevents us from admiring that which
is admirable indeed. And this is so, whether we are moving in the
region of nature, which is the region of God's wonders, or in the
region of art, which is the region of man's wonders; and nowhere truer
than in this sphere and region of language, which is about to claim us
now. Oftentimes here we walk up and down in the midst of intellectual
and moral marvels with a vacant eye and a careless mind; even as some
traveller passes unmoved over fields of fame, or through cities of
ancient renown--unmoved, because utterly unconscious of the lofty deeds
which there have been wrought, of the great hearts which spent
themselves there. We, like him, wanting the knowledge and insight which
would have served to kindle admiration in us, are oftentimes deprived
of this pure and elevating excitement of the mind, and miss no less
that manifold instruction which ever lies about our path, and nowhere
more largely than in our daily words, if only we knew how to put forth
our hands and make it our own. 'What riches,' one exclaims, 'lie hidden
in the vulgar tongue of our poorest and most ignorant. What flowers of
paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts
undistinguished and undiscerned, from having been daily trodden on.'
And this subject upon which we are thus entering ought not to be a dull
or uninteresting one in the handling, or one to which only by an effort
you will yield the attention which I shall claim. If it shall prove so,
this I fear must be through the fault of my manner of treating it; for
certainly in itself there is no study which _may_ be made at once more
instructive and entertaining than the study of the use and abuse, the
origin and distinction of words, with an investigation, slight though
it may be, of the treasures contained in them; which is exactly that
which I now propose to myself and to you. I remember a very learned
scholar, to whom we owe one of our best Greek lexicons, a book which
must have cost him years, speaking in the preface of his completed work
with a just disdain of some, who complained of the irksome drudgery of
such toils as those which had engaged him so long,--toils irksome,
forsooth, because they only had to do with words. He disclaims any part
with those who asked pity for themselves, as so many galley-slaves
chained to the oar, or martyrs who had offered themselves for the good
of the literary world. He declares that the task of classing, sorting,
grouping, comparing, tracing the derivation and usage of words, had
been to him no drudgery, but a delight and labour of love. [Footnote:
It is well worth the while to read on this same subject the pleasant
_causerie_ of Littré 'Comment j'ai fait mon Dictionnaire.' It is to be
found pp. 390-442 of his _Glanures_.]
And if this may be true in regard of a foreign tongue, how much truer
ought it to be in regard of our own, of our 'mother tongue,' as we
affectionately call it. A great writer not very long departed from us
has borne witness at once to the pleasantness and profit of this study.
'In a language,' he says, 'like ours, where so many words are derived
from other languages, there are few modes of instruction more useful or
more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the
etymology or primary meaning of the words they use. There are cases in
which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a
word than by the history of a campaign.' So writes Coleridge; and
impressing the same truth, Emerson has somewhere characterized language
as 'fossil poetry.' He evidently means that just as in some fossil,
curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful
fern or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it may be, have
been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the
stone, and rescued from that perishing which would else have been their
portion,--so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the
imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their
graves, of men whose very names have perished, there are these, which
might so easily have perished too, preserved and made safe for ever.
The phrase is a striking one; the only fault one can find with it is
that it is too narrow. Language may be, and indeed is, this 'fossil
poetry'; but it may be affirmed of it with exactly the same truth that
it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as
effectually embody facts of history, or convictions of the moral sense,
as of the imagination or passion of men; even as, so far as that moral
sense may be perverted, they will bear witness and keep a record of
that perversion. On all these points I shall enter at full in after
lectures; but I may give by anticipation a specimen or two of what I
mean, to make from the first my purpose and plan more fully
intelligible to all.
Language then is 'fossil poetry'; in other words, we are not to look
for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or its
poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is
itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and
imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some
deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to
illustrate and to give an abiding form and body to these. The image may
have grown trite and ordinary now: perhaps through the help of this
very word may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem
little better than a commonplace; yet not the less he who first
discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express
it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and
figurative sense, this man was in his degree a poet--a maker, that is,
of things which were not before, which would not have existed but for
him, or for some other gifted with equal powers. He who spake first of
a 'dilapidated' fortune, what an image must have risen up before his
mind's eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from
stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. Or he who
to that Greek word which signifies 'that which will endure to be held
up to and judged by the sunlight,' gave first its ethical signification
of 'sincere,' 'truthful,' or as we sometimes say, 'transparent,' can we
deny to him the poet's feeling and eye? Many a man had gazed, we are
sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain, before one
called them 'sierras' or 'saws,' the name by which now they are known,
as _Sierra_ Morena, _Sierra_ Nevada; but that man coined his
imagination into a word which will endure as long as the everlasting
hills which he named.
But it was said just now that words often contain a witness for great
moral truths--God having pressed such a seal of truth upon language,
that men are continually uttering deeper things than they know,
asserting mighty principles, it may be asserting them against
themselves, in words that to them may seem nothing more than the
current coin of society. Thus to what grand moral purposes Bishop
Butler turns the word 'pastime'; how solemn the testimony which he
compels the world, out of its own use of this word, to render against
itself--obliging it to own that its amusements and pleasures do not
really satisfy the mind and fill it with the sense of an abiding and
satisfying joy: [Footnote: _Sermon_ xiv. _Upon the Love of God_.
Curiously enough, Montaigne has, in his Essays, drawn the same
testimony out of the word: 'This ordinary phrase of Pass-time, and
passing away the time, represents the custom of those wise sort of
people, who think they cannot have a better account of their lives,
than to let them run out and slide away, to pass them over and to baulk
them, and as much as they can, to take no notice of them and to shun
them, as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality. But I know it
to be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious
even in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it, and nature has
delivered it into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances
that we commonly complain of ourselves, if it be troublesome to us or
slide unprofitably away.'] they are only 'pastime'; they serve only, as
this word confesses, to _pass_ away the _time_, to prevent it from
hanging, an intolerable burden, on men's hands: all which they can do
at the best is to prevent men from discovering and attending to their
own internal poverty and dissatisfaction and want. He might have added
that there is the same acknowledgment in the word 'diversion' which
means no more than that which _diverts_ or turns us aside from
ourselves, and in this way helps us to forget ourselves for a little.
And thus it would appear that, even according to the world's own
confession, all which it proposes is--not to make us happy, but a
little to prevent us from remembering that we are unhappy, to _pass_
away our time, to _divert_ us from ourselves. While on the other hand
we declare that the good which will really fill our souls and satisfy
them to the uttermost, is not in us, but without us and above us, in
the words which we use to set forth any transcending delight. Take
three or four of these words--'transport,' 'rapture,' 'ravishment,'
'ecstasy,'--'transport,' that which _carries_ us, as 'rapture,' or
'ravishment,' that which _snatches_ us out of and above ourselves; and
'ecstasy' is very nearly the same, only drawn from the Greek. And not
less, where a perversion of the moral sense has found place, words
preserve oftentimes a record of this perversion. We have a signal
example of this in the use, or rather misuse, of the words 'religion'
and 'religious' during the Middle Ages, and indeed in many parts of
Christendom still. A 'religious' person did not then mean any one who
felt and owned the bonds that bound him to God and to his fellow-men,
but one who had taken peculiar vows upon him, the member of a monastic
Order, of a 'religion' as it was called. As little did a 'religious'
house then mean, nor does it now mean in the Church of Rome, a
Christian household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house in which
these persons were gathered together according to the rule of some man.
What a light does this one word so used throw on the entire state of
mind and habits of thought in those ages! That then was 'religion,' and
alone deserved the name! And 'religious' was a title which might not be
given to parents and children, husbands and wives, men and women
fulfilling faithfully and holily in the world the duties of their
several stations, but only to those who had devised a self-chosen
service for themselves. [Footnote: A reviewer in Fraser's Magazine, Dec.
1851, doubts whether I have not here pushed my assertion too far. So
far from this, it was not merely the 'popular language' which this
corruption had invaded, but a decree of the great Fourth Lateran
Council (A.D. 1215), forbidding the further multiplication of monastic
Orders, runs thus: Ne nimia _religionum_ diversitas gravem in Ecclesia
Dei confusionem inducat, firmiter prohibemus, ne quis de cetero novam
_religionem_ inveniat, sed quicunque voluerit ad _religionem_ converti,
unam de approbatis assumat.]
But language is fossil history as well. What a record of great social
revolutions, revolutions in nations and in the feelings of nations, the
one word 'frank' contains, which is used, as we all know, to express
aught that is generous, straightforward, and free. The Franks, I need
not remind you, were a powerful German tribe, or association of tribes,
who gave themselves [Footnote: This explanation of the name _Franks_ is
now generally given up. The name is probably a derivative from a lost
O.H.G. _francho_, a spear or javelin: compare A.S. _franca_, Icel.
_frakka_; similarly the Saxons are supposed to have derived their name
from a weapon--_seax_, a knife; see Kluge's _Dict_. (s.v. _frank_).]
this proud name of the 'franks' or the free; and who, at the breaking
up of the Roman Empire, possessed themselves of Gaul, to which they
gave their own name. They were the ruling conquering people, honourably
distinguished from the Gauls and degenerate Romans among whom they
established themselves by their independence, their love of freedom,
their scorn of a lie; they had, in short, the virtues which belong to a
conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior and conquered
one. And thus it came to pass that by degrees the name 'frank'
indicated not merely a national, but involved a moral, distinction as
well; and a 'frank' man was synonymous not merely with a man of the
conquering German race, but was an epithet applied to any man possessed
of certain high moral qualities, which for the most part appertained to,
and were found only in, men of that stock; and thus in men's daily
discourse, when they speak of a person as being 'frank,' or when they
use the words 'franchise,' 'enfranchisement,' to express civil
liberties and immunities, their language here is the outgrowth, the
record, and the result of great historic changes, bears testimony to
facts of history, whereof it may well happen that the speakers have
never heard. [Footnote: 'Frank,' though thus originally a German word,
only came back to Germany from France in the seventeenth century. With
us it is found in the sixteenth; but scarcely earlier.] The word
'slave' has undergone a process entirely analogous, although in an
opposite direction. 'The martial superiority of the Teutonic races
enabled them to keep their slave markets supplied with captives taken
from the Sclavonic tribes. Hence, in all the languages of Western
Europe, the once glorious name of Slave has come to express the most
degraded condition of men. What centuries of violence and warfare does
the history of this word disclose.' [Footnote: Gibbon, _Decline and
Fall_, c. 55. [It is very doubtful whether the idea of 'glory' was
implied originally in the national name of _Slav_. It is generally held
now that the Slavs gave themselves the name as being 'the
intelligible,' or 'the intelligibly speaking' people; as in the case of
many other races, they regarded their strange-speaking neighbours as
'barbarian,' that is 'stammering,' or even as 'dumb.' So the Russians
call their neighbours the Germans _njemets_, connected with _njemo_,
indistinct. The old name _Slovene_, Slavonians, is probably a
derivative from the substantive which appears in Church Slavonic in the
form _slovo_, a word; see Thomsen's _Russia and Scandinavia_, p. 8.
_Slovo_ is closely connected with the old Slavonic word for 'fame'--
_slava_, hence, no doubt, the explanation of _Slave_ favoured by
Gibbon.]]
Having given by anticipation this handful of examples in illustration
of what in these lectures I propose, I will, before proceeding further,
make a few observations on a subject, which, if we would go at all to
the root of the matter, we can scarcely leave altogether untouched,--I
mean the origin of language, in which however we will not entangle
ourselves deeper than we need. There are, or rather there have been,
two theories about this. One, and that which rather has been than now
is, for few maintain it still, would put language on the same level
with the various arts and inventions with which man has gradually
adorned and enriched his life. It would make him by degrees to have
invented it, just as he might have invented any of these, for himself;
and from rude imperfect beginnings, the inarticulate cries by which he
expressed his natural wants, the sounds by which he sought to imitate
the impression of natural objects upon him, little by little to have
arrived at that wondrous organ of thought and feeling, which his
language is often to him now.
It might, I think, be sufficient to object to this explanation, that
language would then be an _accident_ of human nature; and, this being
the case, that we certainly should somewhere encounter tribes sunken so
low as not to possess it; even as there is almost no human art or
invention so obvious, and as it seems to us so indispensable, but there
are those who have fallen below its knowledge and its exercise. But
with language it is not so. There have never yet been found human
beings, not the most degraded horde of South African bushmen, or Papuan
cannibals, who did not employ this means of intercourse with one
another. But the more decisive objection to this view of the matter is,
that it hangs together with, and is indeed an essential part of, that
theory of society, which is contradicted alike by every page of Genesis,
and every notice of our actual experience--the 'urang-utang theory,' as
it has been so happily termed--that, I mean, according to which the
primitive condition of man was the savage one, and the savage himself
the seed out of which in due time the civilized man was unfolded;
whereas, in fact, so far from being this living seed, he might more
justly be considered as a dead withered leaf, torn violently away from
the great trunk of humanity, and with no more power to produce anything
nobler than himself out of himself, than that dead withered leaf to
unfold itself into the oak of the forest. So far from being the child
with the latent capabilities of manhood, he is himself rather the man
prematurely aged, and decrepit, and outworn.
But the truer answer to the inquiry how language arose, is this: God
gave man language, just as He gave him reason, and just because He gave
him reason; for what is man's _word_ but his reason, coming forth that
it may behold itself? They are indeed so essentially one and the same
that the Greek language has one word for them both. He gave it to him,
because he could not be man, that is, a social being, without it. Yet
this must not be taken to affirm that man started at the first
furnished with a full-formed vocabulary of words, and as it were with
his first dictionary and first grammar ready-made to his hands. He did
not thus begin the world _with names_, but _with the power of naming_:
for man is not a mere speaking machine; God did not teach him words, as
one of us teaches a parrot, from without; but gave him a capacity, and
then evoked the capacity which He gave. Here, as in everything else
that concerns the primitive constitution, the great original institutes,
of humanity, our best and truest lights are to be gotten from the study
of the first three chapters of Genesis; and you will observe that there
it is not God who imposed the first names on the creatures, but Adam--
Adam, however, at the direct suggestion of his Creator. _He_ brought
them all, we are told, to Adam, 'to see what he would call them; and
whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name
thereof' (Gen. ii. 19). Here we have the clearest intimation of the
origin, at once divine and human, of speech; while yet neither is so
brought forward as to exclude or obscure the other.
And so far we may concede a limited amount of right to those who have
held a progressive acquisition, on man's part, of the power of
embodying thought in words. I believe that we should conceive the
actual case most truly, if we conceived this power of naming things and
expressing their relations, as one laid up in the depths of man's being,
one of the divine capabilities with which he was created: but one (and
in this differing from those which have produced in various people
various arts of life) which could not remain dormant in him, for man
could be only man through its exercise; which therefore did rapidly bud
and blossom out from within him at every solicitation from the world
without and from his fellow-man; as each object to be named appeared
before his eyes, each relation of things to one another arose before
his mind. It was not merely the possible, but the necessary, emanation
of the spirit with which he had been endowed. Man makes his own
language, but he makes it as the bee makes its cells, as the bird its
nest; he cannot do otherwise. [Footnote: Renan has much of interest on
this matter, both in his work _De l'Origine du Langage_, and in his
_Hist. des Langues Semitiques_. I quote from the latter, p. 445: Sans
doute les langues, comme tout ce qui est organisé, sont sujettes à la
loi du développement graduel. En soutenant que le langage primitif
possédait les éléments nécessaires à son intégrité, nous sommes loin de
dire que les mécanismes d'un âge plus avancé y fussent arrivés a leur
pleine existence. Tout y était, mais confusément et sans distinction.
Le temps seul et les progrès de l'esprit humain pouvaient opérer un
discernement dans cette obscure synthèse, et assigner à chaque élément
son rôle spécial. La vie, en un mot, n'était ici, comme partout, qu'à
la condition de l'évolution du germe primitif, de la distribution des
rôles et de la séparation des organes. Mais ces organes eux-mêmes
furent détermines dès le premier jour, et depuis l'acte générateur qui
le fit être, le langage ne s'est enrichi d'aucune fonction vraiment
nouvelle. Un germe est posé, renfermant en puissance tout ce que l'être
sera un jour; le germe se développe, les formes se constituent dans
leurs proportions régulières, ce qui était en puissance devient en
acte; mais rien ne se crée, rien ne s'ajoute: telle est la loi commune
des êtres soumis aux conditions de la vie. Telle fut aussi la loi du
langage.]
_How_ this latent power evolved itself first, how this spontaneous
generation of language came to pass, is a mystery; even as every act of
creation is of necessity such; and as a mystery all the deepest
inquirers into the subject are content to leave it. Yet we may perhaps
a little help ourselves to the realizing of what the process was, and
what it was not, if we liken it to the growth of a tree springing out
of, and unfolding itself from, a root, and according to a necessary
law--that root being the divine capacity of language with which man was
created, that law being the law of highest reason with which he was
endowed: if we liken it to this rather than to the rearing of a house,
which a man should slowly and painfully fashion for himself with dead
timbers combined after his own fancy and caprice; and which little by
little improved in shape, material, and size, being first but a log
house, answering his barest needs, and only after centuries of toil and
pain growing for his sons' sons into a stately palace for pleasure and
delight.
Were it otherwise, were the savage the primitive man, we should then
find savage tribes, furnished scantily enough, it might be, with the
elements of speech, yet at the same time with its fruitful beginnings,
its vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close
inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant
and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress
of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more
fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When
wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against
light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been
scattered off by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the
world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its
remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one
spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that
expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has
been let go after another, the words which those habits demanded have
dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory and thus
after a while have been wholly lost.
Moffat, in his _Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa_, gives
us a very remarkable example of the disappearing of one of the most
significant words from the language of a tribe sinking ever deeper in
savagery; and with the disappearing of the word, of course, the
disappearing as well of the great spiritual fact and truth whereof that
word was at once the vehicle and the guardian. The Bechuanas, a Caffre
tribe, employed formerly the word 'Morimo,' to designate 'Him that is
above' or 'Him that is in heaven' and attached to the word the notion
of a supreme Divine Being. This word, with the spiritual idea
corresponding to it, Moffat found to have vanished from the language of
the present generation, although here and there he could meet with an
old man, scarcely one or two in a thousand, who remembered in his youth
to have heard speak of 'Morimo'; and this word, once so deeply
significant, only survived now in the spells and charms of the so-
called rainmakers and sorcerers, who misused it to designate a fabulous
ghost, of whom they told the absurdest and most contradictory things.
And as there is no such witness to the degradation of the savage as the
brutal poverty of his language, so is there nothing that so effectually
tends to keep him in the depths to which he has fallen. You cannot
impart to any man more than the words which he understands either now
contain, or can be made, intelligibly to him, to contain. Language is
as truly on one side the limit and restraint of thought, as on the
other side that which feeds and unfolds thought. Thus it is the ever-
repeated complaint of the missionary that the very terms are well-nigh
or wholly wanting in the dialect of the savage whereby to impart to him
heavenly truths; and not these only; but that there are equally wanting
those which should express the nobler emotions of the human heart.
Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, in his curious _History of the
Abipones,_ tells us that neither these nor the Guarinies, two of the
principal native tribes of Brazil, possessed any word in the least
corresponding to our 'thanks.' But what wonder, if the feeling of
gratitude was entirely absent from their hearts, that they should not
have possessed the corresponding word in their vocabularies? Nay, how
should they have had it there? And that in this absence lies the true
explanation is plain from a fact which the same writer records, that,
although inveterate askers, they never showed the slightest sense of
obligation or of gratitude when they obtained what they sought; never
saying more than, 'This will be useful to me,' or, 'This is what I
wanted.' Dr. Krapf, after laborious researches in some widely extended
dialects of East Africa, has remarked in them the same absence of any
words expressing the idea of gratitude.
Nor is it only in what they have forfeited and lost, but also in what
they have retained or invented, that these languages proclaim their
degradation and debasement, and how deeply they and those that speak
them have fallen. For indeed the strange wealth and the strange poverty,
I know not which the strangest and the saddest, of the languages of
savage tribes, rich in words which proclaim their shame, poor in those
which should attest the workings of any nobler life among them, not
seldom absolutely destitute of these last, are a mournful and ever-
recurring surprise, even to those who were more or less prepared to
expect nothing else. Thus I have read of a tribe in New Holland, which
has no word to signify God, but has one to designate a process by which
an unborn child may be destroyed in the bosom of its mother. [Footnote:
A Wesleyan missionary, communicating with me from Fiji, assures me I
have here understated the case. He says: 'I could write down several
words, which express as many different ways of killing an unborn
child.' He has at the same time done me the favour to send me dreadful
confirmation of all which I have here asserted. It is a list of some
Fiji words, with the hideous meanings which they bear, or facts which
they imply. He has naturally confined himself to those in one domain of
human wickedness--that, namely, of cruelty; leaving another domain,
which borders close on this, and which, he assures me, would yield
proofs quite as terrible, altogether untouched. It is impossible to
imagine a record more hideous of what the works of the arch-murderer
are, or one more fitted to stir up missionary zeal in behalf of those
dark places of the earth which are full of the habitations of cruelty.
A very few specimens must suffice. The language of Fiji has a word for
a club which has killed a man; for a dead body which is to be eaten;
for the first of such bodies brought in at the beginning of a war; for
the flesh on each side of the backbone. It has a name of honour given
to those who have taken life; it need not have been the life of an
enemy; if only they have shed blood--it may have been the life of a
woman or a child--the title has been earned. It has a hideous word to
express the torturing and insulting of an enemy, as by cutting off any
part of his body--his nose or tongue, for instance--cooking and eating
it before his face, and taunting him the while; the [Greek:
hakrotaeriazein] of the Greeks, with the cannibalism added. But of this
enough.] And I have been informed, on the authority of one excellently
capable of knowing, an English scholar long resident in Van Diemen's
Land, that in the native language of that island there are [Footnote:
This was written in 1851. Now, in 1888, Van Diemen's Land is called
Tasmania, and the native language of that island is a thing of the
past.] four words to express the taking of human life--one to express a
father's killing of a son, another a son's killing of a father, with
other varieties of murder; and that in no one of these lies the
slightest moral reprobation, or sense of the deep-lying distinction
between to 'kill' and to 'murder'; while at the same time, of that
language so richly and so fearfully provided with expressions for this
extreme utterance of hate, he also reports that a word for 'love' is
wanting in it altogether. Yet with all this, ever and anon in the midst
of this wreck and ruin, there is that in the language of the savage,
some subtle distinction, some curious allusion to a perished
civilization, now utterly unintelligible to the speaker; or some other
note, which proclaims his language to be the remains of a dissipated
inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe which was a royal one once.
The fragments of a broken sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre wherewith
once he held dominion (he, that is, in his progenitors) over large
kingdoms of thought, which now have escaped wholly from his sway.
[Footnote: See on this matter Tylor, _Early History of Mankind_, pp.
150-190; and, still better, the Duke of Argyll, _On Primeval Man_; and
on this same survival of the fragments of an elder civilization, Ebrard,
_Apologetik_, vol. ii. p. 382. Among some of the Papuans the faintest
rudiments of the family survive; of the tribe no trace whatever; while
yet of these one has lately written:--'Sie haben religiöse Gebräuche
und Uebungen, welche, mit einigen anderen Erscheinungen in ihrem Leben,
mit ihrem jetzigen Culturzustande ganz unvereinbar erscheinen, wenn man
darin nicht die Spuren einer früher höhern Bildung erkennen will.'
Sayce agrees with this.]
But while it is thus with him, while this is the downward course of all
those that have chosen the downward path, while with every
impoverishing and debasing of personal and national life there goes
hand in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language;
so on the contrary, where there is advance and progress, where a divine
idea is in any measure realizing itself in a people, where they are
learning more accurately to define and distinguish, more truly to know,
where they are ruling, as men ought to rule, over nature, and
compelling her to give up her secrets to them, where new thoughts are
rising up over the horizon of a nation's mind, new feelings are
stirring at a nation's heart, new facts coming within the sphere of its
knowledge, there will language be growing and advancing too. It cannot
lag behind; for man feels that nothing is properly his own, that he has
not secured any new thought, or entered upon any new spiritual
inheritance, till he has fixed it in language, till he can contemplate
it, not as himself, but as his word; he is conscious that he must
express truth, if he is to preserve it, and still more if he would
propagate it among others. 'Names,' as it has been excellently said,
'are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold upon the
mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and
retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to
all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that
when past might be dissipated for ever, are by their connexion with
language always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves are perpetually
slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name
abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment.'
Men sometimes complain of the number of new theological terms which the
great controversies in which the Church from time to time has been
engaged, have left behind them. But this could not have been otherwise,
unless the gains through those controversies made, were presently to be
lost again; for as has lately been well said: 'The success and enduring
influence of any systematic construction of truth, be it secular or
sacred, depends as much upon an exact terminology, as upon close and
deep thinking itself. Indeed, unless the results to which the human
mind arrives are plainly stated, and firmly fixed in an exact
phraseology, its thinking is to very little purpose in the end.
"Terms," says Whewell, "record discoveries." That which was seen, it
may be with crystal clearness, and in bold outline, in the
consciousness of an individual thinker, may fail to become the property
and possession of mankind at large, because it is not transferred from
the individual to the general mind, by means of a precise phraseology
and a rigorous terminology. Nothing is in its own nature more fugacious
and shifting than thought; and particularly thoughts upon the mysteries
of Christianity. A conception that is plain and accurate in the
understanding of the first man becomes obscure and false in that of the
second, because it was not grasped and firmly held in the form and
proportions with which it first came up, and then handed over to other
minds, a fixed and scientific quantity.' [Footnote: Shedd, _History of
Christian Doctrine_, vol. i. p. 362; compare _Guesses at Truth_, 1866,
p. 217; and Gerber, _Sprache als Kunst_, vol. i. p. 145.] And on the
necessity of names at once for the preservation and the propagation of
truth it has been justly observed: 'Hardly any original thoughts on
mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume
their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until
aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and
held them fast.' [Footnote: Mill, _System of Logic_, vol. ii. p. 291.]
And this holds good alike of the false and of the true. I think we may
observe very often the way in which controversies, after long eddying
backward and forward, hither and thither, concentrate themselves at
last in some single word which is felt to contain all that the one
party would affirm and the other would deny. After a desultory swaying
of the battle hither and thither 'the high places of the field' the
critical position, on the winning of which everything turns, is
discovered at last. Thus the whole controversy of the Catholic Church
with the Arians finally gathers itself up in a single word,
'homoousion;' that with the Nestorians in another, 'theotokos.' One
might be bold to affirm that the entire secret of Buddhism is found in
'Nirvana'; for take away the word, and it is not too much to say that
the keystone to the whole arch is gone. So too when the medieval Church
allowed and then adopted the word 'transubstantiation' (and we know the
exact date of this), it committed itself to a doctrine from which
henceforward it was impossible to recede. The floating error had become
a fixed one, and exercised a far mightier influence on the minds of all
who received it, than except for this it would have ever done. It is
sometimes not a word, but a phrase, which proves thus mighty in
operation. 'Reformation in the head and in the members 'was the
watchword, for more than a century before an actual Reformation came,
of all who were conscious of the deeper needs of the Church. What
intelligent acquaintance with Darwin's speculations would the world in
general have made, except for two or three happy and comprehensive
terms, as 'the survival of the fittest,' 'the struggle for existence,'
'the process of natural selection'? Multitudes who else would have
known nothing about Comte's system, know something about it when they
know that he called it 'the positive philosophy.'
We have been tempted to depart a little, though a very little, from the
subject immediately before us. What was just now said of the manner in
which language enriches itself does not contradict a prior assertion,
that man starts with language as God's perfect gift, which he only
impairs and forfeits by sloth and sin, according to the same law which
holds good in respect of each other of the gifts of heaven. For it was
not meant, as indeed was then observed, that men would possess words to
set forth feelings which were not yet stirring in them, combinations
which they had not yet made, objects which they had not yet seen,
relations of which they were not yet conscious; but that up to man's
needs, (those needs including not merely his animal wants, but all his
higher spiritual cravings,) he would find utterance freely. The great
logical, or grammatical, framework of language, (for grammar is the
logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason,) he would
possess, he knew not how; and certainly not as the final result of
gradual acquisitions, and of reflexion setting these in order, and
drawing general rules from them; but as that rather which alone had
made those acquisitions possible; as that according to which he
unconsciously worked, filled in this framework by degrees with these
later acquisitions of thought, feeling, and experience, as one by one
they arrayed themselves in the garment and vesture of words.