many of the rules and traditions of grammar, whether ancient grammar or
the corrections of it which modern philology has introduced. Grammar,
like law, delights in definition: human speech, like human action,
though very far from being a mere chaos, is indefinite, admits of
degrees, and is always in a state of change or transition. Grammar
gives an erroneous conception of language: for it reduces to a system
that which is not a system. Its figures of speech, pleonasms, ellipses,
anacolutha, pros to semainomenon, and the like have no reality; they do
not either make conscious expressions more intelligible or show the way
in which they have arisen; they are chiefly designed to bring an
earlier use of language into conformity with the later. Often they seem
intended only to remind us that great poets like Aeschylus or Sophocles
or Pindar or a great prose writer like Thucydides are guilty of taking
unwarrantable liberties with grammatical rules; it appears never to
have occurred to the inventors of them that these real “conditores
linguae Graecae” lived in an age before grammar, when “Greece also was
living Greece.” It is the anatomy, not the physiology of language,
which grammar seeks to describe: into the idiom and higher life of
words it does not enter. The ordinary Greek grammar gives a complete
paradigm of the verb, without suggesting that the double or treble
forms of Perfects, Aorists, etc. are hardly ever contemporaneous. It
distinguishes Moods and Tenses, without observing how much of the
nature of one passes into the other. It makes three Voices, Active,
Passive, and Middle, but takes no notice of the precarious existence
and uncertain character of the last of the three. Language is a thing
of degrees and relations and associations and exceptions: grammar ties
it up in fixed rules. Language has many varieties of usage: grammar
tries to reduce them to a single one. Grammar divides verbs into
regular and irregular: it does not recognize that the irregular,
equally with the regular, are subject to law, and that a language which
had no exceptions would not be a natural growth: for it could not have
been subjected to the influences by which language is ordinarily
affected. It is always wanting to describe ancient languages in the
terms of a modern one. It has a favourite fiction that one word is put
in the place of another; the truth is that no word is ever put for
another. It has another fiction, that a word has been omitted: words
are omitted because they are no longer needed; and the omission has
ceased to be observed. The common explanation of kata or some other
preposition “being understood” in a Greek sentence is another fiction
of the same kind, which tends to disguise the fact that under cases
were comprehended originally many more relations, and that prepositions
are used only to define the meaning of them with greater precision.
These instances are sufficient to show the sort of errors which grammar
introduces into language. We are not considering the question of its
utility to the beginner in the study. Even to him the best grammar is
the shortest and that in which he will have least to unlearn. It may be
said that the explanations here referred to are already out of date,
and that the study of Greek grammar has received a new character from
comparative philology. This is true; but it is also true that the
traditional grammar has still a great hold on the mind of the student.
Metaphysics are even more troublesome than the figments of grammar,
because they wear the appearance of philosophy and there is no test to
which they can be subjected. They are useful in so far as they give us
an insight into the history of the human mind and the modes of thought
which have existed in former ages; or in so far as they furnish wider
conceptions of the different branches of knowledge and of their
relation to one another. But they are worse than useless when they
outrun experience and abstract the mind from the observation of facts,
only to envelope it in a mist of words. Some philologers, like
Schleicher, have been greatly influenced by the philosophy of Hegel;
nearly all of them to a certain extent have fallen under the dominion
of physical science. Even Kant himself thought that the first
principles of philosophy could be elicited from the analysis of the
proposition, in this respect falling short of Plato. Westphal holds
that there are three stages of language: (1) in which things were
characterized independently, (2) in which they were regarded in
relation to human thought, and (3) in relation to one another. But are
not such distinctions an anachronism? for they imply a growth of
abstract ideas which never existed in early times. Language cannot be
explained by Metaphysics; for it is prior to them and much more nearly
allied to sense. It is not likely that the meaning of the cases is
ultimately resolvable into relations of space and time. Nor can we
suppose the conception of cause and effect or of the finite and
infinite or of the same and other to be latent in language at a time
when in their abstract form they had never entered into the mind of
man...If the science of Comparative Philology had possessed “enough of
Metaphysics to get rid of Metaphysics,” it would have made far greater
progress.
(4) Our knowledge of language is almost confined to languages which are
fully developed. They are of several patterns; and these become altered
by admixture in various degrees,—they may only borrow a few words from
one another and retain their life comparatively unaltered, or they may
meet in a struggle for existence until one of the two is overpowered
and retires from the field. They attain the full rights and dignity of
language when they acquire the use of writing and have a literature of
their own; they pass into dialects and grow out of them, in proportion
as men are isolated or united by locality or occupation. The common
language sometimes reacts upon the dialects and imparts to them also a
literary character. The laws of language can be best discerned in the
great crises of language, especially in the transitions from ancient to
modern forms of them, whether in Europe or Asia. Such changes are the
silent notes of the world’s history; they mark periods of unknown
length in which war and conquest were running riot over whole
continents, times of suffering too great to be endured by the human
race, in which the masters became subjects and the subject races
masters, in which driven by necessity or impelled by some instinct,
tribes or nations left their original homes and but slowly found a
resting-place. Language would be the greatest of all historical
monuments, if it could only tell us the history of itself.
(5) There are many ways in which we may approach this study. The
simplest of all is to observe our own use of language in conversation
or in writing, how we put words together, how we construct and connect
sentences, what are the rules of accent and rhythm in verse or prose,
the formation and composition of words, the laws of euphony and sound,
the affinities of letters, the mistakes to which we are ourselves most
liable of spelling or pronunciation. We may compare with our own
language some other, even when we have only a slight knowledge of it,
such as French or German. Even a little Latin will enable us to
appreciate the grand difference between ancient and modern European
languages. In the child learning to speak we may note the inherent
strength of language, which like “a mountain river” is always forcing
its way out. We may witness the delight in imitation and repetition,
and some of the laws by which sounds pass into one another. We may
learn something also from the falterings of old age, the searching for
words, and the confusion of them with one another, the forgetfulness of
proper names (more commonly than of other words because they are more
isolated), aphasia, and the like. There are philological lessons also
to be gathered from nicknames, from provincialisms, from the slang of
great cities, from the argot of Paris (that language of suffering and
crime, so pathetically described by Victor Hugo), from the imperfect
articulation of the deaf and dumb, from the jabbering of animals, from
the analysis of sounds in relation to the organs of speech. The
phonograph affords a visible evidence of the nature and divisions of
sound; we may be truly said to know what we can manufacture. Artificial
languages, such as that of Bishop Wilkins, are chiefly useful in
showing what language is not. The study of any foreign language may be
made also a study of Comparative Philology. There are several points,
such as the nature of irregular verbs, of indeclinable parts of speech,
the influence of euphony, the decay or loss of inflections, the
elements of syntax, which may be examined as well in the history of our
own language as of any other. A few well-selected questions may lead
the student at once into the heart of the mystery: such as, Why are the
pronouns and the verb of existence generally more irregular than any
other parts of speech? Why is the number of words so small in which the
sound is an echo of the sense? Why does the meaning of words depart so
widely from their etymology? Why do substantives often differ in
meaning from the verbs to which they are related, adverbs from
adjectives? Why do words differing in origin coalesce in the same sound
though retaining their differences of meaning? Why are some verbs
impersonal? Why are there only so many parts of speech, and on what
principle are they divided? These are a few crucial questions which
give us an insight from different points of view into the true nature
of language.
(6) Thus far we have been endeavouring to strip off from language the
false appearances in which grammar and philology, or the love of system
generally, have clothed it. We have also sought to indicate the sources
of our knowledge of it and the spirit in which we should approach it,
we may now proceed to consider some of the principles or natural laws
which have created or modified it.
i. The first and simplest of all the principles of language, common
also to the animals, is imitation. The lion roars, the wolf howls in
the solitude of the forest: they are answered by similar cries heard
from a distance. The bird, too, mimics the voice of man and makes
answer to him. Man tells to man the secret place in which he is hiding
himself; he remembers and repeats the sound which he has heard. The
love of imitation becomes a passion and an instinct to him. Primitive
men learnt to speak from one another, like a child from its mother or
nurse. They learnt of course a rudimentary, half-articulate language,
the cry or song or speech which was the expression of what we now call
human thoughts and feelings. We may still remark how much greater and
more natural the exercise of the power is in the use of language than
in any other process or action of the human mind.
ii. Imitation provided the first material of language: but it was
“without form and void.” During how many years or hundreds or thousands
of years the imitative or half-articulate stage continued there is no
possibility of determining. But we may reasonably conjecture that there
was a time when the vocal utterance of man was intermediate between
what we now call language and the cry of a bird or animal. Speech
before language was a rudis indigestaque materies, not yet distributed
into words and sentences, in which the cry of fear or joy mingled with
more definite sounds recognized by custom as the expressions of things
or events. It was the principle of analogy which introduced into this
“indigesta moles” order and measure. It was Anaxagoras’ omou panta
chremata, eita nous elthon diekosmese: the light of reason lighted up
all things and at once began to arrange them. In every sentence, in
every word and every termination of a word, this power of forming
relations to one another was contained. There was a proportion of sound
to sound, of meaning to meaning, of meaning to sound. The cases and
numbers of nouns, the persons, tenses, numbers of verbs, were generally
on the same or nearly the same pattern and had the same meaning. The
sounds by which they were expressed were rough-hewn at first; after a
while they grew more refined—the natural laws of euphony began to
affect them. The rules of syntax are likewise based upon analogy. Time
has an analogy with space, arithmetic with geometry. Not only in
musical notes, but in the quantity, quality, accent, rhythm of human
speech, trivial or serious, there is a law of proportion. As in things
of beauty, as in all nature, in the composition as well as in the
motion of all things, there is a similarity of relations by which they
are held together.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the analogies of language are
always uniform: there may be often a choice between several, and
sometimes one and sometimes another will prevail. In Greek there are
three declensions of nouns; the forms of cases in one of them may
intrude upon another. Similarly verbs in -omega and -mu iota
interchange forms of tenses, and the completed paradigm of the verb is
often made up of both. The same nouns may be partly declinable and
partly indeclinable, and in some of their cases may have fallen out of
use. Here are rules with exceptions; they are not however really
exceptions, but contain in themselves indications of other rules. Many
of these interruptions or variations of analogy occur in pronouns or in
the verb of existence of which the forms were too common and therefore
too deeply imbedded in language entirely to drop out. The same verbs in
the same meaning may sometimes take one case, sometimes another. The
participle may also have the character of an adjective, the adverb
either of an adjective or of a preposition. These exceptions are as
regular as the rules, but the causes of them are seldom known to us.
Language, like the animal and vegetable worlds, is everywhere
intersected by the lines of analogy. Like number from which it seems to
be derived, the principle of analogy opens the eyes of men to discern
the similarities and differences of things, and their relations to one
another. At first these are such as lie on the surface only; after a
time they are seen by men to reach farther down into the nature of
things. Gradually in language they arrange themselves into a sort of
imperfect system; groups of personal and case endings are placed side
by side. The fertility of language produces many more than are wanted;
and the superfluous ones are utilized by the assignment to them of new
meanings. The vacuity and the superfluity are thus partially
compensated by each other. It must be remembered that in all the
languages which have a literature, certainly in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,
we are not at the beginning but almost at the end of the linguistic
process; we have reached a time when the verb and the noun are nearly
perfected, though in no language did they completely perfect
themselves, because for some unknown reason the motive powers of
languages seem to have ceased when they were on the eve of completion:
they became fixed or crystallized in an imperfect form either from the
influence of writing and literature, or because no further
differentiation of them was required for the intelligibility of
language. So not without admixture and confusion and displacement and
contamination of sounds and the meanings of words, a lower stage of
language passes into a higher. Thus far we can see and no further. When
we ask the reason why this principle of analogy prevails in all the
vast domain of language, there is no answer to the question; or no
other answer but this, that there are innumerable ways in which, like
number, analogy permeates, not only language, but the whole world, both
visible and intellectual. We know from experience that it does not (a)
arise from any conscious act of reflection that the accusative of a
Latin noun in “us” should end in “um;” nor (b) from any necessity of
being understood,—much less articulation would suffice for this; nor
(c) from greater convenience or expressiveness of particular sounds.
Such notions were certainly far enough away from the mind of primitive
man. We may speak of a latent instinct, of a survival of the fittest,
easiest, most euphonic, most economical of breath, in the case of one
of two competing sounds; but these expressions do not add anything to
our knowledge. We may try to grasp the infinity of language either
under the figure of a limitless plain divided into countries and
districts by natural boundaries, or of a vast river eternally flowing
whose origin is concealed from us; we may apprehend partially the laws
by which speech is regulated: but we do not know, and we seem as if we
should never know, any more than in the parallel case of the origin of
species, how vocal sounds received life and grew, and in the form of
languages came to be distributed over the earth.
iii. Next in order to analogy in the formation of language or even
prior to it comes the principle of onomatopea, which is itself a kind
of analogy or similarity of sound and meaning. In by far the greater
number of words it has become disguised and has disappeared; but in no
stage of language is it entirely lost. It belongs chiefly to early
language, in which words were few; and its influence grew less and less
as time went on. To the ear which had a sense of harmony it became a
barbarism which disturbed the flow and equilibrium of discourse; it was
an excrescence which had to be cut out, a survival which needed to be
got rid of, because it was out of keeping with the rest. It remained
for the most part only as a formative principle, which used words and
letters not as crude imitations of other natural sounds, but as symbols
of ideas which were naturally associated with them. It received in
another way a new character; it affected not so much single words, as
larger portions of human speech. It regulated the juxtaposition of
sounds and the cadence of sentences. It was the music, not of song, but
of speech, in prose as well as verse. The old onomatopea of primitive
language was refined into an onomatopea of a higher kind, in which it
is no longer true to say that a particular sound corresponds to a
motion or action of man or beast or movement of nature, but that in all
the higher uses of language the sound is the echo of the sense,
especially in poetry, in which beauty and expressiveness are given to
human thoughts by the harmonious composition of the words, syllables,
letters, accents, quantities, rhythms, rhymes, varieties and contrasts
of all sorts. The poet with his “Break, break, break” or his e pasin
nekuessi kataphthimenoisin anassein or his “longius ex altoque sinum
trahit,” can produce a far finer music than any crude imitations of
things or actions in sound, although a letter or two having this
imitative power may be a lesser element of beauty in such passages. The
same subtle sensibility, which adapts the word to the thing, adapts the
sentence or cadence to the general meaning or spirit of the passage.
This is the higher onomatopea which has banished the cruder sort as
unworthy to have a place in great languages and literatures.
We can see clearly enough that letters or collocations of letters do by
various degrees of strength or weakness, length or shortness, emphasis
or pitch, become the natural expressions of the finer parts of human
feeling or thought. And not only so, but letters themselves have a
significance; as Plato observes that the letter rho accent is
expressive of motion, the letters delta and tau of binding and rest,
the letter lambda of smoothness, nu of inwardness, the letter eta of
length, the letter omicron of roundness. These were often combined so
as to form composite notions, as for example in tromos (trembling),
trachus (rugged), thrauein (crush), krouein (strike), thruptein
(break), pumbein (whirl),—in all which words we notice a parallel
composition of sounds in their English equivalents. Plato also remarks,
as we remark, that the onomatopoetic principle is far from prevailing
uniformly, and further that no explanation of language consistently
corresponds with any system of philosophy, however great may be the
light which language throws upon the nature of the mind. Both in Greek
and English we find groups of words such as string, swing, sling,
spring, sting, which are parallel to one another and may be said to
derive their vocal effect partly from contrast of letters, but in which
it is impossible to assign a precise amount of meaning to each of the
expressive and onomatopoetic letters. A few of them are directly
imitative, as for example the omega in oon, which represents the round
form of the egg by the figure of the mouth: or bronte (thunder), in
which the fulness of the sound of the word corresponds to the thing
signified by it; or bombos (buzzing), of which the first syllable, as
in its English equivalent, has the meaning of a deep sound. We may
observe also (as we see in the case of the poor stammerer) that speech
has the co-operation of the whole body and may be often assisted or
half expressed by gesticulation. A sound or word is not the work of the
vocal organs only; nearly the whole of the upper part of the human
frame, including head, chest, lungs, have a share in creating it; and
it may be accompanied by a movement of the eyes, nose, fingers, hands,
feet which contributes to the effect of it.
The principle of onomatopea has fallen into discredit, partly because
it has been supposed to imply an actual manufacture of words out of
syllables and letters, like a piece of joiner’s work,—a theory of
language which is more and more refuted by facts, and more and more
going out of fashion with philologians; and partly also because the
traces of onomatopea in separate words become almost obliterated in the
course of ages. The poet of language cannot put in and pull out
letters, as a painter might insert or blot out a shade of colour to
give effect to his picture. It would be ridiculous for him to alter any
received form of a word in order to render it more expressive of the
sense. He can only select, perhaps out of some dialect, the form which
is already best adapted to his purpose. The true onomatopea is not a
creative, but a formative principle, which in the later stage of the
history of language ceases to act upon individual words; but still
works through the collocation of them in the sentence or paragraph, and
the adaptation of every word, syllable, letter to one another and to
the rhythm of the whole passage.