FOOTNOTES:
[39] “The sun has gone down with his battle-stained eye.”
[40] “Roba di Roma,” by W. W. Story.
[41] Macaulay’s “History of England,” Vol. II.
[42] “The Doctor,” Vol, VII.
[CHAPTER XV.]
CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE.
Language is the depository of the accumulated body of experience, to which all former ages have contributed their part, and which is the inheritance of all yet to come.—J. S. Mill.
Often in words contemplated singly there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid up.—Trench.
A thoughtful English writer tells us that, when about nine years old, he learned with much surprise that the word “sincere” was derived from the practice of filling up flaws in furniture with wax, whence sine cera came to mean pure, not vamped up or adulterated. This explanation gave him great pleasure, and abode in his memory as having first shown him that there is a reason in words as well as things. There are few cultivated persons who have not felt, at some time in their lives, a thrill of surprise and delight like that of this writer. Throughout our whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, the stream of our history, inner and outer, runs wonderfully blended with the texture of the words we use. Dive into what subject we will, we never touch the bottom. The simplest prattle of a child is but the light surface of a deep sea containing many treasures. It would be hard, therefore, to find in the whole range of inquiry another study which at once is so fascinating, and so richly repays the labor, as that of the etymology or primitive significations of words.
It is an epoch in one’s intellectual history when he first learns that words are living and not dead things,—that in these children of the mind are incarnated the wit and wisdom, the poetic fancies and the deep intuitions, the passionate longings and the happy or sad experiences of many generations. The discovery is “like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world;” he never ceases wondering at the moral marvels that everywhere reveal themselves to his gaze. To eyes thus opened, dictionaries, instead of seeming huge masses of word-lumber, become vast storehouses of historical memorials, than which none are more vital in spirit or more pregnant with meaning. It is not in oriental fairy-tales only that persons drop pearls every time they open their mouths; like Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, we are dropping gems from our lips in almost every hour of the day. Not a thought, or feeling, or wish can we utter without recalling, by an unconscious sign or symbol, some historic fact, some memory of “auld lang syne,” some bygone custom, some vanished superstition, some exploded prejudice, or some ethical divination that has lost its charm. Even the homeliest and most familiar words, the most hackneyed phrases, are connected by imperceptible ties with the hopes and fears, the reasonings and reflections, of bygone men and times.
Every generation of men inherits and uses all the scientific wealth of the past. “It is not merely the great and rich in the intellectual world who are thus blessed, but the humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into words, benefits by the labors of the greatest. When he counts his little wealth, he finds he has in his hands coins which bear the image and superscription of ancient and modern intellectual dynasties, and that in virtue of this possession acquisitions are in his power, solid knowledge within his reach, which none could ever have attained to, if it were not that the gold of truth once dug out of the mine circulates more and more widely among mankind.” Emerson beautifully calls language “fossil poetry.” The etymologist, he adds, finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. “As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long since ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
Not only is this true, but many a single word, as Archbishop Trench remarks, is itself a concentrated poem, in which are treasured stores of poetical thought and imagery. Examine it closely, and it will be found to rest upon some palpable or subtle analogy of things material and spiritual, showing that, however trite the image now, the man who first coined the word was a poet. The older the word, the profounder and more beautiful the meanings it will often be found to inclose; for words of late growth speak to the head, not to the heart; thoughts and feelings are too subtle for new words, and are conveyed only by those about which cluster many associations. It is the use of words when new and fresh from the lips of their inventors, before their vivid and picturesque meanings have faded out or been obscured by their many secondary significations, that gives such pictorial beauty, pith, and raciness, to the early writers; “and hence to recall language, to restore its early meanings, to re-mint it in novel forms, is the secret of all effective writing and speaking,—of all verbal expression which is to leave, as was said of the eloquence of Pericles, stings in the minds and memories of the hearers.”
Language is not only “fossil poetry,” but it is also fossil philosophy, fossil ethics, and fossil history. As in the pre-Adamite rock are bound up and preserved the vegetable and animal forms of ages long gone by, so in words are locked up truths once known but now forgotten,—the thoughts and feelings, the habits, customs, opinions, virtues and vices of men long since in their graves. Language is, in short, “the depository of the accumulated body of experience, to which all former ages have contributed their part, and which is the inheritance of all yet to come.”[43] It is “like amber, circulating the electric spirit of truth, and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom.”[44] Compared with this memorial of the past, these records of ancient and modern intellectual dynasties, how poor are all other monuments of human power, perseverance, skill, or genius! Unlike the works of individual genius, or the cuneiform inscriptions which are found in oriental countries on the crumbling fragments of half-calcined stone, language gives us the history not only of individuals, but of nations; not only of nations, but of mankind. It is, indeed, “an admirable poem on the history of all ages; a living monument on which is written the genesis of human thought. Thus ‘the ground on which our civilization stands is a sacred one, for it is the deposit of thought. For language, as it is the mirror, so it is the product of reason, and, as it embodies thought, so it is the child of thought. In it are embodied the sparks of that celestial fire which from a once bright centre of civilization has streamed forth over the inhabited earth, and which now already, after less than three myriads of years, forms a galaxy round the globe, a chain of light from pole to pole.’”
How pregnant with instruction is often the history of a single word! Coleridge, who keenly appreciated the significance of words, says that there are cases where more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign. Sometimes the germ of a nation’s life,—the philosophy of some political, moral, or intellectual movement in a country,—will be found coiled up in a single word, just as the oak is found in an acorn. The word “ostracize” gives us a vivid picture of the Athenian democracy, and of the period when oyster-shells were used for ballots. It calls up the barbarity which held an election of candidates for banishment; the arbitrary power which enabled the vilest of the citizens, from mere envy of the reputation of the best man in the city, to make him an exile; and the utter lack and desecration of liberty, while its forms were fetiches for the popular worship. The fact that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, and the merchants of the Middle Ages, is shown by the words we have borrowed from them,—“algebra,” “almanac,” “cypher,” “zero,” “zenith,” “alkali,” “alcohol,” “alchemy,” “alembic,” “magazine,” “tariff,” “cotton,” “elixir”; and so that the monastic system originated in the Greek, and not in the Latin church, is shown by the fact that the words expressing the chief elements of the system, as “monk,” “monastery,” “anchorite,” “cenobite,” “ascetic,” “hermit,” are Greek, not Latin. What an amount of history is wrapped up in the word “Pagan”! The term, we learn from Gibbon, is remotely derived from Πάγη, in the Doric dialect, signifying a fountain; and the rural neighborhood which frequented the same derived the common appellation of Pagus and “Pagans.” Soon “Pagan” and “rural” became nearly synonymous, and the meaner peasants acquired that name which has been corrupted into “peasant” in the modern languages of Europe. All non-military people soon came to be branded as Pagans. The Christians were the soldiers of Christ; their adversaries, who refused the “sacrament,” or military oath of baptism, might deserve the metaphorical name of Pagans. Christianity gradually filled the cities of the empire; the old religion retired and languished, in the time of Prudentius, in obscure villages. From Pagus, as a root, comes pagius, first a villager, then a rural laborer, then a servant, lastly a “page.” Pagina, first the inclosed square of cultivated land near a village, graduated into the “page” of a book. Pagare, from denoting the “field service” that compensated the provider of food and raiment, was applied eventually to every form in which the changes of society required the benefited to “pay” for what they received. Again, when a Scotchman speaks of his “shacklebone,” he not only conveys an idea of his wrist, but discovers by this very term that slavery, or vassalage, continued so long in Scotland as to impress itself indelibly on the language of the country.
Often where history is utterly dumb concerning the past, language speaks. The discovery of the foot-print on the sand did not more certainly prove to Robinson Crusoe that the island of which he had fancied himself the sole inhabitant contained a brother man, than the similarity of the inflections in the speech of different peoples proves their brotherhood. Were all the histories of England swept from existence, the study of its language,—developing the fact that the basis of the language is Saxon, that the names of the prominent objects of nature are Celtic, the terms of war and government Norman-French, the ecclesiastical terms Latin,—would enable us to reconstruct a large part of the story of the past, as it even now enables us to verify many of the statements of the chroniclers. Humboldt, in his “Cosmos,” eulogizes the study of words as one of the richest sources of historical knowledge; and it is probable that what comparative philology, yet in its infancy, has already discovered, will compel a rewriting of the history of the world. Even now it has thrown light on many of the most perplexing problems of religion, history, and ethnography; and it seems destined to triumphs of which we can but dimly apprehend the consequences. On the stone tablets of the universe God’s own finger has written the changes which millions of years have wrought on the mountain and the plain; and in the fluid air, which he coins into spoken words, man has preserved forever the grand facts of his past history and the grand processes of his inmost soul. “Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,” is the cry which is remodelling the map of Europe; and in our country, comparative philologists,—to their shame be it said,—have labored with Satanic zeal to prove the impossibility of a common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the theory of slavery. It has been said that the interpretation of one word in the Vedas fifty years earlier would have saved many Hindoo widows from being burned alive; and now that the philologists of Germany and England have shown that the iron network of caste, which for centuries has hindered the development of India, is not a religious institution, and has no authority in their sacred writings, but is the invention of an arrogant and usurping priesthood,—or, at best, an erroneous tradition, due to the half-knowledge or to the imposture of the native pundits,—the British government will be able to inflict penalties for the observance of the rules of caste, and thus to relieve India from the greatest clog on its progress.