The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

But the difficulty of tracing fleeting words to their sources operates to a great extent in effacing the action of the individual in language. Words become public property before they are incorporated in a language. It would be difficult to establish a system of patents for new words. Here again we see that the line drawn between language and the arts is a subjective delusion, not an objective reality. It is not true that words do not originate with individual men, but merely that we do not perceive it.

Modifications of words, like modifications in the forms of the arts, result from the succession of ideas or other causes affecting particular minds. They obtain acceptance through natural selection by the survival of the fittest.

The chance which a new word or a new implement has of surviving depends on the number of words or implements to be superseded, on their relative importance to the art or the language, and the persistency with which these superseded words or implements are retained. The truth of this is seen in the fact that vocabularies change far more rapidly than grammatical forms; because the same grammatical terminations are employed with a large number of different words, and they are therefore a more constant necessity of speech.

Hence early and barbaric languages may be connected by their grammatical forms long after their vocabularies have entirely changed. The same truth is seen in the fact admitted by philologists, that in small communities new words and modifications of words gain more ready acceptance than in large communities; because the struggle of the new words for existence is less in small than in large communities, and the dialects therefore change more rapidly. And the same causes influence the transformations which take place in the arts. Objects in common use change more slowly than those which are but little employed; the difference is merely one of degree and not of kind.

In dealing with the arts, each separate contrivance occupies a larger share of our attention, to the exclusion of any comprehensive survey of them as a whole. The arts present themselves to our mental vision on a larger scale, and we view them analytically; we are as it were in the brickmaker’s yard seeing each brick turned out of hand, whereas in dealing with language we see only the finished building; the details are lost. We view language synthetically. The arts may be said to present themselves to us as a sea beach in detached fragments; language in the form of a compact sandstone. The empiric or the utilitarian may deny that there is any resemblance between them; but the geologist knows that the mode of deposition has been the same in both cases, and he classes the whole as rocks.

Then again there are facilities for collecting and arranging the data for the study of language which do not exist in the case of the arts. Whilst words take seconds to record, hours and days may be spent in the accurate delineation of form. Words cost nothing, may be packed in folios, transmitted by post, and stored on the shelves of every private library. Ten thousand classified words may be carried in the coat pocket without inconvenience, whilst a tenth part of that number of material objects require a museum to contain them, and are accessible only to a few: this is the reason why the arts have never been subjected to those classifications which form the groundwork of a science.

But when we say that words and implements are both tools employed for the expression of thought, it is important to bear in view one difference between them, which has a practical bearing on the relative value of the two studies as a means of tracing the evolution of culture in prehistoric times and amongst savages. The word is the tool of the ear, the implement the tool of the eye; and for this reason language is the science of historic times, whilst the arts constitute the subject of science to be studied in relation to prehistoric times.

Every new tool or weapon formed by the hand of man retains the same form as long as it continues to exist; it may be handed from man to man, from tribe to tribe, from father to son, from one generation to another; or, buried in the soil, it may under special conditions continue for untold ages without change of form, until in our time it may be discovered and employed as evidence of the condition of the arts at the time it was fabricated. Very different, however, is the history of words. Each word coined by the exercise of the inventive faculty of man to express an idea is liable to change as it passes from mouth to ear. Its continued identity is dependent solely on memory, and it is subject to phonetic and acoustic changes from which the forms of the arts are exempt.

When by the invention of writing each word receives its equivalent in forms that are appreciable to the sense of sight, it gains stability, which places it on a footing of equality with the arts, and enables us to trace with certainty the changes it has undergone; and therefore in historic times language is the surest test of social contact that we can have. But in prehistoric times, before it had acquired this permanence through the invention of writing, the forms of language were, to use Mr. Sayce’s expression, in a constant state of flux.