There are so many of these curious examples that one is tempted to go on choosing instances; but we confine ourselves to one more. Our word yes is a word which by itself is quite incapable of calling up a picture in our minds, but the word is or ‘it is,’ though the idea it conveys is very abstract, and, so to say, intangible—as compared, for instance, with such verbs as move, beat—nevertheless belongs to the ‘significant’ class. Now, it happens that the Latin language used the word est ‘it is’ where we should now use the word ‘yes;’ and it still further happens that our yes[20] is probably the same as the German es, and was used in the same sense of it is as well. Instead of the meaningless word ‘yes’ the Romans used the word est ‘it is,’ and our own ancestors expressed the same idea by saying ‘it.’ Still more. It is well known that French is in the main a descendant from the Latin, not the Latin of Rome, but the corrupter Latin which was spoken in Gaul. Now these Latin-speaking Gauls did not, for some reason, say est, ‘it is,’ for yes, as the Romans did; but they used a pronoun, either ille, ‘he,’ or hoc, ‘this.’ When, therefore, a Gaul desired to say ‘yes,’ he nodded, and said he or else this, meaning ‘He is so,’ or ‘This is so.’ As it happens the Gauls of the north said ille, and those of the south said hoc, and these words gradually got corrupted into two meaningless words, oui and oc. It is well known that the people in the south of France were especially distinguished by using the word oc instead of oui for ‘yes,’ so that their ‘dialect’ got to be called the langue d’oc, and this word Languedoc gave the name to a province of France. Long before that time, however, we may be sure, both the people of the langue d’oil, or langue d’oui, and those of the langue d’oc had forgotten that their words for ‘yes’ had originally meant ‘he’ and ‘this.’
We can, from the instances above given, form a pretty good guess at the way in which the auxiliary or meaningless class of sounds came into use in any language. Each of these must once have had a distinct significance by itself, then (getting meanwhile a little changed in form probably) it gradually lost the separate meaning and became only a particle of speech, only an adjunct to other words. In another way, we may say that before man spoke of ‘on the rock’ or ‘under the rock’ he must have used some expression like ‘head of rock,’ or more literally ‘head rock’ and ‘foot rock;’ and that as time went on, new words coming into use for head and foot, these earlier ones dropped down to be mere adjuncts, and men forgot that they had ever been anything else. Just so no ordinary Frenchman knows that his oui and il are both sprung from the same Latin ille; nor does the ordinary Englishman recognize that ago is a past participle of ‘go;’ nor again, to take a new instance, does, perhaps, the ordinary German recognize that his gewiss, ‘certainly,’ is merely an abbreviation of the past participle gewissen, ‘known.’
We have now followed the growth of language through
Root-sounds.
two of its stages, first, the coining of the principal or essential parts of speech, the nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and secondly, the coining at a later date of the auxiliary parts of speech, the prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, and (where they exist) the enclitics the and a; these last, however, (as separate words,[21]) are wanting from a large number of languages. A third stage is the variation of certain words to form out of them other words which are nearly related in character to the first. We may speak of this process as a process of ringing the changes upon certain root-sounds to form a series of words allied in sound and allied in sense also. We have several instances of such groups of allied words in our own language. Fly, flee, flew, fled, are words allied in sound and in sense. In these cases the sound of the letters f-l constitutes what we may call the root-sound. And it may be said at once that those languages are said to be related in each of which a certain number of words can be traced back to root-sounds which are common to the two or more tongues.
In the case of the vast majority of words, before we can begin by comparing one word with another, or trying to discover the root-words of several different languages, we have first to trace the history of these words backwards, each in its own language, and find their most primitive forms. But in tongues which are pretty nearly related we have often no difficulty in seeing the similarity of corresponding words just as they stand to-day. We have no difficulty, for instance, in seeing the connection of the German Knecht and our knight,[22] the German Nacht and our night, the German Raum and our room; or, again, the connection between the Italian padre and the French père, the Italian tavola and the French (and English) table, etc.
But where the connection between languages is more distant, we have more and more to go back to much simpler roots, in order to show the relationship between them; and by a vast majority the primitive root-sounds in any large family of languages are single syllables, whereof the most constant parts are (as a rule) the consonants. So far as our knowledge goes, we might think of man as beginning human speech with a certain number of these simple root-sounds, and then proceeding to ring the changes upon these root-sounds to express varieties in the root-idea. Sometimes it is easy enough to trace the connection of ideas between different words which have been formed out of the same root-word. But sometimes this is not at all easy. Nor can we say why this special sound has been adopted for any one notion more than for a number of others to which it would have applied equally well. From a root, which in Sanskrit appears in its most ancient form, as mâ, ‘to measure,’ we get words in Greek and Latin which mean ‘to think;’ and from the same root comes our ‘man,’ the person who measures, who compares, i.e., who thinks, also our moon, which means ‘the measurer,’ because the moon helps to measure out the time, the months. But how arbitrary seems this connection between man and moon! So, too, our crab is from the word creep, and means the animal that creeps. But why this name should have been given to crab rather than to ant and beetle it is impossible to say. So that there appears as little trace of a reason governing the formation of words out of root-sounds as there appeared in the adoption of root-sounds to express certain fundamental ideas.
Thus equipped with his fixed root and the various words formed out of it, man had the rough material out of which to build up all the elaborate languages which the world has known. And he continued his work something in this fashion. As generation followed generation the pronunciation of words was changed, as is constantly being done at the present day. Our grandmothers pronounced ‘Rome,’ ‘Room,’ and ‘brooch,’ as it was spelt, and not as we pronounce it—‘broach.’ And let it be remembered, before writing was invented, there was nothing but the pronunciation to fix the word, and a new pronunciation was really a new word. When there was no written form to petrify a word, these changes of pronunciation were very rapid and frequent, so that not only would each generation have a different set of words from their fathers, but probably each tribe would be partly unintelligible to its neighbouring tribes, just as a Somersetshire man is to a great extent unintelligible to a man from Yorkshire. The first result of these changes would be the springing up of that class of ‘meaningless’ words of which we spoke above. Out of some significant words, such as ‘head’ and ‘foot,’ would arise insignificant words similar to ‘over’ and ‘under.’ Such a change could only begin when of two names each for ‘head’ and ‘foot’ one became obsolete as a noun, and was only used adverbially. Then what had originally meant, metaphorically, ‘head of rock’ and ‘foot of rock’[23] might come to be used for ‘over’ and ‘under the rock,’ in exactly the same way that the word ago, having changed its form from agone, has become a ‘meaningless’ word to the Englishman of to-day.
And with the acquisition of the insignificant words a new and very important process began. To understand
Growth of
inflexions.