BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.
Learning the reason of anything, by which we generally mean the cause of it, is a process the instructive benefit of which is not limited by the subject immediately under consideration. To trace the relation of cause and effect is a very great and very important part of true education; of which, it needs hardly here to be said, book-learning is only a help and adjunct. Indeed, this learning or finding of causes is an education or discipline which for those who give themselves to intellectual pursuits, continues all their lives. It is the chief occupation of philosophers, of men of science, of investigators, of all real students. Virgil—who was not a very great poet, being of the second, or even of the third rank, because of his moderate creative power, his lack of vividness of imagination and liveliness of fancy, but who is remarkable for a broad and serene thoughtfulness—said: “Happy is he who is able to discover the causes of things.”[A] And indeed this process of finding causes is one of the most delightful and fascinating, and, to the soul of man, most profitable, in which man can engage. Of which the chief reason is the close and intimate relation that exists between all facts and thoughts and things. Isolation and independence are conditions hardly discoverable. Men can not be independent of each other, as we all find very early in life, if we observe and think. But yet, a man may isolate himself upon the top of a pillar; or he may build himself a hut in the woods, and give himself up to contemplation; thinking that in this way he will discover or evolve something that otherwise would be concealed. The discoveries and the evolutions in these cases, however, do not prove of much value, either to the individuals or to mankind. An isolated man, although monstrous, abnormal, unnatural, is possible, but not an isolated fact. An isolated fact is almost, if not quite, a contradiction in terms; for a fact implies conditions and causes from which it can not be separated. We shall thus find that the inquiry into the cause of such a simple, every-day fact as our speaking English will lead us through, although not over, the whole range of the history, known and conjectured, of that great family of the human race to which the people of Europe and of civilized America belong. To follow the steps of this inquiry will not be difficult, and, I hope, not uninteresting to the least learned reader of this magazine.
Why, then, do we in the United States of America speak English? Because that language is the speech of the English, or the so-called, Anglo-Saxon people? Because our forefathers came from England? Partly so. These facts have certain relations with that into the causes of which we are inquiring, but they do not wholly account for it. For although we are, in the main, an English people, and the forefathers of most of us did come from England, there are now many, although comparatively few, of us who are of Irish or of German blood. Moreover, in Ireland there are millions of Irishmen, Celts, who hate “the Saxon” (that is the English), but who speak English, and whose forefathers have spoken it for many generations. Now, the first reason why those Irishmen speak, and so long have spoken English, is a very simple, bald and cogent one, and it is the very reason of our speaking that language. It is, necessity: nothing more. The Celtic Irishman whose race-tongue was Erse, spoke English for the very reason that we, whose race-tongue it is, speak it; because he must speak it to be understood; for no other reason. But how came this necessity about? How came English speech into Ireland or into America, or, for that matter, into England?
Language is a mere instrument of man’s convenience; as much so as a spade or a knife, or any other tool. He uses it for the purpose of communicating with those by whom he is surrounded; and he must give to things and thoughts the names which they give them, or he might as well be dumb. If they call a certain animal a horse, it will not do for him to call it a cheval; and if they call it un cheval, it will not do for him to call it ung shovel, as many persons have found in France to their surprise and inconvenience. And if he is born and bred in France, no matter how thoroughly English or Irish he may be in blood, he will call it un cheval, without effort and without thought.
These are obvious facts; but for our present purpose they are not trite, nor is the consideration of them trifling. They have bearing upon the very common belief, or assumption, that language is a product of race; that there is some mysterious and inevitable connection between man’s physical and mental constitution and the language that he speaks. There is no such connection. Manner of speech and style of writing are peculiar in various peoples, as their manner and their style in other things and acts are peculiar. There is a French style of speaking, as there is an Italian, an Irish, and an English, which pertains to those various peoples, and which is a product of their national spirit, their genius, as we say. But there is no such influence of national spirit, or of physiological traits or conditions upon the substance of language—words. The Irish did not speak Erse, because Erse was a natural product of the Irish physical or mental constitution. So with the English; so with all peoples. An English, a German or a French boy, born and brought up in Russia, would speak Russian; and (personal peculiarities apart) they all would speak it alike, and without the least modification dependent upon their respective English, German, and French physical and mental constitution. If, however, their mothers were with them, and their mothers could speak no Russian, each of those boys would speak two languages, English and Russian, or German and Russian, or French and Russian, and, accidents apart, each of them would speak his two equally well, and with equal freedom. He would think with equal freedom in both.
Some of my readers must know, from their own observation, that this is true; and yet I do not doubt that even of these there are not a few who have never thought of it as evidence that, although certain languages are spoken by certain races, this is not because there is any natural and peculiar fitness of the words of any one language to the character or the spirit of any one people. The language used by any and every people has a historical origin; and the peculiar forms of its words are the product of time, of circumstance, and probably, in a certain very moderate measure, of climate, and of physiological conditions.
The sun and the moon received their names for good reasons; the former because it is the creator (light and heat being the causes of inorganic life), and the latter because it was the first measurer of time; and these names they have borne for at least four thousand years—we do not know how much longer. But now those words have become mere names; mere sounds which are the vocal indications of the objects to which they are applied, so that if by some wizardry we were all, with one exception, to wake up to-morrow calling the light which rules the day, moon, and that which rules the night, sun, we should be perfectly satisfied, and find in it no inconvenience; and moreover we should look upon him who used the words in the converse senses, that we had forgotten, as a madman.
Words however have, with very few exceptions, a real meaning, or at least a reason for their use, as sun and moon have. The words without such meaning may be all told upon the fingers. Two words of scientific origin, but very common use, are illustrative examples—chloroform and gas, both of which are of recent, the former of very recent, fabrication. Chloroform is so called because it is, or is supposed to be, a chloride of formyl, which is the base of formic acid, a fluid found in red ants; formica being the Latin for ant. It was desirable to have a convenient name for this substance, and the name was made by uniting the first syllable of chloride, or chlorine, with the first syllable of formyl; whence we have chloro-form. The name gas was invented, we know not why or wherefore, by a Dutch chemist, some two hundred and fifty years ago, for all those compressible, air-like fluids to which it is now applied. It was convenient and came first into scientific and then into general use, so that now it is one of the commonest words, even in a sarcastic, metaphorical sense, in the speech of all civilized peoples. Now nearly all words have a significant origin, like chloroform. Those which are without inherent significance, like gas, are very few indeed. Words like these, and like oxygen (which is only about one hundred and fifty years old, and means acid-maker), are called coined words, because they were recently and deliberately made. The words which form the bulk of language are of very remote origin, and, until lately, of untraced growth.
The tracing of the growth of words which has been scientifically—that is, historically and logically—prosecuted for a little more than fifty years, has brought to light the important fact—a fact the discovery of which is second in importance only to that of the discovery of the law of gravitation—that all the languages of the civilized peoples of Europe and America, together with some in Asia, have a common origin. At one time there was no English, no French, no German, no Russian language, no Erse or Gælic, no Latin, no Greek; but at that time the germ of all these languages, and of others which need not be mentioned, existed in a tongue which for more than four thousand years has been unspoken, but which from the people who spoke it has been called Aryan (pronounced Ahrian). This discovery was sure to have been made in one way or another; but the immediate cause of it was the presence in Hindostan of the British East India Company. In 1776, N. B. Halhed, a servant of that company, who had been an early friend of Sheridan, the orator and dramatist, published a Bengali grammar, in which he mentions as very remarkable, “the similitude of Sanskrit words with those of Persian and Arabic (?), and even of Latin and Greek; and these not in technical and metaphorical terms, which the mutation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally introduced, but in the main groundwork of the language, in monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appellations of such things as would be first discriminated on the first dawn of civilization.” Soon afterward, in 1786, Sir William Jones, who had gone to Bengal as a judge, in a paper in “Asiatic Researches,” expressed a like opinion more strongly and in more comprehensive terms. “The Sanskrit language,” he says, “whatever may be its antiquity is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar[B] than could have been produced by accident, so strong that no philologer could examine all the three without believing them to have sprung from one common source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.”