Lectures on the Science of Language

by F. Max Müller

There is a petrified philosophy in language, and if we examine the most ancient word for name we find it is nâman in Sanskrit, nomen in Latin, namo in Gothic. This nâman stands for gnâman, which is preserved in the Latin co-gnomen. The g is dropped as in natus, son, for gnatus. Nâman, therefore, and name are derived from the root gnâ, to know, and meant originally that by which we know a thing.

And how do we know things? We perceive things by our senses, but our senses convey to us information about single things only. But to know is more than to feel, than to perceive, more than to remember, more than to compare. No doubt words are much abused. We speak of a dog knowing his master, of an infant knowing his mother. In such expressions, to know means to recognize. But to know a thing, means more than to recognize it. We know a thing if we are able to bring it, and any part of it, under more general ideas. We then say, not that we have a perception, but a conception, or that we have a general idea of a thing. The facts of nature are perceived by our senses; the thoughts of nature, to borrow an expression of Oersted's, can be conceived by our reason only.[342] Now the first step towards this real knowledge, a step which, however small in appearance, separates man forever from all other animals, is the naming of a thing, or the making a thing knowable. All naming is classification, bringing the individual under the general; and whatever we know, whether empirically or scientifically, we know it only by means of our general ideas. Other animals have sensation, perception, memory, and, in a certain sense, intellect; but all [pg 379] these, in the animal, are conversant with single objects only. Man has sensation, perception, memory, intellect, and reason, and it is his reason only that is conversant with general ideas.[343]

Through reason we not only stand a step above the brute creation: we belong to a different world. We look down on our merely animal experience, on our sensations, perceptions, our memory, and our intellect, as something belonging to us, but not as constituting our most inward and eternal self. Our senses, our memory, our intellect, are like the lenses of a telescope. But there is an eye that looks through them at the realities of the outer world, our own rational and self-conscious soul; a power as distinct from our perceptive faculties as the sun is from the earth which it fills with light, and warmth, and life.

At the very point where man parts company with the brute world, at the first flash of reason as the manifestation of the light within us, there we see the true genesis of language. Analyze any word you like, and you will find that it expresses a general idea peculiar to the individual to which the name belongs. What is the meaning of moon?—the measurer. What is the meaning of sun?—the begetter. What is the meaning of earth?—the ploughed. The old name given to animals, such as cows and sheep, was pasú, the Latin pecus, which means feeders. Animal itself is a later name, and derived from anima, soul. This anima again meant originally blowing or breathing, like spirit from [pg 380] spirare, and was derived from a root, an, to blow, which gives us anila, wind, in Sanskrit, and anemos, wind, in Greek. Ghost, the German Geist, is based on the same conception. It is connected with gust, with yeast, and even with the hissing and boiling geysers of Iceland. Soul is the Gothic saivala, and this is clearly related to another Gothic word, saivs,[344] which means the sea. The sea was called saivs from a root si or siv, the Greek seiō, to shake; it meant the tossed-about water, in contradistinction to stagnant or running water. The soul being called saivala, we see that it was originally conceived by the Teutonic nations as a sea within, heaving up and down with every breath, and reflecting heaven and earth on the mirror of the deep.

The Sanskrit name for love is smara; it is derived from smar, to recollect; and the same root has supplied the German schmerz, pain, and the English smart.

If the serpent is called in Sanskrit sarpa, it is because it was conceived under the general idea of creeping, an idea expressed by the word srip. But the serpent was also called ahi in Sanskrit, in Greek echis or echidna, in Latin anguis. This name is derived from quite a different root and idea. The root is ah in Sanskrit, or anh, which means to press together, to choke, to throttle. Here the distinguishing mark from which the serpent was named was his throttling, and ahi meant serpent, as expressing the general idea of throttler. It is a curious root this anh, and it still lives in several modern words. In Latin it appears as ango, anxi, anctum, to strangle, in angina, quinsy,[345] in [pg 381] angor, suffocation. But angor meant not only quinsy or compression of the neck; it assumed a moral import and signifies anguish or anxiety. The two adjectives angustus, narrow, and anxius, uneasy, both come from the same source. In Greek the root retained its natural and material meaning; in eggys, near, and echis, serpent, throttler. But in Sanskrit it was chosen with great truth as the proper name of sin. Evil no doubt presented itself under various aspects to the human mind, and its names are many; but none so expressive as those derived from our root, anh, to throttle. Anhas in Sanskrit means sin, but it does so only because it meant originally throttling,—the consciousness of sin being like the grasp of the assassin on the throat of his victim. All who have seen and contemplated the statue of Laokoon and his sons, with the serpent coiled round them from head to foot, may realize what those ancients felt and saw when they called sin anhas, or the throttler. This anhas is the same word as the Greek agos, sin. In Gothic the same root has produced agis, in the sense of fear, and from the same source we have awe, in awful, i.e. fearful, and ug, in ugly. The English anguish is from the French angoisse, the Italian angoscia, a corruption of the Latin angustiæ, a strait.

And how did those early thinkers and framers of language distinguish between man and the other animals? What general idea did they connect with the first conception of themselves? The Latin word homo, the French l'homme, which has been reduced to on in [pg 382] on dit, is derived from the same root which we have in humus, the soil, humilis, humble. Homo, therefore, would express the idea of a being made of the dust of the earth.[346]

Another ancient word for man was the Sanskrit marta,[347] the Greek brotos, the Latin mortalis (a secondary derivative), our own mortal. Marta means “he who dies,” and it is remarkable that where everything else was changing, fading, and dying, this should have been chosen as the distinguishing name for man. Those early poets would hardly have called themselves mortals unless they had believed in other beings as immortal.

There is a third name for man which means simply the thinker, and this, the true title of our race, still lives in the name of man. Mâ in Sanskrit means to measure, from which you remember we had the name of moon. Man, a derivative root, means to think. From this we have the Sanskrit manu, originally thinker, then man. In the later Sanskrit we find derivatives, such as mânava, mânusha, manushya, all expressing man. In Gothic we find both man, and mannisks, the modern German mann and mensch.

There were many more names for man, as there were many names for all things in ancient languages. Any feature that struck the observing mind as peculiarly characteristic could be made to furnish a new name. The sun might be called the bright, the warm, the golden, the preserver, the destroyer, the wolf, the lion, the heavenly eye, the father of light and life. Hence that [pg 383] superabundance of synonymes in ancient dialects, and hence that struggle for life carried on among these words, which led to the destruction of the less strong, the less happy, the less fertile words, and ended in the triumph of one, as the recognized and proper name for every object in every language. On a very small scale this process of natural selection, or, as it would better be called, elimination, may still be watched even in modern languages, that is to say, even in languages so old and full of years as English and French. What it was at the first burst of dialects we can only gather from such isolated cases as when Vón Hammer counts 5744 words relating to the camel.[348]