The fact that every word is originally a predicate, that names, though signs of individual conceptions, are all, without exception, derived from general ideas, is one of the most important discoveries in the science of language. It was known before that language is the distinguishing characteristic of man; it was known also that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes; but that these two were only different expressions of the same fact was not known till the theory of roots had been established as preferable to the theories both of Onomatopoieia and of Interjections. But, though our modern philosophy did not know it, the ancient poets and framers of language must have known it. For in Greek language is logos, but logos means also reason, and alogon was chosen as the name, and the most proper name, for brute. No animal thinks, and no animal speaks, except man. Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead [pg 384] sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.
And now I am afraid I have but a few minutes left to explain the last question of all in our science, namely—How can sound express thought? How did roots become the signs of general ideas? How was the abstract idea of measuring expressed by mâ, the idea of thinking by man? How did gâ come to mean going, sthâ standing, sad sitting, dâ giving, mar dying, char walking, kar doing?
I shall try to answer as briefly as possible. The 400 or 500 roots which remain as the constituent elements in different families of language are not interjections, nor are they imitations. They are phonetic types produced by a power inherent in human nature. They exist, as Plato would say, by nature; though with Plato we should add that, when we say by nature, we mean by the hand of God.[349] There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. Each substance has its peculiar ring. We can tell the more or less perfect structure of metals by their vibrations, by the answer which they give. Gold rings differently from tin, wood rings differently from stone; and different sounds are produced according to the nature of each percussion. It was the same with man, the most highly organized of nature's works.[350] Man, in his primitive and perfect [pg 385] state, was not only endowed, like the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoieia. He possessed likewise the faculty of giving more articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind. That faculty was not of his own making. It was an instinct, an instinct of the mind as irresistible as any other instinct. So far as language is the production of that instinct, it belongs to the realm of nature. Man loses his instincts as he ceases to want them. His senses become fainter when, as in the case of scent, they become useless. Thus the creative faculty which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled. The number of these phonetic types must have been almost infinite in the beginning, and it was only through the same process of natural elimination which we observed in the early history of words, that clusters of roots, more or less synonymous, were gradually reduced to one definite type. Instead of deriving language from nine roots, like Dr. Murray,[351] or from one root, a feat actually accomplished by a Dr. Schmidt,[352] we must suppose that the first settlement of the radical elements of language was preceded by a period of unrestrained growth,—the spring of speech—to be followed by many an autumn.
With the process of elimination, or natural selection, the historical element enters into the science of language. However primitive the Chinese may be as compared with terminational and inflectional languages, its roots or words have clearly passed through a long process of mutual attrition. There are many things of a merely traditional character even in Chinese. The rule that in a simple sentence the first word is the subject, the second the verb, the third the object, is a traditional rule. It is by tradition only that ngŏ ģin, in Chinese, means a bad man, whereas ģin ngŏ signifies man is bad. The Chinese themselves distinguish between full and empty roots,[353] the former being predicative, the latter corresponding to our particles which modify the meaning of full roots and determine their relation to each other. It is only by tradition that roots become empty. All roots were originally full whether predicative or demonstrative, and the fact that empty roots in Chinese cannot always be traced back to their full prototypes shows that even the most ancient Chinese had passed through successive periods of growth. Chinese commentators admit that all empty words were originally full words, just as Sanskrit grammarians maintain that all that is found in grammar was originally substantial. But we must be satisfied with but partial proofs of this general principle, and must be prepared to find as many fanciful derivations in Chinese as in Sanskrit. The fact, again, that all roots in Chinese are no longer capable of being employed at pleasure, either as substantives, or verbs, or adjectives, is another proof that, even in this most primitive stage, language points back to a previous growth. Fu is father, [pg 387] mu is mother; fu mu parents; but neither fu nor mu is used as a root in its original predicative sense. The amplest proof, however, of the various stages through which even so simple a language as Chinese must have passed is to be found in the comparatively small number of roots, and in the definite meanings attached to each; a result which could only have been obtained by that constant struggle which has been so well described in natural history as the struggle for life.
But although this sifting of roots, and still more the subsequent combination of roots, cannot be ascribed to the mere working of nature or natural instincts, it is still less, as we saw in a former Lecture, the effect of deliberate or premeditated art, in the sense in which, for instance, a picture of Raphael or a symphony of Beethoven is. Given a root to express flying, or bird, and another to express heap, then the joining together of the two to express many birds, or birds in the plural, is the natural effect of the synthetic power of the human mind, or, to use more homely language, of the power of putting two and two together. Some philosophers maintain indeed that this explains nothing, and that the real mystery to be solved is how the mind can form a synthesis, or conceive many things as one. Into those depths we cannot follow. Other philosophers imagine that the combination of roots to form agglutinative and inflectional language is, like the first formation of roots, the result of a natural instinct. Thus Professor Heyse[354] maintained that “the various forms of development in language must be explained by the philosophers as necessary evolutions, founded in the very essence of human speech.” This is not the [pg 388] case. We can watch the growth of language, and we can understand and explain all that is the result of that growth. But we cannot undertake to prove that all that is in language is so by necessity, and could not have been otherwise. When we have, as in Chinese, two such words as kiai and tu, both expressing a heap, an assembly, a quantity, then we may perfectly understand why either the one or the other should have been used to form the plural. But if one of the two becomes fixed and traditional, while the other becomes obsolete, then we can register the fact as historical, but no philosophy on earth will explain its absolute necessity. We can perfectly understand how, with two such roots as kûŏ, empire, and ćung, middle, the Chinese should have formed what we call a locative, kŭŏ ćung, in the empire. But to say that this was the only way to express this conception is an assertion contradicted both by fact and reason. We saw the various ways in which the future can be formed. They are all equally intelligible and equally possible, but not one of them is inevitable. In Chinese ỳaó means to will, ngò is I; hence ngò ỳaó, I will. The same root ỳaó, added to ḱiú, to go, gives us ngò ỳaó ḱiú, I will go, the first germ of our futures. To say that ngò ỳaó ḱiú was the necessary form of the future in Chinese would introduce a fatalism into language which rests on no authority whatever. The building up of language is not like the building of the cells in a beehive, nor is it like the building of St. Peter's by Michael Angelo. It is the result of innumerable agencies, working each according to certain laws, and leaving in the end the result of their combined efforts freed from all that proved superfluous or useless. From the first combination of two [pg 389] such words as ģin, man, kiai, many, to form the plural ģin kiai, to the perfect grammar of Sanskrit and Greek, everything is intelligible as the result of the two principles of growth which we considered in our second Lecture. What is antecedent to the production of roots is the work of nature; what follows after is the work of man, not in his individual and free, but in his collective and moderating, capacity.
I do not say that every form in Greek or Sanskrit has as yet been analyzed and explained. There are formations in Greek and Latin and English which have hitherto baffled all tests; and there are certain contrivances, such as the augment in Greek, the change of vowels in Hebrew, the Umlaut and Ablaut in the Teutonic dialects, where we might feel inclined to suppose that language admitted distinctions purely musical or phonetic, corresponding to very palpable and material distinctions of thought. Such a supposition, however, is not founded on any safe induction. It may seem inexplicable to us why bruder in German should form its plural as brüder; or brother, brethren. But what is inexplicable and apparently artificial in our modern languages becomes intelligible in their more ancient phases. The change of u into ü, as in bruder, brüder, was not intentional; least of all was it introduced to expressed plurality. The change is phonetic, and due to the influence of an i or j,[355] which existed originally in the last syllable and which reacted regularly on the vowel of the preceding syllable; nay, which leaves its effect behind, even after it has itself disappeared. By a false analogy such a change, perfectly justifiable in a [pg 390] certain class of words, may be applied to other words where no such change was called for; and it may then appear as if an arbitrary change of vowels was intended to convey a grammatical change. But even into these recesses the comparative philologist can follow language, thus discovering a reason even for what in reality was irrational and wrong. It seems difficult to believe that the augment in Greek should originally have had an independent substantial existence, yet all analogy is in favor of such a view. Suppose English had never been written down before Wycliffe's time, we should then find that in some instances the perfect was formed by the mere addition of a short a. Wycliffe spoke and wrote:[356] I knowlech to a felid and seid þus; i.e. I acknowledge to have felt and said thus. In a similar way we read: it should a fallen; instead of “it should have fallen;” and in some parts of England common people still say very much the same: I should a done it. Now in some old English books this a actually coalesces with the verb, at least they are printed together; so that a grammar founded on them would give us “to fall” as the infinitive of the present, to afallen as the infinitive of the past. I do not wish for a moment to be understood as if there was any connection between this a, a contraction of have in English, and the Greek augment which is placed before past tenses. All I mean is, that, if the origin of the augment has not yet been satisfactorily explained, we are not therefore to despair, or to admit an arbitrary addition of a consonant or vowel, used as it were algebraically or by mutual agreement, to distinguish a past from a present tense.
If inductive reasoning is worth anything, we are justified in believing that what has been proved to be true on so large a scale, and in cases where it was least expected, is true with regard to language in general. We require no supernatural interference, nor any conclave of ancient sages, to explain the realities of human speech. All that is formal in language is the result of rational combination; all that is material, the result of a mental instinct. The first natural and instinctive utterances, if sifted differently by different clans, would fully account both for the first origin and for the first divergence of human speech. We can understand not only the origin of language, but likewise the necessary breaking up of one language into many; and we perceive that no amount of variety in the material or the formal elements of speech is incompatible with the admission of one common source.
The Science of Language thus leads us up to that highest summit from whence we see into the very dawn of man's life on earth; and where the words which we have heard so often from the days of our childhood—“And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech”—assume a meaning more natural, more intelligible, more convincing, than they ever had before.
And now in concluding this course of Lectures, I have only to express my regret that the sketch of the Science of Language which I endeavored to place before you, was necessarily so very slight and imperfect. There are many points which I could not touch at all, many which I could only allude to: there is hardly one to which I could do full justice. Still I feel grateful to the President and the Council of this Institution [pg 392] for having given me an opportunity of claiming some share of public sympathy for a science which I believe has a great future in store; and I shall be pleased, if, among those who have done me the honor of attending these Lectures, I have excited, though I could not have satisfied, some curiosity as to the strata which underlie the language on which we stand and walk; and as to the elements which enter into the composition of the very granite of our thoughts.