The earliest languages are marked by exuberance,[214] indetermination, extreme variety, uncontrolled liberty. They are melodious, but prolix and measureless. Words were invented independently, spontaneously, as they were required by the tribe or the individual, with little or no reference to already existing forms. The absence of literature, the want of political unity, the habits of a nomadic life, tended to create an immense multitude of terms and idioms. Among semi-barbarous and wandering communities the peculiarities which we call dialects existed simultaneously and side by side.
The Caucasus and Abyssinia present us a number of distinct languages in a narrow district. The number and variety of the American dialects is almost as great as that of the several tribes; and in Oceania it has been asserted that nearly every island or group of islands possesses a speech which barely offers any affinity with that of the neighbouring groups.
Unity of speech is the result of civilisation, and it is preceded by a diversity of forms which subsequently become the characteristics of particular localities. The steps towards unity are three; first, we have the confused, simultaneous existence of dialectic varieties; then the isolated and independent existence of dialects; and, finally, the fusion of these varieties in a more[215] extended unity. Thus the earliest Hebrew records contain traces of idioms which were subsequently the peculiar property of Aramaic, and we find in the Homeric poems a thousand variations of form and structure which were afterwards exclusively Æolic, or Attic, or Doric. The explanation of this fact is to be found in the consideration that these forms were in Homer’s time the common property of the old Ionic tongue, and it was not till after ages that they became appropriated and localised. The supposition that the rhapsodists employed a judicious selection of idioms, and made a mosaic out of distinct dialects, has long ago been abandoned as impossible and absurd.
The process of eliminating superfluities is found in every language. Redundancy seems to have been necessary to an early stage of thought, for we find it not only in words but in expressions. The whole of Hebrew poetry depends on a repetition and enforcement of the same fundamental thought, so as to gain emphasis and variety. In children we find a tendency to repeat the same thing twice, once affirmatively and once negatively, as though the double assertion gave them an additional security. “It is not you, but I;” “This letter is not A, but B;” are turns of expression well known to those who have observed the language of the nursery. It is surprising to find the same unnecessary tautology existing very widely in the most advanced literatures. “We have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears,” is a superfluity which has many types in the sacred writers; “They were in great numbers, not in small,” is the translation of a line in the Œdipus Tyrannus, and we find even a poet of our own times writing—
There saw he where some careless hand
O’er a DEAD[216] corpse had heaped the sand.
There is no doubt that such tautologies are often so far from being barren, that they give force and precision to the conception which they convey; but the mischief of them is that they give rise to a thousand errors of reasoning, and to many minds have the effect of an argument.
The Spanish fleet you cannot see, because
It is not yet in sight,
or,