[81] It is strange that the French language should not have adopted the same course as the English, in discarding this useless rag of antiquity. The influences which led to the decision of genders in any particular case were purely fanciful.
[82] Renan, p. 28.
[83] Rousseau, Essai sur l’Origine des Langues.
[84] Notions, p. 24 sqq. The remarks on the labials are too amusing to be omitted. “Le bambin, le poupon, le marmot a trouvé les trois labiales; il bée, il baye, il balbutie, il bégaye, il babille, il blatère, il bêle, il bavarde, il braille, il boude, il bouque, il bougonne sur une babiole, sur une bagatelle, sur une billevesée, sur une bêtise, sur un bébé, sur un bonbon, sur un bobo, sur le bilboquet pendu à l’étalage du bimbelotier. Il nomme sa mère et son père avec des mimologismes caressants, et quoiqu’il n’ait encore découvert que la simple touche des lèvres, l’âme se meut déjà dans les mots qu’il module au hasard. Ce Cadmus au maillot vient d’entrevoir un mystère aussi grand à lui seul que tout le reste de la création. Il parle sa pensée.” Want of space alone compels us to refrain from transcribing the remarks on the progress of infants and of society to the dentals. We must say, however, that such speculations must be very sparingly indulged by sober philologists. Many of them, at first sight plausible, were refuted by Plato long ago in the Cratylus, and they lead to a grammatical mysticism which has been well exposed by M. Charma, Essai, p. 213.
[85] By roots we do not mean words used in the primitive language, but rather “skeletons of articulate sound.” “They are merely the fictions of grammarians to indicate the core of a group of related words.”—Hensleigh Wedgwood’s Etymolog. Dict. p. iii. For some remarks on the nature of roots, see Donaldson’s New Cratyl. bk. iii. ch. 1. Ewald’s Hebrew Gram. § 202. This naked kernel of a family of words is often best found in the youngest dialects, e.g. kind (child) from γίγνομαι, genitum, &c. Grimm, Deutsche Gramm. ii. 5. 3. Bopp. Vgl. Gramm. s. 131.
[86] One or two philosophers (e.g. Kircher, Becher, Dalgarno, Bp. Wilkins, Descartes, Leibnitz) have amused themselves with the invention of languages quite arbitrary, in which every word was to be accurately determined; but no artificial language actually used has ever thus arisen. The German rothwelsch, the Italian gergo, the French narquois, the English “thieves’ language,” the lingua franca which serves for commercial purposes on the shores of the Mediterranean, the strange jargon spoken by the Chinese and English at Hong Kong, &c., have all arisen from a corruption of existing languages by metaphors, new words, new meanings, derivation, composition, &c. See Leibnitz, Nouv. Essai sur l’Entendement Humain, iii. I. 2.
[87] Mr. Garnett, Essays, p. 105. Latham, Lect. on Language.
[88] What, for instance, is the origin of the initial σ in such words as σμικρὸς, σφάλλω, or of the initial vowels in ὄνομα, ὀδοὺς, ἀμέλγω, &c.?—Garnett, p. 107.
[89] When a boy answers a lady in the words “Yes, ’m,” he is not aware that his “’m” is a fragment of the five syllables mea domina (madonna, madame, madam, ma’am, ’m.) “Letters, like soldiers, being very apt to desert and drop off in a long march.”—Divers. of Purley, pt. i. ch. vi. “Les noms des saints et les noms des baptêmes les plus communs en sont un exemple.”—De Brosses.
[90] See Philological Transactions, v. 133 sq.