The Origin of Thought and Speech

by M. Moncalm

The study of Sanscrit has shown us that two thousand years ago it occurred to Hindoo grammarians to investigate the origin of the words of their language, when they discovered that all words could be reduced to roots, and that these roots all expressed various forms of activity; that they were therefore verbs, and that the number of these roots was very restricted. Our present philologists have continued this work and are not only able to acknowledge the accuracy of the Brahmanic discovery, but also to certify that the grammatical analysis of the Hindoos, put forth 500 years before our era, has never been surpassed. It is important to remember that roots are the fundamental elements which permeate the whole organism of the language. Hebrew has been reduced by Renan and other Hebraists to about 500 roots; the work has still to be done for the whole Semitic family. The same process has been carried out with regard to the Aryan languages; we find the number of roots in Sanscrit reduced to about 800; of Gothic about 600; rather more than 400 in the Teutonic family, and 600 in the Slavic. The Ural-Altaic languages have also undergone a partial analysis of the same kind, and the result at present corresponds to that obtained by the examination of the other families. After eliminating the tertiary and secondary roots from the Sanscrit the residuum is 600 or 500, and we arrive at the fact that this entire language, and, in a great measure, all the Aryan languages, can be traced back to an extremely small number of roots.

As the Hindoo grammarians asserted that all roots contain the representation of various forms of activity, it behoved our philologists to investigate this and discover their meaning. Professor Noiré thought that the consciousness that men had of their own acts must have formed the origin of the primitive concepts of the human mind, and found expression in signs or words. Max Müller shows us[39] that all the Sanscrit roots express a concept or consciousness of the repeated acts, the acts with which man in his infancy would be most familiar. But it must be noted that the concepts or signs are not of single acts, but the realisation of repeated acts; to dig was not to put a spade into the ground once, it is the action of digging continuously; to sharpen was not to pass one flint over another once, it was the continual action of sharpening. The consciousness of accomplishing these repeated acts as if one act, became the first germ of conceptual thought. During this initial phase of thought, when the first consciousness of his own repeated acts awoke in man and assumed a conceptual character, will, act and knowledge were as yet one and undivided, and the whole of his conscious knowledge was subjective, exclusively concerned with his own voluntary act. We possess the genealogy of a large number of Aryan roots, and we find on examination that the activity which formed their basis was at the beginning always a creative activity, since it called into life conceptions which up to that time had not existed.

Nothing is more interesting than researches into the origin of the growth of human thought, when carried out not according to the systems of certain philologists of our day, but historically, after the fashion of the Indian trapper, who notes on the sand every imprint of the footsteps of him whom he pursues.

For the present I will content myself by bringing forward in illustration three primary roots. Vê (Vâ), which is, to weave; Mar, to crush; and Khan, to dig. Vê (Vâ), Mar, and Khan are thus verbs.

When we now picture the four acts of weaving, spinning, sewing, and knitting, they appear so to differ the one from the other, that it seems impossible to consider them other than four distinct acts, and difficult to believe that there is one common origin to all. These four processes, however, all had their germ in the one primitive act of interlacing the boughs of trees to form a hedge or roof. This root Vê (Vâ) had an immense number of offshoots; from the acts of interlacing and platting came the conception of binding, in Latin vieo, to twist, to divide; in German, winden, wickeln; the Latin words vitis, a vine; vimen, osier, a twig; viburnum, a climbing plant; the Slavic word vetla, willow; the Sanscrit vetra, reed, rush; the German word for rush, binse, is connected with binden, to join, and the secondary meaning of ties of relationship and alliance: again, in the Old High-German, nothbendig, or nothwendigkeit, bound, straitened, and the Gothic naudibandi, tie, chain. All these words, whether in the Roman, German, or Slavonic dialects, have retained the root Vê (Vâ), so that it is impossible not to recognise the trunk of which these are the branches. Thus a large number of apparently dissimilar images became entangled the one with the other, and in proportion as we approach their starting-point do we find them discarding their own special signification, and becoming absorbed in the single conception of weaving and platting.

The root mar, to grind, has also the meaning of to crush, to powder, to rub down, etc., and whether we look at the Latin, Greek, Celtic, German, or Slav, the words representing the verb to mill, and the name mill come thence; the transition from milling to fighting is natural; thus Homer used the word mar-na-mai, I fight, I pound. Mar produced in Latin the words mordeo, I bite; morior (originally, to decay), I die; mortuus, dead; mors, death; morbus, illness; in Greek, marasmos, decay; rendered in German by sich aufreiben, to become exhausted. In Sanscrit we must remember that the consonants r and l are cognate and interchangeable; thus, mar = mal; and that ar in Sanscrit is shortened, and the vowel modified and pronounced ri, mar = mri; that ar may be pronounced ra, and al, la; mar = mra and mal = mla: thus in Sanscrit we find mrita, dead; mritya, death, and mriye, I die. One of the earliest names for man was marta, the dying; the equivalent in Greek for the Sanscrit mra and mla is mbro, mblo; and after dropping the m becomes bro and blo; brotos, mortal. Having chosen this name for himself, man gave the opposite name to the gods; he called them Ambrotoi, without decay, immortal; and their food ambrosia, immortality. An offshoot of mar is mard and mrg; thence mradati, rubbing down, pulverising, grind to powder; mrid is in Sanscrit the word for dust, and afterwards was used for soil in general or earth; mrid, to weaken, to soften, to melt; thus, fluid mass. This idea in English takes the form malt, grain soaked and softened; then the Greek meldo, and the Gothic mulda, soft ground or morass, and that which is softened by use or the action of time. The Latin sordes and sordidus are connected herewith, as the same root may be found in smarna, Gothic, and the Greek mélas and moros, black, and in murus, brown-black; in the Russian smola, wax and resin. “Colour was conceived originally as the result of the act of covering or extending a fluid over a surface; it was not till the art of painting, in its most primitive form, was discovered and named, that there could have been a name for colour.”[40] The name of colour in Sanscrit is varna, from var, to cover. The idea conveyed by the words, to smooth, to flatter, to soften, to mollify, to melt a hard substance, to polish a rough surface by constant rubbing, led to the same terms being used for expressing the softening influence which man exercised on man, by looks, gestures, words or prayers, and these expressions were especially used by men in their relations to the gods, when they strove to propitiate them by supplications and sacrifices: thus the prayer which we now translate by “Be gracious unto us, O God,” meant originally, “Melt to us; be softened, ye gods.”

Language grew and made offshoots, but without confusion; disorder had no place in the progress of thought (still less chance), which was simple and rational. This was not the development of the conscious effort towards some goal. At this period there was no such thing as reflection properly so called; for instance, man did not ponder how best to express a feeling of fear, since fear, like so many other impressions, received vague expression before the concept of fear acquired shape; but our ancestors had a root to express shaking (in Sanscrit kap, kamp, to shake): they used it to describe fear, which manifested itself in the trembling of voice or limbs. Thus, “I shake” might mean, “I shake a tree,” or “I am shaken,” “I am shaken by him” (by my horse), but also “I am trembling”; from it we have in Greek karnos, smoke, not what shakes, or is shaken, but what is in a shaking state, that which moves; kup, which is probably a modification of kamp, means to shake inwardly, to be angry.

Some learned writers have felt disconcerted when after tracing words to their source, they have found nothing but roots with general meanings, such as to go, to move, to run, to do; however, it is by means of these vague, pale conceptions that language has obtained the material for an entire language. The Aryan root ar signified originally to go, to send, to advance, to proceed, going regularly, to stir. Applied to the stirring of the soil, it took the meaning of ploughing; in Latin ar-are, in Greek ar-oun, in Irish ar, in Lithuanian ar-ti, in Russian ora-ti; this root, from its meaning of advancing regularly, was the name of the plough; one derivative was applied to the cattle fit for ploughing, and also to the labourer. Ar was also used for the ploughing of the sea, or rowing, and was found in the words rower and rudder. The Latin word ævum, originally from i, to go, became the name of time, age; and its derivative æviternus, æturnus was made to express eternity. It was by a poetical fiat that the Greek probata, which originally meant no more than things walking forward, became in time the name of cattle. In French, the word meuble means literally anything that is movable, but it became the name of chairs, tables, wardrobes, etc. In this way we see the power of language, which, out of a few simple elements, has created names sufficient to express the infinite aspects of nature.

The ramifications of the Aryan root Dâ give a good idea of the process. Thus Dâ = to give, is in the Sanscrit dădāmi, I give; in Latin, do; in Old Slavonic, da-mi; in Lithuanian, du-mi; in French, donner and pardonner; in Latin, trado, to give over; in Italian, tradire; in French, trahir, trahison; in Latin again, reddo, to give back; in French, rendre and rente. Side by side with the root Dâ, there is another root also Dâ, exactly the same in all outward appearance; it consists of D + Â, but is totally distinct from the former. While from the former we have in Sanscrit, dâ-tram, a gift, we have from the latter dâ´-tram, a sickle. The meaning of the second root is to cut, to carve; the difference is shown by the accent remaining on the radical syllable in dâ´-tram, i.e., the cutting (active); whilst it leaves the radical syllable in dâ-trám, i.e., what is given (passive).

The history of these roots dâ affords an opportunity of noticing a curious resemblance between natural history and philology, two sciences which otherwise are totally different, but alike in one idea which enters into the inwardness of both. Darwin admitted four or five progenitors in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so that the primary elements of all living organisms are the simple cells. In the same way philologists have discovered that there remain in the end certain simple elements of human speech—the primordial roots—which have sufficed to provide the innumerable multitude of words used by the human race. A principle neglected by a great number of evolutionists is that if two origins, whether the roots of language or living cells, have at their starting-point an absolutely similar appearance, and afterwards diverge, it is because at their origin they bore in themselves the germs destined to produce this divergence. Darwin says that two organic cells, which in the embryonic stage may perfectly resemble each other, in growing, gradually develop, the one into an inferior animal, the other into a superior animal, never varying the process; the reason of which fact is that the cells, although not distinguishable the one from the other, differ in the rudiments or principle of life: in the same way philologists say that when two roots have the same sound, but produce families of perfectly distinct words, it is because the germs in each differ. We learn from this that the sound of the words is a matter of indifference at the commencement of a language; no one has succeeded, or will succeed, in making the sound alone the vehicle of a conception.