To Locke belongs the merit of having first clearly asserted that roots, the true irreducible elements of language, which furnish words for the most abstract and sublime conceptions, had at the beginning only a material or sensuous meaning, and this fact, on which idealists and materialists are agreed, is confirmed by comparative philologists. All primitive roots express directly only those acts and those conditions which come under the domain of the senses; all express the consciousness of repeated acts familiar to the members of a society in its infancy, such as pounding, striking, weaving, tying, burning, rubbing, moving, cutting, sharpening, softening. By means of generalisation and specialisation, the roots have acquired the most abstract terms of our advanced society; thus the root to burn developed into the thought of to love, and also to be ashamed; to dig, came to mean to search for, to enquire; the root which means to gather, expressed in primitive logic what we now call observation of facts; the connection of major and minor, or even syllogism. This is without doubt, and it is as certain that the words rake and pinchers came from the verbs to rake and to pinch.
To make the assertion of Locke the more striking, Noiré adds: “When the representative words springing from one root are found side by side, it is always the more ancient of the two which expresses the more material act. The verbs to tear and to cut are the offshoots of a single root; but the passage from the concept of tearing to that of cutting would be slowly effected; the act of tearing was immediate with man, cutting was a mediate act, and of later date, since it could not be done whilst the instrument was lacking.”
I shall now bridge over the distance between the primordial roots, and the organised language as we possess it, in order to show how our ancestors succeeded in forming real phrases, that is to say, intelligible propositions; this will show us the continuous thread which connects our present language with primitive speech.
We can show that both dictionary and grammar are made up of predicative roots and demonstrative elements. By the help of the first we make affirmations concerning things, derived from our knowledge of another object or of many, either in combination under one name, or taking each separately. With the demonstrative element we point to any object in space or time, by using such words as this, that, then, here, there; near, far, above, below, and others of the same kind, whose existence may be explained as a survival of the gesticulating phase in which objects were neither conceived nor described but pointed out; from this we are not to infer that gestures—even accompanied by sounds—gave birth to speech, since they rather excluded it. In their primitive form and intention, these demonstrative elements are addressed to the senses rather than to the intellect. They have in themselves no meaning, and to be of service they must be attached to words that have. The history of the root Khan, to dig, will explain my thought. When our Aryan ancestors had learnt to say Khan, and they wanted to distinguish between those who were digging and the instruments used in digging, between the object of the digging and the time and place of the work, it is possible that these demonstrative suffixes, combined with predicative roots, formed bases, such as Khan-ana, Khan-i, Khan-a, Khan-itra, and still others, which were intended probably for digging-here, digging-now, dig-we, dig-you. By means of these combinations, which varied in their application according to the customs of different villages and families, the speaker sought to distinguish between the subject acting and the object acted upon; and when this difficulty was surmounted, a great step had been taken, the passage from perception to conception was accomplished, and this passage no philosopher prior to Noiré had made clear. “We must always bear in mind that we are speaking here of times, so far beyond the reach of history, and of intellectual processes so widely removed from our own, that none would venture to speak dogmatically on what was actually passing in the minds of the early framers of language when they first uttered these words.”[41] All we can do is to hazard an explanation, and accept it in as far as it seems reasonable; and in the interest of science, we must carefully guard ourselves from asserting that our theory is the only true one. It is easy to conceive that after centuries of constant use certain derivatives should have become unalterably attached to certain meanings, and others should have also retained their special meanings. But what we do not know, is how the sounds destined to become demonstrative elements or personal pronouns were restricted to the terms required for such words, as—here, there, those, he, I, that, etc. There were cases in which a verb in the infinitive would develop into a phrase without any additions being made to it; it would suffice, for instance, if a man uttered the word Khan in a commanding voice—as we should say “work”—for his fellow-labourers to understand that they were to begin to dig. Thus the imperative could be considered a complete sentence with as much justice as Veni-Vedi-Vici would be termed independent and complete sentences. “The shortest sentence of all is, no doubt, the imperative, and it is in the imperative that almost to the present day roots retain their simplest form.”[42]
Our intellects in the present day are developed by the discourses we hear, the books we read, the reflections suggested by our experiences of life; our vocabularies become enriched as our knowledge increases and embraces a greater number of subjects; and if we retrace the path taking us to our ancestors who could not count beyond four sometimes, we should find words and ideas becoming fewer and conspicuous by their absence. It does not therefore follow that because we use language that we made it. It is not our invention; to us every language is traditional. “The words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready made for us. The work of making language belongs to a period in the history of mankind beyond the reach of the ordinary historian, and of which we in our advanced state of mental development can hardly form a clear conception.” Yet that time must have been a fact not less possible of verification than that geological period when “the earth was absorbed in producing the carboniferous vegetation which still supplies us with the means of warmth, light, and life, accumulating during enormous periods of time small deposits of organic matter forming the strata of the globe on which we live. In the same manner the human mind formed that linguistic vegetation, the produce of which still supplies the stores of our grammars and dictionaries”; and after a close examination of these primordial roots whence our language has sprung, we find that it does not consist in a conglomeration of words, the result of an agreement amongst a certain number of men, or the result of chance, but expresses human activity by means of verbs, the living and vivifying portion of speech by the side of which the remainder may almost be considered as dead matter.
The question of the birth of the substantive, without being deliberately posed as a problem, occupied the minds of the Grecian philosophers, and was involved in their researches concerning the relation of an object to the name it bears, of the unknown cause by which a certain name designates a certain object and no other. Whilst the Greeks speculated on the subject after a tentative manner, building up theories which later observations were not long in upsetting, the Hindoos were also engaged in efforts to solve the problem by the help of a more reliable process—the historical.
The early grammarians, having found that words came from roots expressing general concepts, and that these concepts represented some sort of activity, made this fact the basis of their studies; profound thinkers as they were they discovered that man at first could not give a name to a tree, an animal, a star, a river, nor to any other object without discovering first some special quality that seemed at the time most characteristic of the object to be named. Sanscrit has a root As, having amongst other meanings sharpness, quickness; from the same root came words for needle, point, sharpness of sight, quickness of thought; this root is found in the Sanscrit name for a horse, which is asva, runner or racer, one who leaves space quickly behind him. Many other names might have been given to the horse besides the one here mentioned, but all must recall some characteristic trait of this animal; that name, the quick, could also have been given to other animals, but having been repeatedly applied to one, it became unfit for other purposes, and the horse retains undisputed possession. The Sanscrit aksha, eye, comes from the same root as, which also meant to point, to pierce. Another name for eye in Sanscrit is netram, leader, from nî, to lead.
Noiré has just put forth an ingenious theory, that the first substantives would not be miller, digger, weaver, carpenter; but flour, cave, pit, mat, hedge, club, arrow, boat, because these were what had been thought and willed, whilst the agents, of no account from that point of view, remained in the shade, forgotten, and it is possible that for some time no names were given to them.
“When we have once seen that thought in its true sense is always conceptual, taking a verbal form, and that every word is derived from a conceptual root, we shall be ready for the assertion that words being conceptual can never stand for a single percept.”—Max Müller.
Locke first insisted that names are not the signs of things themselves, but always the signs of our concepts of them. This remark received small attention at first, and remained little appreciated until such time as the discoveries of our contemporaries, with no preconcerted unanimity, confirmed its value. Max Müller explains Locke’s words in the following manner: “Each time that we use a general name, if we say dog, tree, chair, we have not these objects before our eyes, only our concepts of them; there can be nothing in the world of sense corresponding even to such simple words as dog, tree, chair. We can never expect to see a dog, a tree, a chair. Dog means every kind of dog from the greyhound to the spaniel; tree, every kind of tree from the oak to the cherry; chair, every kind of chair from the royal throne to the artisan’s stool. We may see a spaniel or a Newfoundland dog; we may see a fir or an apple tree; we may see such and such a chair. People often imagine that they can form a general image of a dog by leaving out what is peculiar to every individual dog.”[43]