This general idea we have in our mind of which we can talk, but our eyes cannot see it as they could a real object. Nothing that we name, nothing that we find in our dictionary can ever be heard, or seen, or felt. “We can even have names for things which never existed, such as gnomes; also for things which exist no more, or which exist not yet, such as the grapes of the last harvest, and those of the next. The mere fact that I call a thing past or future ought to be sufficient to show that it is my concept of which I am speaking, and not the thing as independent of me.”[44]
Berkeley showed that it is simply impossible for any human being to make to himself a general image of a triangle, for such an image would have to be at the same time right-angled, obtuse-angled, acute-angled, and other kinds also; such an object does not exist; whereas it is perfectly possible to have an image of any single triangle; to name some characteristic features common to all triangles, and thus to form a name and at the same time a concept of a triangle.[45] This mental process which Berkeley described so well as applied to modern concepts we can adopt with regard to all, even the most primitive. Man, in entering a forest, discovered in the trees something that was interesting to him. For practical purposes trees were particularly interesting to the primitive framers of language, because they could be split in two, three, or four pieces, cut, shaped according to the size of the piece into blocks, planks, boats, and shafts; any object for which the necessity had made itself felt. Hence, from a root dar, to tear, our Aryan ancestors called trees dru, or dâru, literally what can be torn, or split, or cut; from the same root the Greeks called the skin of an animal dérma, because it was torn off, and a sack dóros (in Sanscrit driti), because it was made of leather, and a spear dóry, because it came from a tree, and was cut and shaped and planed.
Such words being once given would produce many offshoots; the Celts of Gaul and of Ireland called their priests Druids, literally the men of oak-groves. The Greeks called the spirits of the forest trees Dryades; and the Hindoos called a man of wood, or a man with a wooden, or, as we say, flinty heart, dâruna, cruel.
The immense number of intelligible roots gave birth to many new images, these roots crossed and recrossed, for the concepts of to go, to give, to move, to make, would be the foundations of others, in some ways differing; one idea or thought in its flight would meet others perhaps of a conflicting nature, thoughts and words would equally undergo incessant modifications, which fact explains why in these earlier stages of language the members of a community soon ceased to understand each other if separated but for a short period of time.
Ovid, in speaking of the chaos at the beginning of the world, makes a picture which would equally well describe the birth of language. “Matter was in an unformed mass ... the sky, the earth, the sea had all one aspect; there where was the earth, was also the sea, and the sky was there also.”
The extraordinary destinies of the roots I have named constitutes a short chapter only, in the birth and development of tongues; but short as it is, it suffices to give us an idea of the elastic nature of these roots, their faculty of extension, and the part they play in the economy of language, and in the administration of the affairs of the human mind.
Every mental phenomenon has its history, which can only be discovered by tracing it to its source; and as speech has undergone many phases, of which the earlier must have been very different from those now in existence, it is pardonable in the greatest philosophers of antiquity not to have known the intricacies of the human mind, which this changeable speech could alone interpret. The ancients knew their own times, but were ignorant of the preceding ones, in the same way they knew their own language only, and of this language only its contemporary form; and in the case of a word whose meaning was lost or of a foreign word, they sought its origin in an idiom with which they were familiar; in other words, not where it could be found.
For a long time man only knew one kind of being, his own; and possessed one language only, that which expressed his own acts and his own states; the primitive men were sufficiently advanced to say: “let us dig,” “grind,” “they weave”; but if, at the beginning, concepts and speech arose from the consciousness of their own activity, how was the advance made when men desired to speak of the external objects of the world which they saw around them, and were conscious of not having made, and which consequently remained outside the sphere of their wills and of their experience? It is clear that these outward objects to be grasped and named, must have their part in the human activities for which names had already been found. When he saw the lightning tearing a hole in the field, or splitting the trunk of a tree, man could no longer say, “We have dug this hole, you have split the tree.” It was no longer someone, but something that had dug and struck. Nothing seems more simple to us than after saying “I dig” to say also “it digs,” and yet it was a passing to a new world of thought, from the conscious feeling of our own activity to the intuition of the activity of an outward object; this mental act, though inevitable, was by no means an easy one; men realised that the world around was a reflex of themselves, the only light was the light from within. If men could measure, so could the moon; hence he was called the measurer of the sky, from the root Mâ, to measure; the moon was called Mâs, that which measures, its actual name in Sanscrit; in Latin, mensis; in Greek, mêné; English, moon; German, Monat; in Russian, miésets. Men who ran called themselves runners; also the rivers they named sar, running; and to designate the position of the river they added the suffix it, sar-it; literally, running here. Thus sarit is river in Sanscrit; Mâs and sarit thus become complete, intelligible sentences. What we call lightning was originally, tearing, digging, bursting, sparkling; what we call storm and tempest were, grinding, smashing, bursting, blowing; if man could smash, so could the thunderbolt, hence it was called the smasher; and tempest and storm and thunderbolt may have been, smashing, grinding, hurling; and with the addition of the suffix, smashing here, now, there, then.
We have seen that the attribute which was the peculiar characteristic of an object supplied its name, but as most objects possessed more than one attribute, more than one designation were given to it; thus several names were used for river besides sarit, each representing one of its aspects; when flowing in a straight line it was called sîrâ, arrow, plough, plougher; if it seemed to nourish the fields it was mâtar, mother; if it separated or protected one country from another, it became sindhu, the defender, from sidh or sedhati, to keep off; if it became a torrent it received the name of nadi, noisy. In all these forms the river is considered as acting, and is named by roots expressing action; it nourishes, it traces a furrow, it guards, it roars as a wild beast roars. The sun has many attributes; he is brilliant, the warmer, the generator, the scorcher, he is vivifying, overpowering, his many qualities giving him fifty different names, all synonyms of the sun. The earth also had many, it was known by twenty-one names, amongst others it was urvî, wide; jurithvî, broad; mahî, great; but each characteristic trait of the earth could also be found in other objects, thus urivî also meant a river; sky and dawn were called prithvî; and mahî (great, strong) is used for cow and speech. Hence earth, river, sky, dawn, cow, and speech would become homonyms.
These names are of clearly defined objects, all recognisable by the senses; this fact entitles us to apply the following definition to this primitive stage of language; the conscious expression of impressions perceived by the senses.