[CHAPTER XVII]
PROGRESS OR DECAY?
§ 1. Linguistic Estimation. § 2. Degeneration? § 3. Appreciation of Modern Tongues. § 4. The Scientific Attitude. § 5. Final Answer. § 6. Sounds. § 7. Shortenings. § 8. Objections. Result. § 9. Verbal Forms. § 10. Synthesis and Analysis. § 11. Verbal Concord.
XVII.—§ 1. Linguistic Estimation.
The common belief of linguists that one form or one expression is just as good as another, provided they are both found in actual use, and that each language is to be considered a perfect vehicle for the thoughts of the nation speaking it, is in some ways the exact counterpart of the conviction of the Manchester school of economics that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only no artificial hindrances are put in the way of free exchange, for demand and supply will regulate everything better than any Government would be able to. Just as economists were blind to the numerous cases in which actual wants, even crying wants, were not satisfied, so also linguists were deaf to those instances which are, however, obvious to whoever has once turned his attention to them, in which the very structure of a language calls forth misunderstandings in everyday conversation, and in which, consequently, a word has to be repeated or modified or expanded or defined in order to call forth the idea intended by the speaker: he took his stick—no, not John’s, but his own; or: I mean you in the plural (or, you all, or you girls); no, a box on the ear; un dé à jouer, non pas un dé à coudre; nein, ich meine Sie persönlich (with very strong stress on Sie), etc. Every careful writer in any language has had the experience that on re-reading his manuscript he has discovered that a sentence which he thought perfectly clear when he wrote it lends itself to misunderstanding and has to be put in a different way; sometimes he has to add a clarifying parenthesis, because his language is defective in some respect, as when Edward Carpenter (Art of Creation 171), in speaking of the deification of the Babe, writes: “It is not likely that Man—the human male—left to himself would have done this; but to woman it was natural,” thus avoiding the misunderstanding that he was speaking of the whole species, comprising both sexes. Herbert Spencer writes: “Charles had recently obtained—a post in the Post Office I was about to say, but the cacophony stopped me; and then I was about to say, an office in the Post Office, which is nearly as bad; let me say—a place in the Post Office” (Autobiogr. 2. 73—but of course the defect is not really one of sound, as implied by the expression ‘cacophony,’ but one of signification, as both words post and office are ambiguous, and the attempted collocation would therefore puzzle the reader or hearer, because the same word would have to be apprehended in two different senses in close succession). Similar instances might be alleged from any language.
No language is perfect, but if we admit this truth (or truism), we must also admit by implication that it is not unreasonable to investigate the relative value of different languages or of different details in languages. When comparative linguists set themselves against the narrowmindedness of classical scholars who thought Latin and Greek the only worthy objects of study, and emphasized the value of all, even the least literary languages and dialects, they were primarily thinking of their value to the scientist, who finds something of interest in each of them, but they had no idea of comparing the relative value of languages from the point of view of their users—and yet the latter comparison is of much greater importance than the former.
XVII.—§ 2. Degeneration?
People will often use the expressions ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ in connexion with language, but most linguists, when taken to task, will maintain that these expressions as applied to languages should be used without the implication which is commonly attached to them when used of other objects, namely, that there is a progressive tendency towards something better or nearer perfection. They will say that ‘evolution’ means here simply changes going on in languages, without any judgment as to the value of these changes.
But those who do pronounce such a judgment nearly always take the changes as a retrogressive rather than a progressive development: “Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson in the Preface to his Dictionary, and the same lament has been often repeated since his time. This is quite natural: people have always had a tendency to believe in a golden age, that is, in a remote past gloriously different to the miserable present. Why not, then, have the same belief with regard to language, the more so because one cannot fail to notice things in contemporary speech which (superficially at any rate) look like corruptions of the ‘good old’ forms? Everything ‘old’ thus comes to be considered ‘good.’ Lowell and others think they have justified many of the commonly reviled Americanisms if they are able to show them to have existed in England in the sixteenth century, and similar considerations are met with everywhere. The same frame of mind finds support in the usual grammar-school admiration for the two classical languages and their literatures. People were taught to look down upon modern languages as mere dialects or patois and to worship Greek and Latin; the richness and fullness of forms found in those languages came naturally to be considered the very beau idéal of linguistic structure. Bacon gives a classical expression to this view when he declares “ingenia priorum seculorum nostris fuisse multo acutiora et subtiliora” (De augm. scient.[79]). To men fresh from the ordinary grammar-school training, no language would seem really respectable that had not four or five distinct cases and three genders, or that had less than five tenses and as many moods in its verbs. Accordingly, such poor languages as had either lost much of their original richness in grammatical forms (e.g. French, English, or Danish), or had never had any, so far as one knew (e.g. Chinese), were naturally looked upon with something of the pity bestowed on relatives in reduced circumstances, or the contempt felt for foreign paupers. It is well known how in West-European languages, in English, German, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, French, etc., obsolete forms were artificially kept alive and preferred to younger forms by most grammarians; but we see exactly the same point of view in such a language as Magyar, where, under the influence of the historical studies of the grammarian Révai, the belief in the excellence of the ‘veneranda antiquitas’ as compared with the corruption of the modern language has been prevalent in schools and in literature. (See Simonyi US 259; cf. on Modern Greek and Telugu above, p. 301.)
Comparative linguists had one more reason for adopting this manner of estimating languages. To what had the great victories won by their science been due? Whence had they got the material for that magnificent edifice which had proved spacious enough to hold Hindus and Persians, Lithuanians and Slavs, Greeks, Romans, Germans and Kelts? Surely it was neither from Modern English nor Modern Danish, but from the oldest stages of each linguistic group. The older a linguistic document was, the more valuable it was to the first generation of comparative linguists. An English form like had was of no great use, but Gothic habaidedeima was easily picked to pieces, and each of its several elements lent itself capitally to comparison with Sanskrit, Lithuanian and Greek. The linguist was chiefly dependent for his material on the old and archaic languages; his interest centred round their fuller forms: what wonder, then, if in his opinion those languages were superior to all others? What wonder if by comparing had and habaidedeima he came to regard the English form as a mutilated and worn-out relic of a splendid original? or if, noting the change from the old to the modern form, he used strong language and spoke of degeneration, corruption, depravation, decline, phonetic decay, etc.?
The view that the modern languages of Europe, Persia and India are far inferior to the old languages, or the one old language, from which they descend, we have already encountered in the historical part of this work, in Bopp, Humboldt, Grimm and their followers. It looms very large in Schleicher, according to whom the history of language is all a Decline and Fall, and in Max Müller, who says that “on the whole, the history of all the Aryan languages is nothing but a gradual process of decay.” Nor is it yet quite extinct.