We have long had 'assimilation' in our dictionaries; 'dissimilation' has as yet scarcely found its way into them, but it speedily will. [It has already appeared in our books on language. [Footnote: See Skeat's Etym. Dict. (s. v. truffle). Pott (Etym. Forsch. vol. ii. p. 65) introduced the word 'dissimilation' into German.] Advances in philology have rendered it a matter of necessity that we should possess a term to designate a certain process which words unconsciously undergo, and no other would designate it at all so well. There is a process of 'assimilation' going on very extensively in language; the organs of speech finding themselves helped by changing one letter for another which has just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not 'a_df_iance,' but 'a_ff_iance,' not 're_n_ow_m_,' as our ancestors did when 'renom' was first naturalized, but 're_n_ow_n_'; we say too, though we do not write it, 'cu_b_board' and not 'cu_p_board,' 'su_t_tle' and not 'su_b_tle.' But side by side with this there is another opposite process, where some letter would recur too often for euphony or ease in speaking, were the strict form of the word too closely held fast; and where consequently this letter is exchanged for some other, generally for some nearly allied; thus 'cae_r_uleus' was once 'cae_l_uleus,' from caelum [Footnote: The connexion of caeruleus with caelum is not at all certain.] 'me_r_idies' is for 'me_d_idies/ or medius dies. In the same way the Italians prefer 've_l_eno' to 've_n_eno'; the Germans '_k_artoffel' to '_t_artüffel,' from Italian 'tartufola' = Latin terrae tuber, an old name of the potato; and we 'cinnamo_n_' to 'cinnamo_m_' (the earlier form). So too in 'turtle,' 'marble,' 'purple,' we have shrunk from the double 'r' of 'turtur,' 'marmor,' 'purpura.' [Footnote: See Dwight, Modern Philology, 2nd Series, p. 100; Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft, Section 139- 141; and Peile, Introduction to Greek and Latin Etymology, pp. 357- 379.] New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions, evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but did not formerly exist, because in an anterior period they were not required. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own verses, 'singer' (aoidos) sufficiently expressed the double function; such a 'singer' was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus, the bard of the Phaeacians; that double function, in fact, not being in his time contemplated as double, but each of its parts so naturally completing the other, that no second word was required. When, however, in the division of labour one made the verses which another chaunted, then 'poet' or 'maker,' a word unknown to the Homeric age, arose. In like manner, when 'physicians' were the only natural philosophers, the word covered this meaning as well as that other which it still retains; but when the investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself from the art of healing, became an independent study, the name 'physician' remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the art, while the new offshoot sought out and obtained a new name for itself.
But it is not merely new things which will require new names. It will often be discovered that old things have not got a name at all, or, having one, are compelled to share it with something else, often to the serious embarrassment of both. The manner in which men become aware of such deficiencies, is commonly this. Comparing their own language with another, and in some aspects a richer, compelled, it may be, to such comparison through having undertaken to transfer treasures of that language into their own, they become conscious of much worthy to be uttered in human speech, and plainly utterable therein, since another language has found utterance for it; but which hitherto has found no voice in their own. Hereupon with more or less success they proceed to supply the deficiency. Hardly in any other way would the wants in this way revealed make themselves felt even by the most thoughtful; for language is to so large an extent the condition and limit of thought, men are so little accustomed, indeed so little able, to contemplate things, except through the intervention, and by the machinery, of words, that the absence of words from a language almost necessarily brings with it the absence of any sense of that absence. Here is one advantage of acquaintance with other languages besides our own, and of the institution that will follow, if we have learned those other to any profit, of such comparisons, namely, that we thus become aware that names are not, and least of all the names in any one language, co- extensive with things (and by 'things' I mean subjects as well as objects of thought, whatever one can think about), that innumerable things and aspects of things exist, which, though capable of being resumed and connoted in a word, are yet without one, unnamed and unregistered; and thus, vast as may be the world of names, that the world of realities, and of realities which are nameable, is vaster still. Such discoveries the Romans made, when they sought to transplant the moral philosophy of Greece to an Italian soil. They discovered that many of its terms had no equivalents with them; which equivalents thereupon they proceeded to devise for themselves, appealing for this to the latent capabilities of their own tongue. For example, the Greek schools had a word, and one playing no unimportant part in some of their philosophical systems, to express 'apathy' or the absence of all passion and pain. As it was absolutely necessary to possess a corresponding word, Cicero invented 'indolentia,' as that 'if I may so speak' with which he paves the way to his first introduction of it, sufficiently declares. [Footnote: Fin. ii. 4; and for 'qualitas' see Acad. i. 6.] Sometimes, indeed, such a skilful mint-master of words, such a subtle watcher and weigher of their force as was Cicero, [Footnote: Ille verborum vigilantissimus appensor ac mensor, as Augustine happily terms him.] will have noticed even apart from this comparison with other languages, an omission in his own, which thereupon he will endeavour to supply. Thus the Latin had two adjectives which, though not kept apart as strictly as they might have been, possessed each its peculiar meaning, 'invidus' one who is envious, 'invidiosus' one who excites envy in others; [Footnote: Thus the monkish line: Invidiosus ego, non invidus esse laboro.] at the same time there was only one substantive, 'invidia' the correlative of them both; with the disadvantage, therefore, of being employed now in an active, now in a passive sense, now for the envy which men feel, and now for the envy which they excite. The word he saw was made to do double duty; under a seeming unity there lurked a real dualism, from which manifold confusions might follow. He therefore devised 'invidentia,' to express the active envy, or the envying, no doubt desiring that 'invidia' should be restrained to the passive, the being envied. 'Invidentia' to all appearance supplied a real want; yet Cicero himself did not succeed in giving it currency; does not seem himself to have much cared to employ it again. [Footnote: Tusc. iii. 9; iv. 8; cf. Döderlein, Synon. vol. iii, p. 68.] We see by this example that not every word, which even an expert in language proposes, finds acceptance; [Footnote: Quintilian's advice, based on this fact, is good (i. 6. 42): Etiamsi potest nihil peccare, qui utitur iis verbis quae summi auctores tradiderunt, multum tamen refert non solum quid dixerint, sed etiam quid persuaserint. He himself, as he informs us, invented 'vocalitas' to correspond with the Greek [Greek: euphonia] (Instit. i. 5. 24), but I am not conscious that he found any imitators here.] for, as Dryden, treating on this subject, has well observed, 'It is one thing to draw a bill, and another to have it accepted.' Provided some words live, he must be content that others should fall to the ground and die. Nor is this the only unsuccessful candidate for admission into the language which Cicero put forward. His 'indolentia' which I mentioned just now, hardly passed beyond himself; [Footnote: Thus Seneca a little later is unaware, or has forgotten, that Cicero made any such suggestion. Taking no notice of it, he proposes 'impatientia' as an adequate rendering of [Greek: apatheia]. There clung this inconvenience to the word, as he himself allowed, that it was already used in exactly the opposite sense (Ep. 9). Elsewhere he claims to be the inventor of 'essentia' (Ep. 38;.)] his 'vitiositas,' [Footnote: Tusc. iv. 15.] 'indigentia,' [Footnote: Ibid. iv. 9. 21.] and 'mulierositas,' [Footnote: Ibid. iv. ii.] not at all. 'Beatitas' too and 'beatitudo,' [Footnote: Nat. Dear. i. 34.] both of his coining, yet, as he owns himself, with something strange and unattractive about them, found almost no acceptance at all in the classical literature of Rome: 'beatitude,' indeed, obtained a home, as it deserved to do, in the Christian Church, but 'beatitas' none. Coleridge's 'esemplastic,' by which he was fain to express the all-atoning or unifying power of the imagination, has not pleased others at all in the measure in which it pleased himself; while the words of Jeremy Taylor, of such Latinists as Sir Thomas Browne and Henry More, born only to die, are multitudinous as the fallen leaves of autumn. [Footnote: See my English Past and Present, 13th edit. p. 113.] Still even the word which fails is often an honourable testimony to the scholarship, or the exactness of thought, or the imagination of its author; and Ben Jonson is over-hard on 'neologists,' if I may bring this term back to its earlier meaning, when he says: 'A man coins not a new word without some peril, and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured,' [Footnote: Therefore the maxim: Moribus antiquis, praesentibus utere verbis.]
I spoke just now of comprehensive words, which should singly say what hitherto it had taken many words to say, in which a higher term has been reached than before had been attained. The value of these is incalculable. By the cutting short of lengthy explanations and tedious circuits of language, they facilitate mental processes, such as would often have been nearly or quite impossible without them; and such as have invented or put these into circulation, are benefactors of a high order to knowledge. In the ordinary traffic of life, unless our dealings are on the smallest scale, we willingly have about us our money in the shape rather of silver than of copper; and if our transactions are at all extensive, rather in gold than in silver: while, if we were setting forth upon a long and costly journey, we should be best pleased to turn even our gold coin itself into bills of exchange or circular notes; in fact, into the highest denomination of money which it was capable of assuming. How many words with which we are now perfectly familiar are for us what the circular note or bill of exchange is for the traveller or the merchant. As innumerable pence, a multitude of shillings, not a few pounds are gathered up and represented by one of these, so have we in some single word the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, ascending one above the other, until all have been at length summed up for us in that single word. This last may be compared to nothing so fitly as to some mighty river, which does not bring its flood of waters to the sea, till many rills have been swallowed up in brooks, and brooks in streams, and streams in tributary rivers, each of these affluents having lost its separate name and existence in that which at last represents and contains them all.
Science is an immense gainer by words which thus say singly, what whole sentences might with difficulty have succeeded in saying. Thus 'isothermal' is quite a modern invention; but how much is summed up by the word; what a long story is saved, as often as we speak of 'isothermal' lines. Physiologists have given the name of 'atavism' to the emerging again of a face in a family after its disappearance during two or three generations. What would have else needed a sentence is here accomplished by a word. Lord Bacon somewhere describes a certain candidate for the Chair of St. Peter as being 'papable.' There met, that is, in him all the conditions, and they were many, which would admit the choice of the Conclave falling upon him. When Bacon wrote, one to be 'papable' must have been born in lawful wedlock; must have no children nor grandchildren living; must not have a kinsman already in the Conclave; must be already a Cardinal; all which facts this single word sums up. When Aristotle, in the opening sentences of his Rhetoric, declares that rhetoric and logic are antistrophic,' what a wonderful insight into both, and above all into their relations to one another, does the word impart to those who have any such special training as enables them to take in all which hereby he intends. Or take a word so familiar as 'circle,' and imagine how it would fare with us, if, as often as in some long and difficult mathematical problem we needed to refer to this figure, we were obliged to introduce its entire definition, no single word representing it; and not this only, but the definition of each term employed in the definition;—how well nigh impossible it would prove to carry the whole process in the mind, or to take oversight of all its steps. Imagine a few more words struck out of the vocabulary of the mathematician, and if all activity and advance in his proper domain was not altogether arrested, yet would it be as effectually restrained and hampered as commercial intercourse would be, if in all its transactions iron or copper were the sole medium of exchange. Wherever any science is progressive, there will be progress in its nomenclature as well. Words will keep pace with things, and with more or less felicity resuming in themselves the labours of the past, will at once assist and abridge the labours of the future; like tools which, themselves the result of the finest mechanical skill, do at the same time render other and further triumphs of art possible, oftentimes such as would prove quite unattainable without them. [Footnote: See Mill, System of Logic, iv. 6, 3.]
It is not merely the widening of men's intellectual horizon, which, bringing new thoughts within the range of their vision, compels the origination of corresponding words; but as often as regions of this outward world hitherto closed are laid open, the novel objects of interest which these contain will demand to find their names, and not merely to be catalogued in the nomenclature of science, but, so far as they present themselves to the popular eye, will require to be popularly named. When a new thing, a plant, or fruit, or animal, or whatever else it may be, is imported from some foreign land, or so comes within the sphere of knowledge that it needs to be thus named, there are various ways by which this may be done. The first and commonest way is to import the name and the thing together, incorporating the former, unchanged, or with slight modification, into the language. Thus we did with the potato, which is only another form of 'batata,' in which shape the original Indian word appears in our earlier voyagers. But this is not the only way of naming; and the example on which I have just lighted affords good illustration of various other methods which may be adopted. Thus a name belonging to something else, which the new object nearly resembles, may be transferred to it, and the confusion arising from calling different things by the same name disregarded. It was thus in German, 'kartoffel' being only a corruption, which found place in the last century, of 'tartuffel' from the Italian 'tartiiffolo'(Florio), properly the name of the truffle; but which not the less was transferred to the potato, on the ground of the many resemblances between them. [Footnote: [See Kluge, Etym. Dict. (s. v. Kartoffel).] Or again this same transfer may take place, but with some qualifying or distinguishing addition. Thus in Italy also men called the potato 'tartufo,' but added 'bianco,' the white truffle; a name now giving way to 'patata.' Thus was it, too, with the French; who called it apple, but 'apple of the earth'; even as in many of the provincial dialects of Germany it bears the name of 'erdapfel' or earth-apple to this day.
It will sometimes happen that a language, having thus to provide a new name for a new thing, will seem for a season not to have made up its mind by which of these methods it shall do it. Two names will exist side by side, and only after a time will one gain the upper hand of the other. Thus when the pineapple was introduced into England, it brought with it the name of 'ananas' erroneously 'anana' under which last form it is celebrated by Thomson in his Seasons. [Footnote: [The word ananas is from a native Peruvian name nanas. The pineapple was first seen by Europeans in Peru; see the New English Dictionary (s. v.).] This name has been nearly or quite superseded by 'pineapple' manifestly suggested by the likeness of the new fruit to the cone of the pine. It is not a very happy formation; for it is not likeness, but identity, which 'pineapple' suggests, and it gives some excuse to an error, which up to a very late day ran through all German-English and French-English dictionaries; I know not whether even now it has disappeared. In all of these 'pineapple' is rendered as though it signified not the anana, but this cone of the pine; and not very long ago, the Journal des Débats made some uncomplimentary observations on the voracity of the English, who could wind up a Lord Mayor's banquet with fir-cones for dessert.
Sometimes the name adopted will be one drawn from an intermediate language, through which we first became acquainted with the object requiring to be named. 'Alligator' is an example of this. When that ugly crocodile of the New World was first seen by the Spanish discoverers, they called it, with a true insight into its species, 'el lagarto,' the lizard, as being the largest of that lizard species to which it belonged, or sometimes 'el lagarto de las Indias,' the Indian lizard. In Sir Walter Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana the word still retains its Spanish form. Sailing up the Orinoco, 'we saw in it,' he says, 'divers sorts of strange fishes of marvellous bigness, but for lagartos it exceeded; for there were thousands of these ugly serpents, and the people call it, for the abundance of them, the river of lagartos, in their language.' We can explain the shape which with us the word gradually assumed, by supposing that English sailors who brought it home, and had continually heard, but may have never seen it written, blended, as in similar instances has often happened, the Spanish article 'el' with the name. In Ben Jonson's 'alligarta,' we note the word in process of transformation. [Footnote: 'Alcoran' supplies another example of this curious annexation of the article. Examples of a like absorption or incorporation of it are to be found in many languages; in our own, when we write 'a newt,' and not an ewt, or when our fathers wrote 'a nydiot' (Sir T. More), and not an idiot; in the Italian, which has 'lonza' for onza; but they are still more numerous in French. Thus 'lierre,' ivy, was written by Ronsard, 'l'hierre,' which is correct, being the Latin 'hedera.' 'Lingot' is our 'ingot,' but with fusion of the article; in 'larigot' and 'loriot' the word and the article have in the same manner grown together. In old French it was l'endemain,' or, le jour en demain: 'le lendemain,' as now written, is a barbarous excess of expression. 'La Pouille,' a name given to the southern extremity of Italy, and in which we recognize 'Apulia,' is another variety of error, but moving in the same sphere (Génin, Récréations Philologiques, vol. i. pp. 102-105); of the same variety is 'La Natolie,' which was written 'L'Anatolie' once. An Irish scholar has observed that in modern Irish 'an' (='the') is frequently thus absorbed in the names of places, as in 'Nenagh, 'Naul'; while sometimes an error exactly the reverse of this is committed, and a letter supposed to be the article, but in fact a part of the word, dropt: thus 'Oughaval,' instead of 'Noughhaval' or New Habitation. [See Joyce, Irish Local Names.]
Less honourable causes than some which I have mentioned, give birth to new words; which will sometimes reflect back a very fearful light on the moral condition of that epoch in which first they saw the light. Of the Roman emperor, Tiberius, one of those 'inventors of evil things,' of whom St. Paul speaks (Rom. i. 30), Tacitus informs us that under his hateful dominion words, unknown before, emerged in the Latin tongue, for the setting out of wickednesses, happily also previously unknown, which he had invented. It was the same frightful time which gave birth to 'delator,' alike to the thing and to the word.
The atrocious attempt of Lewis XIV. to convert the Protestants in his dominions to the Roman Catholic faith by quartering dragoons upon them, with license to misuse to the uttermost those who refused to conform, this 'booted mission' (mission bottée), as it was facetiously called at the time, has bequeathed 'dragonnade' to the French language. 'Refugee' had at the same time its rise, and owed it to the same event. They were called 'réfugiés' or 'refugees' who took refuge in some land less inhospitable than their own, so as to escape the tender mercies of these missionaries. 'Convertisseur' belongs to the same period. The spiritual factor was so named who undertook to convert the Protestants on a large scale, receiving so much a head for the converts whom he made.
Our present use of 'roué' throws light on another curious and shameful page of French history. The 'roué,' by which word now is meant a man of profligate character and conduct, is properly and primarily one broken on the wheel. Its present and secondary meaning it derived from that Duke of Orleans who was Regent of France after the death of Lewis XIV. It was his miserable ambition to gather round him companions worse, if possible, and wickeder than himself. These, as the Duke of St. Simon assures us, he was wont to call his 'roués'; every one of them abundantly deserving to be broken on the wheel,—which was the punishment then reserved in France for the worst malefactors. [Footnote: The 'roués' themselves declared that the word expressed rather their readiness to give any proof of their affection, even to the being broken upon the wheel, to their protector and friend.] When we have learned the pedigree of the word, the man and the age rise up before us, glorying in their shame, and not caring to pay to virtue even that hypocritical homage which vice finds it sometimes convenient to render.