There is a petrified philosophy in language, and if we examine the most ancient word for "name," we find it is nâman in Sanskrit, nomen in Latin, namô in Gothic. This nâman stands for gnâman, and is derived from the root gnâ, to know, and meant originally that by which we know a thing.
And how do we know things?
The first step toward the real knowledge, a step which, however small in appearance, separates man forever from all other animals, is the naming of a thing, or the making a thing knowable. All naming is classification, bringing the individual under the general; and whatever we know, whether empirically or scientifically, we know it by means of our general ideas.
At the very point where man parts company with the brute world, at the first flash of reason as the manifestation of the light within us, there we see the true genesis of language. Analyze any word you like and you will find that it expresses a general idea peculiar to the individual to whom the name belongs. What is the meaning of moon? The measurer. What is the meaning of sun? The begetter. What is the meaning of earth? The ploughed.
If the serpent is called in Sanskrit sarpa, it is because it was conceived under the general idea of creeping, an idea expressed by the root srip.
An ancient word for man was the Sanskrit marta, the Greek brotos, the Latin mortalis. Marta means "he who dies," and it is remarkable that, where everything else was changing, fading, and dying, this should have been chosen as the distinguishing name for man.
There were many more names for man, as there were many names for all things in ancient languages. Any feature that struck the observing mind as peculiarly characteristic could be made to furnish a new name. In common Sanskrit dictionaries we find 5 words for hand, 11 for light, 15 for cloud, 20 for moon, 26 for snake, 33 for slaughter, 35 for fire, 37 for sun. The sun might be called the bright, the warm, the golden, the preserver, the destroyer, the wolf, the lion, the heavenly eye, the father of light and life. Hence that superabundance of synonyms in ancient dialects, and hence that struggle for life carried on among these words, which led to the destruction of the less strong, the less fertile, the less happy words, and ended in the triumph of one as the recognized and proper name for every object in every language. On a very small scale this process of natural selection, or, as it would better be called, elimination, may still be watched even in modern languages, that is to say, even in languages so old and stricken in years as English and French. What it was at the first burst of dialects we can only gather from such isolated cases as when von Hammer counts 5,744 words all relating to the camel.
The fact that every word is originally a predicate—that names, though signs of individual conceptions, are all, without exception, derived from general ideas—is one of the most important discoveries in the science of language. It was known before that language is the distinguishing characteristic of man; it was known also that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes; but that these two were only different expressions of the same fact was not known till the theory of roots had been established as preferable to the theories both of onomatopoicia and of interjections. But, though our modern philosophy did not know it, the ancient poets and framers of language must have known it. For in Greek, language is logos, but logos means also reason, and alogon was chosen as the name and the most proper name, for brute. No animal, so far as we know, thinks and speaks except man. Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.
What are the two problems left unsettled at the end of the Science of Language: "How do mere cries become phonetic types?" and "How can sensations be changed into concepts?" What are these two, if taken together, but the highest problem of all philosophy, viz., "What is the origin of reason?"