“The one invented half a coat,
The other half a dinner.”
Epic and dramatic poetry, and fiction generally, have added much to the force and suggestiveness of speech. What apt and expressive terms are “utopian”[45] (from the name given by Sir Thomas More to his imaginary island), and “quixotic”! With what other words could we supply the place of Dean Swift’s “liliputian” and “brobdingnagian,” Kenny’s “Jeremy Diddler,” or Dickens’s “pickwickian” and “Circumlocution Office”? What convenient terms are “thrasonical,” from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy, and “rodomontade,” from Rodamonte, a hero of Boiardo, who, strange to say, does not brag and bluster, as the word based on his name seems to imply! It is said that Boiardo, when he had hit upon the name of his hero, had the village bells rung for joy. To Homer we are indebted for “stentorian,” that is, loud-voiced, from Stentor, the Greek herald, whose voice surpassed the united shout of fifty men; and for the word “to hector,” founded on the big talk of the Trojan hero.
The language of savages teems with expressions of deep interest both to the philologist and the student of human nature. Speech with them is a perpetual creation of utterances to image forth the total picture in their minds. The Indian “does not analyze his thoughts or separate his utterances; his thoughts rush forth in a troop. His speech is as a kindling cloud, not as radiant points of light.” The Lenni Lenape Indians express by one polysyllable what with us requires seven monosyllables and three disyllables, viz.: “Come with the canoe and take us across the river.” This polysyllable is nadholineen, and it is formed by taking parts of several words and cementing them into one. In the Iroquois language one word of twenty-one letters expresses this sentence of eighteen words: “I give some money to those who have arrived, in order to buy them more clothes with it.” The apparent wealth of synonyms and of grammatical forms in savage languages is due, not to the mental superiority of the races that speak them, but to their inferiority,—their deficiency in the power of abstraction. “The more barbarous a language,” says Herder, “the greater is the number of its conjugations.” We must not suppose that simplicity in language precedes complexity: simplicity is the triumph of science, not the spontaneous result of intelligence. The natives of the Society Isles have one word for the tail of a dog, another for the tail of a bird, and a third for the tail of a sheep, while for “tail” itself, “tail” in the abstract, they have no word whatever. The Mohicans have words for wood-cutting, cutting the head, etc., yet no verb meaning simply to cut. Even the Anglo-Saxon language, which had a sufficiency of words for all shades of green, red, blue, yellow, had to borrow from the Latin the abstract word “color,” and, while possessing abundant names for every sort of crime, derived from the same source the abstract words “crime” and “transgression.”
Some Indian tribes call a squirrel by a name signifying that he “can stick fast in a tree”; a mole, by a word signifying “carrying the right hand on the left shoulder”; and they have a name for a horse which means “having only one toe.” Among the savages of the Pacific, “to think” is “to speak in the stomach.”
WORDS OF ILLUSIVE ETYMOLOGY.
In the lapse of ages words undergo great changes of form, so that it becomes at last difficult or impossible to ascertain their origin. Terms, of which the composition was originally clear, are worn and rubbed by use like the pebbles which are fretted and rounded into shape and smoothness by the sea waves or by a rapid stream. Like the image and superscription of a coin, their meaning is often so worn away that one cannot make even a probable guess at their origin. One of the commonest causes of the corruptions of words, by which their sources and original meanings are disguised, is the instinctive dislike we feel to the use of a word that is wholly new to us, and the consequent tendency to fasten upon it a meaning which shall remove its seemingly arbitrary character. Foreign words, therefore, when adopted into a language, are especially liable to these changes, being corrupted both in pronunciation and orthography. By thus anglicizing them, we not only avoid the uncouth, barbarous sounds which are so offensive to the ear, but we help the memory by associating the words with others already known.
The mistakes which have been made in attempting to trace the origin of words thus disguised, have done not a little, at times, to bring philology into contempt. The philologist, unless he has much native good sense, and rules his inclinations with an iron rod, is apt to become a verbomaniac. There is a strange fascination in word-hunting, and his hobby-horse, it has been aptly said, is a strong goer that trifles never balk. “To him the British Channel is a surface drain, the Alps and Apennines mere posts and rails, the Mediterranean a simple brook, and the Himalayas only an outlying cover.” Cowper justly ridicules those word-hunters who, in their eagerness to make some startling discovery, never pause to consider whether there is any historic connection between two languages, one of which is supposed to have borrowed a word from another,—
“Learned philologists, who chase