mâdi, I eat;mâhdi, thou eatest;ădi, we eat;ăhdi, ye eat.
mâdi, I eat;mâhdi, thou eatest;ădi, we eat;ăhdi, ye eat.
mâdi, I eat;mâhdi, thou eatest;ădi, we eat;ăhdi, ye eat.
mâdi, I eat;mâhdi, thou eatest;
ădi, we eat;ăhdi, ye eat.
The set of Zulu demonstratives which express the three distances of near, farther, farthest, are very complex, but a remark as to their use shows how thoroughly symbolic sound enters into their nature. The Zulus not only saynansi, ‘here is,’nanso, ‘there is,’nansiya, ‘there is in the distance,’ but they even express the greatness of this distance by the emphasis and prolongation of theya. If we could discern a similar gradation of the vowels to express a corresponding gradation of distance throughout our list, the whole matter would be easier to explain; but it is not so, thei-words for instance, are sometimes nearer and sometimes farther off than thea-words. We can only judge that, as even children can see that a scale of vowels makes a most expressive scale of distances, many pronouns and adverbs in use in the world have probably taken their shape under the influence of this simple device, and thus there have arisen sets of what we may call contrasted or ‘differential’ words.
How the differencing of words by change of vowels may be used to distinguish between the sexes, is well put in a remark of Professor Max Müller’s: ‘The distinction of gender ... is sometimes expressed in such a manner that we can only explain it by ascribing an expressive power to the more or less obscure sound of vowels.Ukko, in Finnic, is an old man;akka, an old woman.... In Mandshuchachais mas. ...cheche, femina. Again,ama, in Mandshu, is father;eme, mother;amcha, father-in-law,emche, mother-in-law.’[293]The Coretú language of Brazil has another curiously contrasted pair of wordstsáackö, ‘father,’tsaacko‘mother,’ while the Carib hasbabafor father, andbibifor mother, and the Ibu of Africa hasnnafor father andnnefor mother. This contrivance of distinguishing the male from the female by a difference of vowels is however but a small part of the process of formation which can be traced among such words as those for father and mother. Their consideration leads intoa very interesting philological region, that of ‘Children’s language.’
If we set down a few of the pairs of words which stand for ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in very different and distant languages—papaandmama; Welsh,tad(dad)andmam; Hungarian,atyaandanya; Mandingo,faandba; Lummi (N.America),manandtan; Catoquina (S.America),payúandnayú; Watchandie (Australia),amoandago—their contrast seems to lie in their consonants, while many other pairs differ totally, like Hebrewabandim; Kuki,p’haandnoo; Kayan,amayandinei; Tarahumara,nonoandjeje. Words of the class ofpapaandmama, occurring in remote parts of the world, were once freely used as evidence of a common origin of the languages in which they were found alike. But Professor Buschmann’s paper on ‘Nature-Sound,’ published in 1853,[294]effectually overthrew this argument, and settled the view that such coincidence might arise again and again by independent production. It was clearly of no use to argue that Carib and English were allied because the wordpapa, ‘father,’ belongs to both, or Hottentot and English because both usemamafor ‘mother,’ seeing that these childish articulations may be used in just the opposite way, for the Chilian word for mother ispapa, and the Tlatskanai for father ismama. Yet the choice of easy little words for ‘father’ and ‘mother’ does not seem to have been quite indiscriminate. The immense list of such words collected by Buschmann shows that the typespaandta, with the similar formsapandat, preponderate in the world as names for ‘father,’ whilemaandna, amandan, preponderate as names for ‘mother.’ His explanation of this state of things as affected by direct symbolism choosing the hard sound for the father, and the gentler for the mother, has very likely truth in it, but it must not be pushed too far. It cannot be, forinstance, the same principle of symbolism which leads the Welshmen to saytadfor ‘father’ andmamfor ‘mother,’ and the Indian of British Columbia to saymaan, ‘father’ andtaan, ‘mother,’ or the Georgian to saymama‘father’ anddeda‘mother.’ Yet I have not succeeded in finding anywhere our familiarpapaandmamaexactly reversed in one and the same language; the nearest approach to it that I can give is from the island of Meang, wheremamameant ‘father, man,’ andbabi, ‘mother, woman.’[295]
Between the nursery wordspapaandmamaand the more formalfatherandmotherthere is an obvious resemblance in sound. What, then, is the origin of these wordsfatherandmother? Up to a certain point their history is clear. They belong to the same group of organized words withvaterandmutter,paterandmater, πατήρ and μήτηρ,pitarandmâtar, and other similar forms through the Indo-European family of languages. There is no doubt that all these pairs of names are derived from an ancient and common Aryan source, and when they are traced back as far as possible towards that source, they appear to have sprung from a pair of words which may be roughly calledpatarandmatar, and which were formed by addingtar, the suffix of the actor, to the verb-rootspaandma. There being two appropriate Sanskrit verbspâandmâ, it is possible to etymologize the two words aspatar, ‘protector,’ andmatar, ‘producer.’ Now this pair of Aryan words must have been very ancient, lying back at the remote common source from which forms parallel to our Englishfatherandmotherpassed into Greek and Persian, Norse and Armenian, thus holding fixed type through the eventful course of Indo-European history. Yet, ancient as these words are, they were no doubt preceded by simpler rudimentary words of the children’s language, for it is not likely that the primitive Aryans did without baby-words for father and mother until they had an organized system of adding suffixes to verb-roots to expresssuch notions as ‘protector’ or ‘producer.’ Nor can it be supposed that it was by mere accident that the root-words thus chosen happened to be the very soundspaandma, whose types so often occur in the remotest parts of the world as names for ‘father’ and ‘mother.’Prof.Adolphe Pictet makes shift to account for the coincidence thus: he postulates first the pair of formspâandmâas Aryan verb-roots of unknown origin, meaning ‘to protect’ and ‘to create,’ next another pair of formspaandma, children’s words commonly used to denote father and mother, and lastly he combines the two by supposing that the root-verbspâandmâwere chosen to form the Indo-European words for parents, because of their resemblance to the familiar baby-words already in use. This circuitous process at any rate saves those sacred monosyllables, the Sanskrit verb-roots, from the disgrace of an assignable origin. Yet those who remember that these verb-roots are only a set of crude forms in use in one particular language of the world at one particular period of its development, may account for the facts more simply and more thoroughly. It is a fair guess that the ubiquitouspaandmaof the children’s language were the original forms; that they were used in an early period of Aryan speech as indiscriminately substantive and verb, just as our modern English, which so often reproduces the most rudimentary linguistic processes, can form from the noun ‘father’ a verb ‘to father;’ and that lastly they became verb-roots, whence the wordspatarandmatarwere formed by the addition of the suffix.[296]
The baby-names for parents must not be studied as though they stood alone in language. They are only important members of a great class of words, belonging to all times and countries within our experience, and forming a children’s language, whose common character is due to its concerningitself with the limited set of ideas in which little children are interested, and expressing these ideas by the limited set of articulations suited to the child’s first attempts to talk. This peculiar language is marked quite characteristically among the low savage tribes of Australia;mamman‘father,’ngangan‘mother,’ and by metaphor ‘thumb,’ ‘great toe’ (as is more fully explained injinnamamman‘great toe,’ i.e. foot’s father),tammin‘grandfather or grandmother,’bab-ba‘bad, foolish, childish,’bee-bee,beep‘breast,’pappi‘father,’pappa‘young one,pup, whelp,’ (whence is grammatically formed the verbpapparniti‘to become a young one, to be born.’) Or if we look for examples from India, it does not matter whether we take them from non-Hindu or Hindu languages, for in baby-language all races are on one footing. Thus Tamilappâ‘father,’ammâ‘mother,’ Bodoaphâ‘father,’âyâ‘mother;’ the Kocch groupnânâandnâni‘paternal grandfather and grandmother,’mâmâ‘uncle,’dâdâ‘cousin,’ may be set beside Sanskrittata‘father,’nanâ‘mother,’ and the Hindustani words of the same class, of which some are familiar to the English ear by being naturalized in Anglo-Indian talk,bâbâ‘father,’bâbû‘child, prince, Mr.,’bîbî‘lady,’dadâ‘nurse’ (âyâ‘nurse’ seems borrowed from Portuguese). Such words are continually coming fresh into existence everywhere, and the law of natural selection determines their fate. The great mass of thenana’sanddada’sof the nursery die out almost as soon as made. Some few take more root and spread over large districts as accepted nursery words, and now and then a curious philologist makes a collection of them. Of such, many are obvious mutilations of longer words, as French fairedodo‘to sleep’ (dormir), Brandenburgwiwi, a common cradle lullaby (wiegen). Others, whatever their origin, fall, in consequence of the small variety of articulations out of which they must be chosen, into a curiously indiscriminate and unmeaning mass, as Swissbobo‘a scratch;’bambam‘all gone;’ Italianbobò‘something to drink,’gogo‘little boy,’ fordede‘to play.’ These are words quoted by Pott, and for English examplesnana‘nurse,’tata!‘good-bye!’ may serve. But allbaby-words, as this very name proves, do not stop short even at this stage of publicity. A small proportion of them establish themselves in the ordinary talk of grown-up men and women, and when they have once made good their place as constituents of general language, they may pass on by inheritance from age to age. Such examples as have been here quoted of nursery words give a clue to the origin of a mass of names in the most diverse languages, for father, mother, grandmother, aunt, child, breast, toy, doll, &c. The negro of Fernando Po who uses the wordbubbohfor ‘a little boy,’ is on equal terms with the German who usesbube; the Congo-man who usestatafor ‘father’ would understand how the same word could be used in classic Latin for ‘father,’ and in mediæval Latin for ‘pedagogue;’ the Carib and the Caroline Islander agree with the Englishman thatpapais a suitable word to express ‘father,’ and then it only remains to carry on the word, and make the baby-language name the priests of the Eastern Church and the greatPapaof the Western. At the same time the evidence explains the indifference with which, out of the small stock of available materials, the same sound does duty for the most different ideas; whymamameans here ‘mother,’ there ‘father,’ there ‘uncle,’mamanhere ‘mother,’ there ‘father-in-law,’dadahere ‘father,’ there ‘nurse,’ there ‘breast,’tatahere ‘father,’ there ‘son.’ A single group of words may serve to show the character of this peculiar region of language: Blackfoot Indianninnah‘father;’ Greekνέννος‘uncle,’νέννα‘aunt;’ Zulunina, Sangirnina, Malagasynini‘mother;’ Javannini‘grandfather or grandmother;’ Vayunini‘paternal aunt;’ Darien Indianninah‘daughter;’ Spanishniño,niña‘child;’ Italianninna‘little girl;’ Milaneseninin‘bed;’ Italianninnare‘to rock the cradle.’
In this way a dozen easy child’s articulations,ba’sandna’s,ti’sandde’s,pa’sandma’s, serve almost as indiscriminately to express a dozen child’s ideas as though they had been shaken in a bag and pulled out at random to express the notion that came first, doll or uncle, nurse or grandfather. It is obvious that among words cramped to such scanty choice of articulate sounds, speculations as to derivation must be more than usually unsafe. Looked at from this point of view, children’s language may give a valuable lesson to the philologist. He has before him a kind of language, formed, under peculiar conditions, and showing the weak points of his method of philological research, only exaggerated into extraordinary distinctness. In ordinary language, the difficulty of connecting sound with sense lies in great measure in the inability of a small and rigid set of articulations to express an interminable variety of tones and noises. In children’s language, a still more scanty set of articulations fails yet more to render these distinctly. The difficulty of finding the derivation of words lies in great measure in the use of more or less similar root-sounds for most heterogeneous purposes. To assume that two words of different meanings, just because they sound somewhat alike, must therefore have a common origin, is even in ordinary language the great source of bad etymology. But in children’s language the theory of root-sounds fairly breaks down. Few would venture to assert, for instance, thatpapaandpaphave a common derivation or a common root. All that we can safely say of connexion between them is that they are words related by common acceptance in the nursery language. As such, they are well marked in ancient Rome as in modern England:papas‘nutricius, nutritor,’pappus‘senex;’ ‘cum cibum et potumbuasacpapasdicunt, et matremmammam, patremtatam(orpapam).’[297]
From children’s language, moreover, we have striking proof of the power of consensus of society, in establishing words in settled use without their carrying traces of inherentexpressiveness. It is true that children are intimately acquainted with the use of emotional and imitative sound, and their vocal intercourse largely consists of such expression. The effects of this are in some degree discernible in the class of words we are considering. But it is obvious that the leading principle of their formation is not to adopt words distinguished by the expressive character of their sound, but to choose somehow a fixed word to answer a given purpose. To do this, different languages have chosen similar articulations to express the most diverse and opposite ideas. Now in the language of grown-up people, it is clear that social consensus has worked in the same way. Even if the extreme supposition be granted, that the ultimate origin of every word of language lies in inherently expressive sound, this only partly affects the case, for it would have to be admitted that, in actual languages, most words have so far departed in sound or sense from this originally expressive stage, that to all intents and purposes they might at first have been arbitrarily chosen. The main principle of language has been, not to preserve traces of original sound-signification for the benefit of future etymologists, but to fix elements of language to serve as counters for practical reckoning of ideas. In this process much original expressiveness has no doubt disappeared beyond all hope of recovery.
Such are some of the ways in which vocal sounds seem to have commended themselves to the mind of the word-maker as fit to express his meaning, and to have been used accordingly. I do not think that the evidence here adduced justifies the setting-up of what is called the Interjectional and Imitative Theory as a complete solution of the problem of original language. Valid as this theory proves itself within limits, it would be incautious to accept a hypothesis which can perhaps satisfactorily account for a twentieth of the crude forms in any language, as a certain and absolute explanation of the nineteen-twentieths whose origin remains doubtful. A key must unlock more doors than this, to betaken as the master-key. Moreover, some special points which have come under consideration in these chapters tend to show the positive necessity of such caution in theorizing. Too narrow a theory of the application of sound to sense may fail to include the varied devices which the languages of different regions turn to account. It is thus with the distinction in meaning of a word by its musical accent, and the distinction of distance by graduated vowels. These are ingenious and intelligible contrivances, but they hardly seem directly emotional or imitative in origin. A safer way of putting the theory of a natural origin of language is to postulate the original utterance of ideas in what may be called self-expressive sounds, without defining closely whether their expression lay in emotional tone, imitative noise, contrast of accent or vowel or consonant, or other phonetic quality. Even here, exception of unknown and perhaps enormous extent must be made for sounds chosen by individuals to express some notion, from motives which even their own minds failed to discern, but which sounds nevertheless made good their footing in the language of the family, the tribe, and the nation. There may be many modes even of recognizable phonetic expression, unknown to us as yet. So far, however, as I have been able to trace them here, such modes have in common a claim to belong not exclusively to the scheme of this or that particular dialect, but to wide-ranging principles of formation of language. Their examples are to be drawn with equal cogency from Sanskrit or Hebrew, from the nursery-language of Lombardy, or the half-Indian, half-European jargon of Vancouver’s Island; and wherever they are found, they help to furnish groups of sound-words—words which have not lost the traces of their first expressive origin, but still carry their direct significance plainly stamped upon them. In fact, the time has now come for a substantial basis to be laid for Generative Philology. A classified collection of words with any strong claim to be self-expressive should be brought together out of the thousand or so of recognizedlanguages and dialects of the world. In such a Dictionary of Sound-Words, half the cases cited might very likely be worthless, but the collection would afford the practical means of expurgating itself; for it would show on a large scale what particular sounds have manifested their fitness to convey particular ideas, by having been repeatedly chosen among different races to convey them.
Attempts to explain as far as may be the primary formation of speech, by tracing out in detail such processes as have been here described, are likely to increase our knowledge by sure and steady steps wherever imagination does not get the better of sober comparison of facts. But there is one side of this problem of the Origin of Language on which such studies have by no means an encouraging effect. Much of the popular interest in such matters is centred in the question, whether the known languages of the world have their source in one or many primæval tongues. On this subject the opinions of the philologists who have compared the greatest number of languages are utterly at variance, nor has any one brought forward a body of philological evidence strong and direct enough to make anything beyond mere vague opinion justifiable. Now such processes as the growth of imitative or symbolic words form a part, be it small or large, of the Origin of Language, but they are by no means restricted to any particular place or period, and are indeed more or less in activity now. Their operation on any two dialects of one language will be to introduce in each a number of new and independent words, and words even suspected of having been formed in this direct way become valueless as proof of genealogical connexion between the languages in which they are found. The test of such genealogical connexion must, in fact, be generally narrowed to such words or grammatical forms as have become so far conventional in sound and sense, that we cannot suppose two tribes to have arrived at them independently, and therefore consider that both must have inherited them from a common source. Thus theintroduction of new sound-words tends to make it practically of less and less consequence to a language what its original stock of words at starting may have been; and the philologist’s extension of his knowledge of such direct formations must compel him to strip off more and more of any language, as being possibly of later growth, before he can set himself to argue upon such a residuum as may have come by direct inheritance from times of primæval speech.
In concluding this survey, some general considerations suggest themselves as to the nature and first beginnings of language. In studying the means of expression among men in stages of mental culture far below our own, one of our first needs is to clear our minds of the kind of superstitious veneration with which articulate speech has so commonly been treated, as though it were not merely the principal but the sole means of uttering thought. We must cease to measure the historical importance of emotional exclamations, of gesture-signs, and of picture-writing, by their comparative insignificance in modern civilized life, but must bring ourselves to associate the articulate words of the dictionary in one group with cries and gestures and pictures, as being all of them means of manifesting outwardly the inward workings of the mind. Such an admission, it must be observed, is far from being a mere detail of scientific classification. It has really a most important bearing on the problem of the Origin of Language. For as the reasons are mostly dark to us, why particular words are currently used to express particular ideas, language has come to be looked upon as a mystery, and either occult philosophical causes have been called in to explain its phenomena, or else the endowment of man with the faculties of thought and utterance has been deemed insufficient, and a special revelation has been demanded to put into his mouth the vocabulary of a particular language. In the debate which has been carried on for ages over this much-vexed problem, the saying in the ‘Kratylos’ comes back toour minds again and again, where Sokrates describes the etymologists who release themselves from their difficulties as to the origin of words by saying that the first words were divinely made, and therefore right, just as the tragedians, when they are in perplexity, fly to their machinery and bring in the gods.[298]Now I think that those who soberly contemplate the operation of cries, groans, laughs, and other emotional utterances, as to which some considerations have been here brought forward, will admit that, at least, our present crude understanding of this kind of expression would lead us to class it among the natural actions of man’s body and mind. Certainly, no one who understands anything of the gesture-language or of picture-writing would be justified in regarding either as due to occult causes, or to any supernatural interference with the course of man’s intellectual development. Their cause evidently lies in natural operations of the human mind, not such as were effective in some long-past condition of humanity and have since disappeared, but in processes existing amongst us, which we can understand and even practise for ourselves. When we study the pictures and gestures with which savages and the deaf-and-dumb express their minds, we can mostly see at a glance the direct relation between the outward sign and the inward thought which it makes manifest. We may see the idea of ‘sleep’ shown in gesture by the head with shut eyes, leant heavily against the open hand; or the idea of ‘running’ by the attitude of the runner, with chest forward, mouth half open, elbows and shoulders well back; or ‘candle’ by the straight forefinger held up, and as it were blown out; or ‘salt’ by the imitated act of sprinkling it with thumb and finger. The figures of the child’s picture-book, the sleeper and the runner, the candle and the salt-cellar, show their purport by the same sort of evident relation between thought and sign. We so far understand the nature of these modes of utterance, that we are ready ourselves to express thought after thought by suchmeans, so that those who see our signs shall perceive our meaning.
When, however, encouraged by our ready success in making out the nature and action of these ruder methods, we turn to the higher art of speech, and ask how such and such words have come to express such and such thoughts, we find ourselves face to face with an immense problem, as yet but in small part solved. The success of investigation has indeed been enough to encourage us to push vigorously forward in the research, but the present explorations have not extended beyond corners and patches of an elsewhere unknown field. Still the results go far to warrant us in associating expression by gestures and pictures with articulate language as to principles of original formation, much as men associate them in actual life by using gesture and word at once. Of course, articulate speech, in its far more complex and elaborate development, has taken up devices to which the more simple and rude means of communication offer nothing comparable. Still, language, so far as its constitution is understood, seems to have been developed like writing or music, like hunting or fire-making, by the exercise of purely human faculties in purely human ways. This state of things by no means belongs exclusively to rudimentary philological operations, such as the choosing expressive sounds to name corresponding ideas by. In the higher departments of speech, where words already existing are turned to account to express new meanings and shade off new distinctions, we find these ends attained by contrivances ranging from extreme dexterity down to utter clumsiness. For a single instance, one great means of giving new meaning to old sound is metaphor, which transfers ideas from hearing to seeing, from touching to thinking, from the concrete of one kind to the abstract of another, and can thus make almost anything in the world help to describe or suggest anything else. What the German philosopher described as the relation of a cow to a comet, that both have tails, is enough and more thanenough for the language-maker. It struck the Australians, when they saw a European book, that it opened and shut like a mussel-shell, and they began accordingly to call books ‘mussels’ (mūyūm). The sight of a steam engine may suggest a whole group of such transitions in our own language; the steam passes along ‘fifes’ or ‘trumpets,’ that is,pipesortubes, and enters by ‘folding-doors’ orvalves, to push a ‘pestle’ orpistonup and down in a ‘roller’ orcylinder, while the light pours from the furnace in ‘staves’ or ‘poles,’ that is, inraysorbeams. The dictionaries are full of cases compared with which such as these are plain and straightforward. Indeed, the processes by which words have really come into existence may often enough remind us of the game of ‘What is my thought like?’ When one knows the answer, it is easy enough to see whatjunkettingand cathedralcanonshave to do with reeds; Latinjuncus‘a reed,’ Low Latinjuncata, ‘cheese made in a reed-basket,’ Italiangiuncata‘cream cheese in a rush frail,’ Frenchjoncadeand Englishjunket, which are preparations of cream, and lastlyjunkettingparties where such delicacies are eaten; Greekκάννη, ‘reed,cane,’κανῶν, ‘measure, rule,’ thencecanonicus, ‘a clerk under the ecclesiastical rule or canon.’ But who could guess the history of these words, who did not happen to know these intermediate links?
Yet there is about this process of derivation a thoroughly human artificial character. When we know the whole facts of any case, we can generally understand it at once, and see that we might have done the same ourselves had it come in our way. And the same thing is true of the processes of making sound-words detailed in these chapters. Such a view is, however, in no way inconsistent with the attempt to generalize upon these processes, and to state them as phases of the development of language among mankind. If certain men under certain circumstances produce certain results, then we may at least expect that other men much resembling these and placed under roughly similar circumstanceswill produce more or less like results; and this has been shown over and over again in these pages to be what really happens. Now Wilhelm von Humboldt’s view that language is an ‘organism’ has been considered a great step in philological speculation; and so far as it has led students to turn their minds to the search after general laws, no doubt it has been so. But it has also caused an increase of vague thinking and talking, and thereby no small darkening of counsel. Had it been meant to say that human thought, language, and action generally, are organic in their nature, and work under fixed laws, this would be a very different matter; but this is distinctly not what is meant, and the very object of calling language an organism is to keep it apart from mere human arts and contrivances. It was a hateful thing to Humboldt’s mind to ‘bring down speech to a mere operation of the understanding.’ ‘Man,’ he says, ‘does not so much form language, as discern with a kind of joyous wonder its developments, coming forth as of themselves.’ Yet, if the practical shifts by which words are shaped or applied to fit new meanings are not devised by an operation of the understanding, we ought consistently to carry the stratagems of the soldier in the field, or the contrivances of the workman at his bench, back into the dark regions of instinct and involuntary action. That the actions of individual men combine to produce results which may be set down in those general statements of fact which we call laws, may be stated once again as one of the main propositions of the Science of Culture. But the nature of a fact is not altered by its being classed in common with others of the same kind, and a man is not less the intelligent inventor of a new word or a new metaphor, because twenty other intelligent inventors elsewhere may have fallen on a similar expedient.
The theory that the original forms of language are to be referred to a low or savage condition of culture among the remotely ancient human race, stands in general consistency with the known facts of philology. The causes which haveproduced language, so far as they are understood, are notable for that childlike simplicity of operation which befits the infancy of human civilization. The ways in which sounds are in the first instance chosen and arranged to express ideas, are practical expedients at the level of nursery philosophy. A child of five years old could catch the meaning of imitative sounds, interjectional words, symbolism of sex or distance by contrast of vowels. Just as no one is likely to enter into the real nature of mythology who has not the keenest appreciation of nursery tales, so the spirit in which we guess riddles and play at children’s games is needed to appreciate the lower phases of language. Such a state of things agrees with the opinion that such rudimentary speech had its origin among men while in a childlike intellectual condition, and thus the self-expressive branch of savage language affords valuable materials for the problem of primitive speech. If we look back in imagination to an early period of human intercourse, where gesture and self-expressive utterance may have had a far greater comparative importance than among ourselves, such a conception introduces no new element into the problem, for a state of things more or less answering to this is described among certain low savage tribes. If we turn from such self-expressive utterance, to that part of articulate language which carries its sense only by traditional and seemingly arbitrary custom, we shall find no contradiction to the hypothesis. Sound carrying direct meaning may be taken up as an element of language, keeping its first significance recognizable to nations yet unborn. But it may far more probably become by wear of sound and shift of sense an expressionless symbol, such as might have been chosen in pure arbitrariness—a philological process to which the vocabularies of savage dialects bear full witness. In the course of the development of language, such traditional words with merely an inherited meaning have in no small measure driven into the background the self-expressive words, just as the Easternfigures 2, 3, 4, which are not self-expressive, have driven into the background the Roman numeralsII, III, IIII,which are—this, again, is an operation which has its place in savage as in cultivated speech. Moreover, to look closely at language as a practical means of expressing thought, is to face evidence of no slight bearing on the history of civilization. We come back to the fact, so full of suggestion, that the languages of the world represent substantially the same intellectual art, the higher nations indeed gaining more expressive power than the lowest tribes, yet doing this not by introducing new and more effective central principles, but by mere addition and improvement in detail. The two great methods of naming thoughts and stating their relation to one another, viz., metaphor and syntax, belong to the infancy of human expression, and are as thoroughly at home in the language of savages as of philosophers. If it be argued that this similarity in principles of language is due to savage tribes having descended from higher culture, carrying down with them in their speech the relics of their former excellence, the answer is that linguistic expedients are actually worked out with as much originality, and more extensively if not more profitably, among savages than among cultured men. Take for example the Algonquin system of compounding words, and the vast Esquimaux scheme of grammatical inflexion. Language belongs in essential principle both to low grades and high of civilization; to which should its origin be attributed? An answer may be had by comparing the methods of language with the work it has to do. Take language all in all over the world, it is obvious that the processes by which words are made and adapted have far less to do with systematic arrangement and scientific classification, than with mere rough and ready ingenuity and the great rule of thumb. Let any one whose vocation it is to realize philosophical or scientific conceptions and to express them in words, ask himself whether ordinary language is an instrument planned for such purposes. Of course it is not.It is hard to say which is the more striking, the want of scientific system in the expression of thought by words, or the infinite cleverness of detail by which this imperfection is got over, so that he who has an idea does somehow make shift to get it clearly in words before his own and other minds. The language by which a nation with highly developed art and knowledge and sentiment must express its thoughts on these subjects, is no apt machine devised for such special work, but an old barbaric engine added to and altered, patched and tinkered into some sort of capability. Ethnography reasonably accounts at once for the immense power and the manifest weakness of language as a means of expressing modern educated thought, by treating it as an original product of low culture, gradually adapted by ages of evolution and selection, to answer more or less sufficiently the requirements of modern civilization.