DIVERSITIES IN LANGUAGES.

§ 16. While affinities among languages have to be sought with painful care over a wide field, diversities are obvious, and have to be accounted for.

Three opinions have existed in respect to the origin of the diversities in languages.

One opinion proceeds, on the supposition that there were originally several distinct stocks of the human race, to the conclusion that there were as many distinct languages as stocks.

A second opinion is, that the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel will, by its miraculous origin and agency, account for the diversities in human languages, just as the flood has, by some divines, been considered as a cause adequate to the production of certain geological irregularities which are found in the structure of the earth.

On the assumption that languages were originally one, a third opinion is, that causes now in operation will account for the existing diversities.

CAUSES OF DIVERSITIES IN LANGUAGES.

§ 17. These causes are,

1. Difference of occupation. The vocabulary of a shepherd must differ from that of a mariner.

2. Difference of improvement in sciences and the arts of life. The man of science must increase the number of his terms as he becomes acquainted with new facts.

3. Difference of climate, both by bringing different classes of objects before the mind, and by producing different effects upon the organs of speech.

Hence it happens that, when two races of men of a common stock are placed in distant countries, the language of each begins to diverge from that of the other in various ways.

1. One word will become obsolete and lost in the one race, and another word in the other.

2. The same word will be differently applied by two distant races of men, and the difference will be so great as to obscure the original affinity.

3. Words will be compounded by two nations in a different

manner.

4. The pronunciation and orthography of the same word will be different, especially by the use of convertible consonants.

These statements appear to be sustained by facts. On the authority of RASK, the ancient Scandinavian, the Danska Tunga, or Old Norse, was, in the ninth century, the common speech in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where now there are great diversities. The progress of these diversities can be satisfactorily traced from that period to the present time. These diversities extend to all those features in which it is possible for one language to differ from another, viz., to words, grammar, inflections, arrangement of words in sentences. "In the various kingdoms and provinces in which it was once spoken, different portions of the parent speech have been abandoned or preserved." Hence it follows that the primitive language of Scandinavia, or "Danska Tunga," does not exist entire in any one, but is dispersed in ALL its derivative dialects, illustrating the fate of the primitive language of the world, as intimated by GROTIUS. See $5.

This last opinion, namely, in respect to the causes now in operation, does not interfere with the supposition that the "confusion of tongues" may have hastened the diversities in language, if it did not originate them.

The general topic of this section can be fitly closed by a quotation from that distinguished philosopher, WILLIAM VON HUMBOLDT: "The true solution of the contrast of stability and fluctuation which we find in language lies in the unity of human nature." "No one assigns precisely the same meaning to a word which another does, and a shade of meaning, be it ever so slight, ripples on like a circle in the water through the entirety of language." "We must regard speech not so much as a dead begotten, but rather a begetting; we must abstract from what it is as a designation of objects, and a help to the understanding; on the contrary, we must go back more carefully to a consideration of its origin, so nearly connected with the subjective mental activity, and to its reciprocal action thereupon." "Even its preservation by means of writing keeps it only in an incomplete, mummy-like fashion, in which it can get

vitality only by timely recitation. In itself it is not an Epyov, but an évépyɛia." It is not, in itself, a completed work, but it is an internal energy in the soul begetting new creations.

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

§ 18. There is the same reason for the study of language that there is for the study of thought.

It is by means of language that the thoughts and emotions of one mind are projected upon another. Language is the medium through which the object of thought in the mind of the speaker or writer is exhibited to the hearer or the reader, and the object is projected upon the receiving mind in an image that is true, distinct, and bright, or in one that is distorted, blurred, and dim, according as that mind is acquainted or not with the medium. If language is only expressed thought, or the “incarnation of thought," and if thought is the copy of things, then the value of things becomes transferred to language, or, rather, is connate with it. As a matter of fact, so entirely are words the exponents of the thought, and purpose, and character of him who uses them, that they form the ground of judging of character for ourselves in our estimate of each other, and for God in his estimate of us all. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." "By thy words shalt thou be justified, and by thy words shalt thou be condemned." It is true that there is a difference between words and things as well as an identity. "Things are the sons of God, and words are the daughters of men;" still, practically, they are so wedded to each other that they are one.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WORDS AND THINGS.

§ 19. Such is the connection between words and things, that a thorough study of language makes the student acquainted both with those minds of which it is the expression, and with those objects to which it is applied.

A language borrows its character, first, from the minds of those who use it in view of the objects to which it is applied, and, secondly, from the objects with which it is associated. The language of a nation is the accumulation of the experience, the wisdom, and the genius of a nation. "The heart of a people is

its mother tongue," and it is only by learning that mother tongue that you can know that heart. It is only while listening to the 'thoughts that breathe and the words that burn," from the lips of her poets and her orators, her historians and her dramatists, that you can feel that heart beating responsive to your own. The great events that have shaped the destiny of that nation, the master-minds who infused their own spirit through the mass of the people, whatever relates to the government, religion, arts, moral sentiment, and social life, you can see distinctly portrayed in the language as you can see them nowhere else, even after that nation is extinct, and the language itself numbered with the dead.

THE

CONNECTION BETWEEN

LANGUAGE AND HISTORY.

§ 20. It is, too, only by means of their language that we are able to trace the history and migration of the early inhabitants of the world. Describing philology as it was at the end of the last century, says Niebuhr, in his preface to the History of Rome, "It had recognized its calling to be the mediator between the remotest ages, to afford to us the enjoyment of preserving through thousands of years an unbroken identity with the noblest and greatest nations of the ancient world, by familiarizing us, through the medium of grammar and history, with the works of their minds and the course of their destinies, as if there were no gulf that divided us from them." In this way, fleeting as language in itself may be, it has raised for the primeval history of man more lasting monuments than those of stone or brass.

The study even of the English language, developing the meaning of names of the prominent objects of nature, which are significant in the Celtic, the solid substratum of Teutonic, the terms of war and government in the Norman-French, the Latin terms in ecclesiastical use, would enable us, in the absence of other histories, to draw inferences in respect to the early condition of England, and even now enables us to verify many of the doubtful statements of written history. Even the names of places would tell us much. When we hear a stream called Wansbeck-water, and know that the three words of which the word is made up each signify "water," the first being Celtic (as in Wansford, Avon), the second German (beck back), we at once

D

recognize three changes of inhabitants to whom the former name successively lost its significance. See DONALSON's New Cratylus.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE LOST MEANING OF WORDS.

§ 21. In the flow of centuries, words often lose their meaning by being used in new applications; and to disinter that meaning out of the alluvium and drift of ages, and bring it up to the light, affords as much pleasure to the linguist as to disinter a fossil does to the geologist. In digging down from the surface to the original meaning of words, applied first to some physical object, and then to a spiritual one, he often meets with this "fossil poetry," which is to him a medal of the nation, or of the race, just as the other is to the geologist a "medal of the creation." The word God means the Deity; but in the original Anglo-Saxon, besides this, it also meant good, or the Good. The word man, in English, means a human being, but in the Anglo-Saxon original its meaning, besides this, was sin, or the sinful. The full history of language would be a history of the human race. "He," says Niebuhr, "who calls departed ages back again into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating. The philologer does this."

RELATIONS OF LANGUAGE TO THE LAWS OF THE MIND.

§ 22. The careful study of language can not fail to make the student acquainted with the laws of the human mind. The origin and formation of words, and the structure of sentences, as exhibited in etymology and syntax, taken as a whole, are but a counterpart of those mental phenomena which have been collected and classified by the masters of mental science. The laws of suggestion, of memory, of imagination, of abstraction, of generalization and reasoning, are distinctly exhibited, not merely in the higher specimens of eloquence and poetry, but also in the common forms of language; so that there is truth in the remark, "that we might turn a treatise on the philosophy of mind into one on the philosophy of language by merely supposing that every thing said in the former of the thoughts as subjective is said again in the latter of the words as objective."