CHAPTER III.

THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE.

[Sidenote: The growth of language.]

We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and houses which were ever made; we now turn aside and ask what were the first of those immaterial instruments, those ‘aëriform, mystic’ legacies which were handed down and gradually improved from the time of the earliest inhabitants of our globe? Foremost among these, long anterior to the ‘metallurgic and other manufacturing _skill_,’ comes language. With us, in whose minds thought and speech are so bound together as to be almost inseparable, the idea that language is an instrument which through long ages has been slowly improved to its present perfection, seems difficult of credit. We think of early man having the same ideas and expressing them as readily as we do now; but this he could not really have done. Not, indeed, that we have any reason to believe that there was a time when man had no language at all; but it seems certain that long ages were necessary before this instrument could be wrought to the fineness in which we find it, and to which, in all the languages with which we are likely to become acquainted, we are accustomed. A rude iron knife or spear-head seems a simple and natural thing to make. But we know that before it could be made iron had to be discovered, and the art of extracting iron from the ore; and, as a matter of fact, we know that thousands of years passed before the iron spear-head was a possibility; thousands of years spent in slowly improving the weapons of stone, and passing on from them to the weapons of bronze. So, too, with language; simple as it seems at first sight to fit the word on to the idea, and early as we ourselves learn this art, a little thought about what language is will show us how much we owe to the ages which have gone before.

[Sidenote: The two main classes of words ‘significant’ and ‘insignificant.’]

To understand fully the department of study called the science of language considerable linguistic knowledge is necessary. But to grasp many of the general principles of this science, and many of the most important facts which it teaches, we do not need any such wide knowledge. In fact, a little thoughtful examination of any single tongue (his own, whichever it may be) would teach a person many things which without thought he would be inclined to pass over as matters of course or matters of no consequence. In truth, in this science of language what we need, even before we need a very wide array of facts, is what is called the scientific method in dealing with the facts which we possess. But, again, this which we call the scientific method is really represented by two qualities which have less pretentious names--_observation_ and _common sense_.

Let us begin then by, so to say, challenging our own language, our English as we find it to-day, and see what hints we can gain from it of the formation of language as a whole and of its origin. An ounce of information gained in this wise, by examination and the use of our own common sense, is worth a much greater bulk of knowledge gained second-hand from books, and merely remembered as facts divorced from their causes.

Take any sentence, and place that, so to say, under a microscope, or under the dissecting-knife--take the opening sentence of this chapter, for example.

“We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and houses that were ever made.”

Let us look at these few words alone.

The first thing we have to notice about this sentence, and any other sentence almost that we could anywhere find, is that the words which compose it fall into two distinct classes, the classes of what I will call _meaning_ and _meaningless_, or significant and _in_-significant words. In the first class fall the words _we_, _looked_, _man_, _fashioning_, _implements_, _weapons_, _houses_, _made_. These I call ‘meaning’ or ‘significant’ words, because, if we isolate each one and utter it alone, it will call up some image to the mind--_we_, _weapons_, _fashioning_, _houses_, _made_, and so forth: the image may be pretty clear or it may be (in the case of the verbs it is) somewhat hazy. But in every case some image or some idea does rise before the mind when any of these words is pronounced. _Have_ and _were_ I exclude for the moment from either class. The words of the second class, then, from the sentence chosen are--_upon_, _the_, _and_, _ever_. Of the first three, at any rate, there can be no difficulty as to why they are classed as the meaningless or insignificant words of the sentence. Isolated from the words of the first class, _upon_, _the_, or _and_ can by no means possibly call up any image or suggest any idea to the mind.

Now, if you take any implement whose manufacture the world has ever seen, unless it be of the most primitive description imaginable, you will find it really devisable into two parts, upon much the same principle that we have here resolved our typical sentence into two primary divisions; it will consist of the _essential_ part, the part which _by itself_ would be useful, and the unessential adjunct which is designed to assist the usefulness of the other portion, but which is useless by itself--or if not useless by itself, it is useless for the purposes for which the implement we are concerned with is made. All handles meant to assist in the use of an implement, be it a stone axe or a most elaborate modern weapon, form such an adjunct to the essential part. Such useful and by comparison useless parts are the blade and the handle of a knife, the barrel and the stock of a gun, the carrying portion of the wheelbarrow and the wheel, the _share_--the shearing or cutting portion of a plough--and the wooden framework; and so forth. There is no need to multiply examples. Nor, I think, is there any need to insist further how strictly analogous the two classes of words here distinguished are to the two parts of any other implement invented by man. It goes almost of course that the essential portion of any implement is the portion which was invented first, that knife-blades were invented before knife-handles, barrows before barrow-wheels, etc. Wherefore it seems to follow of course that, of the two classes of words whereof language consists--whereof all languages consist--the meaning and the meaningless words, the first were the earliest invented or discovered. This is the same as saying that language once consisted altogether of words which had a definite meaning attaching to them even when uttered by themselves, and consequently that the words of the second class grew, so to say, out of the words of the first class.

These are the conclusions which a mere examination of a single language, our own, under the guidance of observation and common sense, would force upon us; always supposing our language to be a representative one. And these conclusions are strengthened when we come to look a little into the history of words, so far as we can trace it.

So far back, therefore, we may go in the history of language to a time when all the words which men used were words which by themselves evoked distinct ideas. Relegating these words, as far as we can, into the classes which grammarians have invented for the different parts of speech, we see that the significant words are all, as a rule, either nouns (or _pro_-nouns), adjectives, or verbs; that the insignificant words are, as a rule, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions--what, in fact, are called _particles_, fragments of speech. I say, _as a rule_, for both divisions. The pronouns and the auxiliary verbs, for example, are very difficult to classify; and it depends rather on their use in each individual sentence, to which division they are to be relegated.

[Sidenote: Origin of speech undiscoverable.]

But though we have now learnt to distinguish the words which by themselves convey definite ideas, and those others whose meaning depends upon the first class, we are as far as ever from understanding how words, whether of one kind or the other, come to have the significance which they have for us. _Book_--no sooner have we pronounced the word than an _idea_ more or less distinct comes into our mind. The thought and the sound seem inseparable, and we cannot remember the time when they were not so. Yet the connection between the thought and the sound is not necessary. In fact, a sound which generally comes connected with one idea may--if we are engaged at the time upon a language not our own--enter our minds, bringing with it an idea quite unconnected with the first. _Share_ and _chère_, _plea_ and _plie_, _feel_ and _viel_ (German), are examples in point; and the same thing is shown by the numerous sounds in our language which have two or more quite distinct meanings, as for example--_ware_ and _were_, and (with most people) _where_ too. _Rite_ and _right_ and _wright_ are pronounced precisely alike; therefore there can be no reason why one sound should convey one idea more than another. In other words, the idea and the sound have an arbitrary, not a natural connection. We have been _taught_ to make the sound ‘book’ for the idea book, but had we been brought up by French parents the sound ‘livre’ would have seemed the natural one to make.

So that this wondrous faculty of speech has, like those other faculties of which Carlyle speaks, been handed down on impalpable vehicles of sound through the ages. Never, perhaps, since the time of our first parents has one person from among the countless millions who have been born had to invent for himself a way of expressing his thoughts in words. This is alone a strange thing enough. Impossible as it is to imagine ourselves without speech, we may ask the question--What should we do if we were ever left in such a predicament? Should we have _any_ guide in fitting the sound on to the idea? _Share_ and _chère_, _feel_ and _viel_--among these unconnected notions is there _any_ reason why we should wed our speech to one rather than another? Clearly there is no reason. Yet in the case which we imagined of a number of rational beings who had to invent a language for the first time, if they are ever to come to an understanding at all there must be some common impulse which makes more than one choose the same sound for a particular idea. How, for instance, we may ask, was it with our first parents? They have passed on to all their descendants for ever the idea of conveying thought by sound, and all the great changes which have since come into the languages of the world have been gradual and, so to say, natural. But this first invention of the idea of speech is of quite another character.

Here we are brought to the threshold of that impenetrable mystery ‘the beginning of things,’ and here we must pause. We recognize this faculty of speech as a thing mysterious, unaccountable, belonging to that supernatural being, man. There must, one would think, have been and must be in us a something which causes our mouth to echo the thought of the heart; and originally this echo must have been spontaneous and natural, the same for all alike. Now it is a mere matter of tradition and instruction, the sound we use for the idea; but at first the two must have had some subtle necessary connection, or how could one of our first parents have known or guessed what the other wished to say? Just as every metal has its peculiar ring, it is as though each impression on the mind rang out its peculiar word from the tongue.[17] Or was it like the faint tremulous sound which glasses give when music is played near? The outward object or the inward thought called out a sort of mimicry, a distant echo--not like, but yet born of the other--on the lips. These earliest sounds may perhaps still sometimes be detected. In the sound _flo_ or _flu_, which in an immense number of languages stands connected with the idea of flowing and of rivers, do we not recognize some attempt to catch the smooth yet rushing sound of water? And again, in the sound _gra_ or _gri_, which is largely associated with the notion of grinding, cutting, or scraping,[18] there is surely something of this in the guttural harshness of the letters, which make the tongue grate, as it were, against the roof of the mouth.

It does not, however, seem probable that the earliest words were mere _imitations_ of the sounds produced by the objects they designed to express, such as are some of the words of child-language whereby dogs are called _bow-wows_ and lambs are called _baas_. Nor need we wonder at this, when we note the principles upon which other sorts of _language_--expressive actions, for instance--are conceived and used. If we intend to express the idea of motion by an expressive gesture, we do not make any copy of the mode of that motion. We say ‘Go,’ and we dart out our hand, half to show that the person we are addressing is to go in the direction which we point out, or that he is to keep away from us; half, again, to give the idea of his movement by the rapidity of our own. But if we wanted to convey this last idea by mere imitation we should move our legs rapidly and not our arms.

It might be thought that the study of the gesture-language which has been used by men, especially the gesture-language of deaf-mutes, who have no other, would give us the best insight into the origin of language among mankind. But in reality the results of such a study are not very satisfactory; and for this reason, that the deaf-mute has in every case been in contact with one or more persons who possessed speech, and whose ideas were therefore entirely formed by the possession and the inheritance of language. This inherited language they translate into signs for the benefit of the deaf-mute, while the latter is still a baby and incapable of inventing language; wherefore it, in its turn, _inherits_ a language almost as much as its parent has done, though it is a language of gesture and not of spoken words.[19] It is a fact, however, that deaf-mutes who cannot hear the sounds they make, do nevertheless articulate certain _sounds_ which they constantly associate with the same ideas. These seem to bring us very near the language-making faculty of man. Lists of these sounds have been made, but they are not such that we can draw any conclusions touching the natural or universal association of sound and sense.

[Sidenote: Growth of the ‘insignificant’ words out of the ‘significant.’]

The origin of human speech and the mode of its first operation are therefore undiscoverable. We can place no measure to the rapidity with which the first created man may have obtained his stock of words of our first class; as Adam is described naming each one of the animals among whom he lived. All these beginnings lie beyond the ken of linguistic science. But even when he was furnished as fully as we choose to suppose with a class of words which had a meaning of their own, there was still the second class whose invention must have followed upon the invention of the first. The adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, particles,--the words which meant _to_, _and_, _at_, _but_, _when_,--these we have already seen must as a whole have come into use later than the other class of words.

This, then, we may fairly call the second stage in the growth of language, the making of these auxiliary words to enforce the meaning of the first class of words. And at the first moment it might seem impossible to imagine how these words could ever have come into existence. Given a certain word-making faculty, we can understand how mankind got sounds to express such ideas as _man_, _head_, _hard_, _red_. But how he could ever have acquired sounds to express such vague notions as _at_, _by_, _and_, it is much less easy to conceive. A closer observation, however, even of our own language, and a wider knowledge of languages generally, lead to the conclusion that all the words of the second class, the auxiliary words, sprang from words of the first class; that every insignificant word has grown out of a word which had its own significance; that, for instance, _with_, _by_, _and_, have descended from roots (now lost) which, if placed alone, would have conveyed as much idea to the mind as _pen_, _ink_, or _paper_ does to us.

This, I say, we should guess even from an examination of our own language alone. For the process is still going on. Take the word _even_, as used in the sentence which we have just written: ‘Even from an examination.’ Here _even_ is an adverb, quite meaningless when used alone, at least as an adverb; but if we see it alone it becomes another word, an adjective, a meaning word, bringing before us the idea of two things hanging level. ‘Even from’ is nonsense as an _idea_ with nothing to follow it, but ‘even weights’ is a perfectly clear and definite notion, and each of the separate words _even_ and _weights_ give us clear and definite notions too. It is the same with _just_, which is both adverb and adjective. ‘Just as’ brings no thought into the mind, but ‘just man’ and _just_ and _man_, separately or together, do. _While_ or _whilst_ are meaningless; but, ‘a while,’ or ‘to while’--to loiter--are full of meaning. In each case the meaningless word came from the meaning word, and was first used as a sort of metaphor, and then the metaphorical part was lost sight of. _Ago_ is a meaningless word by itself, but it is really only a changed form of the obsolete word _agone_, which was an old past participle of the verb ‘to go.’

And we might find many instances of words in the same process of transformation in other languages. The English word _not_ is meaningless, and just as much so are the French _pas_ and _point_ in the sense of _not_; but in the sense of _footstep_, or _point_, they have meaning enough. Originally _Il ne veut pas_ meant, metaphorically, ‘He does not wish a step of your wishes,’ ‘He does not go a footstep with you in your wish;’ _Il ne veut point_, ‘He does not go a point with you in your wish.’ Nowadays all this metaphorical meaning is gone, except to the eye of the grammarian. People recognize that _Il ne veut point_ is rather stronger than _Il ne veut pas_, but it never occurs to them to ask why.

There are so many of these curious examples that one is tempted to go on choosing instances; but we confine ourselves to one more. Our word _yes_ is a word which by itself is quite incapable of calling up a picture in our minds, but the word _is_ or ‘it is,’ though the idea it conveys is very abstract, and, so to say, intangible--as compared, for instance, with such verbs as _move_, _beat_--nevertheless belongs to the ‘significant’ class. Now, it happens that the Latin language used the word _est_ ‘it is’ where we should now use the word ‘yes;’ and it still further happens that our _yes_[20] is probably the same as the German _es_, and was used in the same sense of _it is_ as well. Instead of the meaningless word ‘yes’ the Romans used the word _est_ ‘it is,’ and our own ancestors expressed the same idea by saying ‘it.’ Still more. It is well known that French is in the main a descendant from the Latin, not the Latin of Rome, but the corrupter Latin which was spoken in Gaul. Now these Latin-speaking Gauls did not, for some reason, say _est_, ‘it is,’ for _yes_, as the Romans did; but they used a pronoun, either _ille_, ‘he,’ or _hoc_, ‘this.’ When, therefore, a Gaul desired to say ‘yes,’ he nodded, and said _he_ or else _this_, meaning ‘He is so,’ or ‘This is so.’ As it happens the Gauls of the north said _ille_, and those of the south said _hoc_, and these words gradually got corrupted into two meaningless words, _oui_ and _oc_. It is well known that the people in the south of France were especially distinguished by using the word _oc_ instead of _oui_ for ‘yes,’ so that their ‘dialect’ got to be called the _langue d’oc_, and this word Languedoc gave the name to a province of France. Long before that time, however, we may be sure, both the people of the _langue d’oil_, or _langue d’oui_, and those of the _langue d’oc_ had forgotten that their words for ‘yes’ had originally meant ‘he’ and ‘this.’

We can, from the instances above given, form a pretty good guess at the way in which the auxiliary or meaningless class of sounds came into use in any language. Each of these must once have had a distinct significance by itself, then (getting meanwhile a little changed in form probably) it gradually lost the separate meaning and became only a particle of speech, only an adjunct to other words. In another way, we may say that before man spoke of ‘on the rock’ or ‘under the rock’ he must have used some expression like ‘head of rock,’ or more literally ‘head rock’ and ‘foot rock;’ and that as time went on, new words coming into use for _head_ and _foot_, these earlier ones dropped down to be mere adjuncts, and men forgot that they had ever been anything else. Just so no ordinary Frenchman knows that his _oui_ and _il_ are both sprung from the same Latin _ille_; nor does the ordinary Englishman recognize that _ago_ is a past participle of ‘go;’ nor again, to take a new instance, does, perhaps, the ordinary German recognize that his _gewiss_, ‘certainly,’ is merely an abbreviation of the past participle _gewissen_, ‘known.’

* * * * *

We have now followed the growth of language through

[Sidenote: Root-sounds.]

two of its stages, first, the coining of the principal or essential parts of speech, the nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and secondly, the coining at a later date of the auxiliary parts of speech, the prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, and (where they exist) the enclitics _the_ and _a_; these last, however, (_as separate words_,[21]) are wanting from a large number of languages. A third stage is the variation of certain words to form out of them other words which are nearly related in character to the first. We may speak of this process as a process of ringing the changes upon certain _root-sounds_ to form a series of words allied in sound and allied in sense also. We have several instances of such groups of allied words in our own language. _Fly_, _flee_, _flew_, _fled_, are words allied in sound and in sense. In these cases the sound of the letters f-l constitutes what we may call the root-sound. And it may be said at once that those languages are said to be related in each of which a certain number of words can be traced back to root-sounds which are common to the two or more tongues.

In the case of the vast majority of words, before we can begin by comparing one word with another, or trying to discover the root-words of several different languages, we have first to trace the history of these words backwards, each in its own language, and find their most primitive forms. But in tongues which are pretty nearly related we have often no difficulty in seeing the similarity of corresponding words just as they stand to-day. We have no difficulty, for instance, in seeing the connection of the German _Knecht_ and our _knight_,[22] the German _Nacht_ and our _night_, the German _Raum_ and our _room_; or, again, the connection between the Italian _padre_ and the French _père_, the Italian _tavola_ and the French (and English) _table_, etc.

But where the connection between languages is more distant, we have more and more to go back to much simpler roots, in order to show the relationship between them; and by a vast majority the primitive root-sounds in any large family of languages are single syllables, whereof the most constant parts are (as a rule) the consonants. So far as our knowledge goes, we might think of man as beginning human speech with a certain number of these simple root-sounds, and then proceeding to ring the changes upon these root-sounds to express varieties in the root-idea. Sometimes it is easy enough to trace the connection of ideas between different words which have been formed out of the same root-word. But sometimes this is not at all easy. Nor can we say why this special sound has been adopted for any one notion more than for a number of others to which it would have applied equally well. From a root, which in Sanskrit appears in its most ancient form, as _mâ_, ‘to measure,’ we get words in Greek and Latin which mean ‘to think;’ and from the same root comes our ‘man,’ the person who measures, who compares, _i.e._, who thinks, also our _moon_, which means ‘the measurer,’ because the moon helps to measure out the time, the _months_. But how arbitrary seems this connection between _man_ and _moon_! So, too, our _crab_ is from the word _creep_, and means the animal that creeps. But why this name should have been given to crab rather than to ant and beetle it is impossible to say. So that there appears as little trace of a reason governing the formation of words out of root-sounds as there appeared in the adoption of root-sounds to express certain fundamental ideas.

Thus equipped with his fixed root and the various words formed out of it, man had the rough _material_ out of which to build up all the elaborate languages which the world has known. And he continued his work something in this fashion. As generation followed generation the pronunciation of words was changed, as is constantly being done at the present day. Our grandmothers pronounced ‘Rome,’ ‘Room,’ and ‘brooch,’ as it was spelt, and not as we pronounce it--‘broach.’ And let it be remembered, before writing was invented, there was nothing but the pronunciation to fix the word, and a new pronunciation was really a new word. When there was no written form to petrify a word, these changes of pronunciation were very rapid and frequent, so that not only would each generation have a different set of words from their fathers, but probably each tribe would be partly unintelligible to its neighbouring tribes, just as a Somersetshire man is to a great extent unintelligible to a man from Yorkshire. The first result of these changes would be the springing up of that class of ‘meaningless’ words of which we spoke above. Out of some significant words, such as ‘head’ and ‘foot,’ would arise insignificant words similar to ‘over’ and ‘under.’ Such a change could only begin when of two names each for ‘head’ and ‘foot’ one became obsolete as a noun, and was only used adverbially. Then what had originally meant, metaphorically, ‘head of rock’ and ‘foot of rock’[23] might come to be used for ‘over’ and ‘under the rock,’ in exactly the same way that the word _ago_, having changed its form from _agone_, has become a ‘meaningless’ word to the Englishman of to-day.

And with the acquisition of the insignificant words a new and very important process began. To understand

[Sidenote: Growth of inflexions.]

what it was we will, as we did before, begin by examining the formation of some of the languages with which we are, probably, more or less familiar. Let us note how very many more variations on the same root are to be found in some languages than in others. On the root _dic_, which in Latin expresses the notion of speaking, we have the variations _dico_, _dixi_, _dicere_, _dictum_, _dictio_, _dicto_, _dicor_, _dictor_, _dictator_, _dictatrix_, etc.; and yet this does not nearly exhaust the list, for we have all the changes in the different tenses of _dico_, _dicto_, _dicor_, etc., in the different cases of _dictio_, _dictator_. dictatrix, etc. The languages which contain these numerous variations upon one root are what are called the _inflected_ languages, and the greater number of the changes which they make come under the head of what grammarians call inflexions. These inflexions are of no meaning in themselves, they have no existence even in themselves as words. And yet what is curious is that they are the same for a great number of different words; and they express the same _relative_ meaning in the places where they stand whatever the word may be. If the _-nis_ of _dictionis_ expresses a certain idea relative to _dictio_, so does the _-nis_ of _lectionis_ express the same idea relative to _lectio_, the _-nis_ of _actionis_ the same idea relative to _actio_, and so forth.

Or, to take an example from a modern inflected language, if the _-es_ of _Mannes_, expresses a certain idea relative to _Mann_, so does the same inflexion (_-es_ or _-s_) in _Hauses_, _Baums_, etc., relative to _Haus_ and _Baum_.

Now, how are we to explain this fact? Our grammars, it is true, take it for granted, and give it us as a thing which requires no explanation--the genitive inflexion is _-nis_ or _-es_, or whatever it may be. That is all they tell us. But we cannot be content to take anything of course. An explanation, however, is not difficult, and follows, _almost_ of course, on the exercise of a little common sense. If the _-es_ of Mannes, Hauses, Baumes (Baums) expresses the idea ‘of,’ then, at one time or another, _es_, or some root from which it is derived, must have _meant_ ‘of.’ This explains easily and naturally enough the inflexions in any inflected language. They have no meaning now, but at one time they (or their original forms--their ancestors, so to speak) had no doubt just as much meaning by themselves as our ‘of.’ And therefore the only difference between our use in England to-day, and the ancestral use in a primitive language, was that we say ‘of [the] man,’ and the ancestral language would have said ‘man-of,’ ‘house-of,’ etc. This accounts for the same genitive forms being used for so many different words.

And that the same genitive forms are not used _throughout_ any language is no real objection to this theory. If we say _dictionis_, _lectionis_, but _musæ_, _rosæ_; if we say _Mannes_, _Hauses_, but _Blume_, _Rose_, the only reason of these varieties is that the languages from which these inflexions are derived possessed more than one word meaning ‘of,’ and that one of these words was attached to a certain series of nouns, another word to another series.

This is the explanation which mere common sense would give of the origin of inflexions in language, and further research, had we time to examine the history of language more elaborately, would show that it was _fundamentally_ the right explanation. The only correction which we should have to make on this first and crude theory is explained a little further on. Thus we see in this third stage of language a process very closely analogous to the second. The second stage gave us the auxiliary words, which have decayed so to say, out of the class of significant words. The third stage gives us the auxiliary words joined on to the significant ones, and in their turn decaying to become mere inflexions.

I have called this growth of inflexions the _third_ stage. It is the _third great_ stage in the formation of language, and is the only other stage distinguishable when we are examining what is called an inflected language. And all the languages the general reader is likely to know belong to this class. But when we turn to a wider study of the various tongues in use among mankind we find that this process of forming inflexions is a very slow one, that it, in its turn, has gone through many stages. And it is, in fact, the different stages through which a language has passed on its road to the formation of inflexions which settles the class in which it is to be placed among the various tongues spoken by mankind.

We shall soon understand what are these further stages in language-formation. As far as we have been able to see at present, the inflexion presents itself as something added on to the significant word to give it a varied meaning. It is evidently therefore part of a new process through which language has to go after it has completed its original stock of sounds, namely, the formation of fresh words by joining together two others which already exist. This is a process which, no doubt, in some shape or other, began in the very earliest ages, and which is to this day going on continually. The simpler form of it is the joining together two words which are significant when they stand alone to form a third word expressing a new idea; just as we have joined ‘ant’ to ‘hill’ and formed _ant-hill_, which is a different idea than either _ant_ or _hill_ taken alone. In the words _playful_, _joyful_, again, we have the same process carried rather further. The words mean simply play-full, ‘full of play,’ joy-full, ‘full of joy.’ But we do not in reality quite think of this meaning when we use them. The termination _ful_ has become half-meaningless by itself, and in doing so we observe it has slightly changed its original form.

But far more important in the history of language is the joining of the meaningless or auxiliary words on to other words of the first, the significant class, whereby in the course of time the inflexions of language have been formed. Although _we_ always put the meaningless qualifying word before the chief word, and say ‘on the rock,’ or ‘under the rock,’ it is more natural to man, as is shown by all languages, to put the principal idea first, and say ‘rock on,’ ‘rock under,’ the idea _rock_ being of course the chief idea, the part of the rock, or position in relation to the rock, coming after. So the first step towards forming grammar was the getting a number of meaningless words, and joining them on to the substantive, ‘rock,’ ‘rock-by,’ ‘rock-in,’ ‘rock-to,’ etc. So with the verb. The essential idea in the verb is the action itself, the next idea is the time or person in which the action takes place; and the natural thing for man to do is to make the words follow that order. The joining process would give us from _love_, the idea of loving, ‘love-I,’ ‘love-thou,’ ‘love-he,’ etc.; and for the imperfect ‘love-was-I,’ ‘love-was-thou,’ ‘love-was-he,’ ‘love-was-we,’ ‘love-was-ye,’ ‘love-was-they;’ for perfect ‘love-have-I,’ ‘love-have-thou,’ ‘love-have-he,’ etc. Of course, these are merely illustrations, but they make the mode of this early joining process clearer than if we had chosen a language where that process is actually found in its purity, and then translated the forms into their English equivalents.

We have now arrived at a stage in the formation of language where both _meaning_ and _meaningless_ words have been introduced, and where words have been made up out of combinations of the two. We see at once that with regard to meaningless words the use of them would naturally be fixed very much by tradition and custom; and whereas there might be a great many words standing for _ant_ and _hill_, and therefore a great many ways of saying ant-hill, for the meaningless words, such as _under_ and _on_, there would probably be only a few words. The reason of this is very plain. While all the separate synonyms for _hill_ expressed different ways in which it struck the mind, either as being high, or large, or steep, or what not, for _under_ and _on_, being meaningless words not producing any _picture_ in the mind, only one word apiece or one or two words could very well be in use. So long as _under_ and _on_ were significant words, meaning, perhaps, as we imagined, _head of_, or _foot of_, there would be plenty of synonyms for them; but only one or two out of all these would be handed down in their meaningless forms. And it is this very fact which, as we have seen, accounts for all the grammars of all languages, every one of those grammatical terminations which we know so well in Latin and Greek, and German, having been originally nothing else than meaningless words added on to modify the words which still retained their meaning. We saw before that it was much more natural for people to say ‘rock-on’ or ‘hand-in’ than ‘on the rock’ or ‘in the hand’--because rock and hand were the most important ideas and came first into the mind, while _on_, _in_, etc., were only subsidiary ideas depending upon the important ones. If we stop at rock or hand without adding _on_ and _in_, we have still got something definite upon which our thoughts can rest, but we could not possibly stop at _on_ and _in_ alone, and have any idea in our minds at all. It is plain enough therefore that, though we say ‘on the rock,’ we must have the _idea_ of all the three words in our mind before we begin the phrase, and therefore that our words do not follow the natural order of our ideas; whereas rock-on, hand-in, show the ideas just in the way they come into the mind.

It is a fact, then, that all case-endings arose from adding on meaningless words to the end of the word, the noun or pronoun--_Mann_, _des mann-es_, _dem Mann-e_; _hom-o_, _hom-inis_, _hom-ini_: the addition to the root in every case was once a distinct word of the auxiliary kind, or derived from such a word. The meanings of case-endings such as these cannot, it is true, be discovered now, for they came into existence long before such languages as German or Latin were spoken, and their meanings were lost sight of in ages which passed before history. But that time when the terminations which are meaningless now had a meaning, and the period of transition between this state and the state of a language which is full of grammatical changes inexplicable to those who use them, form distinct epochs in the history of every language. And it is just the same with verb-endings as with the case endings--_ich bin_, _du bist_, really express the ‘I’ and ‘thou’ twice over, as the pronouns exist though hidden and lost sight of in the _-n_ and _-st_ of the verb. In the case of verbs, indeed, we may without going far give some idea of how these endings can be detected. We may say at once that Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Norse, Gaelic, Welsh, Lithuanian, Russian, and other Slavonic languages are all connected together in various degrees of relationship, all descended from one common ancestor, some being close cousins, and some very distant. Now in Sanskrit ‘I am’ is thus declined:--

_as-mi_ I am. _a-si_ thou art. _as-ti_ he is. _’-smas_ we are. _’s-tha_ ye are. _’s-anti_ they are.

By separating the root from the ending in this way we may the more easily detect the additions to the root, and their meanings. _As_ is the root expressing the idea of being, existing; _mi_ is from a root meaning _I_ (preserved in _me_, Greek and Lat. _me_, _mi_, _m[ich]_, etc.); so we get _as-mi_, am-I, or I am. Then we may trace this form of word through a number of languages connected with the Sanskrit. The most important part of _as-mi_, the consonants, are preserved in the Latin _sum_, I am, from which, by some further changes come the French _suis_, the Italian _sono_: the same word appears in our _a-m_, and in the Greek _eimi_ (Doric _esmi_), I am. Next, coming to the second word, we see one of the _s’s_ cut out, and we get _a-si_, in which the _a_ is the root, and the _si_ the addition signifying _thou_. To this addition correspond the final _s’s_ in the Latin _es_, French _es_--_tu es_, and the Greek _eis_ (Doric _essi_). So, again, in _as-ti_, the _ti_ expresses he, and this corresponds to the Latin _est_, French _est_, the Greek _esti_, the German _ist_; in the English the expressive _t_ has been lost. We will not continue the comparison of each word; it will be sufficient if we place side by side the same tense in Sanskrit and in Latin,[24] and give those who do not know Latin an opportunity of recognizing for themselves the tense in its changed form in French or Italian:--

ENGLISH. SANSKRIT. LATIN. I am _as-mi_ _sum_. thou art _a-si_ _es_. he is _as-ti_ _est_. we are _’s-mas_ _sumus_. ye are _’s-tha_ _estis_. they are _’s-anti_ _sunt_.

The plural of the added portion we see contains the letters _m-s_, and if we split these up again we get the separate roots _mi_ and _si_, so that _mas_ means most literally ‘I,’ and ‘thou,’ and hence ‘we.’ In the second person the Latin has preserved an older form than the Sanskrit, _s-t_ the proper root-consonants for the addition part of the second person plural, combining the ideas thou and he, from which, ye. The third person plural cannot be so easily explained.

It will be seen that in the English almost all likeness to the Sanskrit terminations has been lost. Our verb ‘to be’ is very irregular, being, in fact, a mixture of several distinct verbs. The Anglo-Saxon had the verb _beó_ contracted from _beom_ (here we have at least the _m-_ ending for I), I am, _byst_, thou art, _bydh_, he is, and the same appear in the German _bin_, _bist_. It is, of course, very difficult to trace the remains of the meaningless additions in such advanced languages as ours, or even in such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. Nevertheless, the reader may find it not uninteresting to trace in the Latin through most of the tenses of verbs these endings--_m_, for I, the first person; _s_, for thou, the second person; _t_, for he, the third person; _m-s_, for I and thou, we; _st_, for ye, thou and he, ye; _nt_, for they. And the same reader must be content to take on trust the fact that other additions corresponding to different tenses can also be shown or reasonably guessed to have been words expressive by themselves of the idea which belongs to the particular tense; so that where we have such a tense as--

_amabam_ I was loving, _amabas_ thou wast loving, _amabat_, _etc._ he was loving,

we may recognize the meaning of the component parts thus:--

_ama-ba-m_ love-was-I. _ama-ba-s_ love-was-thou. _ama-ba-t_ love-was-he.

Of course, really to show the way in which these meaningless additions have been made and come to be amalgamated with the root, we should have to take examples from a great number of languages in different stages of development. But we have thought it easier, for mere explanation, to take only such languages as were likely to be familiar to the reader, and even to supplement these examples with imaginary ones--like ‘rock-on,’ ‘love-was-I,’ etc.--in English. For our object has been at first merely to give an intelligible account of how language has been formed, of the different stages it has passed through, and to leave to a future time the question as to which languages of the globe have passed through all these stages, and which have gone part of their way in the formation of a perfect language. Between the state of a language in which the meaning of all the separate parts of a word are recognized and that state where they are entirely lost, there is an immense gap, that indeed which separates the most from the least advanced languages of the world.

[Sidenote: Monosyllabic Language.]

Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone through the stage of forming meaningless words, and is therefore possessed of words of both classes. They no longer say ‘head-of-rock’ or ‘foot-of-rock,’ but ‘rock-on’ and ‘rock-under.’ But there are still known languages in which almost every syllable is a word, and where grammar properly speaking is scarcely needed. For grammar, if we come to consider it exactly, is the explanation of the meaning of those added syllables or letters which have lost all natural meaning of their own. If each part of the word were as clear and as intelligible as ‘rock-on’ we should have no need of a grammar at all. A language of this sort is called a monosyllabic or a radical language, not because the people only speak in monosyllables, but because each word, however compound, can be split up into monosyllables or _roots_, which have a distinctly recognizable meaning. ‘Ant-hill-on’ or ‘love-was-I,’ are like the words of such a language.

[Sidenote: Agglutinative language.]

The next stage of growth is where the meaning of the added parts has been lost sight of, except when it is connected with the word which it modifies; but where the essential word has a distinct idea by itself, and without the help of any addition. Suppose, for instance, through ages of change the ‘was I’ in our imaginary example got corrupted into ‘wasi,’ where _wasi_ had no meaning by itself, but was used to express the first person of the past tense. The first person past of love would be ‘love-wasi,’ of move ‘move-wasi,’ and so on, ‘wasi’ no longer having a meaning by itself, but ‘love’ and ‘move’ by themselves being perfectly understandable. Or, to take an actual declension from a Turanian language,--

_bakar-im_ I regard, _bakar-sin_ thou regardest, _bakar_ he regards, _bakar-iz_ we regard, _bakar-siniz_ you regard, _bakar-lar_ they regard,

where, as we see, the root remains entirely unaffected by the addition of the personal pronoun.

A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative stage,[25] because certain grammatical endings (like ‘wasi’) are merely as it were glued on to a root to change its meaning, while the root itself remains quite unaffected, and means neither less nor more than it did before.

[Sidenote: Inflected language.]

But, as ages pass on, the root and the addition get so closely combined that neither of them alone has, as a rule, a distinct meaning, and the language arrives at its third stage of grammar-formation. It is not difficult to find examples of a language in this condition, for such is the case with all the languages by which we are surrounded. All the tongues which the majority of us are likely to study, almost all those which have any literature at all, have arrived at this last stage, which is called the inflexional. For instance, though we might divide _actionis_ into two parts _actio_ and _nis_, and say that the former contains the essential idea, and the addition the idea implied by the genitive case, there are only a few Latin words with which such a process is possible, and even in the case of _actio_ the separation is somewhat misleading. In _homo_ the real root is _hom_, and the genitive is not homo-nis but _hominis_. So, again, though we were able to separate ‘asmi’ into two parts--‘as’ and ‘mi’--one expressing the idea of being, the other the person ‘I,’ this distinction is the refinement of the grammarian, and would never have been recognized by an ordinary speaker of Sanskrit, for whom ‘asmi’ simply meant ‘I am,’ without distinction of parts. In our ‘am’ the grammarian recognizes that the ‘a’ expresses existence, and the ‘m’ expresses I; but so completely have we lost sight of this, that we repeat the ‘I’ before the verb. Just the same in Latin. No Roman could have recognized in the ‘s’ of _sum_ ‘am’ and in the ‘m’ ‘I;’ for him _sum_ meant simply and purely ‘I am.’ It was no more separable in his eyes than the French _êtes_ (Latin _estis_) in _vous êtes_ is separable into a root ‘es,’ contracted in the French into ‘ê,’ meaning _are_, and an addition ‘tes’ signifying _you_. This, then, is the last stage upon which language enters. It is called the inflexional or inflected stage, because the different grammatical changes are not now denoted by a mere addition to an intelligible word, but by a change in the word itself. The root may in many cases remain and be recognizable in its purity, but very frequently it is unrecognizable, so that the different case-or tense-endings can no longer be looked upon as additions, but as changes. Take almost any Latin substantive, and we see this: _homo_, a man, the genitive is formed by changing _homo_ into _hominis_, or, if we please, adding something to the root _hom_--which has in itself no meaning; _musa_ changes into _musæ_; and so forth.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The five stages in the formation of language.]

And now to recapitulate. We have in tracing the growth of language discovered first of all two stages whereby the material of the language was formed: the class of what we have called the meaning or significant words came into being, and out of this was formed the second class of so-called meaningless or auxiliary words. These two stages were in the main passed through before any known language came into existence; for there is no known language which does not contain words of both these classes; albeit the second stage is likewise a process which is still going on, as in the examples chosen, where _even_ and _just_ pass from being adjectives into _even_ and _just_ the adverbs, and the French substantives _pas_ and _point_ take a like change of meaning.

These first two stages passed, there follow three other stages which go to the formation of the grammar of a language: first the stage of merely coupling words together, so as to form fresh words--the _monosyllabic_ state; then the stage in which one part of the additional word has lost its meaning while the root-word remains unchanged--the stage called the _agglutinative_ condition of language; and, finally the stage in which the added portion has become to some extent absorbed into the root-word--which last stage is the _inflected_ condition of a language.

When we have come to this inflexional state, the history of the growth of language comes to an end. It happens indeed, sometimes, that a language which has arrived at the inflected stage may in time come to drop nearly all its inflexions. This has been the case with English and French. Both are descended from languages which had elaborate grammars--the Saxon and the Latin; but both, through an admixture with foreign tongues and from other causes, have come to drop almost all their grammatical forms. We show our grammar only in a few changes in our ordinary verbs--the second and third persons singular, _thou goest_, _he goes_; the past tense and the past participle, _use_, _used_; _buy_, _bought_, etc.; in further variations in our auxiliary verb ‘to be;’ by changes in our pronouns, _I_, _me_, _ye_, _you_, _who_, _whom_, etc.; and by the ‘’s’ and ‘s’ of the possessive case and of the plural, and the comparison of adjectives. The French preserve their grammar to some extent in their pronouns, their adjectives, the plurals of their nouns, and in their verbs. Instances such as these are cases of decay, and do not find any place in the history of the growth of language.

We now pass on to examine where the growth of language has been fully achieved, where it has remained only stunted and imperfect.