# The Mystery of Words/Part 2/Chapter 6

VI
Historic Periods, etc.
The English vocabulary offers a fruitful field of study. First of all, the cast of thought that it expresses is individual. Ours is a distinct, not necessarily superior, civilization; and all the forms of intellectual activity represented by our tongue are so characteristic that one may well believe in the formative influence of a language over the people speaking it.
If we separate our words according to their historic periods, we shall be able to trace in a loose way the spiritual progress of the peoples that used the words. As Hugo says of slang, we may say of our whole vocabulary: To “those who study the tongue as it should be studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth,” English “appears like a veritable ​alluvial deposit.” In this deposit there are strata composed of a great variety of words. Some are very old. They were dropped by the different racial groups which were united by the language and the crude culture commonly called Aryan. Overlying these are strata which contain words of a later date from various sources. Some are of native origin; many are foreign; and a great number of our words are historic documents which, if translated with care, reveal the tendency of ancient thought, the characteristics, the attainments, and the pursuits of a people whose generations have passed through many thousands of years. These words form the slender but unbroken threads of historic unity. They connect temporary movements of thought, modern conceptions and emotions, with those of a more or less remote antiquity. Nearly all the words bear some impression, carry some trait, or conceal some hint of their vanished ancestry.
Thousands of years before the present era, ​our ancestors, we believe, were living in what is now known as southern Russia. They and their associated tribes were the progenitors of nearly all the great peoples that have made history during the past 2,500 years. All these tribes perhaps spoke a similar tongue; and they were united by the bonds of a common culture. Their civilization is called Aryan; and their language was the mother of the Indo-European tongues.
When these tribes broke up, left the steppes country, and migrated to other parts of the world some to the eastward, some to the westward, and others to the southward—their civilization became modified. The group-characteristics of tongue and culture became intensified through isolation from the others and by the pressure of a new environment. These were the ancestors of the Persians and the Hindoos, the Greeks and the Celts, the Teutons and the Slavs, the Romans and the Gauls.
Through the West Teutonic division of ​tongues, we come to our own language, which we find to be most closely related to the Frisian. In looking at the past through our own vocabulary, we catch glimpses of an early civilization that is of peculiar interest to the English-speaking peoples. By means of words still preserved to us, however altered in signification,—many of them coarse and brutal—we can recall remote perceptions; we are able to review acts of antiquity; and we can reawaken conceptions that were held by those who used our ancestral tongue to express their culture during its earliest known stage.
From that distant period came our first ten numerals, and such words as father, mother, daughter, sister, brother, son, widow, nephew (French from neve), foot, tooth, knee, etc.; together with the names of domesticated animals, such as hound, goat, goose, horse (eoh), sow, ewe, wether, cow, wool, ox, steer, free, herd, etc. It is natural that words of this kind should have been used by a nomadic people.
That these tribes had made considerable prog​ress in the arts, is indicated by such words as axle, yoke, wheel, nave, wain or wagon, ore (copper), row, rudder (paddle), door, timber, thatch, mead, weave; and their knowledge, their powers of observation, are shown by such words as tree, birch, withy, wolf, feather, nest, otter, beaver, hare, mouse, night, dew, star, snow, wind, fire, east, thunder, etc.;—all primitive terms, or those derived from early roots.
These and scores of other words tell us much of that prehistoric experience in which many elements of our own modern civilization had their origin. More than that, they show our spiritual kinship with peoples widely distributed over the continents of earth and with others across oceans of time. They keep the ghosts of the dim past before our eyes; they have borne across the centuries some of our simplest, finest, most poetic, and most purely religious conceptions; also they have preserved strange superstitions and the rites that still fascinate us, although we no longer know their meanings. Words of our vocabulary ​have awakened modern sympathies for prehistoric and primitive experiences; and they have demonstrated to us that, however far we may have advanced along material and mechanical lines, in art and science, our spiritual character and psychological processes have not changed through tens of thousands of years.
Long after the Persian and the Indian ancestral tribes had migrated eastward, those of our European groups were making their way slowly “from treeless steppes and pasturelands into a country of forests.” During “this West-Aryan or European period, when the ancestors of the Greeks, the Romans, the Celts and Teutons were still closely connected, a number of words for trees and birds make their first appearance.” To this period have been traced the words, beech, elm, hazel, swallow, throstle, finch, starling, corn, furrow, meal, bean, ear (of corn), to ear (to plow). This would seem to indicate a change of environ​ment and of pursuit. It probably was during this time that words for sea, salt, fish, etc., began to appear in Europe.
A movement among the European tribes carried the ancestors of the Teutons and the Slavs northward through the forests of Germany, those of the Greeks and the Romans toward the Mediterranean. Evidence of early associations between the progenitors of the Celts and the Latins, the Slavs and the Teutons, is found in their languages; but the ancestors of the Greeks apparently separated themselves from the other groups.
The next period, seen through the Teutonic group of tongues, is marked by an advance in civilization. Agriculture already had become a recognized industry. Civic organization had advanced. Commerce had been established; and the sea-faring life had well begun along the northwestern coasts. Natural phenomena were observed, named, and studied. At least all this would seem to be true, if we can judge by words of that time—for it has ​given to our vocabulary: bowl, broth, brew, knead, dough, loaf, hat, comb, house, home, borough, king, earl, buy, ware, worth, and cheap (barter), sea, sound, island, cliff, flood, strand, ship, steer, sail, stay, storm, shower, hail, whale (“for any large sea-beast’’), seal, mew (sea-gull), and words indicating the points of the compass, etc.
We assume that as the primitive Aryans had only one word for metal, ore, given to copper, their knowledge of the metals was slight. But now we come to a period, previous to the separation of the Anglo-Saxons from the other Teutonic tribes, when such words abounded as, gold, silver, tin, lead, iron, and steel. That metal-work was a new art, is suggested by the legends coming from that time, showing that the forgers and blacksmiths were given magical and even sinister powers by the popular imagination.
There were such words as, leech (a healer), lore, write (from reissen) to cut or scratch letters in tablets of bark or wood, and book ​(from beech). Etymology would seem to show also that travel had become more or less common over the land. Fear (from fare) suggests dangers to be expected while traveling through strange lands and forests; learn came from a root meaning, “to follow a track”; weary, “to tramp over wet grounds and moors”; earn came from “field labor”; gain by way of the French, “from a Teutonic verb meaning ‘to graze, to pasture’…to forage, to hunt or fish”; free came “from an Aryan root meaning dear,” that is to say, applied to those connected with household-ties, and therefore not in bondage. This also is the source of our word friend. Bless, a religious word, was derived from blood, “to mark or consecrate with blood”; mirth and merry, meaning “short,” presumably “that which shortens time, or cheers.”
In studying the old words of our vocabulary, we should heed the warning of L. P. Smith, and others, against our giving to them their modern meanings. “Thus fear had the ob​jective sense of a sudden or terrible event till after the Norman Conquest; the early meaning of mirth was ‘enjoyment, happiness,’ and could be used in Old English of religious joy; while merry meant no more than ‘agreeable, pleasing.’” We have passed nearly through the period when the northwestern coasts and forests of Europe were inhabited by the descendants of Aryan tribes still in a crude stage of culture. They had made progress in the rough arts; and they had learned much from their neighboring tribes; but they still remained savages steeped in ignorance and superstition.
Now breaks the dawn of modern civilization. It is brought forth by the influence of the other more fortunate descendants of Aryan groups which had migrated to the Mediterranean regions, and which had come in contact with the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the East. Here the great classical centers of culture were established. From these ​came the beginnings of our modern culture, in its best sense, which influenced our vocabulary even before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.
From this time onward, our borrowings from the civilizations of Athens and Rome include a large part of our vocabulary. At the beginning of the Dark Ages, Christian influence was dominant in Western-European society. This, of course, modified our vocabulary. In addition, there have been Oriental influences, which left their mark, together with large borrowings from more modern sources, such as the Romance languages.
Finally, a very large proportion of all our words is linguistic padding and filling. The number of meaningless words is surprising. Words that are mere scarecrows and effigies of fact litter the pages even of our best books. This abundance of trash-words tells us how loosely we think, how ignorant we are of exact knowledge, how much savagery remains in us, and still how antique is our period. ​Words that stand for other words—hazy symbols of empty signs—embarrass indeed all tongues.
There are two categories of words: one is founded on emotion, the other on reason. Our mental processes confuse the two. Words false and true—symbols of symbols and signs of signs—are jumbled together. All telling words are sparks of knowledge. All knowledge comes from collective and personal experience. Experience is an interpretation of energy. Therefore a word, or group of words, that means anything must identify some active or passive form of energy, or some class of energies. How many of our words do this, precisely?
The educational and ethical value to be gained from the progress already attained in physiological research, particularly with relation to the nervous system, is highly important to civilization, since it affects the individual and, therefore, the people as a whole.
As gray-matter is more amenable to the ​“plastic stress” during childhood and early youth, education in languages should begin early enough to be finished at the tenth or twelfth year of the child’s age. Afterward only practice is necessary to maintain the cerebral habits and to retain the artificial changes wrought in nervous substance. For although the young brain is readily fashioned to perform new functions, also it readily lapses. Rigidity of nervous substance increases rapidly with the years, whilst the powers of reflection increase until at some period after middle-age when the zenith is reached. Until this point is passed, the judgment grows keener and the poise more stable.
Whatever the mysteries of words may be, there is no mistaking their ethical meanings. A man’s language is a very important part of his conduct. He is as obligated to clean speech as he is to clean raiment. He is as morally responsible for his words as he is for any other of his acts. No amount of orderly care directed toward his immediate environ​ment can atone for slovenly disorder in his speech. Ignorance of the niceties of his mother-tongue is contemptible; lame knowledge of its full powers is a form of reprehensible inefficiency of education. Linguistic lawlessness is abhorrent; for language is a law, and he who breaks the law commits something. Language also is an intellectual covenant with a godlike spirit. He who does not keep the covenant sins against the spirit. Brutality in language is taboo. A civilized person may be hurt more severely with a word than by a blow. Style takes care of itself. Plain and simple speech appeals to our better nature because it indicates clear thought and transparent motives. Diplomatic language occupies its own sphere, however that sphere may be regarded by the sensible and straightforward element of mankind. The moral need of looking well to our words becomes more imperative as we reflect on their characteristics and powers. Some words harbor the elements of ambush, of ​assassination, of thievery, of licentiousness, and of every vice known to wickedness and evil. In others there is every known virtue. If moral conduct is good in our daily affairs, the ethics of speech should not be slighted. If it be well to cultivate the beautiful in our environment, it may be even better for our souls to foster the beautiful in our speech. If the aesthetic instinct is excusable, it is commendable in our words. If art is necessary to man, it is essential in his language. If science has any message to deliver, the means of its delivery is not without import. If poetry appeals to our higher nature, it makes its appeal through the fitness of words in their combinations—their suggestiveness and character. And so on with the rest:
“The words of a man’s mouth are as deep waters, and the wellspring of wisdom as a flowing brook.”
—(Proverbs.)
* ↑ The English Language. (Smith.)
* ↑ The English Language. (Smith.)
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