# Language and the Study of Language/Lecture XII

LECTURE XII.
Our last inquiries, into the origin of language and the nature of its connection with thought, brought us to conclusions accordant with those we had reached in the course of our earlier discussions, and foreshadowed by them. As we had found before that the only forces immediately concerned in the growth and changes of language were human, so now we saw that there was no reason to regard any others as having borne a share in its origination: in its incipient stage, no less than in its succeeding phases, speech has been the work of those whose needs it supplies; it is in no other sense of divine origin than as everything which man possesses is a divine gift, the product of endowments and conditions which are not of his own determining. As further, we had recognized the arbitrariness and conventionality of the means whereby each individual among us signifies his conceptions to his fellows—namely, utterances learned by each from those among whom his lot chanced to be cast, he being forced to speak as they were in the habit of ​speaking—so now we perceived that the same qualities had attached from the very outset to the signs chosen for expression; that, as there is at present no internal and necessary reason why we employ one particular complex of sounds rather than another as the representative of a particular idea, so there had never been any such reason; that words never meant thoughts, but always simply designated them. It had formerly appeared to us that, although there has been in every case an etymological reason for a word, this reason is one of convenience only, founded in the prior acquisitions and habitudes of the word-makers; efficient, indeed, at the moment of origination of the word, whose association with the intended meaning it is instrumental in initiating, but idle when the association has once been formed, and therefore soon neglected by the language-users, and often forgotten beyond power of recovery—and now we were brought to acknowledge that the very first words had only a similar reason, being such utterances as the natural endowments and habits of man, his imitative faculty and his tendency to exclaim, made the feasible means of arriving at a mutual comprehension between utterer and listener. Onomatopœia, in all its varieties of application, thus came in at the outset, aided and supplemented by tone and gesture, to help the language-makers to find intelligible signs, but ceased to control the history of each sign when once this had become understood and conventionally accepted; while the productive efficiency of the principle gradually diminished and died out as a stock of signs was accumulated sufficient to serve as the germs of speech, and to increase by combination and differentiation. Thus, as mutual intelligibility had been before proved to be the only test of the unity of language, and its necessity the force that conserved linguistic unity, it was further demonstrated that the desire to understand and be understood by one another was the impulse which acted directly to call forth language. In all its stages of growth alike, then, speech is strictly a social institution; as the speaking man, when reduced to solitude, unlearns its use, so the solitary man would never have formed it. We may extol as much as we please, without risk of exaggeration, the ​advantage which each one of us derives from it within his inmost self, in the training and equipment of his own powers of thought: but the advantage is one we should never have enjoyed, save as we were born members of a community: the ideas of speech and of community are inseparable.
By thus tracing back, as well as our knowledge and our limited time have allowed, the course of the history of human speech even to its very beginning, we have made such answer as was within our power to our introductory question, "Why we speak as we do, and not otherwise?" But, before bringing our discussions to a close, it will be well for us, varying a little the emphasis of our inquiry, to present and consider it in one or two new aspects.
And, in the first place, why do we speak—we human beings and we alone, and not also the other races of animals which have been endowed with faculties in many respects so like our own? The fact is a patent one: although some of the lower animals are not entirely destitute of the power of communicating together, their means of communication is altogether different from what we call language. The essential characteristic of our speech is that it is arbitrary and conventional; that of the animals, on the other hand, is natural and instinctive: the former is, therefore, capable of indefinite change, growth, and development; the latter is unvarying, and cannot transcend its original narrow limits: the one is handed down by tradition, and acquired by instruction; the other appears independently, in its integrity, in every individual of the race. Now, for the superiority of man in this particular, the general reason, that his endowments are vastly higher than those of the inferior races, though by no means so definite as could be desired, is perhaps the truest and most satisfactory of which the case at present admits. When philosophers shall have determined precisely wherein lies the superiority of man's mind, they will at the same time have explained in detail his exclusive possession of speech. We are accustomed to agree that man is distinguished from the brute by the gift of reason; but then we can only define reason as that whereby man is distinguished from the brute; for as to what reason is, how far it ​is a difference of kind, and how far one of degree only, we are quite at a loss to tell. To say that the animal is governed by instinct instead of reason does not help the difficulty; it is but giving a name to a distinction of which we do not comprehend the nature. Wherever the line may require to be drawn between the "blind instinct," as we sometimes style it, of the bee and ant, and the "free intelligence" of man, that line is certainly long passed when we come to some of the higher animals—as, for example, the dog. No one can successfully deny to the dog the possession of an intelligence which is real, even though limited by boundaries much narrower than those that shut in our own; nor of something so akin with many of the nobler qualities on which we pride ourselves that their difference is evanescent and indefinable. And anything wearing even the semblance of intelligence necessarily implies the power to form general ideas. It is little short of absurdity to maintain, for instance, that the dog, and many another animal, does not fully apprehend the idea of a human being; does not, whenever it sees a new individual of the class, recognize it as such, as having like qualities, and able to do like things, with other individuals of the same class whom it has seen before. If the crow did not comprehend what a man is, why should it be afraid of a scarecrow? And how is any application of the results of past experience to the government of present action—such as the brutes are abundantly capable of—possible without the aid of general conceptions? To identify reason, then, with the single mental capacity of forming general ideas, and to trace the possession of speech directly to this faculty, is, in my view, wholly erroneous: it is part of that superficial and unsound philosophy which confounds and identifies speech, thought, and reason. Speech is one of the most conspicuous and valuable of the manifestations of reason; but, even without it, reason would be reason, and man would be man, though far below what he was meant to become, and is capable of becoming through the aid of speech: and there are many other things besides talking which man can do in virtue of his reason, and which are out of the power of any other creature. If we are pressed to say in what mode of ​action, more than in any other, lies that deficiency in the powers of the lower animals which puts language beyond their reach, we need have little hesitation in answering that it is the inferiority of the command which consciousness in them exercises over the mental operations: in their inability to hold up their conceptions before their own gaze, to trace out the steps of reasoning, to analyze and compare in a leisurely and reflective manner, separating qualities and relations from one another, so as to perceive that each is capable of distinct designation. That many animals come so near to a capacity for language as to be able to understand and be directed by it when it is addressed to them by man, was pointed out in the last lecture; nor can I see that their condition is destitute of analogy with that of very young children, whose power of understanding language is developed sooner and more rapidly than their power of employing it; who learn to apprehend a host of things before they learn to express them. In respect to speech, it is very evident that the distance from the oyster, for instance, which no amount of training can bring to the slightest apprehension of anything you may wish to signify to it, to the intelligent and docile dog, is vastly greater than that which separates the dog from the undeveloped man, or from a man of one of the lower and more brutish races.
But once more, why do we speak? what is the final cause of the of language to man? in what way is the possession of such a power of advantage to us? These inquiries open a great and wide-reaching subject; one far too great, indeed, for us to attempt dealing with it, in the contracted space at our command, otherwise than in the briefest and most superficial manner. A detailed reply can be the more easily dispensed with, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the worth of speech is too present to the mind of every one to need to be called up otherwise than by a simple allusion; and as, on the other hand, our previous discussions have brought more or less distinctly to view the chief points requiring notice.
The general answer, in which is summed up nearly the whole array of advantages derived from language, is this: that it enables men to be, as they are intended to be, social, ​and not merely gregarious beings. As it is the product, so it is also the means and instrument, of community. It converts the human race from a bare aggregate of individuals into a unity, having a joint life, a common development, to which each individual contributes his mite, receiving an untold treasure in return. It alone makes history possible. All that man possesses more than the brute is so intimately bound up with language that the two are hardly separable from one another; and, as we have already seen, are regarded by some erroneously, but naturally and excusably, as actually identical. Our endowments, so infinitely higher than the brute's, need also, as being so much freer and less instinctive, to be brought to our knowledge, to be drawn out and educated. The speechless man is a being of undeveloped capacities, having within him the seeds of everything great and good, but seeds which only language can fertilize and bring to fruit; he is potentially the lord of nature, the image of his Creator; but in present reality he is only a more cunning brute among brutes. There is hardly to be found in the whole animal creation any being more ignoble and shocking than those wild and savage solitary men, of whom history affords us now and then a specimen; but what we are above them has been gained through the instrumentality of language, and is the product of a slow progressive accumulation and transmission. If each human being had to begin for himself the career of education and improvement, all the energies of the race would be absorbed in taking, over and over again, the first simple steps. Language enables each generation to lay up securely, and to hand over to its successors, its own collected wisdom, its stores of experience, deduction, and invention, so that each starts from the point which its predecessor had reached, and every individual commences his career, heir to the gathered wealth of an immeasurable past.
So far, now, as this advantage comes to us from the handing down, through means of speech, of knowledge hoarded up by those who have lived before us, or from its communication by our contemporaries, we appreciate with a tolerable degree of justness its nature and value. We know full well that we ​were born ignorant, and have by hearing and reading possessed ourselves in a few short years of more enlightenment than we could have worked out for our own use in many long centuries; we can trace, too, the history of various branches of knowledge, and see how they have grown up from scanty beginnings, by the consenting labour of innumerable minds, through a succession of generations. We are aware that our culture, in the possession of which we are more fortunate than all who have gone before us, is the product of historical conditions working through hundreds, even thousands, of years; that its germs began to be developed in the far distant East, in ages so remote that history and tradition alike fail to give us so much as glimpses of their birth; that they were engendered among exceptionally endowed races, in especially favouring situations, and were passed on from one people to another, elaborated and increased by each, until, but a thousand years ago, our own immediate ancestors, a horde of uncouth barbarians, were ready to receive them in their turn—and that this whole process of accumulation and transfer has been made possible only by means of speech and its kindred and dependent art of record. What we are far less mindful of is the extent to which we derive a similar gain in the inheritance of language itself, and that this very instrumentality is in like manner the gradually gathered and perfected work of many generations—in part, of many races. We do not realize how much of the observation and study of past ages is stored up in the mere words which we learn so easily and use so lightly, and what degree of training our minds receive, almost without knowing it, by entering in this way also into the fruits of the prolonged labour of others. To this point, then, we owe a more special consideration.
Learning to speak is the first step in each child's education, the necessary preparation for receiving higher instruction of every kind. So was it also with the human race; the acquisition of speech constituted the first stage in the progressive development of its capacities. We, as individuals, have forgotten both the labour that the task cost us and the enlightenment its successful accomplishment brought us: the whole ​lies too far back in our lives to be reached by our memories; we feel as if we had always spoken, as directly and naturally as we have thought. As a race, too, we have done the same thing: neither history nor tradition can penetrate to a period at all approaching that of the formation of language; it was in the very childhood of our species, and men learned thinking and talking together, even as they learn them now-a-days: not till they had acquired through language the art of wielding the forces of thought, were they qualified to go on to the storing up of various knowledge. Into a few years of instruction are now crowded, for the young student, the net results of as many tens of centuries of toiling after wisdom on the part of no small portion of mankind; and, in like manner, into the language-learning of the first few months and years is crowded the fruit of as many ages of language-making. We saw in the last lecture that, if two human beings were suffered to grow up together untaught, they would inevitably frame some means of communication, to which we could not deny the name of language: but we know not how many generations would succeed one another before it could reach a fulness comparable with that of even the rudest existing human dialects. Men invent language, their mental instrument, as truly as they invent the mechanical appliances whereby they extend and multiply the power of their hands; but it would be as impossible for a man, or a generation, to invent a language like one of those which we know and use, as, for example, to invent a locomotive engine. The invention of the engine may be said to have begun when the first men learned how to make a fire and keep it alive with fuel; another early step (and one to which many a living race has not even yet ascended) was the contriving of a wheel; command was won, by degrees, of the other mechanical powers, at first in their simplest, then in their more complicated, forms and applications; the metals were discovered, and the means of reducing and working them one after another devised, and improved and perfected by long accumulated experience; various motive powers were noted and reduced to the service of men; to the list of such, it was at length seen that steam might be added, and, after many vain ​trials, this too was brought to subjection—and thus the work was at length carried so far forward that the single step, or the few steps, which remained to be taken, were within the power of an individual mind. When one of us now undertakes to invent a language (as in fact happens from time to time), it is as if one who had been all his life an engineer should sit down to invent a steam-engine: he does nothing but copy with trifling modifications a thing which he is already familiar with; he reärranges the parts a little, varies their relative dimensions, uses new material for one and another of them, and so on—perhaps making some improvements in matters of minor detail, but quite as probably turning out a machine that will not work. To call upon a man who has never spoken to produce a complete language is like setting a wild Fijian or Fuegian at constructing a power-loom or a power-press; he neither knows what it is nor what it will be good for. The conditions of the problem which is set before the language-makers are manifest: man is placed in the midst of creation, with powers which are capable of unlocking half its secrets, but with no positive knowledge either of them or of himself; with apprehensions as confused, with cognitions as synthetic, as are those of the lower animals; and he has to make his way as well as he can to a distinct understanding of the world without and the world within him. He accomplishes his task by means of a continuous process of analysis and combination, whereof every result, as soon as it is found, is fixed by a term, and thus made a permanent possession, capable of being farther elaborated, and communicated by direct instruction. It is necessary to study out what needs to be expressed, as well as the means of its expression. Even the naming of concrete objects, as we saw, demands an analysis and recognition of their distinctive qualities; and to find fitting designations for the acts and relations of the external sensible world, and then, by an acute perception of analogies and a cunning transfer, to adapt those designations to the acts, states, and relations of the intellectual and moral world within the soul, was not an easy or rapid process; yet, till this was measurably advanced, the mind had no instrument with which it ​could perform any of the higher work of which it was capable. But as each generation transmitted to its successor what it had itself inherited from its predecessor, perfected and increased by the results of its own mental labour, the accumulation of language, accompanying the development of analytic thought and the acquisition of knowledge, went steadily and successfully forward; until at last, when one has but acquired his own mother-tongue, a vocabulary of terms and an understanding of what they mean, he already comprehends himself and his surroundings; he possesses the fitting instrument of mental action, and can go on intelligently to observe and deduce for himself. Few of us have any adequate conception of the debt of gratitude we owe to our ancestors for shaping in our behalf the ideas which we now acquire along with the means of their expression, or of how great a part of our intellectual training consists in our simply learning how to speak.
One thing more we have to note in connection herewith. The style in which we shall do our thinking, the framework of our reasonings, the matters of our subjective apprehension, the distinctions and relations to which we shall direct our chief attention, are thus determined in the main for us, not by us. In learning to speak with those about us, we learn also to think with them: their traditional habits of mind become ours. In this guidance there is therefore something of constraint, although we are little apt to realize it. Study of a foreign language brings it in some measure to our sense. He who begins to learn a tongue not his own is at first hardly aware of any incommensurability between its signs for ideas and those to which he has been accustomed. But the more intimately he comes to know it, and the more natural and familiar its use becomes to him, so much the more clearly does he see that the dress it puts upon his thoughts modifies their aspect, the more impossible does it grow to him to translate its phrases with satisfactory accuracy into his native speech. The individual is thus unable to enter into a community of language-users without some abridgment of his personal freedom—even though the penalty be wholly insignificant as compared with the accruing benefit. Thus, too, ​each generation feels always the leading hand, not only of the generation that immediately instructed it, but of all who have gone before, and taken a part in moulding the common speech; and, not least, of those distant communities, hidden from our view in the darkness of the earliest ages, whose action determined the grand structural features of each tongue now spoken. Every race is, indeed, as a whole, the artificer of its own speech, and herein is manifested the sum and general effect of its capacities in this special direction of action; but many a one has felt through all the later periods of its history the constraining and laming force of a language unhappily developed in the first stages of formation; which it might have made better, had the work been to do over again, but which now weighs upon its powers with all the force of disabling inbred habit. Both the intellectual and the historical career of a race is thus in no small degree affected by its speech. Upon this great subject, however, of the influence reflected back from language upon the thought and mind of those who learn and use it, we can here only touch; to treat it with any fulness would require deep and detailed investigations, both linguistic and psychological, for which our inquiries hitherto have only laid the necessary foundation.
The extent to which the different races of men have availed themselves of language, to secure the advantages placed within their reach by it, is, naturally and necessarily, as various as are the endowments of the races. With some, it has served only the low purposes of an existence raised by its aid to a certain height above that of the brutes, and remaining stationary there. Their whole native capacity of mental development seems to have exhausted itself in the acquisition of an amount of language even less than is learned by the young child of many another race, as the first stage upon which his after-education shall be built up. Their life is absorbed in satisfying the demands of the hour; past and future are nothing to them; the world is merely a hunting-ground, where means of gratifying physical desires, and of lengthening out a miserable existence, may be sought and found; its wonders do not even awaken in their minds a sense of a higher power; the barest social intercourse, ​perpetuation by instruction of the petty arts of living, and the scantiest adaptation to the changes of external circumstances, are all they ask of the divine gift of speech. Through such a condition as this we may suppose that all human language has passed; but while in parts of the world it still stays there, and gives no prospect of a higher development except through the influence and aid of races of better gifts and richer acquisitions, it shows elsewhere every degree of progression, up even to the satisfaction of the wants of an advanced and advancing culture like our own, where the knowledge of the past, aiding the understanding of the present and preparing for the future, is laid up in such abundant store, that he who studies longest and deepest, and with most appreciative and inquisitive industry, hardly does more than realize better than his fellows how little he can know of that which is known; how short is life, compared with the almost infinite extent of that series of truths, the infinite variety of that complication of cognitions, which life puts within our reach, and whose apprehension constitutes one of the highest and noblest pleasures of life.
Such full development as this, however, of the uses and advantages of speech would be impossible by the instrumentality of spoken speech alone; it demands a farther auxiliary, in the possession of written speech. The art of writing is so natural a counterpart and complement of the art of speaking, it so notably takes up and carries farther the work which language has undertaken on behalf of mankind, that some consideration of it is well-nigh forced upon us here: our view of the history and office of language would otherwise lack a part essential to its completeness. Speech and writing are equally necessary elements in human history, equally growing out of man's capacity and wants as a social and an indefinitely perfectible being. He would be, without language, hardly man at all, a creature little raised above the brutes; without the art of record, his elevation would soon find its limits; he could never become the being he was meant to be, the possessor of enlightenment, the true lord of nature and discoverer of her secrets. Language makes each community, each race, a unit; writing tends to bind ​together all races and all ages, forcing the whole of mankind to contribute to the education and endowment of every individual. Moreover, there is in many respects so close a parallelism and analogy between the histories of these two sister arts, that, were it only for the value of the illustration, we should be justified in turning aside for a time to follow out the growth of letters.
As in the case of language, it may be remarked, so also in that of writing, we hardly realize, until we begin to investigate the subject, that the art has had a history at all. It seems to us hardly less "natural" to write our thoughts than to speak them: such is the power of educated habit, that we take both alike as things of course. But what we have above shown to be true of spoken language is still more palpably and demonstrably true of written; it was a slow and laborious task for men to arrive at the idea and its realization: more than one race has been engaged in the work of elaborating for our use the simple and convenient means of record of which we are the fortunate possessors; many have been the failures or only partial successes which have attended the efforts of portions of mankind to provide themselves with such means. As it is impossible to trace the history of our own alphabet back to its very beginning, some review of those efforts will be our best means of inferring what its earliest stages of growth must have been, and will prepare us to understand what it is, and what are its advantages.
We have first to notice that the force which impels to the invention of writing, which leads men to represent thought by visible instead of audible signs, is the desire to communicate to a distance, to cut expression loose from its natural limitation to the personal presence of him whose thought is expressed, and make it apprehensible by persons far away. Even the intention of record, of conveying the thought to a distance in time also, making it apprehensible by generations to come, shows itself only secondarily, as experience suggests ​such use; and as for the advantage which the individual himself derives from recording his thought, so as to be able to con it over, to apprehend it and its relations more distinctly, as well as that other incalculable advantage which the individual and the race derive from the transmission and accumulation of knowledge by this means—these are matters which are still farther from the minds of the earliest inventors. Here is a first most notable analogy between the histories of spoken and written speech: the satisfaction of a simple social impulse, arising out of the ordinary needs of intercourse between man and man, brings forth by degrees an instrumentality of supreme importance to the progress of the whole human race. The earliest writers, like the earliest speakers, wrought far more wisely than they knew.
Again, the conveyance of thought by means of writing was not primarily conceived of as a conveyance of the spoken language in which the thought would be expressed: it dealt immediately with the conception itself, striving to place this by direct means before the apprehension of the person addressed. Speech and writing were two independent ways of arriving at the same end. We may add that, so long as it remains in this stage, writing is a tedious and bungling instrumentality; the great step towards its perfection is taken when it accepts a subordinate part, as consort and helpmate of speech.
A first feeble effort toward the realization of the fundamental object of writing is to be seen in the custom—not infrequent at a certain period of culture, and even retained in occasional use among peoples of every grade of civilization—of sending along with a messenger some visible object, symbolical of his errand, and helping both to authenticate and to render it impressive. Thus, the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah, ch. xix.) is directed to take an earthen bottle and break it before the ancients of his people, to signify the sudden and irremediable destruction with which he is to threaten them. Thus ambassadors and heralds in ancient times were charged with the delivery of something typical of the peace or war they were sent to proclaim. And the knight's glove, thrown down in defiance and taken up by him who accepts ​the challenge, and the staff still broken in Germany over the head of the condemned criminal, are instances of the same general style of instrumentality for expressing meaning. Objects, too, are used in a more arbitrary and conventional way, as reminders, helps to the recollection of that which is communicated orally. So the North American Indian on solemn occasions, had his strips of wampum, corresponding to the heads of the discourse he had prepared; and handed them over, one after another, as each announcement was made or each argument finished, to the person addressed. We should hardly need to take any notice of a method of intimation so rude and indefinite as this, but for the development which we know it to have attained, as a practical means of communication and record, in the usage of one or two nations. It received its greatest elaboration in the system of the quippos, or knotted cords, employed in Peru at the time of its discovery and conquest. With these cords the state messengers were provided, and by their numbers, their colours, their groupings, their style of knotting, they were made conventionally significant of each one's message, even to partial independence of his own oral explanation. The accounts, and, to a certain extent, the annals also, of the empire of the Incas are claimed to have been intelligibly kept by means of the quippos. The Peruvians doubtless made out of this coarse instrumentality all that it was capable of becoming; but the essentially low grade of their capacity and culture is indicated by the fact that they had risen to the invention of nothing better. The Chinese, too, curiously enough, have preserved the tradition that their earliest ancestors wrote by means of knotted cords, until the mythical emperor Fo-hi devised the beginnings of the better system of which we shall have presently to speak.
A higher degree of ingenuity, and a greatly superior capacity of progression and development, are to be seen in the contrivance of a picture-writing. This, in its simplest form, is found all over the world, among peoples of a certain degree of civilization. Let us look at an example furnished by the aborigines of our own country.
​Two hunters have gone up the river on an expedition, and have killed a bear and taken many fish. They endeavour to commemorate their success, and make it known to whosoever shall pass that way after them, by a monument raised upon the spot. On a piece of wood they draw two boats, and over each the totem, or symbolic animal, indicating the family to which each hunter respectively belongs—his surname, as it were. The figures of a bear and of half-a-dozen fish tell the rest of the simple story. There is here no idea of a narrative, of an orderly setting forth of the successive incidents making up an act or occurrence: the whole complex is put before the eye at once, unanalyzed, in the form in which we might suppose it to lie in the mind of a brute—or, more properly, as it would lie in the mind of a man destitute of language, and lacking that education in progressive thought which the possession and use of language give; it abnegates, in short, the advantages conferred by language, and is confusedly synthetic, like the conceptions of an untaught human being. It offers but one element implying a possibility of something higher—namely, the totems, which are signs, not for things, but for the conventional and communicable names of things: here is contained in embryo the idea of a written language representing speech, and such might be made to grow out of it, if the picture-writers had but the acuteness to perceive it, and the ingenuity to make the conversion.
The pictorial mode of writing is analogous with that primitive stage of language in which all signs are still onomatopoetic, immediately suggestive of the conceptions they designate, and therefore, with due allowance for the habits and knowledge of those who use them, intelligible without instruction. To the most prominent and important difference between the two allusion was made in the last lecture: in virtue of the character of the medium through which communication is made, the earliest written signs denote concrete objects, while the earliest spoken signs denote the acts and qualities of objects.
One of the American nations, the Mexican, had brought the art of picture-writing to a high state of perfection, ​making it serve the needs of a far from despicable civilization. The germ of a superior development which we saw in the totem-figures of the Indian depiction was in their use made to a certain extent fruitful. Every Mexican name, whether of place or person, was composed of significant words, and could in most cases be signified hieroglyphically—just as we, for instance, might signify 'Mr. Arrowsmith, of Hull,' by an arrow and a human figure holding a hammer, placed within or above the hull of a vessel. So also, the periods, of greater or less length, which made up their intricate and skilfully constructed calendar, all derived their appellations from natural objects, and were intimated in writing by the figures of those objects. Thus the Mexican annals were full of names and dates composed of figures designating the spoken signs of things; and the idea of a hieroglyphic method of writing, which should found itself on spoken language, following the progress of oral narration and attempting to signify this alone, lay apparently within their easy reach; and would, possibly, have been reached in due time, had the Mexican culture been allowed to continue its career of progress uninterfered with. Authorities are somewhat at variance, indeed, as to what was the real condition and character of the Mexican picture-writing at the time of the Conquest, some holding that it had already become a representation of continuous spoken texts. That there was a quite extensive Mexican literature is certain; but the ignorant fanaticism and superstition of the Spanish conquerors almost swept it out of existence, destroying at the same time the key to its comprehension, which has not yet been fully recovered.
In Egypt, the same beginnings have grown into an institution of quite a different character. The Egyptian hieroglyphs, in even the very earliest monuments preserved to us, form a completely elaborated system, of intricate constitution and high development; it undergoes hardly a perceptible change during all the long period covered by the monumental records: yet its transparency of structure is such that it exhibits in no small degree, like the grammatical structure of the Sanskrit language, its own history. In its origin and ​application, it is peculiarly a commemorative and monumental mode of writing, and it retains to the last strictly its pictorial form; every one of its separate signs is the representation of some visible object, however far it may be removed in use from being a designation of that object. It is in this respect like a language which has never forgotten the derivation of its words, or corrupted their etymological form, however much it may have altered their meaning. On the Egyptian monuments are found, accompanied and described by the hieroglyphics, many and various pictorial scenes—such as kings besieging cities or leading trains of captives, individuals making offerings to divinities, souls undergoing judgment and retribution, and other the like—all of which are cast in conventional form, and often contain symbolic elements: their intent is much more didactic than artistic; they are meant to inform rather than to illustrate: these, then, are with evident plausibility assumed still to represent the earliest, purely pictorial, stage of Egyptian writing, corresponding with that illustrated above by an example furnished by our own aborigines; while the hieroglyphs grew out of the attempt—also finding its analogue in the totem-figures of that example, and still more fully in the Mexican delineations—to designate and explain the persons and actions depicted. The ways in which this end was attained, and figured signs made indicative of names and abstract ideas, were various: homonymy and symbolism were both fertile of characters: thus, the name of the god Osiris, Hesiri, was written by the two figures of a kind of seat (?), hes, and an eye, iri; the figure of a basket, neb, signified also neb, 'a lord:' a hand pouring libations from a vase meant 'offer in sacrifice;' an extended hand bearing some object meant ti, 'give;' the wallowing hippopotamus denoted 'filth, indecency;' and so on. But the Egyptians showed in this part of the development of their system a much higher aptitude than the Mexicans for analytic representation, for paralleling, and then identifying, the process of writing with that of speaking. In the first place, they came to be able to write symbolically such a sentence as "Young! old! God hates indecency," by the five figures of a child, an old man, a hawk, ​a fish, a hippopotamus, placed one after the other, while the Mexican would have given a synthetic symbolic representation of the action by a picture of the Great Spirit chastising an evil-doer, or in some other like way. But, in the second place, the Egyptian system had taken the yet more important step—one which, if followed up, would have brought it to the condition of a real alphabet—of indicating simple sounds, phonetic elements, by a part of its figures. That such a step lies not far off from the homonymic designation of a thing by something which called to the mind the sounds of which its name was composed, is evident enough; still, no little insight and tact was needed in order to bridge over and cross the interval, and we do not apprehend so fully as we could desire the details of the movement. It appears, however, that the figure of an object was first made to designate some other conception whose name agreed with its own in the consonantal elements, to the exclusion of the more variable vowels; and then, by a farther abstraction, instead of designating thus a part of the phonetic elements of its own name, it came to signify the initial element only, whether consonant or vowel. For example, the figure of a lion, labo, is used to represent l; that of an eagle, ahom, to represent a. Proper names are written almost exclusively in this style of characters, and the decipherment of the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra on the inscription of the famous Rosetta stone, as set down distinctly in pure phonetic signs, was the first step in our recovery of the key to the hieroglyphs. In ordinary texts, the phonetic, homonymic, and symbolical characters are intricately mingled, variously aiding, explaining, and supplementing one another's meaning. Thus, the signs for Osiris (Hesiri), already given, are always accompanied by the figure of a peculiar hammer or hatchet, which some unknown reason has made one of the standard symbols of divinity; the verb ti, 'give,' having been once written phonetically, has the symbolic outstretched arm with gift added by way of farther explanation; and so on.
In monumental, and to some extent also in literary use, the hieroglyphs maintained, as already remarked, their pictorial form unaltered, as long as the kingdom and civilization ​of Egypt had an existence: reverence for ancient custom, as well as their peculiar adaptedness to the purposes of architectural decoration, to which they were so largely applied, preserved them from corrupting change. But how easily, under the exigencies of familiar practical use, a true alphabet might have grown out of this cumbrous, long-winded, and intricate mode of writing, is shown in the history of its two derivative forms, the hieratic, and the demotic or enchorial. The former, the hieratic, is simply an abbreviated and cursive style of hieroglyphic, in which each figure is represented by a part of its outline, or otherwise so altered as to be hardly recognizable. It was the common written character of the priests and sacred scribes, from a very early period. The demotic was a still later adaptation of the same, and has lost all relics of a pictorial character, being composed of a limited, though large and unwieldy, number of arbitrary signs, chiefly phonetic. What farther improvement and reduction toward a true alphabetic form the demotic might in time have undergone, we cannot tell. For Greek influence and Christianity came in to interrupt the regular course of development; the Christian Coptic literature, casting aside the native modes of writing, adopted a new alphabet, founded upon the Greek.
The history of writing in China, although its final products are in appearance so different from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, goes back to a very similar origin. The Chinese themselves, with that love for historical research and record and the explanation of subsisting institutions which has always distinguished them, have set down for our benefit all the steps of the process by which their immense and unique system of signs has been elaborated out of its scanty beginnings; and both product and process present more numerous and striking analogies with spoken language and its growth than are to be found anywhere else in the whole history of written characters. We have already noticed the Chinese tradition that their earliest ancestors used knotted cords as a means of communication and record. Their first written signs were no development out of these, but a substitution for them. They were, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, simple pictures of ​the objects represented: such are, in fact, the beginnings of every system of written signs for thought, not less necessarily than onomatopoetic utterances, designating acts and qualities, are the beginnings of every system of spoken signs. Thus, the sun was denoted by a circle with a point within, the moon by a crescent, a mountain by a triple peak, a tree and a man by rude figures representing their forms, and so on. Signs were provided thus for a considerable number of natural objects; those, namely, which are most familiarly noted and most easily depicted. But such cannot supply otherwise than in small part the needs of a written language, any more than onomatopoetic signs those of a spoken language. Their store was notably increased by the compounding of two or more simple signs; as the vocabulary of a language by the composition of spoken elements. For example, the signs for 'mountain' and 'man,' put together, signified 'hermit;' those for 'eye' and 'water' signified 'tear;' those for 'woman,' 'hand,' and 'broom,' meant 'housekeeper.' A simple symbolism often came in to aid, both in the case of single and of compound signs. A banner pointing one way signified 'left;' the other way, 'right;' an ear between two doors gave the meaning of 'listen;' 'sun' and 'moon,' taken together, indicated 'light;' 'mouth' and 'bird' made up 'song,' and so on. This is equivalent to the transfer of meaning of a word, effected through a simple association. But the most abundant means of multiplication of the resources of Chinese expression was found in the introduction of a phonetic principle, and the combination of phonetic and ideographic elements into a compound sign. The language, as we saw in the ninth lecture, is full of homonyms, words identical in phonetic form but of different meaning: a sign being found for a word in one of its many senses, either by direct representation or by symbolism, the device was very naturally suggested of making the same sign answer for some of its other meanings also, by the aid of an appended diacritical sign. It was quite as if we, for instance, had learned to signify sound in "safe and sound" symbolically by a circle (as being peculiarly the complete, unbroken figure), and had then suffered it to represent the same ​phonetic compound in its other senses, distinguishing each by some suggestive mark: thus, adding an ear on either side might make it signify 'sound, audible noise;' a sign for 'water' written within it would intimate the meaning of 'sound, an arm of the sea;' a depending line and plummet, that of 'sound, to try the depth of anything.' For example, there is in China a certain simple sign having the pronunciation pe, and meaning 'white' (what the object represented is, and in virtue of what property it was chosen to signify this conception, is now no longer known); then, with the sign for 'tree' prefixed, it means 'pe, a kind of cypress;' with the sign for 'man,' it means 'pe, elder brother;' with the sign for 'manes,' it means 'pe, the vital principle in its existence after death;' and so forth. Some signs are thus very extensively used to form compound characters, in connection with various others that bear a phonetic value in the compound; two of those already instanced are among the most common of them: the sign for 'man' enters into nearly six hundred combinations, all denoting something that has a special relation to man; that for 'tree' enters into more than nine hundred, which denote kinds of trees, wood and things made of wood, and such like matters. Their analogy with the formative elements of spoken language is very evident; they are signs which limit the general value of the phonetic radical, putting it in a certain class or category of meanings.
The Chinese mode of writing, unlike the Egyptian, has been ready to forget and lose sight of its hieroglyphic origin, to convert its characters, when once the needed association was formed between them and their significance, into signs wholly conventional, bearing no traceable resemblance to the objects they originally depicted, and made liable to any modifications which practical convenience, or a sense for symmetry, or mere fancy, should suggest and recommend. In this, again, it offers a manifest analogy with what we have repeatedly shown to be the legitimate and laudable tendency of spoken language. The characters have passed through a variety of transitional forms on their way to that in which they are at present ordinarily written, and which was itself ​established more than a thousand years since: some of these intermediate forms are still preserved in monuments and ancient documents, and to a certain extent even now employed for special uses—as the older phases of many a spoken tongue are kept to the knowledge of posterity by like means; and as a Frenchman, for example, of the present day may clothe his thoughts, upon occasion, in an Old French or a Latin dress. Their current shape has been determined mainly by the customary instruments of writing and the manner of their use—these have exercised all the modifying and adapting force which in a spoken tongue belongs to a powerful euphonic tendency, like that which has made all Italian words end in vowels, and has worn off from French vocables the syllables which followed after the accented one in their Latin originals. And so thoroughly has their hieroglyphic origin been covered up and concealed by these transformations that no one, from their present aspect, would venture even to conjecture that they had started from outlines of natural objects; nor would the older preserved documents suffice to prove this; the truth lay only within reach of the Chinese themselves, as having access to traditional information from yet more ancient times. We have no right to be surprised, then, if the onomatopoetic beginnings of speech, dating from a period compared with which the origin of Chinese writing is but as yesterday, are no longer to be distinctly traced in the worn and altered facts of such language as is now accessible to our researches.
Another set of causes has powerfully influenced the development of the Chinese written expression: namely, the poverty of the spoken tongue, and the felt need of giving it an aid and support from without. The system of signs combines a phonetic and ideographic nature in a manner peculiarly its own. It is rather an auxiliary language, than a reduction of speech to writing. It supplies the defects and removes the ambiguities of the language it represents; it might be learned and used without any regard paid to its phonetic equivalents; and if the Chinese were but willing to forego converse by the tongue and ear, substituting for them the hand and eye, it would answer the purposes of their ​communication vastly better, with its forty thousand signs for ideas, than the spoken means now chiefly employed, with its scant thousand or two. While the uttered vocabulary of the Chinese is one of the poorest in the world, their written one is eminently rich and abundant. This farther analogy with spoken languages it has, that, as was in the first lecture (p. 18) shown to be true of the latter, only a part of its resources are required for the ordinary uses of life: not more than eight or ten thousand of its characters are otherwise than very rare, and all common needs are supplied by from three to five thousand.
One more important mode of writing is said to be distinctly traceable to a hieroglyphic origin: namely, the cuneiform, the character of the monuments of Mesopotamia and the neighbouring countries. Its signs are made up of various combinations of wedge-shaped elements: hence the name "cuneiform" (from Latin cuneiformis, 'wedge-shaped'); they are also sometimes called "arrow-headed characters," from the same peculiarity. There are several different cuneiform alphabets, the older of them being exceedingly intricate and difficult, made up of phonetic, ideographic, and symbolic signs, variously intermingled; and sometimes farther complicated, it is said, with combinations which were phonetic in the language for which they were originated, and have been transferred to the use of another with their old meaning, but a different spoken value (somewhat, as has been pointed out, as we write viz., an abbreviation of Latin videlicet, and read it "namely"). Much that regards the history and relations of the different systems of cuneiform characters is, and may always remain, obscure: but it is confidently claimed that evidences are found which prove their beginnings to have been pictorial; and the peculiar form of their component elements is fully recognized as a consequence of the way in which they were originally written—namely, by pressure of the corner of a square-ended instrument upon tablets of soft clay; these being afterwards dried or burned, to make the record permanent. That, through such intermediate steps even as these, a hieroglyphic system may finally pass over into one truly alphabetic, is shown by the ​derivation from the Mesopotamian cuneiform of the Persian, which is by far the simplest and the best understood of all the systems of its class, being purely phonetic and almost purely alphabetic. It contains about thirty-five signs of simple sounds, some of those for the consonants being partially of a syllabic character—that is to say, being different according as the consonant was to be followed by one or another vowel. In this simpler cuneiform are written the Achæmenidan inscriptions, of which we have already more than once had occasion to take notice, as preserving to us an Indo-European dialect. The history of its formation is unknown.
I have called the Achæmenidan cuneiform a partially syllabic mode of writing; and syllabic systems have played so important and prominent a part in the general history of writing—in the main, traceably as derivatives from methods of a different character—that it is necessary for us to pay them here a little special attention. A pure syllabic alphabet is one whose letters represent syllables, instead of articulations; which makes an imperfect phonetic analysis of words, not into the simple sounds that compose them, but into their syllabic elements; which does not separate the vowel from its attendant consonant or consonants, but denotes both together by an indivisible sign. Such an analysis is more natural and easy to make than one which distinguishes all the phonetic elements—especially in the case of languages of a simple structure, which do not favour difficult consonantal combinations, and therefore make up but a limited number of syllables. Many times, accordingly, when some race has made acquaintance with the art of writing as practised by another, and, instructed and incited by the latter's example, has set about representing its own spoken tongue by written signs, it has fallen first upon the syllabic method. One of the most noted alphabets of this kind is the Japanese kata-kana, or irofa (so called from the names of its first signs, like alphabet, from alpha, beta), to which we have already once had occasion to allude (in the ninth lecture): it was made out of fragments of Chinese characters, and contained forty-seven different signs, one for each of the ​syllables of which the Japanese words were made up: for the spoken alphabet of the language then included only ten consonants and five vowels, and no syllable contained more than one vowel, with a single preceding consonant. A similar alphabet was devised for the Cherokee language, not many years ago, by an ingenious member of the tribe, George Guess, who, though he had never learned to read English, had seen and possessed English books, and knew in general what was their use: it contained eighty-five signs, mostly fashioned out of English letters, though with total disregard of their original value.
Another and a less pure form of syllabic alphabet is that which treats the consonant alone as the substantial part of the syllable, and looks upon the vowel as something of subordinate consequence—as it were, a colouring or affection of the consonant. In its view, then, only the consonant has a right to be written, or to be written in full; the accompanying vowel, if taken note of at all, must be indicated by some less conspicuous sign, attached to the consonant. Peculiar and arbitrary as this mode of conceiving of the syllable may seem to us, it is historically of the highest importance; for upon it was founded the construction of the ancient Semitic alphabet, which has been the parent of the methods of writing used by the great majority of enlightened nations, since the beginning of history. It is not difficult to see how the character of Semitic language should have prompted, or at least favoured, such an estimate of the comparative value of vowel and consonant. In Semitic roots and words (as was explained in the eighth lecture), the consonants are the principally significant, the substantial, element; the vowels bear a subordinate office, that of indicating, as formative elements, the modifications and relations of the radical idea; the former are stable and invariable, the latter liable to constant change. Perhaps we should not be going too far, if we were to say that only a language so constructed could have such an alphabet. Be this as it may, the ancient Semitic alphabet—of which the Phenician is the generally accepted type, being, whether original or not, its oldest traceable form—was a system of twenty-two signs, all of them possessing ​consonantal value: three, however—namely, the signs for the semi-vowels y and w, and for what we may call the "smooth breathing"—partaking somewhat of a vowel character, and being under certain circumstances convertible into representatives of the vowels, i, u, and a.
The Phenician alphabet was thus strictly and exclusively a phonetic system, though one of a peculiar and defective type. We cannot possibly regard it, therefore, as an immediate and original invention; it must have passed, in the hands either of the Semites themselves or of some other people, through the usual preliminary stages of a pictorial or hieroglyphic mode of writing. More probably, its elements were borrowed from one or another of the nations, of yet earlier civilization, by whom we know the Semitic races to have been surrounded, before they entered on their own historic career. The traditional names of its characters are the recognizable appellations of natural objects, and each name has for its initial letter that sound which is designated by the character: thus, the sign for b is called beth, 'house;' that for g, gimel, 'camel;' that for d, daleth, 'door;' in some cases, moreover, a degree of resemblance is traceable between the form of the letter and the figure of the object whose name it bears. This, so far as it goes, would evidently point toward that application of the hieroglyphic principle which, as we saw above (p. 454), made the figures of the lion and eagle represent in Egyptian use the letters l and a. The subject of the ultimate history of the Phenician alphabet, however, is too obscure and too much controverted for us to enter here into its discussion; investigations of it have reached hitherto no satisfactory results.
The diffusion which this alphabet and its derivatives have attained is truly wonderful. From it come, directly or indirectly, the three principal Semitic alphabets, the Hebrew, the Syriac, and the Arabic, the last of which has gained currency over no inconsiderable part of the Old World, being employed by nations of diverse race, Indo-European (Persian, Afghan, and Hindustani), Scythian (Turkish), and Polynesian (Malay); while the Syriac has spread, through the Uigur Turkish, Mongol, and Manchu, to the farthest north-eastern Asia. The eastern Iranian and the Indian alphabets have ​been traced, though more doubtfully, to the same source; and India, especially, has been a home where it has developed into new and richer forms, and whence it has been extended over a vast region, in Asia and the islands lying southward from Asia—reaching at last, in its remote derivatives, conditions as unlike to the original and to one another as are the late dialects of a widely disseminated family of languages. In nearly all these countries, through all its various metamorphoses, it has held fast, in the main, to its primitive character of a consonantal alphabet, with omission, or with partial or subordinated designation, of the vowels. But in its progress in the other direction, toward Europe, it fell first into the hands of the Greeks; and from them it received its final perfection, by the provision of signs enabling it to represent the vowels not less distinctly than the consonants. In the Greek alphabet, for the first time in all our review of the history of written speech, we find realized what we cannot but regard as the true ideal of a mode of writing—namely, that it be simply a faithful representation of spoken speech, furnishing a visible sign for every audible sound that the voice utters, not attempting to distinguish any class of sounds as of more importance than another, nor to set itself up as an independent instrumentality for the conveyance of thought by overpassing the limits of utterance, and assuming to give more or other than the voice gives in speaking.
From the Greek alphabet have been derived, by modifications and adaptations of greater or less consequence, several others, used by peoples of each of the grand divisions of the eastern continent—as the Coptic of later Egypt, already referred to, and the Armenian; the runes of some of the Germanic tribes also, and the early Celtic modes of writing, trace their origin back to it, mainly through the Latin; as does the modern Russian, the most ungainly and unsymmetrical, perhaps, of all its descendants. But the Latin alphabet itself is beyond all comparison the most important of its derivative forms. The Greek colonies of southern Italy were the means of bringing Greek letters to the knowledge of the inhabitants of the peninsula, and several of the Italian nations—the Etruscans, Umbrians, and Oscans, as well as the ​Latins—provided themselves with alphabets derived from the Greek. All these excepting the last have passed away, along with the nationalities and languages to which they belonged; but the Latin alphabet has become the common property of nearly all the enlightened nations of modern times whose civilization is derived from that of Greece and Rome; while, under European influence, its use has also extended and is extending among the races of inferior endowments and culture, even crowding out, to some extent, their indigenous and less convenient modes of writing.
Our examination of the history of writing might here properly enough be closed; yet the particular interest which we take in our own alphabet will justify us in delaying a little, to note the principal steps of the process by which it has been derived from the Phenician—so far, at least, as it is possible to do this without graphic illustration. We shall also thus see more clearly how a borrowed system is wont to be modified and expanded, in passing from the service of one language into that of another. There is never a precise accordance between the phonetic systems, the spoken alphabets, of any two languages, so that a written alphabet which suits the one can be immediately applied to the other's uses; and hence the history of every scheme of characters which has won a wide currency, among various nations, presents a succession of adaptations, more or less wisely and skilfully made.
The chief change wrought upon the Phenician alphabet by the Greeks consisted, as has been already pointed out, in the provision of signs for the vowels. The Semitic tongues, as compared with the Greek, were characterized by an excess of guttural and sibilant sounds: the superfluous signs representing these, then, were put to divers new uses in Greece; our A, E, and O were to the Phenicians designations of certain guttural breathings, having the value of consonants; the semivowel y being wanting in Greek, its sign was greatly altered and simplified to form our I; the sign for w was retained by the early Greeks as the digamma (though abandoned later); for u, they invented a wholly new character, V or Y (which are by origin only varying graphic forms of the same letter). ​The other Greek alterations and additions may be passed over, as of less account.
The Latin alphabet was taken from one of the older forms of the Greek, before the characters of the latter had assumed in all points the form and value with which we are most familiar—when the H, for example, had still its value as a breathing, and had not been converted into a long ē. The system of spoken sounds for which the Latin required written representatives was but a simple one: to the fifteen articulations which, as we saw in the seventh lecture (p. 265), had been the primitive possession of the Indo-European family, it had added but three, the medial vowels e and o, and the labial spirant f (it had, indeed, the semivowels y and w also, but did not distinguish them in writing from the vowels i and u, with which they are so nearly identical: I and J, U and V, are but graphic variations of the same sign). Nearly all the Latin letters are the same with the Greek, or differ from them only by slight diversities of form: but one or two points of discordance need a word of explanation. The Latin system is most peculiar in rejecting the K, which was found in every Greek alphabet, of whatever period or locality, and in writing both its k and g sounds at first by a single letter, C, the ancient sign for the g-sound only: then, when it came to itself, and felt again the need of a separate designation for each, it knew no better than to retain the C for the k-sound, and to add a diacritical mark at its lower end, making a G, for the purpose of denoting the corresponding sonant, g. By a somewhat similar process of transfer, we have come to write the p-sound by the sign, P, which formerly belonged to the r: when the older sign for p, , had assumed a shape so nearly agreeing with the P that the two were not readily distinguished from one another, a tag was hung upon the crook of the latter as a further diacritical mark, and it was thus made into R. For the f-sound, the ancient sign for w, the Greek digamma, F, was somewhat arbitrarily adopted, its only special recommendation being that both w and f were labials. The Q represents an old Phenician letter, a deeper guttural than k, rejected by the later Greek alphabets as superfluous—and really no better than superfluous in the Latin, where the ​pronunciation of the k-sound before u did not differ enough from its pronunciation before a and o to call for an independent notation. Of the remaining three Latin letters, the X is a Greek invention (used in some Greek alphabets also with its Latin value, or representing xi, instead of chi), and, as standing for the double sound ks, not less needless than Q; Y and Z are later importations out of the Greek alphabet, and used only in Greek words, to signify peculiar Greek sounds (the Greek upsilon having by this time changed its value of u for that of the French u, German ü).
The changes which we, in our turn, have introduced into the Latin alphabet, in adapting it to our purposes, are not insignificant, although far from being enough to make it represent our spoken language as fully and consistently as it formerly did that of the Romans. Besides the eighteen articulations of the early Romans, we have (as was shown above, in the third lecture) at least fourteen others which call more or less imperatively for separate designation. There are the a of cat and care, the a of what and all, and the u of cut and curl; there are the two semi-vowel sounds, y and w, the palatal nasal (which we commonly write with ng, as in singing), the three sibilants, z, sh, and zh (the z of azure), the two sounds of th, in thin and thine, and the v of valve; and, finally, the compound consonants ch (in church) and j (in judge). Some of these needs we have managed to provide for: we have turned the two forms of the Latin i, I and J, into two separate letters, with very different values; we have done the same thing with the two forms of u, V and U, converting the former into a sign for the sonant labial spirant; by doubling the same character, we have made one wholly new letter, w, for the labial semi-vowel; and we have utilized y and z, as semi-vowel and sonant sibilant. We have also brought k back into its old place—yet without perceptible gain, since its introduction makes c superfluous; k, c, and s having but two sounds to designate among them. The new characters which the Anglo-Saxons had devised for expressing the two th-sounds we have unfortunately suffered to go out of use again. And q and x are still as useless to us as they were of old to the Romans. Hence, we have virtually only ​twenty-three letters wherewith to write at least thirty-two sounds. In the process of phonetic change, whose tendency is always toward the increase of the spoken alphabet, the filling up of the system of articulated sounds by the distinction of slighter and more nicely differentiated shades of articulation, our spoken alphabet has very notably outgrown the limits of our written alphabet.
To this cause are to be attributed, in part, the anomalies of our orthography. But only in the lesser part. If an alphabet is hardly able to enlarge itself to the dimensions of a growing body of sounds, it is because men do not easily learn to write their words otherwise than as they have been accustomed to do, even when they have learned to pronounce them otherwise—and the same cause operates in other ways yet more effectually to bring about a discordance between the spoken and the written language. It has been the misfortune of the English to pass, during its written period, through the most important crisis in its history, its mixture with the Norman French, also a written tongue: not only were the discordant orthographic usages of the two thus forced together within the limits of the same language, but a period of both orthoëpic and orthographic confusion was introduced—and the orthographic confusion has been, in great measure, only stereotyped, not remedied, by the usage of later times.
We of the present age have thus been in a measure deprived, not by our own fault, of the advantages belonging to a phonetic mode of writing—advantages which seemed to have been secured to us by the joint labours of so many races and so many generations. And yet, we are not altogether without fault in the matter, for we are consenting unto the deeds of our fathers and predecessors. As a community, we are not content with accepting as inevitable our orthographical inheritance, and resolving to make the best of it, despite its defects; we even defend it as being better than any other; we strive to persuade ourselves that an etymological or a historical mode of spelling, as we phrase it, is inherently preferable to a phonetic. Now it is altogether natural and praiseworthy that we should be strongly attached to a time-honoured institution, in the possession of which we have grown up, ​and which we have learned to look upon as a part of the subsisting fabric of our speech; it is natural that we should love even its abuses, and should feel the present inconvenience in ourselves of abandoning it much more keenly than any prospective advantage which may result to us or our successors from such action; that we should therefore look with jealousy upon any one who attempts to change it, questioning narrowly his right to set himself up as its reformer, and the merits of the reforms he proposes. But this natural and laudable feeling becomes a mere blind prejudice, and justly open to ridicule, when it puts on airs, proclaims itself the defender of a great principle, regards inherited modes of spelling as sacred, and frowns upon the phonetist as one who would fain mar the essential beauty and value of the language. Of all the forms of linguistic conservatism, or purism, orthographic purism is the lowest and the easiest; for it deals with the mere external shell or dress of language, and many a one can make stout fight in behalf of the right spelling of a word whose opinion as to its pronunciation even, and yet more its meaning and nice application, would possess no authority or value whatever; hence it is also the commonest, the least reasonable, and the most bigoted. When it claims to be asserting a principle, it is only defending by casuistry a prejudice; it determines beforehand to spell in the prevailing mode, and then casts about to see what reasons besides the mode it can find for doing so, in each particular case. It overwhelms with misapplied etymologic learning him who presumes to write honor and favor for honour and favour (as if it were highly desirable to retain some reminiscence of the French forms, honneur and faveur, through which we have derived them from the Latin honor and favor), and then insists just as strongly, upon neighbour (which is neither French nor Latin); it is not more concerned to preserve the l of calm (Latin calmus) than that of could (Anglo-Saxon cudhe: the l has blundered in, from fancied analogy with would and should), the g of sovereign (Old-English soveraine, French souverain, Italian sovrano) than that of reign (Latin regnum), the s of island (Anglo-Saxon ealand) than that of isle (Old-French isle, Latin insula); it upholds such anomalies as women, which ​offends equally against the phonetic and the etymological principle (it comes from Anglo-Saxon wîf-men). How much better were it to confess candidly that we cling to our modes of spelling, and are determined to perpetuate them, simply because they are ours, and we are used to and love them, with all their absurdities, rather than try to make them out inherently desirable! Even if the irregularities of English orthography were of historical origin throughout—as, in fact, they are so only in part—it is not the business of writing to teach or suggest etymologies. We have already noted it as one of the distinguishing excellencies of the Indo-European languages, that they are so ready to forget the derivation of a term in favour of the convenience of its practical use: he, then, is ready to abnegate a hereditary advantage of his mode of speech, who, for the sake of occasional gratification to a few curious heads, would rivet for ever upon the millions of writers and readers of English the burden of such an orthography. The real etymologist, the historic student of language, is wholly independent of any such paltry assistance, and would rejoice above measure to barter every "historical" item in our spelling during the last three hundred years for a strict phonetic picture of the language as spoken at that distance in the past. Nor do we gain a straw's weight of advantage in the occasional distinction to the eye of words which are of different signification, though pronounced alike: our language is not so Chinese in its character as to require aid of this sort; our writing needs not to guard against ambiguities which are never felt in our spoken speech; we should no more miss the graphic distinction of meet, meat, and mete, of right, write, and rite, than we do now that of the two cleave's and page's, the three or four found's and sound's, or the other groups of homonyms of the same class.
It may well be the case that a thorough reform of English orthography will be found for ever impracticable; it certainly will be so, while the public temper remains what it now is. But let us at any rate acknowledge the truth, that a reformation is greatly to be desired, and perhaps, at some time in the future, a way will be found to bring it about. If we expect and wish that our tongue become one day a world-language, ​understood and employed on every continent and in every clime, then it is our bounden duty to help prepare the way for taking off its neck this heavy millstone. How heavy, we are hardly able to realize, having ourselves well-nigh or quite forgotten the toil it once cost us to learn to read and speak correctly; yet we cannot help seeing how serious an obstacle to the wide extension of a language is a mode of writing which converts it, from one of the easiest in the world, into one of the hardest, for a foreigner to acquire and use.
The English is already, perhaps, spoken and written as mother-tongue by a greater number of persons than any other existing dialect of high cultivation; and its sphere seems to be widening, at home and abroad, more rapidly than that of any other. If it ever becomes a world-language, it will do so, of course, not on account of its superiority as a form of human speech—since no one ever yet abandoned his own vernacular and adopted another because the latter was a better language—but by the effect of social and political conditions, which shall widen the boundaries of the English-speaking community. Yet we cannot but be desirous to convince ourselves that it is worthy of so high a destiny. To trust our own prepossessions upon this point may be very easy and comfortable, but is not quite safe. The universal tendency among men to exaggerate the advantages of their own mode of speech and depreciate those of others would make us, in spite of our sincere attempts at impartiality, more than just to our beloved mother-tongue—even though we might be willing to allow that, as all advantages cannot be found united in one individual, each of its rivals among the cultivated dialects of the present or of the past may surpass it in one or another respect. It does not lie in our way to take up the matter seriously, inquiring and determining what is the absolute rank of the English among languages; yet it may be worth while to give a few moments' consideration to one or two points that bear upon the question.
We have, in the first place, already had occasion to notice that a language is just what the people to whom it belongs ​have made it by their use; it is the reflection of their minds,and of their minds' contents; its words and phrases are instinct with all the depth, the nobility, the subtilty, and the beauty that belongs to their thought; it can be made to express at least as much, and as well, as it has been made to express. A literature, then, is one grand test of the worth of a language—and it is one by which we need not fear to see tried that of our own. It is not national prejudice that makes us claim for English literature, in respect to variety and excellence, a rank second to none. We can show, in every or nearly every department, men who have made our English tongue say what no other tongue has exceeded.
This is not, however, the only test. We cannot but ask also how our language is fitted to admit and facilitate that indefinite progress and extension of thought and knowledge to which we look forward as the promise of the future. Has it all the capacity of development which could be desired for it? In their bearing upon this inquiry, two of its striking peculiarities—the two most conspicuous, in the view of the historical student of language—call for special notice: namely, its uninflective or formless character, and its composition out of two somewhat heterogeneous elements, Germanic and Romanic.
Both these peculiarities have been made the subject of repeated reference in our discussions hitherto. For its poverty in formative elements, for its tendency to monosyllabism, for its inclusion of many parts of speech in the same unvaried word, we have compared English more than once with Chinese. But we must beware of misapprehending the scope and reach of the comparison. There is a curious and suggestive analogy between the present geographical position of the English and Chinese races and the present character of their languages. Since our occupation of the whole breadth of the American continent, the speakers of these two tongues look over to one another as nearest neighbours across the intervening Pacific. But the situation of the Chinese people is the result of simple quiescence in their primeval abode; while the English, setting forth probably from the depths of the same Orient, have reached the seats ​they now occupy, in the sequel of an adventurous and conquering career which has led them around nearly the whole earth, and leaves them masters of many of its fairest portions, under the most varied skies. The virtual distance between the two is therefore almost world-wide; it is to be measured by the course which the English race has traversed, rather than by the distance which still separates its outposts from China. So the English language, starting in that monosyllabism which the Chinese has never quitted, has made the whole round of possible development, till its most advanced portions have almost come back again to their original state; but it still holds in possession much of the territory over which it has passed, and is dowered with all the wealth which it has gathered on its way; it has passed through all stages and varieties of enrichment, and has kept fast hold of their most valuable products. It is therefore in its essential character as far removed from the Chinese as is the Greek. Its resources for the expression of relations, for the sufficient distinction of the categories of thought, are hardly inferior to those of the tongues of highest inflective character: they are of another kind, it is true, but one which, if it has its disadvantages, has its advantages as well. Our analytic flection has a practical value equivalent to that even of the rich synthesis of the classical tongues; and in this respect also we need confess to no disabling inferiority, as compared with the speakers of other cultivated languages.
That, again, the English is a mixed tongue, may not be denied. There has not been that assimilation of its two elements which is the natural result of a complete fusion. The length of our words of Latin origin, as compared with the Saxon, is a plain external indication of this: take anywhere a page of English, and you will find that its Saxon words average less than half as long as those of other derivation. What would have been the natural tendency of the language with respect to these long forms is shown by its treatment of words borrowed earlier from the classical tongues: thus, it has worked down moneta into mint, küriake into church, presbüteros into priest, eleēmosünē into alms, and so on. Only the specially conservative forces of learned culture and the ​habit of writing have saved many others of our sesquipedalian Latin elements from a like fate. We have, then, in a certain sense, two languages combined: one of root-words, prevailingly monosyllabic; the other of long derived forms, whose roots and derivation are in the main unrecognizable by the mass of speakers: and the latter must often lack something of that freshness and direct force which belong to the former. But, on the one hand, we have seen above (toward the end of the third lecture) that the etymological connections of a word are, after all, of very subordinate consequence in determining its degree of significant force and suggestiveness; and, on the other hand, there has been, to no small extent, a real amalgamation of our two vocabularies, the Germanic and Romanic: among the words, mainly Saxon, which answer the commonest and simplest uses of communication, there are not a few also of Latin origin; and some Latin suffixes are familiarly added to Saxon themes, as well as the contrary. Our Latin words thus range from the extreme of homeliness and familiarity to the extreme of learned stateliness, and furnish the means of attaining a great diversity of styles. At the same time, the partial Romanization of our language throughout its whole structure renders it possible for us to naturalize more thoroughly, and use more adroitly, the words which, in common with all other tongues of enlightened nations at the present day, we are obliged to import in great numbers for the designation of objects and relations of learned knowledge. Richness of synonymy, variety of style, and power of assimilation of new learned material, are, then, our compensation for whatever of weakness may cling to our language by reason of the discordance of its constituent elements.
Our general conclusion must be that, if the English is not entitled to all the exaggerated encomiums which are sometimes heaped upon it, if it has no right to be set at the head of all languages, living or extinct, it is at least worthy of all our love and admiration, and will not be found unequal to anything which the future shall require of it—even should circumstances make it the leading tongue of civilized humanity. For what it is to become, every individual who ​employs it shares in the responsibility. The character of a language is not determined by the rules of grammarians and lexicographers, but by the usage of the community, by the voice and opinion of speakers and hearers; and this work most naturally and effectively when it works most unconsciously. Clear and manly thought, and direct and unaffected expression, every writer and speaker can aim at; and, by so doing, can perform his part in the perfecting of his mother-tongue.
With these few words respecting our own language, which must be the subject of highest interest with every student of language, to whom it is native, I bring to a close our consideration of the subject of these lectures, thanking you for your kind and patient attention to my exposition of it, and hoping that what I have said may not be without effect in helping you to clear apprehensions of the nature and history of one of man's noblest gifts and most valuable acquisitions.
* ↑ In drawing up this sketch of the history of writing, I have to acknowledge my special obligations to Professor Steinthal's admirable essay on the Development of Writing (Die Entwickelung der Schrift), published at Berlin, in 1862 (8vo, pp. 113).
* ↑ It is one of those given by Steinthal, who extracts it from Schoolcraft's work on the Indian Tribes, vol. i. p. 352.