Part 4 (2/2)

Nor, indeed, is it hard to see why the language must contain such instruction as this, when we a little realize to ourselves the stages by which it has reached us in its present shape. There was a time when the languages which the English and the Norman severally spoke, existed each by the side of, but un-mingled with, the other; one, that of the small dominant cla.s.s, the other that of the great body of the people.

By degrees, however, with the reconciliation and partial fusion of the two races, the two languages effected a transaction; one indeed prevailed over the other, but at the same time received a mult.i.tude of the words of that other into its own bosom. At once there would exist duplicates for many things. But as in popular speech two words will not long exist side by side to designate the same thing, it became a question how the relative claims of the English and Norman word should adjust themselves, which should remain, which should be dropped; or, if not dropped, should be transferred to some other object, or express some other relation. It is not of course meant that this was ever formally proposed, or as something to be settled by agreement; but practically one was to be taken and one left. Which was it that should maintain its ground? Evidently, where a word was often on the lips of one race, its equivalent seldom on those of the other, where it intimately cohered with the whole manner of life of one, was only remotely in contact with that of the other, where it laid strong hold on one, and only slight on the other, the issue could not be doubtful.

In several cases the matter was simpler still: it was not that one word expelled the other, or that rival claims had to be adjusted; but that there never had existed more than one word, the thing which that word noted having been quite strange to the other section of the nation.

Here is the explanation of the a.s.sertion made just now--namely, that we might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an a.n.a.lysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it.

Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception (to be adduced presently), descend to us from them--'sovereign,' 'sceptre,' 'throne,'

'realm,' 'royalty,' 'homage,' 'prince,' 'duke,' 'count,' ('earl' indeed is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his 'countess' from the Norman), 'chancellor,' 'treasurer,' 'palace,' 'castle,' 'dome,' and a mult.i.tude more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of 'king' would make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new t.i.tle, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time to a.s.sert itself anew.

And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment, are Norman throughout; with the broad basis of the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire; the divisions of time; three out of the four seasons, spring, summer, and winter; the features of natural scenery, the words used in earliest childhood, the simpler emotions of the mind; all the prime social relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister,--these are of native growth and un-borrowed. 'Palace' and 'castle' may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe far dearer names, the 'house,' the 'roof,' the 'home,' the 'hearth.'

His 'board' too, and often probably it was no more, has a more hospitable sound than the 'table' of his lord. His st.u.r.dy arms turn the soil; he is the 'boor,' the 'hind,' the 'churl'; or if his Norman master has a name for him, it is one which on his lips becomes more and more a t.i.tle of opprobrium and contempt, the 'villain.' The instruments used in cultivating the earth, the 'plough,' the 'share,' the 'rake,'

the 'scythe,' the 'harrow,' the 'wain,' the 'sickle,' the 'spade,' the 'sheaf,' the 'barn,' are expressed in his language; so too the main products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats, bere, gra.s.s, flax, hay, straw, weeds; and no less the names of domestic animals. You will remember, no doubt, how in the matter of these Wamba, the Saxon jester in _Ivanhoe_, plays the philologer, [Footnote: Wallis, in his _Grammar_, p. 20, had done so before.] having noted that the names of almost all animals, so long as they are alive, are Saxon, but when dressed and prepared for food become Norman--a fact, he would intimate, not very wonderful; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and feeding them, but only that they might appear on the table of his Norman lord. Thus 'ox,' 'steer,' 'cow,' are Saxon, but 'beef' Norman; 'calf' is Saxon, but 'veal' Norman; 'sheep' is Saxon, but 'mutton'

Norman: so it is severally with 'swine' and 'pork,' 'deer' and 'venison,' 'fowl' and 'pullet.' 'Bacon,' the only flesh which perhaps ever came within the hind's reach, is the single exception. Putting all this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been indicated here, we should certainly gather, that while there are manifest tokens preserved in our language of the Saxon having been for a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of English life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after language; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic records, and the present social condition of England, consent in bearing witness.

Then again, who could doubt, even if the fact were not historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,'

'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,'

'zero '?--for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history were silent on the matter, we might conclude, and we know that we should rightly conclude, that the origins of the monastic system are to be sought in the Greek and not in the Latin branch of the Church, seeing that with hardly an exception the words expressing the const.i.tuent elements of the system, as 'anchorite,' 'archimandrite,' 'ascetic,' 'cen.o.bite,'

'hermit,' 'monastery,' 'monk,' are Greek and not Latin.

But the study of words will throw rays of light upon a past infinitely more remote than any which I have suggested here, will reveal to us secrets of the past, which else must have been lost to us for ever.

Thus it must be a question of profound interest for as many as count the study of man to be far above every other study, to ascertain what point of culture that Indo-European race of which we come, the _stirps generosa et historica_ of the world, as Coleridge has called it, had attained, while it was dwelling still as one family in its common home.

No voices of history, the very faintest voices of tradition, reach us from ages so far removed from our own. But in the silence of all other voices there is one voice which makes itself heard, and which can tell us much. Where Indian, and Greek, and Latin, and Teutonic designate some object by the same word, and where it can be clearly shown that they did not, at a later day, borrow that word one from the other, the object, we may confidently conclude, must have been familiar to the Indo-European race, while yet these several groups of it dwelt as one undivided family together. Now they have such common words for the chief domestic animals--for ox, for sheep, for horse, for dog, for goose, and for many more. From this we have a right to gather that before the migrations began, they had overlived and outgrown the fis.h.i.+ng and hunting stages of existence, and entered on the pastoral.

They have _not_ all the same words for the main products of the earth, as for corn, wheat, barley, wine; it is tolerably evident therefore that they had not entered on the agricultural stage. So too from the absence of names in common for the princ.i.p.al metals, we have a right to argue that they had not arrived at a knowledge of the working of these.

On the other hand, identical names for dress, for house, for door, for garden, for numbers as far as a hundred, for the primary relations of the family, as father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, for the G.o.dhead, testify that the common stock, intellectual and moral, was not small which they severally took with them when they went their way, each to set up for itself and work out its own destinies in its own appointed region of the earth. [Footnote: See Brugmann, _Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen_ (1886), Section 2.] This common stock may, indeed, have been much larger than these investigations declare; for a word, once common to all these languages, may have survived only in one; or possibly may have perished in all.

Larger it may very well, but poorer it cannot, have been. [Footnote: Ozanam (_Les Germains avant le Christianisme_, p. 155): Dans le vocabulaire d'une langue on a tout le spectacle d'une civilisation. On y voit ce qu'un peuple sait des choses invisibles, si les notions de Dieu, de l'ame, du devoir, sont a.s.sez pures chez lui pour ne souffrir que des termes exacts. On mesure la puissance de ses inst.i.tutions par le nombre et la propriete des termes qu'elles veulent pour leur service; la liturgie a ses paroles sacramentelles, la procedure a ses formules. Enfin, si ce peuple a etudie la nature, il faut voir a quel point il en a penetre les secrets, par quelle variete d'expressions, par quels sons flatteurs ou energiques, il a cherche a decrire les divers aspects du ciel et de la terre, a faire, pour ainsi dire, l'inventaire des richesses temporelles dont il dispose.]

This is one way in which words, by their presence or their absence, may teach us history which else we now can never know. I pa.s.s to other ways.

There are vast harvests of historic lore garnered often in single words; important facts which they at once proclaim and preserve; these too such as sometimes have survived nowhere else but in them. How much history lies in the word 'church.' I see no sufficient reason to dissent from those who derive it from the Greek [Greek: kyriakae], 'that which pertains to the Lord,' or 'the house which is the Lord's.'

It is true that a difficulty meets us at the threshold here. How explain the presence of a Greek word in the vocabulary of our Teutonic forefathers? for that _we_ do not derive it immediately from the Greek, is certain. What contact, direct or indirect, between the languages will account for this? The explanation is curious. While Angles, Saxons, and other tribes of the Teutonic stock were almost universally converted through contact with the Latin Church in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, or by its missionaries, some Goths on the Lower Danube had been brought at an earlier date to the knowledge of Christ by Greek missionaries from Constantinople; and this [Greek: kyriakae] or 'church,' did, with certain other words, pa.s.s over from the Greek to the Gothic tongue; these Goths, the first converted and the first therefore with a Christian vocabulary, lending the word in their turn to the other German tribes, to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers among the rest; and by this circuit it has come round from Constantinople to us. [Footnote: The pa.s.sage most ill.u.s.trative of the parentage of the word is from Walafrid Strabo (about A.D. 840): Ab ipsis autem Graecis Kyrch a Kyrios, et alia multa accepimus. Sicut domus Dei Basilica, i.e. Regia a Rege, sic etiam Kyrica, i.e. Dominica a Domino, nuncupatur. Si autem quaeritur, qua occasione ad nos vestigia haec graecitatis advenerint, dicendum praecipue a Gothis, qui et Getae, c.u.m eo tempore, quo ad fidem Christi perducti sunt, in Graecorum provinciis commorantes, nostrum, i.e. theotisc.u.m sermonem habuerint. Cf.

Rudolf von Raumer, _Einwirkung des Christenthums auf die Althochdeutsche Sprache_, p. 288; Niedner, _Kirch. Geschichte_, p. 2.

[It may, however, be as well to remark that no trace of the Greek [Greek: kyriakae] occurs in the literary remains of the Gothic language which have come down to us; the Gothic Christians borrowed [Greek: ekklaesia], as the Latin and Celtic Christians did.]]

Or again, interrogate 'pagan' and 'paganism,' and you will find important history in them. You are aware that 'pagani,' derived from 'pagus,' a village, had at first no religious significance, but designated the dwellers in hamlets and villages as distinguished from the inhabitants of towns and cities. It was, indeed, often applied to _all_ civilians as contradistinguished from the military caste; and this fact may have had a certain influence, when the idea of the faithful as soldiers of Christ was strongly realized in the minds of men. But it was mainly in the following way that it grew to be a name for those alien from the faith of Christ. The Church fixed itself first in the seats and centres of intelligence, in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire; in them its earliest triumphs were won; while, long after these had accepted the truth, heathen superst.i.tions and idolatries lingered on in the obscure hamlets and villages; so that 'pagans' or villagers, came to be applied to _all_ the remaining votaries of the old and decayed superst.i.tions, although not all, but only most of them, were such. In an edict of the Emperor Valentinian, of date A.D. 368, 'pagan' first a.s.sumes this secondary meaning.

'Heathen' has run a course curiously similar. When the Christian faith first found its way into Germany, it was the wild dwellers on the _heaths_ who were the slowest to accept it, the last probably whom it reached. One hardly expects an etymology in _Piers Plowman_; but this is there:

'_Hethene_ is to mene after _heth_, And untiled erthe.'

B. 15, 451, Skeat's ed. (Clarendon Press).

Here, then, are two instructive notices--one, the historic fact that the Church of Christ planted itself first in the haunts of learning and intelligence; another, morally more significant, that it did not shun discussion, feared not to encounter the wit and wisdom of this world, or to expose its claims to the searching examination of educated men; but, on the contrary, had its claims first recognized by them, and in the great cities of the world won first a complete triumph over all opposing powers. [Footnote: There is a good note on 'pagan' in Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, c. 21, at the end; and in Grimm's _Deutsche Mythol_.

p. 1198; and the history of the changes in the word's use is well traced in another interest by Mill, _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 271.]

I quoted in my first lecture the saying of one who, magnifying the advantage to be derived from such studies as ours, did not fear to affirm that oftentimes more might be learned from the history of a word than from the history of a campaign. Thus follow some Latin word,.

'imperator' for example; as Dean Merivale has followed it in his _History of the Romans_, [Footnote: Vol. iii. pp. 441-452.] and you will own as much. But there is no need to look abroad. Words of our own out of number, such as 'barbarous,' 'benefice,' 'clerk,' 'common-sense,'

'romance,' 'sacrament,' 'sophist,' [Footnote: For a history of 'sophist' see Sir Alexander Grant's _Ethics of Aristotle_, 2nd ed. vol.

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