Part 6 (2/2)

This one example is sufficient to show that new words will often repay any amount of attention which we may bestow upon them, and upon the conditions under which they were born. I proceed to consider the causes which suggest or necessitate their birth, the periods when a language is most fruitful in them, the sources from which they usually proceed, with some other interesting phenomena about them.

And first of the causes which give them birth. Now of all these causes the n.o.blest is this--namely, that in the appointments of highest Wisdom there are epochs in the world's history, in which, more than at other times, new moral and spiritual forces are at work, stirring to their central depths the hearts of men. When it thus fares with a people, they make claims on their language which were never made on it before.

It is required to utter truths, to express ideas, remote from it hitherto; for which therefore the adequate expression will naturally not be forthcoming at once, these new thoughts and feelings being larger and deeper than any wherewith hitherto the speakers of that tongue had been familiar. It fares with a language then, as it would fare with a river bed, suddenly required to deliver a far larger volume of waters than had hitherto been its wont. It would in such a case be nothing strange, if the waters surmounted their banks, broke forth on the right hand and on the left, forced new channels with a certain violence for themselves. Something of the kind they must do. Now it was exactly thus that it fared--for there could be no more ill.u.s.trious examples--with the languages of Greece and Rome, when it was demanded of them that they should be vehicles of the truths of revelation.

These languages, as they already existed, might have sufficed, and did suffice, for heathenism, sensuous and finite; but they did not suffice for the spiritual and infinite, for the truths at once so new and so mighty which claimed now to find utterance in the language of men. And thus it continually befell, that the new thought must weave a new garment for itself, those which it found ready made being narrower than that it could wrap itself in them; that the new wine must fas.h.i.+on new vessels for itself, if both should be preserved, the old being neither strong enough, nor expansive enough, to hold it. [ Footnote: Renan, speaking on this matter, says of the early Christians: La langue leur faisait defaut. Le Grec et le Semitique les trahissaient egalement. De la cette enorme violence que le Christianisme naissant fit au langage (_Les Apotres_, p. 71)] Thus, not to speak of mere technical matters, which would claim an utterance, how could the Greek language possess a word for 'idolatry,' so long as the sense of the awful contrast between the wors.h.i.+p of the living G.o.d and of dead things had not risen up in their minds that spoke it? But when Greek began to be the native language of men, to whom this distinction between the Creator and the creature was the most earnest and deepest conviction of their souls, words such as 'idolatry,' 'idolater,' of necessity appeared. The heathen did not claim for their deities to be 'searchers of hearts,'

did not disclaim for them the being 'accepters of persons'; such attributes of power and righteousness entered not into their minds as pertaining to the objects of their wors.h.i.+p. The Greek language, therefore, so long as they only employed it, had not the words corresponding. [Footnote: [Greek: Prosopolaeptaes, kardiognostaes.]]

It, indeed, could not have had them, as the Jewish h.e.l.lenistic Greek could not be without them. How useful a word is 'theocracy'; what good service it has rendered in presenting a certain idea clearly and distinctly to the mind; yet where, except in the bosom of the same Jewish Greek, could it have been born? [Footnote: We preside at its birth in a pa.s.sage of Josephus, _Con. Apion._ ii. 16.]

These difficulties, which were felt the most strongly when the thought and feeling that had been at home in the Hebrew, the original language of inspiration, needed to be transferred into Greek, reappeared, though not in quite so aggravated a form, when that which had gradually woven for itself in the Greek an adequate clothing, again demanded to find a suitable garment in the Latin. An example of the difficulty, and of the way in which the difficulty was ultimately overcome, will ill.u.s.trate this far better than long disquisitions. The cla.s.sical language of Greece had a word for 'saviour' which, though often degraded to unworthy uses, bestowed as a t.i.tle of honour not merely on the false G.o.ds of heathendom, but sometimes on men, such as better deserved to be styled 'destroyers' than 'saviours' of their fellows, was yet in itself not unequal to the setting forth the central office and dignity of Him, who came into the world to _save_ it. The word might be likened to some profaned temple, which needed a new consecration, but not to be abolished, and another built in its room. With the Latin it was otherwise. The language seemed to lack a word, which on one account or another Christians needed continually to utter: indeed Cicero, than whom none could know better the resources of his own tongue, remarkably enough had noted its want of any single equivalent to the Greek 'saviour.' [Footnote: Hoc [Greek: soter] quantum est? ita magnum ut Latine uno verbo exprimi non possit.] 'Salvator' would have been the natural word; but the cla.s.sical Latin of the best times, though it had 'salus' and 'salvus,' had neither this, nor the verb 'salvare'; some, indeed, have thought that 'salvare' had always existed in the common speech. 'Servator' was instinctively felt to be insufficient, even as 'Preserver' would for us fall very short of uttering all which 'Saviour' does now. The seeking of the strayed, the recovery of the lost, the healing of the sick, would all be but feebly and faintly suggested by it, if suggested at all. G.o.d '_preserveth_ man and beast,'

but He is the 'Saviour' of his own in a more inward and far more endearing sense. It was long before the Latin Christian writers extricated themselves from this embarra.s.sment, for the 'Salutificator'

of Tertullian, the 'Sospitator' of another, a.s.suredly did not satisfy the need. The strong good sense of Augustine finally disposed of the difficulty. He made no scruple about using 'Salvator'; observing with a true insight into the conditions under which new words should be admitted, that however 'Salvator' might not have been good Latin before the Saviour came, He by his coming and by the work had made it such; for, as shadows wait upon substances, so words wait upon things.

[Footnote: _Serm_. 299. 6: Christus Jesus, id est Christus Salvator: hoc est enim Latine Jesus. Nec quaerant grammatici quam sit Latinum, sed Christiani, quam verum. Salus enim Latinum nomen est; salvare et salvator non fuerunt haec Latina, antequam veniret Salvator: quando ad Latinos venit, et haec Latina fecit. Cf. _De Trin_. 13. 10: Quod verb.u.m [salvator] Latina lingua antea non habebat, sed habere poterat; sicut potuit quando voluit. Other words which we owe to Christian Latin, probably to the Vulgate or to the earlier Latin translations, are these--'carnalis,' 'clarifico,' 'compa.s.sio,' 'deitas' (Augustine, _Civ.

Dei_, 7. i), 'glorifico,' 'idololatria,' 'incarnatio,' 'justifico,'

'justificatio,' 'longanimitas,' 'mortifico,' 'magnalia,' 'mundicors,'

'pa.s.sio,' 'praedestinatio,' 'refrigerium' (Ronsch, _Vulgata_, p. 321), 'regeneratio,' 'resipiscentia,' 'revelatio,' 'sanctificatio,'

'soliloquium,' 'sufficientia,' 'supererogatio,' 'tribulatio.' Many of these may seem barbarous to the Latin scholar, but there is hardly one of them which does not imply a new thought, or a new feeling, or the sense of a new relation of man to G.o.d or to his fellow-man. Strange too and significant that heathen Latin could get as far as 'peccare' and 'peccatum,' but stopped short of 'peccator' and 'peccatrix.'] Take another example. It seemed so natural a thing, in the old heathen world, to expose infants, where it was not found convenient to rear them, the crime excited so little remark, was so little regarded as a crime at all, that it seemed not worth the while to find a name for it; and thus it came to pa.s.s that the word 'infanticidium' was first born in the bosom of the Christian Church, Tertullian being the earliest in whose writings it appears.

Yet it is not only when new truth, moral or spiritual, has thus to fit itself to the lips of men, that such enlargements of speech become necessary: but in each further unfolding of those seminal truths implanted in man at the first, in each new enlargement of his sphere of knowledge, outward or inward, the same necessities make themselves felt.

The beginnings and progressive advances of moral philosophy in Greece, [Footnote: See Lobeck, _Phrynichus_, p. 350.] the transplantation of the same to Rome, the rise of the scholastic, and then of the mystic, theology in the Middle Ages, the discoveries of modern science and natural philosophy, these each and all have been accompanied with corresponding extensions in the domain of language. Of the words to which each of these has in turn given birth, many, it is true, have never travelled beyond their own peculiar sphere, having remained purely technical, or scientific, or theological to the last; but many, too, have pa.s.sed over from the laboratory and the school, from the cloister and the pulpit, into everyday use, and have, with the ideas which they incorporate, become the common heritage of all. For however hard and repulsive a front any study or science may present to the great body of those who are as laymen in regard of it, there is yet inevitably such a detrition as this continually going forward, and one which it would be well worth while to trace in detail.

Where the movement is a popular one, stirring the heart and mind of a people to its depths, there these new words will for the most part spring out of their bosom, a free spontaneous birth, seldom or never capable of being referred to one man more than another, because in a manner they belong to all. Where, on the contrary, the movement is more strictly theological, or has for its sphere those regions of science and philosophy, where, as first pioneers and discoverers, only a few can bear their part, there the additions to the language and extensions of it will lack something of the freedom, the unconscious boldness, which mark the others. Their character will be more artificial, less spontaneous, although here also the creative genius of a single man, as there of a nation, will oftentimes set its mark; and many a single word will come forth, which will be the result of profound meditation, or of intuitive genius, or of both in happiest combination--many a word, which shall as a torch illuminate vast regions comparatively obscure before, and, it may be, cast its rays far into the yet unexplored darkness beyond; or which, summing up into itself all the acquisitions in a particular direction of the past, shall furnish a mighty vantage- ground from which to advance to new conquests in those realms of mind or of nature, not as yet subdued to the intellect and uses of man.

'Cosmopolite' has often now a shallow or even a mischievous use; and he who calls himself 'cosmopolite' may mean no more than that he is _not_ a patriot, that his native country does _not_ possess his love. Yet, as all must admit, he could have been no common man who, before the preaching of the Gospel, launched this word upon the world, and claimed this name for himself. Nor was he a common man; for Diogenes the Cynic, whose sayings are among quite the most notable in antiquity, was its author. Being demanded of what city or country he was, Diogenes answered that he was a 'cosmopolite'; in this word widening the range of men's thoughts, bringing in not merely a word new to Greek ears, but a thought which, however commonplace and familiar to us now, must have been most novel and startling to those whom he addressed. I am far from a.s.serting that contempt for his citizens.h.i.+p in its narrower sense may not have mingled with this his challenge for himself of a citizens.h.i.+p wide as the world; but there was not the less a very remarkable reaching out here after truths which were not fully born into the world until _He_ came, in whom and in whose Church all national differences and distinctions are done away.

As occupying somewhat of a middle place between those more deliberate word-makers and the mult.i.tude whose words rather grow of themselves than are made, we must not omit him who is a _maker_ by the very right of his name--I mean, the poet. That creative energy with which he is endowed, 'the high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet,' will not fail to manifest itself in this region as in others. Extending the domain of thought and feeling, he will scarcely fail to extend that also of language, which does not willingly lag behind. And the loftier his moods, the more of this maker he will be. The pa.s.sion of such times, the all-fusing imagination, will at once suggest and justify audacities in speech, upon which in calmer moods he would not have ventured, or, venturing, would have failed to carry others with him: for it is only the fluent metal that runs easily into novel shapes and moulds. Nor is it merely that the old and the familiar will often become new in the poet's hands; that he will give the stamp of allowance, as to him will be free to do, to words which hitherto have lived only on the lips of the people, or been confined to some single dialect and province; but he will enrich his native tongue with words unknown and non-existent before--non-existent, that is, save in their elements; for in the historic period of a language it is not permitted to any man to do more than work on pre-existent materials; to evolve what is latent therein, to combine what is apart, to recall what has fallen out of sight.

But to return to the more deliberate coining of words. New necessities have within the last few years called out several of these deliberate creations in our own language. The almost simultaneous discovery of such large abundance of gold in so many quarters of the world led some nations so much to dread an enormous depreciation of this metal, that they ceased to make it the standard of value--Holland for instance did so for a while, though she has since changed her mind; and it has been found convenient to invent a word, 'to demonetize' to express this process of turning a precious metal from being the legal standard into a mere article of commerce. So, too, diplomacy has recently added more than one new word to our vocabulary. I suppose n.o.body ever heard of 'extradition' till within the last few years; nor of 'neutralization'

except, it might be, in some treatise upon chemistry, till in the treaty of peace which followed the Crimean War the 'neutralization' of the Black Sea was made one of the stipulations. 'Secularization,' in like manner, owes its birth to the long and weary negotiations which preceded the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Whenever it proved difficult to find anywhere else compensation for some powerful claimant, there was always some abbey or bishopric which with its revenues might be seized, stripped of its ecclesiastical character, and turned into a secular possession. Our manifold points of contact with the East, the necessity that has thus arisen of representing oriental words to the western world by means of an alphabet not its own, with the manifold discussions on the fittest equivalents, all this has brought with it the need of a word which should describe the process, and 'transliteration' is the result.

We have long had 'a.s.similation' in our dictionaries; 'dissimilation'

has as yet scarcely found its way into them, but it speedily will. [It has already appeared in our books on language. [Footnote: See Skeat's _Etym. Dict_. (s. v. _truffle_). Pott (_Etym. Forsch_. vol. ii. p. 65) introduced the word 'dissimilation' into German.]] Advances in philology have rendered it a matter of necessity that we should possess a term to designate a certain process which words unconsciously undergo, and no other would designate it at all so well. There is a process of 'a.s.similation' going on very extensively in language; the organs of speech finding themselves helped by changing one letter for another which has just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not 'a_df_iance,' but 'a_ff_iance,' not 're_n_ow_m_,' as our ancestors did when 'renom' was first naturalized, but 're_n_ow_n_'; we say too, though we do not write it, 'cu_b_board' and not 'cu_p_board,'

'su_t_tle' and not 'su_b_tle.' But side by side with this there is another opposite process, where some letter would recur too often for euphony or ease in speaking, were the strict form of the word too closely held fast; and where consequently this letter is exchanged for some other, generally for some nearly allied; thus 'cae_r_uleus' was once 'cae_l_uleus,' from caelum [Footnote: The connexion of _caeruleus_ with _caelum_ is not at all certain.] 'me_r_idies' is for 'me_d_idies/ or medius dies. In the same way the Italians prefer 've_l_eno' to 've_n_eno'; the Germans '_k_artoffel' to '_t_artuffel,' from Italian 'tartufola' = Latin terrae tuber, an old name of the potato; and we 'cinnamo_n_' to 'cinnamo_m_' (the earlier form). So too in 'turtle,'

'marble,' 'purple,' we have shrunk from the double '_r_' of 'turtur,'

'marmor,' 'purpura.' [Footnote: See Dwight, _Modern Philology_, 2nd Series, p. 100; Heyse, _System der Sprachwissenschaft_, Section 139- 141; and Peile, _Introduction to Greek and Latin Etymology_, pp. 357- 379.] New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions, evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but did not formerly exist, because in an anterior period they were not required. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own verses, 'singer' (aoidos) sufficiently expressed the double function; such a 'singer' was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus, the bard of the Phaeacians; that double function, in fact, not being in his time contemplated as double, but each of its parts so naturally completing the other, that no second word was required. When, however, in the division of labour one made the verses which another chaunted, then 'poet' or 'maker,' a word unknown to the Homeric age, arose. In like manner, when 'physicians' were the only natural philosophers, the word covered this meaning as well as that other which it still retains; but when the investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself from the art of healing, became an independent study, the name 'physician' remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the art, while the new offshoot sought out and obtained a new name for itself.

But it is not merely new things which will require new names. It will often be discovered that old things have not got a name at all, or, having one, are compelled to share it with something else, often to the serious embarra.s.sment of both. The manner in which men become aware of such deficiencies, is commonly this. Comparing their own language with another, and in some aspects a richer, compelled, it may be, to such comparison through having undertaken to transfer treasures of that language into their own, they become conscious of much worthy to be uttered in human speech, and plainly utterable therein, since another language has found utterance for it; but which hitherto has found no voice in their own. Hereupon with more or less success they proceed to supply the deficiency. Hardly in any other way would the wants in this way revealed make themselves felt even by the most thoughtful; for language is to so large an extent the condition and limit of thought, men are so little accustomed, indeed so little able, to contemplate things, except through the intervention, and by the machinery, of words, that the absence of words from a language almost necessarily brings with it the absence of any sense of that absence. Here is one advantage of acquaintance with other languages besides our own, and of the inst.i.tution that will follow, if we have learned those other to any profit, of such comparisons, namely, that we thus become aware that names are not, and least of all the names in any one language, co- extensive with things (and by 'things' I mean subjects as well as objects of thought, whatever one can _think_ about), that innumerable things and aspects of things exist, which, though capable of being resumed and connoted in a word, are yet without one, unnamed and unregistered; and thus, vast as may be the world of names, that the world of realities, and of realities which are nameable, is vaster still. Such discoveries the Romans made, when they sought to transplant the moral philosophy of Greece to an Italian soil. They discovered that many of its terms had no equivalents with them; which equivalents thereupon they proceeded to devise for themselves, appealing for this to the latent capabilities of their own tongue. For example, the Greek schools had a word, and one playing no unimportant part in some of their philosophical systems, to express 'apathy' or the absence of all pa.s.sion and pain. As it was absolutely necessary to possess a corresponding word, Cicero invented 'indolentia,' as that 'if I may so speak' with which he paves the way to his first introduction of it, sufficiently declares. [Footnote: _Fin_. ii. 4; and for 'qualitas' see _Acad_. i. 6.] Sometimes, indeed, such a skilful mint-master of words, such a subtle watcher and weigher of their force as was Cicero, [Footnote: Ille verborum vigilantissimus appensor ac mensor, as Augustine happily terms him.] will have noticed even apart from this comparison with other languages, an omission in his own, which thereupon he will endeavour to supply. Thus the Latin had two adjectives which, though not kept apart as strictly as they might have been, possessed each its peculiar meaning, 'invidus' one who is envious, 'invidiosus' one who excites envy in others; [Footnote: Thus the monkish line: _Invidiosus_ ego, non _invidus_ esse laboro.] at the same time there was only one substantive, 'invidia' the correlative of them both; with the disadvantage, therefore, of being employed now in an active, now in a pa.s.sive sense, now for the envy which men feel, and now for the envy which they excite. The word he saw was made to do double duty; under a seeming unity there lurked a real dualism, from which manifold confusions might follow. He therefore devised 'invidentia,' to express the active envy, or the envying, no doubt desiring that 'invidia'

should be restrained to the pa.s.sive, the being envied. 'Invidentia' to all appearance supplied a real want; yet Cicero himself did not succeed in giving it currency; does not seem himself to have much cared to employ it again. [Footnote: _Tusc._ iii. 9; iv. 8; cf. Doderlein, _Synon._ vol. iii, p. 68.] We see by this example that not every word, which even an expert in language proposes, finds acceptance; [Footnote: Quintilian's advice, based on this fact, is good (i. 6. 42): Etiamsi potest nihil peccare, qui ut.i.tur iis verbis quae summi auctores tradiderunt, multum tamen refert non solum quid _dixerint_, sed etiam quid _persuaserint_. He himself, as he informs us, invented 'vocalitas'

to correspond with the Greek [Greek: euphonia] (_Inst.i.t._ i. 5. 24), but I am not conscious that he found any imitators here.] for, as Dryden, treating on this subject, has well observed, 'It is one thing to draw a bill, and another to have it accepted.' Provided some words live, he must be content that others should fall to the ground and die.

Nor is this the only unsuccessful candidate for admission into the language which Cicero put forward. His 'indolentia' which I mentioned just now, hardly pa.s.sed beyond himself; [Footnote: Thus Seneca a little later is unaware, or has forgotten, that Cicero made any such suggestion. Taking no notice of it, he proposes 'impatientia' as an adequate rendering of [Greek: apatheia]. There clung this inconvenience to the word, as he himself allowed, that it was already used in exactly the opposite sense (_Ep_. 9). Elsewhere he claims to be the inventor of 'essentia' (_Ep_. 38;.)] his 'vitiositas,' [Footnote: _Tusc_. iv. 15.]

'indigentia,' [Footnote: _Ibid_. iv. 9. 21.] and 'mulierositas,'

[Footnote: _Ibid_. iv. ii.] not at all. 'Beat.i.tas' too and 'beat.i.tudo,'

[Footnote: Nat. Dear. i. 34.] both of his coining, yet, as he owns himself, with something strange and unattractive about them, found almost no acceptance at all in the cla.s.sical literature of Rome: 'beat.i.tude,' indeed, obtained a home, as it deserved to do, in the Christian Church, but 'beat.i.tas' none. Coleridge's 'esemplastic,' by which he was fain to express the all-atoning or unifying power of the imagination, has not pleased others at all in the measure in which it pleased himself; while the words of Jeremy Taylor, of such Latinists as Sir Thomas Browne and Henry More, born only to die, are mult.i.tudinous as the fallen leaves of autumn. [Footnote: See my _English Past and Present_, 13th edit. p. 113.] Still even the word which fails is often an honourable testimony to the scholars.h.i.+p, or the exactness of thought, or the imagination of its author; and Ben Jonson is over-hard on 'neologists,' if I may bring this term back to its earlier meaning, when he says: 'A man coins not a new word without some peril, and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is a.s.sured,' [Footnote: Therefore the maxim: Moribus antiquis, praesentibus utere verbis.]

I spoke just now of comprehensive words, which should singly say what hitherto it had taken many words to say, in which a higher term has been reached than before had been attained. The value of these is incalculable. By the cutting short of lengthy explanations and tedious circuits of language, they facilitate mental processes, such as would often have been nearly or quite impossible without them; and such as have invented or put these into circulation, are benefactors of a high order to knowledge. In the ordinary traffic of life, unless our dealings are on the smallest scale, we willingly have about us our money in the shape rather of silver than of copper; and if our transactions are at all extensive, rather in gold than in silver: while, if we were setting forth upon a long and costly journey, we should be best pleased to turn even our gold coin itself into bills of exchange or circular notes; in fact, into the highest denomination of money which it was capable of a.s.suming. How many words with which we are now perfectly familiar are for us what the circular note or bill of exchange is for the traveller or the merchant. As innumerable pence, a mult.i.tude of s.h.i.+llings, not a few pounds are gathered up and represented by one of these, so have we in some single word the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, ascending one above the other, until all have been at length summed up for us in that single word. This last may be compared to nothing so fitly as to some mighty river, which does not bring its flood of waters to the sea, till many rills have been swallowed up in brooks, and brooks in streams, and streams in tributary rivers, each of these affluents having lost its separate name and existence in that which at last represents and contains them all.

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