Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/144

122 There may be found among them, indeed, every degree of reflection, sometimes rising even to full premeditation. When there is first brought to the knowledge of a community some new substance or product, either natural or artificial, some result of invention or discovery, some process formerly unknown, people ask themselves deliberately "what shall we call it?" and it is by a conscious effort that they devise and assign its appellation—there being, at the same time, an unconscious part to the process; namely, the manner in which their selection is guided and determined by the already subsisting usages and analogies of their speech, and by the limitations of their intelligence. The zoölogist, the chemist, the geologist, when they want a new technical term or distinctive name, go of set purpose to such sources as their Greek and Latin dictionaries, or search out local or personal associations upon which to found their choice; they con over the various distinctive qualities or accidental circumstances of the thing to be denominated, and weigh the capabilities and advisabilities of the case as deliberately as does the father when deciding after which rich uncle, or what noted public character, he shall have his son christened. Sometimes the scientific man has put upon him the task of devising a terminology, as well as a nomenclature—as was the case with those French chemists, at the end of the last century, who fixed the precise scientific meaning to be thenceforth signified by a whole apparatus of formative elements, of suffixes and prefixes: for example, in sulphuret, sulphuric, sulphurous, sulphate, sulphite, sulphide, bisulphate, sesquisulphide, and so on. This is, indeed, of the nature of an artificial universal language, built up of precise, sharply distinguished, and invariably regular signs for the relations of ideas—such a language as some have vainly imagined it possible to invent and teach for all the infinitely varied needs of speech, and for the use of the whole human race: the chemical terminology is, in its own sphere, of universal applicability, and is adopted by chemists of various race and native tongue. But human language is not made in this way. The most important and intimate part of linguistic growth, that which