Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/153

III.] valuable substance, caoutchouc, was first brought to us, we could find for it no better use than the rubbing out of pencil-marks. A whole chapter of literary history is included in the derivation of romantic from Rome: it tells of the rise of rude popular dialects, alongside the learned and polished Latin, in the various provinces of the Roman empire; and of the rise of modern European fiction, written so distinctively in these dialects that it got its name from them; and, finally, of the tone and style of fictitious writing, and the characters it deals with. In like manner, a chapter of religious history is summed up in the word pagan (literally, 'villager'): it tells of the obstinate conservation of heathenism in the villages and hamlets under Roman dominion, when the cities had already learned and embraced Christianity. And, once more, slave suggests a chapter in ethnological history: it tells of the contempt in which the Slaves or Slavonians of eastern and central Europe were held by the more powerful and cultivated Germans, and of the servitude to which so many of them were reduced. Several among the words we have thus instanced—as lunatic, candidate, romantic, money—farther include, as an essential part of their history, the career of one great conquering and civilizing power, the Roman, whose language, along with its knowledge and institutions, has been spread to every part of the globe. The etymology of moon, as signifying 'measurer'’ has given us an interesting glimpse of the modes of thought of that primitive people who first applied this name to the earth's satellite, and to whom her office as a divider of times was so prominent among her attributes. And this is but one among innumerable instances in which our conceptions of olden times and peoples are aided, are made definite and vivid, by like means. To study the moral and intellectual vocabulary of any tongue is of high interest, and full of instruction as to the laws and phenomena of association which have led to its development out of the earlier signs for physical and sensible things: we are constantly brought to the recognition both of the unity of human nature, as shown by the general resemblances which such study brings to light, and of the diversity of human character and