Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/36

14 whom our lot was cast, to understand them and be understood by them, to learn what their greater wisdom and experience could impart to us. In order to this, we had to think and talk as they did, and we were content to do so. Why such and such a combination of sounds was applied to designate such and such an idea was to us a matter of utter indifference; all we knew or cared to know was that others so applied it. Questions of etymology, of fitness of appellation, concerned us not. What was it to us, for instance, when the answer came back to one of our childish inquiries after names, that the word mountain was imported into our tongue out of the Latin, through the Norman French, and was originally an adjective, meaning 'hilly, mountainous,' while hill had once a g in it, indicating its relationship with the adjective high? We recognized no tie between any word and the idea represented by it excepting a mental association which we had ourselves formed, under the guidance, and in obedience to the example, of those about us. We do, indeed, when a little older, perhaps, begin to amuse ourselves with inquiring into the reasons why this word means that thing, and not otherwise: but it is only for the satisfaction of our curiosity; if we fail to find a reason, or if the reason be found trivial and insufficient, we do not on that account reject the word. Thus every vocable was to us an arbitrary and conventional sign; arbitrary, because any one of a thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us and associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting usage of the community of which we formed a part.

Race and blood, it is equally evident, had nothing to do directly with determining our language. English descent would never have made us talk English. No matter who were our ancestors; if those about us had said wasser and milch, or eau and lait, or hūdōr and gala, instead of water and milk, we should have done the same. We could just as readily have accustomed ourselves to say lieben or aimer or philein, as love, wahrheit or vérité or alētheia, as truth. And so in every other case. An American or English mother,