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334 with sufficient frequency to demand formal attention for the social purposes of language. Thus, if only one railway collision had ever occurred, the word "telescoped" would never have been invented; so a single case of "marauding" or of "boycotting" would have been totally insufficient to bring into existence these now familiar terms. It is because most emotional states are too complex ever to recur a second time in the same form and sequence that they can never become fixed by language, and that the feelings excited by the sight of a beautiful landscape, or an Alpine range, may be but imperfectly suggested only by the multitudinous epithets of a poem, and need a new poem to suggest them every time they are felt. The naming faculty is in fact called into action only as impressions emerge into familiarity: for the changing complex of the activities and relations that never recur twice in the same way, and often never recur at all, the mind has no process of classification, and therefore no concepts that can be named.

Uttered speech is full of the signs of this ever-present striving after economy. Observe the constant omission of particles and words whenever intelligibility is to be attained without them. Where gestures will suffice to convey our meaning—a beck of the hand, it may be, or a shrug of the shoulders—we do not need speech, or, when we do, a "Pooh-pooh!" a "Mind!" or a "Beware!" will often answer all our purposes. We say "in French" for "in the French language"; "Thanks!" for "I thank you"; "Herein!" for "Kommen Sie herein!" In phrases like "I go to-morrow, not you," "Ni l'or ni la grandeur ne nous rendent heureux," "Dove ci è despotismo, non ci è virtù" (Gaetano Filangieri), "Er war ärmlich, aber doch sauber gekleidet," "Me ipsum ames oportet, non mea" (Cicero), we habitually omit words formally necessary to the sentence, but not needed to convey its meaning. As, moreover, words are dropped from phrases, so letters are dropped from words. When there is no literature to stereotype a form, as in the case of the native American languages, degeneration by process of syncope sets in rapidly; it is not delayed long even for classic tongues, like Greek and Latin, or for their successors of the Romance family, on all of which phonetic decay has set its mark; while all literary tongues, ancient and modern, display the process in their colloquial forms. Thus the process which turned anima into áme, femina into femme, and punctum into point, which converted the earlier Latin ad diem into the later Latin of ad die, and in Italian shortened de ab illo monte into dal monte, has its analogue in the Bas-Valais peasant's contraction of génisse into j'ni and éteindre into tède; in the Berlin workman's conversion of "Ich" into "I'"; in the English reduction of "I love-did" to "I loved," "boatswain" to