Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/154

 148 LANGUAGE are as yet the only means attained of giving a rational account of the development of lan- guage. There remains, however, the difficulty of explaining how, prior to any knowledge of language, man was led to signify his concep- tions by spoken words, and to devise such mod- ulations for the purpose as to give rise to the same conceptions in the minds of others equally ignorant of language ; but, as Farrar attempts to prove in his work " On the Origin of Lan- guage" (London, 1860), it would seem that man is led instinctively to the articulate repro- duction of natural sounds, and that the con- ception that it was possible to express in sound the inward emotions arose from the felt signifi- cance of the instinctive and involuntary cries which are the germs of interjections. Simi- larly, says Bleek in his Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (Weimar, 1868), the sounds of sen- sations and imitations are natural and involun- tary utterances of emotions which are excited by the play of the organs. The lately deceased Lazarus Geiger, in his Ursprung und Entwicke- lung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft (Stuttgart, 1868 and 1872), a work^of admi- rable learning and ingenuity, attempts to de- monstrate that all words were developed from a single primitive form, analogous to the evolu- tion of the organisms of animals and plants, and to the development of races and peoples. As German and Sanskrit, French and Italian, once formed a single language, and their diver- sities are due only to the prolonged separation of the peoples, he is led to believe that all the languages of the earth grew out of a single germ, and that the still greater diversities are owing only to more extended periods of separation. Without rejecting the proposition of the mi- metic and exclamatory theories that man be- gan to speak by imitating the sounds which he heard animate beings or inanimate objects pro- duce, Geiger is of opinion that man was guided in the selection of utterances by that which he saw, or that he grouped every new sound under some other sound with which he was familiar. He further holds that the use of lan- guage in a measure preceded and produced reasoning, or at least that thought without language must have been different from the present mode of thinking by means of and with language. He arrives consequently at the con- clusion that man could speak before he was in possession of tools and implements. The interdependence of thought and language, and the independence of the one from the other, have ever been subjects of philosophical dis- cussion, but unproductive of positive results. Hence, linguistic scholars have many theories in regard to the measure and degree of such relationships. Prof. Whitney, for example, holds fast to his conclusion that thought is an- terior to language, and independent of it, and that thought need not be internally or exter- nally expressed in order to be thought. This, however, lies beyond the sphere of the science of language proper. Only the development of language within more or less historical times, based on researches into the condition of real languages either of the present or the past, can admit of truly scientific study. Etymology is the science of tracing the history of words, and of determining the laws according to which words change form and meaning in the history of a single language, or in a group of related languages, and if possible through all languages, back to the germinal words of the beginnings of speech. Languages change very rapidly. The language spoken in Koine about A. D. 1000 was widely different from the language of the ancient Komans or the modern Italians. The speech of the aborigines of Africa changes so rapidly that, according to the experience of missionaries, that of any particular tribe becomes entirely incomprehensible within a single generation. About 900 languages and 5,000 dialects are now known. The difficul- ty of deducing for all certain laws of growth and change is therefore apparent. In all lan- guages words have been constructed by putting together previously existing forms of words. Thus, previous to the form irrevocability, there was irrevocable, which was preceded by revocable, which again was formed from re- voice (Fr. revoquer, Latin revocare), which, with evoke, invoke, and provoke, was com- posed from the Latin verb vocare, to call, whose element is toe. All the suffixes and prefixes employed in the composition of these words have their own distinct meaning and office, and some of them formed at one time independent words. When the final element of a word, like voc, in Sanskrit vak, has been found, which is the case when a combina- tion of letters has been reached which cannot be further stripped of formative parts, then the so-called root of a word has been obtained. Thus Chinese, though actually possessing about 40,000 words, has only about 450 roots ; Hebrew and Sanskrit have about 500 roots ; and prob- ably no language has many more. Primary roots consist of only a vowel, as i, to go ; or of a vowel and consonant, as ed, to eat ; or of consonant and vowel, as da, to give. Secon- dary roots have a vowel enclosed by two con- sonants, as tud, to push. Tertiary roots have two consonants followed by a vowel, or one vowel followed by two consonants, or first two consonants, then a vowel followed by an- other consonant, or two consonants, a vow( and again two consonants; as plu, to flow; ard, to hurt ; spas, to spy ; spand, to trern^bh Out of such simple and few roots not only th< words of one but of numerous languages hav been formed. Thus from the Sanskrit root comes the Latin arare, Greek apovv, Irish ar, Lithuanian arti, Russian orati, Gothic arjan, Anglo-Saxon erjan, English ear (the verb), many other words in the same and other guages. Similar examples of the connection existing among the languages related to Eng- lish and ancient Sanskrit, as well as the law? which seem to regulate the changes of sounc"