Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/48

16 words denoting purely spiritual ideas are all evolved from roots expressing mere sensuous perceptions, if these words are thus confessedly accidental or arbitrary or conventional signs, without any essential or necessary relation to the notions signified, although they are a necessary growth from the original verbal stem, the real question at issue is set at rest. The sensations expressed in these primary words are felt by infants, by the deaf and dumb, by brute animals, as well as by speaking men; they might therefore, rather they must, have been felt by man before he made the first attempt to acquaint his comrade with the thoughts which were passing in his own mind. The word was needed not to enable him to realise the perception for himself, but to give him the power of awakening the same idea in another. It mattered not, therefore, what sound conveyed the thought, so long as the signal or message was understood; and thus, where at the outset all was arbitrary, there might be many signs for the same object or the same idea. The notions which, as we have seen, found expression in words derived from the roots MR or ML, might have been denoted as easily by words derived from the stem GR. And in fact the latter has been scarcely less fertile than the former. To it we owe the words which denote the grating and grinding sound of things rubbed forcibly against each other, the grain which serves as grist for the mill, the gravel which the digger scrapes up as he delves his grave, the groan of pain, the grunt of indolence, the scribbling of the child and the delicate engraving of a Bewick or an Albert Durer. We see, further, that words drawn from imitations of natural sounds have furnished names for impressions made on other senses besides that of hearing, and that a presumption is thus furnished for the similar origin of all words whatsoever.

It may seem a poor foundation for a fabric so magnificent as the language of civilised mankind; but whatever belief may be entertained of the first beginnings of articulate speech, the gradual growth of language from its earliest elements is disputed by none; and the examination of our own language carries us back to a condition of thought not many degrees higher than that of tribes which we regard as sunk in hopeless barbarism. Yet that this difference of degree involved in this instance a difference of kind is proved by the very