384 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



through a glass darkly, what I see crystal clear in the synthetic posses- 

 sive Tyranny's by which I have rendered it. 



As I have already said in another connection, German in its noun 

 and. Spanish in its verb are at least as synthetic as Latin, spite of an 

 evolution longer by two thousand years. That these languages with 

 their rich flexional systems and their concords for gender, number and. 

 case are instruments more difficult in the use or less apt in the expres- 

 sion of the thought of Germans and Spaniards than English is for us is 

 sheer assumption; and it were a peculiarly chauvinistic obsession to 

 call German or Spanish languages of a lower type than English. In 

 the estimation of the difficulty that attaches to learning and using a 

 national tongue, no foreigner's opinion can possibly assess the difficulty 

 for the native. As regards the adequacy of a language to express the 

 thoughts of its native users, it may be said that no type of language 

 has ever been found inadequate. Homer's Nestor of the honied tongue 

 with many flexions; Demosthenes with fewer; Cicero with his adjective 

 cases and genders and his verb moods; Burke in a nearly flexionless 

 English : who shall say that one of these commanded a language of less 

 flexibility, a language less apt for the expression of thought, than 

 another? Did Greek flexions hamper Demosthenes, restrict his 

 thought? The appeal of Demosthenes to-day is in part due to De- 

 mosthenes, but in part to what used to be somewhat sentimentally called 

 the genius of the Greek language. I can conceive of a Zulu approxi- 

 mating Demosthenes before a Zulu audience, but not of a Zulu De- 

 mosthenes whose appeal could reach me, unless he had been steeped in 

 a Zulu literature accessible also to me. 



Language is the expression of thought, but it is more, it is the 

 prompter of thought. A word is not only what it means, it is all that 

 it suggests by association. Ehyme, often decried as a meretricious em- 

 bellishment, has helped modern poets to many a richer thought. Meta- 

 phor so completely triumphs over the worn and literal expression that 

 it may be said to do our thinking for us. But metaphor continually 

 wanes in the word till all becomes literal again. The metaphors of a 

 foreign language, of Greek and Latin, where they differ from our own, 

 freshen thought. Other freshening of metaphor is — slang. Demos- 

 thenes, the heir of all his ages, put his thoughts in Greek, but Greek no 

 less put her thoughts in him. Man is the weaver but words are the 

 yarn, and the yarn is delivered to him spun and dyed. Its strands are 

 thought, its color emotion. The weaver has, in fact, little to do. He 

 can at best but a little vary the conventional pattern, handed down to 

 him by his unlettered ancestors. Or again, changing the figure, we may 

 say that language carries its own organic ferments. These ferments set 

 the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling. These ferments supply a vapor 

 aglow with light that never was on land or sea. Some flash of a word 

 — and we see the stars; some sputtering word — and our noses flinch. 



