334 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 in- 

 vented ; 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 feel- 

 ings excited by the sight of a beautiful landscape, or an Alpine 

 range, may be but imperfectly suggested only by the multitudi- 

 nous 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 Tor ni la grandeur ne nous rendent 

 heureux," "Dove ci e despotismo, non ci h virtii" (Gaetano Filan- 

 gieri), " Er war armlich, aber doch sauber gekleidet," " Me ipsum 

 ames oportet, non mea" (Cicero), we habitually omit words for- 

 mally necessary to the sentence, but not needed to convey its 

 meaning. As, moreover, words are dropped from phrases, so let- 

 ters are dropped from words. When there is no literature to 

 stereotype a form, as in the case of the native American lan- 

 guages, 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, an- 

 cient and modern, display the process in their colloquial forms. 

 Thus the process which turned anima into dme, femina into 

 fernme, and pundum into point, which converted the earlier Latin 

 ad diem into the later Latin of ad die, and in Italian shortened 

 de ah illo monte into dal monie, has its analogue in the Bas-Valais 

 peasant's contraction of genisse into fni and eteindre into tede ; 

 in the Berlin workman's conversion of "IcJi" into "J"'; in the 

 English reduction of " I love-did " to " I loved," " boatswain " to 



