434 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Greek was better adapted to give utterance to the inmost thought of his 

 soul than his native Latin. It is doubtful whether an adequate Eng- 

 lish translation of his " Meditations " exists as yet. The late Carl 

 Schurz, who was " master " of two languages in a widely different 

 sense from that usually given to this much-abused word, was wont to 

 say that for certain subjects he preferred the English and for others 

 the German. In his mind each possessed excellencies which the other 

 lacked. 



Until recently almost all students of human speech accepted the 

 theory that abstract ideas or concepts are its ultimate elements. It 

 was held that the mind itself supplies an inherent basis of knowledge in 

 all our cognitions. A name is a mere empty sign, a meaningless 

 symbol, unless there be a preceding mental image of the object which it 

 represents, or an abstract conception in the mind of which it is the 

 sign. The mental image must precede the name, the abstract concep- 

 tion must be anterior to the sign, if it is to be understood. Ideas must 

 precede the visible or audible or tactile signs. A child knows a great 

 many things before it can speak the name. This being the case, the 

 moon is the " measurer," the sun the " light-giver," from roots meaning 

 to measure and to shine. Fifty years ago, Professor Max Miiller worked 

 out this theory with much detail and popularized it with a profusion 

 of poetic imagery. At the present day, however, it is no longer taken 

 seriously by the most competent judges. Most persons conversant 

 with the facts admit that in nearly all languages there are roots that 

 seem to express purely abstract ideas; but whether these are the oldest 

 elements is another question. Dogs and other brutes know the names 

 of objects as well as their uses although they never learn to speak the 

 former. A careful study of the radical elements of many languages 

 has led some philologists to maintain that the earliest words were a 

 sort of cross between a name in action and an appended demonstrative. 

 To walk or to eat would thus mean " walker-that-one," or " walker-he " ; 

 " eater-this-one," or " eater-he." In some of the languages spoken by 

 tribes at the foot of the economic ladder words are used in a sense 

 utterly foreign to our modes of thought. In the Innuit, for example, 

 " he is my son " really means he so?is me; " thou art my son " is I son 

 thee; " he sons me " is equivalent to I am his son. We find a trace of 

 this mode of thought in English owing to the lack of characteristic 

 suffixes, as when Shakespeare says : " Cowards father cowards." Fami- 

 liar examples of this dual nature of words are boycott, out-Herod, 

 water, table, " move on," " get a move on you " ; and many more. 



The endeavor to give utterance to internal speech, as we may call it, 

 has called into existence an astonishing number of word-forms to ex- 

 press number, person, gender and case. These various relations are 

 indicated by prefixes, suffixes and infixes, or by separate words. In 

 English the plural is, for the most part, formed by the addition of 



