LANGUAGE. 



the Scandinavian tongue of the Northmen who 

 settled in the north of France in the beginning of 

 the tenth century, was still more rapid and signal 

 When the descendants of those Northmen con- 

 quered England, only a century and a half after- 

 wards, they were thorough Frenchmen in tongue. 

 This conquest gave rise to another struggle between 

 a Teutonic tongue and the Neo-Latin. In this case, 

 the two were in some respects on an equal footing. 

 The Anglo-Saxon was a cultivated literary language 

 as well as the Norman-French ; and both peoples 

 were Christian, so that neither had to adopt the 

 religion of the other. The struggle was therefore 

 long, and the result doubtful. The French had 

 the advantage of being the language of the ruling 

 class and of the courts oft law ; and if, in addition, 

 the subject people had been heathens, and had 

 received their religion from their conquerors, the 

 inhabitants of Britain would, in all probability, 

 have now been speaking a French dialect As it 

 was, the Norman-French had to yield to the 

 weight of numbers, and be absorbed and assimi- 

 lated by the Anglo-Saxon. It had to content 

 itself with furnishing about half the vocabulary of 

 the common language now spoken by the united 

 peoples, while its rival furnished the rest, and the 

 mould in which the whole was cast, the grammar. 

 In the effort of assimilation, however, the Anglo- 

 Saxon grammatical forms were dislocated and 

 shattered, and now exist only in a mutilated form, 

 as compared with the German dialects, which 

 have not come through a like crisis. 



ROOTS. 



Root, in Philology, is that part which is com- 

 mon to a group of allied words the germ out of 

 which they have all sprung. It is arrived at by 

 taking away the formative parts the suffixes and 

 affixes, and reversing any change that their pres- 

 ence may have caused. Thus, in co-in-V/-ence, 

 the root-syllable is rid, the primary form of which 

 in Latin is cad, to fall. It is seldom that this anal- 

 ysis can be successfully performed with only one 

 language ; in order to get at the true root, the cor- 

 responding words in all the languages of the same 

 family must be compared. Thus, in the Eng. 

 words story, history, historical, historically, histor 

 would seem to be the root ; but by comparing the 

 Greek with the Latin and Sanscrit, we arrive at a 

 syllable vid, meaning to see or know, of which the 

 Eng. (to) wit (wist) is only another form. And 

 even then we are not sure that we have arrived 

 at the original and most simple form. Thus, Eng. 

 yoke, Lat. jugum, come from the syllable jug, to 

 join, seen in Lat. ju(n)go, Gr. zeugo ; and this 

 might be rested in as the root, were there not a 

 simpler form,_/, preserved in Sanscrit, and having 

 the meaning of mingling or being together ; this, 

 which may be taken as the primary root, gives 

 rise to the two secondary roots or modifications, 

 J u & to J 'n. and yudh, to fight (z. e. to join battle). 



The roots of the Aryan languages are always 

 monosyllabic, as /', to go ; ga, to go ; ad, to eat ; 

 vak, to speak ; star, to strew. They are divisible 

 into two classes, the one expressing some action 

 or general property, as in the instances now given ; 

 the other indicating relative position, as ma, here 

 or me ; ta, there or that. The one class are called 

 predicative roots ; the other, pronominal. They 

 all expressed primarily some physical notion or 



relation palpable to the senses ; but from these 

 the transition to the impalpable conceptions of 

 the mind is natural and obvious ; thus, vid, 'to see ' 

 served also for 'to know.' The notion expressed 

 by a root-word is always of a very general kind ; 

 but by a variety of expedients, such as length- 

 ening the vowel, reduplication of the syllable, pre- 

 fixing and affixing letters and syllables (many of 

 which at least are evidently pronominal roots), 

 and composition with other predicative roots, one 

 germ gives rise to a whole group of words expres- 

 sive of the specific applications of the generic idea; 

 e. g. from the root spac or spec (in Gr. skep\ to 

 look, have sprung a numerous family of words in 

 the English and other kindred tongues ; spy, de- 

 spise (to look down upon), spite (through old Fr. 

 despif), respite, respectable, suspicion, prospect, 

 inspect, auspices, speculum, species (i. e. the appear- 

 ance or individual form, as opposed to the kind 

 or genus), spices, &c. From the root (Sans) vid, 

 "(Gr.) id or eid, (Lat.) vid, (Teut.) wit or tvis, there 

 are upwards of a hundred derivatives in the 

 English language alone. 



It requires but a few germs to produce, by the 

 processes above described, the most copious vocab- 

 ulary. The 50,000 words of the Chinese diction- 

 ary are formed from 450 roots ; those of Hebrew 

 and of Sanscrit are reckoned at about 500 ; and 

 there are probably not many more in English. 



ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 



Having seen how words grow or are built up, 

 and traced them back to their roots, a still further 

 question presents itself : how, namely, these roots, 

 this raw material of language, came first into exist- 

 ence? Although this question is purely specu- 

 lative, it is more attractive to most minds than the 

 more matter-of-fact inquiries we have been con- 

 sidering. It was, in fact, the question with which 

 all inquiries into the nature of language began ; 

 and in recent years a whole crop of treatises on it, 

 by the most distinguished philologists of the day, 

 have made their appearance. As was inevitable 

 in a matter of the kind, diverse views are advo- 

 cated ; we can only afford to state, briefly, and 

 with as little controversy as possible, the view that 

 seems to us the most reasonable. 



Man speaks because he thinks and feels, and, 

 being a social animal, has a desire to communicate 

 his thoughts and feelings to his fellows. The 

 impulse to utterance of some kind, either of ges- 

 ture or vocal sound, seems instinctive ; and a 

 sound uttered repeatedly in connection with a 

 particular object or impression, would become by 

 association a sign or symbol of that object or 

 impression. Even the lower animals, some of 

 them at least, seem able to go a little way in this 

 direction. But man alone possesses the faculty 

 of analysis and abstraction necessary to convert 

 such marks of individual things into symbols of 

 more generalised conceptions to make them 

 words instead of mere animal sounds. 



The necessity of words to think in is much 

 insisted on by speculators on this subject, as being 

 the motive-power in the generation of language ; 

 and no doubt it is true that, without language, 

 thought could advance but little, if at all, beyond 

 what is manifested by the brutes. But when they 

 argue as if this necessity of having his ideas 

 objectively depicted, in oKier to exercise his own 



