372 



LANGUAGE. 



parts tliat he will successively perceive. In 

 this manner. >> ntactic and atactic idioms have been 

 lively formed ; the impulse first given has been 

 followed, and thus languages have received various 

 organic or grammatical diaracters and forms. Let 

 us give an example : At the first formation of a 

 language, one man, by signs or otherwise, asks 

 another to do something ; the other, anxious to 

 express his consent at once, and conceiving the 

 whole idea, answers, folo. Another man, whose 

 mind is slower in its operations, divides the idea, 

 and answers in two words, Ego volo, or / will. 

 Another demand is made, to which the first man 

 does not agree ; he answers, Nolo ; the other says, 

 Ego non volo, or / will not. Applying this hypo- 

 thesis to all languages, and their different forms, it 

 will be perceived how, in the beginning, they were 

 framed, and how their various structures have been 

 more or less regular, and more or less elegant in 

 their grammatical analogies, according to the tem- 

 jters and capacities of the nations that first formed 

 them, and of the men that took the lead in that for- 

 mation, who may not always have been the most 

 sensible of the whole band ; for it is to be presumed 

 that, in those early times, as in our day, the affairs 

 of men were not always directed by the ablest, but 

 oftener, perhaps, by the most forward and the most 

 presuming individual. As to the mechanical or 

 physical part of language, that must have depended 

 on the climate and on the peculiar organizations of 

 individuals. 



Although the component sounds of all languages 

 appear very few, they are very numerous, if we con- 

 sider their almost imperceptible shades and modes of 

 utterance. Hence the difficulties that occur every- 

 where in acquiring the pronunciation of foreign 

 idioms. Although the organs of speech are the 

 same in all men and races of men, great differences 

 are produced in their utterance of sounds, by the 

 early habit of more or less contracting or expanding 

 certain of the muscles of which those organs are 

 composed. Opening or shutting the mouth, letting 

 out the air more or less freely through the lungs, and 

 other similar causes, produce infinite varieties in vo- 

 cal sounds and consonant articulations, analogous to 

 those that we perceive in musical instruments, which, 

 like the human voice, are operated upon by touch or 

 pressure, or by the impulsion and expulsion of air. 

 The flute does not produce the same sound with the 

 clarionet or French horn, nor the harpsichord with 

 the violin. Even instruments of the same kind pro- 

 duce different effects, according to the manner in 

 which they are played upon. It is so with the hu- 

 man organs. The first sounds that were uttered, 

 when each language was first invented, gave tone 

 and colour to the rest, and that depended on the first 

 individuals who uttered those sounds, and whom the 

 others imitated or followed. The habits, once fixed, 

 could not easily aftenvards be altered. Each lan- 

 guage, therefore, had its own articulations, its own 

 accent, and its own tones. 



Philosophers have, in general, been of opinion that 

 Uie invention of languages was a very difficult task, 

 and that it required a very long time ages, perhaps 

 to bring an idiom to perfection. We are inclined 

 to be of the contrary opinion. God has given to 

 man, as he has to other animals, all the faculties that 

 are necessary to attain the ends of his creation. 

 These faculties, in animals, we call instinct ; and by 

 whatever high-sounding names our pride may induce 

 us to call them in ourselves, they are, after all, no 

 more than a power given by the Almighty Being. 

 He made man a social animal, because that was 

 necessary to the purposes of his creation; for the same 

 purposes, it was necessary tliat men should under- 



stand each other, that they should exchange pluns, 

 projects and ideas. God, therefore, gave them the 

 means of so doing, and these means consisted of phy- 

 sical organs and mental faculties equal to the tusk. 

 By means of these faculties, they soon found words 

 by which to convey their perceptions of natural and 

 moral objects to one another, and means to retain 

 them in their memory by some method or order of 

 classification, without which they would have been 

 lost in a confusion of articulate sounds. Hence it 

 has happened that there is no language, however 

 barbarous or uncivilized may be the nation that speaks 

 it, that is not systematically arranged ; none, in short, 

 that has not a method of its own, or, in other words, 

 a grammar. They are all reducible to certain gram- 

 matical principles, and none has yet been found that 

 cannot be so reduced. The American Philosophical 

 Society has proved to a demonstration, that the lan- 

 guages of the aborigines of America are rich in 

 words and in grammatical forms, and it has been 

 said, that it would rather seem that they were com- 

 posed by philosophers in their closets, than by sava- 

 ges in the wilderness. (See Report to the Historical 

 and Literary Committee and Correspondence between 

 Mr Dttponceau and Mr Hec/cewelder, in the Histori- 

 cal Transactions of the American Philosophical So- 

 ciety vol. i.) When the writer to whom we allude 

 made use of this expression, we believe that he sought 

 to accommodate himself to ideas generally received ; 

 for he must have known that languages are not made 

 by philosophers in their closets, and he must have 

 been aware of the failure of all those who attempted 

 to invent what they called a philosophical language. 

 Leibnitz, it is said, once had such an idea ; but it is 

 certain that he never tried to carry it into execution; 

 or, if he did, he soon abandoned the senseless pro- 

 ject. To such a degree was the presumption of the 

 learned raised, about the middle of the seventeenth 

 century, that it was thought, that an universal language 

 could be made for the use of all mankind. One Becher, 

 having heard a German prince say, that lie would give 

 300 crowns to him who should discover such a lan- 

 guage, wrote a treatise, in which he asserted, and 

 tried to prove, that he had made the discovery. He 

 presented it to the prince, who paid him with compli- 

 ments, and an invitation to dinner. The work is 

 entitled Character pro Notitia Linguarum universal! 

 (Frankfort, 1661), and is now very scarce. In 1668, 

 John Wilkins, dean of Rippon, and afterwards bishop 

 of Chester, published a thick folio volume, entitled 

 an Essay towards a real Character and Philosophical 

 Language, which contained an alphabet, a grammar, 

 and a dictionary of his supposed perfect idiom. Af- 

 terwards, a M. Faignet, who is called, in the French 

 Encyclopaedia, tresorier de France, but who, in fact, 

 was only a receiver of public moneys in some provin- 

 cial town, wrote, for that compilation, a scheme of a 

 philosophical language, with which the editors did 

 not disdain to swell their work, and which remains 

 there as a monument of the folly and presumption of 

 mankind. The productions of this writer and of 

 bishop Wilkins, show the superiority of nature over 

 philosophy. Nature invents, philosophy imitates. 

 These philosophers had no idea of grammatical forms 

 except those of the languages that they knew, that 

 is to say, those that they had learned at college, and 

 those they had received from their nurses. There- 

 fore, neither the monosyllabic system of the Chinese, 

 nor the polysynthetic of the Americans, ever oc- 

 curred to their minds ; all the improvement that 

 they could think of on the forms which they were fami- 

 liar with, was, to apply to them the principle of 

 little minds, uniformity. To show how they went 

 to work, we will give a few short samples of their 

 respective inventions. M. Faignet thus formed, in 



