June I, 1S76] 



NATURE 



89 



to the aciicn of undeviating laws as the forces and atoms 

 of material nature. We now know that what might 

 seem at first sight the most arbitrary of all things, 

 the phonetic change undergone by words in their 

 passage from one dialect to another, is yet under the 

 control of laws which have been discovered and for- 

 mulated, and which act, unless interfered with by other 

 laws, with unbroken regularity. The old haphazard 

 guesses which once passed for etymologies are now 

 impossible ; given a certain word in Greek or Latin and 

 its phonetic analogue in the other branches of the Aryan 

 family can be determined with certainty. The most 

 plausible derivations, such as that which would connect 

 the Greek KaXew and the Engli-h call, have had to be 

 given up, and the rule has been laid down that if two 

 words in two allied languages exactly resemble one 

 another, we may safely conclude that there is no connec- 

 tion between them. 



The reason why the laws of language can be deter- 

 mined with such precision is that language is a social 

 product, at once the creator and the creation of human 

 society. Language exists for the sake of intercommuni- 

 cation ; it is not what the individual man wishes to be 

 significant that is so, but what the whole community, by 

 a sort of unconscious agreement, determines to be so. 

 Consequently, the arbitrary caprices of the individual 

 have no influence upon the general character of speech. 

 At the most, the individual can do no more than bring 

 some word or phrase into fashion ; all his efforts would 

 not avail to change the phonology, structure, or grammar 

 of a single tongue. Hence it is that the records of 

 speech reflect the ideas and knowledge of society at f ach 

 successive epoch of its growth, just as surely as the fossil 

 records of the rocks preserve the past history of our globe. 

 In tracmg the gro^^th and hist, ry of language we are really 

 tracing the growth and history of society and of human 

 development. The science of language thus becomes 

 of the highest value in testing the various theories that 

 have been formed respecting the early condition and 

 education of mankind. It is the only key which will un- 

 lock the secrets of the prehistoric past of society with 

 scientific certaiaty. Thus it bears unequivocal testimony 

 to the belief that the history of humanity has been on the 

 whole a progre s and not a retrogression. The further 

 back we penetrate into the records of speech the more 

 childlike and barbarous is the society that left them 

 seen to be. The -.vo ds that came to represent moral 

 and religious' ideas triginaliy had a purely sensuoL.s 

 meaning; there was a time when abstracts of any sort 

 did net exist ; and we even have faint glimpses of a 

 period when men were painfully striving to create a lan- 

 guage by the help of onomatopoeia, and of a still earlier 

 period when language as such was not yet formed. 

 Equally unequivocal is the testimony borne by the science 

 of language to the antiquity of man. The three causes of 

 change in language — phonetic decay, the desire of em- 

 phasis, and the influence of analogy— are very slow in 

 their action wherever society is sufficiently compact and 

 settled to allow us to speak of its several forms of speech 

 as dialects of the same farAily ; and yet the oldest monu- 

 ments of language to which we can appeal, whether in 

 Egypt, in Babylonia, in Assyria, or even in that parent- 

 Aryan which it is one of the triumphs of comparative 



philology to have restored by a comparison of its derived 

 languages, are all, linguistically speaking, late, and imply 

 untold ages of previous development. Ethnologists, 

 however, must remember that the science of language 

 does not pretend to occupy their ovvn special province. 

 Language is a social product ; it can tell us therefore 

 nothing of races, only of communities. Members of the 

 same race may speak unallied languages and members of 

 unallied races may speak the same language ; identity of 

 speech is a test of social contact, not of race. Compa- 

 rative philology can throw no light on the physical, as 

 opposed to the mental and moral, history of man ; that 

 task must be left to other sciences. 



One of the chief elements in the mental and moral 

 history of man is the history of his religious ideas, and 

 under the guidance of a scientific study of language this 

 has been to a considerable extent cleared up by compara- 

 tive mythology. The original meanmg of the terms and 

 phrases which embodied the earliest attempts to explain 

 the phenomena of nature came to be forgotten with the 

 increase of knowledge ; a new signification was put into 

 them and an imaginary fairy-world built upon the mis- 

 understood word. The term whereby the primitive 

 savage had endeavoured at once to explain the move- 

 ments of the sun by endowing it with human attributes, 

 and to express his own intuitions of the supernatural, 

 became an Apollo or a Phaethon to whom the shrine was 

 made or the legend recited. The words in which men 

 have, as it were, photographed their religious convictions 

 in different ages and in different parts of the world are an 

 enduring record of the convictions themselves. But the 

 words must be interpreted before the record can be read, 

 and the key to the interpretation is in the hands of the 

 science of language. 



The science of language, however, has a practical as 

 well as a purely theoretical interest. The practical object 

 at which it aims is the creation of a universal language, 

 one, that is, which may serve as the medium of commu- 

 nication between civilised communities throughout the 

 whole world. Another object is the reform of English 

 spelling, at present the despair of teachers and pupils. 

 The spelling of a language ought to represent its pronun- 

 ciation ; our English spelling is a disgrace to a civilised 

 community, a bar to a scientific appreciation of language, 

 a hindrance to acquiring a conversational knowledge of 

 fortign tongues, a cause of wasted time and brains in 

 education, and a fruiiful source of pseudo-etymologies. 

 If comparative philology effect this reform and nothing 

 ebe it will have sufficiently vindicated its practical utiHty. 

 Equally important is the reform which it urges in the 

 matter of classical education. The method of nature 

 and of science is to proceed from the known to the un- 

 known ; this is reversed in our ordinary system of educa- 

 tion which begins with the dead languages and ends with 

 one or two living ones. By breaking down the monopoly of 

 the two classical tongues and demonstrating that for purely 

 linguistic purposes the modern languages of Europe are 

 of greater importance, the science of language is doing a 

 good work. In the study of the classical languages them- 

 selves it has effected a revolution. By explaining the 

 nature and reason of their grammatical forms and rules 

 it has lightened the burden of the learner, since to under- 

 stand is to remember. 



