Notes on the Study of Language 



By W. D. Le Sueur, LL. D. 



To man, the thinker, there are three worlds, the world of 

 things, the world of thought, the world of words. Not to speak 

 too metaphysically we may say that things produce thoughts, 

 and that thoughts produce words. Things without thoughts, 

 and thoughts without words, have but an ambiguous existence. 

 Through the use of words we become fully conscious of our own 

 thoughts and of the universe. To whatever we see we are com- 

 pelled to attach a name, if not an individual one, then a specific or 

 generic one. An unknown animal is at least an animal, an un- 

 known plant at least a plant, an unknown object at least an 

 object. The extreme readiness with which more or less de- 

 scriptive names are given by uncivilised tribes has often been 

 remarked. Amongst the North- American Indians no visitor has 

 long to wait before he is sized up and named, not alwaj^s in a 

 manner which he considers complimentary, but always on the 

 strength of some salient external characteristic. The common 

 people have named our wild-flowers, and done it upon the whole 

 very prettily. There is no touch of erudition in such words 

 as daisy, buttercup, heart's-ease, pansy or mignonette, but there 

 is not a little natural poetr5^ The ignorant will often miscall 

 a word with some element of which they are not familiar, and 

 it sometimes happens that they give us something better than we 

 had before. Our present word " wedlock " was formerh^ " wed- 

 lac," and meant simply " pledge-gift," referring doubtless to the 

 dowries given with daughters ; but the old English word " lac," 

 having fallen out of use in the sense of gift, became confound- 

 ed in the popular mind with the word "lock," which in pro- 

 nunciation it much resembled ; and thenceforth the language 

 possessed a compound of quite different and much superior 

 signification. It is probably not too fanciful to believe that this 

 error on the part of the unlearned has done not a little to 



