58 GESTUEE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 



meanings may have come first, nor that Uacl; blanc, bleich, to 

 bleach, to blachen, Anglo-Saxon blcec, iZac=black, fcZac=pale, 

 ■white, come so nearly together in sound. It has been plau- 

 sibly conjectured that the reversal of the meaning of to " rise " 

 may have happened through a preposition being prefixed to 

 change the sense, and dropping off again, leaving the word 

 with its altered meaning,^ while if blach is related to Ger- 

 man blaken, to burn, and has the sense of " charred, burnt to a 

 coal," and blcmc has that of shining,^ a common origin may 

 possibly be forthcoming for both sets among the family of 

 words, which includes blaze, fulgeo, flagro, (f^Xeyco, ^\6^, San- 

 skrit bhrdg, and so forth. But explanations of this kind have 

 no bearing on the practical use of such words by mankind at 

 large, who take what is given them and ask no questions. 

 Indeed, however much such a notion may vex the souls of 

 etymologists, there is a great deal to be said for the view that 

 much of the accuracy of our modern languages is due to their 

 having so far " lost consciousness " of the derivation of their 

 words, which thus become like counters or algebraic symbols, 

 good to represent just what they are set down to mean. Ar- 

 chaeology is a very interesting and instructive study, but when 

 it comes to exact argument^ it may be that the distinctness 

 of our apprehension of what a Word means, is not always in- 

 creased by a misty recollection hovering about it in our minds, 

 that it or its family once meant something else. For such pur- 

 poses, what is required is not so much a knowledge of etymo- 

 logy, as accurate definition, and the practice of checking words 

 by realizing the things and actions they are used to denote. 

 It is as bearing on the question of the relation between idea 

 and word that the study of the gesture-language is of particu- 

 lar interest. We have in it a method of human utterance 

 independent of speech, and carried on through a difierent 

 medium, in which, as has been said, the connection between 

 idea and sign has hardly ever been broken, or even lost sight 

 of for a moment. The gesture-language is in fact a system of 



1 Jacob Grimm, ' Geschiclite der Deutschen Sprache ;' Leipzig, 1848, p. 664. 

 5 See J. and W. Grimm, ' Deutsches Worterbuch,' Si tt. Mack, blaken, Mick, 

 etc. Diez, Worterb., s.Ti bianco. 



