THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. 349 



Divine workmanship, and again cultured and improved by man in virtue of his 

 divine origin and divine mission on earth, so beautifully expressed by the Stoics — 

 Contemplari atque imitari mundum. Now, in this view, the perfection of a 

 language will depend in the first place, as in a musical instrument, on the 

 number and variety and completeness of the notes which it contains, and again 

 on the quality of these tones, and lastly on the skill with which they are used by 

 a natural genius and a practised player. With this high ideal before us, we 

 shall certainly find no human language perfect ; for, besides that the organs of 

 utterance in some cases may be of less perfect construction and of inferior 

 capacity, the most highly gifted peoples in the use of language are apt to have 

 pet tendencies and to fall into mannerisms, which are not only bad in them- 

 selves, but do an additional harm by excluding other less-favoured elements of 

 a perfect vocal gamut from fair exercise. Thus the language becomes lopsided, 

 and, as in the case of a body palsied in one limb, presents an appearance of 

 completeness which its power of action does not warrant. It appears to have 

 two arms, but can strike only with the right or With the left. Any vital 

 function rarely used is used with difficulty, which gradually hardens itself into 

 an impossibility ; and so we find whole nations of the highest organic accom- 

 plishment unable to pronounce certain letters ; as the Germans cannot pro- 

 nounce th at all, and the English regularly change the x of the Greeks and the 

 Scotch ch into k. Some nations cannot even distinguish r and I, both liquids, 

 no doubt, and so akin, but considerably different, both in the movement of the 

 tongue by which they are pronounced, and in their musical effect on the ear. 

 On the other hand, the aspirate which the German cannot enunciate is so 

 familiar to the Celt that he introduces it regularly where it does not belong, 

 and not rarely allows it, as in the Gaelic ha for ta, to override and delete the 

 consonant which it modifies. There is hardly a nation that does not get into a 

 bad habit of using one part of the machinery by which vocal breath is emitted 

 with such preference as to impart a mannerism so strong as to become a 

 distinctive mark of nationality ; thus the Englishman, by the preferential use of 

 the back of his mouth, gets into what is called the ha-ha style, and the curtailing 

 of the r of its fair proportions, so that 



I saw 



A beautiful sta-aiv = star, 



is a perfectly good rhyme to a London, but not to an Edinburgh ear. The 

 Greek, on the other hand, gave a preference to the front of the mouth, which 

 produced the v^iXov and the ou = oo, which the Englishman in his ignorant 

 i insular fashion refuses to recognise. The Yankee nasalism is another familiar 

 j instance of the same kind ; and the vocalisation even of the liquid /, as 

 in Versailles, of the modern French, is the most recent instance of the 



