On the Study of Words by Richard Chenevix Trench (great book club books .TXT) 📖

nations to which letters are still strange, existing only for the ear and as a sound, we might beforehand expect would prove the least trustworthy of all vehicles whereby the knowledge of the past has reached our present; that one which would most certainly betray its charge. In actual fact it has not proved so at all. It is the main, oftentimes the only, connecting link between the two, an ark riding above the water-floods that have swept away or submerged every other landmark and memorial of bygone ages and vanished generations of men. Far beyond all written records in a language, the language itself stretches back, and offers itself for our investigation—'the pedigree of nations,' as Johnson calls it [Footnote: This statement of his must be taken with a certain amount of qualification. It is not always that races are true to the end to their language; external forces are sometimes too strong. Thus Celtic disappeared before Latin in Gaul and Spain. Slavonic became extinct in Prussia two centuries ago, German taking its room; the negroes of Hayti speak French, and various American tribes have exchanged their own idioms for Spanish and Portuguese. See upon this matter Sayce's Principles of Comparative Philology, pp. 175-181.]— itself in its own independent existence a far older and at the same time a far more instructive document than any book, inscription, or other writing which employs it. The written records may have been falsified by carelessness, by vanity, by fraud, by a multitude of causes; but language never deceives, if only we know how to question it aright.

Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting inquiries, which by the aid of any tolerable dictionary you may carry on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary, succeeding one another, which he meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the successive physical changes through which a region has passed; is, so to say, in a condition to preside at those past changes, to measure the forces that were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their date. Now with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed upon it, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Low German, Danish, Norman words, and then once more Latin and French, with slighter intrusions from many other quarters: and any one with skill to analyse the language might, up to a certain point, re-create for himself the history of the people speaking that language, might with tolerable accuracy appreciate the diverse elements out of which that people was made up, in what proportion these were mingled, and in what succession they followed, one upon the other.

Would he trace, for example, the relation in which the English and Norman occupants of this land stood to one another? An account of this, in the main as accurate as it would be certainly instructive, might be drawn from an intelligent study of the contributions which they have severally made to the English language, as bequeathed to us jointly by them both. Supposing all other records to have perished, we might still work out and almost reconstruct the history by these aids; even as now, when so many documents, so many institutions survive, this must still be accounted the most important, and that of which the study will introduce us, as no other can, into the innermost heart and life of large periods of our history.

Nor, indeed, is it hard to see why the language must contain such instruction as this, when we a little realize to ourselves the stages by which it has reached us in its present shape. There was a time when the languages which the English and the Norman severally spoke, existed each by the side of, but un-mingled with, the other; one, that of the small dominant class, the other that of the great body of the people. By degrees, however, with the reconciliation and partial fusion of the two races, the two languages effected a transaction; one indeed prevailed over the other, but at the same time received a multitude of the words of that other into its own bosom. At once there would exist duplicates for many things. But as in popular speech two words will not long exist side by side to designate the same thing, it became a question how the relative claims of the English and Norman word should adjust themselves, which should remain, which should be dropped; or, if not dropped, should be transferred to some other object, or express some other relation. It is not of course meant that this was ever formally proposed, or as something to be settled by agreement; but practically one was to be taken and one left. Which was it that should maintain its ground? Evidently, where a word was often on the lips of one race, its equivalent seldom on those of the other, where it intimately cohered with the whole manner of life of one, was only remotely in contact with that of the other, where it laid strong hold on one, and only slight on the other, the issue could not be doubtful. In several cases the matter was simpler still: it was not that one word expelled the other, or that rival claims had to be adjusted; but that there never had existed more than one word, the thing which that word noted having been quite strange to the other section of the nation.

Here is the explanation of the assertion made just now—namely, that we might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it. Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception (to be adduced presently), descend to us from them—'sovereign,' 'sceptre,' 'throne,' 'realm,' 'royalty,' 'homage,' 'prince,' 'duke,' 'count,' ('earl' indeed is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his 'countess' from the Norman), 'chancellor,' 'treasurer,' 'palace,' 'castle,' 'dome,' and a multitude more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of 'king' would make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new title, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time to assert itself anew.

And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment, are Norman throughout; with the broad basis of the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire; the divisions of time; three out of the four seasons, spring, summer, and winter; the features of natural scenery, the words used in earliest childhood, the simpler emotions of the mind; all the prime social relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister,—these are of native growth and un-borrowed. 'Palace' and 'castle' may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe far dearer names, the 'house,' the 'roof,' the 'home,' the 'hearth.' His 'board' too, and often probably it was no more, has a more hospitable sound than the 'table' of his lord. His sturdy arms turn the soil; he is the 'boor,' the 'hind,' the 'churl'; or if his Norman master has a name for him, it is one which on his lips becomes more and more a title of opprobrium and contempt, the 'villain.' The instruments used in cultivating the earth, the 'plough,' the 'share,' the 'rake,' the 'scythe,' the 'harrow,' the 'wain,' the 'sickle,' the 'spade,' the 'sheaf,' the 'barn,' are expressed in his language; so too the main products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats, bere, grass, flax, hay, straw, weeds; and no less the names of domestic animals. You will remember, no doubt, how in the matter of these Wamba, the Saxon jester in Ivanhoe, plays the philologer, [Footnote: Wallis, in his Grammar, p. 20, had done so before.] having noted that the names of almost all animals, so long as they are alive, are Saxon, but when dressed and prepared for food become Norman—a fact, he would intimate, not very wonderful; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and feeding them, but only that they might appear on the table of his Norman lord. Thus 'ox,' 'steer,' 'cow,' are Saxon, but 'beef' Norman; 'calf' is Saxon, but 'veal' Norman; 'sheep' is Saxon, but 'mutton' Norman: so it is severally with 'swine' and 'pork,' 'deer' and 'venison,' 'fowl' and 'pullet.' 'Bacon,' the only flesh which perhaps ever came within the hind's reach, is the single exception. Putting all this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been indicated here, we should certainly gather, that while there are manifest tokens preserved in our language of the Saxon having been for a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of English life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after language; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic records, and the present social condition of England, consent in bearing witness.

Then again, who could doubt, even if the fact were not historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,' 'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,' 'zero '?—for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history were silent on the matter, we might conclude, and we know that we should rightly conclude, that the origins of the monastic system are to be sought in the Greek and not in the Latin branch of the Church, seeing that with hardly an exception the words expressing the constituent elements of the system, as 'anchorite,' 'archimandrite,' 'ascetic,' 'cenobite,' 'hermit,' 'monastery,' 'monk,' are Greek and not Latin.

But the study of words will throw rays of light upon a past infinitely more remote than any which I have suggested here, will reveal to us secrets of the past, which else must have been lost to us for ever. Thus it must be a question of profound interest for as many as count the study of man to be far above every other study, to ascertain what point of culture that Indo-European race of which we come, the stirps generosa et historica of the world, as Coleridge has called it, had attained, while it was dwelling still as one family in its common home. No voices of history, the very faintest voices of tradition, reach us from ages so far removed from our own. But in the silence of all other voices there is one voice which makes itself heard, and which can tell us much. Where Indian, and Greek, and Latin, and Teutonic designate some object by the same word, and where it can be clearly shown that they did not, at a later day, borrow that word one from the other, the object, we may confidently conclude, must have been familiar to the Indo-European race, while yet these several groups of it dwelt as one undivided family together. Now they have such common words for the chief domestic animals—for ox, for sheep, for horse, for dog, for goose, and for many more. From this we have a right to gather that before the migrations began, they had overlived and outgrown the fishing and hunting stages of existence, and entered on the pastoral. They have not all the same words for the main products of the earth, as for corn, wheat, barley, wine; it is tolerably evident therefore that they had not entered on the agricultural stage. So too from the absence of names in common for the principal metals, we have a right to argue that they had not arrived at a knowledge