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

medius dies. In the same way the Italians prefer 've_l_eno' to 've_n_eno'; the Germans '_k_artoffel' to '_t_artüffel,' from Italian 'tartufola' = Latin terrae tuber, an old name of the potato; and we 'cinnamo_n_' to 'cinnamo_m_' (the earlier form). So too in 'turtle,' 'marble,' 'purple,' we have shrunk from the double 'r' of 'turtur,' 'marmor,' 'purpura.' [Footnote: See Dwight, Modern Philology, 2nd Series, p. 100; Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft, Section 139- 141; and Peile, Introduction to Greek and Latin Etymology, pp. 357- 379.] New necessities, new evolutions of society into more complex conditions, evoke new words; which come forth, because they are required now; but did not formerly exist, because in an anterior period they were not required. For example, in Greece so long as the poet sang his own verses, 'singer' (aoidos) sufficiently expressed the double function; such a 'singer' was Homer, and such Homer describes Demodocus, the bard of the Phaeacians; that double function, in fact, not being in his time contemplated as double, but each of its parts so naturally completing the other, that no second word was required. When, however, in the division of labour one made the verses which another chaunted, then 'poet' or 'maker,' a word unknown to the Homeric age, arose. In like manner, when 'physicians' were the only natural philosophers, the word covered this meaning as well as that other which it still retains; but when the investigation of nature and natural causes detached itself from the art of healing, became an independent study, the name 'physician' remained to that which was as the stock and stem of the art, while the new offshoot sought out and obtained a new name for itself.

But it is not merely new things which will require new names. It will often be discovered that old things have not got a name at all, or, having one, are compelled to share it with something else, often to the serious embarrassment of both. The manner in which men become aware of such deficiencies, is commonly this. Comparing their own language with another, and in some aspects a richer, compelled, it may be, to such comparison through having undertaken to transfer treasures of that language into their own, they become conscious of much worthy to be uttered in human speech, and plainly utterable therein, since another language has found utterance for it; but which hitherto has found no voice in their own. Hereupon with more or less success they proceed to supply the deficiency. Hardly in any other way would the wants in this way revealed make themselves felt even by the most thoughtful; for language is to so large an extent the condition and limit of thought, men are so little accustomed, indeed so little able, to contemplate things, except through the intervention, and by the machinery, of words, that the absence of words from a language almost necessarily brings with it the absence of any sense of that absence. Here is one advantage of acquaintance with other languages besides our own, and of the institution that will follow, if we have learned those other to any profit, of such comparisons, namely, that we thus become aware that names are not, and least of all the names in any one language, co- extensive with things (and by 'things' I mean subjects as well as objects of thought, whatever one can think about), that innumerable things and aspects of things exist, which, though capable of being resumed and connoted in a word, are yet without one, unnamed and unregistered; and thus, vast as may be the world of names, that the world of realities, and of realities which are nameable, is vaster still. Such discoveries the Romans made, when they sought to transplant the moral philosophy of Greece to an Italian soil. They discovered that many of its terms had no equivalents with them; which equivalents thereupon they proceeded to devise for themselves, appealing for this to the latent capabilities of their own tongue. For example, the Greek schools had a word, and one playing no unimportant part in some of their philosophical systems, to express 'apathy' or the absence of all passion and pain. As it was absolutely necessary to possess a corresponding word, Cicero invented 'indolentia,' as that 'if I may so speak' with which he paves the way to his first introduction of it, sufficiently declares. [Footnote: Fin. ii. 4; and for 'qualitas' see Acad. i. 6.] Sometimes, indeed, such a skilful mint-master of words, such a subtle watcher and weigher of their force as was Cicero, [Footnote: Ille verborum vigilantissimus appensor ac mensor, as Augustine happily terms him.] will have noticed even apart from this comparison with other languages, an omission in his own, which thereupon he will endeavour to supply. Thus the Latin had two adjectives which, though not kept apart as strictly as they might have been, possessed each its peculiar meaning, 'invidus' one who is envious, 'invidiosus' one who excites envy in others; [Footnote: Thus the monkish line: Invidiosus ego, non invidus esse laboro.] at the same time there was only one substantive, 'invidia' the correlative of them both; with the disadvantage, therefore, of being employed now in an active, now in a passive sense, now for the envy which men feel, and now for the envy which they excite. The word he saw was made to do double duty; under a seeming unity there lurked a real dualism, from which manifold confusions might follow. He therefore devised 'invidentia,' to express the active envy, or the envying, no doubt desiring that 'invidia' should be restrained to the passive, the being envied. 'Invidentia' to all appearance supplied a real want; yet Cicero himself did not succeed in giving it currency; does not seem himself to have much cared to employ it again. [Footnote: Tusc. iii. 9; iv. 8; cf. Döderlein, Synon. vol. iii, p. 68.] We see by this example that not every word, which even an expert in language proposes, finds acceptance; [Footnote: Quintilian's advice, based on this fact, is good (i. 6. 42): Etiamsi potest nihil peccare, qui utitur iis verbis quae summi auctores tradiderunt, multum tamen refert non solum quid dixerint, sed etiam quid persuaserint. He himself, as he informs us, invented 'vocalitas' to correspond with the Greek [Greek: euphonia] (Instit. i. 5. 24), but I am not conscious that he found any imitators here.] for, as Dryden, treating on this subject, has well observed, 'It is one thing to draw a bill, and another to have it accepted.' Provided some words live, he must be content that others should fall to the ground and die. Nor is this the only unsuccessful candidate for admission into the language which Cicero put forward. His 'indolentia' which I mentioned just now, hardly passed beyond himself; [Footnote: Thus Seneca a little later is unaware, or has forgotten, that Cicero made any such suggestion. Taking no notice of it, he proposes 'impatientia' as an adequate rendering of [Greek: apatheia]. There clung this inconvenience to the word, as he himself allowed, that it was already used in exactly the opposite sense (Ep. 9). Elsewhere he claims to be the inventor of 'essentia' (Ep. 38;.)] his 'vitiositas,' [Footnote: Tusc. iv. 15.] 'indigentia,' [Footnote: Ibid. iv. 9. 21.] and 'mulierositas,' [Footnote: Ibid. iv. ii.] not at all. 'Beatitas' too and 'beatitudo,' [Footnote: Nat. Dear. i. 34.] both of his coining, yet, as he owns himself, with something strange and unattractive about them, found almost no acceptance at all in the classical literature of Rome: 'beatitude,' indeed, obtained a home, as it deserved to do, in the Christian Church, but 'beatitas' none. Coleridge's 'esemplastic,' by which he was fain to express the all-atoning or unifying power of the imagination, has not pleased others at all in the measure in which it pleased himself; while the words of Jeremy Taylor, of such Latinists as Sir Thomas Browne and Henry More, born only to die, are multitudinous as the fallen leaves of autumn. [Footnote: See my English Past and Present, 13th edit. p. 113.] Still even the word which fails is often an honourable testimony to the scholarship, or the exactness of thought, or the imagination of its author; and Ben Jonson is over-hard on 'neologists,' if I may bring this term back to its earlier meaning, when he says: 'A man coins not a new word without some peril, and less fruit; for if it happen to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured,' [Footnote: Therefore the maxim: Moribus antiquis, praesentibus utere verbis.]

I spoke just now of comprehensive words, which should singly say what hitherto it had taken many words to say, in which a higher term has been reached than before had been attained. The value of these is incalculable. By the cutting short of lengthy explanations and tedious circuits of language, they facilitate mental processes, such as would often have been nearly or quite impossible without them; and such as have invented or put these into circulation, are benefactors of a high order to knowledge. In the ordinary traffic of life, unless our dealings are on the smallest scale, we willingly have about us our money in the shape rather of silver than of copper; and if our transactions are at all extensive, rather in gold than in silver: while, if we were setting forth upon a long and costly journey, we should be best pleased to turn even our gold coin itself into bills of exchange or circular notes; in fact, into the highest denomination of money which it was capable of assuming. How many words with which we are now perfectly familiar are for us what the circular note or bill of exchange is for the traveller or the merchant. As innumerable pence, a multitude of shillings, not a few pounds are gathered up and represented by one of these, so have we in some single word the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, ascending one above the other, until all have been at length summed up for us in that single word. This last may be compared to nothing so fitly as to some mighty river, which does not bring its flood of waters to the sea, till many rills have been swallowed up in brooks, and brooks in streams, and streams in tributary rivers, each of these affluents having lost its separate name and existence in that which at last represents and contains them all.

Science is an immense gainer by words which thus say singly, what whole sentences might with difficulty have succeeded in saying. Thus 'isothermal' is quite a modern invention; but how much is summed up by the word; what a long story is saved, as often as we speak of 'isothermal' lines. Physiologists have given the name of 'atavism' to the emerging again of a face in a family after its disappearance during two or three generations. What would have else needed a sentence is here accomplished by a word. Lord Bacon somewhere describes a certain candidate for the Chair of St. Peter as being 'papable.' There met, that is, in him all the conditions, and they were many, which would admit the choice of the Conclave falling upon him. When Bacon wrote, one to be 'papable' must have been born in lawful wedlock; must have no children nor grandchildren living; must not have a kinsman already in the Conclave; must be already a Cardinal; all which facts this single word sums up. When Aristotle, in the opening sentences of his Rhetoric, declares that rhetoric and logic are antistrophic,' what a wonderful insight into both, and above all into their relations to one another, does the word impart to those who have any such special training as enables them to take in all which hereby he intends. Or take a word so familiar as 'circle,' and imagine how it would fare with us, if, as often as in some long and difficult mathematical problem we needed to refer to this figure, we were obliged to introduce its entire definition, no single word representing it; and not this only, but the definition of each term employed in the definition;—how well nigh impossible it would prove to carry the whole process in the mind, or to take oversight of all its steps. Imagine a few more words struck out of the vocabulary of the mathematician, and if all activity and advance in his proper domain was not altogether arrested, yet would it be as effectually restrained and hampered as commercial intercourse would be, if in all its transactions iron or copper were the sole medium of exchange. Wherever any science is progressive, there will be progress in its nomenclature as well. Words will keep pace with things, and with more or less felicity resuming in themselves the labours of the past, will at once assist and abridge the labours of the future; like tools which, themselves the result of the finest mechanical skill, do at the same time