from the old state of things to do duty in the new, shifting their meanings, and finding in any new thought some resemblance to an old one that would serve to give it a name. English is full of traces of these ways of word-making and word-shifting. For instance, that spacious stone building is still called, as its rough predecessors were, a barrack (that is, hut); in it a regiment (that is, a ruling or command) of soldiers (that is, paid men) of the infantry (that is, lads, who fought on foot) are being inspected (that is, looked into); each company (that is, those who have bread together) being under a captain (that is, head-man) and his lieutenants (that is, place-holders). On the front of the building is a clock, a machine which keeps on its old name, meaning a bell, from the ages when its predecessor was only a bell on which a watchman struck the hours; in later times were added the weights, lumps of metal so-called from the weights of the balance, the pendulum (or hanger), and what are metaphorically called the face and hands, for showing on a scale (or ladder) the hours (or times), divided into minutes (or smalls), and then again into seconds (or followings). These instances are intentionally not drawn from the depths of etymology, but are taken to show the ordinary ways in which language finds means to supply the new terms of advancing society. It will be worth while to give a few cases showing that the languages of less civilized races do their duty in much the same ways. The Aztecs called a boat a 66 "" water-house (acalli), and thence the censer in which they burnt copal as incense came to be called a "little copal-boat" (copalacaltontli). The Vancouver Islanders, when they saw how a screwsteamer went, named it at once yetseh-yetsokleh, that is, the "kick-kicker." The Hidatsas of the Missouri till lately had only hard stone for their arrows and hatchets ; so when they became acquainted with iron and copper they made

names for these metals-uetsasipisa and uetsahisisi, that is to say, "stone black" and "stone red." The horse, when brought by the white men among peoples who had never seen it, had to be named, and accordingly the Tahitians. called it "pig-carry-man," while the Sioux Indians said it was a "magic-dog."

As a help to understand how words [have come to express still more difficult thoughts, it is well to remember the contrast between the gesture-language and spoken English (p. 119). It was seen how the deaf-and-dumb fall short of our power of expressing general and abstract ideas. Not that they cannot conceive such ideas at all. They use signs as general terms when they can lay hold of some quality or action as the mark of a whole class. Thus flapping one's arms like wings means any bird, or birds in general, and the sign of legs-four, means beasts, or quadrupeds in general. The pretence of pouring something out of a jug expresses the notion of fluid, which they understand, as we do, to comprise water, tea, quicksilver; and they probably have, though more dimly than we, such other abstract notions as the whiteness common to all white things, and the length, breadth, and thickness which all solid objects have. But while the deaf-mute's sign must always make us think of the very thing it imitates, the spoken word can shift its meaning. so as to follow thought wherever it goes. It is instructive to look at words in this light, to see how, starting from thoughts as plain as those shown by the signs of the American savage, they can come on to the most difficult terms of the lawyer, the mathematician, and the philosopher. To us words have become, as Lord Bacon said, counters for notions. By means of words we are enabled to deal with abstract ideas, got by comparing a number of thoughts, but so as only to attend to what they have in common. The

reader of this no doubt uses easily, and perhaps correctly, such words as sort, kind, thing, cause, to make, be, do, suffer. If he will try to get clear to his mind what is actually meant by these words, that is, what sense they carry with them wherever used, he may teach himself the best lesson he ever learnt, either in language or philosophy. To Englishmen who know no language but their own, these words are indeed, as it were, counters, chosen at random to express thoughts. Having learnt by practice how and where to apply them, they are seldom even conscious of their highly abstract nature. The philologist cannot trace the complete history of them all, but he knows enough to satisfy him that they came out of words easier to understand. As in the Bornu language of Africa, tando, to "weave," has become a general verb to "make," and in Hebrew bârâ, to "cut" or 'hew," has come to be used for the making of the heavens and earth; so our word to make may have meant originally to fit, or join. The English word sort comes from Latin sors, a "lot," through such a set of meanings as allotment, oracle, fate, condition, chance, portion; kind meant of one kindred or descent; to be may have meant to grow; to suffer meant to bear as a burden. It belongs to high metaphysics to talk of the apprehension of ideas; but these now abstruse words originally meant "catching hold" of "sights." One use of etymology is that it teaches how men thus contrived, from words which expressed plain and easy thoughts, to make terms for more complex and abstruse thoughts. This is the high road along which the human mind has travelled from ignorance to knowledge.

66

The next contrivance of language to be noticed is the use of "grammatical" words, which serve to connect the “real” words and show what they have to do with one another.

This again is well seen by looking at the gesture-language (p. 119). If a deaf-and-dumb man wants to convey in gestures "John is come, he has brought the harness of the pony and put it on a bench," he can communicate the sense of this well enough, but he does it by merely giving the real parts, as "John, harness, pony, carry, bench, put." But the articles "a" and "the," the preposition "of," the conjunction "and," the substantive verb "is," and the pronouns "he," "it," are grammatical devices which have not signs in his natural system, and which he does not even learn the meaning of till he is taught to read. Nevertheless, the deaf-mute, if obliged to be very exact in his account, can actually give us a good idea of the way in which we speaking-people have come to use grammatical words. Though he cannot intimate that it is a bench, he can hold up one finger to show that it is one bench; though he has no sign for the pony, he can as it were point it out so as to show it is that pony; instead of expressing of the pony as we do, he can go farther by pretending to take the harness off the pony. Now English etymology often shows that our grammatical words were made in very much this way out of real words; an or a was originally the numeral "one," still Scotch ane; the is of the same family of words with that and there; of is derived from the same source with off; the conjunction and may be traced back to the more real meaning of "further" or "thereto"; the verb to have has become a mere auxiliary in "I have come," yet it keeps its old full sense of to hold or grasp, when one man seizing another cries "I have him!" When an Englishman says he "stands corrected," this does not mean that he is on his legs, but the verb has sunk into a grammatical auxiliary, now conveying little more than the passive sense he "is corrected." It is curious to notice pronouns being thus formed from more real words. As the

==

"I," ivdlit
"there."

deaf-mute simply points with his finger to express "I" and "thou," so the Greenlander's uvanga "thou," are plainly derived from uv = "here," iv Quite a different device appears in Malay, where âmba "slave" is used as a pronoun "I," and tuwan

"thou."

=3

=

=

"lord "

as a pronoun How this came to pass is plainly shown by Hebrew, in such phrases as are translated in the English Bible, "thy servant saith," "my lord knoweth;" these terms are on the road to become mere personal pronouns meaning "I" and " thou," as in the Malay they actually have done. An exact line cannot be drawn between real and grammatical words in English or any other language, for the good reason that words pass so gradually from the real into the grammatical stage, that the same word may be used in both ways. But though the distinction is not an exact one, it should be noticed attentively. Any one who will try to tell an intelligible story in English real words only, without the help of the grammatical particles which are the links and hinges of the sentence, will see how the use of grammatical words was one of the greatest moves made by man in the formation of articulate speech.

Philology goes still further in explaining how the complicated devices of grammar arose from simple beginnings. The distinction of "parts of speech," familiar to us in a highly-developed state from the Greek and Latin grammars, is a useful means of showing the relations among the several thoughts talked of in the sentence. But it is possible to do without parts of speech, and it is not to be supposed that they existed in the earliest forms of language. In the gesture language it has been already noticed that there is no such distinction even between noun and verb. In classical Chinese, thwan means round, a ball, to make round, to sit round, and so on; ngan means quiet, quietly,