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On the Study of Words

R >> Richard C Trench >> On the Study of Words




Yet it is not only when new truth, moral or spiritual, has thus to fit
itself to the lips of men, that such enlargements of speech become
necessary: but in each further unfolding of those seminal truths
implanted in man at the first, in each new enlargement of his sphere of
knowledge, outward or inward, the same necessities make themselves felt.
The beginnings and progressive advances of moral philosophy in Greece,
[Footnote: See Lobeck, _Phrynichus_, p. 350.] the transplantation of
the same to Rome, the rise of the scholastic, and then of the mystic,
theology in the Middle Ages, the discoveries of modern science and
natural philosophy, these each and all have been accompanied with
corresponding extensions in the domain of language. Of the words to
which each of these has in turn given birth, many, it is true, have
never travelled beyond their own peculiar sphere, having remained
purely technical, or scientific, or theological to the last; but many,
too, have passed over from the laboratory and the school, from the
cloister and the pulpit, into everyday use, and have, with the ideas
which they incorporate, become the common heritage of all. For however
hard and repulsive a front any study or science may present to the
great body of those who are as laymen in regard of it, there is yet
inevitably such a detrition as this continually going forward, and one
which it would be well worth while to trace in detail.

Where the movement is a popular one, stirring the heart and mind of a
people to its depths, there these new words will for the most part
spring out of their bosom, a free spontaneous birth, seldom or never
capable of being referred to one man more than another, because in a
manner they belong to all. Where, on the contrary, the movement is more
strictly theological, or has for its sphere those regions of science
and philosophy, where, as first pioneers and discoverers, only a few
can bear their part, there the additions to the language and extensions
of it will lack something of the freedom, the unconscious boldness,
which mark the others. Their character will be more artificial, less
spontaneous, although here also the creative genius of a single man, as
there of a nation, will oftentimes set its mark; and many a single word
will come forth, which will be the result of profound meditation, or of
intuitive genius, or of both in happiest combination--many a word,
which shall as a torch illuminate vast regions comparatively obscure
before, and, it may be, cast its rays far into the yet unexplored
darkness beyond; or which, summing up into itself all the acquisitions
in a particular direction of the past, shall furnish a mighty vantage-
ground from which to advance to new conquests in those realms of mind
or of nature, not as yet subdued to the intellect and uses of man.

'Cosmopolite' has often now a shallow or even a mischievous use; and he
who calls himself 'cosmopolite' may mean no more than that he is _not_
a patriot, that his native country does _not_ possess his love. Yet, as
all must admit, he could have been no common man who, before the
preaching of the Gospel, launched this word upon the world, and claimed
this name for himself. Nor was he a common man; for Diogenes the Cynic,
whose sayings are among quite the most notable in antiquity, was its
author. Being demanded of what city or country he was, Diogenes
answered that he was a 'cosmopolite'; in this word widening the range
of men's thoughts, bringing in not merely a word new to Greek ears, but
a thought which, however commonplace and familiar to us now, must have
been most novel and startling to those whom he addressed. I am far from
asserting that contempt for his citizenship in its narrower sense may
not have mingled with this his challenge for himself of a citizenship
wide as the world; but there was not the less a very remarkable
reaching out here after truths which were not fully born into the world
until _He_ came, in whom and in whose Church all national differences
and distinctions are done away.

As occupying somewhat of a middle place between those more deliberate
word-makers and the multitude whose words rather grow of themselves
than are made, we must not omit him who is a _maker_ by the very right
of his name--I mean, the poet. That creative energy with which he is
endowed, 'the high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet,' will
not fail to manifest itself in this region as in others. Extending the
domain of thought and feeling, he will scarcely fail to extend that
also of language, which does not willingly lag behind. And the loftier
his moods, the more of this maker he will be. The passion of such times,
the all-fusing imagination, will at once suggest and justify audacities
in speech, upon which in calmer moods he would not have ventured, or,
venturing, would have failed to carry others with him: for it is only
the fluent metal that runs easily into novel shapes and moulds. Nor is
it merely that the old and the familiar will often become new in the
poet's hands; that he will give the stamp of allowance, as to him will
be free to do, to words which hitherto have lived only on the lips of
the people, or been confined to some single dialect and province; but
he will enrich his native tongue with words unknown and non-existent
before--non-existent, that is, save in their elements; for in the
historic period of a language it is not permitted to any man to do more
than work on pre-existent materials; to evolve what is latent therein,
to combine what is apart, to recall what has fallen out of sight.

But to return to the more deliberate coining of words. New necessities
have within the last few years called out several of these deliberate
creations in our own language. The almost simultaneous discovery of
such large abundance of gold in so many quarters of the world led some
nations so much to dread an enormous depreciation of this metal, that
they ceased to make it the standard of value--Holland for instance did
so for a while, though she has since changed her mind; and it has been
found convenient to invent a word, 'to demonetize' to express this
process of turning a precious metal from being the legal standard into
a mere article of commerce. So, too, diplomacy has recently added more
than one new word to our vocabulary. I suppose nobody ever heard of
'extradition' till within the last few years; nor of 'neutralization'
except, it might be, in some treatise upon chemistry, till in the
treaty of peace which followed the Crimean War the 'neutralization' of
the Black Sea was made one of the stipulations. 'Secularization,' in
like manner, owes its birth to the long and weary negotiations which
preceded the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Whenever it proved difficult
to find anywhere else compensation for some powerful claimant, there
was always some abbey or bishopric which with its revenues might be
seized, stripped of its ecclesiastical character, and turned into a
secular possession. Our manifold points of contact with the East, the
necessity that has thus arisen of representing oriental words to the
western world by means of an alphabet not its own, with the manifold
discussions on the fittest equivalents, all this has brought with it
the need of a word which should describe the process, and
'transliteration' is the result.

We have long had 'assimilation' in our dictionaries; 'dissimilation'
has as yet scarcely found its way into them, but it speedily will. [It
has already appeared in our books on language. [Footnote: See Skeat's
_Etym. Dict_. (s. v. _truffle_). Pott (_Etym. Forsch_. vol. ii. p. 65)
introduced the word 'dissimilation' into German.]] Advances in
philology have rendered it a matter of necessity that we should possess
a term to designate a certain process which words unconsciously undergo,
and no other would designate it at all so well. There is a process of
'assimilation' going on very extensively in language; the organs of
speech finding themselves helped by changing one letter for another
which has just occurred, or will just occur in a word; thus we say not
'a_df_iance,' but 'a_ff_iance,' not 're_n_ow_m_,' as our ancestors did
when 'renom' was first naturalized, but 're_n_ow_n_'; we say too,
though we do not write it, 'cu_b_board' and not 'cu_p_board,'
'su_t_tle' and not 'su_b_tle.' But side by side with this there is
another opposite process, where some letter would recur too often for
euphony or ease in speaking, were the strict form of the word too
closely held fast; and where consequently this letter is exchanged for
some other, generally for some nearly allied; thus 'cae_r_uleus' was
once 'cae_l_uleus,' from caelum [Footnote: The connexion of _caeruleus_
with _caelum_ is not at all certain.] 'me_r_idies' is for 'me_d_idies/
or 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 render other and further triumphs of art possible, oftentimes
such as would prove quite unattainable without them. [Footnote: See
Mill, _System of Logic_, iv. 6, 3.]

It is not merely the widening of men's intellectual horizon, which,
bringing new thoughts within the range of their vision, compels the
origination of corresponding words; but as often as regions of this
outward world hitherto closed are laid open, the novel objects of
interest which these contain will demand to find their names, and not
merely to be catalogued in the nomenclature of science, but, so far as
they present themselves to the popular eye, will require to be
popularly named. When a new thing, a plant, or fruit, or animal, or
whatever else it may be, is imported from some foreign land, or so
comes within the sphere of knowledge that it needs to be thus named,
there are various ways by which this may be done. The first and
commonest way is to import the name and the thing together,
incorporating the former, unchanged, or with slight modification, into
the language. Thus we did with the potato, which is only another form
of 'batata,' in which shape the original Indian word appears in our
earlier voyagers. But this is not the only way of naming; and the
example on which I have just lighted affords good illustration of
various other methods which may be adopted. Thus a name belonging to
something else, which the new object nearly resembles, may be
transferred to it, and the confusion arising from calling different
things by the same name disregarded. It was thus in German, 'kartoffel'
being only a corruption, which found place in the last century, of
'tartuffel' from the Italian 'tartiiffolo'(Florio), properly the name
of the truffle; but which not the less was transferred to the potato,
on the ground of the many resemblances between them. [Footnote: [See
Kluge, _Etym. Dict_. (s. v. _Kartoffel_).]] Or again this same transfer
may take place, but with some qualifying or distinguishing addition.
Thus in Italy also men called the potato 'tartufo,' but added 'bianco,'
the white truffle; a name now giving way to 'patata.' Thus was it, too,
with the French; who called it apple, but 'apple of the earth'; even as
in many of the provincial dialects of Germany it bears the name of
'erdapfel' or earth-apple to this day.

It will sometimes happen that a language, having thus to provide a new
name for a new thing, will seem for a season not to have made up its
mind by which of these methods it shall do it. Two names will exist
side by side, and only after a time will one gain the upper hand of the
other. Thus when the pineapple was introduced into England, it brought
with it the name of 'ananas' erroneously 'anana' under which last form
it is celebrated by Thomson in his _Seasons_. [Footnote: [The word
ananas is from a native Peruvian name _nanas_. The pineapple was first
seen by Europeans in Peru; see the _New English Dictionary_ (s. v.).]]
This name has been nearly or quite superseded by 'pineapple' manifestly
suggested by the likeness of the new fruit to the cone of the pine. It
is not a very happy formation; for it is not _likeness_, but _identity_,
which 'pineapple' suggests, and it gives some excuse to an error, which
up to a very late day ran through all German-English and French-English
dictionaries; I know not whether even now it has disappeared. In all of
these 'pineapple' is rendered as though it signified not the anana, but
this cone of the pine; and not very long ago, the _Journal des Débats_
made some uncomplimentary observations on the voracity of the English,
who could wind up a Lord Mayor's banquet with fir-cones for dessert.

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