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 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WORDS. 
 
 A POPULAR INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENCE 
 OF LANGUAGE. 
 
 Second Edition. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25. 
 
 "I iead it with much interest, and recommended it to the 
 young men at Oxford." — Max M tiller. 
 
 Wm. C. Prime, in the New York Journal of Commerce : 
 " It will pay young and old persons to read it." 
 
 R. H. Stoddard, in the New York Mail and Evening 
 
 Express: " A book of universal interest and sterling worth. 
 
 . . In its field it is probably unrivalled." 
 
 George Perry, in the New York Home Journal ; "One 
 of the best introductions to the study of English in the light of 
 the latest advances in philology which we have seen." 
 
 The New York Independent : "The author's style is clear, 
 strong and simple. He spends no time in chasing illusions or 
 airing novelties, and his book is a model in its class." 
 
 The New York Graphic : " For its scope it may be said to 
 be invaluable." 
 
 A. LOVELL & CO., 
 
 NEW YORK.
 
 THE 
 
 Fortunes of Words 
 
 LETTERS TO A LADY 
 
 BY 
 
 FEDERICO GARLANDA, Ph.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE PHILOSOPHY OF WORDS." 
 
 NEW YORK, 
 A. LOVELL & CO. 
 
 / 

 
 Copyright, 1887. 
 
 BY 
 
 F. GARLANDA.
 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 FIRST Letter. — Introduction — The Science of Lan- 
 guage — Its Importance — Its Connection with 
 the Study of Man and History — Words and 
 Things. ..... Page I 
 
 Second Letter. — Etymology and History of Words — 
 Words and Their Life — Linguistic Maps — 
 Beauty and Difficulty of the Science of Lan- 
 guage. ..... Page 12 
 
 Third Letter. — Method and Facts — Analysis and 
 Comparison — Ancient Etymologists and their 
 Stumblings — Roots and their Growth — The Indo- 
 European Languages- — The Position of the En- 
 glish Language — Etymological Instances. Page 18 
 
 Fourth Letter. — The Idea of Root — Grimm's Law — 
 The Root ak and its Derivations — The Root pa — 
 The Root bha— The Root wid. . . Page 31 
 
 Fifth Letter. — Continuation: Growth of Roots — 
 Latin aud Anglo-Saxon Words in the English 
 
 1
 
 IV CONTENTS. 
 
 La7iguage — The Root bhar — The Root luk — The 
 Root da — The Root tar — The Root yu — The Root 
 ma — The Root bhadh — The Root spak. Page 44 
 
 Sixth Letter. — Importance of the Study of Roots — 
 Roots and Dictionaries — History of Several Fa- 
 miliar Words: reception and capable ; y>\\\>\\ (stu- 
 dent) and pupil (of the eye); charming; mercy and 
 market; villain; valet; pontiff; miss and magis- 
 trate; wig and perruque. . . Page 51 
 
 Seventh Letter. — Continuation : to escape, to dis- 
 mantle, artillery, coquetry, dupe, to arrive, press and 
 express ; gossip and commerage ; hypocrite ; throne, 
 angel, government, alms. — Changes in personal and 
 local names: Ingleford, Cape Hvarf, Chateau 
 Vert, Beauchef, Grand-Font, etc. — Names of 
 Ships — Signs of Inns. . . . Page 61 
 
 Eighth Letter. — Some more Researches in the His- 
 tory and Contiection of Familiar Words. — Tear 
 and larme ; dies, jour and Tuesday ; chair, cathedral 
 and session ; tile and detective ; coin in English and 
 in French ; aurora and combustion ; altar and ori- 
 gin ; initial and count ; surgeon and gardener ; 
 arrows and intoxication ; temple and anatomy ; tide 
 and demon ; timber and domestic ; symposium and 
 poison ; a ' buxom ' woman ; syllable and syllabus ; 
 deluge and laundry ; prose and verse ; hectic and 
 sail ; village, parish and diocese ; chaperon ; com-
 
 CONTENTS. V 
 
 plexion ; beauty and bounty ; reasons and ra- 
 tions. ..... Page 71 
 
 Ninth Letter. — Common Words Derived from 
 Local or Persona/ Names — Names of Trees, Ani- 
 mals, Minerals, Fabrics and Money — Influence of 
 the Arabs, the Flemings, and the Italians — Lum- 
 ber, cravat, spencer, sandwich, dollar, tariff, 
 etc. ..... Page 91 
 
 TENTH Letter. — The New Method of Language- 
 Study and the Ways of old Etymologists com- 
 pared — Instances of their vagaries — Skinner, 
 Mdnage, Blackstone, etc. . . Page 99 
 
 Eleventh Letter. — Application of Linguistic to 
 Prehistoric Studies — Primitive Nature of Human 
 ' Tools and Dwellings as shown by their Names — 
 Cooking, Grinding, Weaving, Writing — Books 
 and Book-Making : Parchment, Paper, etc. — The 
 Limbs of our Body and their Names ; the Head t 
 the Hand, the Nose, the Eye, etc. . Page 105 
 
 Twelfth Letter. — The Development of Ethical 
 Feelings Studied in Words — Ethics, Customs and 
 Morals — Law and Bight — Virtue and Vice ; 
 
 * Malice, Perversity and Depravity — Murder — 
 Shame — Truth — Verity — The Ideas of Labor, Pov- 
 erty and Suffering in Latiguage. . Page 1 19 
 
 Thirteenth Letter. — The Color-Sense, and the 
 Names of Colors — Importance of this Subject — 
 Linguistic and Physiological Researches. Page 1 27
 
 vi COX TENTS. 
 
 Fourteenth Letter. — Names of Numbers — The Pro- 
 gressive Development of Calculation Studied in the 
 Names of Numbers — Results from Different Lan- 
 guages. ..... Page 136 
 
 Fifteenth Letter. - The Superstitions of Lan- 
 guage — Familiar words whose fundamental mean- 
 ing is incompatible with our tenets, religious, 
 moral or scientific. . . . Page 147 
 
 Sixteenth Letter. — Why Words Change their 
 Meanings — Influence of Progress — Religious, So- 
 cial and Political Crises — The Advetit of Chris- 
 tianity — The French Revolution — Great Inventions 
 and Discoveries — Influence of the Learned and of 
 the Unlearned. .... Page 153 
 
 Seventeenth Letter. — Slang — Its Merits and 
 Demerits — Purity of Language ; Strength and 
 Beauty — How to Preserve and Promote Them. 
 
 Page 169 
 
 Eighteenth Letter — Synonyms. — When and by 
 Whom They are Used — Reason of their Use — In- 
 adequacy of Language— International Synonyms. 
 
 Page 185 
 
 Nineteenth Letter. — Language and Folkpsychol- 
 ogy — Philosophy of Language — Comparative Stud- 
 ies — The Idea of "Love" in the Latin and in the 
 English Language. . . . Page 199 
 
 Twentieth Letter. — Conclusion. Page . 215
 
 THE 
 
 FORTUNES OF WORDS 
 
 FIRST LETTER. 
 
 Introduction — The Science of Language — Its Importance — 
 Its Connection with the Study of Man and History — 
 Words and Things. 
 
 DEAR FRIEND— Ever since I began to 
 communicate with you on the subject of 
 my studies, there is no kind of encouragement 
 that I have not received from you. You arc so 
 earnest, your mind, instinct with womanly love- 
 liness, is so eager and open to wide and noble 
 sympathies, that your very listening is an in- 
 spiration. I never can think of you without 
 my mind going back to the great women of the 
 Renaissance, who could hold their own in dis- 
 cussing Greek philosophy or mathematics with 
 the greatest savants of the time, and yet did 
 not lose one point of that delicacy and sweet- 
 ness, of that instinctive love for beautiful and
 
 2 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 graceful things, which are the crowning charms 
 of womanhood. I am sure you will not bear 
 me any grudge if I try to put on paper, with as 
 much order as will be possible, some of those re- 
 sults of the science of language about which we 
 have talked so often, and address these letters to 
 you. On my part it is simply a debt of grati- 
 tude. It was in my conversations with you 
 that the idea of these letters originated. Let, 
 then, the fruit go back to her who had so large 
 a part in the planting of the tree. 
 
 It would be altogether superfluous to dis- 
 course to you upon the importance of these 
 studies. They have always been very impor- 
 tant, since studies in words are, after all, studies 
 in things. Besides, they sharpen one's mind 
 and accustom it to observation, comparison, fine 
 analysis and subtle discrimination. In the words 
 of Scaliger, the great antiquarian and philolo- 
 gist, " the sifting of these subtleties, although it 
 is of no use to make machines for grinding corn, 
 frees the mind from the rust of ignorance, and 
 sharpens it for other matters." But nozv, in the 
 light of modern researches and methods, it is a 
 new world entirely that opens before us.
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 3 
 
 He who follows, even superficially, the move- 
 ment of modern studies and compares it with 
 that of the last century, cannot fail to notice a 
 wide difference. Philosophizing was the prom- 
 inent characteristic of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. They discussed and dreamed about man- 
 kind, religion, law, language and the universe. 
 Systems were evolved out of general principles 
 which too often had no foundation except in 
 the fancies of their authors. To-day, on the 
 contrary, the tendencies of all science are strict- 
 ly historical. We have grown sceptical and 
 diffident of philosophical systems. We do not 
 care so much to listen to abstract and subject- 
 ive theories about the nature of society, of law, 
 of religion, of the world, as we strive to know 
 how these things were formed, where they come 
 from, how they grow and live. We have a feel- 
 ing that only by being able to account for their 
 origin and growth, we may be able at all to 
 learn their essence. Hence that spirit of ob- 
 servation and research which, as it was aptly 
 remarked, has made of history a science and of 
 all science a history. It was Goethe, I think, 
 who said that the day would come when
 
 4 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 we would not ask the ox why it has its horns, 
 but how it has come to have them. That time, 
 we may say, has come. New sciences spring up, 
 all in accordance with this new spirit: geology, 
 palaeontology, embryology, comparative anat- 
 omy, all aim to give us a history of life in the 
 world. We all have an impression that there 
 is a universal and lawful continuity in all the 
 phenomena of life, in the biological as well as 
 in the moral world. The adage of the ancients 
 that natura non facit saltns never was so thor- 
 oughly understood as it is nowadays. Now, 
 more than ever, we are aware of the absolute 
 dependence of to-day on the yesterday ; and 
 (let me make this remark in passing) they do 
 not read well the spirit of their age who, for 
 whatever cause and in whatever field, preach 
 revolution instead of insisting on a continuous 
 gradual development. 
 
 Whenever a crisis happens in the commercial 
 or political world, the first thing we require is 
 to investigate how it grew, what brought it 
 about. A physician is not satisfied with his 
 diagnosis if he does not go back for years and 
 generations and hunt out all that can be
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 5 
 
 known about the preceding maladies of his pa- 
 tient, his father, mother and ancestors. This 
 feeling that to know one thing truly implies to 
 know its origin is so general, that we have 
 changed the sense of the word ' etymology.' 
 ' Etymology ' means exactly the exposition or 
 explanation of the true meaning of words 
 {etyvws, true) ; but we have bent it to mean 
 the ' origin of words.' In fact, if the ' true 
 meaning ' of a word and the ' origin ' of a 
 word are not exactly convertible terms, the lat- 
 ter is always a good clue to the former. We 
 must add, however, that modern philology is 
 no longer satisfied with the origin of words 
 alone ; it wants to know their entire history. 
 
 This way of looking at the world historically 
 is the most far-reaching achievement of the 
 modern mind. Whether we shut our eyes or 
 keep them open, there is written on everything 
 'why?' but the 'why' cannot be answered 
 if the 'how?' and 'whence?' are not known. 
 The philosopher says: 'All that is, is,' but 
 the proposition, ' all that is, was not,' or at 
 least, 'all that is, was not as it is,' is equally 
 true. Hence the question which suggests itself
 
 6 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 at all moments of our life : ' How has it come 
 to be so ? ' The trees and flowers which adorn 
 your garden did not exist once, nor did their 
 ancestors have the same shapes and colors; 
 how did they become what they are ? Your 
 beautiful horse, of which you are so fond and 
 so proud, would find in his pedigree strange 
 and unlooked-for relations. So would the dog 
 which lies at your feet and looks up at you with 
 eyes so mild and loving, forgetful entirely of the 
 primitive fierce savagery of his kin. The laws 
 which govern us, this world of society with 
 which we trammel and fetter each other on all 
 sides, have not always been what they are ; 
 what were they, then ? How did they change? 
 
 Indeed, we have only to reflect, to lift our- 
 selves a moment above the material and com- 
 mon-place pursuits of our dull lives, to have the 
 historical problem facing us from everywhere. 
 
 We do generally concern ourselves with the 
 future far more than with the past ; which, after 
 all, is a good and sensible thing. But we should 
 not forget that the future is but a continuation 
 or a consequence of the present, and the present 
 is in its turn both a continuation and a conse-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 7 
 
 quence of the past. We do not know what a 
 man is going to do if we have not seen him at 
 work before. We cannot tell how high a water 
 course is going to run uphill if we do not know 
 from what height it fell. In the physical as 
 well as in the moral world, the key to the future 
 is in the past. 
 
 Concerning the enormous problem of the 
 origin of life, I heard once a lecturer go off on 
 a sentence like this : " I do not care to know 
 the preface to my cradle, but I would like to 
 know the appendix to my grave." It was re- 
 ceived with clamorous applause, as such oxy- 
 morons generally are ; but it was mere rhetoric 
 after all. In his own clumsy metaphor, if we 
 could read the preface to our cradle, the ap- 
 pendix to our grave would read by itself. 
 
 It is this universality and necessity of the 
 historical problem that gives the new science 
 of language an importance and a reach inferior 
 to no other science. The whole man, his mind, 
 his heart, his understanding, his beliefs, his 
 passions, all that he is and has been, is to be 
 found in language. Let us be more exact ; not 
 the tvJiole man is in language, because a great
 
 8 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 many things there are in ourselves which are not 
 known, or but dimly known, to ourselves, which, 
 therefore, are not expressed by words. But it 
 is safe to say that all that part of man which 
 is known to man, is to be found in language. 
 In language, then, we have one of the greatest, 
 the most direct, the most intimate means for 
 the study of man. 
 
 By tracing words back to their primitive 
 formation and meaning, we may learn how 
 some deep and most complex ideas embodied 
 in our words were first formed and conceived. 
 All the words pertaining to the life of the soul 
 can, thus analyzed, throw floods of light on the 
 history of our moral conceptions. On the 
 other hand, by following words downward from 
 their origin to their present use, we can watch 
 the human mind in its action, surprise it in its 
 inmost ways of working ; to say nothing of the 
 great historical, ethnographical and literary 
 problems which are connected with and en- 
 lightened by such investigations. Even putting 
 the practical utility of these studies aside, what 
 a satisfaction to have before the eyes of our 
 mind the linguistic map of the civilized world ;
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 9 
 
 to see the mainsprings from which the streams 
 of modern speeches flow ; to follow them step 
 by step, when they cross or diverge, widen or 
 narrow, merge into others or disappear. What 
 a satisfaction for the geologist to look at a hill 
 and to be able to tell in what age of the earth 
 and how it was formed, what materials it is 
 made of, what kind of vegetation it was covered 
 with, what animals sought shelter in its dens 
 or lay under the shade of its trees ! The same 
 does the glottologist with words. (Allow me to 
 introduce into English this word, which is bet- 
 ter and not so misleading as ' linguist.' Linguist 
 should be called he who knows and speaks 
 several languages ; ' glottologist ' is the student 
 of the science of language. There are linguists 
 who speak half a dozen languages or more, but 
 do not know anything about the science of 
 language. The glottologist does not care to 
 learn to speak several languages ; what he aims 
 at, is to see into the grammatical structure and 
 word-formation of as many languages as he can 
 get hold of.) With a fragmentary and well- 
 worn word, which, to the untrained, means very 
 little, the glottologist goes back centuries and
 
 io THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 centuries, to the first form of that word ; then 
 he follows it in all its metamorphoses and 
 derivations ; traces out its connection with 
 hundreds of other words in different languages, 
 its original meaning and the various other 
 meanings with which it has been clothed in its 
 centennial life. 
 
 You read in your Bible (Deut. xxi., 4), " And 
 the elders of that city shall bring down the 
 heifer unto a rough valley, which is neither 
 eared nor sown." 
 
 If you ask what this eared is, grammarians 
 will tell you that it is the past form of an obso- 
 lete verb, to ear, which means ' to plough.' Ob- 
 solete is about all that they can tell you. If you 
 take a Greek or Roman coin to an antiquarian, 
 and he tells you that it is an ancient coin, an 
 obsolete coin, no longer accepted in common 
 currency, would you be satisfied? Still, it is 
 astonishing how many persons are ready to 
 shut their dictionary and declare " they know 
 all about it " when they have learnt that a 
 word is "obsolete." A glottologist will tell 
 you that this obsolete verb ' to ear,' was in 
 Middle English ericn, from the Anglo-Saxon
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. II 
 
 erian, which is to be referred to an Indo- 
 European root ' ar,' meaning ' to plough.' 
 From this same root we have the Greek verb 
 ar-oo, to plough, the Latin ar-are, and ar-a-trum, 
 the plough ; our adjective ar-able, that can be 
 ploughed, and very likely the substantive earth, 
 the 'tilled.' 
 
 Nor are these researches without a practi- 
 cal bearing. Imagine a student who under- 
 takes to learn a foreign language. If he has 
 not even the slightest training in comparative 
 philology, he is obliged to learn almost all 
 words one by one, mechanically, as so many 
 algebraic signs. By the light of the science of 
 language, on the contrary, he can recognize in 
 each word a member of a certain family, a 
 blossom, a leaf, a branch, which he can easily 
 refer to the trunk with which he is familiar.
 
 SECOND LETTER. 
 
 Etymology and History of Words — Words and their Life — 
 Linguistic Maps — Beauty and Difficulty of the Science of 
 Language. 
 
 1HAVE no intention to follow rigorously, in 
 our conversations, any logical order, because 
 I know that you would not like it. In your 
 eagerness for all intellectual food, you retain an 
 amiable, almost, I would say, pert independ- 
 ence of spirit, which is so thoroughly feminine, 
 and makes you so lovely even in your outbursts 
 of impatience. We shall go on leisurely, let- 
 ting the subject itself lead us onward, rather 
 than break it up and enchase it into a prefixed 
 frame ; just as we did that evening on the 
 piazza, in your villa by the sea, while the skies 
 were aglow with the glories of sunset, the wind 
 was sighing through the pine-trees, and the 
 breakers were dashing their foam at our feet, 
 surging and chanting all the while their eternal 
 monotone ; do you remember ? I hope you
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. *3 
 
 have not forgotten those delightful hours ; / 
 never will. The breakers were ever coming, 
 and breaking, and roaring, and seemed to sing: 
 " We are strong, strong, strong ! We come 
 from afar, far, far ! " The lengthening shadows 
 were bending over them, and all Nature seemed 
 to blend and merge in that immense embrace. 
 There was a pause in our conversation, as hap- 
 pens. You gazed awhile over the dark waters, 
 thoughtfully, and then you said, half shudder- 
 ing, and drawing closer your wraps (that pretty 
 red shawl, so lovely on your white dress) : " I 
 wonder where they come from ! " The mood 
 of the hour was so serious that I ventured upon 
 a joke. " Where they come from ? that's the 
 business of etymology." And you, sharply, " O, 
 you horrid pedant ! ' Still, I know it did not 
 displease you very much, as you turned soon, 
 laughing, and said : " Go on, please ! " 
 
 Why do I thus prattle on, away from my sub- 
 ject ? In truth, I don't know, unless it is 
 because one likes to go over as often as possi- 
 ble the hours that one did enjoy the best. In 
 the future, however, I will be more severe with 
 myself and keep closer to our subject.
 
 14 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 I mentioned that we must not be satisfied 
 with knowing the origin of words, but we 
 must investigate their whole history. Their 
 origin, important as it is, is only the first link 
 of the chain. But from that distant point, 
 how did words travel down to our days? 
 Through what metamorphoses of sound and 
 meaning did they assume their present forms 
 and significations? It is important to know 
 the fountain-head of a river, but to have a full 
 knowledge of the river itself, we must follow it 
 down its course, see by what affluents its waters 
 are swollen, through what lands it runs, down 
 what falls it leaps, into what sea it pours and 
 merges. This is not an idle comparison. It is 
 exactly what glottology aims at : to present, 
 as in a clear map, the course of languages ; 
 to show us whence they start, whither they 
 run, how they mingle and separate, how they 
 live and die. 
 
 Glottology, aided by ethnology and palaeon- 
 tology, has carried the lamp of investigation 
 far back into ages where all history is silent. In 
 its light, the most sequestered valleys, the most 
 insignificant villages have given up their secrets :
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 15 
 
 " We were," they say, " the abode of such and 
 such a race ; such and such a family of men lived 
 here and left their names with us before other 
 families came which drove them away, to be 
 driven in their turn by others." The brooks, 
 the cliffs, the mountains, tell us, by their names, 
 the story of races, of whom we have scarcely 
 any other memory left ; while in the arid col- 
 lections of words, where, as in faded herbaria, 
 are recorded and classified the spoils of lan- 
 guages long since dead, we can read the earliest 
 history of our own race and the civilization of 
 an age so remote that, in comparison, Rome 
 and Greece seem to become our contemporaries. 
 To what does the antiquity of Caesar and Cicero 
 dwindle away, since we can go back to a time 
 when the remote forefathers of those who were 
 to people Italy and subsequently to found 
 Rome, were still pasturing their flocks in the 
 high plains of Asia? Indeed, the philological 
 and archaeological researches of this century 
 have so lengthened the domain of history that 
 they seem to have altered our perspective of 
 time, and made very near to us that which once 
 appeared to be so far away. To one who is
 
 1 6 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 familiar with the Vedas, Virgil and Horace 
 seem to belong to modern literature. It happens 
 with time, after all, as it happens with space. 
 The ideas of farness and nearness depend en- 
 tirely on habit. In Europe it seems quite a 
 journey to go from Paris to Rome, and a good 
 deal of preparation and leave-taking is gone 
 through before setting out. The travelled Am- 
 erican, familiar with the distances of a bound- 
 less continent, crosses the ocean as one would 
 go to his country-seat, and does not think much 
 of taking a trip to Australia. 
 
 Thus it is that the science of language, itself 
 an historical science, is one of the most valid 
 auxiliaries of history. Those who think of it 
 as a dry, uninteresting study of roots with a 
 sleepy accompaniment of declensions and con- 
 jugations, do not understand it aright ; or if 
 they have got some knowledge of it, they fail 
 to see the great green fields which it leads to. 
 
 One might, however, deceive one's self by 
 thinking that because the results and prospects 
 of the science of language are grand and alluring, 
 their pursuit also is always delightful, easy and 
 entertaining. We must remember that the Hill
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. *7 
 
 of Science has at the top a green refreshing 
 plain, lighted by the sun of Truth and sweet 
 to rest upon. But its slopes are awfully steep, 
 thick with stones and thorns, and altogether 
 such that years of hard work and good will and 
 mutual help are required to advance a few steps. 
 The science of language is no exception to the 
 rule. Rather, if we look back to the way in 
 which even the greatest minds, when dealing 
 with language, went stumbling around, down to 
 the present century, we must conclude that its 
 path is even harder than others, and thick with 
 difficulties, snares and pitfalls.
 
 THIRD LETTER. 
 
 Method and Facts — Analysis and Comparison — Ancient Ety- 
 mologists and their Stumblings — Roots and their Growth 
 — The Indo-European Languages — The Position of the 
 English Language — Etymological Instances. 
 
 IN the Science of Language, as in all sci- 
 ence, to reach a positive result was not 
 possible before a method was found. In science, 
 as well as in life, method is everything. 'Method* 
 is " the way after " (metd, after ; hodos, way), 
 the way of following up a clue, an idea, orderly, 
 clearly, consistently, without jerks or jumps 
 or deviations. It is the thread out of the laby- 
 rinth, without which even the most willing, the 
 most skilful and keen-eyed, will go round and 
 round, tiring themselves, tearing their own flesh 
 and bleeding, to find themselves, at last, ex-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 19 
 
 hausted and powerless, there whence they 
 started. 
 
 A method for the science of language was 
 found when it was at last proposed to apply to 
 it the great principle of common-sense, namely 
 to proceed from what we know to what we do 
 not know ; to begin to study the facts which 
 lie around us before devising systems to explain 
 them. Quite simple, you will say ; why did 
 they not apply it at the very start ? Yes, as 
 simple as the egg of Columbus, and equally 
 difficult. To poor, awkward, human minds, 
 are not things most simple the most difficult ? 
 Have they not always been so ? In the 
 political field, for instance, what is more 
 simple and at the same time more useful than 
 the idea that neighboring states should live at 
 peace and help each other to increase their 
 wealth and happiness, rather than live like cats 
 and dogs and give the best strength of their 
 minds and bodies to thoughts and works of 
 mutual destruction ? Still centuries elapsed, full 
 of unspeakable misery, hatred and wars, until, 
 about one hundred years ago, to a few good
 
 20 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 bourgeois the idea occurred that perhaps an ar- 
 rangement could be devised by means of which 
 some states might live side by side in peace, 
 and some good sense be brought also into the 
 transaction of international affairs. Hence, 
 from this simple and very plain idea, the con- 
 federation of the United States of North 
 America, the grandest phenomenon in the 
 political history of the world. 
 
 And in social life, for instance, what would 
 be more simple than to do away with many 
 of the useless, ridiculous, tedious regulations 
 which embitter, and take away nine-tenths 
 of the sweetness and real, soul-felt enjoy- 
 ment of social intercourse, which are a nui- 
 sance to the thousands, a subject of laughter 
 and ennui to the clever, an advantage to 
 nobody? Still, far from getting rid of them, 
 we seem bound to increase them every year, 
 and to get farther and farther from that ' plain 
 living,' which is the inseparable companion of 
 ' high thinking.' 
 
 We must not wonder, then, much less feel 
 tempted to look down on our predecessors,
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 21 
 
 because they stumbled long in their way in the 
 pursuit of science, and did not see the clue 
 which lay quite at their feet. At the same time, 
 it will not be useless to look at their method 
 and some of their mistakes. Their mistakes 
 will at least teach us how to avoid them, and 
 their method, with its necessary results, will be 
 a good test for our own. 
 
 But, first, let me state briefly what the new 
 method is, and which are the new instru- 
 ments of research that are put at our disposi- 
 tion. 
 
 It is necessary, as I have just mentioned, to 
 start from the study of facts. The facts to be 
 studied are words in all their forms, namely, 
 vocabularies and grammars. The method is 
 analytical and historico-comparative. When 
 we take up a word, we must not only consider 
 its present form ; in many cases nothing could 
 be made out of it. We must investigate 
 through what successive forms it has gone, and, 
 secondly, we must compare it with cognate 
 words in cognate languages. We must not 
 imagine intermediate forms ; we must really go
 
 2 2 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 to the historical documents of languages, and 
 collect and compare the forms which are found 
 to exist or to have existed. There is an abyss 
 between the old school, if they deserve such a 
 name, of etymologists and the modern meth- 
 ods. The former, as a rule, did not trouble 
 themselves with researches of this kind ; when 
 they wanted to know the etymology of a word, 
 they looked around for another word which 
 had with it some affinity either in sound or 
 meaning, and having once assumed that this 
 was the original word, they simply imagined 
 the intermediate forms which had to serve as 
 links between that and the supposed deriva- 
 tion. 
 
 The chief results strictly linguistical obtained 
 by the new science may be reduced to two : 
 one concerns the words in themselves, the other 
 languages in general. First, it has demon- 
 strated that every word has at its kernel, as its 
 essential element, a root, that is to say a sound 
 with a general indefinite meaning. These 
 primitive sounds are not many, and from them 
 all our words are formed. In the second place,
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 23 
 
 it has been able to give a classification of lan- 
 guages, at least of the most important of them. 
 A great result this, indeed, if we consider that 
 rational classification is the final scope and 
 crown of all science ; a result which sums up 
 all the work done at the same time that it lays 
 down the plan and ppints the way for the work 
 to come. 
 
 I will not repeat here the general classification 
 of languages. I have given it, as I am sure you 
 remember, in the " Philosophy of Words," and, 
 at any rate, it can be found in every book on 
 the science of language. But I think it worth 
 our while to exhibit briefly the classification of 
 the Indo-European languages, because into this 
 field chiefly our subsequent investigations will 
 proceed. 
 
 The Indo-European or Aryan languages com- 
 prehend the most important languages spoken 
 nowadays in Asia, Europe, and America, by the 
 most civilized peoples. They are divided into 
 seven great groups : 
 
 1. Sanskrit, ) 
 
 \ Eastern group. Asia. 
 
 2. Iranic, I
 
 2 4 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 3. Hellenic, 
 
 4. Italic, 
 
 5. Slavonic, 
 
 6. Teutonic, 
 
 7. Celtic. 
 
 Western group. 
 Europe and America. 
 
 It appears that all of Jhese groups descend 
 from one common mother language, now ex- 
 tinct, which was spoken in the high plains of 
 Central Asia, from which the people who spoke 
 these several languages separated and went 
 upon their migrations, two branches eastward, 
 and five westward. These separations did not 
 take place all at one time, but first one branch 
 split and then another, and another, the latter 
 pressing the former onward, farther from the 
 common stock. 
 
 These seven languages then are sisters, or 
 rather they were, as all of them are now dead ; 
 and the languages that sprang from them are 
 also cognate, although their kinship is of 
 a more remote degree and less easy to de- 
 tect. 
 
 If we care to see at a glance what languages
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 25 
 
 are derived from each of them, the following 
 
 diagram will help us 
 Indie, 
 
 v 
 p 
 
 tx 
 
 B 
 
 o 
 
 rt 
 
 Iranic, 
 
 Celtic, 
 
 Italic, 
 
 Hellenic, 
 
 Letto-Slavic 
 
 Teutonic, 
 
 Vedic Sanskrit, 
 
 Modern Sanskrit, 
 
 Pali and Prakrit (spoken in India). 
 
 !Zend, 
 Cuneiform Inscriptions, 
 Persian. 
 
 j Cymric, 
 ( Gaelic. 
 
 ( Oscan, 
 
 - Latin— 
 ( Umbrian, 
 
 
 Neo-Latin 
 Languages. 
 
 ' Italian, 
 French, 
 Spanish, 
 ^ Portuguese, 
 Proven cal, 
 Walachian, 
 Rumansch. 
 
 Greek (four dialects), 
 Modern Greek. 
 
 Old Prussian, 
 Ecclesiastical Slavonic, 
 Russian Language. 
 
 ( Old High German, 
 High German, - Middle High German, 
 ( Modern High German. 
 
 'Gothic, 
 Anglo-Saxon {English), 
 Low German, -{ Old Du'ch, 
 I Old Frisian, 
 (^ Old Saxon. 
 
 Scandinavian. 
 
 Please give particular attention to two of 
 these groups, the Italic and the Teutonic. See
 
 26 
 
 THE FOR TUXES OF WORDS. 
 
 how prolific they are, how numerous and vari- 
 ous their dialects. Remember that they repre- 
 sent the languages of some of the strongest and 
 highest nations in the world. Much indeed of 
 what is great and worthy in modern civilization 
 is represented by these two families. Let me 
 insist also on the exceptionally fortunate posi- 
 tion of English. While the other intellectual 
 languages of modern Europe belong entirely 
 either to the Teutonic family, as German, or to 
 the Latin family, as French, English shares the 
 good things of both families. Its grammar and, 
 so to say, its substructure, are Teutonic, but its 
 vocabulary belongs in great part to Latin. 
 
 The above diagram, where we have the pedi- 
 gree of all the Indo-European languages, shows 
 where we have to look for the etymology of 
 our words. If we have, for instance, a word 
 belonging to a French dialect, we must com- 
 pare it with the forms it has assumed in other 
 French dialects, then in the other Neo-Latin 
 dialects, then with the form it had or the word 
 from which it is derived, in Latin. The Latin 
 word we can compare with cognate words in 
 the seven Indo-European groups, and finally
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 27 
 
 we can determine the Aryan root from which 
 all those forms are derived. 
 
 Take, for instance, the French word " pere," 
 father. This word occurs in an endless variety 
 of forms in all the Neo-Latin dialects. The 
 typical forms, however, are these: 'Pere,' 
 Northern Italian dialects ' pare,' Italian ' pa- 
 dre,' Latin pa-tre{m). The Latin stem is prop- 
 erly pa-ter, where -ter is a suffix, to be found in 
 all Aryan languages, denoting the ' agent,' and 
 pa- is a primitive Aryan root meaning ' to feed,' 
 'to support.' Hence 'pater' is the 'feeder,' 
 the ' supporter.' Following up this same word 
 in other Aryan languages, we find patc>r in 
 Greek, pidar in Persian, pitri in Sanskrit, and 
 (according to Grimm's law, of which I shall say 
 more hereafter), fadar in Gothic, feeder in An- 
 glo-Saxon, father in English, Vater in Ger- 
 man, each one of which has given rise to 
 many derivations, such as ' fatherly,' ' father- 
 land,' ' patria,' ' paternal,' etc. So, taking 
 one simple root {pa), we can follow it step by 
 step through all its transformations and prolifi. 
 cations in all the dialects directly or indirectly 
 connected with the primitive Aryan speech. It
 
 28 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 is easy to see then the wide scope of modern 
 linguistic researches. Their method is a well- 
 grounded, matter-of-fact proceeding, their field 
 is immense, but at the same time so well de- 
 fined and explored that the glottologist goes 
 over it with the same surety as an intelligent 
 traveller goes through a land of which he holds 
 in his hands a good map. It is also very easy 
 to see that the results of these investigations 
 must be such as the poor attempts of former 
 etymologists, feeling their way in utter dark- 
 ness through a labyrinth of which they knew 
 neither the end nor the beginning, neither the be- 
 longings nor the plan, have nothing to compare 
 with for a moment. They had no idea of roots, 
 and very confused ones about suffixes and pre- 
 fixes. Their treatment of the phonetic princi- 
 ples was rude and empirical. Even when they 
 happened to hit upon a right point, they did not 
 know it, as they had no criterion by which to 
 test the value of their discovery. They were 
 just like a sea-captain who has lost his compass, 
 and, through the darkness of the night, cannot 
 find his position ; he will steer to the right or 
 to the left, as chance suggests, but when can he
 
 \ 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 29 
 
 tell that he is right ? A mere cabin-boy knows 
 just as much as he. 
 
 To see better the difference between the old 
 and the new methods, let us look into the 
 etymology of the words 'pere' and 'father,' 
 as given by two old etymologists. Menage, 
 the celebrated etymologist, throws ' father,' 
 1 pere,' ' pater,' ' padre,' etc., together with 
 'papa,' of which he says: " II est forme 
 (comme maman) par la nature dans la bouchc 
 des enfants, et il n'en faut pas chercher ailleurs 
 l'etymologie." As for the suffix ter, " II n'est 
 qu'une addition, ou pour mieux dire, une cor- 
 ruption du mot, laquelle nc vient point de leur 
 nature, mais de l'institution des homines." 
 
 Skinner, in his " Etymologicon Linguae An- 
 glicanae," derives English ' father,' Anglo- 
 Saxon 'faeder,' German ' vater,' etc., all 
 "immediately from Latin 'pater,' mediately 
 from Greek ' pater.' ' The Greek word then is 
 derived either from paomai, to acquire, or from 
 speiro, to sow. About the formation of the 
 word pater, whether it consists of several ele- 
 ments or not, nothing is said. The English 
 father, he adds, may also be very easily (com-
 
 30 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 modissime) derived from the Danish verb feder, 
 to nourish, ox fodcr, to generate. It would not 
 be easy to accumulate more mistakes in so few 
 lines.
 
 FOURTH LETTER. 
 
 The Idea of Root — Grimm's Law — The Root ak and its De- 
 rivations — The Root pa — The Root bha — The Root wid. 
 
 T T 7~E have just seen how from words which are 
 V V constantly on our lips we can go back to 
 the primitive Indo-European root from which 
 those words descend. The root that is thus 
 reached is never the root of that word alone, but 
 is the kernel, so to speak, round which cluster 
 families of words, all having therein a common 
 starting point. It is the seed from which a 
 trunk grows up with branches, leaves, flowers 
 and fruits. 
 
 The method we have applied is the method 
 of one who starts from the mouth of a river 
 and follows it up to its very source. It is the 
 method by which sources and causes are dis- 
 covered, and science is made. But it is useful 
 sometimes to follow the reverse course, namely, 
 to start from the source, or, in our case, from 
 the root, and follow it downward in all, or at 
 least in its main directions. Let us apply this 
 course to a few roots, chosen at random from
 
 32 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 among the linguistic stock of the Indo- 
 European nations, and let us follow them in 
 their route in two at least of the most import- 
 ant families, the Latin and the Teutonic. We 
 will assume as the best representatives of the 
 Latin family (the best or the most apt for our 
 purpose, at least) Latin itself and French; for 
 the Teutonic family, the English language. 
 The field, thus circumscribed, is still wide 
 enough, and I am sure you would not care to 
 have me muster before you an endless array of 
 Old Slavonic, Old High German, Celtic, or Zend 
 words. But you must not be impatient with 
 me if, before entering upon this investigation, I 
 tarry a little, calling your attention to certain 
 facts which, although they may seem somewhat 
 dry, are, nevertheless, of the greatest interest. 
 In the first place, we must remember that a 
 root is "that combination of sounds which 
 remains when a word is stripped of everything 
 formative." The Indian grammarians called a 
 root dhdtii, from dhd, to nourish. DJidtu means 
 any " primary or elementary substance " ; hence 
 the primary element of words. It was wise 
 and keen to call roots by a word meaning 'to
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 33 
 
 nourish.' Roots are indeed the feeding ele- 
 ment of languages. To be more exact, we must 
 take here feeding in the broad sense which we 
 find in the root pa (whence fa-t 'her), meaning 
 both feeding and breeding. The endless variety 
 of our words is but a growth out of a compar- 
 atively meagre stock of roots. We can have a 
 good idea of the vital power of roots when we 
 remember that all the Indo-European speeches 
 do not presuppose more than 500 roots. The 
 number of roots for the English language given 
 by Mr. Skeat, at the end of his etymological 
 dictionary, is 461. 
 
 The discovery of roots is only one of the 
 glories of the science of language. It has also 
 found out the laws (although at first there seems 
 to be nothing but inextricable confusion) ac- 
 cording to which the various Indo-European 
 languages reflect the sounds which constituted 
 the roots in the mother tongue. A most im- 
 portant law is that which, from the name of 
 the great German philologist who discovered 
 it, is known as Grimm s law. It is a law on 
 the "rotation of consonants" in the Indo- 
 European languages. A common, although un-
 
 34 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 scientific, classification of our consonants^ 
 divides them into hard (P, T, C, as in cost), soft 
 (B, D, G, as \ngo), and aspirates (H, Ph (f), Th). 
 Grimm noticed that if we put Sanskrit, Greek 
 and Latin on one side, Low German (Gothic, 
 Anglo-Saxon and English) in the middle, and 
 Old High German on the other side, then an 
 aspirate in the first group is represented by a 
 soft in the middle group, and by a hard in the 
 other group ; a soft in the first group is repre- 
 sented by a hard in the middle, and by an 
 aspirate in the other; and finally, a hard in the 
 first group is represented by an aspirate in the 
 middle, and by a soft in the last group. Accord- 
 ing to J. Peile's suggestion we may call an as- 
 pirate A, a soft S, a hard H ; then Grimm's 
 law may be represented as follows, the word 
 ASH serving as a mevwria tec/uiica for the 
 whole : 
 
 Sanskrit, Greek, 
 
 Low German, Gothic. 
 
 Old 
 
 Latin. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon, English. 
 
 High Geiman 
 
 A 
 
 S 
 
 H 
 
 S 
 
 H 
 
 A 
 
 H 
 
 A 
 
 S 
 
 I will not enter into further details, as on this 
 matter I had occasion to dilate elsewhere (" Phil-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 35 
 
 osophy of Words," p. j6 f.). But the following 
 table will give an easy and comprehensive exhi- 
 bition of the bearings of Grimm's law : 
 
 
 LABIAL. 
 
 DENTAL. 
 
 GUTTURAL. 
 
 In Greek and generally 
 in Sanskrit and Lat- 
 in, the letters. .. 
 
 p b ph f 
 
 t d th 
 
 k (c) g kh 
 
 Correspond in Gothic 
 (Anglo-Saxon, En- 
 
 ph (0 p b 
 
 th t d 
 
 kh (h,g) k g 
 
 And in Old H. Ger- 
 
 b (v, f) ph,f p 
 
 d th(z) t 
 
 g (h) kh k 
 
 Now let us hasten to investigate the course 
 of some particular root. Let us take first the 
 root AK, which has a wide filiation indeed. If 
 I should say that the word eye comes from this 
 root, you would perhaps laugh at me. But I 
 shall not say it ; facts say it for me. This 
 root means properly ' to pierce,' ' to be sharp,' 
 and (meanings closely allied) ' to see,' ' to be 
 quick.' From it we have the Latin verb ' ac-u- 
 ere,' to sharpen, from which ' ac-utus,' our 
 ac-ute, sharpened, sharp. Ague is only a trans- 
 formation of 'acute,' from Old French agit, 
 sharp, feminine ague. It was once called 
 febris acuta, sharp, stinging fever. Latin ac-us,
 
 tf THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 needle, and our ac-id, ac-idity, come from the 
 same root. 
 
 Ac-va in Sanskrit comes from the same root, 
 and means ' swift,' but it became the name of 
 the horse; Latin, 'aek-vus,' 'equus,' horse; 
 whence our 'equine,' 'equestrian.' The Greek 
 hippos, horse, was once ik-kos. 
 
 Eager, sharp, keen, desirous, is from Latin 
 ac-er, keen ; Middle English egre, Old French 
 eigre, aigre. 
 
 Our ac-me is the Greek cik-mc", a point, the 
 highest point. 
 
 From the same root we have Old Latin oc-us 
 and the diminutive oc-idus, eye, Old Greek ok-os, 
 Russian oka, Gothic augo, German aitge, Anglo- 
 Saxon eage, Middle English eighe, e/y, eye. 
 
 This is a good specimen of the life of roots. 
 
 Starting from the simple and general mean- 
 ing of ' sharpness,' it winds itself through many 
 languages, under many forms. It gives us the 
 name of a fever, of a noble animal, of a house- 
 hold utensil, of an intellectual quality, of the 
 organ of sight. In all these meanings it is easy 
 to trace out the primitive general ' meaning' of 
 the root, but only by careful comparative
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 37 
 
 analysis can one detect the ' form ' of the root 
 itself. Still, the results of slow but continuous 
 evolution are neither more wonderful nor more 
 difficult to trace here than in any other field. 
 Who would at first sight believe, for instance, 
 that the marvellous works of our architecture, 
 the churches, the arches, the palaces, are but a 
 slow growth and improvement from the hut of 
 the savage ? 
 
 Let us take up again the root PA, which we 
 met in- father. The primitive meaning of this 
 root is ' to feed,' ' to nourish,' hence, to support, 
 to protect. We have from it the words pa-ter, 
 father, the 'feeder,' the 'protector'; hence, 
 ' paternal,' ' patrocinium,' ' patrocinate,' ' patri- 
 mony,' ' patria,' the fatherland, ' patriotic,' 
 ' patrician ' ; ' pa-bulum,' food ; ' pa-sc-ere,' to 
 feed, from whose past pa-s-tum we have ' past- 
 ure,' the French ' repas,' meal, ' pastor,' ' pas- 
 toral,' etc. 
 
 We have the same root in the adjective pot-is, 
 that has power, that protects, and pot-ens, power- 
 ful. Hospes, whose stem is hos-pit, is the ' pro- 
 tector of the stranger, of the host ' ; hence, 
 ' hospital,' ' hospice,' etc.
 
 38 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 From this form pot, we have the Italian pot- 
 cre, Old French pocr, pooir, and, to avoid the 
 hiatus, povoir, Modern French pouvoir, English 
 power. 
 
 These formations from the root pa, belong- 
 ing to the Latin family, are very different from 
 those that belong to a Teutonic branch. Ac- 
 cording to Grimm's law, the root pa is reflected 
 in Gothic by fa. Hence we have the English 
 forms, ' fa-ther,' 'food,' ' feed,' ' fodder.' 
 
 The root BHA. This is also an important 
 root, and means to 'shine,' to 'make shine,' 
 and generally to ' make appear,' to bring to 
 manifestation. The Indo-European form bha 
 is reflected in Latin and Greek by fa. In 
 Greek we have the verb fa-mi, to say ; fe-mc, 
 saying, rumor, fame ; pro-fe-tes, ' fore-teller,' 
 prophet ; fo-ne, voice (' tele-phone,' ' phono- 
 graph,' 'phonetic,' 'euphony,' etc.); fa-i-no, to 
 appear, to shine   hence, fain-dmown, that 
 which appears, manifestation, ' phenomenon ' ; 
 fan-tasia, ' that makes visible,' ' that brings 
 forth,' imagination, ' fancy.' Connected with 
 faino, we have also ' diaphanous,' pellucid ; 
 ' epiphany,' apparition.
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 39 
 
 From the same root we have also fa-os (fos), 
 folds, light, whence our ' photograph,' ' photog- 
 raphy,' etc. 
 
 In Latin we have fa-ri, to speak ; ad-far i or 
 affari, to address somebody ; hence, ' affable,' 
 that speaks to people, kind ; effari, to utter ; 
 1 in-effable,' unutterable, indicible ; prae-fari, to 
 say before ; hence, ' preface,' that which is said 
 before the beginning of a work ; ' in-fant,' 
 that does not speak. Fas is the divine law, 
 that which is divinely spoken ; hence, ne-farws, 
 ' nefarious,' against the divine law, horribly 
 wicked. Fa-ma, ' fame ' ; fa-tum, ' fa-te,' that 
 which is spoken, prediction, destiny; ' fa-tal,' 
 belonging to fate, destined. Fatua, a goddess 
 foretelling, foresaying ; to ' infatuate,' to be- 
 witch ; ' infatuated,' that is under a spell, out 
 of his wits, crazed. 
 
 We have also the verb fa-t-eri, to say, to de- 
 clare ; hence con-fit-eri and pro-fit-eri, which, 
 through their past forms confessus, professus, 
 give our ' to confess,' to say to others, and ' to 
 profess,' to state before others ; ' confession,' 
 1 profession,' etc. ' Profession ' must have been 
 said at first only of declared opinions or views,
 
 4° THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 the standing of a man in regard to some points 
 of religion, morals or politics ; hence it was 
 applied to his general standing, his art, his ' pro- 
 fession.' 'Professor' is 'the public declarer'; 
 the teacher. 
 
 From the same root is fa-bula, ' fa-ble,' a le- 
 gend, a story. Connected withfatum is fata, 
 the goddess of destiny; hence Italian fata, a 
 supernatural being, an elf, Portuguese fada, 
 French fre (compare, aime'e from aviata dicte'e 
 from dictata, etc.), English fay. From fe'e we 
 have in French fierie, a work of the 'fee,' an 
 enchantment ; hence Middle English faerie, 
 fairye, and then fairy, which, through a popular 
 mistake, received the meaning of elf, instead 
 of enchantment or ' elfery,' so to speak. 
 
 The root wid, to see, to know. 
 
 You already know the origin of the word ' his- 
 tory.' In Greek from the root vid, and the suffix 
 -tor, we have the forms vid-tor, hid-tor, his-tor, he 
 who sees, who knows. (These different forms are 
 explained elsewhere : " Philosophy of Words," 
 p. ioo-ioi.) From Jiistor we have the verb 
 hi'storeo, and the substantive historia, ' history,'
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 4 1 
 
 the narration of him who has seen, who 
 knows. 
 
 The Sanskrit Veda, knowledge, doctrine, 
 comes from the same root. So does the Latin 
 verb vid-ere, to see, from which ' vi-sion ' (for 
 vid-tion), ' visual,' ' supervision,' ' revision,' ' vis- 
 ible,' ' visit,' ' visitation,' etc., etc. 
 
 From the Greek form id we have also the 
 word idea, properly ' that which is seen,' an 
 image in our mind, a conception ; hence, ' ideal,' 
 'idealize,' etc. Idol is closely connected with 
 ' idea ' ; it means also a ' little image,' a statue. 
 
 In the Teutonic family the root wid assumes 
 the form wit, and from it we have words which 
 at first sight nobody would suspect of any affin- 
 ity or kinship. First, we have the Anglo- 
 Saxon verb wit-an, English to wit, to know ; 
 and the adjective wise, knowing, learned, dis- 
 creet. The words witch and wiseacre belong 
 also to this root, but they need some explana- 
 tion. 
 
 We find in Anglo-Saxon the word wit-e-ga, a 
 prophet, a seer, formed with suffixes denoting 
 the agent from the verb wit-an, to see, to know. 
 From witega we come to the common abbre-
 
 42 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 viated forms witga, wicca, feminine wicce, Mid- 
 dle English tviccJic, the old form for witch, a 
 woman (formerly also a man) supposed to be 
 endowed with superhuman knowledge, with 
 magic power. We meet with the same fact in 
 Icelandic, where from vita, to know, we have 
 vitki, a wizard, and vitka, to bewitch. 
 
 Wiseacre is a good specimen of what strange 
 transformations words may undergo, especially 
 
 when a word is transplated from one language 
 
 A- 
 into another and the new people that use it, 
 
 not knowing its true origin are only too much 
 inclined to see in it some connection with oth- 
 er words familiar to them, and, therefore, so 
 treat it in pronunciation and spelling as to suit 
 their etymological instinct. 
 
 Wiseacre is in Old Dutch wiis-segger, which 
 is a strange travesty of the German zueissager, a 
 ' sooth-sayer,' as if it meant " wise-sayer." But 
 the German word itself is only a product of 
 ignorant manipulation at the hands of the 
 people, and has nothing to do with the verb 
 sagen, to say. The verb weis-sagen is in Middle 
 High German wizagon, which is derived from 
 the substantive wiz-a-go, a prophet. This wiz-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 43 
 
 a-go is formed, with suffixes denoting the agent, 
 from the Old High German verb wiz-an, to see, 
 exactly as wit-e-ga is from the Anglo-Saxon verb 
 wit-an, to see. Wiseacre, then, is merely the 
 rather hybrid product of a German mistake and 
 English phonetic corruption. It has nothing 
 to do either with wise or with acre. It is a 
 name of the agent formed from the verb wit-an, 
 to see, and means, or, to be more exact, meant 
 " seer.
 
 FIFTH LETTER. 
 
 Continuation : Growth of Roots — Latin and Anglo-Saxon 
 Words in the English Language — The Root bhar — The 
 Root Ink — The Root da— The Root tar — The Root^w — 
 The Root ma— The Root bhadh — The Root spak. 
 
 1HOPE you are not tired yet, as I want to 
 lay before you some more instances of the 
 
 development of roots. I am well aware that 
 these researches, interesting as they are in 
 themselves, at length become rather wearisome. 
 In fact, what does not become wearisome if too 
 long persisted in? But, pray, be patient. We 
 shall soon have done with this, and shall pres- 
 ently come to other parts of our subject, which 
 are more varied and, I dare say, more directly 
 interesting. 
 
 Concerning the striking variety of words 
 which grow out of one root, we must keep 
 present to our minds two particular facts : First, 
 an Aryan root is differently modified in passing
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 45 
 
 over into one of the different branches of the 
 Aryan languages ; secondly, once the root is 
 moulded, so to speak, according to the partic- 
 ular genius of a language, it follows, also in all 
 its further developments, the tendencies and 
 laws of that language. Thus, if we compare 
 the developments, or the words sprung from 
 one root, in two or three different languages, we 
 must expect to find very wide dissimilarities. 
 For instance, the Aryan root pa remains /#, as 
 we saw, in Latin, and becomes fa in the Teu- 
 tonic languages ; a difference which becomes 
 greater if we compare the development of this 
 root in these two branches, as we have pabulum 
 and pasture on one side, food and fodder on the 
 other. 
 
 In English there are very many words trans- 
 planted from Latin which, although they are 
 reallv doublets of Teutonic words, yet seem to 
 have with the latter no genealogical connec- 
 tion whatever. In fact, the bulk of the English 
 vocabulary is made up of Anglo-Saxon stock 
 and of words of Latin origin. What is the dif- 
 ference between these two component parts? 
 The Anglo-Saxon words arise from primitive
 
 46 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 Indo-European roots and came down to us di- 
 rectly through the Teutonic family ; the Latin 
 words come from Indo-European roots as well, 
 but, before being transplanted into the English 
 field, they were developed, moulded and elab- 
 orated by the Latin tongue. Moreover, 
 most of them were not transplanted directly 
 from Latin into English either, but underwent 
 a second elaboration at the hands of the French 
 people, from which finally they came into the 
 English language. We might say that the 
 Anglo-Saxon words in the English language are 
 like plants grown up from Indo-European seed 
 on Teutonic ground, in a Teutonic ' milieu,' fos- 
 tered and developed by Teutonic men. Its 
 Latin words, on the other hand, are like plants 
 grown up from Indo-European seed also, but 
 on Latin soil and in Latin surroundings, trans- 
 ported afterwards to French and finally to 
 English soil. Of course, the plants that are 
 thus brought back to England from distant and 
 different climes, must have developed into 
 varieties which at first make it difficult to rec- 
 ognize them as sisters of the plants that have 
 grown from the same seed on Teutonic soil.
 
 THE FORT OWES OF WORDS. 47 
 
 This is what makes Latin and Anglo-Saxon 
 words, which are derived from the same root, 
 look so different. 
 
 Now, let us resume our investigation of the 
 course of some roots. 
 
 Root BHAR, tobear, to bring. 
 
 As the root bha is in Latin and Greek fa, 
 bhar is in Latin and Greek far. Hence the verb 
 fer-re, to bear, to bring ; from which we have 
 to ' in-fer,' to ' pre-fer,' to ' re-fer,' to ' de-fer,' 
 etc.; the adjective ' fer-tile,' that brings forth, 
 fruitful ; and the second part of such words as 
 ' odori-ferous,' ' sopori-ferous,' ' morti-ferous,' 
 " voci-ferous ' (whence ' voci-ferate '), etc. For-s 
 {for-t-is) ' that which is brought about,' chance ; 
 for-tune, ' fortune,' ' case,' destiny ; the goddess 
 of chance ; 'fortunate,' ' fortuitous,' etc. 
 
 This root is, in the Teutonic family, bar, from 
 which the Anglo-Saxon ber-an, to bear; and 
 ' burden,' ' birth,' ' brother.' ' Brother ' answers 
 to Latin ' fra-ter ' : both are formed from the 
 Indo-European root bhar; but one is the result 
 of Latin cultivation, so to say, the other, of 
 Teutonic. 
 
 Bier also belongs to the same root, as well as
 
 48 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 Latin fer-e-trum, a hearse. (As some wag would 
 find some connection between ' bier ' and ' beer,' 
 we may observe here that ' beer ' has nothing 
 to do with our root. It is probably connected 
 with the root of the word ' barley,' meaning to 
 ' ferment.') 
 
 The root LUK, to shine. 
 
 We have the Latin verb luc-ere, to shine ; 
 lues, light ; luc-men, lu-men, light (hence 
 'luminous,' 'illuminate,' etc.); luc-na, lu-na, 
 the moon ; luc-idus, shining ; lac-strare, lu- 
 strare, to make shine, to ' illustrate,' ' illustri- 
 ous,' shining, etc. From this root we have also 
 in German lich-t, light, Anglo-Saxon, Icoht, 
 English ' light.' 
 
 The root DA, to give. 
 
 It is one of the most prolific. Selecting from 
 the numerous words that can be traced to 
 it, we find, for instance, date, properly ' given.' 
 The letters of the Pope are still marked 
 ' datum Romae,' ' given ' in Rome, such and 
 such day. We find also the Latin do-n-um, 
 gift, and our ' donation.' The Latin dos (dot-is) 
 is what is given to the bride, ' dower ' ; dot-arc, 
 to endow ; in Low Latin we find dotariutn,
 
 1HE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 49 
 
 Old French doaire, afterwards douaire, English 
 ' dower.' 
 
 The same root is to be found in many com- 
 pound Latin verbs ending in -dere, as tra-dere, 
 which is from trans, across, over, and dare, 
 properly ' to give over,' and also ' to betray.' 
 From it we have Italian traditore, Old French 
 traitor, English ' traitor.' ' Treason,' Middle 
 English traison, Old French traison, is also 
 from the same source. 
 
 The root SPAK, to see, to spy. 
 
 This is also one of the richest in its growth. 
 We have, for instance, in Sanskrit spag-a, a spy. 
 In Greek it has undergone a curious metathesis ; 
 it occurs under the form shop (instead of spok) ; 
 hence skop-os, what one looks at, aim, ' scope ' ; 
 4 epi-scop-os,' ' over-seer,' popularly disguised 
 under the form ' bishop ' ; skep-t-omai, to see, to 
 look in, to enquire, gives us the word scep-tic, 
 which at first meant simply 'observer,' ' inquirer,' 
 hence 'doubter,' and later, ' unbeliever.' 
 
 In Latin we have no end of words from this 
 root. Spcc-ics is the appearance, the type, the 
 4 species.' It is important to note the analogy, 
 on which the Greeks formed the word meaning
 
 2 sfat, 
 
 5° THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 ' species ' (eidos), from the root vid meaning 
 also ' to see.' 
 
 Spec-ula, a place to look from, has given 
 us 'speculate,' 'speculation,' etc., which, from 
 looking out for the weather, stars, and comets, 
 have been transferred to other meanings with 
 which celestial bodies have not much to do. 
 
 From the supine spec-turn, we have such 
 words as ' in-spect,' to look into ; ' pro-spect,' 
 to look out, to look ahead ; ' su-spect,' to look 
 under, lest something lie there hidden; ' ex- 
 pect,' ' respect,' 'respectable,' * spectacle,' etc., 
 etc. 
 
 Auspices is in Latin au{i)-spicium from avis, 
 bird, and spec, to see; the looking at the flight 
 or other movements or doings of birds in order 
 to guess at future events. 
 
 Spite is a shortening from despite, as ' sport ' 
 from 'desport.' It is in Old French despit, and 
 comes from Latin de-spectus, a 'looking down,' 
 contempt, scorn. Hence despise, despicable, 
 etc.
 
 SIXTH LETTER. 
 
 Importance of the Study of Roots. — Roots and Dictionaries. — 
 History of Several Familiar Words : reception and capa- 
 ble ; pupil (student) and pupil (of the eye) ; charming ; 
 mercy and market ; villain; valet; pontiff; miss and 
 magistrate ; wig and perruque. 
 
 IT is evident that we could thus go on exam- 
 ining roots in all their derivatives until 
 we had exhausted our dictionary. But you 
 need not be afraid. I do not dare to put your 
 patience to such a trial. All I want is to have 
 you notice two facts: First, that all the words 
 we have examined — in fact, all the words in our 
 language — even those that convey the most 
 abstract ideas, come from roots whose meaning 
 is simple and entirely concrete. If you go over 
 the cases we have enquired into, you will not 
 find an exception to this principle. Second, 
 the root-material underlying all linguistic 
 growth is not large. There are but a few hun- 
 dred roots round which all Indo-European
 
 52 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 words cluster, as in so many families. It fol- 
 lows that it is of the greatest importance in all 
 studies of words to go back to the root. Our 
 trouble will be amply compensated, since words, 
 thus examined, tell us the story of their lives, 
 and display before us their pedigrees, with all 
 their connections and relations. And I hope 
 that you will fully agree with me when I say 
 that we should have dictionaries in which words 
 are arranged not alphabetically, but by their 
 roots. Think what a help it would be, if we 
 could take up a dictionary divided into four 
 hundred and odd paragraphs, according to the 
 number of roots from which the substance of 
 the language has developed, and take in at one 
 glance the filiation of each root! In forty or 
 fifty days — ten roots a day — we could go over 
 the whole field of any language. The study of 
 dictionaries would become as systematic as the 
 study of comparative anatomy, or botany, or 
 geology, and in great part a matter of reason- 
 ing, rather than of memory. Besides, it would 
 give us an insight into the true meaning of 
 words, such as now scarcely one person in a 
 thousand has. An alphabetical list at the end
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 53 
 
 would help us to find every word the root of 
 which we do not know or have forgotten. 
 
 Now, putting aside this genealogical study 
 of words, let us, for the sake of variety, pursue 
 our researches rather desultorily, as chance or 
 pleasure leads us, among our everyday words, 
 inquiring what connections they have with one 
 another, what garments they were successively 
 clothed with, and what meanings they have 
 assumed in their long peregrinations. 
 
 Take, for instance, 'reception,' 'recipient] 
 receive, receipt, accept, acceptable, capable, capac- 
 ity, captive. That capable and capacity are con- 
 nected with each other, it is self-evident ; so are 
 accept and acceptable, receive and receipt, etc. 
 But it is perhaps not so evident to everybody 
 that all these words are derived from the same 
 root, and there is therefore a general meaning 
 which underlies all their meanings, however dif- 
 ferent they may be. 
 
 Capable has preserved the root in its best 
 form ; -able is merely a suffix to be found in 
 hundreds of words (sal-able, speak-able, port- 
 able, etc). Cap is the root, and we have from 
 it the Latin verb cap-ere, to take, to take in, to
 
 LoJ(iXuU> - (ptiAMMj 
 
 
 54 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 contain. Hence cap-acions, ' that can contain '; 
 cap-able, that can take in, that can understand ; 
 therefore 'able,' 'skilful.' In the compounds, 
 the root cap is attenuated, so to say, into the 
 form cip, just as fa c is reduced to fie, fiat to fit, 
 tag to tig, etc. Hence the verb rc-cip-ere, to 
 take again, to receive, which was in Old French 
 recever ; and recipient, he who receives. (In 
 Italian, recipiente is said only of things, that 
 take, that contain, as barrels, casks, etc.) From 
 the supine (Lat. re-cep-tum) we have such forms 
 as receipt, reception, except, accept, etc. To except 
 is to take out, to accept is to take to (one's self), 
 to admit. 
 
 Captive is the man who is taken, a prisoner. 
 In French captive has given also cJu'tif, which 
 meant at first, like the Latin captivns, a prisoner 
 of war. By a natural transition it came to mean 
 'miserable,' 'to be pitied,' and now it means 
 'poor,' 'paltry,' 'puny'; English caitiff (Captain, 
 from Low-Latin capitanens, is from the stem capit 
 of caput, the head, the man who is at the head, 
 who leads.) Prince (Italian principe, Latin prin- 
 cipeni), is from prim (prin before c) for primus, 
 first, and the root cap, to take ; prince, ' he
 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 55 
 
 who takes the first place,' a prominent person, 
 a leader. Hence principal, of first importance, 
 and principle, a beginning, a leading tenet. 
 
 We speak of a studious boy as a good pupil, 
 and we speak of the pupil of the eye. Is there 
 any connection between these two words ? Yes ; 
 they are the very same word. We have in 
 Latin the word pupus, which means a little boy, 
 a child, (feminine pupa, a little girl, a doll, a 
 puppet). From pupus the diminutive pupillus 
 is derived, from which our pupil, a boy, a 
 scholar, and pupil of the eye, that is the little 
 image or picture which we see in the center 
 of our eyes. 
 
 When you say of one of your friends that she 
 is ' charming,' you hardly think that, had you 
 said this some centuries ago, your friend would 
 have run a great risk of being burnt alive. 
 From a root kas, we have in Latin cas-men, 
 later car-men, which means a sound, a song, a 
 poem. It was said especially of the religious 
 verses recited or murmured by priests in the 
 performance of their rites, and of the formulas 
 used to conjure up the spirits of the dead.
 
 56 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 From this we have the French verb cJiarmer, 
 to conjure, to enchant. The English charm 
 comes from Latin carmen, through a French 
 channel, and meant properly to enchant, to cast 
 a spell. Charming was then a real synonym of 
 ' bewitching ' ; but what is to us an expression 
 of personal magnetism, of fascination, to the 
 superstitious and, if I may say it, witch-ful mid- 
 dle-ages was a terrible accusation of commun- 
 ion with evil spirits, to be atoned for by death. 
 The word magnetism, which I have just used, 
 has also a long story. Magnet, the loadstone, 
 was so called from the city of Magnesia, where 
 its peculiar properties were first observed. 
 Hence, ' magnetic,' that has great attractive 
 power, great personal influence. 
 
 Mercy, merciless, market, commerce, merchant, 
 merchandise, mercatorial, all come from one and 
 the same root. We have the verb mer-eri, to 
 receive a share, to gain, to deserve ; mer-i-tum, 
 is that which is deserved, desert, merit. We 
 have also in Latin merx (accusative mcrcem), 
 that which is obtained, which is purchased ; 
 hence our mercer or dealer, merchant and mcr-
 
 V 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 57 
 
 chandise. We have also merces (accusative 
 mer cedent) that which is obtained (not by- 
 money), compensation, reward. From merces 
 we have mercy, which gradually lost its mean- 
 ing of a regular, legal compensation, and as- 
 sumed that of concession or reward given out 
 of a sense of fairness and charity. A lawyer 
 would say that the word, from a strictly juridi- 
 cal meaning, passed over to one of equity, and 
 finally, having left the field of law entirely, 
 took shelter within the pale of charity and 
 sympathy. 
 
 Villain has been an unfortunate word. It 
 was in Latin villanus, the inhabitant of the 
 villa, the countryman. Subsequently it as- 
 sumed the meaning of rustic (which is from 
 rus, the country), and its downward course 
 once begun, could not be stopped. Thus it 
 came to mean ill-bred, ill-natured, just as 
 ' rough ' came to mean rascal, rogue, black- 
 guard. 
 
 The French word valet has also lost a great 
 deal. It was once written vaslet, a diminutive
 
 &4A 
 
 58 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 form of vassal, vassallet. It was applied, dur- 
 ing the feudal days, to any young warrior, any 
 young vassal, whose duty it was to follow his 
 chief and assist him with his services. The son 
 of a king might have been called a vaslet, or 
 valet ; but now, hardly! 
 
 Other words, on the contrary, have taken an 
 upward road, and have gained in their meaning. 
 Pontiff, French Pontife, Italian Pontefice, brings 
 us back to the Latin pontifcx. It was once 
 taught in schools that pontifcx meant properly 
 bridge-maker (pons is bridge), and the Romans, 
 with a philosophic and broad-minded sense of 
 of the utility of inter-communications, had 
 entrusted them to the highest religious author- 
 ity, so as to give this extremely important 
 department a kind of religious prestige. This, 
 however, is more ingenious than true. Pons at 
 first meant simply a ' path,' and it is more prob- 
 able that pontifcx, "the path-maker," meant 
 the leader in processions and other religious 
 ceremonies. 
 
 Sire, as we saw elsewhere, comes from Latin 
 senior, which means simply elder, elderly. From
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 59 
 
 the same word we have signorina and senorita, 
 the Italian and Spanish words for miss, which 
 mean, however, according to their etymology, 
 'little old woman. ' 
 
 Who would believe that there is any connec- 
 tion between miss and magistrate ? Still a 
 mere glance at their history will dispel all 
 doubts of their common origin. Latin magis- 
 tratns is from magistcr, which, being a doubly 
 comparative form, means properly ' more 
 greater ' and conveys ideas of authority and 
 superiority. From magister, through the fre- 
 quent loss of the consonant between two vow- 
 els, we have the Old French maistre, and our 
 master, from which mastress, mistress. Now 
 miss, as I have shown in the " Philosophy of 
 Words," is merely a slight transformation of 
 the word misses, our pronounciation of mistress. 
 
 It is not easy, at first, to see any connection 
 between the word season, as winter, fall, etc., 
 and the seasoning of a salad. There is the 
 same connection as in French between the 
 substantive saisoii, the season, and the verb 
 assaisonner, to season. 
 
 The French saisou, from which the English
 
 60 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 season, is from Latin sationem, the sowing time, 
 the spring. But how from this meaning we 
 went to that of seasoning a dish, is well ex- 
 plained by Littre in his " Pathologie verbale." 
 The proper meaning of assaisonner, to season, 
 is to cultivate in the proper season, to ripen in 
 time. " Viande assaisonnee " means cooked " a 
 point, ni trop, ni trop peu, comme qui dirait 
 murie a temps. Du moment que assaisonner 
 fut entre dans la cuisine, il n'en sortit plus, et 
 de cuire a point il passa a l'acception de mettre 
 a point pour le gout a l'aide de certains ingre- 
 dients." 
 
 Did you ever suspect that our wig had any- 
 thing to do with the French perruque ? The 
 French word passed into English, where we 
 find perwigge, and later periwig. Out of a 
 false notion that this peri was the Greek prepo- 
 sition, which we have in many other words, like 
 ' perimeter,' ' Peripatetic,' etc., it was dropped 
 in the course of time and we came to this poor 
 wreck, wig. As to the French perruque, it is to 
 be referred to the Italian pelucca, from pelo, 
 hair.
 
 
 
 SEVENTH LETTER. 
 
 Continuation : to escape, to dismantle, artillery, coquetry, dupe, 
 to arrive, press and express ; gossip and commkrage ; 
 hypocrite; throne, angel, government, alms. — Changes in 
 personal and local names: Ingleford, Cape Hvarf, 
 Chateau Vert, Beauchef, Grand-Pont, etc. — Names of 
 Ships. — Signs of Inns. 
 
 THE original meaning of the word ' escape,' 
 French ecJiapper, had a humoristic tinge, 
 of which we are no longer conscious. In Low- 
 Latin they had a word capa to designate a 
 kind of coat that covered all the body ; from 
 this is the Italian cappa, a kind of mantle To 
 escape (ex-capare), meant properly to get out of 
 one's coat, as when one holds you by your 
 sleeves, and you slip out, leaving your coat in 
 his hands. It was really a slang term ; to ' ske- 
 daddle,' we should say now. The verb is pre- 
 served, but its original piquancy has been lost. 
 Another verb we have taken, like escape, 
 from the name of a coat. To dismantle, French 
 de'maiitcler, is properly to take away a mantle,
 
 62 TV/;? FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 an overcoat. But now we mean thereby to 
 pull down, to destroy the ramparts of a city. 
 The French d/manteler was first introduced in 
 the sixteenth century, and Littre is right when 
 he says that it is really ingenious to have com- 
 pared the bulwarks of a city to the mantle 
 that protects man against cold and bad weather. 
 
 Once the word artillery had nothing to do 
 with gunpowder or firearms. It is a collective 
 substantive derived from ' art,' and it meant all 
 the implements and engines of war, used for 
 attack and defence. The invention of gun- 
 powder put out of use all bows, catapults, and 
 other instruments which were the artillery of 
 old. The word, however, remained, and was 
 applied to guns, cannons, and all the new 
 machines of war introduced after that great 
 invention. 
 
 Attach and attackare etymologically identical. 
 This is one of the many cases in which one 
 word gives birth to two. By and by the natural 
 selection of custom diversifies them in their 
 meaning. 
 
 Coquette is derived from the French cog, the 
 English cock. One cannot help admiring the
 
 J 
 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 63 
 
 ingenious and, to use Littre's word, ' riante,' im- 
 agination that has transferred the air and the 
 appearance of our gallant chanticleer to the 
 human kind, and has found there a happy 
 expression, " pour l'envie de plaire, pourle desir 
 d'attirer en plaisant." It is rather strange that 
 in Italian the same idea should be expressed 
 by the word civetta, which means ' owl.' 
 
 Another word derived from the name of a 
 bird is the French dupe. Dupe is an old name 
 for the whoop, French huppe. This bird has 
 the reputation of being very silly and very easy 
 to catch. It has not been difficult, then, for the 
 popular mind to apply the name of the biro to 
 people who are easily deceived. In the same 
 way we use goose, duck, gander, etc. 
 
 The verb arrive, French arriver, brings us 
 back to a Low-Latin adripare, where the word 
 ripa, bank, is clearly visible. Arriver meant in 
 Old French only to go or to push to the bank, 
 to the shore. Littre quotes : " Li vens les 
 arriva," the wind pushed them ashore. By and 
 by, the idea of bank or shore was lost sight of, 
 and to ' arrive ' came to mean to reach any 
 place whatever. In French they went a step
 
 Ctr*ui4.vc*N <•<■'•«•''« « 
 
 64 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 further, and so they say of a fact that it 
 reached a place, ' took place ;' ' il arriva que 
 . . . ,' it happened that . . . 
 
 The word ' compliment ' is not derived from 
 ' a completione mentis ' nor 'a complete men- 
 tiri,' " fully lying," as Fuller contends, " because 
 compliments are usually completely menda- 
 cious." It is simply a substantive made from 
 the Old French verb complir, Latin complere, to 
 fulfill, and meant at first " accomplishment." 
 The acts and words of civility towards one's 
 friends and neighbors were regarded as ' accom- 
 plishments,' as the fulfillment of a duty. 
 
 It is hardly possible to find two words which 
 can teach us more about the evolution that 
 words go through than " press " and " express." 
 They are derived from the same word, they are 
 similar in sound, and still their meaning is so 
 wide apart. From prcssum, the supine of the 
 Latin verb premere, to press, to weigh down, we 
 have the verb to press, and the compounds to 
 ' impress,' to ' repress,' to ' oppress,' etc. The 
 verb to 'express' and the substantive ' expres- 
 sion/ which means literally 'pressing out, 
 aptly indicate the mental labor necessary to find
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 65 
 
 in words a fitting garment for our thoughts. 
 The past participle ' express,' which means 
 nothing but ' said,' came to have a peculiar 
 strength, as when we say: 'He told us in ex- 
 press terms,' namely, ' He really uttered these 
 words, there is no doubt about it.' Hence such 
 expressions as ' by his express command,' that 
 is to say, 'by his special, particular command.' 
 When we speak of an ' express train,' we use 
 the word in the same sense, 'a special train.' 
 In the same time the word /raw, which at first 
 was said of a simple, rude contrivance to press 
 down a piece of paper against some set types, 
 took the meaning of all that came out of such 
 pressure, so that the name of a poor, almost 
 primitive. tool came to mean one of the greatest 
 powers in the world. 
 
 Imagine two diverging lines : they start from 
 the same point, and at first they are so close to 
 each other that naked eyes fail to perceive any 
 interval between them. But let them go on, 
 each in its direction, and they will run so wide 
 apart that no imaginable space can enclose 
 them. The same thing happens with the mean- 
 ings of our words.
 
 66 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 Gossip is another word the meaning of which 
 has travelled very far, so to speak, from its 
 birth-place. Chaucer spells it gossib, a trans- 
 formation (romgod-sib. Sib means 'akin.' God- 
 father and godmother are ' god-sib,' akin in God. 
 It seems almost fatal for people who are akin to 
 be fond of a good chat together, and of dissect- 
 ing liberally common relations. The French 
 commdrage (from commcre, god-mother) and the 
 Italian comare, god-mother, went through the 
 same evolution of meaning, and are now syno- 
 nyms of gossip, idle at least, if not uncharitable. 
 
 Hypocrite was not such a bad word at first as 
 it is now. It is a Greek word and meant simply 
 an actor, one who clothes himself with other 
 people's personality for an artistic purpose. It 
 is easy to see how from this we came to the 
 present meaning of the word. 
 
 Throne, on the contrary, had nothing lofty 
 about it. It meant simply a stool. Use, by 
 that selection which sometimes is not more ac- 
 countable in language than in other fields, picked 
 it out of many other words meaning a stool or 
 chair, and reserved it for the chair where a king 
 sits.
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 67 
 
 Nor had angel anything divine in its meaning. 
 It meant simply a messenger. It was afterwards 
 confined to the messengers of God. 
 
 Nor had government, as I already had occa- 
 sion to remark elsewhere, anything to do with 
 the great art of the shepherds of peoples, to use 
 Homer's phrase. We have in Greek the verb 
 Kvfepvav, which means ' to steer.' ' Guberna- 
 tor,' in Latin, was the pilot of a boat. By 
 metaphor gubcrnator, gouvemeur, governor 
 became the title of the man who steers the 
 Ship of the State. 
 
 There are some changes in words which are 
 as many indexes of other important changes, 
 social, political or religious. Take, for instance, 
 the word ' alms.' This was once a noble word. 
 Through the forms aelmaesse (Anglo-Saxon), 
 almesse (Middle English), alines, alms comes 
 from the Greek eleemosyne, from the verb clcco, 
 to have pity, to have sympathy for the suffer- 
 ing of our fellow-men. It had then a meaning 
 essentially moral; it meant the sharing with 
 one's soul of other people's grief. By and by 
 it was narrowed down to the present meaning. 
 Do you not think that this change is very sig-
 
 68 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 nificant ? It does not speak well for the rich 
 indeed if, as the story of this word tells us, a 
 few crumbs of bread or a little money have 
 taken the place of that genuine heartfelt sym- 
 pathy which is the first of our duties. And the 
 poor must have been very poor and wretched 
 to accept, without grudge or complaint, the 
 present meaning of the word alms, forgetful 
 entirely of its noble meaning of old. It is note- 
 worthy that in Italy, with the lower people at 
 least, the word carita (charity) has suffered from 
 the same degradation of meaning ; from the 
 expression of that highest bond of love and 
 sympathy which should bind all mankind, it 
 sank to designate the crumbs of bread thrown 
 indifferently or scornfully to a beggar. But of 
 these changes which imply moral or social 
 changes, we shall see more presently. 
 
 Before passing over to other considerations, 
 let us cast a glance at some queer changes 
 which have taken place in proper names either 
 of places or of persons. Such names are as a rule 
 far more steady in their forms than other com- 
 mon words. But sometimes, especially when 
 they pass from one to another language and
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 69 
 
 when popular fancies about their etymology 
 come into play, they show very striking trans- 
 formations. (See Taylor, " Words and Places.") 
 
 Ingle ford, for instance, or the ford of the 
 Angles, has given Hungerford. " Cape Wrath 
 was originally Cape Hvarf, a Norse name, indi- 
 cating a point where the land trends in a new 
 direction." In Oxfordshire Chateau vert has 
 become Shot over Hill ; Beau chef, Be achy 
 Head; Grand Pont, ' the great Bridge,' Gram- 
 pound. Leighton Beau desert has become 
 *Leighton Buzzard. 
 
 Grammercy Square, in New York, you would 
 at first suppose is of French origin. But in 
 the old Dutch maps of the city its name is De 
 Kromvie Zee, the crooked lake, and its site was 
 occupied by a pond. 
 
 Anse des Cousins, the "bay of mosquitoes," 
 became Nancy Cousins bay. Hagenes, one of 
 the Scilly Isles, became St. Agnes, and Soracte, 
 the mountain dear to Horace, is now called St. 
 Oreste. 
 
 A tower, near Grenoble, that was called from 
 St. Vcrena, is now called la tour Sans VENIN, the 
 tower without poison, and the peasants are
 
 7o THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 firmly convinced that no poisonous animal can 
 live in the neighborhood of that tower. 
 
 Sailors have changed H. M. S. Bellerophon 
 into 'the Billy Ruffian'; the 'Andromache' 
 into the 'Andrew Mackay '; the '^Eolus' into 
 the 'Alehouse'; the ' Courageux ' into the 'Cur- 
 rant juice,' and the steamer ' Hirondelle ' (the 
 swallow), into the ' Iron-devil.' 
 
 To this category belong the rather fantastic 
 transformations of signs of inns ; for instance, 
 of 'the Bacchanals' into 'the Bag o' Nails'; 
 the ' Pige washael,' or the virgin's greeting, into ' 
 the 'Pig and Whistle.' If you will allow me, 
 I will conclude this list with the prodigious 
 linguistic feat of that groom " who used to call 
 Othello and Desdemona — two horses under his 
 charge — by the names of Old fellow and Thurs- 
 day morning."
 
 EIGHTH LETTER. 
 
 Some more Researches in the History and Connection, of 
 Familiar Words. — Tear and larme ; dies, jour and Tues- 
 day ; chair, cathedral and session; tile and detective; 
 coin in English and in French/ aurora and combustion ; 
 altar and origin; initial and count; surgeon and gar- 
 dener; airows and intoxication ; temple and anatomy; 
 tide and demon; timber and domestic ; symposium and 
 poison ; a ' buxom ' woman ; syllable and syllabus ; deluge 
 and laundry ; prose and verse; hectic and sail ; village, 
 parish and diocese; chaperon; complexion ; beauty and 
 bounty ; reasons and rations. 
 
 1SAID I would put an end to this rather 
 desultory review of words most notable for 
 their changes in sound and meaning, in order 
 to pass over to other, in my mind, more inter- 
 esting parts of our subject. But you write me 
 that you feel so much interested in these re- 
 searches, and you like these curiosities so much, 
 that 1 will take you at your word, and devote 
 one letter more to this same branch, bringing 
 you another batch of familiar words whose use 
 has undergone striking transformations.
 
 72 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 I. Taylor, in his excellent book on " Words 
 and Places," asks (page 256) : " Who would 
 imagine that the French word larmc is the 
 same as the English tear : that the French jour 
 is a lineal descendant of dies ; or that jour and 
 the two syllables of Tuesday are all descended 
 from the same original Aryan root ? " 
 
 Is this true ? Let us see. From a typical 
 Aryan form dak-ra, a tear, we have the Greek 
 forms dakru, dakriton, dakruma, and Old Latin 
 dacrima, which afterwards, with a change not 
 unusual, passed into lacrima. From this we 
 have the Italian lagrima or lacrima, and the 
 French larme (as sacra-mentum has given ser- 
 menf). According to Grimm's law, to the 
 Aryan type dakra answers a Teutonic type 
 tagra. Hence Gothic tagr, Danish taar, Anglo- 
 Saxon tear, taer, English tear (Middle English 
 tere). 
 
 From Latin dies we have the adjective 
 ' diurnus,' of day time; from which the Italian 
 giorno,journ in the Northern Italian dialects, 
 jour in French. 
 
 The last part of Mr. Taylor's sentence is not 
 correct. Latin dies descends from a root din,
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 73 
 
 to shine ; this root gives in Anglo-Saxon tiw, 
 from which we have the name of the God Tiw : 
 Tewesday, Tiwes-day, Tues-day. It is true 
 then that jour, which is derived from dies, and 
 the ' first ' syllable of Tuesday descend from the 
 same original Aryan root; but the 'second' 
 syllable of Tuesday, that is the substantive day, 
 Middle English dai, dei, Anglo-Saxon daeg, 
 Dutch dag, Gothic dags, German tag, is of an 
 origin entirely uncertain, and has no connection 
 with the root of Latin dies. Were these two 
 words, day and dies, derived from the same 
 Aryan root, the English word should begin by 
 /, according to Grimm's law (compare duo, two; 
 dacruma, tear). Besides, it would still be im- 
 possible to explain the g of the Anglo-Saxon 
 form daeg. 
 
 So easy it is, even for scholars like Taylor, 
 to be deceived by a resemblance of sounds ! 
 
 Would you say that there is any connection 
 between chair and cathedral? Still they are 
 derived from the same root and word ; only one 
 is a substantive, whilst the other has an adjec- 
 tival form. There is more : the word session, 
 which seems to be miles apart, belongs also to
 
 74 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 the same root, and when we say ' a sitting 
 chair,' we say twice the same thing, uncon- 
 sciously, as ' chair ' means by itself something 
 to sit upon. 
 
 We have the Aryan root sad, to which an- 
 swers the Teutonic sit. This root appears in 
 Latin and Greek under the form sed. But in 
 Greek, according to the tendency of that lan- 
 guage to substitute an initial s with an aspirate 
 (compare hus, Latin sus ; hals, Latin sal, etc.), 
 the root sed became hed. From this root we 
 have hed-ra (efya), ' something to sit on,' a chair, 
 a seat. With the prefix katd, we have cathedra, 
 a seat, a stool, a pulpit. Hence cathedral 
 church, a church with a seat, a throne for the 
 bishop. 
 
 This word ' cathedral,' belonging to the eccle- 
 siastical world and being introduced into our 
 language by learned men, has preserved its 
 entire form. But the word 'cathedra' itself, 
 having become a popular word, underwent all 
 those surprising, but at the same time regular 
 transformations by means of which the people, 
 unconsciously yet symmetrically and analogic- 
 ally, mould foreign words according to the
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 75 
 
 types of their own language. Cathedra passing 
 into the French language : First, had to change 
 the sound ca into cha (English sha) ; compare 
 chapcau from capellum, chateau from castcllian, 
 etc. Second, th, reduced first to /, had to dis- 
 appear. As we have often noticed, it is a law 
 of the French language that a consonant 
 between two vowels, in certain particular com- 
 binations, disappears ; compare jeu from iocus, 
 feu from focus, maistre, maitrc, from magister, 
 etc. Third, d (or /) before r had to disappear ; 
 compare pere, mere, frere, from patrcm, ma- 
 tron, fratrem. Fourth, the final a had, as 
 usual, to be reduced to e : table from tabula, 
 lune from luua, etc. 
 
 Through these changes which are constant in 
 the French language, we have successively the 
 forms : chalere, chaere, chair e, from which the 
 English chair. 
 
 The Latin verb sed-ere, to sit, makes in the 
 supine sessuvi, from which the substantive sessio 
 (-onis) is formed, and our session, namely a 
 ' sitting ' of an assembly or other body. 
 
 Is it not clear? 'Session,' 'cathedral,' and 
 ' chair ' are all from one and the same Aryan
 
 7 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 root {sad), however strange it may seem at 
 first. 
 
 Is there any connection between tile and 
 detective ? You laugh. I know what you 
 mean : you will say that one covers, while the 
 other uncovers. Good ! ben trovata ! But I 
 mean, is there any philological connection? is 
 there any genealogical relation between the two 
 words? They are cousins, so to say. One, tile, 
 grew up in a Teutonic country; the other was 
 brought up on Latin soil and then travelled to 
 England, but both of them come from the same 
 Aryan parental root. Detective, of course, is 
 from the Latin preposition de, and the supine 
 tectum of the verb teg-ere, to cover ; from 
 which we have also ' tegument,' a covering. 
 Teg-ere stands for steg-ere, as it can be inferred 
 from the corresponding forms steg-ein in Greek, 
 and sthag in Sanskrit. Tile (which occurs also in 
 the form tigel) is in Anglo-Saxon tigele and cor- 
 responds to Latin tcgula, also from the root 
 teg: properly a covering. We find in Anglo- 
 Saxon tigel-wyrhta, a tile-wright, a potter. 
 
 There can be no doubt that coin is the same 
 word as the French coin. But the latter means 
 'corner,' while the English word is applied to
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 77 
 
 old money. How is this? Coin is the trans- 
 formation of Latin aniens, a wedge, and coins 
 were called a certain kind of moneys, that were 
 stamped with a wedge. The word, transported 
 into English, dropped out of the living and 
 familiar language ; it became, so to say, a fossil 
 word, used merely as a definite scientific term, 
 in accordance with its old meaning. In French, 
 where it had become a familiar word, it under- 
 went some of those modifications of meaning 
 which are common with all living words. 
 It came to be applied not only to wedges and 
 moneys stamped with a wedge, but to any 
 angular form, to the angle of two walls, to a 
 corner. 
 
 I am sure you would be surprised and amused, 
 had we to go over our dictionary together, and 
 pick up at random some of the most common 
 words, which, although differing from each other 
 greatly, are to be referred to the same root. 
 Take, for instance, aurora and combustion. 
 Would you believe that these words come from 
 the same root? Still nothing is more certain. 
 From an Aryan root ns, to burn, normally 
 ampliated into the form ans, we have the Latin
 
 7§ THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 ausosa, the archaic form of aurora. (As you 
 know, Latin s, between two vowels, passes very 
 frequently into r : remember honoris from honos, 
 Jwnosis, etc.) Aurora means really 'burning,' 
 1 shining.' 
 
 From the same root us, and with the same 
 change of s into r, we have the Latin verb 
 ur-ere, to burn, which, however, shows its true 
 root in its supine us-tum. This verb, with the 
 prefix comb, equivalent to cum, gives the verb 
 comburerc, from whose supine combustion we 
 have the substantive combust io, -onis, a burning 
 up, a ' combustion.' 
 
 It is also a fact that altar and origin come 
 from the same root. Altar, Latin altarc, akin 
 with alius, high, is from the root ar (-al), to 
 raise. From this same root we have the Greek 
 verb ' or-nymi,' to raise, to stir up, and Latin 
 or-iri, to rise, to begin. From this the sub- 
 stantive origo -inis is derived, a ' rising,' a 
 ' beginning,' an ' origin.' 
 
 The root i of the verb ire, to go, gives birth 
 to so different words as ' initial ' and ' count.' 
 From iu-irc, to go into, to enter, to begin, we 
 have iu-itium, a begkining, and the adjective
 
 
 A 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 79 
 
 initial. From aim-ire, to go together, we 
 have corn-item, * that goes together,' a ' com- 
 panion,' whence French comte, and English 
 count. The count was the companion, the 
 follower of the prince or duke. 
 
 Practically, a surgeon and a gardener have not 
 much in common. But philologically they are 
 consanguineous. ' Surgeon ' is a corruption 
 from chirurgeon. We find the forms cirurgiau, 
 Old French cirurgien, Modern French c/iirur- 
 gien. It comes from the Greek cheirourgos, 
 from cJiciro — (c/ieir, the hand), and ergeiu, to 
 work ; the physician that works with his hands, 
 that performs^ as we put it nowadays, " practi- 
 cal operations." This word cheir, the hand, is 
 from an Aryan root ghar, to seize, to hold, to 
 grasp, to enclose. From this same root we 
 have the German 'garten,' and the English 
 'garden,' whose primitive meaning was simply 
 an 'enclosure,' an 'enclosed patch of ground.' 
 ' Gardener,' of course, is a direct filiation from 
 'garden.' 
 
 We associate the idea of intoxication with 
 that of wine or liquor. But, strange to say, 
 the word is derived from the Greek name of
 
 80 7V/£ FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 the bow. The bow in Greek is called toxon ; 
 toxa were the arrows ; tokikdn, (Latin toxicant) 
 was called a poison with which the arrows were 
 smeared. In other languages this word toxicon 
 was applied to all kinds of poison ; ; toxicology ' 
 is the branch of medicine that studies poisons. 
 In English we have applied its derivations 
 (' intoxication ' and ' intoxicate') to that particu- 
 lar kind of poisoning which is due to the abuse 
 of wine or other alcoholic beverage. 
 
 Temple and anatomy have also a common 
 origin. Latin templnm, from an original tem- 
 ulum, is, like the Greek tem-enos, from the root 
 tarn, to cut. It was at first a piece of ground cut 
 off for religious purposes, a sacred enclosure. 
 From this same root we have the Greek verb 
 tetn-no, to cut ; tom-e, a section, a part of a work ; 
 and, with the prefix and, anatomy, a cutting up, 
 a dis-secting. 
 
 The same communion of birth may be traced 
 out in tide and demon. Daemon in Latin, dai- 
 mdn in Greek, did not mean an evil spirit, but 
 a god. The word is formed from the root da, 
 to divide, to distribute; daemon was the dis- 
 tributing, the ruling power. It was only in
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 81 
 
 progress of time (very likely under the influ- 
 ence of Christian ideas) that the name of 
 heathen gods was applied to malignant spirits, 
 to infernal deities. 
 
 From the same root da, which in the Teu- 
 tonic family assumes the form ta, we have, 
 among others, the word tide, which at first 
 meant a division, a portion of time, then espe- 
 cially that portion of time that intervenes be- 
 tween the flux and the reflux of the sea ; fin- 
 ally it was applied to the flux and reflux itself. 
 It corresponds exactly to the German Zeit 
 (compare two and zwei ; ten and zehn; etc.) 
 
 Again, the same connection can be shown to 
 exist between domestic and timber. Domestic, 
 as you know, is from Latin domns, a house, and 
 this from the root dam, to build. This root is 
 in the Teutonic family tarn which, with the 
 suffix ra, gives us a word like taui-ra or tcm-ra, 
 meaning ' material for building.' From this 
 we have the Danish tdmmcr, the Swedish tim- 
 mer, and, with the excrescence of a b (quite 
 common between m and r), the English timber. 
 In the same way is formed the German Zim- 
 mer (compare two and zwei; tide and Zeit,
 
 rO "" 
 
 82 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 etc.) The fact that a word meaning 'building 
 material' has been restricted to signify wood, 
 throws no little light upon the life of the an- 
 cient Teutons, the nature of their dwellings and 
 surroundings. 
 
 Not many would be able to discover any 
 connection between symposium and poison. But 
 these two words come also from the same root. 
 There is an Aryan root pa which means to 
 drink. It occurs in Latin and Greek under the 
 form po. From it we have the Greek po-tos, 
 a drink, and the Latin verb po-tare, to drink, 
 with the substantive /0-/z'0/<!, and the adjective 
 po-table, drinkable. 
 
 We have also the Greek substantive po-sis, 
 drink. With the prefix sun (syn), together, we 
 have symposium, 'a drinking together,' a drink- 
 ing party, a feast. Poison is merely a doublet 
 of potion, and meant at first any beverage, of 
 whatever kind. Poison is the French for Latin 
 potio (accusative potionem), just as sationem has 
 given saison. 
 
 Sometimes I am afraid you wonder why I 
 quote Aryan roots with the vowel a (as tarn, 
 sad, pa) and then I give their representa-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 83 
 
 tives in Latin and Greek with other vowels, e, 
 (torn, sed, po). In fact, it is so. As to 
 this point, I beg you to trust me without 
 demonstration. Here too, in these changes of 
 vowels, there are general principles and analo- 
 gies, but it would take me entirely too far if I 
 should attempt to explain them at length. 
 Therefore I beg you to be satisfied that, on this 
 as well as on any other point, I never assert 
 anything without being able to produce sub- 
 stantial proofs of my assertion. 
 
 When you hear or read of ' a buxom lady,' 
 did you ever ask yourself where this buxom 
 comes from, and whether it has always had the 
 same meaning ? We have in Anglo-Saxon the 
 verb bug-an, to bend, to bow. And as from win 
 we have win-some, we have, from the stem of 
 bugan, bug-some, or buxom, whose original mean- 
 ing therefore was ' bowing,' ' obedient,' ' grace- 
 ful,' and also ' good-humored.' From this the 
 present meaning was gradually and naturally 
 developed. 
 
 This root bug is in the Aryan mother-tongue 
 bhugh, which must become in Latin fug (com-
 
 84 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 pare fid from bhid, fcr from bhar, etc.), from 
 which we have the verb fug-ere, to bend, to give 
 way, to turn to flight. Hence fugitive and 
 buxom come from the same Aryan root. 
 
 Where does syllable come from ? It is in Old 
 French sillabe, and came to us from Latin sil- 
 laba, but it is really a Greek word syl-labd, from 
 the prefix syn, together, and the root lab, to 
 seize, to hold together. ' Syllable ' is properly 
 that part of a word which 'holds together.' 
 From the same root we have such words as 
 ' catalepsis,' 'epilepsis, a sudden seizure, a sud- 
 den attack. ' Syllabus ' is a ' holding together,' 
 a ' compendium ' of principles. 
 
 Deluge and laundry come from the same root. 
 ' Laundry ' is spelt in P. Plowman lauendrye, 
 and ' launder ' is spelt lauender. It is evident 
 that they come from the same root as the verb 
 to lav-e, to wash. The root lau (just as aus 
 from us) is an amplification of lu, which we have 
 in the Latin lu-ere, to lave, di-lu-ere, to dilute, 
 di-hivinm, deluge, etc. 
 
 I am sure that you will raise your eyebrows
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 85 
 
 a little if I declare that prose and verse come 
 from the same root. But please listen a mo- 
 ment. The Romans used to call ' prose ' 
 ' prorsa oratio,' that is to say a ' direct speech,' 
 straightforward, not artificially arranged. Prorsa 
 is the feminine of prorsus, a contracted form of 
 prouersus, ' turned forward,' ' straightforward,' 
 from pro, forward, and nersus, the past partici- 
 ple of the verb uertere, to turn. Now verse is 
 simply this same past participle of uertere, and 
 means a ' turning,' a ' line.' 
 
 In English the words derived from this verb 
 uert-erc are countless : ad-vert, con-vert, in-vert, 
 di-vert, sub-vert, re-vert, per-vert, a-vert, with all 
 their connections and derivations. 
 
 Perhaps it will also be a little surprising to 
 hear that hectic and sail descend from a com- 
 mon stock. We have an Aryan root sagh, to 
 hold, to hold in, which has in Greek the form 
 seek. From this we should have a form like 
 sec-tic ; but in Greek, as we know, the initial s 
 is often replaced by an aspirate (compare Latin 
 sed, Greek hed). Therefore we have the form 
 hec-tic, meaning exactly ' holding on,' ' contin-
 
 86 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 ual,' and was said of a fever. The transition to 
 the modern meaning is easily perceived. 
 
 From this root sagli we have a Teutonic type 
 seg-la, 'holding on,' 'bearing up' against the 
 wind, whence German scg-el, Icelandish scgl, 
 Anglo-Saxon seg-el, scgl, Middle English seyl, 
 sell, English sail. 
 
 To put an end to this long, entirely too long 
 letter, let me explain how so different words as 
 economy, parish, village and diocese come from 
 the same parental root. From a root uic, to 
 enter, we have in Sanskrit veca, a house, and in 
 Greek voik-os, afterwards oikos, a house. From 
 the stem of oikos and from that of the verb nome'o, 
 to manage, to govern, we have eco-nomy, prop- 
 erly ' the management of the house' (compare 
 German hauswirtschaft). 
 
 From this same stem oiko, and the prefix 
 dia, through, throughout, we have the verb 
 dioikco, ' to keep house,' to conduct, to govern, 
 and from this the substantive dioikesis, Latin 
 dicccesis, English diocese, an administration, a 
 province (the bishop's province). 
 
 From the same stem and the prefix para, 
 near, beside, we have paroikia, a ' neighbor-
 
 THE FOR TUXES OF WORDS. S7 
 
 hood,' Latin paroecia, French paroisse, Middle 
 English parische, English parish. 
 
 From the same Aryan root uic, from which 
 we have the Greek oikos, we have the Latin 
 uic-us, which was said of a street among houses, 
 and of the houses themselves ; a hamlet, a vil- 
 lage. From this uic-us we have the diminutive 
 uic-ula, a country seat ; from this, uic-la, and 
 then villa (compare sella from sed-ula, sed-la ; 
 stella from stcr-ula, etc.). From villa we have 
 village, villain, etc. We must also remember 
 that our wick, a town, and the Anglo-Saxon 
 zvic, a village, a town, are mere transformations 
 of the Latin uic-us. 
 
 P. S. — In your last note you ask me where 
 chaperon, complexion and beauty come from. 
 I am glad to be able to answer your query ; 
 but first let me remark that you have betrayed 
 your sex very naively. Anybody, even with- 
 out looking at the signature, would say that 
 such etymologies are asked by a woman ! 
 
 Chaperon, as you know, is a French word, and 
 is connected with chape, Low-Latin capa, a cape, 
 from which we have seen the verb ' to escape '
 
 88 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 is derived. Chaperon is properly a hood, a cap. 
 By a rather bold metaphor, we apply this name 
 to the lady that protects, that escorts a young 
 lady. 
 
 Complexion is from euni, together, and the 
 verb pleet ere, to weave, to twine, to plait. Com- 
 plexion meant really the texture, the structure 
 of the body, its constitution. In this sense it 
 is used in French and Italian. But as a healthy 
 or unhealthy constitution is reflected in the 
 skin and outward appearance, the word assumed 
 by and by the meaning which is now current in 
 English. 
 
 The etymology of beauty is quite interesting. 
 We hear often philosophers discuss about the 
 ideal connection of the beautiful with the good. 
 Whatever the opinion of philosophers may be, 
 we have in language some striking facts that 
 should be taken into account. We know that 
 the Greeks used often kalds (beautiful) where we 
 would use ' good.' The Italians use these words 
 in a quite remarkable way. They would speak, 
 for instance, of ' un bel stipendio,' a beautiful 
 salary; 'un bel guadagno,' a beautiful (consid- 
 erable) profit ; ' una bella posizione,' a beauti-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 89 
 
 ful (good) situation, while they say, especially 
 in Southern Italy, that a girl is buona, ' good,' 
 meaning that she is handsome. This same 
 intimate connection between good and beauti- 
 ful appears from the etymology of ' beauty.' 
 In Low-Latin, besides bonus, good, we find the 
 adjective benus, good, goody, from the adverb 
 bene. This bcnus, has a diminutive bcnitlus, 
 goody, pretty. And as from stcrula we have 
 stclla, from scdula sella, from cunula culla, 
 benulus has given bellus, pretty, whence the 
 Italian bcllo, beautiful. From bellus we have 
 the abstract bcllitas (accusative bellitateui) from 
 which the Old French belief, bealtcit and (as 
 alba gives aube, alt{e)rum gives autre, etc.) 
 beaute. Hence Middle English beaute, English 
 fieaiity. 
 
 So that beauty can strictly be said to be a 
 doublet of bounty, as this is from bonitas, good- 
 ness, the abstract from bonus, good. 
 
 A propos of doublets, I want to call your 
 attention to two others that well illustrate how 
 words change in shape and meaning, still being 
 connected by the thread of a fundamental idea. 
 The Latin verb re-or means to think, to judge,
 
 9° THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 to reckon, and from its past ratus we have the 
 substantive ratio that was applied to the fac- 
 ulty of judging, of reckoning, as well as' to the 
 judging and reckoning itself. As from Latin 
 sationem we have French saison and English 
 season, from rationcm we have French raison 
 and English reason. 
 
 But this same word ratio (-onem), came also 
 to be used in a certain technical way, and to 
 denote the measuring out his share of victuals 
 to each soldier, the reckoning to what each 
 soldier is entitled according to the abundance 
 or dearth of supplies, as well as the share itself. 
 In this sense the word remained, so to say, 
 petrified in the military language, and was 
 saved from the usual modifications of words 
 belonging to general use. It preserved the form 
 razione in Italian, ration in French, from which 
 it has been directly imported into English. 
 
 Mathematicians use still another form of this 
 word. While both reason and ration are derived 
 from the accusative of the Latin word, they 
 have taken simply the nominative ratio and 
 use it to mean a calculation, the relation of one 
 thing to another.
 
 NINTH LETTER. 
 
 Common Words Derived from Local or Personal Names — 
 Names of Trees, Animals, Minerals, Fabrics and Money 
 — Influence of the Arabs, the Flemings, and the Italians — 
 Lumber, cravat, spencer, sandwich, dollar, tariff, etc. 
 
 YOU know already that all local names were 
 once common names ; Oxford, for instance, 
 was the ford of the oxen ; ' Thames ' meant 
 'broad water,' etc. But the reverse is equally 
 true, that many of our common words are 
 derived from local or personal names. This is 
 especially true of many of our fruit-trees, of 
 our minerals, of our fabrics, and moneys. 
 
 The word peach, for instance, is in Old 
 French pesche, in Italian pesco or persico, in 
 Spanish persigo, in Latin persicum, and reminds 
 us of the Persian origin of the tree. The 
 ' chestnut,' French chdtaigne or chastaigne, 
 Italian castagno, comes from Castantra, a city 
 in Thessaly. 'Currants' were once called 
 'corinths,' from the city of Corinth. 'Jalap' 
 comes from Jalapa, a province of Mexico ;
 
 92 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 ' coffee ' from the mountain Caffa, south of 
 Abyssinia ; ' Mocha,' ' Portorico,' and many- 
 names of spices, are plainly local names. ' To- 
 bacco ' is the name of an island where the 
 famous weed grows well. The Falernian, the 
 Chianti, the Madeira, Cape, Champagne, Bur- 
 gundy, Chablis, Sauterne, Medoc, Asti, Tokay, 
 Malaga, Marsala, Xeres (Sherry), and several 
 other wines are called after local names. 
 
 Of our animals, the ' guinea-pig ' and the 
 ' canary-bird ' owe their names, as it is evident, 
 to Guinea and the Canary Islands. The 
 ' pheasant,' Latin avis pJiasiana, was imported 
 from the banks of the Phasis, a river in Colchis. 
 The greyhound is the ' Grecian dog,' ' canis 
 graius.' A ' barb ' was a horse imported from 
 Barbary. Angolas, Cashmeres, Newfound- 
 
 1 
 
 lands, etc., need no explanation. 
 
 ' Copper,' Latin cuprum, owes its name to 
 the Cyprus Island. ' Loadstone ' is a corruption 
 of a translation from Lydius lapis, the stone 
 from Lydia. From Crete the Romans derived 
 their crcta, a kind of pipe-clay used for seals. 
 Creta is still used in Italian and has given in 
 French crate, from which our ' clay.'
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 93 
 
 Many chemical substances have been named 
 after local names. ' Ammonia,' for instance, 
 and ' sal ammoniacum,' remind us of the Ly- 
 bian desert where the priests of Jupiter Ammon 
 used to prepare it in large quantities. 
 
 As to the names of our fabrics, we must 
 distinguish three periods in the history of the 
 middle ages : first the Arabs were the most 
 excellent and celebrated workers ; then this 
 glory seemed to pass into the hands of the 
 Flemings, and later of the wealthy Italian 
 republics. As a consequence, we have three 
 classes of names of our fabrics : one of Arabic, 
 the second of Dutch, and the third of Italian 
 origin. 
 
 Muslin, French mousseline, owes its name to 
 Moussul, a city in the neighborhood of the 
 eastern capital of the Caliphs. Gauze, French 
 gaze, Spanish gaza, was made at Gaza. Fus- 
 tian, Italian fustagno, is from Fostat, a suburb 
 of Cairo. The damask silk and the ' Damas- 
 cus ' swords and the 'Toledo' blades clearly 
 indicate their local origin. 
 
 With the decay of Arabian industry and 
 power, the manufactures of the Flemings came
 
 94 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 into prominence. Cambric, French cambrai, 
 was so called from Cambrai. Diapre, formerly 
 written d'ipre, or d'ypres, was made at Ypres. 
 So we have Lisle thread, Arras tapestry, Brus- 
 sels carpets ; and from the Walloons we have 
 galloon, that is Walloon lace. 
 
 From Italian industry we have fiddles of 
 ' Cremona,' Paduasoy or Padua silk, the scent 
 called Bergamot, from the city of Bergamo. 
 Milliners and mantua-makers are so called from 
 Milan (Milaners) and Mantua. 
 
 Lombards, generally money-lenders and 
 pawn-shoppers, gave the name to Lombard 
 Street in London. In French, Lombard means 
 pawn-broker. " The English ' lumber-room ' 
 is the Lombard-room, the room where the 
 Lombard pawn-brokers stored their unre- 
 deemed pledges. Hence, after a time, furni- 
 ture stowed away in an unused chamber came 
 to be called lumber," and lumbering fellow 
 is a useless, clumsy man. 
 
 The word ' cravat ' we have from the Cravatcs 
 or Croats as they are now called. " There was 
 a French regiment of light horse called Me 
 royal cravate ' because it was attired in the
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 95 
 
 Croat fashion, and the word cravat was intro- 
 duced in 1636 when the necktie worn by these 
 troops became the mode." 
 
 Bayonets were so called because they were 
 first made in Bayonne, from 1650 to 1660. 
 Carabine, as the old Italian form calabrino 
 indicates, comes from Calabria. 
 
 Spencers and Sandwiches owe their names to 
 their inventors, Lord Spencer and Lord Sand- 
 wich, "two noble earls," as a contemporaneous 
 epigram says : 
 
 " The one invented half a coat, 
 The other, half a dinner. 
 The plan was good, as some will say, 
 
 And fitted to console one, 
 Because in this poor starving day, 
 Few can afford a whole one." 
 
 Many names of coins have also been proper 
 names. The guinea was first made with gold 
 brought from Guinea. The florin was struck 
 at Florence ; the dollar is a corruption of the 
 German tJialer, which was so called after the 
 valley {thai) of Joachim in Bohemia, whence the 
 silver was taken to make it. The mark was a 
 Venetian coin, stamped with the lion of St. 
 Mark.
 
 96 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 Other moneys owe their names to their 
 stamps: a shilling bore the device of a shield, 
 and the scudo of a scutum. An eagle, an angel, 
 a kreutzer, bear respectively the American 
 eagle, an angel and a cross. The American 
 who says, " I don't care a continental," sums 
 up a good deal of history in a few words. 
 
 Sometimes names of nations become com- 
 mon names. Vandals, vandalism, vandalic, 
 owe their origin and signification to the wan- 
 ton cruelty and destruction of works of art by 
 the Vandals. 
 
 1 Slave,'' 'Slavonic,' had at first a purely eth- 
 nological meaning. But, as the stronger Teu- 
 tonic races used to supply themselves with 
 slaves from these weaker neighbors, slave came 
 to have the meaning of a man deprived of his 
 liberty, property of another. 
 
 The zouaves owe their name to the Shawi, a 
 tribe of desert nomads, who were enlisted by 
 the French after their Algerian conquest. 
 
 The origin of the word tariff, I am sure many 
 free-traders will be glad to know. Moorish
 
 THE FORTUXES OF WORDS. 97 
 
 pirates used to sally forth from Tarifa to plun- 
 der the vessels passing through the straits of 
 Gibraltar. After a time they contented them- 
 selves (and they found it paid) with levying a 
 heavy tax on the navigators that fell into their 
 clutches. This sort of tax was called from 
 where it was collected ' tariff.' 
 
 Very interesting also would be a collection 
 of common words derived from personal names. 
 Such are, for instance, herculean, from Her- 
 cules ; hermetic, from Hermes ; tantalize, from 
 Tantalus ; chimerical, from Chimaera ; mauso- 
 leum, from Mausolus ; philippic, from Demos- 
 thenes' famous orations against King Philip ; 
 tontine system of insurance from the Italian 
 Tonti ; galvanism, voltaic, mesmerism, dalto- 
 nism, guillotine, from Galvani, Volta, Mesmer, 
 Dalton, Dr. Guillotine ; quixotic, from the hero 
 of Cervantes's masterpiece ; rodomontade from 
 Rodomonte, one of the characters of Ariosto's 
 poem ; renard, the French word for fox, from 
 the mediaeval epic of Reynard the Fox ; hec- 
 toring, from Hector; pasquinade, from Pasquino, 
 a popular Roman satyrist ; and finally let us 
 not forget 'lynch] from the summary proceed-
 
 98 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 ings of master John Lynch, nor ' boycot ' and 
 'boycotting,' from the name of the Irish gen- 
 tleman who was the first to suffer from this 
 new form of ostracism.
 
 TENTH LETTER. 
 
 The new method of Language-Study and the ways of old 
 Etymologists compared.— Instances of their vagaries — 
 Skinner, Menage, Blackstone, etc. 
 
 AS a curious as well as instructive diversion, 
 let us look back a moment at the methods 
 adopted and results achieved by the etymolo- 
 gists of the old school, namely, when etymology 
 was not a science, and linguistic laws were a 
 thing unknown. Modern etymology is not 
 satisfied until it has found out the first starting 
 point of the word — the root — and then fol- 
 lowed it downward, step by step. Old 
 etymologists, on the contrary, had no idea of 
 roots, and when they had discovered, or thought 
 to have discovered, a genealogical connection 
 between two words, they did not search for the 
 connecting links, but simply imagined them. 
 Thus a presupposed etymology was made to 
 rest, not on facts, but on imaginations. The 
 results must inevitably be often false, some- 
 times ludicrous, never certain.
 
 loo THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 The French fusil, for instance, Italian fucile, 
 is derived from focile, the Italian word for 
 ' flint.' Focile must be brought back to focus, 
 fire. The suffix -He is quite common in Italian 
 and Latin. Focile, then, or fucile, French fusil, 
 meant at first simply ' flint,' and reminds us of 
 the ' flint-lock ' of the first guns. Menage, in 
 his etymological dictionary, derives it from 
 focus-elicio, as if it were foci-elicium, that is 
 ' fire-eliciting.' He says, however, it may also 
 be derived from feu-sil, where feu is the French 
 word for ' fire,' and sil, he explains, is a con- 
 traction from cxsilirc, to jump out, to spring 
 out ; "quod ex eius et lapidis attritu ignis 
 exsiliat," because fire springs out of the friction 
 of the gun on the stone. In what way the 
 ' French' word feu could be combined with the 
 ' Latin ' exsilire, and how exsilirc could give sil, 
 or how focus-elicio or foci-elicium was changed 
 into ' fusil,' he does not take the trouble to 
 explain. 
 
 Another instance. The word frigate is of 
 doubtful etymology; Diez would derive it from 
 Italian fabricata, but this is by no means cer- 
 tain. But these difficulties did not frighten
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. ioi 
 
 etymologists of the old school. According to 
 Menage, ' frigate ' is derived from renins, the 
 Latin word for 'oar.' From remits, he says, we 
 had the forms ' remicus,' 'remicatus,' ' recatus,' 
 ' frecatus,' ' fregata ! ' Of course, not one of these 
 forms has ever existed. Here, as I said, is the 
 great difference : modern linguistics bases its 
 researches and inductions on the forms which 
 really exist or have existed ; old etymologists 
 simply ' imagined ' any form to suit their 
 fancies. And then, how from recatus we pass 
 over to fregata, it is not explained : no trouble 
 is taken to explain this phenomenal addition of 
 an initial f. 
 
 To derive frigate from remus is hardly better 
 etymology than to derive, as playful Swift sug- 
 gests, 'ostler' from 'oat-stealer,' or 'breeches' 
 from ' bear-riches.' Still, in other cases, 
 Menage seems to have surpassed himself. 
 That cunning animal which is known to us as 
 ' fox,' is called by the French renard. The 
 origin of this name affords a curious insight 
 into the strange manifold elements that concur 
 to the making of our living speech. In a 
 famous poem of the middle ages, animals,
 
 102 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 instead of men, are the personages, and are 
 called by various names. One of them is the 
 fox, and is called Renart. The poem became 
 so popular, and this word 'renart ' so familiar, 
 that by and by it superseded entirely the old 
 name of the fox. But Manage has another 
 etymology of his own : he derives ' renard ' 
 from raposo, the Spanish name for ' fox.' We 
 had, he says, ' raposus,' ' raposinus,' ' rasinus,' 
 ' rasinardus,' ' ranardus,' ' renard ' ! 
 
 ' Denizen ' is from an Old French word, deinz, 
 meaning 'within.' The Low Latin de intus 
 went through these successive forms, all of 
 them historically true: 'd'einz,' ' d'ens,' 'dens,' 
 'dans.' In 'denizen ' we have also the suffix 
 -en, Old French -ein, Latin -anus ; compare 
 'vilein,' ' villanus,' etc. So that 'denizen' 
 means properly ' inhabitant,' and in the provi- 
 sions of the city of London it was used as op- 
 posed to ' foreign.' But Skinner, in his " Ety- 
 mologicon Linguae Anglicanse," derives it from 
 ' Dane's son,' that is, son or descendant from 
 the Danes, because, he explains, the Danes had 
 once been very powerful in England and had 
 conquered the other inhabitants. Blackstone
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 103 
 
 derives ' denizen ' from ex donatione regis, ' by 
 the gift of the King.' 
 
 ' Mors," as well as ' mortal,' is derived from 
 the root ' mar,' which means to mar, to bruise, 
 to kill. But it was once derived from 'amarus,' 
 because it is bitter; or also 'a morsu vetiti 
 pomi,' from the biting of the forbidden 
 apple, as that was the cause of universal 
 death. 
 
 Where does 'girl' come from? We find in 
 Middle English the forms gerl, girl, and 
 gurl, used for either sex, a young man or 
 woman. In Old Low German we find gar, a 
 child, from which, with the suffix /a, we have 
 the diminutive form gorla. But where does gor 
 itself come from ? We do not know. It is a 
 good sign for a science to know its own limit- 
 ations. The old etymologists, though, had no 
 difficulty, not even in this case. They said that 
 ' girl ' was from the Latin ' garrula,' loquacious ! 
 
 'Crypt,' which is connected with the Greek 
 krypto, to conceal, was derived from cry-pit ; 
 somebody was thrown into a ' pit,' where, of 
 course, he ' cried ' ! 
 
 Roger Asham derives ' war ' from ' warre ' or
 
 104 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 ' werse,' the old form of the comparative 
 1 worse,' "because war is worse than peace." 
 
 Also a queer etymology was giv£n of the 
 word ' demijohn.' This kind of vessel is called 
 in Italian ' damigiana,' and owes its name to the 
 city of Damaghan, in Persia, once famous for 
 its glassworks. In French it is called ' dame- 
 jeanne,' which literally means ' Lady Jane.' 
 Hence a mythical Lady Jane was invented to 
 explain this little mythical and less poetical 
 ' demijohn.' 
 
 I might easily fill pages with instances of the 
 vagaries which were once given as etymologies. 
 But those I have given are enough, I think, to 
 show the difference from the methods of mod- 
 ern research.
 
 ELEVENTH LETTER. 
 
 Application of Linguistic to Prehistoric Studies. — Primitive 
 Nature of Human Tools and Dwellings as shown by their 
 Names. — Cooking, Grinding, Weaving, Writing. — Books 
 and Book Making: Parchment, Paper, etc. — The Limbs 
 of our Body and their Names ; the Head, the Hand, the 
 Nose, the Eye, etc. 
 
 THUS far I have only given you stories of 
 words whose sounds and meanings have 
 considerably changed from their original ones. 
 But interesting as etymologies may be, I would 
 be sorry if you should think that this is the 
 whole aim and object of glottology. To trace 
 out the origin of the sounds which are the 
 means of our daily intercourse with our fellow 
 men is, indeed, a study of no little importance. 
 Still, this is only one object of glottology, which 
 really aims, or should aim, at a complete study 
 of language in all its bearings, historical, ethno- 
 graphical and psychological. It is certain, for 
 instance, that the primitive history of the Ar- 
 yan nations, their original abode, their migra-
 
 io6 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 tions, their relations to one another, would 
 never have been clear but for the light afforded 
 .by linguistic researches. There are few prob- 
 lems in the history of man which the science 
 of language does not contribute to solve, or at 
 least bring near to a solution. 
 
 How much has been said and written about 
 the primitive state of man ! How much non- 
 sense uttered ! What a painful and almost 
 ludicrous groping in the dark ! Now we learn 
 from palaeontology that civilization had every- 
 where the most rude and imperfect beginnings; 
 the habitations of men were of the simplest 
 kind — dens, in fact, not much superior to those 
 of the wild beasts. Their tools were like those 
 of the lowest savages. 
 
 In these prehistoric studies, palaeontology 
 and glottology go hand in hand. In the case 
 of the Aryan family, where linguistic docu- 
 ments have been studied with the greatest dili- 
 gence, glottology can even teach us more than 
 palaeontology. If the latter can display the 
 tools of stone, testimony to a rude and primi- 
 tive age, the former can lead us a step further 
 back and give, through the study of words,
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 107 
 
 evidence of a state where not even such miser- 
 able utensils helped the toil of the primitive 
 Aryans and no comfort of houses or devices of 
 arts gave warmth and joy to their dreary lives. 
 Let us see first what words relating to dwell- 
 ing can tell us. Every body would naturally 
 suppose that at the bottom of words meaning 
 'house ' there is to be found a root conveying 
 the idea of building, constructing, or the like. 
 In truth, however, no ancient name for' house ' 
 refers to any such idea. All of them mean 
 simply to ' cover,' to ' shelter,' or to ' be,' to 
 ' stay,' or to ' bring together,' to ' bind,' thus 
 giving evidence of a time when the idea of 
 ' house ' or ' dwelling ' did not imply the idea 
 of construction, but was anything that could 
 afford a shelter, a cavern, a den. House, Ger- 
 man kaus, home, helm, are very likely from a 
 root ku (Teutonic form Jut) meaning to cover, 
 to shelter. The Latin domus and Greek domos 
 are from a root dam, which means to ' bind,' 
 and only later seems to have acquired the 
 meaning of ' building.' The Swedish bo, by, 
 village, English by (as in by-law, properly a 
 local law, a town-law, and in Whit-by, Der-by,
 
 108 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 etc.), High Old German bur, to inhabit, bu, 
 house, conveyed originally no other idea but 
 that of settling down, of staying. Latin Jiorlus, 
 German gartcn, English garden, yard, mean 
 simply ' enclosure.' 
 
 Another element very important in man's 
 life, beside his habitation, is his nourishment. 
 The varied methods of our cooking can be re- 
 duced to a special form, of which all the others 
 may be said to be mere modifications : namely, 
 cooking food in a vessel filled with water. In 
 other words, the most important process in our 
 culinary art is ' boiling.' Simple as it may 
 seem to us, it has not been learned, however, 
 until after centuries of ruder experiments. We 
 read of peoples who eat their meat raw ; others 
 there are who cook, as best they can, the flesh 
 of animals by keeping it between two hot 
 stones. Others have gone a step further: they 
 make, with the skin of the killed animal, a 
 kind of vessel or pot, into which they put the 
 flesh and water; then they bring it to an im- 
 perfect ebullition by throwing into it heated 
 stones. One step further still, and we find 
 pots made with bark of trees and covered with
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 109 
 
 clay. Later on, the bark is dropped, only the 
 clay remains : we have thus the earthenware, 
 into which water is poured, and heated by fire 
 in the usual way. These are the successive 
 steps in the evolution of cooking. Does lan- 
 guage show any trace of such gradual develop- 
 ment in the Indo-European family? Of course 
 we cannot expect to find in linguistic frag- 
 ments a detailed, minute exposition of facts ; 
 but that, on the whole, such evolution has 
 taken place, we can clearly see by a compara- 
 tive study of the Indo-European words which 
 mean ' cooking.' 
 
 The root meaning ' cooking ' in Sanskrit is 
 pack, in Greek is pep. Both these roots are de- 
 rived from an Aryan root pa k, whose primitive 
 meaning "was to ' ripen.' The verb pep-t-ein 
 itself is still used by Homer (Odyssey, 7, 1 19) 
 with the meaning of ' ripen.' It is then not 
 illogical to suppose that, also with the Aryans, 
 at first meat was simply exposed to the burn- 
 ing rays of the sun to make it undergo 
 the same process which fruits on the trees go 
 through, namely, to make it ripen, to bring it 
 to that state of softness and eatableness to
 
 no THE FORTUNES OF W.ORDS. 
 
 which fruits are brought by natural matur- 
 ing, and that it was eaten after this simple per- 
 formance. At length the same result was 
 obtained with the aid of fire instead of the 
 sun-rays, and thus we come to the process of 
 roasting or boiling,- so common with the 
 Homeric heroes. With the advance of civil- 
 ization, the verb peptein and its derivations were 
 clothed, without changing their form, with the 
 meaning of the subsequently invented pro- 
 cesses of making food eatable, just as the word 
 artillery, applied first to bows, catapults and 
 other weapons of ancient armies, was made 
 to signify all the machines of war introduced 
 after the invention of gunpowder. 
 
 Now, as Sanskrit panclia and Greek pente cor- 
 respond to Latin quinque, and Greek hippos cor- 
 responds to Latin aek-yus ; in other words, as 
 very often we find a labial in Greek answering 
 to a guttural in Latin, we can demonstrate that 
 the Latin verb coquo comes directly from the 
 same Aryan pak, from which the Sanskrit pack 
 and the Greek pep-t-o are derived. It follows 
 that our own verb to ' cook,' which of course 
 comes from Latin coquo, must be referred to
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. m 
 
 the Aryan root whose primitive meaning was 
 to ' ripen,' or cook in the sun's rays. 
 
 It is noteworthy that a like evolution is to 
 be observed in the words meaning ' cooking ' in 
 the Semitic and the American languages. 
 
 It is but natural 4hat wh«i the art of cook- 
 ing was so elementary, the food must also have 
 been very simple, and ncft many words must 
 have been at hand to designate it. In English 
 itself it is not very'fong since the word meat 
 was reserved to denote' a -particular kind of 
 food. At first it meant food in general. But 
 the meanings of such words, especially when 
 the art of cooking grows a little complicated, 
 change so frequently, and sometimes so capric- 
 iously, that no further light, can be deduced 
 from them in reference to the remote times of 
 which we are speaking. 
 
 Let us now turn to the 'tools' which so 
 multiply the power of man. Everywhere in 
 language we have permanent testimonials that 
 all arts and their tools have developed from 
 the most rude implements slowly and labori- 
 ously. The words connected with the art of the 
 miller, for instance, (Latin viol-o, Greek mul-c.
 
 H2 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 German miihli) bring us back to the root mar 
 or tnaly which means to ' rub,' to ' bruise,' thus 
 reminding us of the time when cereals were 
 simply rubbed between two stones. 
 
 It is a grand sight, nowadays, to behold one 
 of our ocean greyhounds, flying majestically 
 over the sea, shouldering and breaking, with 
 almost an air of unconcern, the raging billows. 
 Who would believe that these marvellous con- 
 structions are the product of a slow improve- 
 ment from logs excavated, dug out in the mid- 
 dle? Did we not know it otherwise, it would 
 be abundantly testified by our own language. 
 Ship, Anglo-Saxon scip, is from the root skap, 
 to excavate, to dig. From the same root we 
 have in Greek skaf-os, ship, and skuf-os, glass, 
 cup. We say also ' vessel,' French vaisseau, 
 Italian vascello (Dante uses vaselld), that is, 
 ' vase,' something hollowed inside. 
 
 The art of the weaver offers a very interest- 
 ing subject for linguistic researches. The 
 fundamental Aryan root is ua. It appears that 
 the first things on which men practised this art, 
 and from which they obtained the first idea of 
 it, are the boughs and twigs of trees entangled
 
 THE FOR TUNES OF WORDS. i " 3 
 
 with each other. Little reeds and osiers were 
 called in Latin ui-mina, properly ' plaitings ' 
 or 'weavings. Ui is the Latin form of the Ar- 
 yan root ua. From it we have the name of 
 the vine, ui-tis. Even to-day there are peoples 
 in Africa who use as huts the natural entangle- 
 ments of tree branches. 
 
 Again we receive not a little light on the 
 origin of ' writing ' when we learn that 'write 
 comes from a Teutonic root ' writ,' which 
 means to ' cut slightly,' to ' mark,' to 'scratch.' 
 The Latin scrib-ere, to write, which we have 
 in so many words, as ' inscribe,' ' describe,' 
 ' prescribe,' ' inscription,' ' scripture,' etc., comes 
 from an Aryan root scrabh or scarbh, an amplifi- 
 cation of scar, which also means to ' cut slight- 
 ly,' to ' scratch,' to ' mark.' From the same 
 root scrabh, with loss of the initial s (compare 
 teg-ument, de-tec-tive, etc., from the root stag), 
 we have also the Greek graf-ciu, to write, and 
 the English to ' grave,' to ' en-grave.' All these 
 words bear witness to a time when ' writing ' 
 was done on wood or wax or other soft surface 
 by means of a pointed instrument. 
 
 The whole history of book-making is recorded
 
 U4 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 in the very names we use nowadays for book, 
 paper and other things connected therewith. 
 
 ' Book ' is from the Anglo-Saxon bdc, prop- 
 erly ' a beach-tree.' The meaning of ' book ' is 
 due to the custom of writing on tablets of 
 beechen-board. German bucJic, beech, buck, 
 book, Middle High German buoche, a beech 
 tree ; buoch, a book. In Latin the book was 
 called liber. Hence Italian libro and French 
 livre. But liber is also the name of the bark of 
 a tree. 
 
 The ' paper ' on which we write owes its name 
 to papyrus, a kind of reed whose inner rind was 
 used as writing material. This ' papyrus ' was 
 called in Greek bablos, hence biblos, the Greek 
 word for ' book ' and our ' Bible.' 
 
 ' Parchment/ Middle English perchcmin, 
 parchoHyn, French parc/icmin, Latin pcrgamina , 
 pergameiia, Greek pcrgamcnc, was so called from 
 the city of Pergamos, in Asia, where it was 
 first used. 
 
 All these writings, whether on papyrus, liber 
 or parchment, ' rolled up ' formed a ' volume,' 
 from Latin voluerc, to roll, to turn. 
 
 The names of the limbs of our body seem
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 115 
 
 also to provoke our curiosity. Where do they 
 come from ? How were they formed ? They 
 too show traces of a very rude nomenclature, 
 sometimes not well defined, wavering between 
 one meaning and another. 
 
 The Greek cheir, for instance, meant ' hand,' 
 but also ' arm.' The same must be said of Latin 
 manus, as we have from it ' manica,' ' sleeve.' 
 Cheir itself comes from the root ghar, to seize ; 
 manus, from the root ma, means the ' former,' 
 the ' maker.' 
 
 Sanskrit kap-ala, Greek kcphale, Latin cap-ut, 
 and, according to Grimm's law, English head, 
 came from the same root : kap, to contain. Their 
 original meaning was that of a shell, 'scull.' 
 
 The Latin word for ' pot,' testa, has given 
 the Italian testa and the French tete, head. In 
 not a few other languages the name of the head 
 means, etymologically, pot, pumpkin, shell, etc. 
 
 Tooth, Middle English toth, Anglo-Saxon, 
 to3, which stands for tan?, German zahn, Latin 
 dent-cm, Sanskrit dant-a, Greek odonta, are 
 all from an Aryan form adant-a, a present par- 
 ticipial form from a root ad, to cut, to bite, to 
 eat. From this same root we have Latin ed-ere,
 
 n6 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 to cat, Greek cd-ein, Gothic it-an, Anglo-Saxon 
 et-au, English eat. 
 
 Eye, as we have seen, is from a root ak, to be 
 sharp, to pierce. 
 
 Brow, forehead, and also the edge of a cliff, 
 Anglo-Saxon brn, hatinfrous, Greek ofriis, is 
 from a root bliru, to swell, to be prominent. 
 Homer calls Ilios ofrtiesset, ' browy,' if I might 
 say so, hilly. 
 
 The ' eyelid ' is in Latin cil-ium, from a root 
 kal, to cover, to veil. It was said also of any 
 piece of ground stretching forth so as to leave 
 a hollowness under it. In Italian cilio means 
 eyelid as well as edge, cliff. In Russian tsclielo 
 means forehead ; the plural tschelia means cliff. 
 The same coincidence we meet with in the 
 Semitic field. 
 
 The root of ' nose,' German nase, Latin nasus, 
 is uncertain. But it seems it meant simply a 
 stretching forth, a prominence. In Beowulf 
 (v. 571) we read scs-ndssas, for ' promontories.' 
 
 Besides Latin testa, a pot, and perhaps Sans- 
 krit kap-ala, a vase, the art of the potter has 
 given us the word figure, Latin fignrct, from the 
 root fig, to model, to mould. Fi{ii)g-crc was
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. H7 
 
 said at first only of modelling clay, just as the 
 potter does. Figura was the result of this work. 
 Earthenwares were called fictilia . Passing from 
 the material to the intellectual world, we have 
 had such words as fig-ment : , fic-tion, the product 
 of the imagination. In a certain sense, the poet 
 treats and fashions the invisible world of ideas 
 as the potter his clay. 
 
 (We may notice in passing that a kind of 
 works of ' fiction ' which in English are called 
 ' novels ' — from the Italian novella, a piece of 
 news, an anecdote, a tale — are called by other 
 peoples romans or romanzi. For a long time 
 after the fall of the Roman Empire, while the 
 modern Neo-Latin tongues were slowly evolv- 
 ing from Latin, and Latin still held its own as 
 the language of scholars, romans were called 
 the dialects spoken by the people. The 
 same name designated tales, whether prose 
 or poetry, in which the literature of the 
 Middle Ages is so rich, composed in the new 
 dialects for the special amusement and instruc- 
 tion of the common people and of the ladies who 
 did not know Latin. The name has survived 
 and is still applied to works of fiction, like nov-
 
 n8 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 els, tales, etc. In connection with the charac- 
 ter of such literature, the adjective ' romantic ' 
 has acquired also other meanings which would 
 be interesting to follow. But we cannot do it 
 here: it would carry us too far from our sub- 
 ject.) 
 
 While ' head ' and ' figure ' have their names 
 from works of the hands, trunk is evidently 
 taken from the trees. {Chest, Middle English 
 cheste, chiste, is from Latin cista, a box.) 
 
 Foot, Anglo-Saxon fot, Greek pod-a (accusa- 
 tive), Latin ped-em (compare fa-thcr from an 
 Aryan root pa) is derived from the root pad, 
 to go. 
 
 Finger (fi(n)g-er) is from an Aryan root pak, 
 to bind, to grasp, while French doigt, Italian 
 dito, from Latin dig-itus, are from a root die, to 
 point out, to show.
 
 TWELFTH LETTER. 
 
 The Development of Ethical Feelings Studied in Words. — 
 Ethics, Customs and Morals — Law and Right — Virtue 
 and Vice ; Malice, Perversity and Depravity — Murder — 
 Shame — Truth — Verity — The Ideas of Labor, Poverty 
 and Suffering in Language. 
 
 M 
 
 ORE interesting even than the develop- 
 ment of dwellings, tools and the arts per- 
 taining to material life, is it to know how those 
 ideas and feelings have developed in man which 
 properly constitute his morality. Some moral 
 characteristics may be said to be common 
 to all men. Most of them, however, change 
 from nation to nation and from time to time, 
 or to put it in more comprehensive words, 
 they change according to the psychic climate of 
 a people. Peoples that live contemporaneously 
 and in the same physical climate, can, intellect- 
 ually and morally, be wide apart. In a certain 
 sense, even historically they are immensely sep- 
 arated from one another. The Hottentots of 
 to-day, for instance, are materially our contem-
 
 120 the* fortunes of words. 
 
 poraries ; but, from the standpoint of civiliza- 
 tion, they are the contemporaries of the fore- 
 fathers of our race who lived thousands of years 
 ago. And as rude, imperfect, and almost 
 beneath our ideas of man are some elements in 
 the morals of the Hottentots, we have no reason 
 to disbelieve that our remote forefathers may 
 have gone through a similar stage of hardly 
 incipient civilization ; through a stage, where 
 the life of the soul is almost nothing, the hori- 
 zon of the mind is narrow and the material part 
 of life dominates and encompasses all thoughts 
 and aspirations. Even when they had entered 
 upon a stage of comparatively advanced civili- 
 zation, when they had books and arts and laws 
 and powerful organizations, religious, social and 
 political, did their life bear the marks of a bar- 
 barism such as we find among peoples who are 
 greatly our inferiors. As we see to-day canni- 
 balism not only not shunned, but honored as a 
 good and religious custom, we find the code of 
 Manu — the code of a people whose civilization 
 was in many ways worthy of comparison with 
 ours — wholly shaped after the barbarous prin- 
 ciple of retaliation. A man of the lower caste
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 121 
 
 who struck one of the higher, was to have his 
 hand cut off. If he kicked him, his foot must 
 be severed. If he broke a dyke, he must be 
 drowned. Traces of such principles we find 
 with the Romans and the Greeks. In Germany, 
 perjury was punished by cutting the hand that 
 was raised in taking the oath. Even with us, 
 capital punishment is after all but a remnant of 
 this principle, the spirit of which is set forth in 
 the adage, " eye for eye, and tooth for tooth." 
 
 In this field, too, language can supply us 
 with some precious materials for study. We 
 cannot expect, of course, to find in it the com- 
 plete history of the moral development of our 
 race. To do this the linguistic materials should 
 be considerably larger than those in our posses- 
 sion. Besides, it would require such a vast, 
 minute, complete history of each word in con- 
 nection with the development of each language 
 and the historical conditions of each people, 
 that not years, but generations, would hardly 
 be enough for the undertaking. The result, 
 however, would be a history of the mind and 
 soul of our race, such as it is barely possible to 
 dream of.
 
 122 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 At any rate, we can at least discover, by 
 means of linguistic researches, some of those 
 landmarks which show how and in what direc- 
 tions moral life has developed. 
 
 Here too, as it was to be expected, we find 
 that even the loftiest moral ideas and senti- 
 ments did not spring up full-fledged from the 
 human mind, but are the result of a slow devel- 
 opment from very humble, sometimes mean and 
 not moral beginnings. 
 
 The word ' moral ' itself, with its derivations 
 1 morality,' ' immoral,' etc., descends from a 
 word (Latin mos (accusative mor-eni) which 
 means simply ' custom.' So the word ' ethics ' 
 is derived from Greek ethos, custom. They 
 meant, fundamentally, simply that which is in 
 accordance with the usage of the most, which 
 is accepted by long use and agreed upon by the 
 majority of the people.* 
 
 ' Law,' Anglo-Saxon lagh, is simply that 
 which lies, which is even and in due order. 
 
 *" It is of the very essence of custom, and this indeed chiefly 
 explains its strength, that men do not clearly distinguish be 
 tween their actions and their duties — what they ought to do is 
 what they always have done, and they do it." — H. Sumner 
 Maine, ("Village Communities," p. 191.)
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 123 
 
 ' Right ' is that which is straight, not crooked. 
 The Latin ins (whence ' justice,' ' juris-prudence, 
 etc.) is that which binds ; that which men are 
 bound to. 
 
 4 Virtue,' Latin virtus, meant simply strength, 
 especially the strength of the soldier. 'Vice,' 
 Latin vitium, conveyed the idea of something 
 not straight, mixed up, from the root vi, to 
 weave. Mains, bad (whence ' malice,' ' mali- 
 cious, etc.), meant properly ' damaging,' ' ruin- 
 ous,' from the root mar, to damage, to hurt, 
 to bruise. The Greek kakos, bad, meant also 
 at first ' damaging.' 
 
 4 Perverse' is from the Latin per-verto, to turn 
 aside, from the right way ; to corrupt. 4 De- 
 praved ' is from Latin pravns, crooked. Horace 
 speaks of a pravus nasus, a crooked nose. 
 
 Many other words which to our minds con- 
 vey an idea essentially moral, had once no such 
 meaning at all. Thus the word ' murder,' is 
 from the same root as the word ' mortal,' and 
 meant simply to bruise to death, to kill ; for 
 instance, to kill an enemy in battle, without 
 any notion of moral blame in it. Likewise 
 4 manslaughter' had simply the meaning of kill-
 
 124 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 ing, in battle or otherwise, with no ethical im- 
 putation. The same must be said of Latin 
 cczdes, a slaughter. Also the Greek apoktcino 
 meant to kill, whether it was a man in a fight, 
 or an enemy in battle, or an animal in hunting. 
 
 'S/iame,' whose root is connected with 'scathe,' 
 meant at first simply a material damage or of- 
 fense. The grief and mortification which now 
 we attribute to a moral cause, was first due to 
 corporal pain. 
 
 It is noteworthy that in Greek there is no 
 word to convey exactly that idea of blame 
 which we perceive and feel in the word ' lie,' 
 since pseudos was said of all untruth, of a mere 
 mistake and of a deliberate falsehood as well. 
 
 ' True ' is connected, by its root, with ' trust '; 
 fixed, steady, to be trusted. Latin vcrum 
 (whence verity, veracious, etc.) meant originally 
 'credible,' from a root var, to believe. 
 
 An important group of words we have, de- 
 rived from the same root, and conveying the 
 ideas of ' labor' and ' suffering.' 
 
 From the root pen, meaning to exert, to 
 strain one's self, we have in Greek the verb pen- 
 omcti, to exert one's self, to work, to fatigue, to
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 125 
 
 suffer. Hence penia, poverty; peina, hunger; 
 peinan, to be hungry; ponos, fatigue, weariness, 
 suffering ; poneros, working, poor, a wretch, a 
 bad man. There is no little matter for reflec- 
 tion, I think, in this evolution of words from 
 the meaning of ' work ' to that of 'suffering' 
 and ' moral depravation.' 
 
 Doubtless such evolution could only take 
 place in a social system where the poor have to 
 work so hard that labor becomes a suffering, 
 and so difficult it is to find one's way upward, 
 that after useless struggles, they sink into hope- 
 less degradation and wretchedness. 
 
 An analogous evolution we have noticed in 
 the word captivus, captive, a prisoner of war, 
 which came to mean 'miserable,' 'sickly,' in 
 French (c/u'tff), and ' bad ' in Italian {cattivo). 
 
 Laborare meant also to ' work,' and then ' to 
 tire one's self,' to suffer. Compare the two 
 meanings in the English 'laborer' and to 'labor.' 
 The same evolution we have again in the Neo- 
 Latin languages. In French travail means 
 'work,' but in Italian travaglio'xs more properly 
 said of worries and troubles. 
 
 The same thing we meet with in the Semitic
 
 126 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 family. In Hebrew, for instance, the root cisab 
 means ' labor,' ' weariness,' ' grief.' 
 
 When the inferior languages of semi-bar- 
 barous peoples are as well studied as those of 
 the Indo-European family, a larger crop will be 
 gathered in these interesting linguistic and 
 psychologic, or if you will let me coin a word, 
 glotto-psychological studies.
 
 THIRTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 The Color — Sense, and the Names of Colors — Importance of 
 this Subject — Linguistic and Physiological Researches. 
 
 IT would be perfectly superfluous to discourse 
 with you, gifted as you are with so exquisite 
 a feeling for art, upon the paramount im- 
 portance of color in our relations with the outer 
 world. We have just to shut our eyes to per- 
 ceive how barren and desolate this poor vale 
 of tears would be if it should present itself to 
 us in that way, colorless, dark, forever ! 
 
 Things reveal themselves to us through their 
 shape, movement, odor, weight ; but none 
 of their properties strikes us so much and so 
 promptly as their color. When we look at 
 people, we may not notice at once the shape of 
 their nose, the form of their lips, the breadth 
 or narrowness of their forehead ; but we notice 
 at first sight, and remember as long as we have 
 of the people any recollection at all, the color
 
 128 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 of their complexion, whether they are dark, 
 brown or fair. Many, in presence of a flower, 
 a tree, an animal, a house, may overlook some 
 important characteristics, but nobody can fail 
 to notice their color. It is useless to dwell any 
 longer on this point ; its truth is patent. But 
 to an inquisitive mind the question may occur : 
 " Did men always perceive colors in the same 
 way as we do ? Did they always notice in 
 the skies and on earth those delicate hues in 
 which our eyes delight? " A priori, we should 
 expect that in this field, as in all others, there 
 must have been some evolution. The percep- 
 tion of colors, as all mental powers, must have 
 developed and improved in the long run of gen- 
 erations. But whether this be true or not, how 
 are we going to find out ? Evidently the best 
 key to the problem lies in language. If we col- 
 lect the names of colors used by our remote 
 forefathers and inquire into the original primi- 
 tive meaning of those names, we shall have 
 made a great step toward the discovery of the 
 reach and nature of their color perception. 
 
 The subject is the more difficult as the dis- 
 tinctions of colors, especially between kindred
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 1 29 
 
 ones, are not seldom matter for discussion even 
 among educated persons speaking the same 
 language. Of course, far more difficult must it 
 be to find what was the exact meaning of a 
 color-name used some thousand years ago. 
 Again, not unfrequently the same name of color 
 has been used by different peoples with differ- 
 ent meanings. The English ' purple,' for in- 
 stance, is exactly the same word as Latin 
 purpura, Italian porpora, French pourprc, but all 
 of these, except the English word, mean live 
 red. Evidently with such difficulties to battle 
 with, this study is not an easy one. Still some 
 researches have been made and results obtained 
 which are worth recording. Thus it will be a 
 surprise to many to hear that the Veda hymns, 
 which contain more than ten thousand lines and 
 describe the sky over and over in all its aspects 
 and shapes, never mention the color blue. The 
 same thing must be said of the Zendavesta, the 
 sacred books of the Parsees, and of the Bible, 
 and the Homeric poems as well. It is also a 
 fact that neither the Rigvedas nor the Zenda- 
 vesta speak of the trees or the earth as green. 
 They call the trees fruitful, beautiful, gold-
 
 13° THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 en-hued (evidently in reference to the golden 
 fruits), but never are they called green. Aris- 
 toteles in his Meteorology speaks of the rain- 
 bow as tri-colored, ' red, yellow and green.' 
 
 These facts show that for a long time, even 
 with peoples highly civilized, the perception of 
 colors was not so vivid and distinct as it is with 
 us, or at least their classifications and names 
 were in a very imperfect and almost chaotic 
 condition. The same results were arrived at 
 by Mr. Gladstone in his Homeric studies, and 
 by Professor Magnus in his researches among 
 the savage tribes of America. 
 
 We may then safely lay down the conclusion 
 that, however keen the power of sight may be 
 with primitive peoples, they lack that percep- 
 tion of fine shades and hues which can only be 
 acquired by a gradual education of the eye. 
 
 We can now go a stop further. Granting 
 that primitive men did not perceive as many 
 colors as we do, how did they perceive those 
 few ? Our own idea of color has changed 
 within a few years. We conceive it now as a par- 
 ticular movement of matter which assumes dif- 
 ferent appearance according to the nature and
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 13 1 
 
 rapidity of that movement. It would, of course, 
 be absurd to expect that men did at first con- 
 ceive color in any way like this. How then 
 did they conceive it? Also in this case we must 
 appeal to the testimony of language. It appears 
 that they conceived it as some material stuff 
 ' stretched ' over the thing itself. As an in- 
 stance, the root arg (or rag), from which we 
 have the Sanskrit rajatam, silver, rajatas, white, 
 arjauas, light, raktas, red, and Greek argaros, 
 means to ' dye,' to ' stretch.' We have from it 
 the Greek verb rezein, to color, to stretch, and 
 the Latin por-rig-ere, to stretch forth. 
 
 This result, set forth by linguistic investiga- 
 tions, is also supported by the fact that an 
 equally rude idea of color seems still to prevail 
 in the minds of uneducated men, even in our 
 days. 
 
 It remains now to inquire into the origin of the 
 different color-names. Where were they taken 
 from ? To answer this question, it will help us to 
 look at the way that we ourselves follow in the 
 formation of color names. As a rule, we give 
 to a color newly-invented, or newly-noticed and 
 brought into prominence, the name of some min-
 
 I3 2 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 eral or tree or flower whose color most resembles 
 the one in question. Thus we have the color- 
 names ' rose,' ' pink,' ' violet,' ' copper,' ' bronze,' 
 'orange,' 'lemon,' 'hazel,' 'chestnut,' 'ochre,' 
 ' ash,' etc. That is to say, we know no better 
 way of naming or even defining a color than by 
 referring to a substance which has that color. 
 We must, of course, make an exception for the 
 few names of colors whose origin is due to some 
 mere accident, to the name of the inventor, the 
 date of the invention, etc., as color Magenta, 
 Solferino, Marengo, etc. 
 
 If we examine the names of the principal 
 colors in the Indo-European languages, we find 
 that this is the case : names of colors are also, 
 as a rule, names of plants, minerals or some 
 other material substance. 
 
 In Sanskrit rajata means both 'silver' and 
 ' white.' ' Green ' comes from the same root as 
 ' grow ' ; and it refers to trees and vegetation 
 generally. 
 
 It is difficult to trace out the first origin of 
 'black.' It is noteworthy, however, that b/cck 
 in Danish, and black in Swedish, mean ' ink.' It 
 might be objected that ' ink ' being an artificial
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 133 
 
 product, certainly not of prehistoric times, this 
 meaning of blczk and black must be a secondary- 
 meaning. But it is very natural to suppose 
 that at first blcek and black meant any dark, 
 smearing substance, and were by and by re- 
 stricted to that particular substance which was 
 better adapted to dye, to mark, to write. In 
 German blakig, blakcrtg, mean ' burning,' 
 'smoky.' In short, it is almost not to be 
 doubted that ' black ' refers us to some sub- 
 stance with a dark color. 
 
 ' Blue,' Anglo-Saxon blco, whose meaning was 
 first near ' livid,' is not improbably connected 
 with Icelandic bly, German blei, lead. 
 
 ' White ' is from a Teutonic type hwita, 
 (Anglo-Saxon hwit, Gothic Jiweits, German 
 weiss) from a root hwit, to shine. So ' blank ' 
 pale, French blanc, white, is from a root mean- 
 ing to ' shine.' Both therefore, ' white ' and 
 'blank' refer to 'light,' the color of the light. 
 
 The Latin ni-gcr, black, which we have in 
 negro, nigrescent, etc., is from the same root 
 from which noct-em, nukt-a, German nacht, and 
 our ' night ' come. It means the color of the 
 night, the absence of light.
 
 134 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 'Yellow,' whose original color was 'light 
 yellow,' refers us ultimately, like ' green,' to 
 trees and leaves, probably as seen in the pale- 
 ness of the late season, or when struck by the 
 sun's rays. 
 
 This peculiar formation of color-names opens 
 a new window, so to say, through which we can 
 look into the growth of language. It brings 
 forth the facility with which the human mind 
 taking one element of a thing — for instance, its 
 outward appearance — and applying it to other 
 things, rises to a general abstract idea. 
 Thus we have a practical illustration of the way 
 in which our mind works: first, it perceives a 
 similarity between two things; this similarity is 
 perceived as something distinct from the things 
 themselves : it becomes, therefore, an abstrac- 
 tion. This is the first step toward an induction : 
 on a step like this all human knowledge is 
 founded. The highest theorems of our science 
 are but the last links of a chain of abstractions, 
 the first of which rests simply on the approach- 
 ing of two objects which have something in com- 
 mon. The greatest trouble is that in the im- 
 mense chain of such interwoven and far-origin-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 135 
 
 ating abstractions, it is frequently impossible 
 to bring back each of them to its primitive 
 source and significance. Hence very often 
 their true value is misrepresented or miscon- 
 ceived, and such misconception is assumed as 
 the basis for other abstractions which of course, 
 having a wrong foundation, must also be wrong. 
 So that these palaeontologico-linguistic studies 
 have also this merit, of no little importance : 
 they may help us to find out the true origin of 
 a certain category of abstractions, and to cor- 
 rect thereby the false or imperfect theories 
 which rest on a fundamental misunderstanding 
 of those abstractions.
 
 FOURTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 Names of Numbers — The Progressive Development of Calcu- 
 lation Studied in the Names of Numbers — Results from 
 Different Languages. 
 
 IMPORTANT as the color-names are for 
 the study of the development of our percep- 
 tive life, they are not nearly as important as the 
 origin and history of numerals for the study of 
 the development of our understanding. It has 
 long been a question among philosophers 
 whether the idea of numbers belongs to the 
 so-called inborn ideas or must be reckoned 
 as the product of experience. Many were ready 
 to affirm that such propositions as " two and 
 two make four " are " necessary truths," they 
 are evident by themselves, and our experience 
 cannot go behind them ; they simply force 
 themselves upon our minds. Others, J. S. Mill, 
 for instance (quoted by Mr. Tylor), maintain 
 that " two and one are equal to three " ex- 
 presses merely a " truth known to us by early 
 and constant experience: an inductive truth.
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 137 
 
 and such truths are the foundation of the 
 science of numbers.' 1 The discussion among 
 philosophers might have gone on forever, had 
 not the researches of glottologists and ethnolo- 
 gists stepped in to show how facts really are. 
 These researches demonstrate that Mill's opin- 
 ion is the right one. Even such a simple 
 conception as " three and two make five " had 
 to be gained by slow and practical experience. 
 There are to-day peoples who cannot count 
 above five or four or even three or two. The 
 low tribes of Brazil count by their finger-joints 
 up to three only ; any bigger number they ex- 
 press by the word ' many.' A Pari vocabulary 
 gives these numerals : i,'omi'; 2, ' curiri ; ' 3, 
 ' prica,' 'many.' In a Botocudo vocabulary 
 we find : I, ' mokenam ' ; 2, ' uruhu,' ' many.' 
 The New-Hollanders have no numbers beyond 
 ' two.' Other peoples cannot count up to three 
 or four without saying ' two and one,' ' two and 
 two.' In Queensland we find : i,'ganar'; 2, 
 ' burla ' ; 3, ' burla-ganar ' ; 4, ' burla-burla.' In 
 the Kamilaroi dialect we find: I, ' mal ' ; 2, 
 'bularr'; 3, ' guliba ' ; 4, ' bularr-bularr ' ; 5, 
 ' bulaguliba ' ; 6, ' guliba-guliba.'
 
 i3 8 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 All peoples use their fingers to count, and 
 often we find the word ' hand ' meaning ' five ' ; 
 'two hands' or 'half a man' meaning 'ten. 
 ' hands and feet ' or ' one man ' meaning ' twen- 
 ty.' Some peoples count up to ' five ' (which 
 they call a ' hand '), and then they go on say- 
 ing ' a hand and one (six), ' a hand and two ' 
 (seven), ' a hand and three ' (eight), etc. In this 
 way we have a 'quinary' numeral system. 
 Others count up to ' two hands ' (ten), and then 
 they count, ' two hands and one,' ' two hands 
 and two,' etc., thus forming a ' decimal ' system. 
 Others still count up to ' twenty ' (hands and 
 feet), and then count : ' hands-feet and one,' 
 ' hands-feet and two,' etc., up to another twenty 
 that is forty. In this case we have a vigesimal 
 system of numeration. It appears that the 
 most intelligent races have soon discarded the 
 quinary system as insufficient and the vigesi- 
 mal as too cumbersome, and followed the 
 decimal system, not so strictly, however, as to 
 abolish all traces of the two others. Thus, for 
 instance, we have evident remnants of a vigesi- 
 mal system in the French numeration, where, 
 instead of ' septante ' one says 'soixantedix.'
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 139 
 
 and ' quatre-vingts ' (four-twenties) for ' eighty.' 
 We find also six-vingts (120), sept-vi)igts (140), 
 and there is a hospital called les qainze vingts, 
 from its ' three hundred ' inmates. These traces 
 of vigesimal notation are a characteristic of the 
 Keltic race. In Gaelic we find aon deug is da 
 fhichead, one, ten and two-twenties, 51. In 
 Welsh : unarbymtheg ar ugain, one and fifteen 
 over twenty, 36. Perhaps there is also a trace 
 of Keltic influence in ourcounting ' three-score 
 and ten,' ' four-score and fifteen/etc. 
 
 How are the names themselves of the num- 
 bers formed ? Let us look at some facts which 
 happen with different peoples ; they will per- 
 haps help us to see into the origin of our own 
 numerals. Indian scholars had given to certain 
 words a numeral value, so as to have a kind of 
 ' memoria technica ' to remember dates and 
 figures. Thus ' moon ' or 'earth' represented 
 ' one ' ; ' eyes,' ' wings,' ' arms ' or ' jaws ' meant 
 ' two ' ; ' fire ' or ' quality ' meant ' three,' as they 
 imagined three kinds of fire, and three different 
 qualities; 'vowel ' meant ' seven,' as they reck- 
 oned seven vowels, etc. It is not absurd to 
 suppose that as ' hand ' was employed to mean
 
 fee- 
 
 140 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 'five,' they may have used a word like ' wing' 
 or ' leg' or ' arm ' or ' eye ' to mean ' two.' We 
 must remember that once the names for ' five' 
 and ' two ' being found, all the others can be 
 formed through different combinations of these 
 two. 
 
 The Tahitians offer also a fact worthy of at- 
 tention. They are not allowed to pronounce 
 any word which is similar in sound to the name 
 of their chief. Therefore on the advent of a 
 new chief with a name similar to that of a 
 number, they are obliged to find a new word 
 for such number. Thus instead of the word 
 run, the ordinary word for ' two,' they intro- 
 duced the word piti, ' together,' which after- 
 wards remained in the language. Names of this 
 kind, which may take the place of a numeral, 
 are found in all languages. In Latin, for in- 
 stance, instead of ' two,' one might say ' copula,' 
 bond, tie. In English, instead of 'twenty,' we 
 can say ' score,' a notch. In Old Norse we find 
 flockr, flock, for ' five ' ; folk, people, for ' forty ' ; 
 her, army, for eighty. 
 
 We must also remember that names of 
 weights and measures were formed in that way ;
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 14 1 
 
 namely, certain common words were given an 
 exact arithmetical meaning of which at first 
 they were deprived. Thus, gallon (' a large 
 bowl '), furlong (' a furrow-long,' the length of a 
 furrow), pound ('weight '), etc., had at first no 
 exact numeral value. 
 
 Keeping these facts well in our minds let us 
 proceed to study, as far as we can, the origin 
 and formation of the Indo-European numerals. 
 The subject is one of great interest, since num- 
 bers are one of the essentials of our civilization. 
 Only by numbers we can measure the world and 
 ourselves. But we must also remember that of 
 all words the names of numbers are the first to 
 lose their primitive meaning, and therefore to 
 become corrupted in the common parlance. 
 Hence the great difficulty of their study and 
 comparison in the Indo-European languages. 
 Many times we have to be satisfied with vague 
 conjectures and probabilities. 
 
 To begin, the English ' one,' Anglo-Saxon on, 
 Latin nuns, seems to have at its basis a form 
 ai-na from a stem ai, which appears as an am- 
 plification of i, the stem of the pronoun of third 
 person ; so that at first it meant ' this,' ' this one'
 
 r/Un 
 
 
 , Ufit - 
 
 142 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 ' Two ' is the same as 'twain'; Middle En- 
 glish ' tweien,' ' twein,' ' tweie,' ' twei,' 'twa,' 
 'two.' Anglo-Saxon 'twegen' for the mascu- 
 line, 'twa' for the feminine; Gothic, ' twai ' ; 
 German, ' zwei ' ; Sankrit, ' dva ' ; Greek, ' duo ' ; 
 Latin, ' duo.' All from a base dva, whose ulti- 
 mate root is not certain. 
 
 ' Three,' Gothic, ' threis ' ; German, ' drei ' ; 
 Latin, ' tres ' ; is very likely connected with the 
 root tri } to go over, to cross. Does this word 
 remind us of a time when the forefathers of the 
 Indo-European family counted only up to two, 
 and for the first time their numeration was 
 pushed one degree further? 
 
 ' Four,' Middle English, ' feowur ' ; Swedish, 
 ' fyra ' ; German, ' vier ' ; Sanskrit, ' chatvar,' 
 'chatur'; Latin, ' quatuor.' Its fundamental 
 form is ' kwatwar.' The etymology is quite 
 uncertain, although some claim to see in the 
 Sanskrit form ' chatur,' for ' (e)cha-tur,' the word 
 eka, one, and the root of ' three,' as if it were 
 ' one-(and)-three.' 
 
 ' Five,' Middle English, ' fif ' ; Gothic, ' fimf ' ; 
 German, ' fiinf ' ; Greek, ' pempe,' • pente ' ; 
 Latin, ' quinque ' ; Sanskrit, ' panchan.' The
 
 777£ FORTUNES OF WORDS. 143 
 
 fundamental Aryan form is ' pankan,' which the 
 Indian grammarians refer to the root pac, to 
 stretch out, applying it to the hand with all the 
 fingers stretched out. 
 
 It is impossible to say any thing certain about 
 the origin of the four following numbers, al- 
 though one may suggest that Greek okto, Latin 
 'octo,' Gothic 'ahtau,' eight, seems to be a 
 dual, either 'two-fours' or ' two-of-ten ' (com- 
 pare Latin ' duo-de-viginti,' two-of-twenty, 18). 
 'Nine,' Latin ' novem,' Sanskrit ' navan,' may 
 have meant the ' last,' namely the last in the 
 series before a new order begins. 
 
 'Ten,' Gothic ' taihun,' German ' zehn,' Lat- 
 in ' decern,' is in Sanskrit ' dacan,' which some 
 have tried to rebuild into dva-qan, where can 
 represents the word qama, hand ; hence dva-qan 
 'two hands.' This is ingenious, but far from 
 certain. 
 
 The numbers from ten to one hundred re- 
 quire no explanation, except ' eleven ' and 
 ' twelve." ' Eleven ' is in Gothic 'ain-lif,' where 
 ain is the Anglo-Saxon an, one. Lif'xs cognate 
 with the suffix lika, ten, which we find in Lith-
 
 144 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 nanian. Likewise ' twelve,' Gothic twa-lif is 
 ' two-ten.' 
 
 The word 'hundred,' is really a compound ; 
 of hund, which means ' hundred,' and red, the 
 same as ' read,' to speak, to reckon, to count. 
 This red is a superfluous addition ; in Anglo- 
 Saxon we find 'hund' alone. This 'hund' 
 corresponds to Latin ' centum ' and Sanskrit 
 ' cata,' for ' canta ' ; all of which are to be referred 
 to an Aryan kanta, which is a mutilated form 
 from ' dakanta ' ' tenth,' meaning really the 
 ' tenth ten.' So we find in Gothic taihun-tai- 
 hund, ten-tenth, for ' hundred.' 
 
 We may also gather some light about the 
 origin of numerals by inquiring into the forma- 
 tion of the names for large numbers, which are 
 evidently of a more recent date than the simple 
 ones. The Gallas to indicate a great number 
 use a word wiiich means ' hair.' With the 
 Mexicans the word ' hair ' means 400, or a large 
 number. The Romans used to say ' sexcenti ' 
 six hundred, to indicate a large indefinite num- 
 ber. To mean a very large number, say ten 
 billions, the Hindoos used the word ' padma,' 
 lotus, which contains numberless seeds.
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 145 
 
 Chilioi, the Greek word for ' thousand ' is very 
 likely connected with chilos, grass; 'as many 
 as the grass in the fields.' 
 
 The Hebrew elcph, thousand, seems to have 
 meant at first ' herd,' ' flock.' 
 
 As for 'thousand,' Gothic ' thusundi,' it con- 
 tains in its second part ' hund,' hundred ; the 
 first part is difficult to trace back to its source; 
 it may be from a root thu, to swell, to increase, 
 giving thus the meaning of " many hundreds." 
 The numerals up to one hundred are similar 
 in all the Indo-European languages, but they 
 have not a common word for ' thousand.' This 
 does not mean that at the time of their separa- 
 tion they were not able to count up to such 
 number ; they may have done it and employed 
 other words, such as ten hundreds, or the like. 
 But this absence of a common word for ' thou- 
 sand' proves at least this, that their counting very 
 seldom exceeded a few hundreds ; hence they 
 had no necessity for a fixed numeral beyond 
 one hundred. It shows also that their life must 
 have been very simple ; they must have lived 
 in small villages or settlements, with scarcely 
 more than a few hundred souls; otherwise a
 
 146 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 word for thousand would have come to be as 
 steadily used as that for one hundred. These 
 small settlements must evidently have been in- 
 habited by people of the same family or clan. 
 Thus we see that even names of numbers, nay 
 the very absence of a numeral can teach us not 
 a little about the life and civilization of a 
 people.
 
 FIFTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 The Superstitions of Language — Familiar words whose funda- 
 mental meaning is incompatible with our tenets, religious, 
 moral or scientific. 
 
 <QUPERSTITION ' is, etymologically, that 
 v3 which ' remains or stands over.' When 
 an opinion, political, religious or scientific, is 
 exploded, if it still survives and lingers in some 
 minds which either do not see it to be wrong 
 or have not the courage to embrace the right 
 one, that opinion is a ' superstition.' If a ship 
 is wrecked and some fragments remain floating 
 on the surface of the sea, those fragments might 
 in a certain sense be called the ' superstitions ' 
 of the ship. Thus, when a word remains in a 
 language after its primitive meaning has died 
 off, it may be called a 'superstitious' word, as 
 it has in a certain way survived itself and its 
 original signification. The word 'calculation,' 
 for instance, is from Latin calculus, a little
 
 14$ THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 stone, a pebble, and brings us back to the time 
 when simple arithmetical operations were 
 almost impossible without the aid of pebbles. 
 It contains, then, an idea which may be said 
 ' superstitious,' as tlie greatest calculations can 
 now be made without the least idea of resort- 
 ing to the help of pebbles. 
 
 So the word 'electricity' is a superstitious 
 word, since it contains the word 'electron,' 
 amber, on which electricity was discovered, but 
 which has nothing to do with our ways of ob- 
 taining electricity. 
 
 In this way almost all our words may be said 
 to contain some ' superstitious ' element, as our 
 words resemble paintings where little by little 
 the old images disappear and new ones are 
 painted, always on the same canvas. So that 
 the words I have put at the head of this 
 letter, " the superstitions of language," arc 
 really too ambitious. In a certain sense they 
 could embrace the whole field of language. 
 But I do not mean to take them in such a wide 
 significance. I intend to call your attention to 
 those words only, which contain at the bottom 
 an idea not only different from their present
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. M9 
 
 meaning, but implying the existence of religious 
 or scientific systems which we have wholly 
 discarded ; words which we use every day, but 
 belong in reality to a world of ideas which have 
 long been buried out of existence. 
 
 An important category of such words we find 
 in expressions relating to the great phenomena 
 of the physical world, like the rising and setting 
 of the sun and the moon, the appearance of 
 stars and comets. It is not yesterday it 
 was demonstrated, that the succession of 
 night and day is due to the movement of the 
 earth, that the sun has no bed whereto sleep, and 
 the night is not a great black coat which wraps 
 the world. Still every day we speak of the 
 ' setting ' of the sun, of his ' going down,' of his 
 ' rising ' ; as well as of the ' rising ' of the dawn 
 and the ' falling ' of the night. The French 
 say explicitly that the sun ' se couche,' goes to 
 bed, and ' se leve,' gets up. Thus, notwith- 
 standing our great astronomical systems, our 
 daily speech is yet teeming with ideas belong- 
 ing to an entirely primitive age of mankind. 
 
 Not less striking is the use of words which 
 imply a direct influence of the heavenly bodies
 
 I 
 
 15° THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 upon the fate of each individual man. The 
 word 'influence' itself and its doublet ' influ- 
 enza,' imply a belief in such superstition, as 
 they allude to the ' influx' of planets upon our 
 fate, the ' flowing' of their virtue into our lives 
 (' in-fluere '). ' Influenza,' was at first an epi- 
 demic catarrh, said to be caused by the 
 planets. 
 
 It was once believed that the star of Jove 
 was a gay, joyful star, and a man born under it 
 would be happy and mirthful. We still speak 
 of a 'jovial ' temperament. The influence of the 
 planet Saturn was said to be gloomy and stern, 
 and we call such a disposition ' saturnine.' 
 Analogous origins must be ascribed to ' vene- 
 real,' ' mercurial,' ' martial,' etc. We still call 
 an insane man a 'lunatic,' as if we still believed 
 that insanity is caused by the moon. 
 
 We believe no longer in any communication 
 with evil spirits, or conjurations, or other works 
 of magic. Still we say : she has ' bewitched ' 
 me; she is 'charming'; his eloquence is 
 'magic,' etc. 
 
 We speak of ' paper," and ' books,' and ' vol- 
 umes,' although no 'papyrus' but rags are used
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 151 
 
 to make paper, and books are no longer written 
 on 'beechen boards,' nor are they ' rolled up." 
 
 Few fields, however, are so crowded with 
 4 superstitious' and entirely wrong expressions 
 as that concerning the constitution and func- 
 tion of our bodily organs. Our everyday 
 physiology is full of terms so inconsistent with 
 all our accepted notions and certain knowledge, 
 that it is wonderful how we can go on using 
 them without apparently at all being aware 
 of their utter incongruity. By this time we 
 know something about the true anatomy and 
 physiology of our body ; still we are con- 
 stantly speaking of a man of 'good-humor' or 
 'bad humor,' etc., as if we still believed that in 
 our body circulate four humors, the famous four 
 humors of ancient physicians, namely, the chol- 
 eric, the melancholy, the phlegmatic and the 
 sanguine, and that on the relative quantity and 
 mixing of these humors depend the nature 
 and disposition of an individual. The words 
 'temper,' 'temperament,' 'phlegmatic,' 'san- 
 guine,' etc., allude also to these famous four 
 humors. 
 
 It would be very interesting to study the his-
 
 15 2 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 tory of the people's notions about the con- 
 struction and the functions of our body, as con- 
 veyed by popular language. For instance, we 
 seem to have a vague notion that the brain is the 
 centre of intellectual life, while our affections 
 and passions are located in our heart. Why we 
 should have such an opinion, it is difficult to 
 say; still we may be sure that centuries will 
 elapse before all traces of such superstition have 
 disappeared from common parlance, before 
 people stop saying : he is a 'good-hearted ' man, 
 a ' kind-hearted ' fellow, his ' heart ' is.good, etc. 
 The Greeks had even a stranger notion. All 
 that part of psychic life which we refer to the 
 heart or to the brain, they attributed to the 
 midriff, because pJircn (from which our 'phre- 
 nology') meant at first simply ' midriff.' 
 
 Not less ' superstitious ' is our stock of com- 
 mon expressions concerning such phenomena 
 of nature as rain, storm, lightning, etc. But 
 you can pursue this research by yourself. 1 
 am satisfied with having called your attention 
 to the subject.
 
 SIXTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 Why Words Change their Meanings — Influence of Progress — 
 Religious, Social and Political Crises — The Advent of 
 Christianity — The French Revolution — Great Inven- 
 tions and Discoveries — Influence of the Learned and of 
 the Unlearned. 
 
 WE might now inquire, as you suggest, why 
 is it that words acquire new meanings, 
 sometimes so different from the original ones, 
 and when do such changes in meaning take 
 place? 
 
 It is a good philosophic question that you 
 propose to me, and I hasten to answer it with 
 the greatest pleasure, since nothing is so fraught 
 with intellectual joy, nothing is so worthy of 
 man after all, as the study of causes. The child 
 and the uneducated listen, astonished and 
 wondering, to the anecdotes and descriptions 
 of battles and sieges and other famous deeds. 
 Rut the wise do not stop at facts ; they want 
 to ascend to their causes, and see the thread of
 
 154 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 law that knits them together, fashions and 
 moulds them. Besides, no other study 
 better than that of the causes for which 
 the meanings of words change, enables us to 
 see the real intimate connection between the 
 life of a people and its language, between his- 
 tory and philology. 
 
 The meanings of words change because the 
 life of the people changes. There is a slow, con- 
 stant succession of modifications in the mind 
 of each individual man ; no day goes by with- 
 out causing some of his ideas, some of his ways 
 of looking at the world, to be more or less mod- 
 ified. The change from day to day is so slight 
 that generally none perceive it ; but after ten, 
 twenty, thirty years one's mind is so changed 
 that he will often wonder how he could, years 
 ago, have had such or such opinions on this and 
 that. The same change takes place, more or 
 less rapidly, with every nation, as nations are 
 only made up of individuals. While such modi- 
 fications take place in the minds of the peo- 
 ple, what happens in language, which is the 
 organ of their minds? Language follows and 
 fashions itself according to the modified state of
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 155 
 
 their minds. When the ocean, in its perpetual 
 oscillations, covers or abandons a tract of land, 
 this land adapts itself to its new conditions : 
 vegetation changes, grows or dies ; by and by 
 the composition of the soil is changed, and its 
 shape and entire appearance undergo important 
 modifications. Analogous changes happen in 
 language in respect to the mental modifications 
 of the people. When a certain idea is modified, 
 narrowed or widened, debased or enhanced, the 
 meaning of the word which conveys that idea, 
 which is the ' sign ' of that idea, is also modi- 
 fied in the same sense, narrowed or widened, 
 enhanced or debased. Every now and then a 
 new word is introduced, but experience shows 
 that linguistic inventiveness is rather poor. We 
 prefer, in language at least, to modify the tools 
 left us by our forefathers than to invent new 
 ones. 
 
 Thus, slowly, in the course of generations, as 
 the ways of thinking and the modes of life of 
 the people change, words alter their meanings 
 accordingly. But, as in the life of individual 
 men sometimes an event takes place which 
 alone, by itself, changes their moral and mate
 
 156 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 rial life more than it would have been changed 
 in twenty years of ordinary daily modifications, 
 the lives of nations are sometimes wrung by so 
 mighty crises that the changes of a few years 
 are deeper and wider than those of several gen- 
 erations. It is during such abnormal accelera- 
 tions of life in nations, that the most rapid 
 changes in language occur. 
 
 In the history of modern nations no event is 
 recorded whose importance can compare with 
 the advent of Christianity. As the new light 
 flashed up over the pagan world, an im- 
 mense change happened in the minds of the 
 people. The theories of ethics, the views 
 of life and the world, the fundamental notions 
 of God, man, country and mankind were 
 changed. The intellectual vision of man was, 
 so to speak, reversed. The focus of life, which 
 was on earth, was transferred to heaven. They 
 saw glory where first they saw contempt ; 
 learned to despise what first they had admired ; 
 tore down political and social barriers and 
 raised moral ones ; took delight in that which 
 they had scorned and hated ; saw snakes and 
 poison in that which first appeared as a para-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 157 
 
 dise of flowers and music almost heavenly. 
 How was language affected by such changes ? 
 The men, in whom the poles of spiritual life had 
 been so suddenly turned, had no new language 
 at their command to express their new ideas 
 and feelings. What could they do but modify 
 the meanings of the old familiar words so as to 
 represent the changed state of their minds? 
 So they did, and were not the great Christian 
 revolution recorded in a thousand other ways, a 
 great proof of it we would have in the changes 
 that Latin words have undergone with the blos- 
 soming of the new civilization. ' Deus,' which 
 meant a national or ethnical personification of 
 one of the best human gifts, as strength, or 
 valor, or beauty, or talent, or wisdom, came to 
 mean ' one ' divinity, impersonal, ruling the 
 world ab ctcriw, the father of ' all ' men. The 
 names of 'country,' 'humanity,' 'brother,' 
 ' love,' ' neighbor,' 'charity ' acquired meanings 
 entirely new. The word fides, which applied 
 only to relations of man to man, assumed a new 
 signification : the trusting of man in God, his 
 heavenly father. ' Hope,' ' angel,' ' saint,' 'par- 
 adise,' 'grace,' ' servus ' (slave), all were trans-
 
 I5 8 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 formed in their meanings by the magic touch 
 of the new idea. ' Altar,' ' sacrifice,' ' religion,' 
 'penitence,' 'contrition,' 'humility, are also 
 words taken from the pagan world, but how 
 different has their meaning become ! ' Martyr' 
 meant simply ' witness ; ' but what a glorious 
 transformation of meaning it has undergone! 
 
 Another great sudden movement occurred 
 with the French revolution. The result would 
 surprise us, had we to cull out diligently all the 
 terms and words which have been, directly or 
 indirectly, either introduced, or revived, or 
 made prominent and common by that political 
 cyclone. The very terms of ' republic,' ' citi- 
 zen,' 'liberty,' 'equality,' 'brotherhood' had 
 nothing, in the previous centuries, of that pecu- 
 liar glow which now lends them a kind of magic 
 fascination. The terms of ' social contract,' 
 ' convention,' ' solidarity,' are linked therewith 
 indissolubly. Nor can we separate from it such 
 words of evil omen as ' dragonnades,' ' sanscu- 
 lotte,' 'terrorism,' ' noyades,' ' guillotine ; ' just 
 as the words ' petroleuse,' ' dynamitist,' are con- 
 nected with more recent troubles. 
 
 Changes in language, analogous to those
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 159 
 
 brought about by important social or political 
 events, are caused by great inventions or indus- 
 trial improvements. Look over our diction- 
 aries : what an immense array of words pertain- 
 ing to bows and arrows and catapults and 
 spears, mail, armor, lie there buried as in 
 a grave, no longer mentioned in living speech 
 except as the names of dead people are men- 
 tioned in connection with facts of the past. All 
 these things and their names were dropped as 
 soon as gunpowder was invented. And what 
 a new army of words came and is coming into 
 use by its increasing applications ! Think of 
 all the varieties of guns, the various kinds of 
 firearms, the mining and metallurgic industries, 
 together with all the trades connected with 
 them; think of the numerous words which had 
 to be made or modified in order to designate 
 all the new tools, implements, products and 
 processes, and you will have an idea how great 
 and far-reaching maybe the linguistic bearings 
 even of one invention alone. Think of the 
 press, the steam engine, the cotton engine, the 
 power loom, the telegraph, the telephone, the 
 electric light and all the other great inventions
 
 160 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 of this century. None can tell how greatly our 
 daily stock of words will be increased and modi- 
 fied by these new agencies. In the words of 
 Marsh: " It is safe to say that the substitution 
 of cotton for linen, and the supply of tissues by 
 large manufacturing establishments, instead of 
 by domestic labor, have alone driven out of use 
 seven or eight per cent, of the words which 
 formed the staple of household conversation in 
 the agricultural districts of the Northern 
 States." 
 
 The great crises in the moral and political 
 world, and the great industrial inventions, are 
 a practical illustration of how changes take 
 place in the meanings of words, as the people 
 are either obliged to modify the meanings of 
 old words, or to coin new ones. 
 
 But apart from these great and sudden 
 changes, there are, as I mentioned at the begin- 
 ning of this letter, slow but steady forces at 
 work which bring about new words and new 
 meanings in old words. Every man who lives, 
 be he learned or otherwise, contributes to the 
 development of language. In a certain sense 
 even the most awkward and idiotic co-operate
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 161 
 
 in such development, at least by compelling the 
 intelligent to find words to designate their awk- 
 wardness and idiocy. 
 
 Looking at men as instruments for the devel- 
 opment of language, we may divide them, at 
 large, into two categories : the learned, namely, 
 those who act on language reflectively, con- 
 sciously ; and the unlearned, or those who use 
 language almost as a natural power, without 
 reflecting upon or knowledge of its nature and 
 structure. The former may, and generally do, 
 contribute their share to the making of the lan- 
 guage of literature and conversation, to the in- 
 troducing of new terms for arts, fashions, fur- 
 niture, civilities and refinements of life. But 
 their best work is accomplished in the highest 
 field of thought. They are naturally the pio- 
 neers of the intellectual world. It belongs to 
 them to 'clear the ground ' by discriminating, 
 examining and establishing the proper meaning 
 of words, and, when necessary, to introduce new 
 ones. The lawyer, the physician, the philoso- 
 pher, the astronomer, the chemist, the artist, 
 in fact all men who work especially with their 
 brains, are obliged, every now and then, to in-
 
 1 62 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 troduce a new word, to discuss and ascertain 
 the meaning of an old one, and sometimes so to 
 modify its meaning as to bend it to the exig- 
 encies of new ideas. Here you will certainly 
 think of those numerous scientific words, first 
 coined in this century, which are quickly be- 
 coming a part of our daily speech. Still more 
 important, in my mind, than these new words, 
 are those discriminations and modifications of 
 meaning which science and philosophy bring 
 into old and well-worn but all-important words. 
 To some people it seems almost idle to discuss 
 what is the true meaning of ' nation.' Still, on 
 what we understand by such word depends 
 mostly what kind of political arrangements we 
 must aim at, and whether ' patriotism ' or ' in- 
 ternationalism, is one of the first duties of man. 
 It matters not little for the social and political 
 world whether by 'property' we mean one 
 thing or another. Apparently what idler dis- 
 cussion than to fight about the meaning of the 
 word ' species' ? Up to a quarter of a century 
 ago it was generally believed that ' species ' was 
 something fixed in nature, unchangeable, dis- 
 tinct, and by itself. Now, after the studies of
 
 THE FORTUNES OP WORDS. \b% 
 
 Lamark and, above all, Darwin, it is generally 
 accepted that 'species' means nothing natur- 
 ally fixed and unchangeable, but is merely a 
 classificatory term, as Nature presents a contin- 
 uous, uninterrupted chain. In the change of 
 meaning of this word is, after all, the ' summa ' 
 of the evolution-theory, whose consequences 
 nobody yet can foretell. Thus the highest 
 speculations of the greatest minds are first em- 
 bodied in the new meanings of old words, and 
 then stretch out in numberless applications, 
 moral, social, religious and political. Because 
 — it is useless to deny it — the mass of mankind 
 is led on by few speculative minds who, long 
 before the others, are able to catch glimpses of 
 the highest verities. 
 
 But let us go back to our changes in language. 
 Those who are not, or are only superficially edu- 
 cated, contribute also a great deal to the devel- 
 opment of language, but in other directions. 
 One of the most common ways is not only to 
 alter words in their forms, but also to adapt 
 them to more homely and familiar meanings 
 than they were intended for. The word 
 ' theory,' for instance, which was at first quite
 
 1 64 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 a solemn word, as it meant a 'beholding' of a 
 certain order of things, an abstract and specu- 
 lative conclusion, in the common parlance has 
 become synonymous with ' a mere opinion,' the 
 passing whim of a moment. 'Policy' once 
 was said only of the greatest of arts — that 
 of ruling men. Nowadays the newsboy and 
 the applewoman speak of their 'policy' in 
 conducting their trade. 'Conducting' re- 
 minds me of ' conductor,' a leader, which once 
 doubtless could not have been said properly of 
 a man whose business is to collect the fares in 
 a car. A thousand similar instances will sug- 
 gest themselves to whomsoever will stop a mo- 
 ment to consider these phenomena. But these, 
 which certainly are modifications of language, 
 can hardly be said to be contributions toward 
 the growth of it ; just as the walling of a win- 
 dow or the narrowing of a door cannot be called 
 additions to a building. 
 
 There are, however, some ways by which the 
 uneducated and the semi-educated — in other 
 words, the humblest and the middle classes in 
 the intellectual society — contribute very largely 
 to the growth of language : namely, by naming
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WQRDS. 165 
 
 the new things with which they come into con- 
 tact, or by discovering new relations or new 
 properties in things known. Think of the 
 countless additions to our dictionaries that arise 
 in this way ! The sailor who first uses a new 
 knot in his ropes, or discovers a new shape in 
 the waves or in the clouds, or a new way of 
 stretching his sail, or turning his boat, or setting _ 
 his helm, must find words to designate these 
 new things. While talking about them, either 
 to himself or to his listeners, a word will occur 
 which is accepted at once and by and by will 
 become the recognized word to designate such 
 or such another thing. The same happens 
 with the farmer, the horseman, the weaver, the 
 cowboy. No day goes by without some new 
 tool or new process or new aspect of nature or 
 men being discovered. This thing discovered 
 ' must ' be expressed. As long as it is not ex- 
 pressed, as long as it is dumb, it is as though 
 it were not. But to express it, either a new 
 word must be imagined (which as we know, is 
 not often the case), or a word taken from 
 another language in which the thing has already 
 found its expression, or a new meaning must
 
 1 66 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 be driven into an old word. Think of these 
 facts which are going on without pause, and 
 you will realize once more what might and 
 greatness is in language, and how true it is 
 that no religious creed or political constitu- 
 tion is so faithful a mirror of the nature of 
 a people as its language. 
 
 Not less important than the discovery of 
 new things is the discovery of new relations of 
 things. This is the basis of the metaphoric 
 process, which is of the greatest consequence 
 in the development of language. As I had 
 already occasion to mention, it is the constant 
 process of our mind to look at things and com- 
 pare them. When we discover any relation or 
 similiarity between two things, we use, in refer- 
 ence to the second, words which had only 
 been strictly applied to the first. We see that 
 a magnet attracts iron. We see that a strong, 
 eloquent man fascinates, attracts other men to 
 himself. The similarity is very little: the at- 
 traction by the great man is quite different 
 from that of the magnet. Still we think such 
 a scanty thread of resemblance enough to 
 justify us in saying " that man is magnetic";
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 167 
 
 "he has great magnetic influence." Wine or 
 any other beverage which has gone sour, of- 
 fends our taste and hurts our stomach. This 
 has not very much in common with the man- 
 ners of a man who is brusque, unamiable and 
 of a fretful disposition. Still we feel author- 
 ized to say that he has a ' sour ' temper, as 
 if everything in him had turned acid and dis- 
 tasteful. 
 
 Some wines, when the bottle is uncorked, 
 sally forth with a brilliant effervescence which 
 we call "sparkling." And when a man is witty, 
 original, and his conversation teems with fine 
 or amusing repartees, like so many little jets of 
 firework, we say that his mind, his talent is 
 ' sparkling.' The connection between the two 
 kinds of ' sparklingness ' is very thin; it is for 
 the 'imagination' of the reader or listener to 
 bridge over from one kind to the other. Imagin- 
 ation is the great life-spring of language. It is 
 the business of the imagination to see relations 
 between different things ; it is the business of 
 imagination to grasp them when they are so 
 laconically uttered. It is the greatest, the 
 most important, the most poetic part of our
 
 1 68 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 reasoning and our language at the same time — 
 this bringing near two distant things and hitting 
 off, so to say, in one word the point which they 
 they have in common. 
 
 Not all, however, such comparisons are right 
 and sensible, nor are the words that express 
 them always in good taste and clear. This 
 leads me to speak of another phenomenon in 
 the growth of language, which is connected 
 with this metaphorical process, and of which 
 we hear a good deal every day. I mean slang. 
 ' Slang ' is so peculiar a fact, and is growing so 
 steadily that it may fairly claim a chapter all 
 to itself.
 
 SEVENTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 SLANG. 
 
 Slang — Its Merits and Demerits — Purity of Language ; 
 Strength and Beauty — How to Preserve and Promote 
 Them. 
 
 FIRST, what is 'slang?' The origin of the 
 word is not quite ascertained. Most likely- 
 it comes to us from the Scandinavian. But, 
 whatever its origin, what do we mean nowadays 
 by this word ? Worcester says : " Slang, vile, 
 low, or ribald language ; the cant of sharpers 
 or of the vulgar; gibberish." Which definition 
 is far from being correct. It is too exaggerated. 
 A great dictionary should be just to every part 
 of the language ; yea, even unto slang. Many 
 an accomplished lady will be ready to admit, 
 with a smiling flush, that she does use slang 
 every now and then ; " only for fun, you know," 
 and with her intimate friends. But she would
 
 17° THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 be justly indignant, if you should so construe 
 her words as to think her guilty of using " vile, 
 low, or ribald language," or even " the cant of 
 sharpers or of the vulgar." 
 
 Slang is dealt a little more fairly by Skeat, 
 who so defines it : " Low, vulgar language, a 
 colloquial and familiar mode of expression." 
 This definition would be greatly improved if it 
 were cut in two. There should be a period 
 after ' language.' " Low, vulgar language " 
 seems to have been once the meaning of ' slang.' 
 But now it is safe to say, I think, that the best 
 people speak of slang merely as " a colloquial and 
 familiar mode of expression." You hear very 
 often, even among the best educated : "this is 
 slang!" when doubtless no one means to utter 
 a reproach for vulgar language. The teacher 
 insists with his pupils that they must be careful 
 to avoid 'slang' in writing. Surely he does 
 not mean that they must not use vulgar or low 
 or ribald language. Pupils that need such 
 warnings, need something else far more than 
 the study of fine language. The teacher intends 
 simply to admonish them against the exagger- 
 ated use of such phrases, words and idioms as
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 171 
 
 are daily heard in familiar intercourse, but are 
 not yet admitted into good literature. Indeed 
 this and none else seems to be the meaning in 
 which the word ' slang ' is generally accepted 
 nowadays: "A colloquial mode of expression 
 which is not yet acknowledged by good writers." 
 
 And as such, let me say that, in a general way, 
 I am not a particular hater of "slang." Many a 
 time it happened to me — and to you also, I am 
 sure — to hear ladies, educated and in every way 
 refined, say, with an air of exaggerated compunc- 
 tion which is generally • charming ' : " O, poor 
 me ! What did I say ? Such slang ! " Did 
 you never feel, then, like saying to the fair peni- 
 tents : " Take courage ! Do not worry ! here 
 is one who is ready to fight for you and King 
 Slang ! " Indeed, I do not see why we should 
 be afraid of slang and dislike it so. Only here, 
 as everywhere, discrimination is necessary ; and 
 in order to discriminate soundly let us investi- 
 gate how slang originates, and how many kinds 
 of it we have. 
 
 I stated in my preceding letter that language 
 develops mostly by metaphorical process, by 
 applying to one thing a word which strictly be-
 
 I7 2 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 longs to another. In this metaphorizing we 
 may sin against good sense or against good 
 taste. Many metaphors in Ossian, Victor Hugo 
 and his followers are against good sense ; many 
 metaphors employed by uneducated or coarse 
 men are against good taste. What we call 
 ' stang/ grows exactly in the same way, by me- 
 taphorical process ; but our good sense and 
 taste must help us to discriminate between 
 good and bad slang. 
 
 Lawyers who have a very easy case on hand 
 and are certain of success, call it, by a metaphor 
 easy to understand, a "walk-over." Students 
 of medicine call a corpse a "stiff." I heard 
 somebody call a travelling tutor a " bear-lead- 
 er," and " book-keeper" one who never returns 
 borrowed books. Water is often spoken of as 
 " Adam's ale," and a lady who felt tired and 
 depressed was advised by a friend to " key her- 
 self up." These are all typical examples of 
 slang, and, as such, we must scrutinize them 
 closely. 
 
 The walk-over of the lawyers is easy to un- 
 derstand ; it is not only clear, but vivid and 
 forcible. It is therefore probable that this bit
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 173 
 
 of slang may find its way into common language 
 and books. Doubtless our language would not 
 lose anything thereby. It is a metaphor not 
 a whit more bold than that by which we call 
 ' yarn ' a strange and improbable story. Wor- 
 cester registers ' yarn ' in this sense, but marks 
 it 'vulgar." But now who would dare say it 
 is vulgar, since everybody uses it, and it is after 
 all a very good word, with a flavor of that sound 
 humor which attaches to so many words for 
 which we are indebted to our good, brave and 
 mirthful "tars?" 'Walk-over' is not recorded 
 yet in Worcester's dictionary, but I would not 
 wonder if we should find it there in the next 
 edition. Of course, the editor would relieve his 
 philological scrupulousness by adding, between 
 two brackets, "vulgar" or " common," but we 
 would forgive him, sure as we are that in a sub- 
 sequent edition he would take his notation 
 away from "walk-over," as well as from 
 " yarn. 
 
 Father Adam and his modes of life are so 
 well known that when we say " Adam's ale," 
 no misunderstanding is possible. Moreover, 
 there is in this idiom that subtle seasoning of
 
 174 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 wit which preserves words as salt preserves food. 
 All the odds, therefore, are for this idiom being 
 promoted from the ranks of slang to become a 
 part of the common language. Many similar 
 idioms have already run over this road, as 
 " Noah's drink " for ' wine,' to say nothing of 
 the well-known "Adam's apple," which is due 
 to a silly legend that this protuberance was 
 produced by eating the fatal apple. 
 
 A "bear leader" for a 'travelling tutor' 
 is witty or not, accordingly, whether we 
 ask the tutor himself or his youngsters. 
 As a language-making element, however, it 
 is very poor. It is too particular. No 
 body can understand it without explanation. 
 It has therefore no chances of taking a perma- 
 nent place in language, unless some great writer 
 takes it upon himself to introduce it and cliape- 
 ron it. 
 
 The " stiff " of the medical students has 
 even less chances, as not only it is confined 
 to a particular craft, but is vulgar and 
 coarse. 
 
 As for "book-keeper," in the sense of book- 
 retainer, it is simply a pun. Puns may belong
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 1 75 
 
 to the good things of life, but there is no place 
 for them in dictionaries. 
 
 Many would be severe against the use of the 
 verb "to key up " for ' to tone up' one's self. 
 Still, as we speak of the key to a riddle, the key 
 to a book, etc., I do not see why we should ob- 
 ject so much to an analogous metaphor taken 
 from the musical key. The words ' tone ' and 
 ' tonic ' themselves are derived from the world 
 of music. They mean properly ' to stretch,' to 
 stretch the chords of a musical instrument in 
 order to strengthen its notes. Hence the 
 meaning of ' tonic ' as invigorating,' ' strength- 
 ening.' 
 
 Now, looking over these typical specimens of 
 slang, we notice : First, that all of them consist 
 of some kind of metaphor ; second, that those 
 of them which can be easily and universally un- 
 derstood, which do not hurt our good taste or 
 good sense, are a good contribution to our lan- 
 guage and are a desirable leaven in our daily 
 speech ; third, that those which are too partic- 
 ular to be generally understood, or coarse and 
 vulgar, or are merely :ajeu de mots, are doomed 
 to live an ephemeral and much circumscribed
 
 I7 6 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 life. The trouble with what is currently called 
 "slang" is, that much of it belongs to this last 
 class, and is therefore destined to die without 
 ever becoming a true part of any living lan- 
 guage. If we had a good record of the slang 
 in vogue fifty years ago, we would have the 
 most ample proof of what I say. I had occa- 
 sion to look over a " classical dictionary of the 
 vulgar tongue by Francis Grose, Esq., F. A. S." 
 published in London " MDCCLXXXVIII." It 
 is incredible how few words and idioms therein 
 recorded have survived or would be understood 
 at all in our day. I find, for instance, " floating 
 academy" for the lighters on board of which 
 were confined the persons condemned to hard 
 labor. 
 
 'Adam's ale,' beer. 
 'Air and exercise,' he has had air and exercise, 
 
 i.e., he has been whipped at the cart's tail. 
 'Alderman,' a roasted turkey garnished with 
 
 sausages ; the latter are supposed to represent 
 
 the gold chain worn by those magistrates. 
 'Altitudes,' the man is in his altitudes, i.e., he 
 
 is drunk. 
 'Anabaptist,' a pickpocket caught in the fact,
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 177 
 
 and punished with the discipline of the pump 
 
 or horse-pond. 
 ' Apothecary/ to talk like an apothecary, i.e., 
 
 to talk nonsense. 
 ' Babes in the wood,' rogues in the stocks or 
 
 pillory. 
 He squints 'like a bag of nails,' i.e., his eyes 
 
 are directed as many ways as the points of 
 
 nails in a bag. 
 1 Beggar maker,' an ale-house keeper. 
 ' Beggars' bullets,' stones. 
 ' Bow-wow mutton," dog's flesh. 
 ' A brother of the quill,' an author. 
 ' A brother of the string,' a fiddler. 
 'A brother of the whip,' a coachman. 
 ' Butcher's meat,' meat taken up on trust, which 
 
 continues the butcher's until paid for. 
 ' A quarrel-picker,' a glazier, from the small 
 
 squares in casements, called carrcaux, vul- 
 garly ' quarrels.' 
 'A she-house,' a house where the wife rules. 
 ' Sheriff's ball,' an execution. 
 'Sheriff's bracelets,' hand-cuffs. 
 ' Sheriff's hotel,' a prison. 
 1 Sheriff's picture frame,' the gallows.
 
 178 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 We might thus go on for pages and pages of 
 slang and idioms more or less witty, more or 
 less felicitous, but which have generally died 
 away as they were not possessed of that easy 
 and universal intelligibility which is the first 
 requisite of all speech. 
 
 It is a good-fortune of the English language 
 that the common parlance, of the educated 
 classes at least, differs so little from the language 
 of literature. Conversation is thereby enabled 
 to make itself rich, noble and refined by all the 
 polished treasures of prose and verse, without 
 seeming bookish or affected. On the other 
 hand the language of literature is kept lively, 
 vigorous and fresh by holding itself continually 
 in contact with and enriching itself by the re- 
 sources of the language of conversation. 
 
 It has been the privilege of the English lan- 
 guage to be the instrument to express the 
 thoughts of some of the greatest men that ever 
 lived, of writers and thinkers who looked into 
 the mysteries of human nature as deep as men 
 ever did. Still we must remember it is not 
 these great men that make the language. They 
 raise the standard of language, they give it
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 179 
 
 fixity, shape and dignity by bringing it up to a 
 level with their thoughts and moulding it with 
 the might of their genius. But the substance, 
 the sinews as well as the muscles, of language 
 are given by the people. Even the action of 
 the greatest genius is but a little thing in com- 
 parison with that of the people, and the more 
 education increases and culture spreads, the 
 smaller becomes the influence of individuals 
 severally, the greater that of the people at large. 
 This leads us up to consider the much-dis- 
 cussed problem of what is to be done in order 
 to preserve the purity of our language. On this 
 subject many writers and teachers entertained, 
 many still entertain, some queer ideas. They 
 seem to consider as against the purity of lan- 
 guage all the words and idioms which are newly 
 introduced. For them innovation and impu- 
 rity are synonymous. Hence an extreme care- 
 fulness to avoid all words which, however pop- 
 ular, clear and forcible they may be, even some- 
 times necessary, have not yet received the brand 
 of some great writer. The great writers' brand 
 is the all-important for them, and the older, the 
 better. Which views do not seem to indicate,
 
 180 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 in my judgment, a sound apprehension of the 
 nature of language and the laws of its life. If 
 such views should be generally adopted, our 
 written language would soon become a cold, 
 academical, artificial thing, a skeleton instead 
 of a living organism. Fortunately for the En- 
 glish language, they never had great authority 
 or power, cither in England or America. But 
 with other nations, they held sway very long. 
 Academies were instituted which took upon 
 themselves to legislate in matters of language, 
 and mark the limits within which it had to flow. 
 But usually it turned out that language was 
 bid to sleep in a Procrustean bed. It would be 
 unjust to deny the good services of the French 
 Academy to the French language ; but it can 
 hardly be doubted that, while the language has 
 gained in finish and regularity, it has lost in 
 strength and popular spontaneousness by being 
 submitted to the cast-iron rules of the academy.* 
 Far greater damage was wrought to the 
 Italian language by the theories of pedantic 
 
 * It is said that Royer-Collard threatened to resign his 
 im mbership if the academy admitted into its vocabulary the 
 verb baser.
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 181 
 
 literati and academies. They went so far with 
 their narrow-minded exclusivism that at length 
 they lost all authority ; now they are simply 
 laughed at, deprived of all authority. Even in 
 this century there lived pedants (and I am 
 afraid they are not all dead yet), who actually 
 forbade their pupils to read anything which 
 had been written later than during the four- 
 teenth century. Some, however, were so liberal 
 as to admit also the writers of the Cinquecento. 
 All the rest is " modern," which in their minds 
 means "bad," "horrible." It is difficult to im- 
 agine a sillier way of looking at language than 
 that adopted by these powdered academicians. 
 With the same reasonableness one might pre- 
 tend that a nation should be ruled by the laws 
 of five hundred years ago. 
 
 No, it is not by the pedantic devices of the 
 purists that we can preserve a language vigor- 
 ous and pure. Their theories resemble too 
 much the old ways of righting epidemics by 
 means of fumigations, cordons sanitaires, and 
 similar prohibitory measures. We know better 
 now. We try to 'prevent' the incoming and 
 spreading of such diseases by keeping from them
 
 1 82 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 the means to feed upon, by a thorough obedi- 
 ence to hygienic rules. Considering that lan- 
 guage is the production of all the people, the 
 organ of their minds, the mirror of their 
 thoughts, it is not by shutting the doors of our 
 dictionaries against this or that word that we 
 can hope to preserve our language pure, rich 
 and strong. What we want is a good, thor- 
 ough mental hygiene. We want everybody 
 to be as well educated as possible, we want 
 every body to think clearly, strongly and 
 cleanly in order to use and understand clear, 
 strong, sound language. If all the peo- 
 ple were perfectly educated, their minds 
 would be quick to discover new things, to ap- 
 prehend new relations of things, to form new 
 thoughts, to discriminate between good and 
 bad, refined and coarse ; and new words and 
 idioms and felicitous hits of expression would 
 flow in and make a language more rich, vari- 
 ous, noble, manly than the world has yet 
 seen. Because, we must remember, to make a 
 rich and powerful language, it is not enough to 
 have a big dictionary where thousands of words 
 are recorded. It is necessary that these words
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 183 
 
 be in current use among the bulk of the popu- 
 lation, so that as soon as a speaker utters one 
 of them, he is immediately and thoroughly un- 
 derstood by the whole audience. It must be 
 like the striking of a chord on a musical instru- 
 ment : as soon as struck, it must vibrate in the 
 hearts of all the listeners. We may say of 
 words what is said of the circulation of money. 
 This circulation is not represented by the bulk 
 of money of which a people is possessed, be- 
 cause it might lie idle in banks or vaults ; but 
 it is represented by the bulk of money multi- 
 plied by as many times as it is exchanged in 
 the course of one year. Likewise, the real lin- 
 guistic wealth of a people does not depend on 
 the number of words of which its dictionaries 
 can boast, but is determined by the actual use 
 of the mass of those words. 
 
 To conclude these remarks, should a young 
 man ask my advice, I would tell him to remem- 
 ber that language is not a dead thing, but a liv- 
 ing one, and all the minds of the people con- 
 tribute to its life and growth. Therefore, do 
 not be a prig, do not be a pedant. Try first to 
 get a good education, develop your imagina-
 
 1 84 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 tion, educate your taste, strengthen your logi- 
 cal power, and then trust to your judgment. 
 Whenever you hear a new word or idiom which 
 is clear, forcible, apt and decent, do not be 
 afraid : use it, and go ahead.
 
 EIGHTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 Synonyms : When and by Whom They are Used — Reason of 
 their Use — Inadequacy of Language— International Syn- 
 onyms. 
 
 YOU have often heard, I am sure, that, to 
 speak exactly, language has no synonyms, 
 that is to say, it has no two names for one mtd 
 tke-aarrre thing. This is true in the main when we 
 speak of languages that have received a certain 
 development and degree of perfection. It is, 
 however, not true of the languages of the lowest 
 tribes, with whom language is in such an un- 
 steady condition that sometimes the whole of 
 the vocabulary is changed in the course of fifty 
 years. In these continual, and rather irregular 
 changes, when the old expressions are not dead 
 yet entirely, nor have the new ones settled, so 
 to say, in the language, there must needs be 
 several words which are used to denote the 
 same thing. In the same way, when we find
 
 1 86 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 even in such a highly developed language as 
 Sanskrit some one hundred names for the horse 
 and fifty for the dog, it is natural to suppose 
 that some of those names were used indiffer- 
 ently and with the same meaning. 
 
 That we have got rid of such cumbersome 
 wealth, and that we have assigned to each word 
 a particular meaning, shows the greater perfec- 
 tion of our languages, as well as the increased 
 analytical power of our minds. Still we speak 
 of synonyms, meaning thereby, as you know, 
 words importing almost the same ideas, not ex- 
 actly the same, but ideas so nearly related that 
 it requires sometimes much reflection to find 
 out the difference. What are these synonyms ? 
 How and why do we use them? Is there any 
 necessity for them, or can our languages get 
 rid of them as they did of the true synonyms 
 such as are to be found in primitive languages? 
 
 Such questions are not without their psycho- 
 logical as well as philological importance. Here 
 we can surprise our minds at work, and see how 
 little we really know, and that little how imper- 
 fectly ! Man, it is said, is the measure of the 
 universe ; but as soon as we step out of the
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 1 87 
 
 material world, our processes and calcula- 
 tions are so rude, so irregular, so deprived 
 of a universally recognized value, that the 
 roughest ways of calculating of the savages 
 would in comparison seem perfection itself. 
 Still, however imperfect the proceedings of our 
 mind, they are far superior to the instrument 
 by which it gives account of its achievements. 
 Those who confuse language with mind or 
 thought, have only to look intimately into their 
 own thoughts and try to clothe them with 
 words, in order to see how shabbily they have 
 to dress them, and how inferior language is to 
 our mind. Ideas, regal personages, stately and 
 fit for the purple, have to go about in rags like 
 beggars, nay, sometimes these very rags fail 
 them and they have to borrow of one another. 
 When I say a word, goodness, for instance, I 
 have in my mind an idea which is not entirely 
 clear to myself ; it is something made up of my 
 personal experience, of the good things I have 
 seen, the good deeds I have witnessed or heard 
 of, the good people I have met, what I read, 
 what was taught to me, etc. Even as I may 
 know a person very well and easily distin-
 
 1 83 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 guish him among a crowd, still I would be pretty 
 much embarrassed if I were called upon to de- 
 scribe the shape of his mouth and nose, the 
 color of his eyes, his height, his age ; so this 
 idea of ' goodness ' I know well enough to dis- 
 tinguish among many others, but it would be 
 almost impossible for me to give a clear defini- 
 tion of it, stating all its elements and features. 
 If so dim and indefinite is the idea that I my- 
 self have of this particular thing, what is the 
 idea that I call up in your mind when I say the 
 word " goodness " ? Certainly one similar to 
 my own, since you live in the same moral envi- 
 ronment where I live, and have imbibed, through 
 teachings, readings and experiences, about 
 the same ideas as myself. If you had lived in 
 another milieu, for instance, among canni- 
 bals, we would not agree so well, as very likely 
 you would throw into the idea of ' goodness' 
 such acts as that of eating your servants. Such 
 as it is, however, your idea of goodness does 
 not exactly coincide with mine. It would be a 
 miracle if it should, since your personal experi- 
 ences, your reading, your acquaintances, and all 
 those conditions of life from which we form our
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 189 
 
 ideas, have not been exactly like mine. So that 
 if I should, in a very awkward way, represent 
 graphically our ideas of goodness, they would 
 require two different figures, like these, for 
 instance : 
 
 In the same way, when I say " honest," " hon- 
 orable," " upright," I have myself a somewhat 
 vague idea of what I mean. I can give, if 
 called upon to do so, some characters and feat- 
 ures of such ideas, but by no means an exact 
 description. My description would be as far 
 from a truly philosophical explanation as the 
 description of a region by an uncultivated trav- 
 eller differs from the map of a geographer. And 
 I do not think that I do you wrong if I say 
 that also in your mind the ideas called forth by 
 such words as " honest," " honorable," " up- 
 right," are somewhat dim and ill-defined. 
 And also in this case, had we to shape 
 forth our own separate ideas by geometrical
 
 19° THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 figures, we may be sure they would not coin- 
 cide. 
 
 Another observation we have to make. If I 
 consider the ideas of " upright," "honest," 
 " honorable," and try to analyze all the ele- 
 ments of which each of them, in my mind, is 
 composed, I see that some elements are com- 
 mon to all of them, that these ideas are not en- 
 tirely distinct from one another, that not only 
 the regions they occupy in the ideal world are 
 dimly known, but these several regions en- 
 croach upon and intersect each other ; so that 
 had I to represent them with graphic signs, these 
 signs would not be apart from one another, but 
 would be grouped and interwoven in many 
 ways ; thus, for instance : 
 
 Indeed a graphic representation of our idea- 
 logic world would not be a systematic concate- 
 nation of circles with one or several centres, but
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 191 
 
 rather a complicated texture of figures of all 
 kinds. 
 
 Words which convey ideas very closely re- 
 lated, that is to say ideas which in the ideal 
 regions have some part of the space in common, 
 are called synonyms. " Ire," " anger," " wrath," 
 are synonyms because the ideas which they 
 convey are not entirely separated from one an- 
 another ; because their graphical representa- 
 tions would necessarily overlap each other. 
 
 Synonyms then exist because of the incom- 
 plete distinction of our ideas. Until we shall 
 have divided and classified all our intellectual 
 possessions as precisely as a well catalogued 
 library or as a honey-comb, we shall need syno- 
 nyms, that is to say, we shall need synonyms 
 as long as we shall speak, because no sooner 
 have we brought some order and classification 
 into our ideas than new ones arise, by which 
 the former have to be changed or displaced or
 
 I9 2 THE FOR TUXES OF WORDS. 
 
 given up. The incomplete distinction and the 
 indefiniteness of our ideas explain the existence 
 of synonymical expressions. But why do we 
 use them together? Why do I say that "Mr. 
 
 C is a thoroughly reliable, honest, upright 
 
 man ? 
 
 The reason of this fact must also be sought 
 outside the field of language. When I want to 
 convey one of these abstract ideas, I feci that 
 I have myself but a dim conception of it, and 
 that it is but imperfectly set forth by the 
 first word I use. I feel, besides, that in your 
 mind there must also be about the same inde- 
 cision as to the idea contained in my word. 
 Therefore I throw out, almost by instinct, some 
 cognate words, so as to be sure to cover 
 all the ground of the idea which I especially 
 want to convey. Of course, my choice of syn- 
 onymical expressions will be good in proportion 
 with my knowledge of the language, and the 
 clearness and strength of my thinking. If I am 
 ignorant of the language and my thinking is 
 loose and poor, my synonyms are very likely to 
 turn out a useless heap of words, a cumbersome 
 verbiage rather than to add light to my speech.
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 193 
 
 In analyzing the meanings of synonyms, does 
 etymology and knowledge of roots afford us 
 any light ? Up to a certain point it does. 
 Of course, use modifies a great deal the 
 meanings of words, especially of the ab- 
 stract ones, but at the bottom of such varia- 
 tions we can always find a primitive meaning 
 which can explain all the subsequent ones, and 
 the key to this meaning we find, as a rule, in 
 etymology. Coleridge said a very apt thing 
 w r hen he advised us, in order to get the full 
 sense of a word, to present first to our minds 
 the visual image that forms its primary mean- 
 ing. And, as I said, this primary meaning is 
 given us by etymology. 
 
 You may also observe that we use synonyms 
 mostly when we want to convey abstract ideas, 
 that is when our thought turns upon subjects 
 where ideas are most difficult to be clearly con- 
 ceived and neatly separated. We do not use 
 synonyms when we speak of stones, animals, 
 coins and utensils. In the English language, 
 where the most elementary ideas are generally 
 expressed by Anglo-Saxon words, while the 
 most complex ideas, pertaining to literature,
 
 194 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 philosophy and science, are expressed by 
 words taken from the Latin vocabulary, we 
 must naturally expect to find the greatest 
 quantity of synonyms among words of Latin 
 origin. In fact, in the treatise of synonyms 
 edited by Whately, where more than 450 words 
 are examined, scarcely 90 are of Anglo-Saxon 
 origin. 
 
 A peasant generally does not use synonyms. 
 He may use literary or scientific words mal 
 Apropos, but he does not use synonyms for the 
 simple reason that his uncultivated mind does 
 not perceive, between one and another idea, the 
 subtle lines and shades which are plainly visi- 
 ble to an educated mind. Hence he does not 
 feel the necessity of selecting among his vocab- 
 ulary in order to express them. Just as a car- 
 penter or a stone-cutter does not feel the neces- 
 sity of those fine, well-studied touches which 
 form the despair of the great sculptor — the de- 
 spair and at the same time the glory. Because 
 these difficult repeated attempts to clothe an 
 idea with the most perfect dress, whether it be 
 of marble, colors or words, afford some of the 
 greatest joys that our minds are capable of. It
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 195 
 
 is also to be noticed that, through one of those 
 intricate processes which form the inscrutable 
 wonders of our psychic life, while we find an 
 ineffable intellectual pleasure in choosing our 
 words and polishing the expression of our 
 thoughts, intensity of emotion and strength of 
 feeling bring out in full display the resources of 
 our dictionary. As Dr. Abel well remarks, 
 "Devotional feeling evokes the treasures of the 
 soul and of the language. Discussion and epis- 
 tolary correspondence have a like tendency, 
 and the charm of letter-writing in no small de- 
 gree arises from the employment of careful and 
 polished phraseology beyond the wants and 
 usages of our intercourse." 
 
 Another fact we must consider in connection 
 with synonyms, to which it is not usual to 
 pay much attention. Besides the synonyms of 
 which we have just been speaking, there are 
 also some that I would call " international 
 synonyms." 
 
 Let me explain. If you look at the languages 
 now spoken by the civilized nations of Europe^ 
 you will see that they have many terms in com- 
 mon, having changed them just enough to give
 
 196 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 them a native look. This is especially the case 
 , for English and German on one side, English 
 and French, Italian, and the other Neo-Latin 
 languages, on the other. We find, for instance, 
 "honest" in English, "honnete" in French, 
 " onesto " in Italian; "amiable" in English, 
 " aimable " in French, " amabile " in Italian ; 
 "tempest " in English, " tempete " in French, 
 " tempesta " in Italian; "audience" in Eng- 
 lish, "audience " in French, " udienza " in Ital- 
 ian, etc. We should be greatly mistaken, if we 
 were to believe that such words are true syno- 
 nyms. Although they are mere national dis- 
 guisements, or idiosyncratic transformations of 
 the same Latin word, they have assumed in the 
 several languages different shades of meaning, 
 which sometimes mislead us in the interpreta- 
 tion of foreign idioms. 
 
 Again, when you want to translate the Eng- 
 lish word " friend " into a foreign language, if 
 you turn to your dictionary, you will find be- 
 side "friend " the French "ami," the German 
 " freund," the Italian " amico." It would seem 
 that these four words correspond exactly to 
 each other and are absolutely equivalent. In
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 197 
 
 fact, however, they are not. " Ami," for in- 
 stance, is far from being the exact correspond- 
 ent of " freund." A Frenchman, addressing a 
 man with whom he has but the slightest 
 acquaintance, or caressing a boy whom he has 
 never seen before, calls them " mon ami." In- 
 deed, it is not unusual in Paris to hear this epi- 
 thet bestowed on a dog. The German, on the 
 contrary, addressing a person, uses the word 
 "freund" very seldom, and that only when 
 speaking to a very dear friend and on particu- 
 lar occasions. The English "friend" may be 
 said to waver between " ami " and " freund " ; 
 not so prodigally lavished as the French, not so 
 earnest and binding as the German word. The 
 Italians use their " amico " almost in exact cor- 
 respondence with the English "friend." 
 
 Likewise, many other words which in our 
 dictionaries are given as the true translation of 
 corresponding foreign words, in fact translate 
 these only more or less approximately. 
 
 Meanwhile it is evident that, if we select a 
 group of such cognate words and analyze 
 carefully the various meanings in which they 
 arc commonly used by Different peoples, we
 
 198 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 have therein a means to find out what the 
 ideas of these peoples are on particular sub- 
 jects, and to infer thence certain national 
 characteristics and habits. This leads us to 
 say a few words about a new branch of science 
 which makes its object to study the character- 
 istics, the nature, the soul of each several na- 
 tion. Every people presents certain mental 
 traits peculiar to itself, and it is one of the 
 most interesting studies to bring forth in its 
 salient lines the image of its mind. The 
 Germans call this science " Volkerpsychologie "; 
 we might call it, if you do not object, folk- 
 psychology.
 
 NINETEENTH LETTER. 
 
 Language and Folkpsychology — Philosophy of Language — 
 Comparative Studies — The Idea of " Love " in the Latin 
 and in the English Languages. 
 
 IF we desire to penetrate into the ' soul ' of a 
 people, none of the products of its activity- 
 should be left aside in our study. Its art, its 
 laws, its religion, and all the facts in which 
 some of its ideas are imbedded, have a right to 
 claim our attention. It is evident that lan- 
 guage is entitled to a large place in such studies. 
 Although not perfect, it is yet the best instru- 
 ment that we have for the representation of our 
 ideas. Many an idea is formed in our minds 
 which dies unuttered and, so to say, unborn. 
 But by far the greatest number of those ideas 
 which are born at all, are consigned to language 
 rather than to any other mode of expression, 
 like painting, sculpture or music. Language, 
 then, is still the most important element to 
 study in order to draw, if I may say so, the
 
 200 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 psychic map of a nation. " Every race," Marsh 
 says, "has its organic growth which impresses 
 its own peculiar form on the religious ideas and 
 the philosophical opinions of the people, on 
 their political constitution, their legislation, 
 their customs, and the expression of all these 
 individualities is found in the speech. In this 
 are embalmed that to which they have aspired, 
 that to which they have attained. There we 
 find the record of their thought, its compre- 
 hension, wealth and depth, the life of the peo- 
 ple, the limits of their culture, their appetencies 
 and their antipathies, whatsoever has germi- 
 nated, fructified, ripened and passed away 
 among them ; yes, even their shortcomings and 
 their trespasses." 
 
 In nowise can we better estimate the mental 
 development of a people than by looking at 
 its dictionary. As "notions which are the com- 
 mon and recognized property of whole nations 
 or important national sections, come to be ex- 
 pressed by means of single words or standing 
 phrases " it is evident that the stock of words 
 in current use is a good measure of the intel- 
 lectual horizon of a people. Without ever
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 20 1 
 
 having heard a word about Germans or Apaches, 
 it is enough to look at their dictionaries to un- 
 derstand immediately the immense gulf that 
 separates these two civilizations. It is enough 
 to see how poor the English dictionary is in 
 truly English words pertaining to music, to 
 understand that the English are not a musical 
 nation. On the other hand, one look at their 
 unparalleled collection of words relating to 
 commerce, church, or legislation, will show 
 some of the most important directions in 
 which the Anglo-Saxon mind has developed. 
 Thus even the absence of certain words can 
 testify to certain traits of the national mind. 
 
 From these comparisons at large between the 
 dictionaries of two or more peoples, we can 
 narrow our researches to compare the words 
 concerning one particular branch of ideas or 
 feelings. We may assume as self-evident that 
 " a nation to have many words for a concept, 
 must have been much at work upon it, must 
 have developed and varied it and nicely shaded 
 it off. . . . When defining significations 
 with exactness, the dictionary assumes the 
 dignity of a psychological thesaurus, and be-
 
 202 THE FOR TUXES OF WORDS. 
 
 comes a vivid and boldly delineated sketch of 
 a national type." 
 
 Dr. Abel, from whom I have just quoted, has 
 given us a very interesting essay of compara- 
 tive research concerning the idea of " love " 
 with several nations, the most important for 
 our purpose being the Romans and the English. 
 
 In Latin we find mainly four words express- 
 ing the idea of love: ' diligere,' ' amor ' ; 'cari- 
 tas,' ' pietas.' The first two words expressed a 
 spontaneous affection ; the other two a dutiful 
 affection, an affection given because of duty. 
 " To the Romans spontaneous inclination either 
 rested upon a feeling in which intelligent recog- 
 nition of personal worth had gradually ripened 
 into a warmer appreciation of the goodness and 
 amiability of the individual beloved ; or it was 
 pure feeling which, welling up from the secret 
 depths of the soul, and defying the restraints 
 of ordinary reflection, might rapidly run 
 through all the various intervening stages be- 
 tween mere gratification of the finer suscepti- 
 bilities and the mighty flow of an overpowering 
 passion. The former more judicious and dis- 
 cerning kind of spontaneous love the Romans
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 203 
 
 denoted by 'diligere ' ; the latter more impul- 
 sive one by 'amare.' 
 
 " In dutiful love also two stages were ac- 
 knowledged — ' caritas ' and ' pietas.' ' Caritas ' 
 is the moral sanction bestowed upon the bonds 
 of nature that links us to parents, brothers, sis- 
 ters and tried friends — the loving allegiance due 
 to those associated with us as mates and help- 
 ful companions in our earthly career. ' Pietas ' 
 looks in the same direction, but from a higher 
 point of view. Lending to the ethic glow of 
 loyal attachment the more sublime sanctity of 
 religion and faith, it regards fidelity to relations 
 and allies, not as a mere moral and intersocial 
 duty, but as an obligation to the gods them- 
 selves. The sphere of 'pietas' extends not 
 quite so far down, but reaches higher up than 
 that of ' caritas.' " 
 
 ' Caritas ' and ' pietas,' expressing a feeling 
 which is born with us and exists even if we do 
 not display it, have no corresponding verb. The 
 other feeling which implies an active energy of 
 our soul, has given birth to two verbs, ' diligere ' 
 and ' amare.' 
 
 The Romans had also a more general and
 
 204 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 less definite word, ' affectus.' It was used in 
 polite society as a less decided and more con- 
 ventional term for ' love,' almost in the same 
 way as we use the word ' attachment.' 
 
 As to the study of the same idea as it is rep- 
 resented in the English language, I beg to 
 quote Dr. Abel's observations in full, also to give 
 a good demonstration of how the study of words 
 can be made a study of things, and philology 
 can be associated with philosophy and psy- 
 chology : 
 
 "The Englishman's love is always a free gift 
 depending more upon the will of the giver than 
 upon social relations or kinship. Its various 
 kinds differ from each other, not according to 
 the relative condition of the parties concerned, 
 but according to the warmth and coloring in- 
 fused by personal feeling. When the national 
 mind is so disposed, it is only natural that al- 
 most every one of the English words for ' love ' 
 should admit of being applied at will, independ- 
 ently of all other personal relations. 
 
 "The most general designation is ' love.' Orig- 
 inally the passion which seeks to enjoy the 
 presence and sympathy of the beloved, has
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 205 
 
 gradually become to be far more than this. 
 With the desire for sweet communion it unites 
 a more or less prominent spiritual trait, ennobling 
 the passion and enlisting it into the unselfish 
 service of the ideal. It thus becomes a real en- 
 thusiasm for the beautiful and the good, which 
 for the time being is seen embodied in the be- 
 loved object, and which by most men is acknowl- 
 edged only in this short span of the spring-time 
 of the soul. It culminates in a transient self- 
 exaltation of his own nature, during which man 
 is apt to fancy he has found a charm that shall 
 give him a new joy in existence, impart a fresh 
 purity of will, and bestow increased fitness for 
 the battle of life. If love continues after its en- 
 chantment is gone, it ripens into 'affection.' 
 Affection is love tried and purified by the fire 
 of intellect. It comes on to the scene when, 
 the veil of phantasy being lifted, the beloved 
 object is seen in its true nature, and discovered, 
 if not without failings, still worthy of the warm- 
 est appreciation. Affection comes slowly but 
 abides ; giving more than it takes ; and as a 
 touch of tender gratitude for a thousand favors 
 received, a thousand remembrances treasured
 
 206 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 up, and unfading happiness accorded. Accord- 
 ing to English notions, an affection through 
 whose limpid depths the gold of the old love is 
 plainly visible should be the fulfillment of mar- 
 riage. 
 
 " Not only to woman and the beloved, how- 
 ever, are both words applicable. As regards 
 1 affection,' the mingled deliberation and feeling 
 latent in it certainly restricts the word to 
 individuals whose close acquaintance has en- 
 gendered mutual esteem ; but relations of this 
 nature are not necessarily confined to women. 
 They may, on the contrary, extend to relatives 
 and friends of whom we have never been enam- 
 oured, but towards whom, from long and inti- 
 mate intercourse, we are drawn by a feeling akin 
 to love tested and tried. Parents and children, 
 good relatives and dear friends, feel affection 
 for one another. Love likewise expands in 
 meaning. It may either sink to an exaggerated 
 fondness for trifles, or else rise to a devout ap- 
 preciation of the great spiritual entities in which 
 we behold our highest possessions. It is said 
 of a man's sentiment for his country, for hu- 
 manity, science, religion, and in its sublimest
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 207 
 
 application, for God. In order to be able to 
 speak of his love in this sense, man by humil- 
 ity, piety and enthusiasm, must consecrate him- 
 self to the higher powers, whom he may serve 
 through his righteous will, though he can not 
 exalt them by his feeble acts. The confidence 
 springing from this piety encourages man to 
 speak of the love of God to himself. 
 
 " For a particular variety of the love of man 
 there is a special word, ' charity.' It is love 
 moderated to affection, but extended to all our 
 brethren alike. When, by all sorts of experi- 
 ences and the gradual growth of prudence and 
 worldly wisdom, youthful enthusiasm begins to 
 flag, its place should be filled by the more tem- 
 perate and imperishable charity. Charity con- 
 tends that although all men around us, and not 
 the least we ourselves, are erring creatures, we 
 are bound to love our neighbour for God's sake. 
 Charity proclaims that since God has permitted 
 man to sin, it behooves man to embrace with 
 forbearing love those that yield to temptation. 
 Recognizing many excellent qualities in him, 
 ' affection ' loves and cherishes some sympa- 
 thetic individual ; while ' charity,' thinking less
 
 208 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 of human foibles than of the striving energy for 
 good instinct in man, loves all men alike. The 
 one emanates from the soul's longings to ac- 
 knowledge the good, the other from the duty 
 of forgiving the bad. The one is glad, the 
 other sad ; the one of this world, the other of a 
 better. 
 
 " As charity indicates a specific kind of ' love ' 
 extended to all men, so ' fondness ' represents a 
 peculiar shade of that meaning of the term 
 which applies to individuals. 'Fondness' im- 
 plies a deep devotion without including either 
 the staunch and rational esteem of ' affection ' 
 or the passionate fire of ' love.' It is a love for 
 the sake of the dear habit of loving, ready to 
 dispense with any particular worth in the be- 
 loved, and, if it must be, even with return. It 
 is a sort of instinctive and uncontrollable cling- 
 ing that cannot free itself from the object it has 
 chosen to adore, that forgives all, denies noth- 
 ing, and caresses, even when blame or coldness 
 is deserved. Though it may also extend to 
 friends, in its excessive tenderness the term de- 
 scribes principally relations between lovers, or 
 between parents and children. It often origin-
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 209 
 
 ates in a warm heart, inert judgment, and not 
 very active self-esteem ; and although it may- 
 become foolish, never loses the deep glow of 
 true and heartfelt affection. To the genuine, 
 ness of its sympathy the word is indebted for 
 its prerogative in remaining applicable in cases 
 of a nobler nature. Where by the context every 
 suspicion of fondling is shut out, ' fondness ' 
 may be used for a satisfied and restful attach- 
 ment, less active than affection, less exacting 
 than love, but just as certain and reliable as 
 both. A tinge of forbearing and voluntary 
 fondness should be given to every description 
 of love. 
 
 " ' Passion ' often denotes emphatically that 
 passion which occurs most frequently — love. 
 
 " Going back the whole way we have come, 
 and entering a province where there is yet no 
 question of love, we are met by ' liking ' and ' at- 
 tachment.' Liking is a vague interest spring- 
 ing from the feelings, which may, or may not, 
 deepen to real attraction. Between young 
 people of different sex it certainly has a re- 
 markable tendency to pass through the whole 
 morphological series, of which it is the first
 
 210 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 stage. Hence its uses are manifold. Though 
 she may be far enough gone to confess her love 
 to herself, a modest maiden still speaks of ' lik- 
 ing ' ; while with just as good a right a lieuten- 
 ant, referring to a comrade whom he has seen 
 to-day and may forget to-morrow, exclaims, ' I 
 like the fellow, egad !' Attachment lies between 
 liking and love. It arises from an attraction of 
 the intellect or of the feelings, the latter being 
 mostly the more powerful agency of the two. 
 When mutually experienced by man and wo- 
 man, it has a tendency to imperceptibly draw 
 them towards the Niagara of love. It frequently 
 marks a stage in which a seeming surface liking 
 is unconsciously nourished by passion secretly 
 welling up from the hidden depth of the soul. 
 When occurring between persons of the same 
 sex, the feeling is almost entirely restricted to 
 individuals in the same social position, seldom 
 extending to subordinates. Attachment, as a 
 rule, links us to equals or supposed equals. 
 Liking is so vague and love so impetuous, that 
 both may be felt for subordinates as well as for 
 equals or superiors ; affection so zealously takes 
 care of its object that, in a sense, it aspires to
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 21 1 
 
 superiority for the sake of protection ; attach- 
 ment, on the other hand, would be a thoughtful 
 devotion — devotion because of the affection 
 manifestly present, and thoughtful because 
 self-possession is sufficiently preserved to pre- 
 vent the overpowering effect. Conscious re- 
 serve is a counterweight to affection, and, assert- 
 ing itself more strongly towards subordinates 
 than equals, makes the word inapplicable to the 
 former." 
 
 The same kind of investigation can be pur- 
 sued with words related to other orders of 
 ideas : God, justice, law, penalty, crime, valor, 
 cowardice, etc. It is clear that in this way we 
 can draw sketches of the nature of a people 
 that cannot fail to be interesting and to point 
 out characteristics which otherwise might be 
 overlooked. Only we must be careful to see 
 that our investigation is complete on either 
 side, and that the facts are looked at in their 
 true light, lest we might hasten to false conclu- 
 sions. Nothing is more common than to hear 
 or come across in books some summary state- 
 ments concerning the character of a people as 
 conceived from superficial examination of one
 
 212 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 or two words. Landor for instance (" Imaginary 
 Conversations") discovers in the Italians a per- 
 version of moral sense, because they call a 
 bracelet or an ear-ring a ' joy,' gioia. But he 
 does not notice that the English do the same 
 thing, as ' jewel ' is merely the transformation 
 of Italian gioicllo, ' a little joy.' This does not 
 imply any perversion whatever ; it is a natural 
 transition from the thing itself to the pleasure 
 it gives us to look at it ; it is an illustration of 
 the well-known line, " A thing of beauty is a joy 
 forever." Trench and all those who claim 
 that language was given to men all ready-made 
 and perfect, discover in the old meanings of our 
 words traces of a moral purity superior to that 
 of our days. But this is against all facts; on 
 the whole, morals have progressed just as every- 
 thing else, and the history of language shows 
 in our words traces of lower and coarser mean- 
 ings. Even Marsh, generally so wary and cau- 
 tious, makes a considerable slip on this point. 
 Having observed that the Latin idea of the 
 future is conveyed by one word alone {amabo, 
 I shall love), while the languages derived from 
 Latin have a future formed with an auxiliary
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 213 
 
 (French j" aimer ai is j'aimer-ai, tu aimer-as, etc.; 
 see "Philosophy of Words," p. 154 f.), he tries 
 to give a reason for this different system. In 
 the Middle Ages, he says, during which the Neo- 
 Latin languages were formed, society was all 
 unsettled ; there was no security, no confident 
 trusting in the morrow, in the time to come. 
 Therefore the idea of future was more of a dark 
 cloud to them than a clear conception. Hence 
 practically they needed no future tense ; every- 
 thing was referred to the present ; and when it 
 was really necessary to speak of a time that 
 was not yet, the present of the auxiliary was 
 made to do the service of the future. ' I have to 
 love,' not amabo. This is all very fine ; but 
 there is an objection. Now glottology has 
 shown that the Latin amabo, which looks like 
 a simple word, is really a compound, made up 
 of the stem of the verb amare, and the root ba, 
 which means to be : "I am to love." So the 
 explanation given by Marsh, which at first 
 seems so satisfactory, turns out to be a castle 
 in the air. 
 
 Others have tried to infertile whole nature of 
 peoples from the words they commonly use
 
 214 7'HE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 in meeting friends or acquaintances, as " How 
 do you do?" or "comment vous portez-vous? " 
 etc. It is superfluous to add that such infer- 
 ences, whatever they may be, are entirely 
 groundless. No large generalization can be 
 legitimately reached without a great number of 
 facts being studied. These acrobatic induc- 
 tions from one word to an ethnographic trait 
 always remind me of the man who was busy 
 trying to solve a problem in which, the 
 length of the ship being given, the age of the 
 captain was to be found. The application of 
 linguistics to the study of national character- 
 tics is yet a very young branch of the science. 
 Its importance will be appreciated when the 
 facts at its disposal are more numerous ; one 
 reason more for it to be wary and slow in its 
 inductions.
 
 TWENTIETH LETTER. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 NOW before taking my leave of you, my 
 fair and sympathizing listener, let me 
 add a few concluding words. Did I tire you ? I 
 hope not; you told me I did not, and I believe 
 you. Our friendship is so sincere, and you are 
 so frank that you would always tell me your 
 mind unhesitatingly. At all events, if ever I 
 did tire you, prithee forgive me ; as Manzoni 
 says at the end of his great novel : " I did not 
 do it intentionally." At the beginning we saw 
 how words are made ; how from an ancient root 
 countless words are derived, which assume the 
 most various shapes with the most various 
 meanings ; how the bulk of our daily speech, in 
 fact of the speeches of the most civilized 
 peoples, can be traced back to a few hundred 
 roots from which they have grown forth.
 
 216 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 Did I teach anybody to make etymolo- 
 gies? I hope not, indeed! Rather I in- 
 tended to teach not to make etymologies. 
 Etymology nowadays, especially in the Indo- 
 European family, has been so well studied 
 that no corner of the field has been left un- 
 touched. Therefore, to attempt to introduce 
 an etymology without studying the results as- 
 certained by long and learned research, without 
 consulting the standard books on the subject, 
 is just like talking of stars and nebula: without 
 having read one single book on astronomy. 
 
 In the second place we saw, through various 
 instances, that words not only change their 
 shapes, but also their meanings. Very often we 
 find a word conveying a meaning entirely dif- 
 ferent from its primitive one. There is, how- 
 ever, no saltus, no break : we always find, by 
 historical investigation, that the first mean- 
 ing is linked to the latest one by a continuous 
 chain, and underlying both is one common 
 meaning which contains them in embryo. 
 
 The history of such modifications of mean- 
 ings, we saw, can be made to throw light upon 
 certain phases in the life of peoples ; successive
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 217 
 
 improvements in human dwellings and tools, in 
 the perception of colors and the formation of 
 numbers. Religious, political and social revo- 
 lutions, as well as mechanical inventions, are 
 testified to by the evolution of language. In 
 fact a complete history of our words would 
 almost be a history of our civilization. 
 
 Lastly we have studied the relation of words 
 to our ideas, considered especially in the nature 
 and use of synonyms. We saw, also, that by 
 studying and comparing the words and expres- 
 sions of a people we may gain a clear view 
 of its intellectual range, and bring forth some 
 of its most notable characteristics. 
 
 Such studies, if I am not mistaken, are not 
 devoid of great importance. In the light of 
 these theories, a dictionary is no longer a dry 
 record of signs with a certain meaning, or, as it 
 were, a herbarium of dead leaves. It is the liv- 
 ing record of the intellectual wealth of a people ; 
 it is the inventory of its most precious treas- 
 ures. 
 
 Nor must we omit another aspect of the im- 
 portance of words. They not only are the ex- 
 pression of our thoughts, but they react on us
 
 218 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 with a strength that is appalling. Bacon 
 once remarked that men think they rule their 
 words, but very often their words rule them. 
 Many times a man has an idea in his mind, 
 confused, undetermined ; once that idea comes 
 forth, clothed with apt words, its power is 
 increased a thousand-fold. For good and for 
 evil, there is no power that equals the power of 
 words. When a social or political crisis is im- 
 pending, millions are brooding over the evils 
 they suffer or they think they suffer. But their 
 ideas are confused, uncentred ; they feel as if 
 they were in the dark, groping in vain for an 
 issue ; they feel like a child who complains of 
 something that aches him, but does not know 
 what, or how. But let a man step forward and 
 formulate in clear words the evil that troubles 
 all, and shape forth their needs and their de- 
 mands. That man becomes the hero, the leader : 
 his words are like a rocket in a ton of gunpow- 
 der. Every man now sees what he first only felt 
 vaguely. His will is aroused, his resolution is 
 taken, and, whilst a little while ago a few tempo- 
 rary concessions might have solaced his uneasi- 
 ness and stayed any outbreak, now nothing
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 219 
 
 short of full surrender or brutal repression could 
 lead him back to his former condition. 
 
 Not only in that part of our life in which 
 interest mingles with feeling do words lead 
 us even against or beyond our intentions ; 
 but, also, and not less, in the most abstract 
 regions, words wield a power that is difficult to 
 measure. How many theories of science, phi- 
 losophy and theology, have lived through gener- 
 ations of men, making some happy in their 
 faith, sending others to the gallows or to mar- 
 tyrdom, and all the while resting on a mere 
 trick of words, unskilfully chosen or badly un- 
 derstood ! We think only through words, and 
 if we do not apprehend the full reach of our 
 and other people's words, we must needs come 
 to conclusions not entirely right. " The words 
 of a language containing a synopsis of all the 
 principal things in the world, with a list of their 
 qualities, agencies and effects, the distinctions 
 drawn by them are unconsciously adopted, and 
 necessarily become our own views of the general 
 arrangement of the universe."- — " The notions 
 represented by them are constituent portions 
 of our intellectual self ; they regulate the mo-
 
 220 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 mentary operations of our mind." — (Dr. Abel, 
 "Linguistic Essays," p. 150.) It is impossible 
 to overrate the importance of words in this re- 
 spect. As we apprehend the whole material 
 and spiritual world only through words, it 
 follows that the more exact and clear and 
 rich our dictionary is, the better instrument 
 we have for the operations of our mind. 
 In other words, our mind, in its progressive 
 development, works on the language and 
 makes it finer and nobler and richer while 
 trying to convey its more noble and fine acqui- 
 sitions. On the other side, the language helps 
 the mind by giving it an instrument of expres- 
 sion finer and more perfect than ever. Like- 
 wise the student of physics, by successive ex- 
 periments, improves his instruments and tools; 
 these, on their side, help him along to further 
 progress by giving him better means for measur- 
 ing, observing and testing. 
 
 It is also to be remembered that in all these 
 things pertaining to language, one man alone can 
 do very little. Language, from beginning to 
 end, is a social, not an individual produc- 
 tion. Language is perhaps the highest type of
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 221 
 
 organization, in whose making and use every 
 individual takes a share in proportion with his 
 mental activity. No matter what sometimes 
 a single man may do for good or for evil in the 
 social or political field, in language the true sov- 
 ereignty rests with the people. Tiberius, being 
 reproached for using a solecism, answered, half 
 playfully, half scornfully, that he would make 
 it right with an imperial decree. " Caesar," 
 said Marcellus, the grammarian, " thou cans't 
 give the Roman citizenship to men, but not to 
 words." 
 
 At school we are taught to avoid some words 
 and idioms, and to use some others in a way a 
 little different from the common one, which is 
 apt to be loose or blundering. All of which is 
 well. Still we must not for a moment indulge 
 in a belief that such correctings and forbid- 
 dings can have any great influence on the 
 purity and beauty of a language. They are not 
 unlike fumigations, which may be useful but are 
 never able to check the spread of an epidemic 
 disease. No pestilence can be checked without 
 a thoroughly hygienical method of living, 
 without clean dwellings, pure air, wholesome
 
 222 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 food, healthy habits. In the same way, it is not 
 by critical sifting and, I should say, behindhand 
 pruning that we can stay the corruption of a 
 language. When the moral and intellectual 
 level of a people sinks, its language sinks there- 
 with. What is important is a thorough mental 
 and social hygiene. Let a people be inde- 
 pendent, prosperous, educated and generous; 
 then its language will be rich and varied and 
 powerful ; its words and idioms will fly like 
 winged arrows, hitting the mark clear and 
 sharp, bringing forth images of strength and 
 beauty. On the other hand, when the mass of 
 the people sink down into degradation and 
 wretched misery, their language becomes poor, 
 slow, coarse and dull. Their intellectual life 
 is annihilated ; how can they be expected to 
 speak aptly neatly and richly ? 
 
 Nowhere perhaps can we find better evidence 
 of the influence of the political, moral and 
 social conditions on language than in the 
 Italian history. When Italy was dotted 
 with prosperous and independent common- 
 wealths, no nation in Europe could boast of a 
 language so rich, so strong, so full of promise,
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 223 
 
 so vigorous, melodious and beautiful. It was 
 Dante's language. When the thriving com- 
 monwealths were succeeded by those splendid 
 principalities where little by little, amid the 
 pomp of the courts, the splendor of arts, and 
 the luxury of life, liberty was lulled to sleep, 
 we find the language more polished, more re- 
 fined, but lacking some of its Dantesque energy 
 and honest simplicity. It was Ariosto's lan- 
 guage. Later, when even the name of liberty had 
 been suppressed, when the national tyrannies 
 had given way to foreign dominations, and the 
 people was ground down to the most abject mis- 
 ery, the language of Italian literature became of 
 the great languages of Europe the most empty, 
 the most insipid, flaccid and academic. Since 
 the last part of the XVIIIth and more espe- 
 cially since the beginning of this century, when 
 the wonderful movement began which culmin- 
 ated with the liberation and unification of Italy, 
 a visible change has taken place in her lan- 
 guage. Take at random two Italian prose- 
 writers, one of the XVIIIth or XVIIth century 
 and one of our days. The contrast is so strik- 
 ing that one would hardly believe it. The
 
 224 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 
 
 present language of Italian literature is still 
 somewhat uncertain and uneven, as all things 
 that are in a transitory state. But there is 
 life in it; it approaches more and more to the 
 living language of the people, and there is no 
 doubt that after a few generations it will again 
 resume its place as one of the most beautiful 
 and most perfect European speeches. 
 
 Language, then, is inseparable from the social 
 and political fortunes of the people. Where a 
 very small minority are rich and idle, and the 
 masses are ground down by toil, ignorance and 
 poverty, we must have on one side an artificial 
 language, disingenuous, narrow and conven- 
 tional — cant more than language ; on the other 
 side, a brutal, low, vulgar jargon, whose differ- 
 ence from the hothouse language of the upper 
 classes will widen daily. Break these barriers, 
 let welfare be as common as it is possible, and 
 the level of public education will rise, the 
 national mind will improve, the language will 
 grow by the co-operation of all, rich and strong, 
 the mirror of the mental activities of all, equally 
 distant from the superfetations of fashionable 
 cant, as from the vulgarity of slang. Let, then,
 
 THE FORTUNES OF WORDS. 225 
 
 also for the sake of language, the movements be 
 welcome which are now everywhere abroad, 
 tending to beat down sophisms and hoary pre- 
 judices, trying to diffuse a moderate welfare 
 among the greatest number possible. Every 
 step taken in this direction will be recorded in 
 the improvement of language. 
 
 THE END.
 
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