On the Study of Words | Page 6

of a lie; they had, in short, the virtues which
belong to a conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior
and conquered one. And thus it came to pass that by degrees the name
'frank' indicated not merely a national, but involved a moral, distinction
as well; and a 'frank' man was synonymous not merely with a man of
the conquering German race, but was an epithet applied to any man
possessed of certain high moral qualities, which for the most part
appertained to, and were found only in, men of that stock; and thus in
men's daily discourse, when they speak of a person as being 'frank,' or
when they use the words 'franchise,' 'enfranchisement,' to express civil
liberties and immunities, their language here is the outgrowth, the
record, and the result of great historic changes, bears testimony to facts
of history, whereof it may well happen that the speakers have never
heard. [Footnote: 'Frank,' though thus originally a German word, only
came back to Germany from France in the seventeenth century. With us
it is found in the sixteenth; but scarcely earlier.] The word 'slave' has
undergone a process entirely analogous, although in an opposite
direction. 'The martial superiority of the Teutonic races enabled them to
keep their slave markets supplied with captives taken from the
Sclavonic tribes. Hence, in all the languages of Western Europe, the
once glorious name of Slave has come to express the most degraded
condition of men. What centuries of violence and warfare does the
history of this word disclose.' [Footnote: Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c.
55. [It is very doubtful whether the idea of 'glory' was implied
originally in the national name of Slav. It is generally held now that the
Slavs gave themselves the name as being 'the intelligible,' or 'the
intelligibly speaking' people; as in the case of many other races, they
regarded their strange-speaking neighbours as 'barbarian,' that is
'stammering,' or even as 'dumb.' So the Russians call their neighbours

the Germans njemets, connected with njemo, indistinct. The old name
Slovene, Slavonians, is probably a derivative from the substantive
which appears in Church Slavonic in the form slovo, a word; see
Thomsen's Russia and Scandinavia, p. 8. Slovo is closely connected
with the old Slavonic word for 'fame'-- slava, hence, no doubt, the
explanation of Slave favoured by Gibbon.]]
Having given by anticipation this handful of examples in illustration of
what in these lectures I propose, I will, before proceeding further, make
a few observations on a subject, which, if we would go at all to the root
of the matter, we can scarcely leave altogether untouched,--I mean the
origin of language, in which however we will not entangle ourselves
deeper than we need. There are, or rather there have been, two theories
about this. One, and that which rather has been than now is, for few
maintain it still, would put language on the same level with the various
arts and inventions with which man has gradually adorned and enriched
his life. It would make him by degrees to have invented it, just as he
might have invented any of these, for himself; and from rude imperfect
beginnings, the inarticulate cries by which he expressed his natural
wants, the sounds by which he sought to imitate the impression of
natural objects upon him, little by little to have arrived at that wondrous
organ of thought and feeling, which his language is often to him now.
It might, I think, be sufficient to object to this explanation, that
language would then be an accident of human nature; and, this being
the case, that we certainly should somewhere encounter tribes sunken
so low as not to possess it; even as there is almost no human art or
invention so obvious, and as it seems to us so indispensable, but there
are those who have fallen below its knowledge and its exercise. But
with language it is not so. There have never yet been found human
beings, not the most degraded horde of South African bushmen, or
Papuan cannibals, who did not employ this means of intercourse with
one another. But the more decisive objection to this view of the matter
is, that it hangs together with, and is indeed an essential part of, that
theory of society, which is contradicted alike by every page of Genesis,
and every notice of our actual experience--the 'urang-utang theory,' as it
has been so happily termed--that, I mean, according to which the
primitive condition of man was the savage one, and the savage himself
the seed out of which in due time the civilized man was unfolded;

whereas, in fact, so far from being this living seed, he might more
justly be considered as a dead withered leaf, torn violently away from
the