On the Study of Words | Page 8

such; and as a mystery all the deepest inquirers
into the subject are content to leave it. Yet we may perhaps a little help
ourselves to the realizing of what the process was, and what it was not,
if we liken it to the growth of a tree springing out of, and unfolding
itself from, a root, and according to a necessary law--that root being the
divine capacity of language with which man was created, that law
being the law of highest reason with which he was endowed: if we

liken it to this rather than to the rearing of a house, which a man should
slowly and painfully fashion for himself with dead timbers combined
after his own fancy and caprice; and which little by little improved in
shape, material, and size, being first but a log house, answering his
barest needs, and only after centuries of toil and pain growing for his
sons' sons into a stately palace for pleasure and delight.
Were it otherwise, were the savage the primitive man, we should then
find savage tribes, furnished scantily enough, it might be, with the
elements of speech, yet at the same time with its fruitful beginnings, its
vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close
inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant
and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of
degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more
fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When
wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against light
and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been
scattered off by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the
world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its
remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one
spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that
expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has been
let go after another, the words which those habits demanded have
dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory and thus after
a while have been wholly lost.
Moffat, in his Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa, gives us
a very remarkable example of the disappearing of one of the most
significant words from the language of a tribe sinking ever deeper in
savagery; and with the disappearing of the word, of course, the
disappearing as well of the great spiritual fact and truth whereof that
word was at once the vehicle and the guardian. The Bechuanas, a
Caffre tribe, employed formerly the word 'Morimo,' to designate 'Him
that is above' or 'Him that is in heaven' and attached to the word the
notion of a supreme Divine Being. This word, with the spiritual idea
corresponding to it, Moffat found to have vanished from the language
of the present generation, although here and there he could meet with

an old man, scarcely one or two in a thousand, who remembered in his
youth to have heard speak of 'Morimo'; and this word, once so deeply
significant, only survived now in the spells and charms of the so- called
rainmakers and sorcerers, who misused it to designate a fabulous ghost,
of whom they told the absurdest and most contradictory things.
And as there is no such witness to the degradation of the savage as the
brutal poverty of his language, so is there nothing that so effectually
tends to keep him in the depths to which he has fallen. You cannot
impart to any man more than the words which he understands either
now contain, or can be made, intelligibly to him, to contain. Language
is as truly on one side the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other
side that which feeds and unfolds thought. Thus it is the ever- repeated
complaint of the missionary that the very terms are well-nigh or wholly
wanting in the dialect of the savage whereby to impart to him heavenly
truths; and not these only; but that there are equally wanting those
which should express the nobler emotions of the human heart.
Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, in his curious _History of the
Abipones,_ tells us that neither these nor the Guarinies, two of the
principal native tribes of Brazil, possessed any word in the least
corresponding to our 'thanks.' But what wonder, if the feeling of
gratitude was entirely absent from their hearts, that they should not
have possessed the corresponding word in their vocabularies? Nay,
how should they have had it there? And that in this absence lies the true
explanation is plain from a fact which the same writer records, that,
although inveterate askers,