On the Study of Words | Page 9

they never showed the slightest sense of
obligation or of gratitude when they obtained what they sought; never
saying more than, 'This will be useful to me,' or, 'This is what I wanted.'
Dr. Krapf, after laborious researches in some widely extended dialects
of East Africa, has remarked in them the same absence of any words
expressing the idea of gratitude.
Nor is it only in what they have forfeited and lost, but also in what they
have retained or invented, that these languages proclaim their
degradation and debasement, and how deeply they and those that speak
them have fallen. For indeed the strange wealth and the strange poverty,
I know not which the strangest and the saddest, of the languages of

savage tribes, rich in words which proclaim their shame, poor in those
which should attest the workings of any nobler life among them, not
seldom absolutely destitute of these last, are a mournful and ever-
recurring surprise, even to those who were more or less prepared to
expect nothing else. Thus I have read of a tribe in New Holland, which
has no word to signify God, but has one to designate a process by
which an unborn child may be destroyed in the bosom of its mother.
[Footnote: A Wesleyan missionary, communicating with me from Fiji,
assures me I have here understated the case. He says: 'I could write
down several words, which express as many different ways of killing
an unborn child.' He has at the same time done me the favour to send
me dreadful confirmation of all which I have here asserted. It is a list of
some Fiji words, with the hideous meanings which they bear, or facts
which they imply. He has naturally confined himself to those in one
domain of human wickedness--that, namely, of cruelty; leaving another
domain, which borders close on this, and which, he assures me, would
yield proofs quite as terrible, altogether untouched. It is impossible to
imagine a record more hideous of what the works of the arch-murderer
are, or one more fitted to stir up missionary zeal in behalf of those dark
places of the earth which are full of the habitations of cruelty. A very
few specimens must suffice. The language of Fiji has a word for a club
which has killed a man; for a dead body which is to be eaten; for the
first of such bodies brought in at the beginning of a war; for the flesh
on each side of the backbone. It has a name of honour given to those
who have taken life; it need not have been the life of an enemy; if only
they have shed blood--it may have been the life of a woman or a
child--the title has been earned. It has a hideous word to express the
torturing and insulting of an enemy, as by cutting off any part of his
body--his nose or tongue, for instance--cooking and eating it before his
face, and taunting him the while; the [Greek: hakrotaeriazein] of the
Greeks, with the cannibalism added. But of this enough.] And I have
been informed, on the authority of one excellently capable of knowing,
an English scholar long resident in Van Diemen's Land, that in the
native language of that island there are [Footnote: This was written in
1851. Now, in 1888, Van Diemen's Land is called Tasmania, and the
native language of that island is a thing of the past.] four words to
express the taking of human life--one to express a father's killing of a

son, another a son's killing of a father, with other varieties of murder;
and that in no one of these lies the slightest moral reprobation, or sense
of the deep-lying distinction between to 'kill' and to 'murder'; while at
the same time, of that language so richly and so fearfully provided with
expressions for this extreme utterance of hate, he also reports that a
word for 'love' is wanting in it altogether. Yet with all this, ever and
anon in the midst of this wreck and ruin, there is that in the language of
the savage, some subtle distinction, some curious allusion to a perished
civilization, now utterly unintelligible to the speaker; or some other
note, which proclaims his language to be the remains of a dissipated
inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe which was a royal one
once. The fragments of a broken sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre
wherewith once he held dominion (he, that is, in his progenitors) over
large kingdoms of thought, which now have escaped wholly from his
sway. [Footnote: See on this matter Tylor, Early History of Mankind,
pp. 150-190; and, still better, the Duke of Argyll, _On Primeval Man_;
and on this same survival of the fragments