On the Study of Words | Page 6

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 great trunk of humanity, and with no more power to produce anything nobler than himself out of himself, than that dead withered leaf to unfold itself into the oak of the forest. So far from being the child with the latent capabilities of