On the Study of Words | Page 8

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, 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,