On the Study of Words by Richard C Trench

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And scarcely less significant and instructive than the presence of a
word in a language, will be occasionally its absence. Thus Fronto, a
Greek orator in Roman times, finds evidence of an absence of strong
family affection on the part of the Romans in the absence of any word
in the Latin language corresponding to the Greek [Greek: philostorgos]
How curious, from the same point of view, are the conclusions which
Cicero in his high Roman fashion draws from the absence of any word in
the Greek answering to the Latin 'ineptus'; not from this concluding,
as we might have anticipated, that the character designated by the word
was wanting, but rather that the fault was so common, so universal with
the Greeks, that they failed to recognize it as a fault at all.
[Footnote: _De Orat_. ii. 4: Quem enim nos _ineptum_ vocamus, is mihi
videtur ab hoc nomen habere ductum, quod non sit aptus. Idque in
sermonis nostri consuetudine perlate patet. Nam qui aut tempus quid
postulet, non videt, aut plura loquitur, aut se ostentat, aut eorum
quibuscum est vel dignitatis vel commodi rationem non habet, aut
denique in aliquo genere aut inconcinnus aut multus est, is ineptus
esse dicitur. Hoc vitio cumulata est eruditissima illa Graecorum natio.
Itaque quod vim hujus mali Graeci non vident, ne nomen quidem ei vitio
imposuerunt. Ut enim quasras omnia, quomodo Graeci ineptum appellent,
non invenies.] Very instructive you may find it to note these words,
which one people possess, but to which others have nothing to
correspond, so that they have no choice but to borrow these, or else to
go without altogether. Here are some French words for which it would
not be easy, nay, in most cases it would be impossible, to find exact
equivalents in English or in German, or probably in any language:
'aplomb,' 'badinage,' 'borne,' 'chic,' 'chicane,' 'cossu,' 'coterie,'
'egarement,' 'elan,' 'espieglerie,' 'etourderie,' 'friponnerie,'
'gentil,' 'ingenue,' 'liaison,' 'malice,' 'parvenu,' 'persiflage,'
'prevenant,' 'ruse,' 'tournure,' 'tracasserie,' 'verve.' It is evident
that the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are
to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not
found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and
subtle as in many instances are the thoughts which these words embody,
there are deeper thoughts struggling in the bosom of a people, who have
devised for themselves such words as the following: 'gemueth,'
'heimweh,' 'innigkeit,' 'sehnsucht,' 'tiefsinn,' 'sittsamkeit,'
'verhaengniss,' 'weltschmerz,' 'zucht'; all these being German words
which, in a similar manner, partially or wholly fail to find their
equivalents in French.

The petty spite which unhappily so often reigns between nations
dwelling side by side with one another, as it embodies itself in many
shapes, so it finds vent in the words which they borrow from one
another, and the use to which they put them. Thus the French, borrowing
'hablar' from the Spaniards, with whom it means simply to speak, give
it in 'habler' the sense of to brag; the Spaniards paying them off in
exactly their own coin, for of 'parler' which in like manner is but to
speak in French, they make 'parlar,' which means to prate, to chat.
[Footnote: See Darmesteter, _The Life of Words_, Eng. ed. p. 100.]

But it is time to bring this lecture to an end. These illustrations, to
which it would be easy to add more, justify all that has been asserted
of a moral element existing in words; so that they do not hold
themselves neutral in that great conflict between good and evil, light
and darkness, which is dividing the world; that they are not satisfied
to be passionless vehicles, now of the truth, and now of lies. We see,
on the contrary, that they continually take their side, are some of
them children of light, others children of this world, or even of
darkness; they beat with the pulses of our life; they stir with our
passions; we clothe them with light; we steep them in scorn; they
receive from us the impressions of our good and of our evil, which
again they are most active still further to propagate and diffuse.
[Footnote: Two or three examples of what we have been affirming, drawn
from the Latin, may fitly here find place. Thus Cicero (_Tusc_. iii. 7)
laments of 'confidens' that it should have acquired an evil
signification, and come to mean bold, over-confident in oneself, unduly
pushing (compare Virgil,_Georg_. iv. 444), a meaning which little by
little had been superinduced on the word, but etymologically was not
inherent in it at all. In the same way 'latro,' having left two earlier
meanings behind, one of these current so late as in Virgil (_Aen_. xii.
7), settles down at last in the meaning of robber. Not otherwise
'facinus' begins with being simply a fact or act, something done; but
ends with being some act of outrageous wickedness. 'Pronuba' starts
with meaning a bridesmaid it ignobly ends with suggesting a procuress.]
Must we not own then that there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of
which we may hitherto have taken too little account, around us and
about us? Is there not something very solemn and very awful in wielding
such an instrument as this of language is, with such power to wound or
to heal, to kill or to make alive? and may not a deeper meaning than
hitherto we have attached to it, lie in that saying, 'By thy words thou
shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned'?

LECTURE IV.

ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS.

Language, being ever in flux and flow, and, for nations to which
letters are still strange, existing only for the ear and as a sound, we
might beforehand expect would prove the least trustworthy of all
vehicles whereby the knowledge of the past has reached our present;
that one which would most certainly betray its charge. In actual fact
it has not proved so at all. It is the main, oftentimes the only,
connecting link between the two, an ark riding above the water-floods
that have swept away or submerged every other landmark and memorial of
bygone ages and vanished generations of men. Far beyond all written
records in a language, the language itself stretches back, and offers
itself for our investigation--'the pedigree of nations,' as Johnson
calls it [Footnote: This statement of his must be taken with a certain
amount of qualification. It is not always that races are true to the
end to their language; external forces are sometimes too strong. Thus
Celtic disappeared before Latin in Gaul and Spain. Slavonic became
extinct in Prussia two centuries ago, German taking its room; the
negroes of Hayti speak French, and various American tribes have
exchanged their own idioms for Spanish and Portuguese. See upon this
matter Sayce's _Principles of Comparative Philology_, pp. 175-181.]--
itself in its own independent existence a far older and at the same
time a far more instructive document than any book, inscription, or
other writing which employs it. The written records may have been
falsified by carelessness, by vanity, by fraud, by a multitude of
causes; but language never deceives, if only we know how to question it
aright.

Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your
sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting
inquiries, which by the aid of any tolerable dictionary you may carry
on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present
language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the
different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary,
succeeding one another, which he meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the
successive physical changes through which a region has passed; is, so
to say, in a condition to preside at those past changes, to measure the
forces that were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their
date. Now with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it
does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed
upon it, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely
analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and
chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Low German,
Danish, Norman words, and then once more Latin and French, with
slighter intrusions from many other quarters: and any one with skill to
analyse the language might, up to a certain point, re-create for
himself the history of the people speaking that language, might with
tolerable accuracy appreciate the diverse elements out of which that
people was made up, in what proportion these were mingled, and in what
succession they followed, one upon the other.

Would he trace, for example, the relation in which the English and
Norman occupants of this land stood to one another? An account of this,
in the main as accurate as it would be certainly instructive, might be
drawn from an intelligent study of the contributions which they have
severally made to the English language, as bequeathed to us jointly by
them both. Supposing all other records to have perished, we might still
work out and almost reconstruct the history by these aids; even as now,
when so many documents, so many institutions survive, this must still
be accounted the most important, and that of which the study will
introduce us, as no other can, into the innermost heart and life of
large periods of our history.

Nor, indeed, is it hard to see why the language must contain such
instruction as this, when we a little realize to ourselves the stages
by which it has reached us in its present shape. There was a time when
the languages which the English and the Norman severally spoke, existed
each by the side of, but un-mingled with, the other; one, that of the
small dominant class, the other that of the great body of the people.
By degrees, however, with the reconciliation and partial fusion of the
two races, the two languages effected a transaction; one indeed
prevailed over the other, but at the same time received a multitude of
the words of that other into its own bosom. At once there would exist
duplicates for many things. But as in popular speech two words will not
long exist side by side to designate the same thing, it became a
question how the relative claims of the English and Norman word should
adjust themselves, which should remain, which should be dropped; or, if
not dropped, should be transferred to some other object, or express
some other relation. It is not of course meant that this was ever
formally proposed, or as something to be settled by agreement; but
practically one was to be taken and one left. Which was it that should
maintain its ground? Evidently, where a word was often on the lips of
one race, its equivalent seldom on those of the other, where it
intimately cohered with the whole manner of life of one, was only
remotely in contact with that of the other, where it laid strong hold
on one, and only slight on the other, the issue could not be doubtful.
In several cases the matter was simpler still: it was not that one word
expelled the other, or that rival claims had to be adjusted; but that
there never had existed more than one word, the thing which that word
noted having been quite strange to the other section of the nation.

Here is the explanation of the assertion made just now--namely, that we
might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the
Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of
its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and
character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it.
Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race,
from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour,
and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception (to be adduced
presently), descend to us from them--'sovereign,' 'sceptre,' 'throne,'
'realm,' 'royalty,' 'homage,' 'prince,' 'duke,' 'count,' ('earl' indeed
is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his 'countess' from the Norman),
'chancellor,' 'treasurer,' 'palace,' 'castle,' 'dome,' and a multitude
more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of 'king' would
make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the
chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new title, not as
overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line
of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in
fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due
time to assert itself anew.

And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all
articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, with chivalry,
with personal adornment, are Norman throughout; with the broad basis of
the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great
features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire; the
divisions of time; three out of the four seasons, spring, summer, and
winter; the features of natural scenery, the words used in earliest
childhood, the simpler emotions of the mind; all the prime social
relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother,
sister,--these are of native growth and un-borrowed. 'Palace' and
'castle' may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe
far dearer names, the 'house,' the 'roof,' the 'home,' the 'hearth.'
His 'board' too, and often probably it was no more, has a more
hospitable sound than the 'table' of his lord. His sturdy arms turn the
soil; he is the 'boor,' the 'hind,' the 'churl'; or if his Norman
master has a name for him, it is one which on his lips becomes more and
more a title of opprobrium and contempt, the 'villain.' The instruments
used in cultivating the earth, the 'plough,' the 'share,' the 'rake,'
the 'scythe,' the 'harrow,' the 'wain,' the 'sickle,' the 'spade,' the
'sheaf,' the 'barn,' are expressed in his language; so too the main
products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats, bere, grass, flax, hay,
straw, weeds; and no less the names of domestic animals. You will
remember, no doubt, how in the matter of these Wamba, the Saxon jester
in _Ivanhoe_, plays the philologer, [Footnote: Wallis, in his _Grammar_,
p. 20, had done so before.] having noted that the names of almost all
animals, so long as they are alive, are Saxon, but when dressed and
prepared for food become Norman--a fact, he would intimate, not very
wonderful; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and
feeding them, but only that they might appear on the table of his
Norman lord. Thus 'ox,' 'steer,' 'cow,' are Saxon, but 'beef' Norman;
'calf' is Saxon, but 'veal' Norman; 'sheep' is Saxon, but 'mutton'
Norman: so it is severally with 'swine' and 'pork,' 'deer' and
'venison,' 'fowl' and 'pullet.' 'Bacon,' the only flesh which perhaps
ever came within the hind's reach, is the single exception. Putting all
this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been
indicated here, we should certainly gather, that while there are
manifest tokens preserved in our language of the Saxon having been for
a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of
English life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good their
claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after
language; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic
records, and the present social condition of England, consent in
bearing witness.

Then again, who could doubt, even if the fact were not historically
attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the
chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that
from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them-
'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,'
'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,'
'zero '?--for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they
reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit
cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history were silent on
the matter, we might conclude, and we know that we should rightly
conclude, that the origins of the monastic system are to be sought in
the Greek and not in the Latin branch of the Church, seeing that with
hardly an exception the words expressing the constituent elements of
the system, as 'anchorite,' 'archimandrite,' 'ascetic,' 'cenobite,'
'hermit,' 'monastery,' 'monk,' are Greek and not Latin.

But the study of words will throw rays of light upon a past infinitely
more remote than any which I have suggested here, will reveal to us
secrets of the past, which else must have been lost to us for ever.
Thus it must be a question of profound interest for as many as count
the study of man to be far above every other study, to ascertain what
point of culture that Indo-European race of which we come, the _stirps
generosa et historica_ of the world, as Coleridge has called it, had
attained, while it was dwelling still as one family in its common home.
No voices of history, the very faintest voices of tradition, reach us
from ages so far removed from our own. But in the silence of all other
voices there is one voice which makes itself heard, and which can tell
us much. Where Indian, and Greek, and Latin, and Teutonic designate
some object by the same word, and where it can be clearly shown that
they did not, at a later day, borrow that word one from the other, the
object, we may confidently conclude, must have been familiar to the
Indo-European race, while yet these several groups of it dwelt as one
undivided family together. Now they have such common words for the
chief domestic animals--for ox, for sheep, for horse, for dog, for
goose, and for many more. From this we have a right to gather that
before the migrations began, they had overlived and outgrown the
fishing and hunting stages of existence, and entered on the pastoral.
They have _not_ all the same words for the main products of the earth,
as for corn, wheat, barley, wine; it is tolerably evident therefore
that they had not entered on the agricultural stage. So too from the
absence of names in common for the principal metals, we have a right to
argue that they had not arrived at a knowledge of the working of these.

On the other hand, identical names for dress, for house, for door, for
garden, for numbers as far as a hundred, for the primary relations of
the family, as father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, for the
Godhead, testify that the common stock, intellectual and moral, was not
small which they severally took with them when they went their way,
each to set up for itself and work out its own destinies in its own
appointed region of the earth. [Footnote: See Brugmann, _Grundriss der
vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen_ (1886), Section
2.] This common stock may, indeed, have been much larger than these
investigations declare; for a word, once common to all these languages,
may have survived only in one; or possibly may have perished in all.
Larger it may very well, but poorer it cannot, have been. [Footnote:
Ozanam (_Les Germains avant le Christianisme_, p. 155): Dans le
vocabulaire d'une langue on a tout le spectacle d'une civilisation. On
y voit ce qu'un peuple sait des choses invisibles, si les notions de
Dieu, de l'ame, du devoir, sont assez pures chez lui pour ne souffrir
que des termes exacts. On mesure la puissance de ses institutions par
le nombre et la propriete des termes qu'elles veulent pour leur
service; la liturgie a ses paroles sacramentelles, la procedure a ses
formules. Enfin, si ce peuple a etudie la nature, il faut voir a quel
point il en a penetre les secrets, par quelle variete d'expressions,
par quels sons flatteurs ou energiques, il a cherche a decrire les
divers aspects du ciel et de la terre, a faire, pour ainsi dire,
l'inventaire des richesses temporelles dont il dispose.]

This is one way in which words, by their presence or their absence, may
teach us history which else we now can never know. I pass to other ways.

There are vast harvests of historic lore garnered often in single
words; important facts which they at once proclaim and preserve; these
too such as sometimes have survived nowhere else but in them. How much
history lies in the word 'church.' I see no sufficient reason to
dissent from those who derive it from the Greek [Greek: kyriakae],
'that which pertains to the Lord,' or 'the house which is the Lord's.'
It is true that a difficulty meets us at the threshold here. How
explain the presence of a Greek word in the vocabulary of our Teutonic
forefathers? for that _we_ do not derive it immediately from the Greek,
is certain. What contact, direct or indirect, between the languages
will account for this? The explanation is curious. While Angles, Saxons,
and other tribes of the Teutonic stock were almost universally
converted through contact with the Latin Church in the western
provinces of the Roman Empire, or by its missionaries, some Goths on
the Lower Danube had been brought at an earlier date to the knowledge
of Christ by Greek missionaries from Constantinople; and this [Greek:
kyriakae] or 'church,' did, with certain other words, pass over from
the Greek to the Gothic tongue; these Goths, the first converted and
the first therefore with a Christian vocabulary, lending the word in
their turn to the other German tribes, to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers
among the rest; and by this circuit it has come round from
Constantinople to us. [Footnote: The passage most illustrative of the
parentage of the word is from Walafrid Strabo (about A.D. 840): Ab
ipsis autem Graecis Kyrch a Kyrios, et alia multa accepimus. Sicut
domus Dei Basilica, i.e. Regia a Rege, sic etiam Kyrica, i.e. Dominica
a Domino, nuncupatur. Si autem quaeritur, qua occasione ad nos vestigia
haec graecitatis advenerint, dicendum praecipue a Gothis, qui et Getae,
cum eo tempore, quo ad fidem Christi perducti sunt, in Graecorum
provinciis commorantes, nostrum, i.e. theotiscum sermonem habuerint. Cf.
Rudolf von Raumer, _Einwirkung des Christenthums auf die
Althochdeutsche Sprache_, p. 288; Niedner, _Kirch. Geschichte_, p. 2.
[It may, however, be as well to remark that no trace of the Greek
[Greek: kyriakae] occurs in the literary remains of the Gothic language
which have come down to us; the Gothic Christians borrowed [Greek:
ekklaesia], as the Latin and Celtic Christians did.]]

Or again, interrogate 'pagan' and 'paganism,' and you will find
important history in them. You are aware that 'pagani,' derived from
'pagus,' a village, had at first no religious significance, but
designated the dwellers in hamlets and villages as distinguished from
the inhabitants of towns and cities. It was, indeed, often applied to
_all_ civilians as contradistinguished from the military caste; and
this fact may have had a certain influence, when the idea of the
faithful as soldiers of Christ was strongly realized in the minds of
men. But it was mainly in the following way that it grew to be a name
for those alien from the faith of Christ. The Church fixed itself first
in the seats and centres of intelligence, in the towns and cities of
the Roman Empire; in them its earliest triumphs were won; while, long
after these had accepted the truth, heathen superstitions and
idolatries lingered on in the obscure hamlets and villages; so that
'pagans' or villagers, came to be applied to _all_ the remaining
votaries of the old and decayed superstitions, although not all, but
only most of them, were such. In an edict of the Emperor Valentinian,
of date A.D. 368, 'pagan' first assumes this secondary meaning.
'Heathen' has run a course curiously similar. When the Christian faith
first found its way into Germany, it was the wild dwellers on the
_heaths_ who were the slowest to accept it, the last probably whom it
reached. One hardly expects an etymology in _Piers Plowman_; but this
is there:

'_Hethene_ is to mene after _heth_,
And untiled erthe.'
B. 15, 451, Skeat's ed. (Clarendon Press).

Here, then, are two instructive notices--one, the historic fact that
the Church of Christ planted itself first in the haunts of learning and
intelligence; another, morally more significant, that it did not shun
discussion, feared not to encounter the wit and wisdom of this world,
or to expose its claims to the searching examination of educated men;
but, on the contrary, had its claims first recognized by them, and in
the great cities of the world won first a complete triumph over all
opposing powers. [Footnote: There is a good note on 'pagan' in Gibbon's
_Decline and Fall_, c. 21, at the end; and in Grimm's _Deutsche Mythol_.
p. 1198; and the history of the changes in the word's use is well
traced in another interest by Mill, _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 271.]

I quoted in my first lecture the saying of one who, magnifying the
advantage to be derived from such studies as ours, did not fear to
affirm that oftentimes more might be learned from the history of a word
than from the history of a campaign. Thus follow some Latin word,.
'imperator' for example; as Dean Merivale has followed it in his
_History of the Romans_, [Footnote: Vol. iii. pp. 441-452.] and you will
own as much. But there is no need to look abroad. Words of our own out
of number, such as 'barbarous,' 'benefice,' 'clerk,' 'common-sense,'
'romance,' 'sacrament,' 'sophist,' [Footnote: For a history of
'sophist' see Sir Alexander Grant's _Ethics of Aristotle_, 2nd ed. vol.
i. p. 106, sqq.] would prove the truth of the assertion. Let us take
'sacrament'; its history, while it carries us far, will yet carry us by
ways full of instruction; and these not the less instructive, while we
restrict our inquiries to the external history of the word. We find
ourselves first among the forms of Roman law. The 'sacramentum' appears
there as the deposit or pledge, which in certain suits plaintiff and
defendant were alike bound to make, and whereby they engaged themselves
to one another; the loser of the suit forfeiting his pledge to sacred
temple uses, from which fact the name 'sacramentum,' or thing
consecrated, was first derived. The word, as next employed, plants us
amidst the military affairs of Rome, designating the military oath by
which the Roman soldiers mutually engaged themselves at the first
enlisting never to desert their standards, or turn their backs upon the
enemy, or abandon their general,--this employment teaching us the
sacredness which the Romans attached to their military engagements, and
going far to account for their victories. The word was then transferred
from this military oath to any solemn oath whatsoever. These three
stages 'sacramentum' had already passed through, before the Church
claimed it for her own, or indeed herself existed at all. Her early
writers, out of a sense of the sacredness and solemnity of the oath,
transferred this name to almost any act of special solemnity or
sanctity, above all to such mysteries as intended more than met eye or
ear. For them the Incarnation was a 'sacrament,' the lifting up of the
brazen serpent was a 'sacrament,' the giving of the manna, and many
things more. It is well to be acquainted with this phase of the word's
history, depriving as it does of all convincing power those passages
quoted by Roman Catholic controversialists from early church-writers in
proof of their seven sacraments. It is quite true that these may have
called marriage a 'sacrament' and confirmation a 'sacrament,' and we
may reach the Roman seven without difficulty; but then they called many
things more, which even the theologians of Rome do not include in the
'sacraments' properly so called, by the same name; and this evidence,
proving too much, in fact proves nothing at all. One other stage in the
word's history remains; its limitation, namely, to the two
'sacraments,' properly so called, of the Christian Church. A
reminiscence of the employment of 'sacrament,' an employment which
still survived, to signify the plighted troth of the Roman soldier to
his captain and commander, was that which had most to do with the
transfer of the word to Baptism; wherein we, with more than one
allusion to this oath of theirs, pledge ourselves to fight manfully
under Christ's banner, and to continue his faithful soldiers and
servants to our life's end; while the _mysterious_ character of the
Holy Eucharist was mainly that which earned for it this name.

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