direct and intentional. It generally arises from the haughty indolence of the conqueror and his contempt for the bondsman. The masters learn but just enough of the language of their new subjects to make themselves understood; they disregard grammar, reject complicated inflections and variable terminations— those refined expedients of a highly cultivated idiom. The same course is pursued by the vanquished. To be simply understood, not to detain their impatient master, to express their meaning briefly and with despatch, they also drop all that is not strictly necessary, use nouns and verbs only, as we do with foreigners who know not our language, and disregard particles and inflections. This is one mode of decay in languages, subject, like their growth, to certain principles and fixed rules— which prove that conquest, however final and complete, may alter a language but cannot destroy it, thanks to the deep roots which every idiom has in the genius of the race by which it is spoken, and the beautiful harmony between the sentiments of a people and its mode of expression.

THE ETHIC ELEMENT IN LANGUAGE.

CHAPTER XXVI.

145

THE OCCUPATION OF A NATION OPERATING ON LANGUAGE.

Mental peculiarities of nations-The Ethic element in language-In words, in sounds, in structure.

IF climate, external circumstances, and conquest can effect such changes in a language, not less may be expected from the influence of general habits, or social revolutions. The occupation of a people is necessarily reflected in its tongue. Beautifully has Grimm, in his history of the German language, pointed out what it owed successively to the age of the hunter, the shepherd, and the husbandman, and how each portion of this and every other language might be traced back to such epochs. Some nations, which are even now migratory, or still upon the low grade of the hunter, show in their language their great intimacy with the life in nature; thus the Delaware abounds in pictorial expressions, as when it calls an acorn "the nut of the leaf hand." Two branches of the same stock will often bear witness to the occupation of those by whom they were spoken. The continental German has few words, and those mostly of foreign origin, relating to the sea, whilst his brother, the sea-faring Anglo-Saxon, has furnished the world with numerous and beautiful terms for all that concerns navi

gation. The more philosophic character of languages of Eastern nations reflects their habits of meditation; as they pry more into the secret of their own being, their idioms also abound, like those of the Hindoo, with metaphysical abstractions and religious expressions. The peculiar cast of the mind of a nation will gradually mark its language, until the latter reproduces its characteristics by a predominance of words belonging to particular departments of thought or life. The spiritual life of each race is embodied in its language, and affects it not only in certain epochs, or at decisive moments, but through ages of incessant activity. Every generation leaves there the impress of the spirit of its age, and the most powerful and most sensitive, the most penetrating and most contemplative minds of the people, each and all, pour into it their strength and tenderness, their depth and inward being. From period to period, therefore, can the influence of such agencies be traced in the gradual changes which a language has undergone. The French is at first as frank and full of chivalrous naïveté as those were who spoke it; it reflects the urbanity and discretion of a later age, becomes polite and arrogant, delighting in "pointes" and "jeux d'esprit" under Louis XIII., and assumes an elegance and a strange mixture of nobility and ostentation under the Grand Monarque. Who does not almost instinctively perceive in the clear and pure sounds of ancient Greece, and its harmonious, rhythmical construction, another manifestation of their highly refined national mind, which delighted in producing, by the word of the poet or the chisel of the sculptor, those wonders of harmony and just proportions which are still the admiration of our own day? Nor was the objective character of this

LANGUAGE REFLECTS THE CHARACTER OF NATIONS. 147

highly gifted race less clearly expressed in their tongue; here also perfection of form was classic art; here also beauty and success consisted in a fortunate division of words into vowels and consonants, and a strict observance of purely mechanical laws which ruled the length of a syllable and the cadence of a verse. The German, on the other hand, shows as strikingly the subjective character of that nation. In it there is no offensive doubling, and no accumulating of consonants; no mechanical rule determines syllabic quantity; but a word is accented, and a syllable lengthened in proportion to its intrinsic value, as an original root, or as the bearer of a more or less important idea. The external form yields at once to the subjective nature of the sound; the word is respected only as the representative of a spiritual idea. No law of fixed and prescribed rhythm binds the poet; the euphony of the word is determined by its mental music, and his verse is, therefore, apt to be more profound in meaning than melodious in sound.

It is almost a trite saying that the English language is the strongest evidence of the predominant practical tendency of the English nation. It abounds in abbreviations, omissions of relational words and ellipses of all kinds, which made Voltaire sneeringly say, that they gained half an hour in speaking with a Frenchman. The Englishman seems to have applied to his language the great principle of mechanics: to produce with the smallest possible means the greatest possible effect. It is truly a grand sight to mark how a language, by the aid of incredibly small technical means, becomes the mighty instrument of human thought, and proves perfectly well adapted to all purposes of social and political life, not to speak at all of its admirable literature.

This very fact shows the great ethic element of the science of language, and attests its growing importance for the study of man in his inner nature. The mutual relations between the mental life of a people and their language, afford us the means of obtaining a clear insight into their character. Apparently insignificant words, terms of every day life, become thus of great interest to the philosopher, and furnish, when correctly interpreted, a clue to many an apparent mystery. Few have failed to notice the diversity of terms for the appreciation of female beauty in different languages. Is it unimportant, or accidental, that the Frenchman substitutes his "beau” and "joli" for the "hermoso" (formosus) of the Spaniard, whose fastidious eye values the symmetry of form above all other merits? Almost every nation considers a different particular quality as identical with beauty, and expresses it accordingly. Thus the honest, upright Swede, bestows his affections upon a "vacker flicka" (lit. brave girl); the German traces his first perception of the "Schöne " (from Scheinen) to the agreeable action of color and light upon his eye. Proper names, also, pass like current coins from generation to generation, until they lose the sharp outlines of their first forms, but still bear eloquent witness of the very thought that was predominant in the mind of those who first gave or bore them. An Abraham and an Isaac still have the stamp of their sacred origin, and all the names of the Orient are fragrant with poetic and flowery metaphor. The ample, magnificent Roman, in his desire to perpetuate his name, surrounded it with two others as a safeguard against oblivion or confusion, whilst the Scot, the Irishman, and the Welshman of our day still love to refer to their father