Chapter V: Language (2)

So, from the point of view of civilization, language does not matter. Language will always keep up with whatever pace culture sets it. If a new object is invented or a new distinction of thought made, a word is coined or imported or modified in meaning to express the new concept. If a thousand or ten thousand new words are required, they are developed. When it desires to express abstractions like futurity or plurality, any language is capable of doing so, even if it does not habitually express them. If a language is unprovided with formal means for the purpose, such as a grammatical suffix, it falls back on content and uses a word or circumlocution. If the life of a people changes and comes to be conducted along lines that render it frequently important to express an idea like futurity to which previously little attention has been paid, the appropriate circumlocution soon becomes standardized, conveniently brief, and unambiguous. In general, every language is capable of indefinite modification and expansion and thereby is enabled to meet cultural demands almost at once. This is shown by the fact that virtually anything spoken or written can be translated into almost every other language without serious impairment of substance. The æsthetic charm of the original may be lost in the translation; the new forms coined in the receiving language are likely at first to seem awkward; but the meaning, the business of speech, gets expressed.

58. SIZE OF VOCABULARY

The tendency is so instinctive in us to presuppose and therefore to find qualities of inferiority, poverty, or incompleteness in the speech of populations of more backward culture than our own, that a widespread, though unfounded, belief has grown up that the languages of savages and barbarians are extremely limited quantitatively—in the range of their vocabulary. Similar misconceptions are current as to the number of words actually used by single individuals of civilized communities. It is true that no one, not even the most learned and prolific writer, uses all the words of the English language as they are found in an unabridged dictionary. All of us understand many words which we habitually encounter in reading and may even hear frequently spoken, but of which our utterance faculties for some reason have not made us master. In short, a language, being the property and product of a community, possesses more words than can ever be used by a single individual, the sum total of whose ideas is necessarily less than that of his group. Added to this are a certain mental sluggishness, which restricts most of us to a greater or less degree, and the force of habit. Having spoken a certain word a number of times, our brain becomes accustomed to it and we are likely to employ it to the exclusion of its synonyms or in place of words of related but distinguishable meaning.

The degree to which all this affects the speech of the normal man has, however, been greatly exaggerated. Because there are, all told, including technical terms, a hundred thousand or more words in our dictionaries, and because Shakespeare in his writings used 24,000 different words, Milton in his poems 17,000, and the English Bible contains 7,200, it has been concluded that the average man, whose range of thought and power of expression are so much less, must use an enormously smaller vocabulary. It has been stated that many a peasant goes through life without using more than 300 or 400 words, that the vocabulary of Italian grand opera is about 600, and that he is a person above the average who employs more than 3,000 to 4,000 words. If such were the case it would be natural that the uncivilized man, whose life is simpler, and whose knowledge more confined, should be content with an exceedingly small vocabulary.

But it is certain that the figures just cited are erroneous. If any one who considers himself an average person will take the trouble to make a list of his speaking vocabulary, he will quickly discover that he knows, and on occasion uses, the names of at least one to two thousand different things. That is, his vocabulary contains so many concrete nouns. To these must be added the abstract nouns, the verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and the other parts of speech, the short and familiar words that are indispensable to communication in any language. It may thus be safely estimated that it is an exceptionally ignorant and stupid person in a civilized country that has not at his command a vocabulary of several thousand words.

Test counts based on dictionaries show, for people of bookish tastes, a knowledge of about 30,000 to 35,000 words. Most of these would perhaps never be spoken by the individuals tested, would not be at their actual command, but it seems that at least 10,000 would be so controlled. The carefully counted vocabulary of a five and a half year old American boy comprised 1,528 understandingly used words, besides participles and other inflected forms. Two boys between two and three years used 642 and 677 different words.

It is therefore likely that statements as to the paucity of the speech of unlettered peoples are equally exaggerated. He who professes to declare on the strength of his observation that a native language consists of only a few hundred terms, displays chiefly his ignorance. He has either not taken the trouble to exhaust the vocabulary or has not known how to do so. It is true that the traveler or settler can usually converse with natives to the satisfaction of his own needs with two or three hundred words. Even the missionary can do a great deal with this stock, if it is properly chosen. But it does not follow that because a civilized person has not learned more of a language, that there is no more. On this point the testimony of the student is the evidence to be considered.

Dictionaries compiled by missionaries or philologists of languages previously unwritten run to surprising figures. Thus, the number of words recorded in Klamath, the speech of a culturally rude American Indian tribe, is 7,000; in Navaho, 11,000; in Zulu, 17,000; in Dakota, 19,000; in Maya, 20,000; in Nahuatl, 27,000. It may safely be said that every existing language, no matter how backward its speakers are in their general civilization, possesses a vocabulary of at least 5,000 words.

59. QUALITY OF SPEECH SOUNDS

Another mistaken assumption that is frequently made is that the speech of non-literary peoples is harsh, its pronunciation more difficult than ours. This belief is purely subjective. When one has heard and uttered a language all his life, its sounds come to one’s mouth with a minimum of effort; but unfamiliar vowels and consonants are formed awkwardly and inaccurately. No adult reared in an Anglo-Saxon community finds _th_ difficult. Nor does a French or German child, whose speech habits are still plastic, find long difficulty in mastering the particular tongue control necessary to the production of the _th_ sound. But the adult Frenchman or German, whose muscular habits have settled in other lines, tries and tries and falls back on _s_ or _t_. A Spaniard, however, would agree with the Anglo-Saxon as to the ease and “naturalness” of _th_. Conversely, the “rough” _ch_ flows spontaneously out of the mouth of a German or Scotchman, whereas English, French, and Italians have to struggle long to master it, and are tempted to substitute _k_. German _ö_ and French _u_ trouble us, our “short” _u_ is equally resistant to Continental tongues.

Even a novel position can make a familiar sound strange and forbidding. Most Anglo-Saxons fail on the first try to say _ngis_; many give up and declare it beyond their capacity to learn. Yet it is only _sing_ pronounced backward. English uses _ng_ finally and medially in words, not initially. Any English speaker can quickly acquire its use in the new position if, to keep from being disconcerted, he follows some such sequence as _sing_, _singing_, _stinging_, _ringing_, _inging_, _nging_, _ngis_.

So with surd _l_—Welsh _ll_—which is ordinary _l_ minus the accompaniment of vocal cord vibrations. A little practice makes possible the throwing on or off of these vibrations, the “voicing” of speech, for any sound, with as much ease as one would turn a faucet on or off. Surd _l_ thereupon flows with the same readiness as sonant _l_. As a matter of fact we often pronounce it unconsciously at the end of words like _little_. When it comes at the beginning, however, as in the tribal name usually written _Tlingit_, Americans tend to substitute something more habitual, such as _kl_, which is familiar from _clip_, _clean_, _clear_, _close_, _clam_, and many other words. The simple surd _l_ has even been repeatedly described quite inappropriately as a “click”; which is about as far from picturing it with correctness as calling it a thump or a sigh; all because it comes in an unaccustomed position.

Combinations of sounds, especially of consonants, are indeed of variable difficulty for anatomical reasons. Some, like _nd_ and _ts_ and _pf_, have their components telescope or join naturally through being formed in the same part of the mouth. Others, like _kw_ (_qu_), have the two elements articulated widely apart, but for that reason the elements can easily be formed simultaneously. Still others, like _kt_ and _ths_, are intrinsically difficult, because the elements differ in place of production but are alike in method, and therefore come under the operation of the generic rule that similar sounds require more effort to join and yet discriminate than dissimilar ones; for much the same reason that it is on the whole easier to acquire the pronunciation of a wholly new type of sound than of one which differs subtly from one already known. Yet in these matters too, habit rather than anatomical functioning determines the reaction. German _pf_ comes hard to adult Anglo-Saxons, English _kw_ and _ths_ to Germans. So far as degree of accumulation of consonants is concerned, English is one of the extremest of all languages. Monosyllables like _tract_, _stripped_ (_stripd_), _sixths_ (_siksths_), must seem irremediably hard to most speakers of other idioms.

Children’s speech in all languages shows that certain sounds are, as a rule, learned earlier than others, and are therefore presumably somewhat easier physiologically. Sounds like _p_ and _t_ which are formed with the mobile lips and front of the tongue normally precede back tongue sounds like _k_. _B_, _d_, _g_, which are voiced like vowels, tend to precede voiceless _p_, _t_, _k_. Stops or momentary sounds, such as _b_, _d_, _g_, _p_, _t_, _k_, generally come earlier than the fricative continuants _f_, _v_, _th_, _s_, _z_, which require a delicate adjustment of lip or tongue—close proximity without firm contact—whereas the stops involve only a making and breaking of jerky contact. But so slight are the differences of effort or skill in all these cases, that as a rule only a few months separate the learning of the easier from that of the more difficult sounds; and adults no longer feel the differences. The only sound or class of sounds seriously harder than others seems to be that denoted by the letter _r_. Not only do children usually acquire _r_ late, but among all races there appears to be a certain percentage of individuals who never learn to form the sound right, but substitute one approaching _g_ or _w_ or _j_ or _l_. The reason is that _r_ stands alone among speech sounds. It is the only one produced by blowing the tongue into a few gross vibrations; which means that this organ must be held in a special condition of laxness and yet elevated so that the flow of breath may bear on it. However, even this inherent difficulty has been insufficient to prevent many languages from changing easier sounds into _r_.

60. DIFFUSION AND PARALLELISM IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

A phenomenon which language shows more conspicuously than culture, or which is more readily demonstrated in it, is parallel or convergent development, the repeated, independent growth of a trait (§ 89, 100).

Thus sex gender is an old part of Indo-European structure. In English, by the way, it has wholly disappeared, so far as formal expression goes, from noun, adjective, and demonstrative and interrogative pronoun. It lingers only in the personal pronoun of the third person singular—_he_, _she_, _it_. A grammar of living English that was genuinely practical and unbound by tradition would never mention gender except in discussing these three little words. That our grammars specify _man_ as a masculine and _woman_ as a feminine noun is due merely to the fact that in Latin the corresponding words _vir_ and _femina_ possess endings which are recognized as generally masculine and feminine, and that an associated adjective ends respectively in masculine _-us_ or feminine _-a_. These are distinctions of form of which English possesses no equivalents. The survival of distinction between _he_, _she_, and _it_, while _this_ and _the_ and _which_ have become alike irrespective of the sex of the person or thing they denote, is therefore historically significant. It points back to the past and to surviving Indo-European languages.

Besides, Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic express sex by grammatical forms, although like French and Spanish and Italian, they know only two genders, the neuter being unrepresented. These three are the only large language stocks in which sex gender finds expression. Ural-Altaic, Chinese, Japanese, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu, and in general the language families of Asia, Africa, and America do without, although a number of languages make other gender classifications, as of animate and inanimate, personal and impersonal, superior and inferior, intelligent and unintelligent. Sex gender however reappears in Hottentot of South Africa, and in the Chinook and Coast Salish and Pomo languages of the Pacific coast of North America.

How is this distribution to be accounted for? Indo-European, Semitic, and Hamitic occupy contiguous territory, in fact surround the Mediterranean over a tract approximately co-extensive with the Caucasian area. Could they in the remote past have influenced one another? That is, could grammatical sex gender have been invented, so to speak, by one of them, and borrowed by the others, as we know that cultural inventions are constantly diffused? Few philologists would grant this as likely: there are too few authenticated cases of formal elements or concepts having been disseminated between unrelated languages. Is it then possible that our three stocks are at bottom related? Sex gender in that case would be part of their common inheritance. For Semitic and Hamitic a number of specialists have accepted a common origin on other grounds. But for Semitic and Indo-European, philologists, who are professionally exacting, are in the main quite dubious. Positive evidence seems yet to be lacking. Still, the territorial continuity of the three speech groups showing the trait is difficult to accept as mere coincidence. In a parallel case in the realm of culture history, a common source would be accepted as highly probable. Even Hottentot has been considered a remote Semitic-Hamitic offshoot, largely, it is true, because of the very fact that it expresses gender. Philologists, accordingly, may consider the case still open; but it is at least conceivable that the phenomenon goes back to a single origin in these four Old World stocks.

Yet no stretch will account for sex gender in the three American languages as due to contact influence or diffusion, nor relate these tongues to the Old World ones. Clearly here is a case of independent origin or parallel “invention.” Chinook and Coast Salish, indeed, are in contiguity, and one may therefore have taken up the trait in imitation of the other. But Pomo lies well to the south and its affiliations run still farther south. Here sex gender is obviously an independent, secondary, and rather recent growth in the grammar.

In short, it remains doubtful whether sex gender originated three or four or five or six times among these seven language stocks; but it evidently originated repeatedly.

Other traits crop out the world over in much the same manner. A dual, for instance, is found in Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian, Eskimo, and a number of other American languages. The distinction between inclusive and exclusive _we_—_you and I_ as opposed to _he and I_—is made in Malayo-Polynesian, Hottentot, Iroquois, Uto-Aztecan.

A true nominative case-ending, such as Latin and the other varieties of Indo-European evince, is an exceedingly specialized formation; yet is found in the Maidu language of California. Articles, in regard to which Indo-European varies, Latin for instance being without, while its Romance daughter tongues have developed them, recur in Semitic, in Polynesian, and in several groups of American languages, such as Siouan and Hokan. The growth in Romance is significant because of its historicity, and because it was surely not due to imitation of an unrelated language. That is, French developed its articles independently and secondarily; a fact that makes it probable that many languages in other parts of the world, whose history we do not know, developed theirs in a parallel manner, as a product of wholly internal causes—“invented” them, in short, although wholly unconsciously.

A trait found in a large proportion of the American languages is the so-called incorporation of the object pronoun (§ 51). The objective pronoun, or an element representing it, is prefixed or suffixed to the verb, made a part of it. The process is familiar enough to us from Indo-European so far as the subject is concerned: in Latin _ama-s_, _ama-t_, _ama-nt_, the suffixes express “you, he, they” and pronouns comparable to the English ones—independent words—are usually omitted. The _-s_ in _he love-s_ is the sole survival of the process in modern English. None of the older Indo-European tongues however showed an inclination to affix similar elements for the objects, although there are some approaches in a few recent languages of the family: Spanish _diga-me_, “tell me,” and _mata-le_, “kill him,” for instance. Semitic on the other hand, and Basque, do “incorporate” objective elements, whereas most Asiatic and some American languages do not. Many other instances of parallel or convergent traits could be cited.

This greater frequency of parallel developments in language than in culture is perhaps in part due to easier demonstrability in the field of speech. But in the main the higher frequency seems real. Two reasons for the difference suggest themselves.

First, the number of possibilities is small in language, so far as structure is concerned. The categories or concepts used for classifying and for the indication of relations are rigorously limited, and so are the means of expression. The distinctions expressed by gender, for instance, may refer to sex, animateness, personality, worth, shape, position, or possibly one or two other qualities; but there they end. If a language recognizes gender at all, it must have gender of one of these few types. Consequently there is some probability of several unconnected languages sooner or later happening upon the same type of gender. Similarly, for the kinds of number, and of case, and so on, that are denotable. These larger categories, like gender and number and case, are not numerous. Then, the means of expressing such relational and classificatory concepts are limited. There is position or relative order of words; compounding of them; accretions of elements to stems, namely prefixes, infixes, and suffixes; reduplication, the repetition of part or the whole of words; internal changes by shift of vowel or accent within words; and therewith the types of grammatical means are about exhausted. The number of possible choices is so small that the law of accidental probability must cause many languages to hit upon the same devices.

A second reason for the greater frequency of parallelism in language is that structural traits appear to resist diffusion by imitation to a considerable degree. Words are borrowed, sometimes freely, almost always to some degree, between contiguous languages; sounds considerably less; grammar least of all. That is, linguistic content lends itself to diffusion readily, linguistic form with difficulty.

At bottom, the same holds of culture. Specific elements of culture or groups of such elements diffuse very widely at times and may be said to be always tending to diffuse: the wheel, for instance, smelting of metals, the crown as a symbol of royalty, the swastika, Buddhism. The relations of elements among themselves, on the other hand, change by internal growth rather than external imitation. Of this sort are the relations of the classes and members of societies, the fervor with which religion is felt, the esteem accorded to learning or wealth or tradition, the inclination toward this or that avenue of subsistence or economic development. By conquest or peaceful pressure or penetration one people may shatter the political structure or social fabric of another, may undermine its conservatism, may swerve its economic habits. But it is difficult to find cases of one people adopting such tendencies or schemes of cultural organization in mere imitation of the example of another, as it will adopt specific culture content—the wheel or crown or Buddhism, for instance—from outside, often readily. The result is that culture relations or forms develop spontaneously or from within rather than as a result of direct taking over. Also, the types of culture forms being limited in number, the same type is frequently evolved independently. Thus monarchical and democratic societies, feudal or caste-divided ones, priest-ridden and relatively irreligious ones, expansive and mercantile or self-sufficient and agricultural nations, evolve over and over again. On the whole, comparative culture history more often deals with the specific contents of civilization, perhaps because events like the spread of an invention can be traced more definitely and exactly than the rather complex evolutions of say two feudal systems can be compared. The result is that diffusions seem to outweigh parallels; as is set forth in several of the chapters that follow this one (§ 105, 111, 127).

In comparative linguistics, on the other hand, interest inclines to the side of form rather than content; hence the parallelisms or convergences are conspicuous. If as much attention were generally given to words as to grammar, and if they could be traced in their prehistoric or unrecorded wanderings as reliably as many culture traits have been, it is probable that diffusion would loom larger as a principle shaping human speech. There are words that have traveled almost as far as the objects they denote: _tobacco_ and _maize_, for example. And the absorption of words of Latin origin into English was as extensive as the absorption for over a thousand years of Latin, Christian, and Mediterranean culture by the English people—went on as its accompaniment and result.

61. CONVERGENT LANGUAGES

Parallel development in speech form is not restricted to traits like sex gender and object incorporation. It may affect whole languages. Chinese a long time ago became an extremely analytical or “isolating” language. That is, it lost all affixes and internal change. Each word became an unalterable unit. Sentences are built up by putting together these atoms. Grammatical relations are expressed by the order of words: the subject precedes the predicate, for instance. Other ideas that in many languages are treated formally, such as the plural or person, are expressed by content elements, that is, by other words: _many_ for the plural, separate pronouns instead of affixes for person, and so on. The uniformly monosyllabic words of Chinese accentuate this isolating character, which however does not depend intrinsically upon the monosyllabism. In the Indo-European family, as already mentioned, there has been a drift in the same direction during the last two thousand years. This drift toward loss of formal mechanisms and toward the expression of grammar by material elements or their position only, has been evident in all branches of Indo-European, but has been most marked in English. The chief remnants of the older inflectional processes in spoken English of to-day are four verb endings, _-s_, _-ed_, _-ing_, _-en_; three noun endings, the possessive _-’s_ and the plurals _-s_ and _-en_, the latter rare; the case ending _-m_ in _whom_, _them_; a few vowel changes for plurals, as in _man_—_men_, and _goose_—_geese_; and perhaps two hundred vowel changes in verbs, like _sing_, _sang_, _sung_. Compared with Latin, Sanskrit, or even primitive Germanic, this brief list represents a survival of possibly a tenth of the original synthetic inflectional apparatus. That is, English has gone approximately nine tenths of the way towards attaining a grammar of the Chinese type. A third language of independent origin, Polynesian, has traveled about the same distance in the same direction. Superficially it is less like Chinese in that it remains prevailingly polysyllabic, but more like it in having undergone heavy phonetic attrition. This then is a clear case of entire languages converging toward a similar type.

Another instance is found in the remarkable resemblances in plan of structure of Indo-European, especially in its older forms, and of the Penutian group of languages in native California. Common to these two families are an apparatus of similar cases, including accusative, genitive, locative, ablative, instrumental; plural by suffix; vowel changes in the verb according to tense and mode; a passive and several participles and modal forms expressed by suffixes; pronouns either separate or expressed by endings fused with the tense-modal suffixes. Thus, the processes which make English _sing_, _sang_, _sung_, _song_, or _bind_, _bound_, _band_, _bond_, are substantially identical with those which have produced in Penutian Yokuts such forms as _shokud_, pierce, _shukid-ji_, pierced, _shokod_, perforation or hole, _shikid_, piercer or arrow. In short, most of the traits generally cited as constituting the Indo-European languages typically inflectional, reappear in Penutian, and of course independently as regards their origin and history.

These would appear to be phenomena comparable to the growth of feudalism in China more than a thousand years earlier than in Europe, or the appearance of a great centrally governed empire in Peru similar to the ancient monarchies of the Orient.

62. UNCONSCIOUS FACTORS IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

The unceasing processes of change in language are mainly unconscious. The results of the change may rise to the recognition of the speakers; the act of change, and especially its causes, happen without awareness of those through whose minds and mouths they take place. This holds of all departments of language: the phonetics, the structural form, largely even the meaning of words. When a change has begun to creep in, it may be observed and be consciously resisted on the ground of being incorrect or vulgar or foreign. But the underlying motives of the objectors are apparently as unknown to themselves as the impulses of the innovators.

If this view seem extreme, it can easily be shown that the great bulk of any language as it is, apart from any question of change, is employed unconsciously. An illiterate person will use such forms as _child_, _child’s_, _children_, _children’s_ with the same “correctness” as a philologist, yet without being able to give an explanation of the grammatical ideas of singularity and plurality, absoluteness and possession, or to lay down rules as to the manner of expression of these ideas in English. Grammar, in short, exists before grammarians, whose legitimate business is to uncover such rules as are already there. It is an obviously hasty thought that because grammar happens to be taught in schools, speech can be grammatical only through such formal teaching. The Sanskrit and Greek and Latin languages had their declensions and conjugations before Hindu and Greek and Roman scholars first analyzed and described them. The languages of primitive peoples frequently abound with complicated forms and mechanisms which are used consistently and applied without suspicion of their existence. It is much as the blood went round in our bodies quite healthily before Harvey’s discovery of its circulation.

The quality of unconsciousness seems not to be a trait specifically limited to linguistic causes and processes, but to hold in principle of culture generally. It is only that the unconsciousness pervades speech farther. A custom, a belief, an art, however deep down its springs, sooner or later rises into social consciousness. It then seems deliberate, planned, willed, and is construed as arising from conscious motives and developing through conscious channels. But many social phenomena can be led back only to non-rational and obscure motives: the wearing of silk hats, for instance. The whole class of changes in dress styles spring from unconscious causes. Sleeves and skirts lengthen or shorten, trousers flare or tighten, and who can say why? It is perhaps possible to trace a new fashion to Paris or London, and to a particular stratum of society there. But what is it that in the winter of a particular year makes every woman—or man—of a certain social group wear, let us say, a high collared coat, or a shoe that does not come above the ankle, and the next year, or the tenth after, the reverse? It is insufficient to say that this is imitation of a leader of fashion, of a professional creator of style. Why does the group follow him and think the innovation attractive and correct? A year earlier the same innovation would have appeared senseless or extravagant to the same group. A year after, it appeals as belated and ridiculous, and every one wonders that style was so tasteless so short a time ago.

Evidently the æsthetic emotions evoked by fashions are largely beyond the control of both individuals and groups. It is difficult to say where the creative and imitative impulses of fashion come from; which, inasmuch as the impulses obviously reside somewhere in human minds, means that they spring from the unconscious portions of the mind. Evidently then our justification of the dress styles we happen at any time to be following, our pronouncing them artistic or comfortable or sensible or what not, is secondary. A low shoe may be more convenient than a high one, a brown one more practical than a black one. That that is not the reason which determines the wearing of low brown shoes when they are customarily worn, is shown by the fact that at other times high black ones are put on by every one. The reasons that can be and are given are so changeable and inconsistent that they evidently are not the real reasons, but the false secondary reasons that are best distinguished as rationalizations. Excuses, we should call them with reference to individual conduct.

What applies to fashion holds also of manners, of morals, and of many religious observances. Why we defer to women by rising in their presence and passing through a door behind them; why we refrain from eating fish with a knife or drinking soup out of a two handled cup, though drinking it from a single handled one is legitimate; why we do not marry close kin; why we remove our hats in the presence of the deity or his emblems but would feel it impious to pull off our shoes; all the thousands of prescriptions and taboos of which these are examples, possess an unconscious motivation.

Such cases are also illustrations of what is known as the relativity of morals. The Jew sets his hat on to worship, the Oriental punctiliously slips out of his shoes. Some people forbid the marriage of the most remote relatives, others encourage that of first cousins, still others permit the union of uncle and niece. It would seem that all social phenomena which can be brought under this principle of relativity of standard are unconsciously grounded. This in turn implies the unconscious causation of the mores, those products of the social environment in which one is reared and which one accepts as the ultimate authority of conduct. As mores are those folkways or customs to which an emotional coloring has become attached, so that adherence to the custom or departure from it arouses a feeling respectively of approval or disapproval, it is evident that the origin of folkways generally is also unconscious, since there seems no reason why the emotions or ethical affect enveloping a customary action should incline more than the custom itself to spring up unconsciously.

It has become recognized that the average man’s convictions on social matters remote from him are not developed through examination of evidence and exercise of reason, but are taken over, by means of what is sometimes denominated the “herd instinct,” from the society or period in which he happens to have been born and nurtured. His belief in democracy, in monotheism, in his right to charge profit and his freedom to change residence or occupation, have such origin. In many instances it is easy to render striking proof of the proposition: as in the problems of high tariff, or the Athanasian creed, or compulsory vaccination, which are so technical or intricate as to be impossible of independent solution by evidence and argument by the majority of men. Time alone would forbid: we should starve while making the necessary research. And the difference between the average man’s attitude on such difficult points and the highly gifted individual’s attitude toward them or even toward simpler problems, would seem to be one of degree only.

Even on the material sides of culture, unconscious motivation plays a part. In the propulsion of ships, oars and sails fluctuated as the prevalent means down almost to the period of steam vessels. It would be impossible to say that one method was logically superior to the other, that it was recognized as such and then rationally adhered to. The history of warfare shows similar changes between throwing and thrusting spears, stabbing and hewing swords, light and heavy armor. The Greeks and Macedonians in the days of their military superiority lengthened their lances and held them. It no doubt seemed for a time that a definite superiority had been proved for this type of weapon over the shorter, hurled javelin. Then the Romans, as part of their legionary tactics, reverted to the javelin and broke the Macedonian phalanx with their pilum. But the Middle Ages again fell back on the thrusting lance. The Greeks successfully developed heavy armor, until Athenian light armed troops overcame Spartan hoplites. The Macedonians reintroduced heavy armament, which held sway in Europe until after the prevalence of firearms. But the last few years have brought the rebirth of the helmet.

These fashions in tools and practical appliances do not alter as fast as modern dress styles, and part of their causes can often be recognized. Yet there seems no essential difference, as regards consciousness, between the fluctuation of fashions in weapons—or navigation or cooking or travel or house building—and, let us say, the fluctuation of mode between soft and stiff hats or high and low shoes. It may be admitted to have been the open array of the legion that led to the pilum; the bullet that induced the abandonment of the breast plate, shrapnel that caused the reintroduction of the helmet. But these initiating factors were not deliberate as regards the effects that came in their train; and in their turn they were the effects of more remote causes. The whole chain of development in such cases is devious, unforeseen, mainly unforeseeable. At most there is recognition of what is happening; in general the recognition seems to become full only after the change in tool or weapon or industrial process has become completed and is perhaps already being undermined once more.

Of course purely stylistic alterations—and linguistic innovations—also possess their causes. When the derby hat or the pronoun _thou_ becomes obsolete, there is a reason, whether or not we know it or do not see it clearly.

The common causal element in all these changes may be called a shift in social values. Perhaps practical chemical experience has grown, and gunpowder explodes more satisfactorily; or an economic readjustment has made it possible to equip more soldiers with guns. The first result is a greater frequency of bullet penetrations in battle; the next, the abandonment of the breast plate. Increasing wealth or schooling or city residence makes indiscriminate familiarity of manners seem less desirable than at an earlier period: brusque _thou_ begins to yield to indirect plural _you_. Or again, new verbs, all of regular conjugation like _love_, _loved_, are formed in English or imported from French until their number outweighs that of the ancient irregular ones like _sing_, _sang_. A standardizing tendency is thereby set going—“analogizing” is the technical term of the philologist—which begins to turn irregular verbs into regular ones: _dived_ replaces _dove_, just as _lenger_ becomes _longer_, and _toon_ becomes _toes_. There is the same sort of causality in one of these phenomena as in another. The individual or community that leaves off the breast plate or stiff hat is more likely to be aware that it is performing the act than the one that leaves off saying _toon_ or _thou_. But it does not seem that there is an essential difference of process. Linguistic and æsthetic changes are most fully unconscious, social ones next, material and economic ones perhaps least. But in all cases change or innovation is due to a shift of values that are broader than the single phenomenon in question, and that are held to impulsively instead of reasonably. That is why all social creations—institutions, beliefs, codes, styles, speech forms—prove on impartial analysis to be full of inconsistencies and irrationalities. They have sprung not from weighed or reasoned choices but from impulsive desires and emotionally colored habits.

The foregoing discussion may be summarized as follows. Linguistic phenomena and processes are on the whole more deeply unconscious than cultural ones, without however differing in principle. In both language and culture, content is more readily imparted and assimilated than form and enters farther into consciousness. Organization or structure in both cases takes place according to unconscious patterns, such as grammatical categories, social standards, political or economic points of view, religious or intellectual assumptions. These patterns attain recognition only in a late stage of sophistication, and even then continue to alter and to be influential without conscious control. The number of such linguistic and social patterns being limited, they tend to be approximately repeated without historic connection. Partially similar combinations of such patterns sometimes recur, producing languages or cultures of similar type. But established patterns, and still more their combinations, replace each other with difficulty. Their spread therefore takes place through the integral substitution of one language or culture for another, rather than by piecemeal absorption. This is in contrast to the specific elements of which language and culture consist—individual words, mechanical devices, institutional symbols, particular religious ideas or actions, and the like. These elements absorb and diffuse readily. They are therefore imitated more often than they are reinvented. But linguistic and cultural patterns or structures growing up spontaneously may possess more general resemblance than historic connection.

63. LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL STANDARDS

It does not follow that because social usages lack a rational basis, they are therefore unworthy of being followed, or that standards of conduct need be renounced because they are relative, that is, unconsciously founded and changing. The natural inclination of men being to regard their standards of taste, behavior, and social arrangement as wholly reasonable, perfect, and fixed, there follows a first inclination to regard these standards as valueless as soon as their emotionality and variability have been recognized. But such a tendency is only a negative reaction against the previous illusion when this has disappointed by crumbling. The reaction is therefore in a sense a further result of the illusion. Once the fundamental and automatic assumption of fixity and inherent value of social patterns has been given up, and it is recognized that the motive power of behavior in man as in the other animals is affective and unconscious, there is nothing in institutions and codes to quarrel with. They are neither despicable nor glorious; no more deserving in virtue of their existence to be uprooted and demolished than to be defended as absolute and eternal. In some form or other, they are inevitable; and the particular form which they take at this time or that place is always tolerably well founded, in the sense of being adapted with fair success, or having been but recently well adapted, to the conditions of natural and social environment of the group which holds the institution, code, or standard.

That this is a sane attitude is more easily shown in the field of language than of culture, because, language being primarily a mechanism or means, whereas in culture ends or purposes tend more to obtrude, it is easier to view linguistic phenomena dispassionately. Grammars and dictionaries, for instance, are evidently the result of self-consciousness arising about speech which has previously been mainly unconscious. They may be roughly compared to social formulations like law codes or written constitutions or philosophic systems or religious dogmas, which are also representations of usages or beliefs already in existence. When grammarians stigmatize expressions like _ain’t_ or _them cows_ or _he don’t_ as “wrong,” they are judging an innovation, or one of several established conflicting usages, by a standard of correctness that seems to them absolute and permanent. As a matter of actuality, the condemned form may or may not succeed in becoming established. _He don’t_, for example, might attain to correctness in time, although _ain’t_ is perhaps less likely to become legitimized, and _them cows_ to have still smaller prospect of recognition. That a form departs from the canon of to-day of course no more proves that it will be accepted in future than that it will not. What is certain is that if it wins sufficient usage, it will also win sanction, and will become part of the standard of its time.

Linguistic instances like these differ little if at all in principle, in their involved psychology, from the finding of the Supreme Court that a certain legislative enactment is unconstitutional and therefore void; or from the decision of a denomination that dancing or playing golf on Sunday is wicked; or from the widespread sentiment that breaking an unpopular law like that on liquor prohibition is morally justifiable. The chief point of divergence would seem to be that a court is a constituted body endowed with an authority which is not paralleled on the linguistic side, at any rate in Anglo-Saxon countries; although the Latin nations possess Academies whose dicta on correctness of speech enjoy a moral authority approximating the verdicts of a high court.

It is also of interest to remember that the power of nullifying legislation was not specifically granted the Supreme Court by the Constitution of the United States, but that the practice grew up gradually, quite like a speech innovation which becomes established. Certain elements in the American population look upon this power as undesirable and therefore take satisfaction in pointing out its unsanctioned origin. The majority on the other hand feel that the situation on the whole works out well, and that a Supreme Court with its present powers is better than the risk of a Court without power. Still, it remains curiously illogical that the preservation of the Constitution should take place partly through the extra-constitutional functioning of a constitutional body. In principle such a case is similar to that of grammarians who at the same time lay down a rule and exceptions to the rule, because the contradictory usages happen to be actually established.

Codes, dogmas, and grammars are thus normally reflections rather than causes. Such influence as they have is mainly in outward crystallization. They produce a superficial appearance of permanence. In the field of speech, it is easy to recognize that it is not grammarians that make languages, but languages that make grammarians. The analogous process evidently holds for culture. Lawgivers, statesmen, religious leaders, discoverers, inventors, therefore only seem to shape civilization. The deep-seated, blind, and intricate forces that shape culture, also mold the so-called creative leaders of society as essentially as they mold the mass of humanity. Progress, so far as it can objectively be considered to be such, is something that makes itself. We do not make it. Our customary conviction to the contrary is probably the result of an unconscious desire not to realize our individual impotence as regards the culture we live in. Social influence of a sort we do have as individuals. But it is a personal influence on the fortune and careers of other individual members of society, and is concerned largely with aims of personal security, relative dominance, or affection among ourselves. This obviously is a different thing from the exertion of influence on the form or content of civilization as such.

64. RAPIDITY OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE

The rate of change in language is circumscribed by the principles of linguistic causality that have been discussed, but it remains an obscure subject in detail. The opinion often held that unwritten languages necessarily alter faster than written ones, or that those of savages are less stable than the tongues of civilized men, is mainly a naïve reflection of our sense of superiority. It contravenes the principles just referred to and is not supported by evidence. Occasional stories that a primitive tribe after a generation or two was found speaking an almost made-over language are unconscious fabrications due to preconception and supported by hasty acquaintance, faulty records, misunderstanding, or perhaps change of inhabitants. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, has probably changed less in four hundred years than Spanish; Quechua, that of the Incas, no more. English has apparently altered more than any of the three in the same period. Dozens of native tongues, some of them from wholly rude peoples, were written down in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Spanish and other priests, and in most instances the grammars and dictionaries prove to be usable to-day.

Cultural alteration would appear to work toward speech change chiefly in certain ways. New things need new names; new acts mean new thoughts and new ideas require new words. These may be imported; or they may be made out of elements already in the language; or old words may undergo a shift of meaning. In any event, the change is mainly on the side of vocabulary. The sounds of a language are generally much less affected; its plan of structure least of all. The introduction of a new religion or development of a new form of government among a people need not be accompanied by changes in the grammar of their speech, and usually are not, as abundant historical examples prove.

While the causes of grammatical innovation are far from clear, contact with alien tongues is certainly a factor in some degree. An isolated off-shoot of a linguistic group is generally more specialized, and therefore presumably more altered, than the main body of dialects of the family. The reason is that the latter, maintaining abundant reciprocal contact, tend to steady one another, or if they swerve, to do so in the same direction. The speakers of the branch that is geographically detached, however, come to know quite different grammars so far as they learn languages other than their native one, and such knowledge seems to act as an unconscious stimulus toward the growth of new forms and uses. It is not that grammatical concepts are often imitated outright or grammatical elements borrowed. Acquaintance with a language of different type seems rather to act as a ferment which sets new processes going.

It is in the nature of the case that direct specific evidence of changes of this character is hard to secure. But comparison of related languages or dialects with reference to their location frequently shows that the dialects which are geographically situated among strange languages are the most differentiated. This holds of Abyssinian in the Semitic family, of Brahui in Dravidian, of Singhalese in the Indic branch of Indo-European, of Hopi and Tübatulabal in Shoshonean, of Arapaho and Blackfoot in Algonkin, of Huastec in Mayan.

But it is also likely that languages differ among each other in their susceptibility to change, and that the same language differs in successive periods of its history. It is rather to be anticipated that a language may be in a phase now of rapid and then of retarded metabolism, so to speak; that at one stage its tendency may be toward breaking down and absorption, at another toward a more rigid setting of its forms. Similarly, there is reason to believe that languages of certain types of structure are inherently more plastic than others. At any rate, actual differences in rate of change are known. The Indo-European languages, for instance, have perhaps without exception altered more in the three thousand years of historic record than the Semitic ones. And so in native America, while contemporary documentary record is of course wanting, the degree of differentiation within the two stocks suggests strongly that Athabascan is more tenaciously conservative than Siouan.

There are also notable differences in the readiness to borrow words ready-made. English is distinctly more hospitable in this regard than German, which tends rather to express a new concept by a new formation of old elements. The South American languages appear to have borrowed more words from one another than those of North America. In this matter the type of language is probably of some influence, yet on the whole cultural factors perhaps predominate. The direction and degree of cultural absorption seem to determine the absorption of words to a considerable measure. Here writing is certainly potent. The Latin and French element in English, the Sanskrit and Arabic element in the Malaysian languages, were brought in to a large extent by writing, and would evidently have remained much smaller if the historic contacts had been wholly oral. This is perhaps the most important way in which writing exerts influence on the development of spoken language; an influence which in other respects is usually overestimated.