Samuel Johnson

“ Even if it might seem that delicate shades of feeling and thought were not as expressible by such means as by inflection in other languages, we must remember that the national mind has here created an instrument suited to its own genius, and that it has perhaps left all the more room for the action of such powers as inference and association in interpreting its rigid words. ”

“ Still more impressive is the continued fertility of a force that lacks the highest elements of creative power. Here is no monumental literature, dependent on pyramid, tomb, or temple to hoard it up for ages beyond its natural life: the record is trusted to tissues whose evanescence is as close as possible to that of the spoken word. Its circulation, for all it seems to lack ethereal qualities, has grown wider and swifter with time, and it has freely assimilated with all social elements. ”

“ We should say of the Chinese tone-language that neither Shemitic alphabet nor Aryan inflection is a more positive mark of continued culture than this artificial interweaving of the principle of separating tone from feeling with the whole speech of a people. ”

“ The progress of knowledge consists in the degrees of perception that the highest of these forces are essential to the evolution of all beneath them, the whole to every part. Behind the various schemes of invention, inspiration, its psycho- revelation, evolution, thus pointing to a common truth, lies the fact that language is ultimately referable to the necessary unity of essence with manifestation, and the consequent law that every mental act is also a bodily movement. ”

“ Even the gesture-language of deaf-mutes, which has no "grammar," conveys ideas of relation with surprising ease. Speech is everywhere but the instrument of a force beyond itself, and all grammatical forms hasten, as if gifted with insight, to subserve the spiritual demands for communion and growth, of which they are the product.
The Chinese has special auxiliary words that mark its tenses. It distinguishes cases by prepositions, has a full supply of pronouns, three ways of denoting numerals, and a special sign for the plural, as well as the device of doub- ling words for the same purpose. ”

“ It is no more practicable to fix the moment when man became aware of using words for the purpose of being understood, than to find the same moment in the consciousness of a child. Yet it is certain that the organs of speech are long unconsciously directed towards that result.
Renan has emphasized the fact that these processes differ with different races. [1] But they are always preparatory to that epoch in the growth of every race when it conceives its own language as a whole, and deliberately sets about adapting it to its moral purposes : the birth-time at once of nationality and literature. ”

“ The truth folded in that Hebrew legend is the natural sovereignty of man as mind. Human intelligence does, in fact, give names to all creatures and forms by its own necessary and sovereign laws of expression. And then science analyzes the process, thus poetically signified as a whole, into its natural stages. In the same way we may allow the theory that speech is an "invention," if we divest it of individdal meaning; since humanity everywhere reaches the use of its own powers by a continuous discovery, which is of the nature of creation. ”

“ Thus, in the later English, inflection has been reduced to a minimum: a word is invariable, its special meaning and force being shown by its position, according to the natural syntax of the idea of which it forms a part. This structure, which so closely resembles the Chinese, is in modern languages the sign of advanced intellectual growth; and, as a result of the adaptation of speech to the growing demands of civilization, it enables us to comprehend how large a scope of expression may be secured by the uninflected syllables of that apparently inorganic tongue. ”

“ Chinese ideography, on the other hand, can be studied in all its phases: so distinctly has the national genius for graphic art expressed itself, and so little has it been checked, even by printing, in the transformation of its instruments. [27] The living language, too, with its literary treasures, makes all stages of past construction an open book. ”

“ Had not Confucius taught that the best study for a public man was the Book of Odes, and that a noble style was impossible to one not versed therein? Alas ! wise men no longer used a metaphoric style vivid as the picture-signs ; the poet's song was empty and diffuse, and told neither the feeling nor the life of the people. Notwithstanding this plaintive strain, in which Pan-kou did but follow Confucius, there is development in Chinese literature. It is shown especially in the tendency to evolve and distribute the elements of social good. ”

“ Why should the Chinese express greatness by the syllable fa, the Aryan by ma, the Semite by ga ? " 4 To all appearance, certainly, the Chinese roots are as artificial as can well be conceived, and their simple and regular structure strongly suggests elaboration for purposes of compact and terse expression. 5 Such expression is a marked trait of the national mind, and its influence is everywhere visible in the history of the language as a whole. There is no reason why words should not share the impulse. Their uniformity is the strongest evidence that they are a product of national art. ”

“ And we are thus forced to ascribe to the Chinese,—in explanation of their fertility in every kind of literature in spite of such defects in their instrument,—even greater productive energies than those of that wonderful people to whom the civilization of the classical world, and the shaping of its great literary instrument, the alphabet, is now primarily referred. ”

“ Sound has fared in its literary precisely as in its musical relations. The instrument, whether as written sign or musical invention, has received all attention; while sound itself has never been resolved into to its elements, either as words or as tones. Vocal analysis has never reached an alphabet ; ^ though the words can hardly be called syllables in our sense, since they are not combinations of primary sounds. In what way they are associated with the meanings they bear, we as yet have little or no knowledge. The origination of words is far more obscure than that of written signs. ”

“ It is a law familiar to grammarians that the inflectional stage of language is transient, and develops into another in which the structure of a sentence depends no longer on the mere forms of words, but on the logical relations of the ideas which they represent. ”

“ Chinese literature appeals to the imagination by its amount, but makes little use of this faculty in its constructions. A defective sense of the infinite excludes it from the sphere of sublimity. Such mental attitudes as depend on personal isolation, and on that sustained self-abandonment to awe and wonder which routine and prescription forbid, are here scarcely possible. The Chinese eye is too close to concrete things to get perspective or background of space. ”

“ The capability of such primitive atoms of expression for development into conscious methods of communicating ideas Gesture and feature language. is seen in the great ingenuity of deaf-mutes in holding intercourse by means of gestures before being taught to converse by strict system; and in the preponderance of sign language in the eloquence of savage tribes. Such germs of speech, whether in gesture, facial change, emphasis, or tone, are retained through the whole course of human progress, and form important elements in the highest kinds of art. ”

“ The simplest words may have resulted from analysis, or they may be the scattered debris of complex wholes. In a masterly essay on the Origin of Language, Bleek has developed the state- ment that an interjection was the product of an entire state of mind ; each of these primitive words being a complex of what may be called grammatical germs, which after- wards, by analysis, appear as elements of the sentence, or " parts of speech." It is certainly natural that the mind should at first see things as wholes, and itself act as a whole ”

“ It is extremely doubtful if any of the root syllables to which we reduce a language belonged to the primitive stock of actual words. They are either products of analysis, reached by stripping off prefixes and suffixes, and by other systematic methods of reducing words to an ideal nucleus which was probably never in use by itself ”

“ On the one hand, that transition of inarticulate tongue-gestures into distinct words, in which language begins, no more needs a special inven tor than the organic necessity of self-expression, out of which these primitive movements were born. And, on the other hand, the theory of a revelation in aid of the natural faculties breaks down on the fact that there can be no revelation except the manifestation of these faculties themselves, by whose stable processes alone we can know or act. ”

“ Before indicating these uses, I proceed to trace, as far as I may, the universal laws and processes to which Chinese graphic system invites our attention.
Origin of art of writing; early stages of imitation. The ideograph.
The wonderful art of communicating thought by written signs has three stages,—the ideograph, the rebus, the alphabet. This process is a pressure of materials from below, through attractions to an ideal above. It begins in the instinctive use of the nearest means for bringing thoughts to the eye. The savage not only cuts figures on bark to inform his tribe of his doings ”

“ But the Chinese skips such spheres in his haste for the written sign. His interest in sound is confined to its moral uses on the one hand, and its concrete materials on the other. No people has so earnestly preached the educational uses of music, nor sought so indefatigably to make effective actual music. The number of instruments mentioned in their old books is astonishing.2 In this ethical direction is their ideal attraction. Yet the study of the art and science itself is in its rudiments. ”

“ The highest law of the uni- verse works in the lowest stages of growth. What has been calle$ an invention, or a revelation, is in fact given in the very existence of mind. Whatever may have been the nature of the first articulate sounds, they belong to the same organic and unconscious stages of expression with the still earlier language of gesture and feature. Vowels and consonants are not mere products of analysis. They must have been instinctively uttered in the infancy of man, long before they were combined into positive words. ”

“ This brain is too absorbed in details to confront the vast problems of the free reason, or to dwell in mysteries insoluble by the practical understanding. This distinction of the Yellow Race from the Aryan and the Shemite is the more wonderful, when we consider what it has accomplished in spite of its inferior contemplative power. ”

“ The assured belief of the author is disturbed only by the fear that his theory will be assailed on the ground of the "confusion of tongues;" but not at all by any suspicion that the ideograph is too natural a form of primitive writing to require being traced to one centre for mankind, even though that centre be the all-sufficient family of "Noe." ”

“ The English language illustrates this tendency to simplify and shorten words. the application of a single formula of evolution to all varieties of human speech. That the demands of so vast a civilization should have produced so scanty a vocabulary needs some other explanation than a supposed entire dependence on its primitive resources alone. ”

“ To find mere copying without conscious symbolism, we must, perhaps, go back to the "Stone Epoch," in which quite respectable figures of animals are found, though wanting afterwards in the "Bronze." [18] It is at least a poetic, if not positively historic, theory of the origin of the Gaelic alphabet, the letters of which were named from plants or trees, that these characters represented symbolical knots and ties formed from branching twigs, by which knowledge was conveyed, and which had been the mystic hieroglyph of the druid and the bard. ”

“ There is nothing primitive about them. 2 With few exceptions they neither suggest imitation of natural sounds nor typical relations of the human organs to special forms of natural feeling. 3 It is perhaps true that it would require a more subtle physiology than we now possess to trace such relations in Chinese words. But, on the other hand, instead of proving that to every elementary sound a special meaning is prescribed by organic law, the facts of language seem almost to indicate that every sound may become the symbol of every idea. ”

“ On the other hand, inflection also is but a finer and closer kind of agglutination, peculiar to certain race-qualities, and belongs probably to a much earlier stage than we are wont to suppose : nor is it necessarily preceded by a monosyllabic formation. Thus the disintegrative and constructive processes, so readily recognized in later stages of linguistic growth, probably go on side by side in very early ones. Man, the centre of polarities, at once destroyer and builder, is true to his functions even in these infantile motions of his thought. ”

“ These are the hieroglyphics of the wild; some of them as well done as the Egyptian, and far better than the old Chinese picture-signs. To these goes the complex experience of the nomad in definite wholes, familiar to his fellows. [17] These are his simple science and his intuitive poetry: their metaphoric meaning is his natural history, raised into the language of feeling and imagination, and the morality of fable. He has done more than picture objects: this is dramatic combination. ”

“ The "click languages" of Southern Africa represent a still more primitive expression. Through all such stages runs the one law that every bodily motion is the reverse side of a mental act. The inscrutable cosmic law of mind is essential to the growth of every germ of speech. ”