of Thor Miölnir, So, again, the huge Aloadai derived their name from ἀλωή, the threshing-floor, a word belonging to the same root, as ἄλευρον, corn, existed in the form μάλευρον. From the same source came the Sanskrit Maruts, or Storms, the Latin Mars, the Slavonic Morana, and the Greek ἄρης and ἀρετή. But the root passes into other shades of meaning. Under the form marj or mraj, it gave birth to the Greek μέλγω, the Latin mulgeo and mulceo, the English milk (all meaning, originally, to stroke); and in these words, as well as in the Greek βλάξ, μαλακός, μαλθάσσω, the Latin marcidus and mollis, the Greek μέλι, and Latin mel, it passed into the ideas of softness, sweetness, languor, and decay. From the notion of melting the transition was easy to that of desiring or yearning, and we find it, accordingly, in this sense, in the Greek μελεδώνη and ἔλδομαι (which may on good ground be traced to an older μέλδομαι), and finally, in ἐλπίς, hope. Not less strange, yet not less evident, is the passage of the root jan from its original force of making or producing (as shown in the Sanskrit janas, the Greek γένος, γονεύς, and γονός, the English kin; in the Sanskrit janaka, the Teutonic könig, the English king, in γυνή, and queen, and quean) to the abstract idea of knowing, as seen in the Sanskrit jnâ, the Greek γνῶναι, the Latin gnosco, the English know. The close relationship of the two ideas is best seen in the Teutonic kann (can) and kenne (ken).[1]
Origin of languageThe facts which the growth of these words brings before us are origin of in the strictest sense historical. The later meanings presuppose the language, earlier significations, and the stages are reached in a chronological as well as a philosophical order, while the several developements mark an advance of human thought, and a change in the conditions of human society. From the highest conceptions of the profoundest thinkers we are carried back step by step to the rudest notions of an intellect slowly and painfully awakening into consciousness; and we realise the several phases of primæval life, as vividly as if they had been recorded by contemporary chroniclers. But if the process invests the study of words with a significance which it is impossible to overrate, it completely strips the subject of its mystery. No room is left for theories which traced the origin of speech to a faculty no longer possessed by mankind,[2] when the analysis of words exhibits from the beginning the working of the same unvarying laws.[3] If the- ↑ Max Müller, Lectures on Language, second series, vii.; Chips, ii. 257.
- ↑ Max Müller, Lectures on Language, first series, 370, et seq.
- ↑ Whitney, On Language and the Study of Language, passim. Mr. Whitney has carried to its logical results the proposition that man was born, not with speech, but simply with the capacity for speech.
