Pussy and Her Language :: XIII. LANGUAGE OF DIVINE ORIGIN.

XIII. LANGUAGE OF DIVINE ORIGIN.

One of our greatest poets says,

"'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo of the sense."

The words buzz, crackle, crash, blow, rattle, roar, hiss, whistle, and many others of a like nature and construction, were evidently formed to imitate the sounds themselves. Sometimes the word expressing an object is formed to imitate the sound produced by that object, as waye, cuckoo, whippoorwill, whisper, hum. I have been thus particular in calling the attention of the reader to these beautiful characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon because it is the language of the Cat in so far as word-signs are used in it for want of action to express the ideas or as conjunctives more particularly. The smooth and liquid passages from your poets, which express onomatopoeia, are but echoes from that most beautiful of all languages, that of the Cat. Such are the word-signs of Goldsmith,

"The whitewashed wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnished clock that clicked behind the door."

To the credit of the Cat language it must be said that, while it is esteemed a great beauty in writing and conversation, as well as speaking, when the word-signs selected for the expression of an idea convey, by their sound, some resemblance to the subject which they express, the Cat language contains none but such words. You will remember the most wonderful poem written in the English language, and notice the word-painting in the following extract from "Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard,"

"For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind!"

Pope, also, in his "Essay on Criticism," in a manner though different yet scarcely less expressive, gives a verbal representation of his idea, by the selection of his terms in the following:

"These equal syllables alone require,
Though oft the ear the open vowels tire,
While expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."

And, once again, Pope says,

"A needless Alexandrian ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags his slow length along.
Soft is the strain when zephyrs gently blow,
And the smooth streams in smoother numbers flow,
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should, like the torrent, roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labors, and the words move slow.
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main."

I am of the opinion that language is of Divine origin, and that it was put into the mouth of the Cat, the same as it was put into the mouth of Adam, by the Almighty. In this opinion I am encouraged by many of your most prominent writers. In fact, it is the only sensible theory upon which we can stand. But the very first expression of a desire was a sign by action of the muscles, frequently followed by a sound-sign. This has often been demonstrated when infants have been placed, for a year or more, in a room where no speech or expressive action has met either eye or ear, and it has not yet been doubted. Many men have written upon the subject of the origin of language, from every point of view, the majority of these endeavoring to account for its existence without allowing that it is of Divine origin. Undoubtedly the first man, Adam, could talk as naturally as he could hear, see and taste. Speech was a part of his endowment. Is there anything more wonderful in man's talking than in a bird singing, save that speech is a higher order of utterance? Dumb nature, so called, performs marvels every day as wonderful as man talking. The honey bee builds its cell, ignorant of the fact that such a construction is a solution of a problem which had troubled men for centuries to solve—namely, at what point should certain lines meet so as to give the most room with the least material and have the greatest strength in building? This problem is said to have been worked out by a Mr. McLaughlin, a noted Scotch mathematician, who arrived at his conclusion by a laborious and careful fluctionary calculation. To his surprise and the surprise of the whole world, such lines and such a building were found in the common bee cell. Is there anything preposterous in my assertion that the same Creator who gave to the bee the mathematical instinct, could endow animals with the instinct of speech? In proportion as the English language has clung to the purest of Anglo-Saxon words it has gained strength throughout the world, while there have gone down before it the real British, the Cymeric or Welsh, Erse or Irish, the Gaelic of Scotland, and the Manx of the Isle of Man. The British Keltic is entirely gone, and the rest are only local. Besides these, it ousted from the island of Norse the Norman French and several other tongues which had sought to plant themselves on English soil.

My illustrious comrade, Prevost Paradol, one of our most learned Frenchmen, says: "Neither Russia nor united Germany, supposing that they should attain the highest fortune, can pretend to impede that current of things, nor prevent that solution, relatively near at hand, of the long rivalry of European races for the ultimate colonization and domination of the universe. The world will not be Russian, nor German, nor French, alas! nor Spanish. It will be Anglo-Saxon."

It was one of Britain's greatest poets who wrote the following characteristic lines expressive of the force of languages:

"Greek's a harp we love to hear,
Latin is a trumpet clear;
Spanish, like an organ, swells,
Italian rings its bridal bells;
France, with many a frolic mien,
Tunes her sprightly violin;
Loud the German rolls his drum,
When Russia's clashing cymbals come
But Britain's sons may well rejoice,
For English is the human voice."

It is a noticeable fact that there have been five hundred distinct languages, and about three thousand five hundred colloquials, or about five thousand different forms of speech since Adam's time. At the present time five hundred of the primary are dead, so that there are about nine hundred now spoken on all the earth, with about two thousand five hundred colloquials.

Canon Farrar says: "We may, therefore, assert, as Dante did, more than five centuries ago,

"That man speaks, is nature's prompting;
Whether thus or thus she leaves to you
As you do most affect it."

I am surprised at some of the heedlessness of your philologists, and do not wonder that your children have a hard time of it acquiring your language when they are so carelessly misdirected in many instances, misled in many more and given rules which even the fully developed mind of a man is unable to comprehend. It is not from one alone of your linguists that I take this definition of the word "language." "Language is the expression of our ideas by articulate sounds, such as the signs of the ideas." Your Noah Webster, who gathered together all dictionaries extant, including all scientific words and definitions, and dumped them into his big book, gives the definition of the word "language" as follows: "The expression of ideas by words or significant articulate sounds for the communication of thought."

Now, if these definitions are correct, and you choose to accept them as being so, what becomes of the "language" of the deaf and dumb?

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