Language as Interpreter of Life

BLOOD is thicker than water, but language is more than blood. Let any one debate with a modern Greek the question of old Greek pronunciation, and undertake to show him by the coolest of scientific demonstration that it differed in essential points from the modern, and he will find he has trespassed upon holy ground. Phonetic law is for these Greeks a pollution of the sacred temple grounds of patriotism. Belief in the essential identity of the modern language with the old stands as a fundamental article of the national faith. A Greek who would deny it is a high traitor. What wonder ? It is the birthright of its tongue which gives his people its first claim, if not its only claim, to recognition as a nation.

When, on the evening of October 20, 1827,in the harbor of Navarino, the boom of the last cannon echoing back from the cliffs of old Sphakteria proclaimed the end of Turkish domination in the land of old time swayed by the Hellenes, there stood sponsorless and nameless before the nations of the world a population, — not yet a people, but sundry scattered and ill-ordered groups of peoples whose habitations chanced to plant foundations on the sacred soil. It was the same old crumpled, sea-gnawed, sunbathed Greece ; but council house and temple, palæstra and theatre, colonnade and college garden, were gone, — all was gone that gave the ancient life of the dwellers in the land its outward form and semblance of a settled order, and made it a nation’s life. Vague memories, half caricatured upon the traditions of a glorious past, floated in the air that hung over ruin and site ; but where was the people to enter in to the inheritance, or who might claim “ to know the manner of the god of the land ” ?

Neither the leading of goats to pasture over the slopes of Hymettus, the tilling of the battlefield of Man tinea, nor the sailing of fisher - boats through the blue waters of Salamis gave to men a claim on the traditions and name of the past, or provided a bond of union by virtue of which shepherds, peasants, traders, and sailors could be named a people and a nation. The population was of various blood, — Greek, Albanian, Slavic, Frankish, Wallachian. But with all their diversity of blood, these men had been for once united in the sharing of a common risk and the performance of one common task, — the expulsion of the Turk. The fact of this union in risking and achieving gave the impulse and the occasion to the formation of nationality ; the conditions under which the union was inspired gave the bond its insignia and its form. From the hearths of the monasteries and from the lamps and altars of the chapels, the enthusiasm of revolt had gathered its sacred fire. The old Byzantine Christian Church was the one institution surviving in that wasted land not only to remind men of a life higher than that of “ bread alone,” but to maintain, by even the slenderest thread, connection with a past that had meaning and body and purpose such as vindicate the existence of nationality.

The language of the Church, kept alive in the ritual of the chapels and in the decadent learning of the monasteries, was in substance the language in which Demosthenes spoke and Paul wrote. Feeble as it might seem in comparison with the old standards, it still kept its connection with the old, and was capable of receiving limitless refreshment from the sources of the old. The various Greek patois of the peasants and villagers, on the other hand, had long since passed beyond the bounds of literary or national expression. They were now mere vanishing, enfeebled remnants of greatness, suited to the chatterings of goatherds and children and the hagglings of petty traders, or the chantings mayhap of the folk, but incapable of giving an expression to the wants and aspirations of a nation or of a people that had part in the doings of the great outer world. The same was true of the Albanian patois spoken by large masses of the population, and especially by most of the sailor folk whose prowess on the sea had carried no small part of the burden of war. So it fell out that the new national consciousness arising from the ashes of the Revolution clothed itself in the language of the Church which erstwhile had been the nation. The Greek patois were lifted through this higher type of the language into the channels of connection with the old Greek speech that once had been the vehicle of a world civilization, and a modern Greek, in outward form at least, half ancient, half recent, arose as the standard language of the new nation, and became at once its educator, its voice, and its emblem. In form, in manner, in materials, it stands a living monument to the methods and the spirit in which the Greek nationality of the nineteenth century was requickened and reëstablished from the scanty remnants of the old. Even when it drapes the classical himation over the vulgate trousers and waistcoat of to-day in what seems fantastic masquerading, it pays thereby its tribute to the weirdly sentimental spirit of Philhellenism that has helped to make and maintain the state.

The lesson taught here in the small has, like so many of the products of this little land, its larger lesson in terms of greater things. Every standard language, as distinguished from local folk speech and dialect, has been in the history of the world the exponent of some special movement in intercourse and civilization, the garb of some special type of human culture, the voice of some special form of instituted order among men, — commercial, political, religious, or cultural. The very genius of a standard makes it something extended beyond its natural habitat to serve the conveniences of a wider intercourse. The standard divisions of time which deal in multiples like 12,60,360, hark back to the old Chaldean astronomers, from whom came too the " 60 minas make a talent,” as well as the gross and the quire. Wherever 60 seconds make a minute the ancient empire of Mesopotamia has not utterly ceased to be. The conflict of the metre and the foot is still in substance a contest between the innovating Frenchman and the sturdy conservatism of English influence.

Latin, once the speech of a petty district by the Tiber, became the standard medium of intercourse for a mighty empire, absorbed into itself the spirit of the institution, became its outward embodiment, and survives to-day as a monument to the essential character of that institution better and truer than Colosseum or Forum. Its present place in education, in literature, in law, is determined by the place that Rome still holds in the organized life of Europe and in all organized life whose sources are in European civilization. A visible emblem is the place it still holds as the language of the Roman Church; for the Roman Church is in all reality the Roman Empire expressed in terms of the things of the soul. The schoolboy learns from his Latin, if he learns it well, more than words, rules, paradigms, maxims, bits of history, or scraps of mythology; he drinks in the life of old Rome and the spirit of its institutions, — law, order, organization, authority. There is nothing left us, now that the Romans are gone, so Roman as Latin.

What Latin is to the Roman Church Sanskrit is to the Brahmin. Two thousand years and more ago it parted company with the vernacular, and ever since has been maintained as a more or less artificial standard, serving to express and embody the culture which made the classical age and literature of India. What the Romanic languages are to Latin, the various Prakrits of India are to Sanskrit; and one of these in particular, the Pali, as the language of the earliest Buddhistic writings, has become a standard, lifted above time and habitat, and is the distinctive idiom of Buddhism.

When, with the emergence of a national spirit in the form of the Protestant Revolution, German speech in the sixteenth century pushed its way through the crust of Latin that had hitherto overspread the entire literary expression of the land, there was no German language ; there was only a tangle of local dialects, none of which had been deemed worthy of conveying a message to Germany at large, few of aught else than the quickvanishing message of the lips, and that in the common homely matters of everyday village life. In the fire and zeal of a great national uprising, of a struggle that was a battle of language standards as well as of creeds, the German language sprang into existence. It came in response to a need, but it was men, and the message of men to men struggling for expression, that made it. The idiom which carried the burden of the great controversy melted with the heat of conviction, and moulded itself into the form of a language that could voice the thought of a whole people.

The conquest of Italy made Latin, the crystallization of the Brahmin caste made Sanskrit, the preaching of Buddha made Pali, the dominance of Attic standard Greek overall the dialects of Greece is a reflection of Athens’s fourth-century dominance in the sphere of thought and art, the modern Greek is daughter of the Revolution, German as a nation’s speech is an outgrowth of Luther’s Reformation. Most great standard languages will be found to have taken their rise in some movement of human interest that stirred the lives and thought of men toward a larger sympathy and a larger intercourse than the things of village, clan, or cult demanded. It is the same class of movements which have begotten nationalities, at least the nationalities of the modern type.

The ancient state was founded upon religion, and the bond of religion was in its genesis a bond of blood. The modern state tends to obscure the bonds and boundaries of blood, and to substitute for them the ties of common interest and common conditions. Trade, intercourse, like customs, like forms of life, like forms of belief, like forms of thought, count more than blood. And so it comes about that more and more, as the world grows riper, the paths of nationality and of language unite. What levels the way for the one gives life and being to the other. The oldest state is the tribe, and its watchword is blood; the modern state is the nation, and the emblem which the course of history is choosing for it unmistakably is language. The toils and trials of a quasi-nation like AustriaHungary, with its plurality of tongues, only prove the rule. What we have here is a refuge, not a nation.

But a national language is more than an emblem ; more than a flag or a coat of arms ; more than a monument to a great historic nation - making act, which may serve as a rallying point for patriotism and the sentiment of nationality. It is all that, but it is thousandfold more. A written creed or constitution which cannot be amended or reinterpreted may stand as a landmark and a sacred relic, and appeal to the reverence and even the affection of men ; but a very different thing it is from a body of usage and precedent fashioned in historic testings, such as is the English constitution. That bears within itself at any given time a record of past experience in composite. A man’s character at any given time is said to be the resultant of all the conscious choices of his life. Mistakes have left their scars, self-denials have toughened the fibre of the will, lies have left behind them perverted vision of the truth, deeds of mercy have made their deposit of mercifulness.

Language is of like sort with character. Every speaker in all the generations, in every word he has uttered, has helped to build it. Light-winged words, they sped through the barriers of the lips, but could not be lost. They either tended to strengthen the standing norm, — and that either in hearer, speaker, or both, — or they played their part in starting divergence and change or in loosening the foundations of the norm.

The crude methods of the new-born science of language are as yet but playing with the pebbles on the shore of a mighty deep. We read of etymologies, but they only tear away with cumbrous hand the silken warp from the cocoons of words, and miss the pattern and the motive of the weaving, and ignore the life within. Words are not words without context, motive, and life. Synonyms galore printed in Italics cannot compass a description of their life values. The clumsy devices of letters cannot yield a vision of even their bodily form. To know them really one must know them warm, — warm with the life blood of actual living speech ; one must have met them under every variety of life conditions ; one must have “ summered and wintered ” with them.

We arrange them in paradigms, and think we have compassed and measured them; but these paradigm pigeonholes only betray the limitations of our own petty logic. We try to cram words into compartments under our so-called rules of syntax, and the splendid failure which results offers the finest demonstration of the narrow range of reason as compared with the great background of soul life, the vast reaches of the divine indefinite.

Grammar is to the average healthy human being the driest and deathliest of all the disciplines. Except as it serves a temporary practical purpose of offering a first approach to the acquisition of a language, or of presenting to maturer study a convenient tentative and artificial classification of certain facts, it brings spiritual atrophy and death to him who gives and him who takes. Treated as an end unto itself, it desiccates teacher and pupil alike. The fact requires neither demonstration nor illustration. The reason for it, too, is not far to seek. Grammar represents the application of a method that is lifeless to a subject-matter that is life, and the discrepancy between the method and the matter determines the spiritual revulsion against the former. It is a case of inevitable and eternal misfit. Grammar as we practice it is derived from the Sophists and the Stoics, and is still, however much we try to disguise the fact, based upon a confidence in logic, or something in the ordering faculties of the intellect close akin thereto. But language, which is the property of life and personality in the whole, will not yield its secret to the meagre analyses of reason and intellect, which are by their nature partial, which see as in a glass darkly, and not face to face. Language cannot be unlocked by logic ; it can be unlocked only by sympathy.

It would not be my purpose to deny for a moment the possibility of a science of language or to question its utility ; far from it. As little would I undertake to deny the possibility of a science of theology, merely because it fails, as it notably does, to cover and represent the facts of living faith. But what we must recognize, what we must in honesty confess, though it gives us pain to do it, is that the finest endeavors of the finest scientific grammar, like all other processes which apply the purely objective tests to the products of life, and preeminently of soul life, can only serve at the best as correctives and stimulants of vision in detail; they cannot induct any human being into real understanding and appreciation of the life of the whole. Learn and know Meyer’s Grammar and the Kühner-Blass from title-page to index, and what a pitiful travesty that by itself would yield upon a real sympathy with the magnificent idiom in which — not merely through which by its content of idea, but in which itself — Sophocles conveys the touch of the Hellenic fervors and unfolds the Hellenic attitude toward the universe of being : love, awe, joy, hope, regret, simplicity, harmony, beauty, temperance.

If language were a mass of conventional cipher, like a Volapük or the price marks of a secretive hardware shop ; if the ordering faculties that haunt the superficies of mind had dominated it entire and formed it, as they have the price marks, then would there be some hope for grammar. A grammar of Volapük is an eminently satisfactory thing. A code telegram can be translated by purely mechanical processes. The translation, however, of a literary masterpiece, in which language is at the highest flush of vitality, is one of the severest and most evasive tasks to which human endeavor can address itself. You can transfer patches of flesh and skin, and even infuse blood, but you cannot transfer life from one body to another. Words do not live in dictionaries any more than plants in herbariums. They live in the usage of living men. Every word, every phrase, has it subtle, unanalyzable coloring, derived from myriad associations in myriad sentences, as impossible of summary and final description as a personality.

A word has a personal character, and wherever it goes it carries like a human being its character with it; so that in every use of it there is implicit the power and the possibility of standing for vastly more than the special emergency seemed at first to demand. Jest and poetry depend for much of their flavor, as did old-fashioned town meetings, upon this habit of taking along the entirety of individual character. Put language under the same severe restraints which depress personality and turn the town meeting into a battalion of soldiers, and you have the prose of the law code and the auctioneer’s catalogue. But poetry, which always antedates prose, as the Vedic hymns antedate the Brahmanas, and Homer and the dramatic poets the orators, is far more in accord with the inner spirit and purpose of speech than is prose. Language is indeed, as Emerson said, only “fossil poetry.”

Language is through and through a social product. Schleicher, the fine old botanist - philologist of Jena, tried his best in vain to apply to it the analogies of his flower beds and kitchen garden. Stammbaums and branches have gone the way of roots and stems. The laws of sound-change, instead of being like the laws of nature governing the growth of plants and the revolving of planets, prove to be founded on the tendency to social compromise, in the necessity which men are under of getting along together and understanding one another, and resemble, therefore, the laws which govern dress coats, dinner calls, the holding of forks, and the wording of wedding cards.

Even in the outward characteristics of their structure, languages represent in the grand style of summary the dominant social conditions in the history of those peoples who speak them. Thus, at one end of the line stand the so-called agglutinative languages, at the other the monosyllabic. The agglutinative languages, of which the Bantu tongues of Africa and the Mongolian of Central Asia afford illustration, represent the experience of widely scattered populations which maintain over a vast extent of territory a desultory communication with one another. Corresponding to the necessities of the case which demand that every idea and phase of idea be explicitly indicated, these languages are perfectly transparent; that is, perfectly “ regular ” in structure. Like modifications of idea are always expressed by like inflexional elements. Little or nothing is left to be inferred. Every division and subdivision of the thought is duly tagged and labeled.

The Chinese goes to the other extreme. Here almost everything is implicit. Far more is left to be inferred from context, word order, and intonation than is really presented in bodily form. The monosyllabic dabs in which the Chinaman speaks are mere running hints, —a shorthand of speech condensed to the uttermost. They are the natural products of a stable, long-established, densely-compacted civilization, in which unwritten precedent outweighs written statutes ; in which multifold social compromise has finally made life artificial in place of natural, and its acts symbolic rather than presentive. The monosyllabic languages have been produced under tremendous social pressure. They represent, from the artistic as well as the historical point of view, the most finished type of human speech. The maximum of idea is implicit in their structure. They contain the minimum of mechanism for the maximum of expression.

We might multiply illustrations of the way in which language, sensitive as milk to its environment, takes upon it the impress of social conditions as they develop and pass. The modern rapid development of intercourse is, for instance, making itself slowly but irresistibly felt in dulling the colors which mark the linguistic areas on the map of the civilized world. Not only interchange of loan-words, but in far subtler form the acceptance of common syntactical moulds, is gradually lifting the great European culture languages toward the levels of a common medium of communication. While the question whether English, French, Russian, is to become the universal language is awaiting the slow unfolding of political and commercial history, this deep and subtle drift into unity is steadily advancing toward a distant goal. It means no more than that the languages, in their chameleon habit, are taking on the colorings of internationalism.

Man is first and foremost a social being. Language is the social bond, and therefore man’s badge of membership in the body social ; but more than that, it is the embodiment of the nature and spirit of that social fabric to which the individual owns allegiance, and through which he becomes a man. If that social spirit is the logos, then language is the logos made flesh. Man as a member of society is assigned to his place and is made by the language he commands. More or less unconsciously we even locate men by the language they use. So fine and exacting are our tests, for instance, that one who is to command a hearing as representative of a type of the higher civilization of a nation must, on platform or in pulpit, speak in the recognized standard of that civilization. The dialectal colorings of province and district, much as they may delight us in other ways and for other purposes, carry insensibly with them the impression of limitation and provincialism. Through the language a man speaks, or the form of it he uses at any given time, he betrays the scheme of human culture and the order of human society with which at the moment he is in sympathy.

These considerations concerning the place and meaning of language in human society determine what we believe is its place and meaning in the education of mankind. Through language nations in the modern sense are made and held together. Through language the individual is lifted into membership in the nation. The child comes into the world and finds a language awaiting him. The acquiring of that language constitutes his first education. Compared with this all other education is of entirely secondary importance. Observation of the processes by which a child acquires its mother tongue teaches that it is not the language which is drilled into the child’s mind, but it is the child’s mind which is fitted into and expanded into the language. Words and expressions come to the child, not as full and finished globules of thought, but as empty shells which he must fill with idea, as spools on which he must wind the warp of thought. Words are not defined for the child. If they were, he could not understand. He must learn their various uses from single experiences, and by slow and gradual processes arrange the concepts, which by associations, metaphors, and metonymies cling together in the mind and usage of the language community, into their compact place within the shell or about the spool. In doing this he is coming into possession of the folk wisdom of the folk; he is coming into accord with the mind of the historic-social body of which he is to be a member; he is learning to estimate and quote the values of the world in terms of the standard coinage of his place and time ; he is making himself standing ground in human society ; he is forming and building a pou sto for the exercise and development of his free personality. Without school or schoolmaster, textbook or pedagogue, the child and then the man are brought before the seat of the greatest and wisest teacher their lives are ever in all their scope to have, and this teacher is their mother tongue. It is a teacher whose learning they are never to exhaust, and whose stimulating influence toward mental growth is not likely soon to fail. Happy are they who are born into the inheritance of a speech developed and enriched by highest literary use and by long traditions of noble expression ; for then it will be a teacher to age as well as to youth. Happy are they who, through the formal education of the schools, are brought into touch with the life attitude of other peoples as embodied in their languages, and especially of those peoples whose spiritual life has blended into the early currents of our own.

It is particularly, however, for the years of earlier mental development that language plays its chief involuntary part as educator. That which it does now without conscious direction provides the basis and guidance for use in formal and systematic education. It points the way to what is the prime consideration in education, even if it does not swallow up and include all others.

We educate a human being to the end that his personality may most nearly fulfill its inherent possibilities within the human society of which it is to be a part. We do not seek primarily, if we are wise, to fill the mind with various knowledge; for we know that the mind is not so much a reservoir as a mill wheel, not so much a storehouse as a laboratory, not so much a receptacle as an instrument. We do not, if we are wise, rear the child in isolation from life or in untamed individualism ; for we know that man is born to live in society, and that society is historically conditioned, and that the life man lives is part of a succession, — a historical life.

What we really do first of all, if we are wise, is to take the budding bit of individuality in hand, and induce it, constrain it, persuade it, cajole it, overawe it, and, if need be, spank it, into recognition of the existing order. The first thing a child has to learn is to do as it is told to do. To become a historical being is its mission, and as soon as possible it must recognize the authority of the historically constituted order. The acceptance of the authority of society is the gate through which one passes into freedom. The stern law it is, like the rough hand of the paidagogos, that, leads us unto Christ ; it is through obedience and conformity to the spirit that dominates the world that we come to a realization of ourselves, and to our birthright of freedom as sons of God. In the isolation of selfhood we sit without the pale and yearn for the husks the swine eat, but once we have set our faces toward home and order there is enough and to spare. This is what is meant, alike in the statutes of society, in the constitution of the state, and in the oracles of God, by the “ consent of the governed.”

It is the mission of language and literature in education to bring young individual life into accord with the moulds of historical life. Through word and phrase and sentence, through tale and myth and verse, mind is quickened to enter in and occupy these nests and shells that have sheltered other human thought. Mind is expanded in the moulds of mind ; not in the lifeless geometric cells of logic and reasoning, but in the life cells shapen to contain the products of the soul, — the whole, the living soul.

The practically logical mind is a healthy, well-nourished mind, — nothing more nor less. Such mind is produced by feeding it during the years of development upon healthy normal food, not upon the embalmed food of the logicians or the chemists. The Chinese mandarins, trained upon language and innocent of pure logic, are said to be the keenest practical logicians of the world. The forms of reasoning, indeed, to which a child is stimulated in catching the meanings of sentences of the mother speech, or which a boy uses in making out the meaning of a sentence in his Cæsar from the imperfect data of words and syntax, are the forms of contingent reasoning, the ones which are almost exclusively employed in the decisions and judgments of actual life. Men who pretend to regulate their lives according to well - constructed syllogisms — and it must be pretense or self-deception, for there are no such syllogisms in life — are generally regarded as impossible men. They are what are politely known as cranks.

The methods of thought which are based upon objective tests, and which, whether applied in the field of the humanities or of nature studies, we call scientific, have their place in education as well as those we have discussed ; but in elementary education they are to be introduced gradually, and as correctives rather than as staples. Nature study need not be scientific any more than language study. We are not concerned here with any conflict between the study of nature and the study of the humanities, nor are we making protest against the scientific method of studying either ; we are insisting merely upon the educational value that inheres in the direct study of language and of language as literature.

Literary training can never be disjoined from language study. There never was a suggestion more perverse than that which recommends the substitution of translations for originals, on the theory that all the great and choice ideas can thus be exploited as well as through the toil of learning the language. What, pray, are these ideas ? Why not pick them out, arrange them alphabetically by initial words, and print them in double columns like market lists ? The reason straight and simple is that they are inseparable from the language. Language is no mere vehicle. It is itself in large part its own content.

The main educative purposes of literary study and of language study are, in the end, one and the same. They approach the mysteries of the folk mind directly. They deal face to face with the soul and its expression. Contact and sympathy are their instruments ; not the lens, the scalpel, and the syllogism. They throw wide open the window and look straight out into life and the day.

So long as intimations of the larger life, the life social and the life spiritual, have power to call man out of himself and his cell, these studies have their place in the schooling of mankind ; for the reach of the soul is higher than the clutch of the hand.

Benjamin Ide Wheeler.