...
We may now consider (I) how far Plato in the Cratylus has discovered the
true principles of language, and then (II) proceed to compare modern
speculations respecting the origin and nature of language with the
anticipations of his genius.
I. (1) Plato is aware that language is not the work of chance; nor does he
deny that there is a natural fitness in names. He only insists that this
natural fitness shall be intelligibly explained. But he has no idea that
language is a natural organism. He would have heard with surprise that
languages are the common work of whole nations in a primitive or semi-
barbarous age. How, he would probably have argued, could men devoid of art
have contrived a structure of such complexity? No answer could have been
given to this question, either in ancient or in modern times, until the
nature of primitive antiquity had been thoroughly studied, and the
instincts of man had been shown to exist in greater force, when his state
approaches more nearly to that of children or animals. The philosophers of
the last century, after their manner, would have vainly endeavoured to
trace the process by which proper names were converted into common, and
would have shown how the last effort of abstraction invented prepositions
and auxiliaries. The theologian would have proved that language must have
had a divine origin, because in childhood, while the organs are pliable,
the intelligence is wanting, and when the intelligence is able to frame
conceptions, the organs are no longer able to express them. Or, as others
have said: Man is man because he has the gift of speech; and he could not
have invented that which he is. But this would have been an 'argument too
subtle' for Socrates, who rejects the theological account of the origin of
language 'as an excuse for not giving a reason,' which he compares to the
introduction of the 'Deus ex machina' by the tragic poets when they have to
solve a difficulty; thus anticipating many modern controversies in which
the primary agency of the divine Being is confused with the secondary
cause; and God is assumed to have worked a miracle in order to fill up a
lacuna in human knowledge. (Compare Timaeus.)
Neither is Plato wrong in supposing that an element of design and art
enters into language. The creative power abating is supplemented by a
mechanical process. 'Languages are not made but grow,' but they are made
as well as grow; bursting into life like a plant or a flower, they are also
capable of being trained and improved and engrafted upon one another. The
change in them is effected in earlier ages by musical and euphonic
improvements, at a later stage by the influence of grammar and logic, and
by the poetical and literary use of words. They develope rapidly in
childhood, and when they are full grown and set they may still put forth
intellectual powers, like the mind in the body, or rather we may say that
the nobler use of language only begins when the frame-work is complete.
The savage or primitive man, in whom the natural instinct is strongest, is
also the greatest improver of the forms of language. He is the poet or
maker of words, as in civilised ages the dialectician is the definer or
distinguisher of them. The latter calls the second world of abstract terms
into existence, as the former has created the picture sounds which
represent natural objects or processes. Poetry and philosophy--these two,
are the two great formative principles of language, when they have passed
their first stage, of which, as of the first invention of the arts in
general, we only entertain conjecture. And mythology is a link between
them, connecting the visible and invisible, until at length the sensuous
exterior falls away, and the severance of the inner and outer world, of the
idea and the object of sense, becomes complete. At a later period, logic
and grammar, sister arts, preserve and enlarge the decaying instinct of
language, by rule and method, which they gather from analysis and
observation.
(2) There is no trace in any of Plato's writings that he was acquainted
with any language but Greek. Yet he has conceived very truly the relation
of Greek to foreign languages, which he is led to consider, because he
finds that many Greek words are incapable of explanation. Allowing a good
deal for accident, and also for the fancies of the conditores linguae
Graecae, there is an element of which he is unable to give an account.
These unintelligible words he supposes to be of foreign origin, and to have
been derived from a time when the Greeks were either barbarians, or in
close relations to the barbarians. Socrates is aware that this principle
is liable to great abuse; and, like the 'Deus ex machina,' explains
nothing. Hence he excuses himself for the employment of such a device,
and remarks that in foreign words there is still a principle of
correctness, which applies equally both to Greeks and barbarians.
(3) But the greater number of primary words do not admit of derivation
from foreign languages; they must be resolved into the letters out of which
they are composed, and therefore the letters must have a meaning. The
framers of language were aware of this; they observed that alpha was
adapted to express size; eta length; omicron roundness; nu inwardness; rho
accent rush or roar; lambda liquidity; gamma lambda the detention of the
liquid or slippery element; delta and tau binding; phi, psi, sigma, xi,
wind and cold, and so on. Plato's analysis of the letters of the alphabet
shows a wonderful insight into the nature of language. He does not
expressively distinguish between mere imitation and the symbolical use of
sound to express thought, but he recognises in the examples which he gives
both modes of imitation. Gesture is the mode which a deaf and dumb person
would take of indicating his meaning. And language is the gesture of the
tongue; in the use of the letter rho accent, to express a rushing or
roaring, or of omicron to express roundness, there is a direct imitation;
while in the use of the letter alpha to express size, or of eta to express
length, the imitation is symbolical. The use of analogous or similar
sounds, in order to express similar analogous ideas, seems to have escaped
him.
In passing from the gesture of the body to the movement of the tongue,
Plato makes a great step in the physiology of language. He was probably
the first who said that 'language is imitative sound,' which is the
greatest and deepest truth of philology; although he is not aware of the
laws of euphony and association by which imitation must be regulated. He
was probably also the first who made a distinction between simple and
compound words, a truth second only in importance to that which has just
been mentioned. His great insight in one direction curiously contrasts
with his blindness in another; for he appears to be wholly unaware (compare
his derivation of agathos from agastos and thoos) of the difference between
the root and termination. But we must recollect that he was necessarily
more ignorant than any schoolboy of Greek grammar, and had no table of the
inflexions of verbs and nouns before his eyes, which might have suggested
to him the distinction.
(4) Plato distinctly affirms that language is not truth, or 'philosophie
une langue bien faite.' At first, Socrates has delighted himself with
discovering the flux of Heracleitus in language. But he is covertly
satirising the pretence of that or any other age to find philosophy in
words; and he afterwards corrects any erroneous inference which might be
gathered from his experiment. For he finds as many, or almost as many,
words expressive of rest, as he had previously found expressive of motion.
And even if this had been otherwise, who would learn of words when he might
learn of things? There is a great controversy and high argument between
Heracleiteans and Eleatics, but no man of sense would commit his soul in
such enquiries to the imposers of names...In this and other passages Plato
shows that he is as completely emancipated from the influence of 'Idols of
the tribe' as Bacon himself.
The lesson which may be gathered from words is not metaphysical or moral,
but historical. They teach us the affinity of races, they tell us
something about the association of ideas, they occasionally preserve the
memory of a disused custom; but we cannot safely argue from them about
right and wrong, matter and mind, freedom and necessity, or the other
problems of moral and metaphysical philosophy. For the use of words on
such subjects may often be metaphorical, accidental, derived from other
languages, and may have no relation to the contemporary state of thought
and feeling. Nor in any case is the invention of them the result of
philosophical reflection; they have been commonly transferred from matter
to mind, and their meaning is the very reverse of their etymology. Because
there is or is not a name for a thing, we cannot argue that the thing has
or has not an actual existence; or that the antitheses, parallels,
conjugates, correlatives of language have anything corresponding to them in
nature. There are too many words as well as too few; and they generalize
the objects or ideas which they represent. The greatest lesson which the
philosophical analysis of language teaches us is, that we should be above
language, making words our servants, and not allowing them to be our
masters.
Plato does not add the further observation, that the etymological meaning
of words is in process of being lost. If at first framed on a principle of
intelligibility, they would gradually cease to be intelligible, like those
of a foreign language, he is willing to admit that they are subject to many
changes, and put on many disguises. He acknowledges that the 'poor
creature' imitation is supplemented by another 'poor creature,'--
convention. But he does not see that 'habit and repute,' and their
relation to other words, are always exercising an influence over them.
Words appear to be isolated, but they are really the parts of an organism
which is always being reproduced. They are refined by civilization,
harmonized by poetry, emphasized by literature, technically applied in
philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on the border-ground of human
knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from individual genius, and come
with a new force and association to every lively-minded person. They are
fixed by the simultaneous utterance of millions, and yet are always
imperceptibly changing;--not the inventors of language, but writing and
speaking, and particularly great writers, or works which pass into the
hearts of nations, Homer, Shakespear, Dante, the German or English Bible,
Kant and Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages. They carry with them
the faded recollection of their own past history; the use of a word in a
striking and familiar passage gives a complexion to its use everywhere
else, and the new use of an old and familiar phrase has also a peculiar
power over us. But these and other subtleties of language escaped the
observation of Plato. He is not aware that the languages of the world are
organic structures, and that every word in them is related to every other;
nor does he conceive of language as the joint work of the speaker and the
hearer, requiring in man a faculty not only of expressing his thoughts but
of understanding those of others.
On the other hand, he cannot be justly charged with a desire to frame
language on artificial principles. Philosophers have sometimes dreamed of
a technical or scientific language, in words which should have fixed
meanings, and stand in the same relation to one another as the substances
which they denote. But there is no more trace of this in Plato than there
is of a language corresponding to the ideas; nor, indeed, could the want of
such a language be felt until the sciences were far more developed. Those
who would extend the use of technical phraseology beyond the limits of
science or of custom, seem to forget that freedom and suggestiveness and
the play of association are essential characteristics of language. The
great master has shown how he regarded pedantic distinctions of words or
attempts to confine their meaning in the satire on Prodicus in the
Protagoras.
(5) In addition to these anticipations of the general principles of
philology, we may note also a few curious observations on words and sounds.
'The Eretrians say sklerotes for skleroter;' 'the Thessalians call Apollo
Amlos;' 'The Phrygians have the words pur, udor, kunes slightly changed;'
'there is an old Homeric word emesato, meaning "he contrived";' 'our
forefathers, and especially the women, who are most conservative of the
ancient language, loved the letters iota and delta; but now iota is changed
into eta and epsilon, and delta into zeta; this is supposed to increase the
grandeur of the sound.' Plato was very willing to use inductive arguments,
so far as they were within his reach; but he would also have assigned a
large influence to chance. Nor indeed is induction applicable to philology
in the same degree as to most of the physical sciences. For after we have
pushed our researches to the furthest point, in language as in all the
other creations of the human mind, there will always remain an element of
exception or accident or free-will, which cannot be eliminated.
The question, 'whether falsehood is impossible,' which Socrates
characteristically sets aside as too subtle for an old man (compare
Euthyd.), could only have arisen in an age of imperfect consciousness,
which had not yet learned to distinguish words from things. Socrates
replies in effect that words have an independent existence; thus
anticipating the solution of the mediaeval controversy of Nominalism and
Realism. He is aware too that languages exist in various degrees of
perfection, and that the analysis of them can only be carried to a certain
