but yet one which covers with its influence half the realm of language, which involves one of the most curious of problems, and which raises one of the most important questions in the whole domain of philological speculation: I mean the apparatus of NEGATION. It may be out of our reach to attain to the primitive history of the negative particle; but if we are to judge of its source by the track upon which it is found, if origin is to be judged of by kindred, if the unknown is to be surmised by that which is known, it is in this portion of the fabric of speech-namely in the flat pronounadverbs that we must assign its birthplace to the negative particle. The negative particle in our language is simply the consonant N. In Saxon it existed as a word NE, but we have lost that word, and it is now to us a letter only, which enters into many words, as into no, not, nought, none, never. In French, however, this particle is still extant as a separate word; as. Je ne vois pas.' 505. The following parallel quotations exhibit this particle both in its simple state, and also in combinations, some familiar, some strange to us : Anglo-Saxon, 995. Ne geseah næfre nán man God, buton se án-cenneda sunu hit cýðde, se is on his fæder bearme. And Sæt is Johannes gewitnes, dá da Judeas sendon hyra sacerdas and hyra diaconas fram Jerusalem to him, dæt hí acsodon hyne and dus cwædon, Hwat eart du? And he cýode, and ne wiðsóc, and dus cwap, Ne eom ic ná Crist. And hig acsodon hine and dus cwædon, Eart dú Elias? And he cwap Ne com ic hit. Da cwædon hí, Eart ðú witega? And he andwyrde and cwap, Nic. Wycliffe, 1389. No man euere sy3 God, no but the oon bigetun sone, that is in the bosum of the fadir, he hath told out. And this is the witnessing of John, whanne Iewis senten fro Jerusalem prestis and dekenys to hym, that thei schulden axe him, Who art thou? And he knowlechide, and denyede not, and he knowlechide, For I am not Crist. And thei axiden him, What therfore? art thou Elye? And he seide, I am not, Art thou a prophete? And he answeride, Nay. St. John, i. 18-21, Bosworth's Gospels. 506. In Anglo-Saxon the particle NE was used not only for the simple negative, as in the above quotation, but likewise as our nor: and both of these uses continued to the fourteenth century. Thus, in the Vision of Piers the Plowman, Prologue 174:— Alle his route of ratones to pis reson thei assented. Ac po pe belle was ybou3t and on pe beize hanged, pere ne was ratoun in alle pe route for alle pe rewme of Fraunce, þat dorst haue ybounden þe belle aboute pe cattis nekke, Ne hangen it aboute pe cattes hals al Engelonde to wynne. 507. In Chaucer we find the ne in both senses. lowing examples are all from the Prologue. ne = not. He neuere yit no vilonye ne saide. (1.70.) ne = nor. Ne wete hir fyngres in hir sauce depe. (1. 129.) (1. 179.) Ne was so worldly for to haue office. (1. 292.) (1.517.) Ne maked him a spiced conscience. (1. 526.) ne in both senses. The fol But he ne lefte nought for rayn ne thondre. (1. 492.) When ne as a simple negative had been superseded by not, it still continued in the sense of nor, and thus we find it in Spenser, The Faery Queene, i. 1. 28: Then mounted he upon his Steede againe, And with the Lady backward sought to wend. But still did follow one unto the end, The which at last out of the wood them brought. 508. Jacob Grimm would distinguish the former ne from the latter, writing the simple negative as ně, and the equivalent of 'nor' as nē. This he educes from comparison of the collateral forms, such as nih in Gothic for 'nor.' It is some confirmation of Grimm's view, that the ne to which he gives the long vowel, outlived the other, and that it took so much longer time to become merged in newer forms. This is in itself an argument for the probability of its having been a weightier syllable. 509. Another form of this negative was the prefix un-, which has lived through the Saxon and English period without much change. 606 a. It has always been a peculiarly expressive formula, and often strikingly poetical. ungrene. Folde was pa gyt Græs un grene, garsecg þeahte. The field was yet-whiles Cadmon, 116. With grass not green; ocean covered all. Indeed, it is a very great factor in Anglosaxon. It stands in places where we have lost and might gladly recover its use, and where at present we have no better substitute than the clumsy device of prefixing a Latin non. In the Laws of Ine, we have the distinction between landowners and non-landowners expressed by land ágende and un land ágende. In Chaucer and in the Ballads we meet with 'unset steven' for chance-meeting, meeting without appointment. Gawin Douglas, in The Palace of Honour, written in 1501, ranks Dunbar among the illustrious poets, and adds that he is yet undead: 'Dunbar yit undeid.' unborrowed. With orient hues, unborrowed of the sun.-Gray. 510. This N-particle is not limited to the Gothic family. It appears in Latin ne, non, and in- the negative prefix so well known in our borrowed Latin words, as indelible, intolerable, invincible, inextinguishable. In Greek it appears in the prefix an-, as in our borrowed Greek words, anecdote untold before, anodyne which cancels pain, anomaly unevenness, anonymous unnamed. There is something strange and fascinating about this faculty of negation in language. It has been often asserted that there is nothing in speech of which the idea is not borrowed from the outer world. But where in the outer world is there such a thing as a negative? Where is the natural phenomenon that would suggest to the human mind the idea of negation? There are, it is true, many appearances that may supply types of negation to those who are in search of them. They who are in possession of the idea of negation may fancy they see it in nature, in such antitheses as light and shade, day and night, joy and sorrow. But they only see a reflection of their own thought. There is no negative in nature. All nature is one continued series of affirmatives; and if this is too rigid, it is so only because the very term 'affirmation' is a relative one, and implies negation in other words, the expression is improper only because of the lack of such a foil in nature as negation supplies in the world of mind. Negation is a product of mind. The first crude hint of it is seen in the mysterious analogies of instinct. A horse that has put his head into his manger and found nothing there but chaff, gives a toss and a snort that are strongly suggestive of negation. It is a case of expectation baulked. The negative in speech seems to be of this kind. Man is essentially a creature of special pursuits and limited aims. Everything in the world but that which he is at the time in search of is a Nay to him. Call it the smallness and narrowness of his sphere, or call it the divine, the creative, the purposeful, which out of the vast realm of nature carves for itself a route, a course, a direction—it is to this intentness of man that every obstacle, or even every neutral and indifferent thing, becomes contrasted with his momentary bent, and awakens the sense of a Negative in his mind. And yet it is 511. The last great feature that rose in our path was the Indefinite Article. Nothing could be easier to understand how it came and what it was derived from; indeed, it seems the most obvious and natural thing in the world. One might almost imagine it to be unavoidable. a rare possession, and a peculiar feature of modern languages. On the other hand, the Negative is exceedingly mysterious in its nature and sources, and yet it seems to be common to all human speech, and to be as familiar at the earliest stage of primitive barbarism, as in the most cultured languages of the civilised world. I have never heard of a language that had no negative. But I have heard of native dialects in Australia, in which the negatives have been selected as the features of distinction, and have set the names by which the races named themselves, and were known to others1: just as the two old dialects of the 1 The aboriginal tribes on the western slopes of the Australian Cordillera, from the south of Queensland to Victoria, speak a language quite distinct from that of the neighbouring tribes to the east and west, whose people rarely understand it. This language and these tribes, are called by themselves, and by the coast and inland natives, Werrageries, from their negative Werri. The other great family or chain of tribes to the west of them again, occupying the vast western lands of Australia, are designated (I have been told) in their turn by their peculiar negative.' By the kind intervention of a friend, I have this very pertinent note from the pen of Mr. George Macleay, of Pendhill Court, many years resident in New South Wales. The same friend also tells me that the natives of the Pacific Islands universally designate Frenchmen as We-Wees. |