Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    177/196 page 173
    To a biologist the charm of etymology and philology is psychological. We get nearer the subtle and elusive reality of spirit through words and language than in any other way, and when the psychologist is doubled by the historian we shall have something worthy of the name of a philosophy of history. But the phonologist must be a musician ! Because only through an adequate realization of the function, power and art of music and a fusion of its science and art with that of linguistics, shall we have a genuine comprehension of the history and meaning of word- formation and language-making. In a general way the same laws underlie both music and etymology, and in a large yet clear sense, progress in the one is bound up with or analogous to that of the other. Take as a single illustrative fact the simple truth that half of the art of singing consists in getting singers to open their mouths and to make pure vowel tones. To this vowelization of music there is an exact phonologic analog in what one may designate the vowelization of language. Does the uncon¬ scious, with the added conscious art-spirit of a people find expression only in buildings, painting, sculpture, dress, poetry, and music ? And not in the first and most direct, most immaterial, ever living product of the spirit—lan¬ guage ? The question is its own absurd answer, but in the science of philology the fact seems hardly to have been suspected. I have looked in vain among the official phil¬ ologists for any statement of a fact which appears to me far more primal and fundamental than Grimm’s Law or Verner’s Law,—the fact that the more barbaric a language, the nearer its speakers are to the animal; the more are vowel sounds strangled in the pharynx, and hawked, clicked, clucked, coughed, or buzzed, forth. The progress toward civilization is accurately gauged by the progress in vowelization, and in extinguishing the function of the pharynx as a checker or modifier of sound in the produc¬ tion of words. There is not a truer or more accurate gauge
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image