[1475] When we compare the Spanish, French, and Italian languages, many very crucial and essential features prove to be common to all three.1 Now, since they were formed independently of each other, especially as far as their principal and fundamental properties are concerned, we must conclude that these properties derive from a common origin which can only be Latin, and if they do not occur in written Latin they must therefore come from Vulgar Latin. Nor can it be claimed that they derive from the corrupt Latin of the late Empire, because, as I have said [→Z 1031–37], it became corrupted differently and independently from one place to the next, etc., and the languages that were born from Latin were born separately and in different parts of the world. Hence the use of articles and of prepositional particles, which are roughly uniform even materially in the three languages, the similarly uniform use of auxiliary verbs, that is to say, essere [to be] and avere [to have] (except that Spanish does not employ essere), should be regarded as characteristic of Vulgar Latin. Similarly, the use of the finite verb with the particle che [that] (French and Spanish que) instead of the infinitive, etc., traces of which custom [1476] exist in good Latin (that is, of quod, etc.), and far more frequent ones in barbarian Latin. The Greeks also always had the same usage (ὅτι).
Those properties, then, or words, etc. etc., which can only belong to one or other of the three languages, and which cannot be derived from any known origin, could be vestiges of the ancient national languages later extinguished by Latin. But this hypothesis is more difficult to sustain where the Italian language is concerned. And anyway these particular properties, words, etc., even if they do derive from the ancient languages existing prior to the use of Latin in the various countries, etc., cannot have been preserved except by way of Vulgar Latin, which certainly had its own provincial idioms, as is well known, and as I have noted elsewhere [→Z 1020–21] when speaking about the Latin dialects. (9 Aug. 1821.)
The majority of men in the last analysis have no desire or yearning to live except for the sake of living. The real object of life is life, and laboring with great effort to drag a heavy, empty cart up and down the same road. (10 August 1821.)
[1477] There is no human unhappiness that cannot increase. There is, however, a limit to what is called happiness. A man may be wholly fortunate, with nothing left to desire, whose happiness cannot be extended any further. This was the case with Augustus.1 But a man so unhappy that a greater unhappiness cannot be imagined, an unhappiness which is not only fantastical, not only possible, but very often actually realized in one individual or another, in one way or another, such a man does not exist. Fortune may say to many, “I have no greater power to bestow upon you,” but no one can ever boast and say to fortune, “you do not have the strength to harm me further and to increase my troubles.” One can fail to hope, but no one will ever fail to fear. Despair in itself is not enough to reassure man. (10 August 1821.) No one can truthfully boast or say in anger: I cannot be unhappier than I am.
(Many things have been said, and by many people, about synonyms, some denying that there are any in effect, others maintaining that there are, and both parties maintain this about one language or another language or about all languages.)
There has been a fierce debate about synonyms.2 Here is my own opinion. Primitive languages tended rather to signify many things with a single word than to have many words, etc., to signify a single thing. As languages took [1478] shape very gradually and the first very scarce roots were modified in a thousand different ways in order to adapt them stably and distinctly to various meanings, languages went on growing, words (not the root words, but the derivatives or compounds) went on multiplying ad infinitum, and people acquired the capacity to express even the most minimal differences, variations, kinds, and accidents, etc., of things through speech and writing. But synonyms (apart from a few perhaps chance ones, or occurring through exchange with other languages) did not as yet exist. Each word that was formed by modifying the original root or other words that had already been formed, each consistent kind of modification, derivation, inflection, composition, formation that was introduced (as in the case of frequentative or diminutive verbs among the Latins, etc.), was intended to enrich the language and to enhance its potency, not using the paltry faculty of being able to say one and the same thing in several ways, but the very significant faculty of being able to represent distinctly the slightest differences between things, differences either already known from the beginning, but when no one knew how to express them, or only observed over time, or even new ideas, etc. [1479] From this there arose a very great variety in languages, far more substantial than that which stems from the use of synonyms. For, if by using the latter, when we have to say the same thing, we can now and then vary our way of expressing it, for the ancients the same thing, and hence the need for the same word, happened very rarely, because even the minutest difference between the thing to be expressed and the thing already said was sufficient to change its sign, and the language would thereupon supply a different and appropriate expression for that difference, however slight.
But just as these specific differences, and hence the differences in the meanings of the words that expressed them, were very subtle and often almost metaphysical (for the ancients, and especially the Latins, were admirably precise and meticulous in assigning and specifying the meanings of their words and phrases, and see pp. 1115–16, 1162, paragraph 3), so too very naturally the people, who were not capable of an excess of subtleties and who, even if they were able to conceive of them, were incapable of displaying too much refinement in their choice of words, began, once the language had [1480] been enriched, expanded, and made fertile, to confuse a particular word or phrase with another very close to it in meaning, to employ indiscriminately words intended for similar but distinct uses, to neglect meticulous accuracy and gradually to forget the first and precise value of a radical or derivative word, to carry the kind of formations destined for a particular kind of meaning over into meanings of another, neighboring kind, and finally to forget the precise and original value of words and phrases. And as meanings became confused with the passage of time and the overwhelming power of use (which in many respects in languages is merely abuse), they began to multiply them again in each word, and to multiply the words signifying one and the same thing, although at the beginning they differed. In this way, languages lost the capacity they had in better times to express distinctly the slightest differences in ideas, and these differences, little known or noticed by speakers, caused the small but real differences in the meanings of the words to vanish. And lo and behold, you have synonyms.
[1481] Not only the people, but also highly refined speakers (owing to the difficulty of being precise in speaking, which is improvisation), and careless or less diligent writers as well contributed in varying degrees to this outcome. I will discount the ways in which a language spreads, and the countless causes that lose or confound the original and proper meanings of words and of everything having to do with speech.
Poor speakers and careless writers are, in my opinion, the first and principal origins of synonyms in any language. One could also say time, which does not permit that human affairs remain in the same state. Elegant writers, and especially poets, also had a hand in this outcome: because elegance lies in what is unfamiliar and set apart from the common people. And so metaphoric uses, bold flights, inverted meanings, etc. etc., once they had been introduced by elegant writers, came in time to take the place of propriety, dispersing the original proprieties and confusing the meaning of proper words with that of words used metaphorically or in any other way, with the [1482] same sense. Elegant or mannered speakers also come under this head.
These observations explain why the propriety of language in the ancient writers is always marvelous and distinctive. This was not by any means because they were more diligent. Who can compare the diligence of our own times in any activity with that of the ancients? Precision and scrupulousness were not proper to the ancients in the way
they are to the moderns, for the same reasons that greatness is not proper to the moderns as it was to the ancients. And in everything pertaining to language or style, diligent, and even mediocre, modern writers surpass the most diligent ancient writers in precision. It is enough to know them well to grasp this point. See my letter on Mai’s Eusebius, under the observation listed as XVI. 23.71, 23.1 Among the many examples that could be mentioned I will cite a note appended by a French translator to Sallust’s Catiline Conspiracy simply in order to clarify my thought. (Dureau de la Malle, Oeuvres de Salluste, new translation, note 45 on the Conjuration de Catilina, Paris 1808, tome 1, p. 213.)2 *“The accomplished writers of antiquity [1483] did not share, far from it, our petty and obsessive scruples regarding the repetition of the same words, above all when a difference in case required such repetition in the endings, as in the following passage, where we see magnae copiae after magnas copias.”* He refers to the following passage (Sallust, Bellum Catilinarium, ch. 59, or 56): “Sperabat propediem magnas copias se habiturum, si Romae socii incepta patravissent: interea servitia repudiabat, cuius initio ad eum magnae copiae concurrebant” [“He hoped shortly to have a large force if the conspirators in Rome succeeded in carrying out their plans: meanwhile, he refused to enroll slaves, a great number of whom flocked to him at first”].1
It is not therefore greater diligence on the part of the ancient writers, but the fact of their being closer to the earliest definitions of meanings and formations of words, and their forming them themselves—not out of extravagance, with which the ancients were not familiar, but out of need, or utility—that causes them to be regarded as, and to be, true models of propriety in words and expressions. And in point of fact the diligence that derives from art, and indeed produces it, is in inverse ratio to antiquity. Now, the propriety of writers is in direct ratio to it, and Plautus and Terence and the crudest of the other old Latin writers are [1484] so much more correct than Cicero, and so much less elegant. Similarly, the very ignorant writers of the fourteenth century as against sixteenthcentury writers, Dante as against Petrarch and Boccaccio, etc. See p. 1253.
Supposing, then, that a word is never or almost never a synonym of another from the same language in its original state, and that words only become synonyms with the passage of time, and principally both because of elegant writers and poets and, far more, because of bad writers and speakers, it follows that, just as all languages apart from the earliest derive from the corruption of other languages and are subsequent to them in time, etc., so too the daughter languages, generally speaking, must have a greater abundance of genuine and real synonyms than their respective mothers.
This is precisely what occurred in Italian with respect to Latin, its mother. Synonyms really exist in the Italian language, and have existed in it from the beginning (although at the beginning there were not so many). The Italian language does have, it should not be denied, completely true synonyms, and it has them in the utmost abundance, perhaps more than any other cultured language, and it has many more of them [1485] than good Latin had. All the cultured modern languages, generally speaking, have many more true and perfect synonyms than the ancient languages. This is a consequence of time, which bit by bit destroys the minor and transitory differences between the meanings of words, differences nevertheless that were not invented out of extravagance, but on the basis of utility. No word, or almost no word, that is being formed today and introduced into the various languages is synonymous with others already to be found there. (I refer here to languages where they do not go about introducing wholly pointless words out of sheer affectation, ignorance, and barbarousness, and to the detriment of national words. An exception could also be made for some of the words that poets sometimes form, and that not always, nor often, but sometimes could be synonyms of others already in use, and could be preferred and formed simply for the sake of elegance, and for the sake of a certain unfamiliarity, or taken from Latin, etc.) This shows that synonyms are never such at the beginning, and that synonymy is not primordial. But words that have already belonged for a long period of time to each language, whether they belonged to their mother languages or not, have become and are gradually becoming synonymous, and many very recently formed ones will also become such. This comes about especially through carelessness in speaking and writing, and through abuse, which we are obliged to call use and to acknowledge as our lawful lord and master. And this is so certain that one can, by paying a little attention, at first to the [1486] oldest writers in a language and proceeding to the most recent, observe how two or more words that today are synonymous, and that originally were not, have by degrees drawn closer in meaning and entered into a reciprocal exchange of one or other use until they have become entirely merged and used indiscriminately, etc. Some words have become synonyms to this last degree, others to one of the previous degrees, such that they may be used indiscriminately in some circumstances but not in others, yet overall, owing to the negligence and ignorance of writers and speakers, they keep on acquiring a greater resemblance until they attain complete identity.
Let us now consider the consequences of this effect. Synonyms are regarded as the riches of a language. But they are a secondary source of wealth, and the principal wealth and variety is that which I have described on p. 1479. Now, a wealth of synonyms does very great harm to this. The Italian language has many more synonyms than Latin. Is it therefore richer? Let us suppose that 30,000 Latin words, all with [1487] distinct meanings, have passed into the Italian language, but in such a way that instead of 30,000 things, they signify only 10,000, giving three words per meaning. What use is it to Italian to be able to say those 10,000 things each in three different ways, if it is unable to signify, or can only do so confusedly, the other twenty thousand that Latin used to signify separately? This is not wealth, but poverty. A man whose farm has an abundance of vines and fruit, but lacks grain, is not rich, nor is a man who has an abundance of what is superfluous and lacks what is necessary.
From this we shall be able to account for a phenomenon regarding the wealth of ancient languages, which does not seem to me to have been sufficiently noted or clarified. Languages grow as knowledge and the human mind advances. The number of words with a definite meaning, say the philosophers, determine the number of clear ideas in a nation. (Sulzer.)1 The converse could be said of clear ideas, which are almost never clear unless they have a word corresponding to them. Now, [1488] who would dispute that the number of our clear ideas greatly exceeds that of the ancients? That our minds not only embrace a far greater range of things but always see in a more subtle and detailed way, and have acquired a habit of precision and accuracy, and one that is incomparably greater than that of the ancients? And by all means let us consider the cultured ancient languages: as is only natural, we shall not find in them the capacity for expressing the things or the accidents with which they were not acquainted, and the modern ideas that they did not have, or those parts of their own ideas which they did not discern, or at any rate not clearly. But as regards all that the ancients might have had to signify, or wished to signify, as regards all the ideas which could crop up in their discourse, we shall find, generally speaking, in the cultured ancient languages a capacity for expression that is so much greater than in the modern languages, an omnipotence, accuracy, capacity to vary the expression according to the most minute variations in the things to be expressed, and according to the contexts and circumstances of the discourse, that perhaps (but there is no perhaps about it), this capacity has no equal in any of the cultured modern languages. This, then, is why the ancient languages are generally acknowledged to be richer than modern ones.
Now, what is the reason for this? It is true that time suppresses many words, but it also introduces countless others. [1489] The cause, in my opinion, or one of the causes of this, which truly is a wonder, lies in the fact that words intended sometimes for similar, sometimes also for utterly different meanings, become synonymous over time, and whereas at first, and in the ancient languag
es that were closer to the origin of words, they used to express more and more things, or accidents and modifications of things, today they express a single thing. And thus the truly admirable propriety of the Latin language is not to be found in the Italian language, its daughter, and in the others, which have so muddled the very distinct meanings of the words they have inherited from it. And this evil always and ineluctably keeps on growing, and it is something that does great harm to the precise expression of ideas, and hence to the precision and clarity of the ideas themselves. A fault not so much of men as of nature and of the age in which we live.
Now for the remedies. To try to bring words back to the precise meanings they originally had, and to revert to distinguishing between them and using them with their ancient meanings, etc., is as impossible and pedantic as it would be to reintroduce antiquated words and phrases, and to speak as the Latins or the earliest Italians, etc., used to speak. Those who have taken care, when writing specifically about synonyms, to specify [1490] the value of each word similar in meaning to other words, have been of service, and still are, to the philosophy and history of languages, and to many other very useful things, rather than to language use, and the preservation of meanings, and a strict adherence to etymologies, etc., in short, to the attempt to prevent the confusion of meanings, and the ensuing suppression of the minor differences between them, which abuse and the passage of time cannot help but cause, and will continue to cause just as much in the future. Forces of this ilk cannot be defeated by a book or by a Dictionary, etc.
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