Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/126

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104
PROCESSES OF NAMES-GIVING.
[LECT.

the sun and the moon, and their titles were, as nearly as is possible in language, proper names. But such they could not continue to be. No constituent of language is the appellation of an individual existence or act; each designates a class; and, even when circumstances seem to limit the class to one member, we are ever on the watch to extend its bounds. The same tendency which, as already pointed out, leads the child, when it has learned the words papa and sky, to take the things designated by those words as types of classes, and so—rightly enough in principle, though wrongly as regards the customary use of language—to call other men papa, and to call the ceiling sky, is always active in us. Copernicus having taught us that the sun is the great centre of our system, that the earth is not the point about which and for which the rest of the universe was created, the thought is at once suggested to us that the fixed stars also may be centres of systems like our own, and we call them suns. And no sooner does Galileo discover for us the lesser orbs which circle about Jupiter and others of our sister-planets, than, without a scruple, or a suspicion that we are doing anything unusual or illegitimate, we style them moons. Each word, too, has its series of figurative and secondary meanings. "So many suns", "so many moons", signify the time marked by so many revolutions of the two luminaries respectively; in some languages the word moon itself (as in the Greek mēn), in others, a derivative from it (as the Latin mensis and our month), comes to be the usual name of the period determined by the wax and wane of our satellite—and is then transferred to designate those fixed and arbitrary subdivisions of the solar year to which the natural system of lunar months has so generally been compelled to give place. By a figure of another kind, we sometimes call by the name sun one who is conspicuous for brilliancy and influence: "made glorious summer by this sun of York." By yet another, but which has now long lost its character as a figure, and become plain and homely speech, we put sun for sunlight, saying, "to walk out of the sun", " to bask in the sun", and so on. In more learned and technical phrase, the Latin name of the moon, lune, or its diminutive, lunette, is made