Читать книгу The Romance of Words (4th ed.) - Ernest Weekley - Страница 14

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In a sense, all nomenclature, apart from purely scientific language, is popular. But real meanings are often so rapidly obscured that words become mere labels, and cease to call up the image or the poetic idea with which they were first associated. To take a simple instance, how many people realise that the daisy is the "day's eye"?—

"Wele by reson men it calle may

The dayeseye or ellis the 'eye of day.'"

(Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, Prol., l. 184.)

In studying that part of our vocabulary which especially illustrates the tendencies shown in popular name-giving, one is struck by the keen observation and imaginative power shown by our far-off ancestors, and the lack of these qualities in later ages.

Perhaps in no part of the language does this appear so clearly as in the names of plants and flowers. The most primitive way of naming a flower is from some observed resemblance, and it is curious to notice the parallelism of this process in various languages. Thus our crowfoot, crane's bill, larkspur, monkshood, snapdragon, are in German Hahnenfuss (cock's foot), Storchschnabel (stork's bill), Rittersporn (knight's spur), Eisenhut (iron hat), Löwenmaul (lion's mouth). I have purposely chosen instances in which the correspondence is not absolute, because examples like Löwenzahn (lion's tooth), dandelion (Fr. dent de lion) may be suspected of being mere translations. I give the names in most general use, but the provincial variants are numerous, though usually of the same type. The French names of the flowers mentioned are still more like the English. The more learned words which sometimes replace the above are, though now felt as mere symbols, of similar origin, e.g., geranium and pelargonium, used for the cultivated crane's bill, are derived from the Greek for crane and stork respectively. So also in chelidonium, whence our celandine or swallow-wort, we have the Greek for swallow.

In the English names of plants we observe various tendencies of the popular imagination. We have the crudeness of cowslip for earlier cowslop, cow-dung, and many old names of unquotable coarseness, the quaintness of Sweet William, lords and ladies, bachelors' buttons, dead men's fingers, and the exquisite poetry of forget-me-not, heart's ease, love in a mist, traveller's joy. There is also a special group named from medicinal properties, such as feverfew, a doublet of febrifuge, and tansy, Fr. tanaisie, from Greco-Lat. athanasia, immortality. We may compare the learned saxifrage, stone-breaker, of which the Spanish doublet is sassafras. The German name is Steinbrech.

There must have been a time when a simple instinct for poetry was possessed by all nations, as it still is by uncivilised races and children. Among European nations this instinct appears to be dead for ever. We can name neither a mountain nor a flower. Our Mount Costigan, Mount Perry, Mount William cut a sorry figure beside the peaks of the Bernese Oberland, the Monk, the Maiden, the Storm Pike, the Dark Eagle Pike.[24] Occasionally a race which is accidentally brought into closer contact with nature may have a happy inspiration, such as the Drakensberg (dragon's mountain) or Weenen[25] (weeping) of the old voortrekkers. But the Cliff of the Falling Flowers, the name of a precipice over which the Korean queens cast themselves to escape dishonour, represents an imaginative realm which is closed to us.[26] The botanist who describes a new flower hastens to join the company of Messrs Dahl, Fuchs, Lobel, Magnol and Wistar, while fresh varieties are used to immortalise a florist and his family.