Thoreau, whitman and One Language

It was on February 2, 1786, that the words were spoken—the words that captured scholars and speakers and linguists around the world and created whole new branchs of language study:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

         Although the language Sir William Jones referred to in his speech to the Asiatick Society did not exist then, it certainly would not have to live in obscurity much longer. The idea of comparing these languages and others captured Franz Bopp, who founded comparative grammar, and as more and study cast a scrutinizing eye on the languages of Europe and Asia, Proto-Indo-European was born (Watkins, vii). Studies took phratar, frater, bhrater, bruder, bhrathair, frère, and brother and connected them all to one root word, bhrater. People across almost all of Europe, and even beyond, where being drawn together through a web of connected language during the 19th century, as language families developed. Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian families were formed, and those families were reduced to the Satem and Centum languages, and then those two groups were joined into one, called Proto-Indo European. While some languages, like Finnish, were found to be outside the PIE circle, over 99 languages across two continents have been joined together (Millward). Language is grand. It is our most certain means of communication, how we express ourselves, how we define ourselves and our world, how we connect to our communities and our homelands. It is a defining feature of who we are and where we are from. The number of languages we speak is a badge of intelligence, diversity, and tolerance of foreign people. But are these people, speaking these other languages, these “foreign” languages, really so foreign? Are our languages barriers between us or links that connect us? Since the eighteenth century, new ways of approaching language studies and new ideas have begun making everyday language-users wonder. An idea of language as a means of connecting people the world over began to gain a foothold among lovers of words and language. Among those who most fervently supported the idea of language as a bond between people and the world were the transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.
         It is easy to see how this idea might appeal to a transcendentalist.  The founding belief of the philosophy was the movement beyond the self into a place where all individual people are joined with the greater whole. Among the transcendentalists, Henry David Thoreau greatly embraced the idea of a oneness in language, to the point where he viewed language as the “answer to what comprised the universe as far as man could know it,” (Gura, 38). In chapter 17 of Walden, he writes,

You find thus in the sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat. (λέιβω, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; λοβο., globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with a liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils (Thoreau, 2031).

Within this hefty passage is a concentrated look at Thoreau’s conclusions about language—how it works and what it is and does at its core. Thoreau loved language; he studied half a dozen different tongues and stressed the importance of knowing the etymology of the words one used (West, 748). Thoreau also paid close attention to individual letters and the sounds they made. One could say that instead looking at language families, he created “sound families,” based on the shapes of letters and the sounds they made, and in what kinds of words each appeared. Thoreau tended to believe that vowels were not as important as consonants in comparing words, which he divided into many groups. Labials would appear in words describing sweet and pleasant objects, dentals speared in sonorous words, and nasals turned up in words describing repulsive objects. Liquid ideas and objects would use l, versus r, which would denote the ideas of roughness. Gutturals, coming from deep in the throat, described whatever was deep or hollow, and s showed up wherever one needed a word for a whistling thing (West, 764). Thoreau also sought to how the relationship between sounds and objects were connected to the very shapes of letters, describing m as a symbol for all things Motherly or maternal, being “a shorthand sketch of tree, with primitive man had selected as the hieroglyph of these qualities” (West, 764). We see this in Thoreau’s Walden passage; he notes how the b in lobed is itself lobed, and in its capital form is even “double lobed.” Thoreau also connects “lobe” with the words for leaf, liver, and lung, all organic, living things containing liquid l sounds.
Thoreau also uses language to connect objects in nature. /just as the word “lobe” connects animals and plants with their livers and leaves, so too are plants and animals connected to the frozen leaves of ice on the water, and compares the veins running through the ice and the leaves to rivers running through the earth, and the streams running though the sand, and the blood vessels beneath our own skin (Thoreau, 2031). In 1845 Thoreau once wrote, “In all the dissertations on language, men forget the language that is, that is really universal, the inexpressible meaning that is in all things, everywhere,” (West,749). To Thoreau, language and nature were indivisible, and as such, “words were not merely steps to a higher reality but themselves embodied the reality,” (Gura, 49). Through close study of both nature and language, Thoreau saw the key to all knowledge any man could know or needed to know, so combining reading the Bhagavad Gita with watching the ice on Walden pond and contemplating all the possible connections between the two of them was the ultimate education.
Naturally, words being so important and so central to understanding both nature and reality itself, Thoreau tended to search for the original meanings of the words he used (Gura, 8). He complained that figurative language often risked forgetting its own origins (West, 748), much as philologists today complain of “dead metaphors” caused when one forgets the actual meaning behind the words s/he is using (Lewis, 251). In the thirteenth chapter of Walden, “House-Warming,” Thoreau creates a complex passage of word-play as he writes,

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen? (Thoreau, 1999)

Palaver is a word meaning “chatter” connected to the the French parler, the word meaning “to speak,” and also the source of the words “parlor” and “parliamentary.” Thoreau uses the figurative phrase “far-fetched” literally, and points out how our “parlors”—rooms for talk—are served by dumb-waiters, and through all the meaningless chatter people don’t even stop to recognize the connections between the two (West, 748). Thoreau would agree that “when a man uses a current and admitted metaphor without knowing it, he usually gets led into nonsense,” (Lewis, 252), so that no man can master his language or himself without knowing where his words come from. To Thoreau, a man is missing something crucial if he doesn’t know that attending once meant stretching and note the possible continued connections between attention and to stretch. In Thoreau’s mind the connections between brother (English), bruder (German), frère (French), frater (Latin), phrator (Greek), and bhratar (Sanskrit) are more than similar letters and sounds, but a connection between men all around the world, joining them and making them all brothers. Thoreau would delight in the fact that the reconstructed Proto-Indo European word for “god,” deiw-os—which can be seen in the Latin Iūpiter, Greek Zeus, and the Sanskrit Dyaus—is itself a derivative of the root dyeu-, which means “to shine,” and is the root of many words for day, so that “the notion of deity was therefore linked to the notion of the bright sky” (Watkins, xxii). It is the epitome of Thoreau’s language—many words in many tongues, tying themselves together along with a description of nature.
Another transcendentalist writer, the poet Walt Whitman, wrote in his “American Primer”, “A great observation will detect sameness through all languages, however old, however new, however rude. As humanity is one under its amazing diversities, language is one under its” (Primer, 2). Whitman as well believed firmly in language’s innate wholeness, but his vision of language tended to look not into the past, as Thoreau’s did, but towards the future. In his Primer, he proudly states the “The Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious voiced people in the world—and the most perfect users of words,” and that American English “enriched with contributions from all languages, old and new, will be spoken by a hundred millions of people,” (Primer, 2).
For Whitman, the perfect user of words “must be all passions, crimes, trades, animals, stars, God, sex, the past, might, space, metals, and the like—because these are the words, and he who is not these plays with a foreign tongue, turning helplessly to dictionaries and authorities” (Primer, 7). This is because in Whitman’s view, language did not come from dictionaries and rules of grammar and the etymologies that Thoreau absorbed himself in, but from the people, and their lives. He says that words “are the progeny of what has been or is in vogue” (Primer, 4), and that they “have subtle but definite connections with the civilizations which they make vocal” (Howard, 442). Contrary to what Thoreau claimed, the true power and meaning of words did not rest in nature, but in society, in the people that spoke, changed, and gave meaning to the language. His idea of oneness lay not primarily in looking at the connections between different languages, but in mimicking that connecting in the present, creating a new American tongue whose greatest characteristic was to be its “vast inclusiveness” (Howard, 446). Whitman loved slang, colloquialisms, and local peculiarities, “Linguistic developments from non-grammatical usage were to be recognized and included, as were others that grew out of various local peculiarities of pronunciation” (Howard, 447). Whitman criticized dictionaries for never including these words and claimed that the English language “breaks out of the little laws to enter truly higher ones” (Primer, 3). He called the slang of the underworld “powerful words” that ought to be collected, saying that “many of these bad words are fine” (Primer, 4), and he thought that the “black” dialect held “hints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language,” and claimed that he would never “allude to the English Language or tongue without exultation,” because “This is the tongue that spurns laws, as the greatest tongue must” (Primer, 11). He also considered new words to be just as wonderful as slang, considering them necessary; “Words are wanted to supply the copious trains of facts, and flanges of facts, arguments, and adjectival facts, growing out of all new knowledges” (Primer, 5). He specifically mentions the arts, science, and medicine as bringers of new words to the language, and laded them for their contributions. In fact the only words that Whitman considered slovenly were the “merely conventional or merely beautiful words and phrases” that always failed to help him get across his meanings (Howard, 449). One would not be incorrect in saying that Whitman was the transcendentalists’ descriptivist writer to balance out Thoreau’s prescriptivism.
Though Thoreau and Whitman had their differences, they agreed, strangely enough, on which types of pronunciation they preferred. Just as Thoreau considered nasal sounds best fit to describe repulsive objects, so Whitman says that the “pronunciation of Yankees is nasal and offensive,” and suggests replacing any nasal-y teachers in schools so that children will learn “to speak from the chest and in the guttural and baritone methods” (Primer, 5). He considered beautiful pronunciation to come from the “perfect flexible vocal organs, and in a , developed harmonious soul,” rather than from marks of accents or formulas (Primer, 8), and although he knew that “Language must cohere,” the perfect voice was beyond any rules of grammar or pronunciation (Primer, 5). And naturally, Whitman considered spelling “subordinate.” He claimed that “nice spelling and tenacity for or against some one letter or so means dandyism and impotence in literature,” and considered the English language beyond “settled spelling” (Primer, 6). He hoped that some day English would not need to fuss over correct spelling, but let people write words as they spoke them, basing spelling on phonology.
To Whitman, the oneness of language lied in its ability to encompass all peoples, all things, and concepts, all ideas that mankind needed to express. It was a tool of culture accessible to all, and that all should embrace and use to further understand each other. He brought all language under one name for the future, and placed that future in the hand of American English, seeing the reason that American English would become so unifying a force as its willingness to drawn in new pronunciations, spellings and meanings from all groups of people. He had a vision of an approved and official English that did not resist slang words, or dialects. Lawlessness was the key. The perfect language had to rise above conventions and become something greater, something that all people could share in together—that was the true splendor of language and its ability to create bonds. Thoreau looked at the wholeness of language as a lens into the past, where one could see the connections between people and nature. Language was the key to understanding nature and reality itself, and to truly understand one’s words, one needed to know where they came from. A man who used words and metaphors without knowing their origins was a slovenly speaker, who wielded his words without knowing how powerful they were. There was wholeness within the words themselves as well. The shapes of the letters connected to meanings and ideas, the sounds of a word, the sounds and letters used in words that described an object—all held meaning that at its root connected it to nature, and to the fabric of reality itself. Although they may have differentiated on many points, both saw language as an important part of the very fabric of what made man who he was, understood its importance, and used it with precision and care. Since Sir William Jones uttered those fateful words, revealing the tongues that we use not to be barriers built up in between nations, but an intricate web of shared ideas and sounds, lovers of words everywhere, like Thoreau and Whitman, saw the power that Jones’ discovery held, and strove to explore it further. In their searching, they found language that transcended any individual culture, or man, and even any time period or epoch, but a language that encompassed the past, the future and the whole of God’s creation.




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