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Ideas have found their corresponding expressions; and one word will often convey what once required half a dozen. Roots have been expanded, derivations multiplied, terms invented or adopted. A variety of phrases has been provided, which form a sort of compound words. Separate professions, pursuits, and provinces of literature have gained their conventional terminology.
Mezzofanti, a very Tower of Babel in dialects and languages, said of the Provencal, that it was the only patois of the Middle Ages, with its numerous derivations from the Greek, the Arabic, and the Latin, which has survived the various revolutions of language. The others have been altered and modified. They have suffered from the caprices of victory or of fortune.
There should be no more occasion to search for derivations and constructions, and 'twould be as criminal then to coin words as money.
He was advised about all the branches of information contained in learning, and he was up to all the rudiments of doctrines and enlightenment. You couldn't advance him any ideas on any of the parts of speech or lines of thought. You would have thought he was a professor of the weather and politics and chemistry and natural history and the origin of derivations.
The latter are in obscurity respecting all the derivations of the love of the sex, whereas the former are enlightened respecting them: nevertheless, those who are in adultery, can see those derivations and their distinctions, not indeed in and from themselves, but from others when they hear them: for an adulterer has a similar faculty with a chaste husband of elevating his understanding; but an adulterer, after he has acknowledged the distinctions which he has heard from others, nevertheless forgets them, when he immerses his understanding in his filthy pleasure; for the chaste and the unchaste principles, and the sane and the insane, cannot dwell together; but, when separated, they may be distinguished by the understanding.
With an inversion of moral derivations which all mythical expression involves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas in truth genius, the imaginative dominion of experience, is its own reward and fame is but a foolish image by which its worth is symbolised.
In the later editions of Webster, these 'derivations' have been cleared out en masse, and the etymology placed in the hands of men abreast of the science of the time; and the last edition of Webster, the International, is perhaps the best of one-volume dictionaries. Richardson started on a new track altogether.
In cumbering himself with derivations, too, he shows that he knows his place. He may have had a glimmering that some of them were absurd; and that Priscian with his reference to the Greek was a safer guide. But to a scholar brought up on Huguitio derivations were of the first importance; and to leave them out would have been only another mark of inferiority.
The ingenuity of etymologists displayed itself in suggesting derivations for the words in question, which were sometimes absurd, sometimes plausible, but never more than very doubtful conjectures. No sound historical critic could be content to base a positive view on any such unstable foundation, and nothing remained but to decide the controversy on other than linguistic considerations.
We judge of the origin of this love from its delights; for who in any case knows or has known the trace of any love except from its delight and pleasurableness? The delights of conjugial love in their origins are felt as beatitudes, satisfactions, and happinesses, in their derivations as pleasantnesses and pleasures, and in their ultimates as superlative delights.
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