And we might find many instances of words in the same process of transformation in other languages. The English word _not_ is meaningless, and just as much so are the French _pas_ and _point_ in the sense of _not_; but in the sense of _footstep_, or _point_, they have meaning enough. Originally _Il ne veut pas_ meant, metaphorically, ‘He does not wish a step of your wishes,’ ‘He does not go a footstep with you in your wish;’ _Il ne veut point_, ‘He does not go a point with you in your wish.’ Nowadays all this metaphorical meaning is gone, except to the eye of the grammarian. People recognize that _Il ne veut point_ is rather stronger than _Il ne veut pas_, but it never occurs to them to ask why.
There are so many of these curious examples that one is tempted to go on choosing instances; but we confine ourselves to one more. Our word _yes_ is a word which by itself is quite incapable of calling up a picture in our minds, but the word _is_ or ‘it is,’ though the idea it conveys is very abstract, and, so to say, intangible--as compared, for instance, with such verbs as _move_, _beat_--nevertheless belongs to the ‘significant’ class. Now, it happens that the Latin language used the word _est_ ‘it is’ where we should now use the word ‘yes;’ and it still further happens that our _yes_[20] is probably the same as the German _es_, and was used in the same sense of _it is_ as well. Instead of the meaningless word ‘yes’ the Romans used the word _est_ ‘it is,’ and our own ancestors expressed the same idea by saying ‘it.’ Still more. It is well known that French is in the main a descendant from the Latin, not the Latin of Rome, but the corrupter Latin which was spoken in Gaul. Now these Latin-speaking Gauls did not, for some reason, say _est_, ‘it is,’ for _yes_, as the Romans did; but they used a pronoun, either _ille_, ‘he,’ or _hoc_, ‘this.’ When, therefore, a Gaul desired to say ‘yes,’ he nodded, and said _he_ or else _this_, meaning ‘He is so,’ or ‘This is so.’ As it happens the Gauls of the north said _ille_, and those of the south said _hoc_, and these words gradually got corrupted into two meaningless words, _oui_ and _oc_. It is well known that the people in the south of France were especially distinguished by using the word _oc_ instead of _oui_ for ‘yes,’ so that their ‘dialect’ got to be called the _langue d’oc_, and this word Languedoc gave the name to a province of France. Long before that time, however, we may be sure, both the people of the _langue d’oil_, or _langue d’oui_, and those of the _langue d’oc_ had forgotten that their words for ‘yes’ had originally meant ‘he’ and ‘this.’