Footnote 87:Very likely pitch should be understood along with stress.
Footnote 88:As in Bantu or Chinook.
Footnote 89:Perhaps better “general.” The Chinook “neuter” may refer to persons as well as things and may also be used as a plural. “Masculine” and “feminine,” as in German and French, include a great number of inanimate nouns.
Footnote 90:Spoken in the greater part of the southern half of Africa. Chinook is spoken in a number of dialects in the lower Columbia River valley. It is impressive to observe how the human mind has arrived at the same form of expression in two such historically unconnected regions.
Footnote 91:In Yana the noun and the verb are well distinct, though there are certain features that they hold in common which tend to draw them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible. But there are, strictly speaking, no other parts of speech. The adjective is a verb. So are the numeral, the interrogative pronoun (e.g., “to be what?”), and certain “conjunctions” and adverbs (e.g., “to be and” and “to be not”; one says “and-past-I go,” i.e., “and I went”). Adverbs and prepositions are either nouns or merely derivative affixes in the verb.
Footnote 92:If possible, a triune formula.
Footnote 93:One celebrated American writer on culture and language delivered himself of the dictum that, estimable as the speakers of agglutinative languages might be, it was nevertheless a crime for an inflecting woman to marry an agglutinating man. Tremendous spiritual values were evidently at stake. Champions of the “inflective” languages are wont to glory in the very irrationalities of Latin and Greek, except when it suits them to emphasize their profoundly “logical” character. Yet the sober logic of Turkish or Chinese leaves them cold. The glorious irrationalities and formal complexities of many “savage” languages they have no stomach for. Sentimentalists are difficult people.
Footnote 94:I have in mind valuations of form as such. Whether or not a language has a large and useful vocabulary is another matter. The actual size of a vocabulary at a given time is not a thing of real interest to the linguist, as all languages have the resources at their disposal for the creation of new words, should need for them arise. Furthermore, we are not in the least concerned with whether or not a language is of great practical value or is the medium of a great culture. All these considerations, important from other standpoints, have nothing to do with form value.
Footnote 95:E.g., Malay, Polynesian.
Footnote 96:Where, as we have seen, the syntactic relations are by no means free from an alloy of the concrete.
Footnote 97:Very much as an Englishcod-liver oildodges to some extent the task of explicitly defining the relations of the three nouns. Contrast Frenchhuile de foie de morue“oil of liver of cod.”
Footnote 98:See Chapter IV.
Footnote 99:There is probably a real psychological connection between symbolism and such significant alternations asdrink,drank,drunkor Chinesemai(with rising tone) “to buy” andmai(with falling tone) “to sell.” The unconscious tendency toward symbolism is justly emphasized by recent psychological literature. Personally I feel that the passage fromsingtosanghas very much the same feeling as the alternation of symbolic colors—e.g., green for safe, red for danger. But we probably differ greatly as to the intensity with which we feel symbolism in linguistic changes of this type.
Footnote 100:Pure or “concrete relational.” See Chapter V.
Footnote 101:In spite of my reluctance to emphasize the difference between a prefixing and a suffixing language, I feel that there is more involved in this difference than linguists have generally recognized. It seems to me that there is a rather important psychological distinction between a language that settles the formal status of a radical element before announcing it—and this, in effect, is what such languages as Tlingit and Chinook and Bantu are in the habit of doing—and one that begins with the concrete nucleus of a word and defines the status of this nucleus by successive limitations, each curtailing in some degree the generality of all that precedes. The spirit of the former method has something diagrammatic or architectural about it, the latter is a method of pruning afterthoughts. In the more highly wrought prefixing languages the word is apt to affect us as a crystallization of floating elements, the words of the typical suffixing languages (Turkish, Eskimo, Nootka) are “determinative” formations, each added element determining the form of the whole anew. It is so difficult in practice to apply these elusive, yet important, distinctions that an elementary study has no recourse but to ignore them.
Footnote 102:English, however, is only analytic in tendency. Relatively to French, it is still fairly synthetic, at least in certain aspects.
Footnote 103:The former process is demonstrable for English, French, Danish, Tibetan, Chinese, and a host of other languages. The latter tendency may be proven, I believe, for a number of American Indian languages, e.g., Chinook, Navaho. Underneath their present moderately polysynthetic form is discernible an analytic base that in the one case may be roughly described as English-like, in the other, Tibetan-like.
Footnote 104:This applies more particularly to the Romance group: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Roumanian. Modern Greek is not so clearly analytic.
Footnote 105:Seepages 133, 134.
Footnote 106:The following formulae may prove useful to those that are mathematically inclined. Agglutination: c = a + b; regular fusion: c = a + (b - x) + x; irregular fusion: c = (a - x) + (b - y) + (x + y); symbolism: c = (a - x) + x. I do not wish to imply that there is any mystic value in the process of fusion. It is quite likely to have developed as a purely mechanical product of phonetic forces that brought about irregularities of various sorts.
Footnote 107:Seepage 110.
Footnote 108:See Chapter V.
Footnote 109:If we deny the application of the term “inflective” to fusing languages that express the syntactic relations in pure form, that is, without the admixture of such concepts as number, gender, and tense, merely because such admixture is familiar to us in Latin and Greek, we make of “inflection” an even more arbitrary concept than it need be. At the same time it is true that the method of fusion itself tends to break down the wall between our conceptual groups II and IV, to create group III. Yet the possibility of such “inflective” languages should not be denied. In modern Tibetan, for instance, in which concepts of group II are but weakly expressed, if at all, and in which the relational concepts (e.g., the genitive, the agentive or instrumental) are expressed without alloy of the material, we get many interesting examples of fusion, even of symbolism.Mi di, e.g., “man this, the man” is an absolutive form which may be used as the subject of an intransitive verb. When the verb is transitive (really passive), the (logical) subject has to take the agentive form.Mi dithen becomesmi di“by the man,” the vowel of the demonstrative pronoun (or article) being merely lengthened. (There is probably also a change in the tone of the syllable.) This, of course, is of the very essence of inflection. It is an amusing commentary on the insufficiency of our current linguistic classification, which considers “inflective” and “isolating” as worlds asunder, that modern Tibetan may be not inaptly described as an isolating language, aside from such examples of fusion and symbolism as the foregoing.
Footnote 110:I am eliminating entirely the possibility of compounding two or more radical elements into single words or word-like phrases (seepages 67-70). To expressly consider compounding in the present survey of types would be to complicate our problem unduly. Most languages that possess no derivational affixes of any sort may nevertheless freely compound radical elements (independent words). Such compounds often have a fixity that simulates the unity of single words.
Footnote 111:We may assume that in these languages and in those of type D all or most of the relational concepts are expressed in “mixed” form, that such a concept as that of subjectivity, for instance, cannot be expressed without simultaneously involving number or gender or that an active verb form must be possessed of a definite tense. Hence group III will be understood to include, or rather absorb, group IV. Theoretically, of course, certain relational concepts may be expressed pure, others mixed, but in practice it will not be found easy to make the distinction.
Footnote 112:The line between types C and D cannot be very sharply drawn. It is a matter largely of degree. A language of markedly mixed-relational type, but of little power of derivation pure and simple, such as Bantu or French, may be conveniently put into type C, even though it is not devoid of a number of derivational affixes. Roughly speaking, languages of type C may be considered as highly analytic (“purified”) forms of type D.
Footnote 113:In defining the type to which a language belongs one must be careful not to be misled by structural features which are mere survivals of an older stage, which have no productive life and do not enter into the unconscious patterning of the language. All languages are littered with such petrified bodies. The English-sterofspinsterandWebsteris an old agentive suffix, but, as far as the feeling of the present English-speaking generation is concerned, it cannot be said to really exist at all;spinsterandWebsterhave been completely disconnected from the etymological group ofspinand ofweave (web). Similarly, there are hosts of related words in Chinese which differ in the initial consonant, the vowel, the tone, or in the presence or absence of a final consonant. Even where the Chinaman feels the etymological relationship, as in certain cases he can hardly help doing, he can assign no particular function to the phonetic variation as such. Hence it forms no live feature of the language-mechanism and must be ignored in defining the general form of the language. The caution is all the more necessary, as it is precisely the foreigner, who approaches a new language with a certain prying inquisitiveness, that is most apt to see life in vestigial features which the native is either completely unaware of or feels merely as dead form.
Footnote 114:Might nearly as well have come under D.
Footnote 115:Very nearly complex pure-relational.
Footnote 116:Not Greek specifically, of course, but as a typical representative of Indo-European.
Footnote 117:Such, in other words, as can be shown by documentary or comparative evidence to have been derived from a common source. See Chapter VII.
Footnote 118:These are far-eastern and far-western representatives of the “Soudan” group recently proposed by D. Westermann. The genetic relationship between Ewe and Shilluk is exceedingly remote at best.
Footnote 119:This case is doubtful at that. I have put French in C rather than in D with considerable misgivings. Everything depends on how one evaluates elements like-alinnational,-téinbonté, orre-inretourner. They are common enough, but are they as alive, as little petrified or bookish, as our English-nessand-fulandun-?
Footnote 120:In spite of its more isolating cast.
Footnote 121:In a book of this sort it is naturally impossible to give an adequate idea of linguistic structure in its varying forms. Only a few schematic indications are possible. A separate volume would be needed to breathe life into the scheme. Such a volume would point out the salient structural characteristics of a number of languages, so selected as to give the reader an insight into the formal economy of strikingly divergent types.
Footnote 122:In so far as they do not fall out of the normal speech group by reason of a marked speech defect or because they are isolated foreigners that have acquired the language late in life.
Footnote 123:Observe that we are speaking of an individual’s speech as a whole. It is not a question of isolating some particular peculiarity of pronunciation or usage and noting its resemblance to or identity with a feature in another dialect.
Footnote 124:It is doubtful if we have the right to speak of linguistic uniformity even during the predominance of the Koine. It is hardly conceivable that when the various groups of non-Attic Greeks took on the Koine they did not at once tinge it with dialectic peculiarities induced by their previous speech habits.
Footnote 125:The Zaconic dialect of Lacedaemon is the sole exception. It is not derived from the Koine, but stems directly from the Doric dialect of Sparta.
Footnote 126:Though indications are not lacking of what these remoter kin of the Indo-European languages may be. This is disputed ground, however, and hardly fit subject for a purely general study of speech.
Footnote 127:“Dialect” in contrast to an accepted literary norm is a use of the term that we are not considering.
Footnote 128:Spoken in France and Spain in the region of the Pyrenees.
Footnote 129:Or rather apprehended, for we do not, in sober fact, entirely understand it as yet.
Footnote 130:Not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so.
Footnote 131:In relative clauses too we tend to avoid the objective form of “who.” Instead of “The man whom I saw” we are likely to say “The man that I saw” or “The man I saw.”
Footnote 132:“Its” was at one time as impertinent a departure as the “who” of “Who did you see?” It forced itself into English because the old cleavage between masculine, feminine, and neuter was being slowly and powerfully supplemented by a new one between thing-class and animate-class. The latter classification proved too vital to allow usage to couple males and things (“his”) as against females (“her”). The form “its” had to be created on the analogy of words like “man’s,” to satisfy the growing form feeling. The drift was strong enough to sanction a grammatical blunder.
Footnote 133:Psychoanalysts will recognize the mechanism. The mechanisms of “repression of impulse” and of its symptomatic symbolization can be illustrated in the most unexpected corners of individual and group psychology. A more general psychology than Freud’s will eventually prove them to be as applicable to the groping for abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of experience, as to the life of the fundamental instincts.
Footnote 134:Note that it is different withwhose. This has not the support of analogous possessive forms in its own functional group, but the analogical power of the great body of possessives of nouns (man’s,boy’s) as well as of certain personal pronouns (his,its; as predicated possessive alsohers,yours,theirs) is sufficient to give it vitality.
Footnote 135:Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as whenYou saw whom?is equivalent toYou saw so and so and that so and so is who?In such sentenceswhomis pronounced high and lingeringly to emphasize the fact that the person just referred to by the listener is not known or recognized.
Footnote 136:Students of language cannot be entirely normal in their attitude towards their own speech. Perhaps it would be better to say “naïve” than “normal.”
Footnote 137:It is probably thisvariability of valuein the significant compounds of a general linguistic drift that is responsible for the rise of dialectic variations. Each dialect continues the general drift of the common parent, but has not been able to hold fast to constant values for each component of the drift. Deviations as to the drift itself, at first slight, later cumulative, are therefore unavoidable.
Footnote 138:Most sentences beginning with interrogativewhomare likely to be followed bydidordoes,do. Yet not all.
Footnote 139:Better, indeed, than in our oldest Latin and Greek records. The old Indo-Iranian languages alone (Sanskrit, Avestan) show an equally or more archaic status of the Indo-European parent tongue as regards case forms.
Footnote 140:Shoulditseventually drop out, it will have had a curious history. It will have played the rôle of a stop-gap betweenhisin its non-personal use (seefootnote 11,page 167) and the later analytic ofit.Transcriber's Note: This footnote has been renumbered as Footnote 132.
Footnote 141:Except in so far asthathas absorbed other functions than such as originally belonged to it. It was only a nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.
Footnote 142:Aside from the interrogative:am I?is he?Emphasis counts for something. There is a strong tendency for the old “objective” forms to bear a stronger stress than the “subjective” forms. This is why the stress in locutions likeHe didn’t go, did he?andisn’t he?is thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis.
Footnote 143:They:themas an inanimate group may be looked upon as a kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more properly belongs.
Footnote 144:Seepage 155.
Footnote 145:I have changed the Old and Middle High German orthography slightly in order to bring it into accord with modern usage. These purely orthographical changes are immaterial. Theuofmusis a long vowel, very nearly like theooof Englishmoose.
Footnote 146:The vowels of these four words are long;oas inrode,elikeaoffade,ulikeooofbrood,ylike Germanü.
Footnote 147:Or rather stage in a drift.
Footnote 148:Anglo-Saxonfetis “unrounded” from an olderföt, which is phonetically related tofotprecisely as ismys(i.e.,müs) tomus. Middle High Germanue(Modern Germanu) did not develop from an “umlauted” prototype of Old High Germanuoand Anglo-Saxono, but was based directly on the dialecticuo. The unaffected prototype was longo. Had this been affected in the earliest Germanic or West-Germanic period, we should have had a pre-German alternationfot:föti; this olderöcould not well have resulted inue. Fortunately we do not need inferential evidence in this case, yet inferential comparative methods, if handled with care, may be exceedingly useful. They are indeed indispensable to the historian of language.
Footnote 149:Seepage 133.
Footnote 150:Primitive Germanicfot(s),fotiz,mus,musiz; Indo-Europeanpods,podes,mus,muses. The vowels of the first syllables are all long.
Footnote 151:Or in that unconscious sound patterning which is ever on the point of becoming conscious. Seepage 57.
Footnote 152:As have most Dutch and German dialects.
Footnote 153:At least in America.
Footnote 154:It is possible that other than purely phonetic factors are also at work in the history of these vowels.
Footnote 155:The orthography is roughly phonetic. Pronounce all accented vowels long except where otherwise indicated, unaccented vowels short; give continental values to vowels, not present English ones.
Footnote 156:After I. the numbers are not meant to correspond chronologically to those of the English table. The orthography is again roughly phonetic.
Footnote 157:I usessto indicate a peculiar long, voicelesss-sound that was etymologically and phonetically distinct from the old Germanics. It always goes back to an oldt. In the old sources it is generally written as a variant ofz, though it is not to be confused with the modern Germanz(=ts). It was probably a dental (lisped)s.
Footnote 158:Zis to be understood as French or Englishz, not in its German use. Strictly speaking, this “z” (intervocalic-s-) was not voiced but was a soft voiceless sound, a sibilant intermediate between oursandz. In modern North German it has become voiced toz. It is important not to confound thiss—zwith the voiceless intervocalicsthat soon arose from the older lispedss. In Modern German (aside from certain dialects), oldsandssare not now differentiated when final (MausandFusshave identical sibilants), but can still be distinguished as voiced and voicelesssbetween vowels (MäuseandFüsse).
Footnote 159:In practice phonetic laws have their exceptions, but more intensive study almost invariably shows that these exceptions are more apparent than real. They are generally due to the disturbing influence of morphological groupings or to special psychological reasons which inhibit the normal progress of the phonetic drift. It is remarkable with how few exceptions one need operate in linguistic history, aside from “analogical leveling” (morphological replacement).
Footnote 160:These confusions are more theoretical than real, however. A language has countless methods of avoiding practical ambiguities.
Footnote 161:A type of adjustment generally referred to as “analogical leveling.”
Footnote 162:Isolated from other German dialects in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is therefore a good test for gauging the strength of the tendency to “umlaut,” particularly as it has developed a strong drift towards analytic methods.
Footnote 163:Chas in GermanBuch.
Footnote 164:The earlier students of English, however, grossly exaggerated the general “disintegrating” effect of French on middle English. English was moving fast toward a more analytic structure long before the French influence set in.
Footnote 165:For we still name our new scientific instruments and patent medicines from Greek and Latin.
Footnote 166:One might all but say, “has borrowed at all.”
Footnote 167:Seepage 206.
Footnote 168:Ugro-Finnic and Turkish (Tartar)
Footnote 169:Probably, in Sweet’s terminology, high-back (or, better, between back and “mixed” positions)-narrow-unrounded. It generally corresponds to an Indo-European longu.
Footnote 170:There seem to be analogous or partly analogous sounds in certain languages of the Caucasus.
Footnote 171:This can actually be demonstrated for one of the Athabaskan dialects of the Yukon.
Footnote 172:In the sphere of syntax one may point to certain French and Latin influences, but it is doubtful if they ever reached deeper than the written language. Much of this type of influence belongs rather to literary style than to morphology proper.
Footnote 173:Seepage 163.
Footnote 174:A group of languages spoken in southeastern Asia, of which Khmer (Cambodgian) is the best known representative.
Footnote 175:A group of languages spoken in northeastern India.
Footnote 176:I have in mind, e.g., the presence of postpositions in Upper Chinook, a feature that is clearly due to the influence of neighboring Sahaptin languages; or the use by Takelma of instrumental prefixes, which are likely to have been suggested by neighboring “Hokan” languages (Shasta, Karok).
Footnote 177:Itself an amalgam of North “French” and Scandinavian elements.
Footnote 178:The “Celtic” blood of what is now England and Wales is by no means confined to the Celtic-speaking regions—Wales and, until recently, Cornwall. There is every reason to believe that the invading Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) did not exterminate the Brythonic Celts of England nor yet drive them altogether into Wales and Cornwall (there has been far too much “driving” of conquered peoples into mountain fastnesses and land’s ends in our histories), but simply intermingled with them and imposed their rule and language upon them.
Footnote 179:In practice these three peoples can hardly be kept altogether distinct. The terms have rather a local-sentimental than a clearly racial value. Intermarriage has gone on steadily for centuries and it is only in certain outlying regions that we get relatively pure types, e.g., the Highland Scotch of the Hebrides. In America, English, Scotch, and Irish strands have become inextricably interwoven.
Footnote 180:The High German now spoken in northern Germany is not of great age, but is due to the spread of standardized German, based on Upper Saxon, a High German dialect, at the expense of “Plattdeutsch.”
Footnote 181:“Dolichocephalic.”
Footnote 182:“Brachycephalic.”
Footnote 183:By working back from such data as we possess we can make it probable that these languages were originally confined to a comparatively small area in northern Germany and Scandinavia. This area is clearly marginal to the total area of distribution of the Indo-European-speaking peoples. Their center of gravity, say 1000 B.C., seems to have lain in southern Russia.
Footnote 184:While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for it is stronger than one might suppose. There are a surprising number of common and characteristic Germanic words which cannot be connected with known Indo-European radical elements and which may well be survivals of the hypothetical pre-Germanic language; such arehouse,stone,sea,wife(GermanHaus,Stein,See,Weib).
Footnote 185:Only the easternmost part of this island is occupied by Melanesian-speaking Papuans.
Footnote 186:A “nationality” is a major, sentimentally unified, group. The historical factors that lead to the feeling of national unity are various—political, cultural, linguistic, geographic, sometimes specifically religious. True racial factors also may enter in, though the accent on “race” has generally a psychological rather than a strictly biological value. In an area dominated by the national sentiment there is a tendency for language and culture to become uniform and specific, so that linguistic and cultural boundaries at least tend to coincide. Even at best, however, the linguistic unification is never absolute, while the cultural unity is apt to be superficial, of a quasi-political nature, rather than deep and far-reaching.
Footnote 187:The Semitic languages, idiosyncratic as they are, are no more definitely ear-marked.
Footnote 188:Seepage 209.
Footnote 189:The Fijians, for instance, while of Papuan (negroid) race, are Polynesian rather than Melanesian in their cultural and linguistic affinities.
Footnote 190:Though even here there is some significant overlapping. The southernmost Eskimo of Alaska were assimilated in culture to their Tlingit neighbors. In northeastern Siberia, too, there is no sharp cultural line between the Eskimo and the Chukchi.
Footnote 191:The supersession of one language by another is of course not truly a matter of linguistic assimilation.
Footnote 192:“Temperament” is a difficult term to work with. A great deal of what is loosely charged to national “temperament” is really nothing but customary behavior, the effect of traditional ideals of conduct. In a culture, for instance, that does not look kindly upon demonstrativeness, the natural tendency to the display of emotion becomes more than normally inhibited. It would be quite misleading to argue from the customary inhibition, a cultural fact, to the native temperament. But ordinarily we can get at human conduct only as it is culturally modified. Temperament in the raw is a highly elusive thing.
Footnote 193:Seepages 39, 40.
Footnote 194:I can hardly stop to define just what kind of expression is “significant” enough to be called art or literature. Besides, I do not exactly know. We shall have to take literature for granted.
Footnote 195:This “intuitive surrender” has nothing to do with subservience to artistic convention. More than one revolt in modern art has been dominated by the desire to get out of the material just what it is really capable of. The impressionist wants light and color because paint can give him just these; “literature” in painting, the sentimental suggestion of a “story,” is offensive to him because he does not want the virtue of his particular form to be dimmed by shadows from another medium. Similarly, the poet, as never before, insists that words mean just what they really mean.
Footnote 196:See Benedetto Croce, “Aesthetic.”
Footnote 197:The question of the transferability of art productions seems to me to be of genuine theoretic interest. For all that we speak of the sacrosanct uniqueness of a given art work, we know very well, though we do not always admit it, that not all productions are equally intractable to transference. A Chopin étude is inviolate; it moves altogether in the world of piano tone. A Bach fugue is transferable into another set of musical timbres without serious loss of esthetic significance. Chopin plays with the language of the piano as though no other language existed (the medium “disappears”); Bach speaks the language of the piano as a handy means of giving outward expression to a conception wrought in the generalized language of tone.
Footnote 198:Provided, of course, Chinese is careful to provide itself with the necessary scientific vocabulary. Like any other language, it can do so without serious difficulty if the need arises.
Footnote 199:Aside from individual peculiarities of diction, the selection and evaluation of particular words as such.
Footnote 200:Not by any means a great poem, merely a bit of occasional verse written by a young Chinese friend of mine when he left Shanghai for Canada.
Footnote 201:The old name of the country about the mouth of the Yangtsze.
Footnote 202:A province of Manchuria.
Footnote 203:I.e., China.
Footnote 204:Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origins from the singing voice and the measure of the dance. Yet accentual and syllabic types of verse, rather than quantitative verse, seem to be the prevailing norms.
Footnote 205:Quantitative distinctions exist as an objective fact. They have not the same inner, psychological value that they had in Greek.
Footnote 206:Verhaeren was no slave to the Alexandrine, yet he remarked to Symons,à proposof the translation ofLes Aubes, that while he approved of the use of rhymeless verse in the English version, he found it “meaningless” in French.