Root-sounds.
two of its stages, first, the coining of the principal or essential parts of speech, the nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and secondly, the coining at a later date of the auxiliary parts of speech, the prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, and (where they exist) the encliticstheanda; these last, however, (as separate words,[21]) are wanting from a large number of languages. A third stage is the variation of certain words to form out of them other words which are nearly related in character to the first. We may speak of this process as a process of ringing the changes upon certainroot-soundsto form a series of words allied in sound and allied in sense also. We have several instances of such groups of allied words in our own language.Fly,flee,flew,fled, are words allied in sound and in sense. In these cases the sound of the letters f-l constitutes what we may call the root-sound. And it may be said at once that those languages are said to be related in each of which a certain number of words can be traced back to root-sounds which are common to the two or more tongues.
In the case of the vast majority of words, before we can begin by comparing one word with another, or trying to discover the root-words of several different languages, we have first to trace the history of these words backwards, each in its own language, and find their most primitive forms. But in tongues which are pretty nearly related we have often no difficulty in seeing the similarity of corresponding words just as they stand to-day. We have no difficulty, for instance, in seeing the connection of the GermanKnechtand ourknight,[22]the GermanNachtandournight, the GermanRaumand ourroom; or, again, the connection between the Italianpadreand the Frenchpère, the Italiantavolaand the French (and English)table, etc.
But where the connection between languages is more distant, we have more and more to go back to much simpler roots, in order to show the relationship between them; and by a vast majority the primitive root-sounds in any large family of languages are single syllables, whereof the most constant parts are (as a rule) the consonants. So far as our knowledge goes, we might think of man as beginning human speech with a certain number of these simple root-sounds, and then proceeding to ring the changes upon these root-sounds to express varieties in the root-idea. Sometimes it is easy enough to trace the connection of ideas between different words which have been formed out of the same root-word. But sometimes this is not at all easy. Nor can we say why this special sound has been adopted for any one notion more than for a number of others to which it would have applied equally well. From a root, which in Sanskrit appears in its most ancient form, asmâ, ‘to measure,’ we get words in Greek and Latin which mean ‘to think;’ and from the same root comes our ‘man,’ the person who measures, who compares,i.e., who thinks, also ourmoon, which means ‘the measurer,’ because the moon helps to measure out the time, themonths. But how arbitrary seems this connection betweenmanandmoon! So, too, ourcrabis from the wordcreep, and means the animal that creeps. But why this name should have been given to crab rather than to ant and beetle it is impossible to say. So that there appears as little trace of a reason governing the formation of words out of root-sounds as there appeared in the adoption of root-sounds to express certain fundamental ideas.
Thus equipped with his fixed root and the various words formed out of it, man had the roughmaterialout of which to build up all the elaborate languages which the world has known. And he continued his work something in this fashion. As generation followed generation the pronunciation of words was changed, as is constantly being done at the present day. Our grandmothers pronounced ‘Rome,’ ‘Room,’ and ‘brooch,’ as it was spelt, and not as we pronounce it—‘broach.’ And let it be remembered, before writing was invented, there was nothing but the pronunciation to fix the word, and a new pronunciation was really a new word. When there was no written form to petrify a word, these changes of pronunciation were very rapid and frequent, so that not only would each generation have a different set of words from their fathers, but probably each tribe would be partly unintelligible to its neighbouring tribes, just as a Somersetshire man is to a great extent unintelligible to a man from Yorkshire. The first result of these changes would be the springing up of that class of ‘meaningless’ words of which we spoke above. Out of some significant words, such as ‘head’ and ‘foot,’ would arise insignificant words similar to ‘over’ and ‘under.’ Such a change could only begin when of two names each for ‘head’ and ‘foot’ one became obsolete as a noun, and was only used adverbially. Then what had originally meant, metaphorically, ‘head of rock’ and ‘foot of rock’[23]might come to be used for ‘over’ and ‘under the rock,’ in exactly the same way that the wordago, having changed its form fromagone, has become a ‘meaningless’ word to the Englishman of to-day.
And with the acquisition of the insignificant words a new and very important process began. To understand
Growth ofinflexions.
what it was we will, as we did before, begin by examining the formation of some of the languages with which we are, probably, more or less familiar. Let us note how very many more variations on the same root are to be found in some languages than in others. On the rootdic, which in Latin expresses the notion of speaking, we have the variationsdico,dixi,dicere,dictum,dictio,dicto,dicor,dictor,dictator,dictatrix, etc.; and yet this does not nearly exhaust the list, for we have all the changes in the different tenses ofdico,dicto,dicor, etc., in the different cases ofdictio,dictator. dictatrix, etc. The languages which contain these numerous variations upon one root are what are called theinflectedlanguages, and the greater number of the changes which they make come under the head of what grammarians call inflexions. These inflexions are of no meaning in themselves, they have no existence even in themselves as words. And yet what is curious is that they are the same for a great number of different words; and they express the samerelativemeaning in the places where they stand whatever the word may be. If the-nisofdictionisexpresses a certain idea relative todictio, so does the-nisoflectionisexpress the same idea relative tolectio, the-nisofactionisthe same idea relative toactio, and so forth.
Or, to take an example from a modern inflected language, if the-esofMannes, expresses a certain idea relative toMann, so does the same inflexion (-esor-s) inHauses,Baums, etc., relative toHausandBaum.
Now, how are we to explain this fact? Our grammars, it is true, take it for granted, and give it us as a thing which requires no explanation—the genitive inflexion is-nisor-es, or whatever it may be. That is all they tell us. But we cannot be content to take anything of course. Anexplanation, however, is not difficult, and follows,almostof course, on the exercise of a little common sense. If the-esof Mannes, Hauses, Baumes (Baums) expresses the idea ‘of,’ then, at one time or another,es, or some root from which it is derived, must havemeant‘of.’ This explains easily and naturally enough the inflexions in any inflected language. They have no meaning now, but at one time they (or their original forms—their ancestors, so to speak) had no doubt just as much meaning by themselves as our ‘of.’ And therefore the only difference between our use in England to-day, and the ancestral use in a primitive language, was that we say ‘of [the] man,’ and the ancestral language would have said ‘man-of,’ ‘house-of,’ etc. This accounts for the same genitive forms being used for so many different words.
And that the same genitive forms are not usedthroughoutany language is no real objection to this theory. If we saydictionis,lectionis, butmusæ,rosæ; if we sayMannes,Hauses, butBlume,Rose, the only reason of these varieties is that the languages from which these inflexions are derived possessed more than one word meaning ‘of,’ and that one of these words was attached to a certain series of nouns, another word to another series.
This is the explanation which mere common sense would give of the origin of inflexions in language, and further research, had we time to examine the history of language more elaborately, would show that it wasfundamentallythe right explanation. The only correction which we should have to make on this first and crude theory is explained a little further on. Thus we see in this third stage of language a process very closely analogous to the second. The second stage gave us the auxiliary words, which have decayed so to say, out of the class of significant words.The third stage gives us the auxiliary words joined on to the significant ones, and in their turn decaying to become mere inflexions.
I have called this growth of inflexions thethirdstage. It is thethird greatstage in the formation of language, and is the only other stage distinguishable when we are examining what is called an inflected language. And all the languages the general reader is likely to know belong to this class. But when we turn to a wider study of the various tongues in use among mankind we find that this process of forming inflexions is a very slow one, that it, in its turn, has gone through many stages. And it is, in fact, the different stages through which a language has passed on its road to the formation of inflexions which settles the class in which it is to be placed among the various tongues spoken by mankind.
We shall soon understand what are these further stages in language-formation. As far as we have been able to see at present, the inflexion presents itself as something added on to the significant word to give it a varied meaning. It is evidently therefore part of a new process through which language has to go after it has completed its original stock of sounds, namely, the formation of fresh words by joining together two others which already exist. This is a process which, no doubt, in some shape or other, began in the very earliest ages, and which is to this day going on continually. The simpler form of it is the joining together two words which are significant when they stand alone to form a third word expressing a new idea; just as we have joined ‘ant’ to ‘hill’ and formedant-hill, which is a different idea than eitherantorhilltaken alone. In the wordsplayful,joyful, again, we have the same process carried rather further. The words mean simply play-full, ‘full ofplay,’ joy-full, ‘full of joy.’ But we do not in reality quite think of this meaning when we use them. The terminationfulhas become half-meaningless by itself, and in doing so we observe it has slightly changed its original form.
But far more important in the history of language is the joining of the meaningless or auxiliary words on to other words of the first, the significant class, whereby in the course of time the inflexions of language have been formed. Althoughwealways put the meaningless qualifying word before the chief word, and say ‘on the rock,’ or ‘under the rock,’ it is more natural to man, as is shown by all languages, to put the principal idea first, and say ‘rock on,’ ‘rock under,’ the idearockbeing of course the chief idea, the part of the rock, or position in relation to the rock, coming after. So the first step towards forming grammar was the getting a number of meaningless words, and joining them on to the substantive, ‘rock,’ ‘rock-by,’ ‘rock-in,’ ‘rock-to,’ etc. So with the verb. The essential idea in the verb is the action itself, the next idea is the time or person in which the action takes place; and the natural thing for man to do is to make the words follow that order. The joining process would give us fromlove, the idea of loving, ‘love-I,’ ‘love-thou,’ ‘love-he,’ etc.; and for the imperfect ‘love-was-I,’ ‘love-was-thou,’ ‘love-was-he,’ ‘love-was-we,’ ‘love-was-ye,’ ‘love-was-they;’ for perfect ‘love-have-I,’ ‘love-have-thou,’ ‘love-have-he,’ etc. Of course, these are merely illustrations, but they make the mode of this early joining process clearer than if we had chosen a language where that process is actually found in its purity, and then translated the forms into their English equivalents.
We have now arrived at a stage in the formation of language where bothmeaningandmeaninglesswords have beenintroduced, and where words have been made up out of combinations of the two. We see at once that with regard to meaningless words the use of them would naturally be fixed very much by tradition and custom; and whereas there might be a great many words standing forantandhill, and therefore a great many ways of saying ant-hill, for the meaningless words, such asunderandon, there would probably be only a few words. The reason of this is very plain. While all the separate synonyms forhillexpressed different ways in which it struck the mind, either as being high, or large, or steep, or what not, forunderandon, being meaningless words not producing anypicturein the mind, only one word apiece or one or two words could very well be in use. So long asunderandonwere significant words, meaning, perhaps, as we imagined,head of, orfoot of, there would be plenty of synonyms for them; but only one or two out of all these would be handed down in their meaningless forms. And it is this very fact which, as we have seen, accounts for all the grammars of all languages, every one of those grammatical terminations which we know so well in Latin and Greek, and German, having been originally nothing else than meaningless words added on to modify the words which still retained their meaning. We saw before that it was much more natural for people to say ‘rock-on’ or ‘hand-in’ than ‘on the rock’ or ‘in the hand’—because rock and hand were the most important ideas and came first into the mind, whileon,in, etc., were only subsidiary ideas depending upon the important ones. If we stop at rock or hand without addingonandin, we have still got something definite upon which our thoughts can rest, but we could not possibly stop atonandinalone, and have any idea in our minds at all. It is plain enough therefore that, though we say ‘on the rock,’ we must have theideaof all the three words in our mind before we begin the phrase, and therefore that our words do not follow the natural order of our ideas; whereas rock-on, hand-in, show the ideas just in the way they come into the mind.
It is a fact, then, that all case-endings arose from adding on meaningless words to the end of the word, the noun or pronoun—Mann,des mann-es,dem Mann-e;hom-o,hom-inis,hom-ini: the addition to the root in every case was once a distinct word of the auxiliary kind, or derived from such a word. The meanings of case-endings such as these cannot, it is true, be discovered now, for they came into existence long before such languages as German or Latin were spoken, and their meanings were lost sight of in ages which passed before history. But that time when the terminations which are meaningless now had a meaning, and the period of transition between this state and the state of a language which is full of grammatical changes inexplicable to those who use them, form distinct epochs in the history of every language. And it is just the same with verb-endings as with the case endings—ich bin,du bist, really express the ‘I’ and ‘thou’ twice over, as the pronouns exist though hidden and lost sight of in the-nand-stof the verb. In the case of verbs, indeed, we may without going far give some idea of how these endings can be detected. We may say at once that Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Norse, Gaelic, Welsh, Lithuanian, Russian, and other Slavonic languages are all connected together in various degrees of relationship, all descended from one common ancestor, some being close cousins, and some very distant. Now in Sanskrit ‘I am’ is thus declined:—
By separating the root from the ending in this way we may the more easily detect the additions to the root, and their meanings.Asis the root expressing the idea of being, existing;miis from a root meaningI(preserved inme, Greek and Lat.me,mi,m[ich], etc.); so we getas-mi, am-I, or I am. Then we may trace this form of word through a number of languages connected with the Sanskrit. The most important part ofas-mi, the consonants, are preserved in the Latinsum, I am, from which, by some further changes come the Frenchsuis, the Italiansono: the same word appears in oura-m, and in the Greekeimi(Doricesmi), I am. Next, coming to the second word, we see one of thes’scut out, and we geta-si, in which theais the root, and thesithe addition signifyingthou. To this addition correspond the finals’sin the Latines, Frenches—tu es, and the Greekeis(Doricessi). So, again, inas-ti, thetiexpresses he, and this corresponds to the Latinest, Frenchest, the Greekesti, the Germanist; in the English the expressivethas been lost. We will not continue the comparison of each word; it will be sufficient if we place side by side the same tense in Sanskrit and in Latin,[24]and give those who do not know Latin an opportunity of recognizing for themselves the tense in its changed form in French or Italian:—
The plural of the added portion we see contains the lettersm-s, and if we split these up again we get the separate rootsmiandsi, so thatmasmeans most literally ‘I,’ and ‘thou,’ and hence ‘we.’ In the second person the Latin has preserved an older form than the Sanskrit,s-tthe proper root-consonants for the addition part of the second person plural, combining the ideas thou and he, from which, ye. The third person plural cannot be so easily explained.
It will be seen that in the English almost all likeness to the Sanskrit terminations has been lost. Our verb ‘to be’ is very irregular, being, in fact, a mixture of several distinct verbs. The Anglo-Saxon had the verbbeócontracted frombeom(here we have at least them-ending for I), I am,byst, thou art,bydh, he is, and the same appear in the Germanbin,bist. It is, of course, very difficult to trace the remains of the meaningless additions in such advanced languages as ours, or even in such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. Nevertheless, the reader may find it not uninteresting to trace in the Latin through most of the tenses of verbs these endings—m, for I, the first person;s, for thou, the second person;t, for he, the third person;m-s, for I and thou, we;st, for ye, thou and he, ye;nt, for they. And the same reader must be content to take on trust the fact that other additions corresponding to different tenses can also be shown or reasonably guessed to have been words expressive by themselves of the idea which belongs to the particular tense; so that where we have such a tense as—
we may recognize the meaning of the component parts thus:—
Of course, really to show the way in which these meaningless additions have been made and come to be amalgamated with the root, we should have to take examples from a great number of languages in different stages of development. But we have thought it easier, for mere explanation, to take only such languages as were likely to be familiar to the reader, and even to supplement these examples with imaginary ones—like ‘rock-on,’ ‘love-was-I,’ etc.—in English. For our object has been at first merely to give an intelligible account of how language has been formed, of the different stages it has passed through, and to leave to a future time the question as to which languages of the globe have passed through all these stages, and which have gone part of their way in the formation of a perfect language. Between the state of a language in which the meaning of all the separate parts of a word are recognized and that state where they are entirely lost, there is an immense gap, that indeed which separates the most from the least advanced languages of the world.
MonosyllabicLanguage.
Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone through the stage of forming meaningless words, and is therefore possessed of words of both classes. They no longer say ‘head-of-rock’ or ‘foot-of-rock,’ but ‘rock-on’ and ‘rock-under.’ But there are still known languages in which almost every syllable is a word, and where grammar properly speaking is scarcely needed. For grammar, if we come to consider it exactly, is the explanation of the meaning of those added syllables or letters which have lost all natural meaning of their own. If each part of the word were as clear and as intelligible as ‘rock-on’ we should have no need of a grammar at all. A language of this sort is called a monosyllabic or a radical language, not because the people onlyspeak in monosyllables, but because each word, however compound, can be split up into monosyllables orroots, which have a distinctly recognizable meaning. ‘Ant-hill-on’ or ‘love-was-I,’ are like the words of such a language.
Agglutinativelanguage.
The next stage of growth is where the meaning of the added parts has been lost sight of, except when it is connected with the word which it modifies; but where the essential word has a distinct idea by itself, and without the help of any addition. Suppose, for instance, through ages of change the ‘was I’ in our imaginary example got corrupted into ‘wasi,’ wherewasihad no meaning by itself, but was used to express the first person of the past tense. The first person past of love would be ‘love-wasi,’ of move ‘move-wasi,’ and so on, ‘wasi’ no longer having a meaning by itself, but ‘love’ and ‘move’ by themselves being perfectly understandable. Or, to take an actual declension from a Turanian language,—
where, as we see, the root remains entirely unaffected by the addition of the personal pronoun.
A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative stage,[25]because certain grammatical endings (like ‘wasi’) are merely as it were glued on to a root to change its meaning, while the root itself remains quite unaffected, and means neither less nor more than it did before.
Inflectedlanguage.
But, as ages pass on, the root and the addition get so closely combined that neither of them alone has, as a rule, a distinct meaning, and the language arrives at its third stage of grammar-formation. It is not difficult to find examples of a language in this condition,for such is the case with all the languages by which we are surrounded. All the tongues which the majority of us are likely to study, almost all those which have any literature at all, have arrived at this last stage, which is called the inflexional. For instance, though we might divideactionisinto two partsactioandnis, and say that the former contains the essential idea, and the addition the idea implied by the genitive case, there are only a few Latin words with which such a process is possible, and even in the case ofactiothe separation is somewhat misleading. Inhomothe real root ishom, and the genitive is not homo-nis buthominis. So, again, though we were able to separate ‘asmi’ into two parts—‘as’ and ‘mi’—one expressing the idea of being, the other the person ‘I,’ this distinction is the refinement of the grammarian, and would never have been recognized by an ordinary speaker of Sanskrit, for whom ‘asmi’ simply meant ‘I am,’ without distinction of parts. In our ‘am’ the grammarian recognizes that the ‘a’ expresses existence, and the ‘m’ expresses I; but so completely have we lost sight of this, that we repeat the ‘I’ before the verb. Just the same in Latin. No Roman could have recognized in the ‘s’ ofsum‘am’ and in the ‘m’ ‘I;’ for himsummeant simply and purely ‘I am.’ It was no more separable in his eyes than the Frenchêtes(Latinestis) invous êtesis separable into a root ‘es,’ contracted in the French into ‘ê,’ meaningare, and an addition ‘tes’ signifyingyou. This, then, is the last stage upon which language enters. It is called the inflexional or inflected stage, because the different grammatical changes are not now denoted by a mere addition to an intelligible word, but by a change in the word itself. The root may in many cases remain and be recognizable in its purity, but very frequently it is unrecognizable,so that the different case-or tense-endings can no longer be looked upon as additions, but as changes. Take almost any Latin substantive, and we see this:homo, a man, the genitive is formed by changinghomointohominis, or, if we please, adding something to the roothom—which has in itself no meaning;musachanges intomusæ; and so forth.
The five stagesin the formationof language.
And now to recapitulate. We have in tracing the growth of language discovered first of all two stages whereby the material of the language was formed: the class of what we have called the meaning or significant words came into being, and out of this was formed the second class of so-called meaningless or auxiliary words. These two stages were in the main passed through before any known language came into existence; for there is no known language which does not contain words of both these classes; albeit the second stage is likewise a process which is still going on, as in the examples chosen, whereevenandjustpass from being adjectives intoevenandjustthe adverbs, and the French substantivespasandpointtake a like change of meaning.
These first two stages passed, there follow three other stages which go to the formation of the grammar of a language: first the stage of merely coupling words together, so as to form fresh words—themonosyllabicstate; then the stage in which one part of the additional word has lost its meaning while the root-word remains unchanged—the stage called theagglutinativecondition of language; and, finally the stage in which the added portion has become to some extent absorbed into the root-word—which last stage is theinflectedcondition of a language.
When we have come to this inflexional state, the history of the growth of language comes to an end. It happens indeed, sometimes, that a language which has arrived atthe inflected stage may in time come to drop nearly all its inflexions. This has been the case with English and French. Both are descended from languages which had elaborate grammars—the Saxon and the Latin; but both, through an admixture with foreign tongues and from other causes, have come to drop almost all their grammatical forms. We show our grammar only in a few changes in our ordinary verbs—the second and third persons singular,thou goest,he goes; the past tense and the past participle,use,used;buy,bought, etc.; in further variations in our auxiliary verb ‘to be;’ by changes in our pronouns,I,me,ye,you,who,whom, etc.; and by the ‘ ’s’ and ‘s’ of the possessive case and of the plural, and the comparison of adjectives. The French preserve their grammar to some extent in their pronouns, their adjectives, the plurals of their nouns, and in their verbs. Instances such as these are cases of decay, and do not find any place in the history of the growth of language.
We now pass on to examine where the growth of language has been fully achieved, where it has remained only stunted and imperfect.
Wehave now traced the different stages through which language may pass in attaining to its most perfect form, the inflected stage. There were the two stages in which what we may call the bones of the language were formed, the acquisition of those words which, likepen,inkandpaper, when standing alone bring a definite idea into the mind, and, next, the acquisition of those other words which, liketo,for,and, produce no idea in the mind when taken alone. We saw that while the first class of wordsmayhave been acquired with any imaginable rapidity, the second class could only have gradually come into use as one by one they fell out of the rank of the ‘significant’ class.
Again, after this skeleton of language has been got together, there were, we saw, three other stages which went to make up the grammar of a language: the radical stage, in which all the words of the language can be cut up intorootswhich are generally monosyllables, each of which has a meaning as a separate word; the agglutinative stage, when the root,i.e.the part of the word which expresses the essential idea, remains always distinct from any added portion; and, thirdly, the inflected stage, when in many cases theroot and the addition to the root have become so interwoven as to be no longer distinguishable.
Of course, really to understand what these three conditions are like, the reader would have to be acquainted with some language in each of the three; but it is sufficient if we get clearly into our heads that there are these stages of language-growth, and that, further, each one of all the languages of the world may be said to be in one of the three. Our opportunities of tracing the history of languages being so limited, we have no recorded instance of a language passing out of one stage into another; but when we examine into these states they so clearly wear the appearance ofstagesthat there seems every reason to believe that a monosyllabic language might in time develop into an agglutinative, and again from that stage into an inflexional, language,if nothing stopped its growth.
Arrest in thegrowth oflanguage.
But what, we may ask, are the causes which put a stop to the free growth and development of language? One of these causes is the invention of writing. Language itself is of course spoken language, speech, and as such is subject to no laws save those which belong to our organs of speaking and hearing. No sooner is the word spoken than it is gone, and lives only in the memory; and thus speech, though it may last for centuries, dies, as it were, and comes to life again every hour. It is with language as it is with those national songs and ballads which, among nations that have no writing, take the place of books and histories. The same poem or the same tale passes from mouth to mouth almost unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet at no moment is it visible and tangible, nor for the most part of the time audible even, but for these centuries lives on in men’s memories only. So Homer’s ballads must have passed for severalhundred years from mouth to mouth; and, stranger still, stories which were first told somewhere by the banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes by distant ancestors of ours, are told to this very day, little altered, by peasants in remote districts of England and Scotland. But to return to language. It is very clear that so long as language remains speech and speech only, it is subject to just so many variations as, in the course of a generation or two, men may have introduced into their habits of speaking. Why these variations arise it is perhaps not quite easy to understand; but every one knows that they do arise, that from age to age, from generation to generation, not only are new words being continually introduced, and others which once served well enough dropped out of use, but constant changes are going on in the pronunciation of words. As we have already said, if left to itself a language would not remain quite the same in two different districts. We know, for instance, that the language of common people does differ very much in different counties, so that what with varieties of pronunciation, and what with the use of really peculiar words, the inhabitants of one county are scarcely intelligible to the inhabitants of another.
This constant change in language can be resolved, so to say, into two forces—one of decay, the other of renewal. The change which each word undergoes is of the nature of decay. Itlosessomething from its original form. But then, out of this change, it passes into new forms; and very often out of one word, by this mere process of change in sound, two words spring. We have already seen instances of how this may come about. The Anglo-Saxonagânbecomes in process of timeagone, as we have seen. That word again, by a further process of decay, changes intoago. So far we have nothing but loss. But then the Old Englishagânhad only the same meaning as our past participlegone.[26]So now we have two words really in the place of one, and where formerly men would have said, ‘It is a long timeagone,’ or ‘That man has latelyagone,’ we now can say, ‘It is a long timeago,’ ‘The man has latelygone.’ And we may in any language watch this process of decay (phonetic decay, as it is called) and regeneration (dialectic regeneration, the philologists call it) ever going forward. We see, as it were,—
‘The hungry ocean gainAdvantage o’er the kingdom of the shore;And the firm soil win of the watery mainIncreasing store with loss, and loss with store.’
‘The hungry ocean gainAdvantage o’er the kingdom of the shore;And the firm soil win of the watery mainIncreasing store with loss, and loss with store.’
‘The hungry ocean gainAdvantage o’er the kingdom of the shore;And the firm soil win of the watery mainIncreasing store with loss, and loss with store.’
The influence which keeps a language together, and tends to make changes such as these as few as possible, is that of writing. When once writing has been invented it is clear that language no longer depends upon the memory only, no longer has such a seemingly precarious tenure of life as it had when it was no more than speech. The writing remains a strong bulwark against the changes of time. Although our written words are but the symbols of sound, they are symbols so clear that the recollection of the sound springs up in our minds the moment the written word comes before our eyes. So it is that there are hundreds of words in the English language which we should many of us not use once in a lifetime, which are yet perfectly familiar to us. All old-fashioned words which belong to theliterarylanguage, and are never used now in common life, would have been forgotten long ago except for writing. The fact, again, that those provincialisms which make the peasants of different counties almost mutually unintelligible do not affect the intercourse of educated people, is owing to the existence of a written language.
Chinese.
It was at one time thought by philologists that in Chinese we had a genuine specimen of a language in the radical stage of formation. As such it is cited, for instance, in Professor Max Müller’sLectures on the Science of Language. But the most trustworthy Chinese scholars are, I believe, now of opinion that the earliest Chinese of which we can find any trace had already passed through this stage and become an agglutinative language, and that it has since decayed somewhat from that condition to become once more almost a monosyllabic language.
However that may be, it is acknowledged that Chinese has never passed beyond a very primitive condition, and that its having rested so long in this state is due more than anything else to the early invention of writing in that country. We know how strange has been the whole history of civilization in China. How the Chinese, after they had made long ago an advance far beyond all their contemporaries at that date of the world’s history, seem to have suddenly stopped short there, and have remained ever since a stunted incomplete race, devoid of greatness in any form. Their character is reflected very accurately in their language. While it was still in a very primitive condition writing was introduced into the country, and from that time forward the tongue remained almost unchanged. Other languages which are closely allied to Chinese—Burmese, Siamese, and Thibetan—are so nearly monosyllabic that they can scarcely be considered to have yet got fairly into the agglutinative stage.
It is, then, writing which has preserved for us Chinese in the very primitive condition in which we find it. For people in a lower order of civilization there may be many other causes at work to prevent an agglutinative language
Turanianlanguages.
becoming inflexional. It is not always easy to say what the hindering causes have been in any individual case; but perhaps, if we look at the difference between the last two classes of language, we can get some idea of what they might be for the class of agglutinative languages as a whole. An inflexional language has quite lost the memory of the real meaning of its inflexions—or at least the real reason of them. We could give no reason why we should not useboughtin the place ofbuy,artin the place ofam,whomin the place ofwho—no other reason save that we have always been taught to use the words in the position they take in our speech. But there was once a time when the changes only existed in the form ofadditionshaving a distinct meaning. Even in agglutinative languages these additions have a distinct meaningasadditions, or, in other words, if we were using an agglutinative language we should be always able to distinguish the addition from the root, and so should understand the precise effect of the former in modifying the latter. To understand the use of words in an agglutinative language, therefore, a great deal less of tradition and memory would be required than are wanted to preserve an inflected language. This really is the same as saying that for the inflected language we must have a much more constant use; and this again implies a greater intellectual life, a closer bond of union among the people who speak it, than exists among those who speak agglutinative languages.
Or if we look at the change from another point of view, we can say that the cause of the mixing up of the root, and its addition came at first from a desire toshortenthe word and to save time—a desire which was natural to people who spoke much and had much intercourse. We may then, from these various considerations, concludethat the people who use the agglutinative languages are people who have not what is called a close and active national life. This is exactly what we find to be the case. If a primitive language, such as the Chinese, belongs to a people who have, as it were, developed too quickly, the agglutinative languages, as a class, distinguish a vast section of the human race whose natural condition is a very unformed one, who are for the most part nomadic races without fixed homes, or laws, or states. They live a tribal existence, each man having little intercourse save with those of his immediate neighbourhood. They are unused to public assemblies. Such assemblies take among early peoples almost the place of literature, in obliging men to have a common language and a united national life. Being without these controlling influences, it results that the different dialects and tongues belonging to the agglutinative class are almost endless. It is not our intention to weary the reader by even a bare list of them. But we may glance at the chief heads into which these multifarious languages may be grouped, and the geographical position of those who speak them.
The agglutinative tongues include the speech of all those peoples of Central Asia whom in common language we are wont to speak of as Tartars, but whom it would be more correct to describe as belonging to the Turkic or Mongol class, and of whom several different branches—the Huns, who emigrated from the borders of China to Europe; the Mongols or Moghuls, who conquered Persia and Hindustan; and lastly, the Osmanlîs, or Ottomans, who invaded Europe and founded the Turkish Empire—are the most famous, and most infamous, in history. Another large class of agglutinative languages belongs to the natives of the vast region of Siberia, from the Uralmountains to the far east. Another great class, closely allied to these last, the Finnish tongues namely, once spread across all the northern half of what is now European Russia, and across North Scandinavia; but the people who spoke them have been gradually driven to the extreme north by the Russians and Scandinavians. Lastly, a third division is formed by those languages which belonged to the original inhabitants of Hindustan before the greater part of the country was occupied by the Hindus. These languages are spoken of as the Dravidian class. The natural condition of these various nations or peoples is, as we have said, a nomadic state, a state in which agriculture is scarcely known, though individual nations out of them have risen to considerable civilization. And as in very early times ancestors of ours who belonged to a race speaking an inflexional language bestowed upon some part of these nomadic people the appellationTura, which means ‘the swiftness of a horse,’ from their constantly moving from place to place, the word Turanian has been applied to all these various peoples, and the agglutinative languages are spoken of generally as Turanian tongues.