ON
THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF LANGUAGES,
Chiefly fromDr. Latham.
African.—The best way to study the wide and complex philology of Africa is to begin with the frontier of the Semitic languages, remembering that the Ethiopic branch of them is, to all appearance, indigenous to Africa; then to bear in mind that the Arabic, by intrusion and extension, is spread over a great part of Northern and Eastern Africa. The Eastern frontier, however, of the Arabic and the Syriac is in Asia, and in Asia it begins where the Persian and Turk areas end. For the philological geography of Africa it will be found useful to divide the continent into the following sections, regions, or areas: (1) The first division as North-Eastern until it approaches the Equator, and the parts between it and the Red Sea—in geography, Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia, in philology the Coptic, Beja, Nubian, and (in its geographical sense) the Abyssinian regions. (2) The Barbary States and Canary Islands. (3) The Desert, divided into the Western or Great (the Sahara), and the Eastern (or Libyan) Desert. (4) Senegambia, or the drainages of the Senegal and Gambia. (5) Sudania. This gives us what we get nowhere else in Africa, a continuous belt or zone of languages, with fairly determined boundaries from Senegambia to Abyssinia,i.e., across the whole continent in its broadest part. Within the limits of this zone lie the fundamental materials for the study of African philology and ethnology. It is only, however, between the parallels of 10° and 15° N.L. that it is continuous, and this only approximately. (6) The Coast line. This means the sea-board of the Grain, Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts.(7) The Delta (of the Niger). This brings us within the Equator, but only on the side of the Atlantic. The Abyssinian extends to (there or thereabouts) the same parallels on the side of the Indian Ocean. Neither, however, carries us beyond a limited area inland. Where these two limits, East and West, end, South Africa begins. It is, with the exception of the few degrees of latitude just indicated, either equatorial or belonging to the Southern tropic; it falls into two divisions. (8) The Inter-Tropical, or Kaffir. (9) The Extra-Tropical, or Hottentot. All these divisions are simply what their names imply, except only that Senegambia is made to reach as far as Cape Mesurado, so as to include the parts about Sierra Leone and Cape Mount.
American.—The primary division is that between North and South. (1) In North America the connection with Asia is decided. Through the Aleutian dialect of the Eskimo and the Kamtschatkan it is direct; through the Yukahiri and other tongues it is indirect. The Eskimo is a definite class; the Athabascan is also a definite class when compared with the Algonkin. The Chemmesyan, Hailtsa, Wakash, and Chinook are connected. The Jakon and Kallapuiah lead to the languages of the Sahaptin and Shoshoni class, among the congeners of which the sound of “tl” appears. In the Mexican it becomes prominent. Between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific the Algonkin appears to have spread from West to East, and the result has told most on the Iroquois family. The South Oregon languages graduate into the Californian, the Californian into those of the Paduca class and those of Sonora, till we come to two great divisions, the Mexican and the Maya. (2) In South America there is a reappearance of the phenomena of the North: what the Athabascan and Algonkin are in the one peninsula, the Quichua, the Carib, and, above all, the Guarani are in the other. With any South American vocabulary of adequate length, some North American root presents itself; some even from the extreme North, viz., the Eskimo area, which, along with the phenomena of transition, is the chief argument in favour of the fundamental unity of the two classes. The student from Peru finds Quichua words in every vocabulary he lights upon, whilst the student from Brazil finds Guarani words.
Asian.—Asia and Europe, though different quarters of the globe, form but a single continent, and as such have characteristics of their own. One great class of languages is absolutely common to the two—the great Ugrian or Fin family. We miss, no doubt, in Europe such districts as those of Caucasus, and the parts to the North of the Burmese Empire, where numerous mutually unintelligible languages are pressed together within a small area. Again, the inflected languages have their seat in Europe; the monosyllabic in Asia. On the other hand, it is only in the great central continent that Language can be studied in all its stages: the Monosyllabic stage in the South-East of Asia, and the Inflectional inWestern and Southern Europe. This makes Asia and Europe the only region in which the whole (or nearly the whole) history of Language can be studied. Besides this, in Europe and Asia we have a history. We can see how languages like the English and Russian are extending themselves; how the German has extended itself; how the Latin had previously extended itself. We can see how languages like the Keltic, the Lithuanic, and the Fin recede. (1) The Western division is the one with which we are most familiar; it includes Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Valley of the Danube, and Greece; allowance being made for the Turk and Hungarian, which are intrusive. (2) The great Northern area is in Russia conterminous with the Western, which means, roughly speaking, Northern Asia with a large part of Europe; the chief displacements having been effected by the great spread of the Turk language. (3) The South-Eastern area begins with the North frontier of China, and includes Thibet, Nipal, the Transgangetic peninsula, Assam, Siam, Pegu, Cambogia, Cochin-China, and China. (4) The South-Western area contains India, Persia, and the Caucasus; here the displacing languages are Indian, Persian, and Arabic, which last is treated as African.
Oceanic.—The first thing which commands attention is its thorough insular or oceanic character; subordinate to this is the remarkable distribution of its members. In one great division, viz., the Polynesian, the diffusion has been decidedly recent. The first primary division contains the Malay; the second has been called Micronesian; the third division is Polynesia proper. The second group is called Kelenonesian or Melanesian, including Papuan, Australian, and Tasmanian (“Elements,” p. 377). Australian languages are all upon the same general grammatical construction. Mr. Moorhouse says that “not one-twentieth part of the words agree in root, and yet there is evidence sufficient to satisfy any one that they belong to the same family.” All have suffixes to show relation; a dual in substantives, adjectives, and pronouns; no sibilant sounds, no auxiliary verb, no passive voice, no “h,” they abound in the pleonastic, and distinguish genders by postfixes. The only point of agreement is in the first personal pronoun, “I”; this is “nga-nga” on the Swan River; “nga-toa” in New South Wales; “nga-ti,” Adelaide; “ngai-tyo,” Mount Barker; “gni,” Murchison River; “nga-pe,” Encounter Bay; “ngai,” Port Lincoln; “nga-ppo,” Murray River; “naddo,” Murrumbidgee River; “nga-pe,” Lower Murray; “noga-toa,” Hunter River. At the same time, the Malayan is “nga-n”; the Sumba, “nga-nga”; the Thibetian, “nga”; the Corean, “nai”; and the Burmese, “ngai.” Yet Dr. Latham finds no Australian dialects resemble those of the Asiatic Isles. Mr. Norris first detected similarity of the grammar between the Australian and the South Dravidian languages of India, spoken before the Aryan migration to the Ganges. Mr. J. R. Logan, of Singapore, thinks the Australian the most ancient of the Indo-Australian tongues.He says they are “a remnant of the Proto-Scythic era of the harmonic development, and between Chinese and American.” He regards them, with the other kindred dialects of South-Eastern Asia, as in existence “before the expansion of the numerals one, two, and three into higher binary and ternary terms.” According to him, “the pronominal roots are compounded with definitives, singular and plural, with the numeral two to form duals, with masculine and feminine definitives in the third person, and in all the three persons with each other; thus producing not only absolute and relative plurals of the first person, but several other complex plurals.”
J. B.
October 31st, 1873.