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Title: Introduction to the science of language, Volume 1 (of 2)
Author: A. H. Sayce
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Language: English
Original publication: London: C. Kegan Paul & Co, 1880
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INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE.
_INTRODUCTION TO THE
SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE._
BY
A. H. SAYCE,
DEPUTY PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
[Illustration]
LONDON:
C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
1880.
“Ille demum foret nobilissima grammaticæ species, si quis in
linguis tam eruditis quam vulgaribus eximie doctus, de variis
linguarum proprietatibus tractaret; in quibus quæque excellat,
in quibus deficiat ostendens.”—BACON (“De Aug. Scient.,” vi. 1).
_The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved._
PREFACE.
But few words of Preface are needed for a work which will sufficiently
explain itself. It is an attempt to give a systematic account of the
Science of Language, its nature, its progress and its aims, which shall
be at the same time as thorough and exhaustive as our present knowledge
and materials allow. How far the attempt has been successful is for the
reader to judge; the author cannot do more than his best. The method and
theories which underlie the work have been set forth in my “Principles of
Comparative Philology,” where I have criticized certain of the current
assumptions of scientific philology, and endeavoured to show their
inadequacy or positive error. It is gratifying to find that my views and
conclusions have been accepted by leading authorities on the subject,
and I shall, therefore, make no apology for tacitly assuming them in the
present work. So far as the latter is concerned, however, it matters
little whether they are right or wrong; an Introduction necessarily has
mainly to deal with the statement and arrangement of ascertained facts.
The theories the facts are called upon to support are of secondary
importance.
It may be objected that I have handled some parts of the subject at
disproportionate length. But it has seemed to me that an Introduction
should give a survey of the whole field to be explored, and not neglect
any portion of it for the sake of literary unity or easy reading. There
is certain work which must be done once for all, if the ground is to
be cleared for future research and progress, and if well done need
not be done again. The historical retrospect in the first chapter is
indispensable for a right understanding of the “Science of Language;” but
in writing it I have tried not to forget that brevity is a virtue as well
as completeness. It is the fault of the subject-matter if the chapter
seems unduly long.
Exception may perhaps be taken to the use I have made of the languages
and condition of modern savage tribes to illustrate those of primitive
man. It is quite true that in many cases savage tribes are examples of
degeneracy from a higher and less savage state; the Arctic Highlanders
of Ross and Parry, for instance, have retrograded in social habits,
and the disuse of boats and harpoons, from the Eskimaux of the south;
and if we pass from savage to more civilized races there is distinct
evidence in the language of the Polynesians that they have lapsed from
a superior level of civilization. It is also quite true that, however
degraded a tribe or race may now be, it is necessarily much in advance of
palæolithic man when he first began to create a language for himself, and
to discover the use of fire. Nevertheless, it is in modern savages and,
to a less degree, in young children, that we have to look for the best
representatives we can find of primæval man; and so long as we remember
that they are but imperfect representatives we shall not go far wrong
in our scientific inferences. As Professor Max Müller has said:[1] “The
idea that, in order to understand what the so-called civilized people may
have been before they reached their higher enlightenment, we ought to
study savage tribes, such as we find them still at the present day, is
perfectly just. It is the lesson which geology has taught us, applied to
the stratification of the human race.”
In the matter of language, however, we are less likely to make mistakes
in arguing from the modern savage to the first men than in other
departments of anthropology. Here we can better distinguish between old
and new, can trace the gradual growth of ideas and forms, and determine
where articulate language passes into those inarticulate efforts to speak
out of which it originally arose. In fact, a chief part of the services
rendered to glottology by the study and observation of savage and
barbarous idioms consists in the verification they afford of the results
of our analysis of cultivated and historical languages. If, for example,
this leads us to the conclusion that grammatical simplicity is the last
point reached in the evolution of language, we must go to savage dialects
for confirmation before we can accept the conclusion as proven. Moreover,
there is much of the primitive machinery of speech which has been lost
in the languages of the civilized nations of the world, but preserved in
the more conservative idioms of savage tribes—for savages, it must be
remembered, are the most conservative of human beings; while were we to
confine our attention to the groups of tongues spoken by civilized races
we should form but a very partial and erroneous view of language and its
structure, since the conceptions upon which the grammars of the several
families of speech are based are as various as the families of speech
themselves. Nor must we forget the lesson of etymology, that the poverty
of ideas with which even our own Aryan (or rather præ-Aryan) ancestors
started was as great as that of the lowest savages of to-day.
My best thanks are due to Professor Mahaffy for his kindness in looking
over the sheets of the present work during its passage through the press,
and to Mr. Henry Sweet for performing the same kind offices towards
the fourth chapter. Mr. Sweet’s name will guarantee the freedom of the
chapter from phonetic heresies. I have also to tender my thanks to
Professor Rolleston for the help he has given me in the preparation of
the diagrams which accompany the work, while I hardly know how to express
my gratitude sufficiently to Mr. W. G. Hird, of Bradford, who has taken
upon himself the onerous task of providing an index to the two volumes.
How onerous such a labour is can be realized only by those who have
already undergone it.
A. H. SAYCE.
QUEEN’S COLLEGE, OXFORD, _November, 1879_.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
VOL. I.
PAGE
PREFACE v
Chapter I. Theories of Language 1
” II. The Nature and Science of Language 90
” III. The three Causes of Change in Language (Imitation,
Emphasis, and Laziness) 163
Dialectic Variety 202
Appendix to Chapter III. Specimens of Mixed Jargons 219
Chapter IV. The Physiology and Semasiology of Speech (Phonology
and Sematology) 226
Etymology 345
Appendix I. to Chapter IV. The Vocal Organs of Animals 350
” II. ” The Alphabets of Prince L-L. Bonaparte
(Mr. A. J. Ellis) and Mr. H. Sweet 353
Chapter V. The Morphology of Speech 364
The Metaphysics of Language 404
Comparative Syntax 421
CHAPTER I.
THEORIES OF LANGUAGE.
“If we preserve in our histories of the world the names of
those who are said to have discovered the physical elements—the
names of Thales, and Anaximenes, and Empedocles—we ought
not to forget the names of the discoverers of the elements
of language—the founders of one of the most useful and most
successful branches of philosophy—the first grammarians.”—MAX
MÜLLER.
“Speech is silvern, silence is golden,” is the well-known saying of a
modern prophet, wearied with the idle utterances of a transition age, and
forgetful that the _prophet_, or προφητής, is himself but the “spokesman”
of another, and that the era which changed the Hebrew seer into the
_Nabi_, or “proclaimer,” brought with it also the beginning of culture
and civilization, and the consciousness of a high religious destiny. Far
truer was the instinct of the old poet of the Rig-Veda, the most ancient
monument of our Aryan literature, written, it may be, fifteen centuries
before the birth of Christ, when he calls “the Word” one of the highest
goddesses “which rushes onward like the wind, which bursts through heaven
and earth, and, awe-inspiring to each one that it loves, makes him a
Brahman, a poet, and a sage.” The haphazard etymology which saw in the
μέροπες ἄνθρωποι of Homer “articulate-speaking men,” must indeed be
given up, but we may still picture to ourselves the “winged words” which
seemed inspired with the life and divinity of Hermês, or the sacred Muses
from whom the Greek singer drew all his genius and power. Language is at
once the bond and the creation of society, the symbol and token of the
boundary between man and brute.
We must be careful to remember that language includes any kind of
instrumentality whereby we communicate our thoughts and feelings to
others, and therefore that the deaf-mute who can converse only with
the fingers or the lips is as truly gifted with the power of speech as
the man who can articulate his words. The latter has a more perfect
instrument at his command, but that is all. Indeed, it is quite possible
to conceive of a community in which all communications were carried on
with the hands alone; to this day savage tribes make a large use of
gestures, and we are told that the Grebos of Africa ordinarily indicate
the persons and tenses of the verb by this means only. Wherever there is
the power of making our thoughts intelligible to another, or even simply
the possibility of this power, as in the case of the infant, there we
have language, although for ordinary purposes the term may be restricted
to spoken or articulate speech. It is in this sense that language will be
understood in the following pages.
Now one of the earliest subjects of reflection was the language in which
that reflection clothed itself. The power of words was clear even to the
barbarian, and yet at the same time it was equally clear that he himself
exercised a certain power over them. Wonder, it has been said, is the
mother of science, and out of the wonder excited by the great mystery of
language came speculations on its nature and its origin. What, it was
asked, are those modulations of the voice, those emissions of the breath,
which inform others of what is passing in our innermost souls, and
without which the most rudimentary form of society would be impossible?
Perhaps it was in Babylonia that the first attempt was made to answer the
question. Here there was a great mixture of races and languages, and here
it was accordingly that the scene of the confusion of tongues was laid.
The Tower of Babel, the great temple of the Seven Lights of Borsippa,
whose remains we may still see in the ruins of the Birs-i-Nimrúd, was,
it was believed, the cause and origin of the diversity of human speech.
Men endeavoured to make themselves equal to the gods, and to storm heaven
like the giants of Greek mythology, but the winds frustrated their
attempts, and heaven itself confounded their speech. Such was the native
legend, fragments of which have been brought from the Assyrian library of
Assur-bani-pal, or Sardanapalus, and which cannot fail to bring to our
minds the familiar history of Genesis.
Now the same library that has given us these fragments has also given
us the first beginnings of what we may call comparative philology.
The science, the art, and the literature of Babylonia had been the
work of an early people who spoke an agglutinative language, and from
them it had all been borrowed and perhaps improved upon by the later
Semitic settlers in the country. Their language, which for the want of
a better name we will call Accadian, had ceased to be spoken before the
seventeenth century B.C., but not before the civilization and culture it
enshrined had been adopted by a new race, who had to study and learn the
dead tongue in which they were preserved, as the scholars of the Middle
Ages had to study and learn Latin. Hence came the need of dictionaries,
grammars, and reading-books; and the clay tablets of Nineveh accordingly
present us not only with interlinear and parallel Assyrian translations
of Accadian texts, arranged upon the Hamiltonian method, but also with
syllabaries and lexicons, with phrase-books and grammars of the two
languages. It is the first attempt ever made to draw up a grammar, and
the comparative form the attempt has assumed shows how impossible was
even the suggestion of such a thing without the comparison of more
than one form of speech. The vocabularies are compiled sometimes on a
classificatory principle, sometimes on an alphabetic one, sometimes
on the principle of grouping a number of derivations around their
common root; and the latter principle enunciates at once the primary
doctrine and object of comparative philology—the analysis of language
into its simplest elements. With the discovery of roots we may date the
possibility and the beginning of linguistic science.
Next in order of time to the grammarians of Babylonia and Assyria came
the grammarians of India, whose labours again were called forth by the
comparison of different forms of speech. The sacred language of the Veda
had already become antiquated and obscure, while the rise and spread
of Buddhism had raised more than one popular dialect to the rank of a
literary language, and obliged the educated Hindu not only to study his
own speech in its earlier and later forms, but to compare it with other
more or less related idioms as well. Since Indian philology, however, is
intimately connected with the history of the modern science of Language,
it will be more convenient to consider it further on.
The problems of language were naturally among the first to present
themselves to the activity of the Greek mind. Already the instinct of
their wonderful speech, itself the fitting creation and reflex of the
national character, had found in the word λόγος an expression of the
close relationship that exists between reasoned thought and the words
in which it clothes itself; and the question which Greek philosophy
sought to answer was the nature of this relationship, and of the language
wherein it is embodied. Do words exist, it was asked, _by nature_ (φύσει)
or _by convention_ (θέσει); do the sounds which we utter exactly and
necessarily represent things as they are in themselves, or are they
merely the arbitrary marks and symbols conventionally assigned to the
objects we observe and the conceptions we form? This was the question
that the greatest of the Greek thinkers attempted to solve; and the
controversy it called forth divided Greek philosophy into two camps,
and lies at the bottom of all its contributions to linguistic science.
It is true that the question was really a philosophic one, and that the
advocates of free-will on the one side, and of necessity on the other,
naturally saw in speech either the creation and plaything of the human
will, or else a power over which man has as little control as over the
forces of nature. Important as were the results of this controversy, not
only to the philosophy of language, but yet more to the formation of
grammar, it was impossible for a _science_ of language to arise out of
it: its results were logical rather than linguistic, for science requires
the patient _à posteriori_ method of induction, not the _à priori_ method
of immature philosophizing, however brilliantly handled. The Greeks
had, indeed, grasped a truth which has too often been forgotten in
modern times, the truth that language is but the outward embodiment and
crystallization of thought; but they overlooked the fact that to discover
its nature and its laws we must observe and classify its external
phænomena, and not until we have ascertained by this means the conditions
under which thought externalizes itself in language, can we get back to
that thought itself.
Greek researches into language fall into three chief periods, the
period of the præ-Sokratic philosophy, when language in general was the
subject of inquiry, the period of the Sophists, when the categories of
universal grammar were being distinguished and worked out, and the period
of Alexandrine criticism, when the rules of Greek grammar in particular
were elaborated. Herakleitus and Demokritus are the representatives
of the first period: the one the advocate of the innate and necessary
connection between words and the objects they denote, the other of the
absolute power possessed by man to invent or change his speech. The
dispute, however, was soon shifted from words as they are to words as
they once were; since on the one hand it was manifest that the union
assumed to exist between words and objects could no longer be pointed
out in the majority of instances, and on the other hand that numerous
words are merely the later corruptions of earlier forms, so that the
invention of even a single word must be pushed back to an age far
beyond the oldest experience. Hence grew up the so-called science of
_etymology_, a science whose name, it must be confessed, fully justified
one of its leading principles which resulted in the derivation of _lucus
a non lucendo_, “because the sun does _not_ shine therein.” Ἐτυμο-λογία
was “the science of the truth,” the ascertainment of the true origin
of words; but in Greek hands its truer designation would have been the
“science of falsehood” and guess-work. Its follies have been enshrined
in ponderous works like the “Etymologicum Magnum” or the “Onomastikon”
of Pollux; and its curious illustrations of the absurdities into which
a clever and active intellect will fall when deprived of the guidance
of the scientific method of comparison, are scattered broadcast through
the writings of Greek thinkers. Two of its rules, for instance, both
founded on the assumption of the “natural” origin of words, lay down
that the word undergoes the same modifications as the thing it denotes,
and that objects may be named from their contraries (κατ’ ἀντίφρασιν);
and hence it was easy to derive φιλητής, “a thief,” from ὑφέλεσθαι, “to
steal,” by “depriving” the latter word of its first syllable, and to see
in _cœlum_, “heaven,” _cœlatum_, “covered,” “because it is open,” or
in _fœdus_, “covenant,” _fœdus_, “hateful,” “because there is nothing
hateful in it.”[2] After this we need not smile at Plato’s derivation
of θεοί, “gods,” from θέειν, “to run,” because the stars were first
worshipped, or Aristotle’s assumption that objects are easy of digestion
when they are “light” in weight. Dr. Jolly has pointed out that the fact
that ἐτυμός is Ionic indicates the origin of the pseudo-science in the
Ionic schools of philosophy; it is therefore a remarkable illustration of
the “self-sufficient” nature of Greek thought and of Greek contempt for
the “barbarian,” that the dialects of Asia Minor, though so closely akin
to Greek, should have been utterly disregarded, and the investigations
into language consequently left to the vagaries of the fancy without the
light of comparison to guide them to the truth. Plato in the “Kratylus”
is almost the only Greek who has noticed the resemblance of one of these
“barbarous” dialects to his own, and he has only noticed it to draw a
wrong conclusion from the fact. Many Greek words, he maintains, were
borrowed from abroad; and by way of examples he quotes κύων (the Sanskrit
_śwan_, the Latin _canis_, and our _hound_), ὑδώρ (the Sanskrit _udam_,
the Latin _unda_, and our _water_), and πῦρ (the Latin _pruna_, the
Umbrian _pir_, and our _fire_), as being identical with the names of the
same objects in Phrygian. The very fact, however, that Plato has noticed
this resemblance shows that the stimulating influence of contact with
Persia was still felt, even in the domain of language, when the Greeks
found themselves in the presence of an allied and similar civilization,
with all its contrasts to their own, and when men like Themistokles
found it politic to acquire a fluent knowledge of the Persian tongue. It
was not until the Empire of Alexander had overthrown that of Cyrus and
Darius and impressed upon the Greek a sovereign contempt for the Asiatic,
and an equal belief in his own innate superiority, that any regard for
the jargons of the “barbarians” became altogether out of the question.
It was then that the masterpieces of early Greek literature came to be
the sole objects of study and investigation, and philological research
took the form of that one-sided, and therefore erroneous, exposition of
the grammar of a single language, which has been the bane of classical
philology down to our own time.
The linguistic labours of the age of the Sophists were occasioned by
the needs of oratory. When rhetoric became a profitable and all-powerful
pursuit, and the end of education was held to be the ability to hold
one’s own, whether right or wrong, and confute one’s neighbour, words
necessarily came to be regarded as more valuable than things, and the
main care and attention of the sophist were bestowed upon the form of
his sentences and the style of his argument. Just as language had been
approached in the preceding period from a purely metaphysical point of
view, and was to be approached in the succeeding period from a logical
point of view, so now it was looked at from the side of rhetoric. It
was not _etymology_, a knowledge of the “truth,” that was wanted, but a
knowledge of the composition of sentences and of the way in which they
could best be arranged for the purposes of persuasion. The first outlines
of European grammar accordingly go back to this Sophistic age. We find
Protagoras criticizing the opening verse of the Iliad, because μῆνις,
“wrath,” is used as a feminine, contrary to the sense of the word, or
distinguishing the three genders and busying himself with the discovery
of the verbal moods, while the lectures of Prodikus were occupied with
the analysis and definition of synonyms. Some idea may be formed of the
grammatical zeal of the Sophists from the “Clouds” of Aristophanes,[3]
where he ridicules the pedantry that would force the artificial rules of
grammar upon the usage of living speech.
Plato and Aristotle, the products of the impulse given to thought
by that greatest of the Sophists, Sokrates, form the connecting link
between the Sophistic and the Alexandrine periods, and renew in the
shape required by the progress of philosophy the old contest regarding
the nature of language between the followers of Herakleitus and those
of Demokritus. In philology as elsewhere, the idealism of Plato stands
opposed to the practical realism of his pupil Aristotle. Plato paints
language as it ought to be; Aristotle reasons upon it as it is. But in
both cases it was not language in general, but the Greek language in
particular, that was meant; and owing to this short-sightedness of view
and disregard of the comparative method, the theories of each, however
suggestive and stimulating, are yet devoid of scientific value and mainly
interesting to the historian alone. The problem of Plato’s “Kratylus” is
the natural fittingness of words, which finally resolves itself into the
question how it happens that a word is understood by the bearer in the
same sense as it is intended by the speaker. No answer is given to the
question; but the dialogue gives occasion for a complete review of the
linguistic opinions prevalent at the time, and the conclusion put into
the mouth of Sokrates is that while in actual (Greek) speech no natural
and innate connection can be traced between words and things, it were
much to be wished that an ideal speech could be created in which this
natural connection would exist. In this wish, as Dr. Jolly remarks, Plato
shows himself the forerunner of Leibnitz and Bishop Wilkins, the one with
his “Lingua characteristica universalis,” and the other with his “Essay
towards a real Character and a Philosophical Language.”
Aristotle, as might be expected, will have nothing to do with the theory
of the natural origin of speech. He declares himself unequivocally on the
side of its opponents, and lays down that language originates through
the agreement and convention of men (συνθήκῃ). Words, he holds, have no
meaning in themselves; this is put into them by those who utter them, and
they then become so many symbols of the objects signified (ὅταν γίνεται
σύμβολον). “For the sentence (λόγος), when heard, makes one’s meaning
intelligible, not necessarily but accidentally, since it consists of
words, and each word is a symbol.”[4] At the same time Aristotle makes
no clear distinction between thought and language; _concept_ and _word_
are with him interchangeable terms; and his famous ten categories into
which all objects can be classed are as much grammatical as logical, or
perhaps more rightly a mixture of both. In his hands the rhetorical gives
way to the logical treatment of language, and the sentence is analyzed
in the interests of formal logic. As Kant and Hegel observed long ago,
the logical system of Aristotle is purely empirical; it is based on the
grammar of a single language, and is nothing but an analysis of the
mode in which the framers of that language unconsciously thought. To
understand and criticize it properly we must bear this fact in mind,
and remember that the system cannot be corrected or replaced until
comparative philology has taught us to distinguish between the universal
and the particular in the grammar of Greek and Aryan. Whatever injury,
however, logic may have suffered from having been thus built up upon the
idiosyncrasies of the Greek Sentence, Greek grammar gained an equivalent
advantage. Besides the ὄνομα or “noun,” and the ῥῆμα or “verb,” Aristotle
now added to it the σύνδεσμος or “particle,” and introduced the term
πτῶσις or “case,” to denote any kind of flection whatsoever. He also
divided nouns into simple and compound, invented for the neuter another
name (τὸ μεταξύ) than that given by Protagoras, and starting from the
termination of the nominative singular endeavoured to ascertain the rules
for denoting a difference of gender.
The work begun by Aristotle was continued by the Stoics, who perfected
his grammatical system just as they had perfected his logical system.
They separated the ἄρθρον or “article” from the particles, and determined
a fifth part of speech, the πανδέκτης or “adverb;” they confined the
πτῶσις or “case” to the flections of the noun, and distinguished the four
principal cases by names, the Latin translations or mistranslations of
which are now so familiar to us; they divided the verb into its tenses,
moods, and classes, and in the person of Chrysippus, the adherent of
the Stoic school (B.C. 280-206), separated nouns into _appellativa_ and
_propria_. But, like Aristotle, they assumed the same laws for both
thought and language, and were thus led into difficulties and fallacies
which the slightest acquaintance with another language might have
prevented. Thus the logical copula was confounded with the substantive
verb by which it was expressed in Greece, and false arguments were framed
and supported on this assumption. Their opponents, the Epicureans,
contented themselves with inquiries into the origin of speech, which had
to be explained, like everything else, in accordance with the theory
of atoms. The large part, however, played by the action of society in
their system gave their theorizing upon the subject an accidental aspect
of truth which at first sight is somewhat surprising; and even the
well-known lines of Horace (Sat. I. 3. 99, _sq._) contain a more correct
representation of the primitive condition of man and the evolution of
language than the speculations current upon the matter up to the last few
years. Language, it was held, existed φύσει, not θέσει; but the nature
which originated speech was not external nature, but the nature of man.
The different sounds and utterances whereby the same object is denoted
in different languages are due to the varying circumstances in which the
speakers find themselves, and are as much determined by their climate and
social condition, their constitution and physique, as the lowing of the
ox or the bleating of the lamb. Men, indeed, create speech, not however
deliberately and with intention (ἐπιστημόνως), but instinctively through
the impulse of their nature (φυσικῶς κινούμενοι).[5] We may perhaps trace
in these expressions the germs of the theory of the onomatopœic origin of
language.
While the Epicureans were speculating on the origin of speech, the
grammarians of Alexandria were busying themselves with the elaboration of
what the French would call a _grammaire raisonnée_. “Alexandria,” says
Dr. Jolly, “was the birthplace of classical philology, a study which has
directly raised itself upon the ruins of the old Hellenic culture and
spiritual originality.” The intense mental activity and productiveness
of Athens had made way for the frigid pedantry and artificial mannerisms
of commentators and court-poets; the free national life and small rival
states of Greece had been replaced by a semi-oriental despotism and a
cosmopolitan centralization; and unable themselves to emulate the great
creations of the classic age, the literary coterie of the Alexandrine
Museum could do no more than admire and edit them. The very dialect
in which the Attic tragedians and historians had composed and written
had become strange and foreign, while the language of the Homeric
Poems, which it must be remembered were to the Greeks what the Bible
is to us, seemed as obscure and obsolete to the Alexandrine, as the
tongue of Layamon or Piers Plowman does to the ordinary Englishman.
If we add to this the existence of numerous and discordant copies of
Homer, we have abundant reason for the growth of that large army of
commentators, grammarians, and lexicographers which characterized the
schools of Alexandria and laid the foundations of literary criticism. A
minute investigation of the grammatical facts of the Greek language was
rendered necessary, and a comparison of the older and later forms of the
language as well as of its dialects grounded this investigation upon a
comparatively secure basis. The metaphysical turn, however, given to
the first linguistic inquiries still overshadowed the whole study, and
the absurd and misleading “science of etymology” remained to the last
the evil genius of Greek philology. The old dispute as to the origin of
words now assumed a new form, mainly through the influence of the Stoic
and Epicurean systems of philosophy, and the schools of Alexandria were
divided into the two contending factions of Analogists and Anomalists.
The first, among whom was counted the famous Homeric critic Aristarchus,
found in language a strict law of analogy between concept and word,
which was wholly denied by the others. It was round this question that
Greek philology ranged itself from the third century B.C. to the first
century A.D., and out of the controversy it occasioned was formed that
Greek grammar which created the scholars of the last four hundred years,
and is still so widely taught in our own country. Thus Aristarchus, for
instance, in his anxiety to smooth away every irregularity and remove all
exceptions to the rules he had formulated, determined that the genitive
and dative of Ζεύς should no longer be Διός or Ζῆνος, but Ζεός, and Ζεΐ,
and the endeavours of his opponents to upset this piece of pedantry led
to the discovery of other similar exceptions to the general rule, and to
the complete settlement of this portion of the grammar. Krates of Mallos,
the head of the Pergamenian school, stands forward as the chief rival
of Aristarchus on the opposite side. In his hands “anomaly” was made
the leading principle of language, and general rules of any sort flatly
denied, except in so far as they were consecrated by custom. The purism
of his opponents, who wished to correct everything which contravened
the grammatical laws they had laid down, was thus met by an unqualified
defence of the rights of usage—“quem penes arbitrium est et jus et norma
loquendi.” Our own schoolmasters who have introduced an _l_ into _could_
(_coud_), the past tense of _can_, because _should_ from _shall_ has one,
or have prefixed a _w_ to _whole_, the twin-brother of _hale_ (Greek
καλός), because of the analogy of _wheel_ and _which_, are the fitting
successors of the Alexandrine Analogists, and it was unfortunate for both
that they had no Aristophanes to transfer them to cloudland, and ridicule
them in the light of common sense.
Krates, however, has better claims upon our attention than as leader
of the Anomalists. To him we owe the first formal Greek grammar and
collection of the grammatical facts obtained by the labours of the
Alexandrine critics. That a formal grammar, which implies an enunciation
of general rules as well as of the exceptions to them, should have been
the work of an Anomalist rather than of an Analogist, may at first sight
seem surprising; but we must recollect that the Anomalist did not deny
the existence of general rules altogether, but only their universal and
unqualified applicability; while the Analogist who sought to produce
an artificial uniformity in language instead of accepting the facts
of speech as they are, was totally unfitted for composing a practical
grammar.[6]
The immediate cause, however, of the grammar in question was really
the tardy comparison of Greek with a foreign tongue, the Latin, and the
need of a Greek grammar felt by the citizens of Rome. Appius Claudius
Cæcus (censor in B.C. 312) had already written upon grammar,[7] and
Spurius Carvilius, a writing-master (B.C. 234), had regulated the Latin
alphabet, substituting the indispensable _g_ for the useless _z_, and
when Krates came to Rome in 159 B.C., as the Ambassador of Attalus,
the King of Pergamos, he found a ready audience for his ἀκροάσεις, or
“lectures” upon the study of Greek. Almost all that the Romans knew of
literary culture and civilization came from the Greeks; their native
literature was coarse and insignificant, and their language uncultivated
and inflexible. Education at Rome, therefore, meant education upon
Greek models and in the Greek language. Boys learned Greek before they
learned Latin, and the Greek words with which the plays of Plautus are
strewn, as well as their Alexandrine origin, show pretty plainly that a
familiarity with the language of Greece was not confined to the literary
_salon_ of a Scipio, or the houses of a wealthy aristocracy. Livius
Andronicus, the father of Latin literature, was a Greek professor (272
B.C.), and his translation of the “Odyssey” into Latin was doubtless
for the use of his pupils;[8] the first history of Rome, that of
Fabius Pictor (in 200 B.C.), was written in Greek; and even a popular
tribune like Tiberius Gracchus published the Greek speech he had made
at Rhodes. In fact, a knowledge of Greek was necessary not only for
acquiring the barest amount of culture and education, but even for a
proper acquaintance with the Latin language itself. Partly through its
stiff and cumbrous immobility, partly through the want of originality in
its speakers, Latin literature and Latin oratory were alike impossible
without the genial and fructifying influence of the Greek. With Greek
teachers and Greek models, a native literature came into existence, and
the language was artificially trained to become a suitable instrument
for communication between the more polished nations of the ancient world
and their Roman masters. It is true that classical Latin was really
more or less of a hothouse exotic, interesting therefore rather to the
student of literature than to the student of linguistic science; but
the attempt to rear and nurture it, to keep it unpolluted by the spoken
dialects of Rome or the provinces, and to confine it within the rules and
metres of a foreign rhythm made it the seedplot of grammatical questions
and philological investigations. The study of grammar was of practical
importance to the practical Roman; he applied himself to it with all the
energy of his nature, and treated the whole subject in a practical rather
than a philosophical way. Julius Cæsar, the type and impersonation of the
Roman spirit, found time to compose a work, “De Analogiâ,” and invent the
term _ablative_, amid the distractions of political life, and even Cato
with all his dogged conservatism, learnt Greek in his old age in order
that he might be able to teach it to his son. The zeal with which the
deepest problems of grammar were discussed seems strange to us of to-day,
but upon the settlement of these problems depended the possibility of
making Latin the vehicle of law and oratory, and preventing the Roman
world from becoming Greek.
The first school grammar ever written in Europe was the Greek grammar
of Dionysius Thrax, a pupil of Aristarchus, which he published at Rome in
the time of Pompey. The grammar is still in existence,[9] and its opening
sentence, in which grammar is defined as “a practical acquaintance” with
the language of literary men, and divided into six parts—accentuation
and phonology, explanation of figurative expressions, definition,
etymology, general rules of flection, and critical canons[10]—has
formed the starting-point of the innumerable school-grammars which have
since seen the light. It has also been the cause of much of that absurd
etymologizing which the Romans received from the Greeks and handed on to
the lexicographers of modern Europe. Not content with transcribing the
grotesque etymologies of their Greek teachers, the Latin writers strove
to emulate them by still more grotesque etymologies of their own. Lucius
Ælius Stilo, of Lanuvium, about 100 B.C. first gave a course of lectures
on Latin literature and rhetoric, and one of his pupils, Marcus Terentius
Varro, wrote five books, “De Linguâ Latinâ,” which he dedicated to his
friend Cicero. The “science” of Latin etymology was now founded, and a
fruitful field opened to future explorers. Every word had to be provided
with a derivation, and on the received principles of etymology this was
no difficult task. By the law of _antiphrasis_, _bellum_ is made the
neuter of _bellus_, “because there is _nothing_ beautiful in war;” and
_parcus_ is so named because the niggard “spares (_parcere_) nobody.” It
has been left to the vagaries of a later day to excel the Romans in this
part of their labours. The lawyers tell us that _parliament_ is derived
from _parler_, “to speak,” _mentem_, “one’s mind;” Junius[11] that the
_soul_ is “the well of life” from the Greek ζάω, “to live,” and the
Teutonic _wala_, “well,” while _merry_ comes from μυρίζειν, because the
ancients anointed themselves at feasts; and a book entitled “Ereuna,”
published as late as the year of grace 1875, would raise the envy of a
Latin etymologist. When we find Jupiter (Diespiter) gravely derived in it
from the “Celtic” _oyo-meir_, “infinite,” and _peitir_, “a thunderbolt;”
_Nemesis_ discovered to be the “Celtic” _neam-aire_, “pitiless,” and
_manna man-neam_, “food of heaven”—we may trace the last results of
that unhappy disease of “popular etymologizing” which it is the work of
comparative philology to cure.[12]
The introduction of Greek grammar into Rome, however, was attended by
another evil than the propagation of a false system of etymology. The
technical terms of Greek grammar were in many cases misunderstood, and,
accordingly, mistranslated. Thus, in the province of phonology, the mutes
were divided into the ψιλά (_k_, _t_, _p_), and their corresponding
“rough” or aspirated sounds (δασέα), the soft _g_, _d_, and _b_ being
placed between the ψιλά and δασέα, and consequently named μέσα, or
“middle.” The Romans rendered μέσα by _mediæ_, and δασέα by _aspiratæ_,
but ψιλά they mistranslated _tenues_, and the mistranslation still causes
confusion in modern treatises on pronunciation. Similarly, _genitivus_,
the “genitive” or case of “origin,” is a blundering misrepresentation of
the Greek γενική, or case of “the genus,” a wholly different conception;
and _accusativus_, “the accusative,” or case “of accusing,” perpetuates
the mistake which saw in the Greek αἰτιατική a derivative from αἰτιάομαι,
to “blame,” instead of αἰτία, “an object;” while the Greek ἀπαρέμφατος
signifies “without a secondary meaning” of tense or person, and not “the
indefinite” or “indetermining” as the Latin _infinitivus_ would imply. We
still suffer from the errors made in transferring to Rome the grammatical
terminology of Alexandria.
The Romans continued to take an interest in questions of grammar and of
etymology down to the last. It is true that they confined their inquiries
to their own and the Greek language; the descent they claimed from Æneas
and the Trojans inspired them with no desire to investigate the dialects
of Asia, and even the Etruscan language and literature which lingered on
almost to the Christian era at their own doors, were left unregarded by
the leading philologists of Rome. In language, as in everything else,
the provincial had to adapt himself to the prejudices of his conqueror.
Never before or since has the principle of centralization been carried
out with greater logical precision. Even Cæsar who found time to discuss
grammatical questions in the midst of his campaigns in Gaul, never
troubled himself to examine the language of his Gallic adversaries, or to
compare the grammatical forms they used with those of Latin.
Passing by the Emperor Claudius, who endeavoured to reform the
Roman alphabet, and actually introduced three new letters, we come
to Apollonius Dyskolus and his son Herodian, two eminent Alexandrine
grammarians of the second century. We possess part of the “Syntax” of
the former, who specially devoted himself to this branch of the subject,
and expressed himself so briefly and technically (like the grammarians
of ancient India) as to gain the name of Dyskolos, “the Difficult.” His
son Herodian continued the labours of his father, and in the works of
these Græco-Roman grammarians we see the long controversy between the
Analogists and the Anomalists finally settled. Analogy is recognized as
the principle that underlies language; but in actual speech exceptions
occur to every rule, and break through the hard-and-fast lines of
artificial pedantry. The Greek and Latin school-grammars of our boyhood
are the heritage that has come down to us from this old dispute and its
final settlement. Dr. Jolly remarks with justice[13] that the radical
fault of these grammatical labours was the confusion between thinking
and speaking, between logic and grammar—a confusion which intruded
the empirical terminology of formal logic into grammar, and was only
dissipated when an investigation of the languages of the East introduced
the comparative method into the treatment of speech, and showed that to
interpret aright the phænomena of Greek and Latin we must study them in
the light of other tongues.
The tradition handed down by Herodian was taken up by Ælius Donatus
in the fourth century, and Priscian in the sixth; the former the author
of the Latin grammar which dominated the schools of the Middle Ages;
the latter of eighteen books on grammar, the most extensive work of the
kind we have received from classical antiquity. Priscian flourished at
Constantinople during the short revival of the Roman Empire and glory
that marked the reign of Justinian; and one of the most noticeable things
in his writings is his comparison of Latin with Greek, especially the
Æolic dialect. In this he followed Tyrannio or Diokles, the manumitted
slave of Cicero’s wife and the author of a treatise “On the Derivation
of the Latin Language from the Greek.” Donatus and Priscian were the
philological lights of Europe for more than a thousand years, and such
lights were little better than darkness. Once, and once only, was an
attempt made to break down their monopoly and to introduce oriental
learning into Western education. Pope Clement V., at the Council of
Vienne in 1311, exhorted the four great Universities of Europe—Paris,
Bologna, Salamanca, and Oxford—to establish two Chairs of Hebrew, two of
Arabic, and two of Chaldee, in order that their students might be able
to dispute successfully with Jews and Mohammedans. About the same time
Dante, in his treatise “De Vulgari Eloquentiâ,” compared the dialects
of Italy, and selected one which he calls “Illustrious, Cardinal and
Courtly,” spoken wherever education and refinement were to be found,
and sprung from the brilliant Sicilian court of Frederick II.[14]—a
dialect destined to become the language of the “Divina Commedia” and the
nursing-mother of the languages and literatures of modern Europe. But
elsewhere the “Doctrinale puerorum” of the priest Alexander de Villa Dei,
or Villedieu, of Paris, written in leonine verses, was the sole grammar
taught and learnt; and the Latin dictionary of Giovanni de Balbis, of
Genoa, was the only guide to Latin literature. No wonder that Roger
Bacon, in his “Opus Majus,”[15] has to lay down that Greek, Hebrew, and
Latin are three separate and independent languages, which must be learned
and treated separately and independently, and that “those words only
which are derived from Greek and Hebrew ought to be interpreted by those
tongues, since those which are purely Latin cannot be explained except by
Latin words.” “For,” he goes on to say, “Latin pure and simple is quite
different from every other language, and therefore cannot be interpreted
from any other.” The most approved scholars and etymologists of his day
amused themselves by deriving _amen_ from the Latin _a_, “without,” and
the Greek _mene_ (? μείων), “defect,” _parascene_ (_parasceve_) from the
Latin _parare_ and _cæna_, and _cælum_ from the hybrid _case-helios_, or
“house of the sun” (!), much in the same way that Jacobus de Voragine,
the genial author of the “Legenda Aurea,”[16] derives Clemens from
“cleos, quod est gloria, et mens, quasi gloriosa mens;” and says of
the name Cæcilia, “quasi _cæli lilia_, vel _cæcis via_, vel a _cælo_
et _lya_: vel Cæcilia quasi _cæcitate carens_; vel dicitur a _cælo_ et
_leos_ quod est populus.”
But even the older Humanists were not much better. They knelt before
the spirit of classical antiquity with a worship at once child-like and
unreasoning. Their object was to write and speak Latin correctly—that is
to say, in accordance with the usage of certain literary men of Rome, not
to discover the grounds on which this usage rested. Switheim declares
that it matters as little to know why this or that verb governs a case,
as it does to know why _bin_, the Latin _sum_, “governs the nominative,
_ich_, _ego_.” “We can say that the verb governs the nominative, because
it was once so agreed among the grammarians of antiquity that the verb
should govern the nominative _ante se_. If it had been agreed among the
ancients that the object of the verb should be in the accusative, the
verb would govern the accusative.” The grammatical term “to govern” was,
by the way, a legacy bequeathed by the schoolmen; and a very mischievous
legacy it was. Priscian does not yet know it, though it is found in
Consentius. Unreasoning and unreasonable, however, as the Humanists were
in their treatment of grammar, they were outdone by the orthodox who
found in the “errors” of the Vulgate—such as _Da mihi bibere_—direct
proofs of Divine inspiration, and the power of the Holy Spirit to
override the usual rules of grammar. Johannes de Gallandia, for instance,
states boldly:—“Pagina divina non vult se subdere legi Grammatices, nec
vult illius arte regi.” So, again, Smaragdus writes in reference to the
rule laid down by Donatus, that _scalæ_, _scopæ_, _quadrigæ_ must be used
in the plural: “We shall not follow him because we know that the Holy
Spirit has always (namely, in the Vulgate) employed these words in the
singular.”[17]
We have seen that a knowledge of more than one language is an
indispensable preliminary to the formation of a grammar of either; we
have seen also that it was among the Semites of Babylonia and Assyria
that the earliest grammatical essays were first made. The impulse given
to grammatical studies by these attempts did not survive the fall of
Babylon; and though the Jewish schools in Babylonia and elsewhere were
forced to accompany the extinct Hebrew of their sacred books with glosses
and commentaries in Aramaic, they produced nothing that can be called
with any truth a grammatical work. It was not until the foundation of
the School of Edessa, in the sixth century, that the traditions of
the scribes of Assur-bani-pal were taken up by their successors in
Mesopotamia. The study of Greek for ecclesiastical purposes among the
Syrian Christians led to the compilation of a Syrian grammar; and Jacob
of Edessa (A.D. 650-700) succeeded in elaborating one which served as a
model for all succeeding works. His whole grammar, however, was based
on that of the Greeks, and his terminology was either borrowed directly
from the Greek, or formed after the analogy of his Greek originals.
Jacob, to whom the systematization of the Syriac vowel-points is to be
ascribed, was followed by Elias of Nisibis (eleventh century), and John
Barzugbi (thirteenth century), who, says M. Renan, “may be regarded as
the author of the first complete grammar of the Syriac language.”[18] The
Arabs were not slow to imitate the example of their Syrian neighbours.
The preservation of the text of the Korân turned their attention to
philological studies at an early period; and we may assign the real
foundation of Arabic grammar to the end of the seventh century, when
Abul-Aswed (who died 688 A.D.) introduced the diacritical points and
vowel-signs, and wrote some treatises on several questions of grammar.
His labours were continued in the schools of Basra and Kufa, and Sibawaih
(770), the oldest grammarian whose works have come down to us, shows us
Arabic grammar almost complete. His successors, as M. Renan remarks,
did little more than fill out the details of his teaching; and in the
fifteenth century, Suyuthi knows of no less than 2,500 grammarians who
had made a name in Arabic literature.
With Syriac and Arabic grammars thus formed, and the doctrine of
triliteral roots enunciated, all that was wanting was to work out a
comparative grammar of the Semitic dialects. Just as the grammarians
of Greece and Rome had perceived the connection that existed between
the two languages, and in their haphazard and arbitrary fashion had
endeavoured to trace the origin of Latin words to Greek sources, so the
relationship between the Semitic idioms could not but be detected as
soon as serious labours were commenced upon them; and the closeness of
this relationship prevented the errors and absurdities into which the
classical grammarians were betrayed by their ignorance of other tongues.
To the Jews belongs the merit of first formulating what we may term a
comparative grammar. The Saboreans and Masoretes in the sixth century
did for the Old Testament what the Alexandrine Greeks had done for
Homer, the Arabs for the Korân, and the Hindus for the Veda; and in the
tenth century a Hebrew grammar was founded under Arabic influence, and
with it a comparative grammar of the Semitic languages. The Jews, who
had warmly received Mohammedan culture, and even become intermediaries
between their Arabic masters and the “infidel” philosophy of Greece, were
necessarily bilingual; and the first fruits of this necessity were the
grammatical works of the Gaon, Saadia-el-Fayyumi (who died 942). After
Saadia came Menahem-ben-Seruk of Tortosa (960), and Dunash-ben-Librât of
Fez (970), who composed the first works on Hebrew lexicography, and of
whom the latter declares that he “compares the relation of Arabic and
Hebrew, counts all the genuine words of Arabic which are found in Hebrew,
and points out that Hebrew is pure Arabic.” About the same time Judah
Khayyug of Fez gave an exhaustive account of defective roots and the
permutation of servile letters, while Jonah ben Gannach of Cordova (in
Arabic Abul Walid Mervan-ibn-Janah), in the eleventh century, completed
the grammatical labours of his predecessors.
With the decline of Arabic supremacy and the introduction of Neo-Hebrew
arose a new school of Hebrew philology, of which the Kimchi of Narbonne
(A.D. 1200) are the leading representatives. This school was less
comparative than the foregoing, and the rabbinical spirit that prevailed
in it, though conducing to minute accuracy, was not favourable to
philological progress. It was, however, the instructor of the Christian
scholars of the Renaissance, whose zeal for knowledge and learning
brought the study of Hebrew and its cognate languages within the circle
of European thought. The Reformation, breaking as it did with the
mediæval Church, and making its appeal to the Scriptures themselves, made
a knowledge of the original language of the Old Testament indispensable.
Christian scholars like Reuchlin, the two Buxtorfs, Richard Simon,
Ludolf, Schultens, or our own Castell and Pococke, devoted themselves to
a study of Semitic philology with the same energy and success as men like
the Stephenses, the Scaligers, and the Vosses to a study of classical
philology. Lexicons and grammars were compiled, texts were critically
examined and edited, and a comparative dictionary of the Semitic
languages was brought out. It was inevitable that men who were at once
masters of Hebrew and Greek should discover resemblances and coincidences
between the two languages. Hebrew grammar was cast into a classical
mould, and Latin and Greek words were derived from Hebrew roots. Hebrew,
it was argued, was the sacred language which had been spoken by Adam and
the patriarchs, since the names of our first parents and their offspring
are of Hebrew origin; and it was therefore clear that Hebrew must have
been the primæval speech used before the confusion of tongues at Babel,
the primitive source from which the manifold dialects of the world have
been derived. A new etymological system accordingly sprang up, quite as
grotesque in its rules and its results as the old etymological system
of Greece and Rome; and dictionaries of Latin and English appeared in
which every word was provided with its Hebrew original.[19] Since Hebrew
is written from right to left, it was assumed that a Hebrew root could
be read the reverse way if a satisfactory etymology was not otherwise
forthcoming; and as the profane languages might be expected to retain
some reminiscences of their sacred mother, a similar procedure was
adopted to connect words in English and the classical tongues with one
another, and so _stum_ was proved to come from the Latin _mustum_, and
the Latin _forma_ from the Greek μορφή. It was not the only instance in
which theological prepossessions have injured the cause of philology.
With Herder and Lessing, however, a new era of thought and philosophy
began. The mechanical explanation of the world was superseded by a
psychological one; the idea of development took the place of the idea of
contract and convention. Herder devoted a special treatise to the “Ideal
of Speech,”[20] and a prize offered by the Berlin Academy for the best
essay on “the Ideal of a Perfect Language,” was won by Jenisch in 1796.
The work of Jenisch bore the ambitious title, “A philosophico-critical
Comparison and Estimate of Fourteen of the Ancient and Modern Languages
of Europe, viz., Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French,
English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian.”
But Jenisch was still under the dominion of the assumption which made the
Roman jurist discover his _jus gentium_ in those points in which the laws
of different nations agreed; he finds the ideal of a perfect language in
the fourteen languages of his title, all deviations from their grammar
being characterized as “less perfect formations.” Richness in the
vocabulary, expressiveness, clearness, and euphony are the four marks of
superiority. The value of Jenisch’s lucubrations, however, may be judged
from his statement that the Greek case-endings were probably modelled
after those of Hebrew. It needed the genius of Herder to recognize
that the language of a people is but the expression of its spiritual
life, and to lay down in his “Ideen” (1785) that “in each language the
understanding and character of its speakers reflects itself.” A step
forward was made by Mahn in his “Representation of Lexicography from
every Point of View,” published in 1817. In this (p. 264) he divides
the history of speech into three periods corresponding with the periods
in the life of the individual—childhood, youth, and age—severally
distinguished by memory, imagination, and intellect. The first period
is that in which language was formed, the second that in which it was
perfected, the third that in which it was made logical.
If language is logical it is evident that the categories of grammar ought
to correspond with the categories of logic, and attempts were accordingly
made to sketch the outlines of a universal grammar. In 1801 Vater brought
out his “Versuch einer allgemeinen Sprachlehre,” with an introduction on
the nature and origin of speech, and an appendix on the adaptation of
the rules of universal grammar to those of the grammars of individual
tongues. But Vater chose “the high _priori_ road;” he assumed that the
first men spoke in accordance with the forms of logic, and instead of
tracing the history of grammar in the records of living speech, made
that alone normal and correct which seemed to himself to be so. This
work of Vater’s was followed, three years later, by a translation of
De Sacy’s “Axioms of Universal Philology,” and in 1805 by a “Lehrbuch
allgemeiner Grammatik.” Comparative grammar is defined as a setting side
by side of the forms of different languages for the sake of reaching
that which is “common” to them; but this definition is only scientific
in appearance; what is “common” turns out to be not the original forms
of a parent-speech, but the forms which a philosopher of the eighteenth
century believed to lie at the bottom of “universal grammar.”
This idea of a universal grammar was due partly to the influence of
an age which believed the ultimate analyses of logic to represent the
thoughts of primitive man, partly to the unmethodical comparison of a
variety of languages, some ancient, some modern, and some as unrelated
to one another as Greek and Hebrew. But it was also in some measure the
result of a revived study of the old Greek theories about language. Our
countryman James Harris led the way with his “Hermes, or a Philosophical
Enquiry concerning Universal Grammar” (1765). The work was an important
one, for it not only stimulated an interest in linguistic studies, but
also recalled attention to the labours of those who had built up the
framework of our school grammars. Harris was succeeded by Horne Tooke,
whose “Diversions of Purley,” however imperfect and erroneous from the
point of view of modern scientific philology, threw a charm over what had
hitherto seemed repulsive inquiries into the words and forms of speech,
and laid down the axiom that we must first investigate the older forms of
a language before we can determine the origin and nature of their later
equivalents. But Horne Tooke’s work was composed in the interests of a
philosophical theory, and its keynote is struck in the assertion that
_truth_ is that which a man _troweth_. Things are but the reflection
of words, and words are what men deliberately make them. Grammar is no
organic growth, but the mechanical invention of mankind. And just as the
first men framed it in ignorance and imperfection, so the philosophers
of the eighteenth century could reframe it according to the requirements
of formal logic. It was the old mistake of the Greek Analogists over
again, only with the difference that they thought of the grammar of a
single language alone, whereas the more ambitious philologists of the
“Aufklärung” aimed at producing a grammar which would be applicable to
all tongues.
The French Encyclopædia was the manifesto of the “Aufklärung,” and
the Encyclopædia devoted six of its volumes to grammar and literature.
Grammar is divided into general and particular, and while general grammar
is defined as “la science raisonnée des principes immuables et généraux
de la parole prononcée ou écrite dans toutes les langues,” particular
grammar is defined as “the art of applying to the immutable and general
principles of the word whether pronounced or written the arbitrary and
customary usages (_institutions_) of a special language.” In accordance
with the lines thus traced out, Gottfried Hermann, in 1801, published his
work, “De emendendâ ratione Græcæ Grammaticæ,” and G. M. Roth brought out
his “Antihermes, or Philosophical Researches into the pure apprehension
of Human Speech and Universal Philology” in 1795, and his “Outlines
of pure Universal Philology for the use of Academies and advanced
classes in the Gymnasia” in 1815. As yet neither families of speech nor
the morphology of language were even dreamt of; and the “principles”
derived from the school grammars of Greece and Rome, supplemented by
the categories of modern philosophical systems, were supposed to apply
to all languages alike. It was reserved for A. F. Bernhardi, the pupil
of F. A. Wolf and Fichte, the friend of Tieck and Schlegel, to approach
towards a truer conception of the nature and relationship of speech in
his “Sprachlehre,” which he dedicated to his master Wolf. The first
part of this work appeared at Berlin in 1801, under the title of “Reine
Sprachlehre,” the second part, “Angewandte Sprachlehre,” being published
in 1803, and the third part, “Anfangsgründe der Sprachwissenschaft,”
in 1805. Bernhardi first caught sight of the fact that whereas, from a
purely scientific point of view, the grammar of every language follows
its own independent and peculiar line, for practical purposes we must
dwell mainly upon those particulars in which it agrees with the grammars
of other tongues.[21] According to Haym his book was “the first entrance
of the spirit of the romantic movement into the sphere of real science.”
Language is defined “as an allegory of the understanding, which expresses
and represents itself, according to its inherent nature, through this
externalization.” Hence a connection is sought between the sound and the
thing signified; the initial liquid of _light_, for instance, indicates
the sense of the word, whether used as a substantive or as an adjective.
In the second part of his work Bernhardi discusses the relation of
language to poetry on the one side, and to science on the other, and,
as might have been expected from his definition of it as an allegory,
regards it as being in its very essence the lyrical utterance of the
primitive poet.[22]
Meanwhile the etymologists went on with their work of random guessing,
with little heed to the labours of continental scholars upon a philosophy
of grammar. In this country Dr. Murray’s “History of the European
Languages” was posthumously published in 1823, in which he holds that all
the manifold languages of the world are derived from a single primeval
one which consisted of a few monosyllables, AG or WAG being the first
articulate sound. To this primeval language the Teutonic, and not the
Hebrew, “comes nearest;” and it is only fair to say that the relationship
of Sanskrit and Persian to the Aryan dialects of Europe is recognized,
and a full account given of the ancient Indian speech. In an appendix Dr.
Murray also pointed out what we should now term the Aryan affinities of
the Scythian words preserved by the classical authors. But his principles
of etymology were the same as those of the Greeks; similarity of sound
was sufficient to prove identity of origin. And every word, from whatever
quarter it may be gathered, is forced to become a proof or an example
of the descent of language from his nine monosyllabic interjections.
A volume, published in 1800 by W. Whiter, under the ambitious title
of “Etymologicum Magnum, or Universal Etymological Dictionary,” is
not content even with the limits prescribed to himself by Dr. Murray.
English, Greek, Latin, French, Irish, Welsh, Slavonic, Hebrew, Arabic,
Gipsey, Coptic, and many more, are all mixed up together with the most
impartial prodigality. The character of the work may be judged of by
the assertion of the writer, “that from a hord of vagrant Gipsies once
issued that band of sturdy robbers—the companions of Romulus and Remus;”
this being based on the fact that the Gipsies “are in their own language
called Romans, or Romani.” After this we need not be surprised at being
told that the English _give_ and _shaft_, the Hebrew _gabbe_ (_sic_),
the Chaldee _gavav_, the French _javeau_, the German _garbe_, and the
Latin _sparum_, have all one and the same origin; or that _sepulcrum_ is
derived from the Hebrew _kabar_, “to bury,” and the Celtic _pen_ from the
Hebrew _phânâh_, “to incline.”
What has been termed the discovery of Sanskrit by Western scholars put an
end to all this fanciful playing with words and created the science of
language. The native grammarians of India had at an early period analyzed
both the phonetic sounds and the vocabulary of Sanskrit with astonishing
precision, and drawn up a far more scientific system of grammar than
the philologists of Alexandria or Rome had been able to attain. The
Devanâgari alphabet is a splendid monument of phonological accuracy, and
long before the time of Saadia and Khayyug, the Hindu “Vaiyâkaranas,” or
grammarians, had not only discovered that roots are the ultimate elements
of language, but had traced all the words of Sanskrit to a limited number
of roots. Their grammatical system and nomenclature rest upon a firm
foundation of inductive reasoning, and though based on the phænomena of
a single language, show a scientific insight into the nature of speech
which has never been surpassed.
It is possible that the democratic movement of Buddhism which broke
down caste and raised the inferior dialects and languages of India to the
same level as the sacred Sanskrit of the Veda, had much to do with the
extraordinary success of the Hindu grammarians. The immediate object of
their investigation was the language of the Rig-Veda, which had become
obscure and partly obsolete through the changes wrought by time upon the
spoken tongue. The Rig-Veda, pre-eminently called “_the_ Veda,” is a
collection of hymns and poems of various dates, some of which go back to
the earliest days of the Aryan invasion of north-western India; the whole
collection, however, may be roughly ascribed to at least the fourteenth
or fifteenth century B.C. In course of time it came to assume a sacred
character, and the theory of inspiration invented to support this goes
much beyond the most extreme theory of verbal inspiration ever held in
the Jewish or the Christian Church. The Rig-Veda was divided into ten
_mandalas_ or books, each _mandala_ being assigned to some old family;
and out of these were formed three new Vedas—the Yajur, the Sâma, and
the Âtharva. The Yajur and the Sâma may be described as prayer-books
compiled from the Rig for the use of the choristers and the ministers of
the priests, and contain little besides what is found in the earliest
and most sacred Veda. Along with the latter they sometimes go under the
name of the Trayî or “Triad,” a name which implies that the Âtharva-Veda
was not yet in existence when it was given. In fact, the Âtharva_n_a may
be described as a collection of poems mixed up with popular sayings,
medical advice, magical formulæ, and the like. It was assigned to the
Brahman or fourth class of priests, who superintended the ritual, just
as the Sâma-Veda was assigned to the choristers, the Yajur-Veda to the
acolytes, to whom the manual work involved in a sacrifice was delegated,
and the Rig-Veda to the Hotri, or priest proper, who had to recite
portions of it, whence its name of Rig, or “Praise.” The period that
must have elapsed before the hymns of the Rig could have been collected
together, invested with a sacred character, and elaborated into a ritual,
must have been considerable; but not until this was done, and the three
supplementary Vedas composed, was the whole Veda or depository of sacred
“knowledge” complete. At a later date came the Brâhmanas, or commentaries
on the Veda, the object of which was to explain obscure passages in the
old hymns, and the erroneous and absurd explanations sometimes offered
show pretty plainly how much both the language and the ideas of the
people had changed. The sacredness of the Veda was reflected upon the
Brâhmanas themselves, and a time came when they too began to be regarded
as divine, and to be superseded by the Sûtras, the “strings” or manuals
of the grammarians. The diffuse style of the Brâhmanas made way for the
scientific brevity of the Sûtras, and Hindu literature entered upon its
Alexandrine stage. Even the grammar of the Brâhmanas became archaic; and
accordingly, though the Veda was the primary object of the grammarians’
labours, the Brâhmanas also had a share in their regard. The Sûtras
endeavour to explain the Veda and all connected with it—a principal part
of their work being naturally an explanation of the Vedic language and
grammar. But, before this could be effected, an accurate register of
the facts was required, and the Masoretes of India accordingly divided
and counted, not only the verses and words, but even the syllables of
the Rig-Veda. According to Śaunaka, the teacher of Kâtyâyana, the 1,028
hymns of the Rig-Veda contain 10,616 (or 10,622) verses, 153,826 words
(_padas_), and 432,000 syllables, eleven of the hymns being of later
date than the rest; and since the number of syllables and words given by
Śaunaka is the number found in our present texts, it is clear that the
Rig-Veda has been handed down, from the sixth century B.C. to our own
day, with the most perfect precision. This is the more astonishing at
first sight, from its being handed down orally alone; but the labours
of Śaunaka and his brother scholars had much to do with the result.
The numbering of the syllables of the Veda led to the formation of the
so-called Pada-text, in which the single words are divided one from
another, instead of being run together in accordance with the laws of
Sandhi. These laws require that the final letter of a word should be
modified by the initial letter of the word that follows, the consequence
being that two separate syllables (as in _tad śrutwâ_, “having heard
that”) are made to coalesce into one (_tachchhrutwâ_). To resolve these
amalgamated syllables was to discover the phonetic rules and principles
which regulated the pronunciation of Sanskrit, and to lay the foundation
of a scientific phonology.
But a more important work remained behind. Kautsa, a grammarian of the
fifth or sixth century B.C., tells us that the language of the Rig-Veda
had by that time become so obsolete as to be understood with difficulty,
and yet the exact recital of the hymns had come to be regarded as
indispensable for the performance of religious service. The Prâtiśâkhyas,
the oldest production of the grammatical school, show a surprising
acquaintance with the physiological facts of phonetic utterance, and far
surpass the most advanced labours of the Greeks in the same direction.
The Nighantavas, a little later, contain a list of rare Vedic words,
and perhaps started the controversy which broke out shortly afterwards
among the grammarians as to the origin of the nouns. Śâka_t_âyana and
his followers, the Nairuktas, or Etymologists, maintained that they were
all derived from verbs; while his opponents, Gârgya and others, called
the Vaiyâkaranas or Analyzers, sought to show that some at least had a
different origin. In the end, however, the party of Śâka_t_âyana proved
victorious, and the result was not only the formation of the Sanskrit
dictionary, but, what was far more important, the clear enunciation of
the doctrine of roots. In the hands of Yâska and Pânini the doctrine
became fruitful in consequences; the classical language of India was
thoroughly analyzed, and the essential part of each word marked off from
its formative suffixes. In short, a scientific grammar was created. The
_Nirukta_, or “Etymology,” of Yâska is a model of method and conciseness,
though it is thrown into the shade by the grammar of Pânini. This was the
crowning work of the Hindu grammarians, and, composed as it was in the
fourth century B.C., may well excite our astonishment and admiration.
In eight books, and about 4,000 short rules, it sums up the principles
of Sanskrit phonology, the declension of the noun and the conjugation
of the verb (which agree in the main with those worked out by the Greek
grammarians), the nature of the adverbs and other particles, the rules
of syntax, which are interspersed among the various divisions of the
accidence, the etymology of words, with an exhaustive list of “primary”
and “secondary” formative suffixes, and a minute analysis of composition
which has been the basis of modern attempts to deal with this intricate
subject. As an appendix to his Grammar, Pânini also compiled a list of
roots (_dhâtus_, or “elements”), amounting in all to about 1,700.
The brevity and compactness of the work was much aided by the algebraic
system of symbols by which the various terms of grammar were expressed.
Thus, in Pânini, a verbal termination is denoted by _l_, the endings of
the primary tenses by _lt_, those of the secondary tenses by _ln_, the
special tenses and moods being pointed out by an inserted vowel, as _lât_
for the present, _lot_ for the imperative, and so on. The mathematical
character of this device shows the precision with which the several rules
of grammar had been ascertained and laid down, as well as the instinctive
recognition that there was a science of grammar as well as a science of
mathematics. It only remained for a later generation of Western scholars
to demonstrate that such was really the case.
It may seem strange that this later generation was so long in coming.
Already, at the end of the sixteenth century, an Italian, Philippo
Sassetti, during a five years’ residence in India, had made himself
acquainted with Sanskrit, and drew attention to the likeness between the
Sanskrit numerals and other words and corresponding words in his native
language.[23] Another Italian, Roberto de Nobili, who went to India
in 1606 as a missionary, actually transformed himself into a Brahman,
in order to win over the Hindus; and after acquiring a knowledge not
only of Tamil and Telugu, but also of Sanskrit, “showed himself in
public, dressed in the proper garb of the Brahmans, wearing their cord
and their frontal mark, observing their diet, and submitting even to
the complicated rules of caste.”[24] One of his converts—so at least
Professor Max Müller thinks—composed the curious Ezur, or fourth Veda,
which professes to be a lost Veda that he came to preach, and “contains
a wild mixture of Hindu and Christian doctrine.” Fifty years after De
Nobili a German missionary, named Heinrich Roth, was able to dispute in
Sanskrit with the Brahmans, and in 1740 a Frenchman, Père Pons, sent home
a comprehensive and fairly accurate report upon Sanskrit literature. It
was not till 1790, however, that the first Sanskrit grammar was published
in Europe, at Rome, by two German friars, Hanxleden and Paulinus a Sancto
Bartholomeo, whose real name was Philipp Wesdin. Some years before (in
1767) the Frenchmen Cœurdoux and Barthélemy had written from Pondicherry
to the Academy to express their opinion that a relationship existed
between the vocabularies of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and to prove
that this relationship could not be accounted for by the hypothesis of
borrowing. Their letter, however, though read in 1768, was not printed
until 1808, after the death of Anquetil-Duperron, and at the end of one
of his Mémoires. Meanwhile English and German scholars had entered the
field, and the opinion expressed by the French missionaries had become a
belief of the learned world.
In 1784 the Asiatic Society was founded at Calcutta, and its first
members did their utmost to extend a knowledge of the Sanskrit language
and literature. Halhed, in the preface to his “Grammar of Bengali,”
published in 1778, had noticed the “similitude of Sanskrit words with
those of Persian and Arabic, and even of Latin and Greek;” and Sir
William Jones,[25] addressing the Asiatic Society at Calcutta in 1786,
states that “no philologer could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin,
without believing them to have sprung from some common source which,
perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason,” he goes on to
say, “though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic
and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be
added to the same family.”
Here, then, was the great discovery made. It required a man like Sir
William Jones, who united the tastes of the poet and _littérateur_ with
those of the linguistic scholar to overcome the prejudices of a classical
education, and to admit that the languages of Greece and Rome had the
same origin as the languages of the despised Hindu. It required still
greater insight and sobriety to trace them all from a common source,
rather than to magnify the newly acquired Oriental speech by making it
the parent of the languages of the West; and though we may now smile at
his attempt to explain classical mythology by comparing its personages
with Indian deities with similarly sounding names, Sir William Jones
deserves to be remembered as the pioneer of comparative philology.
He stands out in honourable contrast to Dugald Stewart, the Scotch
philosopher of common sense, who, in absolute ignorance of even a single
Sanskrit character, undertook the task of proving that Sanskrit and
Sanskrit literature were alike the inventions of the Brahmans, and that
they were forged after the model of Greek and Latin in order to deceive
European scholars. It was not the first time that philosophy and common
sense have found themselves opposed to unwelcome knowledge.
Lord Monboddo, Stewart’s fellow-countryman, showed himself a sounder
critic and a more unprejudiced inquirer.[26] His friend, Wilkins, the
translator of the “Bhagavadgîta” and “Hitopadeśa,” and author of a
Sanskrit grammar, proved to his satisfaction that Sanskrit was “a richer
and in every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer,” and
that the likeness between Sanskrit on the one side, and Greek and Latin
on the other, demonstrated the descent of all three from some common
primæval tongue. The Scotch judge accordingly found a niche for the new
discovery in his theory which derived mankind from two tailless apes, and
the languages of the world from the Osirian language of Egypt. Sanskrit,
it was plain, had been introduced into India by Osiris, just as Greek
had been brought into the Peloponnesus by the Pelasgians. Not only the
numerals, “the use of which must have been coeval with civil society,”
or the words of common life, but even the grammatical forms of a verb
like _asmi_, “I am,” are produced in evidence of the relationship of
the classical languages of Europe and of India. As early as 1795 Lord
Monboddo was not far from the discovery of that Indo-European family of
speech which has been the starting-point and foundation of the science of
language.
Both Sir William Jones and Lord Monboddo, however, did no more than
draw aside the curtain for a moment and reveal the new world that lay
behind. It was reserved for Germany to accomplish what England had begun.
The genius of Leibniz had already prepared the way by overthrowing the
belief that Hebrew was the original language from which all others
are to be traced, and by setting missionaries and others to work in
compiling vocabularies, grammars, and phrase-books of the manifold
dialects of the world. Thus, in thanking Witsen, the Burgomaster of
Amsterdam, for a translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Hottentot, he
writes: “Remember, I implore you, and remind your Muscovite friends, to
make researches in order to procure specimens of the Scythian languages,
the Samoyedes, Siberians, Bashkirs, Kalmuks, Tungusians, and others;”
and his sound scientific instinct makes him ask (in his “Dissertation
on the Origin of Nations,” 1710): “Why begin with the unknown instead
of the known? It stands to reason that we ought to begin with studying
the modern languages which are within our reach, in order to compare
them with one another, to discover their differences and affinities,
and then to proceed to those which have preceded them in former ages,
in order to show their filiation and their origin, and then to ascend,
step by step, to the most ancient tongues.”[27] He found an illustrious
convert in Catherine of Russia, who once shut herself up for nearly a
year in order to work at her “Comparative Dictionary of Languages,” and
the “Catalogo delle Lingue conosciute e notizia della loro affinitá e
diversitá” (1784) of the Spanish Jesuit missionary, Don Lorenzo Hervas
and the “Mithridates” of Adelung and Vater are, as Professor Max Müller
has observed, plainly due to his influence. The efforts of Leibniz were
seconded in another direction by those of Herder, to whom we may trace
the conception of a comparative treatment of literature and a recognition
of the merits of literary remains beyond those of Greece and Rome.
Herder, as has already been remarked, made the rise of an historical
science possible by substituting the idea of development for that of
uniform sequence in history, and his treatise on the “Origin of Speech,”
crowned by the Berlin Academy in 1772, dissipated for ever the theory
that language was a miraculous gift and not the slowly evolved creation
of the human mind. The German mind was already prepared to seize and
unfold the consequences which resulted from the discovery of Sanskrit. It
was a poet, Friedrich Schlegel, however, and not a philologist, who first
laid down the great fact that the languages of India, Persia, Greece,
Italy, Germany, and Slavonia form but one family, daughters of the same
mother, and heirs of the same wealth of words and flections. Schlegel
learnt Sanskrit while in England during the peace of Amiens (1801-1802),
and to his work on “The Language and Wisdom of the Indians,” published in
1808, may be traced the foundation of the science of language. All that
was now required was some master-scholar who should continue the work
begun by Schlegel, and establish on a deep and firm basis the edifice
that he had reared. This master-scholar was found in Francis Bopp.
Bopp, the true founder of comparative philology, made himself acquainted
with Sanskrit during a visit to England and the India House library, and
in 1816 appeared his famous work, “Das Conjugationssystem,” published at
Frankfurt, in which a minute and scientific comparison was instituted
between the grammatical systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian,
and German. It was not until 1833, however, that the first volume of
his “Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian,
Slavonic, Gothic, and German” came out, though several minor productions
on Comparative Philology had appeared meanwhile, and not until 1852
was the final volume of the Grammar completed. Bopp was the author of
the method which must be followed by every student who pretends to a
scientific treatment of language; and though there is naturally much in
his work that has since needed revision, the main results at which he
arrived will always remain among the fundamental truths of linguistic
science. His Sanskrit grammars were published in 1827, 1832, and 1834,
and his “Vergleichendes Accentuations-System,” published in 1854, not
only pointed out the striking analogy between the accentuation of Greek
and Sanskrit, but also laid the basis of all future inquiries into the
subject. But even Homer nods at times; and as if to warn us against
following too implicitly any leader, however illustrious, Bopp sought
to include the Polynesian dialects in his Indo-European family, and
thereby violated the very method that he had himself inaugurated.[28]
His attempt to connect the language of Georgia with the same family was
not more fortunate;[29] and though Georgian is undoubtedly inflectional
in character, its flections are now known not to be those of the Aryan
group, nor its structure and roots those which distinguish an Aryan
tongue. Even the errors of a great mind are instructive, and serve to
illustrate the soundness of the method which they violate.
Bopp’s work was confined to the more strictly scientific and inductive
side of comparative philology, to the comparison of words and forms, and
the conclusions we may infer therefrom: the metaphysical side of the
science of language found an able expositor in Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Starting with the new method of Bopp, Humboldt revised the old endeavours
to found a philosophy of speech, and extended the results obtained
by Bopp to all the manifold languages of the world. In a number of
publications, more especially the introduction to his great work on the
Kawi language of Java, which came out after his death in 1836,[30] he
dealt with the various problems raised by the science and philosophy of
language, and not only sketched the general outlines of a true philosophy
of speech, but also threw out suggestions which have since borne abundant
fruit in the hands of other scholars. Humboldt’s work was followed up
by Steinthal, whose journal, the “Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und
Sprachwissenschaft,”[31] conducted with the help of Lazarus, has proved
a treasury of suggestive thought to a whole generation of linguistic
scholars. Bopp, on the other hand, was followed by Pott, whose vast
knowledge and genial insight are probably unequalled among the students
of language. His “Etymologische Forschungen,” in spite of its size and
want of an adequate index, is a mine of philological wealth, and his
works on the “Language of the Gipsies” (1846), on “Proper Names” (1856),
and on the “Quinary and Vigesimal Systems of Numeration” (1847), have
largely helped the progress of linguistic science. In the “Anti-Kaulen,”
or “Mythical Representations of the Origin of Peoples and Languages”
(1865), and “The Inequality of the Races of Men” (1856), where a great
display of anthropological knowledge is made, Pott did good service in
checking the unifying haste of a young science.
While Humboldt and Pott were laying broad and deep the foundations
of the new science of language, Jacob Grimm was applying the method of
Bopp in another and more special direction. Instead of endeavouring to
grasp the whole vast range of languages, or even those of the Aryan group
alone, he devoted himself to the minute and scientific study of one
branch of them only, and his “Deutsche Grammatik” (1819-1837) ushered
in a new epoch in the history of comparative philology. Benfey, indeed,
still carried on with a master’s power the labours begun by Bopp and
Pott, but he too had by degrees to adapt himself to the spirit of the
time, and the fame he has acquired as a Sanskrit scholar far outshines
that acquired by his brilliant but ineffectual attempt to reduce the
Aryan and Semitic families of speech to a single stem, or by his “History
of the study of Language and of Oriental Philology in Germany, since
the beginning of the sixteenth century” (1869). The time was come for
a microscopic rather than a telescopic view of language and languages;
the broad outlines of linguistic science had been sketched by its first
founders, and what was now wanted was to fill up the details, to apply
the general principles of the science to special cases, and, by a close
and accurate study of particular languages and dialects, either to
confirm or to overthrow the conclusions at which they had arrived. No
single man can know thoroughly more than a few languages at the most;
for the rest he must be content to trust to the report of others; and
however great may be his genius, however wide-reaching his vision, unless
the materials he uses have already been sifted and arranged in the light
of the comparative method, his most important inferences are likely to
be vitiated. Hence the value of the work begun by Grimm, and of the
direction in which he turned the course of scientific philology. Erasmus
Rask, the Dane, followed up the example thus set with an investigation of
the northern languages of Europe, and his researches into the language
of the Zend-Avesta, the first ever undertaken by an European scholar,
formed the scaffold upon which Eugène Burnouf erected the colossal
structure of Zend philology. Burnouf did for Zend and Achæmenian Persian
what Grimm had done for the Teutonic languages; his work has been
continued by Lassen, Haug, Spiegel, Justi, and others. Meanwhile the
Romance languages were taken in hand by Diez, whose “Comparative Grammar”
(1836), and “Comparative Dictionary” (1853),[32] are masterpieces of
method and insight. Indeed, they may be said to have created Romance
philology altogether. The philology of the Keltic dialects was set on
a scientific footing by our own countryman, Prichard, and above all by
Zeuss and Stokes, while Miklosich and Schleicher did the same for the
Slavonic tongues. Along with his special labours in Slavonic, Schleicher
carried on the tradition of a wider and more general treatment of the
whole Indo-European family itself, and his “Compendium of Comparative
Grammar” (1861-2), in which he endeavoured to restore the grammar of the
parent Aryan speech, will ever remain a monument of learning and genius.
Schleicher also came forward as the representative of the view which
includes the science of language among the physical sciences, and his
works, whatever may be thought of the theory that underlies them, have
done much to further the progress of linguistic study.
Grimm and his school acted wisely and scientifically in beginning with
the modern languages whose phonology and pronunciation, the skeleton
of all real linguistic science, can be fully known, and whose idioms,
the life-blood, as it were, of language, are still living and familiar.
But language, like all things else connected with man and his mind, is
a self-developing organism, and as such must be studied historically.
Consequently, though the student of language must start with the modern
and living languages of the world, the older languages which lie behind
them are of infinite importance, and to neglect them would be as fatal as
for the geologist to neglect the older strata of the earth. The relics of
ancient speech, preserved in the monuments of Egypt or Assyria, or in the
records of Greece and Rome, are as precious as the fossils which enable
the palæontologist to trace the history of life upon the globe, and the
geologist to explain the origin and structure of the existing rocks. The
same method and minute investigation, accordingly, which had effected so
much for the Romance and Teutonic dialects, were applied to the study of
the classical languages, and, in the hands of G. Curtius and his school,
Greek and Latin philology has been revivified and illuminated, and made
to yield stores of precious facts to the comparative philologist. The
old-fashioned scholarship has become a thing of the past; the various
dialects of Italy and Greece have been restored to their true place,
and the death-blow given to the system which derived Latin from Greek,
or attempted to explain the grammars of the two classical languages by
confounding the laws and phænomena peculiar to each. The labours of
Lobeck, of Gottfried Hermann, of Passow, of Döderlein, and above all of
Philipp Buttmann, whose intuition frequently made him anticipate the
conclusions of later discovery, had furnished Curtius with the basis
on which the new superstructure might be built, while Corssen, his
fellow-labourer in the field of Latin research, found that here also
his predecessors had gathered in an almost equal harvest of materials.
Comparative philology has made it possible for the scientific method to
be learnt as well from the study of the classical tongues as from the
study of chemistry or geology.
The results acquired in the realm of the Aryan or Indo-European
languages served as a starting-point for the investigation of other
families of speech. For a long time comparative philology remained
practically synonymous with the comparative treatment of the Aryan
languages only. But its method was equally applicable to the examination
of all other languages throughout the world, and the general laws of
language discovered by men like Bopp and Grimm might be expected to hold
good of all languages and dialects whatsoever. Furnished with the new
scientific method and the principles upon which it was based, scholars
next attacked those Semitic languages whose inflectional structure
seemed to bring them into such close contact with the languages of the
Aryan group. A new era was inaugurated in their study by the labours of
Gesenius, Ewald, and Olshausen; and Renan even attempted a “Histoire
générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques.” But Renan’s work
remains a splendid fragment; the first part, the “Histoire Générale,”
has passed through several editions; but the “Système comparé” has never
appeared. It was soon found that the comparative study of the Aryan
languages would not give the key to all the problems of speech; that in
fact the Aryan group was an exceptional one, and the laws determined
from it, so far from being of universal validity, did not apply even
to the dialects of the Semitic family. The endeavour to reduce the
Semitic radicals to monosyllabic biliterals, under the belief that
Aryan philology necessitated the existence of monosyllabic roots in
all languages, introduced nothing but confusion into the study of the
Semitic tongues; and the theory of pronominal suffixes, which seemed to
be supported by the phænomena of Aryan speech, has been equally a loss
rather than a gain for them. It is at last becoming recognized, however,
that each group of languages, as well as each language in the several
groups, has its own linguistic laws peculiar to itself, and to apply
these to other groups and languages in which they have not been proved
to exist, is to do violence to the comparative method itself. The Aryan
languages are the languages of a civilized race; the parent-speech to
which we may inductively trace them back was spoken by men who stood
on a relatively high level of culture, and was as fully developed, as
inflectional, in short, as Sanskrit or Latin themselves. Such a speech
can tell us far less of the early condition of language than the Bushman
dialects of our own day, and to make the conclusions derived from the
examination of it of universal validity, or so many revelations of the
primitive state of speech, would be a serious error.
The exceptional character of the Aryan group of languages has been made
apparent by the application of the method learnt from its investigation
to other groups of tongues. The four most important groups which have
yet been examined, are the Malay-Polynesian, as explored by W. von
Humboldt, Buschmann, Von der Gabelentz, and Friedrich Müller; the Bâ-ntu
of Southern Africa, the scientific investigation of which is due to
Bleek; the Athapasian and Sonorian of North America, of which Buschmann
has been the Bopp; and, above all, the Ural-Altaic, otherwise called
the Ugro-Altaic, or Turanian, which is now, owing to a variety of
circumstances, receiving a special attention. The work begun by Castrèn,
Schott, Böhtlingk, and Max Müller, has been continued by Boller, Budenz,
Donner, Hunfálvy, Ahlqvist, Thomsen, Ujfalvy, Schiefner, and others;
and so far, at all events, as the Finnic group is concerned, “Turanian”
philology is almost as far advanced as Aryan philology itself. But
the limits of the Ural-Altaic family as a whole are still not quite
settled; while Dr. Edkins would connect Chinese with Mongol roots, others
question the affinity of Mongol itself to the Tatar-Finnic languages,
and Weske has even gone so far as to class the Finnic dialects among the
inflectional tongues, and to hint at their connection with the languages
of the Aryan family. But this is to follow in Bopp’s footsteps only when
he endeavoured to trace the dialects of Polynesia and Europe to a common
source.
The creation of a science of language has brought with it the creation
of a science of comparative mythology and a science of comparative
religion. Language is at once the expression and the creator of thought,
and the history of language is consequently the history of human thought.
Now mythology is a record of the way in which primitive man endeavoured
to explain the phænomena of nature and his relation to the world, just
as religion—that is, religion as crystallized in dogmas and systems—is
a record of man’s attempt to represent his feelings and belief in
relation to a higher power. The record can only be interpreted by the
science of language; it is only when we come to understand the meaning
of the language of mythology that we understand the meaning of mythology
itself. Just as it was Sanskrit which laid the foundation of comparative
philology, so, too, it was the hymns of the Rig-Veda, the oldest monument
of Sanskrit literature, which laid the foundation of comparative
mythology. The familiar forms and names of Greek myth met the scholar
again in the Vedic poems; but their faces were no longer concealed by the
veil of forgetfulness. The poets of the Rig-Veda were still conscious
of the true nature and origin of Zeus (_Dyaus_) the “bright” sky, or
Erinnys (_Saraṇyu_) “the dawn,” and the old stories of the sun-god and
the powers of day are lighted up with renewed life and significancy when
we track them back to their ancient home in the East. Not less important
for the comparative study of religion have been the inquiries into the
development of Brahmanism and its struggles with the teaching of Buddha,
necessitated by the examination of the classical language and literature
of India—inquiries which could be carried on in the dispassionate spirit
of the scholar and without reference to the religious convictions of the
Western world. The settlement of the exact meaning of a single word like
_nirvâna_ opens a fresh chapter in the comparative history of religion.
It is not the least of Professor Max Müller’s services that he has made
both these new sciences household words and invested them with a charm
which has secured to them the attention they deserve.
In England the scientific study of language has taken a special
direction in accordance with the practical character of the nation.
Men like A. J. Ellis, Bell, and Sweet, have followed up the path first
indicated by Grimm and Lepsius, and devoted themselves to an exhaustive
investigation and analysis of articulate sounds. Aided by Helmholz in
Germany, and Prince Lucien Bonaparte in London, they have determined the
physical laws of utterance, have classified the most minute varieties
of sounds, and pointed out the supreme importance, for phonological
purposes, of living dialects. Etymology has to a great extent become a
purely physical science: the connection and derivation of words must
be traced out in obedience to the physiological laws of speech, and
were it not that a sound or group of sounds cannot become a word until
a meaning has been put into it, etymology might be described as merely
a branch of physiology. But phonology, the science of sounds, is not
synonymous with the science of language; it is but a department, a
subdivision, of the master science, and deals only with the external, the
mechanical, the physical side of speech. The relations of grammar and
the inner signification of words and sentences are what constitute the
real essence of language, and in so far as these belong to thought and
not to the mere vocal organs of the body, the science of language, like
the other sciences which have to do with the mind, must be described as
a historical and not as a physical science. There has been a tendency
among some philologists to push phonology beyond its proper sphere and
make it co-extensive with comparative philology: it is this inclination
which has lain at the root of the attempt to include the science of
language among the physical sciences; but phonology is concerned only
with the outward framework of speech, not with its inward essence. This
framework, however, it is, by means of which we are able to investigate
language, and the very fact of its being subject to physical laws which
admit of no contravention, gives the modern science of language its
scientific certainty, and constitutes the difference between it and the
old punning etymology in which, as Voltaire said, the consonants counted
for nothing and the vowels for very little. Before a single derivation
can be admitted it must be shown to be in accordance with the ascertained
phonological laws of the languages we are studying; before it can be
justified it must satisfy the requirements of sense and history. The
outward form is the key to the inward fact which it embodies; we can get
at the original force and meaning of grammatical relations and derivative
words only by interrogating the phonetic utterances by which they are
expressed. The science of phonology is the entrance to the science of
language, but we must not forget that it is but the outer vestibule, not
the inner shrine itself.
It has been necessary to state thus in detail the distinction between
phonology and the science of language as a whole, because a good many of
the theories that have been propounded in the name of the science rest
upon an unconscious confusion of the two. The outward and the inward
have not always been kept apart, and nothing has been commoner than to
argue that a change in the pronunciation of a word or suffix has been
the _cause_ of a change in its meaning. It has even been thought that
the phænomena of inflection might all be accounted for by the action
of phonetic decay in stripping off the final parts of compound words,
and so disguising their primitive form (but not sense), and that when
the comparative philologist has traced a word back to its source in
accordance with phonological laws he has done all that is required of
him. Even Plato and Aristotle had a higher conception of the study
of language than this. No doubt the fact that a scientific treatment
of language rests primarily upon phonology has had much to do with
this one-sided view of speech, but the resemblance of the method of
comparative philology to the method employed by the physical sciences
has also been a cause of it. Comparative philology has been regarded as
a physical science, language held to be a concrete organism, independent
of human volition and with a growth analogous to that of the plant or
the animal, and the laws of language explained without reference to the
facts of psychology. The two Schlegels are the first who may be accounted
responsible for this mode of dealing with language. Friedrich Schlegel
divided languages into the flectionless, the agglutinative, and the
inflectional, and treated the roots of languages as so many seeds, which
grew up and developed like the acorn into the oak. A. W. Schlegel[33]
calls the flectional languages “organic, because they contain a living
principle of growth and development, and alone have, if I may so express
myself, an abundant and luxurious vegetation.” In fact, speech was
regarded by them as something that exists separately and independently,
and the flections of the verb and noun believed to have sprouted out of
the root like so many leaves and branches.
Schlegel’s mysticism, as Steinthal terms it, was exposed by Bopp, who
threw the languages of the world into three groups: (1) those which,
like the Chinese, are “without a grammar;” (2) those which, like the
agglutinative and Aryan tongues, start with monosyllabic roots, and, by
the help of composition, end with a grammar; and (3), lastly, the Semitic
group, which expresses the relations of grammar by internal change. Bopp
here commits at least three errors: (1) Chinese is as fully organized,
as much possesses a grammar, as English or Latin; (2) the roots neither
of the Aryan nor of the agglutinative languages can be proved to be
monosyllabic, while the Aryan languages, at all events, sometimes use
internal vowel-change to denote grammatical differences; and (3) to
imply that the relations of grammar have been called into existence in
the Aryan family by the passage of composition (or agglutination) into
flection is to ascribe the origin of the relations conceived to exist
between the several parts of our thought to the outward accidents of
phonetic decay. Bopp naturally looked upon the laws of Aryan philology as
holding good for all other branches of human speech; for him the parent
Aryan language was the primitive language of mankind, and the verbal and
pronominal roots discovered by the Sanskrit grammarians were assumed to
have constituted a language, and, in fact, to have been the original
language of the human race. Agglutination was but an earlier stage of
inflection, and, in fact, was merely the form in which the unorganized
primitive speech came to possess a grammar by compounding its roots
together. No wonder, therefore, that roots were confounded with words;
that Chinese should be described as consisting of “bare roots;” and
that the possibility should be admitted of deriving all languages from
a single source. Hence the endeavour to find a place for the Polynesian
and Caucasian dialects in the Aryan family, and the stress laid upon the
external rather than the internal side of speech. Structure, morphology,
comparative syntax—these are ideas which have been left to Bopp’s
successors to work out. With him language is still an organism, flowing
from one source and passing through a series of necessary changes; it
is, therefore, not so much a social product as a subject of physical
inquiry. This view of language was assailed by Pott. He justly urges that
we can only speak of language as an organism metaphorically, and that
there is no inner necessity in language to develop like the seed into
the tree, or the chrysalis into the butterfly, than there is in thought
itself. The roots of language have no existence apart from the mind;
before they can become words they must be clothed, now with this form,
now with that, according to their relation with other words. Language,
in fact, is the expression of thought; it cannot be examined except in
connection with thought and the history of the human mind. The science
of language, accordingly, is one of the historical or social sciences,
and phonology is but the key whereby we read the enigmas of the thought
within. Languages will differ according to the different ways in which
men have conceived the world and their relation to it. Pott, therefore,
is an advocate of the original diversity of languages, and, as might
be expected, endeavours to found a science of sematology, or of the
signification of words, by the side of the science of phonology.
Pott had been preceded in his general conception of speech by Wilhelm
von Humboldt; indeed, his advance upon Bopp was due in some measure
to Humboldt’s previous labours. For Pott, it must be remembered, was
pre-eminently a phonologist, and to him we owe the extension of the
results obtained by Grimm in the Teutonic languages to the whole body
of Indo-European tongues. Humboldt, like all other great masters,
rather suggested than worked out; and recent researches have shown
that the facts to which he attached his philosophical system, such as
the nature of the Kawi language of Java, are not always to be trusted.
He laid down that each single language is the individual expression
of the character of a nation, though language, taken generally, “is
an organic whole,” from which the individual languages of the world
radiate as from a centre. The nearer each language approaches the ideal
of language, the more, that is to say, it is free from peculiarities of
thought and expression, the less is it imperfect and, in the bad sense
of the term, individual. And since a language is the outward expression
of the mind and history of a nation, the nation whose language is the
most perfect has approached the most nearly to a perfect culture and
civilization. Language is at once the most exquisite work of art and the
most marvellous creation of science that the spirit and intellect of a
people can produce, and its character, as tested by the standard which
linguistic science has to establish, is a sure and certain clue to the
stage of art and science attained by its speakers. At the same time,
Humboldt emphatically declares that language is not a product (ἔργον),
but an activity (ἐνέργεια); in other words, that language and speaking
are the same. But while maintaining that language is the creative organ
of thought, Humboldt also maintained that it constitutes an independent
world of thought, thus confusing the two senses of the word language—the
one in which language is made identical with the act of speaking, the
other in which it represents the whole body of significant sounds we
utter. Humboldt had been educated under the influences of the Kantian
philosophy, and in his theory of language we may discover a reflection of
Kant’s dualism in the opposition he finds in speech between the general
and the individual, between language as an organic whole, and individual
languages which refuse to answer to the ideal definition of speech.
Steinthal[34] has subjected Humboldt’s statements to a very
thorough-going criticism, and has exposed their manifold inconsistencies
as well as the dualism which underlies them all. Humboldt’s philosophy of
language erred by following the _à priori_ rather than the _à posteriori_
method; the facts discovered by comparative philology were used by him
as illustrations of his conclusions rather than as the premisses upon
which those conclusions were built. Nevertheless, in spite of his _à
priori_ metaphysical method—in spite of his laying down what language
ought to be instead of what it is, Humboldt’s genius scattered ideas and
suggestions through his work which have proved abundantly fruitful in
the hands of later scholars. But the value of these ideas was due to the
far-sightedness of his genius, not to his collection of facts, and he was
accordingly unable to harmonize and classify them, or to erect upon them
a sound theory of speech. Humboldt’s great work consisted in teaching
that language is the expression of national thought, that it must be
treated as an organic whole; that, in short, its science is a historical
and not a physical one.
The work thus begun by Humboldt was taken up by Heyse in his “System
der Sprachwissenschaft.”[35] Heyse approached language from the point
of view of the Hegelian philosophy, but he strives to prevent the _à
priori_ method from overriding the _à posteriori_. His view of language
professes to base itself on the results of comparative philology,
although the endeavour to force them into an Hegelian mould is clearly
traceable. It really rests, however, upon an _à priori_ conception of
the origin of speech, which is neither borne out by linguistic facts
nor easily realizable. Language, he holds, is spiritualized sound: the
world is a great vibratory organ, in which all objects when touched
emit a note, and so, too, the human spirit, when affected by feeling or
reason, emitted certain sounds peculiar to itself, which we call roots.
Speech was as much a necessity to man as ringing is to a piece of brass
when struck. It is, in fact, the music of the soul, and its development
gauges the spiritual development of its speakers. This development of
speech is, therefore, a wholly internal one, dependent not upon the
outward phonology, but upon the common spirit of man that has created
it. The outward sound is but the garment created by thought wherein
to clothe itself, but the garment is always suitable to the thought
it clothes. Since thought “must” develop, language also “must” do the
same, and language, like thought, can develop only in a particular way.
This evolution necessarily depends upon the existence of minds in which
thought has become self-conscious, reflective: “the speaking of children
and of the great mass of mankind is a lifelong, unconscious activity—a
mere natural activity of conscious thought.” Such a theory of language
is plainly mystical. On the one hand, the natural sounds uttered by
a man under strong excitement do not constitute language, but rather
a barren list of interjections; on the other hand, to speak of the
soul, or mind, being affected like ordinary objects of the sense, and
accordingly emitting sounds, is sheer mythology. Moreover, the evolution
of speech, of which Heyse speaks, is not a _necessary_ one: there is no
necessity “in the very essence of human speech” that the various forms
of language—isolating, agglutinative, inflectional—should have come into
existence. Language originated in the very prosaic and unphilosophical
need of intercommunication, without which no community was possible, and
so long as this need could be supplied, the nature and perfecting of the
means was not even considered. The linguistic garment of thought, it is
true, generally (though by no means always) fits the thought it clothes
fairly well, but only because the garment itself is to a great extent
identical with the thought which it envelopes. To deny that language
properly so called exists for children and uneducated persons, as Heyse
finds himself forced to do, is to deny that it was framed by primitive
man, which is, indeed, a _reductio ad absurdum_. Heyse’s chief merit lies
in emphasizing the fact that language is not the work of the individual,
but of the whole community, and of a community, too, which consists of
reasonable, thinking beings.
Steinthal is the modern representative of the school of W. von
Humboldt. Language, he holds, is an activity, an ἐνέργεια, everlastingly
“becoming.” It has “broken forth” necessarily from the human mind
when the conditions for its production were present, and in order,
therefore, to discover the origin and nature of language, we must know
the mental condition which preceded its creation. It originated through
the unconscious action of psychological laws, without being willed into
existence. The same instinctive laws still operate when a child is
learning to speak: the learning is not a conscious effort, and in the
very act of learning speech is being created anew. But these laws will
only operate in a community, the first condition for the “birth” of
language being that men should be united together in a common society.
Hence the need of a psychological ethnology which should deal with the
psychological phænomena, not of the individual, but of the race. This
alone will enable us to penetrate to that “inner form of language” which
Humboldt failed to recognize, but which constitutes language in a far
more real sense than phonology can ever do. This inner form of language
is neither more nor less than “apperception,” or a perception of the
relations between allied apprehensions, and is also described by Lazarus
as a “condensation of thought.”
Steinthal’s writings have proved as suggestive to other scholars as
those of Humboldt, but their effect is marred by a want of clearness,
as well as by an exaggerated use of the _à priori_ method. In opposing
the tendency to make phonology synonymous with the science of language,
Steinthal goes much too far on the opposite side. Instead of using
psychology to control the conclusions of comparative philology, he
deduces philological conclusions from assumed psychological facts.
Not psychology, but comparative philology, can lead us to the first
beginnings of language, and raise the veil that covers its origin. The
error, however, which lies at the bottom of Steinthal’s reasonings is, as
in the case of Heyse, the ambiguous use of the term language. Speaking,
but not language, may be described as an activity. So, too, the faculty
of speech may be said to be instinctive, which language certainly cannot
be. To assert that a child learns to speak without conscious effort
depends again upon an ambiguous use of the word conscious: as a matter of
fact the child learns to speak in much the same way as the adult learns
a foreign language. Nor is it more than a questionable metaphor to speak
of language as “breaking forth” or being “born.” Primitive man framed his
earliest speech with labour and difficulty; no doubt certain mental and
physical conditions were pre-supposed by the process, but no amount of
psychological, even when conjoined with physiological, study will tell us
what these were: in order to discover them we must question the records
of speech itself. Steinthal has been misled, like his predecessors, by
a false conception of the roots of language: he has pictured them to
himself as so many mental germs thrown off spontaneously by the mind,
and forthwith forming a language; and since these germs have a verbal
signification in the Aryan family of speech, he has further identified
them with the concepts of the mind. But roots are not words, and words
are not concepts.
Opposed to Steinthal is the school which groups the science of language
with the physical sciences, and of which Schleicher, with his modern
follower, Hovelacque, may be considered the representative. It may be
traced back to Bopp and Grimm, the one with his microscopic analysis
of the suffixes and belief in the mechanical origin of inflection out
of a previous composition of independent words, and the other with his
engrossing regard for phonology and adherence to Bopp’s theory of a
primitive language of roots. Jacob Grimm’s views may be best gathered
from his treatise “Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache” (1851).[36] In this
he begins by comparing the science of language with the investigation
of natural history, the attempt to discover the origin of speech being
analogous to that of discovering the laws of the production of animals or
the growth of plants. Like Goethe, Grimm inclines to believe that mankind
started from several separate pairs: at all events, the distinction of
gender in the noun implies the influence of the female sex. Language
has passed through three different stages, the last being the analytic,
the middle the inflectional, and the earliest that of the determination
and composition of monosyllabic roots. It is a purely human work,
“emanating immediately from human thought,” and, as such, the key to all
human history. The first words, which are identified with Aryan roots,
were invented by a sort of “wonderful instinct.” The several vowels
and consonants have each a particular force and significancy, _l_, for
instance, expressing softness, _r_ roughness, and in settling what vowel
or consonant should be taken to denote some special verbal idea, the
“inventor” of speech had for the most part to consult his own “arbitrary
choice.” Language, in short, is a human invention, determined by the
natural significance of different articulate sounds; its growth means
the composition and decay of these various sounds. In order to discover
what it is, we have only to investigate the history of this composition
and decay—that is, the nature and history of phonology. It is no wonder,
therefore, that Grimm started by comparing the comparative philologist to
the student of natural history, and imagined that the phænomena of all
human speech could be learned from the examination of the Aryan family.
It is needless to point out the unverified assumption which underlies
the notion that each articulate sound has a particular significancy, or
the inconsistency of this view with the admission of human volition in
the first invention of verbs. Grimm’s attempt to discover the origin
of language was a failure; it amounted to stating that roots have a
particular meaning because that meaning is “natural” to them, and where
this tautological explanation seemed insufficient, to introducing
human caprice. But human caprice in the case of the origin of language
stands on the same footing as the old theory of a social contract. It
was all very well for one primæval man to determine that a particular
sound should represent a particular verbal notion, but how was he to
communicate the fact to his neighbours?
Grimm, however, merely prepared the way for Schleicher. In the three
works in which he most clearly sets forth his views on the nature and
origin of language,[37] Schleicher affirms that language is a natural
organism possessed of a separate existence, and as little subject to the
will of the individual as the power of changing its song to the will
of the nightingale. The growth and decay of language is in accordance
with fixed immutable laws. Its existence as an organism is due to
its being the audible manifestation or symptom of certain material
relations in the constitution of the brain and vocal organs, and is
consequently determined solely by those external conditions of climate,
food, inherited instincts, and the like, which influence our nervous
and muscular system. History and the science of language have nothing
to do with one another. Like the phænomena of chemistry or physiology,
the phænomena of language must be regarded as so many material facts
which can only be the subject-matter of a physical science. The science
of language, in short, is neither more nor less than phonology; the
signification of words is either incapable of scientific treatment, or
else, like their pronunciation, a mere result of determinable nervous
action. The language we speak is conditioned by our bodily organization
and antecedents. An European can only become a real master of Chinese
by ceasing to be an European and becoming, mentally and physically, a
Chinaman. Language, being in no way subject to human volition, follows
its own necessary laws of growth and development. The inflectional
tongues have grown out of the agglutinative, the agglutinative out of
the isolating, and the isolating are to be identified with that primæval
language of roots which is reached by analysis in the Aryan group. The
acquisition of this root-language created man; the primates, who were
less favoured by circumstances than their brethren, and consequently did
not develop speech, fell back into the condition of anthropoid apes.
Hence the importance of the science of language for the Darwinian theory.
Not only do we see language developing by slow degrees from the simple to
the complex by the aid of natural selection, but it is through language
alone that man is separated from the brute; so that before the beginning
of language—a beginning which linguistic science can demonstrate with
certainty—man was in no way distinguishable from the other primates.
Language thus becomes the most important, it may be said the sole, test
of race and lineage. The Ethiopian can change his skin sooner than his
mother-tongue. The languages of the world cannot be carried back to a
single source. There are at least as many original languages as existing
families of speech. The resemblances detected between them are due to
geographical position; the nearer they were to one another at the outset,
the more the speakers were subjected to the same external influences,
the greater will be their similarity. A time comes when the creation of
languages ceases, and is replaced by the entrance of a race into history.
It is before this period, therefore, that the external influences, the
geographical conditions, will have to act.
Schleicher’s views, it will be seen, are based on the false assumption
that language is an actual entity existing apart from the minds and the
mouths of its speakers. In the course of his argument he found himself
forced to adopt a position somewhat inconsistent with this assumption.
If language is a symptom of the brain and vocal organs, it can hardly
be described as an independent organism. In so far as phonology is
concerned,—that part of language, namely, which depends on the vocal
organs,—the physiological laws which determine it can be ascertained in
the same way and with the same certainty as the other laws of physiology;
but mere phonetic sounds do not become language until they embody a
signification; and though it may be quite true that every act of thought
is preceded by a change in the molecules of the brain, yet this change
is altogether unknown to us, and our only way of discovering the laws
and principles of language is by questioning language itself, not by
investigating the alterations undergone by the material of the brain.
The morphologic facts of language must be studied in the same way as the
facts of sociology, of psychology, or of any other science that has to
do with the mind. The science of language, taken as a whole, cannot be
counted among the physical sciences. To identify it with phonology is to
identify the whole with its part. Unless we treat language historically,
its study becomes little more than a dry enumeration of the several
languages of the globe and their distinctive peculiarities. Not being
an independent entity, it cannot follow necessary laws of its own. The
laws of its life and growth are really the laws which govern the action
of society in a particular direction. To speak of the impossibility of
thoroughly mastering a foreign language is absurd. The same difficulty a
member of one community finds in transforming himself into a member of
another community recurs in the case of language, but the fact that an
English child born in India will speak Hindustani as his native tongue,
is sufficient to show that the power of speaking a special language
does not depend on a special organization and ancestry. Language is the
creation of society. An individual speaks a certain language because he
belongs to a certain society. As we shall see hereafter, language is no
test of race; only of social contact. As for the primæval root-language,
we have no proof that it ever existed, and to confound it with a modern
isolating language is simply erroneous. Equally unproved is the belief
that isolating dialects develop into agglutinative, and agglutinative
into inflectional. At all events, the continued existence of isolating
tongues like the Chinese, or of agglutinative tongues like the Magyár
and Turkish, shows that the development is not a _necessary_ one. Not
less difficult to prove is the fancy that there are two periods in
the life of speech—one in which men are giving themselves up to the
production of language, the other when they are creating history. There
is merely an analogy between the action of natural selection in language
and natural selection in the organic world. The science of language can
tell us nothing of the descent of man. Man, it is true, is man in virtue
of language; but, on the other hand, he must have been man to create
language.
Bréal, the leading French philologist, gave at one time a qualified
approval to the essential part of Schleicher’s theories, and their chief
advocate at present is another French scholar, Abel Hovelacque. He has
availed himself of Broca’s investigations, according to which the organ
of language must be placed in the left (more rarely the right) cerebral
hemisphere in the posterior half of the third frontal convolution.
Hovelacque’s work on the science of language[38] exhibits the defects
of Schleicher’s theory of language, as it contains little more than a
catalogue of the various families of speech with their distinguishing
characteristics. The physical theory of language allows for little more
than what may be called a natural history treatment of it; the action of
emphasis and analogy, of phonetic decay and dialectic growth, and all
the other questions involved in a morphologic and historical treatment
of speech are necessarily ignored. Faidherbe, another French follower of
Schleicher, endeavours to bridge over the gulf between man and the ape
by pointing on the one side to the inarticulate clicks of the Bushman,
and on the other to the six different sounds uttered by the _cebus azaræ_
of Paraguay when excited, which arouse corresponding emotions in other
members of the same species.[39] Bleek[40] with Häckel’s help had already
traced the utterances of speech to the cries of the anthropoid apes, and
laid down that articulate language is distinguished from inarticulate
by being broken up and mobilized. The germ of the suggestion was given
by Steinthal, who first pointed out that language approaches its ideal
the more analytic it is; sounds, like ideas, become articulate when they
cease to be indefinite and indistinct. Bleek holds that the imitation
of instinctive sounds made by others to express certain emotions first
reminded the earliest men of the same feelings in themselves which had
prompted them to the same kinds of utterance, and so led them to compare
and distinguish the feeling and its vocal sign, the outward utterance
and the inward signification. Language is thus of interjectional origin,
helped by the imitative instinct, and language in the course of its
development created and moulded thought.
Like Bréal, Max Müller inclines to regard the science of language
as a physical rather than as a historical one, and would compare it
with geology so far as its method is concerned. He, too, holds that
language is the creator of conceptual thought; without the word, without
the bond or memorandum which is to keep our individual impressions
together, a general idea, and consequently reasoned thought, would
have been impossible. Apart from inherited instincts, the deaf-mute,
like the infant, has only the capability for thought so long as he is
unprovided with a language of some sort. No theory, whether onomatopœic
or interjectional or otherwise, which has attempted to explain the
origin of language has succeeded in its task; for language is environed
on all sides by the barrier of roots, and in roots alone we must seek
its origin. How these roots may themselves have originated we do not
know; probably onomatopœia and the reflex action of sounds excited by a
common action had much to do with it; but the science of human speech
is concerned only with the question of the origin of language, not
with that of the origin of roots. The roots, however, once constituted
a real language which may be compared with the Chinese of to-day, and
which in certain instances passed through an agglutinative into an
inflectional stage of development. The roots were, for the most part,
not monosyllabic; whether there was one common stock of roots at the
beginning, or an indefinite number of stocks, we have no means of
determining. What we know is that dialects precede languages, that out
of the many comes the one, and that in the drifting desert of human
speech, only three or four families, like the Aryan, the Semitic, or the
Ugro-Altaic, have been able to establish themselves. At the bottom of
Max Müller’s theory of language seems to lie the philosophic postulate
that the universal precedes the particular; the roots of language are
so many “phonetic types,” so many universals, out of which the manifold
forms and words of living speech have been developed. They constitute
the background of those concepts whereon the structure of thought has
been reared. With the mythopœic epoch of speech all was changed. Then
the particular came to precede and create the universal, and out of
individual words which had lost their original meaning were built up the
myths of Greece and Rome. In each case the process was an unconscious
one; the will of the single man can no more change the tendencies and
growth of language than it can change the force of the winds. Max Müller
thus stands midway between Schleicher and Steinthal.
Side by side with the school of Schleicher there has sprung from
the doctrines of Bopp what may be termed the common-sense school of
philologists. As perhaps is natural, it is mainly in practical America
and England that the school has found its adherents, among whom Whitney
may be considered its most prominent representative. He states the
theories (as opposed to the method and philological facts) of Bopp in
their clearest and most extreme form, and does not shrink from carrying
them out to their logical conclusions. Thus it is affirmed that the
first men spoke in monosyllabic roots, which by means of composition
passed into an agglutinative form of speech, and that again, in a similar
way, into inflection. All flection may be analyzed into a preceding
agglutination, and all agglutination into a preceding juxtaposition
of roots, the latter being both predicative and pronominal. Whitney
holds that language is an institution like government, and that it
is absolutely dependent on the human will, determined only by the
necessities of society. The phonetic forms and meanings of words are
assigned to them by the conscious or unconscious action of a community.
Language is, in all strictness, a human invention, in which onomatopœia
probably played a large part. Its science consequently will be a
historical one. Thought is prior to language; language therefore did not
create thought, nor can it be treated as a separate organism existing
apart from its speakers. The origin of language is explained very simply
by the need of intercommunication between those who first used it, and
since it is always the expression and sign of thought, we may call them,
with perfect accuracy, its inventors. Just as thought which is universal
precedes language, so a single parent-speech precedes dialects.
Whitney’s views, however, require too many still unproved assumptions to
be received as ascertained truths; the existence of a parent-speech, for
instance, being as hypothetical as the transition of one form of speech
into another. Too little regard also is paid to the physiological side
of language, that side which connects it with the physical sciences;
while too much influence is assigned to the human will in its formation.
It cannot with any real strictness be termed an institution, because
an institution has often been founded or changed by an individual, and
over language the individual has no such power. Whitney attributes too
much design, too much volition, to the formation of speech; the need
of intercommunication alone will not explain its origin, since we may
ask, How did this need arise, and how were the means of supplying it
communicated? However much language may now be defined as the expression
of thought, it was not so at first, when conceptual thought was made
possible only by the help of language; and even now language is rather
the embodiment, however imperfect, than the sign of thought. The stress,
moreover, laid upon the element of volition in the production of speech
is inconsistent with the idea that mere juxtaposition and phonetic decay
could have effected that change in the way of viewing things and their
relations which is involved in the transition from one form of speech to
the other.
The problem of the origin of language was taken up from a wholly
different point of view by Lazarus Geiger.[41] He traced it to the
instinct of imitation so deeply implanted in the nature of man. The
expression of feeling, of pain and pleasure, of anger and love was
indicated partly by corresponding cries, partly by the muscular movements
of the face, which might or might not accompany them. The imitation
of these movements on the part of a second person caused a particular
gesture and the cry that accompanied it to be associated with the idea
of passion, pleasure, or pain that had given rise to it. Gradually the
gesture was merged in the cry, and the cry was changed into a root or
word. Each root was, therefore, at the outset, an embodiment and symbol
of an action. Hence it is that the roots to which language can be traced
back are all verbal, all expressive of movement and action. Since the
publication of Geiger’s book, the whole subject of the “Expression of
the Emotions in Men and Animals” has been elaborately worked out by
Mr. Darwin in a special work, while Benfey has independently pointed
out how large an influence the physical accessories of speech must
have originally had in putting sense and significancy into the sounds
associated with them.[42] Looks, gestures, and the modulation of the
voice are common to man and the lower animals, but whereas the import of
looks and the modulation of the voice agrees all over the world, that of
gestures does so only in part. How, then, could gestures have the same
unambiguous meaning for others which Geiger’s theory would demand? The
answer is given by Ludwig Noiré, who takes up and completes the theory of
his master. The weak point in the latter is that it makes language, which
is essentially a social product, the creation of the individual. Noiré,
in a volume at once singularly lucid and suggestive,[43] successfully
meets the difficulty. He recalls the rhythmical cries or sounds which
a body of men will make when engaged in a common work, and which seem
the product of a common impulse. We are all familiar with the cries of
sailors when hauling a rope or pulling the oar; with the shout of the
Eastern vintagers as they beat time in the wine-press; or with the yell
of savages when they attack a foe. In such cries and shouts as these
Noiré would discover the beginnings of speech. They seemed called forth
by the work in which men were engaged for a common purpose, and so became
to them the expression and symbol of it. Once established as intelligible
symbols, they constituted those roots which are at once the earliest form
of language and the germs out of which all future language has grown.
Hence it is that roots denote actions and not objects; hence, too, the
fact that the sense of sight must be regarded as the first stepping-stone
to speech. Like Geiger, Noiré is a philosopher rather than a philologist,
and his explanation of Aryan roots and their connection with one another
frequently contravenes the laws of scientific etymology. Nor can his
identification of roots and words be admitted, or the actual existence at
any time of the hypothetical roots of the Aryan tongues. But his theory
doubtless explains the origin of much that is in speech, though it does
not explain everything. Onomatopœia is not excluded from sharing in the
creation of language, nor can we refuse to recognize the interjectional
source of certain roots and words. But even if it will not solve the
whole problem, Noiré’s theory clears up the origin of that part of speech
which has hitherto appeared hardest to explain. Like the song of the
birds, the language of man, too, is instinctive and necessary, called
forth by a sense of life and energy, by a common participation in a
common work.
Outside the school of Bopp stands a group of scholars of whom the best
known are Scherer, Westphal, and Ludwig. They agree in rejecting Bopp’s
analysis of Aryan grammar and his derivation of flection from a previous
agglutination. Grammatical analysis has doubtless been pushed much too
far both by Bopp and by his pupils, and the protest raised against
it, although needlessly indiscriminating, has done considerable good.
Westphal has recourse to the old trappings of pre-scientific philology,
pleonastic letters, apocope, and so forth, and lays down common “logical
categories” of flection for both the Aryan and the Semitic families.[44]
He defines language as “the embodiment of the content of the human
consciousness,” and holds that its object is to reduce the individualism
of nature to a unity of conception. What is given as separate and
individual is unified by thought and language, and the development of
language is in accordance with this process of unification. The process,
or “movement,” of consciousness finds its expression in the corresponding
movement of speech; just as thought sums up the individual parts of any
perception under a single concept, so language sums up the individual
parts of phonetic utterance under the sentence. The result of this
movement is the evolution of the verb and the completion of organized
speech. Sound and concept are brought together by the common element
of “movement,” a curious return to the κίνησις of Aristotle. It is
evident, however, that Westphal rather restates the phænomena of language
in metaphysical language than really explains them, while his entire
rejection of Bopp’s method and results makes criticism difficult.
Ludwig, like Westphal, rejects the current theory of flection, but
substitutes for it another which can not only be supported by facts, but
is also not inconsistent with the method founded by Bopp. Flection, he
believes, is the result not of agglutination, but of adaptation, certain
unmeaning terminations of existing words being selected to express new
grammatical relations when they first dawned upon the mind.[45] Ludwig’s
view seems to have met with partial acceptation among some of the younger
French philologists, and it is supported by Bergaigne’s researches into
the nature of the case-suffixes.[46] The analysis of the latter has
always been a stumbling-block in the way of the current theory; Bergaigne
has made it clear that they were either the terminations of abstract
nouns or else suffixes which have been adapted in different words to the
expression of very different meanings. On the other hand, Ludwig’s theory
fails when applied to the verb, and we still need an explanation of the
manner in which the same select number of meaningless terminations came
to be attached to so large a variety of words. But the advocates of the
agglutination hypothesis have the same difficulty to contend against when
they deal with the stem-suffixes.
In pursuance of Bopp’s method, but independently of the distinctive
theories of his school, Waitz, the anthropologist, has propounded a new
theory of language.[47] As we do not think in words, but in sentences,
and as language is the expression and embodiment of thought, it is clear
that the unit of language must be the sentence and not the word. The
words which compose a sentence are related to one another in the same
way as the several elements of an idea, or of an action as reproduced in
thought, and can only be decomposed and separated by conscious analysis.
Consequently the incorporating languages of America, in which an
individual action is represented by a single sentence pronounced as one
word, are a survival of the primitive condition of language everywhere.
It is only gradually that the different parts of speech are distinguished
in the sentence, and words formed by breaking up its co-ordinated
elements into separate and independent wholes. Originally words could
as little be used alone and without relation as our own suffixes _ly_
or _ness_. The agglutinative tongues in which the subordinate parts of
a sentence are brought into duly dependent relation to the principal
concept are more highly advanced than the inflectional, the “fundamental
idea of which is that the principal and the subordinate elements of
thought (_Vorstellung_) remain independent and separate, and never
coalesce into a single word.” This principle of flection, however, can
never be logically carried out, since the relations of the central
idea expressed by the suffixes are themselves a kind of subordinate
conception; if _amatis_ is right where the personal pronoun is treated as
a suffix, then _amator bonus_, where the attribute _bonus_ is regarded
as a subordinate, and therefore separate, conception, must be wrong.
An isolating language like the Chinese stands on the highest level
of development, since here the sentence has been thoroughly analyzed
and each member of it rendered clear and distinct, their relations to
one another being determined by position alone. Chinese therefore has
given concrete expression in language to the philosophic analysis of
ideas. Waitz’s view would harmonize with the antiquity and civilization
of Chinese much better than the ordinary one, as well as with its
resemblance to English and other modern analytical languages; and it
is to be noticed that Steinthal, when speaking of Chinese, describes
it as a language in which the real words are the sentences or groups
of subordinated vocables. Waitz’s theory of speech is the theory of an
anthropologist who, as the student of the master-science, is better able
to decide upon the origin of language than the comparative philologist
with whom the existence of language has to be assumed. No science can
of itself discover the genesis of its subject-matter. Friedrich Müller
attaches himself to Waitz when he says:[48] “We disagree with Schleicher
and his school in this one point, that the individual independent word
is not the unity for us that it is for him, but rather the sentence—the
shortest expression of thought.” As he goes on to observe, only the
context—that is, the whole sentence—can determine whether _musas_, for
example, is to be taken as the accusative plural of a noun or, like
_amas_, the second person singular of a verb.
Philological opinion is therefore seen to be still divided upon
certain points. But such division of opinion is a healthy sign of
life and progress in the new science. It is only by the conflict and
discussion of theories that truth can finally be reached, and the many
controversies excited by the science of language show how broadly and
deeply the foundations of the science are being laid. On the phonological
side the progress has been greatest and most certain; morphology and
the investigation of roots still lag behind; comparative syntax is
but beginning to be handled; and sematology, the science of meanings,
has hardly been touched. But the method inaugurated by Bopp remains
unshaken, the main conclusions he arrived at hold their ground, and the
existence of the Aryan family of speech, with all its consequences, is
one of the facts permanently acquired for science. True, there are many
questions still to be settled. It is still disputed whether the science
of language is a historical or a physical one; whether language is an
independent organism obeying fixed and necessary laws of its own or an
“institution” controllable by the will of man; whether phonology is to
exclude all other departments of the science when the nature of the
latter is discussed; whether roots ever constituted a real language or
are merely the ultimate elements into which words may be decomposed;
whether the flectional stage of language springs from the agglutinative,
and this again from the isolating; whether the languages of the world
are the selected residuum of infinite attempts at speech or have flowed
from one or two common sources; whether dialects precede languages or
languages dialects; whether conceptual thought has created language or
language has created conceptual thought; whether, finally, the word or
the sentence is the true unit of speech. But with all this diversity
of opinion there is a yet greater unanimity. There is no scientific
philologist who doubts the indispensable value of phonology and the
absolute strictness of its laws; who questions the axiom that roots are
the ultimate elements of articulate speech, the barrier between man and
brute, and that no etymology is worth anything which does not repose upon
them; who would compare the words of one family of speech with the words
of another in the easy-going fashion of a præ-scientific age; or who
would shut his eyes to the light already shed on the history of the human
mind and the riddle of mythology by the study of the records of speech.
Language is the reflexion of the thoughts and beliefs of communities from
their earliest days; and by tracing its changes and its fortunes, by
discovering the origin and history of words and their meanings, we can
read those thoughts and beliefs with greater certainty and minuteness
than had they been traced by the pen of the historian, or even if
“Supera bellum Thebanum et funera Troiæ
... alias alii quoque res cecinere poetæ.”
CHAPTER II.
THE NATURE AND SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE.
“It is a law universally illustrated by organizations
of every kind, that, in proportion as there is to be
efficiency, there must be specialization, both of structure
and function—specialization which, of necessity, implies
accompanying limitation.”—HERBERT SPENCER.
The review given in the preceding chapter of the opinions held by others
on language and its science or philosophy will have prepared the way for
an independent inquiry into the nature and objects of linguistic science.
Before, however, we can discuss the limits and character of the science
we must have a clear idea of the subject-matter with which it deals. Most
of us, no doubt, have a rough-and-ready definition to give of language;
but science requires something more than rough-and-ready definitions,
and the discordant views as to the scope and meaning of the science of
language which have come before us in the foregoing pages are plain
evidence that an accurate definition of language is not so easy as would
at first sight appear.
Provisionally, however, we may define language as _consisting of certain
modulations of the voice, variously combined and arranged, which serve
as symbols for the thoughts or feelings we wish to express_. The sounds
that we utter must have a _meaning_ before they can become language,
otherwise they will be mere cries or gibberish, less worthy of the name
of language than even the howling of the dog upon the prairie or the
wild song of the forest-bird. Language is the outward expression and
embodiment of thought—the garment, so to speak, with which the mind
clothes itself when it would reveal itself to another or even, it may be,
to itself. The words of a foreign tongue form a language only for those
who understand what they signify: for those who do not they are but empty
sounds, the idle murmur of a “barbarous” jargon. “The language of birds”
was discovered to the Eastern sage alone: to all others the notes of the
nightingale and the thrush were as the plashing of the waterfall and the
drowsy humming of the bees. “Lessons in running brooks” may indeed be
read by the mind, but it is the mind itself that puts them there, and
only in so far as it creates a meaning for them does it create also the
language in which they speak.
It is evident that our thoughts could be represented by other symbols
than sounds. The first and most familiar instance that rises to our minds
is writing, though writing symbolizes thoughts only indirectly, its
immediate office being to symbolize sounds. There is a written language
because there is previously a spoken language, and those who learn
foreign tongues know well how detrimental the power of reading a language
is when we wish to speak it: the language of the eye has to be translated
into the language of the ear. Language can only be symbolized directly
to the eye by hieroglyphics; but if our communication with one another
depended upon hieroglyphic writing it would never be very extensive or
progressive. To say nothing of its requiring time, writing materials,
and skill in drawing, hieroglyphic writing can indicate objects alone
with that clearness and certainty which language demands. It is hardly
possible to represent in this way abstract ideas, verbs, or adjectives,
so that what is denoted shall be recognized by another without previous
instruction. Apart from these drawbacks, however, picture-writing has
this advantage over spoken language, that its symbols are not mere
arbitrary signs like sounds, but intelligible all the world over; and
even the degenerated picture-writing of China, by preserving everywhere
the same character for the same idea, has kept up a unity and spread a
culture throughout the empire which would otherwise have been impossible
among a people divided into many and diverse dialects.
Another means of symbolizing thought is “mathematical language,” which
represents the calculations of the mathematician by written symbols such
as 1, 2, 3, _x_, _y_, _z_. But such symbols are of late invention, and
could not well be applied to express the daily concerns of life. Quite
different is gesture-language, whereby our thoughts and emotions are
represented by movements of the hands and other parts of the body. Most
of our common needs could be expressed in this way, though gestures would
be quite inadequate to represent the wants of a civilized community. Only
such ideas as “I am hungry,” “let me drink,” “it is pleasant,” could be
denoted by them. But, like picture-writing, gestures possess the great
advantage of standing for the same ideas everywhere and among all men.
The expression of pain or surprise, the threatening shake of the hand,
the pointing of the finger, have the same message for the Negro as for
the European. The traveller in a strange and unknown region is thrown
back upon the language of gesture. Burton,[49] perhaps, exaggerates
when he says that the Arapahos of North America, “who possess a scanty
vocabulary, can hardly converse with one another in the dark,” and
another reason may be given for this preference for the light; but the
importance of gesture-language where other means of communication are
wanting is too evident to need examples. Thus Fisher[50] tells us that
the Comanches and neighbouring tribes have “a language of signs, by which
all Indians and traders can understand one another; and they always make
these signs when communicating among themselves.” To the same effect
James[51] writes of the Kiawa-Kashaia Indians: “These nations, although
constantly associating together and united under the influence of the
Bear-Tooth, are yet totally ignorant of each other’s language, insomuch
that it was no uncommon occurrence to see two individuals of different
nations sitting upon the ground, and conversing freely by means of the
language of signs. In the art of thus conveying their ideas they were
thorough adepts; and their manual display was only interrupted at remote
intervals by a smile, or by the auxiliary of an articulated word of the
language of the Crow Indians, which to a very limited extent passes
current among them.” Gesture-language is instinctive—the heritage,
it may be, of the days before man acquired articulate language, or
differed thus far from the brute beast: certain ideas call forth certain
corresponding gestures, and we are not obliged to learn what gestures
stand for particular ideas. Hence it is that even now spoken language is
so largely accompanied by gesture. An excited speaker is likely to make
much use of his hands; and we can often tell what a person is saying to
us, though we do not hear him distinctly, by watching the play of his
features. We know from the appearance of his face whether he is asking
a question, whether he is angry, or whether he is dispirited. With the
cultivation of articulate speech and confidence in the use of it, men
become more phlegmatic in speaking, less inclined to have recourse to
subsidiary helps. It is the awkward country girl whose “manners” have
“not that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.” The preacher
who addresses an audience of barristers does well to dispense with the
gesticulation which is necessary to the mob-orator. According to M.
Antoine d’Abbadie, an Abyssinian Galla marks the punctuation of his
speech by the help of a leathern whip, a slight stroke denoting a comma,
a harder one a semi-colon, a still harder one a full stop, while a note
of admiration is represented by a furious cut through the air.[52] Even
in this country, we have not to go far to find gesture-language employed
in default of spoken language. Where the new system of observing the
movements of the lips has not been introduced, the deaf and dumb can
communicate with the outer world only by the help of gestures, though
the gesture-language of the deaf and dumb, like phonetic writing,
implies a previous spoken language. It is, therefore, to the instinctive
gesture-language of the North American Indians what our system of writing
is to hieroglyphics.
It will be noticed that under the general term of “gesture-language” we
have included not only gesticulation, but also that play of feature and
modulation of the voice which outlast gesticulation among a civilized
people. Gesticulation can hardly form a universal language in the same
way that play of feature and modulation of the voice can. Only in part
have such gestures the same meaning for all men, and so serve to bridge
over the gulf that divides articulate from inarticulate speech. Like
play of feature and modulation of the voice, they are common to men
and animals; but, unlike the latter, they are capable of receiving an
arbitrary and conventional meaning. Helvétius, following in the track of
Anaxagoras, asserted that we have become men through the possession of
hands; had our arms terminated in a horse’s hoof, for instance, we should
have been like the beasts that perish, wanderers and defenceless.[53]
Indeed, it is quite conceivable that our forefathers would have remained
contented with a gesture-language, had not the hands been wanted for
other purposes. Food could not be prepared without them, whereas it was
not until the desire of food was satisfied that the mouth was put to
another use than that of asking for it.
Still the arbitrary element in gesture-language is very small compared
with what it is in spoken language. Here beyond a few interjections, or
possibly a few onomatopœic sounds, the whole body of symbols that stand
for thought is purely conventional. The same combination of sounds may
be used to denote very different ideas. There is no necessary connection
between an idea and a word that represents it. It is as arbitrary as our
making the sign 1 symbolize the idea of unity or the sign = the idea of
equivalence. However well we may be acquainted with our own language,
a foreign one will be wholly unintelligible to us until we have learnt
it. Even natural sounds strike the ear of different individuals and
nations in a totally different way. Exactly the same sound was intended
to be reproduced in the “_bilbit_ amphora” of Nævius,[54] the “_glut
glut_ murmurat unda sonans” of the Latin Anthology[55] and the _puls_
of Varro; nay, as Dr. Farrar points out, even in the κόγξ and the βλώψ
of the Greeks. The Persian _bulbul_ has but little resemblance to the
_jugjug_ of Gascoigne, or the _whitwhit_ of other writers; and yet all
are attempts at imitating the note of the nightingale. The first word
uttered by the children on whom Psammitikhus is said to have tried his
famous experiment seemed to their keepers to be βέκ[ος], whereas we
read in the great Papyrus Ebers, the standard work on Egyptian medicine
compiled in the sixteenth century B.C., that if “a child on the day of
birth ... says _ni_, it will live; if it says _ba_, it will die.” And
only the last of these infantile cries bears any likeness to what we
are told are the primitive and original utterances of childhood, _ma_,
_pa_, and _ta_—utterances, by the way, which are only in part possible
to the Mohawks and Hurons, who possess no labials.[56] So arbitrary
and conventional must be the meanings we associate with the sounds of
articulate speech, and so impossible is it to discover in them any signs
of universal currency. There is no reason in the nature of things why the
word _book_ should represent what we mean when we look at the present
volume; it might just as well be denoted by _koob_, or _biblion_, or
_liber_; and if we chose we might always so denote it.
But although we might choose to do so, unless we could get other
people to do the same, we should find ourselves unintelligible to
our neighbours, and talking gibberish instead of a language. For the
essential thing about a language is that it should be _an instrument for
the communication of our thoughts to others_. There is no good in having
symbols for our thoughts unless we wish our thoughts to become known to
those about us. He who has no thoughts to communicate, no wants to be
supplied, has no need of a language. But such a being, to use the words
of Aristotle, is ἢ θηρίον ἢ θεός, “either a beast or a god;” or as we
might, perhaps, render it in modern phraseology, either a hermit or an
angel. The voiceless Yogi of India, or the Bernardine nun of southern
France, is but as a dumb animal, or the hapless deaf-mute who has never
been trained. The records of speech themselves testify to our instinctive
recognition of the fact. The name _Slave_, for instance, by which so
large a body of our Aryan kinsfolk have called themselves, means “the
speaker,” in opposition to the “dumb” and unintelligible German; just
as in Isaiah (xxxiii. 19), the Assyrians are a people “of a stammering
tongue, that one cannot understand.” _Man_, indeed, comes from the
root _man_, “to think;” but it is thinking for others, for the sake of
embodying the thought in spoken utterance. The same root has produced
μάντις, the “seer;” Μέντωρ and _Minerva_, whose counsels are for others,
not for themselves; μηνύω, to “point out,” and _moneo_, to “advise;”
μνή-μη, “recollection,” and _memini_, to “remember,” and _mentio_, “the
bringing to mind” by mentioning in speech. Even in the Semitic idioms,
_zâcâr_, “a man,” seems connected with _zâcâr_, “to remember,” just as
the Latin _mas_ is with μνήμη and _memini_. Language, in short, is the
prerogative of man, distinguishing him from the brute beast, because it
is the basis and bond of society. Man is “a social animal” in virtue
of language; society could not exist without language any more than
language could without society. The two are correlative terms, though
it is for the sake of society that language has been formed. It is a
social product, springing up with the first community, developing with
the increasing needs of culture and civilization, and disappearing when
the individual Robinson Crusoe is cast back on the island of primitive
isolation.
But though it is a social product, it may also with strict truth
be spoken of as growing up. A society never met together to _make_ a
language. To imagine this would be to revive the theories of the last
century, which referred all society and government to a contract entered
into by our remote forefathers. We do not call the present volume a
_book_ because we have made a formal agreement with our neighbours to
do so, but because if we called it _biblion_ or _liber_ we should not
be understood by the majority of them. The language which we speak is
the heritage which has come down to us from the past, like the laws by
which we are governed, or the habits and customs to which we conform. We
represent our idea of a printed work by the word book, because we have
been taught to do so by others, and those who taught us had been taught
by others, and those again by others. But this process of teaching and
learning implies a very slow and gradual change in the language that is
being handed down. New words come into use as new objects and ideas have
to be named, old words are forgotten, the pronunciation gets altered, and
other changes hereafter to be described take place. And so, without any
deliberate intention on the part of any individual or individuals, the
whole character of a language comes in course of time to be transformed.
Now and then, it is true, we can trace the invention of a wholly new word
to an individual, like _gas_ to the Dutch chemist van Helmont, or _od_
force to Baron von Reichenbach; and still oftener of a new derivative
like _liberalize_, introduced by the Marquis of Lansdowne, _fatherland_
by Isaac Disraeli, _incuriosité_ by Montaigne, _urbanité_ by Balzac,
or _bienfaisance_ by the Abbé de Saint Pierre. But such words must be
accepted by society, be ratified by the tacit agreement of the whole
community, before they can become a part of living speech. Though _gas_
has made its way into common use, _blas_, which van Helmont proposed at
the same time to describe that property of the heavenly bodies whereby
they regulate the changes of time, failed to commend itself to the
general sense of the community, and so passed out of sight;[57] and such
was also the fate of Balzac’s _sériosité_, of Malherbe’s _dévouloir_, and
of Burke’s _literator_. In spite of his 262 works, and the grammars and
vocabularies written to explain the jargon employed in them, Caramuel, a
famous Spanish bishop of the seventeenth century, was unable to bequeath
to posterity a single one of his numerous coinages. The “Cabalistic
Grammar,” published at Brussels in 1642, and the “Audacious Grammar,”
printed at Frankfurt twelve years later, remained unread and unknown, a
monument of “cabalistic” dreams and “audacious” folly.[58] A paternal
government may compel the acceptance of a foreign speech, in place of
the familiar mother-tongue, like the rulers of Japan, who were said, a
short time ago, to be meditating the substitution of English for the
native language under pain of death. But even a government of this kind
cannot invent a new grammar and a new dictionary; it can only borrow
from others: and if we are to judge from the experiences of certain
Oxford colleges where French was similarly enforced in the days of the
Plantagenets, and Latin in those of the Commonwealth, the attempt,
though backed by all the powers of State and Church, is likely to end in
failure. Language must be the unconscious creation of the whole society,
and the changes it undergoes must be equally that society’s unconscious
work.
Now the sum of knowledge possessed by a society increases the longer
the society exists and the more civilized it becomes. This increase
of knowledge is reflected in the language; and hence languages grow
fuller and richer—more developed, as it is termed—the longer they last.
The further back we can trace a language, the poorer it is seen to be.
Not only are words, or rather derivatives and compounds, wanting, but
the words that exist embody but a few out of the many meanings which
afterwards cluster around them. The dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon, of
the Ormulum, or even of Chaucer, is scant and meagre compared with that
at the disposal of a modern English writer. The dialects of savages,
which most resemble what all languages originally were, have few
words, because they have few ideas to express, and such ideas as are
expressed are wonderfully simple. Thus, the Tasmanians, when they wanted
to denote what we mean by “tall” and “round,” had to say “long legs”
and “like a ball” or the “moon” or some other round object, eking out
their scanty vocabulary by the help of gesture.[59] So, too, the New
Caledonians cannot be brought to understand such ideas as those conveyed
by _yesterday_ and _to-morrow_, and the jungle Veddahs of Ceylon are
unable to remember even the names they give to their wives, unless the
latter be present.[60] After this, it is not surprising that, like the
Dammaras of South Africa, they are unable to count, and, consequently,
have no numerals in their language. According to Mr. Galton,[61] indeed,
the Dammaras are able to count as far as three, though he adds that
they discover the loss of an ox, “not by the number of the herd being
diminished, but by the absence of a face that they know.” If two sticks
of tobacco are “the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely
puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep and give him four sticks.” “Once,”
he goes on to say, “while I watched a Dammara floundering hopelessly in
a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally
embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half-a-dozen of her
new-born puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her;
and her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all
present, or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her
eyes over them, backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself.
She evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too
large for her brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the
comparison reflected no great honour on the man.”
The number of abstracts possessed by a language is a good gauge of its
development. It is difficult for us to realize the mental struggles and
the ages of previous preparation required for the discovery of those
ideas which now seem to us so familiar. The day on which, according to
the ancient legend, Pythagoras struck out the idea of the _world_, and
named it κόσμος, summed up all the labours of Eastern philosophy and
Greek thought before which the law and order of the universe at last lay
revealed. It is to Anaxagoras, to Herakleitus, to Xenophanes that we owe
those ideas of mind, of motion, of existence which form the groundwork
of modern science. Nay, our own generation has witnessed the creation of
more than one great abstract idea, henceforth to be the common property
of mankind, through the word by which it is expressed. To have won for
the race a single idea like that of _natural selection_ is a higher glory
than the conquests of a Cæsar. Man’s first work, according to the old
Hebrew writer, was to give names to “every living creature;” and the
Assyrian story of the Creation, with the profound conviction that chaos
is there where language is not, begins its record with the words:
“At that time the heaven on high was unnamed;
In the earth below no name had been recorded:
And chaos unopened was their sire.”
The words by which we express such abstract and spiritual ideas as those
of _spirit_, of _virtue_, or of _intellect_ are all, when examined, found
to have a purely sensuous origin. The _spirit_ was but “the breath,”
_virtue_ “the quality of a man,” _intellect_ “a choosing between.” We can
only rise from the known to the unknown, from that which we perceive to
that which is invisible. As the developing mind starts from the objects
of sense, and passes over the bridge of analogy to objects of thought
and reason, so, too, language, at the outset, had words only for the
visible and the sensuous; and not until it called in the aid of metaphor
could it express the higher imaginations of the soul. If we look closely
into language, we may see how strewn it is with worn-out and forgotten
metaphors. “They are,” as Carlyle has said, “its muscles and tissues and
living integuments,” the aids whereby language can communicate something
more than the things which we see and feel. Even among ourselves, there
are few who can afford to dispense with the assistance of concrete
illustration and metaphor when dealing with abstract subjects. They
throw a halo of light around the impalpable objects of philosophic
reasoning, and enable us to picture them before our minds. It is this
picture-language, as we may call it, which gives so much of its charm
to poetry, which made verse the first embodiment of literature, and
lends to savage speech its poetical garb. The creations of mythology
are in the main its work; and even modern science does not despise a
“nature” which clothes itself with the attributes of humanity and of
sex. It was the power possessed by language of rising from the concrete
to the abstract that made the earliest hieroglyphic systems of writing
possible, and which to this day enables the Chinaman to adapt his mode of
writing to the introduction of new ideas. Like the Chinese lexicon, the
multitudinous wealth of language can be traced back to a few and simple
elements.
If we watch the first attempts of children to speak, we find that their
wants and wishes are conveyed in a very small number of sounds, and
that often a single word is made to express what we should represent by
several. Now children, in spite of their inherited instinct of speech,
are the best example we can have of the way in which the first men
acquired their language, remembering only that the child nowadays has a
complete language already framed for him, whereas the first men had to
frame theirs for themselves. What the individual child now learns in a
few years has been the laborious production of many a century and many
a generation. But the child has still to learn it like his forefathers
before him, and in learning it he may modify its sounds, its forms, or
the meaning of its words, and so take part in bringing about what we call
the growth of speech.
But it is not only by watching children that we can gain some idea of
the way in which languages originally grew up. When we try to acquire
a foreign tongue, not from books, but from conversation, we first pick
up a few sentences and words, and then, by the help of these, endeavour
to make our thoughts and wishes intelligible to others. But since the
sentences and words we know are but few, we have to look about us for
the simplest mode of expressing ourselves, and are obliged to make our
expressions stand for many different ideas. Even then, however, our
vocabulary is imperfect, and we often find ourselves wholly at a loss
for any word by which to convey our meaning. Gestures are the only
resource left to us, and it is by their help that we supplement our
deficient knowledge of the spoken language. Indeed, the first words
and sentences learnt at all may have been acquired by the same means.
Travellers have drawn up vocabularies and phrase-books of the idioms of
unknown tribes by pointing to objects or making use of gesticulations,
and then observing what articulate sounds were associated with these
movements by the persons addressed. It is a good example of the way in
which gestures precede spoken language, and lead on to the latter. The
same gestures are for the most part understood in the same sense among
all the manifold races of men; a shake of the head signifies “no,” a
pointing of the finger symbolizes “locality.” Gestures bridge over the
gulf which separates inarticulate from articulate speech, and they are
still a means of communication for the deaf-mute. But we must distinguish
between gestures and that instinctive play of feature which Mr. Darwin
has treated of in his work on the “Expression of the Emotions.” Gestures,
in the proper sense of the term, are only partly the same for all races
of men; no doubt the instinctive element preponderates in them, but we
have to allow also for a certain element of conventionality. There is
not the same physiological reason why a shake of the head should denote
a negative as there is why a particular expression of the face should
indicate pleasure, or pain, or surprise, or why a feeling of shame should
bring a blush to the cheek. When we are told that the Veddahs of Ceylon
are never seen to laugh, we at once infer that they have no sense of
humour and no power of merriment. Gestures are rather a sign for the
intellect than for the emotion, and since the same feeling must express
itself similarly in the case of every one while the same thought need
not, it is evident that that which expresses thought admits the element
of conventionality more than that which expresses feeling. Pain must
always be pain, and affect the nerves and muscles in the same way; what
is thought of, on the contrary, may be conceived very differently, and
represented in an equally varying manner. Hence it is that we share the
play of feature with the brutes, whereas gestures—embodying as they do a
rational rather than an emotional element—are for the most part peculiar
to man. Man is man in virtue of language, and it was gestures that first
made language possible.
But gestures alone are often but a poor resource for either the
child or the traveller. They fail to express the meaning intended. Let
us suppose a child, for example, to have been scratched by a cat, or
frightened by a herd of cows. It can represent the pain it has suffered,
or the terror it has experienced by gestures, but if it be unacquainted
with the names of cat and cow, it can only point out those animals by
imitating the sounds they utter; and _miow_ and _moo-moo_ become the
nursery names for “cat” and “cow.” And what still goes on in the nursery
was a general procedure in the childhood of mankind. The domestic cat was
introduced into Egypt from Nubia in the time of the eleventh or twelfth
dynasty, and the Egyptians forthwith called it the _miau_, a name which
it still bears in China. Indeed, the French and German equivalents of
“puss,” _mimi_ and _mitz_, have the same origin as the _miow_ of the
nursery or of Egypt, though German could not refrain from borrowing the
unmelodious ending of _katz_. Dr. Comrie states[62] that the natives of
the north-east coast of Papua call the dog a “bow-wow,” and when first
shown an iron axe named it _din-din_, from the sound which it seemed to
make.[63] This imitation of natural sounds goes by the long and barbarous
name of _Onomatopœia_, and though an attempt has been made to substitute
“Imson” (_imitatio son-i_) for “onomatopœic word,” it has failed.[64] Now
if we are to infer anything from the habits of the nursery, and of those
savage tribes which best represent the infancy of mankind, onomatopœia
must have played a large part in the formation of language. Its advocates
have done much harm to what Professor Max Müller has happily termed “The
Bow-wow Theory,” by endeavouring to trace back words as we now find them
to an onomatopœic origin; but this does not prove that the theory when
scientifically applied is false. It is true that there are few words
like _miow_ which can be immediately referred to an onomatopœic source;
it is true also that articulate language begins with roots, from which
its scientific student must derive its words; but it is equally true
that a large proportion of these roots—or rather of what these roots
presuppose—was formed by the help of onomatopœia. It is not only objects
like a dog or an iron axe that the Papuans met by Dr. Comrie named from
the sounds they made upon his ear; an action like that of “eating” was
equally called _nam-nam_ from the noise produced by the process. We who
speak a highly developed language, the worn-out _débris_ of which are
more than sufficient for the creation of new words and forms, can hardly
realize the influence of onomatopœia upon rude and uncivilized jargons.
Of course it is not necessary that the imitation of natural sounds should
be an exact one; indeed, that it never can be: all that is wanted is
that the imitation should be recognizable by those addressed. The same
natural sound, consequently, may strike the ear of different persons very
differently, and so be represented in articulate speech in a strangely
varying manner. Thus, as has been noted before, _bilbit_, _glut-glut_,
and _puls_, are all attempts to represent the same sound. Just as colours
strike differently upon the eyes of different men, so also do sounds upon
their ears, and the poverty of primitive languages in terms to denote
the colours is parallel to the imperfection with which they represented
natural sounds.[65]
Besides gestures and onomatopœia, there is a third way in which we can
make ourselves intelligible without knowing the articulate language of
those to whom we are speaking. This is by making use of interjectional
cries. Like the play of feature, interjectional cries are the same for
all men; we all make much the same kind of exclamation when hurt, or
angry, or surprised. They express our emotions, not our ideas; and since
the main object of language is to express ideas, interjectional cries
can have had but a small share in its formation. Here and there we can
point to a few roots, like _agh_ (_ach_) in Aryan, which seem to have
this derivation; but before the root _agh_ could become a root in the
linguistic sense of the word, and give rise to a number of derivatives,
it was needful for it to cease to be an interjection; that is to say,
it had to express an idea, and not an emotion. Many of our modern
interjections, like _alas_, _lo_, are words that once possessed a full
conceptual meaning, but have lost their original signification, and
been degraded to the level of mere emotional cries. So hard is it for
language to admit anything which was not from the first significant in
thought. Interjections remind us of the animal side of our nature, and
they have forced their way into language only because that animal side
must be represented to the mind. But in thus forcing their way they have
ceased to be the simple utterances of pleasure and pain, and become
expressive of conceivable states of feeling. Only in so far as the first
men approached the brutes more nearly than we do, were interjectional
cries likely to help them in building up the structure of speech. We
may, however, include under the head of interjections those instinctive
cries uttered by men when engaged in a common work, to which Professor
Noiré would trace all roots whatsoever.[66] The sense of life and power
that makes the child shout or the bird sing, and is the ultimate motive
of human speech, causes us to beat time by the help of rhythmical
utterances. And though the utterance be but a monotonous sing-song, it
becomes a symbol and sign of the action it accompanies to all those who
have taken part in it, and in course of time may pass into a word. How
many of the roots of languages were formed in this way it is impossible
to say, but when we consider that there is no modern word which we can
derive from such cries as the sailor makes when he hauls a rope, or the
groom when he cleans a horse, it does not seem likely that they can have
been very numerous. Still they were probably more numerous than the roots
formed from other interjectional cries.
The origin of language, then, is to be sought in _gestures_,
_onomatopœia_, and to a limited extent _interjectional cries_. Like
the rope-bridges of the Himalayas or the Andes, they formed the first
rude means of communication between man and man. Onomatopœic words and
interjections came to be metaphorically applied to denote other ideas
than those for which they properly stood, while the relations of grammar
were pointed out by the help of gesticulation. Thus, by imitating the
gurgling of water and pointing to the mouth, a man could signify what we
express by the sentence, “I wish to drink,” or, “I am thirsty;” and by
uttering a cry of pain and pointing to a knife, he could show that he had
been cut by it. In course of time a collection of words would be formed,
each of which represented what we now call a sentence. For a sentence,
it must be remembered, is the name given by the grammarian to what the
logician would call a proposition or a judgment, and though a judgment
may be analyzed into subject and object and connecting copula (or mental
act of comparison), we cannot, if we wish to be intelligible, separate
its elements one from the other. The whole sentence, the whole Λόγος, as
the Greeks would have termed it, is the only possible unit of thought;
subject and object are as much correlated as the positive and negative
poles of the magnet.
Language, then, we may lay down, begins with sentences, not with
single words. The latter exist only for the lexicographer, and even the
lexicographer has to turn them into sentences by affixing a definition
if he would render them intelligible. We are accustomed to see sentences
divided into their individual words in writing, and so we come to fancy
that this is right and natural. But the very accent which we lay upon
our words ought to show us how far this is from the truth. The accent
of a word varies according to its place in a sentence; for purposes of
accentuation, we regard not the individual words, but the whole sentence
which they compose. And this outward fact of accentuation is but an
indication of the inward fact of signification. All language must be
significant; but until the whole sentence is uttered, until the whole
thought which lies behind it is expressed, this cannot be the case. The
expression of the thought may be faulty and imperfect, but unless the
thought be sufficiently expressed to be intelligible to another, it has
not yet embodied itself in the form of language. The Greek Λόγος was not
the individual word, which, apart from its relation to other parts of the
sentence, has no meaning in itself, but the complete act of reasoning,
which on the inward side is called a judgment, and on the outward side
a sentence or proposition. The single word is to the sentence what
syllables and letters are to the single word. We may break up a word
into the several sounds of which it is composed, but this is the work of
the phonologist, not of the speaker. So, too, we may break up a sentence
like “Don’t do that” into the four words _Do-not-do-that_, but this,
again, is the conscious procedure of the grammarian. Sentences may be of
any length; they may consist of a single syllable, like _go!_ or _yes_,
or they may have to be expressed by a large number of separate “words”;
what is essential is that they should be significant to another, should
adequately convey to his mind the whole thought that is intended to be
expressed. Unless the sounds we utter are combined into a sentence, they
have no more meaning than the cries of the jackal or the yelping of the
cur; and until they have a meaning, and so represent our thought, they do
not constitute language. The sentence, in short, is the only unit which
language can know, and the ultimate starting-point of all our linguistic
inquiries.
It is not necessary that the sentence should be divided into its
component words in writing any more than it actually is in speech. The
French _je le vois_ is as much a single, undivided group of sounds
as the Basque _dakust_ or the Latin _amatur_. In the polysynthetic
languages of America, in which the separate words of a sentence are cut
down to their bare stems and fused into a single whole, the sentence
can as little be split up into its elements as an ordinary compound in
Greek or German. The ancient Hindu grammarians, with that wonderful
insight into language which has made their labours the basis of modern
scientific philology, treated the several words of a sentence just as
we treat syllables and letters. A number of single words are run into
one, the sounds at the end of each word being modified to suit those
that follow, in accordance with the so-called rules of Sandhi, and the
whole group of words is then written without division. Thus the word
_trinairguṇatwamâpannairbadhyante_ must be analyzed into _trinais_,
“with grass blades” (an instrumental pl.), _guṇatwam_, “a rope’s state”
(acc. sing), _â-pannais_, “having attained” (part. pass. of the compound
verb _â-pad_, agreeing with _trinais_), and _badhyante_, “they are bound”
(3rd pl. pres. pass. of the verb _bandh_). In fact, a little attention
will convince every one that even in our own language not only does the
accent of a word depend upon its place in the sentence, but that the
sound with which it terminates equally depends upon the sound which
follows. We pronounce “of” in one way when it stands by itself in the
dictionary, in another way when it precedes “the” or “that.”
If the sentence is the unit of significant speech, it is evident that
all individual words must once have been sentences; that is to say,
when first used they must each have implied or represented a sentence.
And this is borne out by an examination of the records of speech.
We shall see hereafter that words may be divided into conceptual or
presentative, and pronominal or representative, and that wherever we
can trace back the latter to their source, we find them to have been
originally presentative. Thus words like “and” or “because” are now
purely symbolic and representative; there was a time, however, when they
denoted the very definite ideas of “a going further,”[67] and “by the
cause.”[68] Now, if we look carefully into the nature and essence of
these presentative words, it becomes clear that they were at the outset
so many shorthand notes or summaries of various sentences. Take, for
example, the word _memorandum_. Before it can form a part of language,
_memorandum_ must be significant. This can come about only in two ways.
Either we must accompany the utterance of the word _memorandum_ with
gestures which imply “This is a memorandum,” or “Write a memorandum,” or
something similar, or else we must express the meaning of these gestures
by equivalent words. That is to say, the isolated word _memorandum_ must
be incorporated into a sentence by being brought into relation with other
words, before it can become part and parcel of living speech. Taken by
itself, it belongs to the dictionary-maker only, and even he has to add
a definition, that is to say, to make it the subject of a sentence, if
his dictionary is to be something more than a mere catalogue of unmeaning
sounds. Before a definition is supplied by the lexicographer or the
reader, a word is not yet a word; it has no meaning.
The student of language, then, cannot deal with words apart from
sentences. The significant word—that combination of sounds which
represents a thought—is really a crystallized sentence, a kind of
shorthand note in which a proposition has been summed up. Each advance
in philosophy and science is marked by the acquisition of a new idea
or fact, the result of a long train of previous observations and
reasonings: and the more complex the idea or the fact, the more numerous
will be the reasonings, the sentences or judgments, which underlie
it. What a multitude of judgments, which when expressed in language
we call sentences, are implied by the two simple words _humanity_
and _gravitation_! It is a truism in psychology that the terms of a
proposition, when closely interrogated, turn out to be nothing but
abbreviated judgments. The ordinary theory of modern comparative
philologists traces all languages back to a certain number of abstract
roots, each of which was a sort of sentence in embryo, and though this
theory is scarcely tenable in the form in which it is usually presented,
it is yet certain that there was a time in the history of speech when the
articulate or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primitive man were made
the significant representatives of thought by the gestures with which
they were accompanied. And this complex of sound and gesture—a complex
in which, it must be remembered, the sound had no meaning apart from the
gesture—was the earliest sentence. The isolating languages of Further
India still express a new concept by the juxtaposition of two words which
denote that it is the species of a higher genus. Thus, in Taic or Siamese
_kin_ is to “eat,” but when _nam_, “water,” is added, _kin-nam_ means “to
drink;” _mi_ is “rich,” _mi din_, _mi nám_, “earthy,” and “watery,” that
is to say, “rich (in) earth” and “water.”[69]
These examples from the far East show us the way in which our words
first came into existence. They have grown out of sentences by a process
of comparison and determination. Two or more sentence-words, referring to
the same object or idea viewed under different relations to the speaker,
might be set over against one another, and the phonetic part in which
they agreed taken to denote the object or idea considered by itself.
Thus in Semitic _kâtal_ is “he killed,” _kotêl_, “killing,” _k’tol_, “to
kill” and “kill,” _kâtûl_, “killed,” and _katl_, _kitl_, or _kutl_, “a
killing,” where the difference of signification is marked by a difference
of vowel, and co-existing forms of this kind, when compared with each
other, would determine that the three consonants _k-t-l_ had the general
sense of “killing.” But an inflectional language does not permit us to
watch the word-making process so clearly as do those savage jargons in
which a couple of sounds like the Grebo _ni ne_ signify “I do it” or
“you do it,” according to the context and the gestures of the speaker.
Here by degrees, with the growth of consciousness and the analysis of
thought, the external gesture is replaced by some portion of the uttered
sounds which agrees in a number of different instances, and in this way
the words by which the relations of grammar are expressed come into
being. A similar process has been at work in producing those analogical
terminations whereby our Indo-European languages adapt a word to express
a new grammatical relation. Thus, in English, the Greek termination _ize_
(or -_ise_) has been abstracted from the words to which it properly
belonged by comparing them together, and has been instinctively, as it
were, invested with a particular meaning, so that we can now turn any
word we like, whether of Greek origin or not, into a transitive verb by
attaching to it this suffix. In _humanize_, for instance, it is added to
an adjective of Latin origin, in _jeopardize_ to a Romanic compound. When
once a sentence-word had been broken up into single words by comparing
it with other sentence-words relating to the same subject, it was easy
to extend the operation to other sentence-words, which were accordingly
broken up and analyzed without being compared with related sentences. The
phonetic expression of the verbal copula by which the subject and object
were connected together, was the last result of this analytic process;
it was long left to be supplied by the mind, the simple juxtaposition
of subject and object being considered sufficient to suggest the mental
act by which they were compared or contrasted, and to this day many
languages, those of Polynesia, for example, still remain without a verb.
Thus, in Dayak _kutoh ka-halap-e arut-m_, “thy boat is very beautiful,”
is literally “very its-beauty thy-boat,” _andi-m handak imukul-ku_,
“thy brother will be struck by me,” means properly, “thy-brother my
striking-being,” while to express “he has a white jacket on,” the Dayak
must say, _ia ba-klambi ba-puti_, “he with-jacket with-white.”[70]
As we shall see hereafter, all the facts at our disposal tend
to show that the roots of speech, or at all events the earliest
sentence-words out of which the later languages of mankind have sprung,
were polysyllabic, and other facts go equally towards proving that the
terminations of these primitive roots or sentence-words displayed a
wearisome monotony of agreement. Survivals, as Mr. Tylor has happily
termed them, are among the most valuable means we have of arguing back to
an earlier state of things, and we can only treat as a survival the habit
of a child whom I know, who in her first essays at speech affixed a final
_ö_ to almost all her words, saying for instance, _come-ö_ and _dog-ö_
for “come” and “dog.” The older a speech is, the more it has suffered
from the wasting and wearing effects of time, and a language like the
Chinese, which stands out as some weather-beaten granite peak among the
languages of a later day, has so concealed all traces of the originally
pluriliteral character of its vocabulary, that it is only within the last
few years that Sinologues, like Dr. Edkins and M. de Rosny, have detected
it. So, we may infer, will it also be found with all the other languages
of the world; the first utterances of mankind were polysyllabic, though
not perhaps of such monstrous length as the sentence-words of Eskimaux
or Algonquin. In the friction and comparison of these utterances similar
terminations came in some instances to be set apart to denote the
relations of grammar; in other instances the grammatical relations which
lay implicit in the sentence-word were made explicit by its being set
over against another sentence-word similarly employed elsewhere; and so
it came in course of time to be what the Chinese would call an “empty
word” with no presentative meaning of its own. Thus, on the one side, as
M. Bergaigne has shown, the old adjectival suffix _bha_ (_bhi_) in our
own family of speech has become the sign of the dative and genitive cases
(Latin _ti-bi_, dat., Old Slavonic _te-be_, gen.) just as the adjectival
termination _sya_ or _tya_ (as in δημόσιος, “belonging to the people”)
has become the sign of the genitive (ἱππο[σ]ιο); while, on the other
side, the Chinese _tsĭ̥ h‘ai_, “to be hurt,” is literally “eat hurt,”
and _tshyeu tha̤n_, “autumn,” “harvest-heaven.” The Chinese word can
still be used indifferently as a noun, a verb, an adverb or the sign
of a case much like such English words as _silver_ and _picture_, and
its place in the sentence alone determines in what sense it shall be
construed. This is an excellent illustration of the early days of speech,
when the sentence-words contained within themselves all the several
parts of speech at once—all that was needed for a complete sentence;
and it was only by bringing them into contact and contrast with other
sentence-words, that they came to be restricted in their meaning and
use, and to be reduced into mere “words.” Language never forgot the
mode in which it had framed its first vocabulary, and the Greek and
Roman, as much as the Red Indian of America, in framing their compounds
instinctively stripped off the so-called inflections, and reduced the
word they placed first to its simple stem. That part alone of the word
which remained unchanged and unchangeable, could be made use of when
the word was to be treated as simply a word and nothing more. The North
American languages reflect more faithfully than the languages of the
Old World the primitive condition of speech, and the North American
languages can possess from six to eight thousand different verbal forms
or sentences without having abstracted from them a single _word_ which
will express the sense of the verb out of all relation to anything
else.[71] Thus, the Cheroki has thirteen verbs to denote particular kinds
of “washing,” such as “washing the head,” or “the hands,” or “myself,”
and each of these verbs has a multitude of forms, but no isolated word
to denote “washing” in general has as yet been extracted from them.[72]
The difficulty has often been noticed of getting a savage or barbarian
to give the name of an object without incorporating it into a sentence
or bringing it into relation with something else. Thus, a Kurd who
supplied Dr. Sandwith with a vocabulary of the Zaza dialect, was so
little able to conceive of words like “head,” “father,” “hair,” except
as related to himself or some one else, that he had to combine them
with a personal pronoun, saying _sèrè-min_, “my head,” _piè-min_, “my
father,” _porè-min_, “my hair.” The Hoopah and Navaho vocabularies,
published by Schoolcraft,[73] similarly prefix the possessive pronoun
_h’_, _hut_ to all their words, as _hotsintah_, _hut-tah_, “forehead,”
_huanah_, _hunnah_, “eye,” _hoithlani_, _hutcon_, “arm;” and Dr. Latham
points out the same fact in Wallace’s vocabularies from the river Uapes,
where _eri-bida_, _eri-numa_ in Uainambeu, _tcho-kereu_, _tcho-ia_ in
Juri, and _no-dusia_, _no-nunia_ in Barrè, literally “my head,” “my
mouth,” are given as the equivalents of simple “head” and “mouth.” He
also states that he has noticed the same peculiarity among the English
Gipsies.[74] The making of words as distinct from sentences was a long
and laborious process, and there are many languages like those of North
America in which the process has hardly yet begun. A dictionary is the
result of reflection, and ages must elapse before a language can enter
upon its reflective stage. Our children still learn the languages they
speak by first acquiring the knowledge of certain phrases and sentences,
and then gradually analyzing them into words, and the adult who wishes to
gain a successful acquaintance with another tongue must pursue the same
plan. What Steinthal says of the Chinese, that its “smallest real whole
is a sentence, or at least a sentence-relation,”[75] is true of other
languages as well, and the words of which a sentence is composed have no
actual existence apart from that sentence, except for the phonologist and
the lexicographer. Until the whole sentence is completed the individual
words of which it consists have no more signification than the syllables
_ful_ and _ness_ or _cy_ and _ly_ which occur so plentifully in English.
The first condition of language is that it should be significant, and
words are only significant when they stand in relation to one another.
The _logos_, the true word, said Aristotle, was the cause of knowledge;
the individual words of which it was composed were but symbols and tokens
of the impressions of sense.
Now, if language be the embodiment of thought, and if thought can only
express itself under the form of the complete sentence, it is plain that
we must look to the sentence for a true classification of languages. The
sentence expresses the way in which we think, and the different forms
assumed by the sentence—that is to say, the different modes in which
the relations of subject, object, and verb are denoted will constitute
the only sound basis for classifying speech. The particular relation
between the several ideas summed up in a judgment or sentence agrees
with the manner in which we regard the objects about which we think and
speak. If, for instance, we have no clear idea of any distinction between
ourselves and the objects around us, in talking about them any reference
to ourselves will be left out of sight. Instead of saying, “_I_ am
running,” where the speaker distinguishes himself from the act in which
he is engaged, we should say like the Romans _curro_, where the personal
pronoun has no separate and independent mark of its own. Different races
of men do not think in the same way; and, consequently, the forms taken
by the sentence in different languages are not the same. Thus in the
so-called isolating languages, the separate terms or ideas which make
up the sentence are not subordinated to each other, and fused into a
single whole, but every word remains a separate and distinct sentence.
The Chinaman has to say, “_thya̤n-hi le̥ṅ tsyaṅ-s̆aṅ-lei_”-literally,
“heaven-air cold begin-rise-come,”—if he wants to state that “the weather
began to be cold;” and the Burman’s way of expressing “we are going,” is
by saying, “_ṅā dō dhwā kra dhań_”—“I multitude go multitude which.” In
cases such as these, the ideas are each set down independently, instead
of being subordinated one to another, and the words which embody them
are accordingly contrasted with each other like so many independent
sentences. On the other hand, in the agglutinative languages, the ideas
which make up the sentence, though still kept distinct and independent,
are no longer set over against one another, but brought into mutual
relation and harmony, and regarded as of equal force and meaning. The
root or stem still stands out clearly and separately, and the suffixes
of relation are marked with equal distinctness; But for all that, the
inward fact of the incipient subordination which exists between them is
denoted by the outward fact of vocalic harmony, whereby the vowels of
both stem and suffix have to belong to the same class. The Turkish sign
of the infinitive, _mak_, has to become _mek_ after a root like _sev_,
“love,” though both root and suffix still retain their own individuality;
and while _at-lar_ is “horses,” _ev-ler_ is “houses.” The grammatical
relations expressed in the Aryan class of languages by case-endings
and person-endings, or by prefixed pronouns and prepositions, have to
be represented, as a general rule, by postfixes, since in no other way
can sufficient emphasis be laid upon them, and the danger avoided of
their being swallowed up in the verb or noun. Our “I love,” or “the
man,” look but little different in writing from the Turkish _sev-r-im_,
or the Basque _gizoná_, _gizonák_; the case is quite altered, however,
when we try to pronounce these words, the accent falling on the verb in
our “I love,” but allowing the distinction between verb and pronoun to
be clearly felt in the Turkish _sevrim_. It is among the inhabitants
of mountainous and cold regions in the Aryan and Semitic families of
speech—among Albanians, Bulgarians, Scandinavians, and Aramæans—that
the definite article is postfixed instead of being prefixed; and we
can see at once what an emphasis and distinctness would be given to it
by such a position. Only where foreign influences have been at work
do the agglutinative languages change the order of the words in the
sentence and, as in the case of the Hungarian definite article _a_,
_az_, prefix the words expressive of the grammatical relations, instead
of postfixing them. Still further, to mark out the several parts or
terms of the sentence, the objective pronoun may be inserted between
the subjective pronoun and the verbal root or stem; and so we may have
a sentence-word like the French _je vous donne_, as in the Basque
_zamaztet_ (from _eman_, “to give”), or the converse arrangement of the
terms, as in _n-aza-zu-n_, “that you may have me” (“me-have-you-may”).
The incorporating languages, as they are called, are the oldest examples
of the agglutinative class, for they go back to the time when the speaker
had not yet begun to analyze his sentences, and when he could not say
simply, “I give,” without finishing the sentence with the objective
pronoun. Hence it is that in Basque we must say _dituzte beren liburnac_,
“they have them their books,” instead of simply “they have their books;”
and in Accadian, the language of primitive Chaldea, “I built a house”
would be _ê mu-n-rû_,[76] literally “house I-it-built.”
Very distinct from these incorporating tongues are the polysynthetic
or incapsulating dialects of America, in which the words that make up a
sentence are stripped of their grammatical terminations, and then fused
into a single word of monstrous length and appearance. Thus the Algonquin
would say, _wut-ap-pé-sit-tuk-quś-sun-noo-weht-unḱ-quoh_, if he wished
to express the sentence “he, falling on his knees, worshipped him;”
and this cumbrous compound denotes exactly what we split up into seven
words. These polysynthetic languages are an interesting survival of the
early condition of language everywhere, and are but a fresh proof that
America is in truth “the _new_ world.” Primitive forms of speech that
have elsewhere perished long ago still survive there, like the armadillo,
to bear record of a bygone past. The conception of the sentence that
underlies the polysynthetic dialects is the precise converse of that
which underlies the isolating or the agglutinative groups. The several
ideas into which the sentence may be analyzed, instead of being made
equal or independent, are combined like a piece of mosaic into a single
whole. The sentence has not passed beyond its primitive form, or rather
that primitive form has been retained in spite of the growth and
development of the languages to which it belongs. It is possible that
the Eskimaux may be the descendants of the savage races who inhabited
the caves of southern France, when the rivers were stiff with ice for
half the year, and the reindeer roamed freely through the woods and
meers; at all events, among the icebergs and dark winters of the North,
they have preserved their old habits of thought, their old mode of
viewing the world about them, almost unchanged. And yet our own class of
speech, that class to which we give the name inflectional, and which we
sometimes think is the crown and standard of all other kinds of language,
is not so far removed in usage from the Eskimaux or the Algonquin as
are the isolating dialects of China and the agglutinative jargons of
Mongol and Turk. In the inflectional group the words or suffixes which
denote grammatical relations are subordinated to the words which express
objects or actions—that is to say, to nouns and verbs. The termination
of the Latin _currit_ has lost all distinct and independent meaning
of its own; apart from the verbal stem to which it is subordinated,
it is a mere _flatus vocis_, a mere empty sound. In flection proper,
which we may see best exemplified in the Semitic tongues, the relations
of grammar are denoted by internal vowel change—_adamu_, “man,” for
instance, being nominative, _adami_ genitive, and _adama_ accusative. It
was only afterwards, and by the force of analogy, that first unmeaning
suffixes and then agglutinated words which were gradually assimilated
to them, came to take the place of internal vowel change. What we may
term the inflectional instinct sought to express the various relations
of the sentence, as they successively rose to consciousness, out of the
original sentence-word itself. When separate words like _wards_ or _ly_
(_like_) were afterwards employed for the same purpose, they first had
to lose their own individuality, to become empty words, representative
and not presentative, and as such to be engrafted upon the old stems.
The Greek φη-μί, or the Sanskrit _ad-mi_, “I eat,” are single wholes;
the first personal pronoun _ma_, weakened to _mi_, has lost all life of
its own, and its sole right to existence lies in its absorption into the
stems φη- and _ad_-. But an inflectional language cannot carry out its
fundamental principle with logical completeness. All the subordinate
relations of a sentence cannot be brought into the same close connection
with the principal idea as in φημί and _admi_. Sentences like “I speak”
or “I eat” may be comprehended under a single word; but there are many
sentences where this is impossible, and where the attempt to express
in language the relation between the principal and the subordinate,
between the subject and the attribute, has to be given up. In the Latin
_poeta bonus_, for example, the subject and the attribute appear as
separate words; and there is nothing in the flection attached to each
to show that they stand in any relation whatsoever one to the other. So
far as the form goes there is nothing to tell us whether the two words
mean “a good poet” or “the poet is good.” The fundamental principle of
flection has been violated, and the language is on the high road to that
more developed condition in which, as in Chinese, the two ideas are set
plainly and distinctly one against the other, and the mind is left to
supply the relation between them. This impossibility of carrying out
thoroughly the principle of flection brings about an analytic tendency
in all inflectional forms of speech. The longer an inflectional language
lives the more analytic it becomes. The Englishman says “I will go,” and
the Frenchman _le monde_, where the Latin was contented with _ibo_ and
_mundus_. One by one the grammatical relations implied in an inflectional
compound are brought out, as it were, into full relief, and provided with
special forms in which to be expressed; but the change that has taken
place is but an apparent one, the inflectional spirit of the language
still remains; and though we write “he runs,” “I will go,” we pronounce
as if they were single words. The pronoun and the verb, taken apart and
by themselves, convey no meaning to our minds; we have to combine them
before they become significant, and (the order of the words excepted)
there is but slight difference between an English sentence like “never to
be sufficiently relied upon,” and the Tamil _sārndāykku_, “to thee that
hast approached,” to be analyzed into _sār_, “approach,” _d_ sign of the
past, _āy_, “thee,” and _ku_, “to.”
Each of the leading classes of speech naturally comprises various
species or subdivisions. Thus the isolating Chinese differs from the
isolating dialects of Further India, in that the Chinese mode of
expressing the relations of the sentence by position is replaced in
these by the use of words like _prū_, “do;” _khã_, “suffer;” _khōṅ_,
“possession,” _mha_, “from.” So, again, in the agglutinative class,
the Bâ-ntu languages of Southern Africa prefix the same substantive,
worn down, it may be, to a mere unmeaning symbol, to each of the words
in a sentence which have to be brought into relation with each other;
_o_-ka-_ti_ k-_etu_ _o_-ka-_ua_, for instance, being “our fine stick,”
or literally, “stick ours fine.” The Malayo-Polynesian dialects have not
yet attained to the conception of the verb; thus _yaku imukul olo_ (“I
smitten people”) is “I am smitten by the people;” _iṅga̤ra̤-ku ia̤ tatau_
(“my-thought he rich”) “I thought he is rich;” _ia̤ baklambi baputi_ (“he
with-jacket with-white”) “he has a white jacket on.” Basque grammarians
generally hold that the Basque has but two verbs, “to be” and “to have,”
while, on the other hand, there are many languages which lack precisely
these two.
But in all these sub-classes, just as in the main classes of speech,
it is the different conception of the sentence and the form it takes
which characterize the whole language. However much alike may have been
the circumstances by which the first communities of men were surrounded,
they yet viewed the world without them and their own relation to it with
different eyes. The idea they formed of the sentence and its parts was
not the same everywhere. When with the growth of consciousness came also
the formal expression in utterance of the relations of the several parts
of the sentence, it was inevitable that this expression should clothe
itself in essentially various forms. And the psychological peculiarity
which originated each of these forms—a peculiarity itself the result of
previous experiences and tendencies—became continually more definite,
more confirmed, more unalterable. The logician may reduce all forms of
the affirmative proposition or judgment to the single “A is B,” but the
grammarian knows that this is like the _jus gentium_ of the Romans, a
mere abstraction from a limited number of observed instances. It may
be the right form for the sentence to take in the manifold languages
of the world, but as a matter of fact it has never been taken in any
one of them. The form of the sentence as shaped by the primitive
language-builders of each human community has imprinted itself indelibly
upon the linguistic consciousness of their successors. Racial type and
characteristics will change as soon as the conception of the sentence.
Many of the agglutinative languages have approached so nearly to the
phænomena of inflection, as to make it difficult to determine why they
should not be classed with the inflectional tongues; and yet for all
that they remain agglutinative, and have remained so as far back as we
can trace them. Our own language is agglutinative, and even isolating in
many respects, while the French _je vous donne_ seems a clear instance
of incorporation. The Chinese, on the other hand, shows much that is
agglutinative, much even that resembles inflection, and it is only the
polysynthetic languages of America that remain true to their stereotyped
primæval character. Nevertheless, in spite of all this apparent confusion
and overlapping, this borrowing, as it were, of characteristics from
other families of speech, the great types of language stand out each
of them visibly and distinctly. Their broad characteristics can be
clearly sketched, their essential diversity easily felt. It is only
when we come to map out the boundaries between them, to determine where
isolation ends and agglutination begins, that we find ourselves at
fault. Here as elsewhere in nature there is no sharply-defined line
of division to be drawn; species passes gradually and insensibly into
species, class into class. But in spite of this, species and classes
really exist, each with its own type and characteristics, each founded
upon its own conception of the sentence and its parts. When we remember
that the sentence, and not the isolated word, is the starting-point of
philology—when we make it what the logician would term the _fundamentum
divisionis_ for our classification of speech—there is no longer any
difficulty in distinguishing between the several families of speech,
and assigning to each its character and place. The Finnic idioms have
become so nearly inflectional as to have led a recent scholar to suggest
their relationship to our Aryan group; nevertheless, they have never
cleared the magical frontier between flection and agglutination, hard as
it may be to define, since to pass from agglutination to inflection is
to revolutionize the whole system of thought and language and the basis
on which it rests, and to break with the past psychological history
and tendencies of a speech. There are South American butterflies whose
colours have come to resemble so closely those of the plants on which
they are found as to be indistinguishable from them; for all that, the
butterfly still remains a butterfly, and the plant a plant.
Such, then, is language in its origin and its nature. It is significant
sound, the outward embodiment and expression, however imperfect, of
thought. Before sound can become significant it must express the whole
thought or judgment; that is, it must take the form of a sentence.
Historically, the sentence and not the word comes first. The sentence
consists of two factors, one the external sound, the other the internal
thought, and neither of these factors can be disregarded by a true
science of language.
Now, science is accurate knowledge. The statement may seem a truism,
but it is a truism which has sometimes been forgotten. For that which is
accurate is only that which can be defined and limited, that of which
all the boundaries, as it were, are distinctly mapped out and known.
But the boundaries of knowledge can only be discovered by the help of
comparison. It is, in fact, the comparative method that constitutes the
very life of inductive science; it is the application of the comparative
method to any subject which brings that subject within the domain of
scientific knowledge. Our knowledge that night and day follow one another
alternately, or that if we put our hands into the fire they will be
burnt, is not yet scientific. In order to know anything scientifically
we must be able to compare it with something else, and so determine
its size, or weight, or character. Our feelings may tell us that the
atmosphere is hot or cold, but we have no scientific knowledge of either
fact until we can measure one degree of heat or cold against another
by means of the thermometer. As soon as we know the exact amount and
character of each degree of heat or cold, we have laid the foundations
of a science of thermology. It is just the same in the case of language.
Here, too, as soon as we can compare languages and the elements of
languages together, and so measure and determine their character, we
shall have the beginning of a science of language. But the comparison
must be made by the aid of a common standard. The old attempts to
compare Latin with Greek, or both with Hebrew, were failures because the
test applied was a capricious one, depending on the subjective fancies
and prejudices of the inquirer. We cannot compare two things together
without having a third term—a common standard by which to measure them.
We must not have one rule and measure for one set of words or languages
and another rule and measure for another set. The comparative method we
employ must be alike in all cases.
Language is a social product, at once the creation and the creator
of society. It is independent of the caprice of the single individual,
and the Emperor Tiberius could no more change a Latin word[77] than the
slavish obedience of a Benedictine monastery could turn _sumpsimus_ into
_mumpsimus_. Unless the community as a body agree to accept the new
word or form, Cæsar himself is powerless to introduce it. The changes
undergone by language are brought about by the action of circumstances
over which the individual has no control. They are circumstances which
affect the whole community, not the individual member of it. The primary
condition of speech that it should be significant requires that it
should be stamped and recognized by the common consciousness. Now, the
circumstances that affect a whole community will always act in the
same way should the conditions remain the same. Individual caprice is
rendered impossible, and the forms assumed by language will be found
referable to general laws. We have to deal, not with the infinite
complexity of individual motives and caprice, but with the consentient
action of many minds swayed by the same feelings, surrounded by the same
atmosphere. The joint action of a multitude eliminates the accidental
differences of individual character; all that is left is just that
in which all agree, the result of the influences of which all alike
are sensible. The circumstances that determine the common nature of a
society determine also its common utterance, and this common utterance
we call its language. It embodies all the past life and history of the
community that speaks it; each phase in the development of its speakers
is reflected in it as in a mirror, and its worn-out words and forms are
so many crystallized embodiments of dead and bygone thought, so many
fossil relics, as it were, of the past strata of social growth. The facts
of language—its sentences and its words—are the result of the action of
general laws and conditions; by comparing and classifying them we can
discover what these general laws are, and how they act. A knowledge of
these laws and their action constitutes glottology or the science of
language; the use of the comparative method by which they are discovered
constitutes comparative philology.
Comparative philology, therefore, furnishes the materials whereby the
science of language investigates such questions as the origin of speech,
the nature of roots, or the meaning of flection. It may be said to
comprise both comparative and historical grammar, comparative grammar
being primarily occupied in comparing the grammatical forms and syntax of
different languages of the same group; historical grammar in tracing the
history of the forms and syntax of a single language. The two studies,
however, necessarily overlap, comparative grammar requiring a knowledge
of the individual languages compared at the successive periods of their
history, or restoring the older forms of the individual languages by
means of comparison, and historical grammar calling in the aid of the
allied dialects to supply the deficiencies of the literary or monumental
record. Quite apart from either is philology proper in the old sense
of the word, which busied itself solely with literary languages and
the literature they enshrine. The business of philology is to compare
author with author, style with style, to determine the employment of
words and phrases in the writers it investigates and pronounce upon
their correctness, to emend the readings of MSS. and imitate the
idiosyncrasies of particular writers. From the old-fashioned classical
philology to the so-called philosophy of speech there is a wide leap,
but both have been equally transformed by the new comparative method.
The philosophy of speech in the hands of men like Harris or Stoddart[78]
endeavoured to attack the problems of language by “the high _priori_
road,” and by unverified and unverifiable reasoning from the phænomena
of modern dialects to discover the origin of speech and the relation
between grammar and logic. The philosophy of speech under the guidance
of comparative philology has become the science of language, which may
be said to comprehend both. The questions which the _à priori_ method
failed to resolve are now yielding their answers to _à posteriori_
research, and the results already obtained have overthrown the
unsubstantial speculations of the last century. The science of language
has been variously termed “La Linguistique,”[79] “Linguistic Science,”
Glottic,[80] and Glottology,[81] and it stands in the same relation to
comparative philology that physiology stands to comparative anatomy.
Now, the ultimate facts with which comparative philology has to deal are
sentences and the words that have been evolved out of them. These words
and sentences must be real and not imaginary—that is, they must either
belong to some living speech, or be preserved in a written record, or
else be restored by a sound comparison of existing words which presuppose
some common ancestor. Where such real and well-attested words are not
to be had, no conclusions can be drawn. Unless inscribed monuments are
hereafter brought to light or comparison with the Malayan dialects
results in the recovery of a common parent-speech, the condition of the
Polynesian languages 1,000 years ago must remain unknown. Much no doubt
may be effected by comparing the scattered relics of these languages
together, by showing that a sibilant, for instance, has been preserved in
Samoan which has become a simple aspirate elsewhere, or that a guttural
is retained between two vowels in Maori which has been dropped in most
of the other Polynesian settlements; but to assert that some thousand
years back they resembled another language to which they bear little
similarity at present, would be to argue without data, and to violate the
fundamental principles of comparative philology.
The object of the science of language is threefold:—
(1). It compares and classifies sentences, grammatical relations and
words.
(2). It compares and classifies languages and dialects.
(3). By means of this comparison and classification it discovers the laws
which govern language in general and certain languages and dialects in
particular.
Thus by comparing the languages of the Aryan family we discover the
phonetic law that an English _th_ must always represent _t_ in Sanskrit,
Greek, and Latin, unless the action of other determinate laws interfere,
and by comparing different groups of languages together, we find that the
dual number everywhere preceded the plural. There are still many tongues
in which the plural is formed by reduplication, tongues, that is, where
duality, the repetition of the idea, is or has been the only conception
of plurality yet reached; and others in which the number “three” is
denoted by words like _prica_, “many” (in the dialect of the Puris of
South America,) expressive of vague indefiniteness, and an inability to
form a clear idea of anything beyond “two.” Indeed, in our own Aryan
family of speech there was a time when _one_, and _two_, or that which
was “divided” (δύω, δίς, διὰ, &c.) from one, were the only numerals
known, and it required a fresh effort of thought to attain and conceive
of a new numeral, which was accordingly named _tri_, _tres_, _three_, or
that which is “beyond” (_trans_, _through_, Sansk., _tar-â-mi_, “I pass
beyond”).
The laws of speech may be either primary or empirical. Empirical laws
are those generalizations made from the survey of a limited number of
phænomena, the reason of which we do not know. All we know is that given
one particular fact, another particular fact follows, or that wherever
we meet with a particular class of phænomena the same generalization is
sure to hold good. Thus in astronomy, Kepler’s discovery that the planets
move in an ellipse may be termed an empirical law, and the same may be
said of the phonetic law mentioned above which obliges us to compare
an English _th_ with the Greek and Latin _t_. Primary laws are those
higher and more comprehensive laws or generalizations which embrace
the empirical laws and give the reason of them. Such a primary law is
gravitation, such, too, probably is the law of natural selection. In
the science of language examples of these primary laws would be the law
that all language is based on roots, or the law of economy in the use of
speech. The determination of the primary laws of language leads us very
nearly into the charmed land of metaphysic; as the physicist with his
doctrine of force is transported out of the region of pure experiment and
observation, and brought face to face with metaphysical problems, so is
the scientific student of language with his doctrine of roots. Hence that
part of the science of language which stands in the most direct relation
with the old philosophy of speech, which would investigate such subjects
as the origin of gender and case, or determine the priority of thought or
language, has sometimes been called linguistic metaphysics.
When once the laws of language have been laid down we are able to apply
them to our facts (that is, words and sentences), to whatever period
these belong. The science of language, like all other sciences, rests
upon the postulate of uniformity. So long as the conditions remain the
same, the laws of the science will act with undeviating regularity. It
does not matter whether the words we are dealing with are still living
and spoken, or have been dead and obsolete for thousands of years; if
we can show that they fall under the action of a particular law, we
can apply that law to them in either case with equal certainty. When
once we have ascertained that an English _d_ represents a Sanskrit _t_,
only those Sanskrit words which contain a _t_ must be compared with
English words of Teutonic origin which have a _d_ in the corresponding
place, whatever their antiquity may be. A knowledge that an English _d_
answers to a Sanskrit and Latin _t_, and an English _h_ to a Sanskrit
and Latin _c_ (_k_ or _ś_) shows that the English _hundred_ has the
same origin as the Latin _centum_, and the Sanskrit _śatam_, and that,
consequently, our linguistic ancestors were able to count as far as one
hundred before they separated from each other, the one to conquer India,
the other to occupy Europe. Words, in fact, are like the fossils of the
rocks; they embody the thought and knowledge of the society that first
coined and used them, and if we can find out their primitive meaning
by the aid of the comparative method, we shall know the character of
the society that produced them, and the degree of civilization it had
attained. The palæontologist can reconstruct the animal life of the past
ages of the globe with no greater ease than the comparative philologist
can reconstruct the life of bygone and forgotten communities. If the
fragment of a fossil bone can tell us the history of an extinct world,
so, too, can the fragment of a word reveal to us the struggles of ancient
societies, and ideas and beliefs that have long since perished.
But the laws of a science must be verified before they can be accepted
as such. However brilliant or ingenious a hypothesis may be, it remains
a hypothesis, more or less probable, until it has been verified by
experiment and observation. It is to history, to psychology, and to
physiology that the science of language has to look for the verification
of its laws. In the phonautograph of König, or the phonograph of Edison,
we can discover the very forms assumed by the waves of air set in motion
by each sound we utter; and the first lessons of psychology confirm
the conclusion of glottology, that the concrete precedes the abstract.
Sometimes it is not so much the law, the generalization itself, that can
best be verified; but the application of it to the phænomena of speech.
Thus, a sound application of the laws of language makes it clear that the
words possessed in common by Spanish and Arabic are not due to a common
ancestry, but to contact between the two tongues, and the history of the
Moorish conquest of Spain confirms the conclusion.
But we may ask, What is meant precisely by that comparison of words
and sentences on which the laws of language are said to rest? A word,
a sentence, a grammatical form, consists of two elements, one, the
articulate utterance, the other, the signification or thought which the
utterance symbolizes. Sound and sense are the two factors which make up
speech, and it is, therefore, in respect of both sound and sense that our
comparisons have to be made. Comparative philology divides itself into
phonology and sematology, to which, perhaps, we may also add morphology.
Phonology is the science of sounds, sematology the science of meanings,
and morphology the science of grammatical forms. But inasmuch as
grammatical forms are but a combination of the relations of the sentence
(or rather of the meaning those relations convey to the mind) and of the
phonetic sounds by which they are expressed, morphology may be strictly
included partly under phonology, partly under sematology. We must never
forget that the study of sounds is intended to be the vestibule through
which we approach the thought within. The phonological investigations we
carry on, the phonological laws we formulate, are the outworks by which
we may storm the fortress of the inward signification. They enable us to
trace to a common source words that have flowed through diverse regions,
or to discover the origin of some strangely-changed form of grammar, but
the value they possess is the value that belonged to the magic ring of
the Nibelungs: it gives access to the treasure, but is not the treasure
itself. Phonology is not commensurate with comparative philology, as
seems sometimes to be thought. It forms but one side of the science, the
instrument by which we discover the true force and meaning of sentences
and words.
As the instrument of linguistic science, however, phonology is of the
highest importance. In fact the modern science of language is wholly
based upon it, and that which distinguishes comparative philology from
the abortive attempts of former centuries is its scientific investigation
into the laws of articulate utterance and of phonetic change. Here, and
almost here only, we can as yet trace the nature and working of the
laws of speech. It is only because we know that an English _h_ and _d_
must answer to a Sanskrit _k_ (_ś_) and _t_ that we are able to assert
that the primitive Aryan community had attained the conception of “one
hundred.” Sematology is still in a far more backward state; its laws are
still a subject of investigation, and the differences of opinion that
exist as to some of the great questions of linguistic science show only
too plainly how much in this department of it still remains to be done.
But the relative position of phonology and sematology is, after all,
but natural. Phonology deals with the outward and physical, that which,
can be weighed and measured, and imitated by mechanical contrivances;
sematology belongs to the inward and the spiritual—to that realm of
thought, in short, which can only be examined in so far as it makes
itself accessible to the inspection of the senses, and submits itself
to the action of physical laws. Thought seems infinite, manifold, and
free, determining and determined by itself. Like the wind, it “bloweth
where it listeth;” we hear “the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence
it cometh and whither it goeth.” All the capriciousness and complex
mobility of the individual appears to belong to it; we may formulate the
laws of thinking, but not of the forms which that thinking takes. The
vocal organs, on the other hand, through which thought becomes realized
in speech, are subject to all the conditions of the material world. The
utterance of each articulate sound and its relations to another are
conditioned and defined by the physical constitution of man, by the
circumstances in which he finds himself, and by measurable laws of sound.
The outward form of language, the flesh-garment, as it were, in which
thought clothes itself, falls entirely into the domain of physiology
and acoustics. Here we can observe and experimentalize, can weigh and
measure, can even reproduce artificially for ourselves. Every consonant
and vowel can be accurately determined, the machinery and effort needed
to produce them precisely known, the variations they are capable of
exactly ascertained. But when we turn to the informing thought, to
that inner essence which gives life and reality to each modulation of
articulate sound, all appears different. What wonder that the science of
significations should be so far behind the science of sounds?
Let us not forget, however, that thought, in so far as it finds its
expression in language, is not so infinitely free and capricious as we
might at first sight suppose. The very fact of its finding expression
in language, that is, of being embodied in articulate sounds, implies
restraint and submission to conditions. Thought is thus, as it were,
arrested and crystallized; it is only gradually and in consequence of
ascertainable causes that the signification attached to a particular
sound or group of sounds comes to be changed. That these sounds should
symbolize certain ideas is, after all, a matter of convention; it
follows from the tacit agreement, not indeed of isolated individuals,
but of individuals as forming a society. Changes, therefore, in the
signification of words and sentences can only result from causes which
affect the whole society, and as such causes necessarily work slowly
and by degrees, significant change can accordingly be brought under
the action of general laws. But these laws can only be established by
the help of phonology: until we know what words and forms the laws of
phonology will allow us to compare together and refer to a common origin,
we cannot begin to discuss the genesis and history of the significations
they bear. No doubt structure, that is, the conception of the sentence
formed by a language, and the order in which the several parts of a
sentence are arranged, is a very important element in the classification
of languages; still it is only one element, and unless phonology prove
that the roots and derivatives of two idioms are related, no amount of
structural similarity will justify us in deriving them from the same
stock.
Phonology, then, is the key and mainstay of modern linguistic
science; it guarantees the correctness of the results already obtained,
and is the indispensable preliminary to future researches. As will be
shown in a later chapter, our knowledge of sounds and their laws is now
tolerably complete. So, too, is the application of this knowledge to
certain groups of language. The phonological laws of the Aryan family,
for instance, are pretty well ascertained; we know what sounds in one
member of the family answer to other sounds in another member, and what
particular changes of sound are permissible within each of the several
members themselves. It follows from the physical formation of the organs
of speech that the various sounds capable of being articulated are
limited in number. Prince Lucien Bonaparte has enumerated as many as
385, though some of these are not to be met with in any known language
or dialect.[82] The number of different sounds occurring in any single
language is not large among European languages; for instance, Modern
Greek, Spanish, and Illyrian have but five vowel-sounds, while Gaelic,
which has the largest number, possesses twenty-one, Portuguese and
English following next with nineteen a-piece. So far as consonantal
sounds are concerned the number tends to diminish with the culture and
age of a language, and the evidence of facts is against identifying the
hypothetical alphabet to which the sounds of the various Aryan dialects
can be reduced with the actual alphabet of the parent Aryan speech. The
physical formation of our vocal organs, due to climate, food, habit,
and inherited aptitudes, obliges us to pronounce in a particular way.
There are sounds, for instance, which birds and animals can make, but we
cannot; while nothing is harder than to catch and reproduce the exact
pronunciation of a foreign tongue. The Polynesian turns David into
_Raviri_, Samuel into _Hemara_, London into _Ranana_, and Frederick into
_Waratariki_, and the word _steel_ has been adopted in the Sandwich
Islands in the shape of _tila_. It has been said that a foreigner can
never speak another language so perfectly as to conceal all traces of
his origin, and though this is going too far, it is quite certain that
there are languages the pronunciation of which can never be thoroughly
acquired after the age when growth has ended and the organs of speech
have ceased to be plastic. There are numerous sounds which particular
races or individuals are unable to imitate successfully; and those who
have watched the attempt of children to learn their mother-tongue know
how slowly some special sound is often acquired, and how in some cases
it is never acquired at all. The sound which one person will pronounce
as _r_ will be pronounced _l_ by another. Thus, the Chinese change every
_l_ into _r_, and the nearest approach they can make to the pronunciation
of _Christ_ is _Ki-li-sse-t(ŭ)_. The Japanese, on the other hand,
cannot manage _l_, and in their mouths accordingly _idolatry_ becomes
_idoratry_. The native children of Bengal, quick as they are in other
respects, seldom pronounce rightly those English words which begin with
a sibilant and a mute when a consonant precedes them, _ten stamps_,
for instance, being made into _ten-y-stamps_, and _this string_ into
_this-y-string_. The same sound which is pronounced without difficulty in
certain combinations may be a hopeless puzzle in others, and the English
tourist who mispronounces _Boulogne_ and _Cologne_, will yet ask for an
_onion_ and talk of a _barrier_. No individual, it would seem, pronounces
all his sounds exactly like his neighbours, and even the same individual
will vary his pronunciation of the same word in the course of a few
seconds. Variations of pronunciation, in fact, are like the variations we
observe in plants and animals, and if any variation becomes marked and is
rendered popular and general from some cause or other, it brings about an
alteration in the form of words. Such alterations resemble new species in
natural history, and we may compare the different species of pigeons or
dogs with the differences of pronunciations given by different dialects
to what was originally the same sound. Changes in the pronunciation of
words are constantly going on, causing a language to alter its form
and appearance or to branch out into dialects. As these changes are
determined by circumstances and physical necessities, and not by the
arbitrary will of the individual, the laws they follow can be discovered
and laid down. The laws once known, we can tell what words and sounds
in different dialects, or in the different periods of the same dialect,
may be compared together and referred to a common source, supposing,
that is, that the significations they bear allow us to ascribe the
identity of their phonetic elements to anything more than coincidence.
The laws of phonology enable us to assert that the Greek καλός, and
the English _hale_ or _(w)hole_, may be traced back to a common origin
so far as their outward crust and garment—the phonetic sounds of which
they are composed—is concerned; it then remains for sematology to decide
whether the ideas of “beauty” and “soundness” can be connected together.
Distinctions between sounds must be studied in spoken languages, and we
must not forget that it is always very difficult to discover what was the
_exact_ sound attached to a word no longer spoken, but preserved only in
the custody of writing.
Different tribes and races vary much as to the sounds which they find it
easy or hard to pronounce and imitate. A sound which has been changed
into a certain other sound in one language, may have been preserved
or changed into quite a different sound in another language. In our
Aryan group the palatals were originally gutturals; in Malayan, on the
contrary, dentals. Because our Teutonic forefathers turned _k_ into _h_,
we must not conclude that such a change was possible all over the world,
and that wherever we come across an _h_ we are at liberty to assume an
earlier _k_. Indeed, there is clear evidence that in some languages
_h_ may become _k_. The phonetic laws which hold good of one group of
languages, or of one member of a group, do not necessarily hold good of
another.
In comparing languages we have first to compare their grammars, not
their vocabularies. The reason of this is obvious. It is in the sentence,
not in the isolated word, that languages agree or differ, and grammar
deals with the relations that the several parts of the sentence bear
to one another. Single words may accidentally resemble each other in
both sound and sense, and yet belong to languages which have nothing in
common. In the Quichua, or dialect of the Incas, three words—_inti_,
“sun;” _munay_, “love;” and _veypul_, “great”—resemble the Sanskrit
_indra_, _manyu_, and _vipula_,[83] but this is the only likeness that
can be detected between the two tongues. So, too, the Mandshu _shun_,
“the sun,” coincides in sound and meaning with the English word, like
the Mandshu _sengi_ and Latin _sanguis_, “blood,” or the North American
Indian _potómac_ and the Greek πόταμος, “river.” Such accidental
coincidences turn up all the world over. The number of articulate sounds
used in actual speech is, after all, not so very large, nor also the
number of different ideas needed by primitive man; and when we bear
in mind the probable onomatopœic origin of the greater part of our
vocabulary, it is not wonderful that these coincidences should occur.
Indeed, the wonder would be if they did not. But a coincidence of this
sort is one of the surest evidences we can have that the words which seem
to resemble one another have no connection whatsoever. As Professor Max
Müller has said, “sound etymology has nothing to do with sound.” Language
is continually changing; and as the phonetic and significant changes in
it are occasioned by outward conditions and circumstances which vary
from age to age and from country to country, they must necessarily take
a different direction in the mouths of different speakers. The very fact
that the English _call_ and the Greek καλέω have almost every letter
in common, ought to have raised a presumption against their identity,
even before the law was known that an English _c_ answers to a Greek γ,
and a Greek κ to an English _h_, and that, consequently, the true Greek
representative of _call_ is γήρυω, and the true English representative of
καλέω is _hail_.
But if we are not to compare words of the same sound and sense
together, how, it may be asked, are we to ascertain the relationship
of two or more languages, and discover what sounds correspond to each
other in them? Our only guide is grammar. If we find that two languages
express the relations of grammar in the same way, and by the help of
the same machinery, we may conclude that the two languages come from a
common source, and, therefore, possess a common stock of words. Under
grammar will also be included structure—that is to say, the order and
position of the parts of the sentence, as well as the conception of
the sentence itself. Grammar and structure, therefore, are the clue by
which comparative philology must be guided in its researches. It was
the neglect of such a clue that caused Latin and Greek to be compared
with Hebrew, and made the etymological dictionaries of the last century
a rubbish heap of wasted labour. Those languages only which agree in
their way of viewing the relations of thought can be grouped together.
When once agreement in grammar and structure has determined the probable
connection of two tongues, the aid of phonology may be called in to
complete and verify the inquiry. Where the grammars are really connected,
we may feel quite certain that there will be a community of roots. Where,
on the contrary, there is no connection between the grammars, a community
of roots must be due to accident. What proved the existence of an Aryan
family of speech, and thereby founded comparative philology, was not the
resemblances between individual words, striking as these were, but the
exact correspondence between the grammatical forms of the several members
of the family. The lists of words drawn up by Sir W. Jones, by Adelung
or by Vater, remain mere literary curiosities. The comparative philology
of Aryan speech was really created by the comparative grammar of Bopp.
When once the grammatical relationship of the Indo-European languages had
been established, there was a solid basis for phonology to work upon, and
it was not long before Grimm discovered the laws which regulate their
interchanges of sound.
But in comparing grammar and structure, we must be careful to exclude
the accidental, or rather the phænomena due to the peculiar circumstances
in which an individual tongue has been placed. We ought to be able to
trace the history and development of each special language as far back
as possible, ascertaining its oldest forms and noting the successive
changes they have undergone. For this purpose it is necessary that
the language should be a literary one, and that the various phases of
its growth should have been preserved on monuments or in books. Where
this is not the case, we have to fall back upon a simple comparison of
existing dialects, and endeavour to restore from these the common forms
to which their variant derivatives seem to point. The greater the number
of dialects the more satisfactory will be the results of our comparison;
accidental resemblances will be better eliminated, and intermediate
forms are more likely to be preserved. Where the dialects to be compared
are few, we have to contend against one of two difficulties—either the
differences between them are so slight—as in the case of the Semitic
languages—that the parent-speech from which they branched off must be too
recent to throw any light on its earlier history and relationships; or
else the differences are so great, the time during which they have been
separated so considerable, that the links have been lost by which we may
connect them together and reduce them to a single origin.
Phonology requires a knowledge of the past history and development of
the languages it deals with even more than the study of grammar. In the
comparison of words we may lay down the general rule that roots and not
derivatives should be compared together. We should trace the history of
the words we examine as far back as may be, should reduce them to their
simplest forms, and strip off the accretions that have grown round them
like the lichen round the stone. Words derived from the same radical
will often assume different forms in different languages, or even in
the same dialect; while words derived from different radicals will, on
the other hand, assume the same form in different languages, or even in
the same one. _Captive_ and _caitiff_ have the same origin in the Latin
_captivus_; _sound_ may be either the Latin _sonus_ or _subundare_, or
the Anglo-Saxon _sund_, “hale,” or _sund_ from _swimman_. The American
_potómac_, quoted above, is a compound, while the Greek πόταμος comes
from the root πο-, which we find in πίνω and πότος, in the Sanskrit
_pânam_, “a drink,” and our own _potion_. The lexicographers who have
declared _monkey_ to be a corruption of _mannikin_ were little aware that
the word is really the Italian _monichio_, the derivative of _monna_, and
that _monna_, again, is a contraction of _madonna_, _mea domina_. Before
we know the history of a word, we must not venture to compare it with
another, though it may happen that the history will be learnt through
the process of comparison itself. Thus we know that the Gothic _fimf_,
“five,” has lost two gutturals, as well as a final labial, from the
analogy of the Latin _quinque_ (for _quinquem_), the Sanskrit _panchan_
and the Lithuanian _penki_, and we can thus trace it back to the period
when the Aryans of Europe and of Asia were still undivided. But at this
point our materials fail us. We may feel pretty sure that _quemquem_, the
original Aryan word for “five,” is a simple root, and that its numerical
meaning is a derived one; we may even hazard the guess that it has been
formed by reduplication, but beyond this a sound method of etymology
cannot go. To connect it with the Semitic _khâmésh_, as Ewald has done,
is to violate the rules of comparative philology. We know the history
neither of _khâmésh_ nor of _quemquem_.
In comparing words together, it is safest to begin with two classes
of words, those which, like the numerals, have acquired a fixed and
arbitrary meaning, and terms of relationship and every day use. In the
case of the former, the signification, once fixed, remains unaltered,
however much the phonetic crust of the word may change, while new names
are less likely to come into vogue; in the case of the latter, the
very frequency of their use tends to keep them in existence. If a few
families here and there adopt new modes of expression, still it may be
expected that the larger part of the community will be more conservative.
Hence, when we find two languages agreeing in their numerals and words
expressive of common objects and ideas, we may infer that they are
related to one another. The pronouns are not so sure a criterion, as they
have generally been worn down by constant use to monosyllabic forms,
while their antiquity prevents us from discovering their true history
and origin. Like the names of “father” and “mother,” moreover, the first
and second personal pronouns show a tendency to be represented in most
languages by the simplest and earliest sounds uttered by the child.
The laws of phonology must be established by as large a number of
instances as possible. In no other way can the chances of accident or
mistake be avoided. A law, in fact, must hold good of all the phænomena
that are summed up under it, and the more numerous the phænomena, the
wider and more firmly established will the law be. Grimm’s laws of
the interchanges of sound in the Aryan family of speech depend on the
observation and comparison of a very large number of words. As soon
as it was found that English words which contained a _th_ answered in
signification and general form to Latin and Greek words which had a _t_
in the same place, it was possible to formulate the law: English _th_ =
Latin and Greek _t_; all that remained was to verify the law by fresh
instances, and in this way to strengthen the proof of the connection of
the two languages. If it could be shown that real exceptions to the law
occur which are not due to the interference of other laws, the law would
have to be given up, however numerous might be the apparent instances on
which it rested. The progress of comparative philology is continually
strengthening its phonological laws and adding to their number.
The intimate connection of sound and sense must never be lost sight
of in etymological research. They are as it were the outer and inner
sides of the same object. Where the significations are unrelated, we
cannot connect two words which agree in phonetic sound any more than we
can connect two words of the same signification but different sound. In
our own group of tongues the two separate roots _dhā_ “to suck,” and
_dhā_ “to place,” for example, are identical in sound; and if we turn
to languages like Chinese or Ancient Egyptian, we shall find numberless
cases in which the same word, so far as pronunciation is concerned,
has a variety of unallied meanings like our English _box_ or _scale_.
Of course, it is not necessary that the signification of the words we
compare should be exactly the same; the signification of words changes as
much as their outward phonetic form; but we must be able to show that one
meaning is derived from the other, or from a common parentage, just as we
show that one sound is derived from another or from a common source.
For the purposes of phonology more especially, the study of living
spoken dialects is indispensable. No doubt the historical character of
glottology requires us to investigate the records of extinct languages
with as much care as the facts of living ones, and it is only by learning
what a language once was that we can properly know what it is now.
Nevertheless, it is only in the modern languages that we can discover
the nature and laws of pronunciation; it is only here, moreover, that
we are brought face to face with the problems and realities of speech.
The biologist, it is true, cannot dispense with the aid of comparative
anatomy, but his primary object is the study of the living organism. What
has been termed “antiquarian philology” has sometimes stood in the way of
scientific progress; sounds have been confounded with letters, and words
instead of sentences have been made the units of speech. Antiquarian
philology, furthermore, still has the shadow of classical scholasticism
hanging over it; it will need a long education before the world is
disabused of the idea that superiority in literature means superiority
in language, and that a scientific study of language is identical with
the old-fashioned “philology” of the classical scholar. Before the forms
of an extinct speech can be made available for scientific investigation,
they must be revivified by the translation of their written symbols
into phonetic sounds, and how hard such a task is need not be pointed
out. If we wish to work back to the former pronunciation of a language
we must start from its modern and actual pronunciation, and in spite
of all that we can do, in spite of slow and patient induction and a
careful weighing of the facts, our conclusions will be at the best
imperfect and approximative. The older and more scanty the remains of a
language, the more defective and uncertain will be our restoration of
its pronunciation. In the larger number of cases we have to be content
with merely approximative results. What Mr. Ellis and Mr. Sweet have
done for the pronunciation of early English, is due to the abundance of
the data and the unbroken tradition which they embody; to restore the
pronunciation of Latin is a work of greater difficulty, to restore that
of ancient Greek of greater difficulty still. In short, the records of
dead speech must be interpreted by the facts of living language, just as
the conditions which brought about the deposition of the rocks can only
be explained by the forces still at work upon the surface of the globe.
Here as elsewhere in science, we must proceed from the known to the
unknown. The laws of consonantal change laid down for Latin and Greek,
for Sanskrit and Zend, for Keltic and Old High German, receive their
verification and explanation from the Romance dialects of modern Europe;
while it is in the study of savage idioms, in the languages of Bushmen
and of Kafirs, of North American Indians and of Papuans, that some of the
most precious facts of linguistic science have been obtained. An extinct
literary language, indeed, is by its very nature less serviceable to the
comparative philologist than the artless jargons of barbarous tribes.
It is artificial rather than natural, and the product of individual
idiosyncrasies rather than of the whole community. The further removed
it is from the fresh current of living speech, the less capable it
becomes of strictly scientific treatment. The individual element, with
all its arbitrary capriciousness, has entered too largely into it. The
grammatical forms invented and enforced by ignorant grammarians, the
words coined after false analogy by the Homeric rhapsodists and their
successors, or the stilted phrases and inverted expressions employed by
a particular writer and his imitators, all belong to the domain of the
“philologist” rather than to that of the scientific student of language.
He has nothing to do with textual criticism or the study of style, much
less with the successful reproduction of the idiosyncrasies of classical
authors.
Philology in the narrower sense of the term has to prepare materials for
comparative philology in so far as the latter is concerned with literary
languages or dialects. In its turn it is guided in its researches and
kept within the limits of scientific accuracy by comparative philology
which tests and rectifies its conclusions, and prevents for the future
attempts like that of Buttmann to derive ἄφνος from ἄφθονος or that
of K. O. Müller to extract πελασγός from πελαργός. The particular can
only be understood in the light of the universal, and as long as we are
dealing with one language only our comparisons must be limited to that
language alone at different stages of its growth, and will consequently
sometimes lead us astray. Error can only be avoided by making our field
of comparison as wide as possible, and so bringing our theory to the
test of the greatest possible number of facts. It is evident from this,
however, that the comparative philologist will have a special and minute
acquaintance with but a few out of the many facts which come before
his view. The memory even of a Mezzofanti is limited, and the ordinary
student of language must be content to derive from others a large
proportion of the materials on which he works. Caution in the choice and
use of his authorities is here absolutely requisite, and it ought to be
the business of the specialists in each language to see that the facts
presented to him are thoroughly accurate and exact. Their work is the
foundation upon which the structure of comparative philology has to be
built.
But the comparative philologist cannot dispense with a specialist’s
knowledge of at least two languages. In no other way can he have that
intimate acquaintance with the inner life of speech requisite for his
studies, or possess the necessary instinct for selecting the right
authorities to whom to trust when dealing with tongues with which he is
unacquainted. The more languages he knows thus thoroughly the better,
especially if these belong to different classes of speech. Unless
the Aryan scholar is acquainted with a Semitic language, his theory
of flection is likely to be one-sided and faulty, and unless he have
a further knowledge of some agglutinative dialect, his views on the
relation between flection and agglutination must be received with a
certain amount of distrust. Grammars and dictionaries will not give us
that grasp upon the inner structure and spirit of a dialect which is
all-important in determining some of the chief problems of speech. They
present us only with the external facts of a language: before we can
_think_ in it, before we can place ourselves in the mental attitude of
its framers and speakers, we must be saturated with it, as it were, and
have that knowledge of it which can only come from daily and constant use.
At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the comparative
philologist should not introduce the frame of mind of the specialist
into his comparative inquiries. The specialist who takes up comparative
philology as a subsidiary pursuit is likely to spoil it in the taking.
The minor details of his special subject, whether it be Greek or
Sanskrit or Hebrew, will assume an unreal importance in his eyes, and
the main phænomena to which his attention ought to be directed will be
correspondingly dwarfed. Bopp was the father of comparative philology
simply because he was not a specialist in any one of the Aryan languages;
had he been a Sanskritist, and nothing else, he would doubtless have
produced an excellent Sanskrit grammar, but not the famous text-book
of scientific philology. The errors into which he fell have since been
corrected by the special students of the various languages he handled so
freely: the knowledge he acquired of them was sufficient for the great
purpose he had in view, and an exhaustive study of any one of them would
merely have consumed the time and energy which were needed for his other
work.
We can now see clearly what is the object and scope of the science of
language. It has to do with language in all its forms as the significant
utterance of society. Where utterance ceases to be significant, the
science of language also ceases to investigate it. Beyond the barrier
of roots it is unable to pass; other sciences—ethnology, psychology,
physiology—must be called in if we wish to know what lies beyond that
barrier, what, in short, were the inarticulate utterances and gestures
which gave rise to articulate speech. Glottology has to investigate the
origin of language so far as it is really language, but no further. By
the use of the comparative method, words, forms, sentences, dialects, and
languages are classified and traced back to their most primitive form,
and the laws which govern their development and relationships determined
and explained. In this work of comparison, phonology and sematology ought
to go hand in hand, since language consists in the intimate union of
sound and thought; but inasmuch as the facts and laws of phonology can
be more readily discovered and tested than those of sematology, it is
necessary that our linguistic researches should have their starting-point
on the phonological side. Inasmuch as language is the reflection of the
thought of a community, the history of words and forms, as determined by
the application of the laws of glottology, will be also the mental and
spiritual history of the community that used them. Like the geologist,
therefore, who can reconstruct the material history of the earth and
restore the various forms of life that have successively peopled it,
the scientific student of language can read the past history of human
society in the fossil-records of speech. By tracing the Greek δῆμος to
the root δα, “to divide,” he can show that private property in Attica
originated in that allotment of land by the commune which still prevails
among the Slavs, while not only the existence but even the mode of life
and intellectual horizon of the primitive Aryans has been revealed by
comparative philology with more certainty and minuteness than could
have been done by any chronicle, however perfect. But perhaps the most
important of the results obtained by the application of the comparative
method to language, has been the light thrown upon the origin and nature
of mythology and the history of religion. Two new sciences, those of
comparative mythology and comparative religion, have grown up under the
shelter of glottology, and form subordinate sciences dependent upon it.
In the more immediately practical sphere of education, again, the science
of language has lightened the labours of the learner by explaining
the reason of the rule while it insists upon the reversal of the old
unscientific mode of teaching languages by beginning with the dead ones,
and points out that the method of science and of nature alike is to
proceed from the known to the unknown. By breaking down the prejudices
that have so long maintained our present cumbrous and inaccurate
spelling, it is preparing the way for a reform in that direction, with
its consequent saving of time and labour, while the construction of an
universal language is the aim towards which its students ultimately look.
But meanwhile, though much has been accomplished, much more still
remains to be done. Comparative philology and the science of language
are not yet a century old, and the problems of speech that still await
solution are many and important. The previous chapter will have shown
how various are the opinions still held as to the nature of language
and its science, while the belief that the exceptional—we might almost
say abnormal—Aryan family of speech is the type and rule of all others
still unconsciously influences a large amount of philological reasoning.
Is the science of language a physical or a historical one? Did roots
constitute a spoken language or are they phonetic types which never
entered into actual speech? Have isolating languages become agglutinative
and agglutinative languages inflectional? Do dialects precede the common
language or does the common language precede dialects? Have the languages
of the world been all derived from one or two primitive centres or do
they point to an infinite diversity of origin? Such are some of the
questions which still await an answer, and the answer requires more
investigation, more patient observation and induction, and, above all,
more labourers in the field of research.
CHAPTER III.
THE THREE CAUSES OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE.
“Πάντα ῥεῖ.”—HERAKLEITUS.
Sciences may be classed as historical or physical according as they deal
with the mind of man or with external nature. The forces and materials
of nature remain always the same: oxygen and hydrogen, for instance,
are in no way different to-day from what they were a million of ages
ago, and, combined in the same proportions, would always have produced
water. Man and his intellectual creations, on the other hand, have a
history; that is, the same causes do not always act in the same way, nor
do the causes themselves always remain the same. The sum of the forces
set in motion by the human will goes on increasing in an accelerated
ratio: each new generation is influenced and moulded by the one that
preceded it, and that influence becomes itself a fresh factor in the sum
of the forces and causes at work. In place of the simpler processes of
nature, with their unvarying uniformity of action, we have an infinitely
complicated _development_, each stage of which is the immediate growth of
the previous one, and is in turn the origin and germ of all that are to
follow. Unlike the forces and phænomena of nature, thought is infinitely
progressive, for
“through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”
Wherever we have to deal with the products of human thought, there we
have a constant ever-varying evolution, conditioned, it is true, by the
uniform laws of outward nature, but continually modifying and adapting
them. It is through the conditions thus imposed on the development of
thought that we can discover the direction it has taken, and our inquiry
thus becomes in great measure a historical one. We have to see under
what conditions, in what external shape, as it were, the development of
thought has displayed itself at each particular stage of its progress.
Like sociology, or comparative law, the science of language is
concerned with a product of the human intelligence, and must consequently
be included among the historical sciences. Language, we have seen, is
significant sound; sound without significance is not yet language. As it
is the inward sense and meaning, therefore, which constitute the essence
of language, the primary object of comparative philology ought to be to
discover the nature, origin, and history of the signification we breathe
into our words and sentences. This can only be done, however, by finding
out the conditions under which this signification is put into them, and
by questioning the external side of language, those articulate sounds,
namely, whereby we communicate our meaning to another. Now the external
side of language is purely physiological and governed accordingly by
purely physical laws. Phonology, in short, is as much a physical science
as sematology is a historical one; and if we claim for the science
of language in general the rank of a historical science, it is only
because the meaning, rather than the sound, is the essence of speech,
and phonology the handmaid and instrument rather than the equivalent of
glottology. The method pursued by the science of language is the method
of physical science; and this, combined with the fact that the laws of
sound are also physical—the same conditions producing the same sounds in
all periods of human history,—has occasioned the belief that the science
of language is a physical science. But such a view results in identifying
phonology and glottology, in making a subordinate science equivalent to
the higher one, and in ignoring all those questions as to the nature and
origin of language which are of supreme importance to the philosophy of
speech. If we treat glottology as a physical science we must content
ourselves with an exposition of the laws of sound and a mere description
of the languages of the world and their classification, so far as it is
founded on phonology alone. It is evident that such a classification
must be superficial and incomplete; the relationship of languages is
primarily based on grammar and structure rather than on a community of
roots, and even roots must agree in sense as well as in sound before
they can be admitted in proof of linguistic kinship. The intimate and
inseparable connection between the inward and the outward, between sense
and sound, in articulate speech, is a symbol of the connection between
the historical and the physical methods of investigating it; but inasmuch
as the sense is more important than the sound, so, too, the historical
side of linguistic science is more important than its physical side.
Language and languages are in a constant state of change: nowhere,
indeed, can the maxim of Herakleitus, πάντα ῥεῖ, be better illustrated.
This perpetual flux and change is necessitated by the very fact that
language is a product and creation of the human mind. Thought is ever
shifting, moving, developing, and so, too, is the language in which
it seeks to embody itself. But language is not only changing on this
its inner side, it changes also on its outward, its phonetic side. The
physiological organs of speech may be affected by an alteration in
climate, food, or other physical conditions: they are certain to be
affected by the psychological desire to save trouble or to add emphasis
in speaking.
The three great causes of change in language may be briefly described
as (1) imitation or analogy, (2) a wish to be clear and emphatic, and
(3) laziness. Indeed, if we choose to go deep enough we might reduce
all three causes to the general one of laziness, since it is easier to
imitate than to say something new, while clearness in expression not
only saves our neighbour trouble, but also preserves us from unnecessary
repetition. Nothing is gained, however, by too wide a generalization; and
it is, therefore, better to keep the three causes of linguistic change
distinct and separate.
Imitation has played a far more important part in the history of speech
than is ordinarily admitted. Imitation is the primary instinct of the
infant and the savage, and, under the name of fashion, is a ruling power
among civilized men. The great imitative powers of barbarous tribes
have often been remarked upon by travellers; and a marvellous facility
in mimicry and imitation seems to exist in proportion to the scanty
development of the reasoning faculties. In this respect, at all events,
the savage has not much ground for boasting of his superiority to the
ape. Among the less cultivated races, indeed, the passion for imitation
frequently passes into a morbid mania, and strange stories are related
concerning it. Thus Dr. R. Maak, in his “Journey to the Amur,” states
that “it is not unusual for the Maniagri to suffer from a nervous malady
of the most peculiar kind, with which we had already been made acquainted
by the descriptions of several travellers.[84] This malady is met with,
for the most part, amongst the wild people of Siberia, as well as amongst
the Russians settled there. In the district of the Yakutes, where this
affliction very frequently occurs, those affected by it, both Russians
and Yakutes, are known by the name of _Emiura_; but here the same
malady is called by the Maniagri _Olon_, and by the Argurian Cossacks
_Olgandschi_. The attacks of the malady which I am now mentioning consist
in this, that a man suffering from it will, if under the influence of
terror or consternation, unconsciously, and often without the slightest
sense of shame, imitate everything that passes before him.” So, too, Mr.
Jagor, in his “Travels in the Philippines,”[85] tells us that the malady
in question is well known in those islands under the name of _Mali-mali_,
and in Java under that of _Sakit-latar_; and goes on to relate how his
“companions availed themselves of the diseased condition of a poor old
woman who met us in the highway, to practise some rough jokes upon her.
The old woman imitated every motion as if impelled by an irresistible
impulse, and expressed at the same time the most extreme indignation
against those who abused her infirmity.” The description reminds us of
the feats of our own “electro-biologists.”
It is to the desire of imitation that we owe our first knowledge of our
mother-tongue. The child tries to imitate those about him, and as the
faculties of imitation and memory are the only ones yet developed in
him his efforts are usually successful. The distance at which we stand
from the infantile state, and the development of our reasoning powers,
are measured by the prominence given to individuality and our power of
taking the initiative. The community in which each man acts like his
neighbour is not yet a civilized community; Athens is typical of all
that is highest in human culture, and Athens was emphatically the State
in which individuality had the freest play. It is well for the child who
has to learn the language of his parents that he is rather a member of an
uncivilized community than of Periklean Athens.
The love of imitation is the instrument whereby one language is able to
influence another. Sometimes we find a community giving up its own tongue
altogether and adopting that of his neighbours. Such has been the case
with the Kelts of Cornwall, with the Wends of Prussia, or with the Huns
of Bulgaria. The Negroes of Haiti speak French, the Lapps Finnish, while
according to Humboldt and Bonpland,[86] “a million of the aborigines of
America have exchanged their native for a European language.” Social
contact and not identity of race occasions a similarity of language,
since language is the medium of communication between the members of the
same community, not between the scattered branches of the same race. No
doubt where the languages are essentially distinct, based on radically
different conceptions of the sentence and its parts, even the desire of
imitation will be often not strong enough to cause the one language to
be borrowed by the speakers of the other. Here and there we come across
children who have a difficulty in imitating the pronunciation or use
of the words they hear, and such a difficulty is a main cause of the
origination of dialects; but it is among the speakers of agglutinative
or polysynthetic tongues when brought into contact with an inflectional
language that the difficulty is best exemplified. The Negro of the
United States still speaks a jargon which can be called English only by
courtesy, and Humboldt states[87] that “nothing can exceed the difficulty
experienced by the (South American) Indians in learning Spanish,”
although they “manifest quickness of intellect” in other respects,
and “the missionaries assert that their embarrassment is neither the
effect of timidity nor of natural stupidity, but that it arises from the
impediments they meet with in the structure of a language so different
from their native tongue.” Potent as imitation is, it yet has a limit,
and this limit is reached wherever the element of conscious intelligence
intervenes. The savage, like the child, finds it hard to mimic the
products of civilized man, in so far as these embody the application
of the reasoning faculties, and the mode of thought elaborated through
long ages by a cultivated race necessarily forms a stumbling-block to
the Negro or the South American Chayma. The Ethics of Aristotle could
not have been written in a Semitic language, and a Negro Goethe is a
somewhat incongruous conception. Wherever the distance between the two
languages or the two levels of culture is great enough, the attempt to
imitate is either given up altogether or else becomes a failure. The
modes of thought of the borrower are read into the language he borrows.
The Chinaman endeavoured to assimilate English, and the result was
the Pigeon-English of Canton, a jargon in which we have a framework
of English reared upon Chinese grammar and Chinese pronunciation. The
difficulty of reproducing a cultivated language of foreign origin, or
a language based upon a wholly alien conception of things and their
relations, may be illustrated by the difficulty of translating accurately
books written in another tongue. However closely related two languages
may be, the various shades of meaning they attach to corresponding words
or idioms will necessarily differ, and the more cultivated the style of
a writer, the more impossible will it be to represent it exactly in a
translation.
Where a language is not borrowed bodily, or at any rate engrafted upon
the old modes of thinking and expression, it may yet exercise a greater
or less influence upon a neighbouring language. Words, sounds, idioms,
suffixes, and even grammatical forms may be and constantly are borrowed
from one dialect by another; and it is not too much to say that a
thoroughly pure and unmixed language does not exist among the civilized
races of mankind. Our own English is a superstructure of Norman-French
and Latin upon a foundation of Anglo-Saxon, and nine-tenths of the Hindi
language is Sanskrit. No people can have neighbours close to them without
receiving something from them in the shape of inventions, products,
or social institutions; and these almost inevitably are adopted under
foreign names. Thus the French have taken _meeting_ and _comfortable_
from us, and we have received _naïve_ and _éclat_ in return from them.
Such loan-words are of great use in tracing the history and distribution
of civilization, as well as the geographical and social relationships
of the past. _Boomerang_ proves our intercourse with the natives of
Australia, from whom we have derived both the idea and the name of the
weapon; _pew_, the Dutch _puyde_, _puye_, “a pulpit” or “reading-desk,”
from the Latin _podium_, reveals the close connection that existed
between the Churches of England and Holland in the seventeenth century,
while words like _maize_, _hammock_, _canoe_, and _tobacco_, derived as
they are from Haytian through the medium of Spanish, show as plainly as
ordinary history that the Spaniards must have been the discoverers of
America and the introducers of its products into the West. By similar
reasoning we infer that the Baltic provinces must have been inhabited by
a Teutonic population at the time when the Romans received amber from
them under the name of _glæsum_ (our _glass_), and Professor Thomsen has
proved that the Finns must have bordered on Scandinavians and Teutons
some two thousand or more years ago from the number of words borrowed by
Finnish from their languages.
Sounds, again, may be borrowed from one language by another, or native
sounds modified through the influence of a foreign tongue. The easier
of the Hottentot clicks have been borrowed by the Kafirs, and the
Souletin dialect of Basque has admitted the French vowel _u_. Idioms,
too, may pass readily from one tongue to another. Words like _avenir_
and _contrée_ in French, are the result of an attempt to express
German idioms in the Romance of the conquered provincials, _avenir_
or _ad venire_ being a literal translation of the German _zu-kunft_,
and _contrée_ for _contrata (terra)_, a curious representative of the
German _gegend_, “country,” as derived from _gegen_, “against.” The
great extension of the English plural in -_s_, confined as it was in
Anglo-Saxon to a comparatively few words, seems due to Norman-French
influence, and the use of the genitive and dative of the personal
pronouns in English “of me,” “to me,” in the place of the Anglo-Saxon
_min_ and _me_, is modelled after a French pattern. Bulgarian and
Roumanian seem to have caught the infection of Albanian usage in which
the definite article is attached to the end of the word, as in the
Roumanian _domnu-l_, “the lord,” and Persian has even adopted the Semitic
order of words so repugnant to the general structure of the Aryan group,
in saying _dăst-ĭ-’Umăr_, for “Omar’s hand.” For instances of borrowed
suffixes, we have only to point to our English -_ize_ and -_ist_ from the
Greek -ιζ-ω and -ιστ-ης, which tend to supersede the old corresponding
suffixes of the language, and the French participial termination is
imitated in the letter of Gawin Douglas to Richard II. (1385), where
we find such phrases as “Zour honourable lettres conten_and_,” and
“brek_and_ the trewis.”
The borrowing of grammatical forms is of much rarer occurrence,
inasmuch as grammar is the essence and life blood of language, and
to borrow the forms of grammar, therefore, is to intermingle the
psychological histories of two separate tongues. It is a metamorphosis
of the whole inherited mode of thinking and of viewing the relations of
things to ourselves and one another, and to mix two grammars together is
like mixing two different and incompatible modes of thought. A supposed
instance of a mixed grammar (that is, of a mixed language) generally
turns out to have another explanation. Thus it has been believed that
the modern Aryan languages of India have substituted agglutinated
postfixes for flection, and so have adopted the grammatical machinery
of their Dravidian neighbours. Thus in Gujerati, _dêv-mā̃_ means “in
the god,” like the Hindustani _ãdhe-mē̃ _, “in the blind,” and in
Nepalese _mânis-visê_ is “in man,” _mā̃_ or _mē̃ _ being a contraction
of the Sanskrit _madhyê_ (= _madhya-i_), “in the middle,” and _visê_
of _visayê_, “in the thing.” What has really happened in these cases,
however, is this. The first noun instead of being provided with the
locative suffix (-_i_) is compounded with another noun which still
retains the suffix, and the locative signification accordingly resides
not in the second member of the compound, but in its worn-away flection.
Here, then, there is no example of grammatical confusion. There are other
instances of “mixed grammar,” however, which cannot be so easily disposed
of, and it would really seem that in rare cases there actually has been
an interchange of grammatical forms between two unallied languages. Thus
in Assamese, which appears to be at bottom an Aryan language, the plural
affix (_bilak_) is inserted between the noun and the case-ending, so
that from _manuh-bilak_, “men,” we get the genitive _manuh-bilak-or_,
the dative _manuh-bilak-oloi_, the accusative _manuh-bilak-ok_, the
locative _manuh-bilak-ot_, and the ablative _manuh-bilak-e_, where
the postpositions are all of them said to be of non-Aryan origin. The
language of Harar, in Northern Africa, again, though apparently belonging
to the Semitic family of speech, makes use of postpositions, and reverses
the Semitic order of words when employing the genitive; while, according
to Schott, the Persian affix of the dative and accusative was originally
a Turanian postposition. Cases like these must, of course, be carefully
distinguished from those in which we are dealing with an artificial
language and not with the spoken language of the people. A curious
language of this kind, the Pehlevi, was formed in the courts of the
Sassanian princes of Persia, in which the elements of Aryan and Semitic
grammar were mixed together in a strange fashion, but such a language did
not penetrate beyond the limits of the learned class. Of the same nature
are such affected plurals as _termini_ and _fungi_ from _terminus_ and
_fungus_ in English, or the genitive and dative _Christi_ and _Christo_
in theological German. They would not be understood beyond the boundaries
of a narrow circle.[88]
The most usual way in which the grammar of one language is influenced
by that of another is by the adaptation of existing words and forms to
express new grammatical ideas and relations imported from abroad. Thus
the Assyrians became familiarized with the distinction between present
and past time through their acquaintance with the extinct Accadian of
ancient Chaldea, and they accordingly set apart certain separate phonetic
forms, which had previously existed side by side without any difference
of meaning, to express the present and the past tense.[89] So Spiegel[90]
believes that he has discovered the influence of Semitic grammar in the
Zend use of the feminine to denote a neuter or abstract, and of the dual
to denote a pair. The invariable rule of the ancient Maya of placing the
adjective after its substantive, is sometimes violated in the modern
language through the influence of Castilian,[91] and the Ragusan custom
of using the Illyrian _svoj_, “his own,” in the place of _njegòv_, “his,”
is referred by Brugman to the influence of Italian and German.[92]
But the principle of imitation comes chiefly into play in the sphere
of language in changing the form and meaning of words so as to bring
them into agreement with the form and meaning of other words. When the
true history and significance of certain forms have been forgotten by
those who use them, other words with a totally different history and
significance are very likely to be assimilated to them. When language has
once created a particular mould it is very liable to run all manner of
words into it. This is what is meant by the action of _false analogy_ in
speech. Words, forms, and significations which ought to have been kept
apart are erroneously made like one another; the instinct of imitation
and the desire to save trouble combine to exclude the irregular from
language, and to force all exceptions under a uniform rule. The modern
Greek declines innumerable words which formerly belonged to different
declensions after the type of ταμίας, turning βασιλέας, ἄνδρας, and the
like, into nominatives singular, and in the English which is unchecked
by a literary tradition _I comed_ is already more common than _I came_.
Analogy is constantly at work throughout the whole domain of language—in
pronunciation, in formal grammar, in syntax, and in sematology—building
up and reconstructing what phonetic decay and change of meaning have
tended to pull down. English is rapidly forcing all exceptional cases
under the rule that throws the accent back as much as possible; _balcóny_
has become _bálcony_, and Milton’s line “O argument blasphémous, false
and proud,” would no longer scan. There is good reason to believe that
the vocabulary of the primitive Aryan was for the most part, if not
entirely, accented on the last syllable; the course of centuries has
been continually thrusting the accent back as much as possible, and
Latin and the Æolic dialects of Greece which illustrate this tendency,
only show their want of conservatism and relative decay. Though the old
accent of pitch has become an accent of stress in most of the modern
European tongues, the same process is still going on; and while Polish
still accents its words on the penultima, the accentuation of Bohemian is
upon the first syllable. The same fact reappears in the Semitic family
of speech, where it can be shown that the penultima primarily received
the accent, and that the accentuation of the modern Arabic which agrees
with that of English is a later innovation.[93] Greek words like φῡ́ω,
θῡ́ω, and τῑ́ω, where the length of the vowel compensated for the loss
of an iota (*φυίω), were brought under the general rule of the language
which made one vowel before another short,[94] and when Horace addresses
the fountain of Bandusia as “splendidior _vĭtro_,” the quantity assigned
to _vĭtro_, a contracted form of _vistrum_ for _vid-trum_ (from the
root _vid_, “to see”), arises from the mistaken notion that because a
naturally short vowel could be lengthened before a mute followed by a
liquid every vowel in such a position might be treated as indifferently
long or short. So, again, the termination of the Latin nominative plural
in -_es_ was properly short, as may be seen from a comparison with
the Greek; but the long vowel resulting from the combination of this
termination with the final vowel of stems in -_i_ (such as _nubi-es_) was
extended to other cases, and the nominative plural of consonantal stems
like _voc_ (_vox_) was accordingly regarded as ending in a long syllable.
Apart from accent or quantity, however, the pronunciation of words is
largely affected by the influence of analogy. Our English preference
for diphthongal sounds is changing _either_ and _neither_ into _aither_
and _naither_, in spite of the fact that the only other word in the
language by which such a pronunciation could be supported is the misspelt
_height_ from _high_. The Frenchman “gallicizes” the words he borrows
or the proper names he uses just as the Englishman “anglicizes” his;
it is easier for the one to say _Londres_ and _Biarri’_ than _London_
and _Biarritz_, and for the other _Paris_ and _Marsaels_ than _Pari’_
and _Marseies_. Up to the last Charles James Fox called Bordeaux wine
“Bordox,” maintaining that it had been domesticated in England, and ought
accordingly to follow English customs. The action of analogy throws much
light on Grimm’s laws respecting the shifting of sounds in the various
branches of the Aryan family, which will be specially treated in the
next chapter. When once a particular variety of pronunciation has come
into vogue it absorbs and kills all deviating modes of pronunciation
as surely as the cardoon in Central America has killed the native
plants in its neighbourhood. We are all creatures of fashion, and the
instinct of imitation is at work from the moment we first cease to be
_infants_,—“speechless” embryos of humanity.
In the matter of grammar, a familiar instance of the way in which
analogy can change the current forms of speech is afforded by the
extension of the English perfect in -_ed_, the last relic of the affixed
_dide_, the reduplicated past tense of _do_. The Latin _amamini_ is the
plural masculine of the old middle participle which we find in the Sansk.
_bharamâṇas_, the Greek τυπτόμενοι, and the Latin _alumnus_ (_alomenus_
from _al-o_) or _Vertumnus_, the “changing” year. But when it had
firmly established itself as a substitute for the second person plural
of the present of the middle-passive voice, with _estis_ understood,
its true origin and meaning came to be forgotten, and as _amamini_ was
conjugated with _amamur_ and _amantur_, so the anomalous _amemini_ was
conjugated with _amemur_ and _amentur_, and _amabamini_ with _amabamur_
and _amabantur_. The coexistence of the older and later forms of the
third personal pronoun in Greek, σφέ (Sansk. _swa_, Lat. _se_), and ἕ
caused the one to be employed as a plural and the other as a singular,
although the pronoun was originally reflective and of all genders; and
the new plural pronoun was then provided with cases as well as with a
dual formed on the analogy of those of the first and second pronouns.
In the case of the dative alone a difficulty occurred, since here ἡμῖν
or ὑμῖν could not be distinguished in form from σφί(ν) still used as
singular by Herodotus; but the difficulty was overcome by having recourse
to the noun-declension and creating a σφίσι as a parallel to ναῦσι.
The contracted plural accusative πόλεις could not be derived from the
original πολιας (for πολιανς) by any known rule of Greek phonology; it
owes its existence to the habit of making the accusative plural like
the nominative. The whole of the so-called fifth declension in Latin
has grown up from the unconscious blunders of speech. _A_ before _m_
tended to become _e_, as in _siem_ for _siam_, and accordingly by the
side of _materiam_ was heard _materiem_. The accusative _materiem_ was
then confounded with accusatives like _nubem_, and so a new nominative
came into being, _materies_ by the side of _materia_. Meanwhile the
vowel of the accusative case-ending had influenced the vowel of the
other case-endings, and changed the old ablative _materiâ_ and genitive
_materiai_ into _materie_ and _materiei_. The same process was next
extended to the plural, _materiarum_, _materiabus_, and _materias_ became
_materierum_, _materiebus_, and _materies_, and nothing remained but to
assimilate nominative and accusative as in nouns of the third declension
whose accusative plural also terminated in -_es_.
Analogy will sometimes alter the whole structural complexion of a
language. The Coptic, formerly an affix-language like Old Egyptian or the
Semitic tongues, has become a prefix-language, denoting by prefixes the
relations of grammar; and this metamorphosis seems due to the influence
of the neighbouring Berber and cognate dialects. The tendency must have
first shown itself in a few instances, and then by degrees have extended
to the whole language. It has been held that the Aryan conjugation with
a vowel between the root and the suffix, as in the Sanskrit _bhav-â-mi_
or the Latin _(e)s-u-m_, has grown up in the same manner, verbs like
the Sanskrit _ad-mi_, “I eat,” alone surviving as the remains of a past
in which the personal pronoun was attached immediately to the verbal
root. This, however, is very doubtful, the latter class of verbs being
more probably the result of phonetic decay which has obliterated the
connecting vowel, or more correctly the final syllable of the stem.
Syntax has not escaped the all-prevailing action of analogy and
imitation. The relics of English flection are rapidly disappearing
under its influence, and the use of the conjunctive _were_ will soon
be as obsolete as that of _be_. The relative pronoun was originally a
demonstrative like our _that_, which drew attention to the idea contained
in the principal clause, but with the extension of its use as a relative
its demonstrative signification was lost, and it came to be used in
instances where the demonstrative could not be employed.
Examples of the power of analogy in changing and extending the meaning
of words are almost needless. The process is going on before our eyes
every day. A new object or a new idea is named from its likeness to
something with which we are familiar. The Kuriaks call the ox the
“Russian elk” (_Ruski olehn_), just as the Romans spoke of the elephant
as the _Luca bos_, and we are all familiar with the significant name
of the _Sugarloaf_ Mountain. There is a long distance from the primary
signification of _post_ as something “placed” or “fixed” to its
signification as the arrival of correspondence, but every stage of the
way can be traced and shown to be the work of analogy. The post fixed
in the ground became a station, and when such stations were established
for the conveyance of messages, news was said to travel “by post.” To
transfer the name “post” from the machinery whereby the news was carried
to the news itself was at once obvious and easy. The _foot_ of a mountain
is as much a metaphorical expression as the _arm_ of the sea or the _arm_
of law, and every metaphorical expression is an example of analogy.
Three-fourths of our language, indeed, may be said to consist of worn-out
metaphors. In no other way can terms be found for the spiritual and the
abstract. _Spirit_ is itself “the breath,” the _abstract_ that which is
“drawn apart.” Our knowledge grows by comparing the unknown with the
known, and the record of that increase of knowledge grows in the same
way. Things are named from their qualities, but those qualities have
first been observed elsewhere. The _table_ like the _stable_ originally
meant something that “stands,” but the idea of standing had been noted
long before the first table was invented. The only abstract notion the
Tasmanians had attained was that of resemblance. When they wanted to
express the conception of roundness they had to say “like the moon” or
some other round object, and similarly in the case of other abstract
adjectives.
But as in pronunciation and grammar, so too in the matter of
signification the analogy may sometimes be a wrong one. The men who
coined the term “whale-fishery” were ignorant of the fact that the whale
is a mammal, and that its only resemblance to a fish consists in its
living in the sea. The name of _guinea-pig_, again, as applied to the
small animal imported from Brazil, is singularly inappropriate. At other
times the process whereby a new idea or object has been brought into
relation with what was already familiar has been fair and legitimate.
Thus the sense of the French _canard_ as “idle gossip” can be traced back
step by step to the primary meaning of the Low-Latin _canardus_. The
feminine of _canard_ is _cane_, and just as _cane_ is the German _kahn_,
“a skiff,” so _canardus_ properly signified “a small boat.” Then by the
force of analogy the words came to denote “a duck,” and as the duck
was frequently used to decoy other birds by its cry, _canard_ ended in
signifying a mere decoy, a mere empty cry calculated to deceive.
Mythology, as we shall see hereafter, is in large measure based upon
the metaphors of speech. The phænomena of nature were explained by
likening them to those human actions with which primitive man was
acquainted, and when in course of time a higher level of knowledge had
been reached, and the original meaning of the traditional epithets had
been forgotten, they came to be taken literally and interpreted as
referring to beings of a super-human world. The dawn had been likened to
a rosy-fingered maiden, the sun to a charioteer, and so the myths of Eôs,
the ever-fleeing maiden, and of Phœbus Apollo, the heavenly charioteer,
came into existence. Mythology is not so much a disease of language as a
misunderstanding of its metaphors and a misconception of the analogical
reasoning of our early forefathers.
Exactly the converse of this are those popular etymologies whereby
words whose meaning is unknown or forgotten are assimilated to others
with which the speakers are familiar. A gardener has been heard to call
_asphalt_ “ashes-spilt,” and thus render an explanation of the word to
his own mind, and the modern spelling of the German _sündfluth_ is due to
the popular belief that the word, really a compound of _sint_, “great,”
the Anglo-Saxon _sin_, “everlasting,” was invented to denote the deluge
of Noah, which punished the “sins” of mankind. Luther still writes
_sindfluth_ (_sindefluth_), and in his translation of the Bible uses
it in other passages besides those which relate to the Noachian flood
(_e.g._, Ps. 29, 10, and Sirach 39, 22). Proper names have naturally
suffered, especially from the attempt to give a meaning to them. Burgh de
Walter has become Bridgewater and Widder Fjord, “the Creek of Wethers,”
Waterford. The name of Madrid is explained by a popular legend which
makes a boy, pursued by a bear, fly to a tree and cry to his mother
“Madre id, Madre id” (“Mother, he comes”);[95] the Lepontii, we are told
by Pliny,[96] received their title from having been the companions of
Hercules who were “left behind” (λιπόντες!); and the Kirgises were so
named from forty maidens, the mothers of the race, _qyrg_ being “forty”
in Turkic and _qyz_ “a maiden.”[97] Similarly the modern Greeks have
changed the meaningless _Athens_ into Ἀνθῆναι, “the Flowery,” while
Krisa has become Χρυσό, “the Golden.”[98] Where all other means failed
the name was explained by the clumsy device of turning it into the
name of an individual, and so there arose those eponymous heroes like
Hellen and Asshur from whom tribes and nations were supposed to have
been designated. The same process of etymologizing by the help of false
analogy meets us in literature as well as in popular speech. The Homeric
Poems are full of instances of the fact. In the Odyssey the old epic
epithet ἐπηέτανος, “long lasting” (from ἐπὶ, ἄει, and τείνω), has come to
be derived from ἔτος, which had lost its initial digamma (ϝετος, Sanskrit
_vatsas_), and is accordingly employed in the sense of “lasting all the
year,” while the Aorist infinitives χραισμεῖν and ἰδεῖν were taken to
be presents and so provided with the futures χραισμήσω and ἰδήσω. Our
own absurd mode of spelling presents us with parallel cases. Because
_should_, the past tense of _shall_, has an _l_, _could_, the past tense
of _can_, is given one; and _further_, the comparative of _forth_, has
been written and pronounced _farther_ as if derived from _far_.
The desire of clearness and emphasis, the second cause of change in
language, is, like analogy, a creative and constructive power, and is
often found at work in company with analogy. The object of speech is to
communicate our thoughts to one another; where, therefore, our meaning is
not clearly grasped, we begin to pronounce our words more distinctly than
usual and to lay greater stress upon them. The result of this is a clear
enunciation of all the syllables of a word, and sometimes a phonetic
addition to the word itself. In this way we may explain the adventitious
dental that has attached itself to the end of a word like _sound_, Latin
_sonus_, French _son_, or the aspirate which is inserted in the wrong
place by persons who are conscious of a difficulty in pronouncing it in
the right place. So, again, in talking to a foreigner we instinctively
raise the voice and repeat our remarks in a louder tone should he fail
to comprehend them. The more readily our thoughts are understood, the
less need there is of our dwelling upon the sounds which express them.
Hence it is that with the progress of culture and education, and the
consequent advance in quickness of perception, our words get worn away
and slurred over, and a fragment only of the original word or the
original sentence is often sufficient to convey our meaning. English and
French are prominent examples of this fact, French cutting off its final
consonants, and English softening its harder letters and avoiding the
free play of the lips. Classical Italian, nurtured on the pedantic and
metrical pronunciation of literary Latin and screened by the mountains of
Tuscany, cannot, it has been well said, be spoken rapidly; but if we go
to the Bolognese dialect, where these influences have not been at work,
we shall find “A n’ vuoi t’ m’ in parl, S’nor,” doing duty for, “I won’t
have you to speak to me about it, sir.”[99] While the educated Frenchman
leaves the negative to be supplied by the mind when using _pas_, _point_,
or _jamais_ by themselves, the uneducated Englishman strengthens his
negative by repeating it. Indeed, the repetition of the negative in
order to emphasize the negation is a mark of most early languages, and
runs parallel with the gesture and gesticulation which characterize the
tongues of savages and barbarians. The muscular effort called forth by
the latter necessarily extends also to the elocution, and a speaker
generally finds that the clearness of his utterances is assisted by the
exercise of the muscles of the arms and face.
Emphasis acts upon the outward sounds of a word as well as upon its
inner meaning, and like analogy, though by the contrary process of
differentiation, tends to build up new grammatical forms. The English
_thunder_ and _jaundice_ go back to an Anglo-Saxon _thunor_ and a French
_jaunisse_, where the intrusive dental must be referred to the desire of
clearness, since it can hardly be said to facilitate the pronunciation.
So, too, in _impregnable_ and _groom_, the French _imprenable_ and
Anglo-Saxon _guman_, we have other instances of the same striving after
distinct and emphatic utterance, and the extension of the Greek πόλις
(Sanskrit _puris_) into πτόλις, or of πόλεμος into πτόλεμος must be put
down to a similar cause. People who wish to be very particular in the
pronunciation of their words are apt to say _kyind_ for _kind_, and the
Italian _luogho_ has arisen in no other way out of the Latin _locus_.
The varying quality of a vowel, or an apparent exception to Grimm’s laws
of letter-change may be explained by this principle of emphasis. Thus
the Greek οἶδα, like the Sanskrit _vêda_ or the Gothic _vait_, has a
diphthong in the singular, whereas in the dual and plural the vowel is
short (_ĭ_). This has resulted from the fact that the primitive Aryan
laid the accent on the first syllable of the word in the singular; the
less familiar flections of the dual and plural, however, were accented,
and so preserved the short vowel of the root from being changed. In the
same way the Old High German perfect _laiþ_ in the singular observes the
rule which makes an Old High German _þ_ answer to an original _d_; in
the plural, however, where the corresponding Sanskrit form accents the
suffixes and not the root (as in the singular) the rule is violated and
we have _lidum_, _liduþ_ and _lidun_. So, too, by the side of the Old
High German _brôþar_ (_bruder_), answering to a primitive _bhrâ´tar_, we
find _môdar_ (_muther_) and _fadar_ (_vater_) answering to a primitive
_mâtár_ and _pitár_ (_pâtár_); while the accent of the Vedic _saptán_ and
the Greek ἑπτά, “seven,” shows why the Old High German _seban_ and the
Gothic _sibun_ have _b_ instead of the regular _f_.[100]
Emphasis enriches the vocabulary, first of all by introducing synonyms,
and then by making a distinction of meaning between them. To set
two synonyms side by side is the best way of giving clearness and
intelligibility to our thoughts. Much of the charm of our authorized
version of the Bible is due to the attempt of the translators to bring
out the meaning of a Greek or Hebrew word by using two equivalents, one
from a Romanic, the other from a Teutonic source. There comes a time,
however, when we begin to contrast and differentiate the two synonyms;
and so _love_ comes to include much more than its New Testament synonym
_charity_, and _pastor_, the synonym of _shepherd_, is confined to
ecclesiastical language, while custom only allows us to say “_much_
obliged,” and “very grateful.”[101]
Of a similar nature is the process whereby two varying forms of the
same word become distinguished in use and signification. Thus the Latin
_tepor_ and _tempus_ both go back to an earlier _tapas_, “heat,” but the
strengthening of the first syllable of the one, and the change of _s_
into _r_ in the other, caused them to break apart and in course of time
to be employed with a totally different meaning. The difference of sense
brought with it a difference of gender, and thus introduced a grammatical
change. The analogy of other nouns in final -_or_ or -_os_ preserved the
masculine use of _tepor_, while _tempus_ followed the gender of neuters
like _genus_. The history of the termination of the nominative singular
of Latin comparatives has been much the same. This was indifferently
-_ior_ or -_ios_ (-_ius_), like the Greek -ίων and the Sanskrit -_yan_
from an earlier -_yans_, and in Valerius Antias[102] we find _prior_
still used for the neuter in the phrase “senatus-consultum prior,” while
the title of the fourth book of Cassius Hemina’s Annals was, “Bellum
Punicum posterior.” _Arbor_ and _robur_ were originally identical,
and M. Bréal has shown that this was also the case with _cruor_ and
_crus_.[103] The two latter words both represent the Sanskrit _kravis_
and the Greek κρέας in the sense of “bloody flesh” or “bloody limb,”
and their differentiation was aided by the introduction of a new word,
_caro_, in the sense of “flesh.” _Caro_ originally meant simply “part”
or “portion,” a sense in which the Umbrian _karu_ is still employed in
the Engubine Tables,[104] and the Oscan _carneis_ in the Tabula Bantina.
Roots, too, as well as derivatives, may be differentiated and gradually
assume independent meanings. Thus in Greek, if we follow the usual
theory, the old root _ar_ or _ara_ has been split up into three, ἀρ-,
ἐρ-, and ὀρ-, in accordance with the threefold representation of the
Sanskrit _ă_ in European Aryan. Accordingly by the side of ἀρόω, the
Latin _arare_, the Gothic _arjan_ (Old English _ear_), which appropriated
to itself the sense of “ploughing,” we have also ἐρέσσω (_remus_) in the
sense of “rowing,” and ὄρ-νυμι (_orior_) in the sense of “rising” to
one’s work. This differentiation of the three roots, however, seems to
have come about after the separation of the several members of the Aryan
group, as we find no trace of it in the Asiatic branch of the family, and
it must, therefore, have really taken place in the fully-formed words
of the European tongues.[105] Greek with its delicate sense of vocalic
difference shows a special tendency towards utilizing vowel changes for
grammatical purposes. Thus the reduplicated syllables in δίδωμι and
δέδωκα were originally identical, but in course of time, while the sound
of _ĭ_ was appropriated to the present tense, the sound of _e_ came
to mark the perfect. In the same way Greek verbs in -αω, -εω, -οω all
go back to the form which we have in the Sanskrit -_ayâmi_, but later
usage tended to assign a transitive meaning to the form in -οω, and an
intransitive one to that in -εω, while that in -αω floated between the
two. It is probable that the three Semitic case-endings in _u_, _i_, _a_,
which respectively denoted the nominative, genitive, and accusative, all
went back to a primary indeterminate -_a_. In the Negro Dinka language
certain plurals are formed by lengthening or sharpening the vowel of the
singular, like _rōr_, the plural of _ror_, “wood,” _nim_, the plural
of _nom_, “head,” _līb_, the plural of _lyep_, “tongue,” or _tut_, the
plural of _tuot_, “goose;” and since we find that a verb becomes passive
by simply lengthening the final _i_ of the formative elements (as _ran
a-tšī tšōl_, “the man has been called,” by the side of _ran a-tši tšōl_,
“the man has called”), it is possible that the vowel change in all these
cases is due to differentiation for the sake of clearness and emphasis.
Such at least has been the origin of the tones which form so marked a
feature in Chinese. Dr. Edkins has shown that the confusion between words
of different signification occasioned by the loss of various initial and
final letters in pronunciation was obviated by the substitution of tones,
and the effects of phonetic decay have been thus neutralized by the
action of the contrary principle of emphasis.
One of the modes in which this principle comes into play is what
Professor Max Müller has called Dialectic Regeneration. The words and
grammatical forms which have become effete in the literary dialect, are
often replaced by others taken up from the fresh fountain of “provincial”
speech. There is nothing any longer to attract attention in what has
become so prosaic an expression as “the four cardinal points,” striking
as the phrase once was; but when Carlyle goes to the Scotch and borrows
from it the “four airts,” we are at once arrested by the unusual
character of the word, a special emphasis is laid upon it, and we begin
to realize its full meaning. It is in a period of social revolution, like
that of the Norman Conquest in England, that Dialectic Regeneration is
best seen at work on the literary language. As soon as the latter loses
the support of the educated classes, it fails to withstand the attack of
the less favoured but more deeply rooted dialects which have surrounded
it, and, as in the case of literary Anglo-Saxon with its inflections
and learned terms, it disappears for ever. The unwritten languages of
savages and barbarians are in a continual state of flux and change. Old
words and expressions which have ceased to possess the needed amount
of clearness and emphasis have to make way for new ones. The slang of
the schoolboy, or the cant of thieves and costermongers, exemplifies
the same fact. It is not so much the desire of revolting against the
proprieties of a civilized society, or of framing a secret jargon which
shall be unintelligible to others, that produces these wild outgrowths
of language; it is rather the feeling that the conventional terms have
become mere symbols, or, as Hobbes said, the counters of wise men, and
that the ideas which are perceived and felt clearly should be expressed
with equal clearness and force. Man is not wholly ruled by the wish to
save himself trouble and attain his object with the least effort; the
healthy love of physical exertion for its own sake is also a powerful
motive in human life. It is only with the growth of civilization and
thought that the exertion is transferred from the muscles to the brain,
that words become so many algebraic signs, and that syntax takes the
place of elocution. It has been often noticed that the tendency of the
modern languages of Europe is towards a monotonous level of both accent
and tone; but it must be remembered that, as long as poetry exists,
there will exist also a tendency in the opposite direction, as well as a
protest against the reduction of all language into a mere reflection of
the dry light of reason. Laziness will not explain everything in speech
any more than it will in the ordinary dealings of mankind. As Sievers
states:—“We even now often find it stated in works on the science of
language, that all phonetic change results from a striving to facilitate
the pronunciation and simplify the articulation; or, in other words,
that change of sound always consists in a weakening of sound and not in
a strengthening of it. We may allow that although many of the phænomena
observable in the history of speech can be brought under this rule, the
general application of the statement is absolutely false.... The idea of
facilitating the pronunciation, if it is to be any longer maintained,
must be regarded as an essentially relative one. Speaking generally, we
must never forget that the different degrees of difficulty in uttering
various sounds are in themselves extraordinarily slight, and that real
difficulties in forming them are usually experienced only in the case of
sounds belonging to a foreign language.... In short, real difficulties
in pronunciation are never specially felt by the members of a community
which speaks a given language, and with them only a further development
of their language is possible.”
This brings us to the third and last cause of change of language,
laziness, or, as it has also been termed, the principle of least effort.
As the results of laziness show themselves principally in the alterations
undergone by the sounds of speech, this cause of change is commonly known
under the name of Phonetic Decay.[106] But the meanings of words as well
as the expression of grammatical relations are as much subject to decay
as the sounds of speech; the outward form of _age_ which can be traced
back to the Low Latin _ætaticum_ and the classical _ætas_, has suffered
no less from the wear and tear of time than its inward signification,
which goes back to a root meaning “to go.” Like the present strata of the
earth which are the _débris_ of the earlier rocks, the present strata
of language are the worn-out relics of older formations. The power of
laziness, more especially in the shape of phonetic decay, is conspicuous
in almost every word we utter; it is the first agent of linguistic
change that strikes the student, and it has accordingly attracted more
than its due share of attention. The influence of laziness has been
insisted on to the exclusion of the two other equally important causes
of change in speech, and the growth of grammatical consciousness, the
discovery of new grammatical relations and the development of fresh
mental points of view, have even been ascribed to its action. No doubt
its influence is great and far-reaching, but we must be on our guard
against regarding laziness as sufficient of itself to explain all the
phænomena of language. Phonology is rather affected by it than either
morphology or sematology. Owing, however, to the large place assigned to
it in works on comparative philology, it will not be necessary to dwell
upon it here in any great detail. We naturally seek to make ourselves
understood by our neighbours with the least possible amount of trouble.
Muscular and still more mental fatigue is distasteful to us, and the less
we have to exert our vocal organs and powers of thinking when making our
meaning clear to another, the better satisfied we are sure to be. Hence
it happens that we constantly use words with a very dim appreciation
indeed of their full and exact significance. We select that part of the
meaning only which for some reason or other has made an impression upon
our minds, and very often this part of the meaning is merely subsidiary
and accidental to the proper signification of the word. But we are too
lazy to realize that proper signification, and so pass words on to others
the mere shadow and fragment of their former selves. It may often happen
that a sense originally imported into a word by the context in which
it accidentally found itself becomes appropriated to it to the gradual
exclusion of its real signification. The word _silly_, for example, which
once meant “blessed,” like its German cousin _selig_, from being applied
euphemistically to half-witted persons, has entirely lost its true
meaning. A word like _impertinent_ is still in process of being changed.
Its positive _pertinent_ has hitherto preserved its proper sense, at
all events in literature; but the popular mind has already forgotten
the meaning of the negative, and only a short while ago a member of
Parliament was called to order for describing a remark as “impertinent.”
Here the accidental application of a word has caused its primary meaning
to fall into neglect. Still more striking is the fate which has befallen
words like _transpire_ and _eliminate_. The newspapers speak of events
“transpiring” in absolute disregard of the fact that events can hardly
“breathe through,” while _eliminate_ has been used not in the sense of
removing out of the way but of bringing in.[107] It is so much easier to
guess at the meaning of a word from the context in which it occurs than
to trace it back to its real signification, and so long as our use of
it is intelligible there is little care among ordinary speakers as to
whether that use is correct or not.
In this way general terms come to be restricted to individuals, while
words which denote the particular are extended to denote the universal.
_Deer_, which, like the cognate German _thier_ and Latin _fera_,
originally signified wild animals of all kinds, is now confined to a
particular species; while, on the other hand, the Latin _emere_, which
properly signified “to take” in general, came to be restricted to the
special meaning of taking when we “buy.” The older significations of
words are continually decaying and being supplanted by new ones. Those
who use them are too lazy to find out their exact significance.
The principle of laziness is equally active in the province of grammar.
Here, too, the relations formerly conceived to exist between the several
parts of the sentence may be forgotten altogether or replaced by other
relations. The inflections of the Anglo-Saxon noun have been almost all
lost, and the datives _him_ and _whom_ have become objective cases.
Prepositions have taken the place of the case-endings, the adjective
no longer “agrees” with its noun, but is now conceived of as a simple
attribute, while all remembrance of the dative relation has faded out of
the expressions “give me a book,” “send it away.” The subjunctive is fast
ceasing to exist, and the modern Englishman troubles himself but little
about the difference between _be_ and _is_ or between _if I was_ and _if
I were_.
It is in phonology, however, that the principle of laziness is most
active. As far back as we can follow the history of language we see the
stronger and harder sounds perpetually changing into weaker and easier
ones; and so uniform and constant is this tendency that in the absence of
counter-indications we are justified in referring most cases of phonetic
change with which we may meet to the operation of decay. Mr. Douse[108]
has lately made an ingenious but unsuccessful attempt to assign the
phænomena of Grimm’s law to what he terms the principle of least effort,
by supposing that the different phonetic systems of the several branches
of the Indo-European family were evolved out of the _tenues_ or hard
consonants, at a time when these branches were still co-existing dialects
of a single language, through the influence of “Reflex Dissimilation.”
Reflex dissimilation is explained to be a more complicated and somewhat
varying instance of that simple cross compensation which we see
exemplified in the Cockney interchange of _v_ and _w_, or the perverse
persistency with which the same persons, who leave out the aspirate where
it ought to exist, insert it where it ought to be omitted. In both cross
compensation and reflex dissimilation, however, we have a compound action
of the two antagonistic principles of laziness and emphasis.
The age of a language is marked by the extent to which it has been
affected by phonetic decay, and when we find how large its influence
has been upon the Old Egyptian and the Accadian of Chaldæa, as they
appear in the earliest monuments we possess, we may form some idea of
the length of time that must have elapsed since those languages were
first being moulded and fixed. At the same time we must not forget that
phonetic decay will act more readily upon some classes of languages than
upon others. Wherever there is no clear consciousness of the distinction
between root and grammatical suffix, as in our own inflectional family
of speech, there we may expect a greater and more rapid amount of change
than in agglutinative dialects where the relations of grammar are
expressed by independent or semi-independent words. But even the latter
cannot escape the law of gradual decay. To pass over the incorporating
Basque in which words like _dakarkiotezute_, “ye eat it for them,” or
_detzadan_, “that I should have them,” have to be decomposed into _da_,
“it” or “him,” _ekarri_, “to eat,” _ki_, sign of the dative, _o_, “for
him,” _te_, sign of the plural, _zute_, “ye,” and _d_, “him,” _ez_
(_izan_), “to be” or “have,” _za_, sign of the plural, _ta_, “I,” and
_n_, conjunctive affix, we find Yakute Turkish changing _bin_ + _śän_
(“I + thou”) into _biś_, “we,”[109] while the written Japanese _taka-si_
and _taka-ki_, “high,” are pronounced _takai_. Chinese itself is not
exempt from the universal rule. As Dr. Edkins[110] and M. de Rosny
have shown, the modern Mandarin dialect has lost numerous initial and
final consonants, and words like _yi_, “one,” and _ta_, “great,” were
once _tit_ and _dap_. Along the southern bank of the Yang-tsi-kiang and
through Chekiang to Fuh-kien the old initials are still preserved, while
in the northern provinces no less than three finals have been lost and
the tones by which Chinese words of similar form are distinguished from
one another are so many compensations for the loss of letters. Here again
we have the principle of emphasis endeavouring to repair the damage
wrought by the principle of decay.
A literary dialect is naturally less subject to the inroads of
decay than an unwritten one. The spelling of words reacts upon their
pronunciation and preserves it from extensive alteration. There is a
wide chasm between that Tuscan Italian which has been preserved from
corruption by the genius of Dante and the modern dialect of Bologna
or Naples. In the age of Cicero the _cave ne eas_ of polite society
had become _cauneas_ in the language of the people,[111] and how
artificial was the attempt of pedants and purists to maintain the older
pronunciation, even to the restoration of the final _s_ which had already
been dropped by Ennius, appeared pretty plainly as soon as the decline
of the Roman empire and the extinction of the literary class deprived
it of support. Latin at once fell away into the Romance dialects of
modern Europe, just as literary Anglo-Saxon with its inflections and its
learned vocabulary disappeared before the Norman Conquest. The language
of the Assyrian inscriptions remains almost unaltered throughout the long
period of nearly 2,000 years, during which we can watch its fortunes; but
this language was the stereotyped one of literature and education, and
differed very considerably from the spoken language of the people. The
late linguistic character of Hebrew, the extent, that is, to which it has
been influenced by phonetic decay as compared with its sister tongues,
is an incontrovertible proof of the backward literary condition of its
speakers. But even literature and cultivation are unable to preserve
a language altogether from decay and change. The pronunciation of the
educated slowly changes; words become clipped and shortened in spite
of their spelling, and notwithstanding printers and schoolmasters the
spelling in the end has to follow the pronunciation. Mr. Alexander Ellis
has shown in his “Early English Pronunciation” how widely our modern
pronunciation of English has departed from that of Shakspeare’s time,
and the spelling of _though_, _through_, and _enough_ bears witness to a
period when they ended in a guttural aspirate. Our pronunciation is still
undergoing change; the vowels are becoming more and more indistinct and
merged in a common obscure _ĕ_; while such contractions as _I’ll_, _I’d_,
_won’t_, and _can’t_ can hardly be distinguished from Basque forms like
those mentioned above. The educated Englishman speaks, as the French
say, with his lips closed; he finds that he can be understood without
the trouble of opening and rounding them, and his vowels are accordingly
formed in the front rather than in the back part of the mouth. No wonder
that he has a difficulty with the French _eu_; the effort to pronounce it
is too great a strain upon the unexercised muscles of the lips, and so
the English gentleman who told the waiter not to let the _feu_ go out in
his absence found on his return that his friend had been strictly watched
and guarded as a dangerous _fou_.
But though a literature and more especially a widely extended literary
education form the chief obstacle to the action of phonetic decay, there
are other social influences which operate to the same end. Wherever there
is a fixed and stable society, cut off from close intercourse with its
neighbours and handing down unchanged its customs and institutions, we
are likely to find a more or less fixed and stable language. For language
is the mirror of the community that uses it, and where the community
alters but little the language will alter but little too. It is in this
way that we must explain the fact that Lithuanian, though unprotected by
a literature and spoken by the least progressive of the European members
of the Aryan family, is yet the most conservative of all the Western
languages of our group, or that the Bedouin of Central Arabia is said to
speak at the present day a more archaic language than those of Nineveh
or Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. Since the institution of an annual fair
among the Rocky Mountains the idioms of the eastern and western Eskimaux,
who at first were hardly understood by one another, became more and
more assimilated;[112] and the stationary character of Icelandic may be
ascribed as much to the isolation of the settled Norse community in the
island as to the existence of a literature. Of course, the community must
be one which has reached a certain level of culture, and its customs and
institutions must imply organization and recognition of fixed principles.
Where the customs and institutions are founded on mere unreasoning
habit and precedent, we are dealing with a community of barbarians, and
consequently with languages or dialects in a perpetual state of flux.
The changes wrought by phonetic decay are sometimes sufficient to alter
the whole aspect of a language, and are at once the foundation and the
riddle of etymology. Who would recognize in the French _même_, for
instance, any derivative from the Latin pronoun _se_? And yet _même_
goes back to the Low Latin _semetipsissimum_ through the Old Provençal
_smetessme_, the later Provençal _medesme_ and the Old French _meïsme_.
Words of different origin, like _scale_ from the Latin _scala_ and the
Anglo-Saxon _scalu_ and _scealu_, may come to assume the same form;
while words of the same origin, like the French _captif_ and _chétif_,
from _captivus_, or _noel_ and _natal_ from _natalis_, may appear under
different forms. The processes of assimilation and swarabhakti, of
metathesis and epenthesis, to be described in the next chapter, are so
many forms under which phonetic decay displays itself. The history of
language is the history of the continual weakening of uttered sounds and
the gradual lessening of the demands made upon the organs of speech, and
attempts like that to reduce the triliteral roots of the Semitic tongues
to biliteral ones are contrary to the whole tendency of language. Accent
alone is able to hold out against the assaults of phonetic decay; it is
only the accented syllable that remains unchanged when all around it is
perishing, and, as in the case of _age_ from _ætaticum_ or _dine_ from
_desinere_, is often all that is left of the primitive word. It is again
the struggle between the principle of emphasis and the principle of
laziness, between conservatism and revolution. Only when the accent is
shifted to another syllable can phonetic decay gain the victory, and the
shifting of the accent is itself the work of the principle of decay.
The principle of laziness has much to do with the creation of
dialects. Slight variations of pronunciation and of the usage of words
are as inevitable in language as variations of species in zoology, and
where there is no correcting standard these variations are perpetuated
and intensified. Helped by the two other causes of linguistic change,
the dialect of a household becomes in time the dialect of a clan or
tribe, and as soon as its characteristics are sufficiently numerous
and distinct, the dialect is transformed into a language. An isolated
community will by slow degrees form a new language for itself. Just as
the history and character of one society differ from those of another,
so too must the dialect or language differ in which the society finds
expression. Even where the rapid and intimate intercourse of modern
civilization and the safeguard of a common and widely-studied literature
stand in the way, as in the case of England and America, dialectical
differences and peculiarities will yet spring up. In savage and barbarous
communities the growth of innumerable dialects is a matter of necessity.
The manifold languages of the Malayan and Polynesian Archipelago can
be traced back to a common source, but the natives of two neighbouring
islands are often unintelligible to one another; while von der Gabelentz
says of the Melanesians, that “every small island has its own language
or even several languages.”[113] Before the utter extinction of the
Tasmanians, with a population of no more than fifty persons there were
four dialects, each with a different word for “ear,” “eye,” “head,” and
other equally common objects. The language of a shifting unorganized
community will reflect the condition of those who speak it, and we are
not surprised, therefore, at Captain Gordon’s assertion that “some”
of the Manipuran dialects “are spoken by no more than thirty or forty
families, yet (are) so different from the rest as to be unintelligible
to the nearest neighbourhood.” Humboldt tells us[114] that in South
America, together with a great analogy of physical constitution, “a
surprising variety of languages is observed among nations of the same
origin, and which European travellers scarcely distinguish by their
features.” Greece, with its small extent of country and still smaller
amount of population, was said a few years back to possess no fewer
than seventy dialects,[115] and no less than eight principal dialects
besides several subordinate ones exist among the modern Basques, whose
whole population is under 800,000.[116] Indeed, considering the isolation
of the Basques, socially, politically, and linguistically, as well as
the narrow tract of country into which they have been compressed, it
is remarkable that natives of places not forty miles distant from one
another are yet mutually unintelligible.[117] But the natural condition
of language is diversity and change, and it is only under the artificial
influences of civilization and culture that a language becomes uniform
and stationary. As soon as the coercive hand of civilization is removed
it breaks out again into a plentiful crop of dialects. Of course, the
vicissitudes through which semi-civilized peoples are continually
passing greatly assist the process of change. Conquest and the mixture
consequent upon it, famine, disease, and migration, are all powerful aids
to dialect-making. The women of a tribe who stay at home, or who have
been married out of another tribe, sometimes possess a language different
from that of the men; thus, the Carib women in the Antille Isles used a
different tongue from that of their husbands, while the Eskimaux women
in Greenland turn _k_ into _ng_ and _t_ into _n_.[118] Even religion
and superstition play their part in the work; the sacred language of
the “medicine-men” in Greenland, for instance, is for the most part an
arbitrary perversion of the significations of known words; thus _tak_,
“darkness,” is used in the sense of “the north,” and so gives rise to two
new words of this secret speech, _tarsoak_, “earth,” and _tarsoarmis_,
“roots.” The custom of _tapu_ among the Pacific Islanders, according
to which every word which contains a syllable identical with some part
of the name of the reigning chief has to be dropped or changed, is due
to the belief that all things belonging to a chief are consecrated and
inviolable. Since the reign of Queen Pomare _mi_ has been substituted
for _po_, “night,” in Tahitian, and Hale tells us of this language[119]
that its “manner of forming new words seems to be arbitrary. In many
cases the substitutes are made by changing or dropping some letter or
letters of the original word, as _hopoi_ for _hepai_, ... _au_ for
_tau_, &c. In other cases the word substituted is one which had before
a meaning nearly related to that of the term disused.... In some cases
the meaning or origin of the new word is unknown, and it may be a mere
invention, as _ofai_ for _ohatu_ ‘stone,’ _papai_ for _vai_, ‘water,’
_pohe_ for _mate_, ‘dead.’” Similar to the Polynesian _tapu_ is the
Chinese custom of tabooing the elements of the reigning emperor’s name,
and the _ukuhlonipa_, which forbids the Kafir women to pronounce a word
containing a sound like one in the names of their nearest relations.
Thus, “Mr. Leslie states that the wives of Panda’s sons would never
call him (Mr. Leslie) by his Kafir name of u’ Lpondo, on account of its
partial identity with that of the chief, their father-in-law. In the name
of the river Amanzimtoti, ‘Sweet Waters,’ in like manner, _mtoti_ has
been substituted for _mnandi_, hlonipaed or tabooed on account of its
occurring in the name of Tsaka’s mother Unandi.”[120]
The Abipones of South America similarly alter the names of the friends
and relatives of a dead member of the tribe, and the words which entered
into the composition of his name are dropped out of use.[121] For a
parallel superstition we have only to think of the old European belief
in the omen involved in the mere pronunciation of a word, which caused
the Greek to speak of his left hand as ἀρίστερος, “the better one,” and
the Roman to change Maleventum into Beneventum. The belief in the power
of words, in the _vis verbi_ as the Latin termed it, is even now not
extinct, and the same feeling which altered the “Cape of Storms” into the
“Cape of Good Hope” is still prevalent among us.
The sacred jargon of the Eskimaux sorcerer, which finds its analogue in
the slang of the schoolboy, is merely one step lower than the ceremonial
dialects which are to be met with all over the world. The _Bhasa Krama_
or ceremonial language of Java, for example, like the ceremonial
languages of the larger islands of Polynesia, or the ceremonial
conjugation of the ancient Azteks, hedges in the upper classes of the
community with a veritable _tapu_. So, too, the Japanese when addressing
a superior has to speak of himself as _gu-sau_, “a stupid vegetable,” or
_yátsŭ-ko_ (contracted _yákko_), “house-boy,” and of another as _nandzi_,
“famous,” or _te-máye-san_, “the gentleman at hand,” while _o_ or _on_,
“great,” is prefixed to all words which relate to the latter[122] and
distinctive verbs and verbal forms employed expressive of courtesy.[123]
The Chinaman is equally the slave of an artificial politeness; he is
himself “the thief” (_ts’ie_), “the soft-brained” (_’iu_), while the
person he addresses is “the honourable” (_ling_) or “the noble brother”
(_ling hiung_).[124] The Indian _bhavan_, “present,” is construed with
the third person in order to denote the second with ambiguous courtesy,
and the same reluctance to place oneself on a footing of equality by a
blunt “thou” shows itself in the Latin of the Hungarian, who will say
“Dominus dignetur commodare mihi librum,” meaning the second person.[125]
The ceremonial use of the pronouns reaches a still greater extreme in
German, where in addition to the various titles with which “His Highly
well-born,” “His most serene,” or “His Transparency” require to be
addressed, the second person singular has to be represented sometimes by
a masculine _Er_ (“he”), sometimes by a feminine _Sie_ (“she”), sometimes
by a plural _Sie_ (“they”). The latter reminds us of the Hebrew “pluralis
majestatis,” and recalls our own employment of the plural _you_ for the
singular _thou_. Our usage in this respect was probably influenced by the
French use of _vous_, and it is perhaps to the same influence that we may
ascribe the Basque use of _Zute_, “you,” instead of _Zu_, “thou,” which
seems of comparatively late introduction. Two Basque dialects, indeed,
the Souletin and the east Low Navarese, have even developed a ceremonial
conjugation, every person of which, except the second plural, assumes
a special form when a superior is addressed. Besides the ceremonial
conjugation there is also a feminine one, employed whenever a woman is
spoken to. It must be remembered that the Basque verb is an amalgamation
of the verbal root with the personal pronouns.
The rapid changes undergone by languages in a natural state can only
be appreciated by those who have had experience of a tribe of wandering
savages, or who have observed the alterations children would make in
the language they learn if left to themselves. According to Waldeck, a
dictionary compiled by Jesuit missionaries in Central America became
useless within ten years; and Messerschmidt states that the inhabitants
of Ostiak villages, only a mile or two apart, are unintelligible to
one another.[126] The Hurons, Sagard stated in 1631, spoke such a
variety of dialects that not only was the same language hardly to be
heard in two adjacent villages, but even in two adjacent houses, and
these multitudinous dialects he further described as changing every
day. Mr. Trumbull, however, points out that Sagard’s account must be
received with caution, since he says that the instability of language
among the French was almost as great as among the Hurons, and his “very
imperfect dictionary of this unstable language, 200 years or more after
it was compiled, enabled Duponceau to make himself understood without
apparent difficulty by the Wyandots, a remnant of the last nation of the
Hurons.”[127]
But the following account given by Sir C. Lyell in his “Antiquity
of Man,”[128] shows that it is not necessary for a community to be
semi-civilized or barbarous in order to prove how rapidly a non-literary
language can be transformed. “A German colony in Pennsylvania,” he says,
“was cut off from frequent communication with Europe for about a quarter
of a century, during the wars of the French Revolution, between 1792 and
1815. So marked had been the effect even of this brief and imperfect
isolation, that when Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar travelled among them
a few years after the peace, he found the peasants speaking as they had
done in Germany in the preceding century, and retaining a dialect which
at home had already become obsolete. Even after the renewal of the German
emigration from Europe, when I travelled in 1841, among the same people
in the retired valleys of the Alleghanies, I found the newspapers full of
terms half-English and half-German, and many an Anglo-Saxon word which
had assumed a Teutonic dress, as ‘fencen,’ to fence, instead of umzäunen;
‘flauer,’ for flour, instead of mehl, and so on.” Destroy literature and
facility of intercommunication, and the languages of England and America
would soon be as different as those of France and Italy.
It is civilization which counteracts the natural tendency to multiply
dialects, and which is ever striving to absorb the manifold dialects
that exist into a single tongue. All the social conditions of civilized
life tend to break down dialects, to assimilate languages, and to
create a common medium of intercourse. A common government, a common
literature, a common history and a common law, all require a common
language. The Macedonian Empire made Greek the language of the East,
and Rome effectually stamped out the various idioms of its subjects in
the West. It needed an invasion of barbarism and the overthrow of Roman
organization and culture to restore the period of linguistic disunion.
The Church remained the sole representative of civilization, and
consequently the sole possessor of a common tongue. In fact, wherever
civilization has made an advance, the action of the great causes of
change in language has received a check. Every conquest over a horde of
barbarians, every attempt to found a settled government, to establish a
code of laws, to systematize a religion, or to originate a literature, is
a step forward in the direction of linguistic unity. The practical aim
of the science of language is the formation of a universal speech, and
the time may yet come when the dream will be converted into a reality.
The inventions of the present century—the steamer, the railway, and the
telegraph—are bringing all parts of the world into a closer connection
with one another, and abolishing the barriers created by differences of
speech. Commerce demands a _lingua franca_, and now that commerce is
world-wide its _lingua franca_ must be world-wide also.
The language of the chief trading nations must finally prevail in the
struggle for existence, and the prophecy has already been hazarded that
pigeon-English, or a similar grammarless jargon, will be the future
medium of universal intercourse. However this may be, the endeavour to
revive the perishing languages of Europe, and to make the limits of
speech the limits of nationality, is a reversal of the lesson of history
and a return to primitive barbarism. It is but the transient reaction
against the Empire of the first Napoleon, based on the false belief that
language and race are convertible terms. But the endeavour, however
flattering to nations without a history, is doomed to failure. Little
by little the weaker languages and dialects of Europe are disappearing
before the schoolmaster and the railway, and artificial nurture can
alone protract their lingering existence. Gaelic and Welsh in our own
islands, like Breton in France or Lithuanian in Germany and Russia, must
share the fate which has already overtaken Cornish and Wendic. The last
Wendic speaker, Frau Gülzsin, died on the Island of Rügen as long ago as
1404,[129] while Lithuanian is now used by scarcely a million and a half
persons, in spite of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s plea for it as “a
still unmixed language of an old people, now isolated and confined within
narrow bounds,” which would throw light on the history of the past.[130]
The tendency of time is to unify and simplify, and exact science even now
has but one tongue throughout the world. The attempt of Bishop Wilkins
to invent a universal language failed, not because it was premature, but
because such a language, like all others, must be a spontaneous growth; a
better fortune may await the Pasigraphy of Bachmaier,[131] which attempts
to do for the man of literature what the Arabic ciphers have done for the
mathematician, since writing differs from language in being a conscious
human invention.
The history of the extinction of languages is similar to that of the
extinction of dialects. We see the same process at work in both cases,
only on a different scale. Where several dialects exist together, the one
which belongs to the dominant class will finally prevail over the others.
The “Queen’s English” is really the court dialect of Chaucer’s day, which
became the dialect of literature and education, and so has succeeded in
degrading its sister-dialects into illiterate provincialisms, and in
many cases in destroying them altogether. Where the educated and ruling
caste is small, the other dialects will continue to flourish among the
mass of the people, and on the overthrow of the cultured class will
once more assert their own. But in a democratic age like the present,
when books and newspapers are multiplied by the printing press, and the
whole nation is being leavened by the general spread of education, the
dialect of civilization will sooner or later swallow up its less favoured
sisters. The remarkable sameness of dialect which prevails among the
Arabic-speaking populations of the East may be largely accounted for
by the democratic spirit of Mahommedanism which holds all men equal
before the supreme Khalif. It is, therefore, of the highest importance
to comparative philology that the decaying dialects of our own or
other countries should be observed and written down before they have
perished. The history of a language can be traced only by a comparison
of its dialects, which often preserve words and forms that have become
obscure and inexplicable in the standard dialect itself. Where the allied
dialects have disappeared, the chasm that divides the language we are
studying from those with which it was once connected may be too wide to
be easily spanned. For in language, as in everything else, dialect passes
gradually and insensibly into dialect, and it is not until we compare
the two extremes in the series that we are made aware of the accumulated
differences which the transitions have involved.
The progress of civilization, then, implies a continuous diminution of
the languages and dialects of the world, and a corresponding extension
of a single tongue. Just as we have seen that language advances
from complexity to simplicity, so we now see that it advances from
multiplicity to unity. The more barbarous a society is, the more numerous
will be the languages that it speaks. The further back we go into the
past, the greater must be the linguistic anarchy with which we meet. A
language begins with dialects, and since language is the product and
reflection of the community that uses it, the primæval languages of the
world must have been as infinitely numerous as the communities that spoke
them. We start with the Babel of confusion, with the houseless savage
who did that which was right in his own eyes. Language, it is true,
first cemented society together, but it also made each society a body of
hostile units. Many as are the existing languages of the earth, they are
but the selected relics of an infinitely greater number which have passed
away. Here and there we still come across the last waifs of an otherwise
extinct family of speech, the last survivors of a group of languages
and dialects which has long since been forgotten. The Basque, like the
scattered languages of the Caucasus, seems to have no connection with any
other known speech; sheltered by the mountain fastnesses of Biscay, it
remains to bear witness to the linguistic character of an extinct world.
So far as appears at present, the mysterious Etruscan which has left us
some 3,000 short inscriptions is another forlorn waif, without kith or
kin in the world of known tongues. Perhaps, too, the language of the
Lykian inscriptions, which still refuses to be “classified” in spite of
the efforts that have been made to turn it into an Iranian idiom, is a
further example of the same kind. The boulders that have been left on our
hilltops do not tell us with more certainty of the icebergs and icefloes
which brought them thither, than do these stray languages of the manifold
forms of speech of which they are the scanty remnants. Our only wonder
should be not that there are any tongues which refuse to be classed
with others, but that there are so few which thus maintain an isolated
existence.
As we shall see hereafter, families of languages are exceptional in the
history of speech. Professor Max Müller very truly says:[132] “Families
of languages are very peculiar formations; they are, and they must
be, the exception, not the rule, in the growth of language. There was
always the possibility, but there never was, as far as I can judge, any
necessity for human speech leaving its primitive stage of wild growth
and decay.” “If we confine ourselves to the Asiatic continent, with
its important peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of
drifting human speech, three, and only three oases have been formed, in
which, before the beginning of all history, language became permanent
and traditional; assumed, in fact, a new character—a character totally
different from the original character of the floating and constantly
varying speech of human beings.” And these oases, these families of
speech, it is important to remember, are themselves made up of dialects,
only dialects with a common grammar and a common stock of roots. We may,
if we like, construct a hypothetical “parent-speech,” from which we
may derive the several dialects and languages which are the only facts
we have to work upon; but we must not forget that such a parent-speech
is purely hypothetical, the product of reflective analysis and logical
deduction. Fick’s dictionary of the Parent-Aryan is as much the creation
of the comparative philologist’s closet as Schleicher’s “restoration”
of its grammatical forms. Because the Sanskrit _panchan_ and the Latin
_quinque_ can both be reduced to the same form _quemquem_, it does not
follow that the latter form was ever actually existent. As far back as
we can go, we still find ourselves in the presence of allied dialects,
never of a single tongue. The east-Aryan primitive _ghard_, “heart,”
cannot be reduced to the same form as the west-Aryan _kard_, with the
same meaning; the two variant forms of the root testify to a dialectical
difference from the outset.[133] Such, too, is the evidence of words like
those for “daughter,” Greek θυγάτηρ, but Sanskrit _duhitâ_, or “door,”
Greek θύρα, Sanskrit _dwâram_ (not _dhwâram_), while the demonstrative
pronouns appear from the first under two incompatible forms _sa_(s) and
_ta_(s). For the sake of convenience we may assume a parent-speech; we
may even go so far as to picture to ourselves a family of languages like
a family in social life, except that it springs not from two ancestors
but from one; but unless we bear in mind that these assumptions are like
the assumptions of the geometer, ideal creations, never realized in the
actual world, we shall be betrayed into numberless absurdities and false
conclusions. It is to them, indeed, that we owe the belief that the
primitive Aryans had but the single vowel _a_ in their alphabet besides
the three tenues _k_, _t_, _p_, the labials _r_, _m_, _n_, and the
sibilant _s_. Even Dr. Murray, with his nine primæval roots _ag_, _bag_,
_dwag_, _gwag_, _lag_, _mag_, _nag_, _rag_, and _swag_, did better than
this.[134]
Repulsion and division, then, is the natural condition of language. The
three causes of change are ever actively at work, and the influence of
civilization cannot entirely destroy their power. But with the advance
of culture, the dividing barriers are broken down, and to borrow a
metaphor from mechanics, the centrifugal is exchanged for the centripetal
force. Dialects make way for languages, and languages in their turn
tend to centralization. Where thought is of more consequence than the
vocal symbols in which it is expressed, means will be found for making
the symbols uniform and constant. Language begins with multiplicity
and disunion, but its end is unity. The theory that would derive the
idioms of the world from three or four primæval centres, or even from
a single centre, is contrary to the facts. In the very act of being
formed a language necessarily splits itself into dialectical variety.
The children of to-day resemble those children of humanity, the first
framers of articulate speech, and the children of a single household,
if left to themselves, would have each his own jargon, his own dialect.
So it was, too, with primitive man. Where circumstances were favourable
the inhabitants of the same locality, breathing the same air, and
enjoying the same food, would maintain a family likeness in the tongues
they spoke; but elsewhere all the causes of change would have had free
play, and the languages of mankind would have been as numerous as the
songs of birds. With the growth of society, however, language, the great
social unifier, became more and more fixed and settled; though dialects
continued to branch off, they each occupied a wider area, belonged to
a larger community, and retained their marks of relationship to one
another. When the first level of civilization had been reached, the
history of language entered upon a new phase. Families of speech became
possible, and the same causes that produced permanence and stability
in the customs and beliefs of the community produced them also in the
dialects that it used. The first step had been made towards counteracting
the anarchy of primæval speech and attaining that ideal unity to which
language tends. Here and there the race may have deteriorated; the
Hottentots, for instance, with their developed dialects, may be the
degenerate descendants of more civilized ancestors; but the movement on
the whole has been forward and not backward. Science with a myriad voices
declares the ascent and not the descent of man. Our civilization, it is
true, like the languages that reflect it, is still imperfect, is still
far from the goal that it has in view. But we may take heart from what
has been achieved, and perhaps even look forward to the day when there
shall be not only one hope and one faith, but also one language in which
they shall find utterance.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III.
SPECIMENS OF MIXED JARGONS.
_Maltese._
St. John i. 1-14. (1.) Fil bidu kienet il kelma, u il kelma kienet
’aand Alla, u Alla kien il kelma. (2.) Dina kienet fil bidu ’aand Alla.
(3.) Kollosh biha sar; u minn ’aayrha sheyn ma sar, milli sar. (4.) Fiha
il ḥaỹa kienet, u il ḥaỹa kienet id dawl tal bniedmin. (5.) U id dawl
yilma fid dlamiyiet, u id dlamiyiet ma fehmuhsh. (6.) Kien hemma bniedem
mib’aut mn’ Alla, li ismu Jwan. (7.) Dana jie b’shiehed biesh yished
mid Dawl, biesh il koll yemmnu bih. (8.) Hua ma kiensh id Dawl, izda
kien biesh yishhed mid Dawl. (9.) Kien Dawl tas sew̃a, li yuri lil koll
bniedem li yiji fid dinya. (10.) Hu kien fid dinya, u id dinya bih saret,
u id dinya ma ’aarfetush. (11.) Jie fiḥ weyju, u niesu ma laq’auhsh.
(12.) Izda lil dawk kollha li laq’auh, tahom il yedd illi isiru ulied
Alla, lil dawka li yemmnu b’ Ismu: (13.) Li le twieldu(sh) mid demm, u
la mir rieda tal jisem, lanqas mir rieda tar rajel, izda mn’ Alla. (14.)
U il kelma saret jisem, u ’aammret fostna (u rayna sebḥu [_or_ kburitu],
bḥala sebḥ li mnissel-waḥdu mil missier), mimlia bil graẓya u bis sew̃a.
_Creolese_ (or broken Danish), the language of 39,000 negroes in Danish
West Indies, possessing no genders or numbers, declension or conjugation.
See Klauer-Klattowski, “Deutsche Orthoepie,” p. 108, and J. C. Kingos,
“Kreool A B C Buk” (_S. Croix_, 1770). The language is really Dutch with
Danish words intermixed.
St. John i. 1-14. (1.) In die Begin die Woord ha wees, en die Woord ha
wees bie Godt, en Godt ha wees die Woord. (2.) Die selve ha wees bie Godt
in die Begin. (3.) Almael gut ka maek door die selve; en sonder die niet
een gut ka maek, van almael, wat ka maek. (4.) Die Leven ha wees in hem,
en die Leven ha wees die Ligt van die Mensen. (5.) En die Ligt ha skien
in die Dysternis, en die Dysternis no ha begriep die. (6.) Die ha hab een
mens, Godt ha stier hem, en sie naem ha wees Johannes. (7.) Hem ha kom
tot een Getiegnis, dat hem ha sal getieg van die Ligt, dat almael ha sal
gloov door hem. (8.) Hem no ha wees die Ligt, maer dat hem ha sal getieg
van die Ligt. (9.) Die ha wees die waeragtig Ligt, die verligt almael
Mensen, die kom na die Weereld. (10.) Hem ha wees in die Weereld, en die
Weereld ka maek door hem, en die Weereld no ka ken hem. (11.) Hem ha kom
na sie Eigendom, en sie eigen no ha neem hem an. (12.) Maer sooveel ka
neem hem an, na sender hem ka giev magt for kom kinders van Godt, die
gloov in sie Naem; (13.) Die no bin gebooren van Blud, ook niet van die
Wil van Vleis, ook niet van die Wil van man, maer van Godt. (14.) En die
Woord ka kom Vleis, en ka woon onder ons, en ons ka kik sie Heerligheid,
een Heerligheid, als van die eenig gebooren Soon van die Vaeder, vol van
Gnaede en Waerheid.
_Surinam Negro-English_ (or rather Negro-English-Dutch), spoken in the
Dutch colony of Guiana by at least 100,000 persons, of whom 10,000
are Europeans. See Greenfield, “Defence of the Surinam Negro-English
Version,” p. 17. It includes Spanish, Portuguese, and French words.
Nearly all its words end in a vowel, and it is nearly devoid of grammar.
It is called by the Negroes, _Ningre-tongo_ or _Bakra_.
St. John i. 1-14. (1.) Na begin da Woord ben de, da Woord ben de nanga
Gado, en da Woord ben de Gado srefi. (2.) Da ben de nanga Gado na begin.
(3.) Nanga hem allasanni ben kom, en sondro hem no wansanni ben kom,
dissi de. (4.) Da Liebi ben de na inni va hem, en da Liebi ben de da
kandera va somma. (5.) En da kandera de krieni na dongroe, ma dongroe no
ben teki da kandera. (6.) Gado ben senni wan somma, hem neem Johannes;
(7.) Da srefiwan ben kom vo wan getingenis, va a getinge vo da kandera,
va dem allamal kom briebi nanga hem. (8.) Hem srefi no ben de da kandera,
ma a ben kom va takki vo da kandera. (9.) Datti da reti troe kandera,
dissi kieni gi alla somma dissi kom na kondre. (10.) A ben de na kondre,
en em srefi ben meki kondre; en kondre no ben sabi hem. (11.) A ben kom
na hem Eigendom, en dem somma va hem no ben teki hem. (12.) Ma sa menni
va dem dissi ben teki hem, na dem a ben gi trangi, va kom pikien va Gado;
dem, dissi briebi na hem neem. (13.) Dissi no komoppo na broedoe, effi na
wanni vo skien [nanga broedoe], effi na wanni vo wan man, ma dissi ben
kom gebore na Gado. (14.) En da Woord ben kom somma, a ben liebi na wi
mindri, en wi ben si hem Glori, wan Grangglori, dissi fitti da wan Pikien
va Tatta Gado, foeloe va Gnade en Troefasi.[135]
The broken Negro-Spanish of _Curaçao_ which belongs to the Dutch in the
Caribbean Sea. See J. J. Putman: “Gemeenzame Zamenspraken” (1853).
Matt. v. 1-12. (1.) Anto ora koe Hezoes a mira toer e heende nan, eel
a soebi oen seroe; deespuees eel a sienta i soe desipel nan a bini seka
dje. (2.) I eel a koemisa di papia i di sienja nan di ees manera. (3.)
Bieenabeentoera ta e pober nan na spiritoe, pasoba reina di Dioos ta di
nan. (4.) Bieenabeentoera ta ees nan, koe ta jora, pasoba lo nan bira
konsolaa. (5.) Bieenabeentoera pasifiko nan, pasoba lo nan erf tera. (6.)
Bieenabeentoera ees nan, koe tien hamber i sedoe di hoestisji, pasoba
lo nan no tien hamber i sedoe mas. (7.) Bieenabeentoera ees nan, koe
tien mizerikoordia, pasoba lo heende tien mizerikoordia koe nan. (8.)
Bieenabeentoera ees nan, koe ta liempi di koerasoon, pasoba lo nan mira
Dioos. (9.) Bieenabeentoera ees nan, koe ta perkoera paas, pasoba lo nan
ta jama joe di Dioos. (10.) Bieenabeentoera ees nan, koe ta persigido pa
motiboe di hoestisji, pasoba reina di Dioos ta di nan. (11.) Bosonan lo
ta bieenabeentoerado, koe ta koos nan Zoendra i persigi bosonan, i koe
ta koos pa mi kausa nan ganja toer soorto di maloe ariba bosonan. (12.)
Legra bosonan i salta di legria, pasoba bosonan rekompeensa ta grandi
deen di Ciëloe; pasoba nan a persigi di ees manera e profeet nan, koe
tabata promee koe bosonan.
_Indo-Portuguese_, spoken in Ceylon and on the Indian coast by the mixed
descendants of Dutch and Portuguese, 50,000 of whom are to be found
in Ceylon. It omits cases, verbal suffixes, &c., and uses auxiliary
particles, being a mixture of Dutch, Portuguese, and Indic.
St. John i. 1-14. (1.) Ne o começo tinha a Palavra, e a Palavra tinha
junto de Deos, e a Palavra tinha Deos. (2.) O mesmo tinha ne o começo
junto de Deos. (3.) Todas cousas tinha feitas de elle; e sem elle naõ
tinha feita ne huã cousa que tinha feita. (4.) Em elle tinha vida; e a
vida tinha o Lume de homens. (5.) E o Lume te luze em escuridade; e a
escuridade nunca ja conhece aquel. (6.) Tinha hum homem mandado de Deos,
quem seu nome tinha Joaõ. (7.) O mesmo ja vi por hum testimunha, pera da
testimunho de o Lume, que todos de elle pode cré. (8.) Elle naõ tinha o
Lume, mas tinha mandado pera da testimunho de o Lume. (9.) Aquel tinha o
Lume verdadeiro, que te alumia per cada hum homem quem ta vi ne o mundo.
(10.) Elle tinha ne o mundo, e de elle o mundo tinha formado, e o mundo
per elle nunca ja conhece. (11.) Elle ja vi per seu mesmo povo, e seus
mesmos nunca ja recebe per elle. (12.) Mas per todos quantos quem ja
recebe per elle, per ellotros elle ja da poder pera fica os filhos de
Deos, até, per ellotros quem ja cré em seu nome: (13.) Quem tinha nacido,
nem de sangue, nem de a vontade de a carne, nem de a vontade de homem,
mas de Deos. (14.) E a Palavra tinha feita carne, e ja mora entre nos (e
nos ja olha sua gloria, a gloria como de o unigenito de o Pai), enchido
de graça e verdade.
It is needless to give a specimen of the Judæo-Spanish of Turkey, which
the Turkish Jews regard as their sacred language, since it is merely the
old Spanish of three centuries ago, moulded in accordance with Hebrew
idiom. Similarly the sacred language of the Polish Jews is old German,
mixed with Hebrew words and idioms.
Negro-Portuguese, originally introduced into Surinam by Portuguese
Jews, is now spoken only by one tribe of the free Bush Negroes, the
Saramaccans, on the Upper Surinam, who call it _Djoe-tongo_, “Jews’
language.” There are no printed specimens of it.
Negro-French, spoken in Trinidad, San Domingo, Guadaloupe, and
Martinique, is explained in the excellent “Theory and Practice of Creole
Grammar” of J. J. Thomas (1869), and in a “Catéchisme en la Langue
Créole” (1842). Here is a specimen:—
St. John iv. 6. Apouésent, pîts Jacob té nans place là. Jésis, con li
té lasse épîs route li, assise bôd pîts la; et cété coté mindi con-ça.
(7.) Yon femme, gens Samarie, vinî haler dleau. Jésis dîe li: Bâ-moèn
boèr. (8.) Discipes li étant té aller nans boûq la gañèn povisions. (9.)
Alosse, femme Samaritaine la dîe li: coument fair ous, qui yon Juif, ca
mander dleau poû boèr nans lamain moèn, qui yon femme Samaritaine? pâce
Juifs pas ca méler épîs gens Samarie.
CHAPTER IV.
PHONOLOGY AND SEMATOLOGY.
“Sind doch die Lautgebilde der Vorhang, hinter welchem das
Geheimniss der Begriffe steckt, das vom Sprachforscher
Aufdeckung erwartet.”—POTT.
The skeleton of language is formed by those phonetic utterances into
which significancy must be breathed before they can become living
speech. They are the outward vestment of the thought that lies within,
the material in which the mind of man finds its expression. Thought, it
is true, may be conveyed through gesture and picture-writing as well
as through phonetic utterance, but in phonetic utterance alone does it
find a vehicle sufficient and worthy of itself. Like the marble in the
hands of the sculptor, however, sound not only embodies meaning; it also
limits and defines the expression of that meaning, and confines it within
barriers which it may not pass. The language of man is conditioned by his
physical structure and organization.
What anatomy is to physiology, that phonology is to the science of
language. Comparative philology is based upon phonetic laws; the relation
of words, of forms, of dialects, and of languages is determined by the
laws which govern their outward shape. Languages are grouped together
because they have a common stock of roots and a common grammar; and the
identity of roots and of grammar is on the outward side an identity of
phonetic sound. The laws of scientific philology are for the most part
the laws which regulate the change of sounds, and these are dependent
on the physiological structure of the organs of speech. The priority of
sounds, of words, and even of dialects, is frequently to be discovered by
an appeal to the formation of the throat and lips. We may lay down the
general rule that the harder sound passes into the easier, rather than
the easier into the harder; but it lies with phonology and physiology
to determine which is really the harder sound. It is phonology which
has created the modern science of language, and phonology may therefore
be forgiven if it has claimed more than rightfully belongs to it or
forgotten that it is but one side and one branch of the master science
itself.
The empirical laws of the interchange and equivalence of sounds in
a special group of tongues are ascertained by comparative philology;
the explanation of these laws, the assignment of their causes, the
determination of the order followed by phonetic development or decay,
belong to the province of phonology. Phonology touches on the one hand
upon physics in so far as it is concerned with the analysis of the
sounds of speech, and on the other upon physiology in so far as it
studies the nature and operations of the vocal organs themselves. It
is, in fact, as much a branch of physiology as it is of the science of
language, dealing as it does with a special department of physiology;
but it passes beyond the province of physiology when it investigates
the nature of the sounds produced by the activity of those organs
with which alone physiology is concerned. But whether it touches upon
physiology or upon physics, phonology is equally one of the physical
sciences, pursuing the same method and busied with the same material.
So long as philological research is purely phonological, so long have
we to do with a physical science; it is only when we turn to the other
problems of glottology, only when we pass from the outward vesture of
speech to the meaning which it clothes, that the science of language
becomes a historical one. The inner meaning of speech is the reflection
of the human mind, and the development of the human mind must be studied
historically. Those, therefore, who refuse to regard glottology as
other than a physical science, take as it were but a half-view of it;
they are forced to confine themselves to its outward texture, to be
content with a mere description of the different families of speech
and their characteristics, like the botanist or the zoologist, and to
leave untouched the many questions and problems which a broader view
of the science would present to them. It is true that even upon the
broader view, the method of the science is as much that of the physical
sciences as the method of geology; it is also true that the doctrine of
evolution has introduced what may be termed the historical treatment
even into botany and zoology; but nevertheless linguistic science as
a whole must be included among the historical ones, unless we are to
narrow its province unduly and identify it with the subordinate science
of phonology. The physical science will give us the skeleton of speech,
the dry bones of the anatomist’s dissecting-room; for life and thought we
must turn to history.
We must not forget, however, that we can understand the past only by the
help of the present. An antiquarian study of philology will enable us to
trace the history of words and forms, to group languages into families,
and to discover the empirical laws of phonetic change; to interpret and
verify these laws, to correct our classifications and conclusions, to
learn what sounds really are, we must examine the living idioms of the
modern world. The method of science is to work back from the known to
the unknown, and if we are to study glottology to any purpose and to
extend and confirm its generalizations, it must be by first observing and
experimenting on actual speech. We must begin by disabusing our minds
of the belief that words consist of letters and not of sounds; on the
contrary, letters are at best but guides to the sounds they represent,
and only the experienced student of actual sounds is in a position
to determine their real value. Phonology stands at the threshold of
linguistic science, and those alone who have honestly wooed and won her
can enter into the shrine within. The physical science leads upward to
the historical science; the key to the past is to be found in the present.
Now the first question we have to ask is, What is a sound? The most
general answer we can give to this question is that a sound is the
impression made upon the organs of hearing by the rapid swinging of
an elastic body in an elastic medium, which is usually the air. The
vibrations set on foot by this rapid swinging reach the ear under the
form of waves, and these may succeed each other at either irregular or
regular intervals. In the first case we have what is called a noise—a
source of constant delight to the savage and the infant, but exceedingly
painful to the sensitive ear. In the second case musical tones are
produced, among which must be counted the utterances of articulate
speech. Tones, or rather full tones (as opposed to partial ones), are
distinguished from each other by their (1) strength or loudness, their
(2) height or pitch, and their (3) quality or _timbre_. The strength
depends upon the amplitude of the vibrations produced in the elastic
medium, the pitch on the number of the vibrations in any given space of
time, or, what amounts to the same thing, on the length of time occupied
by each vibration, and the _timbre_ (also called “tone”) on the form
assumed by the vibrations or waves of sound, that is to say, on the
relations of the vibrations one to the other.
There are but few musical instruments that produce a simple tone; in
fact, among those usually employed the tuning-fork is almost the only
one from which we can hear it. All other musical tones result from a
combination of simple, or as they have sometimes been termed, “partial”
tones, whose double vibrations or “swing-swangs,” as De Morgan named
them, stand to one another in the relation of 1, 2, 3, 4, &c. The
Pythagoreans of the fourth century B.C. were already acquainted with
the fact that the respective lengths of the fundamental note with its
octave, fifth and fourth, must be as one to two, as two to three, and as
three to four.[136] This fundamental note, or deepest partial tone, is
the starting-point from which we ascend upwards; it forms the standard
by which the pitch or ascending scale of sounds is measured, while the
remaining partial tones go by the name of the harmonics or upper tones.
The partial tones coalesce so closely into a full tone as almost to
escape the notice even of the trained ear, but their co-existence may be
easily detected by the help of resonatory instruments. The full tones
themselves, however, which we shall henceforth call tones or notes,[137]
may not be able to make the impression upon the nerves of hearing needful
for conveying a sense of sound to the brain within. The tone produced by
any number of vibrations less than sixteen a second is wholly inaudible
except by the help of the microphone, and even this number of vibrations
brings out so deep a pitch as to be scarcely perceptible.[138] “For
practical purposes,” says Professor Max Müller,[139] “the lowest tone we
hear is produced by thirty double vibrations in one second, the highest
by 4,000. Between these two lie the usual seven octaves of our musical
instruments. It is said to be possible, however, to produce perceptible
musical tones through eleven octaves, beginning with sixteen and ending
with 38,000 double vibrations in one second, though here the lower
notes are mere hums, the upper notes mere clinks.” The sense of sound
is not stronger and more trustworthy than the other senses of sight,
of touch, of taste, of smell. On all sides we are strictly limited by
the conditions which surround us, and even science, though she may
assist the senses by instruments which enlarge and extend their powers,
reaches at last a boundary which she cannot pass. The world is a vast
sounding-board, even if we know it not; the infinitesimally small and
the infinitesimally great alike lie beyond our apprehension. Above and
below there is infinity, and “the music of the spheres,” of which the old
Greek thinkers dreamed, is not, after all, so very far removed from the
truth that science has revealed to us. The notes or partial tones that we
hear are the purely mechanical product of a definitely determined number
of double vibrations, and the variations in pitch we notice between
them are due to the length of time occupied by these vibrations. If,
for instance, one note takes half the time another does, if the number
of oscillations in the second is twice that required by the fundamental
note, the interval between the two notes is what is called an octave. If,
again, the proportion between the two notes is as three to two, three
waves of the one occupying the same time as two waves of the other, the
interval between them is a fifth; while a major sixth represents the
interval between two notes, which stand to each other as five to three.
Consequently, if we divide into two equal parts a tense cord, which, when
made to vibrate throughout its whole length, yields its fundamental note,
and vibrate either part, we shall hear the octave above that fundamental
note. In other words, the number of the vibrations of any two cords
having the same degree of tension is (other things being equal) inversely
as their length. In the case of two elastic rods or rigid tongues, the
number of vibrations is inversely as the square of the length; hence an
elastic rod six inches long will vibrate four times more rapidly than
a rod of the same material and equal thickness twelve inches long. The
number of vibrations is also dependent on the thickness and tension of
the cords or rods, being inversely as the thickness of the cords and
directly as the thickness of the rods, and in both cases proportional to
the square root of their tension. It must be remembered that membranous
tongues like our own _chordæ vocales_, act in accordance with the same
general law as tense cords and not as elastic rods.
Every body capable of producing sound has a tone peculiar to itself;
a stringed instrument, for instance, and a trombone differ in the
tones they give forth, and we may even divide the air into definitely
circumscribed portions, or “chambers of resonance,” each of which will
have its own peculiar tone. The form assumed by the double vibrations,
the ultimate causes of sound, determines these differences in the quality
of the tones we hear. Sometimes the vibrations will run in zigzag course
through the elastic medium; sometimes their shape will be rounded;
sometimes, again, it will be angular. The simplest wave of sound, that
produced by a tuning-fork, flows in a succession of spiral lines, and
the partial tones or harmonics of other instruments may also be assumed
to be so many simple waves of sound of the same form. In fact, even if a
harmonic may be resolved into a combination of other harmonics or partial
tones, and these again into yet simpler and fainter harmonics, we must
come at last to simple notes, corresponding with the note emitted by the
tuning-fork and composed of vibrations that have the same spiral shape.
It is the varying amalgamation of these simple spirals that occasions the
varying forms of the full tones; each full tone (the simple tone alone
excepted) being made up of harmonics and consequently of their spirals
in different proportions, and in this difference of mixture lies the
difference of quality in the tones we hear.
Ohm, Fourier, and others first proved that the simple pendulous
oscillation is the only vibration unaccompanied by harmonics, and that
all full tones can be decomposed into the simple vibrations of which they
consist. Helmholtz has now ascertained the exact form of many of these
compound tones, as well as the conditions under which the by-notes or
harmonics are present or absent. In the violin, for example, as compared
with the guitar or the pianoforte, he finds that the primary note is
strong, the partial tones from two to six weak, and those from seven
to ten clearer and more distinct.[140] He was first led to detect the
variations of form they assume by applying a microscope to the vibrations
of different musical instruments, and the fact was further confirmed by
the discovery made by himself and Donders that the sounds articulated by
the human voice are composed of vibrations which each assume their own
special shape. The phonautographs since constructed by Scott and König
actually delineate the forms of these waves of sound either on a plate
of sand, or in the flickerings of a gas-flame, or in the movements of
a writing pencil, and the microscopic examination of the impressions
produced by articulate sounds in the tinfoil of the phonograph shows a
series of indentations of various but determinate shapes.
The number of forms which can be assumed by the waves of sound is
naturally limited in kind, while various bodies may emit sounds
containing the same harmonic or partial tone. The quality or timbre which
depends on the relation and strength of these partial tones, and of the
composite form assumed by the sum of their vibrations, constitutes what
we have called a peculiar tone. This, as we have seen, is a simple one
in the case of the tuning-fork, but in other cases it forms part of a
full or complex group. We may find an illustration in the characteristic
lines of light which we learn from the spectrum analysis are projected
by substances; where we are dealing with a simple elementary substance,
the line thrown upon the spectrum is correspondingly simple; where, on
the other hand, the substance is compound, its spectrum also is compound,
reflecting the several chemical elements of which it is made up. The
simple spectrum answers to the simple harmonic or partial tone with its
varying pitch and invariable form, just as the compound spectrum answers
to the full note or peculiar tone with its characteristic quality and
diversified grouping of partial tones. Now, if a body which has a certain
peculiar tone is struck by a sound which contains a partial tone in
any way similar to this peculiar tone, the body in question vibrates
in sympathy, and we hear what is known as a by-note or harmonic. This
by-note reacts upon the partial tone which has caused it, strengthening
the partial tone and so modifying the quality of the complex sound. If,
for instance, we play a note such as C on a violin, the strings of a
piano representing C as well as the harmonics allied to it will vibrate
in sympathy. Of course the more elastic the body which is struck, the
louder and clearer will be the by-note, and of all elastic bodies none
are better than those chambers of resonance into which we can divide the
air. Such chambers of resonance are afforded by wind instruments of all
kinds, whose shape determines the peculiar tone they are to emit. If the
instrument is so constructed as to change its shape at will, now round,
now straight, now broad, now narrow, the number of different chambers of
resonance, and consequently the number of different peculiar tones, may
be almost indefinitely increased.
It is this variability of form which makes the human throat such a
marvellous instrument for the production of manifold sounds. Like most
chambers of resonance, it has the hollow reed-like shape which connects
it most readily with the primary source of sound. In analyzing the
material of language we must never forget that we have to do with the
most perfect wind instrument that exists, a wind instrument, too, of
infinite pliability and power of change, and thus in constant and ready
sympathy with the harmonics that are struck by the other organs of speech.
We must now pass from the science of acoustics to the science of
physiology. We have seen what are the conditions under which musical
notes are produced, we have also seen that among these musical notes
the utterances of articulate speech have to be classed; we have next to
examine into the nature and conformation of the physical organs to which
these utterances owe their origin. In the first place, the organs of
speech may roughly be divided into three groups:—the breathing apparatus,
or lungs, the _trachea_ or windpipe with larynx and bronchial tubes,
and the chamber of resonance or mouth and nose. The lungs provide the
material which is worked up into inarticulate noises and articulate
sounds by the _trachea_ and chamber of resonance. As long as the breath
flows out of the throat and mouth quietly and without interruption
language of any sort is out of the question. The organs of speech are
at rest, and all that can be done is to propel the breath with greater
or less violence. We may breathe hard through the mouth, we may even
make noises like that of snorting through the nose, but as yet there is
nothing which can constitute a starting-point for articulate speech.[141]
Mere _breath_, as distinguished from _voice_, only supplies the material
out of which words and sentences may afterwards be created. Voice is
breath, acted upon and excited into waves of sound by the organs of the
throat and mouth; a larger quantity of air than is needed for simple
breathing is rapidly taken into the lungs, and immediately expelled in
intermittent gusts, but with varying degrees of force. Almost all the
sounds we utter are accompanied by exspiration; only such sounds as an
occasionally mispronounced _ja_ in Germany or our own surprised _Oh!_ are
produced while the breath is being drawn in. Experiment will at once show
how difficult it is to pronounce a sound at the same time that this is
being done.
The breath, then, is the passive instrument through which language is
formed by the trachea and chamber of resonance. This trachea is a long
cartilaginous and elastic pipe ending in the bronchial tubes, through
which the air is admitted to the lungs. Its upper part is termed the
larynx, consisting of five cartilages and situated in the throat. The
lowest of these cartilages is the _cricoid_, which resembles a ring
with the broad flat surface turned downwards. Over this comes the
_cartilago thyroidea_ or Adam’s apple, with two wings which partly
enclose the _cartilago cricoidea_, and form a link between it and the
_os hyoideum_,[142] or bone of the tongue, which has somewhat of the
shape of a horseshoe. The space surrounded by these two cartilages may be
compared with a hollow reed, out of the back part of which a piece has
been cut. From the base of the latter and the upper rim of the _cartilago
cricoidea_ spring two small pyramidal cartilages, the arytenoids,
which resemble the horns of an ox and almost touch one another. Their
roots are connected with one another and with the cricoid and thyroid
cartilages by the so-called _processus vocales_, which in spite of their
name have little to do with the formation of speech. The horns of the
arytenoids serve to unite two elastic bands to the opposite surface of
the thyroid cartilage. These bands are formed of muscle enveloped with
mucous membrane, and are the famous _chordæ vocales_ upon which as upon
the strings of a piano the manifold modulations of human language are
played. So long as they remain, the other vocal organs, not excluding
the tongue, may be removed without depriving the patient of the faculty
of articulate speech.[143] Their length differs in men and women, in
children and adults; the average length in men being about one-third
greater than in women, and occasioning the different pitch of male and
female voices.[144] The two _chordæ vocales_ run obliquely across the
cavity enclosed between the thyroid cartilage and a small projection
on the front part of the arytenoid cartilage, an aperture which is
called the glottis, or _glottis vera_. They can be relaxed or contracted
at will by the muscles of the cartilages to which they are attached,
and a portion of them can even be deadened by pressure from a small
protuberance on the under side of the epiglottis. The glottis itself is
divided into two parts, one the space between the vocal chords and the
lateral thyro-arytenoid and crico-arytenoid cartilages, the other the
triangular space between the vocal chords themselves, the latter allowing
a passage for breath, the former a passage for voice. Both spaces can
of course be narrowed or enlarged by the contraction or relaxation of
the vocal chords, and the junction of the latter will close one or both
altogether. It is in this secret chamber that the phonetic substance of
speech is moulded into shape; the vibrations of the _chordæ vocales_ in
the breath of the glottis are the ultimate cause of syllables and words.
Above this chamber of the voice the trachea or windpipe again widens, and
a second chamber is formed by two cavities on either side, called the
ventricles of the larynx (the _ventriculi Morgagni_). Each cavity leads,
at the back, into a pouch of the mucous membrane called the laryngeal
sac and covered with sixty or seventy mucous glands, the secretion from
which acts like oil on a piece of machinery by keeping the vocal chords
and the surrounding parts in a moist condition. Stretched across the
cavities are two thick ligaments, the false vocal chords, like the true
_chordæ vocales_ below them. They differ from the vocal chords in having
no muscle of their own, but like the latter can contract or enlarge at
pleasure the false glottis (_glottis spuria_), the space, that is, which
is enclosed between them. The false glottis, which, like the false vocal
chords, takes no part in the creation of language, is shut by an elastic
cartilage, called the _epiglottis_, the lower point of which is attached
to the thyroid cartilage immediately above the _chordæ vocales_, while
the upper end broadens out like a leaf and falls over the fissure of
the false glottis. This corresponds with the entrance of the larynx.
The upper surface of the epiglottis is concave, and in swallowing it is
allowed to drop upon the larynx. At other times it may be depressed over
the false and true vocal chords.
Such is the machinery whereby breath from the lungs is transformed into
voice in its passage through the windpipe; and voice is next taken up
by what we have termed the chamber of resonance and modified in various
ways. If we may call the glottis the manufactory of voice, we may call
the mouth and nose the manufactory of the articulate sounds into which
voice is divided. At the back of the epiglottis lies the _pharynx_,
leading into the _œsophagus_, and the pharynx is bounded on the side of
the mouth by the posterior pillar or _arcus pharyngo-palatinus_, opposite
to which is the anterior pillar or _arcus glosso-palatinus_. Between them
are the tonsils, and above these again the _uvula_, a sort of pendent
valve which hangs downwards from the top of the anterior pillar towards
the posterior pillar behind. The uvula is attached to a piece of yielding
muscle known as the soft palate or _velum palati_, which with the uvula
separates the throat from the entrance to the nostrils. The soft palate
can move either backwards or forwards; in pronouncing the guttural (_ng_)
for instance, it is pressed forward against the tongue, shutting off
the throat; in pronouncing the vowels, on the other hand, it is pressed
backward, and so cuts off the flow of breath to the nose. Above the
soft palate comes the arch of the hard palate or roof of the mouth, and
below this the tongue with its two roots and pointed tip. The teeth that
enclose the mouth, along with their alveolars that form the front wall of
the hard palate, have much to do with the formation of specific sounds,
while it is hardly necessary to refer to the phonological importance
of both nose and lips. As is well known, a leading characteristic of
cultivated English is the little use it makes of the latter.
It is now time to consider the precise parts played by these different
organs of speech, in producing the various elements of spoken language.
We must begin by putting out of sight all inarticulate sounds or noises,
such as the clicks of the Bushman or the Hottentot, which have entered
into the composition and framework of actual speech. Such inarticulate
sounds are but the stepping-stones to real language, the first steps
of the ladder, as it were, which were eventually to lead to articulate
words. They are the natural cries of man like the natural cries of the
animals from which they in no way differ; and just as on the one side the
barking of the dog and the mewing of the cat are said to be attempts to
imitate the human voice, so on the other hand the inarticulate cries of
the _infant_ or “non-speaker” are on the same level as the roar of the
lion or the shriek of the cockatoo. We are told that the cynocephalic ape
of the Upper Senegal, whose form is depicted on the monuments of ancient
Egypt, utters clicks which sometimes contain a distinct _d_,[145] and
the Bushmen themselves show a true instinct when they make the beasts
in their fables talk not only with the clicks of the Bushman dialects,
but even in the case of some animals with clicks that do not otherwise
occur.[146] If we watch the first endeavours of children to speak, we
may discover inarticulate noises gradually becoming articulate sounds
with definite meanings, and we may even trace a recollection of the first
efforts of man to create a language for himself in the guttural aspirates
heard for instance in some of the Semitic dialects. Indeed, the name
given to the hard breathing (_h_) by the Greeks, πνεῦμα δασύ or “rough
aspirate,” reminds us of the guttural noises, not yet phonetic sounds,
made by the child; in forming this sound we jerk out the breath at the
same time that we narrow the glottis, adding if we like various degrees
of hoarseness by further stopping its free flow. The glottal catch,
which is heard in Danish after vowels, and according to Mr. Bell is
substituted in the Glasgow pronunciation for “voiceless stops,” is really
a mere cough. Even the _spiritus lenis_ or soft breathing, heard before
a vowel, partakes in some measure of the nature of a noise. It is true
that the rough breathing cannot be sung while the soft breathing may be;
but this is because in the case of the latter the breath is checked near
the vocal chords and can therefore be intoned. Professor Max Müller is
doubtless right in holding that all that the Greeks meant by πνεῦμα ψιλόν
as opposed to πνεῦμα δασύ was “a negative definition of another breath
which is free from roughness,”[147] just as the ĕ-´psilon is negatively
contrasted with the _êta_. Neither breathing was regarded as constituting
as yet a true sound or “voice.”
The true sounds of language, however, were distinguished but roughly
and imperfectly one from the other. Plato, in his Kratylus, divides
them into φονηέντα or “vowels,” and ἄφωνα or “mutes,” these last being
further subdivided into semi-vowels which are neither vowels nor mutes
(φωνηέντα μὲν οὔ, οὐ μέντοι γε ἄφθογγα) and ἄφθογγα or real mutes. The
term ἄφωνα, mutes, afterwards came to be restricted in its sense as a
simple equivalent of Plato’s ἄφθογγα, its place being taken by the term
σύμφωνα or “consonants,” letters, that is to say, which must be sounded
along with a vowel. These consonants were next classed as ἡμίφωνα or
semi-vowels (_l_, _m_, _n_, _r_, and _s_), ὑγρά or “liquids” which
covered all the semi-vowels with the exception of _s_, and ἄφωνα or
“mutes.” The mutes fall into three classes, the ψιλά or “bare” (_k_, _t_,
_p_), the δασέα or “aspirates” (_kh_, _th_, _ph_) and the μέσα which
stood, as it were, “between” them. The Latin translation of the latter
term has given us the _mediæ_ of modern grammars.
Far more thorough-going and scientific were the phonological labours
and classification of the Hindu _prâtiśâkhyas_. Instead of starting
from written speech like the Greek grammarians, they had to do with an
orally-delivered literature, and hence while the Greeks never got beyond
the belief that the tongue, teeth, and lips were the sole instruments of
pronunciation, the Hindus had carefully analyzed the organs of speech
some centuries before the Christian era, and composed phonological
treatises which may favourably compare with those of our own day. They
knew, for example, that in sounding the _tenues_, or hard letters, the
glottis is kept open, while in sounding the _mediæ_, or soft ones, it
is closed; they knew also that _e_ and _o_ were diphthongs analyzable
into _a_ + _i_ and _a_ + _u_; and they explained _k_ and _g_, _p_ and
_b_, as formed by complete contact of the vocal organs. They had noted
the _repha_ or “Newcastle burr,” and had divided the nasals into their
several classes. The names they gave to the various sounds, and the
groups into which they were classified, were descriptive of their mode
of formation, like the names similarly applied by modern phonologists.
Thus the guttural sibilant formed near the root of the tongue (χ) was
called _Jihvâmûlîya_, “the tongue-root letter,” and the labial sibilant
(φ) _Upadhmânîya_, “to be breathed upon.” The consonants were classed
both according to the place where they were formed, and according to
their _prayatna_, or “quality,” the mutes and nasals, for instance, being
formed by “complete contact” of the vocal organs, the semi-vowels by
“_slight_ contact” (_îshat sprishṭa_), the sibilants by “slight opening”
(_îshad vivṛita_), and the vowels by complete opening. A controversy
even sprung up among the grammarians as to the extent of this opening of
the organs. “Some ascribe to the semi-vowels _duḥspṛishṭa_, imperfect
contact, or _îshadaspṛishṭa_, slight non-contact, or _îshadvivṛita_,
slight opening; to the sibilants _nemaspṛishṭa_, half-contact; _i.e._,
greater opening than is required for the semi-vowels, or _vivṛita_,
complete opening; while they require for the vowels either _vivṛita_,
complete opening, or _aspṛishṭa_, non-contact.”[148]
Leaving the speculations of the past, let us now pass on to the results
which have been obtained by modern research. Thanks to the labours of
men like Alexander Ellis, Melville Bell, Helmholtz, Czermak, Brücke,
Sweet, and others, the mechanism of speech has been fairly settled; and
though many points are still open to discussion, the main facts have
been thoroughly ascertained and adequately explained. We have learnt the
real nature and causes of those phonetic elements of speech which the
old grammarians first tried to separate and classify; we have cleared
away the confusion from which even the Vedic scholars of India could
not wholly escape, and have discovered that in phonology as elsewhere,
the convenient systems of practical life do not bear a close scientific
investigation. Even the ordinary distinction of vowels and consonants
is exposed to more than one objection. It rests not upon the essential
character of the sounds themselves, but upon mere differences of
function, and its advocates have to invent a series of semi-vowels or
semi-consonants, a name which of itself indicates how incomplete and
unsatisfactory the distinction must be. The distinction, indeed, has
a basis of fact, but the fact is one which has been misapprehended or
overlooked.
Apart from the respiratory organs which supply the fuel, the chief agents
in the manufacture of speech are the throat and mouth. The breath, as it
makes its way upward, passes the vocal chords, causing these to vibrate;
and while the forms taken by the vibrations determine the quality or
timbre of the sound to be uttered, the very essence of a vowel, for
instance, consisting in the quality of the voice, the number of the
vibrations determines its pitch.
In the pitch we have to distinguish between two things, the chest or
true notes and the head or falsetto notes, respectively due to the
position and action of the vocal chords. In the chest notes the vocal
chords are stiffened and laid side by side, so that when the flow of
breath comes from the lungs, they are forced aside for a moment, to
spring back the next and cause a series of intermittent puffs of breath.
In the falsetto notes, on the other hand, the muscles of the vocal chords
are not contracted, nor is the glottis wholly closed; hence only the
inner membrane of the chords is set in motion by the breath, and instead
of actually meeting one another, the chords merely narrow or enlarge the
aperture of the glottis.[149]
The forms assumed by the vibrations depend, of course, on the anatomical
structure of the vocal chords, their greater or less elasticity, and the
like. Besides quality and pitch, however, we must also take account of
the _intensity_ of the sound, this intensity or emphasis arising from the
force with which the stream of breath is expelled from the lungs, and the
corresponding strain of the muscles of the trachea and vocal chords.
In whispering, the amount of intensity is considerably diminished,
though the pitch is quite as distinct as in loud voice. The glottis is
not completely closed, but the upward flow of breath is not strong enough
to do more than produce a sort of friction, or imperfect vibration in
the vocal chords. The latter incline towards each other on the side
furthest from the arytenoids, and so give the glottis a triangular
shape; the larynx, however, may also assume other forms. Hence it is
that we may distinguish three kinds of whispered voice. We may either
have a soft whisper, where the whole glottis is narrowed, and the force
with which the breath is emitted is very slight; or a medium whisper,
where the force is greater, and only that part of the glottis left open
which lies between the arytenoids; or a loud whisper, where the force
is considerable, the false vocal chords are in close contact, and the
epiglottis bent stiffly downwards, allowing but a very small opening for
the escape of the breath. A loud whisper is rare; a medium whisper the
most common. Sighing, it may be added, is produced above the larynx,
which takes no part in its production; when the vocal chords are brought
into action, the sigh becomes a groan.
It needs but a short experience to discover the numberless varieties
of voice that may exist, and it is not uncommon for a blind man by this
means not only to distinguish the age and sex of those he meets, but
even to recognize his friends. In fact the human voice, from the deepest
male to the highest female voice, has a range of nearly four octaves,
the lowest note being E, produced by 80 vibrations per second, and the
highest C, produced by 1,024 vibrations per second. But Vierordt has
shown that in extreme cases its range is nearly 5½ octaves, from F
(produced by 42 vibrations) to A (produced by 1,708 vibrations). In the
same individual it is rare for the range of the voice to be more than
two octaves, and in ordinary speech it is generally only half an octave.
These different notes are due to changes in the length and tension of the
vocal chords and their approximation or separation, the lower notes, for
instance, requiring them to be longer, looser, and more widely separated
than in the case of the higher notes, and consequently to admit a larger
but less rapid current of air. It has been calculated that 240 different
states of tension of the vocal chords must be accurately producible at
will, in order to cause all the notes and intermediate tones heard in a
perfect voice of ordinary range. Madame Mara could effect no fewer than
2,000 changes. The four chief varieties of the voice—the bass, the tenor,
the contralto, and the soprano—are dependent on differences of pitch,
that is ultimately on differences in the length of the vocal chords.
The bass and the tenor with the intermediate baritone characterize the
man, the contralto and soprano with the intermediate mezzo-soprano
characterize the woman. The lowest note of the contralto is about an
octave higher than the lowest note of the bass, the highest soprano
about an octave higher than the highest tenor. Sometimes, however, we
find a bass voice singing the higher notes of a tenor, and yet at the
same time remaining bass. The reason of this is that the various kinds
of voice differ not only in pitch, but also in timbre. This is caused by
differences in the vocal organs. The larynx of women is smaller than that
of men; the angle formed by it in front is less acute, and the cartilages
are softer. The voice of boys is either contralto or soprano, like
that of women, though generally different in tone. There is, however,
no difference in the larynx of either boys or girls up to the age of
puberty, when in the case of boys it rapidly increases in size, and the
vocal chords become longer, thicker, and coarser.
The elevation or depression of the larynx exercises a certain modifying
influence upon the voice. When the voice is raised from a low to a high
pitch, the whole larynx, together with the trachea, is lifted towards
the base of the skull. The exact way, however, in which the trachea and
the parts above the glottis affect the voice is by no means clear. The
thyro-arytenoid muscles, which extend from the arytenoids to the recessed
angle of the thyroid cartilage, have much to do with the production of
these higher tones. They narrow the diameter of the larynx just below the
vocal chords, and the diminution of the calibre of the wind-tube nearest
the chords thus occasioned heightens the pitch. On the other hand, the
pitch is made to fall by semitones when the tube is lengthened. In
short, the greater the strength of the current of air the higher is the
pitch. The depression of the larynx produces the so-called veiled voice
(_vox clandestina_), the larynx itself being then covered by the entire
pharynx, the root of the tongue approximated to the palate, and the voice
being thus made to resound in the upper part of the pharynx under the
skull.
The precise nature of ventriloquism is not quite certain. J. Müller
states that it may be produced by speaking through an extremely narrow
glottis, during a very slow exspiration, performed only by the lateral
walls of the chest, a deep inspiration having been first taken, so as
to cause the protrusion of the abdominal viscera by the descent of the
diaphragm. Magendie, however, considers it to be produced in the larynx
by variously modifying the voice so as to imitate the changes otherwise
effected in it by distance.
The character of the voice is necessarily modified by changes in the
structure of the vocal organs, whether due to old age, to weather and
climate, to exhaustion, or to disease. In old age the ossification of
the cartilages, the diminution of muscular and nervous power, and the
degeneration of the larynx, make the voice weak, tremulous, and “piping.”
In damp chilly weather the voice is often lowered by as much as two or
three notes: indeed, nothing affects it more rapidly than a damp and
depressing atmosphere. Exhaustion, again, accounts for the dissonance
sometimes perceived in the voice of singers, while inflammation of the
lining membrane of the larynx, and other diseases, will impair or wholly
destroy the power of utterance. Loss of voice during a bad cold is a
familiar instance of the latter fact.
Lisping, stammering, and other kinds of imperfect speech, are mainly
due to nervous disease, stammering being usually caused by temporary
spasm of the glottis. Too high a palate is another cause of irregular
utterance. Dumbness, when not occasioned by deafness, as is generally
the case, must be ascribed either to malformation of the vocal organs,
or, more commonly, to disease of the nervous centres. Whistling, it must
be remembered, results from the vibration caused by the friction of the
breath against the edges of the open lips, and is wholly formed in the
mouth.
The mouth, or chamber of resonance, is especially important for the
creation of articulate speech. On the one side there are a great many
sounds which owe to it their origin, on the other side even the sounds
which are formed in the throat are necessarily modified in passing
through the mouth. While _t_, _p_, or _k_ have no existence until the
voiced breath has reached the region of the mouth, the vowels which are
formed in the throat cannot be heard in their pure and original state,
but must pass through a chamber of resonance and so become more or less
transformed. The throat, again, may remain passive, but the mouth must
always be active. Of course the mouth forms a chamber of resonance not
only for the sounds produced by the throat, but also for those produced
by itself; the larger part of the mouth, for instance, forms a chamber of
resonance for the palatal _ch_. We must remember, moreover, that a sound
can be more variously changed and modified, the larger and more variable
is the part of the mouth which serves as a chamber of resonance, that
is to say, the further back the place is in which it is manufactured.
The vowels consequently come first in capability of modification, then
the gutturals and dentals, and finally the labials. It has often been
observed that children when learning to speak are apt to change a
guttural into a dental, and say _do_ instead of _go_, the guttural being
formed further back than the dental, and so undergoing a greater amount
of modification in its passage through the mouth.
A vowel is voice freely emitted through the throat and mouth without
interruption, and modified only by the different positions assumed by
the tongue. The essence of a vowel is the quality or timbre of the
voiced breath, and this quality, as we have already seen, is due to the
varying forms taken by the vibrating vocal chords when played upon by the
breath. Necessarily, however, the quality of the voice as it leaves the
throat must be always the same, since the throat is a musical instrument
which possesses its own peculiar tone. What, then, is the cause of the
differences we notice in the quality of the vowels? Simply the mobility
of what we have called the chamber of resonance, the manifold shapes the
organs of the mouth are able to assume being so many musical instruments,
each with its peculiar tone. The partial tones or harmonics which go
to make up the quality of the voiced breath are strengthened by the
corresponding peculiar tones of the several shapes assumed by the mouth,
while at the same time those harmonics which do not agree with the
peculiar tones are dulled or deadened. Hence a vowel is the quality of
voiced breath produced by a combination of the forms of the vibrations of
the vocal chords with those of the vibrating air in the various shapes
taken by the chamber of resonance. The pitch of the vowel depends of
course on the number of vibrations during the time of utterance, and may
be detected even when the vowel is whispered. Indeed, as Donders and
Helmholtz have shown, every vowel has its characteristic pitch, whether
it is voiced or whispered. The different vowels can be heard in cases of
aphonia, where the vocal chords are more or less paralyzed, while the
_vox clandestina_ is able to rise or fall. This is explained by the fact
that even in whispering a certain friction is exercised on the vocal
chords. If, for instance, we whisper the sound of _ü_, and then let the
whisper gradually pass into a whistle, we shall always get the same tone,
and Professor Max Müller thinks that the indications of musical pitch in
the whispered vowels must be treated as “imperfect tones; that is to say,
as noises approaching to tones, or as irregular vibrations, nearly, yet
not quite, changed into regular or isochronous vibrations.”[150]
The number of possible vowel-sounds is almost infinite. The vocal
chamber of resonance is almost infinitely variable in the forms it may
assume, and it is in these forms, as we have seen, that we must find
the origin of the vowels and their _nuances_ of sound. In Prince L.-L.
Bonaparte’s alphabet, as given in Mr. A. J. Ellis’s “Early English
Pronunciation,” seventy-five vowel-sounds (exclusive of _ḷ_ and _ṛ_) are
distinguished from one another, ten of which occur in no actual language,
and of the remaining sixty-five, fifty occur each in less than nine
European dialects. For practical purposes, however, it is necessary to
analyze the formation of those vowels only which are heard most usually
in spoken language, always remembering that the _nuances_ of which these
are capable are nearly unlimited, and that the same speaker is constantly
varying what he intends and believes to be the same vowel-sound. Speaking
generally, we may say that in pronouncing the vowels we invariably raise
the tongue towards the palate, but not so as to touch it—as in the case
of the consonants—the lips being passive in some instances, and rounded
in others. It is needless to note that in phonology, as in all other
departments of the science of language, the Italian pronunciation of the
vowels must be adopted. Our erroneous pronunciation of the vowel-symbols
is not one of the least important reasons for urging a reform of English
spelling.
The three fundamental vowels, round which all the others group
themselves, are _a_, _i_, and _u_; and though it is not necessary to
hold that these were the first vowel-sounds articulated by man, it
is necessary to regard them, for analytical purposes, as the primary
elements to which the rest may be ultimately referred. According to
Winteler, these three vowels must be arranged in a straight line, of
which _i_ forms one end and _u_ the other, _a_ standing in the middle.
In forming _a_ the tongue is in a more constrained position than in
the case of any other vowel; it lies flat and retracted, while the lips
are wide open. Helmholtz makes its inherent tone B″ flat. Owing to
the constrained position of the tongue, this vowel is more liable to
be modified than any other; the “neutral” _a_ is scarcely ever heard,
produced as it is by the gradual narrowing of the movement of the
tongue from the back of the mouth, where the obscure _a_ of _father_ is
heard, to the front of the mouth, where we get the broad _ä_ of _pair_.
This neutral _a_ which may be heard in the Italian _ămātă_ is not the
“natural” sound it is sometimes called; different parts of the mouth must
be modified to create it, occasioning the nasal sound we perceive in
moaning if the mouth remains passive, or the shrill _ä_ of the new-born
child, if the nasal orifice is closed by the elevation of the soft
palate.[151] The belief that language was once in a stage in which the
neutral _a_ was the only vowel known is contradicted by the facts of
phonology.
A stronger effort of articulation is required for _i_ and _u_. The lips
must be slightly opened, the larynx raised, and the tongue pushed upward,
so that its front approaches the hard palate, if we want to produce _i_,
the natural pitch of which is said to be D⁗. The movement of the tongue
from the back to the front of the mouth, with a gradual narrowing of the
air passage, forms both the _i_ of _mill_, and the _i_ of _meal_.[152] As
we shall see, the position of the tongue in forming _i_ approaches that
required for forming the palatals, and thus explains the relationship
that exists between them. For _u_ the tongue is raised towards the soft
palate, the larynx lowered, and the lips rounded; hence the connection
between this vowel and the labials. Its connection with the gutturals,
as illustrated by the change of _werra_ into _guerre_, or _vespa_ into
_guêpe_, is explained by the position of the tongue, which approaches the
soft palate in forming _u_, and touches it in forming _k_ or _g_. The
rounded shape of the mouth needed by _u_, as compared with its narrow
neck-like appearance needed by _i_, strengthens the deep partial tones,
and dulls the sharp ones, thus occasioning the converse effect of _i_. In
fact, _u_ is essentially the vowel of the bass, _i_ of the soprano. The
inherent tone of _u_ is F.
It is obvious that an almost endless series of modifications may be made
in the primary vowels by slight changes in the position of the organs
by which they are produced. Between _a_ and _i_ stands _e_; between
_i_ and _u_, _o_. In pronouncing _e_ the tongue is less raised than in
pronouncing _i_; for _o_, the back of the tongue is less raised and the
lips more widely opened than for _u_. In _o_, however, as in _u_, the
lips have to come into play; hence it is that these two sounds are so
frequently weakened to _e_ and _i_, whereas the converse change never
takes place. In _e_ and _i_ we have a simple and not a double action.
According to Helmholtz, the inherent pitch of _o_ is B′ flat, of _e_, B‴
flat or F′.
But _e_ and _o_ may again undergo considerable change. If while
pronouncing close _e_ (as in the French _été_ or German _see_) we round
the lips, the sound is produced which is represented by _ö_ in Middle
and Southern German and _eu_ in French, the short sound of which may be
heard in the German _böcke_. It lies, it will be observed, between _e_
and _o_, and its inherent pitch is C‴ sharp. Closely related to this _ö_
is the German _ü_, French _u_. This sound is produced by rounding the
lips when the organs of speech are in position for pronouncing _i_, which
explains the use of _ü_ and _i_ as rhyming equivalents in German poetry.
_Ü_ consequently lies between _i_ and _u_, though, from another point of
view, it may be described as standing furthest from _a_ in a series of
which _ö_ forms the centre. The inherent pitch of _ü_ is G‴.
Besides _o_, we have also the sound heard long in words like _bought_ or
_aúgust_, and short in words like _not_ and _augúst_, formed by slightly
depressing the tongue, widening the air-passage, and rounding the lips to
a less extent than in the case of _o_.
Other vowel-sounds which may be noticed are the _e_ of the French
_prêtre_, German _väter_, whose natural pitch is made G″ or D‴, the
closely related open _e_ (_ä_) of the English _pair_, the short _a_ of
English closed syllables like _hat_ or _happy_, the short _e_ of the
English _men_, and the short _i_ of the English _hit_, _pill_. These
short vowels are in great measure due to the little use made of the lips
in articulation, and the compensatory exercise of the tongue, which
characterize modern English. It is small wonder that we experience so
much difficulty in pronouncing _ö_ and _ü_, when even our _u_ is uttered
with lips scarcely at all rounded. On the other hand, whenever we find
these sounds in a language, we may conclude that we have to do with a
speech which gives the lips their full share in articulation. Sievers
would call those vowels _passive_ in which all the organs of speech
needed for their clear pronunciation are not brought into play, fully
pronounced vowels being termed _active_.[153]
The same lazy pronunciation of cultivated English which has almost
dispensed with the service of the lips is the cause of the increasing
preponderance of the so-called neutral vowel heard in such words as
_but_, _virtue_, _dove_, _bird_, _oven_. Except in affected pronunciation
we may detect it in most unaccented syllables, especially if they
happen to be final; thus we have _diligĕnce_, _muttŏn_, _ăgainst_,
_finăl_, _evĭl_, _valuăblĕ_. So, too, as Professor Max Müller remarks,
“_town_ sinks to _Paddingtŏn_, _ford_ to _Oxfŏrd_.” He believes it to
be pronounced with non-sonant or whispered breath.[154] Mr. A. J. Ellis
would make it voice in its least modified form; and Mr. Sweet regards it
as a mere voice-glide. The “indistinct” vowel heard in Arabic words by
travellers seems to be identical with it. Its existence in a language
is a sign of age and decay; meaning has become more important than
outward form, and the educated intelligence no longer demands a clear
pronunciation in order to understand what is said. The participation
of all the organs of speech in the creation of vowel-sounds is, on the
contrary, a mark of linguistic freshness and youth. When we find both
tongue and lips equally active in the formation of _u_ and _i_, we may
feel pretty sure that we are in the presence of an uncultivated dialect.
Vowels formed by combining the position of the tongue required for _u_
with that of the lips required for _i_ are extremely rare in Aryan
speech; an exceptional instance is to be met with in the Russian _jery_
(_y_).
But we must never forget the infinite capability of modification
possessed by a vowel. The same vowel-sound of the same word is not only
apt to be pronounced differently by two natives of the same country,
but even by the speaker himself at different times, particularly if
his attention has been directed to his pronunciation of the sound in
question. It is true that the shades of difference between the sounds may
be so fine as to escape all but the specially trained ear; but this does
not prove them to be any the less real. Putting aside quantity, accent,
emphasis, or accidental alteration in the vocal organs, it is difficult
to pronounce the same word twice over in exactly the same way, so far, at
least, as its vowels are concerned. It is not wonderful, therefore, that
it is in their vowels that dialects soonest and most easily alter, and
that the vowel-system is the best guide in mapping out the several stages
in the history of a language. Of course the character of a vowel-sound
is materially affected by its position in a word, or by the consonants
with which it is associated; the pronunciation of the same vowel varies
in a closed or an open syllable. Long and short vowels, too, differ not
only quantitatively, but qualitatively also. Every vowel has both its own
peculiar pitch and a pitch dependent on the length of the vocal chords.
The peculiar pitch is the result of the resonance-chamber in which the
vowel is formed. The high pitch of _i_ is due to the narrow air-passage
in the front of the mouth in which it is produced, while the lowered
pitch of _a_ and _u_ is caused in the one case by the greater size of the
resonance-chamber, and in the other by the narrow opening of the lips.
The same pitch may be produced by different modifications of the same
resonance-chamber. Thus the French _eu_ in _fleur_, produced by slightly
raising the front part of the tongue and rounding the lips, has the same
pitch as the English _e_ in _err_, produced without any rounding of the
lips at all.
But we have not yet finished with the vowels. The mouth is not the only
agent concerned with their production. Brücke[155] asserts that the bones
of the skull itself participate in the vibration caused by the utterance
of the high-pitched vowels. However this may be, the larynx, the
posterior wall of the pharynx, and the _velum pendulum_, or soft palate,
with the uvula attaching to it, have all to do with the creation of
vowel-sounds. Czermak has proved by experiment that the _velum pendulum_
changes its place with each vowel that is uttered, rising successively
for the pronunciation of _a_, _e_, _o_, _u_, and _i_. The nasal orifice,
too, is closed during the pronunciation of some vowels, and more or less
open during that of others. _A_ and _e_ were the only two vowels which
a young man named Leblanc, whose larynx was completely closed, was able
to utter; while, on the other hand, experiment has shown that with _i_,
_o_, and _u_ the passage to the nose is shut, slightly open with _e_,
and considerably open with _a_. From this it will be seen that the term
“nasal vowel” is a misnomer. Nasal vowels, in fact, are produced by
dropping the uvula, and so allowing the air to vibrate freely through the
cavities which connect the nose with the pharynx. So far from a passage
of the air through the nose being necessary, we may even increase the
nasal twang by stopping the nostrils. The strength of the nasalization
depends on the distance of the _velum pendulum_, or soft palate, from
the tongue; and in languages like French, in which much use is made of
nasalized vowels, the vowel is frequently followed by a true guttural
nasal. It has often been noticed that French, in spite of its strong
tendency to nasalize the vowels, has no nasalized _i_ or _u_. The cause
of this deficiency is very simple. A nasalized vowel requires a free
passage for the air from the pharynx to the nose; but this is rendered
almost impossible in the formation of _i_, where the tongue is raised so
high as to send most of the air through the mouth however much depressed
the _velum_ may be, as well as in the formation of _u_, where the tongue
is pushed backward towards the soft palate itself. A nasal _i_, however,
occurs in Portuguese, and probably also in the Sanskrit _simha_, “lion.”
Every vowel-sound, then, demands three main conditions for its
production—the exspiration of air from the lungs, the vibration of the
vocal chords, and the formation of a chamber of resonance by the organs
of speech. The three conditions must co-exist if we are to have a simple
vowel of definite quality, though the exspiration of air need not last
beyond the moment at which the vowel-sound is formed. But the position of
the organs of articulation both before and after its formation occasions
important differences in the manner in which it is introduced or ceases
to be heard. In quick and lively utterance, the energy with which the
stream of air is emitted makes it difficult for each exspiration to
be exactly simultaneous with the corresponding vibration of the vocal
chords, while if the exspiration is weak, the vocal chords are apt for
a moment not to vibrate. In order to give the chords on the one side
the resisting power requisite in energetic exspiration, and on the
other side to make them vibrate without delay in weak exspiration, the
windpipe must be contracted for a second, thus checking the outflow of
breath and causing the chords to vibrate in unison. The sonant breath so
produced is the _spiritus lenis_ of our old school-grammars, the slight
noise produced by the check given in the throat to the uprush of air
from the lungs. The noise may easily be detected in whispering, or in
the pronunciation of a word like _’ear_, when a special effort is made
to prevent it from degenerating into _year_, and the fact that it is a
noise will explain the dislike felt by the sensitive Greek to what the
grammarians term a _hiatus_. The _spiritus lenis_ varies according as it
is the result of a compression of the _chordæ vocales_ alone, or of the
false _chordæ vocales_ as well; but it is doubtful whether we can treat
it as a distinct consonant and not rather as the pure tone of the voice.
Perhaps it should most strictly be called a glide. It readily passes into
the non-sonant aspirate or _spiritus asper_, by allowing the breath to
pass through the throat without check or hindrance. The glottis, indeed,
is in the latter case slightly narrowed and the larynx stiffened, but
the difference between the rough and soft aspirates is that the one is
a continuous sound, the other a checked breath. The vocal chords are
brought together while the breath is passing through the throat, and
since their movement may be either quick or gradual the hard aspirate or
_h_ may correspondingly vary in character. As Czermak first pointed out,
the more usual hard aspirate is that produced by the gradual compression
of the vocal chords when they remain for a moment in a given contracted
position.[156]
The same causes which produce the _spiritus lenis_ or the _spiritus
asper_ at the beginning of the vowel-sound produce similar results at
its end. It may terminate with a weak breathing, a firm breathing, or
a non-sonant aspirate. In the case of a weak breathing the exspiration
either ceases before the vocal chords have begun to vibrate, thus
resulting in a long vowel, or at the very moment at which the windpipe
is opened to admit the passage of air, the result being a short
vowel. The weak breathing answers to what may be called the neutral
vocalic utterance, so rarely heard in language, when the vowel-sound
is introduced without either the soft or hard aspirate, the windpipe
being merely narrowed sufficiently to set the vocal chords in motion at
the same moment that the exspiration takes place. The firm breathing
corresponds with the _spiritus lenis_, and is due to a sudden check
given to the vibrating voice. Examples of it occur in words like _no!_
_bah!_ uttered abruptly, or where we wish to divide two similar vowels
one from the other. The non-sonant aspirate is produced by continuing
the exspiration for a while after the opening of the windpipe, and may
be heard in final vowels which are at once short and strongly accented.
The non-sonant aspirate is sometimes combined with the firm breathing,
especially in Danish, where such words as _ti_, _nei_, are pronounced
with a double exspiratory effort, the second consisting of a non-sonant
breath of more or less strength, jerked up, as it were, after the vowel.
Now, let us stop for a moment to remind ourselves of the distinction
between sonant and non-sonant. Non-sonant or surd sounds (also called
“hard” and “breathed”) are breath as modified by the organs of speech;
sonants, “soft” or “voiced” sounds, are voice similarly modified, voice
being breath when played upon by the vibrating _chordæ vocales_ in its
passage through the partially closed glottis. Voice, therefore, continues
to be heard without interruption as long as we have a succession of
sonants following one upon the other; the transition or “glide” from
one sonant to another consisting simply in the change of position
assumed by the organs of speech. In pronouncing the sound _al_, all
that happens in passing from _a_ to _l_ is a transference of the tongue
from the position required for forming _a_ to the position required for
forming _l_; voice continues without interruption. Now it is clear that
while voice is passing from _a_ to _l_, neither pure _a_ nor pure _l_
can be sounded, though the time occupied by its passage (that is, by
the change in the position of the tongue) is so infinitesimally small
that the sound or sounds actually produced cannot be heard, and all we
can be conscious of is a modification of _a_ at its end or of _l_ at
its beginning. If we have two successive vowels, each belonging to a
different syllable, a separate effort of exspiration is needed for both,
and the transition-sounds are apt to escape notice from the weakening
of the exspiration during the interval between the two efforts; but if
the vowels do not belong to distinct syllables, the result is wholly
different. Diphthongs, as we term them, consist in the combination of
two simple vowels, usually short, into a single syllable pronounced,
therefore, with a single exspiratory effort, and with the stronger accent
on the first vowel. The sound we hear is produced while the organs of
speech are being changed from the position required for the one vowel to
the position required for the other. We have only to sing the diphthongs
_ai_ or _au_ on a long note to hear a distinct _i_ and _u_ at the end
of each, and the Sanskrit grammarians discovered more than two thousand
years ago that the diphthongs _ê_ and _ô_ were really combinations of
_a_ + _i_ and _a_ + _u_. The primary condition of the existence of a
diphthong is the rapid transition from one of the component vowels to the
other, and this renders the true resolution of a diphthongal sound so
extremely difficult except to the specially trained ear. Once acquainted
with the two component vowels, we can easily determine the intermediate
or transition sounds in which the diphthong really consists; but written
documents rarely do acquaint us accurately with them. Diphthongs whose
second element is _e_ or _o_ have sometimes been termed “imperfect”
and considered of younger origin than those whose second element is
_i_ or _u_, because of their greater fulness of tone and consequent
inappropriateness to the unaccented place in the compound; but such a
view does not seem to be correct. It appears certain, however, that
languages show a tendency to form diphthongs the longer they live and
the greater the extent to which they have been affected by phonetic
decay. English is a prominent example of this tendency; our vowels are
all becoming diphthongs; even the first personal pronoun _I_ (_ai_) has
become one, and already we hear _aither_ and _naither_ more frequently
than _either_ (_eether_) and _neither_. The so-called long vowels which
occur in such words as _say_, _no_, _he_, are all diphthongal, and some
of the local dialects have carried the tendency even further than the
literary language.
The existence of triphthongs has been disputed, and no doubt most of
the alleged cases, such as _iei_ or _ieu_ in the Romance idioms, are
either dissyllables or consist of a semi-vowel followed by a diphthong.
But, as Sievers remarks:[157] “the transition from the first to the
second component element of a diphthong may be so prolonged that even
the transition sounds themselves may be distinctly heard.” As for
semi-vowels, they differ from the first element of a diphthong only in
having lost the accent and being followed by a strongly accented vowel.
Hence they come to assume the function of sonant consonants. Hence, too,
the necessity that the vowels in which they originate should possess less
fulness of tone than the vowels by which they are immediately followed.
We may have _yá_ and _wá_, but hardly _ᵃᵢ_ and _ᵃᵤ_. Naturally _i_ and
_u_ most readily pass into semi-vowels, partly from their comparatively
weak tone, partly from the compression of the air-passage needed to
produce them, partly from the similar position of the organs of speech in
forming the spirants _y_ and _w_. These spirants, as we shall see, are
not to be confounded with the semi-vowels _y_ and _w_.
A vowel, then, is the quality or timbre of voice as modified by the
tongue and lips, and consists of the forms assumed by the vibrating air
as it passes through the windpipe and vocal chords. But the tongue and
lips naturally tend towards the same position whatever be the vowel
sounded. A man who has been accustomed to give his tongue a particular
position in pronouncing _i_ will give it much the same position in
pronouncing _e_, for we must never forget that there is an almost
infinite number of _i_’s or _e_’s varying with the slight changes of
position of the tongue and lips when placed for enunciating those vowels.
According to the greater or less use made of the lips in speaking will
be the character of all the vowel-sounds of a language. The vowels,
consequently, fall into systems, and in investigating the phonology of
a dialect, we have to inquire not only what vowels it possesses, but
more particularly what system these fall into. The basis of English
vowel pronunciation is the passive position of the lips, just as in the
Holstein dialect it is the withdrawal and flattening of the tongue.
Sievers states, that in speaking the dialect of Lower Hesse the tongue
must be relaxed and in a position of the slightest possible tension;
while, on the contrary, in the Saxon dialects the whole tongue must be
tense, the throat stiffened and the exspiration energetic. “Hence the
hard, somewhat screaming impression made by this dialect in contrast with
the dull, almost heavy and negative character of the Hessian.”[158]
But it is time to turn from the vowels to the consonants, the skeleton,
as it were, of articulate utterance. A language could consist wholly of
vowels; indeed, a Polynesian dictionary contains numbers of words which
have not a single consonant in them, and children frequently mark the
differences between words rather by the vowels than by the consonants
they contain. The earliest systems of writing other than ideographic
are syllabaries and not alphabets, while alphabets like the Sanskrit
ascribe an “inherent” vowel to each of their consonants. But though
vowels are indispensable to an organized language, it by no means follows
that they were equally indispensable to the first attempts at speech.
As a matter of fact, a preponderance of vowels such as characterizes
the Polynesian dialects is a sign of phonetic decay and linguistic old
age. “Consonants,” says Professor Max Müller, “are much more apt to be
dropped than to sprout up between two vowels.” If we had only the Greek
μέρμερος or the Latin _memor_ before us, we should have no idea that they
have lost an initial sibilant; in fact, this only becomes apparent when
we compare the Sanskrit _smar_, “to remember.” The endeavour sometimes
made to reduce the Parent-Aryan alphabet to a small number of simple
and easily pronounced consonants, is founded on the fallacy that the
results of a phonetic analysis of the words we utter and a reduction
of the sounds they contain into their leading types, is identical with
the primitive alphabet of the Aryan race. On the contrary, the sounds
of a language become more simplified and clearly marked the longer it
continues to be spoken, and the primitive Aryan alphabet, instead of
being a simple list of primary sounds, from which all that are harsh or
indistinct have been carefully eliminated, must really have resembled the
existing alphabets of barbarous or semi-barbarous tribes, and included a
large variety of consonants, many of which we should find it extremely
difficult to reproduce.
Consonants may be divided, in the first place, into hard and soft,
or, as they are more usually termed, surd and sonant. A surd consonant
consists of checked breath, a sonant consonant of checked voice. If, in
the second place, either breath or voice is completely checked in its
passage through the organs of speech, an explosive or momentary (also
called a stopped or mute) consonant is heard at the moment the check
is removed; if the check is not complete, and the organs of speech
only approximate so that the breath cannot escape without friction, a
fricative (spirant, “unstopped”) or continuous consonant is the result.
Where a spirant or fricative is immediately preceded by an explosive, a
double sound or affricative is the result (_e.g._ German _pf_, Armenian
_t’š_); where the spirant follows the explosive we have the aspirated
letters, which will be spoken of hereafter. Among the continuous
consonants must be ranked the nasals, produced by dropping the uvula and
so allowing some of the breath to make its way to the nostrils through
the pharynx, and the trills produced by the vibration of the uvula, the
lips, or more commonly the tongue. Distinct from the nasals and the
trills are the central continuous consonants (_h_, _ch_, _y_, English
_r_, _w_, _wh_, and the sibilants) formed by lifting the centre and point
of the tongue to the centre and front of the palate, and the lateral
continuous consonants (_l_, and, according to Bell, English _th_, _f_,
_v_), in forming which the breath is allowed to escape along the edges
of the tongue. A further cross division will be into liquids, gutturals,
dentals, palatals, labio-dentals, and labials, to which may be added the
linguals or cacuminals (cerebrals) of Sanskrit.
_The Liquids._—Among the liquids should properly be reckoned only
those kinds of _r_ and _l_ which stand to the spirant _r_ and _l_ in the
same relation that the vowel _i_ stands to the spirant _y_. In forming
the vowels, as we have seen, the tongue assumes a dorsal position, that
is, some part of its back is raised towards the palate; in forming the
liquids, on the other hand, the tongue has either an oral (central) or
a lateral position, the liquid _r_ requiring the articulation of the
centre and tip, the liquid _l_ that of the sides. But there are several
kinds of _r_, which may be classed as cacuminal, spirant, alveolar or
dental, uvular or guttural, and laryngeal. The cacuminal _r_ is the
purest liquid _r_ that we hear, inasmuch as it is wholly untrilled, and
is especially common in cultivated English. In order to produce it, the
front surface of the tongue is hollowed out into a spoon-like shape and
raised towards the hard palate behind the alveolar teeth-roots of the
upper jaw, while the edge of the tongue is stiffened and kept free from
any sort of vibration. It will be clear from this how closely allied
this cacuminal _r_ is to the vowels, and we can easily understand the
readiness with which it combines with a vowel-sound when we remember
that it may be formed in almost any part of the hard palate, while the
lips have free play during its creation. Corresponding to the cacuminal
_r_ is the spirant (or “buzzed”) _r_, which also occurs plentifully in
English as in such words as _try_ or _dry_. The mouth is completely
closed by the tongue when sounding _t_ or _d_, and if in passing to
the position needed for _r_ the tongue is not removed from the palate
quickly enough, or the exspiration is not sufficiently strong, a slight
fricative sound like that of _sh_ is produced which results in the
spirant _r_. As for the dental or alveolar _r_, all that is requisite to
produce it is to raise the front part of the tongue, at the same time
slightly arching its extreme edges, and so obtaining a constricted or
“squeezed” chamber of resonance between the side of the tongue and the
alveolars. This _r_ may be untrilled, but in German it is more frequently
a trilled one. The trill is caused by the force of the exspiration which
strikes the thin hollowed edge of the tongue in an outward direction, the
tongue the moment after returning to its former position like a piece
of india-rubber. If the two edges of the front part of the tongue be
pressed against the teeth, the tip of the tongue between them being alone
allowed free play, and accordingly vibrating in a very small and narrow
space, a sound is heard approaching that of _s_ or _sh_. The stronger the
uprush of breath and the vibration it occasions, the plainer will be the
sibilated sound; indeed, a genuine sibilant can even attach itself to the
liquid, as in the Polish _rz_. The uvular or guttural _r_ is supposed by
Sievers to be a modern substitution for the trilled alveolar _r_. At any
rate it is produced by lifting the back of the tongue to the soft palate
and forming a deep groove along the middle of it, in which the uvula can
vibrate freely. The groove, however, is frequently left wholly or nearly
unformed, the consequence being a very grating character acquired by
the _r_, which then passes over into the sonant guttural spirant heard
in sounding the modern Greek γ. The laryngeal _r_ was first observed
and described by Brücke, who makes it arise from sinking the voice so
that the vocal chords cease to vibrate audibly, and merely produce
intermittent and explosive sounds.
Each kind of _l_ is formed in the same way, by raising the tip of the
tongue and so closing the orifice of the mouth, at the same time allowing
the breath to pass along the two sides of the tongue in successive
oscillations produced by the vibrations of the elastic edges of the
tongue. We may distinguish the cacuminal _l_ in which the tip of the
tongue is bent backwards as in the cacuminal _r_; the alveolar _l_
with the edge of the tongue laid against the alveolars; the dental or
interdental _l_ in which the flattened surface of the tongue fills up the
space between the two sides of the mouth; and the dorsal _l_ (as in the
Spanish _llano_) in which the tip of the tongue presses against the lower
incisors, while the centre of the tongue is raised towards the alveolars
of the upper teeth. The best-known variety of the cacuminal _l_ is that
of the Welsh _ll_ formed by pressing the flattened tip of the tongue
against the gums of the upper teeth and allowing the breath to escape on
its right side. The same sound is heard in the Icelandic _hl_ and _l_
before a _t_, and also in Cheroki,[159] though in Icelandic the tongue is
pressed against both sides of the mouth. A half-sonant, spirant _l_ may
be heard when the exspiration is strong; a surd _l_ often occurs at the
end of a word or after surd consonants (particularly _t_ and _s_). The
sound of the _l_ may be made clearer or obscurer by raising or depressing
the front part of the tongue, and so narrowing or enlarging the space
between its edges and the teeth, and since the vowels may be pronounced
with the tip of the tongue on the palate, they may readily pass into _l_
by simply broadening the surface of the tongue.
We have already seen that the tongue is not the only organ of speech
which may be “trilled.” In the Arabic _grhain_ (غ), the Northumberland
_burr_ and the French Provençal _r_, _grasseyé_, the uvula which lies
along the back of the tongue towards the teeth is very distinctly made
to vibrate. “If,” Mr. A. J. Ellis says, “the tongue is more raised and
the vibration indistinct or very slight, the result is the English _r_ in
_more_, _poor_, while a still greater elevation of the tongue produces
the _r_ heard after palatal vowels, as _hear_, _mere_, _fire_. These
trills are so vocal that they form distinct syllables, as _surf_, _serf_,
_fur_, _fir_, _virtue_, _honour_, and are with difficulty separable from
the vowels.” The lips, too, may be trilled, the result being _brh_, a
sound constantly heard from children.
_The Nasals._—The characteristic of a nasal is, as the name declares,
the participation of the nose in producing the sound. The breath passes
through the nose rather than through the mouth. Sometimes, however, all
that happens is the removal of the membrane which separates the nasal
orifice from the pharynx; this alone is indispensable to the formation of
a nasal letter. Hence its resemblance to a vowel, the buccal tube being
alike silent in both cases. If we try to converse when walking uphill
we shall find that the nasals are longest heard. These nasals must be
classified as labial, dental, palatal, and guttural, according to the
part of the speaking apparatus in which the current of air is checked in
its exit, and it will be best to treat them along with the other sounds
formed in the same part. It should be noted, however, that the so-called
surd nasal which we hear in _hm!_ has really, as Sievers remarks, not the
slightest similarity to a nasal, but approximates to the aspirates or
breathings.
The traditional division of the consonants into labial, dental, palatal,
cerebral (cacuminal) and guttural, though not scientifically precise, is
yet too familiar to be disregarded, and we shall therefore follow it so
far as is possible. We must, however, remember at starting the primary
distinction between the two classes of letters, called variously hard
and soft, tenues and mediæ, surds and sonants, as well as between those
called momentary (explosive) and continuous or checks and fricatives.
What this distinction consists in has already been explained.
_The Labials._—The labials may be subdivided into pure labials, with
the formation of which the lips only have to do, and the labio-dentals,
in the formation of which the teeth also participate. In pronouncing the
surd _p_, the sonant _b_, the nasalized _m_, or the middle German _w_,
the lips are either wholly or (as in _wh_) almost wholly closed. _B_
only differs from _p_ in being pronounced with voice instead of breath,
the voice partly preceding, partly following the check occasioned by the
closure of the lips. As in all sonant letters, the exspiration is less
forcible than in the case of surd letters. The labio-dentals _f_ and _v_
are merely modifications of the rough and soft aspirates by pressing the
lower lip against the upper teeth. When the lips are brought together
without any interference of the teeth the _spiritus lenis_ becomes the
German _w_ as heard in a word like _Quelle_. Our _wh_, or rather _hw_,
and _w_ are continuous sounds, the lips being slightly opened, the back
of the tongue raised, and the breath passing over its central part.
_The Dentals._—The articulation needed for the dentals is partly
oral, partly alveolar, partly dorsal. The common principle, however,
involved in the formation of them all is the same; the tongue must be
brought against the teeth. The so-called cerebral or cacuminal dentals
of Sanskrit and the Dravidian tongues (_ṭ_, _ḍ_, _ṭh_, _ḍh_) are due to
oral articulation, the tongue being made convex and the lower surface
raised towards the palate. The English _t_ and _d_ are also said to be
cerebral, though the tip of the tongue is not bent very sharply backwards
in forming them. Alveolar articulation is needed for the dentals when
they have to be pronounced with the edge of the flattened tongue pressed
against the alveolars of the upper teeth, while in dorsal articulation
the point of the tongue is simply turned back against the lower teeth,
its convex being at the same time lifted to the palate. It is in this way
that the Bohemian dorsal _t_ is formed. The dorsal dentals may be varied
by raising the back of the tongue nearer to the mouth or the throat, the
tip either resting behind the lower teeth or being raised to the upper
alveolars. Besides the surd dental _t_ and sonant dental _d_, we have
also a series of dental spirants which bear the same relation to _t_
and _d_ that _f_ and _v_ bear to _p_ and _b_. By slightly opening the
teeth and stopping the aperture with the extended edges of the tongue we
produce the interdental sounds heard in _breath_ or _think_ and _breathe_
or _then_. The first _th_ (or _thorn_ þ) differs from the second (ð)[160]
in being pronounced with the rough breathing instead of the soft
breathing. They stand midway between an oral and a dorsal articulation.
How readily they may pass into the labio-dentals _f_ and _v_ is clear at
a glance; we have only to raise the lower lip a little and curl back the
tongue, and our _th_ becomes an _f_. Equally readily, as we shall see, is
the passage from them to a sibilant. We seldom meet with an interdental
consonant; Sievers, however, states that they exist in Servian and
Armenian, where they regularly represent the whole class of dentals.
_The Palatals._—The palatals come next. They stand between the dentals
and gutturals, and are formed by throwing the middle of the tongue,
raised as it were into a hump, against that part of the roof of the mouth
where the hard palate begins. The sound (_ch_) heard in the English
_church_ or the Italian _cielo_ is now held to be, not a palatal, but
a dental (_t_ followed by _sh_), and we must go to the Sanskrit (_ch_)
as still pronounced to find a type of the whole palatal series. It “is
formed most easily,” says Professor Max Müller, “if we place the tongue
and teeth in the position for the formation of _sh_ in _sharp_, and then
stop the breath by complete contact between the tongue and the back of
the teeth.” It will be seen from this that the true _ch_ is not a double
letter, a compound of _t_ and _sh_ or _s_, but a single consonant which
ought to be denoted by a single character. The Sanskrit palatal _ch_ may
have had the same pronunciation as the Armenian _t‘ sh_,[161] as Sievers
thinks, or it may have been equivalent to _ky_. However this may be, it
is plain from the great extent of the “chamber of resonance” in which
the palatals are formed—the whole of the hard palate being available
for the purpose—that a large number of palatal sounds is possible. They
may range, in fact, from _ky_ to _tsh_. The guttural _k_ passes easily
enough into the palatalized _ky_, as may be seen from the pronunciation
of _kind_ and _cow_ as _kyind_ and _kyow_, not unfrequently heard in
English; indeed, all that is requisite for the transition is for the
front part of the tongue to assume the position needed for _y_, while the
back part is in that needed for _k_. In the northern dialects of Jutland
_j_ is heard after _k_ and _g_ when followed by _œ_, _e_, _o_, and _ö_.
The German “soft” guttural aspirate or palatal spirant in words like
_ich_, _licht_, is the result of the _spiritus asper_ passing the middle
of the tongue when raised against the hard palate, _y_ in _you_ or _yet_
being due to a softening of the breath, the organs of speech remaining
unchanged. The palatal sibilants will have to be considered separately.
_The Gutturals._—Putting aside the cerebrals, which have been treated
under the head of the dentals, we now come to the gutturals, usually an
important class of sounds in savage idioms. First of all we have the
tenuis _k_, produced by bringing the root of the tongue against the
soft palate, together with the deeper _k_ heard in the Semitic _koph_
or Georgian _q_. Next is the media _g_, to create which breath has to
be changed into voice. Then will come the guttural nasal _ng_ (as in
_sing_), and the continuous _ch_ and _g_ heard in the German _nach_ and
_Tage_. The sound heard in _nach_ or the Scotch _loch_ is formed by
raising the tongue against the soft palate or uvula, and so checking the
uprush of breath, its sonant representative being the _g_ of _Tage_. The
result of only slightly checking the uprush of breath in the latter case
is the passage of the guttural into a semi-vowel. This sonant _g_ is
the γ of modern Greek; it sometimes takes the place of the uvular _r_,
though this office more properly belongs to the sonant _g_ of Armenian
pronounced further back in the mouth. The surd _ch_ may be similarly
modified by a posterior pronunciation, and so become the Armenian _xe_,
the Russian _x_, the Polish _ch_, and the deep _ch_ of the Swiss.
_The Sibilants._—The main division of sibilated sounds is into the surd
_s_ and _sh_, and the sonant _z_ and _j_. When the centre and tip of
the tongue are raised to the centre and front of the palate, the breath
or _spiritus asper_ is modified into _s_ (as in _sin_), the voice or
_spiritus lenis_ into _z_ (as in _zeal_ or _rise_). When the tongue is
turned back with its lower surface against the alveolars of the upper
teeth, less of the palate being covered than is required for _s_ and
_z_, breath becomes _sh_ (as in _sharp_), voice _j_ (as in _azure_,
_pleasure_, French _jamais_). The ordinary German _s_ is a dorsal one,
the current of air being allowed to pass between the upper alveolars
and the lower surface of the uplifted tongue; in North German dialects,
however, we frequently meet with an alveolar _s_, formed in much the same
way as the alveolar _r_. The same _s_ also occurs in English, as well as
a cacuminal _s_ distinguished by a more pronounced retraction of the tip
of the tongue and narrower space between it and the palate. The palatal
_ś_, found in Russian, for instance, before the weak vowels (_e_, _i_,
&c.), only differs from the dorsal _s_ in the more retracted position
of the tongue. _Sh_ (_j_) can be modified in three ways. The channel
formed in the tongue when pronouncing _s_ may be so diminished as to
allow the breath to strike against the lips, or the lips may form with
it an approximately rectangular aperture, or, thirdly, the left (or more
rarely the right) side of the tongue may be pressed against the palate,
causing the breath to strike against the lips, which are generally raised
a little on the side. Sievers declares that he has sometimes heard this
unilateral _sh_ in England. However this may be, all three modifications
of _sh_ may combine with the dorsal, alveolar, cacuminal, and palatal
positions of the tongue to produce the cacuminal _sh_ of English
(identical, probably, with the Sanskrit _ś_), the palatal _mouillé_ _ś_
and _ć_ of Polish and Russian, the alveolar _sh_ of the North German
dialects, and the dorsal _sh_ of the Middle and Southern German dialects.
It is one of the many evils of our defective and misleading mode of
spelling that the surd _sh_, though a single sound, is represented by two
letters, and so cannot be distinguished from the aspirated _sh_ (as in
_gas-hole_), which is really a double sound.
These aspirated sounds consist, as we have seen, of an explosive
followed by a spirant, and they occupied an important place in the
older languages of our Aryan family of speech. A large number of roots
contain them, and the Brahmans still pronounce each part of the compound
sound distinctly, _ph_ and _th_, for instance, being pronounced as in
our _up-hill_ and _ant-hill_. The compound nature of the sound caused
sometimes the one element in it, sometimes the other, to fall away. Thus,
to a Sanskrit _tubhy(am)_ corresponds a Latin _tibi_, and the Latin
_mihi_ and Sanskrit _mahyam_ presuppose an earlier _mabhyam_, _mabhi_.
The Athenian tendency to false aspiration which has produced the initial
aspirate of ὑδώρ (Latin _unda_, _udus_) or ἵππος (Latin _equus_) has
also occasionally affected the labial tenuis. φῦσα and its kindred, for
instance, answer to the Latin _pustula_, the Lithuanian _pústi_, “to
blow;” ἄφνος is the Sanskrit _apnas_, the Latin _ops_, and κεφαλὴ is
the Sanskrit _kapâla_, the Latin _caput_. A curious metathesis of the
aspiration may take place in both Sanskrit and Greek. In Sanskrit a final
aspirated media before a following tenuis loses its aspirate, which is
transferred to the initial of the root, provided that be _g_, _d_, or _b_
(as _bhut-karoti_, “he who knows acts,” for _budh-karoti_); and in Greek
we find θρίξ becoming τριχὸς, τρέχω becoming θρέξω.
But it must be remembered that it is only the surd explosives (or
tenues) that properly can thus be combined with the rough breathing
(_h_). A difficulty occurs in the case of the sonant explosives (or
mediæ); and it is a grave question whether we ought to transcribe _gha_,
_dha_, and _bha_ by the side of _kha_, _tha_, and _pha_. In Greek, at
any rate, we have only aspirated tenues, and while τ’ followed by an
aspirate is written θ, this is never the case with δ’. At the same time,
the existence of aspirated mediæ was recognized by the Prâtiśâkhyas by
the side of the aspirated tenues, and the accuracy of the Prâtiśâkhyas
is confirmed by the requirements of etymology.
Closely connected with the sibilants are the palatal and guttural
sounds, already noticed, heard in the German _ich_, _tage_, and _acht_.
The palatal _ch_, written χ by Sievers, _jh_ by Sweet; is of two kinds.
What Sievers calls χ,[162] heard in the German _ich_, Icelandic _hjarta_,
and sometimes in such words as our _hue_, is formed on the hard palate
near the soft palate by the front part of the tongue. On the other hand,
χ,[163] as in the Dutch _g_ before _e_ and _i_, is formed in the hollow
of the arch. The guttural sonant heard in the North German _tage_, or
the modern Greek γ, is formed between the back of the tongue and the
middle of the soft palate, the tongue being lifted up towards the front
of the mouth. As already remarked, it sometimes represents the uvular
_r_; thus, Mr. Sweet says, “when the passage (of the voice) is widened
so as to remove all buzzing, the sound of (_gh_)[162] no longer suggests
(_kh_)[163] or (_g_), but rather a weak (_r_) sound.” Further back in
the mouth is formed the Armenian sonant _g_, corresponding to χ.[163]
The _ch_ of _acht_, again, may be divided into two varieties. _Ch_,[162]
formed, as stated above, between the back of the tongue and the middle of
the soft palate, is the guttural spirant usual in German after _a_, _o_,
and _u_, and heard in Scotch _loch_. Further back is formed _ch_,[163]
common in Swiss and other South German dialects. We have also _ch_,[163]
noted by Mr. Sweet in Scotch after _e_ and _i_, formed between the back
of the tongue and the place where the hard palate begins. It thus comes
very near χ.[164]
Distinct from the exspiratory sounds, whether vowels or consonants,
which have now been passed in review, are sounds formed either by
inspiration or simply by the air in the mouth itself. Winteler[165]
describes certain Swiss dialects which make use of inspiratory sounds
to disguise the voice, and the clicks characteristic of the South
African languages are examples of sounds produced without either taking
in or emitting breath. The Kafirs have borrowed the three easiest
clicks (the dental, the cerebral, and the lateral) from their Hottentot
neighbours,[166] and there are reasons for thinking that the Hottentots
themselves borrowed in turn from the more primitive Bushmen. At all
events, the labial and compound dental clicks are wanting in Hottentot,
and the Bushman fables put what Dr. Bleck calls “a most unpronounceable
click,” which does not occur otherwise in any of the dialects, into the
mouth of the hare, the anteater, and the moon.[167] These inarticulate
clicks, thus adapted to the purposes of articulate speech, bridge over
the gulf between the latter and the cries of animals, and we may see
in them a survival of those primæval utterances out of which language
was born. Traces of what may thus be termed the germs of language on
its phonetic side are met with here and there all over the globe. Thus
Haldeman describes at least three clicks heard in Texan, Chinook, and
other North American languages, _t_ in the Anadahhas of Texas, for
instance, being followed by “an effect as loud as spitting.”[168]
According to Klaproth, clicks occur in Circassian; and Bleek states that
two clicks are distinguished in the ǀikhe language of Guatemala—one
somewhat resembling the Hottentot dental click, and the other the
Hottentot palatal combined with some guttural. Mr. Whitmee has heard a
click in certain dialects spoken by the Negritos of Melanesia. Clicks
are also known among the Gallas; and Miss Lloyd has found a little boy
from Lake Ngami using clicks resembling those of Nama Hottentot. Clicks
are formed by placing the tongue or lips in the position required by an
explosive, and then sucking out the air between the organs thus brought
into play, the result being the “cluck” or “smack” with which grooms are
accustomed to encourage a horse, but in combination with the explosive
for which the organs of speech were set. According to Mr. Sweet, the
labial click is an ordinary kiss; the dental click, “the interjection
of impatience ordinarily written ‘tut.’”[169] In Káfir the clicks are
not pure, as in Bushman—that is to say, they are always accompanied by
an exspiratory consonant, which is formed at the same moment as the
click. This affords an additional reason for thinking that the Káfir
clicks are not survivals from the original condition of speech, but loans
from another people, which have been attached by way of ornament to the
existing exspiratory sounds of the language. Of the same nature as the
clicks are the implosives peculiar to Saxon German, where no distinction
is made between _d_ and _t_, or _b_ and _p_. Similar sounds are heard in
Georgian and the Armenian of Tiflis, and they must have characterized
ancient Accadian, since no distinction is made in writing between final
_d_ and _t_, _g_ and _k_, or _b_ and _p_. These implosives are due to
compression of the air between the closed glottis and the organs of
speech when in position for an explosive, by forcing the glottis upwards.
No sound is emitted until the sound is fully formed, when the final or
transition sound is curiously modified.
We have hitherto dealt with the individual sounds in the same fashion
as the lexicographer deals with individual words. But just as a word
is really but one of the elements of a sentence, and to be thoroughly
understood must be treated as such, individual sounds are but the
elements of which syllables are composed. Whatever may be the nature of a
sound when regarded apart and by itself, it is necessarily much modified
when combined in actual speech with other sounds. The syllable, and not
the single sound, is the starting-point of phonetic utterance.
A syllable must contain either a vowel or a semi-vowel, by which are
meant such inspiratory utterances as that heard in the interjection
_’m_, or the vocalic _r_ and _l_ of Slavonic and other tongues. One
of the first achievements of the phonograph has been to show that an
open syllable like _ga_ can be pronounced either backwards or forwards
indifferently when once the organs of speech are in position; and
not only so, but that when the waves of air set in motion by the
pronunciation of a word are reversed, the word will be reproduced
backwards—_əsoshiéshun_ (_association_), for instance, becoming
_nushéshiosə_.
Mr. Sweet has pointed out that syllables are divided by the stress.
Speech has to be carried on by a succession of exspirations or puffs
of breath, and naturally the force with which the breath is emitted
gradually diminishes during the continuance of the exspiration. Only in
special cases—the interjections, for example—the force increases instead
of diminishing. When the exspiration is spent, and a new breath is taken,
a new syllable begins. Wherever, therefore, the stress is laid we must
place the beginning of a new syllable. In “a name” the stress is on the
nasal, where accordingly the syllable begins; in “an aim” it is, on the
contrary, on the diphthong.
The passage from one sound to another, as has already been noticed,
consists of a series of infinitesimal intermediate sounds, corresponding
with the series of positions assumed by the vocal organs in passing from
one position to another. These intermediate sounds have been conveniently
termed “glides” by Mr. Ellis, and they play an important part in the
formation of syllables. Glides are of two kinds, as the organs of
speech may either be moved from one position to another in the shortest
possible time, or be shifted, on the way, towards another position
needed for the production of a third sound. Thus, in the syllable _ki_
we have the immediate glide required for the transition from _k_ to _i_;
in the syllable _qui_, the indirect glide from _k_ to _i_ through the
position needed for _u_. A glide may, of course, be described as either
initial or final; in _ki_, the glide of _k_ is being final, that of _i_
initial. Some of the so-called consonants and vowels are really glides.
The neutral vowel (_ə_) is termed the “voice-glide” by Mr. Sweet, as
“produced by emitting voice during the passage to or from a consonant.”
It may begin a word, as in “against,” and in English is very frequently
replaced by a liquid, as in the words “little,” “possible.” It is
also found plentifully in the Semitic languages, the Hebrew _sh’wa_,
for instance, being simply the neutral vowel or voice-glide. In words
like “follow,” when pronounced rapidly, we may hear it labialized. A
diphthong, again, is a combination of a full vowel with a glide-vowel
either before or after it, though the glide-vowels may be prolonged into
full vowels without destroying the diphthong, by equalizing the stress
upon the two elements of which it is made up. These glide-vowels (like
the consonantal glides) are produced by putting the vocal organs into
position for pronouncing a particular vowel, but not letting voice sound
until this position is being shifted to that required by the full vowel
which forms the second part of the compound, and reversing the process
when the full vowel forms the first part. Consonantal glides (_y_, _w_,
_r_, _l_, _m_, _n_) are illustrated by the sound of _y_ in _you_, and of
_r_ in _here_, and in a common South-country pronunciation of words like
_red_.[170] According to Mr. Sweet, the aspirate _h_ is a consonant in
the glottis, but “a voiceless glide-vowel in the mouth.”[171]
At all events it is often difficult to distinguish the rough breathing
from the glide which easily develops into it by the help of a little
additional stress. This glide may be detected after mediæ, tenues,
and _s_, whether initial or final, as in our _cold_ (when pronounced
emphatically), _pack_, and _big_. The Irish and Danish aspirated
consonants are formed by laying a separate stress on the glide apart from
the stress laid upon the preceding consonant. The aspirated letters of
Greek and Sanskrit, described above, are of course different, as here we
have a combination of two independent sounds, though the latter of these
(_h_) is in Mr. Sweet’s eyes a mere glide-vowel in the mouth.
Glides may be absent where two consonants formed in the same part of
the vocal organs are united together (e.g. _and_, _its_), or even where
they are formed in different parts. This is especially the case with
English. Wherever homorganic sounds are produced, the vocal organs pass
at once from the position required for the first to that required for the
second, without first falling back into the “position of indifference.”
Where an explosive is followed by a nasal, a sudden opening of the _velum
pendulum_ is substituted for the usual “explosion,” as first pointed out
by Kudelka.
Syllables may differ one from the other in respect of _pitch_ or _tone_,
of _stress_, and of _quantity_. Pitch or tone is but little noticed
by Englishmen, since with us it serves merely a logical or emotional
purpose, such as the expression of surprise or the asking of a question,
but in some languages, Chinese or Swedish or Lithuanian, for example,
every word has its own separate tone, which helps to distinguish it from
other words. This, too, was the case in Vedic Sanskrit, and in ancient
Greek and Latin, what we call the Greek accents being really the marks of
the pitch at which words were pronounced. Pitch or tone depends on the
rapidity of the vibrations of sound, and may be either rising, level,
or falling. The rising tone is that indicated by the acute accent. Tone
may also be compound, marked in Greek by the circumflex. The compound or
circumflex is heard when the tone of a vowel is again raised after it has
already passed the moment of its greatest intensity, and it may therefore
be described as composed of the acute and the grave, or of the rising
and the falling. It may be noticed in Lithuanian as well as in several
German dialects, such as the Thuringian, which have a singing character,
and when it falls upon a diphthong the second element of the diphthong is
distinctly raised in pitch. Naturally it is usually found with diphthongs
and long vowels, but short vowels combined with a liquid may also
carry the circumflex. In Greek it commonly implies a contraction, the
circumflex resulting from the coalescence of a vowel which has the acute
accent with one which has the grave.[172]
The Vedic system of accentuation best exhibits the fundamental character
of accent of pitch. The _udâtta_ or acute denotes the highest pitch
reached by the voice in a group of syllables or words. In the syllable
immediately preceding the voice naturally sinks to its lowest, thus
producing the _anudâtta_, or grave tone. After the _udâtta_, however, the
voice falls gradually; consequently the syllable which follows has the
_swarita_ or circumflex accent, and it is only the next syllable to that
which is again _anudâtta_.
But the tone is regulated by three different conditions, which
sometimes act antagonistically. It may be either a syllable-tone,
determined by the relative force with which the syllables of a word can
be uttered, dependent on the nature of the sounds of which they are
composed; or a word-tone, determined in great measure by the meaning,
and serving to distinguish words from one another; or a sentence-tone,
mostly determined by logic or the feelings. The Greek accents, like the
Vedic ones, were used to denote all three varieties of tone; while the
acute and the circumflex sometimes represent the syllable-accent (as in
θῖνα, ἔτυπον), sometimes the word-accent (as in νυμφή, νύμφα, ποδῶν),
the grave, as Sievers remarks, “is a concession to the requirements of
the sentence-tone.” Similarly in Vedic Sanskrit, the _udâtta_ which
ordinarily indicates the word-accent, falling as it does upon the
syllable (commonly the flection) to which the signification caused the
attention to be chiefly directed, seems also to have indicated the
sentence-tone, since the verb of the principal clause has no accent
whatever attached to it. Previously, however, both in Greek and Sanskrit
the accents denoted the word-tone, and the remarkable agreement between
the accentuation of the two languages enables us to restore in great
measure the accentuation of the undivided parent-speech. It cannot be
an accident, for instance, which makes the numeral seven (_saptán_,
ἑπτά) oxyton in both languages, and the numeral five (_pánchan_, πέντε)
paroxyton, or places the acute accent on the last syllable of adjectives
in -_us_; the accentuation in each instance must have been that of the
Parent-Aryan. Where the accentuation of the two languages differs, it can
generally be explained by the disturbing influence of analogy. Thus while
there is so remarkable an agreement between the accentuation of Vedic
and Greek nouns, there is next to none between that of the verbs. But an
explanation of this is forthcoming. The verb of the principal clause in
the Veda loses its accent, as has just been remarked, unless it stand at
the beginning of the sentence; in fact, it is regarded as an enclitic,
and throws its tone back upon the preceding word however many syllables
it may contain. Now in Greek a rule gradually grew up forbidding the
accent to be placed further back than the antepenultimate; the accent,
accordingly, which in the case of verbal forms of more than two syllables
would have been on the last syllable of the preceding word in the Veda
fell on the penultima of the corresponding verbal form itself in Greek.
The accentuation which thus fixed itself in the verb of the principal
clause was extended by analogy to the verb of the subordinate clause,
and eventually to verbal forms of less than three syllables; φημι, εἰμι,
and ἐστι, however, remained unaccented to bear witness to the process
whereby the Greek language had changed the original accentuation of the
Aryan verb.[173] This, like the accentuation of the noun, was mostly
(and probably at the outset altogether) on the flection-suffix to which
it called attention, and thus marked out the symbols that expressed the
grammatical relations of the sentence. In the Semitic languages, on the
contrary, the primitive accentuation was on the penultima, though there
may possibly have been an earlier time when it was upon the ultima.[174]
The tendency to throw back the accent set in early in Aryan speech; in
Latin, as in the Æolic dialect of Greece, it was uniformly as near the
beginning of a word as possible, and the preservation of the original
pitch-accent in Lithuanian is one of the most curious marks of archaism
in that most conservative of West-Aryan tongues.
In Aryan the word-tone, we have seen, was primarily used in the service
of grammar. In Chinese, Siamese, and other Taic languages, however, its
use is lexical rather than grammatical; here it serves to distinguish the
senses of words which would otherwise be pronounced in the same way. Dr.
Edkins has shown that modern Mandarin Chinese is an exceedingly decayed
speech; its initial consonants have been worn away; and all its final
consonants reduced to the same monotonous nasal. To prevent the confusion
that would thus have been occasioned in a monosyllabic language, where
the possible number of different syllables denoting words was limited
even before the corroding action of phonetic decay, tones were adapted to
the expression of meaning, and as old letters disappeared new tones came
into existence. To create a new tone, says Dr. Edkins, requires about
1,200 years.
The sentence-tone is inseparable from speech even of the most lifeless
character. Each sentence has its own key, and the several parts of it
their own pitch. The tone rises when we ask a question, it falls when
we answer it, it reaches the “level” point of neutrality when we speak
in monotone. But there are dialects and languages in which monotone is
either acute or grave. “Thus in Scotch the rising tone is often employed
monotonously, not only in questions but also in answers and statements of
facts. In Glasgow Scotch the falling tone predominates.”[175] In French,
too, the rising tone is often used in making statements of fact.
Quite distinct from accent of pitch is accent of stress, though the
close connection between the two may be gathered from the fact that
in modern Greek the stress accent regularly answers to the acute and
circumflex of the ancient language. Much of this regularity, however,
may be due to the same pedantic revival which has resuscitated the
dialect of Plato and Thucydides and substituted it for the “modern
Greek” spoken half a century ago. Stress is the force with which
the different syllables of words are uttered, and increased force
is naturally accompanied by increased pitch. Stress, in fact,
corresponds to syllable-tone and word-tone, emphasis—the stress of a
sentence—corresponding to sentence-tone. Like pitch, it may be regarded
as either rising, level, or falling. Stress, however, differs from pitch
in its variability; there is no gradual fall, but a tendency “to sway to
and fro,” as Mr. Sweet expresses it. Rising stress may consequently be of
varying degrees of force and falling stress of weakness, level stress,
even in French, being practically unknown. Stress and pitch together give
to speech its rhythmic character, and make it the lyric utterance in
which man expresses his thoughts and his emotions. Where the rhythm is
regular we have poetry and song, where it is irregular the language of
ordinary prose. Stress is the great conservator of language; the chief
counterpoise to the action of phonetic decay. The accented syllable will
be preserved though all the other syllables by which it is surrounded may
disappear in pronunciation, just as the idea upon which emphasis is laid
will hold out successfully against the attacks of age and forgetfulness.
Winteler[176] has laid down the law that in accented syllables, liquids,
nasals, and spirants are always long after a short vowel if followed by a
consonant (e.g. _man̄ly_, Germ. _al̄t._)
The loss of the accent of pitch in modern English and the consequent
extension of the accent of stress have made us less observant of
_quantity_ than the grammarians of India or the poets of ancient Greece.
All syllables, however, may be classed as long, half-long, or short,
due to the duration of the force with which they are uttered. According
to Brücke, the duration needed for the production of a long vowel is to
that needed for the production of short vowels in the proportion of five
to three, but Sievers remarks that this only applies to the oratorical
pronunciation of modern literary German. In any case, the length of
the same vowel may vary according to circumstances; it is long, for
instance, in the English _sīz_ (_seize_), short in _sĭs_ (_cease_).
Several of the Scotch dialects possess no long vowels at all, while
in French most vowels are half-long, distinctly short accented vowels
being final, as in _oui_.[177] Like vowels, consonants, too, may be long
or short. In our own language final consonants are long after short
vowels (as _hill_), short after long vowels (as _heel_), and _l_ and
the nasals are lengthened before sonants (as _build_), shortened before
surds (as _built_). Short final consonants after short vowels make the
pronunciation appear clipped, as in German words like _mann_.
Accent has considerable influence upon quantity. On the one side short
vowels may be lengthened and pure vowels converted into diphthongs by
the accent falling upon them. This is partly the origin of the Sanskrit
_guṇa_ and _vṛiddhi_, according to which a simple _ă_ is raised to
_â_, an _ĭ_ to _ê_ (_ai_) and _ai_ (_âi_), and an _u_ to _o_ (_au_)
and _au_ (_âu_).[178] The lengthening of short vowels in Hebrew in a
“pause,” that is at the end of a sentence, is another example. In the
German dialects monosyllables which end in a consonant frequently have
their vowel changed into a diphthong by the accent, the original vowel
appearing again as soon as an additional syllable is added. In our
own English the short vowel of a monosyllable which ends in a sonant
frequently becomes half-long when accented (compare _fog_ with _fóggy_,
_god_ with _góddess_). On the other side, the absence of the accent may
bring with it a diminution of quantity. Thus a diphthong may be shortened
by being pronounced in the same period of time as is required for the
pronunciation of a short vowel, or may even be reduced to the short
vowel which lies midway between the two elements of which the diphthong
consists. A short vowel, again, may be reduced to a vocalic consonant
like the Slavonic _r_. Since much movement of the lips in speaking
implies an energetic enunciation, shortened syllables are naturally
pronounced with passive lips. To this fact we must ascribe the numerous
short syllables of modern cultivated English.
There is but little difference between a long or “strong” consonant and
a doubled one. In the first case, the position of the vocal organs for
pronouncing the consonant is retained with gradually decreasing force,
until it is suddenly shifted to the position needed for the following
vowel; in the second case it is shifted back again, when the force
required to produce it is half spent. Strictly speaking, therefore,
the consonant cannot be said to be doubled; there is simply a break or
pause in the utterance of it, the force necessary to produce it being
renewed before it has been fully exhausted. In English, French, German,
or Slavonic the double consonants have become long ones; to find them
still pronounced we must turn to Italian, Swedish, Finnic, or Magyàr.
Analogous to a double consonant is the combination of a sonant with a
surd, when assimilation does not take place, as in _has to do_ or _has
seen_. In Sanskrit and Greek aspirated letters could not be doubled,
Sanskrit permitting only _kkh_, _tth_, and _pph_, and Greek only κχ, τθ,
and πφ; hence it seems plain that there was either no glide or a glide
practically inaudible.
It is obvious that the combination of a consonant and a vowel admits
of an almost infinite series of variations according as the formation of
the one or other sound is made prominent in pronunciation. The consonant
may, as it were, swallow up the vowel; on the other hand, the vocal
organs may be shifted to form the vowel while they are still in the act
of forming the consonant. Hence arise _mouillé_ and labialized letters.
If the front part of the tongue be raised and the lips opened while a
consonant is being uttered, a palatalized or _mouillé_ letter is the
result, of which the Italian _gl_ and _gn_, the Spanish _ll_ and _ñ_, or
the Portuguese _lh_ and _nh_, may be regarded as examples. Still better
examples, according to Sievers, are combinations of consonants with an
original _i_ in many Slavonic languages (_e.g._ Russian _nikto_). Certain
consonants are incapable of being _mouillé_; gutturals, for instance,
in whose formation the back part of the tongue plays so prominent a
part can only be so by becoming palatals. Labialized sounds are those
in which the lips are rounded while the pronunciation of a consonant
is in process. Labials and gutturals show the same fondness for this
labialization or “rounding,” that the palatals and dentals do for
mouillation; and a comparison of the derived languages proves that the
primitive Aryan speech must have possessed a row of labialized or “velar”
gutturals—_kw_, _gw_, _ghw_—of which the Latin _qu_ and our own _cw_,
_qu_ are descendants. There is nothing to show that these velar gutturals
were ever developed out of the simple gutturals; so far back as we can go
in the history of Indo-European speech the two classes of guttural exist
side by side, and the groups of words containing them remain unallied
and unmixed. Γυνή and _queen_ (_quean_) must be separated from γένος,
_genitrix_, _kinder_, and other derivations of the root which we have
in the Sanskrit _janâmi_, the Greek γίγνομαι, γείνομαι, and the Latin
_gigno_; and the labialized _quies_ can have nothing to do with the Greek
κεῖμαι and κώμη (κύμη), our own _home_ and _ham-let_.[179] Both rounding
and mouillation may be combined, as in the Danish _kyst_, _pynte_, and
when occurring at the end of a word may frequently be explained from the
analogy of cases in which the word is followed by a syllable beginning
with _u_ and _i_. Such an explanation, however, is more likely to be true
of mouillation than of rounding; indeed, an _i_ or _y_ sound is very apt
to develop itself after consonants in affected pronunciation, as in the
English _kyind_, _duke_ (for _dook_), or the Greek ζορκάς (δyορκας) for
δορκάς and the Magyàr _ágy_, “bed.” Conversely a palatal _i_ or _y_ may
develop a dental sonant before it: thus the Italian _diacere_ comes from
the Latin _jacere_, the Low Latin _madius_ from _majus_,[180] and the
Greek ζειά (δyειά) and ζυγόν (δyυγόν) from _yava_ and _jugum_ (Sansk.
_yugam_). In these instances we may trace the influence of emphasis; the
parasitic letter is due to the attempt to speak with greater distinctness
and solemnity.
But whether it be emphasis or the other two causes of change described
in an earlier chapter, the pronunciation of sounds, like the meaning
they convey, is in a constant state of flux. Nowhere is the dogma of
Herakleitus, πάντα ῥεῖ, truer than in the history of speech. No two
people pronounce exactly alike, nor does the same person always pronounce
the same word or group of words in exactly the same way. Apart from the
changes undergone by the pronunciation of words according to the sounds
of the other words with which they may be associated, it is difficult to
pronounce the same word when uttered singly twice in precisely the same
way. The very effort to do so produces modification of the sound. Such
shades of difference in utterance, however, are imperceptible to any
but an unusually sensitive ear; it is only when the difference becomes
considerable that it attracts notice. It then constitutes what we may
term a variety, and such varieties we may hear sometimes from the lips of
a single individual, sometimes from the members of a family, sometimes
from those who live in daily contact and under the same conditions of
life. The faculty of imitation is strong within us, and a particular
pronunciation once started soon spreads, as it were instinctively,
amongst those who are much together. It has often been observed how like
the members of a family are to each other, not only in general appearance
and manner, but still more in the use of similar expressions and idioms
and the pronunciation of sounds. It is the same with schools, and to
a less degree with universities to which the students come with their
habits of phonetic utterance more or less formed: it has been said that
the handwriting betrays the school at which the man has been educated; it
may be said with equal justice that the mode of speaking does so too. In
a savage state of existence, where tribe-life and village-life are on the
one hand strict and intense, and the husband on the other hand sees but
little of his wife and children, the conditions favourable to the growth
of varieties in pronunciation are more numerous than among civilized men.
The language of the nursery becomes in time the language of the tribe.
This phonetic variety may be broadly stated as mainly due to differences
in the structure of the vocal organs. Putting aside imitation and
analogy, putting aside, too, all wilful and conscious changes of
pronunciation such as those enumerated on page 205, a particular sound
or a particular way of pronouncing a sound may be easier to one speaker
than to another. Very slight differences in the physical formation of the
organs of speech may produce the most important consequences. And when
a habit of pronunciation has once been fixed, it is difficult to alter
it. The child who is learning to speak will as readily learn Chinese
as English, the Japanese _r_ as the Northumberland _burr_; it is quite
another matter when the attempt to catch the sounds of a new language has
to be made in adult years.
Climate and food have, doubtless, an important effect in producing
changes in the formation of the vocal organs; but at present we have no
means of knowing the nature and extent of their influence. Professor
March remarks of the change of _i_ to _g_ in Anglo-Saxon,[181] that
“the movement (of consonants to vowels) is sometimes reversed, as when
a nation moves northward, or northern peoples mix with a vowel-speaking
race.” The Rev. W. Webster has drawn attention to the nasal twang
which distinguishes not only American English, but American Spanish,
Portuguese, and French as well; and which seems to be due to the dryness
and the extremes of the American climate, while he further suggests
climatic influences for the origin of the loss of the aspirate in Spanish
words like _hijo_, pronounced _ijo_, the Latin _filius_, which in the
fourteenth century still had _f_, and for the intensification of the
aspirate in the corresponding Gascon words. We are all well acquainted
with the hoarseness and roughness that exposure to the atmosphere lends
to the voice, and the exercise and strength that a mountainous region
gives to the lungs produce their effect in the vigour with which sounds
are uttered. In cold countries the respiration is accelerated, while the
air being denser contains a larger volume of oxygen.[182] The prognathism
of the lower and older races of men, again, must have considerably
modified their powers of utterance. “The lower jaw,” says Dr. Rolleston,
“which in every well-marked variety of the human species contributes very
importantly towards the making up of its distinctive character, was in
the brachycephalous Briton usually a very different bone from the lower
jaw of his Silurian predecessor.”[183] The strange fashions, too, which
lead the savage to mutilate and deform his person, have frequently a
very direct bearing upon phonology. Thus the loss and confusion of the
labials and the excessive nasalization in the languages of the natives of
the Pacific coast of America must be traced to the rings that are worn
through the nostrils and lips of the people.[184] The Otyi-herero of
South Africa is lisping in consequence of the custom of knocking out the
four lower teeth, and partly filing off the upper front ones, to which
also Professor Max Müller suggests the occurrence of the English, _th_
and _dh_ in the language may be due, and the Dinkas, who, like all the
negroes of the White River, extract the front teeth of the lower jaw,
have no sibilants.[185]
Whatever may be the causes which bring about varieties in pronunciation,
certain it is that they are as continually making their appearance as
varieties in the realm of natural history. Where they are unrestrained by
the conservative tendencies of literature and education, they soon spread
from the individual and the household and become species or dialects. The
dialect itself may in course of time assume so marked a character of its
own, and be so widely spoken as to be accounted a separate language; and
will stand to the varieties and species destined to grow out of it in the
relation of a genus to its species. But with this further development
phonology has little to do.
It is otherwise with the changes which result in the rise of a new
dialect. Comparative philology is based on the recognition that the
same word will be represented by different combinations of sounds in a
group of allied dialects or languages, and that each combination will
be governed by a fixed phonetic law. An English _h_, for example, will
answer to a Greek and Latin _k_, an English _t_ to a German _z_ and a
Sanskrit _d_. When once a sound is given in a language, we may know the
sounds which must correspond to it in the cognate languages. Now and
then, of course, subordinate laws will interfere with the working of the
general law; but unless such an interference can be proved, we must never
disregard the general law for the sake of an etymological comparison,
however tempting. To compare the Greek θεός with the Latin _deus_ and
the Sanskrit _devas_, rests upon almost as unstable a foundation as the
old derivation of _whole_ from ὅλος, and _call_ from καλέω.[186] We must
never forget that the laws of phonology are as undeviating in their
action as the laws of physical science, and where the spelling does not
mislead us will display themselves in every word of genuine growth. Even
the vowels cannot be changed and shifted arbitrarily; they, too, follow
definite laws of development, and though it is not yet possible to state
their equivalence in the several languages of a single family with the
same precision as in the case of the consonants, we may feel quite sure
that this is the fault of our ignorance and not of the facts themselves.
It was the great Grimm who, following in the wake of Rask, first
formulated the empiric law of that regular _Lautverschiebung_, or
shifting of sounds, in our Indo-European family of speech which has since
gone under his name. Since his time the law has been the subject of much
discussion and examination;[187] his statements have been amended and
amplified, and an endeavour made to apply the same law to the vowels that
has been applied to the consonants. The following table[188] exhibits the
equivalence of sounds in the Aryan family of speech:—
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+--------------+
| | Sanskrit. | Zend. | Greek. | Latin. |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+--------------+
| K | ś (ç) | ç | κ | c |
| Kw }| k, ch, p | k, ch, p | κ, π, τ | qu, c, v |
| (K²) }| | | | |
| G | j, sh | z, sh | γ | g |
| Gw }| g, j, k | g, j, zh, k | β, γ[189] | [g]v, b |
| (G²) }| | | | |
| G H | h | z | χ | h, g |
| G Hw }| [g] h | g, j, zh | χ, φ | v, gv, g |
| (G H²) }| | | | |
| T | t | t | τ | t |
| D | d | d | δ | d, l |
| D H | [d] h | d | θ | f, d, b[190] |
| P | p | p | π | p |
| B | b | b? | β | b |
| B H | [b] h | b | φ | f, b |
| N G | ṅ | ñ | γ | ng |
| N | n | n | ν | n |
| M | m | m | μ | m |
| R | r, l | r | ρ, λ | r, l |
| Y | y | y | y, ζ, δ | j |
| V | v | v | ϝ, υ, ῾ | v |
| S | s | h, s | σ, ῾ | s, r |
| A | a | a | ε | ĕ |
| A² | â, a | — | ο | ŏ, ĕ |
| A³ | a, i, u, î, û | — | α, ο | a, o |
| Â | â | â | ᾱ, ω | ā, ō |
| I | i | i | ῑ | i |
| U | u | u | ῠ | u, o, i |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+--------------+
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+--------------+
| | Oscan and | Gothic. | English. | Modern High |
| | Umbrian. | | | German. |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+--------------+
| K | k | h, g | h, g | h, g |
| Kw }| p | hv, f(p), h | wh, f | w, f |
| (K²) }| | | | |
| G | g | k | k, ch | k, ch |
| Gw }| b | kv | qu, c | qu, k |
| (G²) }| | | | |
| G H | h | g | g, y | g |
| G Hw }| ? | g, v? | g, w? | g, w? |
| (G H²) }| | | | |
| T | t | th, d | d, th | d, t |
| D | d | t | t | z, ss, sz |
| D H | f | d | d | t, th |
| P | p | f, b | f, b | f, b |
| B | b | p? | p? | pf?, f? |
| B H | f | b | b | b |
| N G | ng | ng | ng | ng |
| N | n | n | n | n |
| M | m | m | m | m |
| R | r, l | r, l | r, l | r, l |
| Y | j | j | y | j |
| V | v | v | w | w |
| S | s, r, z | s, z | s, r | s, r |
| A | e | e | — | — |
| A² | — | — | — | — |
| A³ | — | a | — | — |
| Â | — | — | — | — |
| I | i | i | — | — |
| U | u | u, au | — | — |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+--------------+
+---------+-------------+-----------+----------+--------+------------+
| | Lithuanian. | Church | Gaulish. | Old | Old |
| | | Slavonic. | | Irish. | Welsh. |
+---------+-------------+-----------+----------+--------+------------+
| K | sz | s | c | c, ch | c |
| Kw }| k, p | k, p | p | c, ch | p |
| (K²) }| | | | | |
| G | ż | z | g | g | g |
| Gw }| g | g | b? | b, m? | b, m? |
| (G²) }| | | | | |
| G H | z | z | g | g | g |
| G Hw }| g | g | b? | b | b |
| (G H²) }| | | | | |
| T | t | t | t | t, th | t |
| D | d | d | d | d | d |
| D H | d | d | d | d | d |
| P | p | p | ... | ... | ...[191] |
| B | b | b | b | b, m | b, m |
| B H | b | b | b | b, m | b, m |
| N G | ng | -n | ng | ng | ng |
| N | n | n, -n | n | n | n |
| M | m | m, -n | m | m, b | m, b |
| R | r, l | r, l | r, l | r, l | r, l |
| Y | j | j | j | ... | j, ddj, dd |
| V | v | v | v | f, b | gu, u |
| S | s | s, ch | s | s | h |
| A | e | e | — | — | — |
| A² | o, à | o | — | — | — |
| A³ | a | a | — | — | — |
| Â | — | — | — | — | — |
| I | i | i | — | — | — |
| U | u | u, o, ŭ | — | — | — |
+---------+-------------+-----------+----------+--------+------------+
Some of the changes of sound recorded in the above table are as old as
the undivided Aryan speech itself. They go back to the dialects that
existed in the earliest period of which our materials allow us to know.
Instead of clinging, with Fick, to a genealogical tree, and deriving the
Aryan languages of Europe and Asia from two parent-stems, Western and
Eastern Aryan, and these again from a single _Ursprache_ or primitive
speech, it is better to follow J. Schmidt in tracing the later languages
to co-existent dialects, which by the loss or absorption of intermediate
dialects and the migration of the speakers became more and more distinct
and divergent one from the other. It is, of course, quite possible that
the speakers of the most western of these dialects moved across the
Ural range into Europe in a compact body, and there settled for a while
in a district westward of a line drawn from Königsberg to the Crimea,
where the beech grew, and that it was from this second home of the
Aryan race that the waves of European emigrants successively broke off.
Certainly Professor Fick seems to have shown the common possession of
certain phonetic peculiarities, such as the vowel _e_, by the Western as
distinguished from the Eastern Aryans, and the Eastern or Indic branch of
the family clearly once formed a single whole which subsequently divided
into Iranian and Hindu. Unfortunately the position of Armenian and the
allied dialects is still a matter of doubt; and there are scholars who
would regard them as a link between the European and the Asiatic sections
of the Aryan group. But Fick labours hard, and apparently with success,
to prove that the Aryan dialects of Asia Minor, such as we know them
from glosses and inscriptions, belonged to the European, not the Asiatic
section, while Armenian, on the other side, is an Iranian tongue. Fick’s
conclusion is confirmed by the evidence of the cuneiform inscriptions.
Up to the eighth century B.C. Armenia was still inhabited by tribes
who spoke non-Aryan languages, and it was only a century previously
that the Medes had first forced their way into the country regarded by
the agglutinative Accadians as the cradle of their race, but which was
afterwards to be the seat of the Aryan Medes. Eastward of the Halys there
was nothing Aryan until long after the occupation of Armenia by the
new-comers.
We have certain proof that the series of changes which resulted in the
formation of High German took place subsequently to the overthrow of the
Roman Empire. Latin words for instance like (_via_) _strata_ or _campus_,
adopted by the Teutons during the era of their wars with Rome, are found
in both Low and High German in the very forms which the application of
Grimm’s law would require them to have were they native words. Thus
_strata_, Low German _strata_, our _street_, becomes _straza_ in Old High
German, _campus_, our _camp_, similarly becomes _kamph_, _kampf_. The
Hessians were called Catti in Roman times, and though now High Germans,
had the same ancestors as the Batavi, from whom the modern Dutch draw
their descent, while the Malbergian glosses show the language of the
Franks to have been Low German, although the Franconians of to-day,
who are descended from the same stock as the Suabians and Ripuarians,
speak High German. Here, at any rate, we have an instance of a series of
varieties finally resulting in a new language in historical times.
It must not be supposed that all the changes of pronunciation that
serve to distinguish one branch of the Aryan stock from another took
place simultaneously. On the contrary, they were slow and gradual; first
one and then another new fashion in sounding words sprang up and became
general: when once the new pronunciation had, from any cause, taken a
firm hold of the community, analogy caused every word to be submitted to
its influence, unless special reasons, such as accent, stood in the way,
until in course of time the process of shifting the sounds was completed.
An instructive illustration of this shifting of sounds has lately been
going on almost under our eyes. In the Samoan Islands of the Pacific
only fifteen years ago _k_ was an unknown sound except in one small
island of the group, where it replaced _t_. Since then it has practically
disappeared from all of them, and _t_ has taken its place. What makes the
rapidity of the change the more extraordinary is that the speakers of the
language live on separate islands, and that intercourse between them is
less intimate now, according to Mr. Whitmee, than it was in the days of
heathenism. And yet in spite of books and schools, in spite of education
and every effort to check it, the change has come about. The natives
will ridicule the foreigner who pronounces in the new fashion, they will
themselves take pains to sound the _k_ when reading aloud or making a
set speech, but in conversation it has ceased to be heard. The tendency
to put _k_ for _t_ seems to be irresistible; it is in the air, like an
epidemic, and the spelling, so recently introduced, no longer represents
the common pronunciation of the people.[192]
We must be on our guard against thinking that the sounds represented
by the same letter of the alphabet in different languages are really
identical. We have seen of what numberless variations each sound that
we utter is capable, and it does not follow that because the Sanskrit
_cha_ and the English _church_ are written with the same palatal _ch_,
that therefore they are to be pronounced alike. And what is true of the
consonants is still more true of the vowels. There is much to show that
the European scale of three short vowels—_ă_, _ĕ_, _ŏ_—is more primitive
than the Indic single vowel _ă_, in which three distinct vowel-sounds
of the parent-speech have coalesced, but we cannot infer from this that
the three vowel-sounds of the parent-speech were actually _ă_, _ĕ_, and
_ŏ_. Indeed, when we remember that the Greek ἕκατον (for ἕν-καντον)
corresponds to the Latin _centum_, while _ferentis_ is represented by
φέροντος, it is quite clear that the Latin _ĕ_ must have developed out
of one or more sounds which were distinct from it. In dealing with the
hypothetical Parent-Aryan it is best, with Brugman, to symbolize these
three primitive vowels as _a_¹, _a_², and _a_³.[193] It is possible that
some at least of the earlier sounds out of which more than one articulate
sound have afterwards developed, were of a vague indeterminate character,
not properly-formed vowel utterances. Professor Max Müller[194] quotes
authorities to prove that in the Sandwich Islands _k_ and _t_ are
undistinguished, and that “it takes months of patient labour to teach a
Hawaian youth the difference between _k_ and _t_, _g_ and _d_, _l_ and
_r_.”[195] The confusion between _k_ and _t_, however, has already been
explained by the similar fact observed in Samoan where the sound has
actually changed within the last fifteen years, a distinctly-articulated
_k_ becoming an equally distinctly-articulated _t_. But even in English
we find people saying _a cleast_ instead of _at least_, while at Paris
and elsewhere the lower classes say _amikié_ for _amitié_, _charkier_
for _charretier_, _crapu_ for _trapu_.[196] So in the old Paris argot
_j’équions_ stood for _j’étais_, and in Canada the uneducated part
of the population says _mékier_ for _métier_, _moikié_ for _moitié_.
Bleek, again, writes of the Setshuana dialects: “One is justified to
consider _r_ in these dialects as a sort of floating letter, and rather
intermediate between _l_ and _r_, than a decided _r_ sound.”[197] To
these instances of confusion between two consonants which Professor Max
Müller believes to be “a characteristic of the lower stages of human
speech,” may be added the fluctuation between two forms of the same sound
in the North German dialects, where no distinction is made between surd
and sonant _mediæ_, as well as in many of the Armenian dialects.[198] But
we must bear in mind that this childlike inability to distinguish between
sounds may be due to two very different causes. It may be a result either
of the sound being formed at the neutral point, as it were, intermediate
between two distinct sounds, or of the ear being unable to discriminate
between different articulations. The latter cause is analogous to
colour-blindness, and has most to do with the imperfections of childish
utterance or the substitution of _r_ for _l_ so often heard; the other
cause is of a purely phonetic character, and takes us back to the time
when man was gradually fashioning the elements of articulate speech.
This infantile state of language had probably been long left behind by
the cultivated speakers of the Parent-Aryan; indeed, the very existence
of the three vowels marked _a_₁, _a_₂, and _a_₃, would imply that such
was the fact. If there was any confusion in the pronunciation of their
words it would have to be ascribed rather to sound-blindness than to
imperfection of utterance.
The regular action of Grimm’s law may be interfered with by the
influence of other laws, just as in physical science the regular action
of the law of attraction may be interfered with from time to time.
Foremost among these disturbing agencies is the accent. K. Verner has
shown[199] that the position of the accent has occasioned that apparent
disregard of Grimm’s law in the Teutonic languages which has produced
_mutter_ and _vater_ (O. H. G. _muotar_ and _fatar_) by the side of
_bruder_ (O. H. G. _brôpar_), _sieben_ (Goth. _sibun_) by the side of
_fünf_ (Anglo-Saxon _fîf_), _schwieger_ (O. H. G. _swigar_ = ἑκυρὰ,
_so-cru-s_) by the side of _heil_ (Greek καλός), or such a curious change
in the conjugation of the same verb as the Anglo-Saxon _lîðe_,“I sail,”
but _liden_, “sailed.” The same cause has brought about the varying
representation of an original _ſ_ now by _s_, and now by _z_ or _r_. In
the Veda, _bhrâtar_ is accented on the first syllable, like the Greek
φράτηρ, _mâtár_ and _pitár_ on the last, again like the Greek μητήρ and
πατήρ. _Sieben_ answers to the Vedic _saptán_, the Greek ἑπτά, whereas
_fünf_ is the Vedic _pánchan_ and Greek πέντε. _Schwieger_ similarly
goes back to the Vedic _´swa´srû´_, Greek ἑκυρά, just as the O. H. G.
_snura_ from _snuza_ goes back to the Vedic _snushâ´_, Greek νυός, in
contradistinction to _nase_, _nose_, the Vedic _nâ´sa_, the Lithuanian
_nósis_. If we turn to the verb, we find that in Anglo-Saxon, whereas the
present _lîðe_, “(I) sail,” corresponds with a Vedic _bhédâmi_, and the
singular of the past tense _lâð_ with a Vedic _bibhéda_, the plural of
the preterite _lidon_ corresponds with a Vedic _bibhidús_.[200]
There are other influences besides that of the accent which may
change and mar the face of words. Although every change takes place in
strict accordance with phonetic laws, and is consequently capable of
explanation, the occurrence of the changes is more or less sporadic and
arbitrary. That is to say, they may act upon one word and not upon its
neighbour. In _should_ or _would_, for instance, _l_ has been assimilated
to _d_, but in _fold_ and _cold_ it still maintains its existence.
Such changes may be either independent or dependent on the action of
surrounding sounds. The diversification of the Teutonic _a_ into _e_ and
_o_, or the transition of the Latin _ĭ_ and _ŭ_ into Romanic _e_ and
_o_ are instances of independent change. So, too, the modern English
pronunciation of the vowels with passive lips, and the consequent loss
of the intermediate vowels _ü_ and _ö_, is another example of the same
facts. Wherever, indeed, these intermediate vowel-sounds exist, we may
feel sure that the lips take an active part in articulation. In all these
cases the change happens in the formation of the sound, uninfluenced by
the neighbourhood of other sounds. The extension of a simple vowel into
a diphthong may also be brought under this head, though the presence of
the circumflex accent seems to have much to do with it. On the other
hand, changes in the dentals, the passage of _z_ into _r_ and _r_ into
_l_, or the transition from a guttural to a palatal and a dental, are all
examples of purely independent change. When we find an Aryan _kw_ (_k_²)
and _gw_ becoming _ch_ and _j_ in Sanskrit or τ in Greek, we merely see
the gradual forward movement of the tongue, which is moved with less
exertion towards its tip than towards its root. The change of Aryan _kw_
and _gw_ into _p_ and _b_ in Greek (as in πίσυρες and βίος[201]) is held
by Sievers to be due to a sudden “leap” in the articulation, _k_ and _g_
partially assimilating the second part of each compound into _p_ and _b_,
and then falling away altogether.
Most of the changes recorded in Grimm’s law may be brought under the head
of independent change. No doubt the transition of _g_, _d_, _b_, into
_k_, _t_, and _p_ in German is partially dependent upon the accent, but
the growth of an aspirate out of a _tenuis_, as exemplified in the Irish
pronunciation of English, is probably due to nothing but an increase in
the energy and duration with which our breath is expired. The want of the
stress accent brings about the shortening and loss of final vowels, the
tonic accent, on the other hand, tending to lengthen them.
The changes caused by the action of one sound upon another may be
divided into those which are due to assimilation, and those that are not.
In either case the time occupied in pronouncing the changed sound remains
the same as it was before; it is only in cases of independent change that
it may differ. Assimilation is effected in one of two ways. The relative
positions of the vocal organs needed for the pronunciation of two sounds
may be made to approximate, as in the reduction of _ai_ (_a_ + _i_) to
_e_, or the time that elapses between the pronunciation of two sounds may
be reduced or destroyed altogether, as when _supmus_ becomes _summus_.
Where the change is not due to assimilation, it will be found to depend
on an alteration in the time needed for the formation of two or more
sounds.
Assimilation may be regressive, progressive, or reciprocal. Regressive
assimilation is where a sound is assimilated to that which follows it,
as in ἕννυμι for ϝεσ-νυμι, from the root _vas_, or ποσσί, for ποδ-σι
(ποδ-σϝ-ι), and γράμμα for γράφ-μα(τ). Progressive assimilation is the
converse of this, as in στέλλω for στελ-yω, μᾶλλον for μαλ-ιον, _mellis_
for _melv-is_, or the Æolic ἔστελλα for ἔστελ-σα. Regressive assimilation
largely preponderates in our Aryan languages, progressive assimilation in
the Ural-Altaic ones; and it is very possible that Sievers is right[202]
in tracing this contrast to the difference of the accentuation, which
in Ural-Altaic falls upon the first syllable of the word, while in
the parent-Aryan it fell for the most part on the final syllable.
Böhtlingk[203] says, very appositely: “An Indo-Germanic word is a real
whole of such a kind that the speaker has uttered the whole word, as it
were, in spirit, as soon as he has pronounced the first syllable. Only
in this way can it be explained how a syllable (or sound) is modified in
order to assist the pronunciation of the syllable (or sound) that follows
it. A member of the Ural-Altaic race forces out the first syllable of a
word—that part of it, namely, which has the accent—little caring for the
fortune of the rest; on this he next strings in more or less rude fashion
a few more significant syllables, only thinking of a remedy at the moment
when he first feels the want of one.” As for reciprocal assimilation, an
example of it may be found in the reduction of _ai_ to _e_ quoted above,
where both sounds influence one another.
Assimilation may be either complete or partial. There are sounds which
can never be thoroughly assimilated to each other, _bn_, for instance,
can never at once become _nn_, only _mn_. Partial regressive assimilation
meets us very frequently in the classical languages; _e.g._, λεκ-τός from
the root λεγε, ἤνυσμαι from ἀνυτ-, δόγμα from δοκ-; partial progressive
assimilation is rarer; e.g., πάσχω for πάσκω from παθ-σκω.
The changes dependent on the presence of a second sound, which are
not due to assimilation, are necessarily produced by varying the time
needed for pronunciation. Of these the most striking is metathesis.
Metathesis must be referred rather to a mental than to a phonetic origin.
Our thought and will outstrip our pronunciation, the result being that
the sound which ought to follow is made to precede, or else the vocal
organs are shaped prematurely for the formation of a sound which ought to
be heard later, the consequence being that the sound which should come
first has to come last. Metathesis, in fact, is similar to the rapidity,
or rather relaxation, of thought which leads us sometimes to write or
speak a word which belongs to a subsequent part of the sentence; and
it may be of two kinds: either the place of two sounds may be simply
inverted, or the second sound may be made to precede the first by two or
three syllables. How easily the first case can happen is shown by the
phonograph, where each syllable that has been uttered can be reproduced
backward by merely turning the handle of the machine the wrong way. _R_
and _l_ are the most subject to metathesis, then the nasals; the other
consonants vary according to their relationship to the vowels. More
regular than metathesis are the insertion and omission of consonants, as
in ἀν-δ-ρὸς, ἄ-μ-β-ροτος, τέτυφθε for τέτυφσθε, _rêmus_ for _resmus_.
Somewhat different are the insertion and omission of vowels, the first
of which goes under the technical name of _Swarabhakti_. This name
was imported from the Hindu grammarians by Johannes Schmidt,[204] to
mark the growth of a short or reduced vowel from a liquid or nasal,
when accompanied by another consonant. Thus _ănman_, “name,” became
_ănă-man_, and then, by the loss of the first vowel and the compensatory
lengthening of the second, _nômen_ and _nâmâ_. _Swarabhakti_ is, however,
incompatible with the acute accent. We may find examples of it in the
slow pronunciation which in English turns _umbrella_ into _umbĕrella_,
and _Henry_ into _Henĕry_.[205] Prosthesis, or prothesis, the insertion
of a short vowel at the beginning of a word before two consonants, is
another illustration of _Swarabhakti_. There are many nations which find
a difficulty in pronouncing two consonants at the beginning of a word.
Thus the Bengali calls the English _school_ _yschool_, the Arab says
_Iflatún_ for _Platon_, and the Ossete uses _a_ for the same purpose.
In other cases, one of the consonants is dropped altogether, as so
frequently by children and systematically by the natives of Polynesia.
In Latin inscriptions and MSS. later than the fourth century we find
forms like _istatuam_, _ispirito_, just as in the Romanic tongues we have
_estar_ and _espée_ (_épée_) for _stare_ and _spada_, or in Welsh _ysgol_
from _schola_, _yspryd_ from _spiritus_. According to Wentrup,[206] _a_
is often used as a prothetic vowel in Sicilian; Lithuanian has forms
like _iszkadà_, German “_schade_,” and Basque and Hungarian prefix a
similar aid to the pronunciation. No trace of a prothetic vowel can be
found in Latin; in Greek, however, such vowels are very plentiful. Thus
we have ἄσταχυς by the side of στάχυς, ἐχθές by the side of χθές, ἰγνύη
by the side of γόνυ, Ὀβριαρευς by the side of Βριαρεύς. In Greek, too,
as in other languages where prothesis occurs, the complementary vowel
may be inserted before a liquid, more especially _r_, as well as before
a strictly double consonant, _e.g._, ἀμύνω by the side of μύνη, ἐρυθρός
by the side of _ruber_, ὀρέγω by the side of _rego_. Even the digamma
may perhaps take the prefix as in the Homeric ἔεδνον. But it is probable
that no other single consonant does so, the apparent exceptions being
really explained by the loss of a consonant which once existed along with
the one that is left. Ὀκέλλω, for instance, presupposes ὀ-κϝέλλω (Latin
_pellere_), Ἀπόλλων presupposes Α-κϝολιων, “the son of the revolving
one” (Sanskrit _char_, Greek πέλομαι). In other cases we are dealing not
with a prothetic vowel, but with a part of the primitive root: ὄνομα,
for example, is shown by the Irish _aimn_ and Old Prussian _emnes_ to
be more original than the Sanskrit _nâmâ_ or the Latin _nomen_, and to
stand for an earlier _an-man_; and ὄνυξ, the Latin _unguis_, the Irish
_inga_, is earlier in form than the Sanskrit _nakha_ and the English
_nail_ (_nagel_)[207]. We may discover a tendency in Greek to adapt the
prothetic vowel to that of the root, though it is hardly so regular as
in Zend roots beginning with _r_, where we find _i-rith_ for _rith_, but
_u-rud_ for _rud_. Sanskrit, like Latin, shows an inclination rather to
drop initial vowels than to add them, but even in Sanskrit, Curtius has
pointed out[208] the Vedic _i-raj-yâmi_ from _raj_ (_rego_) and _i-radh_,
“to seek to obtain,” from _râdh_. As for the loss of a vowel, it is too
familiar to every one to need any illustration.
More akin to metathesis is epenthesis, which closely resembles the
Teutonic _umlaut_. Epenthesis is especially plentiful in Greek, where
κτέν-yω becomes κτείνω, χερ-ιων χείρων, λόγοσι λόγοις, ἐλαν-ϝω ἐλαύνω,
νερϝον νεῦρον. Probably λέγει for λεγειτ is to be explained as resulting
from the epenthesis of ι (λεγειτ for λεγετι), just as λέγεις stands
for an earlier λεγεσι. Epenthesis thus presupposes a mouillation or
labialization in which the articulation of the consonant is absorbed, as
it were, by that of the _i_ and _u_. The greater the participation of the
lips and tongue in the formation of these vowels, the greater will be the
tendency towards epenthesis.
Lastly, we have to consider the lengthening of vowels, either by way
of compensation or before certain consonants. By compensation is meant
the additional force with which a vowel is pronounced after the loss of
a consonant which followed or preceded it. Thus in Greek the loss of
the digamma in βασιλεϝ-ος produced the Ionic βασιλῆος on the one side
and the Attic βασίλεως on the other, just as the loss of the _yod_ in
πολιy-ος similarly produced πολῆος and πόλεως. So, too, πάνς became
πᾶς, δαιμονς δαίμων, ἐφαν-σα ἔφηνα, _rĕs-mus_ _rémus_, _pĕds_ _pês_,
_exăgmen_ _exâmen_, _măgior_ _mâjor_. In certain cases the vowel was
raised into a diphthong, as in φέρουσι for φεροντι, τιθείς for τιθενς,
ἔστειλα for έστελσα. But a vowel may also be lengthened before liquids,
nasals, and spirants when combined with another consonant. If the grave
or the circumflex accent fall upon the preceding vowel, the tendency is
to lengthen the vowel at the expense of the sonant or spirant following.
Hence it is, that whereas in our English _tint_, or _hilt_, where the
vowel has the acute, the nasal and liquid are long; in _kind_ and _mild_,
on the other hand, where the vowel is circumflexed, it is the vowel (or
rather the diphthong) that is long. The vowel, again, may be lengthened
to compensate for the loss of a double letter. Thus in Latin we find
_vīlicus_ by the side of _villicus_, from _villa_, and whereas the
grammarians lay down that when _ll_ is followed by _i_, single _l_ must
be written, we find _millia_ in the famous inscription of Ancyra. So,
too, the inscriptions vary between _Amulius_ and _Amullius_, _Polio_ and
_Pollio_, and good MSS. have _loquella_, _medella_, instead of _loquēla_,
_medēla_.
There is another fact to be remembered when we are looking for the
application of Grimm’s law—a fact which the law itself ought to bring to
our minds. Different languages have different phonetic tendencies; the
same sound is not equally affected by phonetic decay in two different
dialects or modified in the same way; each language has phonetic laws
and phænomena peculiar to itself. Thus, in Greek, σ between two vowels
is lost, in Latin it becomes _r_; in Greek a nasal preserves, or perhaps
introduces, the vowel _a_, in Latin it prefers the vowel _e_. Because τ
between vowels becomes σ in Greek, or _sr_ in Latin is changed into _br_
(as in _cerebrum_ for _ceresrum_, κέρας, _śiras_), we are not justified
in expecting similar changes in other tongues. In fact we have only to
look at the table of sound-changes, known as Grimm’s law, to see that it
is just because two languages do not follow the same course of phonetic
modification that a scientific philology is possible.
To speak of Grimm’s law being “suspended,” of “exceptions to Grimm’s
law,” and the like, is only to show an ignorance of the principles of
comparative philology. Grimm’s law is simply the statement of certain
observed phonetic facts, which happen invariably, _so far as we know_,
unless interfered with by other facts which, under given conditions,
equally happen invariably. The accidental has little place in phonology,
at all events in an illiterate and uncultivated age. Literature and
education are no doubt disturbing forces: a writer may borrow a word
without modifying its sound according to rule; and the word may be
adopted into the common speech through the agency of the schoolmaster;
but such words are mere aliens and strangers, never truly naturalized
in their new home, and the philologist must treat them as such. Native
words, as well as words which, though borrowed from abroad, have been
borrowed by the people and so given a native stamp, undergo, and must
undergo, all those changes and shiftings of sound which meet us in
Grimm’s law, in the phonetic laws peculiar to individual languages, or
in any other of the generalizations under which we sum up the phænomena
of spoken utterance. False analogy, it is true, may divert a word from
the path it would naturally have taken; one word may be assimilated to
another regardless of its real etymology, or words whose real origin
has been forgotten may be modified so as to convey a new meaning to the
speaker. But, in such cases, the worst that could happen would be the
loss of the true etymology; Grimm’s law would still hold good, and the
originals of the existing sounds would be those demanded by the regular
_Lautverschiebung_. So far as the present form of a word like _Shotover_
(for _château vert_) is concerned, it is to the mere phonologist, as to
the ordinary speaker, a compound of _shot_ and _over_, and in comparing
these two words with allied words in other languages the prescribed
letter-change holds good. It is only the comparative philologist, who
has to deal with the psychological as well as with the phonetic side
of language, that needs to know more, and to determine that _Shotover_
is not what it professes to be, but the product of a more or less
conscious imagination. In most cases of analogy we have to do with mental
as opposed to phonetic assimilation, and they fall, therefore, under
sematology, the science of meanings, rather than under phonology, the
science of sounds. No doubt we find instances of analogy, like the Greek
accusative βεβαῶτα, modelled after the nominative βεβαώς,[209] or the
Latin genitives _diei_, _dierum_, modelled after the accusative _diem_
for _diam_, but such instances fall under the laws and conditions of that
phonetic assimilation which has been already described. Let us hold fast
to the fact that the generalizations, the chief of which are summed up
in the formula known as Grimm’s law, are at once uniform and unvarying.
If an etymology is suggested, which violates these generalizations, that
etymology must be rejected, however plausible or attractive. It is upon
the fixed character of these generalizations that the whole fabric of
scientific philology rests.
Necessarily similar generalizations may be made in the case of other
languages which, like the Aryan, can be grouped into single families of
speech; nay, they must be made before we are justified in grouping them
together, or in comparing and explaining their grammar and vocabulary.
It is not always, however, that the changes of sound are so marked and
violent as in the Indo-European. A group of allied languages may be as
closely related to one another as the modern Romanic dialects of Europe,
and various causes may have combined to give a stability and fixity to
their phonology which has made it change but slightly in the course of
centuries. This is the case with the Semitic dialects, whose laws of
sound-change are extremely simple. Practically the sound shiftings are
confined to the sibilants, where the equivalence of sounds is as follows:—
Assyrian. Hebrew. Ethiopic. Arabic. Aramaic.
_s_ (_sh_) _s_ (_sh_) _s_, _´s_ _sh_, _s_, _th_ _´s_, _s_, _th_
_´s_ _´s_ _s_, _´s_ _s_, _sh_ _´s_
_ts_ _ts_ _ts_ _ts_, _ds_, _dhs_ _ts_, _dh_, _’e_
_z_ _z_ _z_ _z_, _dh_ _z_, _d_[210]
One or two other general laws of phonetic change may be laid down for
special members of the Semitic group; thus, in Assyrian, _s_ before a
dental becomes _l_, and _kh_ is dropped when it answers to the Arabic and
Ethiopic weak _kh_. In the Babylonian dialect, again, _k_ took the place
of _g_, and the _n_ of the other dialects is sometimes replaced by _r_ in
Aramaic.
But the Semitic idioms are dialects rather than languages, so intimate
is the connection between them, so slight the differences by which they
are separated. It is quite otherwise if we turn to a group like the
Malayo-Polynesian, where the word _oran_, “man,” may be represented in
the different dialects by _rang_, _olan_, _lan_, _ala_, _la_, _na_,
_da_, and _ra_.[211] But here, too, the law of equivalence is fixed and
determinate: the Samoan _s_ is changed into _h_ in Tongan and Maori,
while the Maori _k_ is dropped in Samoan.
Equally extensive is the series of changes undergone by sounds in
the Ugro-Finnic tongues, and when the law of sound-shifting has been
determined not only for the Ugro-Finnic division of the Turanian
family, but for the whole Turanian family, comprising Turkish, Mongol,
and Mandshu, we may expect it to include a far larger number of
changes of sound than that summed up in Grimm’s law. So far as the
Ugro-Finnic dialects are concerned, M. de Ujfálvy, in continuance of the
investigations of Riedl,[212] has been able to lay down the following
rules for the phonetic permutations observable in these idioms: (1) The
Finnish and Bulgar _k_ becomes _kh_ in Ostiak, Vogul, and Old Magyár,
and _h_ in modern Magyár; (2) _k_ = _ts_; (3) _k_ or _g_ = _s_, _z_,
_ṣ_, _j_, _ts_, &c.; (4) Finnish _ks_ = Votiak _hs_ (earlier _ht_); (5)
Finnish _kl_, _pl_ = Lapp _vl_; (6) Medial Finnish _k_ and _h_ = Bulgar
and Ugrian _v_ and _f_; (7) Initial Finnish _h_ disappears in Livonian
and Lapp (in Lapp also becomes _v_ before a dental); (8) Finnish _h_ =
_s_, _ṣ_, _ts_, _sy_, _ts_ (_c_), _ẓ_, _tsy_, &c.; (9) Finnish and Bulgar
_k_, _g_, _h_ = Lapp and Ostiak _ng_, _n_ = Magyar _g_; (10) Medial
Finnish _nk_ = Lapp _gg_; (11) Finnish _nt_ = Lapp _dd_; (12) _gy_, _ny_
= _y_, _v_; (13) _t_ = _s_ (Finnish _t_ = _s_, _ṣ_, _sy_, _ts_, _z_,
_ẓ_, &c.); (14) Finnish _s_, _h_ = Ostiak and Vogul _t_; (15) Finnish
_p_ = Votiak _b_ = Magyar _b_, _f_; (16) Finnish _t_ = Magyar _s_, _z_,
_ts_; (17) Finnish _m_ = Lapp _bm_; (18) Lapp _dn_ = Finnish _nn_ or
_n_; (19) Finnish _mb_ = Lapp _bb_; (20) Finnish _kk_, _tt_, _pp_ =
Vêpse and Livonian _k_, _t_, _p_; (21) Finnish _k_, _t_, _p_ = Vêpse and
Livonian _g_, _d_, _b_. This list of phonetic equivalents will make it
clear that the original phonology of the Ugro-Finnic group is generally
best represented by Suomi or Finnish; in some cases, however, Vêpse (or
Tchude) is more archaic than Finnish, and in one case, that of the change
of _t_ into _s_, Ostiak and Vogul are more primitive than Suomi. Vêpse,
again, shows that the long vowels of Suomi are due to contraction. Within
Suomi itself _kk_, _tt_, and _pp_, after a liquid are softened into
simple _k_, _t_, and _p_. The diphthongal consonants of Magyár (_ly_,
_my_, _ty_, &c.), are the result of a contraction of a consonant and a
vowel or diphthong following. The changes undergone by sounds within the
Ugro-Finnic group may be summed up as a whole in the two formulæ: (1) The
Finnish hard explosives are represented by soft explosives in the other
languages of the group; (2) spirants, and the sounds derived from them,
answer in the allied dialects to the explosives of Finnish. As for the
Samoied idioms, similar phonetic permutations may be discovered in them
also. In the Yurak dialect _h_ = _s_, _ng_ = _nr_, and _k_ = _ts_; in
Tavghi _k_ and _t_ tend to become _g_ and _d_; in Yenissei _dd_ = _md_
(_nt_, _nd_, _ntt_, _ltt_), _gg_ = _rk_ (_rg_) or _nk_, and _tt_ = _bt_,
while in Ostiak-Samoied and Kamassinche the hard explosives pass into the
soft _g_, _d_, _b_.[213]
Quite as regular as the permutations of sounds in the Finnic group is the
law of sound-change discovered by Bleek to exist in the Bâ-ntu or Kafir
family. The following table gives it for the principal members of the
group:—
Kafir. Setshuana. Herero. Ki-suahili. Ki-nika. Mpongwe. Bunda.
_k_ _kh_, _h_ _k_ _k_, _g_ _k_, _g_ _k_, _g_ _k_
_ng_ _k_ _ng_ _ng_ _ng_ _ng_ _ng_
_t_ _r_, _s_ _t_ _t_ _h_ _r_, _ty_ _t_
_d_ _l_, _r_ _t_ _nd_ _nd_ _nd_, _l_ _nd_, _r_
_p_ _p_, _f_, _p_ _p_ _v_, _h_ _v_ _b_
_h_
_b_ _b_, _p_ _v_ _b_, _w_ _b_, ’ _v_ —
_s_ _ts_, _s_ _t_, _ty_ _s_, _k_ _s_, _dz_ _z_, _s_, _k_
_k_, ’
_z_ _ts_, _l_, _z_, _h_ _z_, _dz_ _z_, _ts_ _dz_, _g_, _sh_, _g_
_r_ _s_
_f_ _f_, _h_, _s_ _f_ _f_ _w_ _f_
_s_
_v_ _b_, _r_ _s_ _f_ _f_ — _f_
_l_ _l_, _r_ _r_ _l’_ _r_, _l_ _l_, _nl_ _l_
_n_ _n_ _n_ _n_ _n_ _n_ _n_
_m_ _m_ _m_ _m_ _m_ _m_ _m_
The Bâ-ntu law of sound-shifting has the advantage over its Aryan
analogue, that it deals with actually existing sounds which can still
be heard and noted by the scientifically trained ear, whereas many of
the Aryan languages and sounds recorded in Grimm’s law are now extinct.
The Aryan philologist, accordingly, has to assume that the spelling of
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic words is a fair approximation to
their pronunciation. It is upon this assumption that the whole fabric of
historical grammar is built; nay, comparative philology itself, which
began with the comparison of allied forms and words in the classical
languages of India and Europe, is also based upon it. The assumption
offers little difficulty to the Italian, whose spelling accurately
represents his pronunciation, or to the German, who writes pretty much
as he speaks; but it need not be pointed out how strange and unnatural
it seems to the Englishman. English spelling, under the guidance of the
printers, has become a mere system of marks and symbols, arranged upon no
principle, selected with no rational purpose, each of which by a separate
effort of the memory is associated with some sound or word.
For the scientific philologist, no less than for the practical teacher, a
return to the phonetic spelling of our English language is of the highest
importance. What the philologist wishes to know is not how words are
spelt, but how they are pronounced, and this end can be obtained only by
means of an alphabet in which all the chief sounds of the language are
represented, and each character represents but one sound. No doubt the
practical man does not want the alphabet required by the phonologist,
who must denote every shade of sound and have separate symbols for the
sounds heard not in English only, but in other languages as well, but the
alphabet of the practical man should be based on that of the phonologist.
The reformed alphabet should be one which would enable the child or the
foreigner to recognize at once the sound of the word he is reading, and
the philologist to determine the pronunciation of the writer.
Thanks to Messrs. Ellis, Pitman, and others, the question of reforming
our English spelling has not only been brought before the public, but
the conditions under which it is practicable have been discussed and
ascertained, and the merits of rival schemes put to the test. The sounds
of the English language have been analyzed, and the great work of Mr.
A. J. Ellis on the “History of English Pronunciation” has shown how our
absurd and anomalous spelling grew up. At the present time we have in the
field the phonology of Mr. Pitman—an alphabet of thirty-eight letters—a
large proportion of which have new forms; the palæotype and glossic of
Mr. Ellis, the former retaining the type now used by the printers, but
enlarging the alphabet by turning the letters, and similar devices,
the latter by its likeness to the present spelling intended to bridge
over the passage from the present or “Nomic” mode of spelling to the
reformed one; the narrow and the broad Romic of Mr. Sweet, the second an
adaptation of the first to practical use; the ingenious system of Mr. E.
Jones, which by the employment of optional letters for the same sound
contrives to introduce little _apparent_ difference in the spelling of
English words; and several other English and American systems that have
been proposed, more especially the reformed alphabet of the American
Philological Association, together with the transitional alphabet
intended to lead on to it. Some of these are true phonetic alphabets,
words spelt in them varying according to the pronunciation of the writer,
others are merely attempts to reform the present spelling of English
words by making it more consistent, and bringing it more into harmony
with their actual pronunciation. Such attempts would only substitute
a less objectionable mode of spelling for the existing one, a mode of
spelling, too, that would in course of time become as stereotyped and far
removed from the pronunciation of the day as is the present system. With
such attempts, therefore, the scientific philologist can have but little
sympathy; his efforts must rather be directed towards the establishment
of a phonetic alphabet, based on a thorough analysis of English sounds
and conformed to practical requirements.
The question of spelling reform is nothing new. Mr. Ellis has brought
to light a MS. written in 1551 by John Hart of Chester, and entitled
“The Opening of the unreasonable writing of our inglish toung: wherin is
shewed what necessarili is to be left, and what folowed for the perfect
writing therof.” This the author followed up by a published work in
1569, called “An Orthographie, conteyning the due order and reason, howe
to write or painte thimage of mannes voice, most like to the life or
nature.”[214] The object of this, he says, “is to vse as many letters
in our writing, as we doe voyces or breathes in our speaking, and no
more; and neuer to abuse one for another, and to write as we speake.”
Hart, however, it would seem, tried to amend the pronunciation as well
as the spelling of English. The year before (1568) Sir Thomas Smith,
Secretary of State in 1548, and successor of Burleigh, had published
at the famous press of Robert Stephens in Paris, a work, “De recta et
emendata linguæ anglicæ scriptione, dialogus.” In this he had suggested
a reformed alphabet of thirty-four characters, _c_ being used for _ch_,
ð for _th_ (in _then_), and θ for _th_ (in _think_), long vowels being
indicated by a diæresis. In 1580 came another book in black letter
on the same subject, by William Bullokar. His alphabet consisted of
thirty-seven letters, most of which have duplicate forms, and in which
_c’_, _g’_, and _v’_, represent _s_, _j_, and _v_. He composed a primer
and a short pamphlet in the orthography he advocated. In 1619, Dr. Gill,
head-master of St. Paul’s School, published his “Logonomia Anglica,”
which was quickly followed by a second edition in 1621. His alphabet
contained forty characters, and, as might be expected from his position,
his attempt to reform English spelling was a more scholarly one than
those of his predecessors. He found a rival in the Rev. Charles Butler,
an M.A. of Magdalen College, Oxford, who brought out at Oxford, in 1633,
“The English Grammar, or the Institution of Letters, Syllables, and Words
in the English Tongue.” He printed this phonetically, according to his
own system, as well as another book, “The Feminine Monarchy or History
of the Bees” (Oxford, 1634). “These,” says Mr. Ellis, “are the first
English books entirely printed phonetically, as only half of Hart’s was
so presented. But Meigret’s works were long anterior in French.” Butler
represents the final _e_ mute by ’. In 1668 Bishop Wilkins published
his great work, the “Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical
Language.” In this he has a good treatise on phonetics, in which he
probably made use of an important work on the physiological nature of
sounds, brought out by John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry at
Oxford, in 1653;[215] and he has transcribed the Lord’s Prayer and Creed
in his phonetic alphabet of thirty-seven letters. After Bishop Wilkins
the matter rested for a while; but in 1711 the question of reforming
English spelling was once more raised, this time, however, in a practical
direction. Dean Swift appealed to the Prime Minister to appoint a
commission for “the Ascertaining, Correcting, and Improving of the
English Tongue.”[216] His appeal, however, was without effect; and the
next to apply himself to the subject was Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1768,
put forth “A Scheme for a New Alphabet and reformed mode of Spelling,
with Remarks and Examples concerning the same, and an Enquiry into its
Uses.” Franklin embodied his views in a letter to Miss Stephenson (dated
September 20th, 1768), written in his phonetic alphabet, and intended to
meet objections to the proposed reform. It is curious to find the wholly
mistaken objection already put forward that “all our etymologies would be
lost” by a reform of spelling.
But spelling reformers have not been confined to England. Ninety years
ago a reform of Dutch spelling was successfully carried out, though the
result was unsatisfactory, as might have been expected from the ignorance
of phonology that existed at the time. Spanish spelling has recently
undergone revision on the part of the Academy; and even German, which
seems to the Englishman so far advanced on the road towards perfection,
is in process of reformation. The work was begun by Schleicher, who not
only struck out the aphonic _h_ and other useless letters, but even
emulated the Emperor Claudius by inventing a new character. A committee
was lately appointed by the Minister of Education to decide upon such
changes of spelling as seemed to them desirable, and a thorough-going
system of reform, with a new alphabet, like that of Mr. Pitman, has been
inaugurated through the exertions of Dr. Frikke and others.[217]
Of scientific alphabets, also, the phonologist has now his choice.
Putting aside Melville Bell’s “Visible Speech,” in which each character
symbolizes by lines the action of the vocal organs in forming the sound
it represents, the best are the well-known “Standard” and “Missionary
Alphabets” of Lepsius and Max Müller, the alphabets of Ellis and Prince
L-L. Bonaparte, and the alphabet of Sweet. Max Müller’s alphabet is
founded on that of Sir W. Jones, and he brings with justice the charge
against Lepsius’s “Standard Alphabet” that its physiological analysis
is sometimes wrong, and that many of its characters have been found too
complicated for use. Sweet’s alphabet has the advantage of avoiding new
type, of having special signs for voice and whisper, for quantity and
stress, force, pitch, and glide, and of indicating by a full stop the
place of a “force-impulse.” Prince L-L. Bonaparte’s alphabet, however, as
edited by Ellis, is the most complete; indeed, out of his 385 characters,
there occur a few which have not been detected in any known language. The
two last alphabets will be found in the Appendix to the present chapter.
It is possible that the phonograph may hereafter assist us in
constructing a more perfect alphabet than is now possible. Just as
Melville Bell’s letters have a physiological origin, so the letters of
the alphabet of the future may be derived from the forms assumed by
sounds on the sensitive plate of the phonograph. The phonautograph had
already informed us that every sound we utter has a distinct shape and
pattern; it only remained to apply this fact practically by the invention
of the phonograph.
The phonautograph as constructed by Barlow, Léon Scott, and König, is
made to record the sounds of the human voice by the help either of a
pencil or of a gas-flame. The pencil is set in motion by a thin membrane,
against which sounds and words are spoken, and draws on a cylinder
covered with sand the curves which delineate the sounds uttered. When a
gas-flame is employed, the forms assumed by it take the place of those
drawn on the sand. In Edison’s phonograph the fact that the form of every
sound can thus be imprinted on a tangible substance has been utilized
for the reproduction of speech. A plate of tin-foil is folded round a
revolving cylinder indented from one end to the other with a spiral
groove. As the cylinder revolves the groove is kept constantly beneath a
needle, which is attached to a membrane or sounding-board, against which
the voice is impinged through a conical aperture: with each sound that is
uttered the needle presses the tin-foil into the furrow below, imprinting
upon it at the same time the form of the sound. By reversing the process
the needle is made to travel once more over the indented tin-foil,
and the sounding-board being thus set in motion reproduces the sounds
originally spoken. Before the tin-foil is thus reduced to its original
smoothness, a cast of it may be taken, and at any subsequent period
another piece of tin-foil may receive the impression of the cast, and so
reproduce the words which first caused the indentations. It is needless
to point out the assistance which the phonograph is likely to render
to phonology. It is still, of course, new and faulty, and unable, for
instance, to reproduce sibilants; but it cannot fail to be improved and
become almost as perfect a speaking-machine as the human throat itself.
Already it has contributed some facts of importance to phonetic science.
Thus we find that all sounds may be reproduced backwards by simply
beginning with the last forms indented on the tin-foil, _sociability_,
for example, becoming _ytilibaishos_. Diphthongs and double consonants
may be reversed with equal clearness and precision, so that _bite_, which
the phonograph pronounces _bâ-eet_, becomes _tee-âb_ In this way we have
learnt that the _ch_ of _cheque_ is really a double letter, the reversed
pronunciation of the word being _kesht_.
The problem of reproducing human speech has thus been approached
more successfully from the physical and acoustic side than from the
physiological side, where it was attacked by Faber, Kempelen, and others.
They attempted to construct instruments in which the vocal organs could
be represented with the greatest exactness attainable, the lungs being
replaced by a pair of bellows, the trachea by a hollow tube, and so
on. But though these instruments spoke, it was not in human speech, or
anything like it. The utmost they could do was to imitate the first
utterances of a child, or the imperfect and laboured syllables of one who
is learning a foreign tongue.
Nevertheless, it is not in the organs of the human voice any more than
in the mechanism of a lifeless instrument that we have to discover the
source and creator of speech. All that the vocal organs can do is to
supply the skeleton into which the mind breathes the breath of life.
Unmeaning sounds do not constitute language: until a signification has
been put into them, the sounds that have been described and analyzed are
no better than the singing of the birds, the stirring of the trees, or
even the dead utterances of a machine. Phonology, like anatomy, deals
only with the dry bones which have yet to be clothed upon with living
flesh.
But by its very nature a science of meanings, sematology, as it has
been named, can never have the same certitude, the same exactness, as
a science of sounds. The laws of sematology are far less distinct and
invariable; significant change cannot be reduced to the same set of fixed
rules as phonetic change. The phenomena with which sematology deals are
too complicated, too dependent on psychological conditions; the element
of chance or conscious exertion of will seems to enter into them, and it
is often left to the arbitrary choice of an individual to determine the
change of meaning to be undergone by a word. Still this meaning must be
accepted by the community before it can become part of language; unless
it is so accepted it will remain a mere literary curiosity in the pages
of a technical dictionary. And since its acceptance by the community
is due to general causes, influencing many minds alike, it is possible
to analyze and formulate these causes, in fact, to refer significant
change to certain definite principles, to bring it under certain definite
generalizations. Moreover, it must be remembered that the ideas suggested
by most words are what Locke calls “mixed modes.” A word like _just_
or _beauty_ is but a shorthand note suggesting a number of ideas more
or less associated with one another. But the ideas associated with it
in one mind cannot be exactly those associated with it in another; to
one man it suggests what it does not to another. So long as we move
in a society subjected to the same social influences and education as
ourselves we do not readily perceive the fact, since the leading ideas
called up by the word will be alike for all; but it is quite otherwise
when we come to deal with those whose education has been imperfect as
compared with our own. A young speaker often imagines that he makes
himself intelligible to an uneducated audience by using short and homely
words; unless he also suits his ideas to theirs, he will be no better
understood than if he spoke in the purest Johnsonese. If we are suddenly
brought into contact with experts in a subject we have not studied, or
dip into a book on an unfamiliar branch of knowledge, we seem to be
listening to the meaningless sounds of a foreign tongue. The words used
may not be technical words; but familiar words and expressions will bear
senses and suggest ideas to those who use them which they will not bear
to us. It is impossible to convey in a translation all that is meant by
the original writer. We may say that the French _juste_ answers to the
English _just_, and so it does in a rough way; but the train of thoughts
associated with _juste_ is not that associated with _just_, and the true
meaning of a passage may often depend more on the associated thoughts
than on the leading idea itself. Nearly every word, in fact, may be
described as a complex of ideas which is not the same in the minds of any
two individuals, its general meaning lying in the common ideas attached
to it by all the members of a particular society. The significations,
therefore, with which the comparative philologist has to concern himself,
are those unconsciously agreed upon by a body of men, or rather the
common group of ideas suggested by a word to all of them alike. Here,
again, some general causes must be at work which may yet be revealed
by a careful analysis. The comparative philologist has not to trouble
himself, like the classical philologist, with discovering the exact ideas
connected with a word by some individual author; it is the meaning of
words as they are used in current speech, not as they illustrate the
idiosyncrasies of a writer, which it is his province to investigate.
“The genealogies of words,” says Pott,[218] “are the genealogies of
concepts.” As in phonology we have the growth or decay of sounds, so in
sematology we have the growth or decay of ideas. The three principles
of linguistic change, imitation, emphasis and laziness, are incessantly
at work on the meanings as well as upon the sounds of words. Analogy
is ever lending them new senses, and the metaphorical senses may come
to be used to the utter forgetfulness of the original one. The Latin
who spoke of his “mind” or “soul” as _animus_ had altogether forgotten
that at the outset _animus_ was merely the “wind” or “breath.” Here
analogy or imitation is helped by laziness, which makes us forget a
little-used meaning. _Impertinent_ has almost lost its prior and proper
signification, and our children will have to seek it in the records of an
obsolescent literature. But a dead meaning may again rise to life; the
early meaning of a word, whether recovered from books or from the fresh
spring of a local dialect, may once more impress itself upon a community
anxious to emphasize and mark out an idea by an unfamiliar term.
Professor Whitney[219] has summed up significant change under the two
heads of specialization of general terms and generalization of special
terms, but a more thorough-going attempt to determine its laws and
distinguish its causes has been made by Pott.[220] First of all, he
points out, words may be more accurately defined either by widening
or by narrowing their signification. While in the Neo-Latin languages
_caballus_, “a nag,” has taken the wider meaning of “horse” in general,
under the form of _cavallo_ or _cheval_, the modern Greek ἄλογον is no
longer the “irrational beast,” but is narrowed into the specific sense
of “horse.” Like our _deer_, which once meant “wild animals” generally
(German _thier_), so _emere_ has narrowed its primary signification of
“taking” into the special one of “buying.” But, on the other hand, when
we speak of “going to town,” it is not “town” in general or any town
whatsoever that is meant, but London alone.
Then, secondly, there is metaphor, with its ceaseless play upon speech.
Language is the treasure-house of worn-out similes, a living testimony
to the instinct of man to find likeness and resemblance in all he sees.
The Tasmanians, who had no general terms, had yet the power of seeing
resemblances between things: though they could not form the concept
“round,” they said “like the moon” or some other round object. All
the words which have a spiritual or moral meaning go back to a purely
sensuous origin: _Divus_, _Deus_, _Dieu_ was once “the bright sky;”
_soul_ was nothing but the “heaving” sea. It is only by likening such
ideas to the objects of sense that we can imagine them at all, or convey
a hint of our meaning to others. The vocabulary of a language on its
significant side grows by metaphor and analogy. We have only to take a
word like _post_, once the Latin _positum_, “what is fixed” or “placed,”
and trace it through its many derived meanings of “stake,” “position,”
“office,” “station,” “public medium of correspondence,” and “receptacle
for letters,” to see how endless are the shades of colour which a single
word may catch from those with which it is associated. To know the idioms
of a language and the conditions under which its speakers live, is often
to know the history of the changes in signification undergone by its
vocabulary. The mere expression “send to the post” gave to the word
_post_ its last meaning of a building in which letters are deposited and
sorted, and the conditions of schoolboy life are a clue to many of the
metaphorical uses of words which bear quite another meaning in school
life from what they do in ordinary language. Where else but in a country
of examinations could “pass” signify to go through an examination with
success? Each craft, each industry has its own store of technical words,
many of which are merely words in common use employed in particular
senses intelligible only to those who belong to it.
Words, thirdly, will vary in meaning according to their application
to persons or things, to what is good or bad, great or small. What a
difference there is, for instance, between a “beautiful woman” and a
“beautiful picture,” “a fine day” and “a fine fellow.” _Silly_, again,
is simply the German _selig_, “blessed,” and such is still its meaning
in Spenser’s “silly sheep;” but in modern English it has long lost its
favourable sense, and is used only in an unfavourable one. Diminutives,
originally the symbols of affection, have in many cases become the
symbols of contempt, while “childishness” is as much a compliment when
applied to a child as it is the reverse when applied to a man.
In the fourth place, words change their signification according to their
use as active or passive, as subjects or as objects. “The sight of a
thing” has a very different meaning from “the enjoyment of a sight,” as
different, in fact, as is the meaning of _venerandus_ when applied to
the object of veneration or to his admirer. The passive has been evolved
from the middle τύπτομαι, “I beat myself” passing gradually into “I am
beaten.” In English we may say indifferently “a matter is reflected,” or
“a matter reflects itself,” after the usage of French. Similarly a neuter
verb may be regarded as an active followed by the reflective pronoun; our
“to be silent,” or “to walk,” for example, are the French “se taire,” “se
promener.”
Fifthly, an idea may be expressed either by a compound or periphrasis,
or by a single word. The Latin _nepos_ is the French _petit fils_, our
“ninety” the French _quatre-vingt-dix_. The Taic languages of Further
India preserve the primitive habit of denoting a new idea by comparing it
with some other to which it stands in the relation of species to genus.
Thus in Siamese “a heifer” is _lúk nghoa_, “child (of a) bull;” “a lamb”
is _lúk-ké_, “child (of a) sheep,” much as in English _inkstand_ is “a
stand for ink.” It is only by comparison that an object can be known,
its limits marked and determined; it is equally only by comparison that
an idea can be defined and made intelligible. But when this has once
been done, there is no longer any need of setting genus and species side
by side in speech and thought; to do so is but a survival of the early
machinery of language. The fact that the derivatives of the Aryan speaker
are replaced by compounds, or rather antithetic words, in Taic, shows
not only the mental superiority of the former, but also the fundamental
contrast that exists between the two modes of thought. Collectives imply
no small power of abstraction, and the collectives formed by antithesis
in Taic are as much a proof of it as the existence of our “contentment”
by the side of the Siamese _arói chái_, literally “pleasant heart.”
In the sixth place, we must always keep steadily in view the relativity
of ideas and of the words which denote them. The same word may be applied
in a variety of senses, the particular sense which it bears being
determined by the context. The manifold shades of meaning of which each
word is capable, the different associations of ideas which it may excite,
give rise to varieties of signification which in course of time develop
into distinct species. Hence come the idioms that form the characteristic
feature of a dialect or language, and make exact translation into another
language so impossible. Hence, too, that diversification of synonyms
which causes words like _womanly_ and _feminine_ gradually to assume
different meanings, and prevent us from saying “I am very obliged,” or “I
am much tired.”
Seventhly and lastly, change of signification may follow in the wake
of change of pronunciation or the introduction of new words. Phonetic
decay may cause the old form of a word to be forgotten, and so allow it
to assume the new meaning which has gradually been evolved out of its
earlier one. This is the history of most of those inflections which can
be traced back to independent words, such as the sign of the past tense
in English, once the reduplicated perfect of _do_. The signification of
_jeopardy_ has travelled far from that of _jeu parti_, but preparation
had first been made by the change of pronunciation. There are many myths
and mythological beings which owe their existence to the same cause. It
was not till Promêtheus had lost all resemblance in outward name to the
_pramanthas_ or “fire-machine” of India that he borrowed his attributes
from προμήδομαι, and became the wise benefactor of mankind, the gifted
seer of the future, whose brother was Epimêtheus, or “Afterthought.” It
is the same with the legends that group themselves round the distorted
name of a locality. The nose of brass or gilt which adorns Brasenose
College at Oxford could never have come into existence until the old
_Brasinghouse_ or “Brewery” had been transformed, and the phœnix that
stands in the centre of the Phœnix Park at Dublin, would have been
impossible without the assistance of Saxon lips, which turned the Irish
_fion uisg_ or “fine water” into _phœnix_. But change of pronunciation
is especially serviceable in increasing the wealth of a language by
producing two co-ordinate forms out of a single original one. In course
of time the two forms assume different meanings, due to the different
contexts in which they may be used, and when once all memory of the
original identity has perished, the distinction of meaning becomes fixed
and permanent, and tends to grow continually sharper. In the second
century B.C. a Latin writer could still use _prior_ as a neuter, _prios_
or _prius_ as a masculine; but a time soon came when _prior_ was classed
exclusively with other masculine nouns in -_or_ or -_tor_, _prius_
with neuter nouns like _genus_. So, again, the Latin infinitive active
_amare_ and the infinitive passive _amari_ were at the outset one and
the same—the dative singular of a verbal noun in -_s_ (_amas_-), and
one verb, _fio_, the Greek φυ(ι)ω, continued to the last to preserve a
recollection of the fact by the length of the final syllable in _fieri_
or _fiesei_, “to become.” But the shortening of final syllables which
characterizes Latin was early at work, and out of the dative _amasei_
soon originated the two co-existing forms _amase_ (_amare_) and _amasi_
(_amari_). For a while they were used indifferently, but when the
distinction that exists between the German _waren zu haben_ and the
English “were to be had” came to make itself felt, one form remained
the property of the active, while the other was appropriated to the
passive. But a consciousness of the origin of _amari_ seems to have
long survived in the language, since there was a tendency to associate
it more closely with the other forms of the passive voice by affixing
to it the characteristic of the passive, _r_ (_amarier_). What is here
effected by the diversification of the same word, may also be effected by
the diversification of two synonyms, one of which has come from abroad.
Sometimes both may come from abroad, but at different times, the result
being that whereas one of them has been naturalized in the language, the
other is but the nurseling of a learned age. _Priest_ and _presbyter_,
for instance, have both descended from the same source, and were once
identical in meaning. But not only may the old words of a dialect be thus
affected by new comers, the foreign words may even succeed in destroying
the native ones altogether. The same natural selection which has wellnigh
extirpated many of the native plants of Central America in the presence
of the imported cardoon, is also at work in language. Our Old English
_sicker_ has had to give way before _sure_, the Old French _sëur_,
Provençal _segur_, Latin _securus_, and the Latin _equus_ has been
replaced in the Romanic dialects by _caballus_, “a nag.” _Caballus_ is at
once an example of the way in which the meaning of a word may be widened,
and of the operation of natural selection in the field of speech.
The etymologist must keep before him the laws both of phonology and
of sematology before he can venture to group words together and refer
them to a common root. For the etymologist is not merely a historian,
or student of historical grammar; above and beyond the words which
can be traced back, step by step, to their early forms, by the help
of contemporaneous records, there are many more, the derivation of
which has to be constructed much in the same way that a palæontologist
reconstructs a fossil animal by the help of a single bone. The task is
often a difficult and a delicate one, and the best trained scholars
may sometimes fail. The result of false analogy may be regarded as an
organic form, or a foreign word, conformed possibly to the genius of
the language which has borrowed it, may be mistaken for a native. The
præ-Aryan populations of Greece or of Britain must have left some remains
of their languages in the vocabulary of Greek and Keltic, and Greek and
Keltic words which have been counted as Aryan may, after all, be but
aliens. Apart from these dangers, there is further the double one of
assuming a connection between ideas which have nothing to do with one
another, and of separating ideas which start from a common source. On
the one hand, we are apt to judge of primitive man by ourselves, and to
fancy that the ideas which we associate together were equally associated
together by him. On the other hand, we have only to turn to the Ugrian
idioms, with their greater transparency and openness to analysis to see
the passage of one signification in a root into another of a wholly
different kind, accompanied by a modification of the vowel. Thus _karyan_
is “to ring,” and “to lighten;” _kar-yun_ and _kir-yun_, “to cry,” but
_kir-on_, “to curse;” _kah-isen_, _koh-isen_, _kuh-isen_, “to hit,”
“stamp;” _käh-isen_, _köh-isen_, “to roar;” _keh-isen_, _kih-isen_, “to
boil.”[221] We have here the same symbolization of a change of meaning
by a change of vowel as in the Greek perfect δέδωκα by the side of the
present δίδωμι.
The four facts to be remembered in etymology are thus summarized by
Professor Max Müller.[222] (1.) The same word takes different forms in
different languages. Each language or dialect has its peculiar phonetic
laws and tendencies; because a particular interchange of sounds takes
place in one language it does not follow that it does so in another.
In Greek, for instance, _s_ between two vowels is lost, in Latin it
becomes _r_. Our English _two_ is the same word, so far as origin is
concerned, as the German _zwei_, the Latin and Greek _duo_, the Sanskrit
_dwi_; the English _silly_ is the German _selig_, “blessed.” As words
are carried down the stream of time, they change in both outward form
and inward meaning, and this change is in harmony with the physiological
and psychological peculiarities of the particular people that uses
them. (2.) The same word, again, takes different forms in one and the
same language. _Brisk_, _frisky_, and _fresh_ all come from the same
fountain-head, and _bank_ and _bench_ are the differentiated forms of
which _banquet_ is the Romanized equivalent. So, too, in French _noël_
and _natal_ are but forms of the same word of different ages, like _naïf_
and _native_, _chétif_ and _captif_. Then (3) different words take
the same form in different languages. The Greek καλέω and the English
_call_ have as little connection as the Latin _sanguis_ and the Mongol
_sengui_, “blood,” or the modern Greek _mati_ for ὀμμάτιον, and the
Polynesian _mata_, “an eye.” To compare words of different languages
together because they agree in sound is to contravene all the principles
of scientific philology; agreement of sound is the best possible proof
of their want of connection, since each language has its own phonology
and consequently modifies the forms of words in a different fashion. The
comparison even of roots is a dangerous process, not to be indulged in
unless the grammar of the languages to which they belong has been shown
to be of common origin. What we call roots are only the hypothetical
types to which we can reduce the words of a certain group of tongues;
they are, therefore, merely the expression of the phonetic laws common to
all the members of the group. But it does not follow that the selected
phonetic laws which all the members of a certain group of tongues have in
common are the same as the phonetic laws of another language or another
group. Roots, moreover, owing to their shortness, their vagueness, and
their consequent simplicity, are necessarily limited in number, while the
ideas they convey are so wide and general as to cover an almost infinite
series of derived meanings; to say nothing of the probability that many
of them are to be traced to imitations of natural sounds. (4.) Different
words, in the fourth place, may take the same form in one and the same
language. The French _feu_, “fire,” is the Latin _focus_; _feu_, “late,”
the Low Latin _fuitus_ (from _fui_). So too the English _page_, in the
sense of a servant, comes ultimately from the Greek παίδιον, _page_, in
the sense of a leaf of a book, from the Latin _pagina_. An arbitrary and
antiquated spelling may often keep up a distinction between such words in
writing when in speaking all distinction has long since disappeared. The
French _sang_, _cent_, _sans_, _sent_, _s’en_, the English _sow_, _sew_,
_so_, are respectively pronounced in the same way. That no inconvenience
would be caused by writing them in the same way is shown not only by
the fact that many words of similar sound but varying sense, such as
_sound_, _box_, or _lie_, are not distinguished in writing, but also by
the ease with which we can distinguish between them in conversation,
although in conversation we are unable to dwell upon a word or view it
by the light of the completed sentence, as is the case in reading. The
scientific etymologist would welcome the accurate representation of
sounds by symbols, his object is to know what sounds pass into others in
the course of centuries, and this he can only ascertain when the spelling
represents the pronunciation; the amateur etymologist had better leave
the subject alone. Etymology is not a plaything for the amusement of the
ignorant and untrained; it is a serious and difficult study, not to be
attempted without much preparation and previous research. The etymologist
must be thoroughly trained in the principles of scientific philology, he
must have mastered both phonology and sematology, and he must be well
acquainted with more than one of the languages with which he deals. Then
and then only can his labours be fruitful; then, and then only will his
work be a gain and not a hindrance. False etymologies stand in the way of
true ones, and the charlatans who have brought the name of etymology into
contempt have discredited the labours of better men. There is much in
etymology which must always defy analysis, there is much which will have
to be corrected hereafter, but this will matter little if we have once
learnt the lesson that change of sound and meaning can only take place
in accordance with fixed and invariable law. Etymology is but a means to
an end, and that end is partly the history of the development of thought
and civilization as reflected in the fossil records of speech, partly
the discovery and illustration of the laws which govern the shifting and
decay of sounds and the modifications of sense.
APPENDIX I. TO CHAPTER IV.
THE VOCAL ORGANS OF ANIMALS.
Comparative anatomy is the foundation of modern physiology: to
understand the human organism we must compare it with the organisms of
the lower animals. This is as true of the organs of speech as of the
organs of locomotion or sensation, and we shall find that, in spite of
varying degrees of development, the vocal organs of both man and beast
present a general resemblance to each other. Some of the quadrumana have
large sacs between the thyroid cartilage and the _os hyoideum_, which
have much to do with modifying and increasing the resonance of the voice.
The laryngeal sacs possessed by some of the monkeys of Africa cause the
acuteness of tone and hoarseness of cry that characterize them. The great
intensity of the voice in the American “howlers” is due to the size
of the epiglottis and the existence of large cavities in the thyroid
cartilage and _os hyoideum_ which communicate with the ventricles of the
larynx and the laryngo-pharyngeal sacs. The bray of the ass has been
traced to two large sacs existing between the vocal chords and the inner
surface of the thyroid cartilage. Some of the marsupials, such as the
kangaroo, have membranous vocal chords which stretch upon themselves and
so cannot be stretched by the arytenoid muscles. A few of the mammalia,
_e.g._ the giraffe, the porcupine, and the armadillo, have no vocal
chords, and are therefore mute. This is also the case with the cetacea,
the bellowing of the whale being produced by the expulsion of water
through the nostrils during the act of exspiration.
Birds possess a superior larynx which differs considerably from that of
the mammalia, and has nothing to do with the production of sound. Below
this is the inferior larynx at the lower end of the trachea, just before
it bifurcates into the two bronchi. This is the organ of voice, and
differs a good deal, both in form and structure, in the several species
of birds. It is double, except in the parrot and a few other birds, and
is almost always symmetrical. It is composed of the lower rings of the
trachea united so as to form a tube, at the lower end of which are two
protuberances, one in front of the other, and joined together in most
birds by a thin rod of bone (the _os transversale_). To the upper edge of
this bone is attached a delicate membrane (the _membrana semilunaris_),
which is turned upwards, and to the lower edge another membrane (the
_membrana tympaniformis_), formed of the membranous wall of the bronchus.
The latter membrane is highly developed in singing birds, and still more
so in speaking birds, and it can render the first-mentioned membrane
(with which it is connected) tense when made to vibrate. In some birds
the inferior larynx has as many as five muscles, in others none. It is
wanting altogether in vultures. It will be seen that the two membranes
correspond to the vocal chords in the mammalia, sounds being produced by
the vibration of their margins. The various notes are caused by changes
in the degree of tension of the membranes, by differences in the force of
the air-current, and by changes in the length and degree of tension of
the trachea and other parts. The range of the voice in birds is usually
within an octave, but may be much greater.
Serpents have no vocal chords, and their hiss is the result of breath
being forcibly driven through a soft glottis. Frogs have no trachea, so
that their larynx opens into the bronchial tubes; but the loudness of the
croaking of male frogs is due to the distension of two membranous sacs at
the sides of the neck. Some frogs have membranous vocal chords: others
two reed-like bodies, the anterior ends of which are fixed, while the
posterior ends looking into the bronchi are free.
We must wait for the microphone to confute or confirm the statement of
M. Langlois, of Freiburg, that ants communicate with one another by means
of audible sounds. The recent observations of Sir John Lubbock seem to
show the contrary. At all events, the sounds produced by most insects are
produced externally and not internally. The stridulation of the cricket
or grasshopper is made by rubbing certain file-like organs against the
edges of membranous drums on the wings. The pitch of the sounds produced
by the cricket is high, consisting of 4,096 vibrations per second. The
shriek of the death’s-head moth is produced by the friction of parts
connected with the mouth and proboscis, the buzzing of flies and gnats by
the rapid vibration of two rudimentary posterior wings called _halteres_.
The humming of humble-bees, beetles, and the like is due to the passage
of the air through the spiracles.
Fish, with few exceptions, have no special sonorous apparatus. The
noise they make when taken out of the water is caused by the sucking or
flapping movements of their mouth or gill coverings. It is possible that
the air-bladder opening into the pharynx which is possessed by some fish,
may enable them to emit sounds.
[Illustration: PLATE I.
_Fig. 1._ VIEW OF THE TRACHEA AND LARYNX.]
[Illustration: PLATE II.
_Fig. 2._ VIEW OF THE LARYNX FROM ABOVE. 1, Crico-arytenoid ligaments;
2, thyroid cartilage; 3, cricoid cartilage; 4, arytenoid cartilages;
5, chordæ vocales; 6, the right thyro-arytenoideus lateralis; 7,
the left crico-arytenoideus lateralis (the right being removed); 8,
crico-arytenoid ligaments; 9, arytenoideus transversus (connecting the
arytenoids); 10, rima glottidis.
_Fig. 3._ 1, Soft palate (velum pendulum palati); 2, uvula; 3, tongue;
4, hyoid bone; 5, thyroid cartilage; 6, epiglottis; 7, glottis; 8,
trachea; 9, cricoid cartilage; 10, pharynx; 11, superior opening of
larynx; 12, œsophagus; 13, orifice of Eustachian tube.]
[Illustration: PLATE III.
_Fig. 4._ Position for _a_. _Fig. 5._ Position for _e_ (in _hay_).
_Fig. 6._ Position for _i_ (in _he_). _Fig. 7._ Position for _u_.
_Fig. 8._ Position for _k_, _g_, _ng_. _Fig. 9._ Position for _m_.]
[Illustration: PLATE IV.
_Fig. 10._ Position for _r_. _Fig. 11._ Position for _t_, _d_, _n_.
_Fig. 12._ Position for _y_. _Fig. 13._ Position for _s_, _z_. _Fig.
14._ Position for _th_. _Fig. 15._ Position for _f_, _v_. _Fig. 16._
Position for _p_.]
[Illustration: PLATE V.
DIAGRAM SHOWING THE RANGE OF THE HUMAN VOICE.
(From McKendrick’s “Outlines of Physiology,” p. 642.)
Pitch of the vowels, according to Helmholtz.
Pitch of the vowels, according to König.]
APPENDIX II. TO CHAPTER IV.
THE ALPHABETS OF PRINCE L-L. BONAPARTE (MR. A. J. ELLIS) AND MR. H. SWEET.
Prince L-L. Bonaparte’s Alphabet, as edited (and amplified) by Mr. A. J.
Ellis in palæotype (“Early English Pronunciation,” pp. 1293-1307, and
1352-1357).
THE VOWELS
(_as heard in European languages only_).
1. a (in _fAther_).
2. a⸲ (in Gaelic _math_, “good”).
3. aʌ (in Fr. _dent_, Port. _lã_).
4. Ǝ (in Eng. _thE book_).
5. `a⸲ (in Dan. _mand_, “man”).
6. ah (in Eng. _ass_).
7. ə (in Eng. _charActer_).
8. æ (in Eng. _man_).
9. aʌ (in Port. _cAma_).
10. ɐ (in Eng. _pOllute_).
11. _œ_ (in Gael. _laogh_ “calf”).
12. _œ_⸲ (in Gael. _mAOdal_, “tripe”).
13. ᴔ (in Eng. _bird_).
14. ɹ (in Eng. _ear_)
15. _ɹ_ (not found)
16. ’h (in Eng. _opEN_, Germ. _muttER_).
17. ‘’h (not found).
18. ‘h (in Dan. _hat’_, Eng. _bit’_).
19. əh (not found)
20. _ɑ_ (in Fr. _diAble_).
21. Œ (in Roumanian _tatĂ_, “father.”)
22. E₁ (not found)
23. E (in Finnic _pää_, “the head”).
24. e₁ (not found)
25. _e_₁ (in Fr. _père_, Germ. _fett_).
26. _e_₁⸲ (in Gael. _freumh_, “root”).
27. _e_₁ʌ (in Fr. _vin_).
28. e (in Eng. _bed_).
29. _e_ (in Fr. _dé_, Germ. _Ehre_).
30. _e_ʌ (in Port. _sENha_, “sign”).
31. e¹ (in Port. _cEar_, “to sup”).
32. _e_¹ (in Dan. _een_, “one”).
33. _y_ (in Welsh _dyn_, “man”).
34. Y₂ (in Polish _bYli_, “they have been”).
35. _i_ (in Eng. _milk_).
36. _i_¹ (in Eng. _fill_).
37. i (in Eng. _bee_).
38. i⸲ (in Gael. _sINNsreadh_, “ancestors”).
39. iʌ (in Port. _sim_, “yes”).
40. ’j (in Eng. _gate_).
41. ɔ (in Eng. _God_).
42. ɔh (not found)
43. A (in Eng. _all_).
44. _a_h (not found).
45. o₁ (not found).
46. _o_₁ (in Germ. _Gott_).
47. _o_₁⸲ (in Gael. _didOmhnaich_, “Sunday”).
48. _o_₁ʌ (in Fr. _bon_).
49. o (in Eng. _more_).
50. oh (in Esthonian _wõlg_, “debt”).
51. _o_ (in Eng. _Omit_).
52. _o_ʌ (in Port. _sOnho_, “dream”).
53. _o_h (not found).
54. _u_h (in Port. _o_, “the”).
55. _o_¹ (in Dan. _stor_, “great”).
56. u₁ (in Finnish _Suomi_).
57. _u_ (in Eng. _book_).
58. u (in Eng. _pool_).
59. u⸲ (in Gael. _déanADH_, “doing”).
60. uʌ (in Port. _um_, “one”).
61. ’_w_ (in Eng. _home_).
62. _u_¹ (in Swed. _skuld_, “cause”).
63. u¹ (in Lap. _jUkkim_, “I parted”).
64. U (in Swed. _hus_, “house”).
65. y (in Fr. _lune_, Germ. _brÜder_).
66. yʌ (in Basque _sü̃ hĩa_, “son-in-law”; Albanian _hü̃ni_, “he entered”).
67. I (in Dan. _nYde_, “to enjoy”).
68. æh (in Lap. _buÖrre_, “good”).
69. _ə_h (in Fr. _veuf_).
70. _ə_hʌ (in Fr. _un_).
71. œ (in Germ. _böcke_).
72. _ə_ (in Fr. _feu_).
73. _ə_ʌ (not found).
74. œ¹ (in Gael. _keayn_, “sea”).
75. _ə_¹ (in Swed. _sYster_).
76. ’l (in Bohemian _vlk_, “wolf”).
77. ’r (in Bohemian _prst_, “finger”).
CONSONANTS.
_Labials._
_He._[223]
78. p[224] (in Eng. _pea_).
79. pȷ (in Kasikumuk _p’orun_, “glass”).
80. pp (in Italian coppa).
81. pꞁh (in Bav. Germ. _pfard_).
82. ⌊pꞁh (in Thush _p`e_, “side”).
83. wh (in Eng. _which_).
84. pj (in Pol. _gap_, “lounger”).
85. p_w_ (in Fr. _pois_).
86. p_w_j (in Fr. _puits_).
_Se._[225]
87. b (in Eng. _bee_).
88. bȷ (in Kasikumuk _b’ar_, “pond”).
89. bb (in Ital. _gobba_).
90. ‘p (in Saxon Germ.).
91. w (in Eng. _wine_).
92. bj (in Pol. _jedwaB_, “silk”).
93. b_w_ (in Fr. _bois_).
94. b_w_j (in Fr. _buis_).
_Ne._[226]
95. m (in Eng. _me_).
96. mh (in Eng. _tempt_).
97. mm (in Ital. _fiamma_).
98. mȷ (in Kas. _’maq_, “thirst”).
99. b⸲ (in Westmoreland _sebm_, “seven”).
100. w⸲ (in Erse _saṀrad_, “summer”).
101. mj (in Polish _karM_, “feeding”).
102. m_w_ (in Fr. _moi_).
103. m_w_j (in Fr. _muid_).
_Hc._[227]
104. ph (whispered bh; ? in Greek φ).
_Sc._[228]
105. bh (in Spanish _haba_).
106. bh_w_ (Dutch _w_).
_Ht._[229]
107. prh (whispered brh).
_St._[230]
108. brh (made by children with the lips).
109. ɯ (in Eng. _veRy_).
110. ɹ_w_ (in Eng. _our_ occ.).
_Labio-Dentals._
_He._
111. P (not found).
_Se._
112. B (lower lip against the teeth).
_Hc._
113. f (in Eng. _foe_).
114. ff (in Ital. _schiaffo_).
115. _f_ (not found).
116. ·fh (not found).
117. fj (in Guernsey _fyaïz_, “flee ye”).
118. f_w_ (in Fr. _foie_).
119. f_w_j (in Fr. _fuite_).
_Sc._
120. v (in Eng. _vine_).
121. vȷ (in Kas. _‘warta_, “plate”).
122. vv (in Ital. _avventura_).
123. ⌊v (in Dan. _KjöBenhavn_).
124. _v_ (not found).
125. ‘v (Dutch _v_).
126. vH (not found).
127. vj (in Pol. _paW_, “peacock”).
128. v_w_ (in Fr. _voix_).
_Nc._[231]
129. v⸲ (in Erse _feiṀ_,“mild”).
_Labio-Linguals._
_He._
130. ˎp (in Abasian _aTà_, “hay”).
131. ˎpˎp (in Ab. _yTa_, “sit down”).
_Se._
132. ˎb (in Ab. _aDỳ_, “field”).
_Sl._[232]
133. ˎlw (in Gaelic _Lamh_, “hand”).
_Dentals._
_He._
134. ˎˎt (in Erse _Talain_, “earth”).
135. ˎˎtj (in Erse _tirm_, “dry”).
_Se._
136. ˎˎd (in Erse _donn_, “brown”).
137. ˎˎdj (in Erse _dia_, “God”).
_Hc._
138. th (in Eng. _thin_).
139. c (not found).
_Sc._
140. dh (in Eng. _then_).
141. _c_ (not found).
_Hl._[233]
142. Ʇh (not found).
143. Ʇ (in Manx _ooyL_, “apple”).
_Alveolo-Dentals._
_Hc._
144. c (in West Nyland Finnish _metsä_, “forest”).
145. ⸲th (in Ital. _viZio_).
_Sc._
146. _c_ (in Albanian _Zot_, “lord”).
147. ⸲dh (in Span. _liD_).
_Double Alveolars._
_Hc._
148. ˎs (in Ital. _lo Zio_).
149. ˎsˎs (in Ital. _pazzo_).
150. .ˎs (in Ab. _aca_, “granary”).
151. ɾ̣ɾ̣ (in Ab. _aC´abyrg_, “truth”).
152. .ɾ̣ (in Ab. _ácá_, “wild cherry”).
153. .ɾ̣ȷ (in Kas. _čabre_, “much”).
154. ˎsj (in Pol. _siaC´_, “to sow”).
155. ˎs_w_ (in Abasian _aC´a_, “apple”).
156. .ˎsw (in Ab. _ac`_, “ox”).
_Sc._
157. ˎz (in Ital. _lo zelo_).
158. ˎzˎz (in Ital. _rozzo_).
159. ˎzj (in Pol. _jedz´_, “go”).
160. ˎz_w_ (in Ab. _az´y_, “some one”).
_Alveolars._
_He._
161. ˎt (in Fr. _tas_).
162. ˎtȷᴶ (in Kas. _t’ai_, “colt”).
163. ˎtˎt (in Ital. _matto_).
164. tꞁh (in Dan. _til_, “to”).
165. tȷꞁh (in Kas. _ja’t‘olṣa_, “red”).
166. ⌊tꞁh (in Thush _t‘uix_, “salt”).
167. ˎtj (in Russ. _poot’_, “way”).
168. ˎt_w_ (in Fr. _toi_).
169. ˎt_w_j (in Fr. _étui_).
_Se._
170. ˎd (in Fr. _doux_).
171. ˎdȷ (in Kas. _d’oxlu_, “freshness”).
172. ˎdˎd (in Ital. _Iddio_).
173. ‘d (in Saxon).
174. ˎdj (in Russ. _loshad’_, “horse”).
175. ˎd_w_ (in Fr. _doigt_).
176. ˎd_w_j (in Fr. _conduire_).
_Ne._
177. ˎn (in Fr. _nain_).
178. ˎnȷ (in Kas. _n’ak_, “blue”).
179. ˎnˎn (in Ital. _canna_, “reed”).
180. d⸲ (in Irish _bean_, “woman”).
181. ˎnj (in Russ. _lên’_, “tench”).
182. ˎn_w_ (in Fr. _noix_).
183. ˎn_w_j (in Fr. _nuit_).
_Hc._
184. s (in Eng. _so_).
185. ss (in Ital. _cassa_).
186. sȷsȷ (in Kas. _ṣ’ât_, “hour”).
187. sH (= the Arab. ص).
188. sj (in Pol. _koś_,“mow”).
189. s_w_ (in Fr. _soie_).
190. s_w_j (in Fr. _suie_).
_Sc._
191. z (in Eng. _zeal_).
192. zz (in Hungarian _azzal_, “with the”).
193. .z (in Ab. _zaqa_, “how much”).
194. zj (in Pol. _leź_, “go up”).
195. z_w_ (in Fr. _rasoir_).
196. z_w_j (in Fr. _dix-huit_).
_Nc._
197. zh⸲ (not found).
_Hl._
198. l_w_h (not found).
_Sl._
199. ˎl (in Fr. _lait_).
200. lȷ (in Kas. _l’ap_, “shine”).
201. ˎlˎl (in Ital. _stella_).
202. ˎlj (in Russ. _korol’_, “king”).
203. ˎl_w_ (in Fr. _loi_).
204. ˎl_w_j (in Fr. _lui_).
_St._
205. ˎr (in Span. _rey_).
_Whishes (Chuintantes)._
_Hc._
206. sh (in Eng. _she_).
207. shȷ (in Kas. _š’arabuču_ [_š’_], “fellow-countryman”).
208. shsh (in Ital. _pesce_).
209. shȷshȷ (in Kas. _ṣ̆’oldi_, “green”).
210. .sh (in Ab. _aša_, “rope”).
211. shj (in Russ. _vosh’_, “louse”).
212. sh_w_ (in Fr. _choix_).
213. sh_w_j (in Fr. _chuinter_).
214. sh_w_sh_w_ (in Ab. _aṣ̌`_, “plane-tree”).
215. .sh_w_ (in Ab. _aš`_, “door”).
_Sc._
216. zh (in Eng. _pleasure_).
217. zhzh (in Hung. _a’zseb_, “the pocket”).
218. .zh (in Ab. _aža_, “hare”).
219. zhj (in Basque [Soule] _jin_, “come”).
220. zh_w_ (in Fr. _joie_).
221. zh_w_zh_w_ (in Ab. _aẓ̌`_, “cow”).
222. .zh_w_ (in Ab. _ž`aba_, “ten”).
223. zh_w_j (in Fr. _juin_).
_Ht._
224. rsh (in Polish _przez_, “through”).
_St._
225. rzh (not found).
_Palatal Whishes._
_Hc._
226. ˎsh (in Ital. _pece_).
227. ˎshˎsh (in Ital. _caccia_).
228. .ˎsh (in Ab. _ača_, “quail”).
229. ɾ̣hɾ̣h (in Ab. _ač̣´y_, “mouth”).
230. .ɾ̣h (in Ab. _ač`y_, “horse”).
231. .ɾ̣hȷ (in Kas. _č’an_, “early”).
232. ˎshj (in Russ. _noch’_, “night”).
233. ˎsh_w_ (in Louisiana Creole _choui_, “to cook”).
234. ˎsh_w_j (in Trinidad Creole _chouite_, “to cook”).
_Sc._
235. ˎzh (in Ital. _regio_).
236. ˎzhˎzh (in Ital. _maggio_).
237. ˎzhj (in Basque [Soule] _espundja_, “sponge”).
238. ˎzh_w_j (in Louisiana Creole _néjuî_, “needle”).
_Double Palatals._
_Hc._
239. ʇs (in Basque _otso_, “wolf”).
_Palatals._
_Hc._
240. t (in Eng. _tea_).
241. ⌊t (in Dan. _huset_, “the house”).
242. Jh (in Eng. _hue_).
243. tj (in Hung. _tyúk_, “hen”).
244. tjtj (in Hung. _a’ tyúk_, “the hen”).
_Se._
245. d (in Eng. _do_).
246. dd (in Sardinian _beddu_, “beautiful”).
247. ⌊d (in Span. _lado_).
248. ⌊d⌊d (in Jutland _Gud_, “God”).
249. J (in Eng. _yet_).
250. JJ (in Hung. _ejjel_, “night”).
251. dj (in Hung. _gyöngy_, “pearl”).
252. djdj (in Hung. _a’ gyöngy_, “the pearl”).
_Ne._
253. n (in Eng. _no_).
254. nh (in Eng. _tent_).
255. J⸲ (in Basque [Roncal] _azkoỹa_, “badger”).
256. nj (in Fr. _digne_).
257. njnj (in Hung. _a’ nyul_, “the hare”).
258. njh (not found).
_Hc._
259. ˏs (in Sp. Basque _su_, “fire”).
_Sc._
260. ˏz (in Port. _zagal_, “young shepherd”).
_Hl._
261. lh (in Eng. _felt_).
262. ljh (in Saintongeais _glas_, “knell”).
_Sl._
263. l (in Eng. _low_).
264. lj (in Ital. _figlio_).
265. ljlj (in Hung. _melly_, “which”).
_Ht._
266. ↋ʰ (not found).
267. _h_ (= Arab. ح).
268. _h_ȷ (in Kas. _ḥ’olu_, “orphan”).
269. _h_ȷ_h_ȷ (in Kas. _ḥ´i_, “pigeon”).
270. rH (in Kas. _ḥ˘aba_, “fish”).
_St._
271. r (in Eng. “_ray_”).
272. rr (in Ital. _terra_).
273. ↋ (= Arab. ع).
274. rj (in Lusatian _wuhor´_, “eel”).
275. r_w_ (in Fr. _roi_).
276. r_w_j (in Fr. _bruit_).
_Ultra-Palatals._
The whole of this set of letters comes originally from Lepsius’s
Alphabet, and “must be considered, therefore, very doubtful.”
_He._
277. T (in Sansk.).
_Se._
278. D (in Sansk.).
_Ne._
279. N (in Sansk.).
280. Nh (in Dravidian).
_Hc._
281. _s_h (in Sansk.).
282. Thh (in Drav.).
_Sc._
283. _z_h (theoretical).
284. Dhh (in Drav.).
_Hl._
285. Lh (in Drav.).
_Sl._
286. L (in Sansk.).
_Ht._
287. Rh (theoretical).
_St._
288. R (in Sansk.).
289. Rhh (in Drav.).
_Gutturo-Labials._
_He._
290. _p_ (in Peruvian).
291. wjh (in Ab. _ih´y_, “speak”).
_Se._
292. _b_ (not found).
293. wj (in Fr. _huile_).
_Hc._
294. fh (not found).
_Sc._
295. vh (not found).
_Gutturo-Dentals._
_Hc._
296. _t_h (in Surgut Ostiak _kat’_, “day”).
297. _t_h_t_h (in S. Ost. _wat’t’ak_, “without”).
298. _t_hj (in Low S. Ost. _sit̄’a_, “gunpowder”).
299. _t_hj_t_hj (not found).
_Sc._
300. _d_h (in S. Ost. _âd’an_, “morning”).
301. _d_h_d_h (in S. Ost. _wad’d’ax_, “without”).
302. _d_hj (in High S. Ost. _sid̄’a_, “gunpowder”).
303. _d_hj_d_hj (not found).
_Guttural Whishes._
_Hc._
304. ˏˏsh (in Tempiese Sardinian _la chjai_, “the key”).
305. ˏˏshˏˏsh (in Temp. Sard. _vecchju_, “old”).
306. ˏˏsh_w_j (in Picard _kyuir_, “leather”).
_Sc._
307. ˏˏzh_w_j (in Temp. Sard. _la ghjesgia_, “the church”).
308. ˏˏzh_w_jˏˏzh_w_j (in Temp. Sard. _ogghji_, “to-day”).
_Gutturo-Palatals._
_He._
309. _t_ (= Arab. ط).
310. tj (in Basque [Labourd] _ttorttoil_, “turtle-dove”).
_Se._
311. _d_ (= Arab. ض).
312. _d_j (in Basque [Labourd] _yaun_, “lord”).
_Ne._
313. _n_ (not found).
_Hc._
314. ˏ_s_ (not found).
315. _s_ (in Basque [Labourd] _su_, “fire”).
_Sc._
316. ˏ_z_ (not found).
317. _z_ (in Basque [Labourd] _Jesus_).
_Double Guttural._
_Hc._
318. ˏkh (in Gaelic _mac_, “son”).
_Gutturals._
_He._
319. k (in Eng. _key_).
320. kȷ (in Kas. _k’orn_, “nest”).
321. kk (in Ital. _bocca_).
322. kꞁh (in Upper Germ. _komm_).
323. kȷꞁh (in Kas. _k‘’ala_, “white”).
324. ⌊kꞁh (in Thush _k’ok_, “foot”).
325. Hh (in Germ. _hand_).
326. HhHh (in Hung. _ahhoz_, “thereto”).
327. H (in Eng. _hand_).
328. ; (= Arab. _hemza_).
329. kj (in Ital. _la chiave_).
330. kjkj (in Ital. _occhio_).
331. Hhj (in Florentine Ital. _la chiave_).
332. k_w_ (in Fr. _quoi_).
333. H_w_h (an ordinary whistle).
334. H_w_ (a voiced whistle).
335. k_w_j (in Fr. _biscuit_).
_Se._
336. g (in Eng. _go_).
337. gg (in Ital. _veggo_).
338. ‘g (in Ostiak _argem_, “I sing”).
339. H’_w_ (in Span. _huevo_).
340. gj (in Ital. _la ghianda_).
341. gjgj (in Ital. _ragghiare_).
342. g_w_ (in Fr. _goître_).
343. g_w_j (in Fr. _aiguille_).
_Ne._
344. q (in Eng. _singer_).
345. qh (in Eng. _sink_).
346. H‘h⸲ (in Scutari Albanian _halk_, “multitude”).
347. qj or qɈ (in Sanskr.)
_Hc._
348. kh (in Germ. _dach_).
349. x (existence doubtful).
350. khkh (in Sassarese Sard. _palchi_, “because”).
351. khȷkhȷ (in Kas. _x´’ot_, “shade”).
352. khH (not found).
353. kjh (in Germ. _milch_).
354. k_w_h (in Scotch _loch_).
_Sc._
355. gh (in Germ. _tage_).
356. _x_ (existence doubtful).
357. ghgh (in Sass. Sard. _olganu_, “organ”).
358. .gh (existence doubtful).
359. gjh (in Germ. _selig_).
360. g_w_h (in Germ. _auge_).
_Nc._
361. gh⸲h (in Avar _ẋonkodize_ [ẋ] “to snore”).
_Hl._
362. _l_h (not found).
363. lhh (in Welsh _llaw_, “hand”).
364. lhhj (not found).
365. _lw_h (not found).
_Sl._
366. _l_ (in Pol. _łamac_, “to break”).
367. _l_hh (theoretical voiced Welsh _ll_).
368. _l_hhj (not found).
369. _lw_ (not found).
_Hl._
370. krh (= Arab. خ).
371. ._r_h (not found).
_Sl._
372. grh (= Arab. غ).
373. .r (= Newcastle “burr”).
374. ⌊_r_ (in Jutland _var_, “was”).
375. _r_ (in Parisian _Paris_).
376. _rr_ (in Parisian _irregulier_).
_Ultra-Gutturals._
_He._
377. K (= Arab. ق).
378. Kȷ (in Kas. _q’apa_, “hat”).
_Sc._
379. G (not found).
380. G_w_ (not found).
_Ne._
381. Q (not found).
_Hc._
382. _k_h (in Dutch _nacht_).
383. _k_hȷ (in Kas. _x̣’ort_, “pear”).
384. ._k_h (in Kas. _x̣’ata_, “house”).
385. K_w_h (not found).
_Sc._
386. Gh (in Dutch _God_).
387. G_w_h (not found).
_Ht._
388. Ꞁh (not found).
_St._ 389.
Ꞁ (in Dan. _ret_, “right”).
390. ȴꞀ (in Dan. _var_, “was”).
J denotes palatalized or _mouillées_ characters, _w_ labialized or
_veloutées_ characters, _w_j labio-palatalized or _mixtes_ characters,
⌊ a weakened consonant, a doubled letter or group of letters an
emphasized consonant, a prefixed . a semi-emphasized consonant, prefixed
ˎ an alveolarized or dentalized or “advanced” consonant, a prefixed
ˏ a “retracted” consonant, and ȷ a semi-palatalized or semi-mouillée
consonant.[234]
MR. SWEET’S NARROW ROMIC ALPHABET AND LIST OF SYMBOLS.[235]
1. a (in _father_).
2. ɐ (in _bat_).
3. _ɑ_ (broad a).
4. _ɒ_ (broad ɐ).
5. A }
Ɐ } (varieties of ɐ).
6. æ (in _men_).
7. _əe_ (in _man_).
8. æh (in _turn_).
9. _əe_h (in _opener_).
10. b (in _bee_).
11. bh (German w).
12. bh_j_ (palatalized bh).
13. d (in _day_).
14. dh (in _then_).
15. dh_j_ (palatalized dh).
16. D (palatal d).
17. e (close e).
18. ə (French close eu).
19. _e_ (variety of open e).
20. _ə_ (variety of French open eu).
21. eh }
_e_h } (German unaccented e).
22. f (in _fee_).
23. g (in _go_).
24. gh (voiced kh).
25. gh_r_ (trilled gh).
26. gh_w_ (labialized gh).
27. g_j_ }
G } (palatalized g).
28. h (general diacritic).
29. H (aspirate).
30. Hh (open glottis).
31. i (narrow i).
32. _i_ (wide i).
33. ih (Welsh u).
34. _i_h (wide ih).
35. j (in _you_).
36. jh (voiceless j).
37. jh_w_ (labialized jh).
38. kh (Scotch ch).
39. kh_r_ (trilled kh).
40. kh_w_ (labialized kh).
41. kH (aspirated k).
42. k_j_ }
K } (palatalized k).
43. l (in _lee_).
44. lh (voiceless l).
45. L (palatal l).
46. Ꞁ (guttural l).
47. m (in _may_).
48. mh (voiceless m).
49. n (in _now_).
50. nh (voiceless n).
51. _n_ (nasality).
52. N (palatal n).
53. o (close o).
54. _o_ (open o).
55. oh (between o and ə).
56. _o_h (between _o_ and _ə_).
57. ɔ (open o in _all_).
58. ɔh (between ɔ and œ).
59. _ɔ_ (open o in _not_).
60. _ɔ_h (between _ɔ_ and _œ_).
61. œ (open French eu).
62. _œ_ (wide œ).
63. p (in _pay_).
64. ph (voiceless bh).
65. ph_j_ (palatalized ph).
66. pH (aspirated p).
67. q (in _sing_).
68. qh (voiceless q).
69. _q_ (French nasality).
70. r (in _red_).
71. _r_ (trilled letter).
72. r_r_ (trilled r).
73. rh (voiceless r).
74. rh_r_ (trilled rh).
75. r_j_ (palatalized r).
76. R (laryngal r).
77. Rh (voiceless R).
78. s (in _say_).
79. s_j_ (palatalized s).
80. sh (in _fish_).
81. sh_j_ (palatalized sh).
82. sh_w_ (labialized sh).
83. t (in _tea_).
84. th (in _thing_).
85. th_j_ (palatalized th).
86. tH (aspirated t).
87. T (palatal t).
88. u (narrow u).
89. uh (Swedish u).
90. _u_ (English u).
91. _u_h (wide uh).
92. v (in _vie_).
93. ʌ (denotes voice).
94. ʌh }
‘Ʌ } (whisper).
95. w (in _we_).
96. wh (in _why_).
97. _w_ (labialization).
98. x (glottal catch).
99. y (French u).
100. _y_ (wide y).
101. z (in _zeal_).
102. zh (in _rouge_).
103. (a)I (denotes length).
104. a II (extra length).
105. a· (stress or force).
106. a¨ (extra stress).
107. a: (half stress).
108. a̿ (level force).
109. a᷾ (increasing force).
110. a͐ (diminishing force).
111. — (level tone).
112. / (rising tone).
113. \ (falling tone).
114. ∨ (falling and rising tone).
115. ∧ (rising and falling tone).
116. [i] (glide).
117. ‘z (whispered s).
118. aˏ (inner or away from the teeth).
119. aˎ (outer).
120. r† (protruded).
121. r⸸ (inverted or cerebral).
122. * (denotes simultaneity of two sounds it comes between).
123. eˡ (raised tongue).
124. oˡ (narrowed lip-opening).
125. — (beginning of sound-group on weak stress).
CHAPTER V.
THE MORPHOLOGY OF SPEECH.
“In der Wirklichkeit wird die Rede nicht aus ihr
vorangegangenen Wörtern zusammengesetzt, sondern die Wörter
gehen umgekehrt aus dem ganzen der Rede hervor.”—W. VON
HUMBOLDT.
“Rien n’autorise donc à admettre deux moments dans la création
du langage: un premier moment, où il n’aurait eu que des
radicaux, à la manière chinoise, et un second moment, où il
serait arrivé à la grammaire.”—RENAN.
We have seen in an earlier chapter that the form under which our thought
may express itself in language is capable of many variations. The
minds of men and races are very various, and what may seem a perfectly
natural mode of thought and expression to one man may be wholly strange
and unnatural to another. It is as difficult for us to realize the
conception of the sentence formed by the Chinaman, as it is for the
Chinaman to realize ours. The world wears a different aspect to different
individuals, and the relation of the speaker to the things about him may
be regarded in widely different ways. Races start each with a peculiar
temperament and peculiar characteristics; indeed, it is just these
peculiarities that constitute what we call a race. And race peculiarities
become strengthened by time and tradition, by the continuous influence of
the circumstances which have at once created and fostered them. What may
have been only a tendency in the beginning becomes in the end a settled
and permanent feature; the germ develops into the full-grown organism,
and in the course of ages makes explicit all the possibilities that lie
implicit within it. The manifold races of mankind do not all think in the
same manner, and the divergent modes in which they think are reflected in
the languages they utter.
Hence it is that languages can be classed morphologically, that is,
according to the form assumed by the sentence. Here the sentence may
be built, as it were, around a verb, there any conception of a verb
may be absent; here its several parts may be regarded as so many
equipollent monads, set one against the other, there as interdependent
pieces of a Chinese puzzle which all fit into their appropriate places.
In one class of tongues the root may be monosyllabic, in another
polysyllabic; one language may interpose the stem between the root and
the grammatical suffix, another may know nothing of such an intermediary.
Morphologically, therefore, languages differ from each other in the
structure of the sentence and the grammatical relation of its parts.
Now we must not forget that the idea of race has not the same
signification for the glottologist that it has for the physiologist.
For the student of language it means an assemblage of psychological and
physiological peculiarities which are expressed in articulate speech.
For him the European Jew, who has no language but that of the country in
which he is settled, is a member of the European race; only the Jew whose
mother-tongue belongs to the Semitic stock can be reckoned a Semite. At
the outset, no doubt, race meant the same thing in both a glottological
and a physiological sense. The characteristics which reflected themselves
in language were characteristics of which the physiologist has to take
account. But the physiological races of the modern world are far more
mixed than the languages they speak; the physiologist has much more
difficulty in distinguishing his races than has the glottologist in
distinguishing his families of speech.
But, as elsewhere in nature, so, too, in the domain of language,
species passes gradually and insensibly into species, class into class.
The types remain clear and strongly-marked, but the dividing lines
between them are hard to draw. Around each type is grouped a large
assemblage of languages which stand at a perpetually widening distance
from it; on the one side the furthest member of the group almost loses
itself in the outlying member of another, while the most distant member
on the other side can with difficulty be distinguished from the most
distant member of a third group. Isolating Chinese presents the phænomena
of agglutination and even of inflection; the agglutinative Finnic
dialects approach so nearly to inflection that attempts have been made
to include them in the Aryan family; and English is in many respects
highly agglutinative and even polysynthetic, while the French _je vous
donne_ is almost as good an instance of incorporation as could be given
from Basque itself. But with all this gradual approximation the several
types of language still remain fixed and distinct. The Chinese in its
main features, in its bone and muscle, so to say, continues true to
its isolating type, just as Finnic continues true to its agglutinative
type, or French to its inflectional one. The greater or less departure
of a language from its primitive type is due to several causes. First
of all, race in language may become mixed just as much as race in
physiology. Contact between two languages produces not only mixture in
their vocabularies, but a mutual influence upon their phonology, and
even grammar as well. This is a point to which we shall have to return
hereafter. Few languages any more than races in the physiological sense
can have remained quite isolated during the long course of their history
or been preserved from contact with languages of an alien class. Then,
secondly, with all their differences the minds of most men are cast in
the same mould. Thought is one, as a philosopher has said, though the
forms under which it shows itself are infinitely various. Unity underlies
diversity, and this unity finds its expression in the tendency of all
languages to break away from their types and assume common forms. It
is true that a language cannot wholly break away from its type without
becoming another language, and so ceasing to exist; it is true, also,
that such a psychological change as would be implied by the occurrence is
almost inconceivable, and is certainly contrary to historical experience;
but nevertheless languages belonging to two different types may gradually
approach one another during the long ages of their development, and the
difficulty experienced by the student in deciding to which type they
belong may testify to the similarity of the intellectual outfit of all
mankind. Here, at any rate, we can discover a common origin, a common
descent for the manifold branches of the human family.
Schlegel’s attempt to divide languages morphologically has already been
described. He distinguished them primarily as inorganic and organic,
the first class including languages “with grammatical structure,”
like the Chinese, and languages with affixes, and the second class,
including the synthetic or ancient and analytic or modern dialects of the
inflectional tongues. Pott, following Wilhelm von Humboldt, established
the division which with various modifications is still upheld by most
linguistic students. According to this the languages of the world
fall into four groups, the polysynthetic (such as the Eskimaux or the
Mexican), the isolating (like the Chinese), the agglutinative (like the
Turkish), and the inflectional (like Sanskrit). The first group he terms
transnormal, the second two intra-normal, and the third alone normal.
Bopp falls back upon Schlegel’s classification, making but three kinds
of speech, the isolating with monosyllabic roots but “without organism,
without grammar;” the languages capable of composition, of which the
Indo-European form the highest type; and the Semitic languages which
denote the relations of grammar by internal vowel-change. Schleicher,
like Max Müller, discards the first or polysynthetic class of Humboldt
and Pott, while Max Müller acutely seeks historical support for the
threefold division by referring the isolating languages to races which
have not risen above family-life, the agglutinative to nomad tribes, and
the inflectional to peoples who have arrived at the conception of the
state.
All these divisions, so far as they are founded in fact, are really
based, not on the word, but on the sentence, and only have a meaning
if we explain them as representing the different forms under which the
sentence has been conceived by the various races of mankind. To speak of
Chinese being “without grammar,” as Bopp does, or to describe the larger
number of languages as inorganic or other than normal, like Schlegel and
Pott, is simply self-contradictory. Every morphological classification
of language must be founded on grammar—that is, on the relations of the
several parts of the sentence to one another; and the very existence of a
class implies that it has a grammar and an organic life. We shall never
have a satisfactory starting-point for our classification unless we put
both word and root out of sight, and confine ourselves to the sentence
or proposition, and the ways in which the sentence may be expressed. The
reason why languages differ morphologically is that the thought which
they embody assumes different forms.
In the second chapter (pp. 122-132) the languages of the world have
been classed as (1) polysynthetic, (2) isolating, (3) incorporating,
(4) agglutinative, (5) inflectional, and (6) analytic, and reason shown
from the structure of the sentence why such a classification should be
made. Steinthal was the first to make the sentence rather than the word
the basis of morphological arrangement, and to point out that where we
are dealing with grammar and structure, we must have at least two words
standing in grammatical relation to each other. Steinthal’s system is
very elaborate. He begins with the division of language into formless
and formal, a division, however, of very questionable accuracy. It seems
to take us back to the scheme of Schlegel, and to forget that where
languages are distinguished from one another by the forms they assume, we
cannot describe any of them as having no form at all. The form of speech,
indeed, is the mode in which the mind views the connection between the
several parts of a proposition, so that wherever we have a proposition,
wherever, in fact, we have language, there must be form. Steinthal,
however, goes on to divide his formless languages into “juxta-positive”
and “compositive,” the Taic languages belonging to the first, and the
Polynesian, Ural-Altaic, and American belonging to the second. The formal
languages are similarly divided into “juxta-positive” and “compositive,”
Chinese coming under the head of the one and Old Egyptian, Semitic, and
Aryan coming under that of the other.
Humboldt did better than Steinthal in using the terms “imperfect” and
“perfect,” instead of “formless” and “formal.” Like Steinthal, he classed
Chinese along with the inflectional languages of Europe, rather than with
Burman and the other isolating idioms of the far East. This seems most
unnatural, since—so far as outward form is concerned—little difference
can be made between isolating Chinese and isolating Burman. It is true
that the order in which the parts of the sentence follow one another is
more or less free in Chinese, while it is fixed in Burman, but this is
a difference essentially unlike that between inflectional Aryan with
its suffixes and inflectional Semitic with its internal vowel-change.
Besides, both Aryan and Semitic are included in the same class. But both
Humboldt and Steinthal found themselves in a difficulty. Starting with
the assumption that all language follows a regular course of development,
ascending from the isolating stage to the inflectional, they had further
to assume that this development was but a reflection of the general
development of the mind, and that the passage from one stage of speech to
the other was marked by a passage to a higher intelligence and a higher
form of civilization. How, then, could it be possible that the Chinese
nation, which seems to have originated a considerable civilization,
should show no signs of that civilization in its language, the mirror and
reflection of the spirit of man? How could it be that the language spoken
by the primitive Aryans, when they were still simple shepherds on the
Hindu-Kush, before they had learnt the elements of writing and culture
from their Semitic neighbours, was so much in advance of that of a race
to whom belonged the hard task of initiating a civilization? The only
escape from the difficulty was to deny that Chinese should be classed
with Burman, in spite of appearances, and so to throw the whole system of
classification into confusion.
For that system depends upon the mode in which the grammatical relations
of the sentence are expressed, and so long as the mode is the same, the
order followed by the several parts of the sentence matters but little.
The order of words, in fact, is constantly liable to change, and the
simple fact that the definite article is postfixed in Scandinavian,
Albanian, Bulgarian, and Wallachian, while it is prefixed in those other
members of the Aryan family which possess one, shows how impossible
it is to ground any important conclusions upon it. The same language
varies from age to age in the position it assigns to the words it uses.
The modern _moreover_, for example, appears as _overmore_ in the Paston
letters, and the Coptic, once a postfix language, has now become a prefix
one. As we shall see presently, the order assumed by the parts of the
sentence depends in great measure upon the development of grammatical
forms.
Humboldt and Steinthal, nevertheless, are quite right in believing that
there is a distinction between Chinese and Burman, but the distinction
is that between a decrepit and civilized language on the one hand and
a fresh and uncultivated language on the other. Chinese civilization
is immensely old, and the language which enshrines it is immensely old
also; but we must be on our guard against supposing that the antiquity of
Chinese is proved by its isolating character. Chinese is no example of
arrested growth, no fossilized relic of an earlier condition of speech.
Were it so, Chinese civilization, and the originality and progress
it implies, would be inexplicable. When we compare classical Chinese
with Burman or Siamese, or even with the less cultivated dialects of
the Chinese empire itself, we find the progress and development we
should expect; but it is progress and development within the limits
of “isolation.” All the possibilities of the isolating sentence have
been worked out; and if these possibilities are not so numerous or so
adequate as in the case of an agglutinative or inflectional sentence, the
fault is due to the original conception of the sentence with which the
Chinese started, not to fossilization or arrested growth. The Mandarin
dialect of China has been affected by phonetic decay to an enormous
extent; numerous sounds have perished, and words once dissimilar have
become identical in pronunciation. By the help of the ancient rhymes,
of the cognate dialects, and of a scientific examination of the written
characters, Dr. Edkins has been able to restore the pronunciation of
Chinese as it was two thousand and more years ago, and the evidences thus
obtained of the wear and tear of the speech are most striking. _Dak_,
“the flute,” for instance, has become _yo_; _zhet_, “the tongue,” is
now _she_ and the table of correspondent sounds given in the foot-note
will show how great has been the changes undergone by the outward form
of the cultivated language.[236] Side by side with this decay of sounds
went a corresponding grammatical development. Tones were introduced
to distinguish words that had come to be pronounced alike, and the
different parts of the sentence were marked out by “empty words,” used
like our “of” or “if” in a purely symbolical and grammatical sense. It
is probable that the spread of education and the extensive employment of
ideographic writing had much to do with the phonetic decay that attacked
the language. Ambiguities in conversation could always be remedied by an
appeal to written symbols. At all events, it is curious that Accadian
was almost equally affected by phonetic decay; and Accadian not only
possessed a similarly ideographic system of writing, but was spoken in a
country where education was similarly widespread, and clay—the ordinary
writing material—was always at hand.
We are apt to assume that inflectional languages are more highly
advanced than agglutinative ones, and agglutinative languages than
isolating ones, and hence that isolation is the lowest stage of the
three, at the top of which stands flection. But what we really mean when
we say that one language is more advanced than another, is that it is
better adapted to express thought, and that the thought to be expressed
is itself better. Now, it is a grave question whether from this point
of view the three classes of language can really be set the one against
the other. So long as thought is expressed clearly and intelligibly, it
does not much matter how it is expressed—how, that is, the relations
of the sentence or proposition are denoted. When we begin to contrast
the morphology of two classes of speech, there is a tendency to import
our prejudices into the question, and to assume that the grammatical
forms to which we have been accustomed are necessarily superior to
those which appear strange to us. The masterpieces of Greek, or Latin,
or Sanskrit literature have produced the impression that the languages
which embody them must surpass all others as instruments of thought.
But such an impression may, after all, be an incorrect one. English
literature stands on quite as high a level as the literature of the
classical tongues. The English language is quite as good an instrument
of thought as Sanskrit or Greek, and yet English can hardly be said
to be inflectional in the way that Sanskrit and Greek are. If we turn
to China we shall find the Chinaman preferring his own classics to
anything produced by the West, and regarding his own language as the
best possible instrument of thought. Preferences of this kind can as
little be referred to an absolute standard as preferences in the matter
of personal beauty. The European, for instance, has a wholly different
ideal of beauty from the Negro, and the Negro from the Mongol. If the
excellence of a language is to be decided by the number and variety of
its grammatical forms, the palm will be borne off rather by the Eskimaux
or the Cheroki than by the dialects of Greece and Rome; if by the
attainment of terseness and vividness, Chinese will come to the front;
if by clearness and perspicacity, English will dispute the prize with
the agglutinative languages. Indeed, the agglutinative languages are
in advance of the inflectional in one important point, that, namely,
of analyzing the sentence into its component parts, and distinguishing
the relations of grammar one from another. It has been remarked[237]
that “were the development theory true, the inflectional would have
developed into the agglutinative, and not the converse.” Thought is
obscured, not assisted, by the existence of different terminations to
express the same grammatical relation, or of the same termination to
express different grammatical relations; and yet this is an anomaly
and source of confusion which continually meets us in the inflectional
tongues. The ascription of gender to inanimate objects is worthy only
of a savage and unreasoning age, and where the signs of gender have
lost all reference to their original import, as in modern German, they
become merely a relic and survival of barbarism. In fact, when we examine
closely the principle upon which flection rests, we shall find that it
implies an inferior logical faculty to that implied by agglutination.
In a flectional language the relations of the sentence are denoted by
particular suffixes or internal vowel-changes, which group themselves, as
it were, round the principal thought contained in the sentence. In other
words, every subordinate thought should be denoted by a flection. Such
a principle, however, cannot be worked. _Amabit_, it is true, means “he
will love;” but in order to express “he must love,” language has to break
through its flectional principle and denote the idea, not by flection,
but by independent words—_necesse est ut amet_, or _illi amandum est_.
But this is not the only mode in which the principle of flection is
violated by the necessities of developed speech. When sentences come to
be brought into relation with one another, the subordinate sentence ought
to be pointed out by flectional means. This is done in some cases, as in
the Greek use of the inflected article with the infinitive. Generally,
however, the subordination is left to be marked by independent words,
such as the conjunctions, by the very means, in fact, adopted by Chinese
and other isolating languages in accordance with their fundamental
principle. In fact, the principle of flection cannot be logically carried
out beyond the narrow circle of those simple sentences which sufficed
for the needs and intelligence of primitive man, and the progress of
thought in modern Europe has been marked by a corresponding revolt
from the trammels of flection. It is only dialects like those of Slavs
and Lithuanians which still cling to an elaborate system of flection.
English has fitted itself to become a universal language by struggling
to assimilate its condition to that of Chinese. Even the polysynthetic
languages of America can, with a certain show of reason, claim a higher
place for themselves than inflectional speech. If the object of language
is to express thought, it is obvious that that thought should be
expressed as a whole, as in a picture; and this is just what is done by
a polysynthetic sentence. Our own language, when it forms such compound
epithets as “The Employers’ Liability for Injury Bill,” or German when it
interpolates a whole sentence between the article and its substantive,
virtually adopt the principle of polysynthetism. Polysynthetism, however,
is only to be preferred when we wish to represent our thought as a single
whole, to bring it before the mind of another just as it presents itself
to our own mind. The best test we really have of a growth in intelligence
and reasoning power is an increasing clearness and analysis of thought.
The polysynthetic languages are essentially the languages of races
whose logical faculties are backward, or who have not yet left behind
them the “jelly-fish” stage of development.[238] Division of labour,
differentiated organization, analysis of thought and its expression—all
these are the signs of advancing civilization.
The whole picture is imaged in the mind before we break it up into
its several parts. So, too, the sentence which embodied a thought was
conceived as a whole before it was separated into its elements. Gestures
were the first makeshift for grammar; they determined the relations of
each particular utterance. Then these utterances came to be compared
together, and those that agreed were put on one side, and those that
disagreed on another. By slow degrees the relations of grammar were thus
evolved; gestures became more and more unnecessary, until at last in
the most highly cultivated languages, such as modern English, they have
disappeared almost entirely or been banished from educated speech. But
this primitive monad, this undifferentiated sentence-word, developed very
variously in the mouths of different speakers. In one case a number of
antecedent circumstances combined to produce a certain conception of the
outer world and the relation of things to each other and to the mind,
altogether unlike the conception which grew up in other cases. Here the
Chinaman regarded the elements of the sentence as co-ordinate and equal,
setting part against part, and member against member, and leaving the
relations between them to be supplied by the mind. There the Mongol drew
a hard and fast distinction between the principal and the subordinate,
between the nucleus of the proposition and the ideas dependent on it,
but he took care to express each by a corresponding word and to place
these words in the exact relation demanded by the thought. Elsewhere,
again, the Hindu merged the subordinate in the principal, expressing
the relations of the several parts of the sentence by modifications
of the individual words or imitating the original form of speech by a
long and elaborate compound. But in all cases the developed sentence of
the later period would seem to have been evolved out of the primitive
undifferentiated one according to the genius of the speakers and the mode
in which they conceived the relations of ideas. The American tongues
alone preserved a semblance of the form once assumed by all speech, and
in the compounds of the inflected idioms we may also trace a reflection
of the earliest utterances of man. What these were may still be gathered
from the grammar of the Eskimaux, even though there is as great a gap
between this and the primæval sentence-words of his forefathers as there
is between the social condition of the Eskimaux and the social condition
of his first ancestors. A cultured language like the Mexican shows the
highest development attainable by the polysynthetic form of speech; here
words may be isolated and separated from the sentence by means of the
affix _tl_. _Sotsitl_, for instance, is “flowers,” _ni-sotsi-temoa_,
“I look for flowers.” All over the world, indeed, wherever we come
across a savage race, or an individual who has been unaffected by the
civilization surrounding him, we find the primitive inability to separate
the particular from the universal by isolating the individual word, and
extracting it, as it were, from the ideas habitually associated with
it. Thus the Hottentot cannot use a noun without a pronominal suffix
indicating not only gender and case but also person as well, except as a
predicate;[239] in several of the South American dialects the words which
denote “head,” “body,” “eye,” or other parts of the person, cannot be
named without personal relation being denoted by a prefixed possessive
pronoun or denied by a negative or privative prefix,[240] and in Mr.
Wallace’s vocabularies from the river Uapes this inability extends to
other words. A Kurd of the Zaza tribe who furnished Dr. Sandwith with a
list of words belonging to his dialect, was so little “able to conceive
a _hand_ or _father_, except so far as they were related to himself, or
something else, and so essentially concrete rather than abstract were
his notions, that he combined the pronoun with the substantive whenever
he had a part of the human body or a degree of consanguinity to name,”
saying _sèrè-min_, “my head,” and _pie-min_, “my father.” Dr. Latham,
from whom this fact is quoted, goes on to refer to a similar amalgamation
noticed by him in the languages of the Louisiade and mentioned in the
appendix to Macgillivray’s “Voyage of the Rattlesnake,” as well as in the
ordinary Gipsy dialect spoken in England.[241]
A morphological review of the languages of the world reveals one
curious and significant fact. Particular types of language belong to
particular localities. In other words, a morphological classification
of speech is also a geographical one. The polysynthetic idioms are
characteristic of America, the isolating dialects of the extreme east of
Asia. So, too, the leading inflectional families of speech, the Aryan
and the Semitic, have both proceeded, it would seem, from Western Asia,
like the Alarodian family, also inflectional, and best represented by
the modern Georgian. The prefix-pronominal languages are confined to
Southern Africa, as the incorporating Basque to the Pyrenees and the
verbless Malayo-Polynesian to the islands of the Pacific. This fact would
go to show that the distant emigration of languages, like the distant
emigration of races, is very exceptional and chiefly characteristic of
the higher species with their greater energy and expansiveness. The
wanderings of savage tribes are circumscribed by the climatic and other
conditions to which they are peculiarly subject. Without canoes voyages
cannot be taken, and mountains, rivers, deserts, or stronger neighbours
are all obstacles to movement more or less insurmountable. The fact would
also go to show that it is only within the area peculiar to a certain
class of languages that we may look for their progress and development.
It is only in Eastern Asia or in America that we can hope to discover the
highest development of which an isolating or a polysynthetic language is
capable, and so regard Chinese and Mexican not as “arrested growths,”
but as instinct with the progressive intelligence and cultivated life
of the peoples that speak them. Where no traces of a type of speech
different from the prevailing one are to be found, we are justified in
concluding that it never existed there. And finally the fact will correct
that tendency we all have to assume a unity upon insufficient evidence.
Types of language, like types of race, are as strongly marked off from
one another as the countries to which they belong. Polysynthetism is as
much characteristic of America as the hatchet face and red skin of the
aboriginal; isolation of Eastern Asia as the yellow skin and oblique
eyes of the Chinaman or the Burman. Modern discoveries are gradually
producing a conviction that the civilizations of China, of Babylonia, and
of Egypt were all independent and self-evolved. Such at all events is the
case with their modes of writing, the best product of any civilization,
and no one can study the character of these three civilizations without
perceiving that they are radically distinct. Egypt, when the monuments
first cast light upon her some 6,000 years ago, is in the height of her
culture and advancement; but she comes before us as a pharos of light
in the midst of utter darkness, self-contained and self-sufficient, but
surrounded on all sides by tribes and nations even more barbarous than
the untaught Negro of to-day. And such as was the civilization, such
too was the language; the civilizations of the Nile, of the Euphrates,
and of the Hoang-ho, were not more isolated and peculiar than the
languages which embodied them. It is difficult for us with our steamers
and railways and telegraphs to realize the separation and practical
immobility of the ancient world. Geographical barriers cut off tribe
from tribe, race from race, language from language, and war instead of
peace was the sole means that existed of overcoming them. It is to these
barriers, however, that we owe the persistency of racial and linguistic
type which we may still note in so many parts of the world. It has often
been remarked that the fauna and flora of America take us back to a
geological rather than a historical age; the same may also emphatically
be said of the American type of speech. The Eskimaux may or may not be
the survivor of the man of the reindeer age; his grammar, at all events,
is a relic of a bygone era of speech.
The morphology of speech, then, deals with the relation of the parts
of the sentence one to another. This relation is expressed by what
we term grammatical forms. Position, it is true, as well as accent,
frequently takes the place of grammatical forms, especially in languages
like Burman or English, but in this case both position and accent will
have to be considered as belonging to the province of morphology. The
rule which in Burman makes the first of two substantives a genitive or
in English a substantive which follows a transitive verb an accusative
is itself a grammatical form. Even in those tongues in which the
expression of grammatical relations is fullest and most exact, there
is much that can never be expressed by outward means, but only hinted
at and understood. “The rudest of men,” says Chaignet,[242] “are yet
sages; ils s’entendent à demi-mot; ils parlent par _sous-entendus_.” “It
is,” as he goes on to observe, “the gesture, the tone, the connection
of the sense or its abrupt breaking off, the undefinable and speaking
expression of the face, that supply and complete our thought, marking its
relations, or more truly its formal side, its most spiritual element,
whereby language raises itself above mere sensation and matter.” The
structure of a language is determined not only by the general type,
isolating, agglutinative, or otherwise, to which it conforms, but also
by the mode in which its words are linked together, by the way in which
its grammatical forms are used and connected, and by the greater or
less extent to which the quickness of the hearer in understanding what
is not expressed is called upon. Structurally, Coptic belongs to the
inflectional class of tongues, but among these it is distinguished by its
prefixing its grammatical forms instead of affixing them, as was the case
with its parent the Old Egyptian.
We must not forget, however, that whether in Coptic or Old
Egyptian, or any other language, the grammatical form, the relation to
be expressed, the idea to be developed and formulated, lay quite as much
in the mere act of prefixing or affixing as in the sounds which were
prefixed or affixed. The Sanskrit _ad-mi_ means “I eat,” not only because
it is a compound of a verbal stem or root signifying “eating,” and the
personal pronoun _mi_, but because the pronoun is attached to the stem
in such a way as to convey the conception of the relation intended to
exist between the two ideas “eating” and “I.” We may therefore lay down
that one of the modes adopted by language for denoting the relations of
grammar is (1) the attachment of prefixes or affixes which may or may not
be significant when used alone. (2) A second is the insertion of what
are called infixes, as in Dayak, where from _kan_, “to eat,” the stem
_k-um-an_ comes, or in Malay, where by the side of _ka-kan_ and _ma-kan_
we have also _k-um-akan_. So, too, in Tagala we find _b-in-atin_ for
_in-batin_, just as in the secondary conjugations of the Semitic verb,
_iphteal_, _iphtael_, _istaphal_, the suffix _ta_ is inserted between
the first and second consonants of the root instead of being prefixed as
elsewhere. No doubt, metathesis aided by analogy was the primary cause
of this curious phænomenon, as it is in the Sanskrit _yu-na-j-mi_, “I
join,” instead of _yuj-na-mi_ corresponding with the Greek ζεύγ-νυ-μι.
The incorporating and polysynthetic languages are examples of the
principle on a large scale. (3) A third mode of expressing the relations
of grammar is by a change of vowel. The vowel may either pass into
another or receive a different quantity or accent. Professor Pott refers
to the use of _vṛiddhi_ in Sanskrit patronymics by way of illustration
as well as to change of accent in Greek proper names or vocatives. A
difference of vowel which was originally purely phonetic has been adapted
to distinguish between singular and plural in the English _man_ and
_men_, between transitive and intransitive in Greek verbs in -όω and -έω.
Among the less cultivated languages of the world extended use has been
made of this method of indicating the forms of grammar. In Javanese,
for instance, _iki_ is “this,” _ika_, “that,” _iku_, “that there;”
in Japanese _ko_ is “here,” _ka_, “there;” in Carib, _ne_ is “thou,”
_ni_, “he;” in Brazilian Botocudo _ati_ is “I,” _oti_, “thou.”[243]
In African Tumali _ngi_ is “I,” _ngo_, “thou,” and _ngu_, “her.” Even
differences of signification may be denoted by the same means; the
Carib _baba_, “father,” is contrasted with _bibi_, “mother,” just as
the Mantschu _chacha_, “man,” and _ama_, “father,” stand over against
_cheche_, “woman,” and _eme_, “mother,” or the Finnic _ukko_, “old man,”
and African Ibo, _nna_, “father,” over against _akka_, “old woman,” and
_nne_, “mother.” The numerals have not escaped being distinguished in
a similar manner; _tizi_ is “one” in Lushu, and _tazi_, “two;” “three”
and “four” are _ngroka_ and _ngraka_ in Koriak, _niyokh_ and _niyakh_
in Kolyma, _gnasog_ and _gnasag_ in Karaga, and _tsúk_ and _tsaak_
in Kamschatkan, while in Japanese _fitó_, _mi(tsu)_, and _yo_, are
“one,” “three,” and “four,” _fŭtá_, _mu(tsu)_, and _yá_, “two,” “six,” and
“eight.”[244] The Grebo of West Africa can distinguish between “I” and
“thou,” “we” and “you,” solely by the intonation of the voice, _mâ di_
being equally “I eat” and “thou eatest,” _a di_, “you” and “we eat,” and
in Bâ-ntu Mpongwe _tŏnda_ means “to love,” _tōnda_, “not to love.”[245]
(4) An internal change of consonant will be the next mode adopted by
language of marking a grammatical idea. Thus in Burman the active is
distinguished from the passive or neuter by aspirating an unaspirated
consonant, _kya_, for instance, being “to fall,” but _khya_, “to throw,”
_pri_, “to be full,” _phri_, “to fill.”[246] (5) Fifthly, position may
be the determining mark of relations of grammar, as is so pre-eminently
the case in Chinese and the Taic languages. It makes a good deal of
difference in English whether we say, “The man killed the dog,” or “The
dog killed the man.” (6) Another determining mark is reduplication,
which is common to all the languages of the world though used to express
very different grammatical ideas. Sometimes it may denote a past tense,
as in Aryan (δέδωκα, _cecidi_, _did_, &c.); sometimes a plural, as in
the Bushman _tu-tu_, “mouths,” the Sonorian _qui-qui_, “houses,” or the
Malay _raja-raja_, “princes;” sometimes a collective, as in the Canarese
_nîru gîru_, “water and the like;” sometimes a superlative, as in the
Accadian _gal-gal_, “very great,” the Mandingo _ding-ding_, “a very
little child,” or the French _beaucoup-beaucoup_, “very much;” sometimes
continuous action, as in the Dayak _kaká-kaka_, “to go on laughing loud,”
or the Tamil _muru-muru_, “to murmur;” sometimes intensity, as in the
Sanskrit _upary-upari_, “higher and higher,” the Greek παμ-φαίνω, “to
shine brightly,” or the Dayak _ku lyang ku lyang_, “to think deeply;”
sometimes emphasis and asseveration, as in the Dayak _kwai kwai_, “very
strange!” _shi shi_, “yes, yes;” sometimes frequentative or repeated
action, as in the Brazilian _acêm_, “I go out,” _ace-acêm_, “I go out
frequently,” _oce-cem_, “they go out one after the other.”[247] The
reduplication is often a broken one, that is, only the first syllable
or part of a syllable is reduplicated, as in the Latin _mo-mordi_ for
_mor-mordi_. Broken reduplication is very common in the Aryan languages,
but Brugman[248] has shown reason for believing that it has arisen out of
an earlier complete reduplication through the action of phonetic decay.
Now and then the reduplication takes place in the middle of a word, as
in the Sonorian Tepeguana where some plurals are formed by repeating the
second syllable, as in _aliguguli_, “boys,” from _alguli_, “boy,” or a
medial syllable, as in _hiim_, “gourds,” and _googosi_, “dogs,” from
the singulars _him_ and _gogosi_.[249] Instead of the first syllable,
only the initial vowel of a word may undergo reduplication; thus in
Tepeguana _ali_, “child,” is _a-ali_ in the plural, _ogga_, “father,”
is _o-ogga_, _ubi_, “woman,” is _u-ubi_. On the other hand, a word may
be lengthened by the repetition of the vowel at the end, as well as
in the middle; the Botocudos of Brazil, for instance, turn _uatu_, “a
stream,” into _uatu-u-u-u_, “ocean;” with the Aponegricans “six” is
_itawuna_, “seven,” _itawu-ú-una_, while the Madagascar _ratchi_, “bad,”
becomes _ra-a-atchi_, “very bad.”[250] When whole words are reduplicated
a change may be made in the initial consonant of the second part of
the reduplication; thus in Canarese the initial consonant becomes the
guttural _g_, as in the example quoted above, and the French _pêle-mêle_
and English _hurdy-gurdy_ are familiar instances of the same fact. Sir
John Lubbock[251] has made an interesting calculation of the proportion
of reduplicated words found in English, French, German, and Greek on the
one side, and some of the barbarous languages of Africa, America, and
the Pacific on the other, the result being that whereas “in the four
European languages we get about two reduplications in about 1,000 words,
in the savage ones the number varies from 38 to 170, being from twenty to
eighty times as many in proportion.” Reduplication, in fact, is one of
the oldest contrivances of speech. It is largely employed by children in
their first attempts to speak, and we need not, therefore, be surprised
at finding it so persistently holding its ground both in the nursery and
among barbarous tribes. The Polynesians seem to have a special affection
for it, though on the other hand, Mr. Matthews tells us that in North
America while reduplication is a prominent feature of the Dakota verb
it occurs in only one verb in the closely allied Hidacha dialect.[252]
Reduplication, however, is one of the most important modes adopted by
language for denoting the relations of grammar; it is, in fact, one of
the most obvious and natural of its outward means of expressing those
inward forms and grammatical conceptions which the human intelligence has
painfully struggled to realize.[253]
The common division of speech into formal and material is at once
defective and misleading. The articulate sounds of which words are
composed may indeed be called their matter, but they do not become
words, do not constitute a part of speech until they have thought and
significancy breathed into them like the breath of life into man. This
significancy is a relative one, that is to say, the meaning of a word
depends upon its relation to some other. But this relation may be of
two kinds, it may exist either between the ideas denoted by the words
or between the words when coupled together in some particular sentence.
In the first case we have to do with sematology, in the second with
grammar. We can understand what is meant by the word _tree_ only by
comparing and contrasting the idea of _tree_ with other cognate ideas;
but the relation between _tree_ and _sheds_ in such a sentence as “the
tree sheds its leaves,” is of a totally different nature. The idea of
_tree_ remains the same whatever be the outward symbol by which it is
expressed, whether _tree_, or _arbor_, or _baum_, or anything else; the
relation between _tree_ and _sheds_ is one that can be discovered only
by a historical and comparative investigation of English grammar. It is
to this grammatical relation alone that the term _formal_ is strictly
applicable; it has to do with the forms, or, as in the instance before
us, the want of forms, whereby the relations of grammar, the relations,
that is, of words in a sentence, are denoted. Going back to the primitive
sentence-word, we shall have to distinguish between the material sounds
of which it was composed, the meaning it always possessed whenever and
however used, and the form (or position) that it assumed according to the
occasion on which it was used. The child who says “Up!” always attaches
the same signification to the general idea contained in the word, but
whether it is to be regarded as an imperative, a hortative, an optative,
or any other particular grammatical form is left to the context, the tone
and gesture, or the intelligence of the bearer. Language consists of the
material, the significant, and the formal, and it is only the latter,
that part of language, in fact, the origin of which we have elsewhere
traced to gesture, that properly concerns morphology.
Whatever, therefore, belongs to grammar belongs also to morphology.
Not only general form and structure, but also grammar in the narrower
sense of the word, as well as composition, and what our German neighbours
term “word-building” must be included under it. Composition, indeed, is
but a species of declension and conjugation. _Parricida_ and _patris
(oc)cisor_, φερέοικος and οἶκον φέρει, have exactly the same force and
meaning. The only difference between _good-for-nothing_ as a compound
and “he is good for nothing” in a complete sentence, is that the first
can be used as an attribute. The ordinary genitive of the Semitic
tongues, the so-called “construct state,” is really an instance of
composition, the first noun—that which “governs” the second—being
pronounced in a single breath with the other, and accordingly losing the
case-terminations. This did not happen originally, as may be seen from
the occasional occurrence of these terminations even in Assyrian, which
is more strict in following out the rule than any other of the cognate
idioms. The power of composition is greater in some languages than in
others. The polysynthetic sentences of an American dialect present the
appearance of gigantic compounds, with this difference, however, that
in a true compound the language has put together two words that have
already been used independently, or at all events are capable of being
used independently, whereas in the less advanced American languages
the several members of the sentence have never attained the rank of
independent words which can be set apart and employed by themselves. Even
in some of the compounds of the Aryan family, where the flectionless
“stem” shows itself, it may be questioned whether we have not before us
the relics of that earliest stage of speech when the flections had not
yet been evolved, and when the relations of grammar were expressed by
the close amalgamation of flectionless stems in a single sentence-word.
However that may be, the power of forming compounds possessed by the
Aryan group of languages stands in marked contrast to the repugnance felt
by the Semitic tongues in this respect. Composition is as rare in Semitic
as it is common in Aryan, and this contrast between the two families
of speech is one of the many that demonstrate the radical difference
existing between them. Perhaps the extended use made by the Semitic
languages of denoting the relations of grammar by internal vowel-change
had much to do with their objection to the employment of compounds. They
are less agglutinative in character than the Aryan dialects, truer, in
fact, to the principle of flection, and the same instinct that makes
them represent the ideas of “killing” and “a killing” by _kodhêl_ and
_kidhl_ (_kedhel_), rather than by _trucida-n-s_ and _trucida-ti-o(n)_,
makes them also use two unallied roots like _hâlach_ and _yâtsâ_
where the Aryan would have said _ire_ and _exire_. Even within the
Aryan family itself we find the Greek with compounds like the comic
λεπαδο-τεμαχο-σελαχο-γαλεο-κρανιο-λειψανο-δριμ-υπο-τριμματο-σιλφιο-
παραο-μελιτο-κατα-κεχυμενο-κιχλ-επι-κοσσυφο-φαττο-περι-στερ-αλεκτρυον-
οπτ-εγ-κεφαλο-κιγκλο-πελειο-λαγῳο-σιραιο-βαλη-τραγανο-πτερύγων,[254]
and the Latin comparatively poor in them, while modern English, in spite
of the loss of its flections, lags but little behind German. Russian can
form such specimens of agglutination as _bezbozhnichestvovat_, “to be in
the condition of being a godless person,” from _bez Boga_, “without God,”
and classical Sanskrit almost dispenses with syntax by its superabundant
use of composition. Where syntax is highly developed, as it was in Latin,
the growth of composition is checked and limited.
Composition has been a fruitful source of grammatical flection, and
a still more fruitful source of what is meant by “word-building.” It
is highly probable that the person-endings of the Aryan verb _as-mi_,
_a(s)-si_, _as-ti_, or ἐσ-μι, ἐσ-σι, ἐσ-τι, are but the personal pronouns
closely compounded with the verbal stem. Such, certainly, has been the
case with the so-called _tempus durans_ of Aramaic, where _kâdhêlnâ_,
“I am killing,” is resolvable into _kâdhêl_ + _’anâ_, “killing + I,”
and _kâdhlath_, “thou art killing,” into _kâdhêl_ + _at’_, “killing +
thou.”[255] The Latin imperfect and future in -_bam_ and -_bo_ seem to be
compounds of the verbal stem with the verb _fuo_, “to exist,”[256] like
the perfect in -_ui_ or -_vi_ (_fui_), while the pluperfect _scripseram_
is a combination of _eram_ or _esam_ and the perfect _scripsi_ (itself
formed from the verbal stem _scrib_- and the old perfect _esi_ of the
substantive verb “sum”). So, too, the form _amavissem_ is just as much
a compound of _amavi_ (_ama_ + _fui_) and _essem_ (_es_ + _siem_) as is
_amatus sum_ of the passive participle and the substantive verb. If we
turn to our own language we can trace our perfects in -_ed_ back to the
Gothic amalgamation of the verb with _dide_, the reduplicated perfect of
the verb _do_, while the origin of the French _aimerai_ in the infinitive
_aimer_ (_amare_) and the auxiliary _ai_ (_habeo_) is as plain as that of
the Italian _dármelo_ (“to give it to me”) or _fáteglielo_ (“do it for
him”). The real character of the compound has come to be forgotten in
course of time, and its final part has gradually lost all semblance of
independence and been assimilated to the terminations which simply denote
grammatical relations. The general analogy of the language has been too
strong for it, and the agglutinated word has become a flection.
But there are many suffixes which are not flections—that is to say,
which do not denote the relations of grammar, or rather the relations
that exist between the different parts of the sentence. In _I loved_ for
_I love-did_ the grammatical relation which we name a perfect tense, is
not really expressed by the suffixed word _did_, but by the reduplication
which that word has undergone. It was the reduplication that gave _did_
(_dide_) the force of a perfect, and the attachment of _did_ to another
verb merely handed on to the latter the perfect force which it already
possessed. Strictly speaking the suffix -_ed_ is a flection only because
it is the relic of a reduplication, the flection—that is to say, the
expression of a grammatical relation—lying in the reduplication or
_form_ of the word. So, too, when we find _dêv-mã_, meaning “in God,”
in Gujerati, or _andhê-mẽ_, meaning “in the blind,” in Hindustani, we
must not suppose that the locative sense actually lies in the suffixes
_mã_ and _mẽ_. These suffixes go back to the Sanskrit _madhyê_, “in
the middle,” where the flection is to be sought in the termination _i_
(contained in _ê_ = _a_ + _i_) not in the stem _madhya_, “middle.”
When, then, we say that composition may be a fruitful source of
flection, what we mean is this. Flection is the means adopted by a
certain class of languages for expressing the relations that exist
between the members of a sentence, but a perception of these relations
must first grow up in the mind before external means are found for
embodying them. The idea of past time must be arrived at and realized
before the simple process of reduplication can be adopted to denote
it. Not only in other languages but also in the Aryan family of speech
reduplication serves to represent other relations of grammar than that
of past time. When the Frenchman says _beaucoup beaucoup_—meaning “very
much”—he is employing reduplication to express the superlative relation
just as much as the old Accadian with his _galgal_, “very great,” while
the very fact that there are Greek presents like δίδωμι and τίθημι, ought
to show that there was once a time in the history of Aryan speech when
reduplication served other purposes than that of denoting past time.
So it is with all the rest of the grammatical machinery which we call
flection. First of all the growing intelligence came to have, as it were,
an intuition of certain relations between the parts of a sentence, and
then sounds and forms already existing were adapted to denote these. And
the very same form might at successive periods in the development of a
language be adapted to denote different relations, as we have just seen
was the case with reduplication. When suffixes were used for a similar
purpose, they too had to follow the general analogy. Many of these
suffixes seem coeval with the beginnings of Aryan speech, at least so far
as we know anything about it, but others of them, like the person-endings
of the verb, are really instances of composition, the final part of the
compound having become a mere suffix, and so, like many other suffixes,
been adapted to the use of flection.
This brings us to those suffixes which have never been applied to a
purely flectional purpose. If we turn over the pages of an English
dictionary we shall come across the two familiar words _knowledge_ and
_wedlock_, which at first sight seem to have nothing in common. On
tracing them back to earlier forms, however, we find that _knowledge_,
Old English _know-leche_, like _wed-lock_, Old English _wed-lâc_, are
both compounded with the Anglo-Saxon _lâc_, “sport” or “gift,” the Old
High German _leih_, the Old Norse _leikr_, and the Gothic _láiks_. The
word still survives in the north of England under the form of _laik_, “to
play,” and the provincial _lake-fellow_ is merely “play-fellow.”[257]
Several abstracts were formed in Anglo-Saxon by the help of it; thus we
have _feoht-lâc_, “fight,” _gudh-lâc_, “battle,” _bryd-lâc_, “marriage,”
_reaf-lâc_, “robbery.”
Now what has happened in the case of the English _lâc_ has happened in
the case of a good number of other words in all the languages spoken
throughout the world. Words originally independent and distinct become
so glued together in composition that one of them loses its personal
identity, as it were, and comes to be the mere shadow of the other, whose
meaning it qualifies and classifies. Thus, for instance, the Greek κατὰ,
when compounded with the verb ἄγω, “to lead,” limits the sense of the
latter to “leading down,” and our own _hood_ or _head_, the Anglo-Saxon
_hâd_, “a state,” in words like _Godhead_ or _maidenhood_, refers the
nouns to which it is attached to a new and particular class.
Besides flectional suffixes, then, classificatory or formative suffixes
also may ultimately be due to the process of composition. Upon them,
too, analogy will have worked its influence, assimilating them to the
other suffixes which in course of time they had come to resemble. When
composition had once reduced a word to the condition of a mere adjunct of
another word, there was no reason why it should not be put to the same
uses as other similar adjuncts. When the root _bhar_, “to bear,” in such
Latin compounds as _leti-fer_ could no longer be distinguished from the
suffix -_tio(n)_ in words like _na-tio_, it was naturally treated in the
same way.
But it does not follow, as a good number of writers on language have
assumed, that because some of the classificatory suffixes are examples of
composition, all of them are so, any more than in the case of flection
and the flectional suffixes. Indeed, we have only to glance at the
numerous suffixes employed by our own Aryan family of speech in forming
or “building” words to see how impossible it would be to trace back a
large proportion of them to independent words. How, for instance, could
we claim any such origin for the suffixes -_la_- and -_ra_- in _querela_
and λαμπρὸς, or the suffixes -_ana_-, -_na_, and -_an_ in _pecten_,
_donum_, and ἱκανός? With such suffixes all we can do is to watch the
changes they have undergone, or caused other sounds to undergo, through
the action of phonetic decay and false analogy. Thus in Latin where
the combination _sr_ changes into the softer _br_, stems like _ceres_
(Sanskrit _śiras_), “head,” and _fes_ (as in _festus_) have turned into
_cerebrum_ and _Februus_ when combined with the suffix -_ra_; and if we
take the suffix _as_ itself, we shall find its sibilant passing into
_r_ before another vowel, and so originating a long series of curious
transformations. The _r_ which we get in the genitive of _temporis_ was
transferred by analogy to the nominative also, where no vowel followed
it, and though there was a struggle at first between the twin forms in
_s_ and _r_, traces of which survive in the twin _arbos_ and _arbor_,
the later and incorrect form with _r_ finally carried the day, and
classical Latin knows only of a _sopor_, not a _sopos_. But it may be
asked why should the penultimate syllable of _sopōris_ be long whereas
it is short in _tempŏris_ and _arbŏris_, and why, too, should _sopor_ be
masculine while _tempus_ is neuter? Here, again, false analogy has been
at work. A certain number of masculine nouns terminating in -_tor_ and
denoting agents, like _dator_ or _victor_, existed in the language, and
when _sopos_ was changed to _sopor_, it was assimilated to these both
in gender and in declension. Even _victor_, however, had passed under
the action of false analogy. When we compare the Latin _victor_ with
_pater_, or the Greek σωτήρ with πατήρ, it is at once clear that we are
dealing in each case with the same suffix, although in _victor_ the vowel
has been thickened into the fuller _o_. But while _victor_ and σωτήρ
have a long vowel in the oblique cases, this is not the case with the
much older words _pater_ and πατήρ (accusative πατέρα). It is evident,
therefore, that this long vowel must have been a sort of after-thought;
and so, in fact, it was. First of all the vowel of the nominative was
lengthened to compensate for the loss of the final sibilant (_paters_),
and the quantity of the vowel in the nominative was then analogically
extended to the other cases as well. How far this was from having been
originally the case may be gathered from another form of the same suffix
which we have in the Sanskrit _patram_, the Greek πτέρον, and the Latin
_ara-tr-um_. Here the vowel between the two consonants of the suffix has
disappeared altogether, as it has also in words like the Latin _sæclum_
for _sæ-culu-m_, or the Gothic _nê-thla_, our _needle_, where the suffix,
in spite of the change it has suffered, really goes back to _tar_. The
latter group of words (in _tar_), however, is distinguished from the
former (in _trum_) in both signification and gender, the masculine agent
being replaced by a neuter noun of instrumentality. We can easily see how
such a transition of meaning must have come about. The agent presupposes
the act just as much as the act presupposes the agent. Agent and act, in
fact, are co-relative terms, and the parent-Aryan distinguished them,
not by the classificatory suffix—for they both belonged to the same
class—but by the flectional suffix, which was in the one case -_s_ in
the nominative singular, and in the other -_m_. The Latin _trucidator_
and the English _murder_ (formerly _murther_, like _slaugh-ter_
and _laugh-ter_) have precisely the same suffix, and it is only a
recollection of the difference in meaning in the flectional suffixes
which has survived their loss that prevents them from being used with
the same signification. Even these flectional suffixes themselves—as we
shall see hereafter—did not originally imply that difference of meaning
to the expression of which they were afterwards adapted. In nouns like
the Latin _virus_ or the Sanskrit _śiras_-, the final sibilant denoted
a neuter rather than a masculine or a feminine, while _servum_ or _humum_
show that the final labial might characterize the objective case of both
masculine and feminine nouns.
The suffix _tar_ (_ter_) brings us back to those classificatory
suffixes which trace their descent from independent words, if, as is very
probable, we have to connect it with the root found in our _through_, the
Latin _trans_ and _ter-minus_, the Zend _tarô_, “across,” the Sanskrit
_tar-âmi_, “I pass over,” and perhaps, too, the numeral _tri_, _tres_,
_three_.[258] It is not difficult to understand how a word signifying
“to go through with a thing,” could be taken to form nouns of agency.
What more suitable description could be given of “a giver” than “one who
goes through with giving,” _dator(s)_? The antiquity of this use of the
suffix in our family of speech may be gathered from the fact that it
is employed to form those nouns of relationship which are the first to
require a name. _Brother_, _sister_, _daughter_, _mother_, _father_, all
contain this ancient suffix. _Brother_ (_bhrâ-tar_) is “the bearer,” from
the root _bhar_, _daughter_, “the milker” or rather “sucker,” from the
root _dugh_, while the Sanskrit grammarians derive _father_ (_pitar_) and
_mother_ (_mâtar_) from the roots _pâ_ and _mâ_, which respectively mean
“to defend” and “to create.” It is obvious, however, that both “father”
and “mother” must have received names long before it was necessary
to speak of “going across” or “passing through,” and that our Aryan
ancestors would not have waited to compound two words together before
giving names to the nearest and dearest of relationships. As a matter
of fact, in almost all languages names have been found for the parent
in the two simple labial utterances _pa_ and _ma_; and the identity of
these with the Aryan roots _pâ_ and _mâ_ must be a pure accident. What
seems to have happened in the case of our names of relationship was this.
When the Aryan family first comes before us in the records of speech,
it is as a civilized clan with a vast but indeterminate background of
unknown history lying behind them. They had long since entered upon
what may be termed the epithetic stage, when man discovered that he was
a poet, and began to invent epithets for the objects about him, and to
form compounds. It was at this stage of culture and civilization that the
Aryan community coined compound epithets for _brother_, for _daughter_,
and for _sister_, which succeeded in driving out and replacing the older
words that had preceded them. The new compounds in _tar_ took the fancy
of the community, and were widely extended by the force of analogy. The
old labials which had done duty for the ideas of “father” and “mother”
followed the fashion set by the younger names of relationship, and so
just as _bhrâ-tar_ had come to signify “brother,” _pa-tar_ and _mâ-tar_
came to signify “father” and “mother.”
Languages do not begin with composition. If the sentence is anterior to
the word, a considerable time must elapse between the first beginnings of
a language and the piecing together of two independent words. Isolating
tongues like the Chinese or the Burman, where so much use is made of
composition in order to create new conceptions or to define old ones,
are shown by this very fact to have passed into a decrepit stage of
existence. The epithetic stage is one far advanced in the history of a
speech; it implies poetic imagination, a certain measure of culture and
civilization, and the germs of a mythology. The new compounds of this
epithetic stage follow the genius and analogy of the language to which
they belong. If the formation of words depends largely on the use of
suffixes, the newly coined words will in time adapt themselves to the
old rule; what were once independent words will become suffixes, and be
employed in exactly the same way as the other suffixes of the language.
The very existence, then, of classificatory suffixes due to composition
in our Indo-European idioms implies the existence of earlier suffixes for
which we cannot claim a similar origin. We have already seen that this is
the case with many of the suffixes which serve the purposes of flection;
though the person-endings of the verb go back to separate words, every
attempt to discover such a derivation for the principal case-endings has
ended in failure. What is true of the case-endings is pre-eminently true
of those suffixes which are neither flectional nor classificatory. If we
analyze the Latin _alumnus_, we find first of all the flectional suffix
-_(u)s_, then the classificatory suffix _mino_, which relegates the word
to the same class of middle participles as the Greek τυπτόμενος, and
lastly, the suffix _u_, which intervenes between the root _al_ and the
classificatory suffix _mino_. We may call this _u_ a “connecting-vowel,”
or “an euphonic vowel,” or anything else we choose, but the fact remains
that it is a suffix which can be separated from the root _al_. It is a
suffix, however, which is neither flectional nor classificatory, and
may be termed secondary for want of a better name. Secondary suffixes
play an important part in our family of speech, and just as a flectional
suffix often appears as a classificatory one, so, too, a classificatory
suffix may appear as a secondary one. If, for example, we compare a word
like _civitas_ (_civ-i-ta-t-s_) with _sec-ta_, we may not only get the
secondary suffix -_i_-, following immediately upon the root, but also
a reduplication of the classificatory suffix _ta_, which here at least
can have no classificatory sense. We may accordingly define a secondary
suffix as one which does not refer the word of which it forms a part to
any particular class; and where we have several classificatory suffixes
amalgamated together the first of these have generally become secondary.
Thus the English _songstress_ is a combination of two suffixes, one
Saxon and the other Romanic, which equally denoted the feminine. By the
side of _sang-ere_, “the singer,” stood in Anglo-Saxon _sang-estre_,
“the songstress;” it was only when the classificatory significance of
the termination had died out that a new one which really went back to
the Greek -ισσα through the Latin _issa_ (as in _abbatissa_), and the
French -_esse_ (as in _justesse_),[259] was attached to it, and so the
old classificatory suffix became a merely secondary one. In fact, as soon
as the force of a classificatory suffix has been weakened in a word, a
fresh classificatory suffix is always ready to be attached to it, just
as children will talk of _more-er_ and _most-est_, or as Lord Brougham
introduced the equally anomalous _worser_.
Now these secondary suffixes play a most important part in a
large number of languages, and more especially in our own Aryan ones.
It is seldom that a classificatory or flectional suffix can be added
immediately to the root, as in the Sanskrit _ad-mi_, “I eat;” a secondary
suffix has usually to intervene, by means of which the root is raised
to what has been variously termed a base, a theme, or a stem. So far as
the Indo-European family of speech is concerned, it is probable that
even such exceptions to the general rule as that of _ad-mi_ are really
due to phonetic decay, which has worn away the original stem to a simple
monosyllable, as it has done in so many English words like _man_ or
_fall_. When we come to deal with roots, we shall see good reason for
believing that they were all or for the most part once dissyllabic, and
the tendency that many children show to turn the monosyllables of modern
English into dissyllabic words may be but an instinctive reversion to
the early type of speech. No doubt it is very possible that just as
classificatory suffixes have been changed into secondary ones, so on the
other hand secondary suffixes may have come in course of time to assume
a classificatory character. A conspicuous example of this may be found
in the suffix _ya_, which in Greek words like φέρουσα for φερο-ντ-yα,
or δότειρα for δοτ-ερ-yα, has become a mark of the feminine gender. A
distinction of gender is by no means engrained in the nature of things,
and the majority of spoken languages, such as most of those which are
agglutinative or isolating, know nothing at all of it. In some idioms,
those of the Eskimo, Chocktaw, Mushtogee, and Caddo, for instance,[260]
the place of gender is taken by the division of objects into animate
and inanimate, while elsewhere they are divided into rational and
irrational. In the Bâ-ntu dialects of South Africa, nouns are separated
into a number of classes, in one case as many as eighteen, by means of
prefixes which were originally substantives like our -_dom_, -_ship_,
or -_hood_; and the agreement of the pronoun, adjective, and verb with
the substantive is denoted by the employment of the same suffix. Bleek
has not inaptly compared these classes of the Bâ-ntu noun with the
genders of our own family of speech. Thus if we were to take a noun like
I-SI-_zwe_, “nation,” which belongs to the _si_-class or gender, in order
to express the sentence “our fine nation appears, and we love it,” the
Kafir would have to say I-SI-_zwe_ S-_etu_ E-SI-χ’_le_ SI-_ya-bonakala_
_si_-SI-_tanda_, literally “nation ours appears, we-it-love.” Similarly
the noun U-LU-_ti_, “stick,” would require a corresponding change of
prefix in the words in agreement with it; and the sentence would run:
U-LU-_ti_ LW-_etu_ O-LU-χ’_le_ LU-_ya-bonakala_ _si_-LU-_tanda_.[261]
There are many indications that the Aryan language, or rather the
ancestor of that hypothetical speech which we term the parent-Aryan, was
once itself without any signs of gender. We have only to turn to Latin
and Greek to see that the words which denote “father” and “mother,”
_pater_ and _mater_, πατὴρ and μητὴρ, have exactly the same termination,
while so-called diphthongal stems as well as stems in _i_ (_ya_) and
_u_ (like ναῦς and νέκυς, πόλις and λῖς) may be indifferently masculine
and feminine. Even stems in _o_ and _a_, though the first are generally
masculine and the second generally feminine, by no means invariably
maintain the rule, and feminines like _humus_ and ὁδός or masculines like
_advena_ and πολίτης show us that there was a time when these stems also
indicated no particular gender, but owed their subsequent adaptation,
the one to mark the masculine and the other to mark the feminine, to
the influence of analogy. How analogy came to act seems to have been as
follows. First of all the idea of gender was suggested by the difference
between man and woman, male and female, and, as in so many languages at
the present day, was represented not by any outward sign, but by the
meaning of the words themselves. Thus in the Hidacha of North America we
are told that “gender is distinguished by using, for the masculine and
feminine, different words, which may either stand alone or be added to
nouns of the common gender,”[262] and in the Sonorian languages further
south it can only be denoted by the addition of words which signify
“man” and “woman.”[263] Then when the conception of gender had once
been arrived at it was extended to other objects besides those to which
it properly belongs. The primitive Aryan had not yet distinguished the
object thought of from the subject that thought of it; he was still
in the stage of childhood, and just as he transferred the actions and
attributes of inanimate objects to himself, so too he transferred to
them the actions and attributes of himself, and endowed them with a life
similar to his own. The same age which saw the creation and growth of a
mythology saw also the origin of gender in nouns, and the distinction of
gender in the demonstrative pronouns, due to their reference to animate
beings, reacted on the nouns expressive of inanimate objects to which
they likewise referred. As soon as the preponderant number of stems in
_o_ in daily use had come to be regarded as masculine on account of their
meaning, other stems in _o_, whatever might be their signification, had
to follow the general rule and be classed as masculine nouns. How readily
the gender of a word may be determined by its termination has been
already seen in the history of the Latin stems in -_os_. Here and there
the constant use of a word with particular pronouns or its obvious and
natural meaning resisted the common tendency, and hence the preservation
of such anomalies as ὁδός, _humus_,[264] and _advena_ mentioned above.
The suffix _ya_, however, like the suffix -ιδ- (as in αὐλητρίς) in
Greek or the suffix -_ic_- (as in _victrix_) in Latin, formed part of
a class of words which all followed the dominant type; neither use nor
meaning interfered with the appropriation of them all to express the
feminine gender. The accident by which the suffix was attached to words
which chiefly denoted female agents eventually caused it to become a
classificatory instead of remaining a mere secondary suffix. But the
Aryans were not contented with only two genders, as the Semites and some
other races were. A time came when the Aryan awoke to the consciousness
that he was essentially different from the objects about him, that the
life with which he had clothed them was really but the reflection of his
own. He began to distinguish the agent from the patient, and to turn his
middle conjugation into a passive one. The first sign of this new-grown
consciousness was the formation of a nominative for the first personal
pronoun; _ego_, ἐγών, the Sanskrit _aham_, is a far later creation than
the objective _me_ or _mâ_, and whether it be a compound or not, as some
scholars believe, at all events it marks the epoch when the “me” became
an “I.” The discovery had been made that a difference existed between
the nominative and the accusative. But this difference existed only in
the case of animate beings, or of those objects which the custom of
language and the habits of thought it had produced regarded as animate;
there was another class of objects and ideas which were beginning to
require a name and yet could not be reckoned as coming under either of
the two genders with which the language was already acquainted. The same
development of thought which had revealed the distinction between subject
and object brought with it also the conception of abstracts or general
terms. Besides the individual trees which had long ago received their
names, the idea of “tree” itself now needed a word to express it, and the
speaker was no longer contented with detailing his single utterances one
by one, but wanted a general term like “word” or “speech” wherein to sum
them up. And so the new class of neuter nouns came into existence, which
were really nothing more than old accusative cases or bare stems used as
nominatives and given a separate life of their own. So far as form goes,
the Greek δένδρον and ἔπος cannot be distinguished from λόγον and ὄπες,
the Sanskrit _vâchas_ representing both ἔπος and ὄπες alike, any more
than the Latin _regnum_ and _vulgus_ can be distinguished from _dominum_
and _reges_. In the pronouns the bare stem in _t_ or _d_, which had once
served for all cases and all genders, was set apart for neuter nouns,
and the Aryan declension was made complete with its encumbrance of three
genders, which it has needed the practical genius of the English language
to shake off. The further changes that took place in the distribution of
these three genders must be described by the historical grammars of the
special languages of the Aryan family: the age came when their original
meaning and intention was as much forgotten as that of mythology; they
were looked upon as the functions of certain suffixes which thus became
classificatory, and, as in Latin stems in -_as_ or French nouns like
_mer_ which owe their gender to the confusion of the plural nominative
_maria_ with the singular nominative of _musa_, they became the sport
and puppet of false analogy. The mixture of dialects which varied as to
the genders they assigned to particular nouns completed the confusion,
and modern German is an instance of a language which still clings to an
outward excrescence of speech which originated in childish habits of
thought and has now lost all sense and reason for its existence. A mere
tax upon the memory and an embarrassment to free literary expression, it
is no wonder that German genders are a sore trial to the children, who
are sometimes several years before they learn to use them correctly. In
this respect they resemble the Swedish peasantry, who are said to find an
equal difficulty with the genders of their own tongue.
The origin of gender is one of the questions belonging to what
some German scholars have termed “the metaphysics of language.” The
metaphysics of language deals with the source and nature of grammatical
ideas as distinct from the phonetic machinery by which they are
expressed; it seeks by a comparison, firstly of cognate dialects and
then of families of speech, to discover the conception which lay at
the bottom of such grammatical facts as gender, number, and the like.
We want to know not merely how the relations between the several parts
of the sentence are expressed, but what those relations actually are.
The idea must exist before phonetic means are adapted to represent it,
and in order to reach it we must scientifically trace the history of
the phonetic means. The metaphysics of speech, therefore, is but the
second branch and division of its morphology, bearing the same relation
to the inquiry into the growth and origin of stems and suffixes and
suchlike phonetic forms of grammar that sematology does to phonology.
The morphology of language is as much concerned with grammatical ideas
as with the external form in which they are embodied. It is these
grammatical ideas more than their phonetic embodiment that constitute the
_structure_ of a tongue.
Let us see, for example, whether we can track the conception of
number back to its first starting-point. Strange as it may seem there
are some uncivilized languages which make as little distinction between
the singular and the plural as we do ourselves when we use words like
_sheep_. Thus Mr. Matthews states that “Hidatsa nouns suffer no change of
form to indicate the difference between singular and plural,”[265] and in
the Sonorian tongues, according to Buschmann,[266] “the simple word in
the singular serves also for the plural,” while the monosyllabic Othomi
can distinguish between singular and plural only by the prefixed article
_na_ and _ya_,[267] and the Amara of Africa can only say _fŭrŭsn ayŭhu_,
“I have seen horse,” leaving the hearer to decide whether the horse is
one or many. In spite of the vast length of time during which these
languages have been shaping and perfecting themselves, the conception of
number is still so far from being consciously realized that no phonetic
means have yet been adapted or devised to express it. If we turn to the
Tumali of Africa we find in the case of the personal pronouns _ngi_, “I,”
_ngo_, “thou,” and _ngu_, “he,” a slight advance upon this poverty of
thought. Here the plural is denoted by the postposition _da_, “with,” so
that _ngi-n-da_, “we,” is literally “(some one) with me.” The mind has
come to distinguish between itself and that which is outside itself, to
realize, in fact, that it has an individual existence distinct from that
of some one else, and so the conception of duality is attained. At this
conception mankind stopped for a long while; indeed, there are many races
and tribes who have not even yet passed beyond it. Wherever the so-called
plural is formed by means of reduplication—that is to say, wherever the
doubling of a thing is the furthest point of multiplicity to which the
mind can reach, there we have not yet a true plural, but only a dual. All
over the world reduplication seems to have been the earliest contrivance
for denoting something beyond the singular, and to this day in Bushman,
as in many other savage jargons, it serves for a plural.[268] The same
evidence that is borne by the so-called reduplicated plural is borne also
by the numerals. The aborigines of Victoria, according to Mr. Stanbridge,
“have no name for numerals above two;”[269] the Puris of South America
call “three” _prica_ or “many,” which is also the original meaning of the
same numeral in Bushman, and “the New Hollanders,” says Mr. Oldfield of
the western tribes, “have no names for numbers beyond _two_.” It is even
possible, as has been already noticed, that our own Aryan _tri_, _three_,
goes back to the same root as that of the Sanskrit _tar-ô-mi_, “I pass
beyond,” and once signified nothing more than that which is “beyond”
two. The fact that the conception of duality preceded the conception of
plurality, explains how it is that the seemingly useless dual has been
preserved in so many languages by the side of the plural. It is a relic
of a bygone epoch, a survival, as Mr. Tylor would call it, which tends
to be more and more restricted in use until it disappears altogether. In
both Aryan and Semitic the dual appears only as an archaic and perishing
form. The Æolic, in this as in the throwing back of the accent, the least
conservative of the Greek dialects, has lost it entirely; the Latin
keeps it merely in _duo_, _octo_, and _ambo_, and if we pass to the
Semitic idioms, the dual of the noun is preserved only in words which
denote natural pairs like “the eyes” or “the ears,” while in the verb
it has been maintained by Arabic alone, and in some exceptional cases
by Assyrian. Language, however, did not always proceed at once from the
dual to the plural, from the conception, that is, of limited plurality to
the conception of unlimited plurality. Many languages possess a trinal
number, or what are called inclusive and exclusive forms of the personal
pronouns, and in one of the Melanesian idioms, as well as in Vitian or
Fijian, we even find a quadruple number formed by the attachment of
_tavatz_ or _tovatz_, “four,” to the pronouns _na_, “you,” and _dra_,
“we.”[270] In Cheroki the dual of the first person has one form when one
of two persons speaks to the other, another form when the one speaks of
the other to a third, _inaluiha_ being “we two (_i.e._ thou and I) are
tying it;” _awstaluiha_, “we two (_i.e._ he and I) are tying it.” In
Annatom, again, _aniyak_ is “I,” _akaijan_, “you two + I,” _ajumrau_,
“you two - I,” _akataij_, “you three + I,” _aijumtaij_, “you three -
I.” More usually the reduplicated dual led to a plural without the
intervention of a trinal number, or the plural was denoted by some word
like “multitude” or “heap,” which in course of time came to be a plural
sign, just as in other instances it came to signify the numeral “three.”
In the Aryan languages M. Bergaigne has shown[271] that the plural of the
weak cases (nominative, accusative, and vocative) was identical with the
singular of abstract nouns, and their formatives, -_as_ or -_âs_, -_i_ or
-_î_, -_â_ or -_yâ_, and -_an_, continued to the last to mark abstracts
like the Sanskrit _áhan_, “the day,” _lipi_, “writing,” _vrajyâ_, “the
act of travelling,” or _mudâ_, “joy.” So in Semitic Assyrian, where
an abstract is generally regarded as feminine, the feminine plural in
-_utu_ has become the termination of singular nouns like _śarrutu_, “a
kingdom,” and then by a curious change of function been appropriated to
a certain class of masculine plurals. There are reasons for thinking
that the Semitic plural has been based on the dual; however this may be,
the suffixes of the Aryan plural, so far at least as the weak cases are
concerned, are suffixes which we find elsewhere used as secondary and not
classificatory ones.
Even the genitive case, necessary as it appears to us to be, once had
no existence, as indeed it still has none in groups of languages like
the Taic or the Malay. Instead of the genitive, we here have two nouns
placed in apposition to one another, two individuals, as it were, set
side by side without any effort being made to determine their exact
relations beyond the mere fact that one precedes the other, and is
therefore thought of first. Which of the two should thus precede depended
on the psychological point of view of the primitive speaker. We are all
acquainted with the distinction between the objective genitive where
the governed word is the object of the other, as in _amor Socratis_,
“love felt for Socrates,” and the subjective genitive where the converse
is the case, as in _Socratis amor_, “love felt by Socrates,” and this
distinction has led to two different conceptions of the genitive relation
being formed by different races. In the Aryan family, for instance, the
genitive must precede its governing noun; _Horsetown_, equally with
_horse’s town_, means “town of the horse.” In Semitic, on the contrary,
the position of the words is reversed; here the genitive has to follow,
not precede. Perhaps we may see in the position of the genitive in the
two great inflectional families of speech a symbol of the characters of
the two races. The Aryan, the inventor of induction and the scientific
method, fixes his first attention on the phænomenon and traces it up to
its source; the Semite, on the other hand, makes the first cause his
starting-point, and derives therefrom with easy assurance all the varying
phænomena that surround him.
Now, this apposition of two nouns, which still serves the purpose of
the genitive in many languages, might be regarded either as attributive
or as predicative. If predicative, then the two contrasted nouns formed
a complete sentence, “cup gold,” for instance, being equivalent to “the
cup is gold.” If attributive, then one of the two nouns took the place
of an adjective, “gold cup” being nothing more than “a golden cup.” The
apposition of two substantives is thus the germ out of which no less
than three grammatical conceptions have developed—those of the genitive,
of the predicate, and of the adjective. It is but another instance of
that principle of differentiation which we have found at work upon the
phonetic forms whereby the relations of grammar are expressed. Dr.
Friedrich Müller has observed[272] that, as a general rule, the attribute
and the genitive, or as he terms it the possessive, occupy the same
place, and are treated as one and the same relation. In Hottentot, as
in Chinese, where the defining noun must precede that which is defined,
“right-path” means equally “the right path” and “the path of right,” and
our own English language is another example of the same usage. In Malay,
on the contrary, as in the Semitic tongues, both adjective and genitive
have to follow the noun they define; thus the Malayan _ōran ūtan_, or
“man of the wood,” is literally “man-wood,” and _gūmin besar_, “a great
mountain,” “mountain-great.” On the other hand, the predicative relation
is marked off from the attributive and genitival by a converse order
of words; in Malay, for instance, the predicate is placed before its
subject, as in _besar gūmin_, “great (is) the mountain,” and the Semitic
perfect is formed by affixing the pronouns of the first and second
persons to a participle or verbal noun.[273] These primitive contrivances
for distinguishing between the predicate, the attribute, and the
genitive, when the three ideas had in the course of ages been evolved by
the mind of the speaker, gradually gave way to the later and more refined
machinery of suffixes, auxiliaries, and the like.
Now it will be noticed that while the predicative relation is contrasted
with the attributive and the genitival, the two latter assume the same
form. Where the relations of grammar are denoted by position alone, no
distinction is made between the attribute and the possessive. There
is nothing in the outward form to tell us whether in expressions like
_horsetown_ or _ōran ūtan_, _horse_ and _ūtan_ are to be considered as
adjectives or as genitives. And in point of fact there is at bottom
little or no difference between them. The primitive instinct of language
did not err in treating the two conceptions as essentially one and
the same. A “gold cup” is exactly equivalent to a “cup of gold.” The
adjective describes the attribute which defines and limits the class
to which its substantive belongs; and so, too, does the genitive. Both
indicate the species of a genus, limiting the signification of the
substantive, and so having the same functions as those determinatives
which, as we have seen, play so large a part in a Chinese or Burman
dictionary. In such languages these defining words perform the same
classificatory office as the classificatory suffixes of an Aryan dialect;
but whereas the classificatory suffixes of an inflectional tongue are
neither adjectives nor attributes, the classificatory substantives of the
isolating language are really both. We are told that a school-inspector
plucked some children a short time ago for saying that _cannon_ in
_cannon-ball_ was a noun instead of an adjective; the pedantry of the act
was only equal to the ignorance it displays, and illustrates how often
the artificial nomenclature of grammar breaks down when confronted with
the real facts of language.
So long therefore as the adjective or genitive is denoted by position
only, we cannot draw any true line of distinction between them and the
determinatives of the Taic idioms. They all have the same end—that of
limiting and defining a noun—of referring it to some special class or
investing it with some special quality. Hence it is that the genitive
case so frequently assumes the form of an adjective, even in those
languages in which the adjective and the genitive have been eventually
distinguished from one another. In the Tibetan dialects adjectives are
formed from substantives by the addition of the sign of the genitive, as
_ser-gyi_, “golden,” from _ser_, “gold;” and in Hindustani the genitive
takes the marks of gender according to the words to which it refers.[274]
Greek adjectives like δημό-σιο-ς remind us of the old genitive δημοσιο,
which has become δημοῖο in Homer, or the Sanskrit genitive _śiva-sya_
and the pronouns _ta-syâ-s_ and _ta-sya-i_, and though the suffix of
δημό-σιο-ς was originally rather -_tya_ than -_sya_, since a Greek
sibilant between two vowels tends to disappear, the two suffixes once
performed the same functions and bore the same relation to each other as
the demonstratives _sa_ and _ta_. The Aryan genitive stands on the same
footing as the other cases of the nouns which have been traced back by
M. Bergaigne to adjectives used adverbially. If we look at the Bâ-ntu
languages we shall have little difficulty in understanding the reason of
this close connexion between adjective and genitive. As we have seen, the
agreement of words together in these languages is pointed out by the use
of common prefixes, which were once independent substantives, and have
come to answer somewhat to the marks of gender in Greek and Latin. The
same prefixes, however, not only indicate the concord of adjective and
substantive, of verb and subject, but also of nominative and genitive.
Thus the Zulu would say I-SI-_tya_ S-O-_m-fazi_, “the dish of the woman,”
where the common prefix _si_ declares the relation that exists between
the two ideas. If we assume that the primary meaning of _si_ was “mass,”
the words I-SI-_tya_ S-O-_m-fazi_ would properly be read “mass-dish
mass-woman.” The word _si_ is thus the standard and connecting link by
means of which the other two are brought together and compared. It had
been attached to a certain group of words at a time when the conception
of adjective or genitive had not yet been clearly realized, and when mere
position, mere apposition, indicated by itself the association of two
ideas. This close association caused it finally to lose all distinctive
existence of its own, to become, in short, an “empty word” or formative,
the index of a particular class like the classificatory suffixes of our
own tongues. Like these suffixes, again, it came to have what would be
called in Sanskrit or Greek a flectional power; it not only marked the
class to which the substantive belonged, but also the fact that another
word was in concord with it. Whether this were a concord of the adjective
or the genitive, however, the Kafir dialects have never advanced so far
as to determine.
Unlike either the Kafir with prefixes which denote at once attribute,
possessive, and even predicate, or the Aryan languages with their
suffixes each fulfilling a special function, the Semitic tongues
distinguished between genitive and adjective by subordinating the
governing word to its “genitive,” and keeping the attention fixed on the
characteristics which separated species from species within a common
genus. While the adjective constituted an independent word by the side
of the substantive with which it was joined, the genitive was regarded
merely as the latter half of a compound of which the word defined by it
was the first part. In the so-called _construct state_, the governing
noun is pronounced, as it were, in one breath with the genitive that
follows it; its vowels are shortened, and its case-terminations tend to
disappear. Thus in Assyrian, while _śarru rabu_ is “great king,” _śar
rabi_ is “king of great ones,” and in Hebrew the construct _dhiv’rê
hâ’âm_, “words of the people,” stands in marked contrast to the simple
_dhĕvârim_, “words.”
The agglutinative languages of Western Asia, again, traversed an
altogether different road. In the Accadian of ancient Chaldea, we still
find instances in the oldest inscriptions of a genitive by position,
which only differs from an adjective by the meaning it bears. Thus,
_lugal calga_ is “strong king,” _lugal’Uru_, “king of Ur.” But a
postposition soon came to be added to the second substantive in order
to point out more distinctly its place in the sentence, and these
postpositions seem originally to have been verbs. At all events, such is
the case with one of the postpositions, _lal_, used for the genitive;
_lugal ’Uru-lal_, for instance, being literally “king Ur-filling,” though
the more usual postposition -_na_ has lost all traces of its source and
derivation. The latter postposition is found throughout the Ural-Altaic
family, as in the Turkish _evin_, “of a house,” or the Votiak _murten_,
“by a man.” It indicates the genitive in Finnish and Lapp, in Mordvin and
Samoyed, in Mongol (-_yin_, -_un_), and Mantschu (-_ni_). It is somewhat
remarkable that though the Ural-Altaic family is characterized by the
use of postpositions, that is, by making the defining word follow that
which it defines, the modern dialects, with a few exceptions,[275] have
discarded the general rule and placed the adjective before its noun.
This change of position must be ascribed to a wish for differentiation,
when the employment of a special postposition for the genitival relation
had familiarized the speaker with the distinction between adjective and
genitive. Elsewhere the distinction was brought into relief by the help
of special words or symbols to denote the genitive relation. Just as
the Accadians or the Finns employed a postposition which was originally
an independent word with a meaning of its own, so, too, the Semites
replaced the “construct state” by the insertion of the demonstrative or
relative pronoun, _śarru sa rabi_, for example, literally “king that
(is) the great ones,” coming to signify simply “king of the great ones,”
and the Chinese assigned the same office to their _tchi_, “place.”
The analytic languages of modern Europe have followed in the same
track, only employing prepositions like _de_, _of_, or _von_, instead
of demonstrative pronouns or other words. When the conception of the
genitive had once been clearly recognized, means were soon found for
making it as clear in phonetic expression as it was in idea, and the
ambiguous machinery of flection was superseded by a method of expression
which had been familiar to the more advanced Ural-Altaic idioms from a
very remote period.
The history of the genitive has shown us that the same germ may
develop very differently in different families of speech. The conception
of the genitival relation, when fully realized, has worn a varying aspect
to Aryans and Semites, to Accadians and Kafirs. The same grammatical
relation admits of being looked at from many points of view, and of being
expressed in many ways. Let us now turn to another adjunct of grammar
which has assumed more than one form within the same family of speech
itself. A definite article is by no means a universal possession of
language; on the contrary, the majority of languages want it altogether,
and wherever it makes its appearance we can trace it back to the
demonstrative pronoun, with which it is still identical in German. “That
man” and “the man” are in fact one and the same, the only difference
between them being that the demonstrative draws emphatic attention to
a particular individual, while the article acts like a classificatory
suffix by narrowing the boundaries of a genus and reducing it to the
condition of a species. The article has thus the same ultimate function
as the adjective or the genitive, and we should therefore expect to find
it following the lead of the latter and occupying the same position in
the sentence. This, however, is not the case. It is true that in English
and German the article precedes the noun, but it does the same in Hebrew
and Arabic, as also in Old Egyptian, where the adjective follows its
substantive; while, on the other hand, in Scandinavian, as in Wallach,
Bulgarian, and Albanian, the place of the article is after its noun.
The cause of this irregularity is the fact that the article is a very
late product in any speech; it does not grow out of the demonstrative
until an age which has lost all recollection of the early contrivances
of language and found other means than mere position for indicating the
attribute of the noun. How late this is may be judged from the absence of
the definite article in dialects cognate to those which possess one. Thus
in the Semitic languages there is none in either Ethiopic or Assyrian,
except in the very latest period of the latter tongue; among the Aryan
dialects, Russian and the other Slavonic idioms (Bulgarian excepted) have
no article, the Greek article being very inadequately represented by the
relative pronoun _ije_ in Old Slavonic, while Sanskrit also may be said
to be without one, though the demonstrative _sa_ sometimes takes its
place, as in _sa purusha_ like _ille vir_ in Latin. Neither the Finnic
nor the Turkish-Tatar languages have an article, Osmanli Turkish alone
occasionally having recourse to the Persian mode of expressing it by a
_kezra_ (_i_) or _hemza_ (ʾ) as in _nawale-y-ushk_, “the lamentations of
love;” Hungarian, however, has been so far influenced by the neighbouring
German dialects as to turn the demonstrative _az_ or _a_ into a genuine
article, as in _az atya_, “the father,” _a leány_, “the daughter.” On the
other hand, the objective case, or “casus definitus,” as Böhtlingk terms
it, seems formed by a demonstrative affix not only in Turkish-Tatar, but
also in Mongol and even Tibetan; in Mongol, for instance, it is marked
by a suffix which is commonly pronounced -_yighi_.[276] This definite
case very often answers exactly to the use of a definite article with
the noun, and has arisen through a similar desire to give definiteness
and precision to the expression. So, too, Castrén tells us that an affix
-_et_ or -_t_, which he believes to be the pronoun of the third person,
is sometimes attached to the Ostiak accusative, and in Hindustani, where
there is no definite article, its place is taken before the accusative
by a dative with the suffix -_ko_, and in Persian by the suffix -_ra_,
a suffix, by the way, which Schott considers to have been borrowed from
the Tatar or Mongol tongues. We may judge how attributive and defining is
the nature of the objective case from the Chinese, where the same empty
word _tchi_, which, according to Dr. Edkins, was originally _ti_, is the
affix of both the objective and the possessive cases. Passing to the
New World, we find the Algonkins alone among the North American Indians
prefixing the article _mo_ or _m’_, originally a contracted form of the
demonstrative _monko_, “that,” while the monosyllabic Othomis use _na_
and _ya_ in the same sense.
But now the question arises—granting the late growth of the definite
article and its appearance only here and there in a group of allied
languages—Why do some of these use it as a prefix and others as an
affix? As in Greek, or Keltic, or Teutonic, the Romanic article which
has been developed out of the Latin _ille_ always precedes its noun,
except in Wallachian, where “the master” must be rendered by _domnul_,
that is, _dominus ille_. Professor Max Müller thinks that this position
of the article was borrowed from Wallachian by the Bulgarians and
Albanians;[277] M. Benlöw, on the contrary, holds that Albanian set the
example both to Wallach and to Bulgarian.[278] Assuming that Albanian
belongs to the Indo-European family of speech—a point, however, which
has yet to be satisfactorily determined—we should still have an Aryan
language reversing the usual order of Aryan speech. Thus ἔμερ is
“name,” but ἔμερι, “the name;” δέ is “earth,” but δέου, “the earth;”
δέῤῥε, “door,” but δέῤῥα, “the door;” νιερὶ, “man,” in the accusative,
but νιερί-νε, “the man;” νιέρεζ, “men,” but νιέρεζι-τ(ε), “the men.”
Whatever may be thought of Albanian, however, we have a clear case of
the postposition of the Aryan article in the Scandinavian tongues, where
the Swedish _werld-en_, for instance, signifies “the world,” _luft-en_,
“the air,” and it is, perhaps, curious that the Scandinavians, like the
Albanians, are natives of a comparatively cold and mountainous country.
Mountaineers are famous for the use of their lungs, and a postfixed
article is necessarily more emphatic than a prefixed one. More effort is
required in laying stress on the last syllable of a word than in slurring
it over and throwing the accent back.
Now M. Bergaigne has shown[279] that in the primitive Aryan sentence
the qualifying word, whether adjective or genitive or adverb, came before
the subject and governing word, and this agrees with what we have seen
was the early conception formed by the Aryan mind of the attributive
relation in contrast to that formed by the Semitic. We should therefore
expect to find the article following the rule of other qualifying words,
and standing before its noun in the Aryan tongues, and after its noun in
the Semitic tongues. So far as the Aryan tongues are concerned, this is
its general position. The German dialects which have maintained so firmly
the place of the adjective and the genitive have been equally firm in
maintaining the place of the definite article.[280] If Wallach influenced
Bulgarian and Albanian in affixing the article, an explanation may be
found in the forgetfulness shown by the Romanic idioms of the early
rule of Aryan speech, as evidenced by their putting the adjective after
the substantive; if, as seems more probable, Wallach and Bulgarian were
influenced by Albanian, we must bear in mind that the latter language
may not be Aryan at all. As for Swedish and the other Scandinavian
dialects, the inverted position of the article may be ascribed to what
we may call the disorganization of their syntax. While Gothic observed
the old rule which made the dependent and defining word precede, it is
very noticeable that already in the Icelandic Snorra Edda the genitive
without a preposition occurs not only before, but also after its noun.
The syntactical instinct of the language was thus disturbed, and there
was therefore little to prevent a new defining word like the article from
occupying an anomalous place. In the Semitic languages Aramaic alone
assigns a natural position to the article, which is represented by the
so-called _emphatic aleph_ attached to a noun when not otherwise defined
by being in the construct state. Now there are many reasons which would
lead us to believe that Aramaic was the first of the Semitic dialects in
which the article developed itself, and that this happened shortly after
its separation from the dialect which subsequently branched off into
Hebrew, Phœnician, and Assyrian. The article did not make its appearance
in Hebrew or Arabic until the old order of the sentence had been thrown
into confusion by rhetorical inversions and the periphrastic genitive
formed by the demonstrative pronoun. How it came to be prefixed to its
noun is illustrated by the Assyrian. Here a kind of article makes its
appearance in the Persian period, which, when placed after its noun,
has the force of the demonstrative “this” or “that.” Now and then,
however, we find it in conjunction with another demonstrative before
the noun, a construction which can easily be explained if we regard the
demonstrative and the noun as having been first in apposition, and then
brought so closely together that the demonstrative became an article. In
Arabic, too, the demonstrative can be prefixed to a noun which is already
furnished with the article, and the pronoun and noun are thus regarded
as being in apposition to one another. The same is the case in Hebrew,
where we occasionally meet with a construction like _zeh hâ’âm_, “this
people,” literally “this the people,” as well as _zeh Mosheh_, “this
Moses.”[281] The last example shows us that a proper name was considered
definite enough to be put in apposition to the pronoun, even when without
the article, and it is not difficult to assume that an usage which first
grew up in the case of proper names, should in time have extended itself
to all nouns which were considered definite. Even the adjective _rabbim_,
“many,” is found preceding its noun.[282] The preservation of the
case-endings in Hebrew and Arabic may have had something to do with the
position chosen by the article; it was easy enough for a demonstrative
to pass into an affixed article in Aramaic, where the case-endings seem
to have perished early, but it was only possible for it to do so in
languages where they were preserved by its standing before the noun. Old
Egyptian agrees with Hebrew and Arabic in the general rule of placing the
determining word after the word it determines; it also agrees with them
in prefixing the article. But this, again, may be explained by the use of
the demonstrative as an article having originated in its apposition to
the substantive; while the use of _ua_, “one,” as an indefinite article
probably assisted in the process. Of course, when a definite article had
once come into existence, a difference of position served to distinguish
it from the demonstrative pronouns to which it had formerly belonged.
This long inquiry into the causes which have made the article sometimes
an affix and sometimes a prefix has introduced us to the last department
of the morphology of speech—that which is known as syntax, or the
arrangement of words in a sentence. Professor Earle has remarked that
syntax varies inversely as accidence; wherever we have an elaborate
formal grammar, there we have a corresponding poverty of syntax; wherever
we have little formal grammar, as in Chinese or English, there syntax
comes prominently into view. This is only another way of stating the
fact that in default of such contrivances as inflections, language
has recourse to rules of position in order to denote the grammatical
relations of words; and though Greek shows us that a highly developed
accidence may exist along with an equally developed syntax, yet it is
quite true that a language which makes such large use of composition
as Sanskrit, must be very poor in the matter of syntax. Composition
and syntax are antagonistic to each other. The study of comparative
accidence, or, as it is rather loosely called, comparative grammar, is
much in advance of that of comparative syntax; indeed, it is but lately
that comparative syntax has attracted the attention of philologists
to any extent, Jolly, Delbrück, Bergaigne, and others being among the
pioneers of this branch of linguistic science. Here, too, we must work
back to that inner form which underlies the choice of the position of
words in a sentence; we must find out by the comparative method what
were the primary syntactical rules observed by a group of cognate
tongues, what were the grammatical conceptions they indicated, and how
they were modified by the several languages in the course of their
subsequent history. The germs of syntax are capable of infinitely various
development, although each family of speech starts with its own special
point of view, its own particular principle. The Aryan began by placing
the defining word before the word defined; the Semite by placing it
after; just as in Burman the defining word precedes, while in Siamese
or Tai it follows. Languages, which have never attained to the idea of
a verb, like the Polynesian, must necessarily differ materially from
those in which the verbal conjugation plays a principal part; while in
the polysynthetic languages of America, syntax in the proper sense of
the term can hardly be said to exist at all. Unlike formal grammar,
however, syntax is comparatively changeable; Coptic has become a prefix
language, whereas its parent, Old Egyptian, was an affix one, and the
growth of rhetoric as well as the development of grammatical forms tend
to obliterate the old landmarks and principles of syntactical arrangement.
The history of the accusative with the infinitive in Latin is a good
example of this. Prof. Max Müller describes his utter amazement when he
was first taught to say, _Miror te ad me nihil scribere_, “I am surprised
that you write nothing to me,”[283] and there was plenty of reason for
it. He has clearly shown that most of the Greek and Latin infinitives
were originally dative cases of abstract nouns, and not locatives, as
has often been maintained; the Greek δοῦναι or δοϝέναι, for instance,
answering to the Vedic _dâváne_, “to give,” τετυπέναι to _vibhráne_,
“to conquer” or “effect,” _amare_, _monere_, _audire_, to _jîv-áse_,
“to live.” The Greek middle infinitive in -θαι is a relic of the Vedic
dative of an abstract infinitive from the root _dhâ_, “to do” or “place,”
ψευδέσ-θαι, “to do lying,” exactly answering to the Vedic _vayodhai_
(for _váyas-dhai_), “to do living,” or “to live,” on the model of which
analogy has created the false forms τύψεσθαι, τύψασθαι and τυψθήσεσθαι.
The true character of the Latin infinitive may be discovered from the
verb _fieri_, which goes back to an earlier _fiesei_, the dative of a
stem in -_s_. Bearing in mind, then, what the infinitive originally was,
we have little difficulty in understanding how it came to be used with
an accusative, which was really the object after the principal verb. The
sentence quoted above simply meant at first: “I am surprised at you for
the writing of nothing to me,” just as _te volo vivere_ was “I choose you
for living,” or _tempus est videndi lunæ_, “it is the time of the moon,
of seeing (it);” and the extension of the use of the accusative with the
infinitive to sentences in which we can no longer trace any reflection of
its original force, is only another example of the power of analogy in
spreading a particular habit, the proper sense and meaning of which have
been forgotten.
Let us remember, however, that at the time when an Aryan syntax was
first forming itself, there was as yet no distinction between noun
and verb. The accusative and genitive relations of after days did not
yet exist; they were still merged together in a common attributive or
defining relation, and the growth of the verb was necessary before a
genitive could be set apart to define the substantive, and an accusative
or object to define the verb. Reminiscences of this primitive state
of things have survived into the later forms of speech. When Plautus
says, “Quid tibi hanc tactio est,” he is using _tactio_ as he would
_tango_, and while in the Rig-Veda nouns in -_tar_ govern an accusative
like transitive verbs, we actually find a verb undergoing comparison in
_bhavatitarâm_, “he is more so.” In fact, genitive and accusative alike
are what Mr. Sweet calls “attribute-words,” the one being the attribute
of the noun, the other of the verb, and before there was any distinction
between verb and noun there could be no distinction between them also.
The modern Englishman may well ask whether there is any difference
between “the performing this,” and “the performing of this;” or between
“doing a thing,” and “doing badly.” The Latin supines and gerunds, which
are petrified cases of nouns, are followed by what are termed “the
cases of their verbs,” and the so-called indeclinable participles of
Sanskrit, which are really instrumentals of nouns in -_tu_, equally take
the accusative after them. In Greek εὐτυχώς ἔχειν has the same meaning
as εὐτυχίαν ἔχειν, and the Greek and Sanskrit use of an accusative with
the verb “to be,” shows us how artificial are our distinctions between
transitive and intransitive verbs. The adverbial sense of the accusative
comes out plainly in the Homeric ἀκήν ἔσαν, and is one more proof of the
fact that the accusative, like the genitive, must be classed along with
the adjective and the adverb as a qualifying word that defines and limits
the words to which it is attached. Custom and grammatical development
have alone determined how such qualifying words should be severally used.
The languages of our family of speech are in fair agreement as to
the employment of the accusative and the genitive; there are other
syntactical contrivances, however, where such an agreement is not to be
found. The “ablative absolute” of Latin, for instance, is replaced by a
genitive absolute in Greek, by a dative in Lithuanian, by a locative,
sometimes also a genitive, and very rarely an ablative, in Sanskrit.
In old English we have apparently a dative (as in Anglo-Saxon), as
when Wycliffe writes, “they have stolen him, us sleping,” whereas, as
Mr. Peile observes,[284] we should now say, “we sleeping,” using the
nominative as occasionally in Greek. As a matter of fact, this so-called
“casus absolutus,” this case “freed” from all government, and standing
outside the sentence to the perpetual astonishment of the grammarians, is
really a qualificatory word, dependent like the adverb upon the verb, and
denoting the circumstances, or instrument, or mode of an action. Instead
of the construction used by Wycliffe, we might just as well have had,
“they have stolen him during our sleep.”
Perhaps the first thing that strikes us when we first learn the
classical languages, and more especially Latin, is the freedom with which
words are dropped _pêle-mêle_, as it were, into a sentence. This power
of transposing words stands in marked contrast with the comparatively
fixed order of words in a modern European language. When Tennyson says,
“Thee nor carketh care nor slander,” we feel that he has gone to the
extreme length of what is possible even in poetry, and the arrangement
of a German sentence, in spite of its inflections, is determined by
somewhat severe rules. We must remember, however, that the apparent
freedom of the classical languages is due in great measure to the
artificial style of literary men who took advantage of the inflectional
character of the dialects they spoke to invert the position of words
for rhetorical purposes, and that such inversions were not usual in the
language of everyday life. We cannot judge a language properly from
the works of its literary men, and this is particularly the case with
Latin, where the language of literature was divided by a great gulf
from the language of the streets. But even in Latin we find the verb
gravitating towards the end of the sentence; this is its predominant
position, for instance, throughout the second book of the “Gallic War”
of Cæsar, who represents the spoken language of his time much more
closely than most of the other authors of Rome. Now, M. Bergaigne, in
the very able series of articles already referred to,[285] has lately
tried to show that this was not always the position of the Aryan verb.
He begins by distinguishing between _phænomena_, or qualities and acts,
and _objects_ which are recognized either as bearing these qualities,
or as the ends and instruments of the acts. His phænomena, therefore,
will answer to our qualificatory words, and a sentence in which they
occupy the principal place will be a predicative one, just as sentences
in which an object is brought into prominence will be “sentences of
dependence.” The substantive verb is but a late creation; even in Latin
a sentence like “majorum benefacta perlecta” is perfectly intelligible
though “sunt” is omitted; and such a phrase as _Deus est sanctus_ meant
at first “God exists as a holy being,” the adjective being a predicative
attribute or “phænomenon” in apposition to _Deus_. It was only by degrees
that the sense of “existence” disappeared from the verb, and it became
a simple copula. More than once we have referred to the primary rule of
Aryan syntax, according to which the qualifying word is placed before
the word qualified; this is a rule which is borne witness to by almost
every compound, by the verb which affixes the personal pronouns to its
stem; nay, even by our own English, which still makes the adjective
precede its noun. Where the rule seems to be violated, an explanation
is generally forthcoming. Latin and Greek compounds like _versipellis_
or φιλάδελφος, really signify “who has the skin changed,” “one who has
a brother beloved,” the first part of the German _tauge-nichts_, our
_dare-devil_, is an imperative, and the second element in the Sanskrit
_dṛishṭa-pûrvva_, “seen before,” is a pronoun. Whether Bergaigne is
right in following Grimm’s explanation of compounds like φερέ-ϝοικος,
παυσί-νοσος, as containing imperatives, is an open question, though in
the Rig-Veda the imperative and conjunctive are certainly inverted and
set before their case; it is more probable that we are here dealing with
instances of false analogy, δαμάσιππος, “she who tames horses,” having
been made equivalent to ἱππόδαμος “horse-tamer,” and so made the model
of a new formation. As for the _hippopotamus_, or “river-horse,” the
animal came from Egypt, and so, too, did the manner of compounding its
name. Proper names like Ἀγαθός δαίμων, or _Neapolis_, are scarcely in
point; in them, moreover, the attribute and subject are in apposition.
The curious use of the article in Greek with two nouns, one of which is
a genitive, is based upon a different reason. When the article had once
established itself in speech, ὁ τοῦ χοροῦ διδάσκαλος exactly answered
to ὁ χοροδιδάσκαλος, “the choir-master,” and the second noun being
drawn back to the place of its article, we get ὁ διδάσκαλος τοῦ χοροῦ
and ὁ διδάσκαλος ὁ τοῦ χοροῦ, an order which is observed in modern
Albanian. Turning to Latin, we find that the adjective when placed after
the substantive implies a sentence of predication, _res militaris_
being “a thing which is military,” _navis longa_, “a ship which is
long.” It is only proper names compounded with _Forum_ and _Portus_,
like _Forum Julii_, which reverse the order of words as we have it in
_juris-consultor_, and in these proper names the stress is on the second
part of the compound. The altered position of the adjective in the
Romance languages is probably due to the influence of the periphrastic
genitive with the preposition _de_; at all events the older constructions
place the adjective before its noun.
The rule followed by genitives and adjectives must have been followed
by verbs, which are merely attributes of their subjects, and the
formation of the verb by affixing the personal pronouns to the attribute
or verbal stem confirms this conclusion. In the primitive sentence the
object would have come first, then the attribute or verb, and lastly the
subject; and the Latin _credo_, which has the same origin as the Sanskrit
_śrad-dadhâmi_, “heart-placing-I,” is a good illustration of it. But a
want came to be felt of distinguishing between the attribute as a mere
qualificative and the attribute as a predicate, and so while the old
order remained the type of a qualificative sentence, it was reversed in
predicative sentences; the subject was put at the beginning and the verb
at the end. This process was assisted by the division of the sentence
into two halves, one-half consisting of the subject with its dependent
words, and the other half of the verb and object; and if we suppose that
each half was represented by a single compound, we can easily see how
ready to hand the process would have been. Indeed, the verb seems to fix
itself at the end of the sentence almost naturally, since the deaf-mute
when taught to communicate with others, invariably sets the verb in
this position, the subject and object to which his thought is chiefly
directed being the first to occur to his mind. It is this position of the
verbal attribute which has established itself in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,
Gothic, and Anglo-Saxon; which still is the rule in German in dependent
sentences, and has only been changed in English and the Scandinavian and
Romanic dialects through the analogy of the substantive verb and the
extended use of prepositions. A preparation for the new arrangement of
the sentence, however, which places the object last, was already made
by the infinitive. On the one hand, the infinitive could govern a case,
and so was correctly preceded by the governed word; on the other hand,
it was itself a case dependent on the principal verb. But its nominal
character was more and more obliterated by its employment with verbs like
_posse_ or _velle_, _can_ or _will_; “he has the ability for doing,”
gradually came to be “he can do.” Hence in Homer, as in Old Latin and
Old German, the infinitive is mostly found at the end of the sentence,
originally, it is true, accompanied by its cases, but afterwards standing
alone to qualify the verb, and separated by the latter from the cases
with which it was construed. But with all this confusion of the old
order, such cases as the ablative or instrumental still maintained their
proper position before the word they qualified, and when crystallized
into adverbs continued to stand preferably immediately before the verb.
Many of these adverbs afterwards became prepositions, the government of
the noun passing from the verb to the adverb that accompanied it; other
prepositions, like the Latin _gratiâ_ or the Greek χάριν, originated in
substantives construed with genitives; and hence the preposition was
first of all a postposition, following and not preceding its case. Even
now _nach_ stands after its case in German, and we speak of _thereon_ and
_thereof_, _homeward_ and _leeward_, to say nothing of _God-wards_ and
_you-wards_, or of what is told us of Chaucer’s Shipman,[286] that “fful
manye a drauȝt of wyne hadde he i-drawe ffrom Burdeaux ward,” while the
Latin _mecum_, _nobiscum_, and the like, survived to the last days of the
language. So, too, in Anglo-Saxon the preposition sometimes runs counter
to its name by coming after its case, as _hî wyrcað þone cyle hine on_,
“they produce cold him on,”[287] but this construction is fully explained
when we find the preposition occupying the same place in an adverbial
sense, as in the Saxon Chronicle (1016): _se here him fleâh beforan_,
“the army him fled before.”
So long as sentences remained simple and unconnected, there was but
little reason for serious changes to occur in the order of their words.
But it was quite different when an attempt began to be made to connect
them together, to compose sentences that were dependent or subordinate.
When a sentence became an object or attribute of another, the arrangement
that had hitherto held good was necessarily thrown into confusion. Not
only might an idea be an attribute of an attribute, but that again
might be the attribute of another attribute. This intimate connection
and fusion of sentences seems peculiarly suited to the genius of Aryan
speech; where a whole sentence could be expressed by a single long
compound, it was easy enough to make it dependent on something else.
The Semitic tongues, which held composition in abhorrence, were equally
averse to an intimate connection of sentences; neither process was very
compatible with the habit of thought which placed the qualifying word
second instead of first, and we are left to gather the relation of a
subordinate sentence to a principal one merely from their juxtaposition,
or the monotonous repetition of the simple conjunction “and.” Indeed,
the Semitic languages have not risen far above the condition of the
deaf-mute or the Polynesian, who have no dependent sentences, each
sentence standing complete and entire by itself.[288] If the Dayak wishes
to express even so simple a notion as “I thought that he was rich,”
he is obliged to say, _iṅgärä-ku iä tatau_, “my thought; he rich.”
What a contrast to the Greek language with its manifold particles, its
subtle analysis of thought, its delicate expression of every shade
of connection between ideas! Such, however, had not always been the
condition even of the Greek language, or at all events of the language
from which it had sprung. If, for instance, we examine the history of
the relative sentence, we shall find it growing by slow degrees out of
simple subordination. First of all it was merely set side by side with
the principal clause, as in Hebrew and Assyrian poetry, or such English
phrases as “This is the man I saw.” Next, the object of the antecedent
clause was represented in the consequent by a demonstrative pronoun for
the sake of clearness and emphasis; and so we may say: “This is the man,
that (man) I saw.” Then in time the demonstrative came to be used in all
cases alike, and not only where peculiar stress had to be laid; it ceased
to be any longer a pure demonstrative, and became a relative applied by
analogy to instances in which the demonstrative could hardly have been
employed.[289]
We have now passed in review all that is included under the
morphology of speech. The morphology of speech is the reverse side of
its physiology, dealing with the spirit and inner life of the sentence
just as the physiology of speech deals with the outward frame. If
words are posterior to the sentence, if they are in fact but so many
crystallized and abbreviated sentences, that part of the science of
language which treats of their meanings ought strictly to follow a
chapter on morphology. That which is most scientific, however, is not
always the most practically convenient, and such is the case with our
present subject. But we must not forget that the signification of a word
is really determined by its relation to the other words with which it
is combined, and if this does not seem to be the case with the isolated
words we find in the dictionary, it is only because these isolated words
are petrified sentences whose meaning has long ago been established,
partly by reference to other sentences, partly by a determination of
the relations between the parts of which they are composed. The mutual
relations of the elements of a sentence, as well as of fully formed
sentences, constitute grammar in its widest sense; they constitute also
the morphology of language. A fact of grammar is a compound of two
things—the conception of a relation between one idea and another, and
the embodiment of this conception in phonetic utterance. Both parts of
the compound are continually developing, and becoming at once simpler
and clearer, and the duty of the linguistic morphologist is to trace the
history of this development, and follow it back to its earliest source.
We have to discover the different mental points of view from which the
structure of the sentence was regarded by the different races of mankind,
to investigate and compare the various contrivances and processes through
which these points of view eventually found their fullest expression,
to classify the modes of denoting the relations of grammar at the
disposal of language, to examine the nature of composition and of stems
in the groups of speech of which they are characteristic, to analyze
the conceptions of grammar and determine the elements and germs out of
which they have sprung, and finally, to ascertain the true origin and
meaning of the so-called rules of syntax, and keep record of the changes
that take place in the arrangement of words. The mind of man has indeed
been cast everywhere in the same mould, but the scenes amid which its
infancy was cradled, the conditions under which it grew up, have differed
materially and produced a corresponding difference in the expression of
its thoughts in language. Two rivers may start from the same spring, but
one may flow, clear and limpid through granite mountain ranges and silent
forests into a tropical sea—the other may run a turbid and discoloured
course through low marsh-lands, by steaming mills and crowded wharves
into a northern ocean. It is only when we have thoroughly explored the
morphology of each group of kindred tongues, have seen how their inner
form has gradually expanded like the flower out of the seed, that we can
venture to bring our results together, to compare the morphology of one
group of languages with that of another, and learn wherein they differ
and wherein they agree.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion,” p. 65.
[2] See Jolly (translation of Whitney), “Die Sprachwissenschaft,” p.
640.
[3] 660-690.
[4] See the quotations in Steinthal: “Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft
bei den Griechen und Römern” (1863), pp. 181 _sq._
[5] Proclus, p. 9.
[6] Anomalist as he was, moreover, Krates was not blind to the defects
of language as it was commonly used, and it would appear that the ninth
book of his Satires was devoted to the reform of orthography.
[7] He introduced the practice of writing _r_ between two vowels
instead of _s_, and banished the use of _z_ “because its pronunciation
resembles the sound that passes through the teeth of a dying man”
(Pomp. Dig. i. 2, 2, 36, Mart. Cap. i. 3, § 261, ed. Kopp). Panætius
had read his poetical “Maxims,” or “Sententiæ,” which Cicero calls
“Pythagorean” (Tusc. iv. 2, 4).
[8] Max Müller: “Lectures on the Science of Language” (eighth edition,
1875), p. 111.
[9] It is given in Bekker’s “Anecdota,” pp. 629-643. Its authenticity
is satisfactorily defended by Lersch, “Sprachphilosophie der Alten,”
ii. pp. 64-103.
[10] Γραμματική ἔστιν ἐμπειρία τῶν παρὰ ποιηταῖς τε καὶ συγγραφεῦσιν
ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ λεγομένων. Μέρη δὲ αὐτῆς εἰσὶν ἕξ· πρῶτον ἀνάγνωσις
ἐντριβὴς κατὰ προσῳδίαν, δεύτερον ἐξήγησις κατὰ τοὺς ἐνυπάρχοντας
ποιητικούς τρόπους, τρίτον γλωσσῶν τε καὶ ἱστοριῶν πρόχειρος ἀπόδοσις,
τέταρτον ἐτυμολογίας εὕρεσις, πέμπτον ἀναλογίας ἐκλογισμός, ἕκτον
κρίσις ποιημάτων, ὅ δὴ καλλιστόν ἐστι πάντων τῶν ἐν τῇ τέχνῃ.
[11] A good idea of the character of his etymologizing may be gathered
from the following quotation:—“_Vestis_ nomen factum est per syncopen
ex composito _perestis_, et mutato _r_ in _s_ (ut sæpe factum est),
_pesestis_ sive _pesestas_, a verbo _per-edo_, _per-es_, _per-est_;
quo significatur, quidquid _peredit_ et plane consumit et _perdit_
materiam quamque, unde facta est, ut lues illa epidemica pestis
appellationem obtinuerat.” Elsewhere he asserts that _sin_ is derived
from σίνειν, while _so_ is merely ὥς reversed. But Junius is quite
equalled by Scaliger, Voss, Wachter, and other philologists of the
same school. Thus Scaliger says (“De Caus.” c. 35):—“_Ordinis_ nomen
Græcum est. Dicebant militibus tribuni—‘Hactenus tibi licet; hic
consistes: eò progrediere, huc revertere; ὅρον δῶ,’ inde _ordo_;” and
again (“De Caus.” c. 28) that _quatuor_ is κατερα, _i.e._ και ετερα
(the aspirate being dropped as among the Æolians), because when the
Latins had counted “unum, alterum, tria; pro _quarto_ dixere _et
alterum_.” Scaliger, again, agrees with Voss in deriving “_opacus_
ex _Ope_, hoc est, _terrâ_; nam umbræ et frigoris captandi causa in
subterraneos se specus abdebant,” and _pomum_ from πῶμα, because most
fruits quench the thirst. Voss identifies the Latin _rus_ with the
Greek ἄρουρα, “præciso _a_,” and declares: “ab ἔπω, qua notat _operor_,
venit Latinum _opus_.” Perhaps the various etymologies proposed for the
word _cause_ by Perottus will give the best illustration of what once
passed for “a true account of the origin of words.” It is either (1)
from _chaos_, as being the first cause of things, or (2) from καῦσις,
because heat “kindles and inflames us” to action, or (3) “a cavendo,”
because a cause forewarns (“cavet”) us that something should or should
not be done, or, finally (4), “a casu, quia causa accidit.” To these
Voss adds a fresh possibility, that _causa_ comes from “_caiso_,”
that is, “quærere seu petere.” Perottus, again, derives “_locusta_ ex
_locus_ et _ustus_, quod tactu multa urat, morsu vero omnia erodat.” We
cannot but be struck by the ingenuity of these old scholars. Wachter,
however, offers us equally absurd etymologies in the field of modern
High German. Thus he brings _kämpfen_ (from _campus_) from _kam_, “the
fist,” _cat_ from _ge-wachten_, the French _guêter_ (!), and agrees
with Clauberg in making _neigen_ the source of _nacht_.
[12] Where there is so much to choose from it is difficult to select;
but perhaps the richest morsels of the book are the reference of
the Latin suffix -_or_ in words like _sonorous_, as well as the
final syllable of Hebrew words like _tabor_, to the “Celtic” _mhor_,
“great,” and the derivation of the Egyptian Rameses from the “Celtic”
_raromeireas_, “gasconading.” The author, however, cannot claim to
be _facile princeps_ of the year in the matter of bad etymologizing.
A certain Mr. Boult has printed two papers, read before the Literary
and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, in which, among other novel
statements, he informs us that _city_ is derived from the “Celtic”
_sigh-tigh_ or “peace-house;” _count_ from _co-meas_, “united
assessment,” _alderman_ from _all-dor-meann_, “chief of the great
door,” and _custom_ from _cur-do-meas_, “rent of assessment.” It is
needless to observe that “Celtic” with both writers means the decayed
forms of an Irish dictionary.
[13] “Whitney’s Sprachwissenschaft,” p. 660.
[14] “De Vulg. El.” I. xii. p. 46, cxvi. (ed. Fraticelli, 1833).
[15] Ed. Jebb (1733), pp. 44-56. We may notice that Bacon in this part
of his book (p. 44) draws attention to the existence of the French
(“Gallicorum”), Picard, Norman, and Burgundian dialects in France,
which differ from one another in many idioms and uses of words.
[16] Edited by Graesse (1850).
[17] See Thurot: “Extraits de divers Manuscrits latins pour servir à
l’histoire des Doctrines grammaticales au Moyen Age” (1869).
[18] “Histoire des Langues sémitiques,” p. 272.
[19] Thus Voss derives νεός from the Hebrew particle _nâ_, “now.”
[20] See second edition of first collection of “Fragmente zur deutschen
Literatur” (1768).
[21] See Pott: “W. von Humboldt’s Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues” (1876), I. p. cciv.
[22] On this book of Bernhardi’s was founded Reinbeck’s “Handbuch der
Sprachwissenschaft, mit besonderer Hinsicht auf die Deutsche Sprache”
(1815)—intended for school use.
[23] “Lettere,” p. 415 _sq._ (Florence, 1855.)
[24] Max Müller: “Lectures,” p. 155.
[25] “Works, with Life,” by Lord Teignmouth (1807), iii. p. 34.
[26] The second edition of his work on Language, in six vols., “with
large additions and corrections,” was published in 1774.
[27] Quoted by Max Müller: “Lectures,” i. p. 150.
[28] “Ueber die Verwandtschaft der malayisch-polynesischen Sprachen mit
den indisch-europäischen” (1841).
[29] “Die kaukasischen Glieder des indo-europäischen Sprachstammes,”
1847.
[30] See the Edition of Pott, published in two volumes in 1876.
[31] Beginning in 1859.
[32] A new edition has just been brought out (1878), with a valuable
appendix, by Scheler.
[33] “Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales,” p. 14.
[34] “Charakteristik der hauptsächlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues,”
pp. 20-75. Steinthal’s criticism is criticized in turn by Pott in
his edition of Humboldt’s essay, “Ueber die Verschiedenheiten des
menschlichen Sprachbaues” (1876).
[35] Edited by Steinthal (1856).
[36] Translated into French by F. de Wegmann (1859).
[37] “Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft,” 1863
(translated into French in the first part of the “Collection
Philologique,” 1868, and into English by Bikkers, 1869); “Ueber die
Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen” (1865), and
“Die Deutsche Sprache” (second edition, 1869).
[38] Translated into English by Keane for the “Library of Contemporary
Science” (1877).
[39] “Essai sur la Langue Poul” in the “Revue de Linguistique” (Jan. et
Avr. 1875).
[40] “Ursprung der Sprache,” with a preface by Häckel. Translated by T.
Davidson (1869).
[41] “Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft”
(1869).
[42] See also Benfey’s article, “Einige Worte über den Ursprung der
Sprache,” in the “Nachrichten von der k. Gesellschaft der Wissensch.
zu Göttingen,” Jan. 30, 1878. Benfey here points out that just as we
share a capacity of walking with the lower animals, so also do we share
with them a capacity for communicating with one another by the help of
a language of some sort. And he remarks pertinently that it was not
harder for the first men to understand the meaning of what was said to
them than it is for domestic animals nowadays to learn the meaning of
the words and phrases we use in speaking to them or giving them orders.
[43] “Der Ursprung der Sprache” (1877).
[44] See his “Vergleichende Grammatik der indo-germanischen Sprachen”
(1873), I. Appendix, pp. 56-98.
[45] “Agglutination oder Adaptation” (1873).
[46] “Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris,” ii. 5.
[47] “Anthropologie der Naturvölker,” i. p. 272.
[48] “Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft,” I. i. p. 49 (1876).
[49] “City of the Saints,” p. 151.
[50] “Trans. Eth. Soc.” (1869), i. p. 283.
[51] “Expedition to the Rocky Mountains,” iii. p. 52.
[52] Sayce: “Principles of Comparative Philology” (second edition), p.
26.
[53] “De l’Esprit,” i. p. 2. Aristotle attacks Anaxagoras for holding
διὰ τὸ χεῖρας ἔχειν, φρονιμώτατον εἶναι τῶν ζώων τὸν ἄνθρωπον (“De
Part. Animal.,” iv. 10).
[54] “Festus,” p. 28.
[55] II. 405, ed. Burm.
[56] Max Müller: “Lectures,” ii. p. 179 (8th edition).
[57] Whitney: “Life and Growth of Language,” p. 120.
[58] See I. Disraeli: “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii. pp. 79, 80.
[59] Milligan: “Vocabulary of the Dialects of some of the Aboriginal
Tribes of Tasmania,” p. 34.
[60] See Mr. Hartshorne’s Paper read before the British Association
(1875).
[61] “Tropical South Africa,” p. 132.
[62] “Journal of the Anthropological Institute,” vi. 2 (Oct, 1876), p.
119.
[63] A “pig” is called _poro-poro_, and the act of “eating” _nam-nam_.
We must remember, however, that just as a nurse will speak to a child
in nursery-language, so a savage on being asked the name of an object
may have recourse to onomatopœia, instead of giving the real native
word.
[64] Plato termed it ἀπείκασμα (“Krat.,” 402 D, 420 C.).
[65] On the whole subject of the onomatopœic origin of words, see (but
with caution) Wedgwood’s introduction to his “Dictionary of English
Etymology” (first edition, 1859), and Farrar: “Chapters on Language,”
and “Origin of Language” (1860), ch. iv. Compare Buschmann in the
“Abhandlungen der k. Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Berlin” (1852).
[66] See page 82.
[67] Latin _et_, Greek ἔτι, Zend _aiti_, Sanskrit _ati_, are referred
by Weber (“Indische Studien,” ii. p. 406) to the root _at_, “to go.”
[68] As in Chaucer: “Knight’s Tale,” 2488:—“But by the cause that they
sholde ryse.”
[69] See “A Comparative Vocabulary of the Barma, Malayu, and T’hai
Languages,” published at Serampore in 1810. A Siamese compound like
_lúk-mai_, “fruit,” literally, “son of wood,” is an exact equivalent
of the Hebrew “son of Belial” for “sinner,” or “master of hair” for
“hairy.”
[70] Steinthal: “Charakteristik der hauptsächlichsten Typen des
Sprachbaues,” pp. 165, 171, 173.
[71] See Du Ponceau: “Langues d’Amérique,” pp. 120, 200, 234, 236, 237.
[72] Pickering: “Indian Languages,” p. 26.
[73] Part iii. (1853), pp. 420-445.
[74] See Latham in the “Proceedings of the Philological Society,” vol.
vi. (1852-3), p. 85; and in the “Transactions of the Philological
Society” for 1856, pp. 40, 41.
[75] “Charakteristik,” &c., p. 113.
[76] This order of the pronouns was a later innovation in the language,
and seems due to Semitic influence. In the older period of the speech
the form was _rû-n-mu_ or _rû-mu-n_.
[77] Suetonius: “De illustr. Gramm.,” 22. “M. Pomponius Marcellus ...
quum ex oratione Tiberium reprehendisset, affirmante Ateio Capitone,
‘et esse illud Latinum, et, si non esset, futurum certe jam inde;’
‘Mentitur,’ inquit, ‘Capito. Tu enim, Cæsar, civitatem dare potes
hominibus, verbo non potes.’”
[78] Sir John Stoddart: “Universal Grammar, or the Pure Science of
Language,” 2nd edition, 1852.
[79] By French writers.
[80] As by Schleicher.
[81] As by Ascoli.
[82] In A. J. Ellis: “Early English Pronunciation,” pp. 1293-1307,
1352-1357.
[83] Humboldt’s “Travels,” Engl. Tr., i. p. 322.
[84] Compare A. Erman: “Journey round the Earth through North Asia,”
iii. § 1, p. 191.
[85] P. 159.
[86] v. p. 774.
[87] “Travels,” Engl. Tr., i. p. 310.
[88] So in Japan the learned class has introduced the Chinese
characters under the name of Koyé or Won, and with them the Chinese
pronunciation and order of words. In Koyé (that is to say in Chinese)
the particles come first, then the verb, and, lastly, the case. The
reverse is the case in Japanese, or when the characters are read as
Yomi, that is, as ideographs standing for Japanese words. Thus, the
Koyé “sed non videbo hodie illum” would have to be read in Yomi, “illum
videbo hodie non sed.”
[89] Sayce: “Journal R. A. S.” x. 2 (1878).
[90] “Arische Studien,” i. 2, pp. 45-61.
[91] De Charencey in the “Revue de Linguistique” (1873), i. 1, p. 57.
[92] “Ein Problem der Homerischen Textkritik” (1876), p. 95. Pott
(“Wilhelm v. Humboldt ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues,” i. p. 15) suggests that the change of the Latin
demonstrative into the article of the Romance languages was due to
Teutonic influences.
[93] Sayce: “Lectures upon the Assyrian Grammar and Syllabary,” pp. 61,
62, “Journal R. A. S.,” x. 2, pp. 251, 252 (1878).
[94] _E.g._ θῠω in Od. 260, Theok. iv. 21; Aristophanes and the Attic
poets preserve the long vowel.
[95] Hackländer: “Ein Winter in Spanien” (Werke xxii.), ii. 78.
[96] N. H., iii. 20, 24.
[97] Schott: “Abh. der Berlin. Akad.” (1865), p. 440.
[98] Deffner: “Neogræca” in Curtius’ “Studien,” iv. 2, p. 307.
[99] Burton: “Etruscan Bologna,” p. 246.
[100] Karl Verner in Kuhn’s “Zeitschrift,” xxiii. (New Series, iii. 2.)
[101] For Greek synonyms, see Trench: “Synonyms of the New Testament”
(1865).
[102] Apud Priscian. vii. 345.
[103] “Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris,” ii. 5.
[104] V. _a_ 24, _sve mestru karu fratru_ = “si major pars fratrum.”
[105] On the other hand, the Asiatic members of the family have
certainly lost the distinction that existed in the parent speech
between the vowels represented in the European members by _ă_, _ĕ_, and
_ŏ_, so that the differentiation of the root _ar_ may have been earlier
than the period of Aryan separation. In the Finnic group roots are
similarly differentiated by a modification of the vowel, _kah-isen_,
_koh-isen_, and _kuh-isen_, for instance, being “to hit” or “stamp,”
_käh-isen_ and _köh-isen_, “to roar,” _keh-isen_ and _kih-isen_, “to
boil.”
[106] This happy term was the invention of Professor Max Müller.
[107] Mill: “System of Logic,” ii. p. 240.
[108] Grimm’s “Law: a Study” (1876).
[109] Böhtlingk: “Ueber die Sprache der Jakuten,” p. 168.
[110] “Introduction to the Study of the Chinese Characters” (1876).
[111] “De Div.” ii. 40, 84.
[112] Gallatin: “Synopsis of the Indian Tribes of North America,” in
the “Archæologia Americana,” ii.
[113] “Die Melanesischen Sprachen” (1873), p. 4. According to Meyer
(“Sitzungsberichte d. Oesterr. Akademie,” 1874, p. 301), “Riedel has
made us acquainted with twenty-three dialects in some parts only of
North Celebes, and the number of dialects in the whole island can only
be estimated at hundreds.... But in New Guinea this dialectical variety
is very much greater and more thorough-going, since there the very
foundations of a state have not yet begun to be laid.”
[114] “Travels” (English translation), i. 298.
[115] Gibbon: “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (ed. Milman and
Smith), vii. p. 387. Dr. Deffner, however, asserts that there never was
a tithe of that number of dialects in the country.
[116] Prince Lucien Bonaparte reckons that there are 660,000 Basques in
Spain and 140,000 in France.
[117] Sayce: “Principles of Comparative Philology” (2nd edition), p. 87.
[118] The progress of cuneiform research has shown that a similar
woman’s dialect existed among the Accadians, and “a woman’s language”
is also said to exist in Bengal.
[119] “United States Exploring Expedition,” vii. 290.
[120] “Natal Colonist,” Sept. 3rd, 1875. Mr. Theal says (“The Cape
Monthly Magazine,” June, 1877, p. 349): “A woman, who sang the song of
‘Tangalimlibo’ for me, used the word _angoca_, instead of _amanzi_,
for ‘water,’ because this last contained the syllable _nzi_, which she
would not on any account pronounce. She had, therefore, manufactured
another word, the meaning of which had to be judged by the context, as,
standing alone, it is meaningless.” This is a good instance of the way
in which a savage dialect may grow up.
[121] Waitz, iii. 477.
[122] _Mi_ took the place of _o_ in old Japanese, hence the title of
the _Mi-kado_, or “high Gate” (Grande Porte).
[123] See Hoffmann: “Japanese Grammar,” pp. 72 _sq._ and § 111-120.
[124] Endlicher: “Chinesische Grammatik,” pp. 258 _sq._
[125] Pott: Humboldt’s “Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues,”
i. p. 395.
[126] Max Müller: “Lectures,” i. p. 56.
[127] “On the best Method of Studying the American Languages,” p. 11.
[128] P. 152 (4th edition).
[129] Andree: “Wendische Wanderstudien” (1874).
[130] Appendix to Mielcke’s edition of Ruhig’s “Wörterbuch.”
[131] “Pasigraphical Dictionary and Grammar” (1871). Galliani’s
“Dictionnaire télégraphique, économique, et secret” contains 15,576
groups of only three letters, each of which expresses a word or a whole
sentence.
[132] “Lectures on the Science of Religion,” pp. 161, 154.
[133] Bréal: “La Langue Indo-Européenne,” in his “Mélanges de
Philologie Comparée” (1878).
[134] “History of the European Languages,” pp. 31, 32. The following
are the significations assigned to these nine rudiments of speech:—
“I. To strike or move with swift, equable, penetrating or sharp
effect was AG! AG!
If the motion was less sudden, but of the same species, WAG.
If made with force and a great effort, HWAG.
These are varieties of one word, originally used to mark the motion
of fire, water, wind, darts.
“II. To strike with a quick, vigorous, impelling force, BAG or BWAG, of
which FAG and PAG are softer varieties.
“III. To strike with a harsh, violent, strong blow, DWAG, of which
THWAG and TWAG are varieties.
“IV. To move or strike with a quick, tottering, unequal impulse,
GWAG or CWAG.
“V. To strike with a pliant slap, LAG and HLAG.
“VI. To press by strong force or impulse so as to condense, bruise, or
compel, MAG.
“VII. To strike with a crushing, destroying power, NAG and
HNAG.
“VIII. To strike with a strong, rude, sharp, penetrating power,
RAG or HRAG.
“IX. To move with a weighty strong impulse, SWAG.”
[135] _Cfer._ Wullschlaegel: “Kurzgefasste Neger-Englische Grammatik”
(1854), and “Deutsch-Neger-Englisches Wörterbuch, nebst einem Anhang
Neger-Englische Sprüchwörter enthaltend” (1856).
[136] Helmholtz: “Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen,” 3rd edition
(1870).
[137] Speaking accurately a musical note is a tone only in so far as
its quality or timbre is taken account of.
[138] The fact can easily be tested by Captain Galton’s whistle.
According to some authorities, however, it requires less than eight and
more than 24,000 vibrations per second, to produce no effect upon the
auditory nerve.
[139] “Lectures,” ii. 8th edition (1875), p. 111.
[140] Helmholtz: “Die Lehre,” &c., p. 143.
[141] Serpents have no voice in the proper sense of the word, as they
have no vocal chords; the hissing sounds they produce being caused by a
mere forcible breathing through a soft glottis.
[142] That is, “U-shaped bone.”
[143] Of course, if an opening is made in the trachea, voice is
impossible unless it is closed, and division or injury of the laryngeal
nerves will equally destroy voice by paralyzing the muscles of the
vocal chords.
[144] In men the average length is about eleven lines.
[145] Faidherbe: “Essai sur la Langue Poul,” in the “Revue de
Linguistique,” January and April, 1875.
[146] Bleek: “A brief Account of Bushman Folklore, and other Texts,”
p. 6. “A most curious feature in Bushman folklore is formed by the
speeches of various animals, recited in modes of pronouncing Bushman,
said to be peculiar to the animals in whose mouths they are placed. It
is a remarkable attempt to imitate the shape or position of the mouth
of the kind of animal to be represented. Among the Bushman sounds which
are hereby affected, and often entirely commuted, are principally
the clicks. These are either converted into other consonants, as
into labials (in the language of the Tortoise), or into palatals and
compound dentals and sibilants (as in the language of the Ichneumon),
or into clicks otherwise unknown in Bushman (as far as our present
experience goes), as in the language of the Jackal, who is introduced
as making use of a strange labial click, which bears to the ordinary
labial click a relation in sound similar to that which the palatal
click bears to the cerebral click. Again, the Moon—and it seems also
the Hare and the Anteater—substitute a most unpronounceable click in
place of all others, excepting the lip click. Another animal, the Blue
Crane, differs in its speech from the ordinary Bushman, mainly by the
insertion of a _tt_ at the end of the first syllable of almost every
word.”
[147] “Lectures,” ii. p. 141 (8th edition).
[148] Max Müller: “A Sanskrit Grammar for Beginners,” 2nd edition, p.
23, _note_. See Mr. Ellis’s examination of the “Rules of the Indian
Phonologists,” as given by Whitney (“Atharva-Vêda Prâtiçâkhya”), in
“Early English Pronunciation,” pt. 4, pp. 1336-1338.
[149] See Sievers: “Grundzüge d. Lautphysiologie” (1876), p. 19. This
explanation of the causes of this difference between the two kinds
of voice (true and falsetto) is due to the observations of Garcia.
Various theories had previously been put forward to account for it.
J. Müller thought that in producing chest notes, the whole breadth of
the vocal chords vibrated, only their thin inner margins in producing
falsetto notes. Mayo and Magendie held that the falsetto notes are
produced by the vibrations of only one-half the length of the vocal
chords, when the glottis is partially closed; G. Weber that they are
due to the vibration of the chords in segments, separated by nodal
points, so that harmonics of the fundamental note are formed. Pétrequin
and Diday maintained that they are produced by the vibration of the
air itself in the glottis, without any movement on the part of the
vocal chords, while Wheatstone thought that they are formed by the
division of the air in the trachea into harmonic lengths, the tone
produced by the vocal chords being thus reciprocated, since, besides
vibrating by reciprocation with a sonorous body, the vibrations of
which are isochronous with its own, a column of air may also vibrate
by reciprocation in its several lengths, the number of its vibrations
being in this case a multiple of those of the sonorous body.
[150] “Lectures,” ii. p. 128 (8th edition).
[151] Bindseil: “Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen vergleichenden
Sprachlehre,” p. 212 (1838), quoted by Max Müller: “Lectures,” ii. p.
136.
[152] For the difference between these two sounds, see Sweet: “Handbook
of Phonetics,” § 14, p. 9.
[153] “Grundzüge d. Lautphysiologie,” p. 46 (1876).
[154] “Lectures,” ii. p. 133.
[155] “Grundzüge d. Physiologie u. Systematik d. Sprachlaute,” p. 16
(1856).
[156] “Wiener Sitzungsberichte,” lii. 2, pp. 623 sq.
[157] “Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie,” p. 88 (1876).
[158] Sievers, _loc. cit._ p. 50.
[159] Haldeman in the “Proceedings of the American Oriental Society,”
1874, p. xlv. According to Professor Rhys the Welsh _ll_ has resulted
from the meeting of two _l_’s, each sounded independently up to the
ninth century. Like the Welsh pronunciation of _dd_, the pronunciation
of _ll_ may have been originally borrowed from English.
[160] Mr. Sweet has proved that the pronunciation of these two
Anglo-Saxon letters was originally the same, but it would be convenient
to use them to distinguish the different sounds of the modern English
_th_.
[161] Hübschmann: “Z. d. D. M. G.” xxx. pp. 53, 57.
[162] That is, the guttural sonant in question.
[163] As in _nach_.
[164] This is the guttural sonant in question.
[165] “Die Kerenzer Mundart,” p. 5.
[166] Bleek: “Comparative Grammar of South African Languages,” pp.
12-15. The lateral click is sounded by the Kafirs, as by Europeans,
by placing the tongue against the side-teeth, and then withdrawing
it, whereas the Nama Hottentots produce it as far back as possible,
covering the whole of the palate with the tongue. The palatal click
of the Hottentots, which is very difficult to imitate, seems to be
found in one or two Kafir words. The clicks, it must be noted, only
occur in the Kafir dialects adjoining the Hottentots, and the Kafir
clicks “are only found in the place of other consonants, and are used
like consonants at the beginning of syllables, whilst in Hottentot a
guttural explosive consonant (_k_, _kh_, or _g_), the faucal spirant
_h_ and the nasal _n_, can be immediately preceded by a click, and form
together with it the initial element of the syllables.”
[167] See above, p. 243. The compound dental click is produced,
according to Wuras, by pressing the air through the upper and lower
teeth, which stand slightly apart. Dr. Bleek says that “the Bushman
word for ‘to sleep’ seems to be _ǀphkoĩnyé_, beginning with a
combination of dental click, aspirated labial and guttural tenuis in
which three letters are sounded together.”
[168] Ellis: “Early Engl. Pron.” p. 1349.
[169] Professor Mahaffy notices that “old women among us express pity
by a regular palatal click.”
[170] Sievers holds that our _th_ (as in _the_) is sometimes “reduced”
to a glide (“Grundzüge,” p. 91).
[171] “The Japanese _ṛ_,” says Mr. Sweet, “seems to be formed by
first bringing the tip of the tongue against the gums without any
emission of breath, and then passing on to an untrilled _r_, allowing
voiced breath to pass at the moment of removing the tongue.” The sound
has been mistaken for _r_, _l_, or even _d_, and as it is substituted
for all foreign _l_’s and _r_’s, the Japanese tendency to change _l_
into _r_ has been contrasted with the Chinese tendency to change _r_
into _l_. It is possible that the Old Egyptian possessed the same
curious sound.
[172] The compound tone in Swedish, according to Mr. Sweet, “only
occurs in words of more than one syllable,” and “consists of a falling
tone on the first (the accented syllable), followed by a high tone on
the next. The high tone seems to be reached by a jump rather than by a
glide. The compound is, therefore, a compound rise distributed over two
syllables.” The other Swedish accent, the simple tone, is the negative
of the compound one, and answers to the “glottal catch” or _stöd tone_
of Danish.
[173] See Wackernagel in Kuhn’s “Zeitschrift,” 23 (1877).
[174] See Sayce in “Journal of Royal Asiatic Society,” x. 2 (1878), pp.
251, 252.
[175] Sweet: “Handbook,” p. 35.
[176] “Kerenzer Mundart,” pp. 142 sq.
[177] Sweet: “Handbook,” pp. 59, 60.
[178] In many instances, however, _guṇa_ and _vṛiddhi_ seem to be due
to the presence of the vowel _a_ in the following syllable, which has
been anticipated, as in the case of the German _umlaut_ or the Greek
epenthesis (as in λόγοις for the locative λόγο-σι, and then, by false
analogy, λόγοισι).
[179] The existence of these velar gutturals was first pointed out by
Ascoli, and since by Fick and Havet.
[180] Diez: “Grammatik d. romanisch. Spr.” (2nd edition), i. 248, 254.
[181] “Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language” (1870), p. 28.
[182] See Robin and Verdeil: “Chimie anatomique,” ii. p. 44.
[183] Appendix to Greenwell’s “British Barrows” (1877), p. 645.
[184] Daa: “On the Languages of the Northern Tribes of the Old and New
Continents,” in the “Transactions of the Philological Society” (1856),
p. 256.
[185] “Sir George Grey’s Library,” i. p. 167; and A. Kaufmann: “Das
Gebiet des weissen Flusses und dessen Bewohner” (1861), quoted by Max
Müller: “Lectures,” 8th edition, ii. p. 178.
[186] See, however, Ascoli’s ingenious attempt to remove the
phonological difficulties in his “Studj Critici,” ii. (1877), pp.
386-396.
[187] For a recent English examination of the subject see Douse:
“Grimm’s Law: a Study” (1876), and Rhŷs’s review in the “Academy,” Jan.
12, 1878; also Murray and Nicol in the “Academy,” Feb. 23, March 2 and
16, 1878.
[188] The table of consonants is taken from Rhŷs: “Lectures on Welsh
Philology,” p. 17.
[189] Before υ.
[190] In the middle of a word, _e.g._ _ruber_ (ἐρυθρός).
[191] _P_ did not exist in the early Keltic languages; hence proper
names like _Menapia_ must be treated as non-Aryan, or at all events as
non-Keltic.
[192] Pratt: “Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language” (edited by
Whitmee), p. 1, 1878.
[193] To Brugman belongs the credit of first demonstrating the
existence of these three distinct vowel-sounds in the Parent-Aryan
(Kuhn’s “Zeitschrift,” 1877). Brugman has been criticized by Collitz
in Bezzenberger’s “Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen,”
ii. 4 (1878), who maintains that the three primitive sounds were really
_ĕ_, _ŏ_, _ă_, and not the indeterminate _a_¹, _a_², _a_³. On the other
hand, an able article by De Saussure in the “Mémoires de la Société de
Linguistique de Paris,” iii. 5 (1878), accepts Brugman’s nomenclature,
while criticizing and modifying some of his conclusions. His _a_,
Brugman’s _a_¹, became _e_ in West Aryan, and is never weakened into
_i_ or _u_ in Sanskrit. His _a_² (also Brugman’s) is the West Aryan
_o_², and in Sanskrit is lengthened in an open syllable (_e.g._ _jajâna_
= γέγονε). In Latin _ŏ_ often became _ĕ_, as in _genu_ (Greek γόνυ,
Sansk. _jânu_). Different from this _o_² is another _o_¹, standing in
the same relation to a that _o_² does in Latin to _e_, and answering
to a Sanskrit _i_ or _î_. Besides this short _o_¹ is also a long _ō_,
which appears also as _ā_, and corresponds with Sansk. _â_. De Saussure
further points out that velar _k_ in Sanskrit is palatalized (becomes
_ch_) when followed by _a_ (= _ĕ_) and _a_² (= _ŏ_).
[194] “Lectures,” ii. pp. 184 _sq._ (8th edition).
[195] “The Polynesian,” October, 1862.
[196] Agnel: “Observations sur la Prononciation et le Langage rustique
des environs de Paris,” pp. 11, 28; Terrien Poncel: “Du Langage,” p. 49.
[197] “Sir George Grey’s Library,” i. p. 135. Professor Mahaffy informs
us of a child of three years of age who invariably substitutes _n_ for
_l_, and cannot be made to feel the difference between them.
[198] Sievers: “Lautphysiologie,” p. 127.
[199] Kuhn’s “Zeitschrift,” xxiii. pp. 97-130 (1877).
[200] The termination of the participles of German weak verbs, such
as the Goth. _tami-da_ (“domitus”), answers to the Vedic _dami-tás_
(like the Greek κλυτός) where the accent is oxytone. Verner sums up his
conclusions as follows: (1) The original accentuation was preserved
in Teutonic even after the introduction of those changes of sound
characteristic of the Teutonic branch of the Aryan family; (2) the
accent, however, was no longer purely tonic, it had become also an
accent of stress; (3) the exceptional representation of an Aryan _k_,
_t_, and _p_ at the beginning of a syllable by a Teutonic _g_, _d_, _b_
is due to the original accentuation of the words in which it occurs;
and (4) this is also the case with _z_ or _r_ in the place of _s_.
[201] Sanskrit _jîv_, Latin _vivo_ (_vixi_), English _quick_,
presupposing an original reduplicated _qwi-gwi_.
[202] “Lautphysiologie,” p. 137.
[203] “Jenaer Literaturzeitung” (1874), p. 767; quoted by Sievers.
[204] “Zur Geschichte des indogermanischen Vocalismus,” ii.
[205] According to the current theory the sonant or vocalic _n_,
_l_, and _r_ develop out of a consonantal _n_, _l_, _r_. Fick
(Bezzenberger’s “Beiträge,” iv., 1878) has shown that Greek aorists
like ἔδρακε or παθών owe their α-vowel to this cause. The
accentuation of the last syllable occasioned the loss of the vowel of
the present-stem (which Fick proves to represent the oldest form of the
verb), and out of the resulting ἔδρκε or πθών grew ἔδρακε and παθών.
The corresponding Swarabhakti vowel in Teutonic is _u_ (cfer. ἑκατόν,
_i.e._ ἑκαντόν for ἑκντόν, and Gothic _hund_ (our _hundred_), ἄρκτος,
and Gothic _vulfs_, -ματός and Gothic participial -_munds_). According
to the Indian grammarians the Sanskrit _ṛi_ = ¼ _a_ + ½ _r_ +
¼ _a_ (Greek ᾰρᾰ).
[206] “Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Sicilianischen Mundart,” p. 154.
[207] See Joh. Schmidt: “Ueber Metathesis von Nasalen,” in Kuhn’s
“Zeitschrift,” xxiii. pp. 266-302 (1877).
[208] “Grundzüge” (2nd edition), p. 650.
[209] Brugman in Kuhn’s “Zeitschrift,” xxiv. p. 81 (1878).
[210] Recent researches seem to have shown that the parent-Semitic
possessed two dentals, which may be written _ṭ_ and _ḍ_, and are
represented in Arabic by _th_ and _dh_ (ذ), and in Assyrian, Hebrew,
and Ethiopic by _s_ (_sh_) and _z_. Consequently the table of
sound-shiftings will be—
Parent-Semitic. Arabic. Assyrian. Hebrew. Ethiopic. Aramaic.
_ṭ_ _th_ _s_ _sh_ _s_ _th_
_ḍ_ _dh_ _z_ _z_ _z_ _d_
_t_ _t_ _t_ _t_ _t_ _t_ (_th_)
_d_ _d_ _d_ _d_ _d_ _d_
_sh_ _s_ _s_ _sh_ _s_ _s_
_s_ _sh_ _s_ _s_ _sh_ _sh_
_´s_ _s_ _´s_ _´s_ _s_ _sh_
[211] Logan: “Indian Archipelago,” iii. p. 665.
[212] “Magyarische Grammatik” (1858).
[213] De Ujfálvy, in the “Revue de Philologie et d’Ethnographie,” i. 1,
pp. 20-50.
[214] Reprinted by I. Pitman in 1850.
[215] The “Grammatica Linguæ Anglicanæ,” to which is prefixed a
treatise “De Sonorum omnium loquelarium formatione: Tractatus
Grammatico-physicus.”
[216] Swift’s “Works,” ix. pp. 137-139 (edit. Sir W. Scott).
[217] The monthly journal of these reformers, published at Bremen, is
entitled: “Reform. Zeitšrift des algemeinen fereins zur einfürung einer
fereinfahten deutšen rehtšreibung.”
[218] “Etymologische Forschungen,” v. p. xxii.
[219] “Language and the Study of Language,” p. 106.
[220] See his “Etymologische Forschungen,” v. i., Introd. (2nd edition).
[221] Donner: “Z. D. M. G,” xxvii. 4 (1873).
[222] “Lectures,” ii. pp. 268 _sq._ (8th edition).
[223] That is, hard-explosive.
[224] These characters represent the palæotype symbols employed by Mr.
Ellis.
[225] Soft-explosive.
[226] Nasal-explosive.
[227] Hard-continuous.
[228] Soft-continuous.
[229] Hard-trill.
[230] Soft-trill.
[231] Nasal-continuous.
[232] Soft-liquid.
[233] Hard-liquid.
[234] For Mr. Ellis’s own Palæotype Alphabet, see “Early English
Pronunciation,” part i. pp. 3-12, where also a list of signs denoting
clicks, pitch, whisper, glide, &c., is given.
[235] In “A Handbook of Phonetics,” pp. xv-xvii.
[236]
Old Old Middle Hakka South
Chinese. Mandarin. Dialect. Dialect. Fukien. Canton.
g c’h, k’ (h) g (dj) k’ k’, k k’
d t’(l) d t’ t’, t t’
b p’ (f) b (v) p’ p’, p (h) p’
This table applies only to words which have the fifth tone (Edkins:
“Introduction to the Study of the Chinese Characters,” p. 185).
[237] Sayce: “Principles of Comparative Philology,” Preface to 2nd
edition, p. ix.
[238] See “Contemporary Review,” April, 1876.
[239] Fr. Müller: “Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft,” i. 2, p. 2.
[240] Sayce: “Principles of Comparative Philology” (2nd edition), p.
229.
[241] “Transactions of the Philological Society” (1856), pp. 40, 41.
[242] “La Philosophie de la Science du Langage étudiée dans la
formation des mots” (1875), p. 83.
[243] Tylor: “Primitive Culture,” i. pp. 199-201.
[244] See Sayce: “Principles of Comparative Philology,” 2nd edition, p.
253.
[245] Wilson: “Grammar,” p. 32.
[246] Schiefner: “Tibetische Studien” (1851), p. 30.
[247] Platzmann: “Brasilianische Grammatik,” chap. xv.
[248] In Curtius’ “Studien,” vii. pp. 185 _sq._
[249] Buschmann: “Abhandlungen d. Berlin. Akad.,” 1869, i. p. 122.
[250] The whole subject of reduplication has been exhaustively treated
by Professor Pott, to whose work reference should be made: “Doppelung
als eines der wichtigsten Bildungsmittel der Sprache.”
[251] “On the Origin of Civilization,” pp. 403-405.
[252] “Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians,” p. 77.
[253] See Pott: “Humboldt’s Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues” (1876), i. pp. 305, 306.
[254] Aristoph. “Eccl.” 1169.
[255] See Sayce: “The Tenses of the Assyrian Verb,” in “J. R. A. S.,”
Jan. 1877.
[256] Not _dhâ_, “to place,” like the perfect in the Teutonic
languages, since Old Irish has _b_ (_e.g._ _caru-b_ = “amabo”), and in
Keltic _b_ cannot come from _dh_.
[257] Earle: “Philology of the English Tongue” (2nd edition), p. 305.
[258] The only difficulty here is that the base of the feminine in
Sanskrit is _tiśar_.
[259] Brachet, however, holds that _justice_ and _justesse_ are
collateral forms, both from the Latin -_itia_.
[260] “Archæologia Americana,” ii. pp. 25, 166, 169.
[261] Bleek: “Comparative Grammar of the South African Languages,” pp.
97, 98.
[262] Matthews: “Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians”
(1877), p. 95.
[263] Buschmann: “Abhand. d. Berliner Akademie” (1869), i. p. 103.
[264] The Sanskrit equivalent of _humus_, however, has had to submit
to the prevailing analogy, and in the form of _bhûmi_ assume what has
become the feminine suffix.
[265] “Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians,” p. 96.
[266] “Abhandlungen d. Berlin. Akad.” (1869), i. p. 122.
[267] “Eléments de la Grammaire Othomi,” in the “Revue Orientale et
Américaine,” p. 21.
[268] Friedrich Müller: “Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft,” i. 2, p. 27.
[269] “Trans. of the Ethnological Society,” i. p. 304.
[270] Latham in the “Proceedings of the Philological Society” (1852),
p. 59.
[271] “Du Rôle de la Dérivation dans la Déclinaison indo-européenne,”
in the “Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris,” ii. 5.
[272] “Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft,” i. 2, p. 2.
[273] See Sayce: “The Tenses of the Assyrian Verb,” in the “J. R. A.
S.,” Jan. 1877.
[274] Max Müller: “Lectures,” i. p. 106.
[275] See, for instance, Wiedemann: “Grammatik der Wotjakischen
Sprache” (1851), pp. 268-271.
[276] Böhtlingk: “Jakutische Grammatik,” p. 160.
[277] In Bunsen’s “Philosophy of Universal History,” i. p. 265.
[278] “La Grèce avant les Grecs,” p. 45. According, however, to M.
Dozon (“Grammaire albanaise,” 1878), the postfixed Albanian article is
really a termination like that of the German adjective, and not a relic
of the demonstrative pronoun.
[279] “De la Construction Grammaticale,” in the “Mémoires de la Société
de Linguistique de Paris,” iii. 1, 2, 3.
[280] It is possible that the position of the article in the greater
number of the Romanic languages may have been influenced by Teutonic
usage.
[281] Exod. xxxii. 1, Josh. ix. 12 _sq._, Is. xxiii. 13.
[282] Jer. xvi. 16, Ps. xxxii. 10, lxxxix. 51.
[283] “Chips,” iv. p. 39.
[284] “Primer of Philology” (1877), p. 112.
[285] “De la Construction Grammaticale,” in the “Mémoires de la Société
de Linguistique,” iii. 1, 2, 3.
[286] Prologue, 396.
[287] Orosius, i. 1, 23.
[288] Gaussin: “Du dialecte de Tahiti” (1853).
[289] See Jolly: “Ueber die einfachste Form der Hypotaxis im
Indo-germanischen,” and Windisch: “Untersuchungen über den Ursprung des
Relativpronomens,” in Curtius’s “Studien,” vi. 1 and ii. 2.
END OF VOL. I.
CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM, TOOKS COURT,
CHANCERY LANE.
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