Lectures on The Science of Language Part 10

We now turn back in order to discover how many possible forms of language may be produced by the free combination of these const.i.tuent elements; and we shall then endeavor to find out whether each of these possible forms has its real counterpart in some or other of the dialects of mankind. We are attempting in fact to carry out a _morphological cla.s.sification_ of speech, which is based entirely on the form or manner in which roots are put together, and therefore quite independent of the genealogical cla.s.sification which, according to its very nature, is based on the formations of language handed down ready made from generation to generation.

Before, however, we enter on this, the princ.i.p.al subject of our present Lecture, we have still to examine, as briefly as possible, a second family of speech, which, like the Aryan, is established on the strictest principles of genealogical cla.s.sification, namely, the _Semitic_.

The Semitic family is divided into three branches, the _Aramaic_, the _Hebraic_, and the _Arabic_.(280)

The _Aramaic_ occupies the north, including Syria, Mesopotamia, and part of the ancient kingdoms of Babylonia and a.s.syria. It is known to us chiefly in two dialects, the _Syriac_ and _Chaldee_. The former name is given to the language which has been preserved to us in a translation of the Bible (the Pes.h.i.+to(281)) ascribed to the second century, and in the rich Christian literature dating from the fourth. It is still spoken, though in a very corrupt form, by the Nestorians of Kurdistan, near the lakes of Van and Urmia, and by some Christian tribes in Mesopotamia; and an attempt has been made by the American missionaries,(282) stationed at Urmia, to restore this dialect to some grammatical correctness by publis.h.i.+ng translations and a grammar of what they call the Neo-Syriac language.

The name of _Chaldee_ has been given to the language adopted by the Jews during the Babylonian captivity. Though the Jews always retained a knowledge of their sacred language, they soon began to adopt the dialect of their conquerors, not for conversation only, but also for literary composition.(283) The book of Ezra contains fragments in Chaldee, contemporaneous with the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, and several of the apocryphal books, though preserved to us in Greek only, were most likely composed originally in Chaldee, and not in Hebrew. The so-called _Targums_(284) again, or translations and paraphrases of the Old Testament, written during the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era,(285) give us another specimen of the Aramaic, or the language of Babylonia, as transplanted to Palestine. This Aramaic was the dialect spoken by Christ and his disciples. The few authentic words preserved in the New Testament as spoken by our Lord in His own language, such as _Talitha k.u.mi_, _Ephphatha_, _Abba_, are not in Hebrew, but in the Chaldee, or Aramaic, as then spoken by the Jews.(286)

After the destruction of Jerusalem the literature of the Jews continued to be written in the same dialect. The Talmud(287) of Jerusalem of the fourth, and that of Babylon of the fifth, century exhibit the Aramean, as spoken by the educated Jews settled in these two localities, though greatly depraved and spoiled by an admixture of strange elements. This language remained the literary idiom of the Jews to the tenth century. The _Masora_,(288) and the traditional commentary of the Old Testament, was written in it about that time. Soon after the Jews adopted Arabic as their literary language, and retained it to the thirteenth century. They then returned to a kind of modernized Hebrew, which they still continue to employ for learned discussions.

It is curious that the Aramaic branch of the Semitic family, though originally the language of the great kingdoms of Babylon and Nineveh, should have been preserved to us only in the literature of the Jews, and of the Christians of Syria. There must have been a Babylonian literature, for the wisdom of the Chaldeans had acquired a reputation which could hardly have been sustained without a literature. Abraham must have spoken Aramaic before he emigrated to Canaan. Laban spoke the same dialect, and the name which he gave to the heap of stones that was to be a witness between him and Jacob, (Jegar-sahadutha) is Syriac, whereas Galeed, the name by which Jacob called it, is Hebrew.(289) If we are ever to recover a knowledge of that ancient Babylonian literature, it must be from the cuneiform inscriptions lately brought home from Babylon and Nineveh. They are clearly written in a Semitic language. About this there can be no longer any doubt. And though the progress in deciphering them has been slow, and slower than was at one time expected, yet there is no reason to despair. In a letter, dated April, 1853, Sir Henry Rawlinson wrote:-

"On the clay tablets which we have found at Nineveh, and which now are to be counted by thousands, there are explanatory treatises on almost every subject under the sun: the art of writing, grammars, and dictionaries, notation, weights and measures, divisions of time, chronology, astronomy, geography, history, mythology, geology, botany, &c. In fact we have now at our disposal a perfect cyclopaedia of a.s.syrian science." Considering what has been achieved in deciphering one cla.s.s of cuneiform inscriptions, the Persian, there is no reason to doubt that the whole of that cyclopaedia will some day be read with the same ease with which we read the mountain records of Darius.

There is, however, another miserable remnant of what was once the literature of the Chaldeans or Babylonians, namely, the "Book of Adam,"

and similar works preserved by the _Mendates_ or _Nasoreans_, a curious sect settled near Ba.s.sora. Though the composition of these works is as late as the tenth century after Christ, it has been supposed that under a modern crust of wild and senseless hallucinations, they contain some grains of genuine ancient Babylonian thought. These _Mendates_ have in fact been identified with the _Nabateans_, who are mentioned as late as the tenth century(290) of our era, as a race purely pagan, and distinct from Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans. In Arabic the name Nabatean(291) is used for Babylonians,-nay, all the people of Aramaic origin, settled in the earliest times between the Euphrates and Tigris are referred to by that name.(292) It is supposed that the Nabateans, who are mentioned about the beginning of the Christian era as a race distinguished for their astronomical and general scientific knowledge, were the ancestors of the mediaeval Nabateans, and the descendants of the ancient Babylonians and Chaldeans. You may have lately seen in some literary journals an account of a work called "The Nabatean Agriculture." It exists only in an Arabic translation by Ibn-Wahs.h.i.+yyah, the Chaldean,(293) who lived about 900 years after Christ, but the original, which was written by Kuthami in Aramean, has lately been referred to the beginning of the thirteenth century B. C. The evidence is not yet fully before us, but from what is known it seems more likely that this work was the compilation of a Nabatean, who lived about the fourth century after Christ;(294) and though it contains ancient traditions, which may go back to the days of the great Babylonian monarchs, these traditions can hardly be taken as a fair representation of the ancient civilization of the Aramean race.

The second branch of the Semitic family is the _Hebraic_, chiefly represented by the ancient language of Palestine, where Hebrew was spoken and written from the days of Moses to the times of Nehemiah and the Maccabees, though of course with considerable modifications, and with a strong admixture of Aramean forms, particularly since the Babylonian captivity, and the rise of a powerful civilization in the neighboring country of Syria. The ancient language of Phnicia, to judge from inscriptions, was most closely allied to Hebrew, and the language of the Carthaginians too must be referred to the same branch.

Hebrew was first encroached upon by Aramaic dialects, through the political ascendency of Babylon, and still more of Syria; and was at last swept away by Arabic, which, since the conquest of Palestine and Syria in the year 636, has monopolized nearly the whole area formerly occupied by the two older branches of the Semitic stock, the Aramaic and Hebrew.

This third, or Arabic, branch sprang from the Arabian peninsula, where it is still spoken by a compact ma.s.s of aboriginal inhabitants. Its most ancient doc.u.ments are the _Himyaritic_ inscriptions. In very early times this Arabic branch was transplanted to Africa, where, south of Egypt and Nubia, on the coast opposite Yemen, an ancient Semitic dialect has maintained itself to the present day. This is the _Ethiopic_ or _Abyssinian_, or, as it is called by the people themselves, the _Gees_ language. Though no longer spoken in its purity by the people of Habesh, it is still preserved in their sacred writings, translations of the Bible, and similar works, which date from the third and fourth centuries. The modern language of Abyssinia is called _Amharic_.

The earliest literary doc.u.ments of Arabic go back beyond Mohammed. They are called _Moallakat_, literally, suspended poems, because they are said to have been thus publicly exhibited at Mecca. They are old popular poems, descriptive of desert life. With Mohammed Arabic became the language of a victorious religion, and established its sway over Asia, Africa, and Europe.

These three branches, the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and Arabic, are so closely related to each other, that it was impossible not to recognize their common origin. Every root in these languages, as far back as we know them, must consist of three consonants, and numerous words are derived from these roots by a simple change of vowels, leaving the consonantal skeleton as much as possible intact. It is impossible to mistake a Semitic language; and what is most important-it is impossible to imagine an Aryan language derived from a Semitic, or a Semitic from an Aryan language. The grammatical framework is totally distinct in these two families of speech.

This does not exclude, however, the possibility that both are diverging streams of the same source; and the comparisons that have been inst.i.tuted between the Semitic roots, reduced to their simplest form, and the roots of the Aryan languages, have made it more than probable that the material elements with which they both started were originally the same.

Other languages which are supposed to belong to the Semitic family are the _Berber_ dialects of Northern Africa, spoken on the coast from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean before the invasion of the Arabs, and now pushed back towards the interior. Some other African languages, too, such as the _Haussa_ and _Galla_, have been cla.s.sed as Semitic; and the language of Egypt, from the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions to the Coptic, which ceased to be spoken after the seventeenth century, has equally been referred to this cla.s.s. The Semitic character of these dialects, however, is much less clearly defined, and the exact degree of relations.h.i.+p in which they stand to the Semitic languages, properly so-called, has still to be determined.

Strictly speaking the Aryan and Semitic are the only _families_ of speech which fully deserve that t.i.tle. They both presuppose the existence of a finished system of grammar, previous to the first divergence of their dialects. Their history is from the beginning a history of decay rather than of growth, and hence the unmistakable family-likeness which pervades every one even of their latest descendants. The language of the Sepoy and that of the English soldier are, strictly speaking, one and the same language. They are both built up of materials which were definitely shaped before the Teutonic and Indic branches separated. No new root has been added to either since their first separation; and the grammatical forms which are of more modern growth in English or Hindustani, are, if closely examined, new combinations only of elements which existed from the beginning in all the Aryan dialects. In the termination of the English _he is_, and in the inaudible termination of the French _il est_, we recognize the result of an act performed before the first separation of the Aryan family, the combination of the predicative root _as_ with the demonstrative root _ti_; an act performed once for all, and continuing to be felt to the present day.

It was the custom of Nebuchadnezzar to have his name stamped on every brick that was used during his reign in erecting his colossal palaces.

Those palaces fell to ruins, but from the ruins the ancient materials were carried away for building new cities; and on examining the bricks in the walls of the modern city of Baghdad on the borders of the Tigris, Sir Henry Rawlinson discovered on each the clear traces of that royal signature. It is the same if we examine the structure of modern languages.

They too were built up with the materials taken from the ruins of the ancient languages, and every word, if properly examined, displays the visible stamp impressed upon it from the first by the founders of the Aryan and the Semitic empires of speech.

The relations.h.i.+p of languages, however, is not always so close. Languages may diverge before their grammatical system has become fixed and hardened; and in that case they cannot be expected to show the same marked features of a common descent as, for instance, the Neo-Latin dialects, French, Italian, and Spanish. They may have much in common, but they will likewise display an after-growth in words and grammatical forms peculiar to each dialect. With regard to words we see that even languages so intimately related to each other as the six Romance dialects, diverged in some of the commonest expressions. Instead of the Latin _frater_, the French _frere_, we find in Spanish _hermano_. There was a very good reason for this change. The Latin word _frater_, changed into _fray_ and _frayle_, had been applied to express a brother or a friar. It was felt inconvenient that the same word should express two ideas which it was sometimes necessary to distinguish, and therefore, by a kind of natural elimination, _frater_ was given up as the name of brother in Spanish, and replaced from the dialectical stores of Latin, by _germa.n.u.s_. In the same manner the Latin word for shepherd, _pastor_, was so constantly applied to the shepherd of the people or the clergyman, _le pasteur_, that a new word was wanted for the real shepherd. Thus _berbicarius_ from _berbex_ or _vervex_, a wether, was used instead of _pastor_, and changed into the French _berger_. Instead of the Spanish _enfermo_, ill, we find in French _malade_, in Italian _malato_. Languages so intimately related as Greek and Latin have fixed on different expressions for son, daughter, brother, woman, man, sky, earth, moon, hand, mouth, tree, bird, &c.(295) That is to say, out of a large number of synonymes which were supplied by the numerous dialects of the Aryan family, the Greeks perpetuated one, the Romans another. It is clear that when the working of this principle of natural selection is allowed to extend more widely, languages, though proceeding from the same source, may in time acquire a totally different nomenclature for the commonest objects. The number of real synonymes is frequently exaggerated, and if we are told that in Icelandic there are 120 names for island, or in Arabic 500 names for lion,(296) and 1,000 names for sword,(297) many of these are no doubt purely poetical. But even where there are in a language only four or five names for the same objects, it is clear that four languages might be derived from it, each in appearance quite distinct from the rest.

The same applies to grammar. When the Romance languages, for instance, formed their new future by placing the auxiliary verb _habere_, to have, after the infinitive, it was quite open to any one of them to fix upon some other expedient for expressing the future. The French might have chosen _je vais dire_ or _je dirvais_ (I wade to say) instead of _je dirai_, and in this case the future in French would have been totally distinct from the future in Italian. If such changes are possible in literary languages of such long standing as French and Italian, we must be prepared for a great deal more in languages which, as I said, diverged before any definite settlement had taken place either in their grammar or their dictionary. If we were to expect in them the definite criteria of a genealogical relations.h.i.+p which unites the members of the Aryan and Semitic families of speech, we should necessarily be disappointed. Such criteria could not possibly exist in these languages. But there are criteria for determining even these more distant degrees of relations.h.i.+p in the vast realm of speech; and they are sufficient at least to arrest the hasty conclusions of those who would deny the possibility of a common origin of any languages more removed from each other than French and Italian, Sanskrit and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. You will see this more clearly after we have examined the principles of what I call the _morphological cla.s.sification_ of human speech.

As all languages, so far as we can judge at present, can be reduced in the end to roots, predicative and demonstrative, it is clear that, according to the manner in which roots are put together, we may expect to find three kinds of languages, or three stages in the gradual formation of speech.

1. Roots may be used as words, each root preserving its full independence.

2. Two roots may be joined together to form words, and in these compounds one root may lose its independence.

3. Two roots may be joined together to form words, and in these compounds both roots may lose their independence.

What applies to two roots, applies to three or four or more. The principle is the same, though it would lead to a more varied subdivision.

The first stage, in which each root preserves its independence, and in which there is no formal distinction between a root and a word, I call the _Radical Stage_. This stage is best represented by ancient Chinese.

Languages belonging to this first or Radical Stage, have sometimes been called _Monosyllabic_ or _Isolating_. The second stage, in which two or more roots coalesce to form a word, the one retaining its radical independence, the other sinking down to a mere termination, I call the _Terminational Stage_. This stage is best represented by the Turanian family of speech, and the languages belonging to it have generally been called _agglutinative_, from _gluten_, glue. The third stage, in which roots coalesce so that neither the one nor the other retains its substantive independence, I call the _Inflectional Stage_. This stage is best represented by the Aryan and Semitic families, and the languages belonging to it have sometimes been distinguished by the name of _organic_ or _amalgamating_.

The first stage excludes phonetic corruption altogether.

The second stage excludes phonetic corruption in the princ.i.p.al root, but allows it in the secondary or determinative elements.

The third stage allows phonetic corruption both in the princ.i.p.al root and in the terminations.

A few instances will make this cla.s.sification clearer.

In the first stage, which is represented by Chinese, every word is a root, and has its own substantial meaning. Thus, where we say in Latin _baculo_, with a stick, we say in Chinese _? cang_.(298) Here _?_ might be taken for a mere preposition, like the English _with_. But in Chinese this _?_ is a root; it is the same word which, if used as a verb, would mean "to employ." Therefore in Chinese _? cang_ means literally "employ stick." Or again, where we say in English _at home_, or in Latin _domi_, the Chinese say _uo-li, uo_ meaning _house_, and _li_ originally _inside_.(299) The name for _day_ in Chinese is _gi-tse_, which means originally _son of the sun_.(300)

There is in Chinese, as we saw before, no formal distinction between a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition. The same root, according to its position in a sentence, may be employed to convey the meaning of great, greatness, greatly, and to be great. Everything in fact depends in Chinese on the proper collocation of words in a sentence. Thus _ng ta ni_ means "I beat thee;" but _ni ta ng_ would mean "Thou beatest me." Thus _ngo gin_ means "a bad man;" _gin ngo_ would mean "the man is bad."

As long as every word, or part of a word, is felt to express its own radical meaning, a language belongs to the first or radical stage. As soon as such words as _tse_ in _gi-tse_, day, _li_ in _uo-li_, at home, or _?_ in _?-cang_, with the stick, lose their etymological meaning and become mere signs of derivation or of case, language enters into the second or _Terminational_ stage.

By far the largest number of languages belong to this stage. The whole of what is called the _Turanian_ family of speech consists of Terminational or Agglutinative languages, and this Turanian family comprises in reality all languages spoken in Asia and Europe, and not included under the Aryan and Semitic families, with the exception of Chinese and its cognate dialects. In the great continent of the Old World the Semitic and Aryan languages occupy only what may be called the four western peninsulas, namely, India with Persia, Arabia, Asia Minor, and Europe; and we have reason to suppose that even these countries were held by Turanian tribes previous to the arrival of the Aryan and Semitic nations.

This Turanian family is of great importance in the science of languages.

Some scholars would deny it the name of a family; and if family is only applicable to dialects so closely connected among themselves as the Aryan or Semitic, it would no doubt be preferable to speak of the Turanian as a cla.s.s or group, and not as a family of languages. But this concession must not be understood as an admission that the members of this cla.s.s start from different sources, and that they are held together, not by genealogical affinity, but by morphological similarity only.

These languages share elements in common which they must have borrowed from the same source, and their formal coincidences, though of a different character from those of the Aryan and Semitic families, are such that it would be impossible to ascribe them to mere accident.

The name Turanian is used in opposition to Aryan, and is applied to the nomadic races of Asia as opposed to the agricultural or Aryan races.

The Turanian family or cla.s.s consists of two great divisions, the _Northern_ and the _Southern_.

The Northern is sometimes called the _Ural-Altaic_ or _Ugro-Tataric_, and it is divided into five sections, the _Tungusic_, _Mongolic_, _Turkic_, _Finnic_, and _Samoyedic_.

The Southern, which occupies the south of Asia, is divided into four cla.s.ses, the _Tamulic_, or the languages of the Dekhan; the _Bhotiya_, or the dialects of Tibet and Bhotan; the _Tac_, or the dialects of Siam, and the _Malaic_, or the Malay and Polynesian dialects.

No doubt if we expected to find in this immense number of languages the same family likeness which holds the Semitic or Aryan languages together, we should be disappointed. But the very absence of that family likeness const.i.tutes one of the distinguis.h.i.+ng features of the Turanian dialects.

They are _Nomad_ languages, as contrasted with the Aryan, and Semitic languages.(301) In the latter most words and grammatical forms were thrown out but once by the creative power of one generation, and they were not lightly parted with, even though their original distinctness had been blurred by phonetic corruption. To hand down a language in this manner is possible only among people whose history runs on in one main stream; and where religion, law, and poetry supply well-defined borders which hem in on every side the current of language. Among the Turanian nomads no such nucleus of a political, social, or literary character has ever been formed. Empires were no sooner founded than they were scattered again like the sand-clouds of the desert; no laws, no songs, no stories outlived the age of their authors. How quickly language can change, if thus left to itself without any literary standard, we saw in a former Lecture, when treating of the growth of dialects. The most necessary substantives, such as father, mother, daughter, son, have frequently been lost and replaced by synonymes in the different dialects of Turanian speech, and the grammatical terminations have been treated with the same freedom.

Nevertheless, some of the Turanian numerals and p.r.o.nouns, and many Turanian roots, point to a single original source; and the common words and common roots, which have been discovered in the most distant branches of the Turanian stock, warrant the admission of a real, though very distant, genealogical relations.h.i.+p of all Turanian speech.

The most characteristic feature of the Turanian languages is what has been called _Agglutination_, or "gluing together."(302) This means not only that, in their grammar, p.r.o.nouns are _glued_ to the verbs in order to form the conjugation, or prepositions to substantives in order to form declension. _That_ would not be a distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of the Turanian or nomad languages; for in Hebrew as well as in Sanskrit, conjugation and declension were originally formed on the same principle.

What distinguishes the Turanian languages is, that in them the conjugation and declension can still be taken to pieces; and although the terminations have by no means always retained their significative power as independent words, they are felt as modificatory syllables, and as distinct from the roots to which they are appended.

In the Aryan languages the modifications of words, comprised under declension and conjugation, were likewise originally expressed by agglutination. But the component parts began soon to coalesce, so as to form one integral word, liable in its turn to phonetic corruption to such an extent that it became impossible after a time to decide which was the root and which the modificatory element. The difference between an Aryan and a Turanian language is somewhat the same as between good and bad mosaic. The Aryan words seem made of one piece, the Turanian words clearly show the sutures and fissures where the small stones are cemented together.

There was a very good reason why the Turanian languages should have remained in this second or agglutinative stage. It was felt essential that the radical portion of each word should stand out in distinct relief, and never be obscured or absorbed, as happens in the third or inflectional stage.

The French _age_, for instance, has lost its whole material body, and is nothing but termination. _Age_ in old French was _eage_ and _edage_.

_Edage_ is a corruption of the Latin _tatic.u.m_; _tatic.u.m_ is a derivative of _tas_; _tas_ an abbreviation of _vitas_; _vitas_ is derived from _vum_, and in _vum_, __ only is the radical or predicative element, the Sanskrit _ay_ in _ay-us_, life, which contains the germ from which these various words derive their life and meaning. From _vum_ the Romans derived _viternus_, contracted into _ternus_, so that _age_ and _eternity_ flow from the same source. What trace of __ or _vum_, or even _vitas_ and _tas_, remains in _age_? Turanian languages cannot afford such words as _age_ in their dictionaries. It is an indispensable requirement in a nomadic language that it should be intelligible to many, though their intercourse be but scanty. It requires tradition, society, and literature, to maintain words and forms which can no longer be a.n.a.lyzed at once. Such words would seldom spring up in nomadic languages, or if they did, they would die away with each generation.

The Aryan verb contains many forms in which the personal p.r.o.noun is no longer felt distinctly. And yet tradition, custom, and law preserve the life of these veterans, and make us feel unwilling to part with them. But in the ever-s.h.i.+fting state of a nomadic society no debased coin can be tolerated in language, no obscure legend accepted on trust. The metal must be pure, and the legend distinct; that the one may be weighed, and the other, if not deciphered, at least recognized as a well-known guarantee.

Hence the small proportion of irregular forms in all agglutinative languages.(303)