Lectures on The Science of Language Part 6

_Lettish_ is the language of Kurland and Livonia, more modern in its grammar than Lithuanian, yet not immediately derived from it.

We now come to the _Slavonic_ languages, properly so called. The eastern branch comprehends the _Russian_ with various local dialects; the _Bulgarian_, and the _Illyrian_. The most ancient doc.u.ment of this eastern branch is the so-called Ecclesiastical Slavonic, _i.e._ the ancient Bulgarian, into which Cyrillus and Methodius translated the Bible, in the middle of the ninth century. This is still the authorized version(184) of the Bible for the whole Slavonic race; and to the student of the Slavonic languages, it is what Gothic is to the student of German. The modern Bulgarian, on the contrary, as far as grammatical forms are concerned, is the most reduced among the Slavonic dialects.

_Illyrian_ is a convenient or inconvenient name to comprehend the _Servian_, _Croatian_, and _Slovinian_ dialects. Literary fragments of _Slovinian_ go back as far as the tenth century.(185)

The western branch comprehends the language of _Poland_, _Bohemia_, and _Lusatia_. The oldest specimen of Polish belongs to the fourteenth century: the Psalter of Margarite. The Bohemian language was, till lately, traced back to the ninth century. But most of these old Bohemian poems are now considered spurious; and it is doubtful, even, whether an ancient interlinear translation of the Gospel of St. John can be ascribed to the tenth century.(186)

The language of Lusatia is spoken, probably, by no more than 150,000 people, known in Germany by the name of _Wends_.

We have examined all the languages of our first or Aryan family, which are spoken in Europe, with one exception, the _Albanian_. This language is clearly a member of the same family; and as it is sufficiently distinct from Greek or any other recognized language, it has been traced back to one of the neighboring races of the Greeks, the Illyrians, and is supposed to be the only surviving representative of the various so-called barbarous tongues which surrounded and interpenetrated the dialects of Greece.

We now pa.s.s on from Europe to Asia; and here we begin at once, on the extreme south, with the languages of India. As I sketched the history of Sanskrit in one of my former Lectures, it must suffice, at present, to mark the different periods of that language, beginning, about 1500 B. C., with the dialect of the Vedas, which is followed by the modern Sanskrit; the popular dialects of the third century B. C.; the Prakrit dialects of the plays; and the spoken dialects, such as Hindi, Hindustani, Mahratti, Bengali. There are many points of great interest to the student of language, in the long history of the speech of India; and it has been truly said that Sanskrit is to the science of language what mathematics are to astronomy. In an introductory course of lectures, however, like the present, it would be out of place to enter on a minute a.n.a.lysis of the grammatical organism of this language of languages.

There is one point only on which I may be allowed to say a few words. I have frequently been asked, "But how can you prove that Sanskrit literature is so old as it is supposed to be? How can you fix any Indian dates before the time of Alexander's conquest? What dependence can be placed on Sanskrit ma.n.u.scripts which may have been forged or interpolated?" It is easier to ask such questions than to answer them, at least to answer them briefly and intelligibly. But, perhaps, the following argument will serve as a partial answer, and show that Sanskrit was the spoken language of India at least some centuries before the time of Solomon. In the hymns of the Veda, which are the oldest literary compositions in Sanskrit, the geographical horizon of the poets is, for the greater part, limited to the north-west of India. There are very few pa.s.sages in which any allusions to the sea or the sea-coast occur, whereas the snowy mountains, and the rivers of the Penjab, and the scenery of the Upper Ganges valley are familiar objects to the ancient bards. There is no doubt, in fact, that the people who spoke Sanskrit came into India from the north, and gradually extended their sway to the south and east. Now, at the time of Solomon, it can be proved that Sanskrit was spoken at least as far south as the mouth of the Indus.

You remember the fleet of Thars.h.i.+sh(187) which Solomon had at sea, together with the navy of Hiram, and which came once in three years, bringing _gold_ and _silver_, _ivory_, _apes_, and _peac.o.c.ks_. The same navy, which was stationed on the sh.o.r.e of the Red Sea, is said to have fetched gold from _Ophir_,(188) and to have brought, likewise, great plenty of _algum_(189) trees and precious stones from Ophir.

Well, a great deal has been written to find out where this Ophir was; but there can be no doubt that it was in India. The names for _apes_, _peac.o.c.ks_, _ivory_ and _algum_-trees are foreign words in Hebrew, as much as _gutta-percha_ or _tobacco_ are in English. Now, if we wished to know from what part of the world _gutta-percha_ was first imported into England, we might safely conclude that it came from that country where the name, _gutta-percha_, formed part of the spoken language.(190) If, therefore, we can find a language in which the names for peac.o.c.k, apes, ivory, and algum-tree, which are foreign in Hebrew, are indigenous, we may be certain that the country in which that language was spoken must have been the Ophir of the Bible. That language is no other but Sanskrit.

_Apes_ are called, in Hebrew, _koph_, a word without an etymology in the Semitic languages, but nearly identical in sound with the Sanskrit name of ape, _kapi_.

_Ivory_ is called either _karnoth-shen_, horns of tooth; or _shen habbim_.

This _habbim_ is again without a derivation in Hebrew, but it is most likely a corruption of the Sanskrit name for elephant, _ibha_, preceded by the Semitic article.(191)

_Peac.o.c.ks_ are called in Hebrew _tukhi-im_, and this finds its explanation in the name still used for peac.o.c.k on the coast of Malabar, _togei_, which in turn has been derived from the Sanskrit _sikhin_, meaning furnished with a crest.

All these articles, ivory, gold, apes, peac.o.c.ks, are indigenous in India, though of course they might have been found in other countries likewise.

Not so the _algum-tree_, at least if interpreters are right in taking _algum_ or _almug_ for sandalwood. Sandalwood is found indigenous on the coast of Malabar only; and one of its numerous names there, and in Sanskrit, is _valguka_. This _valgu_(_ka_) is clearly the name which Jewish and Phnician merchants corrupted into _algum_, and which in Hebrew was still further changed into _almug_.

Now, the place where the navy of Solomon and Hiram, coming down the Red Sea, would naturally have landed, was the mouth of the Indus. There _gold_ and _precious stones_ from the north would have been brought down the Indus; and _sandalwood_, _peac.o.c.ks_, and _apes_ would have been brought from Central and Southern India. In this very locality Ptolemy (vii. 1) gives us the name of _Abiria_, above _Pattalene_. In the same locality Hindu geographers place the people called _Abhira_ or _abhira_; and in the same neighborhood MacMurdo, in his account of the province of Cutch, still knows a race of _Ahirs_,(192) the descendants, in all probability, of the people who sold to Hiram and Solomon their gold and precious stones, their apes, peac.o.c.ks, and sandalwood.(193)

If, then, in the Veda the people who spoke Sanskrit were still settled in the north of India, whereas at the time of Solomon their language had extended to Cutch and even the Malabar coast, this will show that at all events Sanskrit is not of yesterday, and that it is as old, at least, as the book of Job, in which the gold of Ophir is mentioned.(194)

Most closely allied to Sanskrit, more particularly to the Sanskrit of the Veda, is the ancient language of the Zend-avesta,(195) the so-called _Zend_, or sacred language of the Zoroastrians or Fire-wors.h.i.+ppers. It was, in fact, chiefly through the Sanskrit, and with the help of comparative philology, that the ancient dialect of the Parsis or Fire-wors.h.i.+ppers was deciphered. The MSS. had been preserved by the Parsi priests at Bombay, where a colony of fire-wors.h.i.+ppers had fled in the tenth century,(196) and where it has risen since to considerable wealth and influence. Other settlements of Guebres are to be found in Yezd and parts of Kerman. A Frenchman, Anquetil Duperron, was the first to translate the Zend-avesta, but his translation was not from the original, but from a modern Persian translation. The first European who attempted to read the original words of Zoroaster was Rask, the Dane; and after his premature death, Burnouf, in France, achieved one of the greatest triumphs in modern scholars.h.i.+p by deciphering the language of the Zend-avesta, and establis.h.i.+ng its close relations.h.i.+p with Sanskrit. The same doubts which were expressed about the age and the genuineness of the Veda, were repeated with regard to the Zend-avesta, by men of high authority as oriental scholars, by Sir W. Jones himself, and even by the late Professor Wilson. But Burnouf's arguments, based at first on grammatical evidence only, were irresistible, and have of late been most signally confirmed by the discovery of the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes. That there was a Zoroaster, an ancient sage, was known long before Burnouf.

Plato speaks of a teacher of Zoroaster's Magic (?a?e?a), and calls Zoroaster the son of _Oromazes_.(197)

This name of Oromazes is important; for Oromazes is clearly meant for _Ormuzd_, the G.o.d of the Zoroastrians. The name of this G.o.d, as read in the inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, is _Auramazda_, which comes very near to Plato's Oromazes.(198) Thus Darius says, in one pa.s.sage: "Through the grace of Auramazda I am king; Auramazda gave me the kingdom." But what is the meaning of _Auramazda_? We receive a hint from one pa.s.sage in the Achaemenian inscriptions, where Auramazda is divided into two words, both being declined. The genitive of Auramazda occurs there as _Aurahya mazdaha_. But even this is unintelligible, and is, in fact, nothing but a phonetic corruption of the name of the supreme Deity as it occurs on every page of the Zend-avesta, namely, _Ahuro mazdao_ (nom.). Here, too, both words are declined; and instead of _Ahuro mazdao_, we also find _Mazdao ahuro_.(199) Well, this _Ahuro mazdao_ is represented in the Zend-avesta as the creator and ruler of the world; as good, holy, and true; and as doing battle against all that is evil, dark, and false. "The wicked perish through the wisdom and holiness of the living wise Spirit." In the oldest hymns, the power of darkness, which is opposed to _Ahuro mazdao_ has not yet received its proper name, which is _Angro mainyus_, the later _Ahriman_; but it is spoken of as a power, as _Drukhs_ or deceit; and the princ.i.p.al doctrine which Zoroaster came to preach was that we must choose between these two powers, that we must be good, and not bad. These are his words:-

"In the beginning there was a pair of twins, two spirits, each of a peculiar activity. These are the Good and the Base in thought, word, and deed. Choose one of these two spirits; Be good, not base!"(200)

Or again:-

"Ahuramazda is holy, true, to be honored through veracity, through holy deeds." "You cannot serve both."

Now, if we wanted to prove that Anglo-Saxon was a real language, and more ancient than English, a mere comparison of a few words such as _lord_ and _hlafford_, _gospel_ and _G.o.dspel_ would be sufficient. _Hlafford_ has a meaning; _lord_ has none; therefore we may safely say that without such a compound as _hlafford_, the word _lord_ could never have arisen. The same, if we compare the language of the Zend-avesta with that of the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius. _Auramazda_ is clearly a corruption of _Ahuro mazdao_, and if the language of the Mountain-records of Behistun is genuine, then, _a fortiori_, is the language of the Zend-avesta genuine, as deciphered by Burnouf, long before he had deciphered the language of Cyrus and Darius. But what is the meaning of _Ahuro mazdao_? Here Zend does not give us an answer; but we must look to Sanskrit, as the more primitive language, just as we looked from French to Italian, in order to discover the original form and meaning of _feu_. According to the rules which govern the changes of words, common to Zend and Sanskrit, _Ahuro mazdao_ corresponds to the Sanskrit _Asuro medhas_; and this would mean the "Wise Spirit," neither more nor less.

We have editions, translations, and commentaries of the Zend-avesta by Burnouf, Brockhaus, Spiegel, and Westergaard. Yet there still remains much to be done. Dr. Haug, now settled at Poona, has lately taken up the work which Burnouf left unfinished. He has pointed out that the text of the Zend-avesta, as we have it, comprises fragments of very different antiquity, and that the most ancient only, the so-called Gathas, can be ascribed to Zarathustra. "This portion," he writes in a lecture just received from India, "compared with the whole bulk of the Zend fragments is very small; but by the difference of dialect it is easily recognized.

The most important pieces written in this peculiar dialect are called Gathas or songs, arranged in five small collections; they have different metres, which mostly agree with those of the Veda; their language is very near to the Vedic dialect." It is to be regretted that in the same lecture, which holds out the promise of so much that will be extremely valuable, Dr. Haug should have lent his authority to the opinion that Zoroaster or Zarathustra is mentioned in the Rig-Veda as Jaradash?i. The meaning of jaradashti in the Rig-Veda may be seen in the Sanskrit Dictionary of the Russian Academy, and no Sanskrit scholar would seriously think of translating the word by Zoroaster.

At what time Zoroaster lived, is a more difficult question which we cannot discuss at present.(201) It must suffice if we have proved that he lived, and that his language, the Zend, is a real language, and anterior in time to the language of the cuneiform inscriptions.

We trace the subsequent history of the Persian language from Zend to the inscriptions of the Achaemenian dynasty; from thence to what is called _Pehlevi_ or _Huzvaresh_ (better Huzuresh), the language of the Sa.s.sanian dynasty (226-651), as it is found in the dialect of the translations of the Zend-avesta, and in the official language of the Sa.s.sanian coins and inscriptions. This is considerably mixed with Semitic elements, probably imported from Syria. In a still later form, freed also from the Semitic elements which abound in Pehlevi, the language of Persia appears again as _Parsi_, which differs but little from the language of _Firdusi_, the great epic poet of Persia, the author of the Shahnameh, about 1000 A. D.

The later history of Persian consists entirely in the gradual increase of Arabic words, which have crept into the language since the conquest of Persia and the conversion of the Persians to the religion of Mohammed.

The other languages which evince by their grammar and vocabulary a general relations.h.i.+p with Sanskrit and Persian, but which have received too distinct and national a character to be cla.s.sed as mere dialects, are the languages _of Afghanistan_ or the _Pushtu_, the language of _Bokhara_, the language of the _Kurds_, the _Ossetian_ language in the Caucasus, and the _Armenian_. Much might be said on every one of these tongues and their claims to be cla.s.sed as independent members of the Aryan family; but our time is limited, nor has any one of them acquired, as yet, that importance which belongs to the vernaculars of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany, and to other branches of Aryan speech which have been a.n.a.lyzed critically, and may be studied historically in the successive periods of their literary existence. There is, however, one more language which we have omitted to mention, and which belongs equally to Asia and Europe, the language of the _Gipsies_. This language, though most degraded in its grammar, and with a dictionary stolen from all the countries through which the Zingaris pa.s.sed, is clearly an exile from Hindustan.

You see, from the diagram before you,(202) that it is possible to divide the whole Aryan family into two divisions: the _Southern_, including the Indic and Iranic cla.s.ses, and the _Northern_ or _North-western_, comprising all the rest. Sanskrit and Zend share certain words and grammatical forms in common which do not exist in any of the other Aryan languages; and there can be no doubt that the ancestors of the poets of the Veda and of the wors.h.i.+ppers of _Ahuro mazdao_ lived together for some time after they had left the original home of the whole Aryan race. For let us see this clearly: the genealogical cla.s.sification of languages, as drawn in this diagram, has an historical meaning. As sure as the six Romance dialects point to an original home of Italian shepherds on the seven hills at Rome, the Aryan languages together point to an earlier period of language, when the first ancestors of the Indians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Slaves, the Celts, and the Germans were living together within the same enclosures, nay under the same roof. There was a time when out of many possible names for _father_, _mother_, _daughter_, _son_, _dog_ and _cow_, _heaven_ and _earth_, those which we find in all the Aryan languages were framed, and obtained a mastery _in the struggle for life_ which is carried on among synonymous words as much as among plants and animals. Look at the comparative table of the auxiliary verb AS, to be, in the different Aryan languages. The selection of the root AS out of many roots, equally applicable to the idea of being, and the joining of this root with one set of personal terminations, all originally personal p.r.o.nouns, were individual acts, or if you like, historical events. They took place once, at a certain date and in a certain place; and as we find the same forms preserved by all the members of the Aryan family, it follows that before the ancestors of the Indians and Persians started for the south, and the leaders of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic colonies marched towards the sh.o.r.es of Europe, there was a small clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language, not yet Sanskrit or Greek or German, but containing the dialectical germs of all; a clan that had advanced to a state of agricultural civilization; that had recognized the bonds of blood, and sanctioned the bonds of marriage; and that invoked the Giver of Light and Life in heaven by the same name which you may still hear in the temples of Benares, in the basilicas of Rome, and in our own churches and cathedrals.

After this clan broke up, the ancestors of the Indians and Zoroastrians must have remained together for some time in their migrations or new settlements; and I believe that it was the reform of Zoroaster which produced at last the split between the wors.h.i.+ppers of the Vedic G.o.ds and the wors.h.i.+ppers of Ormuzd. Whether, besides this division into a southern and northern branch, it is possible by the same test (the community of particular words and forms), to discover the successive periods when the Germans separated from the Slaves, the Celts from the Italians, or the Italians from the Greeks, seems more than doubtful. The attempts made by different scholars have led to different and by no means satisfactory results;(203) and it seems best, for the present, to trace each of the northern cla.s.ses back to its own dialect, and to account for the more special coincidences between such languages as, for instance, the Slavonic and Teutonic, by admitting that the ancestors of these races preserved from the beginning certain dialectical peculiarities which existed before, as well as after, the separation of the Aryan family.

LECTURE VI. COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR.

The genealogical cla.s.sification of the Aryan languages was founded, as we saw, on a close comparison of the grammatical characteristics of each; and it is the object of such works as Bopp's "Comparative Grammar" to show that the grammatical articulation of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic, was produced once and for all; and that the apparent differences in the terminations of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, must be explained by laws of phonetic decay, peculiar to each dialect, which modified the original common Aryan type, and changed it into so many national languages. It might seem, therefore, as if the object of comparative grammar was attained as soon as the exact genealogical relations.h.i.+p of languages had been settled; and those who only look to the higher problems of the science of language have not hesitated to declare that "there is no painsworthy difficulty nor dispute about declension, number, case, and gender of nouns." But although it is certainly true that comparative grammar is only a means, and that it has well nigh taught us all that it has to teach,-at least in the Aryan family of speech,-it is to be hoped that, in the science of language, it will always retain that prominent place which it has obtained through the labors of Bopp, Grimm, Pott, Benfey, Curtius, Kuhn, and others. Besides, comparative grammar has more to do than simply to compare. It would be easy enough to place side by side the paradigms of declension and conjugation in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the other Aryan dialects, and to mark both their coincidences and their differences. But after we have done this, and after we have explained the phonetic laws which cause the primitive Aryan type to a.s.sume that national variety which we admire in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, new problems arise of a more interesting nature. We know that grammatical terminations, as they are now called, were originally independent words, and had their own purpose and meaning. Is it possible, after comparative grammar has established the original forms of the Aryan terminations, to trace them back to independent words, and to discover their original purpose and meaning? You will remember that this was the point from which we started. We wanted to know why the termination _d_ in _I loved_ should change a present into a past act. We saw that before answering this question we had to discover the most original form of this termination by tracing it from English to Gothic, and afterwards, if necessary, from Gothic to Sanskrit. We now return to our original question, namely, What is language that a mere formal change, such as that of _I love_ into _I loved_, should produce so very material a difference?

Let us clearly see what we mean if we make a distinction between the radical and formal elements of a language; and by formal elements I mean not only the terminations of declension and conjugation, but all derivative elements; all, in fact, that is not radical. Our view on the origin of language must chiefly depend on the view which we take of these formal, as opposed to the radical, elements of speech. Those who consider that language is a conventional production, base their arguments princ.i.p.ally on these formal elements. The inflections of words, they maintain, are the best proof that language was made by mutual agreement.

They look upon them as mere letters or syllables without any meaning by themselves; and if they were asked why the mere addition of a _d_ changes _I love_ into _I loved_, or why the addition of the syllable _rai_ gave to _j'aime_, I love, the power of a future, _j'aimerai_, they would answer, that it was so because, at a very early time in the history of the world, certain persons, or families, or clans, agreed that it should be so.

This view was opposed by another which represents language as an organic and almost a living being, and explains its formal elements as produced by a principle of growth inherent in its very nature. "Languages,"(204) it is maintained, "are formed by a process, not of crystalline accretion, but of germinal development. Every essential part of language existed as completely (although only implicitly) in the primitive germ, as the petals of a flower exist in the bud before the mingled influences of the sun and the air caused it to unfold." This view was first propounded by Frederick Schlegel,(205) and it is still held by many with whom poetical phraseology takes the place of sound and severe reasoning.

The science of language adopts neither of these views. As to imagining a congress for settling the proper exponents of such relations as nominative, genitive, singular, plural, active, and pa.s.sive, it stands to reason that if such abstruse problems could have been discussed in a language void of inflections, there was no inducement for agreeing on a more perfect means of communication. And as to imagining language, that is to say nouns and verbs, endowed with an inward principle of growth, all we can say is, that such a conception is really inconceivable. Language may be conceived as a production, but it cannot be conceived as a substance that could itself produce. But the science of language has nothing to do with mere theories, whether conceivable or not. It collects facts, and its only object is to account for these facts, as far as possible. Instead of looking on inflections in general either as conventional signs or natural excrescences, it takes each termination by itself, establishes its most primitive form by means of comparison, and then treats that primitive syllable as it would treat any other part of language,-namely, as something which was originally intended to convey a meaning. Whether we are still able to discover the original intention of every part of language is quite a different question, and it should be admitted at once that many grammatical forms, after they have been restored to their most primitive type, are still without an explanation. But with every year new discoveries are made by means of careful inductive reasoning. We become more familiar every day with the secret ways of language, and there is no reason to doubt that in the end grammatical a.n.a.lysis will be as successful as chemical a.n.a.lysis. Grammar, though sometimes very bewildering to us in its later stages, is originally a much less formidable undertaking than is commonly supposed. What is grammar after all but declension and conjugation? Originally declension could not have been anything but the composition of a noun with some other word expressive of number and case.

How the number was expressed, we saw in a former lecture; and the same process led to the formation of cases.

Thus the locative is formed in various ways in Chinese:(206) one is by adding such words as _cung_, the middle, or _nei_, inside. Thus, _kuo-cung_, in the empire; _i sui cung_, within a year. The instrumental is formed by the preposition _?_, which preposition is an old root, meaning _to use_. Thus _? ting_, with a stick, where in Latin we should use the ablative, in Greek the dative. Now, however complicated the declensions, regular and irregular, may be in Greek and Latin, we may be certain that originally they were formed by this simple method of composition.

There was originally in all the Aryan languages a case expressive of locality, which grammarians call the _locative_. In Sanskrit every substantive has its locative, as well as its genitive, dative, and accusative. Thus, _heart_ in Sanskrit is _h?id_; in the heart, is _h?idi_.

Here, therefore, the termination of the locative is simply short _i_. This short _i_ is a demonstrative root, and in all probability the same root which in Latin produced the preposition _in_. The Sanskrit _h?idi_ represents, therefore, an original compound, as it were, _heart-within_, which gradually became settled as one of the recognized cases of nouns ending in consonants. If we look to Chinese,(207) we find that the locative is expressed there in the same manner, but with a greater freedom in the choice of the words expressive of locality. "In the empire," is expressed by _kuo cung_; "within a year," is expressed by _i sui cung_.

Instead of _cung_, however, we might have employed other terms also, such as, for instance, _nei_, inside. It might be said that the formation of so primitive a case as the locative offers little difficulty, but that this process of composition fails to account for the origin of the more abstract cases, the accusative, the dative, and genitive. If we derive our notions of the cases from philosophical grammar, it is true, no doubt, that it would be difficult to convey by a simple composition the abstract relations supposed to be expressed by the terminations of the genitive, dative, and accusative. But remember that these are only general categories under which philosophers and grammarians endeavored to arrange the facts of language. The people with whom language grew up knew nothing of datives and accusatives. Everything that is abstract in language was originally concrete. If people wanted to say the King of Rome, they meant really the King at Rome, and they would readily have used what I have just described as the locative; whereas the more abstract idea of the genitive would never enter into their system of thought. But more than this, it can be proved that the locative has actually taken, in some cases, the place of the genitive. In Latin, for instance, the old genitive of nouns in _a_ was _as_. This we find still in _pater familias_, instead of _pater familiae_. The Umbrian and Oscan dialects retained the _s_ throughout as the sign of the genitive after nouns in _a_. The _ae_ of the genitive was originally _ai_, that is to say, the old locative in _i_. "King of Rome,"

if rendered by _Rex Romae_, meant really "King at Rome." And here you will see how grammar, which ought to be the most logical of all sciences, is frequently the most illogical. A boy is taught at school, that if he wants to say "I am staying at Rome," he must use the genitive to express the locative. How a logician or grammarian can so twist and turn the meaning of the genitive as to make it express rest in a place, is not for us to inquire; but, if he succeeded, his pupil would at once use the genitive of Carthage (Carthaginis) or of Athens (Athenarum) for the same purpose, and he would then have to be told that these genitives could not be used in the same manner as the genitive of nouns in _a._ How all this is achieved by what is called philosophical grammar, we know not; but comparative grammar at once removes all difficulty. It is only in the first declension that the locative has supplanted the genitive, whereas _Carthaginis_ and _Athenarum_, being real genitives, could never be employed to express a locative. A special case, such as the locative, may be generalized into the more general genitive, but not _vice versa_.

You see thus by one instance how what grammarians call a genitive was formed by the same process of composition which we can watch in Chinese, and which we can prove to have taken place in the original language of the Aryans. And the same applies to the dative. If a boy is told that the dative expresses a relation of one object to another, less direct than that of the accusative, he may well wonder how such a flying arch could ever have been built up with the scanty materials which language has at her disposal; but he will be still more surprised if, after having realized this grammatical abstraction, he is told that in Greek, in order to convey the very definite idea of being in a place, he has to use after certain nouns the termination of the dative. "I am staying at Salamis,"

must be expressed by the dative _Salamini_. If you ask why? Comparative grammar again can alone give an answer. The termination of the Greek dative in _i_, was originally the termination of the locative. The locative may well convey the meaning of the dative, but the faded features of the dative can never express the fresh distinctness of the locative.

The dative _Salamini_ was first a locative. "I live at Salamis," never conveyed the meaning, "I live to Salamis." On the contrary, the dative, in such phrases as "I give it to the father," was originally a locative; and after expressing at first the palpable relation of "I give it unto the father," or "I place it on or in the father," it gradually a.s.sumed the more general, the less local, less colored aspect which logicians and grammarians ascribe to their datives.(208)

If the explanation just given of some of the cases in Greek and Latin should seem too artificial or too forced, we have only to think of French in order to see exactly the same process repeated under our eyes. The most abstract relations of the genitive, as, for instance, "The immortality of the soul" (_l'immortalite de l'ame_); or of the dative, as, for instance, "I trust myself to G.o.d" (_je me fie a Dieu_), are expressed by prepositions, such as _de_ and _ad_, which in Latin had the distinct local meanings of "down from," and "towards." Nay, the English _of_ and _to_, which have taken the place of the German terminations _s_ and _m_, are likewise prepositions of an originally local character. The only difference between our cases and those of the ancient languages consists in this,-that the determining element is now placed before the word, whereas, in the original language of the Aryans, it was placed at the end.

What applies to the cases of nouns, applies with equal truth to the terminations of verbs. It may seem difficult to discover in the personal terminations of Greek and Latin the exact p.r.o.nouns which were added to a verbal base in order to express, _I_ love, _thou_ lovest, _he_ loves; but it stands to reason that originally these terminations must have been the same in all languages,-namely, personal p.r.o.nouns. We may be puzzled by the terminations of _thou lovest_ and _he loves_, where _st_ and _s_ can hardly be identified with the modern _thou_ and _he_; but we have only to place all the Aryan dialects together, and we shall see at once that they point back to an original set of terminations which can easily be brought to tell their own story.

Let us begin with modern formations, because we have here more daylight for watching the intricate and sometimes wayward movements of language; or, better still, let us begin with an imaginary case, or with what may be called the language of the future, in order to see quite clearly how, what we should call grammatical forms, may arise. Let us suppose that the slaves in America were to rise against their masters, and, after gaining some victories, were to sail back in large numbers to some part of Central Africa, beyond the reach of their white enemies or friends. Let us suppose these men availing themselves of the lessons they had learnt in their captivity, and gradually working out a civilization of their own. It is quite possible that some centuries hence, a new Livingstone might find among the descendants of the American slaves, a language, a literature, laws, and manners, bearing a striking similitude to those of his own country. What an interesting problem for any future historian and ethnologist! Yet there are problems in the past history of the world of equal interest, which have been and are still to be solved by the student of language. Now I believe that a careful examination of the language of the descendants of those escaped slaves would suffice to determine with perfect certainty their past history, even though no doc.u.ments and no tradition had preserved the story of their captivity and liberation. At first, no doubt, the threads might seem hopelessly entangled. A missionary might surprise the scholars of Europe by an account of that new African language. He might describe it at first as very imperfect-as a language, for instance, so poor that the same word had to be used to express the most heterogeneous ideas. He might point out how the same sound, without any change of accent, meant _true_, a _ceremony_, a _workman_, and was used also as a verb in the sense of literary composition. All these, he might say, are expressed in that strange dialect by the sound _rait_ (right, rite, wright, write). He might likewise observe that this dialect, as poor almost as Chinese, had hardly any grammatical inflections, and that it had no genders, except in a few words such as man-of-war, and a railway-engine, which were both conceived as feminine beings, and spoken of as _she_. He might then mention an even more extraordinary feature, namely, that although this language had no terminations for the masculine and feminine genders of nouns, it employed a masculine and feminine termination after the affirmative particle, according as it was addressed to a lady or a gentleman. Their affirmative particle being the same as the English, _Yes_, they added a final _r_ to it if addressed to a man, and a final _m_ if addressed to a lady: that is to say, instead of simply saying, _Yes_, these descendants of the escaped American slaves said _Yesr_ to a man, and _Yesm_ to a lady.

Absurd as this may sound, I can a.s.sure you that the descriptions which are given of the dialects of savage tribes, as explained for the first time by travellers or missionaries, are even more extraordinary. But let us consider now what the student of language would have to do, if such forms as _Yesr_ and _Yesm_ were, for the first time, brought under his notice.

He would first have to trace them back historically, as far as possible to their more original types, and if he discovered their connection with _Yes Sir_ and _Yes Ma'm_, he would point out how such contractions were most likely to spring up in a vulgar dialect. After having traced back the _Yesr_ and _Yesm of_ the free African negroes to the idiom of their former American masters, the etymologist would next inquire how such phrases as _Yes Sir_ and _Yes Madam_, came to be used on the American continent.

Finding nothing a.n.a.logous in the dialects of the aboriginal inhabitants of America, he would be led, by a mere comparison of words, to the languages of Europe, and here again, first to the language of England. Even if no historical doc.u.ments had been preserved, the doc.u.ments of language would show that the white masters, whose language the ancestors of the free Africans adopted during their servitude, came originally from England, and, within certain limits, it would even be possible to fix the time when the English language was first transplanted to America. That language must have pa.s.sed, at least, the age of Chaucer before it migrated to the New World. For Chaucer has two affirmative particles, _Yea_ and _Yes_, and he distinguishes between the two. He uses _Yes_ only in answer to negative questions. For instance, in answer to "Does he not go?" he would say, _Yes_. In all other cases Chaucer uses _Yea_. To a question, "Does he go?"