Philology
From LoveToKnow 1911
PHILOLOGY, the generally accepted comprehensive name for the study of the word (Gr. Xoyos), or languages; it designates that branch of knowledge which deals with human speech, and with all that speech discloses as to the nature and history of man. Philology has two principal divisions, corresponding to the two uses of "word" or "speech," as signifying either what is said or the language in which it is said, as either the thought expressed - which, when recorded, takes the form of literature - or the instrumentality of its expression: these divisions are the literary and the linguistic. Not all study of literature, indeed, is philological: as when, for example, the records of the ancient Chinese are ransacked for notices of astronomical or meteorological phenomena, or the principles of geometry are learned from the textbook of a Greek sage; while, on the other hand, to study Ptolemy and Euclid for the history of the sciences represented by them is philological more than scientific. Again, the study of language itself has its literary side: as when the vocabulary of a community (say of the ancient Indo-Europeans or Aryans) is taken as a document from which to infer the range and grade of knowledge of its speakers, their circumstances and their institutions: The two divisions thus do not admit of absolute distinction and separation, though for some time past tending toward greater independence. The literary is the older of the two; it even occupied until recently the whole field, since the scientific study of language itself has arisen only within the 19th century. Till then, literary philology included linguistic, as a merely subordinate and auxiliary part, the knowledge of a language being the necessary key to a knowledge of the literature written in that language. When, therefore, instead of studying each language by itself for the sake of its own literature men began to compare one language with another, in order to bring to light their relationships, their structures, their histories, the name "comparative philology" naturally enough suggested itself and came into use for the new method; and this name, awkward and trivial though it may be, has become so firmly fixed in English usage that it can be only slowly, if at all, displaced. European usage (especially German) tends more strongly than English to restrict the name philology to its older office, and to employ for the recent branch of knowledge a specific term, like those that have gained more or less currency with us also; a's glottic, glossology, linguistics, linguistic science, science of language, and the like. It is not a question of absolute propriety or correctness, since the word philology is in its nature wide enough to imply all language-study of whatever kind; it is one, rather, of the convenient distinction of methods that have grown too independent and important to be any longer well included under a common name.
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I
The Science of Language in general. Philology, in all its departments, began and grew up as classical; the history of our civilization made the study of Greek and Latin long the exclusive, still longer the predominant and regulating, occupation of secular scholarship. The Hebrew and its literature were held apart, as something of a different order, as sacred. It was not imagined that any tongue to which culture and literature did not lend importance was worthy of serious attention from scholars. The first essays in comparison, likewise, were made upon the classical tongues, and were as erroneous in method and fertile in false conclusions as was to be expected, considering the narrowness of view and the controlling prejudices of those who made them; and the admission of Hebrew to the comparison only added to the confusion. The change which the past century has seen has been a part of the general scientific movement of the age, which has brought about the establishment of so many new branches of knowledge, both historical and physical, by the abandonment of shackling prejudices, the freedom of inquiry, the recognition of the dignity of all knowledge, the wide-reaching assemblage of facts and their objective comparison, and the resulting constant improvement of method. Literary philology has had its full share of advantage from this movement; but linguistic philology has been actually created by it out of the crude observations and wild deductions of earlier times, as truly as chemistry out of alchemy, or geology out of diluvianism. It is unnecessary here to follow out the details of the development; but we may well refer to the decisive influence of one discovery, the decisive action of one scholar. It was the discovery of the special relationship of the Aryan or Indo-European languages, depending in great measure upon the introduction of the Sanskrit as a term in their comparison, and demonstrated and worked out by the German scholar Bopp, that founded the science of linguistic philology. While there is abundant room for further improvement, it yet appears that the grand features of philologic study, in all its departments, are now so distinctly drawn that no revolution of its methods, but only their modification in minor respects, is henceforth probable. How and for what purposes to investigate the literature of any people (philology in the more proper sense), combining the knowledge thus obtained with that derived from other sources; how to study and set forth the material and structure and combinations of a language (grammar), or of a body of related languages (comparative grammar); how to co-ordinate and interpret the general phenomena of language, as variously illustrated in the infinitely varying facts of different tongues, so as to exhibit its nature as a factor in human history and its methods of life and growth (linguistic science) - these are what philology teaches.
The study of language is a division of the general science of anthropology, and is akin to all the rest in respect to its to objects and its methods. Man as we now see him is a twofold being: in part the child of nature, as logy to his capacities and desires, his endowments of mind and body; in part the creature of education, by training in the knowledge, the arts, the social conduct, of which his predecessors have gained possession. And the problem of anthropology is this: how natural man has become cultivated man; how a being thus endowed by nature should have begun and carried on the processes of acquisition which have brought him to his present state. The results of his predecessors' labours are not transmuted for his benefit into natural instincts, in language or in anything else. The child of the most civilized race, if isolated and left wholly to his own resources, aided by neither the example nor the instruction of his fellows, would no more speak the speech of his ancestors than he would build their houses, fashion their clothes, practise any of their arts, inherit their knowledge or wealth. In fact, he would possess no language, no arts, no wealth, but would have to go to work to acquire them, by the same processes which began to win them for the first human beings. One advantage he would doubtless enjoy: the descendant of a cultivated race has an enhanced aptitude for the reception of cultivation; he is more cultivable; and this is an element that has to be allowed for ip comparing present conditions with past, as influencing the rate of progress, but nothing more. In all other respects it is man with the endowments which we now find him possessed of, but destitute of the gradually accumulated results of the exercise of his faculties, whose progress we have to explain. And it is, as a matter of necessity, by studying recent observable modes of acquisition, and transferring them, with due allowance for different circumstances, to the more primitive periods, that the question of first acquisition or origin is. to be solved, for language as for tools, for arts, for family and social organization, and the rest. There is just as much and just as little reason for assuming miraculous interference and aid in one of these departments as in another. If men have been left to themselves to make and improve instruments, to form and perfect modes of social organization, by implanted powers directed by natural desires, and under the pressure of circumstances, then also to make and change the signs that constitute their speech. All expressions, as all instruments, are at present, and have been through the known past, made and changed by the men who use them; the same will have been the case in the unknown or prehistoric past. And we command now enough of the history of language, with the processes of its life and growth, to determine with confidence its mode of origin - within certain limits, as will appear below.
It is beyond all question, in the first place, that the desire of communication was the only force directly impelling men to the production of language. Man's sociality, Cause his disposition to band together with his fellows, for lower and for higher purposes, for mutual help making and for sympathy, is one of his most fundamental characteristics. To understand those about one and to be understood by them is now, and must have been from the very beginning, a prime necessity of human existence; we cannot conceive of man, even in his most undeveloped state, as without the recognition of it. Communication is still the universally recognized office of speech, and to the immense majority of speakers the only one; the common man knows no other, and can only with difficulty and imperfectly be brought to see that there is any other; of the added distinctness and reach of mental action which the possession of such an instrumentality gives him he is wholly unconscious: and it is obvious that what the comparatively cultivated being of to-day can hardly be made to realize can never have acted upon the first men as a motive to action. It may perhaps be made a question which of the two uses of speech, communication or the facilitation of thought is the higher; there can be no question, at any rate, that the former is the broader and the more fundamental. That the kind and degree of thinking which we do nowadays would be impossible without language-signs is true enough; but so also it would be impossible without written signs. That there was a time when men had to do what mental work they could without the help of writing, as an art not yet devised, we have no difficulty in realizing, because the art is of comparatively recent device, and there are still communities enough that are working without it; it is much harder to realize that there was a time when speaking also was an art not yet attained, and that men had to carry on their rude and rudimentary thinking without it. Writing too was devised for conscious purposes of communication only; its esoteric uses, like those of speech, were at first unsuspected, and incapable of acting as an inducement; they were not noticed until made experience of, and then only by those who look beneath the surface of things. There is no analogy closer and more instructive than this between speech and writing. But analogies are abundant elsewhere in the history of human development. Everywhere it is the lower and more obvious inducements that are first effective, and that lead gradually to the possession of what serves and stimulates higher wants. All the arts and industries have grown out of men's effort to get enough to eat and protection against cold and heat - just as language, with all its uses, out of men's effort to communicate with their fellows. As a solitary man now would never form even the beginnings of speech, as one separated from society unlearns his speech by disuse and becomes virtually dumb, so early man, with all his powers, would never have acquired speech, save as to those powers was added sociality with the needs it brought. We might conceive of a solitary man as housing and dressing himself, devising rude tools, and thus lifting himself a step from wildness toward cultivation; but we cannot conceive of him as ever learning to talk. Recognition of the impulse to communication as the efficient cause of language-making is an element of primary importance in the theory of the origin of language. No one who either leaves it out of account or denies it will, however ingenious and entertaining his speculations, cast any real light on the earliest history of speech. To inquire under what peculiar circumstances, in connexion with what mode of individual or combined action, a first outburst of oral expression may have taken place, is, on the other hand, quite futile. The needed circumstances were always present when human beings were in one another's society; there was an incessant drawing-on to attempts at mutual understanding which met with occasional, and then ever more frequent and complete success. There inheres in most reasoning upon this subject the rooted assumption, governing opinion even when not openly upheld or consciously made, that conceptions have real natural names, and that in a state of nature these will somehow break forth and reveal themselves under favouring circumstances. The falsity of such a view is shown by our whole further discussion.
The character of the motive force to speech determined the character of the beginnings of speech. That was first signified which was most capable of intelligible signification, of Speech not that which was first in order of importance, and writing. as judged by any standard which we can apply to it, or first in order of conceptional development. All attempts to determine the first spoken signs by asking what should have most impressed the mind of primitive man are and must be failures. It was the exigencies and possibilities of practical life, in conditions quite out of reach of our distinct conception, that prescribed the earliest signs of communication. So, by a true and instructive analogy, the beginnings of writing are rude depictions of visible objects; it is now thoroughly recognized that no alphabet, of whatever present character, can have originated in any other way; everything else is gradually arrived at from that - as, indeed, in the ingeniously shaping hands of man, from any central body of signs, though but of small extent, all else is attainable by processes of analogy and adaptation and transfer. Now what is it that is directly signifiable in the world about us ? Evidently the separate acts and qualities of sensible objects, and nothing else. In writing, or signification to the eye, the first element is the rude depiction of the outline of an object, or of that one of the sum of its characteristic qualities which the eye takes note of and the hand is capable of intelligibly reproducing; from that the mind understands the whole complex object itself, and then whatever further may in the circumstances of its use be suggested by it. So, for example, the picture of a tree signifies primarily a tree, then perhaps wood, something made of wood, and so on; that of a pair of outstretched wings signifies secondarily flight, then soaring, height, and whatever else these may lead to. No concrete thing is signifiable in its totality or otherwise than by a facile analysis of its constituent qualities and a selection of the one which is both sufficiently characteristic in itself and capable of being called up by a sign before the mind addressed.
And what quality shall be selected depends in great measure upon the instrumentality used for its signification. Of such instrumentalities men possess a considerable variety. taiities of We must leave out of account that of depiction, as Expression. just instanced, because its employment belongs to a much more advanced state of cultivation, and leads the way to the invention not of speech but of the analogous and auxiliary art of writing. There remain gesture, or changes of position of the various parts of the body, especially of the most mobile parts, the arms and hands; grimace, or the changes of expression of the features of the countenance (in strictness, a variety of the preceding); and utterance, or the production of audible sound. It cannot be doubted that, in the first stages of communicative expression, all these three were used together, each for the particular purposes which it was best calculated to serve. The nearest approach to such action that is now possible is when two persons, wholly ignorant of one another's speech, meet and need to communicate - an imperfect correspondence, because each is trained to habits of expression and works consciously, and with the advantage of long experience, towards making himself understood; yet it is good for its main purpose. What they do, to reach mutual comprehension, is like what the first speechless men, unconsciously and infinitely more slowly, learned to do: face, hands, body, voice, are all put to use. It is altogether probable that gesture at first performed the principal part, even to such extent that the earliest human language may be said to have been a language of gesture signs; indeed, there exist at the present day such gesture-languages as those in use between roving tribes of different speech that from time to time meet one another (the most noted example is that of the gesture-language, of a very considerable degree of development, of the prairie tribes of American Indians); or such signs as are the natural resort of those who by deafness are cut off from ordinary spoken intercourse with their fellows. Yet there never can have been a stage or period in which all the three instrumentalities were not put to use together. In fact, they are still all used together; that is even now an ineffective speaking to which grimace and gesture ("action," as Demosthenes called them) are not added as enforcers; and the lower the grade of development and culture of a language, the more important, even for intelligibility, is their addition. But voice has won to itself the chief and almost exclusive part in communication, insomuch that we call all communication "language" (i.e. "tonguiness") just as a race of mutes might call it "handiness" and talk (by gesture) of a handiness of grimace. This is not in the least because of any closer connexion of the thinking apparatus with the muscles that act to produce audible sounds than with those that act to produce visible motions; not because there are natural uttered names for conceptions any more than natural gestured names. It is simply a case of "survival of the fittest," or analogous to the process by which iron has become the exclusive material of swords, and gold and silver of money: because, namely, experience has shown this to be the material best adapted to this special use. The advantages of voice are numerous and obvious. There is first its economy, as employing a mechanism that is available for little else, and leaving free for other purposes those indispensable instruments the hands. Then there is its superior perceptibleness: its nice differences impress themselves upon the sense at a distance at which visible motions become indistinct; they are not hidden by intervening objects; they allow the eyes of the listener as well as the hands of the speaker to be employed in other useful work; they are as plain in the dark as in the light; and they are able to catch and command the attention of one who is not to be reached in any other way. We might add as the third advantage a superior capability of variation and combination on the part of spoken sounds; but this is not to be insisted on, inasmuch as we hardly know what a gesture-language might have become if men's ingenuity in expression had been expended through all time upon its elaboration; and the superiority, however real, can hardly have been obvious enough to serve as a motive: certainly, there are spoken languages now existing whose abundance of resources falls short of what is attainable by gesture. Oral utterance is the form which expression has inevitably taken, the sum of man's endowments being what it is; but it would be a mistake to suppose that a necessity of any other kind is involved in their relation. The fundamental conditions of speech are man's grade of intellectual power and his social instinct; these being given, his expression follows, availing itself of what means it finds best suited to its purpose; if voice had been wanting it would have taken the next best. So, in certain well-known cases, a marked artistic gift on the part of individuals deprived of the use of hands has found means of exercise in the feet instead. But men in general have hands, instruments of exquisite tact and power, to serve the needs of their intellect; and so voice also, to provide and use the tools of thought; there is no error in maintaining that the voice is given us for speech, if only we do not proceed to draw from such a dictum false conclusions as to the relation between thought and utterance. Man is created with bodily instruments suited to do the work prescribed by his mental capacities; therein lies the harmony of his endowment.
It is through imitation that all signification becomes directly suggestive. The first written signs are (as already noticed) the depictions of visible objects, and could be nothing else; and, by the same necessity, the first uttered signs were the imitations of audible sounds. To reproduce any sound of which the originating cause or the circumstances of production are known, brings up of course before the conception that sound, along with the originator, or circumstances of origination, or whatever else may be naturally associated with it. There are two special directions in which this mode of signmaking is fruitful: imitation of the sounds of external nature (as the cries of animals and the noises of inanimate objects when in motion or acted on by other objects) and imitation of human sounds. The two are essentially one in principle, although by some held apart, or even opposed to each other, as respectively the imitative or onomatopoetic and the exclamatory or interjectional beginnings of speech; they differ only in their spheres of significance, the one being especially suggestive of external objects, the other of inward feelings. There are natural human tones, indicative of feeling, as there are natural gestures, poses, modes of facial expression, which either are immediately intelligible to us (as is the warning cry of the hen to the dayold chicken), or have their value taught us by our earliest experiences. If we hear a cry of joy or a shriek of pain, a laugh or a groan, we need no explanation in words to tell us what it signifies any more than when we see a sad face or a drooping attitude. So also the characteristic cry or act of anything outside ourselves, if even rudely imitated, is to us an effective reminder and awakener of conception. We have no reason to question that such were the suggestions of the beginnings of uttered expression. The same means have made their contributions to language even down to our own day; we call words so produced "onomatopoetic" (i.e. "name-making"), after the example of the Greeks, who could not conceive that actually new additions to language should be made in any other way. What and how wide the range of the imitative principle, and what amount of language-signs it was capable of yielding, is a subject for special investigation - or rather, of speculation, since anything like exact knowledge in regard to it will never be attained; and the matter is one of altogether secondary consequence; it is sufficient for our purpose that enough could certainly be won in this way to serve as the effective germs of speech.
All the natural means of expression are still at our command, and are put to more or less use by us, and their products are as. intelligible to us as they have been to any generation of our ancestors, back to the very first. They are analogous also to the means of communication of the lower animals; this, so far as we know, consists in observing and interpreting one another's movements and natural sounds (where there are such). But language is a step beyond this, and different from it. To make language, the intent to signify must be present. A cry wrung out by pain, or a laugh of amusement, though intelligible, is not language; either of them, if consciously reproduced in order to signify to another pain or pleasure, is language. So a cough within hearing of any one attracts his attention; but to cough, or to produce any other sound, articulate or inarticulate, for the purpose of attracting another's attention, is to commit an act of language-making, such as in human history preceded in abundance the establishment of definite traditional signs for conceptions. Here begins to appear the division between human language and all brute expression; since we do not know that any animal but man ever definitely took this step. It would be highly interesting to find out just how near any come to it; and to this point ought to be especially directed the attention of those who are investigating the communication of the lower animals in its relation to human communication. Among the animals of highest intelligence that associate with man and learn something of his ways, a certain amount of sign-making expressly for communication is not to be denied; the dog that barks at a door because he knows that somebody will come and let him in is an instance of it; perhaps, in wild life, the throwing out of sentinel birds from a flock, whose warning cry shall advertise their fellows of the threat of danger, is as near an approach to it as is anywhere made.
But the actual permanent beginnings of speech are only reached when the natural basis is still further abandoned, and signs begin to be used, not because their natural suggestiveness is seen in them, but by imitation, from the example of others who have been observed to use conventhe same sign for the same purpose. Then for the first time the means of communication becomes something to be handed down, rather than made anew by each individual; it takes on that traditional character which is the essential character of all human institutions, which appears not less in the forms of social organization, the details of religious ceremonial, the methods of art and the arts, than in language. That all existing speech, and all known recorded speech, is purely traditional, cannot at all he questioned. It is proved even by the single fact that for any given conception there are as many different spoken signs as there are languages - say a thousand (this number is rather far within than beyond the truth), each of them intelligible to him who has learned to use it and to associate it with the conception to which it belongs, but unintelligible to the users of the nine hundred and ninetynine other signs, as these are all unintelligible to him; unless, indeed, he learn a few of them also, even as at the beginning he learned the one that he calls his own. What single sign, and what set of signs, any individual shall use, depends upon the community into the midst of which he is cast, by birth or other circumstances, during his first years. That it does not depend upon his race is demonstrated by facts the most numerous and various; the African whose purity of descent is attested by every feature is found all over the world speaking just that language, or jargon, into the midst of which the fates of present or former slavery have brought his parents; every civilized community contains elements of various lineage, combined into one by unity of speech; and instances are frequent enough where whole nations speak a tongue of which their ancestors knew nothing; for example, the Celtic Gauls and the Germanic Normans of France speak the dialect of a geographically insignificant district in central Italy, while we ourselves can hardly utter a sentence or write a line without bringing in more or less of that same dialect. There is not an item of any tongue of which we know anything that is " natural" expression, or to the possession of which its speaker is brought by birth instead of by education; there is even very little that is traceably founded on such natural expression; everywhere No-ts or human attribution reigns supreme, and the original 41uocs or natural significance has disappeared and is only to be found by theoretic induction (as we have found it above). It seems to some as if a name like cuckoo (one of the most striking available cases of onomatopoeia) were a "natural" one; but there is just as much Nuts in it as in any other name; it implies the observation of an aggregate of qualities in a certain bird, and the selection of one among them as the convenient basis of a mutual understanding when the bird is in question; every animal conspicuous to us must have its designation, won in one way or another; and in this case to imitate the characteristic cry is the most available way. If anything but convenience and availability were involved, all our names for animals would have to be and to remain imitations of the sounds they make. That the name of cuckoo is applied also to the female and young, and at other than the singing season, and then to related species which do not make the same sound - all helps to show the essentially conventional character of even this name. An analogous process of elimination of original meaning, and reduction to the value of conventional designation merely, is to be seen in every part of language throughout its whole history. Since men ceased to derive their names from signs having a natural suggestiveness, and began to make them from other names already in use with an understood value, every new name has had its etymology and its historical occasion - as, for example, the name quarantine from the two-score (quarantaine) of days of precautionary confinement, or volume from its being rolled up, or book from a beechwood staff, or copper from Cyprus, or lunacy from a fancied influence of the moon, or priest from being an older Orpeo(15 mpos) person, or butterfly from the butter-yellow colour of a certain XXI. 14 common species: every part of our language, as of every other, is full of such examples - but, when once the name is applied, it belongs to that to which it is applied, and no longer to its relatives by etymology; its origin is neglected, and its form may be gradually changed beyond recognition, or its meaning so far altered that comparison with the original shall seem a joke or an absurdity. This is a regular and essential part of the process of name-making in all human speech, and from the very beginning of the history of speech: in fact (as pointed out above), the latter can only be said to have begun when this process was successfully initiated, when uttered signs began to be, what they have ever since continued to be, conventional, or dependent only on a mutual understanding. Thus alone did language gain the capacity of unlimited growth and development. The sphere and scope of natural expression are narrowly bounded; but there is no end to the resources of conventional sign-making.
It is well to point out here that this change of t he basis of men's communication from natural suggestiveness to mutual understanding, and the consequent purely conven Speech tional character of all human language, in its every part and particle, puts an absolute line of demarca tion between the latter and the means of communication of all the lower animals. The two are not of the same kind, any more than human society in its variety of organization is of the same kind with the instinctive herding of wild cattle or swarming of insects, any more than human architecture with the instinctive burrowing of the fox and nestbuilding of the bird, any more than human industry and accumulation of capital with the instinctive hoarding of bees and beavers. In all these cases alike the action of men is a result of the adaptation of means at hand to the satisfaction of felt needs, or of purposes dimly perceived at first, but growing clearer with gradually acquired experience. Man is the only being that has established institutions - gradually accumulated and perfected results of the exercise of powers analogous in kind to, but greatly differing in degree from, those of the lower animals. The difference in degree of endowment. does not constitute the difference in language, it only leads to it. There was a time when all existing human beings were as destitute of language as the dog; and that time would come again for any number of human beings who should be cut off (if that were practicable) from all instruction by their fellows: only they would at once proceed to recreate language, society and arts by the same steps by which their own remote ancestors created those which we now possess; while the dog would remain what he and his ancestors have always been, a creature of very superior intelligence, indeed, as compared with most, of infinite intelligence as compared with many, yet incapable of rising by the acquisition of culture through the formation and development of traditional institutions. There is just the same saltus existent in the difference between man's conventional speech and the natural communication of the lower races as in that between men's forms of society and the instinctive associations of the lower races; but it is no greater and no other; it is neither more absolute and characteristic nor more difficult to explain. Hence those who put forward language as the distinction between man and the lower animals, and those who look upon our language as the same in kind with the means of communication of the lower animals, only much more complete and perfect, fail alike to comprehend the true nature of language, and are alike wrong in their arguments and conclusions. No addition to or multiplication of brute speech would make anything like human speech; the two are separated by a step which no animal below man has ever taken; and, on the other hand, language is only the most conspicuous among those institutions the development of which has constituted human progress, while their possession constitutes human culture.
With the question of the origin of man, whether or not developed out of lower animal forms, intermediate to the anthropoid apes, language has nothing to do, nor can its study ever be made to contribute anything to the solution of that question. If there once existed creatures above the apes and below man, who were extirpated by primitive man as his especial rivals in the struggle for existence, or became extinct in any other way, there is no difficulty in supposing them to have possessed forms of speech, more rudimentary and imperfect than ours. At any rate, all existing human speech is one in the essential characteristics which we have thus far noted or shall hereafter have to consider, even as humanity is one in its distinction from the lower animals; the differences are in nonessentials. All speech is one in the sense that every human being, of whatever race he may be, is capable of acquiring any existing tongue, and of using it for the same purposes for which its present possessors Culture. use it, with such power and effect as his individual capacity allows, and without any essential change in the mental operations carried on by means of speech - even as he may acquire any other of the items of culture belonging to a race not his own. The difference between employing one language and another is like that between employing one instrument and another in mechanical arts; one instrument may be better than another, and may enable its user to turn out better work, but the human ingenuity behind both is the same, and works in the same way. Nor has the making of language anything whatever to do with making man what he is, as an animal species having a certain physical form and intellectual endowment. Being what he is by nature, man has by the development of language and other institutions become what he is by culture. His acquired culture is the necessary result of his native endowment, not the contrary. The acquisition of the first stumbling beginnings of a superior means of communication had no more influence to raise him from a simian to a human being than the present high culture and perfected speech of certain races has to lift them up to something more than human and specifically different from the races of inferior culture. It cannot be too absolutely laid down that differences of language, down to the possession of language at all, are differences only in respect to education and culture.
How long man, after he came into such being as he now is, physically and intellectually, continued to communicate with imitative signs of direct significance, when the production of traditional signs began, how rapidly they were accumulated, and how long any traces of - their imitative origin clave to them - these and the signs. like questions it is at present idle to try to answer even conjecturally: just as it is to seek to determine when the first instruments were used, how soon they were shaped instead of being left crude, at what epoch fire was reduced to service, and so on. The stages of development and their succession are clear enough; to fix their chronology will doubtless never be found practicable. There is much reason for holding, as some do, that the very first items of culture were hardest to win and cost most time, the rate of accumulation (as in the case of capital) increasing with the amount accumulated. Beyond all reasonable question, however, there was a positively long period of purely imitative signs, and a longer one of mixed imitative and traditional ones, the latter gradually gaining upon the former, before the present condition of things was reached, when the production of new signs by imitation is only sporadic and of the utmost rarity, and all language-signs besides are traditional, their increase in any community being solely by variation and combination, and by borrowing from other communities. Of what nature, in various respects, this earliest languagematerial was is sufficiently clear. The signs, in the first place, were of the sort that we call "roots." By this is only meant that they were integral signs, significant s in their entirety, not divisible into parts, of which ge. one signified one thing and another another thing, or of which one gave the main significance, while another was an added sign of kind or relation. In a language of developed structure like our own, we arrive at such "roots" mainly by an artificial strippingoff of the signs of relation which almost every word still has, or can be shown to have once had. In un-cost-li-ness, for example, cost is the centrally significant element; so far as English is concerned it is a root, about which cluster a whole body of forms and derivatives; if we could follow its history no farther it would be to us an ultimate root, as much so as bind or sing or mean. But we can follow it up, to the Latin compound con-sta, a root sta with a prefixed formative element con. Then sta, which in slightly varied forms we find in a whole body of related tongues called "Indo-European," having in them all the same significance "stand," is an Indo-European root, and to us an ultimate one, because we can follow its history no farther; but there always remains the possibility that it is as far from being actually original as is the English root cost: that is to say, it is not within our power ever to get back to the really primitive elements of speech and to demonstrate their character by positive evidence. The reason for accepting a primitive root-stage of language is in great part theoretical: because nothing else is reconcilable with any acceptable view of the origin of language. The law of the simplicity of beginnings is an absolute one for everything of the nature of an institution, for every gradually developed product of the exercise of human faculties. That an original speech-sign should be of double character, one part of it meaning this and another part that, or one part radical and the other formative, is as inconceivable as that the first instruments should have had handles, or the first shelters a front room and a back one. But this theoretical reason finds all the historical support which it needs in the fact that, through all the observable periods of language-history we see formative elements coming from words originally independent, and not from anything else. Thus, in the example just taken, the -li- of costliness is a suffix of so recent growth that its whole history is distinctly traceable; it is simply our adjective like, worn down in both form and meaning to a subordinate value in combination with certain words to which it was appended, and then added freely as a suffix to any word from which it was desired to make a derivative adjective - or, later but more often, a derivative adverb. The ness is much older (though only Germanic), and its history obscurer; it contains, in fact, two parts, neither of them of demonstrable origin; but there are equivalent later suffixes, as ship in hardship and dom in wisdom, whose derivation from independent words (shape, doom) is beyond question. The un- of uncostliness is still more ancient (being Indo-European), and its probably pronominal origin hardly available as an illustration; but the comparatively modern prefix be-, of become, belie, &c., comes from the independent preposition by, by the same process as -ly or -li- from like. And the con which has contributed its part to the making of the quasi-root cost is also in origin identical with the Latin preposition cum, " with." By all the known facts of later language-growth we are driven to the opinion that every formative element goes back to some previously existing independent word; and hence that in analysing our present words we are retracing the steps of an earlier synthesis, or following up the history of our formed words toward the unformed roots out of which they have grown. The doctrine of the historical growth of language-structure leads by a logical necessity to that of a root-stage in the history of all language; the only means of avoiding the latter is the assumption of a miraculous element in the former.
Of what phonetic form were the earliest traditional speechsigns is, so far as essentials are concerned, to be inferred with Earliest reasonable certainty. They were doubtless articu- Phonetic late: that is to say, composed of alternating conso Forms. nant and vowel sounds, like our present speech; and they probably contained a part of the same sounds which we now use. All human language is of this character; there are no sounds in any tongue which are not learned and reproduced as easily by children of one race as of another; all dialects admit a like phonetic analysis, and are representable by alphabetic signs; and the leading sounds, consonant and vowel, are even practically the same in all; though every dialect has its own (for the most part, readily definable and imitable) niceties of their pronunciation, while certain sounds are rare, or even met with only in a single group of languages or in a single language. Articulate sounds are such as are capable of being combined with others into that succession of distinct yet connectable syllables which is the characteristic of human speech-utterance. The name "articulate" belongs to this utterance, as distinguished from inarticulate human sounds and cries and from the sounds made by the lower animals. The word itself is Latin, by translation from the Greek, and, though very widely misunderstood, and even deliberately misapplied in some languages to designate all sound, of whatever kind, uttered by any living creature, is a most happily chosen and truly descriptive term. It signifies "jointed," or broken up into successive parts, like a limb or stem; the joints are the syllables; and the syllabic structure is mainly effected by the alternation of closer or consonant sounds with opener or vowel sounds. The simplest syllabic combination (as the facts of language show) is that of a single consonant with a following vowel; and there are languages even now existing which reject any other. Hence there is much plausibility in the view that the first speech-signs will have had this phonetic form and been monosyllabic, or dissyllabic only by repetition (reduplication) of one syllable, such as the speech of very young children shows to have a peculiar ease and naturalness. The point, however, is one of only secondary importance, and may be left to the further progress of phonetic study to settle, if it can; the root-theory, at any rate, is not bound to any definite form or extent of root, but only denies that there can have been any grammatical structure in language except by development in connexion with experience in the use of language. What particular sounds, and how many, made up the first spoken alphabet is also a matter of conjecture merely; they are likely to have been the closest consonants and the openest vowels, medial utterances being of later development.
As regards their significant value, the first language-signs must have denoted those physical acts and qualities which are directly apprehensible by the senses; both because Character these alone are directly signifiable, and because it of Early was only they that untrained human beings had Speech. the power to deal with or the occasion to use. Such signs would then be applied to more intellectual uses as fast as there was occasion for it. The whole history of language, down to our own day, is full of examples of the reduction of physical terms and phrases to the expression of non-physical conceptions and relations; we can hardly write a line without giving illustrations of this kind of linguistic growth. So pervading is it, that we never regard ourselves as having read the history of any intellectual or moral term till we have traced it back to a physical origin. And we are still all the time drawing figurative comparisons between material and moral things and processes, and calling the latter by the names of the former. There has never been any difficulty in providing for new knowledge and more refined thought by putting to new uses the earlier and grosser materials of speech.
As a matter of course, whatever we now signify by our simple expressions for simple acts, wants, and the like, was intended to be signified through the first speech-signs by the users of them. But to us, with our elaborated apparatus of speech, the sentence, composed of subject and predicate, with a verb or special predicative word to signify the predication, is established as the norm of expression, and we regard everything else as an abbreviated sentence, or as involving a virtual sentence. With a view to this we must have "parts of speech": that is, words held apart in office from one another, each usable for such and such a purpose and no other, and answering a due variety of purposes, so that when they are combined they fit together, as parts composing a whole, and the desired meaning is made clear. Inflexions, too, lend their aid; or else auxiliary words of various kinds answering the same purpose - namely, of determining the relations of the members of the sentence. But all our success in understanding the earliest stages of language depends upon our power to conceive a state of things where none of these distinctions were established, where one speech-sign was like another, calling up a conception in its indefinite entirety, and leaving the circumstances of the case to limit its application.
Such a language is far below ours in explicitness; but it would suffice for a great deal of successful communication; indeed (as will be shown farther on) there are many languages even now in existence which are little better off. So a look of approval or disgust, a gesture of beckoning or repulsion, a grunt of assent or inquiry, is as significant as a sentence, means a sentence, is translatable into a sentence, and hence may even in a certain way be called a sentence; and in the same way, but only so, the original roots of language may be said to have been sentences. In point of fact, between the holophrastic gesture or uttered sign and the sentence which we can now substitute for it - for example between the sign of beckoning and the equivalent sentence, "I want you to come here" - lies the whole history of development of inflective speech.
What has been this history of development, how the first scanty and formless signs have been changed into the immense variety and fullness of existing speech, it is of course went of impossible to point out in detail, or by demonstration of facts, because nearly the whole process is hidden in the darkness of an impenetrable past. The only way to cast any light upon it is by careful, induction from the change and growth which are seen to have been going on in the recent periods for which we have recorded evidence, or which are going on at the present time. Of some groups of related languages we can read the life for three or four thousand years back, and by comparison can infer it much farther; and the knowledge thus won is what we have to apply to the explanation of periods and languages otherwise unknown. Nothing has a right to be admitted as a factor in language-growth of which the action is not demonstrable in recorded language. Our own family of languages is the one of whose development most is known, by observation and well-warranted inference; and it may be well here to sketch the most important features of its history, by way of general illustration.
Apparently the earliest class-distinction traceable in IndoEuropean speech is that of pronominal roots, or signs of position, from the more general mass of roots. It is not a formal distinction, marked by a structural difference, but, so far as can be seen, is founded only on the assignment by usage of certain elements to certain offices. Formal distinction began with combination, the addition of one element to another, their fusion into a single word, and the reduction of the one part to a subordinate value, as sign of a certain modification of meaning of the other. Thus, doubtless by endings of pronominal origin, were made the first verbforms, or words used only when predication was intended (since that is all that makes a verb), conveying at first a distinction of persons only, then of persons and numbers, while the further distinctions of tense and mode were by degrees added. To the nouns, which became nouns by the setting up of the separate and special class of verbs, were added in like manner distinctions of case, of number, and of gender. With the separation of noun and verb, and the establishment of their respective inflexion, the creative work of language-making is virtually done; the rest is a matter of differentiation of uses. For the noun (noun substantive) and the adjective (noun adjective) become two parts of speech only by a gradually deepened separation of use; there is no original or formal distinction between them; the pronouns as a rule merely add the noun-inflexion to a special set of stems; adverbs are a part of the same formation as nouncases; prepositions are adverbs with a specialized construction, of secondary growth; conjunctions are the products of a like specialization; articles, where found at all, are merely weakened demonstratives and numerals.
To the process of form-making, as exhibited in this history, belong two parts: the one external, consisting in the addition of one existing element of speech to another and their combination into a single word; the other internal, consisting in the adaptation of the compound to its special use and involving the subordination of one element to the other. Both parts appear also abundantly in other departments of language-change, and throughout the whole history of our languages; nothing has to be assumed for the earliest formations which is not plainly illustrated in the latest. For example, the last important addition to the formative apparatus of English is the common adverb-making suffix -ly, coming, as already pointed out, from the independent adjective like. There was nothing at first to distinguish a compound like godly (godlike) from one like storm-tossed, save that the former was more adaptable than the other to wider uses; resemblance is an idea easily generalized into appurtenance and the like, and the conversion of godlike to godly is a simple result of the processes of phonetic change described farther on. The extension of the same element to combination with adjectives instead of nouns, and its conversion to adverbmaking value, is a much more striking case of adaptation, and is nearly limited to English among the Germanic languages that have turned like into a suffix. A similar striking case of combination and adaptation is seen in the Romanic adverb-making suffix mente or ment, coming from the Latin ablative mente, " with mind." So, to make a Romanic future like donnerai, " I shall give," there was needed in the first place the preexisting elements, donner, " to give," and ai, " I have," and their combination; but this is only a part; the other indispensable part is the gradual adaptation of a phrase meaning "I have [something before me] for giving" to the expression of simple futurity, donabo. So far as the adaptation is concerned the case is quite parallel to that of j'ai donne, " I have given," &c. (equivalent phrases or combinations are found in many languages), where the expression of possession of something that is acted on has been in like manner modified into the expression of past action. Parallel in both combination and adaptation is the past tense loved, according to a widely accepted theory, from love-did, while we have again the same adaptation without combination in the equivalent phrase did love. That these are examples of the process by which the whole inflective structure of Ind.-European language was built up admits of no reasonable question. Our belief that it is so rests upon the solid foundation that we can demonstrate no other process, and that this one is sufficient. It is true that we can prove such an origin for our formative elements in only a small minority of instances; but this is just what was to be expected, considering what we know of the disguising processes of language-growth. No one would guess in the mere y of ably (for able-ly) the presence of the adjective like, any more than in the altered final of sent and the shortened vowel of led the effect of a did once added to send and lead. The true history of these forms can be shown, because there happen to be other facts left in existence to show it; where such facts are not within reach we are left to infer by analogy from the known to the unknown. The validity of our inference can only be shaken by showing that there are forms incapable of having been made in this way, or that there are and have been other ways of making forms. Of the former there is evidently but small chance; if a noun-form meaning, "with mind" can become the means of conversion of all the adjectives of a language into adverbs, and a verb meaning "have" (and, yet earlier, "seize") of signifying both future and past time, there is obviously nothing that is impossible of attainment by such means. As regards the latter, no one appears to have even attempted to demonstrate the genesis of formative elements in any other way during the historical periods of language; it is simply assumed that the early methods of language-making will have been something different from and superior in spontaneity and fruitfulness to the later ones; that certain forms, or forms at certain periods, were made out-and-out, as forms; that signs of formal distinction somehow exuded from roots and stems; that original words were many-membered, and that a formative value settled in some member of them - and the like. Such doctrines are purely fanciful, and so opposed to the teachings both of observation and of sound theory that the epithet absurd is hardly too strong to apply to them. If the later races, of developed intelligence, and trained in the methods of a fuller expression, can only win a new form by a long and gradual process of combination and adaptation, why should the earlier and comparatively untrained generations have been able to do any better ? The advantage ought to be, if anywhere, on our side. The progress of language in every department, accompanying and representing the advance of the race, on the whole, in the art of speaking as in other arts, is from the grosser to the more refined, from the physical to the moral and intellectual, from the material to the formal. The conversion of compounds into forms, by the reduction of one of their elements to formative value, is simply a part of the general process which also creates auxiliaries and form-words and connectives, all the vocabulary of mind, and all the figurative phraseology that gives life and vigour to our speech. If a copula, expressive of the grammatical relation of predication, could be won only by attenuation of the meaning of verbs signifying "grow," "breathe," "stand," and the like; if our auxiliaries of tense and mode all go traceably back to words of physical meaning (as have to "seize," may to "be great or strong," shall to "be under penalty," and so on); if of comes from the comparatively physical off, and for from "before, forward"; if relative pronouns are specialized demonstratives and interrogatives; if right means etymologically "straight," and wrong means "twisted"; if spirit is "blowing," and intellect a "picking out among," and understanding a "getting beneath," and development an "unfolding"; if an event takes place or comes to pass, and then drops out of mind and is forgotten (oppcsite of gotten) - then it is of no avail to object to the grossness of any of the processes by which, in earlier language or in l&ter, the expression of formal relations is won. The mental sense of the relation expressed is entirely superior to and independent of the means of its expression. He who, to express the plural of man, says what is equivalent to man-man or heap-man (devices which are met with in not a few languages) has just as good a sense of plurality as he who says men or homines; that sense is no more degraded in him by the coarseness of the phrase he uses to signify it than is our own sense of eventuality and of pastness by the undisguised coarseness of take place and have been. In short, it is to be laid down with the utmost distinctness and confidence, as a law of language-growth, that there is nothing formal anywhere in language which was not once material; that the formal is made out of the material, by processes which began in the earliest history of language and are still in action.
We have dropped here the restriction to our own or IndoEuropean language with which we began, because it is evident Laws of that what is true of this family of speech, one of the Change most highly organized that exist, may also be true of Growth. the rest - must be true of them, unless some valid evidence be found to the contrary. The unity of human nature makes human speech alike in the character of its beginnings and in the general features of its after-history. Everywhere among men a certain store of expression, body of traditional signs of thought, being given, as used by a certain community, it is capable of increase on certain accordant lines, and only on them. In some languages, and under peculiar circumstances, borrowing is a great means of increase; but it is the most external and least organically important of all. Out-and-out invention (which, so far as we can see, must be of the kind called by us onomatopoetic) is found to play only a very insignificant part in the historical periods of language - clearly because there are other and easier modes of gaining new expression for what needs to be expressed. In the course of phonetic change a word sometimes varies into two (or more) forms, and makes so many words, which are differently turned to account. Everything beyond this must be the product of combination; there is no other way, so far as concerns the externals of speech. Then, partly as accompanying and aiding this external growth, partly as separate from and supplementing it, there is in all language an internal growth, making no appearance in the audible part of speech, consisting in multiplication of meanings, 'their modification in the way of precision or comprehension or correctness, the restriction of words to certain uses, and so on. Along with these, too, a constant change of phonetic form constitutes an inseparable part of the life of language. Speech is no more stable with respect to the sounds of which it is composed than with respect to its grammatical forms, its vocabulary, or the body of conceptions signified by it. Even nearly related languages differ as much in their spoken alphabets and the combinations of sounds they admit, and in their uttered forms of words historically the same, as in any other part; and the same is true of local dialects and of class dialects within the same community. Phonetic change has nothing whatever to do with change of meaning; the two are the product of wholly independent tendencies. Sometimes, indeed, they chance to coincide, as in the distinction of minute " small," and minute " moment"; but it is only by chance, as the spoken accordance of second in its two meanings ("next" and "sixtieth of a minute") shows; words that maintain their identity of value most obstinately, like the numerals, are liable to vary indefinitely in form (so four, fidvor, quatuor, TEaaap -ES, &c., from an original kwetwor-; five, quinque, coic, &c., from penkwe - while, on the other hand, two and three show as striking an accordance of form as of meaning through all the same languages); what is far the most common is that the word becomes very unlike its former self in both respects, like priest from the Greek 7rpca/v ' epos (presbyter), literally "older man." Human convenience is, to be sure, the governing motive in both changes; but it is convenience of two different kinds: the one mental, depending on the fact (pointed out above) that a name when once applied belongs to the thing to which it is applied, to the disregard of its etymological connexions, does not need to be changed when the thing changes, and is ready for new application to anything that can be brought into one class with the latter; and the other physical, depending on the organs of speech and their successive movements, by which the sounds that make up the word are produced. Phonetic convenience is economy of effort on the part of those organs; and to no other law than that of economy of utterance have any of the phenomena of phonetic change been found traceable (though it is also to be noted that some phenomena have not hitherto been successfully brought under it, and that the way of effecting this is still unclear). "Euphony," which used to be appealed to as explanation, is a false principle, except so far as the term may be made an idealized synonym of economy. The ear finds that agreeable which the organs of utterance find facile. Economy in utterance is no isolated tendency; it is the same that plays its part in all other kinds of human action, and in language appears equally in the abbreviation of the sentence by leaving out parts that can be spared without loss of intelligibility. It is an insidious tendency, always lying in wait, like gravitation, to pull down what is not sufficiently held up - the holding-up force in language being the faithfulness of tradition, or accurate reproduction by the learner and user of the signs which he has acquired. No generation of men has any intention to speak otherwise than as its predecessor has spoken, or any consciousness that it is doing so; and yet, from generation to generation, words are shortened, sounds are assimilated to one another, and one element passes out of use while a new one is introduced. Abbreviation and assimilation are the most conspicuous departments of phonetic change, and those in which the nature of the governing tendency is most plainly seen. Taken by itself, one sound is as easy as another to the person who has accustomed himself to it from childhood; and those which the young child most easily acquires are not those which in the history of speech are least liable to alteration; it is especially in the combinations and transitions of rapid speaking that the tongue, as it were, finds out for itself easier ways of performing its task, by dropping and slurring and adapting. To trace out the infinitely varied items of this change, to co-ordinate and compare them and discover their reasons, constitutes a special department of language-study, which is treated under the head of Phonetics. It only needs to be pointed out here that phonetic change plays a necessary part in the structural development of language, by integrating compound words through fusion and loss of identity of their component parts, and, what is of yet more importance, by converting them into forms, through disguise of identity of one of the parts and its phonetic subordination to the other part. It is this that turns, for example, the compound god-like into the derivative godly, the compound love-did into the verbal form loved. And yet one further result sometimes follows: an internal change is wrought by phonetic influence in the body of a word, which change then may in the further history of the word be left as the sole means of distinction between one form and another. It is thus that, in the most recent period, the distinction of led from lead and met from meet and so on has been made; the added auxiliary which originally made these preterites induced a shortening of the root-vowel, and this was left behind when the auxiliary disappeared by the usual process of abbreviation. It is in the same way that the distinctions of men from man, of were from was, of set from sit, with all their analogues, were brought about: by a modification of vowel-sound (Ger. Umlaut) occasioned by the presence in the following syllable of an i-vowel, which in the older stages of the language is still to be seen there. And the distinctions of sing, sang, sung and song, of bind, bound, band and bond, are certainly of the same kind, though they go back so far in the history of our family of languages that their beginnings are not yet clearly demonstrable; they were in their origin phonetic accidents, inorganic, mere accompaniments and results of external combinations which bore the office of distinction of meaning and were sufficient to it; in some of our languages they have been disregarded and effaced, in others they have risen to prominent importance. To regard these internal changes as primary and organic is parallel with assuming the primariness of the formative apparatus of language in general; like this, it ignores the positive evidence we have of the secondary production of such differences; they are, like everything else in linguistic structure, the outcome of combination and adaptation. Borrowing, or the taking-in of material out of another language, has been more than once referred to above as sometimes an important element in language-history, though less or M p owing d e e -reachin and organic than the rest. There is or Mixing. g g nothing anomalous about borrowing; it is rather in essential accordance with the whole process of languageacquisition. All our names were adopted by us because they were already in use by others; and a community is in the same way capable of taking a new name from a community with which it comes in contact as an individual from individuals. Not that it seeks or admits in this way new names for old things; but it accepts new things along with the names that seem to belong to them. Hence any degree of intercourse between one community and another, leading to exchange of products or of knowledge, is sure to lead also to some borrowing of names; and there is hardly a language in the world, except of races occupying peculiarly isolated positions, that does not contain a certain amount of foreign material thus won, even as our English has elements in its vocabulary from half the other tongues in the world. The scale of borrowing is greatly increased when one people becomes the pupil of another in respect of its civilization: hence the abundant classical elements in all the European tongues, even the non-Romanic; hence the Arabic material in Persian and Turkish and Malay; hence the Chinese in Japanese and Corean; and, as a further result, even dead languages, like the Greek and Latin and the Sanskrit, become stores to be drawn upon in that learned and conscious quest of new expression which in the school-stage of culture supplements or even in a measure replaces the unconscious growth of natural speech. So, in mixture of communities, which is a highly-intensified form of contact and intercourse, there follows such mixture of speech as the conditions of the case determine; yet not a mixture on equal terms, through all the departments of vocabulary and grammar; the resulting speech (just as when two individuals learn to speak alike) is essentially that of the one constituent of the new community, with more or less material borrowed from that of the other. What is most easily taken in out of another language is the names of concrete things; every degree of removal from this involves additional difficulty - names of abstract things, epithets, verbs, connectives, forms. Indeed, the borrowing of forms in the highest sense, or forms of inflexion, is wellnigh or quite impossible; no example of it has been demonstrated in any of the historical periods of language, though it is some times adventurously assumed as a part of prehistoric growth. How nearly it may be approached is instanced by the presence in English of such learned plurals as phenomena and strata. This extreme resistance to mixture in the department of inflexion is the ground on which some deny the possibility of mixture in language, and hence the existence of such a thing as a mixed language. The difference is mainly a verbal one; but it would seem about as reasonable to deny that a region is inundated so long as the tops of its highest mountains are above water. According to the simple and natural meaning of the term, nearly all languages are mixed, in varying degree and within varying limits, which the circumstances of each case must explain.
These are the leading processes of change seen at work in all present speech and in all known past speech, and hence to be regarded as having worked through the whole history of speech. By their operation every existing tongue has been developed out of its rudimentary radical condition to that in which we now see it. The variety of existing languages is well-nigh infinite, not only in their material but in their degree of development and the kind of resulting structure. Just as the earlier stages in the history of the use of tools are exemplified even at the present day by races which have never advanced beyond them, so is it in regard to language also - and, of course, in the latter case as in the former, this state of things strengthens and establishes the theory of a gradual development. There is not an element of linguistic structure possessed by some languages which is not wanting in formal structure, and which cannot be shown ever to have advanced out of the radical stage. The most noted example of such a rudimentary tongue is the Chinese, which in its present condition lacks all formal distinction of the parts of speech, all inflexion, all derivation; each of its words (all of them monosyllables) is an integral sign, not divisible into parts of separate significance; and each in general is usable wherever the radical idea is wanted, with the value of one part of speech or another, as determined by the connexion in which it stands; a condition parallel with that in which Indo-European speech may be regarded as existing prior to the beginnings of its career of formal development briefly sketched above. And there are other tongues, related and unrelated to Chinese, of which the same description, or one nearly like it, might be given. To call such languages radical is by no means to maintain that they exhibit the primal roots of human speech, unchanged or only phonetically changed, or that they have known nothing of the combination of element with element. Of some of them the roots are in greater or less part dissyllabic; and we do not yet know that all dissyllabism, and even that all complexity of syllable beyond a single consonant with following vowel, is not the result of combination or reduplication. But all combination is not form-making; it needs a whole class of combinations, with a recognized common element in them producing a recognized common modification of meaning, to make a form. The same elements which (in Latin, and even to some extent in English also) are of formal value in con-stant and pre-diet lack that character in cost and preach; the same like which makes adverbs in tru-ly and right-ly is present without any such value in such and which (from so-like and who-like); cost and preach, and such and which, are as purely radical in English as other words of which we do not happen to be able to demonstrate the composite character. And so a Chinese monosyllable or an Egyptian or Polynesian dissyllable is radical, unless there can be demonstrated in some part of it a formative value; and a language wholly composed of such words is a root-language. Recent investigation goes to show that Chinese had at some period of its history a formal development, since extinguished by the same processes of phonetic decay which in English have wiped out so many signs of a formal character and brought back so considerable a part of the vocabulary to monosyllabism. In languages thus constituted the only possible external alteration is that phonetic change to which all human speech, from the others; and there are even tongues which have no very beginning of its traditional life, is liable; the only growth is internal, by that multiplication and adaptation and improvement of meanings which is equally an inseparable part of all language-history. This may include the reduction of certain elements to the value of auxiliaries, particles, form-words, such as play an important part in analytical tongues like English, and are perhaps also instanced in prehistoric Indo-European speech by the class of pronominal roots. Phrases take the place of compounds and of inflexions, and the same element may have an auxiliary value in certain connexions while retaining its full force in others, like, for instance, our own have. It is not easy to define the distinction between such phrase-collocations and the beginnings of agglutination; yet the distinction itself is in general clearly enough to be drawn (like that in French between donnerai and ai donne) when the whole habit of the language is well understood.
Such languages, constituting the small minority of human tongues, are wont to be called "isolating," i.e. using each Agglutl= element by itself, in its integral form. All besides are "agglutinative," or more or less compounded into words containing a formal part, an indicator of class-value. Here the differences, in kind and degree, are very great; the variety ranges from a scantiness hardly superior to Chinese isolation up to an intricacy compared with which Indo-European structure is hardly fuller than Chinese. Some brief characterization of the various families of language in this respect will be given farther on, in connexion with their classification. The attempt is also made to classify the great mass of agglutinating tongues under different heads: those are ranked as simply "agglutinative" in which there is a general conservation of the separate identity of root or stem on the one hand, and of formative element, suffix or prefix, on the other; while the name "inflective," used in a higher and pregnant sense, is given to those that admit a superior fusion and integration of the two parts, to the disguise and loss of separate identity, and, yet more, with the development of an internal change as auxiliary to or as substitute for the original agglutination. But there is no term in linguistic science so uncertain of meaning, so arbitrary of application, so dependent on the idiosyncrasy of its user, as the term "inflective." Any language ought to have the right to be called inflective that has inflexion: that is, that not merely distinguishes parts of speech and roots and stems formally from one another, but also conjugates its verbs and declines its nouns; and the name is sometimes so used. If, again, it be strictly limited to signify the possession of inner flexion of roots and stems (as if simply agglutinated forms could be called "exflective"), it marks only a difference of degree of agglutination, and should be carefully used as so doing. As describing the fundamental and predominant character of language-structure, it belongs to only one family of languages, the Semitic, where most of the work of grammatical distinction is done by internal changes of vowel, the origin of which thus far eludes all attempts at explanation. By perhaps the majority of students of language it is, as a generally descriptive title, restricted to that family and one other, the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic; but such a classification is not to be approved, for, in respect to this characteristic, Indo-European speech ranks not with Semitic but with the great body of agglutinative tongues. To few of these can the name be altogether denied, since there is hardly a body of related dialects in existence that does not exhibit some items of "inflective" structure; the Aryan is only the one among them that has most to show. Outside the Semitic, at any rate, one should not speak of inflective and non-inflective languages, but only of languages more inflective and less inflective.
To account for the great and striking differences of structure among human languages is beyond the power of the linguistic student, and will doubtless always continue so. We Value of are not likely to be able even to demonstrate a corre Structure, y lation of capacities, saying that a race which has done this and that in other departments of human activity might have been expected to form such and such a language.
Every tongue represents the general outcome of the capacity of a race as exerted in this particular direction, under the influence of historical circumstances which we can have no hope of tracing. There are striking apparent anomalies to be noted. The Chinese and the Egyptians have shown themselves to be among the most gifted races the earth has known; but the Chinese tongue is of unsurpassed jejuneness, and the Egyptian, in point of structure, little better, while among the wild tribes of Africa and America we find tongues of every grade, up to a high one, or to the highest. This shows clearly enough that mental power is not measured by language-structure. But any other linguistic test would prove equally insufficient. On the whole, the value and rank of a language are determined by what its users have made it do. The reflex action of its speech on the mind and culture of a people is a theme of high interest, but of extreme difficulty, and apt to lead its investigators away into empty declamation; taking everything together, its amount, as is shown by the instances already referred to, is but small. The question is simply one of the facilitation of work by the use of one set of tools rather than another; and a poor tool in skilful hands can do vastly better work than the best tool in unskilful hands - even as the ancient Egyptians, without steel or steam, turned out products which, both for colossal grandeur and for exquisite finish, are the despair of modern engineers and artists. In such a history of development as that of human speech a fortunate turn may lead to results of unforeseen value; the earlier steps determine the later in a degree quite beyond their own intrinsic importance. Everything in language depends upon habit and analogy; and the formation of habit is a slow process, while the habit once formed exercises a constraining as well as a guiding influence. Hence the persistency of language-structure: when a certain sum and kind of expression is produced, and made to answer the purposes of expression, it remains the same by inertia; a shift of direction becomes of extreme difficulty. No other reason can at present be given why in historical time there has been no marked development out of one grade of structure into another; but the fact no more shakes the linguistic scholar's belief in the growth of structure than the absence of new animal species worked out under his eyes shakes the confidence of the believer in animal development. The modifying causes and their modes of action are clearly seen, and there is no limit to the results of their action except what is imposed by circumstances.
It is in vain to attempt to use dates in language-history, to say when this or that step in development was taken, and how long a period it cost, especially now that the changed views as to the antiquity of man are making it probable that only a small part of the whole history is brought within the reach even of our deductions from the most ancient unity of recorded dialects. At any rate, for aught that we Origin of know or have reason to believe, all existing dialects are equally old; every one alike has the whole immeasurable past of language-life behind it, has reached its present condition by advance along its own line of growth and change from the first beginnings of human expression. Many of these separate lines we clearly see to converge and unite, as we follow them back into the past; but whether they all ultimately converge to one point is a question quite beyond our power to answer. If in this immensity of time many languages have won so little, if everywhere languagegrowth has been so slow, then we can only differ as to whether it is reasonably certain, or probable, or only possible, that there should have been a considerable first period of human existence without traditional speech, and a yet more considerable one before the fixation of so much as should leave abiding traces in its descendants, and that meanwhile the race should have multiplied and scattered into independent communities. And the mere possibility is enough to exclude all dogmatic assertion of the unity of origin of human speech, even assuming unity of origin of the human race. For to prove that identity by the still existing facts of language is utterly out of the question; the metamorphosing effect of constant change has been too great to allow it. In point of fact, taking languages as they now exist, only those have been shown related which possess a common structure, or have together grown out of the more primitive radical stage, since structure proves itself a more constant and reliable evidence than material. And this is likely ever to be the case; at any rate, to trace all the world's languages so far back toward their beginnings as to find in them evidences of identity is beyond the wildest hope. We must be content with demonstrating for those beginnings a unity of kind as alike a body of formless roots. But, on the other hand, since this unity is really demonstrated, since all structure is the result of growth, and no degree of difference of structure, any more than of difference of material, refuses explanation as the result of discordant growth from identical beginnings, it is equally inadmissible to claim that the diversities of language prove it to have had different beginnings. That is to say, the question of the unity of speech, and yet more that of the unity of the race, is beyond the reach of the student of language; the best view he can attain is the hypothetical one, that, if the race is one, the beginnings of speech were perhaps one - but probably not, even then. This negative conclusion is so clearly established as to leave no excuse for the still oftrepeated attempts to press language into service on either side of the controversy respecting human unity of race.
That all making and changing of language is by the act of its speakers is too obvious to call for discussion. No other force capable of acting and of producing effects is Unconscious Growth either demonstrable or conceivable as concerned through in the work. The doctrine that language is an Individuals. organism, growing by its own inherent powers, exempt from the interference of those who use it, is simply an indefensible paradox. Every word that is uttered is so by an act of human will, at first in imitation of others, then more and more by a formed and controlling habit; it is accessible to no change except by influences working in the speaker's mind and leading him to make it otherwise. Not that he is aware of this, or directs his action knowingly to that end. The whole process is unconscious. If any implication of reflective or intended action can be shown to inhere in any doctrine of linguistic science, it vitiates that doctrine. The attitude of the ordinary speaker towards his language is that of unreasoning acceptance; it seems to him that his names for things are their real names, and all others unintelligent nicknames; he thinks himself to possess his speech by the same tenure as his sight or hearing; it is "natural" to him (or, if he reasons about it, he attributes it to a divine origin, as races beginning to philosophize are wont to ascribe their various social institutions to their gods); he knows nothing of its structure and relations; it never occurs to him to find fault with it, or to deem it insufficient and add to or change it; he is wholly unaware that it does change. He simply satisfies his social needs of communication by means of it; and if he has anything to express that is different from what has been expressed before, he takes the shortest way to a provision for the need; while any relaxation of the energy of utterance tends to a variation in the uttered combinations; and thus changes come by his act, though without his knowledge. His sole object is, on the basis of what language he has, to make known his thought in the most convenient way to his fellow; everything else follows with and from that. Human nature and circumstances being what they are, what follows actually is, as already shown, incessant growth and change. For it we have not to seek special disturbing causes in the history of the speakers, although such may come in to heighten and quicken the change; we know that even in a small community, on a narrow islet, cut off from all intercourse with other communities, the speech would grow different - as certainly, if not as rapidly, as anywhere in the world - and only by the action of its speakers: not that the speakers of a language act in unison and simultaneously to produce a given change. This must begin in an individual, or more or less accordantly in a limited number of individuals, and spread from such example through the community. Initiation by one or a few, acceptance and adoption by the rest - such is the necessary method of all linguistic change, and to be read as plainly in the facts of change now going on among ourselves as in those of former language. The doctrine of the inaccessibility of language to other action than that of its speakers does not imply a power in the individual speaker to create or alter anything in the common speech, any more than it implies his desire to do so. What he suggests by his example must be approved by the imitation of his fellows, in order to become language. The common speech is the common property, and no one person has any more power over it than another. If there are, for example, a thousand speakers of a certain dialect, each one wields in general a thousandth part of the force required to change it - with just so much more as may belong to his excess of influence over his fellows, due to recognized superiority of any kind on his part. His action is limited only by their assent; but this is in effect a very narrow limitation, ensuring the adoption of nothing that is not in near accordance with the already existing; though it is also to be noted that he is as little apt to strike off into startling change as they to allow it; since the governing power of already formed habits of speech is as strong in him as in them. That change to which the existing habits naturally lead is easy to bring about; any other is practically impossible. It is this tendency on the part of the collective speakers of a language to approve or reject a proposed change according to its conformity with their already subsisting usages that we are accustomed to call by the fanciful name "the genius of a language." On the relation of the part played in language-change by the individual to that by the community, in combination with the inevitableness of change, rests the explanation of the dialectic variation of language. If language were stable there would of course be no divarication; but since it is always varying, and by items of difference that proceed from individuals and become general by diffusion, there can be uniformity of change only so far as diffusion goes or as the influences of communication extend. Within the limits of a single community, small or large, whatever change arises spreads gradually to all, and so becomes part of the general speech; but let that community become divided into two (or more) parts, and then the changes arising in either part do not spread to the other, and there begins to appear a difference in linguistic usage between them. It is at first slight, even to insignificance; not greater than exists between the dialects of different localities or ranks or occupations in the same community, without detriment to the general unity of speech. This unity, namely, rests solely on mutual intelligibility, and is compatible with no small amount of individual and class difference, in vocabulary, in grammar and in pronunciation; indeed, in the strictest sense, each individual has a dialect of his own, different from that of every other, even as he has a handwriting, a countenance, a character of his own. And every item of change, as it takes place, must have its season of existence as a local or class or trade peculiarity, before it gains universal currency; some of them linger long in that condition, or never emerge from it. All these differences in the speech of different sub-communities within the same community are essentially dialectic; they differ not in kind, but only in degree, from those which separate the best-marked dialects; they are kept down by general communication within the limit of general mutual intelligibility. Where that restraining influence ceases the limit is gradually but surely overpassed, and real dialects are the result. From what we know of the life of language we can say positively that continued uniformity of speech without continued community is not practicable. If it were possible to divide artificially, by an impassable chasm or wall, a people one for ages, and continuing to occupy the same seats, the language of the divided parts would at once begin to be dialectically different; and after sufficient time had elapsed each would have become unintelligible to the other. That is to say, whenever a community of uniform speech breaks up, its speech breaks up also; nor do we know of any other cause of dialectic diversity.
In applying this explanation of dialectic growth we have to allow for modifying circumstances of various nature, which alter not indeed the fact but the rate and kind of divarication. Some languages grow and change much more rapidly than others, with a corresponding effect upon divarication, since this is but a result of discordant growth. Usually, when there is division of a community, the parts get into different external circumstances, come in contact or mingle with different neighbouring communities, and the like; and this quickens and increases their divergence of speech. But the modifying factor of by far the highest importance here, as elsewhere in the history of language, is civilization. Civilization in its higher forms so multiplies the forces of communication as to render it possible that the widely-divided parts of one people, living in circumstances and under institutions of very different character, should yet maintain a substantial oneness of speech; of this there is no more striking example than the two great divisions of the English-speaking people on opposite sides of the Atlantic. On the other hand, a savage people cannot spread even a little without dialectic disunity; there are abundant examples to be met with now of mutually unintelligible speech between the smallest subdivisions of a race of obviously kindred tongue - as the different clusters of huts on the same coral islet. It is with linguistic unity precisely as it is with political unity, and for the same reasons. Before the attainment of civilization the human race, whether proceeding from one centre of dispersion or from several, was spread over the earth in a state of utter disintegration; bur every centre of civilization becomes also a centre of integration; its influences make for unity of speech as of all other social institutions. Since culture has become incontestably the dominant power in human history, the unifying forces in language have also been stronger than the diversifying; and with culture at its full height, and spread equally to every land and race, one universal language, like one universal community, is not an absurdity or theoretic impossibility, but only a Utopian or millennial dream.
Dialectic variation is thus simply a consequence of the movements of population. As the original human race or races, so the divisions or communities of later formation, from point to point through the whole life of man on the earth, have spread and separated, but jostled and interfered, have conquered and exterminated or mingled and absorbed; and their speech has been affected accordingly. Hence something of these movements can be read in the present condition of languages, as in a faithful though obscure record - more, doubtless, than can be read in any other way, however little it may be when viewed absolutely. Dialectic resemblances point inevitably back to an earlier unity of speech, and hence of community; from what we know of the history of speech, they are not to be accounted for in any other way. The longer the separation that has produced the diversity, the greater its degree. With every generation the amount of accordance decreases and that of discordance increases the common origin of the dialects is at first palpable, then evident on examination, then to be made out by skilled research, then perhaps no longer demonstrable at all; for there is plainly no limit to the possible divergence. So long, now, as any Speech. ev i dence of original unity is discoverable we call Speechh. the languages "related dialects," and combine them into a "family." The term "family" simply signifies a group of languages which the evidence thus far at command, as estimated by us, leads us to regard as descended by the ordinary processes of dialectic divarication from one original tongue. That it does not imply a denial of the possibility of wider relationship is obvious from what has been said above. That there is abundant room for error in the classification represented by it is also clear, since we may take purely accidental resemblances, or the results of borrowing, for evidence of common descent, or may overlook or wrongly estimate real evidences, which more study and improved method will bring 'to light.
Grouping into families is nothing more than the best classification attainable at a given stage in the progress of linguistic science; it is in no small part provisional only, and is always held liable to modification, even sweeping, by the results of further research. Of some families we can follow the history by external evidences a great way back into the past; their structure is so highly developed as to be traced with confidence everywhere; and their territory is well within our reach: such we regard with the highest degree of confidence, hardly allowing for more than the possibility that some other dialect, or group, or now-accepted family even, may sometime prove its right to be added on. But these are the rare exceptions; in the great majority of cases we have only the languages as they now exist, and in more or less scanty collections, of every degree of trustworthiness; and even their first grouping is tentative and incomplete, and involves an adjournment of deeper questions to the day of more. light. To complete and perfect the work of classification by relationship, or the establishment of families and their subdivisions, is the first object of the comparative study of languages. No other classification has a value in the least comparable with it; that by grade of structure is a mere recreation, leading to nothing; that by absolute worth is of no account whatever, at any rate in the present state of our knowledge. On genetic relationship, in the first place, is founded all investigation of the historical development of languages; since it is in the main the comparison of related dialects, even in the case of families having a long recorded history, and elsewhere only that, that gives us knowledge of their earlier condition and enables us to trace the lines of change. In the second place, and yet more obviously, with this classification is connected all that language has to teach as to the affinities of human races; whatever aid linguistic science renders to ethnology rests upon the proved relationships of human tongues.
That a classification of languages, to which we have now to proceed, is not equivalent to a classification of races, and why this is so, is evident enough from the principles which have been brought out by our whole discussion Recapitula- rou g y Lion. of languages, and which, in their bearing upon this particular point, may well be recapitulated here. No language is a race-characteristic, determined by the special endowments of a race; all languages are of the nature of institutions, parallel products of powers common to all mankind - the powers, namely, involved in the application of the fittest available means to securing the common end of communication. Hence they are indefinitely transferable, like other institutions - like religions, arts, forms of social organization, and so on - under the constraining force of circumstances. As an individual can learn any language, foreign as well as ancestral, if it be put in his way, so also a community, which in respect to such a matter is only an aggregate of individuals. Accordingly, as individuals of very various race are often found in one community, speaking together one tongue, and utterly ignorant of any other, so there are found great communities of various descent, speaking the dialects of one common tongue, which at some period historical circumstances have imposed upon them. The conspicuous example, which comes into every one's mind when this subject is discussed, is that of the Romanic countries of southern Europe, all using dialects of a language which, 2500 years ago, was itself the insignificant dialect of a small district in central Italy; but this is only the most important and striking of a whole class of similar facts. Such are the results of the contact and mixture of races and languages. If language-history were limited to growth and divarication, and race-history to spread and dispersion, it would be a comparatively easy task to trace both backward toward their origin; as the case is, the confusion is inextricable and hopeless. Mixture of race and mixture of speech are coincident and connected processes; the latter never takes place without something of the former; but the one is not at all a measure of the other, because circumstances may give to the speech of the one element of population a greatly disproportionate xxr. 14 preponderance. Thus, there is left in French only an insignificant trace of the Celtic dialects of the predominant raceconstituent of the French people; French is the speech of the Latin conquerors of Gaul, mixed perceptibly with that of its later Frankish conquerors; it was adopted in its integrity by the Norse conquerors of a part of the land, then brought into Britain by the same Norsemen in the course of their further conquests, this time only as an element of mixture, and thence carried with English speech to America, to be the language of a still further mixed community. Almost every possible phase of language-mixture is traceable in the history of the abundant words of Latin origin used by American negroes. What events of this character took place in prehistoric time we shall never be able to tell. If any one chooses to assert the possibility that even the completely isolated dialect of the little Basque community may have been derived by the Iberian race from an intrusive minority as small as that which made the Celts of Gaul speakers of Latin, we should have to admit it as a possibility - yet without detriment to the value of the dialect as indicating the isolated race-position of its speakers. In strictness, language is never a proof of race, either in an individual or in a community; it is only a probable indication of.race, in the absence of more authoritative opposing indications; it is one evidence, to be combined with others, in the approach towards a solution of the confessedly insoluble problems of human history. But we must notice, as a most important circumstance, that its degree of probability is greatest where its aid is most needed, in prehistoric periods and among uncultivated races; since it is mainly civilization that gives to language a propagative force disproportionate to the number of its speakers. On the whole, the contributions of language to ethnology are practically far greater in amount and more distinct than those derived from any other source.
The genetical classification of languages, then, is to be taken for just what it attempts to be, and no more: primarily as a Classifica- classification of languages only; but secondarily tion. as casting light, in varying manner and degree, on movements of community, which in their turn depend more or less upon movements of races. It is what the fates of men have left to represent the tongues of men - a record imperfect even to fragmentariness. Many a family once as important as some of those here set down has perhaps been wiped out of existence, or is left only in an inconspicuous fragment; one and another has perhaps been extended far beyond the limits of the race that shaped it - which, we can never tell to our satisfaction.
i. Indo-European (Indo-Germanic) Family. - To this family belongs incontestably the first place, and for many reasons: the historical position of the peoples speaking its dialects, who have now long been the leaders in the world's history; the abundance and variety and merit of its literatures, ancient and modern, which, especially the modern, are wholly unapproached by those of any other division of mankind; the period covered by its records; and, most of all, the great variety and richness of its development. These advantages make of it an illustration of the history of human speech with which no other family can bear a moment's comparison as to value, however important various other families may be in their bearing on one and another point or department of history, and however necessary the combination of the testimony of all to a solution of the problems involved in speech. These advantages have made IndoEuropean language the training-ground of comparative philology, and its study will always remain the leading branch of that science. Many matters of importance in its history have been brought up and used as illustrations in the preceding discussion; but as its constitution and ascertained development call for a fuller and more systematic exposition than they have found here, a special section is devoted to the subject (see Part II. below; also Indo-European Language).
2. Semitic Family. - This family also is beyond all question the second in importance, on account of the part which its peoples (Hebrews, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Syrians, Arabs, Abyssinians, &c.) have played in history, and of the rank of its literatures. For a special treatment of it see Semitic Languages. Some of the peculiarities of the language have been alluded to above; in the monotony and rigidity of its triliteral roots, and in the extended use which it makes of internal vowel-change ("inflexion" in the special sense of that term) for the purposes of grammatical distinction, it is more peculiar and unlike all the other known families of language than these are unlike one another. There are, and perhaps will always be, those to whom the peculiarities just mentioned will seem original; but if the views of language and its history taken above are in the main true, then that opinion is untenable; Semitic language must have grown into its present forms out of beginnings accordant in kind, if not identical in substance, with those of other families; and the only question remaining to be solved is, through what processes and under what governing tendencies Semitic speech should have arrived at its present state. And with this solution is most obviously and incontestably bound up that of the other interesting and much discussed question, whether the Semitic family can be shown to be related with other families, especially with the Indo-European. To some the possession in common of grammatical gender, or of the classification of objects in general as masculine and feminine, is of itself enough to prove such relationship; but, though the fact is a striking one, and of no small importance as an indication, this degree of value can by no means be attributed to it in the present state of our knowledge - any more than to any other single item of structure among the infinite variety of such, distributed among the multitude of human tongues. Many ethers compare the Semitic and Indo-European "roots" with one another, and believe themselves to find there numerous indications of identity of material and signification; but these also must pass for insufficient, until it shall prove possible by their aid to work out an acceptable theory of how Semitic structure should have grown out of such radical elements as underlie Indo-European structure, or out of the accordant initial products of a structural growth that afterwards diverged into two so discordant forms. To show that, both the material and the method have been hitherto wanting, and any confident decision is at least premature; but present probabilities are strongly against the solubility of the question. While many general considerations favour the ultimate unity of these two great civilized and civilizing white races of neighbouring homes, and no discordance of speech (as was shown above) can ever be made to prove their diversity of origin, it seems in a high degree unlikely that the evidence of speech will ever be made to prove them one.
3. Hamitic Family
The prominent importance of this family (see Hamitic Languages) is due to a single one of its members, the Egyptian. It occupies the north-eastern corner of Africa, with the border-lands of that continent stretching westward along the whole shore of the Mediterranean, and southward to beyond the equator. It falls into three principal divisions: (I) the ancient Egyptian, with its descendant, the more modern Coptic (itself now for some centuries extinct; see Egypt, Copts); (2) the Libyan or Berber languages of northern Africa; (3) the Ethiopic languages of eastern Africa. Its situation thus plainly suggests the theory of its intrusion from Asia, across the isthmus of Suez, and its gradual spread from that point; and the theory is strongly favoured by the physical character of the Hamites, and the historical position, especially of the Egyptians, so strikingly different from that of the African races in general. Linguistic evidences of the relationship of Hamite with Semite have also been sought, and by many believed to be found; but the maintenance of the two families in their separateness is an indication that those evidences have not yet been accepted as satisfactory; and such is indeed the case. The Egyptian is a language of extreme simplicity of structure, almost of no structure at all. Its radical words are partly monosyllabic, partly of more than one syllable, but not in the latter case any more than in the former showing traceable signs of extension by formative processes from simpler elements. It has no derivative apparatus by which noun-stems are made from roots; the root is the stem likewise; there is nothing that can be properly called either declension or conjugation; and the same pronominal particles or suffixes have now a subjective value, indicating use as a verb, and now a possessive, indicating use as a noun. There is no method known to linguistic science by which the relationship of such a tongue as this with the highly and peculiarly inflective Semitic can be shown, short of a thorough working out of the history of development of each family taken by itself, and a retracing in some measure of the steps by which each should have arrived at its present position from a common starting-point; and this has by no means been done. In short, the problem of the relation of Semitic with Hamitic, not less than with IndoEuropean, depends upon that of Semitic growth, and the two must be solved together. There are striking correspondences between the pronouns of the two families, such as, if supported by evidences from other parts of their material, would be taken as signs of relationship; but, in the absence of such support, they are not to be relied upon, not till it can be shown to be possible that two languages could grow to be so different in all other respects as are Egyptian and Hebrew, and yet retain by inheritance corresponding pronouns. And the possession of grammatical gender by Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic speech, and by them almost alone, among all human languages, though an extremely noteworthy fact, is (as was pointed out above) in the present condition of linguistic science quite too weak a basis for a belief in the original identity of the three families.
Egyptian is limited to the delta and valley of the Nile, and is the only Hamitic language which has ancient records; of the others the existing forms alone are known.
The Libyan or Berber division of the family occupies the inhabitable part of northern Africa, so far as it has not been displaced by intrusive tongues of other connexion - in later times the Arabic, which since the Mahommedan conquest has been the cultivated tongue of the Mediterranean coast, while the earlier Vandal, Latin and Punic have disappeared, except in the traces they may have left in Berber dialectic speech. The principal dialects are the Kabyle, the Shilha and the Tuarek or Tamashek, corresponding nearly to the ancient Numidian, Mauretanian and Gaetulian respectively.
The third or Ethiopic division includes as its chief members the Beja or Bisharin, the Saho, the Dankali, the Somali, and the more inland Galla; the first two lying along the Red Sea north of Semitic Abyssinia, the others south of it, to the equator. By some authorities (Lepsius, Bieck) there is added to the Hamitic family as a fourth division a group from extreme southern Africa, the Hottentot and Bushman languages. The ground of this classification is the possession by the Hottentot of the distinction of grammatical gender, and even its designation by signs closely corresponding to those used in the Ethiopic division. Others deny the sufficiency of this evidence, and rank the Hottentot as a separate group of African dialects, adding to it provisionally the Bushman, until better knowledge of the latter shall show whether it is or is not a group by itself. If the Hottentot be Hamitic, we shall have to suppose it cut off at a very remote period from the rest of the family, and forced gradually southward, while all the time suffering mixture both of speech and of blood with the negro races, until the physical constitution of its speakers has become completely metamorphosed, and of its original speech no signs are left save those referred to above; and while such exceptional phonetic peculiarities have been worked out as the use of the clicks or clucking sounds: and this must be regarded as at least extremely difficult.
4. Monosyllabic or South-eastern Asiatic Family. - This body of languages may well enough be the next taken up; and here again (as was the case with the preceding family) on account of the prominent importance of one of its dialects and of the people speaking it - the Chinese people and language. The territory of the family includes the whole south-eastern corner of Asia: China on the north-east, Farther India in the south, and the high plateau of Tibet, with the neighbouring Himalayan regions, to the westward. The ultimate unity of all these languages rests chiefly upon the evidence of their form, as being all alike essentially monosyllabic and isolating, or destitute of formal structure; the material correspondences among them, of accordant words, are not sufficient to prove them related. The Chinese itself can be followed up, in contemporary records, to a period probably not far from 2000 B.C., and the language, the people, and their institutions, are then already in the main what they have ever since continued to be (see China); the other leading tongues come into view much later, as they receive culture and religion from China on the one hand (the Annamites), or from India on the other (the Tibetans, Burmese, Siamese); and the territory includes great numbers of wild tribes unknown until our own times, whose race-relations and language-relations are as yet very obscure. Current opinion tends to regard the Annamites, Peguans and Cambodians (the Mon-Khmer group) as forming a more nearly related group or division, and as having been the earlier population of Farther India, in part dispossessed and driven forward by the later intrusion from the north of Siamese and Burmese, of whom the former are more nearly related to the Chinese and the latter to the Tibetans. The Mon-Khmer group is itself more nearly related to the Kolarian and Malay-Polynesian.
The character of the languages of this family, especially as instanced by its most important member, the Chinese, has been pretty fully set forth in the general discussions above. They are languages of roots: that is to say, there is not demonstrable in any of their words a formative part, limiting the word, along with others similarly characterized, to a certain office or set of offices in the formation of the sentence. That the words are ultimate roots, come down from the first period of language-making, we have no reason whatever to believe; and they may possibly have passed through processes of growth which equipped them with some scanty supply of forms; but no evidence to that effect has yet been produced. The indications relied on to show an earlier polysyllabism in the family (though already in Chinese reduced to monosyllabism before the earliest historical appearance of the language, some 4000 years ago) are the comparatively recent loss of certain. final mutes in Chinese words, and the presence on a considerable scale in Tibetan spelling of added initial and final consonants, now silent in the literary dialect, but claimed to be still uttered in some parts of the country. If the theory connecting these phenomena be established, the Tibetan will approve itself to be by far the most primitive of the dialects of the family, furnishing the key to the history of the rest.
For further details respecting the various tongues of the monosyllabic family, the articles on the different divisions of its territory (Burma; China; Siam; Tibet, &c.) may be consulted. The languages all alike show an addition to the resources of distinction possessed by languages in general, in the use of tones: that is to say, words of which the alphabetic elements are the same differ in meaning according as they are uttered in a higher or a lower tone, with the rising or the falling inflexion, and so on. By this means, for example, the monosyllabic elements of the literary Chinese, numbering but 500 as we should write them, are raised to the number of about r 500 words.
5. Ural-Altaic (Scythian, Turanian) Family
China and Tibet are bordered on the north and west by the eastern branches of anothe