Anthropology

A sentence being made up of its connected sounds as a limb is made up of its joints, we call language articulate or “jointed,” to distinguish it from the inarticulate or “unjointed” sounds uttered by the lower animals. Such conversation by gestures and exclamations as was shown in the last chapter to be a natural language common to mankind, is half-way between the communications of animals and full human speech. Every people, even the smallest and most savage tribe, has an articulate language, carried on by a whole system of sounds and meanings, which serves the speaker as a sort of catalogue of the contents of the world he lives in, taking in every subject he thinks about, and enabling him to say what he thinks about it. What a complicated and ingenious apparatus a language may be, the Greek and Latin grammars sufficiently show. Yet the more carefully such difficult languages are looked into, the more plainly it is seen that they grew up out of earlier and simpler kinds of speech. It is not our business here to make a systematic survey of the structure of languages, such as will be found in the treatises of Max Müller, Sayce, Whitney, and Peile. What we have to attend to, is that many of the processes by which languages have been built up are still to be found at work among men, and that grammar is not a set of arbitrary rules framed by grammarians, but the result of man’s efforts to get easier, fuller, and exacter expression for his thoughts. It may be noticed that our examples are oftener taken from English than from any other tongue. The reason of this is not merely the convenience of using the most familiar words as instances, but that English is of all existing languages perhaps the best for explaining the development of language in general. While its words may in great part be traced to high antiquity, its structure has passed through extreme changes in coming down to modern times, and in its present state the language at once keeps up relics of ancient formations, and has the freest growth actually going on. Thus, in one way or another, English has something to show in illustration of three out of four of the processes known to have helped in the making of language, at any time and anywhere.

As in the course of ages man’s knowledge became wider and his civilization more complex, his language had to keep up with them. Comparatively few and plain expressions had sufficed for his early rude condition, but now more and more terms had to be added for the new notions, implements, arts, offices, and relations of more highly organized society. Etymology shows how such new words are made by altering and combining old ones, carrying on old words from the old state of things to do duty in the new, shifting their meanings, and finding in any new thought some resemblance to an old one that would serve to give it a name. English is full of traces of these ways of word-making and word-shifting. For instance, that spacious stone building is still called, as its rough predecessors were, a barrack (that is, hut); in it a regiment (that is, a ruling or command) of soldiers (that is, paid men) of the infantry (that is, lads, who fought on foot) are being inspected (that is, looked into); each company (that is, those who have bread together) being under a captain (that is, headman) and his lieutenants (that is, place-holders). On the front of the building is a clock, a machine which keeps on its old name, meaning a bell, from the ages when its predecessor was only a bell on which a watchman struck the hours; in later times were added the weights, lumps of metal so-called from the weights of the balance, the pendulum (or hanger), and what are metaphorically called the face and hands, for showing on a scale (or ladder) the hours (or times), divided into minutes (or smalls), and then again into seconds (or followings). These instances are intentionally not drawn from the depths of etymology, but are taken to show the ordinary ways in which language finds means to supply the new terms of advancing society. It will be worth while to give a few cases showing that the languages of less civilized races do their duty in much the same ways. The Aztecs called a boat a “water-house” (acalli), and thence the censer in which they burnt copal as incense came to be called a “little copal-boat” (copalacaltontli). The Vancouver Islanders, when they saw how a screw-steamer went, named it at once yetseh-yetsokleh, that is, the “kick-kicker.” The Hidatsas of the Missouri till lately had only hard stone for their arrows and hatchets; so when they became acquainted with iron and copper they made names for these metals—uetsasipisa and uetsahisisi, that is to say, “stone black” and “stone red,” The horse, when brought by the white men among peoples who had never seen it, had to be named, and accordingly the Tahitians called it “pig-carry-man,” while the Sioux Indians said it was a “magic-dog.”

As a help to understand how words have come to express still more difficult thoughts, it is well to remember the contrast between the gesture-language and spoken English (p. 119). It was seen how the deaf-and-dumb fall short of our power of expressing general and abstract ideas. Not that they cannot conceive such ideas at all. They use signs as general terms when they can lay hold of some quality or action as the mark of a whole class. Thus flapping one’s arms like wings means any bird, or birds in general, and the sign of legs-four, means beasts, or quadrupeds in general. The pretence of pouring something out of a jug expresses the notion of fluid, which they understand, as we do, to comprise water, tea, quicksilver; and they probably have, though more dimly than we, such other abstract notions as the whiteness common to all white things, and the length, breadth, and thickness which all solid objects have. But while the deaf-mute’s sign must always make us think of the very thing it imitates, the spoken word can shift its meaning so as to follow thought wherever it goes. It is instructive to look at words in this light, to see how, starting from thoughts as plain as those shown by the signs of the American savage, they can come on to the most difficult terms of the lawyer, the mathematician, and the philosopher. To us words have become, as Lord Bacon said, counters for notions. By means of words we are enabled to deal with abstract ideas, got by comparing a number of thoughts, but so as only to attend to what they have in common. The reader of this no doubt uses easily, and perhaps correctly, such words as sort, kind, thing, cause, to make, be, do, suffer. If he will try to get clear to his mind what is actually meant by these words, that is, what sense they carry with them wherever used, he may teach himself the best lesson he ever learnt, either in language or philosophy. To Englishmen who know no language but their own, these words are indeed, as it were, counters, chosen at random to express thoughts. Having learnt by practice how and where to apply them, they are seldom even conscious of their highly abstract nature. The philologist cannot trace the complete history of them all, but he knows enough to satisfy him that they came out of words easier to understand. As in the Bornu language of Africa, tando, to “weave,” has become a general verb to “make,” and in Hebrew bârâ, to “cut” or “hew,” has come to be used for the making of the heavens and earth; so our word to make may have meant originally to fit, or join. The English word sort comes from Latin sors, a “lot,” through such a set of meanings as allotment, oracle, fate, condition, chance, portion; kind meant of one kindred or descent; to be may have meant to grow; to suffer meant to bear as a burden. It belongs to high metaphysics to talk of the apprehension of ideas; but these now abstruse words originally meant “catching hold” of “sights.” One use of etymology is that it teaches how men thus contrived, from words which expressed plain and easy thoughts, to make terms for more complex and abstruse thoughts. This is the high road along which the human mind has travelled from ignorance to knowledge.

The next contrivance of language to be noticed is the use of “grammatical” words, which serve to connect the “real” words and show what they have to do with one another. This again is well seen by looking at the gesture-language (p. 119). If a deaf-and-dumb man wants to convey in gestures “John is come, he has brought the harness of the pony and put it on a bench,” he can communicate the sense of this well enough, but he does it by merely giving the real parts, as “John, harness, pony, carry, bench, put.” But the articles “a” and “the,” the preposition “of,” the conjunction “and,” the substantive verb “is,” and the pronouns “he,” “it,” are grammatical devices which have not signs in his natural system, and which he does not even learn the meaning of till he is taught to read. Nevertheless, the deaf-mute, if obliged to be very exact in his account, can actually give us a good idea of the way in which we speaking-people have come to use grammatical words. Though he cannot intimate that it is a bench, he can hold up one finger to show that it is one bench; though he has no sign for the pony, he can as it were point it out so as to show it is that pony; instead of expressing of the pony as we do, he can go farther by pretending to take the harness off the pony. Now English etymology often shows that our grammatical words were made in very much this way out of real words; an or a was originally the numeral “one,” still Scotch ane; the is of the same family of words with that and there; of is derived from the same source with off; the conjunction and may be traced back to the more real meaning of “further” or “thereto”; the verb to have has become a mere auxiliary in “I have come,” yet it keeps its old full sense of to hold or grasp, when one man seizing another cries “I have him!” When an Englishman says he “stands corrected,” this does not mean that he is on his legs, but the verb has sunk into a grammatical auxiliary, now conveying little more than the passive sense he “is corrected.” It is curious to notice pronouns being thus formed from more real words. As the deaf-mute simply points with his finger to express “I” and “thou,” so the Greenlander’s uvanga = “I,” ivdlit = “thou,” are plainly derived from uv = “here,” iv = “there.” Quite a different device appears in Malay, where âmba = “slave” is used as a pronoun “I,” and tuwan = “lord” as a pronoun “thou.” How this came to pass is plainly shown by Hebrew, in such phrases as are translated in the English Bible, “thy servant saith,” “my lord knoweth;” these terms are on the road to become mere personal pronouns meaning “I” and “thou,” as in the Malay they actually have done. An exact line cannot be drawn between real and grammatical words in English or any other language, for the good reason that words pass so gradually from the real into the grammatical stage, that the same word may be used in both ways. But though the distinction is not an exact one, it should be noticed attentively. Any one who will try to tell an intelligible story in English real words only, without the help of the grammatical particles which are the links and hinges of the sentence, will see how the use of grammatical words was one of the greatest moves made by man in the formation of articulate speech.

Philology goes still further in explaining how the complicated devices of grammar arose from simple beginnings. The distinction of “parts of speech,” familiar to us in a highly-developed state from the Greek and Latin grammars, is a useful means of showing the relations among the several thoughts talked of in the sentence. But it is possible to do without parts of speech, and it is not to be supposed that they existed in the earliest forms of language. In the gesture language it has been already noticed that there is no such distinction even between noun and verb. In classical Chinese, thwan means round, a ball, to make round, to sit round, and so on; ngan means quiet, quietly, to quiet, to be quiet, &c. We English can quite enter into this, for our language has so far dropped the ancient inflexions as to break up distinctions between parts of speech in almost Chinese fashion, using a word either as substantive, adjective, or verb, as the people’s quiet, a quiet people, to quiet the people, and without scruple turning a verb into a substantive, as a workmen’s strike, or a substantive into a verb, as to horse a coach. The very formation of new parts of speech may be seen going on, as where Chinese shows how prepositions may be made out of nouns or verbs. Thus “kuo chung,” that is “kingdom middle,” is used to mean “in the kingdom,” and “sha jin i thing,” that is, “kill man use stick,” expresses “to kill a man with a stick.” So an African language, the Mandingo, may be caught in the act of making prepositions out of the nouns kang, “neck,” and kono, “belly,” when they say “put table neck” for “on the table,” and “house belly” for “in the house.”

We have next to look at the way in which language grows by combining its words to form new ones. To see this, words have to be noticed not as they stand by themselves, but as they come together in actual speaking. Language consists of sentences, and a sentence is made up of words, each word being a distinct spoken sound carrying a distinct meaning. The simplest notion of a sentence may be had from such a language as Chinese, where it can be taken apart into words which are each a single syllable. Thus kou chi shi jin sse, that is “dog sow eat man food” means that dogs and sows eat the food of men. The class of languages which can be taken to pieces in this perfect way are called analytic or isolating. In most languages of the world, however, which are more or less synthetic or compounding, the tendency is not so strong to keep words separate, and they are apt to attach themselves together. To bring clearly before our minds how the joining or compounding of words takes place, let us notice rather more closely than usual one of our English sentences. On listening, it will appear that the spoken words have not really breaks between them as in writing, but the syllables run on continuously till the speaker pauses, and what marks a word is, not its being really separated, but its having an emphasis, or stress (as it is called by Mr. Sweet). Now, from time to time, certain words may be noticed becoming actually fixed together. How this joining gradually takes place we sometimes try to show by writing them differently, as hard ware, hard-ware, hardware; or steam ship, steam-ship, steamship. On listening to such joined words, it is found that one of the two has lost its stress, the whole compound having now but one stress. This is how in talking English our minds give a sign by our voices that two words have become one. The next step is when the sound of one of the part-words becomes slurred or broken down, as in the end-words of waterman, wrongful. Or both the simple words may have broken down, as in boatswain and coxswain, where writing keeps up the original meaning of the swain in charge of the boat or cock-boat, but in actual speaking the words have shrunk to what may be spelt bōsun, coxun. Now this process of forming a new word by (so to speak) welding together two or more old ones, is one of the chief acts by which word-makers, ancient and modern, have furnished themselves with more manageable terms, which again as the meanings of the separate parts were less cared for, were cut shorter in speaking. When this has not gone too far, philologists can still get back to the original elements of such words, discerning the fourteen night in fortnight; the unus and decem in undecim, shrunk still farther in French onze; the jus, dico, in Latin judex, which in English comes down to judge.

As examples how word-compounding goes on in unfamiliar tongues, may be taken the Malay term for “arrow,” which is anak-panah, or “child-(of-the)-bow;” and the native Australian term for “unanimous,” which is gurdugynyul, or “heart-one-come.” To show how such compound words become shortened, take the Mandingo word for “sister,” inbadingmuso, which is made up of mi bado dingo muso, meaning “my-mother-child-female.” The natives of Vancouver’s Island gave to a certain long-bearded Englishman the name Yakpus; this appears to have come from yakhpekukselkous, made up of words signifying “long-face-hair-man,” which in speaking had been cut down to yakpus. No one who did not happen to be told the history of this word could ever have guessed it. This is an important lesson in the science of language, for it is likely that tens of thousands of words in the languages of the world may have come into the state in which we find them by the shortening of long compound words, and when this has been done recklessly as in the last example, and the history lost, all reasonable hope is gone of ever getting back to the original form and meaning. Nor does this process of contraction affect only compound words, but it may act on a whole sentence, fusing it as it were into one word. Here the synthetic or compounding principle reaches its height. As a contrast to the analytic Chinese sentence given at page 139, to show the perfect distinctness of their words, we may take a sentence of an African language to show how utterly that distinctness may be lost. When a Grebo negro wishes to express that he is very angry, he says in his metaphorical way “it has raised a bone in my breast.” His full words for expressing this would be e ya mu kra wudi, but in speaking he runs them together so that what he actually utters is yamukroure. Where such breaking down has gone on unchecked, it is easy to see how the language of a barbaric tribe may alter so much in a few generations as hardly to be recognised. Indeed, any one who will attend to how English words run together in talking may satisfy himself that his own language would undergo rapid changes like those of barbaric tongues, were it not for the schoolmaster and the printer, who insist on keeping our words fixed and separate.

The few examples here given of new words made by compounding old ones may serve to illustrate the great principle that such combination, far from being a mere source of confusion, has been one of the great means of building up language. Especially, one of the great discoveries in modern philology is how grammatical formation and inflexion has partly come about by a kind of word-compounding. It must have seemed to the old scholars a mysterious and arbitrary proceeding that Latin should have fixed upon a set of meaningless affixes to inflect and make into different parts of speech ago, agis, agit, agere, agens, actum, actor, actio, activus, activè, &c. But the mystery to some extent disappeared when it was noticed how in modern languages the running together of words produced something of the kind. Thus the hood of womanhood, priesthood, which is now a mere grammatical suffix, was in old English a word of itself, hâd, meaning form, order, state; and the suffix -ly was once the distinct word “like,” as is seen by Anglo-Saxon saying cwên-lic, “queen-like,” where modern English says queenly. In Chaucer’s English it is seen how the pronoun thou had dwindled into a mere verb-ending,

In English the future tense of the verb to give is “I will give,” or, colloquially, “I’ll give.” Here writing separates what speaking joins, but the modern French future tense donnerai, donneras, is the verb donner with the auxiliary verb ai, as, both spoken and written on to it, so that “je donnerai” is a phrase like “I have to give.” The plural donnerons, donnerez, can no longer be thus taken to pieces, for the remains of the auxiliary verb have passed into meaningless grammatical affixes ons, ez. There is reason to suppose that many of the affixes of Greek and Latin grammar arose in this way by distinct words combining together and then shrinking. Not that it would be safe to assert that all affixes came into existence in this particular way. As was pointed out in the last chapter, men wanting to utter a thought are clever enough to catch up in very far-fetched ways a sound to express it. Thus the prefix ge, which German uses to make past participles with, seems to have originally signified “with” or “together,” which sense it still retains in such words as gespiele, “playfellow;” but by a curious shifting of purpose it came to serve as a means of forming participles, as spielen, to play, gespielt, played. It was so used also in Anglo-Saxon, as clypian, to call, geclypod, called, which word in its later form yclept still keeps up among us a trace of the old grammatical device. Philologists have to keep their eyes open to this power which language-makers have of using sounds for some new purpose they were not intended for. Thus, in English, the change of vowels in foot, feet, and in find, found, now serves as a means of declining the noun and conjugating the verb. But history happens to show that the vowel change was not originally made with this intention at all. The Anglo-Saxon declension proves that the vowel was not then a sign of number in the noun; it was singular fôt, fôtes, fêt, plural fêt, fôta, fôtum. Nor was it a sign of tense in the Anglo-Saxon verb, where the perfect of findan, to find, had different vowels in its singular, ic fand, I found, and its plural, we fundon, we found. It was the later Englishmen who, knowing nothing of the real reasons which brought about the variation of the vowels, took to using them to mark singular from plural, and present from perfect.

It is the work of grammarians in examining any language to take all its combined words to pieces as far as possible. Greek and Latin grammars now teach how to analyze words by stripping off their affixes, so as to get down to the real part or root, which is generally a simple sound expressing a simple notion. A root is best understood by considering it to have been once a separate word, as it would be in such a language as English. Even in languages where the roots seldom appear without some affix attached, they may stand by themselves as imperative, like Latin dic! say! Turkish sev! love! But in many languages roots can only be found as imaginary forms, by comparing a group of words and getting at the common part belonging to them all. Thus in Latin it appears from gnosco, gnotus, &c., that there must be a root gno which carries the thought of knowing. Going on to Greek, there is found in gignōskō, gnōsis, gnōmē, &c., the same root gno with the same meaning. Turning next to Sanskrit, a similar sound, jnâ, appears as the root-form for knowing. In this way, by comparing the whole set of Aryan or Indo-European languages, it appears that there must have been in ancient times a word something like gna, meaning to know, which is to be traced not only in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, but in many other languages of the family, as Russian znat, English know. A few more such Aryan roots, which the reader recognises at once in well-known languages, are sta, to stand, sad, to sit, ga, to go, i, to go, ma, to measure, da, to give, vid, to see, rag, to rule, mar to die. These simple sounds seem to have already become fixed to carry their meanings in the remote ages when the ancestors of the Aryan peoples wandered with their herds on the highlands of Central Asia. It is not needful to tell the student of anthropology how interesting it is to arrive thus at the earliest known root-words of any family. But it should at the same time be noticed that even in the earliest of these sets of roots, we seldom come to anything like an actual origin or beginning. Some few may indeed have been taken direct from the natural language, for instance ru, to roar, and if this was so here is a real origin. But most roots, to whatever languages of the world they may belong, are like the group given above, where it is impossible to say confidently how their sound came to express their meaning. Unless this can be done, it is safest not to take such roots as really primitive formations, for they may have a long lost history of the utmost change. How this may happen, our own language has a useful lesson to teach. Imagine one who knows no language but English trying to get at its roots. To him the verb to roll might seem a root-word, a primitive element of language; indeed it actually has been fancied a natural sound imitating the act of rolling. Yet any philologist would tell him that English roll is a comparatively modern form, which came through a long series of earlier stages; it was borrowed from French rolle, roller, now rôle, rouler, all from Latin rotulus, diminutive of rota, a wheel, even this coming from a more ancient verb and signifying a runner or goer. Still more adventurous is the history of another English word which has now all the parts of a verb, to check, checking, checked, besides such forms as a check in one’s course, the check-string to stop the coachman, the check-valve to stop the water in a pipe. This word check has all the simplicity of sound and sense which might belong to an original root-word. Yet strange to say, it is really the Persian word shah, meaning “king,” which came to Europe with the game of chess as the word of challenge to the king, and thence by a curious metaphor passed into a general word for stopping anybody or anything. For all that is known, many root-words among the Greeks or Jews, or even the simple-looking monosyllables of the Chinese, may during præhistoric ages have travelled as far from their real origin as these English verbs. Thus the roots from which language grows may often be themselves sprung as it were from yet earlier seeds or cuttings, grown at home or imported from abroad, and though in our time words mostly come from the ancient roots, the power of striking new roots is not yet dead.

Having now, in such a broad way as suits the present purpose, looked at the formation of words, something may be said as to how language contrives to show the relations among the words of a sentence. This is done by what grammarians call syntax, concord, and government. It has been seen (p. 119) that the gesture-language, though wanting in grammatical forms, has a strongly marked syntax. The deaf-mute’s signs must follow one another in proper order, otherwise they may convey a wrong meaning or seem nonsense. So, in spoken languages which do not inflect their words, such as the Chinese, syntax is the main part of grammar; thus li ping = sharp weapons, ping li = weapons (are) sharp; chi kuo = to govern the kingdom, but kuo chi = the kingdom is governed. This seems quite natural to us, for modern English has come far towards the Chinese plan of making the sense of the sentence depend on the order of the words, thus marking the difference between rank of families and families of rank, or between men kill lions and lions kill men. In Latin it is very different, where words can be put about with such freedom, that the English reader may be hardly able to make sense of one of Tacitus’ sentences without fresh sorting the words into some order he can think them in. Especially in Latin verses there is often hardly more syntax than if the words were nonsense-syllables arranged only to scan. The sense has to be made out from the grammatical inflections, as where it is seen that in “vile potabis modicis Sabinum cantharis,” the cheapness has to do with the wine and the smallness with the mugs. It is because so many of the inflections have disappeared from English, that the English translation has to obtain a proper understanding by stricter order of words. Where the meaning of sentences depends on order or syntax, that order must be followed, but it must be borne in mind that this order differs in different languages. For a single instance, in Malay, where orang = man and utan = forest, savages and apes are called orang utan, which is just opposite to the English construction “forest man.”

Every one who can construe Greek and Latin sees what real service is done by government and agreement in showing how the words of a sentence hang together, what quality is stated of what thing, or who is asserted to act on what. But even Greek and Latin have changed so much from their earlier state, that they often fail to show the scholar clearly what they mean to do, and why. It is useful to make acquaintance with the languages of ruder nations, which show government and agreement in earlier and plainer stages of growth. One great object of grammatical construction is to make it quite clear which of two nouns concerned is subject and which object, for instance, whether it was a chief who killed a bear, or a bear who killed a chief. A particle properly attached will do this, as when the Algonquin Indians put on the syllable un both to noun and verb, in a way which we may try to translate by the pronoun him, thus:—

This gives a notion of the natural manner in which grammatical government may have come into use to mark the parts of the sentence. At the same time, it shows that different languages may go different ways to work, for here the verb and object agree together, and the subject (so to speak) governs both, which is quite unlike our familiar rule of the verb agreeing with the nominative or subject. To see the working of concord or agreement in a far clearer and completer form than Latin can show it, we may look at the Hottentot language, where a sentence may run somewhat thus, “That woman-she, our tribe’s-she, rich-being-she, another village-in-dwelling-she, praise-we-do cattle-of-she, she-does present-us two calves-of-she-from.” Here the pronoun running through the whole sentence makes it clear to the dullest hearer that it is the woman who is rich, who dwells in another village, whose cattle are praised, and who gives two of her calves. The terminations in a Greek or Latin sentence, which show the agreement of substantive and adjective with their proper verb, are remains of affixes which may have once carried their signification as plainly as they still do in the language of the Hottentots. A different plan of concord, but even more instructive to the classical scholar, appears in the Zulu language, which divides things into classes, and then carries the marking syllable of the class right through the sentence, so as to connect all the words it is attached to. Thus “u-bu-kosi b-etu o-bu-kulu bu-ya-bonakala si-bu-tanda,” means “our great kingdom appears, we love it.” Here bu, the mark of the class to which kingdom belongs, is repeated through every word referring to it. To give an idea how this acts in holding the sentence together, Dr. Bleek translates it by repeating the dom of kingdom in a similar way; “the king-dom, our dom, which dom is the great dom, the dom appears, we love the dom.” This is clumsy, but it answers the great purpose of speech, that of making one’s meaning certain beyond mistake. So, by using different class-syllables for singular and plural, and carrying them on through the whole sentence, the Zulu shows the agreement in number more plainly than Greek or Latin can do. But the Zulu language does not recognise by its class-syllables what we call gender. It is in fact one of the puzzles of philology, what can have led the speaker of Aryan languages like Greek, or Semitic languages like Hebrew, to classify things and thoughts by sex so unreasonably as they do. For Latin examples, take the following groups: pes (masc.), manus (fem.), brachium (neut.); amor (masc.), virtus (fem.), delictum (neut.). German shows gender in as practically absurd a state, as witness der Hund, die Ratte; das Thier, die Pflanze. In Anglo-Saxon, wîf (English wife), was neuter, while wîf-man (i.e. “wife-man,” English woman) was masculine. Modern English, in discarding an old system of grammatical gender that had come to be worse than useless, has set an example which French and German might do well to follow. Yet it must be borne in mind that the devices of language, though they may decay into absurdity, were never originally absurd. No doubt the gender-system of the classic languages is the remains of an older and more consistent plan. There are languages outside our classical education which show that gender (that is genus, kind, class,) is by no means necessarily according to sex. Thus in the Algonquin languages of North America, and the Dravidian languages of South India, things are divided not as male or female, but as alive or dead, rational or irrational, and put accordingly in the animate or major gender, or in the inanimate or minor gender. Having noticed how the Zulu concord does its work by regularly repeating the class-sign, we seem to understand how in the Aryan languages the signs of number and gender may have come to be used as a similar means of carrying through the sentence the information that this substantive belongs to that adjective and that verb. Yet even in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic, such concord falls short of the fulness and clearness it has among the barbarians of Africa, while in the languages of modern Europe, especially our own, it has mostly disappeared, probably because with the advance of intelligence it was no longer found necessary.

The facts in this chapter will have given the reader some idea how man has been and still is at work building up language. Any one who began by studying the grammars of such languages as Greek or Arabic, or even of such barbarous tongues as Zulu or Eskimo, would think them wonderfully artificial systems. Indeed, had one of these languages suddenly come into existence among a tribe of men, this would have been an event mysterious and unaccountable in the highest degree. But when one begins at the other end, by noticing the steps by which word-making and composition, declension and conjugation, concord and syntax, arise from the simplest and rudest beginnings, then the formation of language is seen to be reasonable, purposeful, and intelligible. It was shown in the last chapter that man still possesses the faculty of bringing into use fresh sounds to express thoughts, and now it may be added that he still possesses the faculty of framing these sounds into full articulate speech. Thus every human tribe has the capabilities which, had they not inherited a language ready-made from their parents, would have enabled them to make a new language of their own.