Anthropology

The next question is, What can be learnt from languages as to the history of the nations speaking them, and the races these nations belong to?

In former chapters, in dividing mankind into stocks or races according to their skulls, complexions, and other bodily characters, language was not taken into account as a mark of race. In fact, a man’s language is no full and certain proof of his parentage. There are even cases in which it is totally misleading, as when some of us have seen persons whose language is English, but their faces Chinese or African, and who, on inquiry, are found to have been brought away in infancy from their native countries. It is within every one’s experience how one parent language disappears in intermarriage, as where persons called Boileau or Muller may be now absolutely English as to language, in spite of their French or German ancestry. Now not only individuals but whole populations may have their native languages thus lost or absorbed. The negroes shipped as slaves to America were taken from many tribes and had no native tongue in common, so that they came to talk to one another in the language of their white masters, and there is now to be seen the curious spectacle of black woolly-haired families talking broken-down dialects of English, French, or Spanish. In our own country the Keltic language of the Ancient Britons has not long since fallen out of use in Cornwall, as in time it will in Wales. But whether the Keltic language is spoken or not, the Keltic blood remains in the mixed population of Cornwall, and to class the modern Cornishmen as of pure English race because they speak English, would be to misuse the evidence of language. Much bad anthropology has been made by thus carelessly taking language and race as though they went always and exactly together. Yet they do go together to a great extent. Although what a man’s language really proves is not his parentage but his bringing-up, yet most children are in fact brought up by their own parents, and inherit their language as well as their features. So long as people of one race and speech live together in their own nation, their language will remain a race-mark common to all. And although migration and intermarriage, conquest and slavery interfere, from time to time, so that the native tongue of a nation can never tell the whole story of their ancestry, still it tells a part of it, and that a most important part. Thus in Cornwall the English tongue is a real record of the settlement of the English there, though it fails to tell of the Keltic race who were in the land before them, and with whom they mixed. In a word, the information which the language of a nation gives as to its race is something like what a man’s surname tells as to his family, by no means the whole history, but one great line of it.

It has next to be seen what the languages of the world can show as to the early history of nations. Great care has to be taken with the proofs of connexion between languages. It is of little use to compare two languages as old-fashioned philologists were too apt to do when, if they found half-a-dozen words at all similar, they took these without more ado to be remnants of one primitive tongue, the origin of both. In the more careful philological comparisons of the present day many similarities of words have to be thrown aside as not proving connexion at all. In any two languages a few words are sure to be similar by mere accident, as where, in the Society Islands, tiputa means a cloak, like tippet with us. Words must only be compared when there is a real correspondence of meaning as well as sound, or the way would be opened for fancies like that of a writer who connects the well known Polynesian word tabu, sacred, with tabut, the Arabic name of the ark of the covenant, apparently because that was a very sacred object. Also, words imitated from nature prove nothing in this way, as where the Hindus and the savages of Vancouver’s Island both call a crow kaka, this being not because their languages are connected, but because it is the bird’s cry. What is most important of all is to make sure that the words compared really belong to the old stock of the language they are found in. Before now a writer has proved to his own satisfaction that Turkish, Arabic, and Persian are all branches of one primitive language, his argument being that the Turks call a man adam, as the Arabs call the first man, and a father pader, which is like the Persian word. The fact is true enough, but what the argument omits to notice is that the Turks have been for ages enriching their own barbaric language by taking words from the cultured Arabic and Persian, and adam and pader are such lately borrowed words, not philologically Turkish at all. Borrowed words like these are indeed valuable evidence, but what they prove is not the common origin of languages, it is intercourse between the nations speaking them. They often give the clue to the country from which some new produce was obtained, or some new instrument, or idea, or institution, was learnt. Thus in English it is seen by the very words how Italy furnished us with opera, sonata, chiaroscuro, while Spain gave gallina and mulatto, how from the Hebrews we have sabbath and jubilee, from the Arabs zero and magazine, while Mexico has supplied chocolate and tomato, Haiti hammock and hurricane, Peru guano and quinine, and even the languages of the South Sea Islands are represented by taboo and tatoo. But in all this there is not one particle of evidence that any one of these languages is sprung from the same family with any other.

When two languages have such a common descent, the philologist is not content to ascertain it by merely looking for a few words of similar sound. Indeed he expects to find that the words of the ancestral language will not only have changed in its descendant languages, but that they will often have changed according to different rules. Thus he knows that according to the rule called Grimm’s law, the English ten, tame, should appear in German with a different initial, zehn, zahm, while again these should be represented in Latin by decem, domare. With the same regularity of change, the sound which in some of the Polynesian languages is k, in others has become t; thus the word man, in the Sandwich Islands kanaka (whence our sailors call any South Sea Islander a kanaker), appears in New Zealand under the form of tangata. Going beyond the sound of words into their structure, the comparative philologist reckons that when two languages are allied, they ought to show such similarity in the roots and in the putting together, that neither chance nor borrowing can account for the resemblance. In the first chapter, for another purpose, examples were given of languages continuing to show their intimate connexion while diverging from their parent tongues. The reader may find it worth while to look back to these illustrations (p. 8) before going on to the following sketch of the families of language belonging to the various races of man.

The languages of white men mostly belong to two great families, the Aryan and Semitic. First as to the Aryan family, called also Indo-European, which takes in the languages of part of South and West Asia, and almost the whole of Europe. The original tongue whence these are all descended may be called the Primitive Aryan. What the roots of this ancient language were like, and how they were put together into words, the student may gain an idea from Greek and Latin, but a still better from Sanskrit, where both roots and inflexions have been kept up in a more perfect and regular state. As a rough illustration of the way in which words of our familiar European languages may be discerned in Sanskrit, one line of the first hymn of the Veda is here given, where the worshippers entreat Agni, the divine Fire, that he will be approachable to us as a father to a son, and will be near for our happiness:

Sa nah pitâ-iva sûnave Agne su-upâyanah bhava: sachasva nah svastaye.

Here may be more or less clearly made out words connected with Latin, Greek, and English nos, pater, son, ignis, up, be, sequi, cuestō, and others. Though the original Aryan is a lost language, philologists try to reconstruct it by comparing its oldest and most perfect descendants, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Greek, Latin, Old Russian, Gothic, Old Irish, &c. Granting that a primitive Aryan tongue once existed, there must once have been a nation who spoke it, and whose descendants carried it down to later ages. It is hard to draw any certain bodily picture of the primitive Aryans themselves (see page 109), for in their course of migration and conquest they so mingled with other races, that now the nations united by Aryan speech range through the utmost varieties of white men, from the Icelander to the Hindu. The early home of the Aryans is supposed to have been in Inner Asia, perhaps in the present Turkestan, in the region of the Oxus and Yaxartes, for here the practicable way of migration for nomads with flocks and herds lies open down into Persia on the one side, and India on the other. As India and Persia have preserved in their sacred languages the Aryan tongue less changed than elsewhere, it may be judged that the land whence the invading Aryans came was not far off. But it may have been further east in Central Asia, or further west on the Russian plains. In this home-land, wherever it may have been, the Aryans lived in barbaric but not savage clans, tilling the soil and grazing their flocks and herds, workers in metal and skilled in many arts of life, a warlike folk who went forth to fight in chariots, a people able to govern and obey, to make laws and abide by them, a religious people earnest in the worship of the sun, and sky, and fire, and waters, and with pious faith in the divine spirits of their ancestors. Carrying with them their language, laws, and religion, these nation-founders spread in radiating tracks of migration over South-West Asia and all Europe. Where they went they found the land peopled by Dravidians, Tatars, and doubtless many other stocks once spread far and wide, like the Basques, whose language still lingers in the Pyrenees. Where the old languages have vanished, the record of the early populations of Europe is only to be had from their tombs, and seen in the features of the present nations, which may be often more those of the original people than of the Aryan invaders. The earliest Aryan hordes who started on their westward migration may have been the ancestors of the Keltic nations, for their language has undergone most change, and they are found in the far west of Europe, as though they had been pressed on by the Teuton-Scandinavian tribes who followed them, distant kinsfolk but not friends. The ancestors of the Græco-Italian nations migrated westward till they reached the Mediterranean, and last came the Slavonic peoples who now occupy Eastern Europe. Thus much of the beginnings of the Aryan nations may be learnt from their languages and their places on the map. It is not in the earliest ages of history that they appear on the world-stage where Egyptians and Babylonians had long played the great parts. The Aryans become prominent within a thousand years before the Christian era, when in India there arises among them the religion of Buddha, now reckoned the most numerous in the world; when the Medes and Persians come into power, and Cyrus appears with his conquering host; when the Greeks bring their wondrous intellect to bear on art, science, and philosophy; and the Romans set up the military and legal system which gave them their empire. In later ages our Teutonic nations, who made their first appearance as the ravagers of culture, come to be its promoters. The Aryan nations have kept up in the modern world the career of conquest and the union with other peoples which they began in præhistoric ages. Outside the world known to the ancients, Aryan languages are now spoken on far continents and islands, whether the men who speak them are white colonists from Europe, who have slain or driven out the old dwellers on the soil, or whether they have become blended with the native nations as in Mexico and Peru.

To proceed now to the languages of the next family, the Semitic, an idea of these can be most easily gained from Hebrew. Any student seriously bent on the science of language should learn at least enough Hebrew to spell out a few chapters of Genesis, for all the other languages commonly taught in England being of the Aryan family, this will serve to bring his mind out of that groove, by familiarizing him with speech of a different material. A very moderate number of roots, mostly of three consonants, by altering their internal vowels and changing their affixes, are made to form the greater part of the language so regularly that Hebrew dictionaries are arranged throughout by the roots. Thus from the root m-l-ch are derived verb and noun forms with the sense of reigning, as mâlach = he reigned, mâlchû = they reigned, yimloch = he shall reign, timloch = thou shalt reign, melech = king (familiar in the name of Melchi-zedek, “king of righteousness”), melâchim = kings, malchenû = our king, malchâh = queen; mamlâchâh = kingdom, and so on. The principal languages belonging to the Semitic family are the Assyrian, Hebrew and Phœnician, Syrian, Arabic and Ethiopic. The Assyrian of the Nineveh inscriptions and the Arabic spoken by the desert Beduins between them best represent the original language they are all descended from. The ancient or modern peoples speaking Semitic tongues belong mainly to the dark-white race, the type in which they agree being now most plainly seen in the Jewish countenance, with its aquiline nose, full lips, and curly black hair. Yet by features alone it would not have been possible to distinguish the Jews, Assyrians, and Arabs, among the mass of dark-white nations. Here is seen the value of language, which comes in to show that a certain group of nations are connected by common ancestry from an ancient people, who spoke the lost tongue whence Arabic and Hebrew are offshoots, and who in the ages when history begins were dwelling in South-West Asia, and sending forth their migrating tribes to found new nations, whose acts in the world form one of the great chapters of history. The conquering Assyrians took up and carried on the older Chaldæan civilisation. The Phœnicians became the great merchants of the old world, with trading colonies along the Mediterranean and commerce in the far East, nor was it only stuffs and spices that they carried, but they spread arts and thoughts into new regions, and in their hands the clumsy hieroglyphic writing became the alphabet. The Israelites, though as a nation they never reached such power or culture, made their conquests in the world of religion, and while the crowd of deities worshipped in Assyrian and Phœnician temples vanished away, the worship of Jehovah passed on into Christianity, and overspread the world. Latest, the warrior-tribes of Arabia carried the banner of their prophet among the nations around, and founded the faith of Islam, a civilizing power in the middle ages, and even in these days of its decay an influence across the world from Western Africa to the islands of the far East.

The language of the ancient Egyptians, though it cannot be classed in the Semitic family with Hebrew, has important points of correspondence, whether due to the long intercourse between the two races in Egypt, or to some deeper ancestral connection; and such analogies also appear in the Berber languages of North Africa. These difficult questions can merely be mentioned here. Attempts have been made, though with little result, to prove the Aryan and Semitic languages themselves to be descended from a single parent tongue. If it is so, then ages of change have so wiped away the traces of common origin that philological comparison fails to substantiate them. While speaking of the Aryan and Semitic families of language, it should be noticed that many philologists connect them as belonging to one class, as being “inflecting” languages, or such as can blend their roots and affixes, and alter the roots themselves internally so that, as the beginner in Greek grammar well knows, it is often no easy matter to see where the root ends and the termination begins. The inflecting families have certainly a power of compact word-formation which has done much to give expressiveness and accuracy to such poetical and philosophical languages as Greek and Arabic. But the distinction is by no means clear between the structure of such inflecting languages and the agglutinating languages of other nations, as the Tatars. Could the Aryan and Semitic families be both traced back to the same family, this would not prove the whole white race to have had one original language, for the Georgian of the Caucasus, the Basque of the Pyrenees, and several more would still lie outside, apparently unconnected with either of the great families, or with one another.

In the middle and north of Asia, on the steppes or among the swamps and forests of the bleak north, wandering hordes of hunters or herdsmen show the squat-built brown-yellow Tatar or Mongolian type, and speak languages of one family, such as Manchu and Mongol. Although principally belonging to Asia, these Tatar or Turanian languages have established themselves in Europe. At a remote period, rude Tatar tribes had spread over northern Europe, but they were followed up and encroached on by the invading Aryans, till now only much-mixed outlying remnants of them, Esths, Finns, Lapps, are found speaking Tatar languages. In later ages, history records how armies of Tatar race, Huns and Turks, poured into Europe in their turn, subduing the Aryan peoples, so that now the Hungarian and Turkish languages remain records of these last waves of invasion from Central Asia. The Tatar hordes are first heard of in history as barbarians, as many tribes are still, but their chief nations becoming Buddhists, Mohammedans, or Christians, have adopted the civilisation belonging to these religions. The Tatar languages are of the kind called agglutinative, forming words by putting first the root, which carries the sense and is followed by suffixes strung on to modify it. Thus in Turkish the root sev, to love, makes sevishdirilmediler, they were not to be brought to love one another. In some languages of this class, a remarkable law of vowel-harmony compels the suffix to conform its vowel to that of the root it is attached to, as if to make clear to the hearer that it belongs to it; thus in Hungarian ház = house, forms házam = my house, but szék = chair, forms székem = my chair.

The dense population of South-East Asia, comprising the Burmese, the Siamese, and especially the Chinese, shows a type of complexion and feature plainly related to the Tatar or Mongolian, but the general character of their language is different. The Chinese language is made up of monosyllables, each a word with its own real or grammatical sense, so that our infant-school books in one syllable give some notion of Chinese sentences. Other neighbouring languages share this habit of using monosyllables, and as this limits them to an inconveniently small number of words, they have taken to the expedient of making the musical pitch or intonation alter the meaning, as in Siamese, where the syllable ha, according to the notes it is intoned on, means a pestilence, or the number five, or the verb to seek. Thus the intoning which in England serves to express emotion or distinguish question from answer is turned to account in the far East for making actually different words, an example how language catches at any available device when a means of expression is wanted. Looking on the map of Asia at this south-east group of nations, it is plainly not by accident that the people of such neighbouring districts should have come to talk in words of one syllable, but the habit seems to have come from a common ancestral source, and gives the whole set of languages a family character. These monosyllable languages are often used to illustrate what the simple childlike constructions of man’s primitive speech may have been like. But it is well to mention that Chinese or Siamese, simple as they are, must not be relied on as primitive languages. The childlike Chinese phrases may be not primitive at all, but may come of the falling away of older complicated grammar, much as our own English tends to cut short the long words and drop the inflexions used by our ancestors. Chinese simplicity of grammar by no means goes with simplicity of thought and life. The Chinese nation, like the Egyptian and the Babylonian, had been raised to a highly artificial civilisation in ages before the Phœnicians and Greeks came out of barbarism. It is not yet clear to what race the old Babylonians belonged who spoke the Akkadian tongue, but this shows analogies which may connect it with the Tatar or Mongolian languages.

It has been already seen (p. 102) how the Malays, Micronesians, Polynesians, and Malagasy, a varied and mixed population of partly Mongoloid race, are united over their immense ocean-district half round the globe by languages of one family, the Malayo-Polynesian. The parent language of this family may have belonged to Asia, for in the Malay region the grammar is more complex, and words are found like tasik = sea and langit = sky, while in the distant islands of New Zealand and Hawaii these have come down to tai and lai, as though the language became shrunk and formless as the race migrated further from home, and sank into the barbaric life of ocean islanders.

The continent of India has not lost the languages of the tribes who were in the land before the Aryan invasion gave rise to the Hindu population. Especially in the south whole nations, though they have taken to Hindu civilisation, speak languages belonging to the Dravidian family, such as Tamil, Telugu, and Canarese. The importance of this element of Indian population may be seen by these non-Aryan tongues still extending over most of the great triangle of India south of the Nerbudda, besides remnants in districts to the north. Yet Aryan dialects are spoken in India by many mixed tribes who may have little of Aryan blood. In the forests of Ceylon are found the only people in the world leading a savage life who speak an Aryan language akin to ours. These are the Veddas or “hunters,” shy wild men who build bough huts, and live on game and wild honey, the children, as it seems, of forest-natives mingled with Singhalese outcasts whose language in a broken-down state they speak.

Among the black races, whether or not the eastern negros of Melanesia are connected by race with the African negros, the Melanesian languages stand apart. Nor do all African negros speak languages of one family, but some, such as the Mandingo, seem separate from the great language-family of Central and South Africa, named the Bantu from tribes calling themselves simply “men” (ba-ntu). One of the chief peculiarities of the Bantu languages is their working (just unlike the Tatar languages) by putting prefixes in front. Thus the African magician is called mganga, the plural of which is waganga, magicians. The Kafirs of a certain district bear the well-known name of the basuto, which is a plural form, a single native being called mosuto, while his country is lesuto, his language sesuto, and his character or quality bosuto. In South Africa lies a very different language-family, the Hottentot-Bushman, remarkable for the way in which “clicks,” much like what among us nurses make to children and coachmen to horses, do duty as consonants in words. Lastly, turning to America, the native languages fall into a variety of families. Some of these are known to English readers by a word or two, as the Eskimo of the Arctic coasts by the name of the kayak or single boat on which our sport canoes are modelled; the Algonquin which prevailed from New England to Virginia at the time of the early colonists, and whence we have mocassin and tomahawk; the Aztec of Mexico known by the ocelot and the cacao-bean; the Tupi-Carib of the West Indies and the Brazilian forests, the home of the toucan and jaguar; lastly the Quichua or Peruvian, the language of the inca.

In concluding this account of the chief families of language, it is to be noticed that there are many more, some only consisting of a few dialects or a single one. Altogether a list of fifty or a hundred might perhaps be made, of which no one has been satisfactorily shown to be related to any other. It may, indeed, be expected that often two or three which now seem separate may prove on closer examination to be branches of one family, but there seems no prospect of the families all coming together in this way as offshoots of one original language. The question whether there was one primitive speech, or many, has been in past times most useful in encouraging the scientific comparison of languages. Both theories claim to account for the actual state of language in the world. On the one hand it may be argued that the languages descended from the primitive tongue have branched off so far apart as often no longer to show their connection; on the other hand, if there were many primitive languages, of which those that survived have given rise to families, this would come to much the same state of things. But if, as seems likely, the original formation of language did not take place all at once, but was a gradual process extending through ages, and not absolutely stopped even now, then it is not a hopeful task to search for primitive languages at all (see page 131). In the present improved state of philology it answers better to work back from known languages to the lost ancestral languages whence they must have come down. It has been seen that this study leads to excellent results as to the history, not only of the languages themselves, but of the nations speaking them, as when it gives the clue to the peopling of the South Sea Islands, or proves some remote ancestral connexion between the ancient Britons, and the English and Danes who came after them to our land. Yet though language is so valuable a help and guide in national history, it must not be trusted as if it could give the whole origin of a race, or go back to its beginning. All negroes do not speak languages of one family, nor all yellow, or brown, or white men. In exploring the early life of nations, their languages may lead us far back, often much farther than historical records, but they seem hardly to reach anywhere near the origins of the great human races, still less to the general origin of mankind.