Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

If, instead of the singular, we take the corresponding plural abantu, ‘men, people’ (whence the generic name of Bantu), the sentence looks quite different:

abantu betu abachle bayabonakala, sibatanda (2).

In the same way, if we successively take as our starting-point ilizwe, ‘country,’ the corresponding plural amazwe, ‘countries,’ isizwe, ‘nation,’ izizwe, ‘nations,’ intombi, ‘girl,’ izintombi, ‘girls,’ we get:

In other words, every substantive belongs to one of several classes, of which some have a singular and others a plural meaning; each of these classes has its own prefix, by means of which the concord of the parts of a sentence is indicated. (An inhabitant of the country of Uganda is called muganda, pl. baganda or waganda; the language spoken there is luganda.)

It will be noticed that adjectives such as ‘handsome’ or ‘ours’ take different shapes according to the word to which they refer; in the Zulu Lord’s Prayer ‘thy’ is found in the following forms: lako (referring to igama, ‘name,’ for iligama, 5), bako, (ubukumkani, ‘kingdom,’ 14), yako (intando, ‘will,’ 9). So also the genitive case of the same noun has a great many different forms, for the genitive relation is expressed by the reminder of the governing word + the ‘relative particle’ a (which is combined with the following sound); take, for instance, inkosi, ‘chief, king’:

umuntu wenkosi, ‘the king’s man’ (1; we for w + a + i).
abantu benkosi, ‘the king’s men’ (2).
ilizwe lenkosi, ‘the king’s country’ (5).
amazwe enkosi, ‘the king’s countries’ (6).
isizwe senkosi, ‘the king’s nation’ (7).
ukutanda kwenkosi, ‘the king’s love’ (15).

Livingstone says that these apparently redundant repetitions “impart energy and perspicuity to each member of a proposition, and prevent the possibility of a mistake as to the antecedent.” These prefixes are necessary to the Bantu languages; still, Bleek is right as against Livingstone in speaking of the repetitions as cumbersome, just as the endings of Latin multorum virorum antiquorum are cumbersome, however indispensable they may have been to the contemporaries of Cicero.

These African phenomena have been mentioned here chiefly to show to what lengths concord may go in the speech of some primitive peoples. The prevalent opinion is that each of these prefixes (umu, aba, ili, etc.) was originally an independent word, and that thus words like umuntu, ilizwe, were at first compounds like E. steamship, where it would evidently be possible to imagine a reference to this word by means of a repeated ship (our ship, which ship is a great ship, the ship appears, we love the ship); but at any rate the Zulus extend this principle to cases that would be parallel to an imagined repetition of friendship by means of the same ship, or to referring to steamer by means of the ending er (Bleek 107). Bleek and others have tried to find out by an analysis of the words making up the different classes what may have been the original meaning of the class-prefix, but very often the connecting tie is extremely loose, and in many cases it seems that a word might with equal right have belonged to another class than the one to which it actually belongs. The connexion also frequently seems to be a derived rather than an original one, and much in this class-division is just as arbitrary as the reference of Aryan nouns to each of the three genders. In several of the classes the words have a definite numerical value, so that they go together in pairs as corresponding singular and plural nouns; but the existence of a certain number of exceptions shows that these numerical values cannot originally have been associated with the class prefixes, but must be due to an extension by analogy (Bleek 140 ff.). The starting-point may have been substantives standing to each other in the relation of ‘person’ to ‘people,’ ‘soldier’ to ‘army,’ ‘tree’ to ‘forest,’ etc. The prefixes of such words as the latter of each of these pairs will easily acquire a certain sense of plurality, no matter what they may have meant originally, and then they will lend themselves to forming a kind of plural in other nouns, being either put instead of the prefix belonging properly to the noun (amazwe, ‘countries,’ 6; ilizwe, ‘country,’ 5), or placed before it (ma-luto, ‘spoons,’ 6, luto, ‘spoon,’ 11).

In some of the languages “the forms of some of the prefixes have been so strongly contracted as almost to defy identification.” (Bleek 234). All the prefixes probably at first had fuller forms than appear now. Bleek noticed that the ma- prefix never, except in some degraded languages, had a corresponding ma- as particle, but, on the contrary, is followed in the sentence by ga-, ya-, or a-, and mu- (3) generally has a corresponding particle gu-. Now, Sir Harry Johnston (The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, 2. 891) has found that on Mount Eldon and in Kavirondo there are some very archaic forms of Bantu languages, in which gumu- and gama- are the commonly used forms of the mu- and ma- prefixes, as well as baba- and bubu- for ordinary ba-, bu-; he infers that the original forms of mu-, ma- were ngumu-, ngama-. I am not so sure that he is right when he says that these prefixes were originally “words which had a separate meaning of their own, either as directives or demonstrative pronouns, as indications of sex, weakness, littleness or greatness, and so on”—for, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, such grammatical instruments may have been at first inseparable parts of long words—parts which had no meaning of their own—and have acquired some more or less vague grammatical meaning through being extended gradually to other words with which they had originally nothing to do. The actual irregularity in their distribution certainly seems to point in that direction.

XVIII.—§ 10. Word Order Again.

Mention has already been made here and there of word order and its relation to the great question of simplification of grammatical structure; but it will be well in this place to return to the subject in a more comprehensive way. The theory of word order has long been the Cinderella of linguistic science: how many even of the best and fullest grammars are wholly, or almost wholly, silent about it! And yet it presents a great many problems of high importance and of the greatest interest, not only in those languages in which word order has been extensively utilized for grammatical purposes, such as English and Chinese, but in other languages as well.

In historical times we see a gradual evolution of strict rules for word order, while our general impression of the older stages of our languages is that words were often placed more or less at random. This is what we should naturally expect from primitive man, whose thoughts and words are most likely to have come to him rushing helter-skelter, in wild confusion. One cannot, of course, apply so strong an expression to languages such as Sanskrit, Greek or Gothic; still, compared with our modern languages, it cannot be denied that there is in them much more of what from one point of view is disorder, and from another freedom.

This is especially the case with regard to the mutual position of the subject of a sentence and its verb. In the earliest times, sometimes one of them comes first, and sometimes the other. Then there is a growing tendency to place the subject first, and as this position is found not only in most European languages but also in Chinese and other languages of far-away, the phenomenon must be founded in the very nature of human thought, though its non-prevalence in most of the older Aryan languages goes far to show that this particular order is only natural to developed human thought.

Survivals of the earlier state of things are found here and there; thus, in German ballad style: “Kam ein schlanker bursch gegangen.” But it is well worth noticing that such an arrangement is generally avoided, in German as well as in the other modern languages of Western Europe, and in those cases where there is some reason for placing the verb before the subject, the speaker still, as it were, satisfies his grammatical instinct by putting a kind of sham subject before the verb, as in E. there comes a time when ..., Dan. der kommer en tid da ..., G. es kommt eine zeit wo ..., Fr. il arrive un temps où....

In Keltic the habitual word order placed the verb first, but little by little the tendency prevailed to introduce most sentences by a periphrasis, as in ‘(it) is the man that comes,’ and as that came to mean merely ‘the man comes,’ the word order Subject-Verb was thus brought about circuitously.

Before this particular word order, Subject-Verb, was firmly established in modern Gothonic languages, an exception obtained wherever the sentence began with some other word than the subject; this might be some important member of the proposition that was placed first for the sake of emphasis, or it might be some unimportant little adverb, but the rule was that the verb should at any rate have the second place, as being felt to be in some way the middle or central part of the whole, and the subject had then to be content to be placed after the verb. This was the rule in Middle English and in Old French, and it is still strictly followed in German and Danish: Gestern kam das schiff | Pigen gav jeg kagen, ikke drengen. Traces of the practice are still found in English in parenthetic sentences to indicate who is the speaker (‘Oh, yes,’ said he), and after a somewhat long subjunct, if there is no object (‘About this time died the gentle Queen Elizabeth’), where this word order is little more than a stylistic trick to avoid the abrupt effect of ending the sentence with an isolated verb like died. Otherwise the order Subject-Verb is almost universal in English.

XVIII.—§ 11. Compromises.

The inverted order, Verb-Subject, is used extensively in many languages to express questions, wishes and invitations. But, as already stated, this order was not originally peculiar to such sentences. A question was expressed, no matter how the words were arranged, by pronouncing the whole sentence, or the most important part of it, in a peculiar rising tone. This manner of indicating questions is, of course, still kept up in modern speech, and is often the only thing to show that a question is meant (‘John?’ | ‘John is here?’). But although there was thus a natural manner of expressing questions, and although the inverted word order was used in other sorts of sentences as well, yet in course of time there came to be a connexion between the two things, so that putting the verb before the subject was felt as implying a question. The rising tone then came to be less necessary, and is much less marked in inverted sentences like ‘Is John here?’ than in sentences with the usual word order: ‘John is here?’

Now, after this method of indicating questions had become comparatively fixed, and after the habit of thinking of the subject first had become all but universal, these two principles entered into conflict, the result of which has been, in English, Danish and French, the establishment in some cases of various kinds of compromise, in which the interrogatory word order has formally carried the day, while really the verb, that is to say the verb which means something, is placed after its subject. In English, this is attained by means of the auxiliary do: instead of Shakespeare’s “Came he not home to-night?” (Ro. II. 4. 2) we now say, “Did he not (or, Didn’t he) come home to-night?” and so in all cases where a similar arrangement is not already brought about by the presence of some other auxiliary, ‘Will he come?’, ‘Can he come?’, etc. Where we have an interrogatory pronoun as a subject, no auxiliary is required, because the natural front position of the pronoun maintains the order Subject-Verb (Who came? | What happened?). But if the pronoun is not the subject, do is required to establish the balance between the two principles (Who(m) did you see? | What does he say?).

In Danish, the verb mon, used in the old language to indicate a weak necessity or a vague futurity, fulfils to a certain extent the same office as the English do; up to the eighteenth century mon was really an auxiliary verb, followed by the infinitive: ‘Mon han komme?’; but now the construction has changed, the indicative is used with mon: ‘Mon han kommer?’, and mon is no longer a verb, but an interrogatory adverb, which serves the purpose of placing the subject before the verb, besides making the question more indefinite and vague: ‘Kommer han?’ means ‘Does he come?’ or ‘Will he come?’ but ‘Mon han kommer?’ means ‘Does he come (Will he come), do you think?’

French, finally, has developed two distinct forms of compromise between the conflicting principles, for in ‘Est-ce que Pierre bat Jean?’ est-ce represents the interrogatory and Pierre bat the usual word order, and in ‘Pierre bat-il Jean?’ the real subject is placed before and the sham subject after the verb. Here also, as in Danish, the ultimate result is the creation of ‘empty words,’ or interrogatory adverbs: est-ce-que in every respect except in spelling is one word (note that it does not change with the tense of the main verb), and thus is a sentence prefix to introduce questions; and in popular speech we find another empty word, namely ti (see, among other scholars, G. Paris, Mélanges ling. 276). The origin of this ti is very curious. While the t of Latin amat, etc., coming after a vowel, disappeared at a very early period of the French language, and so produced il aime, etc., the same t was kept in Old French wherever a consonant protected it,[88] and so gave the forms est, sont, fait (from fact, for facit), font, chantent, etc. From est-il, fait-il, etc., the t was then by analogy reintroduced in aime-t-il, instead of the earlier aime il. Now, towards the end of the Middle Ages, French final consonants were as a rule dropped in speech, except when followed immediately by a word beginning with a vowel. Consequently, while t is mute in sentences like ‘Ton frère dit | Tes frères disent,’ it is sounded in the corresponding questions, ‘Ton frère dit-il? Tes frères disent-ils?’ As the final consonants of il and ils are also generally dropped, even by educated speakers, the difference between interrogatory and declarative sentences in the spoken language depends solely on the addition of ti to the verb: written phonetically, the pairs will be:

Now, popular instinct seizes upon this ti as a convenient sign of interrogative sentences, and, forgetting its origin, uses it even with a feminine subject, turning ‘Ta sœur di(t)’ into the question ‘Ta sœur di ti?’, and in the first person: ‘Je di ti?’ ‘Nous dison ti?’ ‘Je vous fais-ti tort?’ (Maupassant). In novels this is often written as if it were the adverb y: C’est-y pas vrai? | Je suis t’y bête! | C’est-y vous le monsieur de l’Académie qui va avoir cent ans? (Daudet). I have dwelt on this point because, besides showing the interest of many problems of word order, it also throws some light on the sometimes unexpected ways by which languages must often travel to arrive at new expressions for grammatical categories.

It was mentioned above that the inverted order, Verb-Subject, is used extensively, not only in questions, but also to express wishes and invitations. Here, too, we find in English compromises with the usual order, Subject-Verb. For, apart from such formulas as ‘Long live the King!’ a wish is generally expressed by means of may, which is placed first, while the real verb comes after the subject: ‘May she be happy!’, and instead of the old ‘Go we!’ we have now ‘Let us go!’ with us, the virtual subject, placed before the real verb. When a pronoun is wanted with an imperative, it used to be placed after the verb, as in Shakespeare: ‘Stand thou forth’ and ‘Fear not thou,’ or in the Bible: ‘Turn ye unto him,’ but now the usual order has prevailed: ‘You try!’ ‘You take that seat, and somebody fetch a few more chairs!’ But if the auxiliary do is used, we have the compromise order: ‘Don’t you stir!’

XVIII.—§ 12. Order Beneficial?

I have here selected one point, the place of the subject, to illustrate the growing regularity in word order; but the same tendency is manifested in other fields as well: the place of the object (or of two objects, if we have an indirect besides a direct object), the place of the adjunct adjective, the place of a subordinate adverb, which by coming regularly before a certain case may become a preposition ‘governing’ that case, etc. It cannot be denied that the tendency towards a more regular word order is universal, and in accordance with the general trend of this inquiry we must next ask the question: Is this tendency a beneficial one? Does the more regular word order found in recent stages of our languages constitute a progress in linguistic structure? Or should it be deplored because it hinders freedom of movement?

In answering this question we must first of all beware of letting our judgment be run away with by the word ‘freedom.’ Because freedom is desirable elsewhere, it does not follow that it should be the best thing in this domain; just as above we did not allow ourselves to be imposed on by the phrase ‘wealth of forms,’ so here we must be on our guard against the word ‘free’: what if we turned the question in another way: Which is preferable, order or disorder? It may be true that, viewed exclusively from the standpoint of the speaker, freedom would seem to be a great advantage, as it is a restraint to him to be obliged to follow strict rules; but an orderly arrangement is decidedly in the interest of the hearer, as it very considerably facilitates his understanding of what is said; it is therefore, though indirectly, in the interest of the speaker too, because he naturally speaks for the purpose of being understood. Besides, he is soon in his turn to become the hearer: as no one is exclusively hearer or speaker, there can be no real conflict of interest between the two.

If it be urged in favour of a free word order that we owe a certain regard to the interests of poets, it must be taken into consideration, first, that we cannot all of us be poets, and that a regard to all those of us who resemble Molière’s M. Jourdain in speaking prose without being aware of it is perhaps, after all, more important than a regard for those very few who are in the enviable position of writing readable verse; secondly, that a statistical investigation would, no doubt, give as its result that those poets who make the most extensive use of inversions are not among the greatest of their craft; and, finally, that so many methods are found of neutralizing the restraint of word order, in the shape of particles, passive voice, different constructions of sentences, etc., that no artist in language need despair.

So far, we have scarcely done more than clear the ground before answering our question. And now we must recognize that there are some rules of word order which cannot be called beneficial in any way; they are like certain rules of etiquette, in so far as one can see no reason for their existence, and yet one is obliged to bow to them. Historians may, in some cases, be able to account for their origin and show that they had a raison d’être at some remote period; but the circumstances that called them into existence then have passed away, and they are now felt to be restraints with no concurrent advantage to reconcile us to their observance. Among rules of this class we may reckon those for placing the French pronouns now before, and now after, the verb, now with the dative and now with the accusative first, ‘elle me le donne | elle le lui donne | donnez-le moi | ne me le donnez pas.’ And, again, the rules for placing the verb, object, etc., in German subordinate clauses otherwise than in main sentences. That the latter rules are defective and are inferior to the English rules, which are the same for the two kinds of sentences, was pointed out before, when we examined Johannson’s German sentences (p. 341), but here we may state that the real, innermost reason for condemning them is their inconsistency: the same rule does not apply in all cases. It seems possible to establish the important principle that the more consistent a rule for word order is, the more useful it is in the economy of speech, not only as facilitating the understanding of what is said, but also as rendering possible certain thoroughgoing changes in linguistic structure.

XVIII.—§ 13. Word Order and Simplification.

This, then, is the conclusion I arrive at, that as simplification of grammatical structure, abolition of case distinctions, and so forth, always go hand in hand with the development of a fixed word order, this cannot be accidental, but there must exist a relation of cause and effect between the two phenomena. Which, then, is the prius or cause? To my mind undoubtedly the fixed word order, so that the grammatical simplification is the posterius or effect. It is, however, by no means uncommon to find a half-latent conception in people’s minds that the flexional endings were first lost ‘by phonetic decay,’ or ‘through the blind operation of sound laws,’ and that then a fixed word order had to step in to make up for the loss of the previous forms of expression. But if this were true we should have to imagine an intervening period in which the mutual relations of words were indicated in neither way; a period, in fact, in which speech was unintelligible and consequently practically useless. The theory is therefore untenable. It follows that a fixed word order must have come in first: it would come quite gradually as a natural consequence of greater mental development and general maturity, when the speaker’s ideas no longer came into his mind helter-skelter, but in orderly sequence. If before the establishment of some sort of fixed word order any tendency to slur certain final consonants or vowels of grammatical importance had manifested itself, it could not have become universal, as it would have been constantly checked by the necessity that speech should be intelligible, and that therefore those marks which showed the relation of different words should not be obliterated. But when once each word was placed at the exact spot where it properly belonged, then there was no longer anything to forbid the endings being weakened by assimilation, etc., or being finally dropped altogether.

To bring out my view I have been obliged in the preceding paragraph to use expressions that should not be taken too literally; I have spoken as if the changes referred to were made ‘in the lump,’ that is, as if the word order was first settled in every respect, and after that the endings began to be dropped. The real facts are, of course, much more complicated, changes of one kind being interwoven with changes of the other in such a way as to render it difficult, if not impossible, in any particular case to discover which was the prius and which the posterius. We are not able to lay our finger on one spot and say: Here final m or n was dropped, because it was now rendered superfluous as a case-sign on account of the accusative being invariably placed after the verb, or for some other such reason. Nevertheless, the essential truth of my hypothesis seems to me unimpeachable. Look at Latin final s. Cicero (Orat. 48. 161) expressly tells us, what is corroborated by a good many inscriptions, that there existed a strong tendency to drop final s; but the tendency did not prevail. The reason seems obvious; take a page of Latin prose and try the effect of striking out all final s’s, and you will find that it will be extremely difficult to determine the meaning of many passages; a consonant playing so important a part in the endings of nouns and verbs could not be left out without loss in a language possessing so much freedom in regard to word position as Latin. Consequently it was kept, but in course of time word position became more and more subject to laws; and when, centuries later, after the splitting up of Latin into the Romanic languages, the tendency to slur over final s knocked once more at the door, it met no longer with the same resistance: final s disappeared, first in Italian and Rumanian, then in French, where it was kept till about the end of the Middle Ages, and it is now beginning to sound a retreat in Spanish; see on Andalusian Fr. Wulff, Un Chapitre de Phonétique Andalouse, 1889.

The main line of development in historical times has, I take it, been the following: first, a period in which words were placed somewhere or other according to the fancy of the moment, but many of them provided with signs that would show their mutual relations; next, a period with retention of these signs, combined with a growing regularity in word order, and at the same time in many connexions a more copious employment of prepositions; then an increasing indistinctness and finally complete dropping of the endings, word order (and prepositions) being now sufficient to indicate the relations at first shown by endings and similar means.

Viewed in this light, the transition from freedom in word position to greater strictness must be considered a beneficial change, since it has enabled the speakers to do away with more circumstantial and clumsy linguistic means. Schiller says:

(Every other master is known by what he says, but the master of style by what he is wisely silent on.) What style is to the individual, the general laws of language are to the nation, and we must award the palm to that language which makes it possible “to be wisely silent” about things which in other languages have to be expressed in a troublesome way, and which have often to be expressed over and over again (virorum omnium bonorum veterum, ealra godra ealdra manna). Could any linguistic expedient be more worthy of the genus homo sapiens than using for different purposes, with different significations, two sentences like ‘John beats Henry’ and ‘Henry beats John,’ or the four Danish ones, ‘Jens slaar Henrik—Henrik slaar Jens—slaar Jens Henrik?—slaar Henrik Jens?’ (John beats Henry—H. beats J.—does J. beat H.?—does H. beat J.?), or the Chinese use of či in different places (Ch. XIX § 3)? Cannot this be compared with the ingenious Arabic system of numeration, in which 234 means something entirely different from 324, or 423, or 432, and the ideas of “tens” and “hundreds” are elegantly suggested by the order of the characters, not, as in the Roman system, ponderously expressed?

Now, it should not be forgotten that this system, “where more is meant than meets the ear,” is not only more convenient, but also clearer than flexions, as actually found in existing languages, for word order in those languages which utilize it grammatically is used much more consistently than any endings have ever been in the old Aryan languages. It is not true, as Johannson would have us believe, that the dispensing with old flexional endings was too dearly bought, as it brought about increasing possibilities of misunderstandings; for in the evolution of languages the discarding of old flexions goes hand in hand with the development of simpler and more regular expedients that are rather less liable than the old ones to produce misunderstandings. Johannson writes: “In contrast to Jespersen I do not consider that the masterly expression is the one which is ‘wisely silent,’ and consequently leaves the meaning to be partly guessed at, but the one which is able to impart the meaning of the speaker or writer clearly and perfectly”—but here he seems rather wide of the mark. For, just as in reading the arithmetical symbol 234 we are perfectly sure that two hundred and thirty-four is meant, and not three hundred and forty-two, so in reading and hearing ‘The boy hates the girl’ we cannot have the least doubt who hates whom. After all, there is less guesswork in the grammatical understanding of English than of Latin; cf. the examples given above, Ch. XVIII § 4, p. 343.

The tendency towards a fixed word order is therefore a progressive one, directly as well as indirectly. The substitution of word order for flexions means a victory of spiritual over material agencies.

XVIII.—§ 14. Summary.

We may here sum up the results of our comparison of the main features of the grammatical structures of ancient and modern languages belonging to our family of speech. We have found certain traits common to the old stages and certain others characteristic of recent ones, and have thus been enabled to establish some definite tendencies of development and to find out the general direction of change; and we have shown reasons for the conviction that this development has on the whole and in the main been a beneficial one, thus justifying us in speaking about ‘progress in language.’ The points in which the superiority of the modern languages manifested itself were the following:

(1) The forms are generally shorter, thus involving less muscular exertion and requiring less time for their enunciation.

(2) There are not so many of them to burden the memory.

(3) Their formation is much more regular.

(4) Their syntactic use also presents fewer irregularities.

(5) Their more analytic and abstract character facilitates expression by rendering possible a great many combinations and constructions which were formerly impossible or unidiomatic.

(6) The clumsy repetitions known under the name of concord have become superfluous.

(7) A clear and unambiguous understanding is secured through a regular word order.

These several advantages have not been won all at once, and languages differ very much in the velocity with which they have been moving in the direction indicated; thus High German is in many respects behindhand as compared with Low German; European Dutch as compared with African Dutch; Swedish as compared with Danish; and all of them as compared with English; further, among the Romanic languages we see considerable variations in this respect. What is maintained is chiefly that there is a general tendency for languages to develop along the lines here indicated, and that this development may truly, from the anthropocentric point of view, which is the only justifiable one, be termed a progressive evolution.

But is this tendency really general, or even universal, in the world of languages? It will easily be seen that my examples have in the main been taken from comparatively few languages, those with which I myself and presumably most of my readers are most familiar, all of them belonging to the Gothonic and Romanic branches of the Aryan family. Would the same theory hold good with regard to other languages? Without pretending to an intimate knowledge of the history of many languages, I yet dare assert that my conclusions are confirmed by all those languages whose history is accessible to us. Colloquial Irish and Gaelic have in many ways a simpler grammatical structure than the Oldest Irish. Russian has got rid of some of the complications of Old Slavonic, and the same is true, even in a much higher degree, of some of the other Slavonic languages; thus, Bulgarian has greatly simplified its nominal and Serbian its verbal flexions. The grammar of spoken Modern Greek is much less complicated than that of the language of Homer or of Demosthenes. The structure of Modern Persian is nearly as simple as English, though that of Old Persian was highly complicated. In India we witness a constant simplification of grammar from Sanskrit through Prakrit and Pali to the modern languages, Hindi, Hindostani (Urdu), Bengali, etc. Outside the Aryan world we see the same movement: Hebrew is simpler and more regular than Assyrian, and spoken Arabic than the old classical language, Koptic than Old Egyptian. Of most of the other languages we are not in possession of written records from very early times; still, we may affirm that in Turkish there has been an evolution, though rather a slow one, of a similar kind; and, as we shall see in a later chapter, Chinese seems to have moved in the same direction, though the nature of its writing makes the task of penetrating into its history a matter of extreme difficulty. A comparative study of the numerous Bantu languages spoken all over South Africa justifies us in thinking that their evolution has been along the same lines: in some of them the prefixes characterizing various classes of nouns have been reduced in number and in extent (cf. above, § 9). Of one of them we have a grammar two hundred years old, by Brusciotto à Vetralla (re-edited by H. Grattan Guinness, London, 1882). A comparison of his description with the language now spoken in the same region (Mpongwe) shows that the class signs have dwindled down considerably and the number of the classes has been reduced from 16 to 10. In short, though we can only prove it with regard to a minority of the multitudinous languages spoken on the globe, this minority embraces all the languages known to us for so long a period that we can talk of their history, and we may, therefore, confidently maintain that what may be briefly termed the tendency towards grammatical simplification is a universal fact of linguistic history.

That this simplification is progressive, i.e. beneficial, was overlooked by the older generation of linguistic thinkers, because they saw a kosmos, a beautiful and well-arranged world, in the old languages, and missed in the modern ones several things that they had been accustomed to regard with veneration. To some extent they were right: every language, when studied in the right spirit, presents so many beautiful points in its systematic structure that it may be called a ‘kosmos.’ But it is not in every way a kosmos; like everything human, it presents fine and less fine features, and a comparative valuation, such as the one here attempted, should take both into consideration. There is undoubtedly an exquisite beauty in the old Greek language, and the ancient Hellenes, with their artistic temperament, knew how to turn that beauty to the best account in their literary productions; but there is no less beauty in many modern languages—though its appraisement is a matter of taste, and as such evades scientific inquiry. But the æsthetic point of view is not the decisive one: language is of the utmost importance to the whole practical and spiritual life of mankind, and therefore has to be estimated by such tests as those applied above; if that is done, we cannot be blind to the fact that modern languages as wholes are more practical than ancient ones, and that the latter present so many more anomalies and irregularities than our present-day languages that we may feel inclined, if not to apply to them Shakespeare’s line, “Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,” yet to think that the development has been from something nearer chaos to something nearer kosmos.