Footnote 89:
Perhaps better “general.” The Chinook “neuter” may refer
to persons as well as things and may also be used as a plural.
“Masculine” and “feminine,” as in German and French, include a great
number of inanimate nouns.
Footnote 90:
Spoken in the greater part of the southern half of Africa.
Chinook is spoken in a number of dialects in the lower Columbia River
valley. It is impressive to observe how the human mind has arrived at
the same form of expression in two such historically unconnected
regions.
Footnote 91:
In Yana the noun and the verb are well distinct, though
there are certain features that they hold in common which tend to draw
them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible. But there are,
strictly speaking, no other parts of speech. The adjective is a verb. So
are the numeral, the interrogative pronoun (e.g., “to be what?”), and
certain “conjunctions” and adverbs (e.g., “to be and” and “to be not”;
one says “and-past-I go,” i.e., “and I went”). Adverbs and prepositions
are either nouns or merely derivative affixes in the verb.
Footnote 93:
One celebrated American writer on culture and language
delivered himself of the dictum that, estimable as the speakers of
agglutinative languages might be, it was nevertheless a crime for an
inflecting woman to marry an agglutinating man. Tremendous spiritual
values were evidently at stake. Champions of the “inflective” languages
are wont to glory in the very irrationalities of Latin and Greek, except
when it suits them to emphasize their profoundly “logical” character.
Yet the sober logic of Turkish or Chinese leaves them cold. The glorious
irrationalities and formal complexities of many “savage” languages they
have no stomach for. Sentimentalists are difficult people.
Footnote 94:
I have in mind valuations of form as such. Whether or not
a language has a large and useful vocabulary is another matter. The
actual size of a vocabulary at a given time is not a thing of real
interest to the linguist, as all languages have the resources at their
disposal for the creation of new words, should need for them arise.
Furthermore, we are not in the least concerned with whether or not a
language is of great practical value or is the medium of a great
culture. All these considerations, important from other standpoints,
have nothing to do with form value.
Footnote 96:
Where, as we have seen, the syntactic relations are by no
means free from an alloy of the concrete.
Footnote 97:
Very much as an English cod-liver oil dodges to some
extent the task of explicitly defining the relations of the three nouns.
Contrast French huile de foie de morue “oil of liver of cod.”
Footnote 99:
There is probably a real psychological connection between
symbolism and such significant alternations as drink, drank, drunk
or Chinese mai (with rising tone) “to buy” and mai (with falling
tone) “to sell.” The unconscious tendency toward symbolism is justly
emphasized by recent psychological literature. Personally I feel that
the passage from sing to sang has very much the same feeling as the
alternation of symbolic colors—e.g., green for safe, red for danger.
But we probably differ greatly as to the intensity with which we feel
symbolism in linguistic changes of this type.
Footnote 100:
Pure or “concrete relational.” See Chapter V.
Footnote 101:
In spite of my reluctance to emphasize the difference
between a prefixing and a suffixing language, I feel that there is more
involved in this difference than linguists have generally recognized. It
seems to me that there is a rather important psychological distinction
between a language that settles the formal status of a radical element
before announcing it—and this, in effect, is what such languages as
Tlingit and Chinook and Bantu are in the habit of doing—and one that
begins with the concrete nucleus of a word and defines the status of
this nucleus by successive limitations, each curtailing in some degree
the generality of all that precedes. The spirit of the former method has
something diagrammatic or architectural about it, the latter is a method
of pruning afterthoughts. In the more highly wrought prefixing languages
the word is apt to affect us as a crystallization of floating elements,
the words of the typical suffixing languages (Turkish, Eskimo, Nootka)
are “determinative” formations, each added element determining the form
of the whole anew. It is so difficult in practice to apply these
elusive, yet important, distinctions that an elementary study has no
recourse but to ignore them.
Footnote 102:
English, however, is only analytic in tendency.
Relatively to French, it is still fairly synthetic, at least in certain
aspects.
Footnote 103:
The former process is demonstrable for English, French,
Danish, Tibetan, Chinese, and a host of other languages. The latter
tendency may be proven, I believe, for a number of American Indian
languages, e.g., Chinook, Navaho. Underneath their present moderately
polysynthetic form is discernible an analytic base that in the one case
may be roughly described as English-like, in the other, Tibetan-like.
Footnote 104:
This applies more particularly to the Romance group:
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Roumanian. Modern Greek is not so
clearly analytic.
Footnote 106:
The following formulae may prove useful to those that are
mathematically inclined. Agglutination: c = a + b; regular fusion:
c = a + (b - x) + x; irregular fusion: c = (a - x) + (b - y) + (x + y);
symbolism: c = (a - x) + x. I do not wish to imply that there is any
mystic value in the process of fusion. It is quite likely to have
developed as a purely mechanical product of phonetic forces that brought
about irregularities of various sorts.
Footnote 109:
If we deny the application of the term “inflective” to
fusing languages that express the syntactic relations in pure form, that
is, without the admixture of such concepts as number, gender, and tense,
merely because such admixture is familiar to us in Latin and Greek, we
make of “inflection” an even more arbitrary concept than it need be. At
the same time it is true that the method of fusion itself tends to break
down the wall between our conceptual groups II and IV, to create group
III. Yet the possibility of such “inflective” languages should not be
denied. In modern Tibetan, for instance, in which concepts of group II
are but weakly expressed, if at all, and in which the relational
concepts (e.g., the genitive, the agentive or instrumental) are
expressed without alloy of the material, we get many interesting
examples of fusion, even of symbolism. Mi di, e.g., “man this, the
man” is an absolutive form which may be used as the subject of an
intransitive verb. When the verb is transitive (really passive), the
(logical) subject has to take the agentive form. Mi di then becomes
mi di “by the man,” the vowel of the demonstrative pronoun (or
article) being merely lengthened. (There is probably also a change in
the tone of the syllable.) This, of course, is of the very essence of
inflection. It is an amusing commentary on the insufficiency of our
current linguistic classification, which considers “inflective” and
“isolating” as worlds asunder, that modern Tibetan may be not inaptly
described as an isolating language, aside from such examples of fusion
and symbolism as the foregoing.
Footnote 110:
I am eliminating entirely the possibility of compounding
two or more radical elements into single words or word-like phrases (see
pages 67-70). To expressly consider compounding in the present survey of
types would be to complicate our problem unduly. Most languages that
possess no derivational affixes of any sort may nevertheless freely
compound radical elements (independent words). Such compounds often have
a fixity that simulates the unity of single words.
Footnote 111:
We may assume that in these languages and in those of
type D all or most of the relational concepts are expressed in “mixed”
form, that such a concept as that of subjectivity, for instance, cannot
be expressed without simultaneously involving number or gender or that
an active verb form must be possessed of a definite tense. Hence group
III will be understood to include, or rather absorb, group IV.
Theoretically, of course, certain relational concepts may be expressed
pure, others mixed, but in practice it will not be found easy to make
the distinction.
Footnote 112:
The line between types C and D cannot be very sharply
drawn. It is a matter largely of degree. A language of markedly
mixed-relational type, but of little power of derivation pure and
simple, such as Bantu or French, may be conveniently put into type C,
even though it is not devoid of a number of derivational affixes.
Roughly speaking, languages of type C may be considered as highly
analytic (“purified”) forms of type D.
Footnote 113:
In defining the type to which a language belongs one must
be careful not to be misled by structural features which are mere
survivals of an older stage, which have no productive life and do not
enter into the unconscious patterning of the language. All languages are
littered with such petrified bodies. The English -ster of spinster
and Webster is an old agentive suffix, but, as far as the feeling of
the present English-speaking generation is concerned, it cannot be said
to really exist at all; spinster and Webster have been completely
disconnected from the etymological group of spin and of weave (web).
Similarly, there are hosts of related words in Chinese which differ in
the initial consonant, the vowel, the tone, or in the presence or
absence of a final consonant. Even where the Chinaman feels the
etymological relationship, as in certain cases he can hardly help doing,
he can assign no particular function to the phonetic variation as such.
Hence it forms no live feature of the language-mechanism and must be
ignored in defining the general form of the language. The caution is all
the more necessary, as it is precisely the foreigner, who approaches a
new language with a certain prying inquisitiveness, that is most apt to
see life in vestigial features which the native is either completely
unaware of or feels merely as dead form.
Footnote 114:
Might nearly as well have come under D.
Footnote 116:
Not Greek specifically, of course, but as a typical
representative of Indo-European.
Footnote 117:
Such, in other words, as can be shown by documentary or
comparative evidence to have been derived from a common source. See
Chapter VII.
Footnote 118:
These are far-eastern and far-western representatives of
the “Soudan” group recently proposed by D. Westermann. The genetic
relationship between Ewe and Shilluk is exceedingly remote at best.
Footnote 119:
This case is doubtful at that. I have put French in C
rather than in D with considerable misgivings. Everything depends on how
one evaluates elements like -al in national, -té in bonté, or
re- in retourner. They are common enough, but are they as alive, as
little petrified or bookish, as our English -ness and -ful and
un-?
Footnote 121:
In a book of this sort it is naturally impossible to give
an adequate idea of linguistic structure in its varying forms. Only a
few schematic indications are possible. A separate volume would be
needed to breathe life into the scheme. Such a volume would point out
the salient structural characteristics of a number of languages, so
selected as to give the reader an insight into the formal economy of
strikingly divergent types.
Footnote 122:
In so far as they do not fall out of the normal speech
group by reason of a marked speech defect or because they are isolated
foreigners that have acquired the language late in life.
Footnote 123:
Observe that we are speaking of an individual’s speech as
a whole. It is not a question of isolating some particular peculiarity
of pronunciation or usage and noting its resemblance to or identity with
a feature in another dialect.
Footnote 124:
It is doubtful if we have the right to speak of
linguistic uniformity even during the predominance of the Koine. It is
hardly conceivable that when the various groups of non-Attic Greeks took
on the Koine they did not at once tinge it with dialectic peculiarities
induced by their previous speech habits.
Footnote 125:
The Zaconic dialect of Lacedaemon is the sole exception.
It is not derived from the Koine, but stems directly from the Doric
dialect of Sparta.
Footnote 126:
Though indications are not lacking of what these remoter
kin of the Indo-European languages may be. This is disputed ground,
however, and hardly fit subject for a purely general study of speech.
Footnote 127:
“Dialect” in contrast to an accepted literary norm is a
use of the term that we are not considering.
Footnote 128:
Spoken in France and Spain in the region of the
Pyrenees.
Footnote 129:
Or rather apprehended, for we do not, in sober fact,
entirely understand it as yet.
Footnote 130:
Not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so.
Footnote 131:
In relative clauses too we tend to avoid the objective
form of “who.” Instead of “The man whom I saw” we are likely to say “The
man that I saw” or “The man I saw.”
Footnote 132:
“Its” was at one time as impertinent a departure as the
“who” of “Who did you see?” It forced itself into English because the
old cleavage between masculine, feminine, and neuter was being slowly
and powerfully supplemented by a new one between thing-class and
animate-class. The latter classification proved too vital to allow usage
to couple males and things (“his”) as against females (“her”). The form
“its” had to be created on the analogy of words like “man’s,” to satisfy
the growing form feeling. The drift was strong enough to sanction a
grammatical blunder.
Footnote 133:
Psychoanalysts will recognize the mechanism. The
mechanisms of “repression of impulse” and of its symptomatic
symbolization can be illustrated in the most unexpected corners of
individual and group psychology. A more general psychology than Freud’s
will eventually prove them to be as applicable to the groping for
abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of experience, as to the
life of the fundamental instincts.
Footnote 134:
Note that it is different with whose. This has not the
support of analogous possessive forms in its own functional group, but
the analogical power of the great body of possessives of nouns (man’s,
boy’s) as well as of certain personal pronouns (his, its; as
predicated possessive also hers, yours, theirs) is sufficient to
give it vitality.
Footnote 135:
Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as when You saw
whom? is equivalent to You saw so and so and that so and so is who?
In such sentences whom is pronounced high and lingeringly to emphasize
the fact that the person just referred to by the listener is not known
or recognized.
Footnote 136:
Students of language cannot be entirely normal in their
attitude towards their own speech. Perhaps it would be better to say
“naïve” than “normal.”
Footnote 137:
It is probably this variability of value in the
significant compounds of a general linguistic drift that is responsible
for the rise of dialectic variations. Each dialect continues the general
drift of the common parent, but has not been able to hold fast to
constant values for each component of the drift. Deviations as to the
drift itself, at first slight, later cumulative, are therefore
unavoidable.
Footnote 138:
Most sentences beginning with interrogative whom are
likely to be followed by did or does, do. Yet not all.
Footnote 139:
Better, indeed, than in our oldest Latin and Greek
records. The old Indo-Iranian languages alone (Sanskrit, Avestan) show
an equally or more archaic status of the Indo-European parent tongue as
regards case forms.
Footnote 140:
Should its eventually drop out, it will have had a
curious history. It will have played the rôle of a stop-gap between
his in its non-personal use (see footnote 11, page 167) and the later
analytic of it. Transcriber's Note: This footnote has been renumbered as Footnote 132.
Footnote 141:
Except in so far as that has absorbed other functions
than such as originally belonged to it. It was only a
nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.
Footnote 142:
Aside from the interrogative: am I?is he? Emphasis
counts for something. There is a strong tendency for the old “objective”
forms to bear a stronger stress than the “subjective” forms. This is why
the stress in locutions like He didn’t go, did he? and isn’t he? is
thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis.
Footnote 143:They: them as an inanimate group may be looked upon as
a kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more
properly belongs.
Footnote 145:
I have changed the Old and Middle High German orthography
slightly in order to bring it into accord with modern usage. These
purely orthographical changes are immaterial. The u of mus is a long
vowel, very nearly like the oo of English moose.
Footnote 146:
The vowels of these four words are long; o as in
rode, e like a of fade, u like oo of brood, y like
German ü.
Footnote 148:
Anglo-Saxon fet is “unrounded” from an older föt,
which is phonetically related to fot precisely as is mys (i.e.,
müs) to mus. Middle High German ue (Modern German u) did not
develop from an “umlauted” prototype of Old High German uo and
Anglo-Saxon o, but was based directly on the dialectic uo. The
unaffected prototype was long o. Had this been affected in the
earliest Germanic or West-Germanic period, we should have had a
pre-German alternation fot: föti; this older ö could not well
have resulted in ue. Fortunately we do not need inferential evidence
in this case, yet inferential comparative methods, if handled with care,
may be exceedingly useful. They are indeed indispensable to the
historian of language.
Footnote 154:
It is possible that other than purely phonetic factors
are also at work in the history of these vowels.
Footnote 155:
The orthography is roughly phonetic. Pronounce all
accented vowels long except where otherwise indicated, unaccented vowels
short; give continental values to vowels, not present English ones.
Footnote 156:
After I. the numbers are not meant to correspond
chronologically to those of the English table. The orthography is again
roughly phonetic.
Footnote 157:
I use ss to indicate a peculiar long, voiceless
s-sound that was etymologically and phonetically distinct from the old
Germanic s. It always goes back to an old t. In the old sources it
is generally written as a variant of z, though it is not to be
confused with the modern German z (= ts). It was probably a dental
(lisped) s.
Footnote 158:Z is to be understood as French or English z, not in
its German use. Strictly speaking, this “z” (intervocalic -s-) was not
voiced but was a soft voiceless sound, a sibilant intermediate between
our s and z. In modern North German it has become voiced to z. It
is important not to confound this s—z with the voiceless
intervocalic s that soon arose from the older lisped ss. In Modern
German (aside from certain dialects), old s and ss are not now
differentiated when final (Maus and Fuss have identical sibilants),
but can still be distinguished as voiced and voiceless s between
vowels (Mäuse and Füsse).
Footnote 159:
In practice phonetic laws have their exceptions, but more
intensive study almost invariably shows that these exceptions are more
apparent than real. They are generally due to the disturbing influence
of morphological groupings or to special psychological reasons which
inhibit the normal progress of the phonetic drift. It is remarkable with
how few exceptions one need operate in linguistic history, aside from
“analogical leveling” (morphological replacement).
Footnote 160:
These confusions are more theoretical than real, however.
A language has countless methods of avoiding practical ambiguities.
Footnote 161:
A type of adjustment generally referred to as “analogical
leveling.”
Footnote 162:
Isolated from other German dialects in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries. It is therefore a good test for gauging
the strength of the tendency to “umlaut,” particularly as it has
developed a strong drift towards analytic methods.
Footnote 164:
The earlier students of English, however, grossly
exaggerated the general “disintegrating” effect of French on middle
English. English was moving fast toward a more analytic structure long
before the French influence set in.
Footnote 165:
For we still name our new scientific instruments and
patent medicines from Greek and Latin.
Footnote 166:
One might all but say, “has borrowed at all.”
Footnote 169:
Probably, in Sweet’s terminology, high-back (or, better,
between back and “mixed” positions)-narrow-unrounded. It generally
corresponds to an Indo-European long u.
Footnote 170:
There seem to be analogous or partly analogous sounds in
certain languages of the Caucasus.
Footnote 171:
This can actually be demonstrated for one of the
Athabaskan dialects of the Yukon.
Footnote 172:
In the sphere of syntax one may point to certain French
and Latin influences, but it is doubtful if they ever reached deeper
than the written language. Much of this type of influence belongs rather
to literary style than to morphology proper.
Footnote 174:
A group of languages spoken in southeastern Asia, of
which Khmer (Cambodgian) is the best known representative.
Footnote 175:
A group of languages spoken in northeastern India.
Footnote 176:
I have in mind, e.g., the presence of postpositions in
Upper Chinook, a feature that is clearly due to the influence of
neighboring Sahaptin languages; or the use by Takelma of instrumental
prefixes, which are likely to have been suggested by neighboring “Hokan”
languages (Shasta, Karok).
Footnote 177:
Itself an amalgam of North “French” and Scandinavian
elements.
Footnote 178:
The “Celtic” blood of what is now England and Wales is by
no means confined to the Celtic-speaking regions—Wales and, until
recently, Cornwall. There is every reason to believe that the invading
Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) did not exterminate the
Brythonic Celts of England nor yet drive them altogether into Wales and
Cornwall (there has been far too much “driving” of conquered peoples
into mountain fastnesses and land’s ends in our histories), but simply
intermingled with them and imposed their rule and language upon them.
Footnote 179:
In practice these three peoples can hardly be kept
altogether distinct. The terms have rather a local-sentimental than a
clearly racial value. Intermarriage has gone on steadily for centuries
and it is only in certain outlying regions that we get relatively pure
types, e.g., the Highland Scotch of the Hebrides. In America, English,
Scotch, and Irish strands have become inextricably interwoven.
Footnote 180:
The High German now spoken in northern Germany is not of
great age, but is due to the spread of standardized German, based on
Upper Saxon, a High German dialect, at the expense of “Plattdeutsch.”
Footnote 183:
By working back from such data as we possess we can make
it probable that these languages were originally confined to a
comparatively small area in northern Germany and Scandinavia. This area
is clearly marginal to the total area of distribution of the
Indo-European-speaking peoples. Their center of gravity, say 1000 B.C.,
seems to have lain in southern Russia.
Footnote 184:
While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for
it is stronger than one might suppose. There are a surprising number of
common and characteristic Germanic words which cannot be connected with
known Indo-European radical elements and which may well be survivals of
the hypothetical pre-Germanic language; such are house, stone,
sea, wife (German Haus, Stein, See, Weib).
Footnote 185:
Only the easternmost part of this island is occupied by
Melanesian-speaking Papuans.
Footnote 186:
A “nationality” is a major, sentimentally unified, group.
The historical factors that lead to the feeling of national unity are
various—political, cultural, linguistic, geographic, sometimes
specifically religious. True racial factors also may enter in, though
the accent on “race” has generally a psychological rather than a
strictly biological value. In an area dominated by the national
sentiment there is a tendency for language and culture to become uniform
and specific, so that linguistic and cultural boundaries at least tend
to coincide. Even at best, however, the linguistic unification is never
absolute, while the cultural unity is apt to be superficial, of a
quasi-political nature, rather than deep and far-reaching.
Footnote 187:
The Semitic languages, idiosyncratic as they are, are no
more definitely ear-marked.
Footnote 189:
The Fijians, for instance, while of Papuan (negroid)
race, are Polynesian rather than Melanesian in their cultural and
linguistic affinities.
Footnote 190:
Though even here there is some significant overlapping.
The southernmost Eskimo of Alaska were assimilated in culture to their
Tlingit neighbors. In northeastern Siberia, too, there is no sharp
cultural line between the Eskimo and the Chukchi.
Footnote 191:
The supersession of one language by another is of course
not truly a matter of linguistic assimilation.
Footnote 192:
“Temperament” is a difficult term to work with. A great
deal of what is loosely charged to national “temperament” is really
nothing but customary behavior, the effect of traditional ideals of
conduct. In a culture, for instance, that does not look kindly upon
demonstrativeness, the natural tendency to the display of emotion
becomes more than normally inhibited. It would be quite misleading to
argue from the customary inhibition, a cultural fact, to the native
temperament. But ordinarily we can get at human conduct only as it is
culturally modified. Temperament in the raw is a highly elusive thing.
Footnote 194:
I can hardly stop to define just what kind of expression
is “significant” enough to be called art or literature. Besides, I do
not exactly know. We shall have to take literature for granted.
Footnote 195:
This “intuitive surrender” has nothing to do with
subservience to artistic convention. More than one revolt in modern art
has been dominated by the desire to get out of the material just what it
is really capable of. The impressionist wants light and color because
paint can give him just these; “literature” in painting, the sentimental
suggestion of a “story,” is offensive to him because he does not want
the virtue of his particular form to be dimmed by shadows from another
medium. Similarly, the poet, as never before, insists that words mean
just what they really mean.
Footnote 197:
The question of the transferability of art productions
seems to me to be of genuine theoretic interest. For all that we speak
of the sacrosanct uniqueness of a given art work, we know very well,
though we do not always admit it, that not all productions are equally
intractable to transference. A Chopin étude is inviolate; it moves
altogether in the world of piano tone. A Bach fugue is transferable into
another set of musical timbres without serious loss of esthetic
significance. Chopin plays with the language of the piano as though no
other language existed (the medium “disappears”); Bach speaks the
language of the piano as a handy means of giving outward expression to a
conception wrought in the generalized language of tone.
Footnote 198:
Provided, of course, Chinese is careful to provide itself
with the necessary scientific vocabulary. Like any other language, it
can do so without serious difficulty if the need arises.
Footnote 199:
Aside from individual peculiarities of diction, the
selection and evaluation of particular words as such.
Footnote 200:
Not by any means a great poem, merely a bit of occasional
verse written by a young Chinese friend of mine when he left Shanghai
for Canada.
Footnote 201:
The old name of the country about the mouth of the
Yangtsze.
Footnote 204:
Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origins from the
singing voice and the measure of the dance. Yet accentual and syllabic
types of verse, rather than quantitative verse, seem to be the
prevailing norms.
Footnote 205:
Quantitative distinctions exist as an objective fact.
They have not the same inner, psychological value that they had in
Greek.
Footnote 206:
Verhaeren was no slave to the Alexandrine, yet he
remarked to Symons, à propos of the translation of Les Aubes, that
while he approved of the use of rhymeless verse in the English version,
he found it “meaningless” in French.