Footnotes to Chapter I:
The Value of Comparative Philology
1. The following statute was approved by the University of Oxford in 1868 (Statuta Universitatis Oxoniensis, iv., i., 37. §§ 1–3):—
“1. Professor philologiæ comparativæ a Vice-Cancellario, et professoribus linguarum Hebraicæ, Sanskriticæ, Græcæ, Latinæ, et Anglo-Saxonicæ eligatur. In æqualitate suffragantium rem decidat Vice-Cancellarius.
“Proviso tamen ut si vir cl. M. Müller, M.A., hodie linguarum modernarum Europæ professor Taylorianus, eam professionem intra mensem post hoc statutum sancitum resignaverit, seque professoris philologiæ comparativæ munus suscipere paratum esse scripto Vice-Cancellarium certiorem fecerit, is primus admittatur professor.
“2. Professor quotannis per sex menses in Universitate incolat et commoretur inter decimum diem Octobris et primum diem Julii sequentis.
“3. Professor duas lectionum series in duobus discretis terminis legat, terminis Paschatis et S. Trinitatis pro uno reputatis; scilicet per sex septimanas in utroque termino, et bis ad minimum in unaquaque septimana: atque insuper per sex septimanas unius alicujus termini bis ad minimum in unaquaque septimana per unius horæ spatium vacet instruendis auditoribus in iis quæ melius sine solennitate tradi possunt. Unam porro ad minimum lectionem quotannis publice habeat ab academicis quibuscunque sine mercede audiendam. De die hora et loco quibus hæc lectio solennis habenda sit academiam modo consueto certiorem faciat.”
2. An offer to found a professorship of Chinese, to be held by an Englishman whom even Stanislas Julien recognized as the best Chinese scholar of the day, has lately been received very coldly by the Hebdomadal Council of the University.
3. Liber Sextus Decretalium (Lugduni, 1572), p. 1027: “Ut igitur peritia linguarum hujusmodi possit habiliter per instructionem efficaciam obtinere, hoc sacro approbante concilio scholas in subscriptarum linguarum generibus ubicunque Romanam curiam residere contigerit, necnon in Parisiensi, et Oxoniensi, Bononiensi, et Salmantino studiis providimus erigendas; statuentes ut in quolibet locorum ipsorum teneantur viri catholici, sufficienter habentes Hebraicæ, Arabicæ, et Chaldææ linguarum notitiam.”
4. Greaves, Oratio Oxonii habita, 1637, p. 19: “Paucos ultra centum annos numeramus ex quo Græcæ primum literæ oras hasce appulerunt, antea ignotæ prorsus, nonnullis exosæ etiam et invisæ, indoctissimis scilicet fraterculis, quibus religio erat graece scire, et levissimus Atticæ eruditionis gustus hæresin sapiebat.”
5. See Biographia Britannica Literaria, vol. i. p. 110.
6. M. M.’s Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. i. p. 171.
7. Ibid., p. 176.
8. See Notes A and B, pp. 43, 45.
9. See M. M., Science of Religion, 1873, p. 293.
10. See Weber, Indische Studien, vol. i. p. 38.
11. See Haug, in Ewald’s Biblische Jahrbücher, vol. vi. p. 162.
12. Anab., i. 2, 7: Ἐνταῦθα Κύρῳ Βασίλεια ἦν καὶ παράδεισος μέγας, ἀγρίων θηρίων πλήρης, ἅ ἐκεῖνος ἐθήρευεν ἀπὸ ἵππου, ὁπότε γυμνάσαι βούλοιτο ἑαυτόν τε καὶ τοὺς ἵππους. Διὰ μέσου δὲ τοῦ παραδείσου ῥεῖ ὁ Μαίανδρος ποταμός κ.τ.λ. Hell., iv. 1, 15: Ἐν περιειργμένοις παραδείσοις κ.τ.λ.
13. See Indian Antiquary, 1874, p. 332.
14. Grassmann, Kuhn’s Zeitschrift, vol. ix. p. 23.
15. Ebel, Kuhn’s Zeitschrift, vol. viii. p. 242.
16. Schleicher, Compendium, § 112.
17. Lottner, Kuhn’s Zeitschrift, vol. ix. p. 319.
18. Leo Meyer, Die Gothische Sprache, § 31.
19. Choeroboscus, B. A., p. 1274, 29: Τὰ ἀπαρέμφατα ἀμφιβάλλεται εἰ ἄρα εἰσὶ ῥήματα ἢ οὐχί. Schoemann, Rede-theile, p. 49.
20. Apollonius, De Constr., i. c. 8, p. 32: Δυνάμει αὐτὸ τὸ ῥῆμα οὔτε πρόσωπα ἐπιδέχεται οὔτε ἀριθμούς, ἀλλὰ ἐγγενόμενον ἐν προσώποις τότε καὶ τὰ πρόσωπα διέστειλεν . . . . καὶ ψυχικὴν διάθεσιν. Schoemann, l.c. p. 19.
22. Benfey, Orient und Occident, vol. i. p. 606; vol. ii. pp. 97, 132.
23. Chips, vol. iii. p. 134.
24. Dr. Kielhorn in his grammar gives correctly tad as base, tat as nom. and acc. sing., because in the latter case phonetic rules either require or allow the change of d into t. Boehtlingk, Roth, and Benfey also give the right forms. Curtius, like Bopp, gives yat, Schleicher tat, which he supposes to have been changed at an early time into tad (§ 203).
25. Weich ist es (ṭ oder ḍ) wohl im abl. sing., gafnâṭ (gafnâdha). Justi, Handbuch der Zendsprache, p. 362.
26. Orient und Occident, vol. i. p. 298.
27. Entwickelung der Lateinischen Formenlehre, 1870, p. 20.
28. Grundriss der Lateinischen Declination, 1866, p. 9.
29. See Benfey, l.c. p. 298.
30. In the dictionary of Boehtlingk and Roth we read s.v. gnâ, “scarce in the singular; nom. sing. seems to be gnâs, according to the passage Rv. IV. 9, 4, and Naigh. I. 11, in one text, while the other text gives the form gnâ.” Against this, it should be remarked, that it would make no difference whether the MSS. of the Naighaṇṭuka give gnâ or gnâs. Gnâ would be the nom. sing., gnâs would be the form in which the word occurs most frequently in the Veda. It is easy to see that the collector of the Naighaṇṭuka allowed himself to quote words according to either principle.
Devarâja, in his commentary on gnâ, explains it: “Gamer dhâtor dhâpṛ́vasyajyatibhyo naḥ (U. S. III. 6) iti bahulakân napratyayo bhavati ṭilopaś ca; ṭap. Gatyarthâ buddhyarthâḥ jânanti karmeti gnâḥ. Yadvâ gacchati yajñeshu; abhí yajñám gṛṇîhi no gnâvaḥ (patnîvaḥ) Rv. I. 15, 3. Chandâṃsi vai gnâ iti brâhmaṇam iti Mâdhavaḥ. Asmấ îd u gnấś cid (Rv. I. 61, 8) ity api; gâyatryâdyâ devapatnya iti sa eva. Tasmâc chandasâm gâyatryâdînâm vâgrûpatvâd gnâvyapadeśaḥ.”
In his remarks on Nigh. III. 29, it is quite clear that Devarâja takes gnâḥ as a nom. plur., not as a nom. sing. He says: Menâ gnâ iti stríṇâm; ubhâv api śabdau vyâkhyâtau vânnâmasu. Mânayanti hi tâḥ patiśvaśuramátulâdayaḥ, pûjyâ bhûshayitavyâś ceti smaraṇât. Gacchanty enâḥ patayo patyârthinaḥ. The passage quoted in the Nirukta III. 29, gnâs tvâkṛntann apaso ’tanvata vayitryo ’vayan, is taken from the Tâṇḍyabrâhmaṇa I. 8, 9. “O dress! the women cut thee out, the workers stretched thee out, the weavers wove thee.”
Thus every support which the Nighaṇṭu or the Nirukta was supposed to give to the form gnâḥ as a nom. sing. vanishes. And if it is said s.v. gnâspati, that in this compound gnâḥ might be taken as a nom. sing., and that the Pada-text separates gnâḥ-patiḥ, it has been overlooked that the separation in Rv. II. 38, 10, is a mere misprint. See Prâtiśâkhya, 738. The compound gnâspatiḥ has been correctly explained as standing for gnâyâspatiḥ, and the same old genitive is also found in jâspatiḥ and jâspatyam. See also Vâjasan. Prâtiśâkhya, IV. 39. It is important to observe that the metre requires us to pronounce gnâspati either as gnăāspătĭḥ or as gănāspătĭḥ.
There is, as far as I know, no passage where gnâḥ in the Veda can be taken as a nom. sing., and it should be observed that gnâḥ as nom. plur. is almost always disyllabic in the Rig-veda, excepting the tenth Maṇḍala; that the acc. sing. (V. 43, 6) is, however, disyllabic, but the acc. plur. monosyllabic (I. 22, 10). In V. 43, 13, we must either read gn̆āḥ or ōshădhī̆ḥ.
The beginning of V.43.13c is also given as “ghnā vasāna oṣadhīr”. Printed text (breve over n, combined breve and macron over i) may be intended to read “gnăâḥ” or “gănâḥ” and “oṣadhĭîḥ”.
31. Sthâ, svâbhiprâyabodhanânukûlasthiti, to reveal by gestures, a meaning not found in our dictionaries. Wilson renders it wrongly by to stay with, which would govern the instrumental. Śap, cursing, means to use curses in order to convey some meaning or intention to another person.
32. Wilson’s Sanskrit Grammar, p. 390.
33. In verbs compounded with prepositions the accent is on the penultimate: e.g., samídhe, atikráme, etc.
34. See M. M.’s Translation of the Rig-Veda, I. p. 34.
35. Morris, Historic Outlines of English Accidence, p. 52.
36. Morris, l.c. p. 177.
II.
REDE LECTURE,
DELIVERED IN THE SENATE HOUSE BEFORE
THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE,
ON FRIDAY, MAY 29, 1868.1
Part I.
ON THE STRATIFICATION OF LANGUAGE.
There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering. We have all experienced it in childhood, in youth, and in our manhood, and we may hope that even in our old age this affection of the mind will not entirely pass away. If we analyze this feeling of wonder carefully, we shall find that it consists of two elements. What we mean by wondering is not only that we are startled or stunned,—that I should call the merely passive element of wonder. When we say “I wonder,” we confess that we are taken aback, but there is a secret satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of surprise, a kind of hope, nay, almost of certainty, that sooner or later the wonder will cease, that our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple with these novel impressions or experiences, grasp them, it may be, throw them, and finally triumph over them. In fact we wonder at the riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm conviction that there is a solution to them all, even though we ourselves may not be able to find it.
Wonder, no doubt, arises from ignorance, but from a peculiar kind of ignorance; from what might be called a fertile ignorance: an ignorance which, if we look back at the history of most of our sciences, will be found to have been the mother of all human knowledge. For thousands of years men have looked at the earth with its stratifications, in some places so clearly mapped out; for thousands of years they must have seen in their quarries and mines, as well as we ourselves, the imbedded petrifications of organic creatures: yet they looked and passed on without thinking more about it—they did not wonder. Not even an Aristotle had eyes to see; and the conception of a science of the earth, of Geology, was reserved for the eighteenth century.
Still more extraordinary is the listlessness with which during all the centuries that have elapsed since the first names were given to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field, men have passed by what was much nearer to them than even the gravel on which they trod, namely, the words of their own language. Here, too, the clearly marked lines of different strata seemed almost to challenge attention, and the pulses of former life were still throbbing in the petrified forms imbedded in grammars and dictionaries. Yet not even a Plato had eyes to see, or ears to hear, and the conception of a science of language, of Glottology, was reserved for the nineteenth century.
I am far from saying that Plato and Aristotle knew nothing of the nature, the origin, and the purpose of language, or that we have nothing to learn from their works. They, and their successors, and their predecessors too, beginning with Herakleitos and Demokritos, were startled and almost fascinated by the mysteries of human speech as much as by the mysteries of human thought; and what we call grammar and the laws of language, nay, all the technical terms which are still current in our schools, such as noun and verb, case and number, infinitive and participle, all this was first discovered and named by the philosophers and grammarians of Greece, to whom, in spite of all our new discoveries, I believe we are still beholden, whether consciously or unconsciously, for more than half of our intellectual life.
But the interest which those ancient Greek philosophers took in language was purely philosophical. It was the form, far more than the matter of speech which seemed to them a subject worthy of philosophical speculation. The idea that there was, even in their days, an immense mass of accumulated speech to be sifted, to be analyzed, and to be accounted for somehow, before any theories on the nature of language could be safely started, hardly ever entered their minds; or when it did, as we see here and there in Plato’s “Kratylos,” it soon vanished, without leaving any permanent impression. Each people and each generation has its own problems to solve. The problem that occupied Plato in his “Kratylos” was, if I understand him rightly, the possibility of a perfect language, a correct, true, or ideal language, a language founded on his own philosophy, his own system of types or ideas. He was too wise a man to attempt, like Bishop Wilkins, the actual construction of a philosophical language. But, like Leibniz, he just lets us see that a perfect language is conceivable, and that the chief reason of the imperfections of real language must be found in the fact that its original framers were ignorant of the true nature of things, ignorant of dialectic philosophy, and therefore incapable of naming rightly what they had failed to apprehend correctly. Plato’s view of actual language, as far as it can be made out from the critical and negative rather than didactic and positive dialogue of “Kratylos,” seems to have been very much the same as his view of actual government. Both fall short of the ideal, and both are to be tolerated only in so far as they participate in the perfections of an ideal state and an ideal language.2 Plato’s “Kratylos” is full of suggestive wisdom. It is one of those books which, as we read them again from time to time, seem every time like new books: so little do we perceive at first all that is pre-supposed in them,—the accumulated mould of thought, if I may say so, in which alone a philosophy like that of Plato could strike its roots and draw its support.
But while Plato shows a deeper insight into the mysteries of language than almost any philosopher that has come after him, he has no eyes for that marvelous harvest of words garnered up in our dictionaries, and in the dictionaries of all the races of the earth. With him language is almost synonymous with Greek, and though in one passage of the “Kratylos” he suggests that certain Greek words might have been borrowed from the Barbarians, and, more particularly from the Phrygians, yet that remark, as coming from Plato, seems to be purely ironical, and though it contains, as we know, a germ of truth that has proved most fruitful in our modern science of language, it struck no roots in the minds of Greek philosophers. How much our new science of language differs from the linguistic studies of the Greeks; how entirely the interest which Plato took in language is now supplanted by new interests, is strikingly brought home to us when we see how the Société de Linguistique, lately founded at Paris, and including the names of the most distinguished scholars of France, declares in one of its first statutes that “it will receive no communication concerning the origin of language or the formation of a universal language,” the very subjects which, in the time of Herakleitos and Plato, rendered linguistic studies worthy of the consideration of a philosopher.
It may be that the world was too young in the days of Plato, and that the means of communication were wanting to enable the ancient philosopher to see very far beyond the narrow horizon of Greece. With us it is different. The world has grown older, and has left to us in the annals of its various literatures the monuments of growing and decaying speech. The world has grown larger, and we have before us, not only the relics of ancient civilization in Asia, Africa, and America, but living languages in such number and variety that we draw back almost aghast at the mere list of their names. The world has grown wiser too, and where Plato could only see imperfections, the failures of the founders of human speech, we see, as everywhere else in human life, a natural progress from the imperfect towards the perfect, unceasing attempts at realizing the ideal, and the frequent triumphs of the human mind over the inevitable difficulties of this earthly condition,—difficulties, not of man’s own making, but, as I firmly believe, prepared for him, and not without a purpose, as toils and tasks, by a higher Power and by the highest Wisdom.
Let us look then abroad and behold the materials which the student of language has now to face. Beginning with the language of the Western Isles, we have at the present day, at least 100,000 words, arranged as on the shelves of a Museum, in the pages of Johnson and Webster. But these 100,000 words represent only the best grains that have remained in the sieve, while clouds of chaff have been winnowed off, and while many a valuable grain too has been lost by mere carelessness. If we counted the wealth of English dialects, and if we added the treasures of the ancient language from Alfred to Wycliffe, we should easily double the herbarium of the linguistic flora of England. And what are these Western Isles as compared to Europe; and what is Europe, a mere promontory, as compared to the vast continent of Asia; and what again is Asia, as compared to the whole inhabitable world? But there is no corner of that world that is not full of language: the very desert and the isles of the sea teem with dialects, and the more we recede from the centres of civilization, the larger the number of independent languages, springing up in every valley, and overshadowing the smallest island.
Ἴδαν ἐς πολύδενδρον ἀνὴρ ὑλατόμος ἐνθὼν
Παπταίνει, παρέοντος ἄδην, πόθεν ἄρξεται ἔργω.3
We are bewildered by the variety of plants, of birds, and fishes, and insects, scattered with lavish prodigality over land and sea;—but what is the living wealth of that Fauna as compared to the winged words which fill the air with unceasing music! What are the scanty relics of fossil plants and animals, compared to the storehouse of what we call the dead languages! How then can we explain it that for centuries and centuries, while collecting beasts, and birds, and fishes, and insects, while studying their forms, from the largest down to the smallest and almost invisible creatures, man has passed by this forest of speech, without seeing the forest, as we say in German, for the very number of its trees (Man sah den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht), without once asking how this vast currency could have been coined, what inexhaustible mines could have supplied the metal, what cunning hands could have devised the image and superscription,—without once wondering at the countless treasure inherited by him from the fathers of the human race?
Let us now turn our attention in a different direction. After it had been discovered that there was this great mass of material to be collected, to be classified, to be explained, what has the Science of Language, as yet, really accomplished? It has achieved much, considering that real work only began about fifty years ago; it has achieved little, if we look at what still remains to be done.
The first discovery was that languages admit of classification. Now this was a very great discovery, and it at once changed and raised the whole character of linguistic studies. Languages might have been, for all we know, the result of individual fancy or poetry; words might have been created here and there at random, or been fixed by a convention, more or less arbitrary. In that case a scientific classification would have been as impossible as it is if applied to the changing fashions of the day. Nothing can be classified, nothing can be scientifically ruled and ordered, except what has grown up in natural order and according to rational rule.
Out of the great mass of speech that is now accessible to the student of language, a number of so-called families have been separated, such as the Aryan, the Semitic, the Ural-Altaic, the Indo-Chinese, the Dravidian, the Malayo-Polynesian, the Kafir or Bâ-ntu in Africa, and the Polysynthetic dialects of America. The only classes, however, which have been carefully examined, and which alone have hitherto supplied the materials for what we might call the Philosophy of Language, are the Aryan and the Semitic, the former comprising the languages of India, Persia, Armenia, Greece and Italy, and of the Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic races; the latter consisting of the languages of the Babylonians, the Syrians, the Jews, the Ethiopians, the Arabs.
These two classes include, no doubt, the most important languages of the world, if we measure the importance of languages by the amount of influence exercised on the political and literary history of the world by those who speak them. But considered by themselves, and placed in their proper place in the vast realm of human speech, they describe but a very small segment of the entire circle. The completeness of the evidence which they place before us in the long series of their literary treasures, points them out in an eminent degree as the most useful subjects on which to study the anatomy of speech, and nearly all the discoveries that have been made as to the laws of language, the process of composition, derivation, and inflexion, have been gained by Aryan and Semitic scholars.
Far be it from me, therefore, to underrate the value of Aryan and Semitic scholarship for a successful prosecution of the Science of Language. But while doing full justice to the method adopted by Semitic and Aryan scholars in the discovery of the laws that regulate the growth and decay of language, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that our field of observation has been thus far extremely limited, and that we should act in defiance of the simplest rules of sound induction, were we to generalize on such scanty evidence. Let us but clearly see what place these two so-called families, the Aryan and Semitic, occupy in the great kingdom of speech. They are in reality but two centres, two small settlements of speech, and all we know of them is their period of decay, not their period of growth, their descending, not their ascending career, their Being, as we say in German, not their Becoming (Ihr Gewordensein, nicht ihr Werden). Even in the earliest literary documents both the Aryan and Semitic speech appear before us as fixed and petrified. They had left forever that stage during which language grows and expands, before it is arrested in its exuberant fertility by means of religious or political concentration, by means of oral tradition, or finally by means of a written literature. In the natural history of speech, writing, or, what in early times takes the place of writing, oral tradition, is something merely accidental. It represents a foreign influence which, in natural history, can only be compared to the influence exercised by domestication on plants and animals. Language would be language still, nay, would be more truly language, if the idea of a literature, whether oral or written, had never entered men’s minds; and however important the effects produced by this artificial domestication of language may be, it is clear that our ideas of what language is in a natural state, and therefore what Sanskrit and Hebrew, too, must have been before they were tamed and fixed by literary cultivation, ought not to be formed from an exclusive study of Aryan and Semitic speech. I maintain that all that we call Aryan and Semitic speech, wonderful as its literary representatives may be, consists of neither more or less than so many varieties which all owe their origin to only two historical concentrations of wild unbounded speech; nay, however perfect, however powerful, however glorious in the history of the world,—in the eyes of the student of language, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, are what a student of natural history would not hesitate to call “monstra,” unnatural, exceptional formations which can never disclose to us the real character of language left to itself to follow out its own laws without let or hindrance.
For that purpose a study of Chinese and the Turanian dialects, a study even of the jargons of the savages of Africa, Polynesia, and Melanesia is far more instructive than the most minute analysis of Sanskrit and Hebrew. The impression which a study of Greek and Latin and Sanskrit leaves on our minds is, that language is a work of art, most complicated, most wonderful, most perfect. We have given so many names to its outward features, its genders and cases, its tenses and moods, its participles, gerunds, and supines, that at last we are frightened at our own devices. Who can read through all the so-called irregular verbs, or look at the thousands and thousands of words in a Greek Dictionary without feeling that he moves about in a perfect labyrinth? How then, we ask, was this labyrinth erected? How did all this come to be? We ourselves, speaking the language which we speak, move about, as it were, in the innermost chambers, in the darkest recesses of that primeval palace, but we cannot tell by what steps and through what passages we arrived there, and we look in vain for the thread of Ariadne which in leading us out of the enchanted castle of our language, would disclose to us the way by which we ourselves, or our fathers and forefathers before us, entered into it.
The question how language came to be what it is has been asked again and again. Even a school-boy, if he possesses but a grain of the gift of wondering must ask himself why mensa means one table, and mensæ many tables; why I love should be amo, I am loved amor, I shall love amabo, I have loved amavi, I should have loved amavissem. Until very lately two answers only could have been given to such questions. Both sound to us almost absurd, yet in their time they were supported by the highest authorities. Either, it was said, language, and particularly the grammatical framework of language was made by convention, by agreeing to call one table mensa, and many tables mensæ; or, and this was Schlegel’s view, language was declared to possess an organic life, and its terminations, prefixes, and suffixes were supposed to have sprouted forth from the radicals and stems and branches of language, like so many buds and flowers. To us it seems almost incredible that such theories should have been seriously maintained, and maintained by men of learning and genius. But what better answer could they have given? What better answer has been given even now? We have learnt something, chiefly from a study of the modern dialects, which often repeat the processes of ancient speech, and thus betray the secrets of the family. We have learnt that in some of the dialects of modern Sanskrit, in Bengali for instance,4 the plural is formed, as it is in Chinese, Mongolian, Turkish, Finnish, Burmese, and Siamese, also in the Dravidian and Malayo-Polynesian dialects, by adding a word expressive of plurality, and then appending again the terminations of the singular. We have learnt from French how a future, je parlerai, can be formed by an auxiliary verb: “I to speak have” coming to mean, I shall speak. We have learnt from our own language, whether English or German, that suffixes, such as head in godhead, ship in ladyship, dom in kingdom were originally substantives, having the meaning of quality, shape, and state. But I doubt whether even thus we should have arrived at a thorough understanding of the real antecedents of language, unless, what happened in the study of the stratification of the earth, had happened in the study of language. If the formation of the crust of the earth had been throughout regular and uniform, and if none of the lower strata had been tilted up, so that even those who run might read, no shaft from the surface could have been sunk deep enough to bring the geologist from the tertiary strata down to the Silurian rocks. The same in language. Unless some languages had been arrested in their growth during their earlier stages, and had remained on the surface in this primitive state exposed only to the decomposing influence of atmospheric action, and to the ill-treatment of literary cultivation, I doubt whether any scholar would have had the courage to say that at one time Sanskrit was like unto Chinese, and Hebrew no better than Malay. In the successive strata of language thus exposed to our view, we have in fact, as in Geology, the very thread of Ariadne, which, if we will but trust to it, will lead us out of the dark labyrinth of language in which we live, by the same road by which we and those who came before us, first entered into it. The more we retrace our steps, the more we advance from stratum to stratum, from story to story, the more shall we feel almost dazzled by the daylight that breaks in upon us; the more shall we be struck, no longer by the intricacy of Greek or Sanskrit grammar, but by the marvelous simplicity of the original warp of human speech, as preserved, for instance, in Chinese; by the child-like contrivances, that are at the bottom of Paulo-post Futures and Conditional Moods.
Let no one be frightened at the idea of studying a Chinese grammar. Those who can take an interest in the secret springs of the mind, in the elements of pure reason, in the laws of thought, will find a Chinese grammar most instructive, most fascinating. It is the faithful photograph of man in his leading-strings, trying the muscles of his mind, groping his way, and so delighted with his first successful grasps that he repeats them again and again. It is child’s play, if you like, but it displays, like all child’s play, that wisdom and strength which are perfect in the mouth of babes and sucklings. Every shade of thought that finds expression in the highly finished and nicely balanced system of Greek tenses, moods, and particles can be expressed, and has been expressed, in that infant language by words that have neither prefix nor suffix, no terminations to indicate number, case, tense, mood, or person. Every word in Chinese is monosyllabic, and the same word, without any change of form, may be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, or a particle. Thus ta, according to its position in a sentence, may mean great, greatness, to grow, very much, very.5
And here a very important observation has been made by Chinese grammarians, an observation which, after a very slight modification and expansion, contains indeed the secret of the whole growth of language from Chinese to English. If a word in Chinese is used with the bonâ fide signification of a noun or a verb, it is called a full word (shi-tsé); if it is used as a particle or with a merely determinative or formal character, it is called an empty word (hiu-tsé6). There is as yet no outward difference between full and empty words in Chinese, and this renders it all the more creditable to the grammarians of China that they should have perceived the inward distinction, even in the absence of any outward signs.
Let us learn then from Chinese grammarians this great lesson, that words may become empty, and without restricting the meaning of empty words as they do, let us use that term in the most general sense, as expressive of the fact that words may lose something of their full original meaning.
Let us add to this another observation, which the Chinese could not well have made, but which we shall see confirmed again and again in the history of language, viz.: that empty words, or, as we may also call them, dead words, are most exposed to phonetic decay.
It is clear then that, with these two preliminary observations, we can imagine three conditions of language:—
1. There may be languages in which all words, both empty and full, retain their independent form. Even words which are used when we should use mere suffixes or terminations, retain their outward integrity in Chinese. Thus, in Chinese, jin means man, tu means crowd, jin-tu, man-crowd. In this compound both jin and tu continue to be felt as independent words, more so than in our own compound man-kind; but nevertheless tu has become empty, it only serves to determine the preceding word jin, man, and tells us the quantity or number in which jin shall be taken. The compound answers in intention to our plural, but in form it is wide apart from men, the plural of man.
2. Empty words may lose their independence, may suffer phonetic decay, and dwindle down to mere suffixes and terminations. Thus in Burmese the plural is formed by to, in Finnish, Mordvinian, and Ostiakian by t. As soon as to ceases to be used as an independent word in the sense of number, it becomes an empty, or if you like, an obsolete word, that has no meaning except as the exponent of plurality; nay, at last, it may dwindle down to a mere letter, which is then called by grammarians the termination of the plural. In this second stage phonetic decay may well-nigh destroy the whole body of an empty word, but—and this is important—no full words, no radicals are as yet attacked by that disintegrating process.
3. Phonetic decay may advance, and does advance still further. Full words also may lose their independence, and be attacked by the same disease that had destroyed the original features of suffixes and prefixes. In this state it is frequently impossible to distinguish any longer between the radical and formative elements of words.
If we wished to represent these three stages of language algebraically, we might represent the first by RR, using R as the symbol of a root which has suffered no phonetic decay; the second, by R + ρ or ρ + R, or ρ + R + ρ representing by ρ an empty word that has suffered phonetic change; the third, by rρ, or ρr, or ρrρ, when both full and empty words have been changed, and have become welded together into one indistinguishable mass through the intense heat of thought, and by the constant hammering of the tongue.
Those who are acquainted with the works of Humboldt will easily recognize, in these three stages or strata, a classification of language first suggested by that eminent philosopher. According to him languages can be classified as isolating, agglutinative,7 and inflectional, and his definition of these three classes agrees in the main with the description just given of the three strata or stages of language.
But what is curious is that this threefold classification, and the consequences to which it leads, should not at once have been fully reasoned out, nay, that a system most palpably erroneous should have been founded upon it. We find it repeated again and again in most works on Comparative Philology, that Chinese belongs to the isolating class, the Turanian languages to the combinatory, the Aryan and Semitic to the inflectional; nay, Professor Pott8 and his school seem convinced that no evolution can ever take place from isolating to combinatory and from combinatory to inflectional speech. We should thus be forced to believe that by some inexplicable grammatical instinct, or by some kind of inherent necessity, languages were from the beginning created as isolating or combinatory, or inflectional, and must remain so to the end.
It is strange that those scholars who hold that no transition is possible from one form of language to another, should not have seen that there is really no language that can be strictly called either isolating, or combinatory, or inflectional, and that the transition from one stage to another is in fact constantly taking place under our very noses. Even Chinese is not free from combinatory forms, and the more highly developed among the combinatory languages show the clearest traces of incipient inflection. The difficulty is not to show the transition of one stratum of speech into another, but rather to draw a sharp line between the different strata. The same difficulty was felt in Geology, and led Sir Charles Lyell to invent such pliant names as Eocene, Meiocene, and Pleiocene, names which indicate a mere dawn, a minority, or a majority of new formations, but do not draw a fast and hard line, cutting off one stratum from the other. Natural growth, and even merely mechanical accumulation and accretion, here as elsewhere, are so minute and almost imperceptible that they defy all strict scientific terminology, and force upon us the lesson that we must be satisfied with an approximate accuracy. For practical purposes Humboldt’s classification of languages may be quite sufficient, and we have no difficulty in classing any given language, according to the prevailing character of its formation, as either isolating, or combinatory, or inflectional. But when we analyze each language more carefully we find there is not one exclusively isolating, or exclusively combinatory, or exclusively inflectional. The power of composition, which is retained unimpaired through every stratum, can at any moment place an inflectional on a level with an isolating and a combinatory language. A compound such as the Sanskrit go-duh, cow-milking, differs little, if at all, from the Chinese nieou-jou, vaccæ lac, or in the patois of Canton, ngau ü, cow-milk, before it takes the terminations of the nominative, which is, of course, impossible in Chinese.
So again in English New-town, in Greek Nea-polis, would be simply combinatory compounds. Even Newton would still belong to the combinatory stratum; but Naples would have to be classed as belonging to the inflectional stage.
Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and the Dravidian languages belong in the main to the combinatory stratum; but having received a considerable amount of literary cultivation, they all alike exhibit forms which in every sense of the word are inflectional. If in Finnish, for instance, we find käsi, in the singular, hand, and kädet, in the plural, hands, we see that phonetic corruption has clearly reached the very core of the noun, and given rise to a plural more decidedly inflectional than the Greek χεῖρ-ες, or the English hand-s. In Tamil, where the suffix of the plural is gaḷ, we have indeed a regular combinatory form in kei-gaḷ, hands; but if the same plural suffix gaḷ is added to kal, stone, the euphonic rules of Tamil require not only a change in the suffix, which becomes kaḷ, but likewise a modification in the body of the word, kal being changed to kar. We thus get the plural karkaḷ which in every sense of the word is an inflectional form. In this plural suffix gaḷ, Dr. Caldwell has recognized the Dravidian taḷa or daḷa, a host, a crowd; and though, as he admits himself in the second edition (p. 143), the evidence in support of this etymology may not be entirely satisfactory, the steps by which the learned author of the Grammar of the Dravidian languages has traced the plural termination lu in Telugu back to the same original suffix kaḷ admit of little doubt.
Evidence of a similar kind may easily be found in any grammar, whether of an isolating, combinatory, or inflectional language, wherever there is evidence as to the ascending or descending progress of any particular form of speech. Everywhere amalgamation points back to combination, and combination back to juxtaposition, everywhere isolating speech tends towards terminational forms, and terminational forms become inflectional.
I may best be able to explain the view commonly held with regard to the strata of language by a reference to the strata of the earth. Here, too, where different strata have been tilted up, it might seem at first sight as if they were arranged perpendicularly and side by side, none underlying the other, none presupposing the other. But as the geologist, on the strength of more general evidence, has to reverse this perpendicular position, and to re-arrange his strata in their natural order, and as they followed each other horizontally, the student of language too is irresistibly driven to the same conclusion. No language can by any possibility be inflectional without having passed through the combinatory and isolating stratum; no language can by any possibility be combinatory without clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum of isolation. Unless Sanskrit and Greek and Hebrew had passed through the combinatory stratum, nay, unless, at some time or other, they had been no better than Chinese, their present form would be as great a miracle as the existence of chalk (and the strata associated with it) without an underlying stratum of oolite (and the strata associated with it;) or a stratum of oolite unsupported by the trias or system of new red sandstone. Bunsen’s dictum, that “the question whether a language can begin with inflections, implies an absurdity,” may have seemed too strongly worded: but if he took inflections in the commonly received meaning, in the sense of something that may be added or removed from a base in order to define or to modify its meaning, then surely the simple argument ex nihilo nihil fit is sufficient to prove that the inflections must have been something by themselves, before they became inflections relatively to the base, and that the base too must have existed by itself, before it could be defined and modified by the addition of such inflections.
But we need not depend on purely logical arguments, when we have historical evidence to appeal to. As far as we know the history of language, we see it everywhere confined within those three great strata or zones which we have just described. There are inflectional changes, no doubt, which cannot as yet be explained, such as the m in the accusative singular of masculine, feminine, and in the nominative and accusative of neuter nouns; or the change of vowels between the Hebrew Piel and Pual, Hiphil and Hophal, where we might feel tempted to admit formative agencies different from juxtaposition and combination. But if we consider how in Sanskrit the Vedic instrumental plural, aśvebhis (Lat. equobus), becomes before our very eyes aśvais (Lat. equis), and how such changes as Bruder, brother, and Brüder, brethren, Ich weiss, I know, A.S. wât, and Wir wissen, we know, A.S. wit-on, have been explained as the results of purely mechanical, i.e., combinatory proceedings, we need not despair of further progress in the same direction. One thing is certain, that, wherever inflection has yielded to a rational analysis, it has invariably been recognized as the result of a previous combination, and wherever combination has been traced back to an earlier stage, that earlier stage has been simple juxtaposition. The primitive blocks of Chinese and the most perplexing agglomerates of Greek can be explained as the result of one continuous formative process, whatever the material elements may be on which it was exercised; nor is it possible even to imagine in the formation of language more than these three strata through which hitherto all human speech has passed.
All we can do is to subdivide each stratum, and thus, for instance, distinguish in the second stratum the suffixing (R + ρ) from the prefixing (ρ + R), and from the affixing (ρ + R + ρ) languages.
A fourth class, the infixing or incapsulating languages, are but a variety of the affixing class, for what in Bask or in the polysynthetic dialects of America has the appearance of actual insertion of formative elements into the body of a base can be explained more rationally by the former existence of simpler bases to which modifying suffixes or prefixes have once been added, but not so firmly as to exclude the addition of new suffixes at the end of the base, instead of, as with us, at the end of the compound. If we could say in Greek δείκ-μι-νυ, instead of δείκ-νυ-μι, or in Sanskrit yu-mi-na-j, instead of yu-na-j-mi, we should have a real beginning of so-called incapsulating formations.9
A few instances will place the normal progress of language from stratum to stratum more clearly before our eyes. We have seen that in Chinese every word is monosyllabic, every word tells, and there are, as yet, no suffixes by which one word is derived from another, no case-terminations by which the relation of one word to another could be indicated. How, then, does Chinese distinguish between the son of the father, and the father of the son? Simply by position. Fú is father, tzé, son; therefore fú tzé is son of the father, tzé fú, father of the son. This rule admits of no exception but one. If a Chinese wants to say a wine-glass, he puts wine first and glass last, as in English. If he wants to say a glass of wine, he puts glass first and wine last. Thus i-pei thsieou, a cup of wine; thsieou pei, a wine-cup. If, however, it seems desirable to mark the word which is in the genitive more distinctly, the word tchi may be placed after it, and we may say, fú tchi tzé, the son of the father. In the Mandarin dialect this tchi has become ti, and is added so constantly to the governed word, that, to all intents and purposes, it may be treated as what we call the termination of the genitive. Originally this tchi was a relative, or rather a demonstrative, pronoun, and it continues to be used as such in the ancient Chinese.10
It is perfectly true that Chinese possesses no derivative suffixes; that it cannot derive, for instance, kingly from a noun, such as king, or adjectives like visible and invisible from a verb videre, to see. Yet the same idea which we express by invisible, is expressed without difficulty in Chinese, only in a different way. They say khan-pu-kien, “I-behold-and-do-not-see,” and this to them conveys the same idea as the English invisible, though more exactly invisible might be rendered by kien, to see, pou-te, one cannot, tí, which.
We cannot in Chinese derive from ferrum, iron, a new substantive ferrarius, a man who works in iron, a blacksmith; ferraria, an iron mine, and again ferrariarius, a man who works in an iron mine. All this is possible in an inflectional language only. But it is not to be supposed that in Chinese there is an independent expression for every single conception, even for those which are clearly secondary and derivative. If an arrow in Chinese is shi, then a maker of arrows (in old French fléchier, in English fletcher) is called an arrow-man, shi-jin. Shui means water, fu, man; hence shui-fu, a water man, a water carrier. The same word shui, water, if followed by sheu, hand, stands for steersman, literally, water-hand. Kin means gold, tsiang, maker; hence kin-tsiang, a goldsmith. Shou means writing, sheu, hand; hence shou-sheu, a writer, a copyist, literally, a writing-hand.
A transition from such compounds to really combinatory speech is extremely easy. Let sheu, in the sense of hand, become obsolete, and be replaced in the ordinary language by another word for hand; and let such names as shu-sheu, author, shui-sheu, boatsman, be retained, and the people who speak this language will soon accustom themselves to look upon sheu as a mere derivative, and use it by a kind of false analogy, even where the original meaning of sheu, hand, would not have been applicable.11
We can watch the same process even in comparatively modern languages. In Anglo-Saxon, for instance, hâd means state, order. It is used as an independent word, and continued to be so used as late as Spenser, who wrote:—