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Tous las autres exemplaires originaux sont filmte on commenqant par la premiere page qui comporte une empreinte d'impression ou d'illustration at en terminant par la derniire page qui comporte une telle empreinte. Un des symboies suivants apparaltra sur la dernlAre image de cheque microfiche, selon le cas: le symbols — »> signifie "A SUIVRE", le symbols V signifie "FIN". Les cartea, planches, tableaux, etc.. peuvent dtre filmte it des taux de reduction diff^rents. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour Atre reproduit en un seul cllchA, il est film« A partir de I'angle supArieur gauche, de gauche A droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'Images n^cessaire. Les diagrammes suivanta illustrent la mAthode. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 On Languages as evincing special modes of thought. By E. T. Fletcher, Esq, [Bead before the Society, 15th March, 1854.] Few will probably be disposed to question the utility of linguistic study. How little do we know, for instance, of the history of those mysterious phantoms the Pelasgians and Etruscans. And how ditferent had it been, if the language of these people, or even any considerable fragments, had survived to our times, still to be read and understood. More would then have been gained in obtaining a definite notion of the history and affinities of these nations than all the labors of Niebuhr, and Mueller have been able to effect in giving form and substance to their shadowy and uncertain history, It is with individuals as with nations, the state and charac- ter of a writer, the age in which he lived, and the calling which he exercised, are often transparently visible in the language and style of his writings. If we take up, for example, that delightful little treatise, the Octavius of Minutius Felix, concerning the age and authorship of which so much was in dispute during the last century, we are first led to remark that the elegance of style and general purity of diction would place it in, or near, the classical period. But we observe then, the occurrence of such post classical words as * univiray ' daemon^'' ^furiescens^^ and ' viror ' for * viriditas,^ which stamp it as belonging to an age subsequent to that of Virgil and Horace. Yet we have no late-Latin forms. ' Potatus * for instance is the late-Latin equivalent for the classical ' epotus '. The author uses the latter. Again we remark 52 ON LANOUAOE8. such words as ' comperendino ' and ' ejurato,^ which belong to juridicallangiiage. From all which we conclude that the writer was a jurisconsult, and that he iived in post Augustan times, but not later than the third century of our era, which facts have been severally verified from other and extraneous sources. The unity of the human race, its derivation from one family, and not from several protoplasts, and the place of its original seats, somewhere near the Indian Caucasus, are points which at the present day seem to have a preponderating weight of evidence in their favor. It has been shewn that numerous and striking as are the varieties of the human species, there are none that lie without the range of natural causes, that may not have been produced by a change in the external condi- tions of climate, latitude, relative sea-level, and the like. The Negro type, for instance, is a strongly-marked variety : yet Latham remarks that as truly as a short stature and light skin coincide with the occupancy of mountain ranges, the negro physiognomy coincides with that of the alluvia of rivers. And another high authority (Dr. Daniell) observes that on leaving the low swamps round the Delta of the Niger for (he sandstone country of the interior, the skin becomes fairer, black becomes brown, and brown yellow. Pritchard, in his * Researches,' has adduced the case of an Arab family who removed from higher ground to the low and sultry valley of the HoAran. [n a few generations these people had perceptibly approached, in form and features, the physiognomy of the Negro. Even in Africa, the Negro areas are scanty and small, being chiefly limited to hot and moist alluvial grounds. Again, as regards the original unity of language, the various diversities of dialect are clearly traceable through their several steps of derivation, in lines converging, like the radii of a vast Otf LAN6UA6ES. 63 circle, to the central point just noted. Thus the great area ot" the monosyllabic tongues, comprising China, Thibet, and the Transgangetic peninsula, is ethnologically connected with this point by the sub-Himalayan parts of Norihern India and by the transitional dialects of North eastern Afganistan. The Indo-European languages are all traceable to the Zend, or to the old Persian, cognate dialects of the Sanscrit. Africa is sub- Se.nitic, the chief exception appearing to be the anomalous Coptic, differing from the Semitic family by the richness and variety of its inflections, and from the Indo-European by these inflections being generally produced by prefixes. The Ame- rican dialects, on the other hand, appear to be derived from the polysyllabic tongues of Northern Asia and Hindustan. (n the earliest ages, dialectic dilFerences must have arisen, and these differences assuned a permanent condition as distinct languages, with far greater ease and rapidity than is con- ceivable at the present (hy. The speech of man was then unvvarped by habit, or precedent, or the all pervading influence of usage and fashion. Clear and vigorous in thought, divinely gifted with the faculty of elaborating for himself a science of vocal signs to serve as land marks and tokens of outer in- fluences and internal conceptions, he stood there fresh from the hands of God, a listener and spectator, surround- ed by shapes of p »wer and beauty, and by sounds of almost infinite range, from the 'gnats small minstrelsy' to earth-shaking thunder. It is not difficult ther» to imagine the force and vivid- ness of his earliest attempts at language. As some vast river, whose course is not now to be altered by the uttermost exertion of human power, but which, at its source felt that modifying influence of a rock, or stone, or any the smallest obstacle, so, in the beginning, the speech of man, we may be certain, was modified by influences that are weak and powerless 54 ON LANGUAO£8. now. How else was it that lor ages before the first Olympiad, the Greek, the Hebrew, and the Sanscrit aready existed complete and finished in structure ? Or shall we say that our ordinary chronologies are erroneous and that the world must have been peopled long before the received era ? At present, this hypothesis is scarcely tenable. Fact upon fact hasb^en adduced to the contrary. Take for example the curious re- searches of Bremontier, relative to the progressive advance of the * dunes' or sand-heaps in the South-west of France. These sand-heaps accumulating first on the sea-shore have been gradually pushed forward by the wind upon the inland country, destroying all vegetation, and converting the rich and truitful plains into a sterile desert. The action of similar dunes has been familiar to all ages. The author of the Homeric hymn to Apollo seems to allude to them. Modern writers have re- marked that the vast sand-plain of lli)sapenna, on the coast of Donegal, was, so late as the middle of the last century, a beautiful domain belonging to Lord Boyne. In 1825 the roof of the mansion house was just above the ground, so that the peasantry used to descend into the apartment as into a sub- terranean-cave ; in 1835 not the slighest trace of building was visible. Deluc has mentioned the dune which threatened the church of Padstow in Cornwall : it overhung the roof and all access would have been prevented, but for the door being at the other end. From the same cause, the villages of Brittany have suffered : of one of them nothing is now visible but the summit of the church-steeple. In the department of Landes in France, plains, forests, and the works of man, have been successively buried by their slow but irresistible advance* Many villages and towns mentioned in medi^.val records now lie fathom -deep in the sand, to reappear no more. Ten of these were struggling with the sands twenty years ago, and 'f ON LANGUAGES. 55 ^r one of them Miinlzan, after a contest of more than a quarter of a century, lias at length succumbed to its doom and almost wholly disappeared. As these dunes advance with the most perfect regularity, and at the rate of from GO to 72 feet in a year, Bremonticr, by a very simple process of measurement concludes that their action cannot have commenced much more than 40 centuries ago ; a conclusion which DeLuc had already arrived at by measuring those of Holland, where the dates of the dykes enabled him to attain a high degree of presumptive accuracy. Assuming then that the human family originated from one pair, and that the era of the first exodus or dispersion lies within the recognised limits of history, the question occurs, were the primary varieties of language invariably connected with special modes of thought ? Were they correlative with those of the human species itself ? — And how far were these the growth of dynanic influences as climate, soil, mode of life, and the flora of their respective areas. There is good reason to believe, with Klaproth, that before the deluge there existed no considerable varieties of language. The forms of human speecli were most probably nearly the same everywhere. Apart from the reasons which he has ad- duced, the universal ' violence and corruption' which the Hebrew records speak of, hint rather at a population com- pressed witjiin a small area than at the pastoral habits of one widely diffused. Of the mosaic deluge itself, the form of the Hebrew expression " under the whole heavens," the old Apamean medals with figures in an ark or chest floating on the waters, the Phrygian tradition in connexion therewith mentioned in the Sybilline oracles, which however apocryphal, are yet confessedly ancient, the old Hellenic Myth of Deuca- lion, itself of Indian origin, and the similar mythoi of many M 56 ON LANGUAGES, lands collected by Harcourt in his Doctrine of the Deluge, all incline us to the belief that this great cataclysm swept off the whole human race, one family alone excepted. The first land to appear from amid the slowly receding waters must have been the lofty Hindoo-Koosh and its continuation eastward in the Himalayan chain. These it is probable were the first to receive the sacred footprints of the aged patriarch and his sons, themselves the sires and patriarchs of our race. Here on the swelling slopes of these monarchs of earth's mountains, no unfitting: stage for the occasion, stood the sole survivors of the mighty ruin : here was the altar built, the fire kindled, and from hence the smoke of their offering ascended, we are told, as a sweet savor to God. From this chain, then, originated the first dispersion of the human family. On looking at the physical configuration of Asia, we are struck by the fact that great part of its surface is taken up by extensive plateaux or elevated tracts of table-land, raised from four thousand to ten thousand feet above the sea-level. Of these the two most remarkable are the great Eastern plateau, which comprises the whole of Thibet, with the desert of Gobi, extending Eastward and Northward past the great wall of China, and the Western or Iranian plateau, nearly coincident with the limits of modern Persia. The Hindoo Goosh, which we have considered as the cradle of our race, lies as an isthmus between these two plateaux, which would of course become habitable before the plains or level country. The former, or larger of these table- lands appears to have b?en the original home of the monosyllabic or uninflected tongues, whose type is the Chinese, and the latter, or Iranian plateau, that of the polysyllabic or inflected tongues. The inflected languages are again divisible into two great and widely dif- erent families, 1st. The partially inflected, with a tendency i 1 >< ■ ON LANOUAGBS. 57 I " to fall into analytic forms, such as the Syro-Arabian tongues ; and secondly, the highly inflected, with a tendency to synthetic forms of which the Sanscrit is the most notable type and ex- ample. Thus there are three great divisions of which, psy- chologically considered, the first or uninflected, will he found connected with mere rationalism in its lowest form ; the second or Syro Arabian, with strong objectivity of mind, or rationalism kindled by imagination ; and the third, the old Indian or high- ly-inflected, with a subjective cast of thought, or rationalism enlivened by a creative fancy. Let us consider each of these divisions in order. The swarm of emigrants thrown eastwards from the Hindoo- Koosh, while the low lands were as yet uninhabitable, found themselves in the highlands of Thibet and the desert of Gobi. Thibet has been described by Turner as " one of the " least favored countries under heaven, and appearing in a " great measure incapable of culture. It exhibits only low " rocky hills (that is, rising but little above the plateau), " without any visible vegetation, or extensive arid plains, '• both of the most stern and stubborn aspect, promising full as " little as ihey produce. Its climate is cohl and bleak in the " extreme, from the severe effects of which the inhabitants are *' obliged to seek refuge in sheltered valleys and hollows, or " amidst the warmest aspects of the rocks." Here then, where the means of sustenance were so scanty, a social exis- tence was scarcely possible to these earliest comers. They would have starved, had they attempted to live in clusters or large communities : the instinct of self-preservation compelled them to isolate themselves. We may imagine then, the state of gradual degradation into which their language must have fallen, living as they did thus miserably, and thus isolated from each other. Without a written literature, exposed to 58 ON JLANGUAOKS. cold and famine, in a land untraversed by rivers, and present- ing an interminable monotony of rock and sand with a back ground of eternal snow, the nobler faculties of the mind must in them have remained dormant, Auicy and imagina- tion must have drooped and died. The very keenness and susceptibility of impression which characterised those early ages, undwarfed by the weight of usage or precedent, all these must have rapidly hastened the downward progress of their language. So by degrees there grew up a stern utilitarianism of thought and speech. Linguistic declensions became dis- used, the graceful and expressive changes of words fell away : and thus was evolved a language without syllables, a speech without inflections. The physical structure of the people themselves became degraded, and thus was originated the mongoltype, a cast of form and features since recognised as beloncrint>- to all dwellers in cold and desolate lands, as those of Arctic Asia, and the American Esquimaux. Spreading thus in course of time towards the Eastward, they struck the headwaters of the Irawaddy and its trans- Gangetic brethren, and of the great Chinese rivers, the Hoang-ho and Yantse-kiang, streams of vast extent, the natural outlets of this widely extended plateau, and leading to warm and sunny lands, the luxuriant plains of South- eastern Asia. Thus arose the great empire of China. These wanderers from the central table-land, dwarfed alike in body and intellect, found a country abounding in natural advantages, rich in all manner of products. Then first grew up among them laws, government and forms of civil polity. From the peculiar cast of thought possessed by these first comers, the face of the country as well as its usages and institutions as- sumed everywhere a practical and unimaginative aspect. Bridges were constructed, canals cut, and grain cultivated H k t ON LANGUAGE!*. 60 through almost intenninahle plains. 'Ihv.y became, what they are now, a nation of agriculturists and engineers. With ad- mirable perseverance, with unwearying toil and industry, they seconded the fertility of the soil, or overcame its ii regularities. A religion existed, but of an eminently rationalistic character ; not a polytheism, which could scarcely have bean generated without the imaginative faculty, but a cold, repellant theism, — a blank, expression of their belief that some unknown power existed but of doubtful attributes and nature. Temples were built and a priesthood established. A wonderful exactness of form and ceremony prevailed. But the power of creating mythi, and investing severest truth with the graceful figments of fancy, a power common to all otiier nations^, existed not in them. To Science and Literature no temple was erected. The poverty of their language was in part remedied by the introduction of tonic accents, but it remained still inadequate to the demands of philosophy. None scanned the secrets of the universe, or sounded the depths of the human soul. No rhapsodist or singer appeared. The seasons in their glorious change rolled away : life and death, change and reproduction, all the iris-hued facts and shews of existence, lay around them, but no poet arose. No analogue, or even reflex, existed of that spirit which produced, in other lands, the Ramayana of the old Hindoos, or the Iliad and Odyssy of Homer. Far other was the destiny of the dwellers on the Western or Iranian plateau. It lias been noted that these became early divided into two widely different branches. Of these, the next in order of place to that which we have just consi- dered, is the old-Indian family, of whose language the Sanscrit affords the most perfect type, and from which^ or some cog- nate tongue, all the various Indo-European dialects are de- scended. Here, as before, the dynamics of ethnology must GO ON 'languages. be taken iargely into account, and the character of this class seems to have been mainly i'.ifluenced by tlieir original fixity of habitation, by the greater density and centralisation of their living, a condition permitted by the productiveness of the soil, and by the early subtlety of intellect and play of fancy acquired from being thus clustered in masses, blesi with c> mild and delicious, but not sul*ry or enervating climate, and with the meanis of existence scattered everywhere abundantly around them. At the ncithorn extremity of Hindustan, walled in on every side by the lofty mountains of the Himalaya system, lies the elevated valley of Cashn ore, a land hallowed by immemorial tradition, revered as sacred throughout India, the resort of innumerable pilgrim?, and celebrated in the strains ol both eastern and western bards. Like the happy valley of llasse- las, Nature seems to have intended it as an asylum and refuge from the outer world. It lies at the source of the Jylum, or Hydaspes, a tributary of the IndUvS, and one of the ftve rivers from which the territory of the Punjaub takes its name. One narrow opening aione, towards the northwest, alFords a pas- sage way to the inhabitants, and a means of exit to the river. The height above the sea-level preserves it from the intense tropical heats of Lower India, and has adorned it with the choicest products of mere temperate climes. The rose, the iris, and the lotus (lower are there in profusion ; the apple, the pear, luul apricot, prolfer their fruits; massive plane trees Rte»nd everywMiere in broad-leave*! magnillcence of foliage, while the river itself, with numerous bends, sweeps on majes- tically through fill. Solemn and characteristic too is the ruined temple of black )narble that stands near Lslamabail, a Cyclopean structure, built up of huge uncemented blocks of hard compact limestone ; in style a combination of Egyptian, UN LANGUAGES. 61 f • Tuscan and Saxon ; it stands there in grim and sullen silence, jDerhaps the oldest temple in the world. But everything here points to the most remote antiquity. Mount Meru, the Hin- doo Paradise, stands close by, on the confnies of Cashmir and Thibet. The traces of this name in far distant lands evince how deep was the reverence oT early migratory colonists lor tliis most venerable mountain. Witness the sacerdotal Meroe in Abyssinia, the Meropes in Greece, and with its intensive pre- fix soo, Somaros of Dodona, and Samaria in Palestine. As to the last, how significant, in this connection, is the speech of the Sumaritan woman, ' our fathers worshipped in this mountain.' Again, the primeval name of Cashmir was Kaira, and the province itself was called Kaira-naya, the word naya signifying polity or government ; hence the European Chse- ronea. It was also called t!ie habitation of Casyapa, a my- thological personage by whose agency the valley is said to have been drained : hence probably the Cassiopaei of Hellas. These old familiar names were adopted by the earliest colo- nists in the nomenclature of their new abodes, from a feeling which is common to all, and of which ' the land we live in' is a notable exam[)lo. It is remarkable, by the way, that the oKl Greek names of tribes and places are signilicant if reference be had to the Sanscrit, but utterly unmeaning without such reference. Such then was the birth-place of the old-Indian family of nations. But in course of time the Cashmirian val- ley could no longer restrain the expansive energies of its tenants. At an era when the language had that amount of intlection which we find in the Turanian dialects of Siberia and the Tamul of Southern India, a mighty exodus took pla'^e, India, Northern Asia, and the Iranian plateau, received their earliest inhabitants. Then arose among these wanderers the religion of Buddha, a species of dissenting protest against 62 ON LANGUAGES. the caste-system organized hierarchy of Brahmanism which still remained the religion of Cashmir. For it will he found that in all ages a widely expanded population is most favor- ahle to the growth of civil license and religious dissent, while the congregation of large masses begets an ease and refine- ment averse to innovation and more in keej)ing with estab- lished forms.* Thus, then, the Cashmirians who remained in their original home-seats passed rapidly through all the phases of a highly civilized community. They became intellectually subtle, esthetically fastidious, exact, and criticaL Their language, like themselves, bei-ame polished and refined to the last degree? until It reached its culmination of excellence in the classical Sanscrit, the Deva-nogari, or language of the Gods. They next appear on the stage as armed and conquering enthusiasts, stronfi- in the niiglit of fanaticism, the same power which gave the strength of insanity to the gloomy religionist of our own civil wars, and bore down in ruin the else unconquerable chivalry of Kngland. So sped forth on their destroying mis- * In the history of ouv own Innd wo have evidence enough of this. Elizabeth and James and the first Charles, discouvngcd the increase of liondon, and drove the leading politicians to their coun- try residences, from an idle fear of their meddling too nmch in state matters. A fatal and suicidal policy 1 For hence arose the country-party, a race of wealthy country gentlemen, strong in a feeling of personal independence, living on their own estates, pow- erful by comparison with those around them, and thence self-confi- dent, tenacious in opinion, and abhorrent of restraint. Such were the beginnings of evil. The storm that swept away church and monarchy together n)ay perhaps be traced to this eloud no larger than a man's hand. 4 ON LANOUAOES. 63 I sion the Brahmans and their folluwers. A long and fearful warfare issued, and the Kshatriyas, or warrior-caste, were violently expelled from their strongholds. This holy war has furnished the theme of the oldest Indian epopee. Thus, in the very ancient Mahabharata, we find at the end of the fifth book " There was in Malwa a king named Herghes, whose army consisted altogether of Kshatriyas, and between him and the king of the Brahmans a war broke out. The Kshatriyas, though the most numerous party were neverthelesR worsted in eve.y engagement." And again, in the first book of the Ramayana, — " The power of the Kshatriyas is not greater than that of the Brahmans : O Brahm.a, thy power is of Divine origin and tar superior to that of Kshatriya." And the war- rior tribe in India have ever since remained in strict subordi- nation to the oriesthood. By this invasion, the Sanscrit became the language of all Hindustan, with the exception of the Deccan or southern ex- tremity, a plateau where the old Tamul is still spoken : and in conformity with this view, the Sanscrit is known on the pen- insula by a term signifying " from the North", clearly point- ing out from what quarter it was introduced. The Sanscrit literature, like its language, is everywhere in- dicative of strong subjectivity of thought. By subjectivity is meant that condition of the thinker when his thoughts radiate outwards from himself, when in every process of the mind, he himself is the starting point of his conception and the outer world only presents itself to him through the alembic of his being and colored by the medium of his own individuality. Subjectivity is most favorable to the exercise of that faculty which, for want of a better name, we may here call fancy, wherein the thinker is the demiurgus of his own thoughts, shnoina: them as ho will and uncontrolled bv influences from 64 ON LANGUAGES. without. Objectivity on the other hand implies the being swayed by influences and agriicies external to the thinker, and is less favorable to the developement of imagination. In sub- jectivity the ego is pre-eminently active : in objectivity, on the contrary, passive. And hence it is that in the vast circle of Sanscrit literature that has come down to us, what chiefly strikes us is its rich- ' ness and luxuriance, its inexhaustible invention, its life and vividness, its splendor of conception, and unwearying power of delineation. It is the apotheosis of human creative fancy. In the Mahabharata, for instance, the Deity Krishna calls up from the depths of ocean the wonderful city Dwarka, glittering with gold and precious stones, temples lift their heads in sun- shine, the smoke of incense rises from the altars, the gardens are shaded with trees of paradise and refreshed with the waters of immortality. And in its rapid change of events, its love of the marvellous and the powerful interest excited, it suggests a comparison with that idol of our boyhood the " Arabian Nights Entertainments" a production in fact not of Arabian origin as De Sacy maintained, but essentially Indian, as Von Hammer has shewn, both in spirit and conception. Everywhere in these creations of the mind, we seem to have before us a true reflex of the life led by the old Indians themselves, moving in a land favored beyond all other lands, invigorated by their Northern descent, and beholding the wonders of earth and heaven mirrored on the surface of broad and magnificent streams. And how wonderfully subtle and powerful was the instrument of their intellectual expression, the language with which they thought ! What delicate shades, what refined dif- ferences of meaning, what metrical harmonies lay within the compass of a dialect possessing such varieties of grammatical inflection ! — 'I'hree numbers and eight cases exist for the nouns 4 ON LANOUAGKS. 65 of which there are seventeen classes or declensions : then for the verbs there are ten conjugations, each verb besides the ordi- nary parasmaipada and atmane-pada, or active and reflective forms, being susceptible of a passive voice and also of a causal, desiderative, and frequentative form. Thus arose the grand heroic poems, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the venerable Vedas, older than all, and the philosophic compilation of Menu ; works that yet remain, vast, stately and imperishable as the mighty oaks and banyans of the land from which they sprang. Nor was the influence of the old Indian mode of thought confined to the East alone. Swarms of colonists were thrown out in all directions. Westward they were checked" by the warlike Syro-Arabians, so that in this direction their course was circuitous, chiefly south from the mouth of the Indus, or northwards along the skirt of the Iranian plateau. This lat- ter swarm seems to have traversed the Caspian and entered Greece from the North, the former to have sailed from that estuary of the Indus, known as the Cori : — the Cori-Indus, whence Corinthus and the Corinthians. Again Pelasa is the antient name for the Province of Bahar ; and Pelaska is a known derivative form : — what if the old Pelasains drew their origin thence ? That the people inhabiting the country of the Indus were recognized as navigators in the very earliest ages, is clear from the Institutes of Menu (reaching back to 1400 B. C. ) where they are spoken of as "merchants who traffic beyond the sea." And it is on the banks of the Indus that we find Attock, the Htloe mountains, and Tatla, the re- presentatives or rather originals of Attica, the Hellenes, and the symbolical Tettix, respectively. Farther, what can the mere classical scholar make of so conr