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THE HISTORY OF
LANGUAGE
By HENRY SWEET, M.A.
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THE
HiSTORYPf.
IJANGUAGE
BY^HEHRY
SWEET' m. A
BEDFORD • STREET • LONDON
All rights resen
First Edition, 1900
Reprinted, 1901, 1908, 1016, 1920, 1930
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
r
PREFACE
When asked by Mr. Dent to write an introduction to the
principles of Comparative Philology for his series, I willingly
consented, not only because I had the necessary materials
ready to hand, but also because I felt there was still room for
an addition to the already large literature of the subject ; a
subject which, however, admits of being approached from so
many different points of view that any competent treatment of
it is sure to have some special merits of its own.
The first part of this book deals with the deilnirion of the
science of language, its scope (p. 20) and methods, and the
life of language generally. In this part I have aimed at
clearness of statement and adequate illustration, and have tried
to avoid truisms and superfluous generalizations on the one
hand, and over-abstraction and linguistic mysticism on the
other.
In order to give greater definiteness and concreteness to
the reader's impressions I have added a second parr, consisting
of a brief sketch of the structure of that family of languages
to which English belongs — the Aryan or Indogermanic —
together with a discussion of its affinities to other families of
languages, which last will serve both to widen the reader's
linguistic horizon and to prepare him to follow problems which
cannot be ignored much longer.
In the last chapter the reader is introduced to a still
wider view of language by the discussion of some of the
most interesting questions of general philology — that of the
vi PREFACE
individuality of language and the connexion between language
and nationality.
It need hardly be said that care has been taken to exclude
antiquated views and statements. Arguments founded on
language are so often appealed to by investigators in other
branches of knowledge, such as archaeology and anthropology,
and the science of language affords so many analogies for the
biologist and naturalist that it is important that the information
given in works on language should be as reliable as possible.
And yet we still meet arguments founded on the assumption
that such a language as Chinese represents the primitive stage
in the evolution of speech (p. 70), that the languages of savages
change completely in a single generation (p. 79), that the
old inflectional languages are the most perfect types of speech,
and so on.
I have tried to confine myself as far as possible to the
statement of those views and results which are generally
accepted. But comparative philology is still too young a
science to make it possible to exclude all unsettled and dis-
puted questions. It would, for instance, be unreasonable to
ask me to cut out all reference to the most ancient language
in the world merely because a small but noisy band of para-
dox-lovers and hunters after notoriety still profess to disbelieve
the existence of a *' so-called Accadian or Sumerian language."
In short, every one who undertakes to write a book of this
kind must rely on his own judgment. He must avoid as far
as possible the discussion of questions on which he feels doubt-
ful ; but on the other hand he is bound to express his opinion
definitely on all questions on which his mind is made up, even
if he stands alone in his views.
I foresee most opposition to the chapter on Aryan affinities.
In philology, as in all branches of knowledge, it is the speci-
alist who mOot strenuously opposes any attempt to widen the
field of his methods. Hence the advocate of affinity between
the Aryan and the Finnish languages need not be alarmed
when he hears that the majority of Aryan philologists reject
the hypothesis. In many cases this rejection merely means
PREFACE vii
that our specialist has his hands full already, and shrinks from
learning a new set of languages — a state of mind which no
one can quarrel with. Even when this passively agnostic
attitude developes into aggressive antagonism, it is generally
little more than the expression of mere prejudice against de-
throning Aryan from its proud isolation and affiliating it to
the languages of yellow races ; or want of imagination and
power of realizing an earlier morphological stage of Aryan ;
or, lastly, that conservatism and caution which would rather
miss a brilliant discovery than run the risk of having mistakes
exposed.
I have therefore pursued the affinities of Aryan as far as
the impartial application of generally accepted principles
seemed to yield definite results. I cannot but accept these
results, because, if I reject them, I must also reject the results
of comparative Aryan philology itself (p. 120).
But I have not gone a step beyond what I feel to be solid
ground. If I had pursued all the tempting combinations and
far-reaching generalizations suggested by the linguistic dis-
coveries of the last twenty years, it would, for instance, have
been easy to connect Aryan with Chinese. But plausible as
Lacouperie's and Ball's affiliation of Chinese to Sumerian is, it
cannot be regarded as proved in our present ignorance of the
history of Chinese itself. Till the history of Chinese sounds
has been written any comparison of it with other languages
cannot be anything but tentative.
It would have been still more premature to include in a
book of this kind a discussion of the relationships of those
languages which lie — or seem to lie — outside the "Aryo-
Altaic " and Semitic families, especially as regards partially
deciphered languages such as Etruscan and Hittite.
But mischievous as it would be to mix up conjecture with
fact in such a branch of the subject as this, there is a time for
pure hypothesis, and there is a place for it even in an element-
ary book. It would, for instance, be a mistake to ignore the
question of the origin of language merely because it cannot be
approached except by a priori conjecture : indeed, the mere
rrn PREFACE
fact of this being the only method obviates any clanger of
misleading. So also the illustration of the possibility of
existing languages being only a few centuries old (p. 88) is
on the face of it frankly conjectural ; if it turns out to be
untenable it will still serve to enlarge the reader's knowledge
and stimulate his imagination. Similar remarks apply to the
discussion of the age of Aryan (p. 99).
From what has been said it is evident that although this
book is not intended to be an original contribution to com-
parative philology, it must almost inevitably contain some
original views and results. In the statement of the principles
of sound-change will be found several modifications of earlier
views : thus the inconsistencies pointed out by P. Passy in
the exposition of these views has led me to a still further
divergence from the views of the latter, culminating in the
axiom that "the imitation of sounds is generally perfect"
(p. 19). Much of what I have said about the conditions of
linguistic change and stability is, I think, new, as also my
view of the origin of the Aryan race (p. 129), which has
already received the approval of some eminent scholars.
Ox/orJ,
December 1899.
CONTENTS
I. LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDY
PAGE
What is Language? i
Language Imperfect and Traditional .... 3
Change ; Dialects and Cognate Languages ... 4
Comparative and Historical Philology .... 5
General Grammar ; Principles and Methods of Gramm:ir . 6
Effects of Change ; the Science of Language ... 10
II. SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE
Phonetics, Phonology ... . . . ij
Consonants ......... 13
Vowels ........ . , 15
Synthesis; Glides ly
III. SOUND CHANGES
The Imitation of Sounds Generally Perfect ,
Organic Shifting ........
Acoustic Changes .......
Combinative Changes . .....
External Changes ; Changes Gradual ....
Sound-Laws . .......
Phonetic Looseness .
General Principles: Economy; Comparative Ease of Sounds
Relative Stability of Sounds ......
Influence of Race and Climate .....
19
20
21
22
23
24
27
30
31
3*
CONTENTS
IV. MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
The Origin of Language
Logical and Grammatical Development
Word-Order . , . ,
Composition .....
Derivation ; Form-Words
Inflection ....
Reduplication ; Origin of the Parts of Spe
Evolution of tile Verb
Evolution of the Preposition
Concord
Gender
Morphological Classification of Language
Isolating ....
Agglutinative , , .
Inflectional ....
Polysynthetic ; Incorporating
Analytical ....
:ch
V. CHANGES IN LANGUAGE
Periods ; Development of Dialects
Strata: Literary and Colloquial ....
Families of Languages ; Mixed Languages .
Rapidity of Change
Changes in Morphological Structure . . . .
Antiquity of Language . . ...
General Results of Change ... . .
Control of Change . . ....
Limitations of Control : General Levellino- of Structure
VI. THE ARYAN LANGUAGES
Original Home
Age ; General Structure .....
Sounds .......
Accentuation . ......
Gradation .......
Inflections .......
Concord; the Inflectional Instinct
Primitive Aryan Inflections ....
CONTENTS
VII. AFFINITIES OF ARYAN
PAGE
Ugrian ...... ...iiz
Altaic .......... 121
Sumerian .......... 124
The Aryan Race . . 129
VIII. THE INDIVIDUALITY OF LANGUAGES
Phonetic Individuality . . . , . . 135
Range of Expression ....... 137
Language and Nationality ....... 139
Bibliography ......... 146
I
THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
CHAPTER I
Language and its Study
What is Language ? Language may be defined as the
expression of thought by means of speech-sounds. In other
words, every sentence or word by which we express our ideas
has a certain definite form of its own by virtue of the sounds
of which it is made up, and has a more or less definite
meaning.
The first thing in the study of language is to realize clearly
this duality of form and meaning, constituting respectively the
formal ?iTi<i the logical (or psychological) side of language.
Although language is inconceivable without this polarity of
form and meaning, it is often convenient — and even necessary
— to look at language from a more or less onesidedly formal
or logical point of view, as the case may be. The study of
the formal side of language is based on phonetif s — the science
of speech-sounds ; the study of the logical side of language is
based on psycholo gy — the science of mind.
But every expression of meaning by sound does not neces-
sarily constitute language in the strict sense of the word.
Such sounds as oh ! ah ! pah ! and the other interjections
with which we express emotions, call for attention, utter
commands, and so on, convey definite enough ideas, but by
themselves they no more constitute language than the corre-
sponding cries of animals do, Some of them Indeed are
2 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
excluded from the language of the speaker by their form.
Thus we have interjections consisting entirely of consonants,
such as the lengthened sh / with which we enjoin silence, and
\.\\e pst ! with which Germans call waiters in restaurants: we
have to make sh ! into hush before we can admit it into the
English language.
What these sounds lack is *' articulation" — that is, logical
articulation. From a formal point of view, such interjections
?LS pah ! or the cry of the cuckoo, or the bleat of the sheep,
or the series of whistles with which a monkey expresses
surprise or curiosity, are fairly articulate ; but they are not
logically articulate like the sentences of language proper, in
which words are combined together to express corresponding
combinations of ideas into thoughts. Such an interjection as
sh I expresses the same ideas as the sentences / ivish you to be
silent I be silent ! \ dont mahe so much noise / but it expresses
them vaguely : it is equivalent to a sentence, and yet is not a
sentence. It is true that we can have sentences consisting of
a single word, such as the imperative come ! We regard coirie
in itself as a word because we can freely combine it with other
words to form sentences, which we cannot do with sh ! till
we have transformed it into a real word ; it is therefore, as we
have said, neither a word nor a sentence, but something
between the two.
Lan£u age, then, implies the differentia tion^Qf ivnvd and sen-
tence. It IS evident that until it has reached this stage, it
cannot claim to be an efficient expression or instrument of
thought. This differentiation has not been attained by animals:
they can express ideas by sounds, but they cannot combine
these sounds together to express corresponding combinations
of ideas. Thus they can make a sound which serves — whether
intentionally or not — to warn their companions of danger ; but
they cannot, as far as we know, combine other sounds with
it to indicate the nature of the danger ; and if they indicate the
source or locality of the danger, it is only by instinctive move-
ments or glances.
LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDY
There are other ways besides speech by which ideas may
De communicated. One of these, as we have jast seen, is
gesture. When gestures, instead of being isolated, are
consciously combined to show combinations of ideas, we
have a true gesture-language, perfectly analogous to speech-
language. Among the natives of North America the multiplicity
of mutually unintelligible languages has led to the development
of a common gesture-language in which conversations of some
length can be carried on. A similar means of communication
is often spontaneously developed among deaf-mutes in civilized
countries. This natural language of deaf-mutes must be care-
fully distinguished from the artificial "deaf-and-dumb alphabet,"
which is a mere mechanical reproduction of the letters with
which the words of the ordinary language are written.
This gesture-language is — in j t^s^inipler_J^^rms, at any rate^
— pract[callvthe_jc|^^ worldjitiss aiQ th at
deai^muie^ElHS^ readily^ndersjan^T^Hefsign^^aniuage of
s^va^es^
Language Imperfect and Traditional. In ordinary
language or "speech-language," on the other hand, the con-
nection between form and meaning is much less direct. It is
far easier to find appropriate gesture-symbols than it is to find
appropriate and self-interpreting phonetic ones. It is true that
it is easy enough to suggest such ideas as those of blowing
and drinking by sound, and we can perceive a certain con-
nection between the initial consonants of the English words
mouth and nose and the things these words stand for ; but the
gesture-speaker has a much simpler and surer way of express-
ing them by merely pointing to them with his finger, and in
the same way he can indicate other parts of the face, and find
gestures to express such ideas as hearing and seeing, which
cannot be directly suggested by any combination of sounds.
Of course, in a highly developed gesture-language the
meaning of the gestures would not be always self-evident ;
but the number of self-interpreting signs is always infinitely
greater than in speech-language. The consequence is, as
regards the latter, that a fully developed speech-language has
4 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
to be learnt from the beginning by each generation of its
speakers ; that is, it is kept up by tradition. This further
implies permanent communities of some extent. The absence
of these conditions among animals is alone enough to explain
why they have not developed their interjectional cries into a
genuine language.
But the superiority as regards directness of association is
not invariably on the side of gesture-language, as we see in
such an imitative word as cuckoo. It is evident, therefore,
that ideas must from the beginning have been expressed by a
combination of gesture and sound. As gesture is only avail-
able in the light of day or of the camp-fire and when the
speakers are face to face, there would also be a tendency from
the first to develop the more convenient sound-signs and to
extend their use as much as possible, till at last they consti-
tuted the majority of the words, and what was at first an
easily learnt natural language became a complex traditional
one of infinitely greater convenience and range of expression.
Change ; Dialects and Cognate Languages. As
soon as language became traditional, the connection between
sound and meaning became practically arbitrary, so that not
only was there a necessity of continually adding to the vocab-
ulary and making the means of expression more precise, but
there was nothing to check the natural tendency to change
which we observe in all languages. Languages thus began to
have histories.
Again, natural gesture-language is uniform everywhere. A
traditional speech-language, on the other hand, requires un-
interrupted intercourse between the whole body of its speakers
to keep it uniform, and as this is difficult or even impossible
beyond a certain area, all languages tend to split up first into
a group of dialects and then into a group of cognate languages,
as when Latin split up into an Italian, a Gaulish, a Spanish
dialect, etc., and these dialects developed into the separate
languages Italian, French, Spanish, which together form part
of the Romance family of languages, whose common parent-
lanouage is Latin.
LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDY 5
' Most of the changes in language are so gradual that the
speakers of each language are unconscious of them at the
time. Even those changes which are the result of conscious
innovation must be the result of some natural tendency or
general want ; otherwise they would not be adopted by the
majority of the speakers of the language. Besides, if every
individual speaker modified the common language differently,
the result would be mutual unintelligibility, which could be
avoided only by keeping the language entirely unchanged ;
hence the mere fact of language changing implies uniformity
of change in the language of each individual speaker of it.
Hence linguistic changes are, on the whole, regular. „Given,
fo r instance, a ^Latin^L prd, we c an__g enerally tell bef orehand
with consi derable accur acy wha tior mit will assu me"ln~Ttalia n
an3]The_other Kornahc'elanguages ;~~ajid if iFfs lost in any of
these^JaQg uages^_ w ^"caDro iten~giv^ a ~reasorr"fbr the loss, as
aIso^^r_any changes of meanmg^a"wor3niTay^under£0 in^ ny
one'^Romance^tari^age^ ^
^'Comparative and Historical Philology, Con-
versely, by comparing words of similar form and meaning in
the different Romance languages we can often tell beforehand
what was the original Latin word of which they are all
descendants ; thus by comparing Italian chiamare with Spanish
llamar we can infer the parent form, Latin clamare. In this
way the science of comparative philology, as it is called, is
able to re-construct to some extent the lost parent of such a
family of languages as the Aryan by comparing together
Sanskrit, G reek, Latin,_English and the oth er jnembeiis of
the family.
We see, then, that the comparison of such cognate lan-
guages as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin is only an extension of
the purely historical investigation which traces the changes of
a single language, as when we trace the development of Old
English (Anglo-Saxon) through the Middle English of
Chaucer down to Modern English. So also, if all the
Romance languages except Italian had been lost, comparative
Romance philology would shrink to historical Italian grammar.
6 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
In reconstructing a hypothetical parent-language it is neces-
sary to take all the languages of the. family into account, for
even those which have diverged most widely from the parent-
language may preserve sounds or grammatical forms and other
linguistic features which are lost in the other languages. Thus
in the Aryan family English alone has preserved the original
Aryan sound of w, and French still preserves the s of the
plural of nouns, which is lost in Italian. And yet English
and French are on the whole the least archaic, the least
conservative languages of their respective families.
General Grammar, Historical and comparative philo-
logy content themselves with tracing the phenomena of a
language or a group of cognate languages as far back as
possible without necessarily trying to explain the origin of the
oldest linguistic phenomena thus arrived at. This latter is the
task of general (or philosophical) grammar, which deals, not
with any special languages, but with the general principles
which underlie the grammatical phenomena of all languages,
whether cognate or not. In fact, general grammar prefers to
compare languages which are genealogically distinct — or, at
any rate, only remotely connected — because, when we find
the same grammatical constructions and linguistic changes
developing independently in several unconnected languages,
we have all the more reason for believing that they are the
result of some general tendency in language, as when we see
English and Chinese developing almost the same principles of
word-order.
Principles and Methods of Grammar. The im-
pertect nature of the association between sound and meaning in
language not only makes it liable to continual change, but also
determines its structure generally, so that language is only
partly rational and logical : there is in all languages an
element of irrationality.
In the first place, only a part of the phenomena of a
language can be brought under general rules. Hence the
separation of dictionary and grammar, the former dealing, with
the isolated facts of language, the latter only with what can be
\ LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDY 7
brought under general rules. In an ideally perfect language
such an antithesis would not exist; and the connection be-
I tween the form and meaning even of such primary words as
man would fall under general principles just as much as the
formation of its plural or its place in an interrogative sentence
— so that we should be able to give rules by which, perhaps,
the m in man denoted " living being," the n denoted " rational-
ity," and so on. It is evident that in such a language every-
thing would be grammar, and the dictionary would be simply
an alphabetical index to the grammar.
As science is concerned only with what can be brought
under general principles, we can understand how the science
of language deals mainly with grammar ; in fact, if we only
widen our conception of grammar a little, comparative grammar
and comparative philology become convertible terms.
But even in grammar everything is not rational and sym-
metrical. The grammar of every language is full of irregu-
larities, exceptions, anomalies, and inconsistencies — that is, the
correspondence between grammatical form and grammatical
function is imperfect. Hence the separation of acxidence and
syntax, which obliges us, for instance, to learn all about the
different forms of the subjunctive mood in one part of the
grammar, and learn the rules for its use in another place.
Those who try to define accurately and consistently the line
between accidence and syntax forget that the separation be-
tween the two is entirely a matter of practical convenience,
not of scientific principle, and that in a perfect language any
such separation would be not only irrational but impossible.
Even in syntax we can make a distinction between forma/
and analytical syntax on the one hand and logical or synthetic
syntax on the other hand, the former being die point of view
of the hearer, the latter of the speaker. The hearer has the
forms given to him and has to infer their meanings, partly
from the forms themselves, partly from che context ; the
speaker has the meanings in his mind, and has to select those
forms which convey them most clearly. So also in the
scientific investigation of a language we can cither take such a
8 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
form as the nominative case — supposing the language has one
— and examine its s\mtactical uses or grammatical meaning ;
or we can take such a grammatical relation as that of subject
and predicate, and inquire into the ditferent ways in which it
is expressed grammatically either in some language or group
of cognate languages or in language in general. It is evident
that formal must precede logical syntax, which latter belongs
more to general grammar.
Every grammatical category is — or ought to be — the ex-
pression of some logical category. Thus the grammatical
categories "plural of nouns," " plural of verbs," or the more
general ones " plural " or " number " are the formal ex-
pressions of the logical categories " morc-than-ones " or
"discrete quantity."
In a perfect language every grammatical category would
correspond exactly to some logical category, but in actual lan-
guage they often diverge from one another. Often, too, a
grammatical category is more or less completely wanting.
Thus, in many languages there is no grammatical category
number, such an idea as that of " men " being expressed by
the unmodified man and left to be gathered from the context,
or else expressed by the addition of some such word as Jiiarrv
or some, which is a " lexical " and not a grammatical method
of expression.
Or a grammaiical category may have so many discon-
nected functions that it is impossible to find any one logical
category to correspond, as is the case with such an inflec-
tion as the dative in Greek and with some of the English
prepositions.
Or it may have so vague a meaning that it is difficult or
impossible to find any corresponding logical category ; thus
the distinction between such abstract nouns as 'whiteness,
goodness and the adjectives ivh'ite, good is a purely gram-
matical one, there being no logical ditference between such
pairs as ivh'ite and ichiteness.
Besides these negative defects, the grammatical and logical
categories often contradict one another more or less directly
LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDY 9
as in many a man^ where the grammatical category " singular
number " contradicts the meaning of the word many.
It is characteristic of the imperfections of language that
the word "rule" in grammar always suggests the idea of
"exceptions" and "irregularities."
The only phenomena which can be brought under general
rules are those which have something in common by which
they are associated together in the mind by the p ocess of
group-association, so that association-groups are formed. Thus
the words trees and houses and all the other plurals in -s are
associated together both formally and logically. Such plurals
as men and children are associated with them logically, but
from a formal point of view are only partially associated
with them : children and trees are formally associated together
inasmuch as they both have plural inflections, but they are
disassociated by their inflections being entirely different.
When we say therefore that men and children are irregular
plurals, we mean that they are partially isolated from and
stand outside the main group of regular plurals.
When logic triumphs over grammar, the result is sometimes
an anti-grammatical construction, as in the frequent association
of a plural verb with a sing lar collective noun [the party ivere
assembled). Such constructions are often the result of ending
a sentence with a construction difl^erent from the one with
which it was began (anacoluthia), of which the example just
given may also be regarded as an instance. An important
class of antigrammatical constructions are those which result
from a blending of two different constructions, as when in
colloquial English we blend the two constructions this kind
and these things into these hind of things. Blending is closely
allied to anacoluthia, which may be defined as successive blend-
ing, while blending itself is really simultaneous anacoluthia.
There are also antilogical constructions, which misrepresent
the logical relations between the ideas expressed by them.
The most marked antilogical constructions are those which
result from " shifting," as in the Latin laudatum Irl " to be
about to praise," which means literally " to be gone to praise "
lo THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
instead of " to go to be praised," the marking of the passive
meaning being shifted from the transitive verb to the intransi-
tive auxihary, which is incapable of being conceived in the
passive relation.
Effects of Change. The changes and anomalies in the
growth of language which we have been considering are by
no means purely injurious in their effects.
In the first place, even the purely destructive changes are
often useful, as when phonetic decay shortens unwieldy poly-
syllables and gets rid of useless inflections.
Again, changes which result in the formation of new dis-
tinctions — as when in spoken English / iv'ill not develops into
ril not, I ivojit — though they greatly increase the complexity
and irregularity of the language, are, on the other hand,
essential factors in the development of language : as we shall
see hereafter, such distinctions as those of the parts of speech
are to some extent the result of phonetic changes ; and it is
mainly by metaphor and other changes of meanings that a
language is able to build up a whole dictionary of abstract
terms on the foundation of a few hundred root-words.
The Science of Language. The business of the
science of language is first to get a clear idea of the nature of
the various linguistic processes — sound-changes, loss of sounds,
changes of meaning, etc. — and then to trace in detail their
effect on the structure of language, explaining the causes of
each phenomenon, and referring them all as far as possible to
general principles. The science of language has, therefore, to
deal with such questions as these: — Why do languages
change ? What are the exact processes by which one lan-
guage splits up into a group of cognate languages ? How are
we to find out whether two or more languages are cognate or
not, and how are we to find out their parent language ? What
is the origin of the distinction between noun and verb and ttie
other parts of speech ? What is the origin of inflections ?
Such questions as these naturally suggest still wider ones,
such as the origin of language, the connection between race
and language, together with others which are practical rather
LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDY n
than scientific, such as the applications of philology to the
practical mastery of languages, the decipherment of inscrip-
tions and other writings in unknown languages, and remoter
applications of philology to archaeological and historical in-
vestigations, as when by a study of the hypothetical primitive
vocabulary of the Aryan languages we try to discover the
state of civilization of the speakers of the undivided parent
Aryan language.
It is a curious reflection to have to make that if language
were a perfect expression of thought, there would be no science
of language. Language would then be simply an art. There
would be but one language unchanging both in time and place.
Without linguistic change there could be no historical grammar
and no comparative philology.
The peculiar charm of the study of languages lies precisely
in the mixture of the rational and the irrational, the arbitrary
and exceptional with the symmetrical and regular which they
all present. After the inflexible logic of the exact sciences,
it is a relief to turn to the science of language : a language is
like a friend whose very faults and weaknesses endear him to
us. The peculiar value of the study of language as a training
for the mind is the result of its combination of scientific
method with human interest. The science of language is in
this respect intermediate between the natural sciences on the
one hand and history and literature on the other, to which
latter it is also the most indispensable auxiliary.
CHAPTER II
Sounds of Language
The whole science of speech-sounds is included under
phonology^ which includes the history and theory of sound-
changes ; the term phonetics excludes this, being concerned
mainly with the analysis and classification of the actual sound.
In discussing sounds it is necessary to employ a consistent
phonetic notation, which we enclose in ( ) to prevent con-
fusion with the traditional or " nomic " spelling of the lan-
guage we are dealing with ; thus (hedz) is the phonetic
spelling corresponding to the nomic heads. In dealing with
dead languages, whose pronunciation is more or less uncer-
tain, it is better to keep the traditional spelling, and supple-
ment its deficiencies by diacritics, as when we put a macron
over the a of Latin mater to show that it is long, instead
of doubling it (aa), as we should do in a purely phonetic
transcription.
The first task of phonetics is to describe the shape and
positions of the throat, tongue, lips, and the other organs of
speech by which sounds are produced; this is the organic side
of phonetics. The acoustic study of sounds classifies them
according to their likeness to the ear, and explains how the
acoustic effect of each sound is the necessary result of its
organic formation. Thus the high pitch and clear sound
which is common to the consonant (s) and the vowel (i) is
the result of a narrow passage being formed in the fore part of
the mouth between the fore part of the tongue and the palate;
and this similarity of sound explains why in late Latin such
THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 13
words as spiritu[s) developed an (i) before the (s), whence
modern French (cspri) through '^ispiritu.^
For scientific purposes it is necessary to have a general
knowledge of the whole field of possible sounds, for in dealing
with any one sound it is often necessary to know all the
sounds it may have developed out of and all that it is liable
to change into.
The first thing is to master certain general distinctions.
The most important of these is breath and voice. In ordinary
breathing or sighing the glottis or space between the vocal
chords in the throat is wide open, so that the air from the
lungs passes through without producing any sound except
that caused by its friction against the sides of the throat and
mouth passages. The simplest breath-sound is the aspirate
(h). If, on the other hand, the edges of the glottis are
brought together so that the passage of air between them
makes them vibrate, we have voice. The simplest form of
voice is the "neutral" vowel (9) in sofa (soufa).
If the passage from the back of the mouth into the nose
is left open by lowering the soft palate, we get a nasal sound,
such as (m), which by closing the nasal passage becomes (b),
as in amber. There are also nasal vowels, which we mark by
adding («), as in the French (vse/;) •y/'w, where we have the
nasal vowel corresponding to the English (ae) in man.
Consonants, If any vocal organs are brought together
so as either completely to stop the passage, as in (b, ra), or
cause audible friction (hiss or buzz), as in (f, s), a consonant
is the result. All consonants go in pairs of breath and voice.
Thus to the lip-teeth-breath (or voiceless) consonant (f) cor-
responds the lip-teeth-voice (v). Breath consonants are
sometimes expressed by adding the modifier (^h) to the symbol
of the corresponding voice consonant; thus (w/6) in tuby is
the breath consonant corresponding to the lip-back-voice
consonant (w).
Some consonants have hardly any audible friction when
voiced, such as (m, w, 1). Such consonants resemble vowels,
1 The * is used to show that the form is hypothetical only.
14 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
and are therefore called vowel-like (or liquid) consonants.
But in their breath forms (w>6, U) the friction is clearly
audible.
Consonants admit of a twofold division by form and by
place. By form we distinguish open consonants, such as
(s, w, f), j-/o/>^f J consonants, such as (b, t, k), nasa/f such as
(m, n),and si(/e (or divided) consonants, such as (1), formed
by stopping the middle of the passage, and leaving it open at
the sides, and trilled consonants, which are the result of
vibration of flexible parts of the mouth ; thus in the trilled
Scotch (r) the point of the tongue vibrates against the gums,
the English (r) in r<?<r/ being the corresponding open consonant
without any trill.
By place we distinguish back (guttural) consonants, formed
by the root of the tongue and the back of the mouth, such as
(k),fronl, such as (j) in you^ point, such as (r, t, n), blade
(s, z), formed by the point together with the surface of the
tongue immediately behind it, from which the blade-point (y)
in she and (3) in rouge are formed by raising the point of
the tongue towards the (r) -position, Up, such as (b, m), lip-
teeth (f, v), lip-back [why w), formed by narrowing the lip-
opening and raising the back of the tongue at the same time.
There are also throat-consonants : the throat-stop or glottal
stop ( ' ) is the sound produced in coughing. The aspirate
(h) may be regarded as a weak open throat-consonant, the
peculiar Arabic consonants ha and 'en being strong open throat-
consonants — (h) the breath, (') the voice-consonant.
Beside the main positions back, front, etc., there are an
infinite number of intermediate positions, which we distinguish
roughly as inner, or nearer the throat, and outer, or nearer the
lips. Thus (r) is inner point, (]?), as in thin, and (^), as in
then, are outer point or teeth-point, the ordinary English (t,
d, n, 1) being formed in an intermediate position.
The consonant (w) is really a compound consonant — formed
in two different places at once. The German consonant (x-zf )
in auch as compared with the simple (x) in ach is also a
compound consonant, but in its formation the back element
THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 15
predominates over the lip element instead of being subordi-
nate to it as in (w) or (w/'), so that it is a lip-modified
back consonant, which we indicate by adding (w). So also
we may use (J) to show front-modification. Thus the French
(1) in elle is really (l/),the middle of the tongue being arched
up towards the (j) -position.
Vowels, Vowels are the result of different shapes of
the voice-passage, each of which moulds the neutral voice-
murmur (a) into a different vowel, mainly by different posi-
tions of the tongue and lips, but without narrowing the passage
so much as to cause an audible hiss or buzz, which would
make the vowel into a consonant. The number of possible
vowels is as unlimited as the number of the organic positions
which produce them. But if we select certain definite posi-
tions as fixed points, it is easy to determine intermediate
positions.
If we pass from such a vowel as (i) in pit to (do) in fa//,
we can feel that the root of the tongue is drawn back, while
in (i) the fore-part of the tongue is raised towards the palate.
We may therefore call (i) a. front and (o) a Ifac^ vowel. In
(3) the tongue is in an intermediate position which we call
mixed. Again, if we pass from (i) to (as) in matt, we can
feel that the front of the tongue is lowered, so that we may
call (ae) a /otu vowel as opposed to the /jig/j (i), in which
the tongue is brought as close to the palate as is possible
without making the (i) into a consonant — a kind of (j). If
in passing from one to the other we stop half-way, we get the
w/rf vowel (e) in mett. If, again, we stop half-way between
(i) and (e) we get the second vowel in pity, which we may
define either as "lowered high-front'* or "raised mid-front."
Every vowel may be rounded by bringing the lips together.
Thus, if we round (i), we get the high-front-round (y),
which is the sound of French u.
We have, lastly, the difHcult distinction of narrotu and
nvide. Thus French (i) in si is the high-front-narrow vowel
corresponding to the wide English (/) in it, wide vowels
being distinguished when necessary by italics. So also (w)
i6 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
in English good is the wide of the Scotch (u) m good, which
is the high-back-narrow-round vowel. In the formation of
narrow vowels the tongue and flexible parts of the mouth are
made tense and convex in shape, while in wide vowels they
are relaxed and flattened.
Vowels of different formation often have the same, or nearly
the same, pitch or inherent tone. Thus the high pitch and
clear tone of (i) or (/') may be dulled either by rounding or
retraction of the tongue towards the high-mixed position of
(i) in Welsh dyn or (V) in English pretty, the result being
that (i) has the same pitch as (y), (V) has the same pitch as
[y). There is the same relation between the low-mixed-
narrow (aa) in English ^wrr and the low-front-round-narrow
(oeoe) in French /><?z/r, which are very similar in sound though
formed in totally different ways.
*< Widening " a vowel flattens the tongue and therefore
has an effect similar to lowering the whole body of the
tongue ; hence the high-front-wide (/) is similar in sound
to the mid-front-narrow (e) in French ///. Mid-front-wide
(f) in English men resembles the low-front-narrow (e) in
Scotch men and English care so closely that we can class the
two together as ** open " varieties of the " close " French
(e). So also the mid-back-wide-round (o) in German
stock and the low-back-narrow-round (o) in English fall
form acoustic pairs.
The various open voice consonants must necessarily yield
more or less distinct vowel-sounds when their position are
expanded so as to remove audible friction. Thus if we start
from the back-open-voice (y) in German sage, and increase
the distance between tongue and palate, we obtain a pure
vowel-sound, which will be either the mid-back- wide (a) in
father or the mid-back-narrow (e) in come if the (y) is
formed in a medium position, or the low-back-wide (a) of
French ^i/i? if we start from inner (y). Conversely, if we
narrow the lip-opening of (u), we get (w), and the front
vowels become varieties of (W when the tongue is brought
close to the palate.
THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 17
Synthesis. We have hitherto considered sounds from
the point of view of analysis. We have now to consider their
synthesis, that is, the different ways in which they are joined
together. We first have to learn to recognize the distinc-
tions of quantity or length, stress or loudness, and intonation
or tone.
By quantity sounds are distinguished as long, half-long
or medium, and short, the two former being indicated by
doubling.
There are also three degrees of stress: strong (•), half-
strong or medium (:), and tueak, which is marked when
necessary by prefixing (-), these marks being put before
the sound on which the stressed syllable begins, as in (:kon-
tra'dikt) contradict, which has exactly the same stress as
the sentence (:kBm -at 'WBns) come at once! A syllable is a
group of sounds containing a vowel or vowel-like consonant
uttered with one impulse of stress. If two vowels are
uttered with one impulse of stress, they together constitute
a diphthong.
Intonation is either level (-), rising ('), or falling ( ').
The rising tone may be heard in such questions as luhat', the
falling in answers, such as yes\ In intonation we must also
distinguish the length of the rise or fall. Thus tuhat' with a
short rise — beginning rather high — expresses mere inquiry,
but with a long rise — beginning low — it expresses surprise
or indignation. There are also compound tones formed by
combining a rise and a fall in one syllable, viz. the compound-
rising (falling-rising) tone marked ", and the compound-falling
(rising-falling) tone marked "", as in taie care" expressing
caution or warning, oh^ expressing sarcasm.
Glides are sounds in which the organs of speech do not
remain in any one definite position, but keep on moving, so as
to form an indefinite series of different positions. We generally
make glides in passing from one position to another. Thus
in such combination of sounds as (aja), we first have the (a)-
position and then the movement up towards the (j) -position,
producing an indefinite number of sounds intermediate between
i8
THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
(a) and (j). If we stop for a moment just before we get to
the (j), we form a distinct (i), giving (aija).
But there are also glideless combinations, as in (haend)
hand, where the (d) is simply the (n) lengthened and unna-
salized, so that there is no change whatever in the position of
the tongue in passing from the (n] to the (d)
CHAPTER III
Sound Changes
The sounds of any one period of a language are transmitted
to the next generation almost entirely by imitation, only
occasionally aided by inspection of the movements of the
organs of speech. But it is to be observed that uniformity
of pronunciation and perfect imitation are only relative terms.
The differences in the quality of the voice caused by slight
differences in the shapes and sizes of the oral passages in each
individual make it impossible for one individual to imitate
exactly the sounds of another. But we learn instinctively to
allow for these inevitable differences, and by long practice we
are able to know with certainty that our interlocutor's sound
is as near our own as the peculiarities of our respective organs
will allow, and we regard the imitation as practically, though
not ideally, perfect.
The Imitation of Sounds Generally Perfect.
The learning of vernacular sounds by imitation is a slow and
difficult task, but the conditions of beginning in infancy,
having nothing else to do, and, above all, of the mind being
unhampered by conflicting associations with the sounds of
other languages, are so favourable, and the inducements to
learn are so strong, that the imitation is in most cases practically
perfect. It is not only that mis-pronunciations tend to make
the speaker more or less unintelligible, but there is also an
incessant pressure brought to bear by the majority on all
peculiarities of speech which are in the minority, this pressure
being specially effective when it takes the form of ridicule.
That the pronunciation of average normal individuals who
19
20 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
have emerged fron the tentative stage of infancy may be a
perfect imitation of that of the preceding generation is proved
by the numerous instances there are of unstable sounds being
handed down unchanged through many generations. Thus
the difficult Semitic throat-sounds which were lost in Assyrian
more than 4000 years ago through mixture with a non-Semitic
population, are preserved in Arabic to the present day. The
preservation of Aryan (w) in Modern English — a sound
which easily loses its back element and then passes into (v)
on the one hand, and is liable to change to (yw, y, g) on
the other — is, perhaps, still more remarkable. It would be
useless to multiply examples, because the preservation of sounds
unchanged through at least several generations is the rule, not
•Jtie exception, in all languages.
Organic Shifting, The main cause of sound-change
must therefore be sought elsewhere. The real cause of sound-
change seems to be organic shifting — failure to hit the mark,
the result either of carelessness or sloth. Every one is liable
to such failures occasionally ; but as the failure of the organic
sense — that is, the muscular sensations which accompany
every movement of the organs of speech — is being con-
tinually corrected by the acoustic sense as well as by the
necessity of making oneself understood, these inducements to
change do not generally have any very appreciable permanent
effect on the pronunciation. The same individual who makes
luhat ? into (woh) or (wo) or even a muffled (aa) and yes
into a mere grunt, will, when excited or asked to repeat what
he is saying, come out with a sharp and clear enunciation.
But a slight deviation from the pronunciation learnt in
infancy may easily pass unheeded, especially by those who
make the same change in their own pronunciation ; for in
this case the acoustic sense, instead of correcting, will en-
courage the innovation. If a speaker is isolated in any way
from hearing the pronunciation of his contemporaries, his
pronunciation will change rapidly, but it will, of course, have
no effect on the pronunciation of the community at large.
Adults who have become deaf generally develop marked
SOUND CHANGES 21
divergences from the normal pronunciation they formerly-
followed.
Acoustic Changes. Infants learning to speak do un-
doubtedly mispronounce through defective imitation, as when
they make (I?) in through, etc., into (f), which is as purely an
acoustic and not an organic change as that of ())) into (s), so
often made by foreigners. The frequent infantine change of
(s) into (t) is, on the other hand, purely organic, for the two
sounds have no acoustic resemblance whatever ; this change is
an example of "not hitting the mark," or, rather, of over-
hitting it : instead of merely bringing the blade of the tongue
close to the palate, the child overdoes it by bringing the
organs into actual contact. It is evident therefore that the
child must first have learnt to pronounce (s) correctly —
which is, indeed, one of the easiest sounds to imitate — and
then have modified its own pronunciation through carelessness
or forgetfulness.
In arguing from the mispronunciations of children we must
be careful to distinguish between those which are peculiar to
children's language and those which also occur in the language
of adults. Now it is a significant fact that in actual language
(]j) does not undergo the acoustic or imitative change into
(f) or (s), but becomes (t), which, like the infant's change
of (s) into (t), is an organic rather than an acoustic change.
So also the Russian (f) in Fedor from Theodore is not a
change in Russian itself, but is merely an imitation of an
unfamiliar foreign sound.
But we must not go into the opposite extreme of denying
all acoustic changes in normal speech. The frequent change
of point (r) into the back consonant (y) — either with or
without trill — as in the usual French and German pronun-
ciation, is an example, although this change is greatly helped
by the fact that the back trill, in which the uvula (the
extremity of the soft palate) is simply lifted up by the root
of the tongue, is distinctly easier than the point one.
There is another class of acoustic changes which we may
call " distinctive " changes, by which a sound is modified so
B
22 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
as to make it more distinct to the ear ; thus when (b) and
outer or dental (d) become open consonants between vowels
— a frequent change in many languages — the resulting ( c^) is
kept, but the *' lip-open " or bilabial (/5) generally becomes
the lip-teeth (v), which has a sharper buzz, and is more
distinct from (w).
The frequent changes by which two sounds of similar
acoustic effect are made more distinct to the ear are partly
organic, partly acoustic.
Combinative Ctianges. The changes we have hitherto
considered are isolative as opposed to combinative sound-changes,
such as that of (x) into (9) in German ich, where the front
vowel (i) has changed the original back consonant — still
preserved in Swiss German — into the nearest front one.
This change is, of course, purely organic. In it, the as-
similative influence works forwards. We have an example
of backwards-working organic assimilative change in the
mutation (umlaut) of the Germanic languages ; for it is now
generally admitted that such changes as that of back (uu) to
the corresponding front vowel (yy) in Old English ^wwj-,
" mouse," plural mys from older *musi, began with the
change of (s) into front-modified (s/) — a sound which may
be heard in Russian — which then gradually fronted the
preceding vowel. Such influences may also be backwards
and forwards at the same time, as in the very frequent voicing
of a breath consonant between vowels, or when a voiced stop
becomes open between two vowels — that is, is made more like
a vowel — both changes being shown in the conversion of
Latin y^/<3 into Provencal y«<^^, French y>rt(? (fee^g), y/*?.
When a diphthong such as (au) is "smoothed" into a long
vowel (00), there seem to be always intermediate stages such
as (ao, DO, do) with mutual assimilation of the two vowels.
Divergent ChangeS' All the above changes are con-
vergent, and purely organic. There are also a large number
of divergent changes, which are purely acoustic, being the
result of striving after distinctness, as when the diphthong
(ou) in no is exaggerated into (au) in the vulgar London and
SOUND CHANGES 23
other English dialects. The frequent change of (ii) into
diphthongs of the (ai)-type, as in English tuine and German
ivein from older 'w'ln began with the failure to begin the vowel
at the proper height, giving a very close (ei), which, being
liable to be confused in sound with (ee), was made into (ai,
ai, a\, oi), etc. by divergence. Such a change is therefore
partly organic, partly acoustic.
External Changes. Such a change as that of Middle
English eyen into Modern English eyes is evidently neither an
organic nor an acoustic change. In fact it is not a phonetic
change at all, but rather a substitution of one plural ending
for another — a substitution by analogy, in this case the
analogy of the regular plurals in -j". Such a change as thar
of rt to in the preterites broke, spoke, from earlier brake,
spake, was regarded as an organic change by the older school
of philologists, but we know now that this is as little a
phonetic change as that of the plural -en into -es. In this case
the analogy was that of the of the preterite participles broken,
spoken, etc. ; he spake having nearly the same meaning as he
has spoken, the vowel of the latter was extended to the former
word. The change of (fj) into (s) in such inflections as
speaketh, speaks, is probably also a purely " external '' change,
and not, as might be supposed, an example of defective
imitation, for there is no other example of such a change at
the time when (fi) became (s) in verb endings.
Changes Gradual. It is evident that such changes as
that of (ii) into (ai) must be gradual in their operation, for
the direct change would be equally opposed to organic and to
acoustic principles. So also when we see (m) between
vowels becoming (v) — as is often the case in the Celtic
languages — we assume some such series as (/3«, ^, v), the first
being simply a (m) formed with imperfect lip-closure.
If, then, we had reason to believe in such a direct change
as that of (k) into (p), we should have to assume that the
change was acoustic, which in this case would offer no
difficult) - as all the voiceless stops are very similar in sound ;
if, on the other hand, we rejected the acoustic explanation.
24 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
we should have to assume some such series as (kw, pw, p)
with various intermediate changes.
Sound Laws. If a child or a foreigner makes through
into (fruu), we naturally expect them to carry out this change
of (j:) into (f) everywhere. Indeed, it stands to reason that
if the child or the foreigner finds it " impossible " to pronounce
(])) in one word, he will find it just as impossible to pronounce
it in any other.
When such changes are carried out in actual language,
they are called sound-laws. Thus the sound-law that German
d corresponds to th in English, as in ding^ denhen, compared
with things think, means that the common Germanic (})) has
been changed in German into (d), of course, through inter-
mediate (^). In this sense, a sound-law may be regarded as
simply a statement of the fact that in a certain period of a
certain language its speakers got into the habit of mis-
pronouncing a certain sound. The convenient expression
sound-law must not be allowed to mislead us into regarding
such a generalization as "Grimm's Law" as a general law or
principle binding for all languages or even for all periods of
one language : it is simply a collection of statements of the
result of certain changes that took place at certain definite
periods of certain languages. Thus from that part of Grimm's
Law which states that to original Aryan voice stops correspond
breath stops in Low German and English and various de-
velopments of aspirated breath stops in High German —
as in Latin domare, English tame, German %ahm (tsaam) —
we may infer the possibility of such changes in other languages,
but we cannot assume them anywhere as facts until they have
been proved to have actually taken place. We can as little
assume that because a certain change has taken place in one
period of a language, it necessarily occurred at an earlier
period or will occur at a later period of that language : each
period has its own "sound-laws," and Modern German is
no more able to change (t) into (ts) than English is.
In stating sound-laws we muse of course be careful to make
our statements as definite as possible. Thus the statement in
SOUND CHANGES 25
Grimm's Law that English / appears as 2 in German does
not apply to the combination sf, as in German stein = English
stone, where the (s) prevented the development of the aspirate
(th) out of which German (ts) developed, because (s) it-
self is a kind of aspirate, so that such a combination as (sth)
would seem to be a double aspiration. It is evident that this
is merely an exception to a statement, not to any actual law.
Specially important are the limitations of sound-changes by
conditions of general synthesis. Thus the changes of long
vowels follow quite different laws from those of short vowels ;
it is easy to see that the length of (ii) alone makes it possible
to lower the first half of it towards (e) while keeping the
second half unchanged, so that the change of short (i) into
(ai) would be almost impossible, at least from an organic
point of view.
The influence of stress is important. Long vowels get
shortened in unstressed syllables, as in (fraidi) Friday, com-
pared with (dei) day, and short vowels undergo different
changes in unstressed syllables from those they undergo when
under full stress, and are often merged in the one obscure (a),
which is then liable to be dropped entirely ; thus to the
Germanic form sunno preserved in Gothic correspond Old
English sunne with close (e), which has passed through
Middle English sunne, sonne (sunna) into sun.
Intonation, too, often has a considerable effect on sound-
changes, and appears to be sometimes a direct cause of change.
A rising tone or high pitch tends to raise the natural pitch of
vowels, making a into e through (ss), while falling tones have
the opposite effect of deepening a in the direction of 0. Both
changes may be observed in the Aryan languages ; the e of
the Greek vocative h'lppe is the result of the high tone on both
syllables which naturally accompanies calling, while the of
the nominative h'lppos = Latin eqvus older eq-vos " horse," is
probably the result of a falling tone.
These limitations often give rise to doublets, such as
the "strong" emphatic (him) and the "weak" (im). as
in (ai sdd 'him not 'hsd) compared with (ai so -im jestadi),
26 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
{^6GEt) demonstrative and (^at) conjunction and relative pro-
noun, as in (ai nou ^at ^xt s truw) / inotv that that is true.
This last is an instance of how language utilizes new distinc-
tions of sound which are the result of mechanical causes — in
this case of difference of stress — to express distinctions of
meaning or grammatical function. It often happens that a
weak form whose origin is forgotten becomes strong — that is,
capable of taking full stress — and then perhaps developes a
new weak form of its own. Thus of and iv'ith were in Middle
English pronounced (of, wi]?), which in early Modern English
became (ov, wi'S) when unstressed. In the present English
(wi^) has entirely supplanted the earlier strong form (wif)),
which has become extinct, while o^and of (ov) are now dis-
tinct words, the latter having developed a new weak form of
its own — (3v),
As we have already remarked, such phenomena are not
exceptions to sound-laws, but simply elements of a more
accurate delinition of them.
Many changes which were formerly regarded as genuine
exceptions are now recognized to be external — that is, to
be substitutions, not changes — so that such a change as that
of ^ to in spoke (p. 23) is no longer regarded as an
exception to the law which requires a to be kept unchanged
in such words.
Many exceptions which are not explained by analogy are
the result of mixture of dialects or languages. Thus English
hale is simply the northern form corresponding to the standard
Southern avhole, both being equally regular developments of
the common form Old English hal. Many irregularities in
Latin phonology are the result of the introduction of words
from the cognate languages Oscan and Umbrian. Such
changes as those of (m) into (p) in such names as Peggy,
Polly, are also the result of borrowing from a foreign language
— that of the nursery.
Lastly, an isolated change is not necessarily an irregular
one. Thus the change of old English civa]) into modern
English quoth is not parallel to that of brake into broke — on
SOUND CHANGES 27
the contrary, it is strictly organic and perfectly regular, but is
the result of so many peculiar circumstances and shiftings of
stress that it is the only word in the language in v/hich this
final result could be attained. So also with such a change as
that of French monsieur into (psj^). That this last change
is only occasional cannot be regarded as constituting irregu-
larity, for every change must have a beginning ; this change is
only occasional simply because the combination of circum-
stances which alone make it possible as yet occur only
occasionally.
If, then, we carefully remove all such disturbing factors as
analogy, mixture of dialects, etc., we find our a priori con-
clusions confirmed — that is, that an exception to a law of
sound-change is from the point of view of ordinary civilized
languages impossible, and, indeed, almost inconceivable.
But in the actual life of language, a state of things in which
internal sound-changes are carried out through several genera-
tions without being affected by external influences is almost as
inconceivable. Hence from a practical point of view the
" invariability of sound-laws " merely means that if an apparent
exception does not fall under some organic or acoustic law,
we should look out for analogy or some other external cause.
Phonetic Looseness, Nor must it ever be forgotten
that language is only a means to an end. Civilized languages,
which are spoken by populous communities and over areas of
some extent, and which mvolve copious vocabularies and the
expression of complex and varied thought, must be precise in
their articulation ; and the habit of precise articulation becomes
so ingrained in the speakers of these languages that, as already
remarked, they regard all deviations from their accustomed
organic positions as impossibilities.
Under different circumstances, different ideals may prevail.
Many savage and half-civilized communities certainly seem to
take sound-change much more lightly than we do. Trust-
worthy observers tell us, for instance, that in one of the Poly-
nesian languages of the Pacific, Samoan, the consonant (k)
existed only in the single vi 0x6. puke, "catch I "; that it was
28 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
then substituted for (t) more and more in some of the Samoan
islands, and then spread rapidly over the whole group.
Whitmee remarks, speaking of Samoan, " many of the natives
are exceedingly careless and incorrect in the pronunciation of
consonants, and even exchange or transpose them without con-
fusion, and almost unnoticed by their hearers ; as in manu for
namu ' a scent,' lagoga for lagona * to understand,' lavaau for
'valaau ' to call ' ; but they are very particular about the pro-
nunciation of the vowels." There is similar testimony with
regard to the other languages of the Pacific, not only Polyne-
sian and Melanesian, but also some of the Malay languages.
Strange as such a state of things may seem, much of it is
evidently only an exaggeration of what happens in all lan-
guages. Among the island populations of the Pacific the tend-
encies to careless articulation which exist everywhere are
allowed greater scope partly from the intellectual indolence of the
speakers, partly from the want of external restraint. In small,
scattered communities which are constantly liable to be broken
up into still smaller ones, the instability of external circum-
stances rejects itself in the language. Such languages are
like the language of children : they are always starting afresh,
and are in a constant ferment of experiment and phonetic
licence checked only by the necessity of being intelligible to a
small circle of hearers. The temperament and circumstances
of these people are both those of children, and their sound-
changes have a childish character. The instability of their
surroundings gives their speech that tentative character which
we observe in the articulation of infants. As already remarked,
all changes must have a beginning. Even in such a language
as German some one must have begun to make his (r) into a
back sound, and to untrill it, and it was only gradually that
the change spread through whole communities. The only
difference is that in such a language as Samoan there are a
greater number of such tentative changes going on at once.
When, however, we are told that a Samoan pronounces
sometimes (t) and sometimes (k) at random, we seem to
be really on unfamiliar ground. It is true that in some in-
SOUND CHANGES 29
stances this fluctuation is simply mixture of dialects. In other
instances this explanation will not apparently hold good : there
really seems to be a perfectly spontaneous fluctuation between
the two sounds. But it would be desirable to have this
fluctuation defined more closely. Does it mean that the
speaker varies incessantly between outer (dental) and inner
(t), outer and inner front (c), outer and inner (k) in
uttering one and the same word ? We do not find any hint
that such is the case. If, on the other hand, it means that the
speaker hesitates between two detinite sounds — such as outer
(t) and medium (k) — then the phenomenon cannot be
described as laxity but as duality of pronunciation — a kind of
traditional bilingualism, for which we are inclined to seek
some non-organic external cause. If the speaker really uttered
an indefinite variety of intermediate sounds, we might ascribe
it simply to childish restlessness and love of variety — which,
again, are external factors, not organic ones.
On the whole, it is best to admit that as yet we are not in
full possession of the facts of sound-change in all types of
languages and under all possible conditions, and that con-
sequently our theories may still be one-sided. We may even
have to admit that some languages allow each sound — or
rather certain sounds which are less logically distinctive than
the others — to diverge from its normal or medium articulation
in all directions to a certain degree, so that a sound is to them
not one definite point, as it were, but an indefinite number of
points within a circle, as if in English we pronounced the
vowel in father with a continual variation between broad
French a. and all the intermediate stages between it and the
** outer " thin long (aa) v/rich is nearly the (as) in man. If
we allowed the same licence to (ae) itself, it is difficult to see
how (aa) and (as) could be kept from running together, so
that only the distinction of quantity would remain. There is
much difficulty in realizing such a fluctuation, not only because
it is opposed tc the practice of most languages, but also
because such carelessness can only be the result of laziness,
and the lazier the speaker the more to his advantage it is to
30 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
select that shade of sound which is easiest and most convenient
to form and to keep to it.
General Principles : Economy. We now come to
the question whether there are any great general principles
which underlie the special sound-changes or " sound-laws "
of a given language.
There can be no doubt that the principle of economy plavs
an important part in the sound-changes of language. We
have economy of time in the shortening of words and the
dropping of syllables by which, for instance, the four syllables
of the Middle English hy cause that have been shortened into
(bikoz) and even into (koz). The spirit that prompted the
English saying '' time is money," is clearly stamped on the
history of the language.
Economy of effort, or laziness, is most clearly shown in
the way in which all languages strive after ease of transition,
as in convergent sound-changes. Such individual changes as
the untrilling of (r), which is common to many highly civil-
ized communities, is an undoubted case of economy of effort.
The fate of the consonants in many Pol5'nesian languages, in
which whole sentences can be made up of vowels only, reflects
the listless indolence of their speakers. The laziness is often
mental rather than physical, as when the distinction of short
and long vowel-quantity is lost in such languages as Russian,
and, to a great extent, in the Romance languages. Such
changes as those of (|?) into (t), which are contrary to the
principle of avoiding unnecessary physical effort, are really
cases of mental laziness — in this case, of not taking the trouble
to measure the distance between tongue and palate.
Comparative Ease of Sounds. It is dangerous to
assume that the loss or modification of a sound is the result
ot its inherent difficulty — except in such cases as the untrilling
of (r). The mere fact that a sound exists in any language is
a proof that it is not in itself difficult. To the ordinary adult
speaker all familiai sound? are easy, all unfamiliar sounds are
not oni;' difficult but impossible. The Semitic throat con-
sonants have been handed down UDchanged for many thousand
SOUND CHANGES 3»
years, and Arab children learn them with as much ease as the
other consonants ; and their early loss in Assyrian, and their
later loss in Hebrew and Ethiopic is sim.ply the result of the
large mixture of and contact with alien races to whom these
sounds were unfamiliar.
When we observe the tolerably general tendency of sounds
to change from back to forward by which (k) before (i) and
the other front vowels becomes first the front-stop (c) — a stop
formed in the same place as (j) — and then (t/'),as in English
chin compared with German kinn, and by which Latin u
becomes (y) in French une, the converse change being com-
paratively rare and generally due to external influences, we
are tempted to attribute this to the greater effort of moving
the more unwieldy root of the tongue. But this tendency is
more probably due to the fact that the sounds formed in the
fore part of the mouth are more numerous and more sharply
defined than the back ones, so that the tendency is due rather
to acoustic considerations of distinctiveness than to organic
ones.
Relative Stability of Sounds, It is more profitable
to consider the relative stability of sounds. Long vowels are
less stable than short vowels because their length makes it
more difficult to maintain the tongue-position uniform through-
out them, and diphthongs are still less stable because of the
temptation to convergent changes or the necessity of divergent
changes ; hence in English such a short vowel as i in ivit is
as old as anything in Sanskrit, while most of our long vowels
and diphthongs are at most a few centuries old.
The most unstable sounds as regards position are those
which can be modified in more than one direction, such as the
medium mid (a) in English father^ which can be changed in
the direction either of (o) or (e). So also among the con-
sonants, the front stops are remarkably unstable ; they gener-
ally develop in the direction of {\fif, ts, s), as in French chien
from Latin canem through (csene), but they are sometimes
shifted back to the (k) -position. Thus in Egyptian Arabic
the Old Arabic front-stop-voice (j) in gamal, ** camel," has
32 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
become (g) instead of (d^, ;) as in the other dialects, although
proof is still afforded that (j) was the original sound by the
development of Old Arabic ivagh^ " face," into (wi/) through
(-jh, c, \f), the (j) having been unvoiced by the (h).
Influence of Race and Climate. There can be no
doubt that an intimate mixture of races leads to a mixture of
language and of sounds, and that this effect may also be
produced by mere contact of the two races, if continued long
enough ; but this introduction of foreign sounds is not change,
but substitution. As regards modification of native sounds,
we do not find that the children of Europeans born in Arab-
s])eaking countries have anv more difficulty in learning the
Arabic sounds than the children of natives.
On the whole, the influence of other races and other
languages is mostly indirect. In the first place, as we see
from the Semitic languages, it tends to eliminate those sounds
which are peculiar to the original language. Secondly, if
there is any conflict between different tendencies, the foreign
element will throw its weight into that scale with which it is
most in sympathy.
The influence of climate may be seen in the frequency with
which (a) is rounded in the direction of (o) in the northern
languages of Europe — as in English stone from Old English
ttan — as compared with the southern languages, in which it is
generally preserved; this rounding of (a) is doubtless the
result of unwillingness to open the mouth widely in the chilly
and foggy air of the North. But, on the whole, climate
seems to have hardly more influence than race.
We must finally remember once more that all these general
principles of change are subordinate to the main function of
language, that is, the expression of ideas, and that all changes
which imperil this function must be, and are, strenuously
resisted. English people are quite as much inclined as French
to drop final consonants, to get rid of ()?) and so on, but such
tendencies are resisted in English because they would make
the language unintelligible.
CHAPTER IV
Morphologfical Development
The Origin of Language. We have already seen
that language proper or " traditional language " was preceded
by what we may call "natural language," which consisted
partly of gestures, partly of sounds and sound-groups directly
associated with the ideas they represented. There are three
principal ways in which such associations can be formed,
yielding the three classes of imitative, interjectional, and
symbolic words, all of which have left numerous traces in
traditional language.
But caution is necessary in dealing with such words, for
the association between words and their meanings is so strong
that we are apt to assume a natural connection of sound with
sense whicli may be purely imaginary. Thus to an English-
man the English names of the colours suggest the idea of
each colour much more vividly than the French names ; but
a Frenchman would not admit that there is anything in such
a word as yellow to suggest yellowness. Again, in many
words which really seem to have an imitative or symbolic
element in their sounds, this may be the result of comparatively
recent sound-changes. Thus the [/) in such words as English
shame and German scham, schande has nothing to do with the
interjection hush ! the initial consonants in these words being
merely late developments of older (sk), preserved in Swedish
and Danish sham^ etc.
Beginning, however, with the imitative words, there can be
no doubt about such words as cuckoo and cock. Both of these
words first appeared in EngHsh within — or almost within —
33
34 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
historical periods ; both supplanted the earlier words geac and
hana respectively, the latter being preserved in Old English
in the Northern dialects as well as in the compound han-cred
"cock-crow," and to the present day in the derivative hen»
Nor are either of them of foreign origin ; they are, in short,
new roots formed by direct imitation of the sounds uttered by
the birds they represent. The origin of language is therefore
bv no means so mysterious a problem as many people would
have us believe ; it is a process which is going on almost
under our eyes. There are hundreds of words in English,
German, and other modern languages, which have been formed
quite recently in similar ways. Thus the familiar word
humbug appeared first about the year 1 7 50, and was certainly
evolved or invented not long before that time. Unfortunately
we know nothing certain about its origin ; and it is possible
that it is merely a compound of the already existing words
hum and hug^ in which case it did not involve the creation of
a new root. The word hum itself is, however, an undoubtedly
imitative root of comparatively late origin, like Z'z/zz, hang^
pop^ and hundreds of others.
That imitative words really formed part of the vocabulary
of primitive languages is clear from such words as mau " cat "
in Egyptian and Chinese ; in neither of these languages —
which are not cognate with one another — is there any reason
to suppose that there ever was any other word for the animal
in question. When we consider such apparently imitative
words as Sanskrit haka " crow," and the many words in
which the cries of birds are imitated by back consonants, we
cannot but regard it as probable that Old English geac itself
was originally an imitative word.
These imitative words are important as bearing on the
question of the original phonetic structure of language. On
the basis of the fact that Sanskrit and Gothic have only three
short vowels a, i, u, it used to be assumed that the older
languages had much fewer sound-distinctions than modern
ones. But we know now that this simplicity in the sound-
structure of Sanskrit and Gothic is not original, but the result
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 35
of comparatively late levelling and the consequent loss of the
two other vowels e and 0. That primitive language must
have had a large number of sounds to build up its words with
is evident from the consideration that man in his pre-articulate
stage was a hunter, and therefore must have been skilled in
decoying wild animals by imitating their cries — which has
always been an amusement of the young of the human species
apart from any utilitarian considerations. Thus in the life of
the Anglo-Saxon saint GuJ?lac, the enumeration of the good
moral qualities displayed by him in childhood reaches a
climax in the assurance, " nor did he imitate the various cries
of birds."
We now come to the interjechonal words. A comparison
of the numerous interjections of disgust and dislike and
similar emotions, beginning with lip consonants, such as pah !
fie ! Danish fy ! German pfu'i ! make it highly probable at
least that the Aryan root which appear in Sanskrit as p'l
**hate," and in the Old English y7o«J "enemy," whence
Modern English ^^-w.^, is of similar origin. The agreement of
Arabic w*^//'* calamity," also used as an interjection luoe ! with
the English nvoe. Old English -iva-la " alas ! " is the result of
independent development of what appears to be an inter jectional
root.
The most interesting and important is the third class —
the symbolic roots. These seem to have arisen by what we
may call " lingual gesture," which, again, may have often
begun with a cry for attention to the manual gestures involved
in pointing to the teeth, lips, and other parts of the mouth.
Sympathetic — at first unconscious — lingual gesture would then
naturally accompany the hand-gesture, which by degrees
would be dropped as superfluous ; thus, supposing the cry for
attention took the form of the clear open (aa), the "lingual
gesture" for "teeth " might assume some such form as (ata)
or (ada), which would at the same time serve to express the
allied meanings "bite, eat, food," which could be gradually
differentiated into such roots as those preserved in Latin cdere
"eat," dens "tooth" literally "eater" or "biter."
36 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
Such roots as those contained in English ivinci, German
ivehen "blow (of the wind)/' may be regarded either as the
result of actual blowing with the mouth, or as imitations of
the sound of the wind. In either case some such breath
sound as (w^) in nvhat would be a better imitation, and this
may have been the original form of the initial consonants of
the root. Other lip consonants have the same symbolic or
imitative meaning in Old English hla'wan " blow," and the
new formation pxffan *' puff, blow," Chineseyi/w^ *' wind," and
in many other words.
We can hardly doubt that primitive man expressed drinking
by an " in-breathed " open-lip-breath consonant, that is, by
drawing in breath between the lips. As in-breathed sounds
could not be long tolerated in the midst of the normal out-
breathed ones, such sounds would soon be formed in the
same way as the latter, whence the Aryan roots contained in
Sanskrit p'lhami, Latin h'lhere "drink." We have what is
probably another kind of symbolism in the Arabic Jarah
"drink," whence our "sherbet."
But there is a similar class of consonants known as " clicks,"
which still survive in some primitive languages of California
and South Africa, where they appear to have been native to
the Bushman and Hottentot languages, whence they were
borrowed by some of the Bantu or Kaffir languages, such as
Zulu. The sound expressed by tut ! is a point-click, formed
by putting the point of the tongue in the (t) -position and
sucking the air from under it, so that when the contact is
released, a smacking sound is produced ; so also a lip-click
is a kind of smacking kiss, and a unilateral side-click is the
old-fashioned sound tor encouraging a horse. These sounds,
as well as the in-breathers, were probably originally " food-
sounds " — at first sounds accompanying the taking of food,
which were then used to express the ideas of food, asking
for food, etc. Just as Latin b'lbere is a disguised in-breather,
so also such a word as Gothic mim% " flesh," " meat," may
contain a disguised click.
It may be remarked that some of the interjections may be
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 37
partly or wholly symbolic, such as hush ! whose dull hiss
seems naturally to contrast itself with the sharp (s), which
we instinctively use to incite a dog or imitate the sound made
by a snake.
Symbolism seems even to have provided language with
some of its purely grammatical elements. The demonstrative
point-consonant in the, tha[t) = Greek /o, thou = Latin tuy
and numerous other words, seems to be the result of the
sympathetic tongue-gesture which would naturally accompany
the action of pointing with the fingers.
Some pronominal roots seem to have arisen through a vague
symbolism which associated the easiest and most obvious of
all consonants with *' mother " and then with " me," the
next easiest consonant (p) being then associated with the
idea of "father," whose (f) by Grimm's Law corresponds
to original Aryan (p) preserved in Latin ^^/<fr. Nothmg is
more widely spread than the roots ma *' mother,"/^ " father,"
and the use of m to indicate the pronoun of the first person.
The association between the ideas "mother" and "myself"
might easily lead to the idea of " father," suggesting that of
" the nearest outsider," as distinguished from the remoter
objects indicated by those consonants which result from
lingual pointing — (t, n, 1). When we find some languages
using m- for "father" — as in the Georgian mama "father"
— we need not be surprised to find a certain laxity in the use
of the pronominal elements as well.
In the old-fashioned lengthening of the vowel of little to
emphasize the idea of littleness we have an undoubted in-
stance of deliberate symbolism, for the form leetle cannot be
explained as a possible organic development of Old English
lytel, the regular development of which, with the length of
the vowel preserved, is seen in the proper name Lyte» Still
more deliberate is the symbolism by which a modern French
chemist made sulphate into sulphite, nitrate into nitrite, intend-
ing by the substitution of the thin-sounding (i) to indicate a
less degree of chemical action — a symbolism which is lost in
the English pronunciation (-ait). We find a similar-
38 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
differentiation in the Manchu Tartar ama "father,'' err.e
** mother." In some savage languages the persons of the
pronouns are differentiated out of the one common demonstra-
tive form by the use of (i) to denote " I," (u) to denote the
distant "he," and so on. Many primitive languages use (u)
to denote bigness, reminding us of the German child who,
according to Gabelentz, made up a language of his own in
which the vowels were symbolically modilied to show dis-
tinctions of size, so that when his father appeared before him
in a big fur travelling-coat, he called him not papa^ but pupu ;
so also he called an easy chair luhul, a miniature toy chair
lih'il, and so on.
However uncertain these explanations may be, they are
enough to show at any rate the possibility of language having
been evolved through spontaneous associations of sounds with
ideas.
Logical and Grammatical Development, But
language has from the beginning a purely logical development
as well.
It is enough to glance through the varied meanings of the
commoner verbs and adjectives given in an ordinary dictionary
of any language to see how easily a large vocabulary may be
developed out of a comparatively scanty stock of root-words ;
and the impression is further strengthened if we look at a
dictionary in which the words are arranged under roots and
families of words. Even the most abstract metaphysical
words are often transparently material in their origin, such as
concept^ German anschauung, and the word metaphysics itself,
which is ultimately derived from a root meaning " to grow "
— and any word may be more or less directly of imitative or
symbolic origin. As Tylor remarks, " it might seem difficult
to hit upon an imitative word to denote a courtier, but the
Basuto of South Africa do this perfectly ; they have a word
ntsi-nts't, which means a fly, being, indeed, an imitation of its
buzz, and they simply transfer this word to mean also the
flattering parasite who buzzes round the chief like a fly round
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 39
But we are concerned mainly with the grammatical develop-
ment of language.
The first step in this direction was to combine two or more
of the primitive imitative or interjectional cries or linguistic
gestures to indicate a combination of the ideas associated with
them. When this was done — when, for instance, hiss there
hole meant, or might mean, "there is a snake in that hole,'*
or cuckoo here meant " the cuckoo has come," cuckoo^ etc.,
came to be real words instead of vague sentence-words, as in
the pre-linguistic period when the first sentence might perhaps
have been vaguely expressed by the single word hiss.
At first the logical connection between the words of these
primitive sentences must have been quite vague, and probably
the order of the words did not matter much — in short, the
sentence had no form.
Word=order. But even before the logical significance of
word-order had dawned on the minds of the speakers, some
sentences which had become stereotyped by incessant repetition
must have settled down to a fixed word-order ; and when this
had been carried out in a number of separate sentences, some
more or less definite general principles must have been evolved.
Nor must it be forgotten that even in the pre-linguistic stage
in which gesture predominated, there must have been some
principles of order, for even the modern deat-mute child fol-
lows certain principles in this respect, which are quite inde-
pendent of the word-order of what would be his native lan-
guage, if he were capable of speech. Thus Tylor tells us
that " in conveying to a deaf-and-dumb child the thought of a
green box, we must make a sign for * box ' first, and then
show, as by pointing to the grass outside, that its colour is
green. The true gesture-syntax is * box green,' and if this
order were reversed, as it is in the English language, the child
might fail to see what grass had to do with a box." So also
the deaf-and-dumb order of the cat killed the mouse is '* mouse
cat kill."
The principle of this arrangement is to mention first what
is permanent and can be taken for granted, and then to add
40 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
whatever qualifies it. A tree is something permanent, while
its greenness, the fall of its leaves, and still more its being struck
by lightning, are more or less changeable attributes or phe-
nomena associated with it ; hence the natural logical order is
tree green, tree haves fall, tree lightning struch. Similarly the
deaf-and-dumb order mouse cat kill implies that the idea which
first suggests itself to the gesture-speaker's mind is that of
the mouse running about.
This suggests another natural method of word-order, that
is, putting tirst the word that expresses the most prominent or
emphatic ideas. One result of emphatic word-order is that
the same combination of words may show different orders
under different circumstances. Thus, if in the last sentence
the speaker thinks first of the cat watching at a mouse's hole,
the word cat would naturally come first. So also if we see a
man in the distance, we see first that it is a man and not an
animal, and then perhaps see that the man is black, so that the
idea man is the emphatic and permanent one ; but if we say
" not the white man but the black man," the last man h?vS so
little logical prominence or emphasis that we could omit it
altogether.
In this way we can understand how different languages have
different word-orders, and also how some languages have
freer word-orders than others, the order being freest in those
languages which, like Latin, show the relations between words
by inflection, although even in Latin there are certain general
principles, or at least, tendencies of word-order, so that it is
only in the artificial language of poetry that we find such a
violent separation of words as in
hanc deus et melior litem natura d'lremit.
It is easy to see too how in this way there have been periods
of fluctuation and experiment in word-order, the result of which
often was to show that the most natural or the most logical
order was not always the most distinct or the most practically
convenient. Thus in the purely nominal sentences — without
any verb — of parent Aryan, which are still preserved in such
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 41
Latin constructions as ars longa, v'lta bre-vis^ it would be im-
possible to distinguish between " short life " and " life is
short '* without inverting the logical order noun + adjective,
that is, making the originally em])hatic and exceptional order
adjective + noun the ordinary normal one. The extensive
occurrence of this order in a variety of languages shows that
it must have had some practical convenience to recommend it.
Composition. This " pre-adjunct " order — putting the
adjunct or modifying word before its head-word, that is, the
word whose meaning it modities — is evidently very old in
Aryan, for it is the basis of the Aryan method of forming
compound words. Such compounds as the Sanskrit raja-putra
" king's son," Greek h'lppo-damos " horse-taming," theo-dotos
" god-given, given by a god," are simply fragments of sen-
tences — they were originally free groups of words preserved
from the pre-inflectional period of Aryan, in which gram-
matical relations were shown by merely putting the adjunct-
word before its head-word ; in the above compounds the first
elements are equivalent respectively to genitives, accusatives,
and instrumental or ablatives. As the connection between
the members of such groups was felt to be more and more
intimate, the whole group came at last to have only one
accent, as if it were a single word ; hence, when it became
the rule that every noun and adjective must have its relations
to the other words in the sentence shown by inflection, the
first elements of these groups were passed over and allowed
to remain uninflected, and being regarded now as only parts
of words, they lost their freedom of position in the sentence,
and so such a form as hippo could only form part of a word,
and was no longer an independent word.
In a compound, the simple words of which it is made up
are brought into such close connection that they are "isolated "
from the other words of the sentence in which they occur ;
but nevertheless each element must be recognizable as being,
originally at least, an independent word. Thus, although
J:'ippo is not in itself an independent word, the mind connects
it without effort with the independent word h'tppos ; and in
42 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
■English the compound blackbird is isolated from the group
black bird only by having one strong stress instead of two, and >
by having a special meaning which does not result from merely
putting together the meanings of black and bird
If both elements of a compound cease to be recognizable,
the compound becomes indistinguishable from a simple word,
as in the case of the monosyllabic lord from Old English
hlaford, itself a disguised form of the compound hlaf-iveard
" bread-guardian."
Derivation. When one of the elements of a compound
or word-group is isolated from any association with an inde-
pendent word, as -ord in hlaford is isolated from lueard, it
often develops into a derivative prefix or suffix, that is, a
sound or group of sounds which can be added to words to
form new words, not mere compounds. Thus the ending -lie
in Old English ivljlic "womanly, feminine," is only a dis-
guised form of He " body," so that ivlflic was originally a
possessive compound, "woman-body" meaning "having the
body or form of a woman." So also the derivative prefix
un- in unkno-cun, unseen differs only from not in being incapable
of separation from the word it modities.
Composition and derivation, though the result of the fixed
order of words in sentences, are thus word-forming and not
sentence-forming processes. We will now turn our attention
to the grammatical means — other than word-order — by which
this is effected.
Form=words. In such a sentence as the nature of man
is radically good we can observe two classes of words, viz.
full-^duords — nature, man, radically, good — and form-ivords or
" empty words," as the Chinese grammarians call them — the,
of, is — which have little or no independent meaning of their
own, and serve only to define the meaning of full-words and
show how they are connected together. In gesture-language
such a sentence would be expressed — if it could be expressed
at all — simply by the juxtaposition of its full-words. In
Chinese also this sentence could be translated into one com-
posed entirely of full- words : jin sirf pen fen, literally,
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 43
"man nature root good." In Chinese the fact that "man"
is an adjunct to " nature " might be made clearer by putting
between them the form-word or particle ci — -Jin c'l sirj\
The older school of philologists regarded form-words as
arbitrary inventions made for the express purpose of showing
grammatical relations. One of the earliest and most energetic
opponents of this view was our countryman Home Took,
whose Diversions of Pur/ey, first published about 1770, is an
attempt to show that even prepositions and conjunctions once
had a definite independent meaning, and are simply worn-down
forms of full-words — a view which is now generally accepted.
Thus he connects if, Old English gif with the verb to give,
making out that i/' originally meant "given (or granted) that."
Although we know now that this view is incorrect, and that
if IS really formed from an old noun meaning "doubt," we
cannot be severe on Home Took for this and the other mis-
taken etymologies in his book ; as regards if, he was misled
by the Scotch tovm gin, which, however, really seems to owe
its n to association with the participle given.
Even when we cannot trace a form-word back to an
original material form-word, we can generally make it at least
probable that it once had a definite meaning. Thus we can
trace back the history of ihe to a period when there was no
article at all — as is still the case in Russian and Finnish — and
the had the full demonstrative meaning " that " or " this," till at
last we can trace it up to the Aryan demonstrative symbolic
root /-.
Inflected form-words such as is are, of course, of much
later origin. This word originally meant " dwell," and be
originally meant "grow," and we can still see traces of a distinc-
tion of meaning in the early Sanskrit use of as and bhii, the
latter being used mainly with reference to innate or permanent
attributes. So also the Spanish estar " be " is simply the Latin
stare " stand." We can easily see from such expressions as //
stands to reason, stand convicted, rest satisfied, how full verbs
may sink into " link-verbs," and then into mere grammatical
devices for showing that the following word is a predicate.
44 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
Inflection. Inflection itself has exactly the same func-
tion as the use of form-words, as we see by comparing the '
nature of man with mans nature. The difference is a mainly
formal one : a form-word, however abstract its meaning may
be, is still to some extent an independent word, while an
inflection is formally on a level with a derivative element, being
only a part of another word with which it is indissolubly
connected. Not that there is necessarily any formal distinc-
tion between an inflection and a form- word. Thus in Johns
here the form-word is is run on to the preceding word exactly
in the same way as in Johns house; but we can easily show
that in the former sentence the s is really an independent word
by transposing into here's John, or by making it emphatic —
here is John. So also Chinese ci is as much an independent
word as English of ; if it became inseparably connected with
the preceding word, jinci would be almost as much a genitive
case as mans is.
We can see the development of inflection out of independent
words which have lost their formal independence in such forms
as the French future parlerai from Late ha.tm pa rabo/are haheo
" I have to speak," and the modern Scandinavian passive
formed by adding -s to the corresponding active forms, the j-
being a shortened form of Icelandic -sh, as in hiiask " prepare
oneself," whence the borrowed English to busk, the -sk again
being only a shortening of sik ' oneself.*
Inflections such as these last, which are added to an already
inflected word, are conveniently distinguished as " secondary "
inflections. But it must always be borne in mind that any of
the inflections we call " primary " in Aryan may be really of
secondary origin, for an inflectional system is not necessarily
built up all at once.
As the end of a word or group of words is more
liable to phonetic decay than the beginning, most inflections
assume the form of "post-flections." We have examples of
" pre-flection " m the Arabic verb ; thus kataba " write " has
present or future taktubu " she writes," with preflection, pre-
terite katabat " she wrote," with post-flection. The Aryan
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 45
augment, as in Greek e-tupe " he struck," may be a genuine
primary pre-tlection, while the ge- of the Old English preterite
participle, as in ge-d'ip-od " named, yclept,'' is an example of a
secondary pre-flection.
The curious phenomenon of " intro-flection," as in Arabic
ihtasaha " he acquired for himself," from the root kasaba
"gain," seems to be developed out of the two other forms;
thus ihtasaha is the result of transposition of the / of earlier
'^'it-kasaba.
In some languages introflection is very fully developed. A
similar phenomenon is also found in derivation. In both cases
it seems to be the result of a desire to join the " adfix " or
addition to the original word or " stem " as closely as possible.
Another way in which inflections are more intimately
connected with their stems is by sound-change, as when some
such inflection as "^/o/i developed in Modern German 'mx.of'(isse
with a vowel different from that of the singular yi/j-j. In the
corresponding English plural feet^ the old -i after causing a
similar mutation (p. 22) of the preceding vowel was at last
dropped entirely, so that the inflection is now marked by
vowel-change only. The " gradation " of our strong verbs
by which we distinguish such forms as s'lng^ sang, sung, is a
striking instance of how sound-changes which were originally
accidental — in this case the result of the stress falling on
diff^erent syllables in different inflections of the verb — have
come to have a definite grammatical inflectional function.
Of course, if an inflection is lost before it modifies its stem,
the word becomes uninflected, as also if any modification left
behind by the lost inflection is afterwards got rid of by further
change either internal or external. Thus in Old-English the
older neuter plural *sceapu " sheep " lost its -u in accordance
v.ith the general law that the -u of the neuter ])lural is dropped
after a long syllable, so that in Old and also in Modern English
the word has the same form for singular and plural. We have
examples of much more extensive loss of inflection. Thus in
Old Arabic the cases are distinguished mainly by the three
endings -u, -/, -a, standing respectively for the nominative,
46 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
genitive, and accusative ; these light endings were dropped
already in Old Arabic at the end of a sentence, and were then
dropped everywhere, so that Arabic has now no cases at all.
It may happen that an inflectional element, instead of
becoming more and more a part of its stem till at last, perhaps,
it disappears altogether, may pursue the opposite course of
development, and even regain something of the formal
independence of the free particle or full-word of which it is the
descendant. This has happened with the genitive ending in
English. Such a group of words as commander-in-chief still
forms its plural commanders-in-chief ^ but its genitive singular is
commander-in-chief ^ s — a form which might lead a speaker of a
rigorously inflectional language like Latin to infer that the
preposition in governs the genitive in English. So also, while
in Middle England they still said the hinges sune of Engelond,
the present construction is the king of England' s son, the genitive
inflection being freely added to the last member of a group, even
if it is an adverb or some other word incapable of taking such
an inflection ; the genitive inflection in Modern English is,
in fact, treated as if it were a suffixed preposition or particle.
When to the purely phonetic and mechanical possibilities
of change and decay are added the logical changes of function
and meaning to which inflections are as much liable as inde-
pendent words, we need not be surprised to find great diver-
gence between form and function in most inflectional systems.
Even in so simple an inflectional system as that of English
we have homonym inflections such as man s^ speaks, and
synonym inflections such as horses and oxen. No one would
think of trying to find a common meaning for the inflections
of mans, dogs, and speaks ; but it is almost as futile to attempt
it with such a grammatical category as the dative case in
Greek, which is really made up of a variety of Aryan cases —
dative, ablative, locative — which have been confounded
together partly by phonetic decay, partly by confusion of
meanings and grammatic functions.
Hence the development of schemes of inflections such as
the declensions and conjugations of Latin, which are partly
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 47
made up of periphrastic forms, that is, of combinations of
inflected words with form-words, which form-words, again,
may be either uninflected particles as in the EngHsh to goy or
inflected words such as auxiliary verbs. It is evident that
such Latin perfects as dixit and the periphrastic locutus est are
logically identical in character.
Reduplication, One of the most primitive and natural
ways of strengthening, emphasizing, or otherwise modifying the
meaning of a word is to repeat it ; even in English we can say
good good or had lad in the sense of ** very good," " very
bad." Such repetition-groups are very common in many
languages, such as those belonging to the Malay group. They
are used to express a great variety of meanings and gram-
matical functions, such as plural of nouns — man-man = " men "
— the superlative degree of adjectives, to make verbs causative
— groiv-grotv = "make to grow" — and many others.
Such repetitions are apt to be disguised by phonetic changes,
as when in Japanese /:uni " country " makes its plural kuniguni
through the tendency to make a breath consonant voiced
between vowels. There is also a tendency to shorten the
first element, so that instead of two distinct words we have
only reduplication, that is, a repetition of its first syllable, as in
the Aryan reduplication preserved in such perfects as Latin
momord'i "I bit," Gothic Iiaihait = hehatt "I commanded,"
which in Old English appears in the disguised and contracted
form Iiet " commanded, named," traces of the reduplication
being, however, still preserved in the Anglian form heht, whence
in Middle English h'lghte, " hight, was named."
We see from reduplication that what appears to be inflec-
tion is not necessarily the result of independent form-words
having lost their independence, although such a prefix as
mo~ in momord'i is really in a certain sense a worn down
full-word.
Origin of the Parts of Speech. It is evident that
the relations between full-words in a sentence depend partly on
their meaning. Thus man, tree, snoiv, and other " substance-
words " are most frequently used as head- words, to be further
48 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
defined by "attribute-words," some of which denote more
or less permanent attributes, such as h'lg, green, <white, while
others denote changing attributes or phenomena, such as come,
fall, melt. There is further a tendency to take the permanent
attributes for granted, and so to use them attributively, while
phenomena, which cannot be so easily taken for granted,
require to be stated expressly in the form of a predicate, as
in the big tree fell.
These three kinds of words — substance-words, attribute-
words, and phenomenon-words — would tend therefore to as-
sociate themselves with different grammatical functions and to
take different positions in the sentence, and by degrees
different classes of form-words would cluster round them.
Thus substance-words would often be used as subjects and come
first in the sentence, and would naturally be modified by
words expressing distinctions of number and place, which by
degrees might develope into inflections of number and place —
one tree, tivo trees, three trees, many trees, at the tree, behind the
tree, under the tree, aivay from the tree, etc. Phenomenon-
words would be first used mainly as predicates, and would
gravitate towards the end of a sentence, and would be
naturally accompanied by words denoting distinctions of time,
activity and passivity and other conditions of phenomena,
which might gradually develope into tenses, moods, voices,
etc. Permanent attributes, lastly, would naturally immedi-
ately follow or precede the substance-word they qualified.
In short, substance- words, attribute- words, and phenomenon-
words would gradually develope into nouns, adjectives and
verbs respectively.
But from the beginning it would be necessary to make
statements about the greenness and other attributes of trees
as well as their falling, and also to use substance-words as
predicates ; and in time the want would be felt of using
phenomenon-words as attributes [running <zvater), and also of
using attribute-words and phenomenon-words as subjects of
statements or as head-words. Hence most languages have
devices for making adjectives into "abstract nouns," such as
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 49
greenness^ and verbs into verbal nouns or infinitives and verbal
adjectives or participles.
In this way, although the idea of substance-word almost
necessarily calls forth the idea of the grammatical category
"noun," the converse is not the case: the term noun cannot
possibly be defined by reference to the meanings of the words
included under it. We can hardly define a noun even by
its purely grammatical functions : it is true that the main
function of a noun is to serve as a head-word or subject-word,
but a noun in the genitive case or as the first element of a
compound may be a pure attribute-word having the function
of an adjective, and any noun may be logically a predicate — •
for in such a sentence as gold is a metaly the strictly gram-
matical predicate is /V, but the logical predicate is metal.
Indeed, the only certain tests of nouns and the other parts of
speech are purely formal ones. Such a word as stone is a
noun not because it is a substance-word, but because it has
plural stones ; and silk in silk thread is not an adjective for
the purely formal reason that it does not admit of degrees
of comparison, while silken in silken thread, although in this
connection it is quite as much a substance-word as silk itself,
is an adjective because its form allows of such a comparative
as more silken.
In a language like Chinese, which has no inflections and
uses only a few grammatical form-words, and relies mainly
on word-order, it is still more difficult than in English to
discriminate the parts of speech. Apart from their gram-
matical context Chinese words can only be classed as substance-
words and phenomenon-words — "dead words" and "living
words " as the Chinese grammarians respectively call them —
and so on. If a substance-word is put before another sub-
stance-word — either with or without the particle ci between
them — it becomes an adjunct-word. Further than this we
cannot go in our grammatical analysis of Chinese. We have
no right to call jin ci either an adjective or a genitive case,
nor can we settle definitely whether jin in jin si-q is to be
regarded as a genitive or an adjective, or whether the two
50 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
words together constitute a compound or a mere word-group.
Hence what we for convenience call nouns and adjectives in
Chinese are strictly speaking only noun- and adjective-
equivalents, just as in English we might call of man a genitive-
equivalent or oh man I a vocative-equivalent. In such a
language as Latin, on the other hand, vir is definitely a
noun and nothing else, and if we wish to use it as an
adjective we must change it into some such form as vinlisj
which, again, has to be further modified before it can be used
as an adverb.
But, after all, the differences between languages as regards
clearness of the parts of speech are only of degree. There is
even less formal distinction between adverb v^nd conjunction
in English than there is between noun-equivalent and ad-
jective-equivalent in Chinese. Even in Latin we cannot tell
without the context whether such a word as senex is a noun
or an adjective.
Evolution of the Verb. In languages which do not
definitely mark off the parts of speech there can be no verb :
there can only be phenomenon-words and predicate-words ;
a phenomenon-word may be used as a predicate-word, but
it may also be used as a subject-word — that is as a noun-
equivalent. In Chinese any word may be used as a predicate,
and, as we have seen, even in Aryan, nouns and adjectives
could be used as predicates without the help of a verb. In
Old Arabic the distinction between nominal and verbal
sentences is quite a regular and normal one. When in Old
Arabic a nominal sentence would otherwise be ambiguous- or
when it is desired to emphasize the subject, a personal pro-
noun of the third person is inserted, as in allahu huiva / hajju,
" God is the Hving one," literally " God he the living."
This addition of a personal pronoun is a common method
of marking the predicate in a variety of languages. Although
we still know very little of the origin of the Aryan inflec-
tions, we know that the personal inflections of the verb are
simply personal pronouns that have lost their independence.
We can still see the pronoun of the first person in the English
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 51
a-m and that of the third person in ha-th, whose (])) is a
modification of Aryan /, originally a demonstrative gesture-
sound.
But we must not suppose that such combinations had a
definitely predicative function from the beginning. It is clear
from a study of primitive languages that such a word as hath
or has originally meant nothing more than " his having " or
"his holding." Indeed, there are many languages in which
there is no distinction between the personal element in "he
has" and the possessive "his house," both being expressed
by adding the same personal pronoun or pronominal suffix to
a noun or noun-equivalent ; as in Old Egyptian, where meh-a
" I fill," literally " filling of me," has the same form as
pera " my house."
The next step in the evolution of the verb was the de-
velopment of a special form for predication made distinct from
the possessive form, either by the disuse of the latter in its
suffixed form, or else by one or both of the two forms under-
going different sound-changes, or by any other process of
differentiation. Thus in Finnish kate-n'i " my hand," k'dte-s'i
"thy hand," the endings are distinct from and yet evidently
allied with those of sano-n " I speak," sano-t " thou speakest."
These last forms are verbs in the strict sense of the word.
But it is evident that at first the only result of the differ-
entiation of " I speak " from " my speech " was to create a
special form to express predication. In some languages, the
predicate-inflections by means of what were originally pro-
nouns can be applied to any word, just as in Chinese any
word can be made into a predicate by putting it in certain
definite positions with regard to other words in the sentence.
In some African languages even personal pronouns can be
" conjugated " in such sentences as " it is I."
Verb in its strict grammatical sense implies the antithesis
of noun. The Finnish, Aryan, and Semitic verb is a true
verb because its personal endings are not added to any word
indiscriminately, but only to certain definite words which, as
a whole, belong to the class of phenomenon-words. When
52 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
this stage is reached, so far from " I speak " being felt to be
equivalent to " my speaking " or " my speech " with the idea
of predication added, the two words speak and speech are
regarded as forming opposite poles as far as their grammatical
functions are concerned.
The difficulty which now arises as to how to use words
that are not phenomenon-words as predicates is solved,
as we have seen, in two ways. One is to keep up the
primitive method of showing that a word is predicative by
simply putting it after its subject, resulting in nominal as
opposted to verbal sentences. The other is to develope verbs
of feeble phenomenality, such as "stand, sit, grow" into
" copulas " or verbs of pure, abstract predication ; such verbs
are, logically speaking, predicative prefixes (or suffixes) to
the real logical predicate.
Evolution of the Preposition. — The evolution of the
preposition is second in importance only to that of the verb.
A preposition is, logically speaking, a word put before a
noun-word — noun, pronoun, infinitive — to make it into an
adjunct- word. Thus in a man of honour the " preposition-
group " of honour is an adjunct to the noun man, mfree from
care [ he did it lu'ith ease, the preposition-groups are adjuncts
to an adjective and a verb respectively. Another way ot
making a noun into an adjunct is by inflecting it ; hence the
preposition of in of honour is logically equivalent to a genitive
ending, andyVow care mfree from care is equivalent to care in
the " caritative " case, and so on, so that we may call of honour
a " genitive-equivalent." It must be understood that every
word that is capable of making a noun-word into an adjunct
is not necessarily a preposition ; thus in a man having i^a sense
of) honour, the participle having undoubtedly has this function,
but it is not a preposition simply because it is a part of a verb
with nothing to make it different from any other verb — that is,
no word can be regarded as belonging definitely to the class
of prepositions or any other part of speech unless it is isolated
or marked off in some way from the other parts of speech.
Such words as of from, w/V/j, which are completely isolated
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 53
fi om all parts of speech except that of prepositions by being
used only as prepositions are called primary prepositions. It is
true that of is evidently connected with the adverb off" and
from with the adverb ^ro in to and fro, but they are distinctly
separated from them not merely by difference of meaning but
also by difference of form — they are, in fact, distinct words.
There is a less distinct kind of prepositions called secondary,
which were originally words belonging to other parts of speech
used analogously to primary prepositions, as in to 'walk round
the park | half past twelve | notiuithstanding that. The prepo-
sition round was originally an adjective, and the other two are
in form indistinguishable from inflected parts of verbs, although
in the case of past an arbitrary distinction of spelling has been
made between it and passed. But although there is no formal
isolation here — nothing in the form of these words to show
they are grammatically different from the adjective round or
the participle passed in the time has passed quickly — yet there
is grammatical isolation, for it is impossible to regard round
in lualk round the park as an adjective, and past in half -past
twelve is felt to be grammatically analogous to half after twelve,
where there is no doubt of after being a genuine primary pre-
position. So also o^in it is a long way off is an adverb, but
in the ship was anchored just off the coast the words off the coast
constitute a preposition-group just as much as by the coast ;
indeed o^is now sometimes substituted for of in such con-
structions as he bought it off a man in the street. The logical
difference between an adverb and a preposition is simply that
the adverb can independently qualify another word, as in quite
ready, very well, while a preposition can only do so indirectly
by entering into a preposition-group. An adverb is, or
may be, a full-word, a preposition can only be a connective
form-word, although it can at the same time have a definite
enough meaning of its own, as in going to and from school,
where the prepositions have the same meaning as the adverbs
in to and fro. If an adverb is put before a noun, as in he is
quite a gentleman, it approximates to an adjective, although in
this construction we know it is not an adjective, because if it
54 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
were, it would come after the definite article, as in he is a
perfect gentleman ; hence in such a construction as you are the
very man I ivant we cannot help regarding very as having
been completely converted into an adjective. Hence also in
off" the coast we must regard ojf as being no longer an adverb
but a preposition.
Besides general grammatical considerations, we have also
in English a purely formal test to distinguish between adverbs
and prepositions, that is, that the latter " govern " a pronoun
in the objective case : of me, nuith us, round him, past him, off"
them.
If we trace the Modern English objective case back to
Old English, we find that it is the result of blending together
two old Aryan cases — the accusative and the dative. In Old
English some prepositions govern the accusative only, some
the dative, some both accusative and dative, some the genitive.
In the older Aryan languages the prepositions govern a still
greater variety of cases. When a preposition governs a variety
of cases in an Aryan language, there is generally a difference
of meaning, as in the old Aryan usage still preserved in
Modern German by which in governs the accusative when
motion is implied — that is in the meaning of our "into" —
the dative when rest is implied. In Latin the accusative by
itself is used to express the goal of motion, as in domum
** (go) home," and " rest in " is often expressed simply by
putting the noun in some disguised form of the original Aryan
locative case, as in doml " in the house, at home," tota urbe
"in the whole city," the addition of a preposition being
obligatory in other parallel constructions just as much as in a
modern language. It is not difficult therefore to infer that the
Aryan prepositions were originally adverbs, which at first
were adjuncts not to the noun but to the accompanying verb,
so that such a Latin sentence as in urbem contcndit originally
meant " he in-marched to-the-city," the verb being, of course,
intransitive. By degrees these old adverbs came to be more
and more closely connected in thought with the inflected nouns
they now served to define, till at last the original meanings of
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 55
the cases were subordinated to those of the accompanying
prepositions, and in some cases forgotten.
In the modern analytic languages such as French and
English, the prepositions have encroached so much on the
cases as to have come to be complete substitutes for them.
It was very different with the old pre-inflectional prepositions,
which were exactly on a level with the present English pre-
positions in their combination with nouns and with those
pronouns which do not distinguish an objective case — that is,
they could be distinguished from adverbs or particles and
other parts of speech only by their grammatical functions
combined with a certain amount of isolation.
All prepositions must theoretically be referred back ulti-
mately to full-words ; that is, all prepositions were originally
secondary.
In Chinese the words which serve as prepositions are
generally phenomenon-words ; thus the instrumental ivith is
expressed by /' " take," as in fat jin i' jin " to kill a man
with a sword," literally " kill man take sword," and in
Modern Chinese " he was eaten by a tiger " is expressed by
*' suffer tiger eat was." Indeed, in Old Chinese we some-
times feel doubtful whether we ought not to regard our pre-
position as a verb ; thus even the first sentence given above
might be translated " having taken a sword he killed the
man " without doing violence to the rules of grammar, but as
the words do not naturally suggest such a literal translation,
we are justified in regarding the construction as a prepositional
one.
In Arabic the prepositions were originally nouns, which, in
the inflectional period of the language, were isolated from the
other nouns by being indeclinable. Thus " he distinguished
between them " was originally expressed by '* he distinguished
the interstice of them," the original construction being of
course liable to be obscured, as in baina yada'i-h'i " (he
appeared) before him," literally "between two-hands-of-
him " ; ba'ina is from the point of view of Old Arabic simply
a fossilized accusative singular of the masculine noun ha'inun
56 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
*' interstice, separation," itself a regularly formed verb-noun.
Of course, it is by no means certain that all the Arabic pre-
positions were originally nouns ; but the majority of them
must have had that origin, for otherwise there would be no
reason for the rule that all prepositions without exception
govern the genitive. We see that although Arabic prepositions
govern a case, they do so from a grammatical point of view
which was totally different from that which prevailed in the
Aryan languages.
The old primitive pre-inflectional prepositions of early forms
of speech were of course used with much greater freedom and
vagueness of function than those of inflectional languages.
Even in Latin and German prepositions do not always pre-
cede their nouns, but appear occasionally as " post-positions."
In that most ancient of languar^es, Sumerian, there is a well-
defined class of post-positions, which may be regarded
either as suffixed particles — enclitic prepositions — or as loosely
joined-on inflections, into which it is evident that such post-
positions might easily develope. Hence in such constructions
as Latin in urhe it is conceivable that the same particle might
appear twice over, as a worn-down suffix and as a kind of
prefix.
Concord. In primitive language permanent attribute-
words were naturally put in juxtaposition with the substance-
word they qualified.
Many languages then found it natural and convenient to
bring out more clearly the connection between head-word and
adjunct-word by repeating the form-words or inflections of
the former before or after the latter as well, the result being
grammatical concord. Thus in / bought these books at Mr.
Smith's, the bookseller s, the repetition of the genitive ending
serves to show more clearly that bookseller is an adjunct to —
stands in apposition to — Mr. Smith's, and the repetition of the
plural inflection of books in the preceding these has the same
function. But English has so few inflections left that it has
lost most of the old Aryan concords. Thus there is no
concord m green trees, the trees became green, where in Latin
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 57
green would repeat the inflections of trees, just as these does in
English.
The concord in they are, where they and are are both in the
plural number, arose in a different way. In Aryan a finite
verb was capable of forming a complete sentence by itself, and
the independent personal pronouns were added only when
emphatic. By degrees, as the endings became more and more
indistinct, the addition of the personal pronouns became
obligatory, as in German, English, and French. These lan-
guages go so far as to add a pronoun to impersonal verbs, as
in it rains, when the it is quite unmeaning, for the subject is
already contained in the verb itself, the word rain by itself
implying " water falls," or something of the sort.
Concord is in itself not only superfluous but unmeaning and
illogical : the plural in those men there does not imply more
than one pointing, nor does the idea of green in green trees
admit of plurality ; and although by the plural are in they are
we may be said to imply more than one beings or existings,
this follows from the they, and does not require to be empha-
sized over again. But nevertheless, concord, like many other
illogical developments in language, has its uses. The free
word-order in such a language as Latin is mainly the result
of concord.
The highest development of concord is seen in Zulu
and the other Bantu languages of South Africa. In Zulu
every noun belongs to one of sixteen classes, each of which
has movable prefixes, some having a singular, some a plural
meaning, and when a noun is used in a sentence, all the
following words having reference to it must begin with a
prefix referring back to it. Thus the word for " man " being
umuntu, plural ahantu, the sentence " our handsome man
appears, we love him " is expressed by
umuulM ivtlM wwwchle wyabonakala, simtanda,
which, with the substitution of " men " for " man " becomes
ahaMlM ^etu ahaz\AQ ^dtyabonakala, si/^atanda.
58 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
These concords extend far beyond the limits of Aryan
concord. Even the genitive enters into concord with its
head-word ; thus iniosi " chief" — familiar to readers of Rider
Haggard — enters into such groups as umuntu tuenkosi " the
king's man," ahantu benkosi *' the king's men."
These repetitions, clumsy as they are, give great precision
to the sentence, obviating the use of the still clumsier the
former, the latter, or such evasions of grammatical inadequacy
as he i^the plaintiff'^ said that he (^the defendant") said that his
( the plain ti^s ) father said.
Gender, Gender is the expression of sex-distinctions
by means of grammatical forms. All languages have words
for " man, male, woman, female," and some distinguish gender
in the pronouns by means of such words as "he, she, it."
In English the grammatical category " masculine " generally
agrees with the logical* category "male" and so on, that is,
English gender is natural. In Old English the Aryan
grammatical gender was still preserved, as it still is in German
also. By grammatical gender things are as often masculine
and feminine as neuter, and even the names of living beings
may be neuter. Of course, in those languages which have
only the two personal genders all the names of things must
be either masculine or feminine.
In Modern English we occasionally diverge from the
principles of natural gender, as when a ship is called " she "
and the sun is called " he." These newly-formed genders —
for in old EngHsh ship was neuter and sun feminine — are the
result of personilication, the personification in the case of sun
being due partly to the influence of the corresponding Latin
and French words, which have the grammatical masculine
gender.
It was for a long time assumed that the old Aryan
grammatical genders were also the result of personification.
But when we find in Old English and German hand made
feminine and finger made masculine, while foot is masculine
and toe feminine, it is difficult to explain the inconsistency,
and even xl foot and toe followed the analogy of hand and
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 59
Jinjer, we should still fail to see how the distribution of the
two genders could be justified by any assumptions of masculine
denoting what is strong and big, feminine what is small and
delicate, and so on ; and if there ever were principles of per-
sonification or analogy with distinctions of sex, it is impossible
to explain why they have been so completely lost in the
commonest words.
It is now, indeed, generally agreed that grammatical gender
in Aryan is not the result of personification, but has developed
out of a different distinction which had originally nothing to
do with distinctions of sex. It is believed, for instance, that
the ending -a owes its association with the female sex to its
chance agreement with the Aryan root ma " mother " and
other fortuitous associations. That there is nothing a priori
improbable in this supposition is shown by the fact that in
Tibetan, which otherwise does not distinguish gender — not
even in the pronouns — the endings -pa^ -po are used to denote
male, and -ma^ -mo to denote female beings, as in hodpa
"Tibetan man," rgjalpo " king,'' /^o^//z<3 " Tibetan woman,"
rgjahno " queen," it being clear from their other uses that they
had originally nothing to do with distinctions of sex, which
they seem to have come to denote only through their chance
associations with the symbolic use of ^ for " father " and m for
"mother."
The fact that in Greek, neuter plural nouns are regularly
associated with verbs in the singular can only be explained on
the asauniption that the neuter plural was originally a collective
or abstract noun: when a Greek said "all things changes,"
he must originally have meant " totality [panta) changes,"
or something of the kind.
The fact that the Aryan neuter plural ending was in some
instances at least originally the same as the feminine singular,
as in Latin hona^ leads inevitably to the further inference that
feminine endings had originally the same collective or abstract
meaning ; which is confirmed by the fact that most abstract
nouns are still feminine in the Aryan languages.
As regards the masculine, it has long been conjectured that
6o THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
the ending -j-, as in Latin bonus, rex, was originally only a
demonstrative, for its other function — that of pointing out the
subject in a sentence — cannot be explained in any other way.
It is at any rate evident that it had originally nothing to do
with sex, for even such endings as Greek -os, Latin -us are
occasionally feminine, as in the Latin manus " hand " with the
same irrational gender as the Old English hand. The category
masculine was therefore at first simply the opposite of what
was implied by the category feminine — that is, it implied the
individual as opposed to the collective or abstract. Masculine
and feminine were at first the only genders in Aryan, as the
neuter could not have been evolved till the two original
categories had become associated with distinctions of sex ;
and, besides, the Aryan neuter shows every sign of being a
secondary and late development. The Hamitic and Semitic
languages have only the two personal genders, and in them
grammatical gender is fully developed from the very beginning
of our knowledge of them.
The grammatical marking off of nouns into two opposite
categories is common in the languages of barbarous races,
such as those of North America. This contrast assumes
various forms : sometimes that of living and lifeless, sometimes
that of human and animal, sometimes a vaguer one of higher
and lower. Many American-Indian languages make this
distinction of higher and lower, the higher including not only
male human beings, but sometimes even weapons, fishing-nets
and other valued implements ; while the lower includes not
only lifeless objects generally, but often also the women of
the tribe. All this shows that the confusion between feminine
and neuter in Aryan is not so improbable as it might at first
sight appear, when once the idea of individuality had developed
into that of " male human being " through such stages as
"important, strong, vigorous," etc.
It may be added that although we cannot explain Aryan
grammatical gender by personification, there may have been,
and probably was, a good deal of personification during the
period when the later sex-gender was represented by the
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 6i
earlier stage of what we may call "class-gender," resembling
what we see in the Bantu languages, where, although the
division of the classes as a whole is not regulated by con-
siderations of sex, some of the numerous classes are assigned,
as one might expect, to such special sex-categories as * man,
woman, men.*
The mechanical distinctions of grammatical gender in such
languages as the old Aryan cannot be kept up except by an
elaborate system of inflection and concord. When inflections
decay, the distinctions of gender are gradually lost. English
has no grammatical gender at all. Dutch and Danish in
their colloquial forms have only two genders, the common or
personal and the neuter, although they still keep up the three
genders in their pronouns, just as English does. Other Aryan
languages, such as Lithuanian and the Romance languages, have
given up the neuter, and so returned to the earlier distinction
of masculine and feminine only, so that in these languages
every lifeless thing must necessarily be seemingly personified.
Morphological Classification of Languages.
Languages may be roughly classed according to their morpho-
logical character — that is, their grammatical structure in the
widest sense — as isolating, agglutinative, inflectional, and
incorporating.
Isolating languages show grammatical relations partly by
the relative position or order of their full-words, partly by the
use of particles. Old Chinese is mainly a " position-language,"
for it indicates the chief grammatical categories by word-
order, and only uses grammatical particles when obliged to do
so by considerations of clearness and to avoid ambiguity.
Other isolating languages, such as Burmese, make a more
extensive use of particles, which allows a freer word-order ;
these are " particle-languages " par excellence.
Isolating languages consist, therefore, of strings of formally
independent words. Thus if English were made up entirely
of sentences such as the following, it would be an isolating
language : you hnoiv many people | do you know it f | a ten
62 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
pound note. Even \{ do you were contracted into (djuw), the
isolating character would still remain, for such a change is a
purely mechanical one, without any morphological function.
Although many languages of the isolating type, such as
Malay, are polysyllabic, there is a distinct tendency in this
class of languages to the monosyllabic form, which not only
makes them shorter and more convenient, but also clearer in
structure, through getting rid of the possibility of confounding
the unaccented syllable of a full-word with a form-word, as
when in English tell her (teb) is confounded with teller. We
have a group of monosyllabic isolating languages in the East
of Asia, comprising Chinese and its cognate Burmese together
with the unrelated Siamese and Annamite or Cochin-Chinese
and other languages.
Nearly all these languages are also tone-languages, that is,
in them each word has a definite rising, falling, or compound
tone associated with it, which is as much an integral part of
it as any of its vowels or consonants ; so that words which
would otherwise be identical are often distinguished by differ-
ences of tone. Thus in some negotiations between English-
men and Chinese there was some excitement when the
interpreter informed the Englishmen that the Chinese speaker
had referred to England as "your country of devils," with
the depreciating epithet usually applied to foreigners ; it
turned out that he had misheard as kiuei kivok " devil country,"
what was really pronounced kivel hnvoh " honoured or dis-
tinguished country " — at least so the Chinese said.
In the agglutinative languages grammatical relations are
shown by prefixing, suffixing, or infixing sounds and syllables
which are no longer independent words, and yet are clearly
distinguishable from the full-words they modify, and not in-
extricably blended with them as in inflection. If English, in
addition to word-order and form-words, indicated grammatical
relations only by such formations as un-just-ly, care-less-ness, it
would be an agglutinative language.
There are various degrees of agglutination. Loosely
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 63
agglutinative languages, in which the agglutinative inflections
and derivative elements still retain some of their original free-
dom of position — so that, for instance, the case suffixes of
nouns can change places with those denoting the plural — and
in which many of the agglutinative elements still show distinct
etymological relations with independent words, are often
hardly distinguishable from isolating languages.
Tibetan is an example of a half-monosyllabic agglutinative
language, which has apparently developed out of an earlier
isolating and purely monosyllabic stage, Tibetan being, indeed,
closely cognate to Chinese and Burmese. This half-mono-
syllabic structure may be illustrated by supposing that in
English we allowed such words as manly ^ un-knoivn^ use-less-ly,
but not such combinations as ivoman-ly or demi-god.
Even in the most advanced agglutination, such as we see in
Turkish aya-lar "officers," ev-ldr "houses," aya-lar-da " in
(the) officers," the suffixes, though they are as devoid of in-
dependent meaning as any Aryan inflections, have nothing in
their form to distinguish them from independent words, and
although not necessarily kept unchanged under all circum-
stances, they are clearly distinguishable from the word they
modify.
When, on the other hand, the word and its inseparable
modifiers are so closely connected that it becomes necessary
to distinguish between abstract '* stems " and actually existing
independent words, agglutination becomes inflection. Thus
in modern Finnish — which is as good a type as any of a fully
developed inflectional language — the word for *' hand " has
Sing.
Nomin.
kds'i
Plural.
Nomin.
kddet
Genitive
kdden
Gen.
kdsien
Partitive
kdttd
Part.
kdsid
Illative
I'dteen
Illative
kds'iin
Ablative
kddeltd
Ablative
kdsdtd
Here the body of the word not only shows a variety of forms
— iJj-, kdd-.^ kdt but it is impossible to distinguish by
64 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
mere inspection between the original word and its inflections :
we cannot form the plural nominative from the singular nomin-
ative, nor in the latter can we tell whether the final -z is an
inflection or part of the original word.
It so happens that the nominative singular iasi has another
form iate-, which, however, does not occur as an independent
word, but only when followed by a possessive suffix, as in
J^ateni "my hand," and iasi can easily be explained as a later
form of iafe in accordance with the general rule that -e in such
words becomes -/ which then changes a preceding / to s, the
change of / to ^ in kaden^ kadet, etc., being also the necessary
result of phonetic laws, ^kate^ then, is the theoretical "stem"
which nowhere exists as an independent word, although there
can be no doubt of its having done so at a comparatively
recent period. It is also to be observed that most of the
endings, such as -//^, -/, are not only logically, but also form-
ally incapable of standing alone, most of the oblique cases of
the plural being distinguished from the corresponding ones of
the singular solely by the insertion of / ; and although most of
the endings, such as -Ita, are clearly recognizable in both
numbers and through all the declensions, others are beginning
to show variations and obscurations — thus the original partitive
ending ~ta, -t'd has shrunk to -a, -a in the plural.
We see here the germs of those changes and confusions
which have resulted in what Gabelentz well calls " the
defective-system " of inflections such as we see in the Aryan
languages, as in the Latin verb, where in the first conjugation
-at is indicative, -et subjunctive, while in the second -et is
indicative, and in the third -at is subjunctive !
The most abstract form of inflection and the farthest
removed from the agglutinative stage is that which we see in
English forms such 2iS footy feet, sing, sang, sung. This form
of inflection is most consistently and widely developed in the
Semitic languages, where the " external inflections " of Finnish
and the Aryan languages are largely replaced by vowel-change,
transpositions of vowel and consonant, consonant-doubling,
and other forms of "inner flection," as when in Arabic the
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 65
borrowed word mil " mile " forms its plural atnyal on the
analogy of native plurals, and salim " be safe " forms a causative
sallam " deliver up," whence by perfectly regular changes the
infinitive or verb-noun t-asUm " surrender.'*
The important distinction between polysytithetlc on the
one hand and oligo- or mono-synthetic on the other runs
through all agglutinative and inflectional languages. Many of
the agglutinative languages are highly polysynthetic, that is,
they allow an almost indefmite number of derivative or inflec-
tional elements to be tacked on to one word, as when Turkish
sev " to love " forms not only the simple infinitive sevmek,
but also such monsters as sevifdirilememek " not to be able to
be made to love one another."
The more abstractly grammatical Semitic languages on the,
other hand are almost monosynthetic : they have indeed such
ample resources in the way of inner modification that they
seldom have occasion to add more than one derivative element
at a time, their free use of prefixes making it still more un-
necessary to pile one suffix on another as is done in prefixless
Turkish ; in such a word as m-uslim-at-un " female believer,"
where m- is the mark of the participle, -(2/ of the feminine, -un
of the nominative, we reach the limits of polysynthetism in
Arabic. From a Semitic point of view such formations as
English use-ful-ness^ Latin com-pon-er-et-ur appear half agglu-
tinative, and such inflectional forms as Sanskrit ^^^^-Mj'^j- "to
feet " appear as downright agglutinations — which, indeed,
they may very well be.
As regards polysynthetism, Finnish and Aryan are inter-
mediate between the two extremes — they allow heaping of
suffixes, but only within certain reasonable limits.
It is to be noted that " polysynthetic " is often used in the
sense of " incorporating," to which we will now turn our
attention.
If we define inflection as " agglutination run mad," we may
regard incorporation as inflection run madder still : it is
65 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
the result of attempting to develope the verb into a complete
sentence.
In a language whose personal verb-endings are distinct
enough not to require the help of independent pronouns, an
intransitive verb is often able to constitute a sentence by itself,
as in the Latin ven'i " I have come," plu'it " it rains " ; and
there are many languages of polysynthetic tendencies in which
the inflections of a transitive verb necessarily include an in-
flectional pronominal element to indicate the object as well as
the subject, so that transitive verbs are also capable of forming
a complete sentence.
This is the beginning of incorporation, which is nowhere
more logically carried out than in Mexican or Nahuatl, in
which even nouns in the objective relations can be incorporated
bodily into the verb. Thus from ka "eat" is formed not only
n't-k-ka " I-it-eat," but also nl-naka-ka *' I-meat-eat," in both
of which forms it must be understood that all the prefixes are
real agglutinative or inflectional elements, for the independent
words for " I," ** he or it," " meat," are iieKvatlJenvatl, nahatl
respectively ; or rather, these verb-forms are compromises
between composition, agglutination, and inflection, naha-y for
instance, being evidently an older form which was perhaps
originally an independent word, from which nahatl is a later
formation ; with which compare the origin of composition in
Aryan (p. 41).
The more general way of expression in Mexican in such
cases is nikha in nahatl " I-it-eat the meat," the principle
being to begin with a generalized abstract sentence-equivalent,
and then to specify details by tacking on complementary full-
words standing in apposition to the pronominal inflections, very
much as in such French constructions as^V Va'i im 'votre frere.
But Mexican goes further than this. It expresses *' I am
building a house for my son " similarly by " I-it-build my-
son (with possessive prefix) a house," and to make it quite
clear that the first complement is in the indirect object rela-
tion, the verb is put in what may be called '* the datival
mood " by the addition of the inflection -Hay which gives the
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 67
gereral sense of " doing for, or with reference to some one
else."
If a transitive verb has not a definite object, an indefinite
one must be included in the inflection of the verb ; thus " I
strike" must be expressed either by niteiuiteki " I-someone-
strike," or n'ltlatuitek'i " I-something-strike."
In some of the North American languages these principles-
are carried much further, so that whole sentences are con-
jugated as verbs in a much more complicated manner.
We have a solitary European example of an incorporating
language in Basque, an isolated language still spoken in the
North of Spain and South of France, whose inflectional
resources are lavished on providing inflections to express all
possible combinations of pronouns with verbs, such as I-go-to~
h'tm^ let'them-bring'her-tO'Us, the pronominal elements of which
are, of course, only clipped and disguised forms of independent
pronouns.
There are many other minor criteria of morphological
classification.
The most important of these is perhaps that of the position
of the agglutinative or inflectional elements before or after the
word or stem. In Turkish and the other Altaic languages,
as also in Finnish, these are always postpositions, so that every
word begins with the root, which always has the chief stress.
The Bantu languages of South Africa, on the other hand,
favour prefixes : they may be described as prefix-agglutinative
concord languages. The Semitic languages favour prefixes
and postpositions about equally. The Aryan languages are
mainly postpositional with occasional use of prefixes, most of
which, however, are of later origin.
An impartial study of the morphological development of
languages makes it tolerably certain that all inflectional lan-
guages must once have been isolating and have passed through
the agglutinative stage.
When a language loses its inflectional character, and indi-
cates grammatical relations by means of particles, such as
68 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
the prepositions which play so prominent a part in English
grammar, and by auxiliary verbs, etc., it is said to become
analytical, in as much as it " analyses " its older inflected
words into combinations of independent words. But if we
examine even such thorough-going analytical languages as
English and French, we see that this process of analysis is
not carried out with any consistency. In the first place,
many grammatical categories are lost more or less completely
without any attempt being made to supply their place by
analytical combinations. Thus both English and French
have allowed the accusative inflection of nouns to fall into
complete disuse, and have not supplied the want by the use of
A preposition, as Spanish does with nouns denoting persons in
such constructions as vencio al enem'igOy literally, " he-conquered
to-the-enemy.'* Again, many of the new formations of
French and the other Romance languages have completely
lost their analytical* character by becoming secondary inflec-
tions, such as the futures and conditionals of the verbs (p. 44).
Lastly, even the most analytical languages preserve some at
least of the old inflections. Thus English has only one case-
inflection of nouns, and French has none, but, on the other
hand, the French verb is still fairly rich in inflections, especi-
ally if we include the secondary ones, which we have every
right to do in comparing the French inflectional system with
that of Latin, for some of the Latin inflections themselves
are certainly of secondary origin. The Italian verb-inflections
are still fuller through not being worn away by phonetic
decay, and such inflections as these are quite as distinct as
anything in Latin: —
Indie. Present
Preterite
Future
parlo
parlal
parlero
parli
parlasti
parlera'i
parla
parlo
parlera
parl'iamo
tarlammo
parleremo
parlate
parlano
parlaste
parlarono
parlerete
parleranno
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 69
These inflections are certainly different in detail from the
original Latin ones, but nevertheless they show no decay
whatever of the inflectional principle ; every person is per-
fectly distinguished without the help of any independent
pronouns, and more than this cannot be expected from any
inflectional system.
Even the English inflections, few as their number is, are
an integral and essential part of the language. The fact that
we can form many English sentences without any inflections
at all does not justify us in classing English among the isolat-
ing languages, as long as it still continues to inflect the
preterites of hundreds of verbs by vowel-change either alone
[sing, sang) or in combination with external inflection (/<?//,
told). The complete distinction of the persons in the singular
am, are, is is quite exceptional, but the excessive frequency of
these forms gives them great morphological weight. We can
imagine our genitive inflection being supplanted by the pre-
position of, as has actually been the case in spoken Dutch,
but we cannot imagine English losing its plural inflection of
nouns except by a sudden and complete upheaval of the whole
morphological structure of the language. In short, there is
no reason to suppose that English will ever become unin-
flectional by any process of normal inner development, and
there seems good reason for extending this assumption to other
languages also ; so that we cannot but accept Sayce's dictum,
** once inflectional, always inflectional."
Hence, while English appears as almost uninflectional when
compared with such a language as Latin, it appears in the
opposite light when compared with an isolating language such
as Chinese. One important result of what we may call
" inherited inflectional instincts " is that in English we still
proceed from the special to the general, while Chinese does
exactly the reverse. Thus in English we are compelled by
the structure of the language to put every noun either in the
singular or the plural, so that when we have to express such
an idea as that of man generally or man in the abstract, we
fluctuate helplessly between singular and plural — man is . , ,
70 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
men ore . . , the lion is . . , lions are . . We are equally
helpless when we have to make a statement without defining
its exact relation to the time when we are speaking ; thus in
such a sentence as the ancients did not know that Africa . .
an island., we hesitate whether to use nvas or is. In Chinese,
on the other hand, in which the number of a noun or the
tense of a verb is never expressed when it can be gathered
with certainty from the context — which they can in the
majority of instances — such difficulties can never arise : in
Chinese we should simply say man rational, Africa island, and
should only add the necessary particles if we wished expressly
to emphasize the ideas of plurality, past tense, etc. This
deep-seated difference between the English and the Chinese
linguistic mind is clearly shown in translating into Chinese
such a statement as that some one was born in a certain street
in a certain town in a certain province in a certain country ;
here Chinese would entirely reverse the order, beginning with
the country, and descending progressively from generals to
particulars.
These considerations are enough to refute the plausible
hypothesis that Chinese may, after all, only be an analytical
language which has carried out the revolt against inflection in
a more radical manner than English.
But, on the other hand, there can be little doubt that the
old idea of Chinese having preserved unchanged the earliest
type of human speech is as false. On the contrary, there is
clear proof in the structure of the language itself that it was
once polysyllabic, and that its words were to a great extent
formed by the addition of agglutinative elements, some of
which may have had the function of cases, etc. A comparison
with the cognate languages confirms these conclusions, and
also shows that the Chinese word-order is not original, and
that the language must consequently have formerly expressed
grammatical relations by other means.
We see then that while a language is still in the loosely
agglutinative stage, it has two opposite possibilities of develop-
ment open to it. It may develope its agglutinative elements
MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
into a complex system of inflection, which may take the form
of cumbrous polysynthetism or incorporation ; or, on the other
hand, it may shake off its loose aggkitinations, and let them
fall back into their original state of independent particles ; and
when it has once learnt to dispense with superfluities, it may
carry out the principle of relying on the context to that
extreme of elliptical conciseness and concentrated force of
expression which exciles our admiration in Old Chinese.
CHAPTER V
Changes in Language
Periods, The first general effect of change in a language
is that there comes a time when the earliest written documents
of that language become obscure, and at last unintelligible, so
that we are obliged to admit certain more or less detinite
periods in the language, such as Old English, Middle English,
and Modern English, each of such periods admitting further
subdivisions within itself.
Development of Dialects. The unity of a language
can be kept up only by uniform intercourse between all its
speakers ; and if this is wanting, the language begins to split up
into dialects.
If this development of differences of dialect is simply the
result of the community being spread over too wide a tract of
uniform country, the result will be an infinite number of
dialects, each differing but slightly from the nearest one, but
differing in course of time very considerably from those furthest
away from it. But there will be no definite lines of division,
and the dialects will shade off insensibly one into another ; so
that any division, say, into a Northern, Central, and a Southern
group of dialects, will necessarily be arbitrary in the case of
those dialects which are exactly intermediate between the most
marked Northern and Central or Central and Southern dialects.
Even if we compare two languages, we find such dialects as
some of the North Italian, which are exactly half-wav between
French and Italian. This overlapping of dialects is increased
by the fact that any one of the numerous changes wliich cause
differences of dialect may have ditferent boundaries from those
72
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 73
of the other changes. Thus a North-Central dialect may have
a certain consonant change in common with the Northern
group, or some of its sub-dialects, while in other respects
following the changes of the other Central dialects.
If a dialect or group of dialects is sharply separated from
the other dialects or groups by mountains, wide rivers, or
other natural boundaries, or by differences of government or
religion, it will correspondingly diverge from all the others and
develope features of its own.
But when civilization brings with it the necessity of central-
ization, it becomes necessary to use one special dialect as a
means of general communication throughout the country,
especially if some of the dialects have become mutually
unintelligible. If centralization goes on long enough, this
common or standard dialect, after being influenced more or
less by the local dialects, begins to supplant them, first in the
speech of the educated, and then in that of the lower classes,
till at last nothing remains of the original dialect but some
peculiarities of speech and intonation, which last seems to
survive longest. Thus it is that London English has not
only become the educated speech of the whole kingdom, but
has almost completely absorbed the rustic dialects of the home
counties.
Such a standard or non-local dialect is, of course, itself
liable to split into local dialects again. Thus Italian has its
local dialects occupying the areas of the old Italian dialects —
or rather languages — cognate with Latin, although they are
not in any way descended from the latter, which had indeed
become extinct long before Latin began to split up into dialects.
The old Laconian dialect of Greek, on the other hand, still
survives, while most of the other Greek dialects are mere
descendants of the Common Late Greek or Late Attic of
the New Testament.
As no language can be absolutely uniform for any length of
time over any large area, such a change as that of Old into
Middle English really means the change of one group of
dialects into another group of dialects. Hence the convenience
74 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
of taking some one standard, dialect as the representative of
each period, as when we base the chronology of our division
of the periods of English on the changes in the inflectional
vowels of the Southern dialect : when we make the loss of
unstressed e in the fifteenth century the mark of the end of the
Middle and the beginning of the Modern period, as in sun =
Middle English sunne, this applies only to the Southern dialect,
for in the Northern dialect the " final <?" was completely
dropped at least three centuries earlier.
Strata : Literary and Colloquial. In most languages
there are " strata " or dialects which are non-local in the sense
of never having had a definite locality, and which correspond
to distinctions of class, culture, or occupation in the speakers
of the language, the most important of these dialects being the
result of the contrast of educated and vulgar, literary and
colloquial speech. The distinction between educated or refined
and vulgar is often a very fluctuating one ; thus in English
the present vulgarism sparronv-grass for asparagus, and such
pronunciations as (forard, piktar) for foriuard, picture, were
considered perfectly correct two centuries ago.
As regards the distinction between literary and colloquial,
it is important to observe that the literary peculiarities of any
given period of a language are, for the most part, simply
fossilized colloquialisms of an earlier period ; thus the poetical
and liturgical thou hast instead of you have was still a familiar
colloquialism in the last century — so familiar, indeed, that it
became vulgar and was dropped in polite speech, but was kept
up in literature, mainly through the influence of the liturgical
dialect of the Bible and Prayer-book.
It is now generally admitted that the only stratum of language
which is natural in its development is the spoken language, of
which the literary language is a more or less arbitrary and
conscious modification, besides being, as already remarked, a
mixture of colloquialisms of difl^erent periods, and therefore
more or less of an anachronism. It is now an axiom of
scientific philology that the real life of language is in many
respects more clearly seen and better studied in dialects and
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 75
colloquial forms of speech than in highly developed literary
languages.
But although some of the latter — such as Homeric Greek
and Spenserian English — are so mixed and arbitrary in their
composition as to be simply monstrosities, we must be careful
not to exaggerate the artificiality of literary dialects. The
most far-fetched literary constructions and expressions are
seldom arbitrary : they are generally founded on something
in the spoken language of some period or other. The long
compounds of Sanscrit literature are simply exaggerations of
the natural formations of the spoken language.
The importance of dialects may, on the other hand, be
easily over-estimated, especially by half-taught enthusiasts, who,
for instance, pick out a few conservative features in Lowland
Scotch, and persuade themselves that it is the pure Anglian
dialect of Old English preserved unchanged, in spite of the
evident fact that it has diverged quite as much from Old
English as the standard dialect has. Most of the present
English dialects are so isolated in their development and so
given over to disintegrating influences as to be, on the whole,
less conservative than and generally inferior to the standard
dialect. They throw little light on the development of
English, which is more profitably dealt with by a combined
study of the literary documents and the educated colloquial
speech of each period as far as it is accessible to us.
Wherever the literary language is strongly developed, we
must be prepared to find numerous traces of its influence on
the spoken language. It is important to observe that these
literary importations, though conscious artificialities in one
generation, may become natural and unconscious in another.
Thus English is full of historically incorrect pronunciations
which have resulted from the attempt to follow spellings based
on false etymologies and analogies, as when we pronounce
author with ( J)) instead of (t).' Our dialects swarm with mis-
pronunciations of learned words, which make up a large
proportion of their special vocabularies.
It is necessary to observe that the distinction between
7b THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
literary and colloquial does not necessarily imply the existence
of a written literature. The archaic language of the oldest
Sanskrit hymns was faithfully preserved by oral tradition,
together with the rules of grammar and pronunciation which
alone made that faithful preservation possible, long before
they were committed to writing. The ancient Hindoos, in-
deed, put more trust in oral tradition than in any manuscript
authority. Even unlettered savages, such as the natives of
the Andaman islands, have a traditional language employed
only in poetry which differs considerably from the language
of everyday life.
Families of Languages. The difference between a
group of dialects and a group or family of cognate languages
is one of degree only, the most marked contrast being between
a group of mutually intelligible dialects only one of which is
the expression of national life, and a group of connected but
mutually unintelligible languages, each of which is the ex-
pression of a distinct national life, culture, and literature.
We can thus answer the question, Dialect or language ? either
from a purely linguistic or a political point of view : from the
latter point of view such languages as Spanish and Portuguese,
Norwegian and Swedish, are unquestionably distinct languages,
although linguistically speaking they are scarcely more than
dialects of each other. In fact, the Galician dialect, though
politically within Spain, is purely Portuguese, so that if it is
a dialect of Spanish, Portuguese must be one also. Dialects
frequently overlap political divisions in this way. Thus the
Catalan dialect in Spain is Provencal, not Spanish, while the
Provengal dialects, though for the most part politically French,
are almost as distinct from French as French from Italian.
Mixed Languages, Whenever two dialects or languages
come in contact, there is sure to be influence either on one
side only or on both, the influence being generally much
stronger on one side. The standard dialect may swallow
up the local ones, but it is always liable to be influenced
by them : every literary language is the result of mixture of
dialects to some extent
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE ^^
Families of languages do not admit " a standard language/'
but nevertheless those languages of a family which have the
greatest political, Hterary or intellectual weight combined with
the largest population do practically exercise much the same
influence as a standard dialect, especially if they are in a
central position. Thus we find first Low and then High
German exercising a strong influence on the Scandinavian
languages : half the vocabulary of Danish is High and Low
German, the latter being mainly the result of the supremacy
of the Hanse-towns in the Middle Ages. The strength of
this influence is strikingly shown in the Danish pehersvend
"bachelor,'* literally "pepper-boy," which was originally
a nickname applied to the unmarried clerks of the Hanse
firms.
Even when the two languages are so distinct as to show
no outward sign of being cognate, there may still be influence,
which, indeed, depends mainly on the intimacy of the
intercourse between the speakers of the two languages.
When two races are absolutely mixed by conquest or
immigration, the influence is of course still stronger, but the
language which is most strongly influenced through being at a
disadvantage in any way generally becomes extinct, as when
the Scandinavianinvadersof Normandy, and the Scandinavian
founders of the Russian monarchy became respectively French-
men and Russians in speech, the former again losing their
adopted language in England. We see from these examples
that the influence of the lost lan,(Tuage on the surviving one
may vary indefinitely in degree. The small body of Scandina-
vians in Russia have left practically no linguistic traces behind
them, and the vast hordes of JMongols who afterwards held
Russia for many centuries have had but a superficial influence
on the language, while the Normans, through learning to speak
a language which was the great vehicle of Western culture,
have had a great and permanent effect on English.
The great problem of comparative philology is to dis-
tinguish between those resemblances which are the result of
78 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
common parentage and those which are the result of influence,
or what is called "borrowing." The whole science of com-
parative philology is based on the assumption that, as a general
rule, one language does not adopt the morphological structure
of another — it does not adopt strange inflections or methods
of word-formation or syntax, while the vocabulary and the
idioms may be borrowed to any extent.
These general principles must not be pressed too hard or
carried out too mechanically. Thus the wholesale adoption
of Latin words in Enghsh has led to the adoption of many
Latin plurals, but there are no signs of such plural endings as
-;' spreading to words of native origin. The Latin structure
of sentences, too, has had some influence on the literary dia-
lect of English as of all the European languages ; but these
influences have hardly affected the spoken language ; and,
indeed, even the literary language has now got rid of most of
the Latinisms of the last century.
Hence it is that such a mixed language as Pigeon- English,
though the bulk of its vocabulary is mis-pronounced English,
is in structure purely Chinese, with hardly a trace of English
inflections, or even of Enghsh syntax.
Nevertheless, there are several remarkable instances where a
number of languages, apparently genealogically distinct, show
striking resemblances not only in sounds, but also in general
structure. Thus in the Caucasus we have a number of unrelated
languages — some of which, such as Armenian and Ossetian,
are of Aryan origin — all having rare and remarkable phonetic
peculiarities in common. In Eastern Asia we find Chinese,
Tibetan, and Burmese agreeing not only in having true aspirates,
but also in aspirating hiss-consonants in such combinations as
(ts, t/'), which they often make into (tsh, t/h), and sharing these
marked peculiarities together with monosyllabic structure and
word-intonation — which last is wanting only in Tibetan —
with the neighbouring Siamese and Annamite, with which
they are not in any way related, although they have strongly
influenced their vocabulary, especially that of Siamese. It
is remarkable to observe that the complexity of the tone-
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 79
distinctions increases as we advance south-eastwards : Tibetan
has no word -tones, Burmese has only two, Siamese has live.
North Chinese four, while in South Chinese (Cantonese) and
Annamite the number of tones reaches its maximum. These
facts seem to show that the borrowing, if any, is on the side
of Burmese and Chinese, but against this we must set the
unexpected fact that Mon and Cambodgian, which are ap-
parently the real aboriginal languages of Further India, and
which are similar in structure to, though unconnected with
Annamite, have no word-tones at all. It seems, then, that
the distinction of word-tones must have developed and spread
out from some small centre in South- Eastern Asia without
any regard to linguistic relationship.
This kind of influence is no doubt in some cases more
negative than positive — that is, it merely means that if two
neighbouring languages have certain features in common, their
juxtaposition helps each to preserve what might perhaps
otherwise be lost.
Rapidity of change. When we see how quickly
languages change, and then find comparative philologists
making far-reaching inferences about the structure of some
hypothetical parent language thousands of years ago from a
form preserved in some illiterate dialect of the present day,
we are apt to feel distrust of results obtained in such a
way.
But it must be remembered that rapidity of change is
always one-sided, and that innovations in one part of the
structure of a language are always compensated by increased
conservatism in other respects ; for without this conservative
reaction language would speedily become unlit to communicate
ideas.
A statement has often been repeated that missionaries
among some tribe in Central America found that the language
changed so rapidly that the grammar of it made by a pre-
decessor only a generation before was already quite antiquated
and useless. Those who quote this as an instance of the
supposed rapidity of change in the languages of uncivilized
8o THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
populations fail to see that the story confutes itself ; for if the
language changed so completely in a single generation, the
children, parents, and grandparents in a family would be
mutually unintelligible, and traditional language would there-
fore be useless, and would have to be replaced by gesture-
language. It is also to be observed that the only certain fact
is that the grammar was useless — all the rest is inference from
this fact; and this suggests the question whether the grammar
was not quite as useless when it was first composed.
There is, indeed, quite as strong testimony the other way,
showing that uncivilized languages can, under certain cir-
cumstances, be just as conservative as literary languages.
F. Miiller, speaking of the language of a very primitive race,
says : " The Eskimo language is of great importance for the
history of language, because it offers us a sure chronological
standard for estimating the phonetic changes of uncivilized
languages. As Kleinschmidt remarks, * The Eskimos in
Labrador have been separated for at least a thousand years
from the Greenlanders, and yet the languages of the two differ
less than, for example, Danish and Swedish or Dutch and
Hamburg Low- German. The inhabitants of Boothia Felix,
with whom Captain John Ross in his second Polar expe-
dition passed three years, understood a good deal of what
he read to them out of a Greenland book, and would no
doubt have understood more of it if they had heard it from
a Greenlander, and perhaps all of it, if a Greenlander had
talked to them about matters of everyday life.' "
There is no evidence to show that unwritten languages
necessarily change quicker than others. As already remarked,
a language may be a literary without being a written language.
But the important fact to realize is that however faithfully an
archaic stage of a language may be handed down by oral tra-
dition or by writing, this does not prevent the spoken language
from changing. While the Alexandrian grammarians were
busily employed in fixing and recording a standard which, as
they fondly imagined, would make classical Attic Greek the
universal language of culture for all times, the mongrel popu-
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 8i
lation of Byzantium was unconsciously evolving the present
Romaic, which differs more from the Alexandrian Greek
than Italian does from the language of Cicero. So also in
England the fixity of our orthography during the last few
centuries seems to have promoted rather than hindered the
rapid changes in our vowels.
Other causes must be sought for linguistic conservatism.
One of the most important of these is stability of external
circumstances and conservatism of life and habits in the
speakers of the language. The Eskimos have preserved their
language almost unchanged because their life is in the main
still that of the stone-age inhabitants of Europe, of whom
they seem to be the last surviving representatives : they have
had few new ideas to find expression for, and have had but
few strangers among them to corrupt the purity of their
speech. So also it has often been a subject of wonder that
the uncultured Lithuanian peasant should speak a language
which, although not quite so identical with Sanskrit as some
would have us believe, is certainly much nearer to it than the
Neo-Sanskrit dialects of the intelligent and cultivated Hindoo.
But it is this very want of culture and contact with the great
world of ideas that has enabled the Lithuanians to preserve
with such comparative fidelity a language built up of unstable
inflections, although, as we shall see, other factors have con-
tributed to this result. Where stability of circumstances and
life is wanting, civiUzed and uncivilized languages alike change
rapidly, as we see in the islands of the Pacific. With most
civilized languages the external conditions are intermediate
between the two extremes : the disturbing influences of in-
creasing complexity of life are balanced by the influence of
tradition and organization. Hence it is that the standard
dialect of a civilized language is generally on the whole not
less conservative than any one of the local dialects.
All languages, too, have periods of conservatism, so that a
language which is changing rapidly at the present time may
turn out to be as conservative as another which is apparently
stationary, if both are compared with their common parent
82 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
language, simply because the one which Is now stationary
may have had earlier periods of change and innovation.
Arabic is a striking instance of a language which changes
comparatively little through natural stability of structure. In
Arabic, as in the other Semitic languages, most of the roots
are " triliteral " — that is, they consist of three consonants ;
and much of the grammatical work that in other languages is
effected by means of derivative syllables and composition is
in Semitic done by inner vowel-change and transposition of
vowels and consonants, the consonants — with certain definite
exceptions — remaining unchanged through all the transforma-
tions of a root. Thus in Arabic from ^/7c/" skin" is formed the
denominative verb gallad '■^ to bind (a book)," whence again
by equally regular changes is formed the verb-noun tagUd
"binding," just as taslim "surrender," is formed from saliam
(p. 65), so that the same root can be used twice over in the
collocation taglid gild ^^\q.2x\\^y binding," disguised, and yet
transparently visible. It is evident that in such a language
there is but little temptation or occasion to shorten words
by dropping prefixes or suffixes ; the only elements that
could, and were, got rid of in this way were the case-
inflectional vowels, whose loss has not altered the general
character of the language. Hence also the complex and
irregular " inner plurals " have been generally preserved
because of their shortness and phonetic convenience, the
plural in some instances being shorter than the singular, as
in mudun " cities," singular madtnat. In short, such a lan-
guage must be taken as it is, or else let alone — " pigeon
Arabic " would be an impossibility. Hence it is that even
Egyptian Arabic is still very conservative, while the lan-
guage of the Bedaween of Arabia, which has the further
advantage of unchanged habits of life and freedom from
foreign influence on its speakers, is almost more archaic than
the Babylonian Semitic of six thousand years ago, which
was exposed to strong foreign influence from the beginning.
Parent Aryan with its half worn-out inflections is an example
of a naturally unstable language ; so that although it is a Ian-
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 83
guage of probably later development than Semitic, its present
descendants on the whole show a much greater departure
from the original structure.
As regards the relative rapidity of change in a group of
dialects or cognate languages, the chief cause of change is
isolation from the other languages of the group; in a compact
body of languages, the greater the distance from the centre,
the greater the changes, while, on the other hand, the most
central dialect or language is generally the most conservative.
Thus among the Semitic languages the Egyptian dialect of
Arabic is the most central, having Syrian Arabic on one side
and the North African dialects of Arabic on the other, and
the conservative Bedaween Arabic all round it; hence in spite
of the strong foreign influences to which it has been exposed
it is still remarkably conservative, especially in its sounds.
The Bedaween dialects of Arabia are still more so because
of the extreme conservatism of their life and the absence
of foreign influence, all the adjoining countries being also
inhabited by Arabic-speaking populations. Lithuanian is also
a central language ; it has the great advantage of having the
comparatively archaic Slavonic languages on one side and its
own near cognate Lettish on the other, this language act-
ing as a bulwark against German influence, so that Lithuanian
is surrounded on all sides by kindred languages of a fairly
conservative character. At the present time the most central
of the Germanic languages is the High German of North
Germany, which is accordingly more archaic in its inflections
than either Dutch, and Low German on the North or the
Upper German dialects of Switzerland and the South.
It is to be observed that the same conservative influences
may be exercised, though probably in a less degree, by
languages which arc either not cognate or only remotely so.
It seems at least probable that both Slavonic and Lithuanian
owe some of their preservation of the unstable Aryan in-
flections — Russian, for instance, has still eight cases — to the
example of Finnish with its complicated and yet symmetrical
inflectional system which gives the noun fifteen cases.
84 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
Distance from the centre involves not only absence of con-
trol by cognates but also liability to foreign influence. This
last, however, is probably only a secondary cause of the
remarkably unconservative character of English and French.
These languages are the most remote from the original
centres of their respective groups, and both have developed
morphological characteristics which are far in advance of
anything in their immediate cognates : we need only call to
mind the monosyllabic tendencies of both languages and their
great development of homonyms, which seems almost to call
for the distinctions of word-tones, the English loss of gram-
matical gender, the almost complete loss of the plural ending -j
in spoken French, and its peculiar periphrastic partitive case
(du pain) which — against all Aryan analogy — is used almost
in the subject relation {^voila du pain), its use of the old
adverb en (from Latin inde) as a pronoun, and so on.
We have in Modern Icelandic an instructive instance of
the conflict between the two factors of conservatism in life
and absence of foreign influence on the one hand and com-
plete isolation from direct contact with cognate languages on
the other. The result is that the language instead of de-
veloping in an analytical direction similar to that of its
immediate cognates, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, has
preserved its old inflectional system absolutely unimpaired on
the whole although with frequent modifications of detail : in
Modern as in Old Icelandic the definite article and the pro-
noun " they " still sharply distinguish all three genders, and
when "they" refers to a man and a woman together, or even
to two things one of which is grammatically masculine, the
other grammatically feminine, the pronoun is still put in
the neuter plural. In the other Scandinavian languages, on the
other hand, the noun-inflections are almost as much levelled
as in English, and even grammatical gender is only partially
preserved, these languages being as much inferior to modern
German in inflectional conservatism as Icelandic is superior
f£) it. But the sounds of Modern Icelandic have undergone
the most fantastic changes through the want of control by
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 85
cognate languages. Thus a has become (au), and au itself
has become (oei), the front-round y has been levelled under
t, and so on, while in the other Scandinavian languages it has
been kept distinct from /, and a has merely been rounded
into a variety of (dd) without any further exaggeration.
Icelandic, in fact, as regards its sounds behaves like an adult
whose speech by deafness has been isolated from the con-
trol of his fellow-speakers. It is curious to observe that the
island-Portuguese of the Azores shows a curious change of
long vowels into diphthongs equally opposed to the tendencies
of the continental mother-language. Lastly, some of the
most phonetically degraded and most morphologically sim-
plilied forms of speech are found among the scattered island
populations of the Pacific, where the factors of unsettled life,
continual migration and isolation all work together.
Changes in Morphological Structure. The ques-
tion of change of morphological structure has already been
discussed (p. 67). As we have seen, we have to dis-
tinguish between change and substitution of structure: Pigeon
English is not a natural development of English, but a recast-
ing of the English vocabulary in a new and foreign mould.
So also with the various forms of English and other European
languages spoken by negroes, although here the new mould is
more that of an alien mind than of an alien language. Such
hnguages as Yiddish — the German spoken by Jews — so ably
investigated by Wiener, shows foreign influence mainly in
the vocabulary, its effect on the structure being chiefly the
negative one of getting rid of useless traditional complexities.
The comparative philologist must realize that any one of
the ancient languages he has to deal with — however classical
and elaborately literary it may be in its extant form — may
have been originally a " substitution-dialect " like Pigeon
English. It may even have been a " selection-language "
like the Chinook jargon of the West Coast of North America,
which is a mixture of English and various native vocabularies
with a large number of newly formed imitative, interjectional
and symbolic roots. There is this simple difference between
D
86 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
the two that a selection-language in the presumably rare cases
in which it is not swallowed up by one of the languages of
which it is made up developes into a language with so strong
an individuality of its own that it cannot be regarded as a
dialect, and in time it would probably lose all apparent con-
nection with its sources. But if a form of Negro- English
developed into a traditional independent form of speech, we
might have an absolutely uninflectional form of speech, of
evident English origin from the point of view of comparative
philology, which, if we had no means of tracing back its
history continuously, we might regard as the result of normal
inner development.
Antiquity of Language, The oldest written docu-
ments of human speech take us back about 10,000 years.
But civilization is certainly far older than 8000 B.C., and the
invention of writing is certainly older too — how much older
we cannot tell. It is still more hopeless to inquire into the
age of language itself — that is, fully developed traditional
language. The question is of especial importance in its bear-
ing on the great problem of the descent of all languages
from one common primeval language or from a number of
independently evolved parent languages.
The abandonment of the old idea that the supposed
language of Paradise — Hebrew — was this primeval language
led to a reaction against such a priori assumptions, and philo-
logists, like botanists and zoologists, began to take a pride in
setting up as many species — that is, independent families of
languages — as possible. But increased knowledge, and the
more systematic comparisons thus made possible seem now to
be bringing us gradually up to far-reaching combinations which
will greatly reduce the number of originally distinct families,
so that no cautious investigator would now venture to deny
dogmatically the possibility of all languages having a common
origin, though he would always be able to make certain
reservations in favour not only of Volaplik but of other
languages which we will consider hereafter.
It is evident that our prospects of finding our way back to
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 87
such a universal parent-language depend greatly on the length
of time that has elapsed since the first evolution of language.
It is also clear that the greater the age we assign to extant
languages, the greater the chance of their having a common
origin in spite of their want of similarity; so that the greater
the possibihty of such a common origin the more difficult
becomes the task of recovering the primeval language.
There is no need to dwell on the influence of language as
a factor in civilization. It is indeed so self-evident that there
is a danger of exaggerating it, and forgetting that it is by no
means an indispensable factor. It is clear that the evolution
of language itself postulates a considerable intellectual and
social development; and if civilization had thus to begin with-
out the help of language — that is, fully developed traditional
speech-language — there is no reason why it should not have
advanced a long way without it : there is no reason why the
hypothetical homo alalus " speechless man " should not have
developed the art of picture-writing side by side with that
of building houses and even temples. There is therefore the
possibility of the evolution of language being a comparatively
recent event. If so, we must apparently, for several self-
evident reasons, content ourselves with limiting the number of
original parent-languages as much as possible, and give up the
search for a common primeval language.
One obvious reservation as regards the original unity of
human speech must be made at once. The large number
of new roots that have been created in all languages must
at once be subtracted from the common vocabulary of the
languages of earth: it is no use trying to trace back such
words as buzz and cuckoo to a primitive Hebrew or any
other primeval root. It is this constant possibility of in-
dependent re-creation which makes polyglot comparisons
uncertain: the agreement of Chinese y}/ mu' with English
father and mother does not prove much as regards either the
affinities of the two languages or the existence of similar
words in any possible parent-language.
We have, lastly, the possibility of the formation of totally
88 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
new languages. If roots can be created at any period,
what difficulty is there in assuming the wholesale creation
of a body of roots sufficient to form the foundation of a
whole vocabulary ? The Chinook jargon, of which we have
already spoken, is in part such a new language. We have
only to go a little further, and suppose two or three children
speaking mutually unintelligible languages — one of two per-
haps being a slave of another tribe — lost in the forest, and
forced to communicate by gesture till they spontaneously
developed a language of their own, and then becoming the
parents of a tribe. Even in civilized communities children
left to themselves sometimes evolve languages unintelligible to
the rest of the world. It is true that in these cases part at
least of the vocabulary consists of nursery words distorted out
of recognition, but the result is practically a language which
cannot be regarded as descended from that of the children's
parents.
We have, I think, an actual specimen of a new-formed
language — whether wholly or only partly new — in that of the
Botocudos of Brazil. Although the native languages of
America do not all show the elaborate polysynthetic and
incorporating structure of Eskimo, Algonquin, Mexican,
Quichua, etc., most of them are by no means primitive in
structure, and show signs of having had a long history behind
them. It is quite otherwise with Botocudo. Our knowledge
of this curious language is unfortunately very imperfect, but
the following details, taken from the supplement to F.
Miiller's Grundr'iss, will give an idea of its structure — or
rather want of structure — about which Mliller remarks ;
*'This peculiar idiom of the New World, which seems to
have no cognates, belongs to the isolating languages with
incipient agglutination, and is characterized by a simple un-
developed grammatical structure which differs completely
from the ordinary type of American languages. There is
no formal distinction between noun and verb ; both are
entirely undefined. Adjuncts generally precede their head-
words, except that the attribute generally follows its head-
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 89
word. The attribute-relation is not distinguished from the
predicate-relation. The verb is not defined as to time, and
does not even seem to require to have past time marked by
adverbs ; the future alone is marked by the word * to-
morrow ' when necessary. The system of numeration is
undeveloped, and seems to consist of names of fingers.'' It is
interesting to observe that this primitive language has a con-
siderable number of elementary sounds, including long and
short and nasalized vowels, back and front as well as point
and lip nasals (r;, n, n, m), and distinguishes voice and breath
stops. Its chief means of grammatical expression are word-
order, the use of original nouns as prepositions, and the addition
of such words as *' many " to express the plural. Its roots
are polysyllabic as well as monosyllabic, although some of the
former appear to be compounds, composition and repetition
being the chief means of forming new words. There is no
formal mark of composition, which is therefore generally
indistinguishable from mere word-grouping. The extra-
ordinary clumsiness of the groups by which the most primitive
ideas are often expressed serves to strengthen the impression
that the language makes of being a late formation. Thus an
ox is called " hoof split big," that is, the big animal with the
split hoof, a sheep " hoof split little," such word-groups being
by no means confined to the expression of ideas which may
have been originally foreign to the speakers : thus "eyelid"
is called " eye hole skin," " beardless " is expressed by "face
hair not." There is, at first sight, nothing in the structure
of this language to oblige us to believe that it is more than a
few centuries old ; and there may be other examples among
savage languages. But a detailed etymological comparison
with the neighbouring languages would be necessary before
expressing a definite opinion. As we see, F. Miiller regards
it as an isolated language.
General Results of Change. As already remarked,
all languages and all periods of them are liable to a variety of
changes. The meanings of words, word-groups, sentences,
and parts of words (inflections, derivative syllables, etc.) are
90 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
liable to change, because these meanings are generally more or
less vague, and we are always either narrowing them — as when
the Old English genitive is in modern English restricted more
and more to its possessive meaning — or extending them, ex-
tension by metaphor and transference of meaning being the
main source of expressions for new ideas, as in the word source
itself.
All changes in the relations between words must be either
in the direction of convergence or divergence. If convergent
changes are carried far enough, they result in the complete
levelling of distinctions. Phonetic levelling results in homo-
nyms, such as a bear^ to hear ; convergent changes of meaning
end in producing synonyms, such as heg'm, commence. Diver-
gent changes also create new forms in the shape of doublets,
such as of, off.
Grammatical irregularities are mainly the result either of
purely phonetic changes — as in the preterite kept from keep —
or of convergent changes of meaning — as in go, ivent, where
ivend has become identical in meaning with go — or of a
combination of both.
Control of Change. Although logical considerations
cannot alter the direction of changes, they still have a con-
siderable control over them. Indeed, every language at any
given period is the result of an incessant struggle between the
tendency to change and the logical effort to get rid of the
resulting ambiguities and complexities. If we consider that
the initial consonant-mutations of Welsh — by which, for
instance, tad "father" becomes dad in the combination ei dad
" his father " and thad in the combination e'l thad '* her father "
— the vowel-mutation or umlaut of the Germanic languages,
the liaisons of Modern French, and the many other similar
changes in different languages are really tendencies common
to all speech, we cannot help seeing that their unrestrained
working through only a few centuries would make any
language so irregular and phonetically decayed as to be unfit
for the expression of ideas, besides being too complex to be
retained in the memory of its speakers. As an instance of
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 91
what actually does happen in language we may take the Old
Irish toibnim *' I drive," dosennat " they drive," tafnetar " they
drove," toffund "to drive," all formed by the working of
strict phonetic laws from the Aryan verb-root sivand with
the prefixed particle do.
In each language such anomalies are allowed to accumulate
till they become a strain on the memory or cause ambiguity,
and then the whole system has to be reformed.
This implies, in the first place, that the speakers of a
language, although they cannot absolutely prevent changes,
yet have a considerable power of resisting and retarding them.
When boys at school ridicule pronunciations and expressions
which do not conform to those of the majority, they are doing
their best to prevent change. If they did not do so, and if
the rest of the community did not exercise the same control
over the speech of individuals, the languages of two successive
generations might become mutually unintelligible, as we see in
the frequent instances of children left to themselves developing
a language understood only by themselves.
This is another reason why each generation can tolerate
only a certain amount of change ; so that if a language changes
much in one direction, it has to make up for it by being
correspondingly conservative in another direction. Thus
English has greatly changed its vowels in the last few centuries,
as we see by comparing the pronunciation with the spelling of
such words as tale, tail, be, few — the spellings of which are
fairly close representations of their pronunciation at the be-
ginning of the modern English period — but has been conserv-
ative with its consonants ; while French drops its consonants
freely, as in bete compared with the borrowed English beast,
which still keeps the Early Old French s of beste, and is
phonetically careless in its treatment of final consonants. As
consonant-loss and vowel-weakening together would make
English unintelligible, one of these i-'^ndencies has to be re-
sisted, and from a variety of causes ic was the former tendency
which was resisted. Even the Polynesian languages are
conservative as regards their vowels (p. 28).
92 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
In dealing with the results of changes which it is too late
to prevent, the main question the speakers of the language
have to settle with each change — of course, unconsciously —
is whether it is useful or not to the language considered as a
means of expression.
In dealing with superfluous distinctions, the general tendency
of language is simply to get rid of them. Thus of the three
traditional synonyms sky^ heaven, tuelkiTiy the present spoken
English preserves only the first. Spoken languages, in fact,
as a general rule do not tolerate synonyms. Even with such
familiar synonyms as begin and commence, buy and purchase in
English, there can be no hesitation as to which word in each
pair is the natural expression of the idea, and which is super-
fluous : even the most affected and pretentious speaker would
hardly talk of commencing to purchase : the colloquial use of
such words as commence is, in fact, a case of mixture of dialect
— mLxture with the literary dialeet. ^Vhen we are told that
Arabic is the most copious language in the world because it
has five hundred words for a lion, we feel sure beforehand
that most of these will turn out to be fantastic literary terms
belonging to a variety of periods ; as a matter of fact, even
classical Arabic prose generally has only one word for " lion "
[asad), for which each of the modern Arabic dialects substi-
tutes one — and only one — other word.
If both of a pair of doublets can be utilized to express a
useful distinction — as in of, ojf, a{ji), one — they are kept;
otherwise there is a tendency simply to discard one of them,
as in the case of Modern English (wi))). The growth of
proper names out of ordinary nouns and adjectives often shows
how otherwise superfluous distinctions may be utilized, as in
milner, which is sim])ly an older form of miller, mickle and
mitchell, which are respectively Northern and Southern de-
velopments of Old English micel, whence Modern English
much, which was originally a weak form which lost its /
through want of stress.
Defective distinctions, on the other hand, can be remedied
only by the formation of new distinctions. Thus if numerous
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 93
homonyms lead to ambiguity, a new word of allied meaning
is substituted for one of the members of a homonym-group, or
one of the words is differentiated by the addition of a de-
rivative syllable, or in some other way. In Modern Chinese,
where the number of homonyms is enormous, most full-words
are in the spoken language made into compounds, as if in
English we were to differentiate the like-sounding son, sun, by
expanding them respectively into "son-boy " and " sun-star."
The difficulties caused by grammatical irregularities are
met in various ways. If the forms that make up a gram-
matical category become hopelessly confused by phonetic
changes and confusions of meaning, the inflections or other
grammatical forms are simply got rid of, as when Italian
abolished the Latin case inflections after phonetic decay had
reduced such forms as hominls, hom'tni, homine, hominem to
some such common form as "^om'ine — not even keeping such
distinct forms as -orum, -ihus — and substituted the use of
prepositions.
If this cannot be done, levelling is had recourse to, as in
the change of English brethren into brothers, where the rare
inflection -en is levelled under the excessively frequent -j-,
and the stem-vowel e is levelled under that of the singular
brother, brother s, this change being further aided by the
analogy of the great majority of the other plurals, in which
the plural keeps the stem-vowel of the singular ; in other
words, the -s and the vowel are extended to those forms
which are in the minority.
The choice of the form under which the exceptions are
levelled — which then becomes the " regular form " — is deter-
mined partly by its relative frequency, partly by considerations
of distinctness and convenience. Thus Middle and Modern
English had the choice practically between two endings for
the plural of nouns, that is, ^en and -es ; but as the Southern
Middle English tendency to drop final weak -n made the
former ending ambiguous, it was necessary to adopt the latter,
in spite of the resulting confusion with the -s of the genitive,
the confusion being afterwards made worse by the introduction
94 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
of the Northern verb-ending -x instead of -th. But these
three grammatical functions were so distinct logically as to
make confusion impossible, and so the logical instinct of the
language acquiesced in the arrangement.
Limitations of Control, These last changes illustrate
an important limitation in the logical control of changes, viz.
that although the linguistic instinct can both prevent changes
and utilize them when actually carried out, and also get rid
of them, it cannot exercise foresight with regard to them ;
as Paul says, language knows nothing of precautions against
the future results of changes.
Still less can distinctions that have once been lost be
deliberately restored. The linguistic instinct cannot create
doublets, it can only utilize them when formed by purely
mechanical processes. Thus whatever may be the explana-
tion of the diiference in pronunciation betv/een the noun luind
and the verb luinci in English, we may be quite sure that the
shortening of the vowel in the former is not the result of any
attempt to distinguish it from the verb — a distinction which
is, indeed, quite superfluous, as the two words are always
fully distinguished by their contexts. As a matter of fact,
such dilferentiations are generally not made when they are
most required.
The development of distinctions of tone in such a language
as Chinese, by which words that would otherwise be identical
in form are kept apart, used to be explained as a compensation
for the contusions caused by phonetic decay — that is, that
when two words became homonyms, a tone was " invented '*
to keep them distinct, and that as confusion increased, more
and more distinctions of tone were elaborated to keep pace
with the demands of distinctness. The real explanation of
this apparent use of word-tones for purposes of differentiation
is the exact opposite. It was the development of tone-
distinctions that led to the carelessness of articulation and the
multiplication of what without the tones would be homonyms.
General Levelling of Structure. The various
processes of logical control and levelling of irregularities often
CHANGES IN LANGUAGE 95
gi'/e a deceptive smoothness to the surface of a language, and
make us incHned to assume that it was so from the beginning,
and that this symmetry and simphcity of structure is the
result of long-continued harmonious development, when it
may be only a recent levelling. In this way we learn to look
with suspicion on a language which, for instance, uniformly
throws the chief stress on the first, or the last, or the last
but one (penultimate) syllable of words, and to keep our
minds open for the admission that this may be only a late
levelling of a more varied system of stress.
The triliteralism of Semitic roots (p. 82) is a striking
instance of the way in which language manages to carry out
consistently some general but not universal tendency. It is
evident from the comparison of such Arabic "roots'* as
far-r " flee," farag " split," y^r^^y, faraz " separate, "y^zr^,
" spread," farih " have the mind dilated, be pleased," etc.,
that these forms were originally derivatives of an older
biliteral root far. This is confirmed by the fact that many
existing Arabic root- words are plainly biliteral and not triliteral,
such as ibn " son," plural ban-un, and are universally acknow-
ledged as such. Roots like amar " command," which begin
with a strong vowel, seem at first sight to be also biliteral. But
no Arabic grammarian would admit this ; and when asked
where the third consonant was, would point to the initial glottal
stop or *'hamza" with which an Arab, like a German, be-
gins an initial emphatic vowel ; and, indeed, just as katab
" write " has present jahtub " he writes," so also amar or
^amar has present y'^a'wz/r. But this exaggeration of the initial
closure of the glottis was probably at first only a device of
the linguistic instinct for pressing these biliteral roots into the
triliteral mould ; the immediate impulse being probably given
by the attempt to construct from amar, etc., a form parallel
to the type o{ jaktub and numerous presents of the same form.
We may illustrate another levelling device of language by
an imaginary example. Suppose English had remained an
unmixed descendant of Old English, and by phonetic decay had
become almost entirply monosyllabic, and that the last words
96 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
to resist this contraction were unseen, unhwjun, arid the other
derivatives with prefixed un-. The equal stress on prefix and
root and the distinct meaning of the former might then easily
lead the linguistic instinct to regard these derivatives not as
dissv liable words, but as groups of monosyllables — un seen
parallel to not seen. In this way a language which had been
forced by a process of levelling into the monosyllabic mould
might retain a good many disguised polysyllabic words.
^
CHAPTER VI
The Aryan Langua§:es
The chief languages of the Aryan or Indogermanic family
may be classed as follows, different periods of their develop-
ment being separated by dashes : —
(A) East' Aryan or Asiatic :
(^) Indian languages : Sanskrit, the sacred language of
India — Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, and the
other Prakrit dialects — Sindhi, Panjabi, Gujarati, Hindi
(or Hindustani), Bengali and the other Gaurian languages,
to one of which the different dialects of the Gipsy language
belong.
[b) Iranian languages : Zend or old Bactrian, the Old
Persian of the Cuneiform inscriptions — Pehlevi — Modern
Persian.
[c) Armenian, which is really intermediate between East-
and West-Aryan.
(B) West-Aryan or European:
[d) Greek, the most important of whose dialects belong
to three main groups: (i) Ionic and Attic, (2) Doric, (3)
iEolic — Modern Greek or Romaic is a continuation of the
Attic dialect.
!e) Albanian.
f) Italic group : Oscan, Umbrian, Latin — the Rom-
ance languages : Italian, Provengal, French, Spanish, Portu-
guese, Roumanian.
(^) Celtic languages : Gaulish. The Goidelic group : Irish,
Manx, Gaelic of Scotland. The Cymric group : Welsh,
Cornish, Breton (introduced from Britain).
97
98 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
(^h) Slavonic languages : Old Bulgarian or Ecclesiasucal
Slavonic — Russian, Polish, Bohemian, Servian, Bulgariar.
(/) Baltic languages : Lithuanian, Lettish.
(/) Germanic languages : Gothic. Scandinavian lan-
guages : Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish. West
Germanic : Old Saxon, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, English,
all of which constitute the Low-German group; (High)
German.
Original Home. We know from history and tradition
that the Aryan languages did not originally occupy anything
like their present territory. We know that at the time when
the hymns of the Rig- Veda — the oldest literary document
of Sanskrit — were composed, the Aryan invaders of India
were still confined to the north-west corner of the country,
and we know that Greece and Italy were originally inhabited
by non- Aryan races who spoke non- Aryan languages ; for it
is now certain that whatever family of languages Etruscan
and Pelasgian belong to, it is not Aryan. It is now generally
assumed that the original home of the Aryans must be sought
somewhere in central or northern Europe. A comparison
of the peculiarities of each language shows that they must at
first have diverged gradually and with little or no disruption
of geographical continuity, although the divergences were in
many cases afterwards increased by extensive migrations.
Thus we find very close resemblances and special afhnities
between Celtic and Latin, less close resemblances between
Celtic and Germanic, while in the same way the Baltic
languages are closely allied to the Slavonic, and yet show
some affinities with Germanic. Slavonic again, shows
likeness with the Asiatic group, and Armenian shares so
many of the peculiarities of the European and the Asiatic
group that it is diihcult to decide under which to class it.
The only way to do justice to these various relationships
is to assume that when parent Aryan began to split up into
separate languages or dialects, these incipient languages
occupied much the same relative positions as they do now : —
THE ARYAN LANGUAGES 99
I Germanic
Celtic Lithuanian Slavonic
Italic Greek Armenian
Zend, Sanskrit
We shall be able to come to more definite conclusions as-
to the original home of Aryan when we have considered its
affinities with other families of languages.
Age. The oldest contemporary documents of the Aryan
languages are the Greek and Latin inscriptions, which take
us back, however, no further than about the sixth century b.c.
The oldest Aryan literary document is the oldest collection of
Sanskrit hymns known as the Rig- Veda (more correctly
rgveda "hymn-wisdom"), which were handed down by
minutely accurate oral tradition long before they were com-
mitted to writing. The relation of their language to that of
the later Brahmanas and the still later classical Sanskrit of the
Indian grammarians, which must have been a dead language
before the rise of Buddhism in the sixth century b.c, shows
that their language cannot well be later than about 2000 b.c,
and is perhaps older.
It is, of course, still more uncertain how far we are carried
back by the hypothetical reconstruction of parent Aryan on
the basis of the comparison of the oldest forms of each Aryan
language. This reconstruction does not carry us farther back
than that late period of the language which immediately pre-
ceded its break-up into distinct languages — that is, to a period
in which these languages were only represented by slight dia-
lectal variations, all of which need not, however, have neces-
sarily corresponded exactly to the later divisions into languages.
We may, perhaps, venture on the conjecture that the Aryan
language still constituted an undivided whole about 10,000
B.C. — undivided in the sense that all Aryan speakers were still
able to understand each other with perfect ease.
General Structure. The general results of comparative
philology seem to justify us in regarding the oldest Sanskrit as
a fairly true representation of the general structure of parent
too THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
Aryan in that stage of development which immediately prec<'ded
its breaking up into distinct languages. In one feature, how-
ever, the Asiatic group must be regarded as less conserviti\e
than the European, and that is in the vowels. It is nov
.generally admitted that the simplicity of the Sanskrit vowel-
system with its three short vowels a, /', u is delusive, and tha:
the European languages have preserved the parent Aryan
vowels much more faithfully, so that the vowel-system obtained
by a comparison of the oldest Greek dialects is not very far
removed from the original Aryan one, and is at any rate much
more archaic than that of the Asiatic group, not only in its
preservation of e and o, but also in its diphthongs. Sanskrit
has, on the other hand, not only preserved the Aryan accent-
uation in its main features, but also the chief characteristics of
its consonant-system.
It must also be remembered that the earliest specimens of
writing in India — the inscriptions of Acoka — date only from
the middle of the third century B.C. — that is, after Sanskrit
had ceased to be a living language. From the elaborate and
accurately phonetic alphabet of these inscriptions — which is
probably of South Arabian origin — is indirectly derived the
much later Devanagari alphabet in which Sanskrit literature
has been mainly preserved.
It is evident, therefore, that the Sanskrit levelling of shorts
and under a may be a late change, and that the apparent
absence of these vowels and of other archaic features from the
present text of the Rig- Veda may be merely an inevitable
result of forcing the language into the mould of the Devana-
gari alphabet, which certainly distorts it in many ways, as
shown by the fact that we cannot make metre of the text
without considerable modifications. We have, at any rate,
clear proof in Sanskrit itself of its having had e and o in the
same words in which they occur in the European languages.
Thus original /' becomes the front stop c before a — European
f, as in ca = Latin que (Aryan h), while it remains un-
changed before a = European o, this latter being preserved in
Sanskrit in such collocations as in agivo dramati " the horse
THE ARYAN LANGUAGES loi
runs," where the -o stands for older -oz from Aryan -os pre-
served in the Greek l/tppos. It is, however, to be observed
that the Sanskrit phoneticians — the earhest of whom go back
to about the sixth century b.c. — give no hint of the existence
of short e or o.
Sounds. Parent Aryan seems to have had at least the
following 'voivels :
a ; /', e ; Uj
all of which occurred both short and long. The e was an
open sound, perhaps once the same as the English (os) mman.
There were also a considerable number of diphthongs :
ai, e'ty oi ; au, eu^ ou
all of which also occurred with the first element long :
J/, el, 01 ; au, eu, ou
The chief consonants were :
j n I J, (z) w
/', g f , J t, d p, b
kh, gh ch, jh th, dh ph, hh
[y]) («) n m
of which those in ( ) were only secondary developments, r\ for
instance being only a modification of n before k and the other
back consonants. The aspirates in the third line constitute a
characteristic feature of Aryan, especially the voice aspirates
gh, etc. The breath aspirates were no doubt the same in
Aryan as they still are in the traditional pronunciation of
Sanskrit, that is simply ordinary English (k), etc., uttered
with independent stress on the breath-glide that follows the
stop, exactly as in the Irish pronunciation of such a word as
tell. The voice-aspirates differ in the present pronunciation of
Sanskrit from simple g, etc., in having strong stress on the
glide to the following vowel as in dadhami " I place " com-
pared with dadami " I give," but the Sanskrit grammarians
seem to make dh, etc., a combination of d, etc., with a voice
throat-sound like that of Arabic V/z, which also occurred alone
I02 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
in Sanskrit as a weakening of gh^ as in hant'i " he kills '*
(present participle ghnant); it is called " sonant h " by Euro-
pean scholars. It is, therefore, uncertain whether the Aryan
aspirates were originally emphatic forms of i g, etc., or con-
tractions of simple /' g, etc., and a following throat consonant h,
which was voiced after voice consonants. Besides the normal
back consonants i, /-/', g, gh there were four other back con-
sonants which probably differed from them in being formed
as far back as possible in the mouth, like the Arabic qaf^
developing afterwards into hiv, etc., in which the w may be
taken to imply only a rounding or lip-modification of the
preceding consonant, not a combination of (k), etc. + (w).
The vowel-like consonants r, /, n and the other nasals were
capable of assuming syllabic functions — that is, of being used
like vowels. This syllabic use of r and / is preserved in Old
Sanskrit, as in the participles hrta " made," klpta " arranged"
compared with haromi " I make," halpam'i " I arrange," in
both of which latter a = Aryan e. In the present pronuncia-
tion of Sanskrit they are made into r, / + a vowel, irta
becoming iritaj as in the word Sanskrit itself. In the other
Aryan languages they are resolved in the same way into the
corresponding consonant preceded or followed by a vowel, the
consonant itself being then sometimes dropped, as is also the
case in the Sanskrit representative of syllabic n. Thus Aryan
Into " stretched " appears in Sanskrit as taia^ in Greek as tatSs,
in Latin as ientus, while Greek derkomai "see" has aorist
edrakon = Sanskrit adr^am with ra = syllabic r. These
syllabic consonants also occurred long : at any rate, we can
hardly explain such preterite participles as Sa.nsknt purna =
English fullj Greek strotos " spread " with z7r, ro instead of
r, ar respectively, except on the supposition that they are
developments of Aryan pllno, strrto.
The development of these syllabic consonants is, as may be
inferred from the examples given, the result of their losing the
accompanying vowel in originally unaccented syllables. This
leads us to a consideration of the most important factor in
Aryan sound-changes — its accentuation.
THE ARYAN LANGUAGES 103
Aryan seems originally to have had but one accent — the
acute — which consisted in uttering one syllable with greater
force than the others together with either a rising or a high
level tone, any following syllable being then uttered with
diminishing stress and a falling tone, unless it was followed by
another acute accent, in which case it became a low level or
grave tone, every syllable before an acute or after a falling tone
being grave. Such are the main principles of Old Sanskrit
accentuation, which no doubt apply also to parent Aryan.
The agreement of Greek and Sanskrit proves also that it had
a circumflex or compound-falling tone, the result of contract-
ing two vowels — an acute followed by a falling one — into one
syllable. Thus the acute accent of the Greek nominative
time becomes circumflex in the genitive times, where the inflec-
tion is a contraction of -ees or something similar. In Vedic
Sanskrit the long vowels of such contracted inflections are
often metrically equivalent to two syllables, just as in English
sarcastic oh ! with a compound-falling tone sounds like two
syllables — one for each of the elements of the compound
tone.
The place of the accent was not restricted by any considera-
tions of quantity or distance from the end of the word, as
was afterwards the case in Greek and Latin, nor was it
restricted to the root-syllable of a word, as was afterwards the
tendency in the Germanic languages. Although we cannot
help assuming that all derivative and inflectional elements must
originally have been unaccented — for this is the main condi-
tion of their development — this was no longer the case in
Aryan as we know it. On the contrary, certain inflectional
elements had come to be regarded as emphatic, and so became
capable of taking away the accent from the root-syllable.
The " augment " — the inseparable prefix f- which marked past
time — regularly did so, as in the aorist which appears in
Sanskrit as adrgam. In the nouns the nominative, vocative
and accusative — that is, the more abstractly grammatical cases
— were " strong " cases, that is, they threw the stress on to
the stem, while in the other cases the endings are emphasized.
I04 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
Hence all noun-inflection was originally accompanied by shift-
ing of accent, which is still preserved in such Sanskrit and
Greek forms as 'oah = Latin vox, Greek ops " voice,"
accusative singular vacam, opa, but genitive vacas, opos. The
verb, too, shows similar shittings, as in Sanskrit e{i " he goes,"
imas " we go," Greek eiti, tmen (where the accent has been
thrown back) = Aryan eitt, imes.
These last examples also afford illustrations of a marked
characteristic of Aryan — its tendency to weakened unac-
cented sounds, in which it bears a striking resemblance to
Modern English with its changes of strong-stress (aa) are,
(/ael) shall, {^^^) ^^^^ (aj/al,!), as in (ailgou) / tuill go. In
completely unaccented or " grave " syllables the tendency was
to drop short vowels altogether, as in Sanskrit asmi '* I am,"
smas " we are " = Aryan esm'i, srnes ; and this is, as already re-
marked, the origin of the syllabic consonants, as when Greek
derkomai "see " has aorist edrahon with the regular accent on
the augment, ra being the regular Greek representation of
syllabic r. Just as Aryan er in derkomai became r when
unaccented, so also the diphthongs «, eu were reduced to /, u
respectively when unaccented, as in Aryan imes compared
with eimi, and Greek pustbs " known " compared with the
present peuthomai.
The Aryan vowels were not less susceptible to the influences
of intonation. The difference of the Greek nominative hippos
and the vocative hippe can easily be explained by supposing
that the o is the result of the falling tone which necessarily
followed the acute accent on the first syllable, while the e in
the vocative is the natural result of shouting out each syllable
with a high, clear tone. The alternation of o, o with e, a, e,
a in other cases may, therefore, also be the result of
changes of intonation which are, however, still very obscure
and doubtful. This alternation is shown in such Greek pairs
as demo " build," domos " house," leipo " leave " perfect
leloipe, akris " point " okris " pointed," rhegnumi " break "
perfect erroge, phami " speak," phone " voice."
The distinctions of quantity were sharply defined in
THE ARYAN LANGUAGES 105
Aryan, even syllabic consonants being distinguished as long
and short.
Compensatory lengthening of short vowels was frequent.
The most important cases are those which fall under the law
that the vowel of an accented short syllable is lengthened when
a following syllable is dropped, as in Latin vox compared
with Sanskrit 'vaca(s)f Greek epos, Greek i/ops "thief,"
compared with ilopos " thief," Greek^^/^r" father," compared
with accusative patera.
Such lengthenings as that in Sanskrit janu " knee," com-
pared with Greek gonu and the other instances in which
appears as a in Sanskrit, may be the result of intonation, for
in some of the Chinese dialects vowels are regularly length-
ened under certain tones — especially falling ones. As we
have seen, the ol gonu, etc., may be the result of the influence
of such a falling tone.
As we have seen, the loss of sounds plays a prominent
part in Aryan phonology. Not only vowels are freely
dropped, as in smes " we are," pater- " father," but also con-
sonants. Thus the Sanskrit nominative ^/Va is explained a«
the result of dropping the original r before another word
beginning with a consonant, just as in English the (r) ol
father is dropped when the next word begins with a conson-
ant, as in (faa^a wiljam). In Sanskrit the other form ^p'ltat
was afterwards supplanted by pita even when a vowel
followed.
Gradation. One result of all these, and the many other
sound changes in Aryan, was that the vowels were associated
together in more or less definite gradation-series, the character
• of which was partly dependent on the accompanying conson-
ants. The following are examples of some of these series,
with examples from the different languages : —
er, er, or, or, r : Greek phero = Aryan h/jero " I carry,"
Old English h^r, " bier," Greek derkoma'i, perfect dedorka,
phor, "thief," literally "carrier (off)," Greek edrakon.
ei, oi, i : Greek le'ipo " leave," perfect lelo'ipa, aorist el'ipon,
to which correspond Old English beVifan " remain," preterite
io6 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
belafy noun Idf " leavings," whence by mutation lajan ** to
leave," and the preterite participle hel'ifen^
en, on, n : Old English h'lndan " bind," preterite hand^
preterite participle lunden from older Germanic hundano with
the accent on the last syllable, where the un is the Germanic
representative of the syllabic n.
We see from these last examples how the old Aryan
gradation came in the separate Aryan languages to be associ-
ated with definite grammatical functions, till at last these
originally mechanical changes came themselves to have in-
flectional values, and at last in some cases supplanted the
original inflections. The Germanic and Old English pre-
terites are the lineal descendants of the Aryan reduplicating
perfects, traces of the original reduplication being still
preserved in such Old English forms as heht '* commanded,
named" from hatan (p. 47).
Already in parent Aryan these gradations and other sound-
changes ran through the whole language, adding fresh
complexity not only to its inflectional, but also to its deriva-
tional processes.
Inflections. The Aryan inflections were both numer-
ous and irregular, apart from the variations which resulted
from gradation and the numerous other changes brought
about by shifting of stress, influence of intonation, and loss of
vowels and consonants.
Thus the nouns had three numbers, singular, dual, and
plural. The smgular of nouns had at least eight cases,
nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, genitive, ablative,
locative, instrumental, these distinctions being less clear in
the plural, and still less so in the dual, in which only three
cases or groups of cases are clearly distinguished. The
comparative indistinctness of the plural inflections is pro-
bably the result of the case-inflections having blended with
the following plural-inflection, although there is in Aryan
nothing like the regular correspondence of singular and
plural inflections which we observe in Finnish. The case-
endings vary not only according to the number, but also
THE ARYAN LANGUAGES 107
according to the gender of the noun. As the distinctions of
grammatical gender are of secondary origin in Aryan (p. 59),
such inflectional distinctions must also be of secondary origin.
It is to be observed that the different forms of the inflections
are not mere variations of one common form, but are often
perfectly distinct in origin — grammatical synonyms.
The endings vary according to the character of the stem,
the most important distinction being that between polysyllabic
vocalic stems — the most important of which again are the 0-
stems (chiefly masculine) and the J-s'tems (feminine), such
as ectuo *' horse," feminine ecwa — and the consonantal stems,
which may be monosyllabic, as in the Greek nominative
singular ops " voice," Latin vox, compared with the Greek
nominative singular hippos = Aryan ectuos. Monosyllabic
stems ending in vowels also belong to the consonantal class,
such as nau " ship."
The real relation between these two classes of stems has
long been a matter of dispute. The old school of philolo-
gists who started from the axiom that all roots were mono-
syllabic regarded the ^-stems as consonant roots + a
demonstrative element -a. But when we find the final vowel
of such a word as ecivo preserved not only in composition
(Greek hlppo'), but also in the vocative, in which all philo-
logists agree in seeing the bare word without any inflectional
addition, we cannot but regard it as an integral part of the
word — as part of the root, in fact. It is, therefore, possible
that instead of the vocalic stems being extensions of the con-
sonantal stems, the latter are shortenings of the vocalic stems.
In fact the lengthening in such nominative as Greek phor
(p. 105) seems almost to prove that this is so — at least in
many instances.
The endings themselves vary greatly in character. The -t
of the nominative is apparently of pronominal or demonstrative
origin (p. 37). Other endings, such as the locative, may
from their meaning be conjectured to have been originally
particles similar to prepositions. Others, such as the dative
plural ending preserved in Latin omnibus, Sanskrit -hhjas.
io8 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
and the Sanskrit instrumental plural -blns^ are clumsy
agglutinations with what look like old nouns.
The ver6-endings which denote person show clear traces
of the development out of suffixed pronouns.
As in the nouns, the endings differ — though in a less
degree — according as they come in contact with a vocalic or
a consonantal verb-stem, as in the vocalic bhero '* I carry,"
bhereti " he carries," compared with the consonantal esmi " I
am," est't " he is." This analogy is an argument for the
verb-stems having been originally nouns.
The verb is remarkable in showing pre-flection in the
form of the augment with which the imperfect and aorist are
formed, as in the imperfect ehherom " I carried," ehheret " he
carried," the endings of the aorist being similar in charac<^er,
as in edrcom *' I saw," edrces *' thou sawest," edrcet ** he
saw." The shortening of the endings is apparently the result
of the accent being thrown back on the augment. The
perfect has the most peculiar endings, as may be seen by
comparing the last three forms with the corresponding ones
of the perfect singular dedorca^ dedorctha, dedorce.
Besides these tenses, there was also an s-aorist, preserved
in such forms as Latin dixit " he said," = dic-s-it, a
pluperfect formed from the perfect by prefixing the augment,
and a future formed by adding -sjo.
Aryan also had special stems for the subjunctive and
optative moods. The subjunctive is formed by adding some
vowel to the verb-stem, whence the long vowels in the sub-
junctives of vocalic verbs, as in Sanskrit bhavasi " thou
mayest be," Latin legas compared with the corresponding
indicative forms bhavas'i, leg'ts. The mark of the optative
is j7, weak i as in sjem " I would be," simen " we would be,"
bheroim " I would carry." The imperative is represented partly
by the uninflected v^rb-stem, as in bhere " carry ! ," partly by
special endings.
There were also special forms for the passive and middle
(or reflexive) voices, die latter being apparently the original ;
THE ARYAN LANGUAGES 109
Its endings seem to be derived from those of the active, as in
the third person singular hheretai compared with the corre-
sponding active form hhereti.
The verb distinguished three numbers like the noun, but
made no distinction of gender, as in the Semitic languages,
which is an additional argument in favour of noun-gender
being of late development in Aryan.
From the verb-stems are also formed by means of special
derivative elements verb-nouns or infinitives, and verb-adjec-
tives or participles, which are inflected like nouns and
adjectives respectively.
Besides the distinction of vocalic and consonantal stems,
the verb also has a number of special present-stems, some
formed by adding syllables, some by reduplication, some by
infixing a nasal, and so on, as in the Greek deik-numi " I
show " compared with deih-tos " capable of proof," d'ldomi " I
give'* compared with dotos "given," Latin ru-m-po "I break"
compared with ruptus " broken." These various formations
no doubt originally had special meanings of their own, of
which some of them still show traces, especially those in
-sk which were originally inchoative verbs : Latin cre-sco
"increase," originally "begin to grow."
Concord; the Inflectional Instinct, As might
be expected in so highly inflectional a language, concord was
fully developed, so that adjectives were generally sharply
marked off from nouns by their power of taking the
inflections of all three genders. When concord had once
established itself, it must have greatly strengthened the in-
flectional instinct, and also had a great influence on the
development of grammatical gender.
All this led to other important results. In the first place a
general tendency developed itself to give a definite grammatical
form to each logical category. The parts of speech were
marked off by easily recognizable formal characteristics, and
a strict line was drawn between what we may call " major "
and " minor " parts of speech, the former being declinable, the
latter — comprising adverbs and particles — indeclinable, and
no THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
therefore generally incapable of being used as nouns or verbs,
etc., until they had received an appropriate derivative syllable.
As the major parts of speech were the natural rulers in a
sentence, a feeling gradually sprang up that no full-word —
unless an abverb — could take its place as an independent
member of a sentence till an inflection had been tacked on to
it, not merely as a means of showing its concord-relations and
other special relations to the other words in the sentence, but
also to show that it was really an independent word, and
not part of another word. Hence the bare stem or root
was employed only in the case of those declinable words j
which were capable of constituting sentences by themselves — i
that is, nouns in the vocative and verbs in the imperative, |
vocatives and imperatives being on a level with interjections, ,
which are " sentence-words " rather than words in the ordinary
sense. Otherwise such bare stems as ecivo, bhere, made the 1
hearer expect either another inflected full-word to make up a
compound, or else an inflection — which might be preceded by
a derivative element — to make up a simple word.
Primitive Aryan Inflections, It is clear from a
survey of the inflections of Late Aryan as revealed to us by
comparative philology, that they are but the ruins of an older
system, in which the inflections were much more numerous,
but at the same time more distinct and regular. Thus there
was probably a period when the noun had twice as many
cases, which were added to all nouns alike with but trifling
modification by the final sounds of the stem.
There must also have been a period in which the instincts
of inflection and concord were only beginning to assert them-
selves ; in which inflections were freely omitted when they
could be easily supplied from the context — when, for instance,
three good man could do duty for three good men on the ground
that plurality was already indicated by the numeral, and that
concord was to be shown grammatically only when it was
really wanted.
This period, again, must have been preceded by one of
more or less loose agglutination, in which the cases were mere
THE ARYAN LANGUAGES iii
post-positions ; and this period was preceded in its turn by ar
isolating period, in which grammatical relations were indicated
by word-order and the use of particles. In this oldest pre-
agglutinative period post-adjunct order [man good) must have
prevailed (p. 41 ) — a tendency which was completely reversed
afterwards.
CHAPTER VII
Affinities of Aryan
After we have learnt all we can by comparing the
different Aryan languages among themselves and reconstruct-
ing their common ancestor, the next step is to find a basis
of comparison with other non-Aryan families of languages.
Just as the Slavonic languages are non-Germanic languages,
and yet akin to the Germanic languages, so also there may
be languages which though not Aryan may still be cognate
with parent Aryan through descent from the same remote
ancestor.
The first step in determining the ai^nities of a language
or group of languages is to find out its original home. As
we have seen, the evidence drawn from the Aryan languages
is in favour of a central or north European origin, and there
is nothing in the history of the speakers of these languages to
make this conclusion improbable.
The next step is to determine what other families of
languages were geographically conterminous with Aryan
during the period of its unity.
Ugrian. If, then, we look eastwards, we find the
Aryan languages in direct contact with the great Ugrian
family, of which Finnish and Hungarian are the most
prominent representatives. Of the other Ugrian languages,
Esthonian is a mere dialect of Finnish, and Lappish is closely
connected with it, these three constituting a special West-
Finnic group. West- Finnic, together with the more easterly
Volga and Permian groups, constitutes the Finnic division.
The other main division, the Ugric or Uralic, is represented
I 12
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 113
by Hungarian together with Ostiak and Vogul, which last
are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, and extend
therefore into Asia : —
(West Finnic: Finnish, ( rr - /T\/r \
\ Lappish \ Hungarian (Magyar)
Finnic < _. , ^^ Uffric < Vogful
Volga group
Permian group
Tr 1 Ugric < Vogul
Volga group ^ | ^J^j^
The Ugrian languages have not a long literary history.
The oldest documents of Finnish date back only a few
centuries. Those of Hungarian are older ; but even the
earliest of them are less conservative on the whole than
Modern Finnish. That Finnish has changed but little
during the last 1600 years or more — certainly much less than
most of the Aryan languages — is shown by the archaic
character of its loan-words, especially those from the
Germanic languages, such as kun'ingas " king,'* where the a =
Aryan of the stem is preserved, which is lost already in
Gothic — the most archaic of the Germanic languages. So
also kaunis = Gothic skauns, German schoriy keeps the stem-
vowel /. Some of the other loan-words exhibit still more
remarkable archaisms. It is to be remarked that Finnish
had probably got into the habit of reducing initial consonant-
groups to a single consonant long before the period of these
borrowings, so that the initial s of Germanic *skaunts was
dropped at once — not in consequence of any later change.
All the evidence points to the northern half of Russia as
the original home of the undivided Ugrians, who, however,
even now are much less divided than the Aryans. Aryan and
Ugrian must therefore have been neighbours from the begin-
ning. The character of the loan-words — which show a
striking predominance of ideas relating to military and political
organization — seems to prove, indeed, that when they were
first introduced, the Ugrians must have been in a state of
political subordination to the more warlike Germanic race.
But the borrowing was sometimes the other way. Anderson
has shown that the Aryans occasionally borrowed words from
114 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
the Ugrians, especially names of weapons, such as the Slavonic
toporu " axe," Finnish tappara, which is a regular derivative
from tappaa "strike, kill."
When we consider that a comparison of Finnish with
Hungarian shows at first sight but little resemblance, while
the divergences between the different Aryan languages are
still greater, it stands to reason that the divergences between
Aryan as a whole and Ugrian as a whole must be greater
still, so that the number of genuine cognate words which are
easily recognizable must be small, while there is always the
suspicion of borrowing.
But when we find a word occurring in the eastern as well
as the western Ugrian languages and at the same time denoting
ideas which are not likely to require a borrowed word to
express them, then we are justified in rejecting the hypothesis
of borrowing on either side, or at least in hesitating to reject
the hypothesis of common origin. Anderson — who was the first
to investigate the question in a scientific and impartial spirit —
has made detailed comparisons of part of the vocabularies of
the two families, and the result is to establish beyond reason-
able doubt that Aryan and Ugrian have a certain number of
roots in common. Thus the familiar Finnish word sanakirja
"dictionary," literally "word-book," is made up of such
roots. With Sana compare the Sanscrit svana " sound," Old
Irish son "word." We have another derivative from the
root Siva in Sanskrit svara " sound," old EngHsh andsivaru
" answer " ; here again we have Finnish parallels such as
sorina "noise,'* saarna "sermon," and many others. The
word k'trja "book" has also the meanings " mark, furrow,
incision," showing that it was originally applied to letters
carved on wood, just as hooh = Old English ioc, which also
has the meaning " beech tree," originally meant a slab of
beech- wood carved with runic letters. It is formed from the
Ugrian root i-r " to cut," cognate with the Aryan root
preserved in Modern English in shear, score, plough-share
= Old English sceran, scoru, scaru, with which compare
Finnish koro "notch," -hara in aurankara "ploughshare."
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 115
The Aryan root appears also without the s, as in Greek iaro
"shear, shave."
The absence of the initial s in the Finnish words may be
original, but it may also be the result of the already mentioned
phonetic law which does not allow more than one initial con-
sonant, in consequence of which such borrowed Germanic
words as those corresponding to Old English dryhten " lord "
and strand " shore " appear in Finnish in the disguised forms
ruht'mas "prince" and ranta. This peculiarity — which runs
through all the Ugrian languages — together with the want of
any original distinction between breath and voice stops —
g, d, h being mere secondary forms of i, /, p — and the general
poverty of the Ugrian consonant-system add greatly to the
uncertainty of comparison.
The difficulties about borrowing do not affect a comparison
of the grammatical structure of the two families ; for, whatever
may be said about the unlimited possibilities of mixture of
languages, there is no evidence that the fundamental gram-
matical structure of a language is ever appreciably modified by
foreign influence. We know that as long as scholars confined
themselves to comparisons of the vocabularies of the different
Aryan languages, the relationships of these languages continued
to be a matter of vague guesswork : it was not till Bopp
and his successors began a methodical comparison of their
inflections that the true relationship was established, and the
science of comparative philology put on a really scientific basis.
It is interesting to observe that just as the older school of
investigators preferred the most improbable hypotheses of
borrowing to admitting the clearest evidence of a common
origin of Aryan and Ugrian, so also the pre-scientific com-
parers of Latin and Greek with the Germanic and other
Aryan languages hardly ever got further than to admit the
possibility of borrowing, even the boldest of them only going
so far as to suggest that Greek and Latin might have borrowed
words from the rude tribes of the north instead of 'vice versa.
The morphological comparison of Ugrian and Aryan is
ii6 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
much facilitated by the fact that the Ugrian languages are,
like the older Aryan languages, inflectional. In their present
stage of development, indeed, the West-Finnic languages are
in some respects more rigorously inflectional and further
removed from the agglutinative stage than Sanskrit itself.
But on the whole the present Finnish inflections are dis-
tinctly more primitive than the oldest Aryan ones. They
are more numerous, more regular in form, and more concrete
and primitive in meaning. Thus the noun has fifteen cases,
in most of which the original local meaning is clearly
discernible: in fact the Finnish inflections are in most cases
what we should be inclined on a priori grounds to postulate as
constituting the prehistoric stage in parent Aryan.
The Finnish verb is poor in tense-distinctions, but rich in
moods, infinitives and participles, as well as in derivative
elements, out of which the mood-distinctions seem in many cases
to have developed. Like the Aryan verb it has three persons
and two numbers, to which some of the languages add a dual.
The personal endings of the Finnish verb are evidently suffixed
pronouns. These endings and the pronouns themselves bear
so close a resemblance to the corresponding Aryan forms that
it amounts to identity in some cases. Thus the present
indicative oi sanoa "to say" — compare j^/7iz " word " — is
conjugated as follows :
m'ln'd sanon plural : me sanomme
s'lna sanot te sanotte
han sanoo he sanovat
The most superficial comparison of this paradigm not only
with such Sanskrit forms as bha-vami " I am," plural bhavamasy
second person plural bhavatka^ but with the corresponding
forms of such languages as Modern Italian, would be enough
to establish a common origin. If we trace the Finnish forms
further back by comparison with the other Ugrian languages,
the resemblances become still more striking.
Thus the ending of the first person singular was originally
-w, which is still preserved in Lappish — where it becomes -b
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 117
in some dialects — and in most of the other languages, Finnish
itself showing traces of it. The independent pronoun of the
second person singular appears in Lappish as ton, don, the other
languages also pointing to initial /- as the older form. The
older form of "he'* appears from similar evidence to
have been sana, together with another form saiva or saivan,
which is probably cognate with the Aryan reflexive pronoun
seive, seiuo, Latin suus. Finnish shows another ending -p'l,
-vi of the third person singular, which seems to be one of the
primitive p-pronouns (p. 37), together with a third ending
"Sen, which may contain the same pronominal element as the
Aryan ending -ti. In the third person plural the h of the
pronoun is a later form of s, as in the singular. The verb-
ending is transparently nominal in character, being simply the
singular -w with the noun-plural-/ — compare i^V<?-/ "hands."
There is no blind borrowing or imitation here, but a free
selection from a common stock of pronominal material.
We cannot expect the same degree of similarity in the
noun-inflections. One great difficulty is that what appears to
be one case may be really two distinct cases run together.
Thus in Finnish the genitive and the accusative singular
both end in -n, but in some of the other languages the accusa-
tive preserves the older form -m or -me, as in the Lappish
demonstrative tarn, which is identical in root, inflection and
meaning with the Sanskrit tarn. Unfortunately the uses of
the Ugrian accusative afford us no direct clue to its original
meaning, but the Aryan use of the accusative to denote the
goal of motion may well be the original one in Ugrian also,
where nearly all the other cases still preserve direct traces of
■their original local meanings.
In identifying the accusative ending -m in Ugrian and Aryan,
one reservation must be made. The Sanskrit tarn is specific-
ally masculine as opposed to feminine, the ending -m being
also used to mark the neuter nominative singular. Lappish
tarn, on the other hand, has no such restrictions, for Lappish,
like the other Ugrian languages, knows nothing of grammatical
gender. But this — which has been urged as one of the strongest
E
ii8 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
arguments against any affinity between the two families — is
only a welcome confirmation of the original absence of gender
in the Aryan languages themselves.
After what we have seen of the resemblance between the
Aryan and Ugrian pronouns, we need not be surprised to find
in some of the Ugrian languages a definite suffix -sa or -s
having the functions of a definite article, which is otherwise
wanting in the Ugrian languages. Finnish has lost this -s as
an independent suffix, but still preserves it in a good many
words, where, however, it has been fossilized so as to become
part of the stem of the word, its meaning having been quite
forgotten, as \n parmas, ess'ne parmas-na, " in (the) bosom,"
by the side of the original form parma without any s. The
preservation of the j- in Aryan loan-words, as in kun'mgat
*' king," kaun'is "beautiful" — where it has also become part
of the stem — is no doubt the result of identifying the
Aryan nominative ending -s with the Ugrian definite suffix
of which the Aryan -j itse'f is only a later development, or ;
parallel development from the same demonstrative root.
We thus find in Ugrian the germs of the Aryan nominative
case and masculine gender, although Ugrian itself is still
equally destitute of a masculine gender and a distinctive
nominative case ; for in Finnish the nominative singular is
simply the bare stem, from which it is difl^erentiated only by
secondary phonetic changes (p. 64), just as in Aryan we
find such nominatives as pater marked solely by secondary
changes (p. 105). .
We have thus found forms in Ugrian so similar to the
nominative and accusative singular endings in Aryan as to
make their identity and consequently their common origin at
least highly probable. But this identification does not throw
much fresh light on Aryan morphology, and merely serves to
confirm conclusions drawn from the Aryan languages
themselves.
It is different with the following views, founded on an
ingenious speculation of Anderson, which throw unexpected
light not only on the origin of Aryan cases, but also on some
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 119
of the details of the development of grammatical gender. Our
starting-point is the Finnish partitive case.
The partitive ending is -ta, the / being often dropped in
accordance with the general tendencies of the language, and
the a being changed to a= (as) whenever the laws of " vowel-
harmony " require this change. Its original meaning was
motion from a place ; and this meaning is still preserved in
some adverbial uses, as in kaukaa " from afar," where -aa is
a contraction of -ata. The partitive was therefore originally
an ablative, and is probably remotely cognate with the
Sanskrit and early Latin ablative in such words as agvad= Latin
eqvd[d). It is easy to see how the idea of " motion from "
or "taking from" developed into that of "part of," as in
le'ipaa " some bread " — leip'd being the borrowed Germanic
word represented by English loaf — corresponding to the
French du pain, literally "from the bread."
In Finnish the subject as well as the object is put in the
partitive whenever the meaning requires it, as in mteh'id tulee
" some-men are coming," the verb being then always put in
the singular; compare m'lehet tule-vat "the men are coming,"
where we have a " total " instead of a " partial " subject,
with the verb in the plural. This is an interesting parallel to
the Greek use of singular verbs after neuter plurals ; the
difference being, of course, that while the Greek neuter plurals
were originally singulars, the Finnish partitive miehid is as
distinctly plural in form — as shown by the inserted / —
although it has come to be felt as equivalent to a collective
singular.
There is an analogous distinction in the predicate. Thus
ki'u't on kova, where the predicate kova is in the nominative,
means " the stone is hard," that is, " not a soft stone " ;
while kivi on kovaa, where the predicate is in the partitive,
means " stone belongs to — is part of — the class of hard things."
Here again we see the tendency of the partitive to suggest the
idea of abstractness or generalization.
But if in such constructions as those last described the
subject is a living being, the complement must always be in the
I20 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
nominative, not in the partitive ; thus in such a sentence as
" man is mortal," the predicate " mortal " is put in the
nominative. This is done also even when the subject is
merely a part of a living being, such as hands, feet, hair.
Here we see clearly the tendency to associate the partitive
with what in Aryan would be the neuter gender. This is
carried, according to Anderson, still further in Esthonian,
where mud = Finnish muuta, the partitive of muu, " otlier,
different," in some constructions entirely excludes the idea
of a living being.
If, then, Lappish tarn is to be identified with Sanskrit tarrif
we are justified in comparing tat a, the Fmnish partitive
singular of the same demonstrative pronoun, with the Sanskrit
neuter singular tad, Gothic ]:ata. If so, the neuter pronoun
ending still preserved in English //, that, ivhat, is nothing but
the last remains of an old partitive case or agglutinative
postposition.
We have not space to dwell on the equally striking
agreements in the derivative endings of the two families,
which, again, often amount to identity.
If all these and many other resemblances that might be
adduced do not prove the common origin of Aryan and
Ugrian, and if we assume that the Ugrians borrowed not
only a great part of their vocabulary, but also many of their
derivative syllables, together with at least the personal endings
of their verbs from Aryan, then the whole fabric of com-
parative philology falls to the ground, and we are no longer
justified in inferring from the similarity of the inflections in
Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit that these languages have a
common origin. In fact, the whole controversy about the
affinities of Aryan and Ugrian has no longer any ground to
stand on, for there is no longer any Aryan family, and no
longer any obstacle to assuming that the dusky inhabitants of
India simply borrowed their inflections from Greek and Latin
in their prehistoric stages of development.
That the long-continued proximity of the two languages
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 121
has kept them HnguistlcalJy closer together than would per-
haps otherwise have been the case, is probable enough. The
resemblance of Finnish to the nearest Aiyan language — that
is, Russian — is very remarkable, in the syntax as well as in
the general morphology. But all such influence is mainly
negative — in the way of arresting change, not of causing it.
Altaic. The affiliation of Aryan to Ugrian is only
the first step in the investigation of its affinities. If we
pursue our course still further east, we come at once on the
great Altaic family of languages covering nearly the whole
of northern Asia from the Ural mountains to the Pacific
Ocean. These languages are spoken by a fairly homogeneous
Tartar or Mongol race, to which the eastern Ugrians also
belong. Even the Fins still preserve certain Mongol char-
acteristics, in spite of the large mixture of Germanic blood.
Just as Ugrian represents an earlier stage of Aryan, so
also the more highly developed of the Altaic languages, such
as Turkish, may be said to represent an earlier stage of
Ugrian itself. Thus in Ugro- Aryan the plural of nouns is
formed by adding either the vowel i or a consonant which
appears in Finnish as / and in Aryan as s — perhaps originally
the English (])) — as in Finnish kdde-t "hand-s," partitive
plural k'ds-i-a, Greek diko-i " houses,*' there being Ugrian
evidence to make it almost certain that this / is a weakening
of kj whose unaccountable absence from the Aryan inflections
is therefore only apparent. Thus in these languages the
plural is formed by suffixes which are incapable of standing
alone, while the Turkish plural ending -lar, though not an
independent word, has nothing in its form to show that it
is not one. Again, in Altaic, these suffixes are so loosely
connected with the stem that they can often change places
with one another, and can be strung on one after another
in a way that would be impossible in Aryan and most West-
Finnish languages (p. 65). For these reasons we must
regard the Altaic languages as agglutinative rather than
inflectional.
A general survey of the Altaic languages, beginning with
122 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
the highly developed, half inflectional languages of the West,
shows, as we advance east, a progressive preponderance of
agglutinative over inflectional tendencies, and, at the same
time, progressive simplification of the grammatical structure.
In the Mongol dialects the grammatical suffixes are more
loosely joined to their stems than in Turkish, and at the
same time they are much fewer in number, so that many
grammatical relations are expressed only vaguely, or not at
all, and the parts of speech are only imperfectly discriminated.
In Manchu, the most eastern of the continental Altaic
languages, what seems to us so necessary a distinction as
that of singular and plural has no grammatical mark, being
only indicated when necessary by some such word as "many,"
as in Chinese.
With this loosely agglutinative structure is probably con-
nected what is the most striking formal feature of these
languages, which at the same time constitutes the main bond
of union between them and the neighbouring Ugrian languages
— that is, vowel-harmony. Vowel-harmony is common to all
the languages of the two families, though it is almost — but
not entirely — lost in Japanese in the extreme east, and
Esthonian in the extreme west. It is fully developed in
Finnish, though not so elaborately as in some of the Turkish
dialects of Siberia. In Finnish, the vowels are divided, from
the point of view of vowel-harmony, into the three classes
hard, soft, and neutral. The hard vowels comprise all the
la:k vowels, the soft the corresponding front vowels — what
we should call "mutated" vowels, (j, o, a) — while those
front vowels which have no corresponding back vowels are
regarded as neutral (he). If the first vowel of a word
is hard, all the other vowels in the word must be either hard
or neutral, as in muuttumattomuudestansa " from his unchang-
ingness " ; if the first vowel is soft, all others must be soft
or neutral, as in tytymattomyydestansa " from his discontented-
ness." In some instances the vowel of a suffix is made
identical with the one that immediately precedes, and this
is carried out consistently in some of the Turkish dialects.
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 123
The physiological explanation of vowel-harmony is, of
course, that it is simply the result of laziness ; that is to say,
that when the tongue was once put in the back or front
position respectively, it was found easiest to keep the tongue
in that position throughout the rest of the word as far as
possible. The tendency to subordinate all the vowels in a
word to the first vowel was greatly strengthened by the fact
that in the Ugrian and Altaic languages the first syllable
is always the root or stem, and always has the chief stress.
Hence vowel-harmony serves both to further emphasize the
subordination of the suffixes to the stem, and to bind these
loose elements more closely together, and so assert the unity
of the word as much as possible.
The affinity of Ugrian to Altaic is postulated not only
by vowel-harmony and by geographical continuity and identity
of race, but also by the general morphological relations
between the two families, which are parallel, as already
remarked, to those between Ugrian and Aryan : for just as
Ugrian shows a stage of inflection out of which the Aryan
inflections would naturally develope, so also Altaic shows a
stage of agglutination out of which, as shown in Turkish,
such inflections as we find in Ugrian not only could, but
almost inevitably must have developed.
We have thus arrived at the further result that the Aryan
languages are a branch of the great Ugro-Altaic family, the
whole group of languages extending now from the Pacific
to the Atlantic with hardly a break. It is interesting to
observe the continuity and the progressiveness of the develop-
ment of these languages from east to west. In Japanese in
the extreme east we have a language which has never emerged
from a primitive agglutinative type, in which the suflixes are
so loosely joined to their stems that they seem as if they
were on the point of falling off; then as we advance west-
ward, we are met by increasing complexity of agglutinative
structure, culminating in Turkish, till in the Ugrian languages
we find fully developed inflection, accompanied by a gradu-
ally increasing simplification and selection, till we find in
124 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
Central Europe two most perfect and characteristic types
of inflectional speech — that is, Finnish and Lithuanian, which
latter is now the most conservative of the Aryan languages.
Then, as we advance still further westward away from the
central languages (p. 83), we find the inflectional system
decaying more and more, till at last in the extreme West we
find English in as nearly as possible the same stage morpho-
logically as Japanese in the extreme East.
But we are still some way from the end of our inquiry,
the next stage of which takes us to the valley of the
Euphrates.
Sumerian. The cuneiform or arrow-headed inscrip-
tions on the clay tablets and other remains found in the
valley of the Euphrates and the neighbouring countries throw
startling light on the origin of the Aryo-Altaic languages,
and carry back their literary history to the very dawn of
civilization.
The cuneiform system of writing was extensively applied
to many diiferent languages belonging to different families.
The decipherment of the old Persian cuneiform inscriptions,
the oldest of which belong to the sixth century B.C., led
to the decipherment of the earlier Assyrian and Babylonian
inscriptions, both written in a Semitic language closely allied
to Hebrew.
Further excavations in the valley of the Euphrates revealed
numerous monuments of a still earlier and non-Semitic race
and language, the so-called Accadian, or Sumerian, as it is
now generally designated.
The antiquity of Sumerian may be judged from the fact
that it was already beginning to be a dead language as early
as 2000 B.C. The definite ascendency of the Semites in the
mixed population of ancient Chaldea began with the reign
of Sargon I, himself a Semite, who united the two provinces
of Sumir in the south and Accad in the north into one
kingdom. The Sumerian civilization must have been an
old-established one long before this event, which took place
about 3800 B.C., and the Sumerians must have been in pos-
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 125
session of wiPitIng before 8000 B.C., which is about the date
of the earhest written documents in Sumerian that have yet
been discovered.
Some very ancient statues that were discovered in Baby-
lonia fully confirmed the conclusion that the Sumcrians were
not a Semitic race. On the contrary, these statues showed
all the characteristics of the Tartar or Finnic race. And
when some progress had been made in deciphering the old
Sumerian language, it was found to show striking signs of
affinity with the languages of the Tartar races — more especi-
ally with the Ugrian family. With all distrust of similarity
of vocabulary, one cannot but be struck by such resemblances
as those between Sumerian hha " fish " and Finnish kala^
h'ldu "moon" and Finnish huu, Vepse-Finnish kuda't.
The comparison, too, of Sumerian urudu "copper" with
Finnish rauta " iron " is certainly more plausible than the
older assumption that the Fins, who were the acknowledged
masters of the Germanic tribes in the art of metal- working,
learnt the use of iron from the latter, and then, instead
of simply adopting the Germanic name for it, took the
Scandinavian word rauYi "hematite" as its designation.
The truth is that raiiYi and rauta are both independent
formations from one Aryo- Altaic root meaning "red" or
"dark."
But the main argument in favour of the affinity of Sumerian
with the Ugro- Altaic family is that they are all governed by
the great law of vowel-harmony, which in Sumerian as well
as in Ugro- Altaic gave rise to the characteristic vowel (ae) in
English man as the " soft " form of a together with front-
rounded vowels resembling or identical with French u and cii.
Many languages all over the world show various convergent
acoustic sound-changes, but none of them show anything like
vowel-harmony as carried out in these two groups of languages,
and we cannot but regard this as being as decisive a proof of
affinity as similarity of inflections would be.
Inflectional resemblances we cannot reasonably expect ; for
some of the Altaic languages themselves have hardly advanced
126 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
even to the agglutinative stage at the present day, and we
cannot therefore expect a language which must practically be
a near approach to the parent Altaic language to have developed
inflections thousands of years ago.
Primitive as the structure of Sumerian is, it is far from
being that isolating, monosyllabic, Chinese-like language we
might be inclined to expect. On the contrary, its roots, or
what appear to be such, are as often polysyllabic as mono-
svllabic, and this applies to particles as well as full-words ;
many, too, of the monosyllables seem to be late contractions
of longer words.
Grammatical relations are shown in a variety of ways : —
( 1 ) by reduplication, which appears in various stages,
sometimes in that of complete repetition of the word, some-
times in various contracted forms, so that only the beginning
of the word is repeated, as in the Aryan reduplication.
(2) hy prolongation, that is, the addition of a vowel, pre-
ceding consonants being doubled: thus the "prolonged " form
of ad " father " is adda. We may, however, conjecture that
the relation between the two forms is the same as the relation
between vocalic and consonantal stems in Aryan may be —
that is, that prolongation is the original stage.
(3) by prefixes and suffixes, the same adfixes sometimes
having different functions according as they precede or follow
their stems. One stem may receive many of these elements :
the language is highly polysynthetic.
(4) by particles, which are however often difficult to
distinguish from the loosely agglutmated adfixes, particles
which otherwise appear to be quite free, often entering into
apparently close union with the former.
(5) by tuord-order, which, however, does not play a very
prominent part in the morphology of a language which is
provided with so many adlixes.
As might be expected, grammatical categories and relations
are often not marked at all, but left to be inferred from the
context. Thus the plural of nouns is often the same as the
singular ; the genitive relation is often shown by mere post-
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 127
position of the genitival word, as in e odda (prolonged forni)
" house father," according to the general principle of putting
adjunct-words after their head -words.
The whole structure of the language is based on the noun.
Adjectives — which, in accordance with the general principles
of Sumerian word-order, always follow their nouns— are not
formally distinguished from these, and may indeed be them-
selves regarded as nouns in apposition or in the genitive
relation, thus the half compound lu-gal " prince, king,"
literally " man strong," might also be explained as "man of
strength."
The nouns have, of course, no distinctions of grammatical
gender. They take postpositions answering to the cases of
Finnish and Aryan, of which there are about nine — no doubt
mere remains of a larger number. One of these, -gim or
-gime^ means "like," the others seem to be originally local in
their meanings. -r<7, often shortened to -r, is apparently a
verb *' go." -ta " in, out of, from " may be the parent of
the Finnish partitive and the Aryan ablative. The plural is
either left unmarked, or reduplication is used, as with kur
" mountain, country," plural kur kur ^ or some periphrase is
used. Prolongation of nouns seems to imply emphasis, as in
kurkura "the mountains."
The pronouns p!ay an important part in Sumerian grammar.
The personal pronouns when absolute — that is, not used as
adfixes — take various prolonged or emphatic forms, as with
%a-~i " thou " ; when a postposition is added, they resume
their shorter forms, as in ma-ra, " to me." But the pro-
nouns generally appear in the form of adfixes ; thus the
possessive pronouns are suffixes, as in e--z.u "thy house,"
with the same order as with other genitival or adjecti\al
words.
Verb-stems are capable of prolongation and reduplication,
like the nouns, the bare stem generally having a preterite
meaning, as in the Aryan root-aorist (Greek el'ipon), while
the prolonged and reduplicated forms have a durative or
present meaning, which again reminds us of the Aryan present-
128 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
stems. Special stems are formed by prefixes, most of which
are identical in form with the noun-postpositions. Thus
verbs of motion take ra-, which is therefore identical with
the accusative postposition -ra. The negative particle nu- is
often shortened and mixed up with other prefixes, so that
practically we get a negative inflection of the verb. So also
with other prefixed particles.
As regards the persons, the first and second are generally
expressed by adding the possessive suffix to the prolonged
root, as in garra-mu " I make," garra-zu " thou makest,"
from gar " make,*' the third person being left without any
pronominal suffix, as in the Aryan perfect [dedorce " he has
seen ").
The verb-forms are greatly complicated by the addition of
prefixes to denote the pronominal objects " me," " him," etc.
Even pronouns in the dative relation are incorporated into the
verb, as also a variety of particles.
All these additions follow each other in a more or less
definite order, which, however, curiously enough varies at
different periods of the language. In the later language the
stem-prefixes ra-, etc., often follow instead of immediately
preceding the verb-root.
The result of so many different adfixes coming together
and being subject to all the disguises produced bv the working
of vowel-harmony, shortening, elision and blending together,
is great complexity and irregularity, this chaotic, elastic irre-
gularity being, however, very different from the stiff, fossilized
irregularity of Aryan forms.
Sumerian may, then, be briefly described as a loosely agglu-
tinative highly polysynthetic language with a tendency towards
incorporation.
Such a language can easily develope in the two opposite
directions of complexity and simplicity. By making its
agglutinations fixed and permanent, it would develope either
into an inflectional language like Finnish or a definitely in-
corporating language of the Basque type, according to the
nature and amount of the logical control exercised over the
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN 129
resulting forms. If, on the other hand, the agglutinations,
instead of being tightened, were loosened again, the result
would be that compromise between agglutinative and particle
languages which we observe in the eastern branch of the
Altaic family ; and if the resulting particles were reduced to
a minimum, and the words became monosyllabic by phonetic
decay, a language of the isolating type would be evolved.
Hence we see that the comparatively isolating structure of the
eastern Altaic languages does not necessarily imply an isolating
parent-language.
Whatever the precise relations between Sumerian and
Aryan may be, there can be little doubt that Sumerian brings
us much nearer than. Finnish or Altaic do to the common
ancestor of them all. At any rate, there is nothing in the
morphological character of Sumerian to make such a relation
improbable.
The Aryan Race. The great difficulty of the Aryan
problem and one of the chief reasons for the prevailing pre-
judice against the hypothesis of a common origin of Aryan
and Finnish is that the evidence of race seems to contradict
that of language. The archaeological researches of late years
have shown that the undivided Aryans must have had a fairly
definite type of their own, and that physically they were very
different from the round-headed (brachycephalic), yellow-
skinned Mongols, and that the primitive Aryan type is still
faithfully preserved in the rural districts of Sweden : the
original Aryans were a tall long-headed (dolichocephalic) race
with blue eyes, fair hair, and pink-and-white complexion.
Not only were they not an Asiatic race, but all the evidence
seems to show that they were the descendants of the savages of
the stone period, who were the first inhabitants of Europe.
Aryan cannot therefore have been their original language ;
it must have been a borrowed language — a language, as we
have seen, of Asiatic origin. But instead of the Aryans
coming from Central Asia and driving out a supposed Finnic
population, as was formerly supposed, it was the Fins who
invaded Europe and imposed their language on an alien race.
I30 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
From what we know of the spread of Babylonian and Chinese
civilization in historical times, there is reason to suppose that
the spread of Asiatic culture and language in Europe was a
very gradual and even to some extent a peaceful process,
although it was no doubt aided by the polished jade or bronze
weapons of the newcomers, to which the aborigines could only
oppose weapons of chipped flint and bone-tipped arrows.
The immediate ancestors of the Aryans must therefore
have been not only a mixed race, but a race in which the
foreign element was strong enough to prevent the native lan-
guage from getting the upper hand, as is generally the case
when the conquerors constitute only a small body of aristo-
crats. But in all cases in which the langpage of the conquered
absorbs that of the conquerors, the former constitute a settled
population of some degree of civilization, being indeed gener-
ally superior in culture and therefore inferior in physical energy
to their conquerors. In the case of the first invasion of
Europe by Asiatics the circumstances were reversed ; it was
impossible that a scattered population of hunters and fishers
should impose their language on a compact body of compar-
atively civilized invaders, who, however inferior they may
have been in stature and muscular vigour, had metals and
numbers on their side.
How is it then that the Swedes, who are undoubtedly as
pure Aryans as any, both in race and language, show an
almost pure European or Caucasian type ?
The solution of the problem lies in the influence of climate.
It is now generally agreed that the Caucasian is a bleached
race — that its fairness is the result of long exposure to the
intense Cwld of the glacier period, which of course continued,
though in a milder form, long after the Ime of the glaciers
had retreated to the Scandinavian peninsula. Hence even
now the pure European races of the North thrive only in cold
climates, and melt away under the sun of the tropics. Hence
also when the fair races are mixed with darker ones the latter
get the upper hand in southern climates : even the climate of
England, inclement as it seems to a Southerner, is too mild
AFFINITIES OF ARYAN iji
for the pure blonde type, which is becoming rarer and rarer
every century. As we go further south, we find that in
Germany, for instance, the dark-skinned, short-headed type
predominates more and more over the fair-haired, white-
complexioned, long-headed type of the north of Germany, till
at last the long-heads form only a small percentage of the
population, except in mountainous regions where the chmatic
conditions tend to keep up the vigour of the fair race.
Those investigators of Aryan affinities who, in their attempts
to reconcile European race-affinities with Asiatic language-
affinities, have been driven into assuming, against the main
body of evidence, that the primitive Aryans were a pre-
dominantly short-headed and not a long-headed race, have
overlooked the easy solution of the difficulty afforded by the
consideration that if exposure to a warm climate modifies a
mixed race in the way just described, the reverse change of
climate would affect that same population in a reverse way :
that is to say, they have omitted to consider what would be
the effect on such a mixed race of exposure to a colder
climate.
If we suppose a mixed population of long-heads and short-
heads occupying the plains of Central Europe at a time when
the extreme north of the continent was still kept uninhabitable
by sheets of ice, and then suppose some of these following the
retreating ice-line into the peninsula of Scandinavia, we have
a probable hypothesis which sufficiently explains how in this
hiixed population thus restored to conditions exactly similar
to those which had evolved one of its component races, the
latter rapidly developed at the expense of the other, so that
the proportion of long to short skulls in the old Swedish
burial-places of the earliest prehistoric period is exactly the
reverse of what we f nd in Southern Germany.
It is still generally assumed that the short skulls in these
burial-places are those of an alien race — perhaps Finnish serfs.
But it is not necessary to assume that the aristocrats should have
buried low-class foreigners in their own cemeteries ; and it is
simpler to accept these short skulls as a proof that the Aryan
t32 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
race itself was a mixed one. So also the tall, short-headed
race which undoubtedly existed in Western Europe in pre-
historic times may well be the result of a similar mixture
of races.
An additional argument in favour of Scandinavia having
been the original home and nursery of a definite Aryan race
as opposed to the other mixed European populations is afforded
by the dialectal relations of the Aryan language to its cognates.
If Aryan had developed anywhere south of Scandinavia — if
it had developed in the plains of Lithuania, as would other-
wise appear the most probable hypothesis — Aryan and Ugrian
would be connected by many links of intermediate dialects.
But of this we see no traces : the two families are sharply
and definitely opposed to one another in morphological struc-
ture, in spite of their common origin. This points clearly to
a long period of isolation and solitary incubation, so to speak,
on the part of that dialect of Ugro- Altaic which developed
into the earliest stage of parent Aryan ; and this condition is
satisfied, as far as we can see, only by the hypothesis of
Scandinavia having been the original home of the Aryan race
and the Aryan language. Penka, the great advocate of the
Scandinavian origin of the Aryans, has collected numerous
and weighty arguments for this theory from the history and
traditions of the different Aryan nations themselves.
CHAPTER VIII
The Individuality of Languages
In passing from one language to another the most general
impression we receive is that of the strong individuaUty of
each of them. No two languages are alike : even such mere
dialects as Spanish and Portuguese, Danish and Swedish, are
sharply contrasted in many essential features. We soon learn
to recognize each language by its phonetic structure not only
as heard, but also in its written form; even if we know
practically nothing of the language, we can often say after
reading a few lines, " this is Russian or Servian, this looks
like Malay, this is a North-American Indian language."
After further study we learn to feel the deeper divergences of
grammatical structure, range of ideas, and the way in which
ideas are analyzed and expressed ; and all this can be ob-
served and felt spontaneously without any help from direct
grammatical and philological training.
In fact, the comparative and historical study of languages is
apt to blind us to the recognition of the essential individuality
of each of them.
After studying the comparative grammar of the Ar\an
languages with its incessant repetition of comparisons of a
few hundred words such as Sanskrit sunu^ Old Bulgarian
synii, Lithuanian sunus. Old English sunu. Modern English
son, we are apt to forget that such close resemblances are few
and far between, and that even in the most conservative
Aryan languages the number of native words that can be at
once recognized as Aryan is surprisingly small. And when
we come to a language such as Albanian, we find that it is so
133
134 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
full of loan-words from the Romance and Slavonic languages,
and from Turkish and Romaic, that out of more than five
thousand words only about four hundred can be proved to be
native. This is an extreme case ; but even in such languages
as Sanskrit and Greek the number of words of foreign or
obscure etymology is greater than any one would imagine
a prioriy and it must not be forgotten that some of the words
for which etymologies have been found may be familiarizations
of foreign words, like sparrotu-grass for asparagus. When we
find the Sanskrit word for ** bear " (animal) derived from a
root meaning "to shine," we cannot help suspecting either
this explanation or a false etymology. Of those words whose
etymology is certain, many are so disguised by sound-changes
and changes of meaning that none but a philologist could
recognize them. So also dialect-enthusiasts pick out a few
sensational archaisms, and ignore the fact that the special
vocabulary of their dialect is made up just as much of dis-
tortions of often only half-understood words of French and
learned origin imported direct from the standard language,
such as bayonet, bj-otichitis. It is the same with the recognition
of athnities. Finnish, Lappish and Hungarian are closely
related, but it was not till 1770 that the Hungarian Sajnovics
published his proof that Hungarian and Lappish were the
same language — that is, cognate — and so laid the foundations
of comparative Ugrian grammar. Nor was it without hesitation
that the founders of Aryan comparative philology admitted
the Celtic languages into the Aryan family.
We find the same individuality in the general structure of
languages. Sanskrit, Latin and Greek are all inflectional
languages belonging to the same family, and yet they make a
very dilferent use of their common inflectional material.
There can be no greater contrast than that between the varied
building up of the Latin sentence with its constant alternation
oi direct and indirect narration, accusative with infinitive,
and ablative absolute, and its finely-graded sequence of tenses,
and the heavy and monotonous classical Sanskrit sentence
overloaded with participles and gerunds, often to the almost
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF LANGUAGES 135
comp'.ete exclusion of the finite verb, and its long compounds
which usurp the functions of inflection. Greek, again, uses
its inflections in a very different way from Latin, and more
like th? modern analytical languages of Europe.
From th's point of view the morphological classification of
languages acts as a welcome corrective to the purely genealogical
and historical classification. It teaches us both to recognize
what are the really characteristic and more or less permanent
features in the different periods of a language or in the members
of a group of cognate languages, and also to realize that
languages genealogically unconnected may develope similar
morphological structure. But even an elaborate morphological
classification does but scant justice to the infinite variety of
linguistic structure, as we see from what has just been said
about the divergent structure of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek.
Phonetic individuality. The first thing that strikes
us in a new language is, of course, its phonetic structure.
This depends, in the first place, on the sounds of which it is
composed. Every language, and every period of a language,
selects for its own use only some out of the whole body of
available sounds. Thus English has mixed vowels, but no
front-round vowels of the type of French u, and it is rich in
hiss-sounds. Arabic, again, is characterized by its numerous
back and throat consonants — x, y, k, q (inner k), h, ', '
(glottal stop). The number of elementary sounds in a lan-
guage is also characteristic. Harmonious and sonorous languages
have few sounds with well-marked distinctions, especially
in the vowel system ; while an exceptionally large number
of sounds, as in Celtic Irish, and to a less extent in English
and Russian, implies numerous transitional and intermediate
sounds, which detract from the harmony of the language and
give it a certain character of indistinctness and even monotony.
Very characteristic, too, are distinctions which result from
different principles of combination. Thus English and Arabic
tolerate what in other languages would seem intolerably harsh
consonant-groups, which in Arabic, however, are excluded
from the beginning of the word, while English has no more
136 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
objection to such initial combinations as (str-) than it has to
such final groups as (-ksts). Then we have endless synthetic
distinctions of stress, quantity, and intonation. In some lan-
guages, such as French, there is a tendency to equal stress on
all syllables. In Finnish there is a strong stress on the first
syllable with rigorous preservation of the distinctions of short
and long vowels, double and single consonants in the unstressed
syllables, which is elfected not so much by exaggerating the
length of the long vowels and double consonants as by
excessive shortening of the short vowels and uttering the
single consonants as lightly as possible. In English we have
strong stress on any syllable with great obscuration of the un-
stressed syllables. In Russian and the Romance languages there
is hardly any distinction of quantity in the vowels ; and in
Spanish we hear a combination of very short vowel-quantity
and falling intonation which gives the language a harsh and
almost brutal character in spite of the harmony of its vowels.
In Swedish every full-stressed vowel is either long or followed
by more than one consonant, so that there are no short stressed
syllables, which gives a certain heaviness to this harmonious
language. The influence of intonation on the general phonetic
character of a language is equally important. The monotonous
falling tones of Finnish and the predominance of rising tones
in Scotch and of compound rising tones in American-English
are among the most marked phonetic characteristics of these
forms of speech, and the ones that strike a foreigner first.
The constant alternation of varied word-tones in Chinese
give a peculiar graceful animation to the language which
reminds one of the twittering of birds.
Besides these influences, the general quality of the voice is
liable to be modified by changes in the shape of the throat
and mouth passages, which give rise to the various qualities of
voice known as clear, dull, muffled, nasal, wheezing, strangled
voice. The last effect is a disagreeable feature of Portuguese
pronunciation.
Every language has certain general tendencies which control
the organic formation of its sounds, constituting what is called
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF LANGUAGES 137
its organic basis or basis of articulation. Thus in English we
flatten and lower the tongue, hollow the fore part of it and
generally draw it back from the teeth, while we keep the lips
in a neutral position without either pouting them or spreading
them out at the corners. This flattening of the tongue leads
to widening of the vowels, its hollowing gives a general dull
resonance which is especially noticeable in the (1), while the
retraction of the tongue favours the development of mixed
vowels, and the neutral position of the lips tends to eliminate
front-round vowels. In French everything is reversed ; the
tongue is arched and raised and advanced, and the lips
articulate with energy, whence narrowness both in vowels
and consonants, a tendency to outer (dental) articulation of
point and blade consonants, and full development of front-
round vowels. The organic basis together with the general
synthetic distinctions of stress and intonation are often more
permanent than the actual sounds of a language, and a minute
comparative study of such features will in the futwe be an
essential branch of comparative philology. But the organic
basis is, of course, like everything else in language, liable to
change. Thus the organic basis of early or Tudor Modern
English seems to have been different in many respects from
that of the present English and to have been nearer to that
of Modern French.
Range of Expression. If we turn now from the
purely formal to the grammatical and logical characteristics
of languages, our attention may first be directed to differences
in range of expression. We cannot expect the speakers of
a language to have expressions for ideas and things with
which they are unacquainted ; but even within the limits of
what is common to all minds we find great diflerences in
detail. Often in speaking a foreign language we seek in vain
for a precise equivalent for some native word or idiom, and
find that there is not any definite equivalent, and that we
must content ourselves with a vague periphrasis. Sometimes
the difficulty arises from want of an abstract general term,
as when in savage languages there is no word for " tree " but
138 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
only names for the different kinds of trees, or no word for
"wash" but only words for washing the feet, washing the
hands and so on. On the other hand, the expression may be
too vague ; most languages have words like get in English or
coup in French, which to a foreigner seem to mean almost
anything.
In comparing the range of expression and copiousness of
vocabulary in different languages we must be cautious in as-
suming that a language is unable to express a certain idea merely
because we do not find the expression in the exact place in
the language where we expect to find it. As we have seen,
there are many languages which have no plural inflection or
indeed any grammatical marking of the plural ; but this does
not imply that they are unable to make the distinction ; in
such languages the plural is marked by the addition of some
such word as "several" or "many." So also we make the
German mannle'in into "little man " with a full-word instead
of a diminutive ending. We arc often inclined to admire and
envy languages which have special derivative elements with
which they can express such ideas as " succeed in shooting a
bird," " gain by singing," " begin to become red," and
express the idea of smallness combined either with that of
affection or of contempt by the addition of special endings ;
but all the ideas conveyed by such formations can generally
be expressed with greater precision and often with equal
brevity in a language destitu'.e of them.
In estimating the copiousness of the vocabulary of a language
we ought strictly first to eliminate everything that can be
formed a priori — that is, such compounds and derivatives as
giraffe-catcher or bonnetless, which, logically speaking, are no
more independent words than the phrases catcher of giraffes
and tv'ithout a bonnet — together with all fantastic literary new
formations which perhaps occur only in the writings of a single
author. We must also limit ourselves strictly to one period
of a language: the English of the Neiv English Dictionary is
not one language, but half-a-dozen. So also in comparing
the number of roots we must, when we come to the Semitic
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF LANGUAGES
139
trilitcral roots, make some allowance for the fact that they are
really derivatives from biliteral roots (p. 95.)
Language and Nationality. The interesting question
now arises, How far are the infinite varieties in the charac-
ters of languages to be regarded as the expression of the
national characteristics of their speakers ?
As already remarked, we cannot expect to find in a
language expressions for what is unfamiliar to its speakers.
Hence from a meagre vocabulary we cannot but infer a low
intellectual development — so low indeed as to make the
speakers unable to observe the objects around them. The
question is, whether such languages really exist outside the
imaginations of a priori theorists. A statement has often been
repeated that the natives of a certain district in the South of
England had only three hundred words in their vocabulary.
But when we find a missionary in Tierra del Fuego compiling
a dictionary of 30,000 words in the Yaagan language — that is,
a hundred times as many — we cannot give any credence to this
statement, especially if we consider the number of names of
different parts of a waggon or a plough, and all the words
required in connection even with a single agricultural operation,
together with names of birds, plants, and other natural objects.
The complexity and variety of external objects and phenomena
is so great that even on a purely material and objective basis
there would be no difficulty in increasing the vocabulary
indefinitely. The truth seems to be that in all languages —
whether primitive or advanced — words are formed to express
whatever calls for expression, and this goes on till the vocabu-
lary is so large that any addition to it would be a strain on the
memory of the average speaker. The condition of any word
being permanently adopted into the vocabulary is that it must
occur often enough not to be forgotten by the majority of the
speakers.
It is therefore more profitable to consider the relative
frequency of the different categories of ideas in the vocabulary.
If a group of cognate languages have no word in common to
express any idea connected with agriculture, but have many
I40 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
unborrowed words connected with hunting, we are inclined to
infer that the speakers of the parent language had not emerged
from the hunting or at least the nomadic stage. A compari-
son of the common Aryan vocabulary seems to show that the
undivided Aryans were nomad herdsmen and hunters, with
perhaps some knowledge of agriculture, but with hardly any
knowledge of metal-working. The common Semitic voca-
bulary shows a striking poverty in designations of external
nature ; and the negative evidence thus afforded of life in a
barren monotonous country is confirmed by positive linguistic
evidence of the primitive Semites having been dwellers of the
desert ; which, with other arguments, leaves but little doubt
that their original home was Arabia.
But " linguistic palaeontology " requires caution and control
by archseology. Thus it used to be assumed that because all
the Aryan languages had originally the same word for
"horse" — even Old English still preserves Aryan ecivo in
the form of coh — therefore the Aryans must have ridden or
at least driven horses. But the archaeological evidence only
tells us that the Stone-age ancestors of the Aryans hunted the
horse for its flesh, so that all the Aryan ecivo allows us to
infer is that the Aryans were acquainted with the wild horse
of the plains of Europe.
We have also to be cautious in drawing negative conclusions.
Thus it has been inferred from the absence of any common
Aryan or Ugrian word for "blue" and some other colours
together with a variety of other evidence of the same kind
that the older races were more or less colour-blind. But it
was afterwards observed that all the colours whose names can
be referred back to parent Aryan and parent Ugrian are
colours of cattle ; that is, the first colours to receive special
names were those by which they identified their most valued
domestic animals. This is confirmed by the fact that in
Finnish the word for " colour," that is kam}a, originally
meant simply "hair." It is evident therefore that such
limitations have nothing to do with the degree of development
of the colour-sense : these primitive people did not speak
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF LANGUAGES 141
much of " blue " because they had little occasion to do so ;
and if they had, it was easy to say " like the sky, the colour
of the sky."
That the vocabulary of a language not only can, but must
reflect something of the character and environment of its
speakers is evident. The question how far the morphological
structure of a language does so, is more difficult.
Here, again, caution is necessary. When we find the Old
Germanic languages modifying the Aryan principles of concord
by putting an adjective which refers to a man and woman
together in the neuter plural instead of the masculine plural,
as was originally done, we are inclined to regard it as a proof
that our forefathers had already developed something of that
abstract and philosophical turn of mind which the average
Englishman is apt to associate with the name " German."
But it turns out tliat the change was originally a purely
phonetic one, by which the old dual ending was confused
with that of the neuter plural. So it was not the minds of the
speakers which created this new principle of concord; it was
the phonetic change which created first the new concord, and
then the logical sense that it was more rational to include
male and female under the more abstract neuter than to merge
them under what was considered the superior sex.
The doubling of the middle consonant in Arabic verb-roots
to give them a special causal or transitive meaning, as in sallam
"surrender," seems a natural enough piece of symbolism, but
it is more probable that these forms are the result of contrac-
tions of the reduplicated roots which have similar grammatical
functions in the cognate Hamitic languages of North Africa.
It is still more doubtful whether the curiously symmetrical use
of the three short vowels ^, /, w, in Arabic to denote the
accusative, genitive, and nominative cases respectively is any-
thing but fortuitous, for such abstract symbolism seems far
beyond the mental capacity of a primitive population. We
might as well attempt to find symbolism in j///^, sang, sung.
XVe also have to be careful in our chronology. From the
fact that some of the Aryan-speaking populations have been
142 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
the great carriers of civilization, and that the Aryan languages
were originally inflectional, it has been inferred that the in-
flectional structure is in some way an expression of the intel-
lectual superiority of the Aryan race. But the truth is that
at the time when the Aryans laid the foundations of their
inflectional system they were far from being in an advanced
state of civilization, and that it was not till a long time after
that — after they had served their apprenticeship to the older
civilizations of the Mediterranean, Egypt, and Western Asia
— that they developed any independent intellectual activity.
It must also be observed that some of the great triumphs of
civilization have been achieved by nations speaking Aryan
languages in the analytical rather than the inliectional stage.
Even of Greek we may say that its genius is analytical rather
than inflectional, and that instead of the Greek inflections
being the expression of Greek intellect, they were rather
antagonistic to it.
The only features of Greek that can be really reflections of
the Greek mind are those which were developed in the
language itself. The contrast between the Greek and the
less intellectual Roman mind is clearly stamped on the lan-
guages of these two nations. The practical Roman was con-
tented V. ith a narrow concrete vocabulary, and aimed at a
businesslike conciseness of expression, to which he was
inclined to sacrifice both flexibility of expression and distinct-
ness of meaning. All of this he found compatible with, and
to some extent in harmony with his traditional system of
inflections, which he accordingly developed in such a way as
to create a perfect type of inflectional speech — that is, from
the syntactical point of view. The active Greek mind, on
the other hand, required flexibility and clearness of structure
wherewith to give expression to his abstract speculations, and
finding the purely inflectional system inadequate for his wants,
proceeded to anticipate the analytical developments of the
later Aryan languages. He evolved a definite article, which
in time lost nearly all meaning, and became a mere prop for
inflections — a grammatical device for inflecting infinitives and
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF LANGUAGES 143
sn on. The analytical genius of the Greeks is most clearly
shown in their particles, whose over-development at the same
time reflects some of the weak sides of their intellectual
temperament.
Chinese bears in its structure still more definite marks of
intellectual power. It combines Roman brevity with Greek
love of clearness and moderation of expression, but shows
none of the imaginative and poetical qualities reflected in
most Aryan languages. It is characteristic of the Chinese
mind that it never personifies : in such a collocation as
that which is literally translated his hand guide me, where
hand would otherwise be naturally taken as the subject, we
must take it adverbially, and translate " with his hand he
guides me." The Chinese linguistic instinct is, as we have
seen (p. 69), highly abstract and generalizing, and this
tendency, together with the desire of logical clearness, has
led to a great development of particles, which, like the
Greek, are often untranslateable. This use of particles is
however partly the result of the development of sentence,
intonation being hindered by the word-tones, many of these
particles serving practically as marks of punctuation. If
Old Chinese is often ambiguous, this is partly the result of
our unfamiliarity with Chinese trains of thought, partly of
excessive conciseness and reliance on the context, in which
Chinese is the very antipodes of Greek and the other Old
Aryan languages.
Intellectual activity is shown as clearly in the structure of
the Chinese sentence as in those of Greek and Latin. The
flexibility of the Old Chinese construction and the ease with
which logically prominent words are put at the beginning of
the sentence are truly marvellous when we consider that all
this is done in spite of the dependence of Chinese grammar on
word-order and with the help only of a few loose particles.
The other extreme of artless monotony is shown in Arabic
and the other Semitic languages. Arabic has practically no
infinitives or participles and makes but little use of dependent
sentences, so that its periods are very short, and mainly para-
144 THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE
tactic. The Arabic sentence with its excessive use of finite
verbs is, however, not at all clumsy hke that of the later San-
skrit and the Ugro-Altaic languages with their excessive use
of infinitives and participles ; on the contrary, its simplicity
gives a great charm to simple narrative. But the sentence
structure of all these languages gives the impression either of
want of intellectual activity or of over abstraction. It is to be
observed that the earlier pre-classical Sanskrit prose is much
lighter and more varied than the classical, and makes a free
use of finite verbs ; much of the heaviness of the later language
may be the result of its being a dead language.
The South African Bantu languages certainly reflect one
of the most prominent national characteristics of their speakers.
The African is a born orator and lawyer : he loves arguments
and elaborate statements. It seems evident, therefore, that it
was the necessity of knowing " who's who " in a complicated
legal statement which led to the elaboration of their peculiar
system of concord (p. 57).
We have lastly to remember that language is not merely a
means of expression. Even when a language is extended
from the service of everyday life to that of science, meta-
physics, and religion, there still remains its assthetic and
literary use. We cannot regard language exclusively from
the practical and utilitarian point of view. Language was,
almost from the beginning, a plaything as well as an intel-
lectual tool — a vehicle of wit, humour, imagination and poetrv.
From this point of view we can understand — what would
otherwise be a puzzle — why the development of such a com-
mon-sense language as Chinese is but an isolated phenomenon.
The imaginative and emotional Arvan or Semite could never
have followed the narrow path of Chinese linguistic develop-
ment. To them Chinese would appear like a solid and sym-
metrically built house without ornament outside and with walls
bare of pictures.
But even the Semitic languages, with all their picturesque-
ness and emotional force, lack the flexibility and variety of the
Aryan languages, in which they are, indeed, inferior to the
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF LANGUAGES 145
Ugrian languages as well. The Semitic languages compared
with the Aryan always give the impression of rigid schematism
and artificial symmetry. It is a significant fact that no Sem-
itic race has ever produced anything resembling an epic poem:
it is only the Aryan and the Ugrian languages that can afford
a frame for such a sustained effort of imagination.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following list includes only some of those books which will be
found most directly useful to beginners, or to those who wish to follow
up special branches of study. Purely popular books are mostly excluded,
as also those which now have a mainly historical interest. Fuller
bibliographies will be found in many of the books cited, as also in
Sonnenschein's Best Books and Reader s Guide.
GENERAL WORKS.
Paul, H. Principicn der Sprachgeschichte. Halle, 4th edn., 1909.
Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie. Strassburg, 1909.
Strong, H. A. Introauction to the Study of the History of Language.
London, 1891. [An adaptation of the above work for English
readers.]
Von der Gaselentz, G. Die Sprachivissenschaft. Leipzig, 2nd edn.,
1901.
Sayce, A. H. Princif>lei of Comparati'vc Philology. London, 3rd edn.,
1885.
Sweet, H. Ne'w English Grammar, Part I. Oxford, 1900.
The Practical Study of Languages. London, 1899.
MiJLLER, F. M. Einleitung in die SprachiLtssenschaft. Vienna, 1876-
88. [Gives brief sketches of the structure of the chief languages
and linguistic families, together with a general introduction.]
Handbuch der Klassischen Alter, i 900.
Whitney, W. D. Life and Groiuth of Language. New York, 1875.
Language and the Study of Language. New York, edn. of 1899.
Wade, G. W. Elementary Chapters in Comparati've Philology. 18 87.
WuNDT, W. V'olker psychologic. Leipzig, 1900.
MiSTELi, F. Characteristik der haupts'dchlichsten Typei des Sprachkaus.
Berlin, 1S93.
Byrne, J. General Principles of the Structure of Language. London,
2 vols., I 885.
PoRZCziNSKi. tinleitung in die Sprachzuissenschuft. 1910.
FiNCK, F. N. Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus. Marburg, 1910.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 147
PHONOLOGY.
Passy, p. Etude sur les Changements Fhonittques. Paris, 1890.
The Sounds of the French Language. Paris, 19 13.
Sweet, H. History of English Soundu Oxford, 1888.
Primer of Phonetics. 1906. [Clarendon Press Series.]
Wechssler. debt ex Lautgesetze ? 1900.
ARYAN,
HiRT, K., and Streitberg, W. Indogermanifche Bibliothek. Strassburg,
1907.
Meringer, R. Indogermanische Sprachtuissenschaft. Leipzig (Sammlung
Goschen), 1897.
Giles, P. iihort Manual of Comparati'ue Philology for Classical Students.
London, 1901.
Streitberg, W. Urgermanische Grammatik. Strassburg, 1S96.
Lindsay, W. M. The Latin Language, an Historical Account of Latin
Sounds, Stems, and Flexions. Oxford, 1894.
Penka, K. Herkunft der Arier. Teschen, 1 886. [Largely superseded.]
Taylor, I. Origin of the Aryans. London, 1890. [Largely super-
seded.]
Brugmann, C, and Thumb, A. Untersuchungen zur indo-germanischen
Sprach-und Kulturicissenschaft. Strassburg, 19 10.
Schrader, O. Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte. Strassburg, 3rd
edn., 2 vols., 1906-7.
HiRT, H. Die Indogermanen. Strassburg, 2 vols., 190:5-7.
Feist, S. Europa im Lichte der Vorgeschichte und die Ergebnisse der
Vergleichenden indogermanischen Sprachiuissenschaft. Halle, 1910.
Brugmann and Delbruck. Grundriss der Vergleichenden Grammatik
der indogermanischen Sprachen. Strassburg, 6 vols., 1 886-1 900;
voL ii, 1906-9.
Much, M. Die Heimat der Indo-Germanen. Berlin, 1904.
Meillet, A. Introduction a I'itude comparati'ue des Ungues indo-
europiennes. 1912, 3rd edn,
Les diaUctes indo-europeens. Paris, 1908.
Les Langues dans I' Europe nou-velle. Paris, 1918.
148 BIBLIOGRAPHY
UGRIAN.
Eliot, C. N. E. Finnish Grammar. Oxford, 189 1. [Historical a
comparative as well as practical.]
Anderson, N. Studien zur Vergleichung der Indogermanischen u
Finnisch-ugrischen Sprachen. Dorpat, 1879.
Recent literature is contained mainly in periodicals : see especia
Journal de la SocUte Finno-ougrienne (Helsingfors), and Finnisc/.
ugrische Forschungen (Helsingfors and Leipzig).
ALTAIC.
Grunzel, J. ErHuurf einer Vergleichenden Grammatik der Altaisch
Sprachen nebst einem Vergleichenden Worterbuch. Leipzig, 1895.
Vambery. Uigurische Sprachmonumente under das Kudatku Bilik. Editic
by Radlov, St. Petersburg, 1900.
Winkler. Das UralahHische und seine Gruppen. Berlin, 18S5.
Der Uralahaische Sprachstamm, das Finnische und das Japanisch
Berlin, 1909.
SIMERIAN.
HoMMEL, F. Sumerische Lesestiicke. Munich, 1894. [Includes syll
baries and a short grammar.]
Prince, J. D. Materials for a Sumerian Lexicon. Leipzig, 1905--.
See also correspondence between Briinnow and Halevy in Rci.
Semitique, 1906 ; also Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, si
" Sumerian or Crytography."
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