Lectures on The Science of Language 31

Lectures on The Science of Language 31

We have necessarily confined ourselves in our analysis of language to that

family of languages to which our own tongue, and those with which we are

best acquainted, belong; but what applies to Sanskrit and the Aryan family

applies to the whole realm of human speech. Every language, without a

single exception, that has as yet been cast into the crucible of

comparative grammar, has been found to contain these two substantial

elements, predicative and demonstrative roots. In the Semitic family these

two constituent elements are even more palpable than in Sanskrit and

Greek. Even before the discovery of Sanskrit, and the rise of comparative

philology, Semitic scholars had successfully traced back the whole

dictionary of Hebrew and Arabic to a small number of roots, and as every

root in these languages consists of three consonants, the Semitic

languages have sometimes been called by the name of triliteral.

 

To a still higher degree the constituent elements are, as it were, on the

very surface in the Turanian family of speech. It is one of the

characteristic features of that family, that, whatever the number of

prefixes and suffixes, the root must always stand out in full relief, and

must never be allowed to suffer by its contact with derivative elements.

 

There is one language, the Chinese, in which no analysis of any kind is

required for the discovery of its component parts. It is a language in

which no coalescence of roots has taken place: every word is a root, and

every root is a word. It is, in fact, the most primitive stage in which we

can imagine human language to have existed. It is language _comme il

faut_; it is what we should naturally have expected all languages to be.

 

There are, no doubt, numerous dialects in Asia, Africa, America, and

Polynesia, which have not yet been dissected by the knife of the

grammarian; but we may be satisfied at least with this negative evidence,

that, as yet, no language which has passed through the ordeal of

grammatical analysis has ever disclosed any but these two constituent

elements.

 

The problem, therefore, of the origin of language, which seemed so

perplexing and mysterious to the ancient philosophers, assumes a much

simpler aspect with us. We have learnt what language is made of; we have

found that everything in language, except the roots, is intelligible, and

can be accounted for. There is nothing to surprise us in the combination

of the predicative and demonstrative roots which led to the building up of

all the languages with which we are acquainted, from Chinese to English.

It is not only conceivable, as Professor Pott remarks, “that the formation

of the Sanskrit language, as it is handed down to us, may have been

preceded by a state of the greatest simplicity and entire absence of

inflections, such as is exhibited to the present day by the Chinese and

other monosyllabic languages.” It is absolutely impossible that it should

have been otherwise. After we have seen that all languages must have

started from this Chinese or monosyllabic stage, the only portion of the

problem of the origin of language that remains to be solved is this: How

can we account for the origin of those predicative and demonstrative roots

which form the constituent elements of all human speech, and which have

hitherto resisted all attempts at further analysis? This problem will form

the subject of our two next Lectures.

 

 

 

 

 

LECTURE VIII. MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION.

 

 

We finished in our last Lecture our analysis of language, and we arrived

at the result that _predicative_ and _demonstrative_ roots are the sole

constituent elements of human speech.

 

We now turn back in order to discover how many possible forms of language

may be produced by the free combination of these constituent elements; and

we shall then endeavor to find out whether each of these possible forms

has its real counterpart in some or other of the dialects of mankind. We

are attempting in fact to carry out a _morphological classification_ of

speech, which is based entirely on the form or manner in which roots are

put together, and therefore quite independent of the genealogical

classification which, according to its very nature, is based on the

formations of language handed down ready made from generation to

generation.

 

Before, however, we enter on this, the principal subject of our present

Lecture, we have still to examine, as briefly as possible, a second family

of speech, which, like the Aryan, is established on the strictest

principles of genealogical classification, namely, the _Semitic_.

 

The Semitic family is divided into three branches, the _Aramaic_, the

_Hebraic_, and the _Arabic_.(280)

 

The _Aramaic_ occupies the north, including Syria, Mesopotamia, and part

of the ancient kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria. It is known to us

chiefly in two dialects, the _Syriac_ and _Chaldee_. The former name is

given to the language which has been preserved to us in a translation of

the Bible (the Peshito(281)) ascribed to the second century, and in the

rich Christian literature dating from the fourth. It is still spoken,

though in a very corrupt form, by the Nestorians of Kurdistan, near the

lakes of Van and Urmia, and by some Christian tribes in Mesopotamia; and

an attempt has been made by the American missionaries,(282) stationed at

Urmia, to restore this dialect to some grammatical correctness by

publishing translations and a grammar of what they call the Neo-Syriac

language.

 

The name of _Chaldee_ has been given to the language adopted by the Jews

during the Babylonian captivity. Though the Jews always retained a

knowledge of their sacred language, they soon began to adopt the dialect

of their conquerors, not for conversation only, but also for literary

composition.(283) The book of Ezra contains fragments in Chaldee,

contemporaneous with the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, and

several of the apocryphal books, though preserved to us in Greek only,

were most likely composed originally in Chaldee, and not in Hebrew. The

so-called _Targums_(284) again, or translations and paraphrases of the Old

Testament, written during the centuries immediately preceding and

following the Christian era,(285) give us another specimen of the Aramaic,

or the language of Babylonia, as transplanted to Palestine. This Aramaic

was the dialect spoken by Christ and his disciples. The few authentic

words preserved in the New Testament as spoken by our Lord in His own

language, such as _Talitha kumi_, _Ephphatha_, _Abba_, are not in Hebrew,

but in the Chaldee, or Aramaic, as then spoken by the Jews.(286)

 

After the destruction of Jerusalem the literature of the Jews continued to

be written in the same dialect. The Talmud(287) of Jerusalem of the

fourth, and that of Babylon of the fifth, century exhibit the Aramean, as

spoken by the educated Jews settled in these two localities, though

greatly depraved and spoiled by an admixture of strange elements. This

language remained the literary idiom of the Jews to the tenth century. The

_Masora_,(288) and the traditional commentary of the Old Testament, was

written in it about that time. Soon after the Jews adopted Arabic as their

literary language, and retained it to the thirteenth century. They then

returned to a kind of modernized Hebrew, which they still continue to

employ for learned discussions.

 

It is curious that the Aramaic branch of the Semitic family, though

originally the language of the great kingdoms of Babylon and Nineveh,

should have been preserved to us only in the literature of the Jews, and

of the Christians of Syria. There must have been a Babylonian literature,

for the wisdom of the Chaldeans had acquired a reputation which could

hardly have been sustained without a literature. Abraham must have spoken

Aramaic before he emigrated to Canaan. Laban spoke the same dialect, and

the name which he gave to the heap of stones that was to be a witness

between him and Jacob, (Jegar-sahadutha) is Syriac, whereas Galeed, the

name by which Jacob called it, is Hebrew.(289) If we are ever to recover a

knowledge of that ancient Babylonian literature, it must be from the

cuneiform inscriptions lately brought home from Babylon and Nineveh. They

are clearly written in a Semitic language. About this there can be no

longer any doubt. And though the progress in deciphering them has been

slow, and slower than was at one time expected, yet there is no reason to

despair. In a letter, dated April, 1853, Sir Henry Rawlinson wrote:—

 

“On the clay tablets which we have found at Nineveh, and which now are to

be counted by thousands, there are explanatory treatises on almost every

subject under the sun: the art of writing, grammars, and dictionaries,

notation, weights and measures, divisions of time, chronology, astronomy,

geography, history, mythology, geology, botany, &c. In fact we have now at

our disposal a perfect cyclopædia of Assyrian science.” Considering what

has been achieved in deciphering one class of cuneiform inscriptions, the

Persian, there is no reason to doubt that the whole of that cyclopædia

will some day be read with the same ease with which we read the mountain

records of Darius.

 

There is, however, another miserable remnant of what was once the

literature of the Chaldeans or Babylonians, namely, the “Book of Adam,”

and similar works preserved by the _Mendaïtes_ or _Nasoreans_, a curious

sect settled near Bassora. Though the composition of these works is as

late as the tenth century after Christ, it has been supposed that under a

modern crust of wild and senseless hallucinations, they contain some

grains of genuine ancient Babylonian thought. These _Mendaïtes_ have in

fact been identified with the _Nabateans_, who are mentioned as late as

the tenth century(290) of our era, as a race purely pagan, and distinct

from Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans. In Arabic the name Nabatean(291)

is used for Babylonians,—nay, all the people of Aramaic origin, settled in

the earliest times between the Euphrates and Tigris are referred to by

that name.(292) It is supposed that the Nabateans, who are mentioned about

the beginning of the Christian era as a race distinguished for their

astronomical and general scientific knowledge, were the ancestors of the

mediæval Nabateans, and the descendants of the ancient Babylonians and

Chaldeans. You may have lately seen in some literary journals an account

of a work called “The Nabatean Agriculture.” It exists only in an Arabic

translation by Ibn-Wahshiyyah, the Chaldean,(293) who lived about 900

years after Christ, but the original, which was written by Kuthami in

Aramean, has lately been referred to the beginning of the thirteenth

century B. C. The evidence is not yet fully before us, but from what is

known it seems more likely that this work was the compilation of a

Nabatean, who lived about the fourth century after Christ;(294) and though

it contains ancient traditions, which may go back to the days of the great

Babylonian monarchs, these traditions can hardly be taken as a fair representation of the ancient civilization of the Aramean race.