Lectures on The Science of Language 33

Lectures on The Science of Language 33

There is in Chinese, as we saw before, no formal distinction between a

noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition. The same root,

according to its position in a sentence, may be employed to convey the

meaning of great, greatness, greatly, and to be great. Everything in fact

depends in Chinese on the proper collocation of words in a sentence. Thus

_ngò tà ni_ means “I beat thee;” but _ni tà ngò_ would mean “Thou beatest

me.” Thus _ngŏ ģin_ means “a bad man;” _ģin ngŏ_ would mean “the man is

bad.”

 

As long as every word, or part of a word, is felt to express its own

radical meaning, a language belongs to the first or radical stage. As soon

as such words as _tse_ in _ģi-tse_, day, _li_ in _ŭŏ-li_, at home, or _ỳ_

in _ỳ-ćáng_, with the stick, lose their etymological meaning and become

mere signs of derivation or of case, language enters into the second or

_Terminational_ stage.

 

By far the largest number of languages belong to this stage. The whole of

what is called the _Turanian_ family of speech consists of Terminational

or Agglutinative languages, and this Turanian family comprises in reality

all languages spoken in Asia and Europe, and not included under the Aryan

and Semitic families, with the exception of Chinese and its cognate

dialects. In the great continent of the Old World the Semitic and Aryan

languages occupy only what may be called the four western peninsulas,

namely, India with Persia, Arabia, Asia Minor, and Europe; and we have

reason to suppose that even these countries were held by Turanian tribes

previous to the arrival of the Aryan and Semitic nations.

 

This Turanian family is of great importance in the science of languages.

Some scholars would deny it the name of a family; and if family is only

applicable to dialects so closely connected among themselves as the Aryan

or Semitic, it would no doubt be preferable to speak of the Turanian as a

class or group, and not as a family of languages. But this concession must

not be understood as an admission that the members of this class start

from different sources, and that they are held together, not by

genealogical affinity, but by morphological similarity only.

 

These languages share elements in common which they must have borrowed

from the same source, and their formal coincidences, though of a different

character from those of the Aryan and Semitic families, are such that it

would be impossible to ascribe them to mere accident.

 

The name Turanian is used in opposition to Aryan, and is applied to the

nomadic races of Asia as opposed to the agricultural or Aryan races.

 

The Turanian family or class consists of two great divisions, the

_Northern_ and the _Southern_.

 

The Northern is sometimes called the _Ural-Altaic_ or _Ugro-Tataric_, and

it is divided into five sections, the _Tungusic_, _Mongolic_, _Turkic_,

_Finnic_, and _Samoyedic_.

 

The Southern, which occupies the south of Asia, is divided into four

classes, the _Tamulic_, or the languages of the Dekhan; the _Bhotîya_, or

the dialects of Tibet and Bhotan; the _Taïc_, or the dialects of Siam, and

the _Malaic_, or the Malay and Polynesian dialects.

 

No doubt if we expected to find in this immense number of languages the

same family likeness which holds the Semitic or Aryan languages together,

we should be disappointed. But the very absence of that family likeness

constitutes one of the distinguishing features of the Turanian dialects.

They are _Nomad_ languages, as contrasted with the Aryan, and Semitic

languages.(301) In the latter most words and grammatical forms were thrown

out but once by the creative power of one generation, and they were not

lightly parted with, even though their original distinctness had been

blurred by phonetic corruption. To hand down a language in this manner is

possible only among people whose history runs on in one main stream; and

where religion, law, and poetry supply well-defined borders which hem in

on every side the current of language. Among the Turanian nomads no such

nucleus of a political, social, or literary character has ever been

formed. Empires were no sooner founded than they were scattered again like

the sand-clouds of the desert; no laws, no songs, no stories outlived the

age of their authors. How quickly language can change, if thus left to

itself without any literary standard, we saw in a former Lecture, when

treating of the growth of dialects. The most necessary substantives, such

as father, mother, daughter, son, have frequently been lost and replaced

by synonymes in the different dialects of Turanian speech, and the

grammatical terminations have been treated with the same freedom.

Nevertheless, some of the Turanian numerals and pronouns, and many

Turanian roots, point to a single original source; and the common words

and common roots, which have been discovered in the most distant branches

of the Turanian stock, warrant the admission of a real, though very

distant, genealogical relationship of all Turanian speech.

 

The most characteristic feature of the Turanian languages is what has been

called _Agglutination_, or “gluing together.”(302) This means not only

that, in their grammar, pronouns are _glued_ to the verbs in order to form

the conjugation, or prepositions to substantives in order to form

declension. _That_ would not be a distinguishing characteristic of the

Turanian or nomad languages; for in Hebrew as well as in Sanskrit,

conjugation and declension were originally formed on the same principle.

What distinguishes the Turanian languages is, that in them the conjugation

and declension can still be taken to pieces; and although the terminations

have by no means always retained their significative power as independent

words, they are felt as modificatory syllables, and as distinct from the

roots to which they are appended.

 

In the Aryan languages the modifications of words, comprised under

declension and conjugation, were likewise originally expressed by

agglutination. But the component parts began soon to coalesce, so as to

form one integral word, liable in its turn to phonetic corruption to such

an extent that it became impossible after a time to decide which was the

root and which the modificatory element. The difference between an Aryan

and a Turanian language is somewhat the same as between good and bad

mosaic. The Aryan words seem made of one piece, the Turanian words clearly

show the sutures and fissures where the small stones are cemented

together.

 

There was a very good reason why the Turanian languages should have

remained in this second or agglutinative stage. It was felt essential that

the radical portion of each word should stand out in distinct relief, and

never be obscured or absorbed, as happens in the third or inflectional

stage.

 

The French _âge_, for instance, has lost its whole material body, and is

nothing but termination. _Age_ in old French was _eage_ and _edage_.

_Edage_ is a corruption of the Latin _œtaticum_; _œtaticum_ is a

derivative of _œtas_; _œtas_ an abbreviation of _œvitas_; _œvitas_ is

derived from _œvum_, and in _œvum_, _œ_ only is the radical or predicative

element, the Sanskrit _ây_ in _ây-us_, life, which contains the germ from

which these various words derive their life and meaning. From _œvum_ the

Romans derived _œviternus_, contracted into _œternus_, so that _age_ and

_eternity_ flow from the same source. What trace of _œ_ or _œvum_, or even

_œvitas_ and _œtas_, remains in _âge_? Turanian languages cannot afford

such words as _âge_ in their dictionaries. It is an indispensable

requirement in a nomadic language that it should be intelligible to many,

though their intercourse be but scanty. It requires tradition, society,

and literature, to maintain words and forms which can no longer be

analyzed at once. Such words would seldom spring up in nomadic languages,

or if they did, they would die away with each generation.

 

The Aryan verb contains many forms in which the personal pronoun is no

longer felt distinctly. And yet tradition, custom, and law preserve the

life of these veterans, and make us feel unwilling to part with them. But

in the ever-shifting state of a nomadic society no debased coin can be

tolerated in language, no obscure legend accepted on trust. The metal must

be pure, and the legend distinct; that the one may be weighed, and the

other, if not deciphered, at least recognized as a well-known guarantee.

Hence the small proportion of irregular forms in all agglutinative

languages.(303)

 

A Turanian might tolerate the Sanskrit,

 

as-mi, a-si, as-ti, ’s-mas, ’s-tha, ’s-anti,

I am, thou art, he is, we are, you are, they are;

 

or even the Latin,

 

’s-um, e-s, es-t, ’su-mus, es-tis, ’sunt.

 

In these instances, with a few exceptions, root and affix are as

distinguishable as, for instance, in Turkish:

 

bakar-im, bakar-sin, bakar,

I regard, thou regardest, he regards.

 

bakar-iz, bakar-siniz, bakar-lar

we regard, you regard, they regard.

 

But a conjugation like the Hindustání, which is a modern Aryan dialect,

 

hun, hai, hai, hain, ho, hain,

 

would not be compatible with the genius of the Turanian languages, because

it would not answer the requirements of a nomadic life. Turanian dialects

exhibit either no terminational distinctions at all, as in Mandshu, which

is a Tungusic dialect; or a complete and intelligible system of affixes,

as in the spoken dialect of Nyertchinsk, equally of Tungusic descent. But

a state of conjugation in which, through phonetic corruption, the suffix

of the first person singular and plural, and of the third person plural

are the same, where there is no distinction between the second and third

persons singular, and between the first and third persons plural, would

necessarily lead, in a Turanian dialect, to the adoption of new and more

expressive forms. New pronouns would have to be used to mark the persons,

or some other expedient be resorted to for the same purpose.

 

And this will make it still more clear why the Turanian languages, or in

fact all languages in this second or agglutinative stage, though protected

against phonetic corruption more than the Aryan and Semitic languages, are

so much exposed to the changes produced by dialectical regeneration. A

Turanian retains, as it were, the consciousness of his language and

grammar. The idea, for instance, which he connects with a plural is that

of a noun followed by a syllable indicative of plurality; a passive with

him is a verb followed by a syllable expressive of suffering, or eating,

or going.(304) Now these determinative ideas may be expressed in various

ways, and though in one and the same clan, and during one period of time,

a certain number of terminations would become stationary, and be assigned

to the __EXPRESSION__ of certain grammatical categories, such as the plural,

the passive, the genitive, different hordes, as they separated, would

still feel themselves at liberty to repeat the process of grammatical