Lectures on The Science of Language 39

Lectures on The Science of Language 39

You will have perceived that in what I have said I only argue for the

possibility, not for the necessity, of a common origin of language.

 

I look upon the problem of the common origin of language, which I have

shown to be quite independent of the problem of the common origin of

mankind, as a question which ought to be kept open as long as possible. It

is not, I believe, a problem quite as hopeless as that of the plurality of

worlds, on which so much has been written of late, but it should be

treated very much in the same manner. As it is impossible to demonstrate

by the evidence of the senses that the planets are inhabited, the only way

to prove that they are, is to prove that it is impossible that they should

not be. Thus on the other hand, in order to prove that the planets are not

inhabited, you must prove that it is impossible that they should be. As

soon as the one or the other has been proved, the question will be set at

rest: till then it must remain an open question, whatever our own

predilections on the subject may be.

 

I do not take quite as desponding a view of the problem of the common

origin of language, but I insist on this, that we ought not to allow this

problem to be in any way prejudged. Now it has been the tendency of the

most distinguished writers on comparative philology to take it almost for

granted, that after the discovery of the two families of language, the

Aryan and Semitic, and after the establishment of the close ties of

relationship which unite the members of each, it would be impossible to

admit any longer a common origin of language. It was natural, after the

criteria by which the unity of the Aryan as well as the Semitic dialects

can be proved had been so successfully defined, that the absence of

similar coincidences between any Semitic and Aryan language, or between

these and any other branch of speech, should have led to a belief that no

connection was admissible between them. A Linnæan botanist, who has his

definite marks by which to recognize an Anemone, would reject with equal

confidence any connection between the species Anemone and other flowers

which have since been classed under the same head though deficient in the

Linnæan marks of the Anemone.

 

But there are surely different degrees of affinity in languages as well as

in all other productions of nature, and the different families of speech,

though they cannot show the same signs of relationship by which their

members are held together, need not of necessity have been perfect

strangers to each other from the beginning.

 

Now I confess that when I found the argument used over and over again,

that it is impossible any longer to speak of a common origin of language,

because comparative philology had proved that there existed various

families of language, I felt that this was not true, that at all events it

was an exaggeration.

 

The problem, if properly viewed, bears the following aspect:—“_If you wish

to assert that language had various beginnings, you must prove it

impossible that language could have had a common origin._”

 

No such impossibility has ever been established with regard to a common

origin of the Aryan and Semitic dialects; while on the contrary the

analysis of the grammatical forms in either family has removed many

difficulties, and made it at least intelligible how, with materials

identical or very similar, two individuals, or two families, or two

nations, could in the course of time have produced languages so different

in form as Hebrew and Sanskrit.

 

But still greater light was thrown on the formative and metamorphic

process of language by the study of other dialects unconnected with

Sanskrit or Hebrew, and exhibiting before our eyes the growth of those

grammatical forms (grammatical in the widest sense of the word) which in

the Aryan and Semitic families we know only as formed, not as forming; as

decaying, not as living; as traditional, not as understood and

intentional: I mean the Turanian languages. The traces by which these

languages attest their original relationship are much fainter than in the

Semitic and Aryan families, but they are so of necessity. In the Aryan and

Semitic families, the agglutinative process, by which alone grammatical

forms can be obtained, has been arrested at some time, and this could only

have been through religious or political influences. By the same power

through which an advancing civilization absorbs the manifold dialects in

which every spoken idiom naturally represents itself, the first political

or religious centralization must necessarily have put a check on the

exuberance of an agglutinative speech. Out of many possible forms one

became popular, fixed, and technical for each word, for each grammatical

category; and by means of poetry, law, and religion, a literary or

political language was produced to which thenceforth nothing had to be

added; which in a short time, after becoming unintelligible in its formal

elements, was liable to phonetic corruption only, but incapable of

internal resuscitation. It is necessary to admit a primitive concentration

of this kind for the Aryan and Semitic families, for it is thus only that

we can account for coincidences between Sanskrit and Greek terminations,

which were formed neither from Greek nor from Sanskrit materials, but

which are still identically the same in both. It is in this sense that I

call these languages political or state languages, and it has been truly

said that languages belonging to these families must be able to prove

their relationship by sharing in common not only what is regular and

intelligible, but what is anomalous, unintelligible, and dead.

 

If no such concentration takes place, languages, though formed of the same

materials and originally identical, must necessarily diverge in what we

may call dialects, but in a very different sense from the dialects such as

we find in the later periods of political languages. The process of

agglutination will continue in each clan, and forms becoming

unintelligible will be easily replaced by new and more intelligible

compounds. If the cases are formed by postpositions, new postpositions can

be used as soon as the old ones become obsolete. If the conjugation is

formed by pronouns, new pronouns can be used if the old ones are no longer

sufficiently distinct.

 

Let us ask then, what coincidences we are likely to find in agglutinative

dialects which have become separated, and which gradually approach to a

more settled state? It seems to me that we can only expect to find in them

such coincidences as Castrén and Schott have succeeded in discovering in

the Finnic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Samoyedic languages; and such

as Hodgson, Caldwell, Logan, and myself have pointed out in the Tamulic,

Gangetic, Lohitic, Taïc, and Malaïc languages. They must refer chiefly to

the radical materials of language, or to those parts of speech which it is

most difficult to reproduce, I mean pronouns, numerals, and prepositions.

These languages will hardly ever agree in what is anomalous or inorganic,

because their organism repels continually what begins to be formal and

unintelligible. It is astonishing rather, that any words of a conventional

meaning should have been discovered as the common property of the Turanian

languages, than that most of their words and forms should be peculiar to

each. These coincidences must, however, be accounted for by those who deny

the common origin of the Turanian languages; they must be accounted for,

either as the result of accident, or of an imitative instinct which led

the human mind everywhere to the same onomatopoëtic formations. This has

never been done, and it will require great efforts to achieve it.

 

To myself the study of the Turanian family was interesting particularly

because it offered an opportunity of learning how far languages, supposed

to be of a common origin, might diverge and become dissimilar by the

unrestrained operation of dialectic regeneration.

 

In a letter which I addressed to my friend, the late Baron Bunsen, and

which was published by him in his “Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal

History”(310) (vol. i. pp. 263-521), it had been my object to trace, as

far as I was able, the principles which guided the formation of

agglutinative languages, and to show how far languages may become

dissimilar in their grammar and dictionary, and yet allow us to treat them

as cognate dialects. In answer to the assertion that it was impossible, I

tried, in the fourth, fifth, and sixth sections of that Essay, to show

_how_ it was possible, that, starting from a common ground, languages as

different as Mandshu and Finnish, Malay and Siamese, should have arrived

at their present state, and might still be treated as cognate tongues. And

as I look upon this process of agglutination as the only intelligible

means by which language can acquire a grammatical organization, and clear

the barrier which has arrested the growth of the Chinese idiom, I felt

justified in applying the principles derived from the formation of the

Turanian languages to the Aryan and Semitic families. They also must have

passed through an agglutinative stage, and it is during that period alone

that we can account for the gradual divergence and individualization of

what we afterwards call the Aryan and Semitic forms of speech. If we can

account for the different appearance of Mandshu and Finnish, we can also

account for the distance between Hebrew and Sanskrit. It is true that we

do not know the Aryan speech during its agglutinative period, but we can

infer what it was when we see languages like Finnish and Turkish

approaching more and more to an Aryan type. Such has been the advance

which Turkish has made towards inflectional forms, that Professor Ewald

claims for it the title of a synthetic language, a title which he gives to

the Aryan and Semitic dialects after they have left the agglutinative

stage, and entered into a process of phonetic corruption and dissolution.

“Many of its component parts,” he says, “though they were no doubt

originally, as in every language, independent words, have been reduced to

mere vowels, or have been lost altogether, so that we must infer their

former presence by the changes which they have wrought in the body of the

word. _Göz_ means eye, and _gör_, to see; _ish_, deed, and _ir_, to do;

_îtsh_, the interior, _gîr_, to enter.”(311) Nay, he goes so far as to

admit some formal elements which Turkish shares in common with the Aryan

family, and which therefore could only date from a period when both were

still in their agglutinative infancy. For instance, _di_, as exponent of a

past action; _ta_, as the sign of the past participle of the passive;

_lu_, as a suffix to form adjectives, &c.(312) This is more than I should

venture to assert.

 

Taking this view of the gradual formation of language by agglutination, as

opposed to intussusception, it is hardly necessary to say that, if I speak

of a Turanian family of speech, I use the word family in a different sense

from that which it has with regard to the Aryan and Semitic languages. In

my Letter on the Turanian languages, which has been the subject of such

fierce attacks from those who believe in different beginnings of language

and mankind, I had explained this repeatedly, and I had preferred the term

of _group_ for the Turanian languages, in order to express as clearly as

possible that the relation between Turkish and Mandshu, between Tamil and

Finnish, was a different one, not in degree only, but in kind, from that

between Sanskrit and Greek. “These Turanian languages,” I said (p. 216),

“cannot be considered as standing to each other in the same relation as

Hebrew and Arabic, Sanskrit and Greek.” “They are radii diverging from a

common centre, not children of a common parent.” And still they are not so

widely distant as Hebrew and Sanskrit, because none of them has entered