lectures on the science of language 7

lectures on the science of language 7

In order to understand the meaning of _dialectical __ regeneration_ we

must first see clearly what we mean by dialect. We saw before that

language has no independent substantial existence. Language exists in man,

it lives in being spoken, it dies with each word that is pronounced, and

is no longer heard. It is a mere accident that language should ever have

been reduced to writing, and have been made the vehicle of a written

literature. Even now the largest number of languages have produced no

literature. Among the numerous tribes of Central Asia, Africa, America,

and Polynesia, language still lives in its natural state, in a state of

continual combustion; and it is there that we must go if we wish to gain

an insight into the growth of human speech previous to its being arrested

by any literary interference. What we are accustomed to call languages,

the literary idioms of Greece, and Rome, and India, of Italy, France, and

Spain, must be considered as artificial, rather than as natural forms of

speech. The real and natural life of language is in its dialects, and in

spite of the tyranny exercised by the classical or literary idioms, the

day is still very far off which is to see the dialects, even of such

classical languages as Italian and French, entirely eradicated. About

twenty of the Italian dialects have been reduced to writing, and made

known by the press.(34) Champollion-Figeac reckons the most

distinguishable dialects of France at fourteen.(35) The number of modern

Greek dialects(36) is carried by some as high as seventy, and though many

of these are hardly more than local varieties, yet some, like the

Tzaconic, differ from the literary language as much as Doric differed from

Attic. In the island of Lesbos, villages distant from each other not more

than two or three hours have frequently peculiar words of their own, and

their own peculiar pronunciation.(37) But let us take a language which,

though not without a literature, has been less under the influence of

classical writers than Italian or French, and we shall then see at once

how abundant the growth of dialects! The Friesian, which is spoken on a

small area on the north-western coast of Germany, between the Scheldt and

Jutland, and on the islands near the shore, which has been spoken there

for at least two thousand years,(38) and which possesses literary

documents as old as the twelfth century, is broken up into endless local

dialects. I quote from Kohl’s Travels. “The commonest things,” he writes,

“which are named almost alike all over Europe, receive quite different

names in the different Friesian Islands. Thus, in Amrum, _father_ is

called _aatj_; on the Halligs, _baba_ or _babe_; in Sylt, _foder_ or

_vaar_; in many districts on the main-land, _täte_; in the eastern part of

Föhr, _oti_ or _ohitj_. Although these people live within a couple of

German miles from each other, these words differ more than the Italian

_padre_ and the English _father_. Even the names of their districts and

islands are totally different in different dialects. The island of _Sylt_

is called _Söl_, _Sol_, and _Sal_.” Each of these dialects, though it

might be made out by a Friesian scholar, is unintelligible except to the

peasants of each narrow district in which it prevails. What is therefore

generally called the Friesian language, and described as such in Friesian

grammars, is in reality but one out of many dialects, though, no doubt,

the most important; and the same holds good with regard to all so-called

literary languages.

 

It is a mistake to imagine that dialects are everywhere corruptions of the

literary language. Even in England,(39) the local patois have many forms

which are more primitive than the language of Shakespeare, and the

richness of their vocabulary surpasses, on many points, that of the

classical writers of any period. Dialects have always been the feeders

rather than the channels of a literary language; anyhow, they are parallel

streams which existed long before one of them was raised to that temporary

eminence which is the result of literary cultivation.

 

What Grimm says of the origin of dialects in general applies only to such

as are produced by phonetic corruption. “Dialects,” he writes,(40)

“develop themselves progressively, and the more we look backward in the

history of language the smaller is their number, and the less definite

their features. All multiplicity arises gradually from an original unity.”

So it seems, indeed, if we build our theories of language exclusively on

the materials supplied by literary idioms, such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,

and Gothic. No doubt these are the royal heads in the history of language.

But as political history ought to be more than a chronicle of royal

dynasties, so the historian of language ought never to lose sight of those

lower and popular strata of speech from which these dynasties originally

sprang, and by which alone they are supported.

 

Here, however, lies the difficulty. How are we to trace the history of

dialects? In the ancient history of language, literary dialects alone

supply us with materials, whereas the very existence of spoken dialects is

hardly noticed by ancient writers.

 

We are told, indeed, by Pliny,(41) that in Colchis there were more than

three hundred tribes speaking different dialects; and that the Romans, in

order to carry on any intercourse with the natives, had to employ a

hundred and thirty interpreters. This is probably an exaggeration; but we

have no reason to doubt the statement of Strabo,(42) who speaks of seventy

tribes living together in that country, which, even now, is called “the

mountain of languages.” In modern times, again, when missionaries have

devoted themselves to the study of the languages of savage and illiterate

tribes, they have seldom been able to do more than to acquire one out of

many dialects; and, when their exertions have been at all successful, that

dialect which they had reduced to writing, and made the medium of their

civilizing influence, soon assumed a kind of literary supremacy, so as to

leave the rest behind as barbarous jargons. Yet, whatever is known of the

dialects of savage tribes is chiefly or entirely due to missionaries; and

it is much to be desired that their attention should again and again be

directed to this interesting problem of the dialectical life of language

which they alone have the means of elucidating. Gabriel Sagard, who was

sent as a missionary to the Hurons in 1626, and published his “Grand

Voyage du pays des Hurons,” at Paris, in 1631, states that among these

North American tribes hardly one village speaks the same language as

another; nay, that two families of the same village do not speak exactly

the same language. And he adds what is important, that their language is

changing every day, and is already so much changed that the ancient Huron

language is almost entirely different from the present. During the last

two hundred years, on the contrary, the languages of the Hurons and

Iroquois are said not to have changed at all.(43) We read of

missionaries(44) in Central America who attempted to write down the

language of savage tribes, and who compiled with great care a dictionary

of all the words they could lay hold of. Returning to the same tribe after

the lapse of only ten years, they found that this dictionary had become

antiquated and useless. Old words had sunk to the ground, and new ones had

risen to the surface; and to all outward appearance the language was

completely changed.

 

Nothing surprised the Jesuit missionaries so much as the immense number of

languages spoken by the natives of America. But this, far from being a

proof of a high state of civilization, rather showed that the various

races of America had never submitted, for any length of time, to a

powerful political concentration, and that they had never succeeded in

founding great national empires. Hervas reduces, indeed, all the dialects

of America to eleven families(45)—four for the south, and seven for the

north; but this could be done only by the same careful and minute

comparison which enables us to class the idioms spoken in Iceland and

Ceylon as cognate dialects. For practical purposes the dialects of America

are distinct dialects, and the people who speak them are mutually

unintelligible.

 

We hear the same observations everywhere where the rank growth of dialects

has been watched by intelligent observers. If we turn our eyes to Burmah,

we find that there the Burmese has produced a considerable literature, and

is the recognized medium of communication not only in Burmah, but likewise

in Pegu and Arakan. But the intricate mountain ranges of the peninsula of

the Irawaddy(46) afford a safe refuge to many independent tribes, speaking

their own independent dialects; and in the neighborhood of Manipura alone

Captain Gordon collected no less than twelve dialects. “Some of them,” he

says, “are spoken by no more than thirty or forty families, yet so

different from the rest as to be unintelligible to the nearest

neighborhood.” Brown, the excellent American missionary, who has spent his

whole life in preaching the Gospel in that part of the world, tells us

that some tribes who left their native village to settle in another

valley, became unintelligible to their forefathers in two or three

generations.(47)

 

In the north of Asia the Ostiakes, as Messerschmidt informs us, though

really speaking the same language everywhere, have produced so many words

and forms peculiar to each tribe, that even within the limits of twelve or

twenty German miles, communication among them becomes extremely difficult.

Castren, the heroic explorer of the languages of northern and central

Asia,(48) assures us that some of the Mongolian dialects are actually

entering into a new phase of grammatical life; and that while the literary

language of the Mongolians has no terminations for the persons of the

verb, that characteristic feature of Turanian speech had lately broken out

in the spoken dialects of the Buriates and in the Tungusic idioms near

Njertschinsk in Siberia.

 

One more observation of the same character from the pen of Robert Moffat,

in his “Missionary Scenes and Labors in Southern Africa.” “The purity and

harmony of language,” he writes, “is kept up by their pitches, or public

meetings, by their festivals and ceremonies, as well as by their songs and

their constant intercourse. With the isolated villagers of the desert it

is far otherwise; they have no such meetings; they are compelled to

traverse the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village.

On such occasions fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden,

often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of

two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are

beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and

those still further advanced, romping and playing together, the children

of nature, through their livelong day, _become habituated to a language of

their own_. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious; and thus,

from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect of a host of mongrel words and

phrases, joined together without rule, and _in the course of one

generation the entire character of the language is changed_.”

 

Such is the life of language in a state of nature; and in a similar

manner, we have a right to conclude, languages grew up which we only know

after the bit and bridle of literature were thrown over their necks. It

need not be a written or classical literature to give an ascendency to one

out of many dialects, and to impart to its peculiarities an undisputed

legitimacy. Speeches at pitches or public meetings, popular ballads,

national laws, religious oracles, exercise, though to a smaller extent,

the same influence. They will arrest the natural flow of language in the

countless rivulets of its dialects, and give a permanency to certain

formations of speech which, without these external influences, could have

enjoyed but an ephemeral existence. Though we cannot fully enter, at

present, on the problem of the origin of language, yet this we can clearly

see, that, whatever the origin of language was, its first tendency must

have been towards an unbounded variety. To this there was, however, a

natural check, which prepared from the very beginning the growth of

national and literary languages. The language of the father became the

language of a family; the language of a family that of a clan. In one and

the same clan different families would preserve among themselves their own

familiar forms and __EXPRESSION__s. They would add new words, some so fanciful

and quaint as to be hardly intelligible to other members of the same clan.

Such __EXPRESSION__s would naturally be suppressed, as we suppress provincial

peculiarities and pet words of our own, at large assemblies where all

clansmen meet and are expected to take part in general discussions. But

they would be cherished all the more round the fire of each tent, in

proportion as the general dialect of the clan assumed a more formal

character. Class dialects, too, would spring up; the dialects of servants,

grooms, shepherds, and soldiers. Women would have their own household

words; and the rising generation would not be long without a more racy

phraseology of their own. Even we, in this literary age, and at a distance

of thousands of years from those early fathers of language, do not speak

at home as we speak in public. The same circumstances which give rise to

the formal language of a clan, as distinguished from the dialects of

families, produce, on a larger scale, the languages of a confederation of

clans, of nascent colonies, of rising nationalities. Before there is a

national language, there have always been hundreds of dialects in

districts, towns, villages, clans, and families; and though the progress

of civilization and centralization tends to reduce their number and to

soften their features, it has not as yet annihilated them, even in our own time.