LANGUAGE—(_continued_).
Articulate Speech, 130—Growth of Meanings, 131—Abstract
Words, 135—Real and Grammatical Words, 136—Parts of Speech,
138—Sentences, 139—Analytic Language, 139—Word Combination,
140—Synthetic Language, 141—Affixes, 142—Sound-change,
143—Roots, 144—Syntax, 146—Government and Concord, 147—Gender,
149—Development of Language, 150.
A sentence being made up of its connected sounds as a limb is made up of
its joints, we call language _articulate_ or “jointed,” to distinguish
it from the _inarticulate_ or “unjointed” sounds uttered by the lower
animals. Such conversation by gestures and exclamations as was shown
in the last chapter to be a natural language common to mankind, is
half-way between the communications of animals and full human speech.
Every people, even the smallest and most savage tribe, has an articulate
language, carried on by a whole system of sounds and meanings, which
serves the speaker as a sort of catalogue of the contents of the world he
lives in, taking in every subject he thinks about, and enabling him to
say what he thinks about it. What a complicated and ingenious apparatus a
language may be, the Greek and Latin grammars sufficiently show. Yet the
more carefully such difficult languages are looked into, the more plainly
it is seen that they grew up out of earlier and simpler kinds of speech.
It is not our business here to make a systematic survey of the structure
of languages, such as will be found in the treatises of Max Müller,
Sayce, Whitney, and Peile. What we have to attend to, is that many of the
processes by which languages have been built up are still to be found at
work among men, and that grammar is not a set of arbitrary rules framed
by grammarians, but the result of man’s efforts to get easier, fuller,
and exacter expression for his thoughts. It may be noticed that our
examples are oftener taken from English than from any other tongue. The
reason of this is not merely the convenience of using the most familiar
words as instances, but that English is of all existing languages perhaps
the best for explaining the development of language in general. While its
words may in great part be traced to high antiquity, its structure has
passed through extreme changes in coming down to modern times, and in its
present state the language at once keeps up relics of ancient formations,
and has the freest growth actually going on. Thus, in one way or another,
English has something to show in illustration of three out of four of the
processes known to have helped in the making of language, at any time and
anywhere.
As in the course of ages man’s knowledge became wider and his
civilization more complex, his language had to keep up with them.
Comparatively few and plain expressions had sufficed for his early
rude condition, but now more and more terms had to be added for the
new notions, implements, arts, offices, and relations of more highly
organized society. Etymology shows how such new words are made by
altering and combining old ones, carrying on old words from the old
state of things to do duty in the new, shifting their meanings, and
finding in any new thought some resemblance to an old one that would
serve to give it a name. English is full of traces of these ways of
word-making and word-shifting. For instance, that spacious stone building
is still called, as its rough predecessors were, a _barrack_ (that is,
hut); in it a _regiment_ (that is, a ruling or command) of _soldiers_
(that is, paid men) of the _infantry_ (that is, lads, who fought on foot)
are being _inspected_ (that is, looked into); each _company_ (that is,
those who have bread together) being under a _captain_ (that is, headman)
and his _lieutenants_ (that is, place-holders). On the front of the
building is a _clock_, a machine which keeps on its old name, meaning
a bell, from the ages when its predecessor was only a bell on which a
watchman struck the hours; in later times were added the _weights_, lumps
of metal so-called from the weights of the balance, the _pendulum_ (or
hanger), and what are metaphorically called the _face_ and _hands_, for
showing on a _scale_ (or ladder) the _hours_ (or times), divided into
_minutes_ (or smalls), and then again into _seconds_ (or followings).
These instances are intentionally not drawn from the depths of etymology,
but are taken to show the ordinary ways in which language finds means
to supply the new terms of advancing society. It will be worth while
to give a few cases showing that the languages of less civilized
races do their duty in much the same ways. The Aztecs called a boat a
“water-house” (_acalli_), and thence the censer in which they burnt copal
as incense came to be called a “little copal-boat” (_copalacaltontli_).
The Vancouver Islanders, when they saw how a screw-steamer went, named
it at once _yetseh-yetsokleh_, that is, the “kick-kicker.” The Hidatsas
of the Missouri till lately had only hard stone for their arrows and
hatchets; so when they became acquainted with iron and copper they made
names for these metals—_uetsasipisa_ and _uetsahisisi_, that is to say,
“stone black” and “stone red,” The horse, when brought by the white men
among peoples who had never seen it, had to be named, and accordingly the
Tahitians called it “pig-carry-man,” while the Sioux Indians said it was
a “magic-dog.”
As a help to understand how words have come to express still more
difficult thoughts, it is well to remember the contrast between the
gesture-language and spoken English (p. 119). It was seen how the
deaf-and-dumb fall short of our power of expressing general and abstract
ideas. Not that they cannot conceive such ideas at all. They use signs
as general terms when they can lay hold of some quality or action as
the mark of a whole class. Thus flapping one’s arms like wings means
any bird, or birds in general, and the sign of legs-four, means beasts,
or quadrupeds in general. The pretence of pouring something out of a
jug expresses the notion of fluid, which they understand, as we do, to
comprise water, tea, quicksilver; and they probably have, though more
dimly than we, such other abstract notions as the whiteness common to
all white things, and the length, breadth, and thickness which all solid
objects have. But while the deaf-mute’s sign must always make us think of
the very thing it imitates, the spoken word can shift its meaning so as
to follow thought wherever it goes. It is instructive to look at words in
this light, to see how, starting from thoughts as plain as those shown by
the signs of the American savage, they can come on to the most difficult
terms of the lawyer, the mathematician, and the philosopher. To us words
have become, as Lord Bacon said, counters for notions. By means of words
we are enabled to deal with abstract ideas, got by comparing a number
of thoughts, but so as only to attend to what they have in common. The
reader of this no doubt uses easily, and perhaps correctly, such words as
_sort_, _kind_, _thing_, _cause_, to _make_, _be_, _do_, _suffer_. If he
will try to get clear to his mind what is actually meant by these words,
that is, what sense they carry with them wherever used, he may teach
himself the best lesson he ever learnt, either in language or philosophy.
To Englishmen who know no language but their own, these words are indeed,
as it were, counters, chosen at random to express thoughts. Having
learnt by practice how and where to apply them, they are seldom even
conscious of their highly abstract nature. The philologist cannot trace
the complete history of them all, but he knows enough to satisfy him that
they came out of words easier to understand. As in the Bornu language of
Africa, _tando_, to “weave,” has become a general verb to “make,” and in
Hebrew _bârâ_, to “cut” or “hew,” has come to be used for the making of
the heavens and earth; so our word to _make_ may have meant originally to
fit, or join. The English word _sort_ comes from Latin _sors_, a “lot,”
through such a set of meanings as allotment, oracle, fate, condition,
chance, portion; _kind_ meant of one kindred or descent; to _be_ may
have meant to grow; to _suffer_ meant to bear as a burden. It belongs to
high metaphysics to talk of the _apprehension_ of _ideas_; but these now
abstruse words originally meant “catching hold” of “sights.” One use of
etymology is that it teaches how men thus contrived, from words which
expressed plain and easy thoughts, to make terms for more complex and
abstruse thoughts. This is the high road along which the human mind has
travelled from ignorance to knowledge.
The next contrivance of language to be noticed is the use of
“grammatical” words, which serve to connect the “real” words and show
what they have to do with one another. This again is well seen by
looking at the gesture-language (p. 119). If a deaf-and-dumb man wants to
convey in gestures “John is come, he has brought the harness of the pony
and put it on a bench,” he can communicate the sense of this well enough,
but he does it by merely giving the real parts, as “John, harness, pony,
carry, bench, put.” But the articles “a” and “the,” the preposition
“of,” the conjunction “and,” the substantive verb “is,” and the pronouns
“he,” “it,” are grammatical devices which have not signs in his natural
system, and which he does not even learn the meaning of till he is taught
to read. Nevertheless, the deaf-mute, if obliged to be very exact in
his account, can actually give us a good idea of the way in which we
speaking-people have come to use grammatical words. Though he cannot
intimate that it is _a_ bench, he can hold up one finger to show that it
is _one_ bench; though he has no sign for _the_ pony, he can as it were
point it out so as to show it is _that_ pony; instead of expressing _of_
the pony as we do, he can go farther by pretending to take the harness
_off_ the pony. Now English etymology often shows that our grammatical
words were made in very much this way out of real words; _an_ or _a_ was
originally the numeral “one,” still Scotch _ane_; _the_ is of the same
family of words with _that_ and _there_; _of_ is derived from the same
source with _off_; the conjunction _and_ may be traced back to the more
real meaning of “further” or “thereto”; the verb to _have_ has become a
mere auxiliary in “I _have_ come,” yet it keeps its old full sense of to
hold or grasp, when one man seizing another cries “I _have_ him!” When
an Englishman says he “_stands_ corrected,” this does not mean that he
is on his legs, but the verb has sunk into a grammatical auxiliary, now
conveying little more than the passive sense he “is corrected.” It is
curious to notice pronouns being thus formed from more real words. As
the deaf-mute simply points with his finger to express “I” and “thou,”
so the Greenlander’s _uvanga_ = “I,” _ivdlit_ = “thou,” are plainly
derived from _uv_ = “here,” _iv_ = “there.” Quite a different device
appears in Malay, where _âmba_ = “slave” is used as a pronoun “I,” and
_tuwan_ = “lord” as a pronoun “thou.” How this came to pass is plainly
shown by Hebrew, in such phrases as are translated in the English Bible,
“_thy servant_ saith,” “_my lord_ knoweth;” these terms are on the road
to become mere personal pronouns meaning “I” and “thou,” as in the Malay
they actually have done. An exact line cannot be drawn between real and
grammatical words in English or any other language, for the good reason
that words pass so gradually from the real into the grammatical stage,
that the same word may be used in both ways. But though the distinction
is not an exact one, it should be noticed attentively. Any one who will
try to tell an intelligible story in English real words only, without
the help of the grammatical particles which are the links and hinges of
the sentence, will see how the use of grammatical words was one of the
greatest moves made by man in the formation of articulate speech.
Philology goes still further in explaining how the complicated devices
of grammar arose from simple beginnings. The distinction of “parts of
speech,” familiar to us in a highly-developed state from the Greek and
Latin grammars, is a useful means of showing the relations among the
several thoughts talked of in the sentence. But it is possible to do
without parts of speech, and it is not to be supposed that they existed
in the earliest forms of language. In the gesture language it has been
already noticed that there is no such distinction even between noun and
verb. In classical Chinese, _thwan_ means round, a ball, to make round,
to sit round, and so on; _ngan_ means quiet, quietly, to quiet, to
be quiet, &c. We English can quite enter into this, for our language
has so far dropped the ancient inflexions as to break up distinctions
between parts of speech in almost Chinese fashion, using a word either
as substantive, adjective, or verb, as the people’s _quiet_, a _quiet_
people, to _quiet_ the people, and without scruple turning a verb into
a substantive, as a workmen’s _strike_, or a substantive into a verb,
as to _horse_ a coach. The very formation of new parts of speech may be
seen going on, as where Chinese shows how prepositions may be made out
of nouns or verbs. Thus “kuo _chung_,” that is “kingdom _middle_,” is
used to mean “in the kingdom,” and “sha jin _i_ thing,” that is, “kill
man _use_ stick,” expresses “to kill a man _with_ a stick.” So an African
language, the Mandingo, may be caught in the act of making prepositions
out of the nouns _kang_, “neck,” and _kono_, “_belly_,” when they say
“put table _neck_” for “_on_ the table,” and “house _belly_” for “_in_
the house.”
We have next to look at the way in which language grows by combining its
words to form new ones. To see this, words have to be noticed not as
they stand by themselves, but as they come together in actual speaking.
Language consists of sentences, and a sentence is made up of words,
each word being a distinct spoken sound carrying a distinct meaning.
The simplest notion of a sentence may be had from such a language as
Chinese, where it can be taken apart into words which are each a single
syllable. Thus _kou chi shi jin sse_, that is “dog sow eat man food”
means that dogs and sows eat the food of men. The class of languages
which can be taken to pieces in this perfect way are called _analytic_
or isolating. In most languages of the world, however, which are more
or less _synthetic_ or compounding, the tendency is not so strong to
keep words separate, and they are apt to attach themselves together. To
bring clearly before our minds how the joining or compounding of words
takes place, let us notice rather more closely than usual one of our
English sentences. On listening, it will appear that the spoken words
have not really breaks between them as in writing, but the syllables run
on continuously till the speaker pauses, and what marks a word is, not
its being really separated, but its having an emphasis, or stress (as
it is called by Mr. Sweet). Now, from time to time, certain words may
be noticed becoming actually fixed together. How this joining gradually
takes place we sometimes try to show by writing them differently, as
_hard ware_, _hard-ware_, _hardware_; or _steam ship_, _steam-ship_,
_steamship_. On listening to such joined words, it is found that one
of the two has lost its stress, the whole compound having now but one
stress. This is how in talking English our minds give a sign by our
voices that two words have become one. The next step is when the sound
of one of the part-words becomes slurred or broken down, as in the
end-words of _waterman_, _wrongful_. Or both the simple words may have
broken down, as in _boatswain_ and _coxswain_, where writing keeps up the
original meaning of the _swain_ in charge of the _boat_ or _cock_-boat,
but in actual speaking the words have shrunk to what may be spelt
_bōsun_, _coxun_. Now this process of forming a new word by (so to speak)
welding together two or more old ones, is one of the chief acts by which
word-makers, ancient and modern, have furnished themselves with more
manageable terms, which again as the meanings of the separate parts were
less cared for, were cut shorter in speaking. When this has not gone too
far, philologists can still get back to the original elements of such
words, discerning the _fourteen night_ in _fortnight_; the _unus_ and
_decem_ in _undecim_, shrunk still farther in French _onze_; the _jus_,
_dico_, in Latin _judex_, which in English comes down to _judge_.
As examples how word-compounding goes on in unfamiliar tongues,
may be taken the Malay term for “arrow,” which is _anak-panah_, or
“child-(of-the)-bow;” and the native Australian term for “unanimous,”
which is _gurdugynyul_, or “heart-one-come.” To show how such
compound words become shortened, take the Mandingo word for “sister,”
_inbadingmuso_, which is made up of _mi bado dingo muso_, meaning
“my-mother-child-female.” The natives of Vancouver’s Island gave to
a certain long-bearded Englishman the name _Yakpus_; this appears
to have come from _yakhpekukselkous_, made up of words signifying
“long-face-hair-man,” which in speaking had been cut down to _yakpus_.
No one who did not happen to be told the history of this word could ever
have guessed it. This is an important lesson in the science of language,
for it is likely that tens of thousands of words in the languages of
the world may have come into the state in which we find them by the
shortening of long compound words, and when this has been done recklessly
as in the last example, and the history lost, all reasonable hope is gone
of ever getting back to the original form and meaning. Nor does this
process of contraction affect only compound words, but it may act on a
whole sentence, fusing it as it were into one word. Here the synthetic or
compounding principle reaches its height. As a contrast to the analytic
Chinese sentence given at page 139, to show the perfect distinctness
of their words, we may take a sentence of an African language to show
how utterly that distinctness may be lost. When a Grebo negro wishes to
express that he is very angry, he says in his metaphorical way “it has
raised a bone in my breast.” His full words for expressing this would be
_e ya mu kra wudi_, but in speaking he runs them together so that what
he actually utters is _yamukroure_. Where such breaking down has gone on
unchecked, it is easy to see how the language of a barbaric tribe may
alter so much in a few generations as hardly to be recognised. Indeed,
any one who will attend to how English words run together in talking
may satisfy himself that his own language would undergo rapid changes
like those of barbaric tongues, were it not for the schoolmaster and the
printer, who insist on keeping our words fixed and separate.
The few examples here given of new words made by compounding old ones
may serve to illustrate the great principle that such combination, far
from being a mere source of confusion, has been one of the great means
of building up language. Especially, one of the great discoveries in
modern philology is how grammatical formation and inflexion has partly
come about by a kind of word-compounding. It must have seemed to the
old scholars a mysterious and arbitrary proceeding that Latin should
have fixed upon a set of meaningless affixes to inflect and make into
different parts of speech _ago_, _agis_, _agit_, _agere_, _agens_,
_actum_, _actor_, _actio_, _activus_, _activè_, &c. But the mystery to
some extent disappeared when it was noticed how in modern languages the
running together of words produced something of the kind. Thus the _hood_
of _womanhood_, _priesthood_, which is now a mere grammatical suffix,
was in old English a word of itself, _hâd_, meaning form, order, state;
and the suffix -_ly_ was once the distinct word “like,” as is seen by
Anglo-Saxon saying cwên-_lic_, “queen-_like_,” where modern English says
queen_ly_. In Chaucer’s English it is seen how the pronoun _thou_ had
dwindled into a mere verb-ending,
“He pokyd Johan, and seyde, Slepist_ow_?
Herdist_ow_ ever slik a sang er now?”
In English the future tense of the verb to give is “I will give,” or,
colloquially, “I’ll give.” Here writing separates what speaking joins,
but the modern French future tense _donnerai_, _donneras_, is the verb
_donner_ with the auxiliary verb _ai_, _as_, both spoken and written
on to it, so that “je donnerai” is a phrase like “I have to give.” The
plural _donnerons_, _donnerez_, can no longer be thus taken to pieces,
for the remains of the auxiliary verb have passed into meaningless
grammatical affixes _ons_, _ez_. There is reason to suppose that many
of the affixes of Greek and Latin grammar arose in this way by distinct
words combining together and then shrinking. Not that it would be safe
to assert that all affixes came into existence in this particular way.
As was pointed out in the last chapter, men wanting to utter a thought
are clever enough to catch up in very far-fetched ways a sound to express
it. Thus the prefix _ge_, which German uses to make past participles
with, seems to have originally signified “with” or “together,” which
sense it still retains in such words as _gespiele_, “playfellow;” but
by a curious shifting of purpose it came to serve as a means of forming
participles, as _spielen_, to play, _gespielt_, played. It was so used
also in Anglo-Saxon, as _clypian_, to call, _geclypod_, called, which
word in its later form _yclept_ still keeps up among us a trace of
the old grammatical device. Philologists have to keep their eyes open
to this power which language-makers have of using sounds for some new
purpose they were not intended for. Thus, in English, the change of
vowels in _foot_, _feet_, and in _find_, _found_, now serves as a means
of declining the noun and conjugating the verb. But history happens to
show that the vowel change was not originally made with this intention
at all. The Anglo-Saxon declension proves that the vowel was not then a
sign of number in the noun; it was singular _fôt_, _fôtes_, _fêt_, plural
_fêt_, _fôta_, _fôtum_. Nor was it a sign of tense in the Anglo-Saxon
verb, where the perfect of _findan_, to find, had different vowels in its
singular, _ic fand_, I found, and its plural, _we fundon_, we found. It
was the later Englishmen who, knowing nothing of the real reasons which
brought about the variation of the vowels, took to using them to mark
singular from plural, and present from perfect.
It is the work of grammarians in examining any language to take all its
combined words to pieces as far as possible. Greek and Latin grammars
now teach how to analyze words by stripping off their affixes, so as to
get down to the real part or root, which is generally a simple sound
expressing a simple notion. A root is best understood by considering it
to have been once a separate word, as it would be in such a language as
English. Even in languages where the roots seldom appear without some
affix attached, they may stand by themselves as imperative, like Latin
_dic!_ say! Turkish _sev!_ love! But in many languages roots can only
be found as imaginary forms, by comparing a group of words and getting
at the common part belonging to them all. Thus in Latin it appears
from _gnosco_, _gnotus_, &c., that there must be a root _gno_ which
carries the thought of knowing. Going on to Greek, there is found in
_gignōskō_, _gnōsis_, _gnōmē_, &c., the same root _gno_ with the same
meaning. Turning next to Sanskrit, a similar sound, _jnâ_, appears as
the root-form for knowing. In this way, by comparing the whole set of
Aryan or Indo-European languages, it appears that there must have been
in ancient times a word something like _gna_, meaning to know, which is
to be traced not only in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, but in many other
languages of the family, as Russian _znat_, English _know_. A few more
such Aryan roots, which the reader recognises at once in well-known
languages, are _sta_, to stand, _sad_, to sit, _ga_, to go, _i_, to go,
_ma_, to measure, _da_, to give, _vid_, to see, _rag_, to rule, _mar_
to die. These simple sounds seem to have already become fixed to carry
their meanings in the remote ages when the ancestors of the Aryan peoples
wandered with their herds on the highlands of Central Asia. It is not
needful to tell the student of anthropology how interesting it is to
arrive thus at the earliest known root-words of any family. But it should
at the same time be noticed that even in the earliest of these sets of
roots, we seldom come to anything like an actual origin or beginning.
Some few may indeed have been taken direct from the natural language,
for instance _ru_, to roar, and if this was so here is a real origin.
But most roots, to whatever languages of the world they may belong, are
like the group given above, where it is impossible to say confidently how
their sound came to express their meaning. Unless this can be done, it is
safest not to take such roots as really primitive formations, for they
may have a long lost history of the utmost change. How this may happen,
our own language has a useful lesson to teach. Imagine one who knows
no language but English trying to get at its roots. To him the verb to
_roll_ might seem a root-word, a primitive element of language; indeed it
actually has been fancied a natural sound imitating the act of rolling.
Yet any philologist would tell him that English _roll_ is a comparatively
modern form, which came through a long series of earlier stages; it
was borrowed from French _rolle_, _roller_, now _rôle_, _rouler_, all
from Latin _rotulus_, diminutive of _rota_, a wheel, even this coming
from a more ancient verb and signifying a runner or goer. Still more
adventurous is the history of another English word which has now all the
parts of a verb, to _check_, _checking_, _checked_, besides such forms
as a _check_ in one’s course, the _check_-string to stop the coachman,
the _check_-valve to stop the water in a pipe. This word _check_ has
all the simplicity of sound and sense which might belong to an original
root-word. Yet strange to say, it is really the Persian word _shah_,
meaning “king,” which came to Europe with the game of chess as the word
of challenge to the king, and thence by a curious metaphor passed into
a general word for stopping anybody or anything. For all that is known,
many root-words among the Greeks or Jews, or even the simple-looking
monosyllables of the Chinese, may during præhistoric ages have travelled
as far from their real origin as these English verbs. Thus the roots from
which language grows may often be themselves sprung as it were from yet
earlier seeds or cuttings, grown at home or imported from abroad, and
though in our time words mostly come from the ancient roots, the power of
striking new roots is not yet dead.
Having now, in such a broad way as suits the present purpose, looked
at the formation of words, something may be said as to how language
contrives to show the relations among the words of a sentence. This
is done by what grammarians call syntax, concord, and government. It
has been seen (p. 119) that the gesture-language, though wanting in
grammatical forms, has a strongly marked syntax. The deaf-mute’s signs
must follow one another in proper order, otherwise they may convey a
wrong meaning or seem nonsense. So, in spoken languages which do not
inflect their words, such as the Chinese, syntax is the main part of
grammar; thus _li ping_ = sharp weapons, _ping li_ = weapons (are)
sharp; _chi kuo_ = to govern the kingdom, but _kuo chi_ = the kingdom is
governed. This seems quite natural to us, for modern English has come
far towards the Chinese plan of making the sense of the sentence depend
on the order of the words, thus marking the difference between _rank
of families_ and _families of rank_, or between _men kill lions_ and
_lions kill men_. In Latin it is very different, where words can be put
about with such freedom, that the English reader may be hardly able to
make sense of one of Tacitus’ sentences without fresh sorting the words
into some order he can think them in. Especially in Latin verses there
is often hardly more syntax than if the words were nonsense-syllables
arranged only to scan. The sense has to be made out from the grammatical
inflections, as where it is seen that in “vile potabis modicis Sabinum
cantharis,” the cheapness has to do with the wine and the smallness with
the mugs. It is because so many of the inflections have disappeared
from English, that the English translation has to obtain a proper
understanding by stricter order of words. Where the meaning of sentences
depends on order or syntax, that order must be followed, but it must
be borne in mind that this order differs in different languages. For
a single instance, in Malay, where _orang_ = man and _utan_ = forest,
savages and apes are called _orang utan_, which is just opposite to the
English construction “forest man.”
Every one who can construe Greek and Latin sees what real service is done
by government and agreement in showing how the words of a sentence hang
together, what quality is stated of what thing, or who is asserted to act
on what. But even Greek and Latin have changed so much from their earlier
state, that they often fail to show the scholar clearly what they mean
to do, and why. It is useful to make acquaintance with the languages of
ruder nations, which show government and agreement in earlier and plainer
stages of growth. One great object of grammatical construction is to
make it quite clear which of two nouns concerned is subject and which
object, for instance, whether it was a chief who killed a bear, or a bear
who killed a chief. A particle properly attached will do this, as when
the Algonquin Indians put on the syllable _un_ both to noun and verb, in
a way which we may try to translate by the pronoun _him_, thus:—
Ogimau ogi nissa_un_ mukw_un_.
chief he-did kill-_him_ bear-_him_.
Mukwah ogi nissa_un_ ogima_un_.
bear he-did kill-_him_ chief-_him_.
This gives a notion of the natural manner in which grammatical government
may have come into use to mark the parts of the sentence. At the same
time, it shows that different languages may go different ways to work,
for here the verb and object agree together, and the subject (so to
speak) governs both, which is quite unlike our familiar rule of the verb
agreeing with the nominative or subject. To see the working of concord
or agreement in a far clearer and completer form than Latin can show it,
we may look at the Hottentot language, where a sentence may run somewhat
thus, “That woman-_she_, our tribe’s-_she_, rich-being-_she_, another
village-in-dwelling-_she_, praise-we-do cattle-of-_she_, _she_-does
present-us two calves-of-_she_-from.” Here the pronoun running through
the whole sentence makes it clear to the dullest hearer that it is
the woman who is rich, who dwells in another village, whose cattle
are praised, and who gives two of her calves. The terminations in a
Greek or Latin sentence, which show the agreement of substantive and
adjective with their proper verb, are remains of affixes which may have
once carried their signification as plainly as they still do in the
language of the Hottentots. A different plan of concord, but even more
instructive to the classical scholar, appears in the Zulu language,
which divides things into classes, and then carries the marking syllable
of the class right through the sentence, so as to connect all the words
it is attached to. Thus “u-_bu_-kosi _b_-etu o-_bu_-kulu _bu_-ya-bonakala
si-_bu_-tanda,” means “our great kingdom appears, we love it.” Here _bu_,
the mark of the class to which kingdom belongs, is repeated through
every word referring to it. To give an idea how this acts in holding the
sentence together, Dr. Bleek translates it by repeating the _dom_ of
king_dom_ in a similar way; “the king-_dom_, our _dom_, which _dom_ is
the great _dom_, the _dom_ appears, we love the _dom_.” This is clumsy,
but it answers the great purpose of speech, that of making one’s meaning
certain beyond mistake. So, by using different class-syllables for
singular and plural, and carrying them on through the whole sentence, the
Zulu shows the agreement in number more plainly than Greek or Latin can
do. But the Zulu language does not recognise by its class-syllables what
we call gender. It is in fact one of the puzzles of philology, what can
have led the speaker of Aryan languages like Greek, or Semitic languages
like Hebrew, to classify things and thoughts by sex so unreasonably as
they do. For Latin examples, take the following groups: _pes_ (masc.),
_manus_ (fem.), _brachium_ (neut.); _amor_ (masc.), _virtus_ (fem.),
_delictum_ (neut.). German shows gender in as practically absurd a
state, as witness _der_ Hund, _die_ Ratte; _das_ Thier, _die_ Pflanze.
In Anglo-Saxon, _wîf_ (English _wife_), was neuter, while _wîf-man_
(_i.e._ “wife-man,” English _woman_) was masculine. Modern English, in
discarding an old system of grammatical gender that had come to be worse
than useless, has set an example which French and German might do well
to follow. Yet it must be borne in mind that the devices of language,
though they may decay into absurdity, were never originally absurd. No
doubt the gender-system of the classic languages is the remains of an
older and more consistent plan. There are languages outside our classical
education which show that _gender_ (that is _genus_, kind, class,) is by
no means necessarily according to sex. Thus in the Algonquin languages
of North America, and the Dravidian languages of South India, things
are divided not as male or female, but as alive or dead, rational or
irrational, and put accordingly in the animate or major gender, or in the
inanimate or minor gender. Having noticed how the Zulu concord does its
work by regularly repeating the class-sign, we seem to understand how in
the Aryan languages the signs of number and gender may have come to be
used as a similar means of carrying through the sentence the information
that this substantive belongs to that adjective and that verb. Yet even
in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic, such concord falls short of the
fulness and clearness it has among the barbarians of Africa, while
in the languages of modern Europe, especially our own, it has mostly
disappeared, probably because with the advance of intelligence it was no
longer found necessary.
The facts in this chapter will have given the reader some idea how
man has been and still is at work building up language. Any one who
began by studying the grammars of such languages as Greek or Arabic,
or even of such barbarous tongues as Zulu or Eskimo, would think them
wonderfully artificial systems. Indeed, had one of these languages
suddenly come into existence among a tribe of men, this would have been
an event mysterious and unaccountable in the highest degree. But when
one begins at the other end, by noticing the steps by which word-making
and composition, declension and conjugation, concord and syntax, arise
from the simplest and rudest beginnings, then the formation of language
is seen to be reasonable, purposeful, and intelligible. It was shown in
the last chapter that man still possesses the faculty of bringing into
use fresh sounds to express thoughts, and now it may be added that he
still possesses the faculty of framing these sounds into full articulate
speech. Thus every human tribe has the capabilities which, had they not
inherited a language ready-made from their parents, would have enabled
them to make a new language of their own.