LANGUAGE AND RACE.
Adoption and loss of Language, 152—Ancestral Language,
153—Families of Language, 155—Aryan, 156—Semitic, 159—Egyptian,
Berber, &c. 160—Tatar or Turanian, 161—South-East Asian,
162—Malayo-Polynesian, 163—Dravidian, 164—African, Bantu,
Hottentot, 164—American, 165—Early Languages and Races, 165.
The next question is, What can be learnt from languages as to the history
of the nations speaking them, and the races these nations belong to?
In former chapters, in dividing mankind into stocks or races according
to their skulls, complexions, and other bodily characters, language was
not taken into account as a mark of race. In fact, a man’s language is no
full and certain proof of his parentage. There are even cases in which
it is totally misleading, as when some of us have seen persons whose
language is English, but their faces Chinese or African, and who, on
inquiry, are found to have been brought away in infancy from their native
countries. It is within every one’s experience how one parent language
disappears in intermarriage, as where persons called Boileau or Muller
may be now absolutely English as to language, in spite of their French
or German ancestry. Now not only individuals but whole populations may
have their native languages thus lost or absorbed. The negroes shipped
as slaves to America were taken from many tribes and had no native tongue
in common, so that they came to talk to one another in the language of
their white masters, and there is now to be seen the curious spectacle
of black woolly-haired families talking broken-down dialects of English,
French, or Spanish. In our own country the Keltic language of the Ancient
Britons has not long since fallen out of use in Cornwall, as in time it
will in Wales. But whether the Keltic language is spoken or not, the
Keltic blood remains in the mixed population of Cornwall, and to class
the modern Cornishmen as of pure English race because they speak English,
would be to misuse the evidence of language. Much bad anthropology has
been made by thus carelessly taking language and race as though they went
always and exactly together. Yet they do go together to a great extent.
Although what a man’s language really proves is not his parentage but
his bringing-up, yet most children are in fact brought up by their own
parents, and inherit their language as well as their features. So long as
people of one race and speech live together in their own nation, their
language will remain a race-mark common to all. And although migration
and intermarriage, conquest and slavery interfere, from time to time,
so that the native tongue of a nation can never tell the whole story of
their ancestry, still it tells a part of it, and that a most important
part. Thus in Cornwall the English tongue is a real record of the
settlement of the English there, though it fails to tell of the Keltic
race who were in the land before them, and with whom they mixed. In a
word, the information which the language of a nation gives as to its race
is something like what a man’s surname tells as to his family, by no
means the whole history, but one great line of it.
It has next to be seen what the languages of the world can show as
to the early history of nations. Great care has to be taken with the
proofs of connexion between languages. It is of little use to compare
two languages as old-fashioned philologists were too apt to do when, if
they found half-a-dozen words at all similar, they took these without
more ado to be remnants of one primitive tongue, the origin of both.
In the more careful philological comparisons of the present day many
similarities of words have to be thrown aside as not proving connexion
at all. In any two languages a few words are sure to be similar by mere
accident, as where, in the Society Islands, _tiputa_ means a cloak,
like _tippet_ with us. Words must only be compared when there is a real
correspondence of meaning as well as sound, or the way would be opened
for fancies like that of a writer who connects the well known Polynesian
word _tabu_, sacred, with _tabut_, the Arabic name of the ark of the
covenant, apparently because that was a very sacred object. Also, words
imitated from nature prove nothing in this way, as where the Hindus and
the savages of Vancouver’s Island both call a crow _kaka_, this being not
because their languages are connected, but because it is the bird’s cry.
What is most important of all is to make sure that the words compared
really belong to the old stock of the language they are found in. Before
now a writer has proved to his own satisfaction that Turkish, Arabic,
and Persian are all branches of one primitive language, his argument
being that the Turks call a man _adam_, as the Arabs call the first man,
and a father _pader_, which is like the Persian word. The fact is true
enough, but what the argument omits to notice is that the Turks have
been for ages enriching their own barbaric language by taking words from
the cultured Arabic and Persian, and _adam_ and _pader_ are such lately
borrowed words, not philologically Turkish at all. Borrowed words like
these are indeed valuable evidence, but what they prove is not the common
origin of languages, it is intercourse between the nations speaking them.
They often give the clue to the country from which some new produce was
obtained, or some new instrument, or idea, or institution, was learnt.
Thus in English it is seen by the very words how Italy furnished us
with _opera_, _sonata_, _chiaroscuro_, while Spain gave _gallina_ and
_mulatto_, how from the Hebrews we have _sabbath_ and _jubilee_, from the
Arabs _zero_ and _magazine_, while Mexico has supplied _chocolate_ and
_tomato_, Haiti _hammock_ and _hurricane_, Peru _guano_ and _quinine_,
and even the languages of the South Sea Islands are represented by
_taboo_ and _tatoo_. But in all this there is not one particle of
evidence that any one of these languages is sprung from the same family
with any other.
When two languages have such a common descent, the philologist is not
content to ascertain it by merely looking for a few words of similar
sound. Indeed he expects to find that the words of the ancestral language
will not only have changed in its descendant languages, but that they
will often have changed according to different rules. Thus he knows that
according to the rule called Grimm’s law, the English _ten_, _tame_,
should appear in German with a different initial, _zehn_, _zahm_, while
again these should be represented in Latin by _decem_, _domare_. With
the same regularity of change, the sound which in some of the Polynesian
languages is _k_, in others has become _t_; thus the word man, in the
Sandwich Islands _kanaka_ (whence our sailors call any South Sea Islander
a _kanaker_), appears in New Zealand under the form of _tangata_.
Going beyond the sound of words into their structure, the comparative
philologist reckons that when two languages are allied, they ought to
show such similarity in the roots and in the putting together, that
neither chance nor borrowing can account for the resemblance. In the
first chapter, for another purpose, examples were given of languages
continuing to show their intimate connexion while diverging from their
parent tongues. The reader may find it worth while to look back to these
illustrations (p. 8) before going on to the following sketch of the
families of language belonging to the various races of man.
The languages of white men mostly belong to two great families, the Aryan
and Semitic. First as to the Aryan family, called also Indo-European,
which takes in the languages of part of South and West Asia, and
almost the whole of Europe. The original tongue whence these are all
descended may be called the Primitive Aryan. What the roots of this
ancient language were like, and how they were put together into words,
the student may gain an idea from Greek and Latin, but a still better
from Sanskrit, where both roots and inflexions have been kept up in
a more perfect and regular state. As a rough illustration of the way
in which words of our familiar European languages may be discerned in
Sanskrit, one line of the first hymn of the Veda is here given, where the
worshippers entreat Agni, the divine Fire, that he will be approachable
to us as a father to a son, and will be near for our happiness:
Sa nah pitâ-iva sûnave Agne su-upâyanah bhava: sachasva nah
svastaye.
Here may be more or less clearly made out words connected with Latin,
Greek, and English _nos_, _pater_, _son_, _ignis_, _up_, _be_, _sequi_,
_cuestō_, and others. Though the original Aryan is a lost language,
philologists try to reconstruct it by comparing its oldest and most
perfect descendants, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Greek, Latin, Old Russian,
Gothic, Old Irish, &c. Granting that a primitive Aryan tongue once
existed, there must once have been a nation who spoke it, and whose
descendants carried it down to later ages. It is hard to draw any certain
bodily picture of the primitive Aryans themselves (see page 109), for
in their course of migration and conquest they so mingled with other
races, that now the nations united by Aryan speech range through the
utmost varieties of white men, from the Icelander to the Hindu. The early
home of the Aryans is supposed to have been in Inner Asia, perhaps in
the present Turkestan, in the region of the Oxus and Yaxartes, for here
the practicable way of migration for nomads with flocks and herds lies
open down into Persia on the one side, and India on the other. As India
and Persia have preserved in their sacred languages the Aryan tongue
less changed than elsewhere, it may be judged that the land whence the
invading Aryans came was not far off. But it may have been further
east in Central Asia, or further west on the Russian plains. In this
home-land, wherever it may have been, the Aryans lived in barbaric but
not savage clans, tilling the soil and grazing their flocks and herds,
workers in metal and skilled in many arts of life, a warlike folk who
went forth to fight in chariots, a people able to govern and obey, to
make laws and abide by them, a religious people earnest in the worship
of the sun, and sky, and fire, and waters, and with pious faith in the
divine spirits of their ancestors. Carrying with them their language,
laws, and religion, these nation-founders spread in radiating tracks of
migration over South-West Asia and all Europe. Where they went they found
the land peopled by Dravidians, Tatars, and doubtless many other stocks
once spread far and wide, like the Basques, whose language still lingers
in the Pyrenees. Where the old languages have vanished, the record of
the early populations of Europe is only to be had from their tombs, and
seen in the features of the present nations, which may be often more
those of the original people than of the Aryan invaders. The earliest
Aryan hordes who started on their westward migration may have been the
ancestors of the Keltic nations, for their language has undergone most
change, and they are found in the far west of Europe, as though they had
been pressed on by the Teuton-Scandinavian tribes who followed them,
distant kinsfolk but not friends. The ancestors of the Græco-Italian
nations migrated westward till they reached the Mediterranean, and last
came the Slavonic peoples who now occupy Eastern Europe. Thus much of the
beginnings of the Aryan nations may be learnt from their languages and
their places on the map. It is not in the earliest ages of history that
they appear on the world-stage where Egyptians and Babylonians had long
played the great parts. The Aryans become prominent within a thousand
years before the Christian era, when in India there arises among them
the religion of Buddha, now reckoned the most numerous in the world;
when the Medes and Persians come into power, and Cyrus appears with his
conquering host; when the Greeks bring their wondrous intellect to bear
on art, science, and philosophy; and the Romans set up the military and
legal system which gave them their empire. In later ages our Teutonic
nations, who made their first appearance as the ravagers of culture,
come to be its promoters. The Aryan nations have kept up in the modern
world the career of conquest and the union with other peoples which they
began in præhistoric ages. Outside the world known to the ancients, Aryan
languages are now spoken on far continents and islands, whether the men
who speak them are white colonists from Europe, who have slain or driven
out the old dwellers on the soil, or whether they have become blended
with the native nations as in Mexico and Peru.
To proceed now to the languages of the next family, the Semitic, an idea
of these can be most easily gained from Hebrew. Any student seriously
bent on the science of language should learn at least enough Hebrew
to spell out a few chapters of Genesis, for all the other languages
commonly taught in England being of the Aryan family, this will serve
to bring his mind out of that groove, by familiarizing him with speech
of a different material. A very moderate number of roots, mostly of
three consonants, by altering their internal vowels and changing their
affixes, are made to form the greater part of the language so regularly
that Hebrew dictionaries are arranged throughout by the roots. Thus from
the root _m-l-ch_ are derived verb and noun forms with the sense of
reigning, as _mâlach_ = he reigned, _mâlchû_ = they reigned, _yimloch_ =
he shall reign, _timloch_ = thou shalt reign, _melech_ = king (familiar
in the name of _Melchi-zedek_, “king of righteousness”), _melâchim_ =
kings, _malchenû_ = our king, _malchâh_ = queen; _mamlâchâh_ = kingdom,
and so on. The principal languages belonging to the Semitic family are
the Assyrian, Hebrew and Phœnician, Syrian, Arabic and Ethiopic. The
Assyrian of the Nineveh inscriptions and the Arabic spoken by the desert
Beduins between them best represent the original language they are all
descended from. The ancient or modern peoples speaking Semitic tongues
belong mainly to the dark-white race, the type in which they agree being
now most plainly seen in the Jewish countenance, with its aquiline nose,
full lips, and curly black hair. Yet by features alone it would not have
been possible to distinguish the Jews, Assyrians, and Arabs, among the
mass of dark-white nations. Here is seen the value of language, which
comes in to show that a certain group of nations are connected by common
ancestry from an ancient people, who spoke the lost tongue whence Arabic
and Hebrew are offshoots, and who in the ages when history begins were
dwelling in South-West Asia, and sending forth their migrating tribes to
found new nations, whose acts in the world form one of the great chapters
of history. The conquering Assyrians took up and carried on the older
Chaldæan civilisation. The Phœnicians became the great merchants of the
old world, with trading colonies along the Mediterranean and commerce
in the far East, nor was it only stuffs and spices that they carried,
but they spread arts and thoughts into new regions, and in their hands
the clumsy hieroglyphic writing became the alphabet. The Israelites,
though as a nation they never reached such power or culture, made their
conquests in the world of religion, and while the crowd of deities
worshipped in Assyrian and Phœnician temples vanished away, the worship
of Jehovah passed on into Christianity, and overspread the world. Latest,
the warrior-tribes of Arabia carried the banner of their prophet among
the nations around, and founded the faith of Islam, a civilizing power in
the middle ages, and even in these days of its decay an influence across
the world from Western Africa to the islands of the far East.
The language of the ancient Egyptians, though it cannot be classed in
the Semitic family with Hebrew, has important points of correspondence,
whether due to the long intercourse between the two races in Egypt, or to
some deeper ancestral connection; and such analogies also appear in the
Berber languages of North Africa. These difficult questions can merely
be mentioned here. Attempts have been made, though with little result,
to prove the Aryan and Semitic languages themselves to be descended from
a single parent tongue. If it is so, then ages of change have so wiped
away the traces of common origin that philological comparison fails to
substantiate them. While speaking of the Aryan and Semitic families of
language, it should be noticed that many philologists connect them as
belonging to one class, as being “inflecting” languages, or such as can
blend their roots and affixes, and alter the roots themselves internally
so that, as the beginner in Greek grammar well knows, it is often no
easy matter to see where the root ends and the termination begins. The
inflecting families have certainly a power of compact word-formation
which has done much to give expressiveness and accuracy to such poetical
and philosophical languages as Greek and Arabic. But the distinction is
by no means clear between the structure of such inflecting languages and
the agglutinating languages of other nations, as the Tatars. Could the
Aryan and Semitic families be both traced back to the same family, this
would not prove the whole white race to have had one original language,
for the Georgian of the Caucasus, the Basque of the Pyrenees, and several
more would still lie outside, apparently unconnected with either of the
great families, or with one another.
In the middle and north of Asia, on the steppes or among the swamps and
forests of the bleak north, wandering hordes of hunters or herdsmen show
the squat-built brown-yellow Tatar or Mongolian type, and speak languages
of one family, such as Manchu and Mongol. Although principally belonging
to Asia, these Tatar or Turanian languages have established themselves in
Europe. At a remote period, rude Tatar tribes had spread over northern
Europe, but they were followed up and encroached on by the invading
Aryans, till now only much-mixed outlying remnants of them, Esths, Finns,
Lapps, are found speaking Tatar languages. In later ages, history
records how armies of Tatar race, Huns and Turks, poured into Europe
in their turn, subduing the Aryan peoples, so that now the Hungarian
and Turkish languages remain records of these last waves of invasion
from Central Asia. The Tatar hordes are first heard of in history as
barbarians, as many tribes are still, but their chief nations becoming
Buddhists, Mohammedans, or Christians, have adopted the civilisation
belonging to these religions. The Tatar languages are of the kind called
agglutinative, forming words by putting first the root, which carries
the sense and is followed by suffixes strung on to modify it. Thus in
Turkish the root _sev_, to love, makes _sevishdirilmediler_, they were
not to be brought to love one another. In some languages of this class, a
remarkable law of vowel-harmony compels the suffix to conform its vowel
to that of the root it is attached to, as if to make clear to the hearer
that it belongs to it; thus in Hungarian _ház_ = house, forms _házam_ =
my house, but _szék_ = chair, forms _székem_ = my chair.
The dense population of South-East Asia, comprising the Burmese, the
Siamese, and especially the Chinese, shows a type of complexion and
feature plainly related to the Tatar or Mongolian, but the general
character of their language is different. The Chinese language is made
up of monosyllables, each a word with its own real or grammatical sense,
so that our infant-school books in one syllable give some notion of
Chinese sentences. Other neighbouring languages share this habit of
using monosyllables, and as this limits them to an inconveniently small
number of words, they have taken to the expedient of making the musical
pitch or intonation alter the meaning, as in Siamese, where the syllable
_ha_, according to the notes it is intoned on, means a pestilence,
or the number five, or the verb to seek. Thus the intoning which in
England serves to express emotion or distinguish question from answer is
turned to account in the far East for making actually different words,
an example how language catches at any available device when a means
of expression is wanted. Looking on the map of Asia at this south-east
group of nations, it is plainly not by accident that the people of
such neighbouring districts should have come to talk in words of one
syllable, but the habit seems to have come from a common ancestral
source, and gives the whole set of languages a family character. These
monosyllable languages are often used to illustrate what the simple
childlike constructions of man’s primitive speech may have been like.
But it is well to mention that Chinese or Siamese, simple as they are,
must not be relied on as primitive languages. The childlike Chinese
phrases may be not primitive at all, but may come of the falling away of
older complicated grammar, much as our own English tends to cut short
the long words and drop the inflexions used by our ancestors. Chinese
simplicity of grammar by no means goes with simplicity of thought and
life. The Chinese nation, like the Egyptian and the Babylonian, had been
raised to a highly artificial civilisation in ages before the Phœnicians
and Greeks came out of barbarism. It is not yet clear to what race the
old Babylonians belonged who spoke the Akkadian tongue, but this shows
analogies which may connect it with the Tatar or Mongolian languages.
It has been already seen (p. 102) how the Malays, Micronesians,
Polynesians, and Malagasy, a varied and mixed population of partly
Mongoloid race, are united over their immense ocean-district half round
the globe by languages of one family, the Malayo-Polynesian. The parent
language of this family may have belonged to Asia, for in the Malay
region the grammar is more complex, and words are found like _tasik_ =
sea and _langit_ = sky, while in the distant islands of New Zealand and
Hawaii these have come down to _tai_ and _lai_, as though the language
became shrunk and formless as the race migrated further from home, and
sank into the barbaric life of ocean islanders.
The continent of India has not lost the languages of the tribes who were
in the land before the Aryan invasion gave rise to the Hindu population.
Especially in the south whole nations, though they have taken to Hindu
civilisation, speak languages belonging to the Dravidian family, such as
Tamil, Telugu, and Canarese. The importance of this element of Indian
population may be seen by these non-Aryan tongues still extending over
most of the great triangle of India south of the Nerbudda, besides
remnants in districts to the north. Yet Aryan dialects are spoken in
India by many mixed tribes who may have little of Aryan blood. In the
forests of Ceylon are found the only people in the world leading a savage
life who speak an Aryan language akin to ours. These are the Veddas
or “hunters,” shy wild men who build bough huts, and live on game and
wild honey, the children, as it seems, of forest-natives mingled with
Singhalese outcasts whose language in a broken-down state they speak.
Among the black races, whether or not the eastern negros of Melanesia
are connected by race with the African negros, the Melanesian languages
stand apart. Nor do all African negros speak languages of one family, but
some, such as the Mandingo, seem separate from the great language-family
of Central and South Africa, named the Bantu from tribes calling
themselves simply “men” (_ba-ntu_). One of the chief peculiarities of
the Bantu languages is their working (just unlike the Tatar languages)
by putting prefixes in front. Thus the African magician is called
_mganga_, the plural of which is _waganga_, magicians. The Kafirs of
a certain district bear the well-known name of the _basuto_, which
is a plural form, a single native being called _mosuto_, while his
country is _lesuto_, his language _sesuto_, and his character or quality
_bosuto_. In South Africa lies a very different language-family, the
Hottentot-Bushman, remarkable for the way in which “clicks,” much like
what among us nurses make to children and coachmen to horses, do duty as
consonants in words. Lastly, turning to America, the native languages
fall into a variety of families. Some of these are known to English
readers by a word or two, as the Eskimo of the Arctic coasts by the name
of the _kayak_ or single boat on which our sport canoes are modelled; the
Algonquin which prevailed from New England to Virginia at the time of the
early colonists, and whence we have _mocassin_ and _tomahawk_; the Aztec
of Mexico known by the _ocelot_ and the _cacao_-bean; the Tupi-Carib of
the West Indies and the Brazilian forests, the home of the _toucan_ and
_jaguar_; lastly the Quichua or Peruvian, the language of the _inca_.
In concluding this account of the chief families of language, it is to be
noticed that there are many more, some only consisting of a few dialects
or a single one. Altogether a list of fifty or a hundred might perhaps be
made, of which no one has been satisfactorily shown to be related to any
other. It may, indeed, be expected that often two or three which now seem
separate may prove on closer examination to be branches of one family,
but there seems no prospect of the families all coming together in this
way as offshoots of one original language. The question whether there
was one primitive speech, or many, has been in past times most useful in
encouraging the scientific comparison of languages. Both theories claim
to account for the actual state of language in the world. On the one
hand it may be argued that the languages descended from the primitive
tongue have branched off so far apart as often no longer to show their
connection; on the other hand, if there were many primitive languages, of
which those that survived have given rise to families, this would come
to much the same state of things. But if, as seems likely, the original
formation of language did not take place all at once, but was a gradual
process extending through ages, and not absolutely stopped even now,
then it is not a hopeful task to search for primitive languages at all
(see page 131). In the present improved state of philology it answers
better to work back from known languages to the lost ancestral languages
whence they must have come down. It has been seen that this study leads
to excellent results as to the history, not only of the languages
themselves, but of the nations speaking them, as when it gives the clue
to the peopling of the South Sea Islands, or proves some remote ancestral
connexion between the ancient Britons, and the English and Danes who came
after them to our land. Yet though language is so valuable a help and
guide in national history, it must not be trusted as if it could give the
whole origin of a race, or go back to its beginning. All negroes do not
speak languages of one family, nor all yellow, or brown, or white men.
In exploring the early life of nations, their languages may lead us far
back, often much farther than historical records, but they seem hardly to
reach anywhere near the origins of the great human races, still less to
the general origin of mankind.