[43].
Aryan Hypothesis and Controversy.
The Races of Mankind change more slowly than their Languages.
Theory of the gradual Origin of Languages.
Difficulty of defining what is meant by a Language as distinct
from a Dialect.
Great Number of extinct and living Tongues.
No European Language a Thousand Years old.
Gaps between Languages, how caused.
Imperfection of the Record.
Changes always in Progress.
Struggle for Existence between rival Terms and Dialects.
Causes of Selection.
Each Language formed slowly in a single Geographical Area.
May die out gradually or suddenly.
Once lost can never be revived.
Mode of Origin of Languages and Species a Mystery.
Speculations as to the Number of original Languages or Species
unprofitable.
The supposed existence, at a remote and unknown period, of a language
conventionally called the Aryan, has of late years been a favourite
subject of speculation among German philologists, and Professor Max
Muller has given us lately the most improved version of this theory,
and has set forth the various facts and arguments by which it may be
defended, with his usual perspicuity and eloquence. He observes that if
we know nothing of the existence of Latin--if all historical documents
previous to the fifteenth century had been lost--if tradition even was
silent as to the former existence of a Roman empire, a mere comparison
of the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Wallachian, and Rhaetian
dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been
a language from which these six modern dialects derive their origin in
common. Without this supposition it would be impossible to account for
their structure and composition, as, for example, for the forms of the
auxiliary verb "to be," all evidently varieties of one common type,
while it is equally clear that no one of the six affords the original
form from which the others could have been borrowed. So also in none
of the six languages do we find the elements of which these verbal and
other forms could have been composed; they must have been handed down as
relics from a former period, they must have existed in some antecedent
language, which we know to have been the Latin.
But, in like manner, he goes on to show, that Latin itself, as well as
Greek, Sanscrit, Zend (or Bactrian), Lithuanian, old Sclavonic, Gothic,
and Armenian are also eight varieties of one common and more ancient
type, and no one of them could have been the original from which the
others were borrowed. They have all such an amount of mutual resemblance
as to point to a more ancient language, the Aryan, which was to them
what Latin was to the six Romance languages. The people who spoke this
unknown parent speech, of which so many other ancient tongues were
off-shoots, must have migrated at a remote era to widely separated
regions of the old world, such as Northern Asia, Europe, and India south
of the Himalaya.*
(* Max Muller, "Comparative Mythology" Oxford Essays 1856.)
The soundness of some parts of this Aryan hypothesis has lately been
called in question by Mr. Crawfurd, on the ground that the Hindoos,
Persians, Turks, Scandinavians, and other people referred to as having
derived not only words but grammatical forms from an Aryan source,
belong each of them to a distinct race, and all these races have, it is
said, preserved their peculiar characters unaltered from the earliest
dawn of history and tradition. If, therefore, no appreciable change has
occurred in three or four thousand years, we should be obliged to assume
a far more remote date for the first branching off of such races from a
common stock than the supposed period of the Aryan migrations, and the
dispersion of that language over many and distant countries.
But Mr. Crawfurd has, I think, himself helped us to remove this
stumbling-block, by admitting that a nation speaking a language allied
to the Sanscrit (the oldest of the eight tongues alluded to), once
probably inhabited that region situated to the north-west of India,
which within the period of authentic history has poured out its
conquering hordes over a great extent of Western Asia and Eastern
Europe. The same people, he says, may have acted the same part in the
long, dark night which preceded the dawn of tradition.*
(* Crawfurd, "Transactions of the Ethnological Society"
volume 1 1861.)
These conquerors may have been few in number when compared to the
populations which they subdued. In such cases the new settlers, although
reckoned by tens of thousands, might merge in a few centuries into the
millions of subjects which they ruled. It is an acknowledged fact that
the colour and features of the Negro or European are entirely lost in
the fourth generation, provided that no fresh infusion of one or
other of the two races takes place. The distinctive physical features,
therefore, of the Aryan conquerors might soon wear out and be lost in
those of the nations they overran; yet many of the words, and, what is
more in point, some of the grammatical forms of their language, might
be retained by the masses which they had governed for centuries, these
masses continuing to preserve the same features of race which had
distinguished them long before the Aryan invasions.
There can be no question that if we could trace back any set of cognate
languages now existing to some common point of departure, they would
converge and meet sooner in some era of the past than would the existing
races of mankind; in other words, races change much more slowly than
languages. But, according to the doctrine of transmutation, to form a
new species would take an incomparably longer period than to form a new
race. No language seems ever to last for a thousand years, whereas
many a species seems to have endured for hundreds of thousands. A
philologist, therefore, who is contending that all living languages are
derivative and not primordial, has a great advantage over a naturalist
who is endeavouring to inculcate a similar theory in regard to species.
It may not be uninstructive, in order fairly to appreciate the vast
difficulty of the task of those who advocate transmutation in natural
history, to consider how hard it would be even for a philologist to
succeed, if he should try to convince an assemblage of intelligent
but illiterate persons that the language spoken by them, and all those
talked by contemporary nations, were modern inventions, moreover that
these same forms of speech were still constantly undergoing change, and
none of them destined to last for ever.
We will suppose him to begin by stating his conviction, that the living
languages have been gradually derived from others now extinct, and
spoken by nations which had immediately preceded them in the order of
time, and that those again had used forms of speech derived from still
older ones. They might naturally exclaim, "How strange it is that you
should find records of a multitude of dead languages, that a part of the
human economy which in our own time is so remarkable for its stability,
should have been so inconstant in bygone ages! We all speak as our
parents and grandparents spoke before us, and so, we are told, do the
Germans and French. What evidence is there of such incessant variation
in remoter times? and, if it be true, why not imagine that when one form
of speech was lost, another was suddenly and supernaturally created by
a gift of tongues or confusion of languages, as at the building of
the Tower of Babel? Where are the memorials of all the intermediate
dialects, which must have existed, if this doctrine of perpetual
fluctuation be true? And how comes it that the tongues now spoken do not
pass by insensible gradations the one into the other, and into the dead
languages of dates immediately antecedent?
"Lastly, if this theory of indefinite modifiability be sound, what
meaning can be attached to the term language, and what definition can be
given of it so as to distinguish a language from a dialect?"
In reply to this last question, the philologist might confess that the
learned are not agreed as to what constitutes a language as distinct
from a dialect. Some believe that there are 4000 living languages,
others that there are 6000, so that the mode of defining them is clearly
a mere matter of opinion. Some contend, for example, that the Danish,
Norwegian, and Swedish form one Scandinavian tongue, others that
they constitute three different languages, others that the Danish and
Norwegian are one--mere dialects of the same language, but that Swedish
is distinct.
The philologist, however, might fairly argue that this very ambiguity
was greatly in favour of his doctrine, since if languages had all been
constantly undergoing transmutation, there ought often to be a want of
real lines of demarcation between them. He might, however, propose that
he and his pupils should come to an understanding that two languages
should be regarded as distinct whenever the speakers of them are unable
to converse together, or freely to exchange ideas, whether by word
or writing. Scientifically speaking, such a test might be vague
and unsatisfactory, like the test of species by their capability of
producing fertile hybrids; but if the pupil is persuaded that there
are such things in nature as distinct languages, whatever may have been
their origin, the definition above suggested might be of practical use,
and enable the teacher to proceed with his argument.
He might begin by undertaking to prove that none of the languages of
modern Europe were a thousand years old. No English scholar, he might
say, who has not specially given himself up to the study of Anglo-Saxon,
can interpret the documents in which the chronicles and laws of England
were written in the days of King Alfred, so that we may be sure that
none of the English of the nineteenth century could converse with the
subjects of that monarch if these last could now be restored to life.
The difficulties encountered would not arise merely from the intrusion
of French terms, in consequence of the Norman conquest, because that
large portion of our language (including the articles, pronouns, etc.),
which is Saxon has also undergone great transformations by abbreviation,
new modes of pronunciation, spelling, and various corruptions, so as to
be unlike both ancient and modern German. They who now speak German, if
brought into contact with their Teutonic ancestors of the ninth century,
would be quite unable to converse with them, and, in like manner, the
subjects of Charlemagne could not have exchanged ideas with the Goths of
Alaric's army, or with the soldiers of Arminius in the days of Augustus
Caesar. So rapid indeed has been the change in Germany, that the
epic poem called the Nibelungen Lied, once so popular, and only seven
centuries old, cannot now be enjoyed, except by the erudite.
If we then turn to France, we meet again with similar evidence of
ceaseless change. There is a treaty of peace still extant a thousand
years old, between Charles the Bald and King Louis of Germany (dated
A.D. 841), in which the German king takes an oath in what was the French
tongue of that day, while the French king swears in the German of the
same era, and neither of these oaths would now convey a distinct meaning
to any but the learned in these two countries. So also in Italy, the
modern Italian cannot be traced back much beyond the time of Dante, or
some six centuries before our time. Even in Rome, where there had been
no permanent intrusion of foreigners, such as the Lombard settlers of
German origin in the plains of the Po, the common people of the year
1000 spoke quite a distinct language from that of their Roman ancestors
or their Italian descendants, as is shown by the celebrated chronicle
of the monk Benedict, of the convent of St. Andrea on Mount Soracte,
written in such barbarous Latin, and with such strange grammatical
forms, that it requires a profoundly skilled linguist to decipher it.*
(* See G. Pertz, "Monumenta Germanica" volume 3.)
Having thus established the preliminary fact, that none of the tongues
now spoken were in existence ten centuries ago, and that the ancient
languages have passed through many a transitional dialect before they
settled into the forms now in use, the philologist might bring forward
proofs of the great numbers both of lost and living forms of speech.
Strabo tells us that in his time, in the Caucasus alone (a chain of
mountains not longer than the Alps, and much narrower), there were
spoken at least seventy languages. At the present period the number, it
is said, would be still greater if all the distinct dialects of those
mountains were reckoned. Several of these Caucasian tongues admit of no
comparison with any known living or lost Asiatic or European language.
Others which are not peculiar are obsolete forms of known languages,
such as the Georgian, Mongolian, Persian, Arabic, and Tartarian. It
seems that as often as conquering hordes swept over that part of Asia,
always coming from the north and east, they drove before them the
inhabitants of the plains, who took refuge in some of the retired
valleys and high mountain fastnesses, where they maintained their
independence, as do the Circassians in our time in spite of the power of
Russia.
In the Himalayan Mountains, from Assam to its extreme north-western
limit, and generally in the more hilly parts of British India, the
diversity of languages is surprisingly great, impeding the advance of
civilisation and the labours of the missionary. In South America and
Mexico, Alexander Humboldt reckoned the distinct tongues by hundreds,
and those of Africa are said to be equally numerous. Even in China, some
eighteen provincial dialects prevail, almost all deviating so much from
others that the speakers are not mutually intelligible, and besides
these there are other distinct forms of speech in the mountains of the
same empire.
The philologist might next proceed to point out that the geographical
relations of living and dead languages favour the hypothesis of the
living ones having been derived from the extinct, in spite of our
inability, in most instances, to adduce documentary evidence of the
fact or to discover monuments of all the intermediate and transitional
dialects which must have existed. Thus he would observe that the modern
Romance languages are spoken exactly where the ancient Romans once lived
or ruled, and the Greek of our days where the older classical Greek was
formerly spoken. Exceptions to this rule might be detected, but they
would be explicable by reference to colonisation and conquest.
As to the many and wide gaps sometimes encountered between the dead and
living languages, we must remember that it is not part of the plan of
any people to preserve memorials of their forms of speech expressly for
the edification of posterity. Their manuscripts and inscriptions serve
some present purpose, are occasional and imperfect from the first,
and are rendered more fragmentary in the course of time, some being
intentionally destroyed, others lost by the decay of the perishable
materials on which they are written; so that to question the theory of
all known languages being derivative on the ground that we can rarely
trace a passage from the ancient to the modern through all the dialects
which must have flourished one after the other in the intermediate ages,
implies a want of reflection on the laws which govern the recording as
well as the obliterating processes.
But another important question still remains to be considered, namely,
whether the trifling changes which can alone be witnessed by a single
generation, can possibly represent the working of that machinery
which, in the course of many centuries, has given rise to such mighty
revolutions in the forms of speech throughout the world. Everyone
may have noticed in his own lifetime the stealing in of some slight
alterations of accent, pronunciation or spelling, or the introduction of
some words borrowed from a foreign language to express ideas of which no
native term precisely conveyed the import. He may also remember hearing
for the first time some cant terms or slang phrases, which have since
forced their way into common use, in spite of the efforts of the purist.
But he may still contend that "within the range of his experience," his
language has continued unchanged, and he may believe in its immutability
in spite of minor variations. The real question, however, at issue
is, whether there are any limits to this variability. He will find on
farther investigation, that new technical terms are coined almost daily
in various arts, sciences, professions, and trades, that new names must
be found for new inventions, that many of these acquire a metaphorical
sense, and then make their way into general circulation, as
"stereotyped," for instance, which would have been as meaningless to the
men of the seventeenth century as would the new terms and images derived
from steamboat and railway travelling to the men of the eighteenth.
If the numerous words, idioms, and phrases, many of them of ephemeral
duration, which are thus invented by the young and old in various
classes of society, in the nursery, the school, the camp, the fleet, the
courts of law and the study of the man of science or literature, could
all be collected together and put on record, their number in one or
two centuries might compare with the entire permanent vocabulary of the
language. It becomes, therefore, a curious subject of inquiry, what are
the laws which govern not only the invention, but also the "selection"
of some of these words or idioms, giving them currency in preference to
others?--for as the powers of the human memory are limited, a check must
be found to the endless increase and multiplication of terms, and
old words must be dropped nearly as fast as new ones are put into
circulation. Sometimes the new word or phrase, or a modification of
the old ones, will entirely supplant the more ancient expressions, or,
instead of the latter being discarded, both may flourish together, the
older one having a more restricted use.
Although the speakers may be unconscious that any great fluctuation is
going on in their language--although when we observe the manner in which
new words and phrases are thrown out, as if at random or in sport, while
others get into vogue, we may think the process of change to be the
result of mere chance--there are nevertheless fixed laws in action, by
which, in the general struggle for existence, some terms and dialects
gain the victory over others. The slightest advantage attached to some
new mode of pronouncing or spelling, from considerations of brevity or
euphony, may turn the scale, or more powerful causes of selection may
decide which of two or more rivals shall triumph and which succumb.
Among these are fashion, or the influence of an aristocracy, whether of
birth or education, popular writers, orators, preachers--a centralised
government organising its schools expressly to promote uniformity of
diction, and to get the better of provincialisms and local dialects.
Between these dialects, which may be regarded as so many "incipient
languages," the competition is always keenest when they are most nearly
allied, and the extinction of any one of them destroys some of the links
by which a dominant tongue may have been previously connected with
some other widely distinct one. It is by the perpetual loss of such
intermediate forms of speech that the great dissimilarity of the
languages which survive is brought about. Thus, if Dutch should become a
dead language, English and German would be separated by a wider gap.
Some languages which are spoken by millions, and spread over a wide
area, will endure much longer than others which have never had a wide
range, especially if the tendency to incessant change in one of these
dominant tongues is arrested for a time by a standard literature.
But even this source of stability is insecure, for popular writers
themselves are great innovators, sometimes coining new words, and
still oftener new expressions and idioms, to embody their own original
conceptions and sentiments, or some peculiar modes of thought and
feeling characteristic of their age. Even when a language is regarded
with superstitious veneration as the vehicle of divine truths and
religious precepts, and which has prevailed for many generations, it
will be incapable of permanently maintaining its ground. Hebrew had
ceased to be a living language before the Christian era. Sanscrit, the
sacred language of the Hindoos, shared the same fate, in spite of the
veneration in which the Vedas are still held, and in spite of many a
Sanscrit poem once popular and national.
The Christians of Constantinople and the Morea still hear the New
Testament and their liturgy read in ancient Greek, while they speak a
dialect in which Paul might have preached in vain at Athens. So in
the Catholic Church, the Italians pray in one tongue and talk another.
Luther's translation of the Bible acted as a powerful cause of
"selection," giving at once to one of many competing dialects (that of
Saxony) a prominent and dominant position in Germany; but the style
of Luther has, like that of our English Bible, already become somewhat
antiquated.
If the doctrine of gradual transmutation be applicable to languages, all
those spoken in historical times must each of them have had a
closely allied prototype; and accordingly, whenever we can thoroughly
investigate their history, we find in them some internal evidence of
successive additions by the invention of new words or the modification
of old ones. Proofs also of borrowing are discernible, letters being
retained in the spelling of some words which have no longer any meaning
as they are now pronounced--no connection with any corresponding sounds.
Such redundant or silent letters, once useful in the parent speech,
have been aptly compared by Mr. Darwin to rudimentary organs in living
beings, which, as he interprets them, have at some former period been
more fully developed, having had their proper functions to perform in
the organisation of a remote progenitor.
If all known languages are derivative and not primordial creations, they
must each of them have been slowly elaborated in a single geographical
area. No one of them can have had two birthplaces. If one were carried
by a colony to a distant region, it would immediately begin to vary
unless frequent intercourse was kept up with the mother country. The
descendants of the same stock, if perfectly isolated, would in five or
six centuries, perhaps sooner, be quite unable to converse with those
who remained at home, or with those who may have migrated to some
distant region, where they were shut out from all communication with
others speaking the same tongue.
A Norwegian colony which settled in Iceland in the ninth century,
maintained its independence for about 400 years, during which time the
old Gothic which they at first spoke became corrupted and considerably
modified. In the meantime the natives of Norway, who had enjoyed much
commercial intercourse with the rest of Europe, acquired quite a new
speech, and looked on the Icelandic as having been stationary, and
as representing the pure Gothic original of which their own was an
offshoot.
A German colony in Pennsylvania was cut off from frequent communication
with Europe for about a quarter of a century, during the wars of the
French Revolution between 1792 and 1815. So marked had been the effect
even of this brief and imperfect isolation, that when Prince Bernhard of
Saxe-Weimar travelled among them a few years after the peace, he found
the peasants speaking as they had done in Germany in the preceding
century,*) and retaining a dialect which at home had already become
obsolete.
(* "Travels of Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, in North
America, in 1825 and 1826", page 123.)
Even after the renewal of the German emigration from Europe, when I
travelled in 1841 among the same people in the retired valleys of the
Alleghenies, I found the newspapers full of terms half English and
half German, and many an Anglo-Saxon word, which had assumed a Teutonic
dress, as "fencen," to fence, instead of umzaunen, "flauer" for flour,
instead of mehl, and so on. What with the retention of terms no longer
in use in the mother country, and the borrowing of new ones from
neighbouring states, there might have arisen in Pennsylvania in five or
six generations, but for the influx of newcomers from Germany, a mongrel
speech equally unintelligible to the Anglo-Saxon and to the inhabitants
of the European fatherland.
If languages resemble species in having had each their "specific centre"
or single area of creation, in which they have been slowly formed, so
each of them is alike liable to slow or to sudden extinction. They may
die out very gradually in consequence of transmutation, or abruptly by
the extermination of the last surviving representatives of the unaltered
type. We know in what century the last Dodo perished, and we know
that in the seventeenth century the language of the Red Indians of
Massachusetts, into which Father Eliot had translated the Bible, and
in which Christianity was preached for several generations, ceased to
exist, the last individuals by whom it was spoken having at that period
died without issue.*
(* Lyell, "Travels in North America" volume 1 page 260
1845.)
But if just before that event the white man had retreated from the
continent, or had been swept off by an epidemic, those Indians might
soon have repeopled the wilderness, and their copious vocabulary
and peculiar forms of expression might have lasted without important
modification to this day. The extinction, however, of languages in
general is not abrupt, any more than that of species. It will also be
evident from what has been said, that a language which has once died out
can never be revived, since the same assemblage of conditions can never
be restored even among the descendants of the same stock, much less
simultaneously among all the rounding nations with whom they may be in
contact.
We may compare the persistency of languages, or the tendency of each
generation to adopt without change the vocabulary of its predecessor,
to the force of inheritance in the organic world, which causes the
offspring to resemble its parents. The inventive power which coins new
words or modifies old ones, and adapts them to new wants and conditions
as often as these arise, answers to the variety-making power in the
animate creation.
Progressive improvement in language is a necessary consequence of
the progress of the human mind from one generation to another. As
civilisation advances, a greater number of terms are required to express
abstract ideas, and words previously used in a vague sense, so long
as the state of society was rude and barbarous, gradually acquire more
precise and definite meanings, in consequence of which several terms
must be employed to express ideas and things, which a single word had
before signified, though somewhat loosely and imperfectly.
The farther this subdivision of function is carried, the more complete
and perfect the language becomes, just as species of higher grade have
special organs, such as eyes, lungs, and stomach, for seeing, breathing,
and digesting, which in simple organisms are all performed by one and
the same part of the body.*
(* See Herbert Spencer's "Psychology" and "Scientific
Essays.")
When we had satisfied ourselves that all the existing languages, instead
of being primordial creations, or the direct gifts of a supernatural
Power, have been slowly elaborated, partly by the modification of
pre-existing dialects, partly by borrowing terms at successive periods
from numerous foreign sources, and partly by new inventions made some of
them deliberately, and some casually and as it were fortuitously--when
we have discovered the principal causes of selection, which have guided
the adoption or rejection of rival names for the same things and ideas,
rival modes of pronouncing the same words and provincial dialects
competing one with another--we are still very far from comprehending all
the laws which have governed the formation of each language.
It was a profound saying of William Humboldt, that "Man is Man only by
means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already Man."
Other animals may be able to utter sounds more articulate and as varied
as the click of the Bushman, but voice alone can never enable brute
intelligence to acquire language.
When we consider the complexity of every form of speech spoken by a
highly civilised nation, and discover that the grammatical rules and
the inflections which denote number, time, and equality are usually the
product of a rude state of society--that the savage and the sage, the
peasant and man of letters, the child and the philosopher, have worked
together, in the course of many generations, to build up a fabric
which has been truly described as a wonderful instrument of thought, a
machine, the several parts of which are so well adjusted to each other
as to resemble the product of one period and of a single mind--we cannot
but look upon the result as a profound mystery, and one of which the
separate builders have been almost as unconscious as are the bees in
a hive of the architectural skill and mathematical knowledge which is
displayed in the construction of the honeycomb.
In our attempts to account for the origin of species, we find ourselves
still sooner brought face to face with the working of a law of
development of so high an order as to stand nearly in the same relation
as the Deity himself to man's finite understanding, a law capable of
adding new and powerful causes, such as the moral and intellectual
faculties of the human race, to a system of nature which had gone on for
millions of years without the intervention of any analogous cause. If we
confound "Variation" or "Natural Selection" with such creational laws,
we deify secondary causes or immeasurably exaggerate their influence.
Yet we ought by no means to undervalue the importance of the step which
will have been made, should it hereafter become the generally received
opinion of men of science (as I fully expect it will), that the past
changes of the organic world have been brought about by the subordinate
agency of such causes as "Variation" and "Natural Selection." All our
advances in the knowledge of Nature have consisted of such steps as
these, and we must not be discouraged because greater mysteries remain
behind wholly inscrutable to us.
If the philologist is asked whether in the beginning of things there
was one or five, or a greater number of languages, he may answer that,
before he can reply to such a question, it must be decided whether the
origin of Man was single, or whether there were many primordial races.
But he may also observe, that if mankind began their career in a rude
state of society, their whole vocabulary would be limited to a
few words, and that if they then separated into several isolated
communities, each of these would soon acquire an entirely distinct
language, some roots being lost and others corrupted and transformed
beyond the possibility of subsequent identification, so that it might
be hopeless to expect to trace back the living and dead languages to one
starting point, even if that point were of much more modern date than
we have now good reason to suppose. In like manner it may be said of
species, that if those first formed were of very simple structure, and
they began to vary and to lose some organs by disuse and acquire
new ones by development, they might soon differ as much as so many
distinctly created primordial types. It would therefore be a waste of
time to speculate on the number of original monads or germs from which
all plants and animals were subsequently evolved, more especially as the
oldest fossiliferous strata known to us may be the last of a long series
of antecedent formations, which once contained organic remains. It was
not till geologists ceased to discuss the condition of the original
nucleus of the planet, whether it was solid or fluid, and whether it
owed its fluidity to aqueous or igneous causes, that they began to
achieve their great triumphs; and the vast progress which has recently
been made in showing how the living species may be connected with the
extinct by a common bond of descent, has been due to a more careful
study of the actual state of the living world, and to those monuments of
the past in which the relics of the animate creation of former ages are
best preserved and least mutilated by the hand of time.