Language has a setting. The people that speak it belong to a race (or a
number of races), that is, to a group which is set off by physical
characteristics from other groups. Again, language does not exist apart
from culture, that is, from the socially inherited assemblage of
practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives.
Anthropologists have been in the habit of studying man under the three
rubrics of race, language, and culture. One of the first things they do
with a natural area like Africa or the South Seas is to map it out from
this threefold point of view. These maps answer the questions: What and
where are the major divisions of the human animal, biologically
considered (e.g., Congo Negro, Egyptian White; Australian Black,
Polynesian)? What are the most inclusive linguistic groupings, the
"linguistic stocks," and what is the distribution of each (e.g., the
Hamitic languages of northern Africa, the Bantu languages of the south;
the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and
Polynesia)? How do the peoples of the given area divide themselves as
cultural beings? what are the outstanding "cultural areas" and what are
the dominant ideas in each (e.g., the Mohammedan north of Africa; the
primitive hunting, non-agricultural culture of the Bushmen in the south;
the culture of the Australian natives, poor in physical respects but
richly developed in ceremonialism; the more advanced and highly
specialized culture of Polynesia)?
The man in the street does not stop to analyze his position in the
general scheme of humanity. He feels that he is the representative of
some strongly integrated portion of humanity--now thought of as a
"nationality," now as a "race"--and that everything that pertains to him
as a typical representative of this large group somehow belongs
together. If he is an Englishman, he feels himself to be a member of the
"Anglo-Saxon" race, the "genius" of which race has fashioned the English
language and the "Anglo-Saxon" culture of which the language is the
expression. Science is colder. It inquires if these three types of
classification--racial, linguistic, and cultural--are congruent, if
their association is an inherently necessary one or is merely a matter
of external history. The answer to the inquiry is not encouraging to
"race" sentimentalists. Historians and anthropologists find that races,
languages, and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion, that
their areas of distribution intercross in the most bewildering fashion,
and that the history of each is apt to follow a distinctive course.
Races intermingle in a way that languages do not. On the other hand,
languages may spread far beyond their original home, invading the
territory of new races and of new culture spheres. A language may even
die out in its primary area and live on among peoples violently hostile
to the persons of its original speakers. Further, the accidents of
history are constantly rearranging the borders of culture areas without
necessarily effacing the existing linguistic cleavages. If we can once
thoroughly convince ourselves that race, in its only intelligible, that
is biological, sense, is supremely indifferent to the history of
languages and cultures, that these are no more directly explainable on
the score of race than on that of the laws of physics and chemistry, we
shall have gained a viewpoint that allows a certain interest to such
mystic slogans as Slavophilism, Anglo-Saxondom, Teutonism, and the Latin
genius but that quite refuses to be taken in by any of them. A careful
study of linguistic distributions and of the history of such
distributions is one of the driest of commentaries on these sentimental
creeds.
That a group of languages need not in the least correspond to a racial
group or a culture area is easily demonstrated. We may even show how a
single language intercrosses with race and culture lines. The English
language is not spoken by a unified race. In the United States there are
several millions of negroes who know no other language. It is their
mother-tongue, the formal vesture of their inmost thoughts and
sentiments. It is as much their property, as inalienably "theirs," as
the King of England's. Nor do the English-speaking whites of America
constitute a definite race except by way of contrast to the negroes. Of
the three fundamental white races in Europe generally recognized by
physical anthropologists--the Baltic or North European, the Alpine, and
the Mediterranean--each has numerous English-speaking representatives in
America. But does not the historical core of English-speaking peoples,
those relatively "unmixed" populations that still reside in England and
its colonies, represent a race, pure and single? I cannot see that the
evidence points that way. The English people are an amalgam of many
distinct strains. Besides the old "Anglo-Saxon," in other words North
German, element which is conventionally represented as the basic
strain, the English blood comprises Norman French,[177] Scandinavian,
"Celtic,"[178] and pre-Celtic elements. If by "English" we mean also
Scotch and Irish,[179] then the term "Celtic" is loosely used for at
least two quite distinct racial elements--the short, dark-complexioned
type of Wales and the taller, lighter, often ruddy-haired type of the
Highlands and parts of Ireland. Even if we confine ourselves to the
Saxon element, which, needless to say, nowhere appears "pure," we are
not at the end of our troubles. We may roughly identify this strain with
the racial type now predominant in southern Denmark and adjoining parts
of northern Germany. If so, we must content ourselves with the
reflection that while the English language is historically most closely
affiliated with Frisian, in second degree with the other West Germanic
dialects (Low Saxon or "Plattdeutsch," Dutch, High German), only in
third degree with Scandinavian, the specific "Saxon" racial type that
overran England in the fifth and sixth centuries was largely the same as
that now represented by the Danes, who speak a Scandinavian language,
while the High German-speaking population of central and southern
Germany[180] is markedly distinct.
[Footnote 177: Itself an amalgam of North "French" and Scandinavian
elements.]
[Footnote 178: The "Celtic" blood of what is now England and Wales is by
no means confined to the Celtic-speaking regions--Wales and, until
recently, Cornwall. There is every reason to believe that the invading
Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) did not exterminate the
Brythonic Celts of England nor yet drive them altogether into Wales and
Cornwall (there has been far too much "driving" of conquered peoples
into mountain fastnesses and land's ends in our histories), but simply
intermingled with them and imposed their rule and language upon them.]
[Footnote 179: In practice these three peoples can hardly be kept
altogether distinct. The terms have rather a local-sentimental than a
clearly racial value. Intermarriage has gone on steadily for centuries
and it is only in certain outlying regions that we get relatively pure
types, e.g., the Highland Scotch of the Hebrides. In America, English,
Scotch, and Irish strands have become inextricably interwoven.]
[Footnote 180: The High German now spoken in northern Germany is not of
great age, but is due to the spread of standardized German, based on
Upper Saxon, a High German dialect, at the expense of "Plattdeutsch."]
But what if we ignore these finer distinctions and simply assume that
the "Teutonic" or Baltic or North European racial type coincided in its
distribution with that of the Germanic languages? Are we not on safe
ground then? No, we are now in hotter water than ever. First of all, the
mass of the German-speaking population (central and southern Germany,
German Switzerland, German Austria) do not belong to the tall,
blond-haired, long-headed[181] "Teutonic" race at all, but to the
shorter, darker-complexioned, short-headed[182] Alpine race, of which
the central population of France, the French Swiss, and many of the
western and northern Slavs (e.g., Bohemians and Poles) are equally good
representatives. The distribution of these "Alpine" populations
corresponds in part to that of the old continental "Celts," whose
language has everywhere given way to Italic, Germanic, and Slavic
pressure. We shall do well to avoid speaking of a "Celtic race," but if
we were driven to give the term a content, it would probably be more
appropriate to apply it to, roughly, the western portion of the Alpine
peoples than to the two island types that I referred to before. These
latter were certainly "Celticized," in speech and, partly, in blood,
precisely as, centuries later, most of England and part of Scotland was
"Teutonized" by the Angles and Saxons. Linguistically speaking, the
"Celts" of to-day (Irish Gaelic, Manx, Scotch Gaelic, Welsh, Breton) are
Celtic and most of the Germans of to-day are Germanic precisely as the
American Negro, Americanized Jew, Minnesota Swede, and German-American
are "English." But, secondly, the Baltic race was, and is, by no means
an exclusively Germanic-speaking people. The northernmost "Celts," such
as the Highland Scotch, are in all probability a specialized offshoot of
this race. What these people spoke before they were Celticized nobody
knows, but there is nothing whatever to indicate that they spoke a
Germanic language. Their language may quite well have been as remote
from any known Indo-European idiom as are Basque and Turkish to-day.
Again, to the east of the Scandinavians are non-Germanic members of the
race--the Finns and related peoples, speaking languages that are not
definitely known to be related to Indo-European at all.
[Footnote 181: "Dolichocephalic."]
[Footnote 182: "Brachycephalic."]
We cannot stop here. The geographical position of the Germanic languages
is such[183] as to make it highly probable that they represent but an
outlying transfer of an Indo-European dialect (possibly a Celto-Italic
prototype) to a Baltic people speaking a language or a group of
languages that was alien to Indo-European.[184] Not only, then, is
English not spoken by a unified race at present but its prototype, more
likely than not, was originally a foreign language to the race with
which English is more particularly associated. We need not seriously
entertain the idea that English or the group of languages to which it
belongs is in any intelligible sense the expression of race, that there
are embedded in it qualities that reflect the temperament or "genius" of
a particular breed of human beings.
[Footnote 183: By working back from such data as we possess we can make
it probable that these languages were originally confined to a
comparatively small area in northern Germany and Scandinavia. This area
is clearly marginal to the total area of distribution of the
Indo-European-speaking peoples. Their center of gravity, say 1000 B.C.,
seems to have lain in southern Russia.]
[Footnote 184: While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for
it is stronger than one might suppose. There are a surprising number of
common and characteristic Germanic words which cannot be connected with
known Indo-European radical elements and which may well be survivals of
the hypothetical pre-Germanic language; such are _house_, _stone_,
_sea_, _wife_ (German _Haus_, _Stein_, _See_, _Weib_).]
Many other, and more striking, examples of the lack of correspondence
between race and language could be given if space permitted. One
instance will do for many. The Malayo-Polynesian languages form a
well-defined group that takes in the southern end of the Malay Peninsula
and the tremendous island world to the south and east (except Australia
and the greater part of New Guinea). In this vast region we find
represented no less than three distinct races--the Negro-like Papuans of
New Guinea and Melanesia, the Malay race of Indonesia, and the
Polynesians of the outer islands. The Polynesians and Malays all speak
languages of the Malayo-Polynesian group, while the languages of the
Papuans belong partly to this group (Melanesian), partly to the
unrelated languages ("Papuan") of New Guinea.[185] In spite of the fact
that the greatest race cleavage in this region lies between the Papuans
and the Polynesians, the major linguistic division is of Malayan on the
one side, Melanesian and Polynesian on the other.
[Footnote 185: Only the easternmost part of this island is occupied by
Melanesian-speaking Papuans.]
As with race, so with culture. Particularly in more primitive levels,
where the secondarily unifying power of the "national"[186] ideal does
not arise to disturb the flow of what we might call natural
distributions, is it easy to show that language and culture are not
intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one
culture, closely related languages--even a single language--belong to
distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in
aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as
structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of.[187] The
speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas--the
simple hunting culture of western Canada and the interior of Alaska
(Loucheux, Chipewyan), the buffalo culture of the Plains (Sarcee), the
highly ritualized culture of the southwest (Navaho), and the peculiarly
specialized culture of northwestern California (Hupa). The cultural
adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest
contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages
themselves.[188] The Hupa Indians are very typical of the culture area
to which they belong. Culturally identical with them are the neighboring
Yurok and Karok. There is the liveliest intertribal intercourse between
the Hupa, Yurok, and Karok, so much so that all three generally attend
an important religious ceremony given by any one of them. It is
difficult to say what elements in their combined culture belong in
origin to this tribe or that, so much at one are they in communal
action, feeling, and thought. But their languages are not merely alien
to each other; they belong to three of the major American linguistic
groups, each with an immense distribution on the northern continent.
Hupa, as we have seen, is Athabaskan and, as such, is also distantly
related to Haida (Queen Charlotte Islands) and Tlingit (southern
Alaska); Yurok is one of the two isolated Californian languages of the
Algonkin stock, the center of gravity of which lies in the region of the
Great Lakes; Karok is the northernmost member of the Hokan group, which
stretches far to the south beyond the confines of California and has
remoter relatives along the Gulf of Mexico.
[Footnote 186: A "nationality" is a major, sentimentally unified, group.
The historical factors that lead to the feeling of national unity are
various--political, cultural, linguistic, geographic, sometimes
specifically religious. True racial factors also may enter in, though
the accent on "race" has generally a psychological rather than a
strictly biological value. In an area dominated by the national
sentiment there is a tendency for language and culture to become uniform
and specific, so that linguistic and cultural boundaries at least tend
to coincide. Even at best, however, the linguistic unification is never
absolute, while the cultural unity is apt to be superficial, of a
quasi-political nature, rather than deep and far-reaching.]
[Footnote 187: The Semitic languages, idiosyncratic as they are, are no
more definitely ear-marked.]
[Footnote 188: See page 209.]
[Transcriber's note: Footnote 188 refers to the paragraph beginning on
line 6448.]
Returning to English, most of us would readily admit, I believe, that
the community of language between Great Britain and the United States is
far from arguing a like community of culture. It is customary to say
that they possess a common "Anglo-Saxon" cultural heritage, but are not
many significant differences in life and feeling obscured by the
tendency of the "cultured" to take this common heritage too much for
granted? In so far as America is still specifically "English," it is
only colonially or vestigially so; its prevailing cultural drift is
partly towards autonomous and distinctive developments, partly towards
immersion in the larger European culture of which that of England is
only a particular facet. We cannot deny that the possession of a common
language is still and will long continue to be a smoother of the way to
a mutual cultural understanding between England and America, but it is
very clear that other factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, are
working powerfully to counteract this leveling influence. A common
language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a common culture when the
geographical, political, and economic determinants of the culture are no
longer the same throughout its area.
Language, race, and culture are not necessarily correlated. This does
not mean that they never are. There is some tendency, as a matter of
fact, for racial and cultural lines of cleavage to correspond to
linguistic ones, though in any given case the latter may not be of the
same degree of importance as the others. Thus, there is a fairly
definite line of cleavage between the Polynesian languages, race, and
culture on the one hand and those of the Melanesians on the other, in
spite of a considerable amount of overlapping.[189] The racial and
cultural division, however, particularly the former, are of major
importance, while the linguistic division is of quite minor
significance, the Polynesian languages constituting hardly more than a
special dialectic subdivision of the combined Melanesian-Polynesian
group. Still clearer-cut coincidences of cleavage may be found. The
language, race, and culture of the Eskimo are markedly distinct from
those of their neighbors;[190] in southern Africa the language, race,
and culture of the Bushmen offer an even stronger contrast to those of
their Bantu neighbors. Coincidences of this sort are of the greatest
significance, of course, but this significance is not one of inherent
psychological relation between the three factors of race, language, and
culture. The coincidences of cleavage point merely to a readily
intelligible historical association. If the Bantu and Bushmen are so
sharply differentiated in all respects, the reason is simply that the
former are relatively recent arrivals in southern Africa. The two
peoples developed in complete isolation from each other; their present
propinquity is too recent for the slow process of cultural and racial
assimilation to have set in very powerfully. As we go back in time, we
shall have to assume that relatively scanty populations occupied large
territories for untold generations and that contact with other masses of
population was not as insistent and prolonged as it later became. The
geographical and historical isolation that brought about race
differentiations was naturally favorable also to far-reaching variations
in language and culture. The very fact that races and cultures which are
brought into historical contact tend to assimilate in the long run,
while neighboring languages assimilate each other only casually and in
superficial respects[191], indicates that there is no profound causal
relation between the development of language and the specific
development of race and of culture.
[Footnote 189: The Fijians, for instance, while of Papuan (negroid)
race, are Polynesian rather than Melanesian in their cultural and
linguistic affinities.]
[Footnote 190: Though even here there is some significant overlapping.
The southernmost Eskimo of Alaska were assimilated in culture to their
Tlingit neighbors. In northeastern Siberia, too, there is no sharp
cultural line between the Eskimo and the Chukchi.]
[Footnote 191: The supersession of one language by another is of course
not truly a matter of linguistic assimilation.]
But surely, the wary reader will object, there must be some relation
between language and culture, and between language and at least that
intangible aspect of race that we call "temperament". Is it not
inconceivable that the particular collective qualities of mind that have
fashioned a culture are not precisely the same as were responsible for
the growth of a particular linguistic morphology? This question takes us
into the heart of the most difficult problems of social psychology. It
is doubtful if any one has yet attained to sufficient clarity on the
nature of the historical process and on the ultimate psychological
factors involved in linguistic and cultural drifts to answer it
intelligently. I can only very briefly set forth my own views, or rather
my general attitude. It would be very difficult to prove that
"temperament", the general emotional disposition of a people[192], is
basically responsible for the slant and drift of a culture, however much
it may manifest itself in an individual's handling of the elements of
that culture. But granted that temperament has a certain value for the
shaping of culture, difficult though it be to say just how, it does not
follow that it has the same value for the shaping of language. It is
impossible to show that the form of a language has the slightest
connection with national temperament. Its line of variation, its drift,
runs inexorably in the channel ordained for it by its historic
antecedents; it is as regardless of the feelings and sentiments of its
speakers as is the course of a river of the atmospheric humors of the
landscape. I am convinced that it is futile to look in linguistic
structure for differences corresponding to the temperamental variations
which are supposed to be correlated with race. In this connection it is
well to remember that the emotional aspect of our psychic life is but
meagerly expressed in the build of language[193].
[Footnote 192: "Temperament" is a difficult term to work with. A great
deal of what is loosely charged to national "temperament" is really
nothing but customary behavior, the effect of traditional ideals of
conduct. In a culture, for instance, that does not look kindly upon
demonstrativeness, the natural tendency to the display of emotion
becomes more than normally inhibited. It would be quite misleading to
argue from the customary inhibition, a cultural fact, to the native
temperament. But ordinarily we can get at human conduct only as it is
culturally modified. Temperament in the raw is a highly elusive thing.]
[Footnote 193: See pages 39, 40.]
[Transcriber's note: Footnote 193 refers to the paragraph beginning on
line 1256.]
Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven, are, in a
sense, one and the same. As there is nothing to show that there are
significant racial differences in the fundamental conformation of
thought, it follows that the infinite variability of linguistic form,
another name for the infinite variability of the actual process of
thought, cannot be an index of such significant racial differences. This
is only apparently a paradox. The latent content of all languages is the
same--the intuitive _science_ of experience. It is the manifest form
that is never twice the same, for this form, which we call linguistic
morphology, is nothing more nor less than a collective _art_ of thought,
an art denuded of the irrelevancies of individual sentiment. At last
analysis, then, language can no more flow from race as such than can the
sonnet form.
Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense
causally related. Culture may be defined as _what_ a society does and
thinks. Language is a particular _how_ of thought. It is difficult to
see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between
a selected inventory of experience (culture, a significant selection
made by society) and the particular manner in which the society
expresses all experience. The drift of culture, another way of saying
history, is a complex series of changes in society's selected
inventory--additions, losses, changes of emphasis and relation. The
drift of language is not properly concerned with changes of content at
all, merely with changes in formal expression. It is possible, in
thought, to change every sound, word, and concrete concept of a language
without changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one can pour
into a fixed mold water or plaster or molten gold. If it can be shown
that culture has an innate form, a series of contours, quite apart from
subject-matter of any description whatsoever, we have a something in
culture that may serve as a term of comparison with and possibly a
means of relating it to language. But until such purely formal patterns
of culture are discovered and laid bare, we shall do well to hold the
drifts of language and of culture to be non-comparable and unrelated
processes. From this it follows that all attempts to connect particular
types of linguistic morphology with certain correlated stages of
cultural development are vain. Rightly understood, such correlations are
rubbish. The merest _coup d'oeil_ verifies our theoretical argument on
this point. Both simple and complex types of language of an indefinite
number of varieties may be found spoken at any desired level of cultural
advance. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the
Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.
It goes without saying that the mere content of language is intimately
related to culture. A society that has no knowledge of theosophy need
have no name for it; aborigines that had never seen or heard of a horse
were compelled to invent or borrow a word for the animal when they made
his acquaintance. In the sense that the vocabulary of a language more or
less faithfully reflects the culture whose purposes it serves it is
perfectly true that the history of language and the history of culture
move along parallel lines. But this superficial and extraneous kind of
parallelism is of no real interest to the linguist except in so far as
the growth or borrowing of new words incidentally throws light on the
formal trends of the language. The linguistic student should never make
the mistake of identifying a language with its dictionary.
If both this and the preceding chapter have been largely negative in
their contentions, I believe that they have been healthily so. There is
perhaps no better way to learn the essential nature of speech than to
realize what it is not and what it does not do. Its superficial
connections with other historic processes are so close that it needs to
be shaken free of them if we are to see it in its own right. Everything
that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that
it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has
evolved--nothing short of a finished form of expression for all
communicable experience. This form may be endlessly varied by the
individual without thereby losing its distinctive contours; and it is
constantly reshaping itself as is all art. Language is the most massive
and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of
unconscious generations.