CHAPTER V

LANGUAGE

47. Linguistic relationship: the speech family.—48. Criteria

of relationship.—49. Sound equivalences and phonetic laws.—50.

The principal speech families.—51. Classification of languages

by types.—52. Permanence of language and race.—53. The

biological and historical nature of language.—54. Problems

of the relation of language and culture.—55. Period of the

origin of language.—56. Culture, speech, and nationality.—57.

Relative worth of languages.—58. Size of vocabulary.—59.

Quality of speech sounds.—60. Diffusion and parallelism in

language and culture.—61. Convergent languages.—62. Unconscious

factors in language and culture.—63. Linguistic and cultural

standards.—64. Rapidity of linguistic change.

47. LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIP: THE SPEECH FAMILY

The question that the historian and anthropologist are likely to ask most

frequently of the philologist, is whether this and that language are or

are not related. Relationship in such connection means descent from a

common source, as two brothers are descended from the same father, or two

cousins from a common grandfather. If languages can be demonstrated to

possess such common source, it is clear that the peoples who spoke them

must at one time have been in close contact, or perhaps have constituted

a single people. If, on the other hand, the languages of two peoples

prove wholly dissimilar, though their racial types and cultures be

virtually identical, as indeed is sometimes found to be the case—witness

the Hungarians and their neighbors—it is evident that an element of

discontinuous development must somewhere be reckoned with. Perhaps one

part of an originally single racial group gradually modified its speech

beyond recognition, or under the shock of conquest, migration, or other

historical accident entirely discarded it in favor of a new and foreign

tongue. Or the opposite may be true: the two groups were originally

distinct in all respects, but, being brought in contact, their cultures

interpenetrated, intermarriage followed, and the two physical types

became assimilated into one while the languages remained dissimilar. In

short, if one wishes full understanding of a people, one must take its

language into consideration. This means that it must be classified. If a

historical classification is to be more than barrenly logical, it must

have reference to relationship, development, origin. In a word, it must

be a genetic classification.

The term used to indicate that two or more languages have a common source

but are unrelated to all others, or seem so in the present state of

knowledge, is “linguistic family.” “Linguistic stock” is frequently used

as a synonym. This is the fundamental concept in the classification of

languages. Without a clear idea of its meaning one involves himself in

confusion on attempting to use philology as an aid to other branches of

human history.

There is no abstract reason against referring to a group of unrelated

languages as a “family” because they are all spoken in one area, nor

against denominating as “families,” as has sometimes been done, the major

subdivisions of a group of languages admittedly of common origin. Again,

languages that show certain similarities of type or structure, such as

inflection, might conceivably be put into one “family.” But there is

this objection to all such usages: they do not commit themselves on the

point of genetic relationship, or they contradict it, or only partially

exhaust it. Yet commonness of origin is so important in many connections

that it is indispensable to have one term which denotes its ascertainable

presence. And for this quality there happens to be no generally

understood designation other than “linguistic family,” or its synonym,

“linguistic stock.” This phrase will therefore be used here strictly

in the sense of the whole of a group of languages sprung from a single

source, and only in that sense. Other groupings will be indicated by

phrases like “languages of such and such an area,” “subfamily,” “division

of a family,” or “languages of similar type.”

48. CRITERIA OF RELATIONSHIP

The question that first arises in regard to linguistic families is how

the relationship of their constituent idioms is determined. In brief, the

method is one of comparison. If a considerable proportion of the words

and grammatical forms of two languages are reasonably similar, similar

enough to indicate that the resemblances cannot be due to mere accident,

these similar words and forms must go back to a common source, and if

this source is not borrowing, the two tongues are related. If comparison

fails to bring out any such degree of resemblance, the languages are

classed in distinct families.

Of course it is possible that the reason two languages seem unrelated

is not that they are really so, but that they have in the lapse of ages

become so much differentiated that one cannot any longer find resemblance

between their forms. In that event true relationship would be obscured

by its remoteness. Theoretically there is high probability that many

families of languages, customarily regarded as totally distinct, do go

back in the far past to a common origin, and that ignorance of their

history, or inability to analyze them deeply, prevents recognition of

their relationship. From time to time it happens that groups of languages

which at first seemed unrelated are shown by more intensive study to

possess elements enough in common to compel the recognition of their

original unity. In that case what were supposed to be several “families”

become merged in one. The scope of a particular family may be thus

enlarged; but the scope of the generic concept of “family” is not altered.

Whether there is any hope that comparative philology may ultimately

be prosecuted with sufficient success to lead all the varied forms of

human speech back to a single origin, is an interesting speculation. A

fair statement is that such a possibility cannot be denied, but that

the science is still far from such a realization, and that progress

toward it is necessarily slow. Of more immediate concern is an ordering

and summarizing of the knowledge in hand with a view to such positive

inferences as can be drawn.

In an estimate of the similarity of languages, words that count as

evidence must meet two requirements: they must be alike or traceably

similar in sound; and they must be alike or similar in meaning. This

double requirement holds, whether full words or separable parts of words,

roots or grammatical forms, are compared. The English word _eel_ and

the French _île_, meaning island, are pronounced almost exactly alike,

yet their meaning is so different that no sane person would regard them

as sprung from the same origin. As a matter of fact _île_ is derived

from Latin _insula_, whereas _eel_ has a cognate in German _aal_. These

prototypes _insula_ and _aal_ being as different in sound as they are

in meaning, any possibility that _eel_ and _île_ might be related is

easily disposed of. Yet if the Latin and German equivalents were lost, if

nothing were known of the history of the English and French languages,

and if _île_ meant not _island_ but, say, _fish_ or _watersnake_, then it

might be reasonable to think of a connection.

Such doubtful cases, of which a certain proportion are likely to be

adjudged wrongly, are bound to come up in regard to the less investigated

languages, particularly those of nations without writing, the earlier

stages of whose speech have perished without trace. In proportion as more

is known of a language, or as careful analysis can reconstruct more of

its past stages, the number of such borderline cases obviously becomes

fewer.

Before genetic connection between two languages can be thought of, the

number of their words similar in sound and sense must be reasonably

large. An isolated handful of resemblances obviously are either

importations—loan words—or the result of coincidence. Thus in the native

Californian language known as Yuki, _ko_ means _go_, and _kom_ means

_come_. Yet examination of Yuki reveals no further instances of the same

kind. It would therefore be absurd to dream of a connection: one swallow

does not make a summer. This lone pair of resemblances means nothing

except that the mathematical law of probability has operated. Among the

thousands of words in one language, a number are likely to be similar

in sound to words of another language; and of this number again a small

fraction, perhaps one or two or five in all, will happen to bear some

resemblance in meaning also. In short, the similarities upon which a

verdict of genetic relationship is based must be sufficiently numerous

to fall well beyond possibility of mere coincidence; and it must also be

possible to prove with reasonable certainty that they are not the result

of one language borrowing words from another, as, for instance, English

borrowed from French and Latin.

At the same time it is not necessary that the similarities extend to the

point of identity. In fact, too close a resemblance between part of the

stock of two languages immediately raises a presumption of borrowing.

For every language is continually changing, and once a mother tongue

has split into several branches, each of these goes on modifying its

sounds, and gradually shifting the meaning of its words, generation after

generation. In short, where connection is real, it must be veiled by a

certain degree of distortion.

Take the English word _foot_ and the Latin word of the same meaning,

_pes_. To offhand inspection the sounds or forms of the two words do

not seem similar. The resemblance becomes more definite in other forms

of _pes_, for instance the genitive case _ped-is_ or the accusative

_ped-em_. Obviously the stem or elementary portion of the Latin word is

not _pes_ but _ped-_; and the _d_ is closer to the English _t_ of _foot_

than is the _s_ of _pes_. The probability of relationship is increased

by the Greek word for foot, _pous_, whose stem proves to be _pod-_,

with vowel closer to that of English. Meanwhile, it would be recognized

that there are English words beginning with _ped-_, such as _pedal_,

_pedestrian_, _pedestal_, all of which have a clear association with the

idea of foot. All these words however possess almost exact equivalents in

Latin. One would therefore be justified in concluding from these facts

what indeed the history of the languages proves, namely, that _pedal_,

_pedestrian_, and _pedestal_ are Latin words taken over into English;

whereas _foot_ and _pes_ and _pous_, and for that matter German _fuss_,

are derivatives from a common form which once existed in the now extinct

mother tongue from which Greek and Latin and English and German are

derived.

49. SOUND EQUIVALENCES AND PHONETIC LAWS

The question next arises whether it is possible to account for the

distortions which have modified the original word into _foot_, _ped-_,

etc. What has caused the initial sound of this ancient word to become _p_

in Latin and _f_ in English, and its last consonant to be _d_ in Latin

and Greek, _t_ in English, and _ss_ in German? To answer this seemingly

innocent question with accuracy for this one word alone would involve a

treatise on the whole group of languages in question, and even then the

causes, as causes, could scarcely be set down with certainty. But it

has proved possible to assemble a large number of instances of parallel

distortion in which Latin _p_ corresponds to English _f_, or _d_ to _t_.

Evidently philology has got hold of a generalized phenomenon here. Since

_father_ corresponds to _pater_, _full_ to _pl-enus_, _for_ to _pro_,

_fish_ to _piscis_, and so on in case after case, we are evidently face

to face with a happening that has occurred with regularity and to which

the name “law” is therefore applicable.

The _f_ of _foot_ and _p_ of _pes_ are both lip sounds. They differ

preëminently in that _f_ can be prolonged indefinitely, whereas _p_

is a momentary sound. It is produced by closure of the lips for a

fraction of a second during which there is an interruption of sound

production, followed by a somewhat explosive release of the breath which

has been impounded in the mouth cavity. This explosion is of necessity

instantaneous. Since it is preceded by occlusion, or stoppage of the

breath, it is customary to speak of sounds produced by a process like

_p_ as “stops.” _F_, on the other hand, is a “continuant,” or more

specifically a “fricative.”

The English word _three_ begins with a sound which, although

conventionally represented by the two letters _th_, is a simple sound

and in a class with _f_ in being fricative. _Th_ is formed by putting

the tongue lightly across the teeth, just as _f_ is made by placing the

lower lip against the edge of the upper teeth. In both cases the breath

is expelled with friction through a narrow passage. Now if the fricative

_f_ is represented in Latin by the stop _p_, then, if regularity holds

good, the English fricative _th_ ought to be represented in Latin by the

stop sound in the corresponding dental position, namely _t_. The Latin

word for _three_ is in fact _tres_; for _thin_, _ten-uis_; for _mother_,

_mater_; for _thou_, _tu_, and so on. The regularity therefore extends

beyond the limits of the single labial class of sounds, and applies with

equal force to the dentals; and, it may be added, to the palatals or

gutturals as well.

As one passes from English and Latin to German, one finds the initial

sound of the word meaning three, _drei_, to be somewhat different from

_th_ and _t_ but still clearly allied, since it also is made by the

tongue against the teeth. _D_ is a stop like _t_, but the vocal cords

vibrate while it is being pronounced, whereas in _t_ the vocal cords

are silent. _D_ is “voiced” or “sonant,” _t_ “unvoiced” or “surd.”

Hence the formulation: Latin, surd stop; German, sonant stop; English,

fricative. This triple equivalence can be substantiated in other words.

For instance, _ten-uis_, _dünn_, _thin_; _tu_, _du_, _thou_.

If it is the English word that contains a surd stop, what will be the

equivalent in Latin and German? Compare _ten_, Latin _decem_, German

_zehn_. Again the three classes of sounds run parallel; but the place of

their appearance in the three languages has shifted.

The third possible placing of the three sounds in the three languages is

when English has the sonant stop, _d_. By exclusion it might be predicted

that Latin should then show the fricative _th_ and German the surd stop

_t_. The word _daughter_ confirms. The German is _tochter_. Latin in this

case fails us, the original corresponding stem having gone out of use and

been replaced by the word _filia_. But Greek, whose sounds align with

those of Latin as opposed to English and German, provides the _th_ as

expected: _thygater_. Compare _death_, _tod_, _thanatos_.

Let us bring together these results so that the eye may grasp them:

Latin, Greek surd stop sonant stop fricative

German sonant stop fricative surd stop

English fricative surd stop sonant stop

Latin, Greek tres duo thygater

German drei zwei tochter

English three two daughter

These relations apply not only to the dentals _d_, _t_, _th_ (_z_), which

have been chosen for illustration, but also to the labials, _p_, _b_,

_f_, and to the palatals _k_, _g_, _h_ (_gh_, _ch_).

It is evident that most of the sounds occur in all three groups of

languages, but not in the same words. The sound _t_ is common to

English, Latin, and German, but when it appears in a particular word

in one of these languages it is replaced by _d_ and _th_ in the two

others. This replacing is known as a “sound shift.” The sound shifts

just enumerated constitute the famous Grimm’s Law. This was the first

discovered important phonetic law or system of sound substitutions. Yet

it is only one of a number of shifts that have been worked out for the

Indo-European group of languages to which English, German, and Latin

belong. So far, only stopped and fricative consonants have been reviewed

here, and no vowels have been considered. Other groups of languages also

show shifts, but often different ones, as between _l_ and _n_, or _s_ and

_k_, or _p_ and _k_.

The significance of a shift lies in the fact that its regularity cannot

be explained on any other ground than that the words in which the law

is operative must originally have been the same. That is, Latin _duo_,

German _zwei_, English _two_ are all only variants of a word which

meant “two” in the mother tongue from which these three languages are

descended. This example alone is of course insufficient evidence for the

existence of such a common mother tongue. But that each of the shifts

discussed is substantiated by hundreds or thousands of words in which

it holds true, puts the shift beyond the possibility of mere accident.

The explanation of coincidence is ruled out. The resemblances therefore

are both genuine and genetic. The conclusion becomes inevitable that the

languages thus linked are later modifications of a former single speech.

It is in this way that linguistic relationship is determined. Where an

ancient sound shift, a law of phonetic change, can be established by

a sufficient number of cases, argument ceases. It is true that when

most of a language has perished, or when an unwritten language has been

but fragmentarily recorded or its analysis not carried far, a strong

presumption of genetic unity may crowd in on the investigator who is not

yet in a position to present the evidence of laws. The indications may be

strong enough to warrant a tentative assumption of relationship. But the

final test is always the establishment of laws of sound equivalence that

hold good with predominating regularity.

50. THE PRINCIPAL SPEECH FAMILIES

The number of linguistic families is not a matter of much theoretical

import. From what has already been said it appears that the number

can perhaps never be determined with absolute accuracy. As knowledge

accumulates and dissection is carried to greater refinements, new

phonetic laws will uncover and serve to unite what now seem to be

separate stocks. Yet for the practical purpose of classification and

tracing relationship the linguistic family will remain a valuable tool. A

rapid survey of the principal families is therefore worth while.

[Illustration: FIG. 12. Linguistic Families of Asia and Europe. 1,

Basque. 2, Indo-European. 3, Caucasian (perhaps two families). 4,

Ural-Altaic (a, Finno-Ugric; b, Samoyed; c, Turkish; d, Mongol; e,

Tungus-Manchu). 5, Semitic. 6, Dravidian. 7, Kolarian. 8, Sinitic (a,

Chinese; b, Shan-Siamese; c, Tibeto-Burman). 9, Khasi. 10, Anamese. 11,

Mon-Khmer. 12, Sakai. 13, Semang. 14, Andaman. 15, Malayo-Polynesian.

16, Korean. 17, Japanese. 18, Ainu. 19, Yeniseian. 20, Yukaghir. 21,

Chukchi-Kamchadal. 22, Eskimo.]

In Asia and Europe, which must be considered a unit in this connection,

the number of stocks, according to conservative reckoning, does not

exceed twenty-five. The most important of these, in point of number

of speakers, is the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic or Aryan family,

whose territory for several thousand years has comprised southwestern

Asia and the greater part, but by no means all, of Europe. The most

populous branches of the Indo-European family are the Indic, Slavic,

Germanic, and Romance or Latin. Others are Persian or Iranic, Armenian,

Greek, Albanian, Baltic or Lithuanian, and Keltic. From Europe various

Indo-European languages, such as English, Spanish, French, Russian, have

in recent centuries been carried to other continents, until in some,

such as the Americas and Australia, the greater area is now inhabited by

peoples speaking Indo-European. As the accompanying maps are intended

to depict the historic or native distribution of languages they do

not show this diffusion. It will be noted that the distribution of

Indo-European has the form of a long belt stretching from western Europe

to northeastern India, with an interruption only in Asia Minor (Fig.

12). Turkish peoples displaced Indo-Europeans there about a thousand

years ago, thus breaking the territorial continuity. It is probable

that another link between the western and eastern Indo-Europeans once

stretched around the north of the Caspian sea. Here also there are Turks

now.

Almost equaling Indo-European in the number of its speakers is Sinitic,

which is generally held to include Chinese proper with its dialects; the

Tibeto-Burman branch; the T’ai or Shan-Siamese branch; and probably some

minor divisions like Lolo.

In extent of territory occupied the Altaic stock rivals the

Indo-European. Its three main divisions, Turkish, Mongolian, and

Tungus-Manchu, cover most of northern and central Asia and some tracts

in Europe. The Turks, as just noted, are the only stock that within the

period of history has gained appreciable territory at Indo-European

expense. The Uralic or Finno-Ugric family has eastern Europe and

northwestern Asia as its home, with the Finns and Hungarian Magyars as

its most civilized and best known representatives. This is a scattered

stock. Most scholars unite the three Altaic divisions, Finno-Ugric, and

Samoyed into a vast Ural-Altaic family.

Of the Semitic family, Arabic is the chief living representative, with

Abyssinian in Africa as a little known half-sister. Arabic is one of

the most widely diffused of all languages, and as the orthodox vehicle

of Mohammedanism has served an important function as a culture carrier.

Several great nations of ancient times also spoke Semitic tongues: the

Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Carthaginians, and Hebrews.

Southern India is Dravidian. While people of this family enter little

into our customary thoughts, they number over fifty millions. Japanese

and Korean also merit mention as important stock tongues. Anamese, by

some regarded as an offshoot from Chinese, may constitute a separate

stock. Several minor families will be found on the Asiatic map, most of

them consisting of uncivilized peoples or limited in their territory or

the number of their speakers. Yet, so far as can be judged from present

knowledge, they form units of the same order of independence as the great

Indo-European, Semitic, and Ural-Altaic stocks.

Language distributions in Africa are in the main simple (Fig. 13). The

whole of northern Africa beyond latitude 10°, and parts of east Africa

almost to the equator, were at one time Hamitic. This is the family to

which the language of ancient Egypt belonged. Hamitic and Semitic, named

after sons of Noah, probably derive from a common source, although the

separation of the common mother tongue into the African Hamitic and the

Asiatic Semitic divisions must have occurred very anciently. In the past

thousand years Hamitic has yielded ground before Semitic, due to the

spread of Arabic in Mohammedan Africa.

Africa south of the equator is the home of the great Bantu family, except

in the extreme southwest of the continent. There a tract of considerable

area, though of small populational density, was in the possession of the

backward Bushmen and Hottentots, distinctive in their physical type as

well as languages.

[Illustration: FIG. 13. Linguistic Families of Africa. 1, Hamitic.

2, Semitic (a, old; b, intrusive in former Hamitic territory since

Mohammed). 3, Bantu. 4, Hottentot. 5, Bushman. 6, Malayo-Polynesian. X,

the Sudan, not consistently classified.]

Between the equator and latitude ten north, in the belt known as the

Sudan, there is much greater speech diversity than elsewhere in

Africa. The languages of the Sudan fall into several families, perhaps

into a fairly large number. Opinion conflicts or is unsettled as to

their classification. They are, at least in the main, non-Hamitic and

non-Bantu; but this negative fact does not preclude their having had

either a single or a dozen origins. It has usually been easier to throw

them all into a vague group designated as non-Hamitic and non-Bantu than

to compare them in detail.

In Oceania conditions are similar to those of Africa, in that there

are a few great, widely branching stocks and one rather small area,

New Guinea, of astounding speech diversity. Indeed, superficially this

variety is the outstanding linguistic feature of New Guinea. The hundreds

of Papuan dialects of the island look as if they might require twenty or

more families to accommodate them. However, it is inconceivable that so

small a population should time and again have evolved totally new forms

of speech. It is much more likely that something in the mode of life

or habits of mind of the Papuans has favored the breaking up of their

speech into local dialects and an unusually rapid modification of these

into markedly differentiated languages. What the circumstances were that

favored this tendency to segregation and change can be only conjectured.

At any rate, New Guinea ranks with the Sudan, western North America, and

the Amazonian region of South America, as one of the areas of greatest

linguistic multiplicity.

All the remainder of Oceania is either Australian or Malayo-Polynesian in

speech. The Australian idioms have been imperfectly recorded. They were

numerous and locally much varied, but seem to derive from a single mother

tongue.

All the East Indies, including part of the Malay Peninsula, and

all of the island world of the Pacific—Polynesia, Micronesia, and

Melanesia—always excepting interior New Guinea—are the habitat of the

closely-knit Malayo-Polynesian family, whose unity was quickly recognized

by philologists. From Madagascar to Easter Island this speech stretches

more than half-way around our planet. Some authorities believe that the

Mon-Khmer languages of southern Indo-China and the Kolarian or Munda-Kol

tongues of India are related in origin to Malayo-Polynesian, and

denominate the larger whole, the Austronesian family.

[Illustration: FIG. 14. Some important linguistic families of North

America: 1, Eskimo; 2, Athabascan; 3, Algonkin; 4, Iroquoian; 5, Siouan;

6, Muskogean; 7, Uto-Aztecan; 8, Mayan. SA1, Arawak, No. 1 on South

American map (Fig. 15). SA8, Chibcha, No. 8 on South American map. The

white areas are occupied by nearly seventy smaller families, according to

the classification usually accepted.]

North and South America, according to the usual reckoning, contain

more native language families than all the remainder of the world. The

orthodox classification allots about seventy-five families to North

America (some fifty of them represented within the borders of the

United States) and another seventy-five to South America. They varied

greatly in size at the time of discovery, some being confined to a few

hundred souls, whereas others stretched through tribe after tribe over

enormous areas. Their distribution is so irregular and their areas so

disproportionate as to be impossible of vivid representation except on

a large-scale map in colors. The most important in extent of territory,

number of speakers, or the cultural importance of the nations adhering

to them, are, in North America, Eskimo, Athabascan, Algonkin, Iroquoian,

Muskogean, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan, Maya; and in South America, Chibcha,

Quechua, Aymara, Araucanian, Arawak, Carib, Tupi, Tapuya. It will be seen

on the maps (Figs. 14, 15) that these sixteen groups held the greater

part of the area of the double continent, the remaining smaller areas

being crowded with about ten times as many stocks. Obviously, as in New

Guinea, there cannot well have been such an original multiplicity; in

fact, recent studies are tending to consolidate the hundred and fifty

New World families into considerably fewer groups. But the evidence for

such reductions is necessarily difficult to bring and much of it is still

incomplete. The stocks mentioned above have been long determined and

generally accepted.

About a third of humanity to-day speaks some form of Indo-European.

A quarter talks some dialect of Sinitic stock. Semitic, Dravidian,

Ural-Altaic, Japanese, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu have each from about

fifty to a hundred million speakers. The languages included in these

eight families form the speech of approximately ninety per cent of living

human beings.

51. CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES BY TYPES

A classification is widely prevalent which puts languages according

to their structure into three types: inflective, agglutinating, and

isolating. To this some add a fourth type, the polysynthetic or

incorporating. While the classification is largely misrepresentative, it

enters so abundantly into current thought about human speech that it is

worth presenting, analyzing, and, so far as it is invalid, refuting.

[Illustration: FIG. 15. Some important linguistic families of South

America: 1, Arawak; 2, Carib; 3, Tapuya; 4, Tupi; 5, Araucanian; 6,

Aymara; 7, Quechua (Inca); 8, Chibcha. The white areas are occupied

by about seventy smaller families, according to the usually accepted

classification. (Based on Chamberlain.)]

An inflecting language expresses relations or grammatical form by

adding prefixes or suffixes which cannot stand alone, or if they stood

alone would mean nothing; or that operates by internal modifications of

the stem, which also can have no independent existence. The _-ing_ of

_killing_ is such an inflection; so are the vowel changes and the ending

_-en_ in the conjugation _write_, _wrote_, _written_.

An isolating language expresses such relations or forms by separate words

or isolated particles. English _heart of man_ is isolating, where the

Latin equivalent _cor hominis_ is inflective, the per se meaningless

suffix _-is_ rendering the genitive or possessive force of the English

word _of_.

An agglutinative language glues together into solid words elements

for which a definite meaning of their own can be traced. English does

not use this mechanism for purposes that are ordinarily reckoned as

strictly grammatical, but does employ it for closely related purposes.

_Under-take_, _rest-less_, are examples; and in a form like _light-ly_,

which goes back to _light-like_, the force of the suffix which converts

the adjective into the adverb is of a kind that in descriptions of most

languages would be considered grammatical or formal.

Polysynthetic languages are agglutinative ones carried to a high

pitch, or those that can compound words into equivalents of fair sized

sentences. _Steam-boat-propeller-blade_ might be called a polysynthetic

form if we spoke or wrote it in one word as modern German and ancient

Greek would.

Incorporating languages embody the object noun, or the pronoun

representing it, into the word that contains the verb stem. This

construction is totally foreign to English.[7]

Each of these classes evidently defines one or more distinctive

linguistic processes. There are different mechanisms at work in

_kill-ing_, _of man_, _light-ly_. The distinction is therefore both valid

and valuable. Its abuse lies in trying to slap the label of one type on

a whole language. The instances given show that English employs most

of the several distinct processes. Obviously it would be arbitrary to

classify English as outright of one type. This is also the situation for

most other languages. There are a few languages that tend prevailingly

in one direction or the other: Sanskrit and Latin and Hebrew toward the

inflective structure, Turkish toward the agglutinative, Chinese toward

the isolating. But they form a small minority, and most of them contain

certain processes of types other than their predominating ones. Sanskrit,

for instance, has polysynthetic traits, Hebrew incorporating ones.

Therefore, so long as these concepts are used to picture a language in

detail, with balanced recognition of the different processes employed

by it, they are valuable tools to philological description. When on the

other hand the concepts are degraded into catchwords designating three

or four compartments into one of which every language is somehow to be

stuffed, they grossly misrepresent most of the facts. The concepts, in

short, apply usefully to types of linguistic processes, inadequately to

types of languages.

Why then has the classification of human languages into inflecting,

agglutinating, isolating, and polysynthetic or incorporating ones

been repeated so often? First of all, because languages vary almost

infinitely, and a true or natural classification, other than the genetic

one into families, is intricate. The mind craves simplicity and the three

or four supposedly all-embracing types are a temptation.

A second reason lies deeper. As philology grew up into a systematic body

of knowledge, it centered its first interests on Latin and Greek, then on

Sanskrit and the other older Indo-European languages. These happened to

have inflective processes unusually well developed. They also happened

to be the languages from which the native speech of the philologists was

derived. What is our own seems good to us; consequently Indo-European

was elevated into the highest or inflective class of languages. As a

sort of after-thought, Semitic, which includes Hebrew, the language of

part of our Scriptures, was included. Then Chinese, which follows an

unusually simple plan of structure that is the opposite in many ways of

the complex structure of old Indo-European, and which was the speech

of a civilized people, was set apart as a class of the second rank.

This left the majority of human languages to be dumped into a third

class, or a third and fourth class, with the pleasing implication that

they were less capable of abstraction, more materialistic, cruder, and

generally inferior. Philologists are customarily regarded as extreme

examples of passionless, dry, objective human beings. The history of this

philological classification indicates that they too are influenced by

emotional and self-complacent impulses.

52. PERMANENCE OF LANGUAGE AND RACE

It is sometimes thought because a new language is readily learned,

especially in youth, that language is a relatively unstable factor in

human history, less permanent than race. It is necessary to guard against

two fallacies in this connection. The first is to argue from individuals

to societies; the second, that because change is possible, it takes place.

As a matter of fact, languages often preserve their existence,

and even their territory, with surprising tenacity in the face of

conquest, new religions and culture, and the economic disadvantages of

unintelligibility. To-day, Breton, a Keltic dialect, maintains itself in

France as the every-day language of the people in the isolated province

of Brittany—a sort of philological fossil. It has withstood the influence

of two thousand years of contact, first with Latin, then with Frankish

German, at last with French. Its Welsh sister-tongue flourishes in spite

of the Anglo-Saxon speech of the remainder of Great Britain. The original

inhabitants of Spain were mostly of non-Aryan stock. Keltic, Roman, and

Gothic invasions have successively swept over them and finally left the

language of the country Romance, but the original speech also survives

the vicissitudes of thousands of years and is still spoken in the

western Pyrenees as Basque. Ancient Egypt was conquered by the Hyksos,

the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman, but whatever

the official speech of the ruling class, the people continued to speak

Egyptian. Finally, the Arab came and brought with him a new religion,

which entailed use of the Arabic language. Egypt has at last become

Arabic-speaking, but until a century or two ago the Coptic language,

the daughter of the ancient Egyptian tongue of five thousand years

ago, was kept alive by the native Christians along the Nile, and even

to-day it survives in ritual. The boundary between French on the one

side and German, Dutch, and Flemish on the other, has been accurately

known for over six hundred years. With all the wars and conquests back

and forth across the speech line, endless political changes and cultural

influences, this line has scarcely anywhere shifted more than a few dozen

miles, and in places has not moved by a comfortable afternoon’s stroll.

While populations can learn and unlearn languages, they tend to do so

with reluctance and infinite slowness, especially while they remain

in their inherited territories. Speech tends to be one of the most

persistent ethnic characters.

In general, where two populations mingle, the speech of the more

numerous prevails, even if it be the subject nationality. A wide gap

in culture may overcome the influence of the majority, yet the speech

of a culturally more active and advanced population ordinarily wrests

permanent territory to itself slowly except where there is an actual

crowding out or numerical swamping of the natives. This explains the

numerous survivals and “islands” of speech: Keltic, Albanian, Basque,

Caucasian, in Europe; Dravidian and Kolarian in India; Nahuatl and Maya

and many others in modern Mexico; Quechua in Peru; Aymara in Bolivia;

Tupi in Brazil. There are cases to the contrary, like the rapid spread of

Latin in most of Gaul after Cæsar’s conquest, but they seem exceptional.

As to the relative permanence of race and speech, everything depends on

the side from which the question is approached. From the point of view

of hereditary strains, race must be the more conservative, because it

can change rapidly only through admixture with another race, whereas a

language may be completely exchanged in a short time. From the point

of view of history, however, which regards human actions within given

territories, speech is often more stable. Wars or trade or migration may

bring one racial element after another into an area until the type has

become altered or diluted, and yet the original language, or one directly

descended from it, remains. The introduction of the negro from Africa to

America illustrates this distinction. From the point of view of biology,

the negro has at least partially preserved his type, although he has

taken on a wholly new language. As a matter of history, the reverse is

true: English continues to be the speech of the southern United States,

whereas the population now consists of two races instead of one, and the

negro element has been altered by the infusion of white blood. It is a

fallacy to think, because one can learn French or become a Christian and

yet is powerless to change his eye color or head shape, that language and

culture are altogether less stable than race. Speech and culture have an

existence of their own, whose integrity does not depend on hereditary

integrity. The two may move together or separately.

53. THE BIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL NATURE OF LANGUAGE

It is a truism, but one important never to forget in the study of man,

that the faculty of speech is innate, but every language wholly acquired.

Moreover, the environment of which languages are the product is not a

natural one, that is, geographic or climatic, but social. All words and

speech forms that are learned—and they constitute almost the complete

mass of language—are imitated directly from other human beings. Those

new forms that from time to time come into use rest on existing speech

material, are shaped according to tendencies already operative although

perhaps more or less hidden, cannot generally be attributed, as regards

origin, or at least entire origin, to single individuals; in short,

present a history similar to that of inventions and new institutions.

Language thus is a superorganic product; which of course does not

contradict—in fact implies—that it rests on an organic basis.

The “speech” of the animals other than man has something in common with

human languages. It consists of sounds produced by the body, accompanied

by certain mental activities or conditions, and capable of arousing

certain definite responses in other individuals of the species. It

differs from human speech in several fundamental particulars. First of

all, the cries and calls and murmurs of the brutes appear to be wholly

instinctive. A fowl raised alone in an incubator will peep and crow or

cluck as it will scratch and peck. A dog reared by a foster cat will

bark, or growl, or whine, or yelp, when it has attained the requisite

age, and on application of the proper stimulus, as he will wag or crouch

or hunt or dig, and no differently from the dog brought up in association

with other dogs. By contrast, the Japanese infant turned over to American

foster parents never utters or knows a single Japanese word, learns only

English, and learns that as well as do his Caucasian step-brothers.

Evidently then, animal speech is to all intents wholly organic and not at

all “social” in the sense of being superorganic. If this summary is not

absolutely exact, it departs from the truth only infinitesimally.

Further, animal speech has no “meaning,” does not serve as a vehicle of

“communication.” The opposite is often assumed popularly, because we

anthropomorphize. If it is said that a dog’s growl “means” anger, and

that his bark “communicates” suspicion or excitement to his fellows, the

words are used in a sense different from their significance when we say

that the term _red_ “means” the color at one end of the spectrum, or that

a message of departure “communicates” information. The animal sounds

convey knowledge only of subjective states. They “impart” the fact that

the utterer feels anger, excitement, fear, pain, contentment, or some

other affect. They are immediate reflex responses to a feeling. They may

be “understood” in the sense that a sympathetic feeling is evoked or at

any rate mobilized; and thereby they may lead or tend to lead to action

by the hearers. In the same way, any man instinctively “understands”

the moan of a fellow human being. But the moan does not tell whether

the pain is of a second’s or a week’s duration, due to a blow or to gas

in the bowel, to an ulcerated tooth or to mental anguish. There is no

communication of anything objective, of ideas as distinct from feelings,

as when we say _red_ or _break_ or _up_ or _water_. Not one of these

simple concepts can be communicated as such by any brute speech.

One consequence is the “arbitrariness” of human speech. Why should the

sound-cluster _red_ denote that particular color rather than green? Why

does the same word often designate quite distinct ideas in different

languages—the approximate sound group _lay_ meaning “milk” in French;

_lass_ “a girl” in English, “tired” in French, “allow” in German? Such

facts are physiologically arbitrary; just as it is physiologically

arbitrary and organically meaningless that Americans live in a republic

and Britons under a monarchy, or that they turn respectively to the right

and left on the road. Phenomena like these have other social, cultural,

or superorganic phenomena as their immediate causes or antecedents. In

the light of such antecedents, viewed on the level of history, these

phenomena are intelligible: we know why the United States is a republic,

we can trace the development of words like _lay_ and _lass_. It is only

from the biological plane that such facts seem insignificant or arbitrary.

54. PROBLEMS OF THE RELATION OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

This association of language and civilization, or let us say the

linguistic and non-linguistic constituents of culture, brings up the

problem whether it would be possible for one to exist without the

other. Actually, of course, no such case is known. Speculatively,

different conclusions might be reached. It is difficult to imagine any

generalized thinking taking place without words or symbols derived from

words. Religious beliefs and certain phases of social organization also

seem dependent on speech: caste ranking, marriage regulations, kinship

recognition, law, and the like. On the other hand, it is conceivable that

a considerable series of inventions might be made, and the applied arts

might be developed in a fair measure by imitation, among a speechless

people. Finally there seems no reason why certain elements of culture,

such as music, should not flourish as successfully in a society without

as with language.

For the converse, a cultureless species of animal might conceivably

develop and use a form of true speech. Such communications as “The river

is rising,” “Bite it off,” “What do you find inside?” would be within

the range of thought of such a species. Why then have even the most

intelligent of the brutes failed to develop a language? Possibly because

such a language would lack a definite survival value for the species, in

the absence of accompanying culture.

On the whole, however, it would seem that language and culture rest, in

a way which is not yet fully understood, on the same set of faculties,

and that these, for some reason that is still more obscure, developed

in the ancestors of man, while remaining in abeyance in other species.

Even the anthropoid apes seem virtually devoid of the impulse to

communicate, in spite of freely expressing their affective states of

mind by voice, facial gesture, and bodily movement. The most responsive

to man of all species, the dog, learns to accept a considerable stock of

culture in the sense of fitting himself to it: he develops conscience

and manners, for example. Yet, however highly bred, he does not hand

on his accomplishments to his progeny, who again depend on their human

masters for what they acquire. A group of the best reared dogs left to

themselves for a few years would lose all their politeness and revert to

the predomestic habits of their species. In short, the culture impulse is

lacking in the dog except so far as it is instilled by man; and in most

animals it can notoriously be instilled only to a very limited degree.

In the same way, the impulse toward communication can be said to be

wanting. A dog may understand a hundred words of command and express in

his behavior fifty shades of emotion; only rarely does he seem to try to

communicate information of objective fact. Very likely we are attributing

to him even in these rare cases the impulse which we should feel. In the

event of a member of the family being injured or lost, it is certain that

a good dog expresses his agitation, uneasiness, disturbed attachment;

but much less certain is it that he intends to summon help, as we

spontaneously incline to believe because such summoning would be our own

reaction to the situation.

The history and causes of the development in incipient man of the group

of traits that may be called the faculties for speech and civilization

remain one of the darkest areas in the field of knowledge. It is plain

that these faculties lie essentially in the sphere of what is ordinarily

called the mind, rather than in the body, since men and the apes are

far more similar in their general physiques than they are in the degree

of their ability to use their physiques for non-physiological purposes.

Or, if this antithesis of physical and mental seem unfortunate, it might

be said that the growth of the faculties for speech and culture was

connected more with special developments of the central nervous system

than with those of the remainder of the body.

55. PERIOD OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

Is, then, human language as old as culture? It is difficult to be

positive, because words perish like beliefs and institutions, whereas

stone tools endure as direct evidence. On the whole, however, it would

appear that the first rudiments of what deserves to be called language

are about as ancient as the first culture manifestations, not only

because of the theoretically close association of the two phases, but

in the light of circumstantial testimony, namely the skull interiors of

fossil men. In Piltdown as well as Neandertal man, those brain cortex

areas in which the nervous activities connected with auditory and motor

speech are most centralized in modern man, are fairly well developed,

as shown by casts of the skull interiors, which conform closely to the

brain surface. The general frontal region, the largest area of the cortex

believed to be devoted to associative functions—in loose parlance, to

thought—is also greater than in any known ape. More than one authority

has therefore felt justified in attributing speech to the ancestors of

man that lived well back in the Pleistocene. The lower jaws of Piltdown

and in a measure of Heidelberg man, it is true, are narrow and chinless,

thus leaving somewhat less free play to the tongue than living human

races enjoy. But this factor is probably of less importance than the one

of mental facultative development. The parrot is lipless and yet can

reproduce the sounds of human speech. What he lacks is language faculty;

and this, it seems, fossil man already had in some measure.

56. CULTURE, SPEECH, AND NATIONALITY

This point of view raises the question whether one ought to speak of

language and culture or rather of language as a part of culture. So

far as the process of their transmission is concerned, and the type of

mechanism of their development, it is clear that language and culture

are one. For practical purposes it is generally convenient to keep

them distinct. There is no doubt that two peoples can share in what is

substantially the same culture and yet speak fundamentally different

idioms; for instance, the Finno-Ugric Magyars or Hungarians among the

adjacent Slavs, Germans, and Latins of central Europe, who are all

Indo-Europeans. The other way around, the northern Hindus and west

Europeans are certainly different culturally, yet their languages go back

to a common origin. In fact it has become a commonplace that the arguing

of connection between the three factors of race, language, and culture

(or nationality), the making of inferences from one to the other, is

logically unsound (§ 33). One can no more think correctly in terms of

Aryan heads or a Semitic race, for instance, than of blond linguistic

types, Catholic physiques, or inflecting social institutions.

At the same time, speech and culture tend to form something of a unit as

opposed to race. It is possible for a population to substitute a wholly

new language and type of civilization for the old ones, as the American

negro has done, and yet to remain relatively unmodified racially, or

at least to carry on its former physical type unchanged in a large

proportion of its members. On the other hand, a change of speech without

some change of culture seems impossible. Certainly wherever Greek,

Latin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Pali, Chinese have penetrated, there

have been established new phases of civilization. In a lower degree, the

same principle probably holds true of every gain of one language at the

expense of another, even when the spreading idiom is not associated with

a great or active culture.

The linkage of speech and culture is further perceptible in the degree to

which they both contribute, in most cases, to the idea of nationality.

What chiefly marks off the French nation from the Italian, the Dutch from

the German, the Swedish from the Norwegian—their respective customs and

ideals, or the language gap? It would be difficult to say. The cultural

differences tend to crystallize around language differences, and then

in turn are reinforced by language, so that the two factors interact

complexly. Nationality, especially in its modern developments, includes

another factor, that of social or political segregation, which may in

some degree run counter to both speech and culture. Switzerland with

its German, French, and Italian speaking population, or Belgium, almost

equally divided between Flemings and Walloons, are striking examples.

Yet however successfully Switzerland and Belgium maintain their national

unity, it is clear that this is a composite of subnational elements,

each of which possesses a certain cultural as well as linguistic

distinctness. Thus the Walloon speaks a French dialect, the Fleming a

Dutch one; and the point of view, temperament, historic antecedents, and

minor customs of the two groups are perceptibly different. Similarly,

both the history and the outlook and therefore the culture of the French

and German cantons of Switzerland are definitely distinguishable.

57. RELATIVE WORTH OF LANGUAGES

One respect in which languages differ from cultures is that they

cannot, like the latter, be rated as higher and lower. Of course, even

as regards culture, such rating is often a dubious procedure, meaning

little more than that the person making the comparison assumes his

own culture to be the highest and estimates other cultures low in

proportion as they vary. Although this is a subjective and uncritical

procedure, nevertheless certain objective comparisons are possible. Some

cultures surpass others in their quantitative content: they possess more

different arts, abilities, and items of knowledge. Also, some culture

traits may be considered intrinsically superior to others: metal tools

against stone ones, for instance, since metal is adopted by all stone

culture peoples who can secure it, whereas the reverse is not true.

Further, in most cases a new addition does not wholly obliterate an

older element, this retaining a subsidiary place, or perhaps serving

some more special function than before. In this way the culture becomes

more differentiated. The old art may even attain a higher degree of

perfection than it had previously; as the finest polish was given to

stone implements in northern Europe after bronze was known. In general,

accretion is the process typical of culture growth. Older elements come

to function in a more limited sphere as new ones are added, but are

not extirpated by them. Oars and sails remain as constituent parts of

the stock of civilization after it has added steam and motor boats. In

the senses then that a culture has a larger content of elements, that

these elements are more differentiated, and that a greater proportion of

these elements are of the kind that inherently tend to supersede related

elements, the culture may be considered superior.

As regards languages, there are also quantitative differences. Some

contain several times as many words as others. But vocabulary is largely

a cultural matter. A people that uses more materials, manufactures more

objects, possesses knowledge of a larger array of facts, and makes finer

discriminations in thought, must inevitably have more words. Yet even

notable increases in size of speech content appear not to be accompanied

by appreciable changes in form. A larger vocabulary does not mean a

different type of structure. Grammar seems to be little influenced

by culture status. No clear correspondence has yet been traceable

between type or degree of civilization and type of language. Neither

the presence nor the absence of particular features of tense, number,

case, reduplication, or the like seems ever to have been of demonstrable

advantage toward the attainment of higher culture. The speech of the

former and modern nations most active in the propagation of culture has

been of quite diverse type. The languages of the Egyptians (Hamitic);

Sumerians; Babylonians and Arabs (Semitic); Hindus and Greeks (ancient

Indo-European); Anglo-Saxons (modern Indo-European); Chinese; and Mayas,

are about as different as exist. The Sumerian type of civilization was

taken over bodily and successfully by the Semitic Babylonians. The bulk

of Japanese culture is Chinese; yet Japanese speech is built on wholly

different principles.

Then, it is impossible to rate one speech trait or type as inherently or

objectively superior to another on any basis like that which justifies

the placing of a metal culture above a stone culture. If wealth of

grammatical apparatus is a criterion of superiority, Latin is a higher

language than French, and Anglo-Saxon than English. But if lack of

declensions and conjugations is a virtue, then Chinese surpasses English

almost as much as English surpasses Latin. There is no reason favoring

one of these possible judgments rather than its opposite. _Amabo_ is no

better or worse than _I shall love_ as a means of expressing the same

idea. The one is more compact, the other more plastic. There are times

when compactness is a virtue, occasions when plasticity has advantages.

By the Latin or synthetic standard, the English expression is loose

jointed, lacking in structure; by the English or analytic standard, the

Latin form is over-condensed, adhering unnecessarily to form. One cannot

similarly balance the merits of a steel and a flint knife, of a medical

and a shamanistic phase of society. The one cuts or cures better than the

other.

So, from the point of view of civilization, language does not matter.

Language will always keep up with whatever pace culture sets it. If a

new object is invented or a new distinction of thought made, a word is

coined or imported or modified in meaning to express the new concept. If

a thousand or ten thousand new words are required, they are developed.

When it desires to express abstractions like futurity or plurality, any

language is capable of doing so, even if it does not habitually express

them. If a language is unprovided with formal means for the purpose,

such as a grammatical suffix, it falls back on content and uses a word

or circumlocution. If the life of a people changes and comes to be

conducted along lines that render it frequently important to express an

idea like futurity to which previously little attention has been paid,

the appropriate circumlocution soon becomes standardized, conveniently

brief, and unambiguous. In general, every language is capable of

indefinite modification and expansion and thereby is enabled to meet

cultural demands almost at once. This is shown by the fact that virtually

anything spoken or written can be translated into almost every other

language without serious impairment of substance. The æsthetic charm of

the original may be lost in the translation; the new forms coined in the

receiving language are likely at first to seem awkward; but the meaning,

the business of speech, gets expressed.

58. SIZE OF VOCABULARY

The tendency is so instinctive in us to presuppose and therefore to find

qualities of inferiority, poverty, or incompleteness in the speech of

populations of more backward culture than our own, that a widespread,

though unfounded, belief has grown up that the languages of savages and

barbarians are extremely limited quantitatively—in the range of their

vocabulary. Similar misconceptions are current as to the number of words

actually used by single individuals of civilized communities. It is

true that no one, not even the most learned and prolific writer, uses

all the words of the English language as they are found in an unabridged

dictionary. All of us understand many words which we habitually encounter

in reading and may even hear frequently spoken, but of which our

utterance faculties for some reason have not made us master. In short, a

language, being the property and product of a community, possesses more

words than can ever be used by a single individual, the sum total of

whose ideas is necessarily less than that of his group. Added to this are

a certain mental sluggishness, which restricts most of us to a greater

or less degree, and the force of habit. Having spoken a certain word a

number of times, our brain becomes accustomed to it and we are likely

to employ it to the exclusion of its synonyms or in place of words of

related but distinguishable meaning.

The degree to which all this affects the speech of the normal man has,

however, been greatly exaggerated. Because there are, all told, including

technical terms, a hundred thousand or more words in our dictionaries,

and because Shakespeare in his writings used 24,000 different words,

Milton in his poems 17,000, and the English Bible contains 7,200, it has

been concluded that the average man, whose range of thought and power of

expression are so much less, must use an enormously smaller vocabulary.

It has been stated that many a peasant goes through life without using

more than 300 or 400 words, that the vocabulary of Italian grand opera

is about 600, and that he is a person above the average who employs more

than 3,000 to 4,000 words. If such were the case it would be natural that

the uncivilized man, whose life is simpler, and whose knowledge more

confined, should be content with an exceedingly small vocabulary.

But it is certain that the figures just cited are erroneous. If any one

who considers himself an average person will take the trouble to make a

list of his speaking vocabulary, he will quickly discover that he knows,

and on occasion uses, the names of at least one to two thousand different

things. That is, his vocabulary contains so many concrete nouns. To

these must be added the abstract nouns, the verbs, adjectives, pronouns,

and the other parts of speech, the short and familiar words that are

indispensable to communication in any language. It may thus be safely

estimated that it is an exceptionally ignorant and stupid person in a

civilized country that has not at his command a vocabulary of several

thousand words.

Test counts based on dictionaries show, for people of bookish tastes, a

knowledge of about 30,000 to 35,000 words. Most of these would perhaps

never be spoken by the individuals tested, would not be at their actual

command, but it seems that at least 10,000 would be so controlled. The

carefully counted vocabulary of a five and a half year old American boy

comprised 1,528 understandingly used words, besides participles and other

inflected forms. Two boys between two and three years used 642 and 677

different words.

It is therefore likely that statements as to the paucity of the speech of

unlettered peoples are equally exaggerated. He who professes to declare

on the strength of his observation that a native language consists of

only a few hundred terms, displays chiefly his ignorance. He has either

not taken the trouble to exhaust the vocabulary or has not known how to

do so. It is true that the traveler or settler can usually converse with

natives to the satisfaction of his own needs with two or three hundred

words. Even the missionary can do a great deal with this stock, if it is

properly chosen. But it does not follow that because a civilized person

has not learned more of a language, that there is no more. On this point

the testimony of the student is the evidence to be considered.

Dictionaries compiled by missionaries or philologists of languages

previously unwritten run to surprising figures. Thus, the number of words

recorded in Klamath, the speech of a culturally rude American Indian

tribe, is 7,000; in Navaho, 11,000; in Zulu, 17,000; in Dakota, 19,000;

in Maya, 20,000; in Nahuatl, 27,000. It may safely be said that every

existing language, no matter how backward its speakers are in their

general civilization, possesses a vocabulary of at least 5,000 words.

59. QUALITY OF SPEECH SOUNDS

Another mistaken assumption that is frequently made is that the speech

of non-literary peoples is harsh, its pronunciation more difficult than

ours. This belief is purely subjective. When one has heard and uttered

a language all his life, its sounds come to one’s mouth with a minimum

of effort; but unfamiliar vowels and consonants are formed awkwardly and

inaccurately. No adult reared in an Anglo-Saxon community finds _th_

difficult. Nor does a French or German child, whose speech habits are

still plastic, find long difficulty in mastering the particular tongue

control necessary to the production of the _th_ sound. But the adult

Frenchman or German, whose muscular habits have settled in other lines,

tries and tries and falls back on _s_ or _t_. A Spaniard, however, would

agree with the Anglo-Saxon as to the ease and “naturalness” of _th_.

Conversely, the “rough” _ch_ flows spontaneously out of the mouth of

a German or Scotchman, whereas English, French, and Italians have to

struggle long to master it, and are tempted to substitute _k_. German

_ö_ and French _u_ trouble us, our “short” _u_ is equally resistant to

Continental tongues.

Even a novel position can make a familiar sound strange and forbidding.

Most Anglo-Saxons fail on the first try to say _ngis_; many give up

and declare it beyond their capacity to learn. Yet it is only _sing_

pronounced backward. English uses _ng_ finally and medially in words,

not initially. Any English speaker can quickly acquire its use in the

new position if, to keep from being disconcerted, he follows some such

sequence as _sing_, _singing_, _stinging_, _ringing_, _inging_, _nging_,

_ngis_.

So with surd _l_—Welsh _ll_—which is ordinary _l_ minus the accompaniment

of vocal cord vibrations. A little practice makes possible the throwing

on or off of these vibrations, the “voicing” of speech, for any sound,

with as much ease as one would turn a faucet on or off. Surd _l_

thereupon flows with the same readiness as sonant _l_. As a matter

of fact we often pronounce it unconsciously at the end of words like

_little_. When it comes at the beginning, however, as in the tribal name

usually written _Tlingit_, Americans tend to substitute something more

habitual, such as _kl_, which is familiar from _clip_, _clean_, _clear_,

_close_, _clam_, and many other words. The simple surd _l_ has even been

repeatedly described quite inappropriately as a “click”; which is about

as far from picturing it with correctness as calling it a thump or a

sigh; all because it comes in an unaccustomed position.

Combinations of sounds, especially of consonants, are indeed of variable

difficulty for anatomical reasons. Some, like _nd_ and _ts_ and _pf_,

have their components telescope or join naturally through being formed

in the same part of the mouth. Others, like _kw_ (_qu_), have the two

elements articulated widely apart, but for that reason the elements can

easily be formed simultaneously. Still others, like _kt_ and _ths_,

are intrinsically difficult, because the elements differ in place

of production but are alike in method, and therefore come under the

operation of the generic rule that similar sounds require more effort to

join and yet discriminate than dissimilar ones; for much the same reason

that it is on the whole easier to acquire the pronunciation of a wholly

new type of sound than of one which differs subtly from one already

known. Yet in these matters too, habit rather than anatomical functioning

determines the reaction. German _pf_ comes hard to adult Anglo-Saxons,

English _kw_ and _ths_ to Germans. So far as degree of accumulation

of consonants is concerned, English is one of the extremest of all

languages. Monosyllables like _tract_, _stripped_ (_stripd_), _sixths_

(_siksths_), must seem irremediably hard to most speakers of other idioms.

Children’s speech in all languages shows that certain sounds are, as a

rule, learned earlier than others, and are therefore presumably somewhat

easier physiologically. Sounds like _p_ and _t_ which are formed with

the mobile lips and front of the tongue normally precede back tongue

sounds like _k_. _B_, _d_, _g_, which are voiced like vowels, tend to

precede voiceless _p_, _t_, _k_. Stops or momentary sounds, such as

_b_, _d_, _g_, _p_, _t_, _k_, generally come earlier than the fricative

continuants _f_, _v_, _th_, _s_, _z_, which require a delicate adjustment

of lip or tongue—close proximity without firm contact—whereas the stops

involve only a making and breaking of jerky contact. But so slight are

the differences of effort or skill in all these cases, that as a rule

only a few months separate the learning of the easier from that of the

more difficult sounds; and adults no longer feel the differences. The

only sound or class of sounds seriously harder than others seems to be

that denoted by the letter _r_. Not only do children usually acquire

_r_ late, but among all races there appears to be a certain percentage

of individuals who never learn to form the sound right, but substitute

one approaching _g_ or _w_ or _j_ or _l_. The reason is that _r_ stands

alone among speech sounds. It is the only one produced by blowing the

tongue into a few gross vibrations; which means that this organ must be

held in a special condition of laxness and yet elevated so that the flow

of breath may bear on it. However, even this inherent difficulty has been

insufficient to prevent many languages from changing easier sounds into

_r_.

60. DIFFUSION AND PARALLELISM IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

A phenomenon which language shows more conspicuously than culture, or

which is more readily demonstrated in it, is parallel or convergent

development, the repeated, independent growth of a trait (§ 89, 100).

Thus sex gender is an old part of Indo-European structure. In English,

by the way, it has wholly disappeared, so far as formal expression goes,

from noun, adjective, and demonstrative and interrogative pronoun. It

lingers only in the personal pronoun of the third person singular—_he_,

_she_, _it_. A grammar of living English that was genuinely practical

and unbound by tradition would never mention gender except in discussing

these three little words. That our grammars specify _man_ as a masculine

and _woman_ as a feminine noun is due merely to the fact that in Latin

the corresponding words _vir_ and _femina_ possess endings which are

recognized as generally masculine and feminine, and that an associated

adjective ends respectively in masculine _-us_ or feminine _-a_. These

are distinctions of form of which English possesses no equivalents. The

survival of distinction between _he_, _she_, and _it_, while _this_ and

_the_ and _which_ have become alike irrespective of the sex of the person

or thing they denote, is therefore historically significant. It points

back to the past and to surviving Indo-European languages.

Besides, Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic express sex by grammatical

forms, although like French and Spanish and Italian, they know only

two genders, the neuter being unrepresented. These three are the only

large language stocks in which sex gender finds expression. Ural-Altaic,

Chinese, Japanese, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu, and in general

the language families of Asia, Africa, and America do without,

although a number of languages make other gender classifications, as of

animate and inanimate, personal and impersonal, superior and inferior,

intelligent and unintelligent. Sex gender however reappears in Hottentot

of South Africa, and in the Chinook and Coast Salish and Pomo languages

of the Pacific coast of North America.

How is this distribution to be accounted for? Indo-European, Semitic, and

Hamitic occupy contiguous territory, in fact surround the Mediterranean

over a tract approximately co-extensive with the Caucasian area. Could

they in the remote past have influenced one another? That is, could

grammatical sex gender have been invented, so to speak, by one of them,

and borrowed by the others, as we know that cultural inventions are

constantly diffused? Few philologists would grant this as likely: there

are too few authenticated cases of formal elements or concepts having

been disseminated between unrelated languages. Is it then possible that

our three stocks are at bottom related? Sex gender in that case would

be part of their common inheritance. For Semitic and Hamitic a number

of specialists have accepted a common origin on other grounds. But for

Semitic and Indo-European, philologists, who are professionally exacting,

are in the main quite dubious. Positive evidence seems yet to be lacking.

Still, the territorial continuity of the three speech groups showing the

trait is difficult to accept as mere coincidence. In a parallel case in

the realm of culture history, a common source would be accepted as highly

probable. Even Hottentot has been considered a remote Semitic-Hamitic

offshoot, largely, it is true, because of the very fact that it expresses

gender. Philologists, accordingly, may consider the case still open; but

it is at least conceivable that the phenomenon goes back to a single

origin in these four Old World stocks.

Yet no stretch will account for sex gender in the three American

languages as due to contact influence or diffusion, nor relate these

tongues to the Old World ones. Clearly here is a case of independent

origin or parallel “invention.” Chinook and Coast Salish, indeed, are in

contiguity, and one may therefore have taken up the trait in imitation of

the other. But Pomo lies well to the south and its affiliations run still

farther south. Here sex gender is obviously an independent, secondary,

and rather recent growth in the grammar.

In short, it remains doubtful whether sex gender originated three or four

or five or six times among these seven language stocks; but it evidently

originated repeatedly.

Other traits crop out the world over in much the same manner. A dual,

for instance, is found in Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian, Eskimo, and

a number of other American languages. The distinction between inclusive

and exclusive _we_—_you and I_ as opposed to _he and I_—is made in

Malayo-Polynesian, Hottentot, Iroquois, Uto-Aztecan.

A true nominative case-ending, such as Latin and the other varieties of

Indo-European evince, is an exceedingly specialized formation; yet is

found in the Maidu language of California. Articles, in regard to which

Indo-European varies, Latin for instance being without, while its Romance

daughter tongues have developed them, recur in Semitic, in Polynesian,

and in several groups of American languages, such as Siouan and Hokan.

The growth in Romance is significant because of its historicity, and

because it was surely not due to imitation of an unrelated language. That

is, French developed its articles independently and secondarily; a fact

that makes it probable that many languages in other parts of the world,

whose history we do not know, developed theirs in a parallel manner, as

a product of wholly internal causes—“invented” them, in short, although

wholly unconsciously.

A trait found in a large proportion of the American languages is the

so-called incorporation of the object pronoun (§ 51). The objective

pronoun, or an element representing it, is prefixed or suffixed to the

verb, made a part of it. The process is familiar enough to us from

Indo-European so far as the subject is concerned: in Latin _ama-s_,

_ama-t_, _ama-nt_, the suffixes express “you, he, they” and pronouns

comparable to the English ones—independent words—are usually omitted.

The _-s_ in _he love-s_ is the sole survival of the process in modern

English. None of the older Indo-European tongues however showed an

inclination to affix similar elements for the objects, although there

are some approaches in a few recent languages of the family: Spanish

_diga-me_, “tell me,” and _mata-le_, “kill him,” for instance. Semitic

on the other hand, and Basque, do “incorporate” objective elements,

whereas most Asiatic and some American languages do not. Many other

instances of parallel or convergent traits could be cited.

This greater frequency of parallel developments in language than in

culture is perhaps in part due to easier demonstrability in the field of

speech. But in the main the higher frequency seems real. Two reasons for

the difference suggest themselves.

First, the number of possibilities is small in language, so far as

structure is concerned. The categories or concepts used for classifying

and for the indication of relations are rigorously limited, and so are

the means of expression. The distinctions expressed by gender, for

instance, may refer to sex, animateness, personality, worth, shape,

position, or possibly one or two other qualities; but there they end.

If a language recognizes gender at all, it must have gender of one of

these few types. Consequently there is some probability of several

unconnected languages sooner or later happening upon the same type of

gender. Similarly, for the kinds of number, and of case, and so on, that

are denotable. These larger categories, like gender and number and case,

are not numerous. Then, the means of expressing such relational and

classificatory concepts are limited. There is position or relative order

of words; compounding of them; accretions of elements to stems, namely

prefixes, infixes, and suffixes; reduplication, the repetition of part or

the whole of words; internal changes by shift of vowel or accent within

words; and therewith the types of grammatical means are about exhausted.

The number of possible choices is so small that the law of accidental

probability must cause many languages to hit upon the same devices.

A second reason for the greater frequency of parallelism in language

is that structural traits appear to resist diffusion by imitation to

a considerable degree. Words are borrowed, sometimes freely, almost

always to some degree, between contiguous languages; sounds considerably

less; grammar least of all. That is, linguistic content lends itself to

diffusion readily, linguistic form with difficulty.

At bottom, the same holds of culture. Specific elements of culture or

groups of such elements diffuse very widely at times and may be said

to be always tending to diffuse: the wheel, for instance, smelting of

metals, the crown as a symbol of royalty, the swastika, Buddhism. The

relations of elements among themselves, on the other hand, change by

internal growth rather than external imitation. Of this sort are the

relations of the classes and members of societies, the fervor with which

religion is felt, the esteem accorded to learning or wealth or tradition,

the inclination toward this or that avenue of subsistence or economic

development. By conquest or peaceful pressure or penetration one people

may shatter the political structure or social fabric of another, may

undermine its conservatism, may swerve its economic habits. But it is

difficult to find cases of one people adopting such tendencies or schemes

of cultural organization in mere imitation of the example of another, as

it will adopt specific culture content—the wheel or crown or Buddhism,

for instance—from outside, often readily. The result is that culture

relations or forms develop spontaneously or from within rather than as

a result of direct taking over. Also, the types of culture forms being

limited in number, the same type is frequently evolved independently.

Thus monarchical and democratic societies, feudal or caste-divided ones,

priest-ridden and relatively irreligious ones, expansive and mercantile

or self-sufficient and agricultural nations, evolve over and over again.

On the whole, comparative culture history more often deals with the

specific contents of civilization, perhaps because events like the spread

of an invention can be traced more definitely and exactly than the rather

complex evolutions of say two feudal systems can be compared. The result

is that diffusions seem to outweigh parallels; as is set forth in several

of the chapters that follow this one (§ 105, 111, 127).

In comparative linguistics, on the other hand, interest inclines to the

side of form rather than content; hence the parallelisms or convergences

are conspicuous. If as much attention were generally given to words as to

grammar, and if they could be traced in their prehistoric or unrecorded

wanderings as reliably as many culture traits have been, it is probable

that diffusion would loom larger as a principle shaping human speech.

There are words that have traveled almost as far as the objects they

denote: _tobacco_ and _maize_, for example. And the absorption of words

of Latin origin into English was as extensive as the absorption for over

a thousand years of Latin, Christian, and Mediterranean culture by the

English people—went on as its accompaniment and result.

61. CONVERGENT LANGUAGES

Parallel development in speech form is not restricted to traits like sex

gender and object incorporation. It may affect whole languages. Chinese

a long time ago became an extremely analytical or “isolating” language.

That is, it lost all affixes and internal change. Each word became an

unalterable unit. Sentences are built up by putting together these atoms.

Grammatical relations are expressed by the order of words: the subject

precedes the predicate, for instance. Other ideas that in many languages

are treated formally, such as the plural or person, are expressed by

content elements, that is, by other words: _many_ for the plural,

separate pronouns instead of affixes for person, and so on. The uniformly

monosyllabic words of Chinese accentuate this isolating character,

which however does not depend intrinsically upon the monosyllabism. In

the Indo-European family, as already mentioned, there has been a drift

in the same direction during the last two thousand years. This drift

toward loss of formal mechanisms and toward the expression of grammar

by material elements or their position only, has been evident in all

branches of Indo-European, but has been most marked in English. The

chief remnants of the older inflectional processes in spoken English of

to-day are four verb endings, _-s_, _-ed_, _-ing_, _-en_; three noun

endings, the possessive _-’s_ and the plurals _-s_ and _-en_, the latter

rare; the case ending _-m_ in _whom_, _them_; a few vowel changes for

plurals, as in _man_—_men_, and _goose_—_geese_; and perhaps two hundred

vowel changes in verbs, like _sing_, _sang_, _sung_. Compared with

Latin, Sanskrit, or even primitive Germanic, this brief list represents

a survival of possibly a tenth of the original synthetic inflectional

apparatus. That is, English has gone approximately nine tenths of the

way towards attaining a grammar of the Chinese type. A third language of

independent origin, Polynesian, has traveled about the same distance in

the same direction. Superficially it is less like Chinese in that it

remains prevailingly polysyllabic, but more like it in having undergone

heavy phonetic attrition. This then is a clear case of entire languages

converging toward a similar type.

Another instance is found in the remarkable resemblances in plan of

structure of Indo-European, especially in its older forms, and of the

Penutian group of languages in native California. Common to these two

families are an apparatus of similar cases, including accusative,

genitive, locative, ablative, instrumental; plural by suffix; vowel

changes in the verb according to tense and mode; a passive and several

participles and modal forms expressed by suffixes; pronouns either

separate or expressed by endings fused with the tense-modal suffixes.

Thus, the processes which make English _sing_, _sang_, _sung_, _song_, or

_bind_, _bound_, _band_, _bond_, are substantially identical with those

which have produced in Penutian Yokuts such forms as _shokud_, pierce,

_shukid-ji_, pierced, _shokod_, perforation or hole, _shikid_, piercer or

arrow. In short, most of the traits generally cited as constituting the

Indo-European languages typically inflectional, reappear in Penutian, and

of course independently as regards their origin and history.

These would appear to be phenomena comparable to the growth of feudalism

in China more than a thousand years earlier than in Europe, or the

appearance of a great centrally governed empire in Peru similar to the

ancient monarchies of the Orient.

62. UNCONSCIOUS FACTORS IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

The unceasing processes of change in language are mainly unconscious.

The results of the change may rise to the recognition of the speakers;

the act of change, and especially its causes, happen without awareness

of those through whose minds and mouths they take place. This holds of

all departments of language: the phonetics, the structural form, largely

even the meaning of words. When a change has begun to creep in, it may

be observed and be consciously resisted on the ground of being incorrect

or vulgar or foreign. But the underlying motives of the objectors are

apparently as unknown to themselves as the impulses of the innovators.

If this view seem extreme, it can easily be shown that the great

bulk of any language as it is, apart from any question of change, is

employed unconsciously. An illiterate person will use such forms as

_child_, _child’s_, _children_, _children’s_ with the same “correctness”

as a philologist, yet without being able to give an explanation of

the grammatical ideas of singularity and plurality, absoluteness and

possession, or to lay down rules as to the manner of expression of these

ideas in English. Grammar, in short, exists before grammarians, whose

legitimate business is to uncover such rules as are already there. It is

an obviously hasty thought that because grammar happens to be taught in

schools, speech can be grammatical only through such formal teaching.

The Sanskrit and Greek and Latin languages had their declensions and

conjugations before Hindu and Greek and Roman scholars first analyzed

and described them. The languages of primitive peoples frequently abound

with complicated forms and mechanisms which are used consistently and

applied without suspicion of their existence. It is much as the blood

went round in our bodies quite healthily before Harvey’s discovery of its

circulation.

The quality of unconsciousness seems not to be a trait specifically

limited to linguistic causes and processes, but to hold in principle

of culture generally. It is only that the unconsciousness pervades

speech farther. A custom, a belief, an art, however deep down its

springs, sooner or later rises into social consciousness. It then seems

deliberate, planned, willed, and is construed as arising from conscious

motives and developing through conscious channels. But many social

phenomena can be led back only to non-rational and obscure motives: the

wearing of silk hats, for instance. The whole class of changes in dress

styles spring from unconscious causes. Sleeves and skirts lengthen or

shorten, trousers flare or tighten, and who can say why? It is perhaps

possible to trace a new fashion to Paris or London, and to a particular

stratum of society there. But what is it that in the winter of a

particular year makes every woman—or man—of a certain social group wear,

let us say, a high collared coat, or a shoe that does not come above

the ankle, and the next year, or the tenth after, the reverse? It is

insufficient to say that this is imitation of a leader of fashion, of a

professional creator of style. Why does the group follow him and think

the innovation attractive and correct? A year earlier the same innovation

would have appeared senseless or extravagant to the same group. A year

after, it appeals as belated and ridiculous, and every one wonders that

style was so tasteless so short a time ago.

Evidently the æsthetic emotions evoked by fashions are largely beyond the

control of both individuals and groups. It is difficult to say where the

creative and imitative impulses of fashion come from; which, inasmuch as

the impulses obviously reside somewhere in human minds, means that they

spring from the unconscious portions of the mind. Evidently then our

justification of the dress styles we happen at any time to be following,

our pronouncing them artistic or comfortable or sensible or what not, is

secondary. A low shoe may be more convenient than a high one, a brown

one more practical than a black one. That that is not the reason which

determines the wearing of low brown shoes when they are customarily

worn, is shown by the fact that at other times high black ones are put

on by every one. The reasons that can be and are given are so changeable

and inconsistent that they evidently are not the real reasons, but the

false secondary reasons that are best distinguished as rationalizations.

Excuses, we should call them with reference to individual conduct.

What applies to fashion holds also of manners, of morals, and of many

religious observances. Why we defer to women by rising in their presence

and passing through a door behind them; why we refrain from eating fish

with a knife or drinking soup out of a two handled cup, though drinking

it from a single handled one is legitimate; why we do not marry close

kin; why we remove our hats in the presence of the deity or his emblems

but would feel it impious to pull off our shoes; all the thousands

of prescriptions and taboos of which these are examples, possess an

unconscious motivation.

Such cases are also illustrations of what is known as the relativity of

morals. The Jew sets his hat on to worship, the Oriental punctiliously

slips out of his shoes. Some people forbid the marriage of the most

remote relatives, others encourage that of first cousins, still others

permit the union of uncle and niece. It would seem that all social

phenomena which can be brought under this principle of relativity of

standard are unconsciously grounded. This in turn implies the unconscious

causation of the mores, those products of the social environment in which

one is reared and which one accepts as the ultimate authority of conduct.

As mores are those folkways or customs to which an emotional coloring

has become attached, so that adherence to the custom or departure from

it arouses a feeling respectively of approval or disapproval, it is

evident that the origin of folkways generally is also unconscious, since

there seems no reason why the emotions or ethical affect enveloping a

customary action should incline more than the custom itself to spring up

unconsciously.

It has become recognized that the average man’s convictions on social

matters remote from him are not developed through examination of evidence

and exercise of reason, but are taken over, by means of what is sometimes

denominated the “herd instinct,” from the society or period in which

he happens to have been born and nurtured. His belief in democracy, in

monotheism, in his right to charge profit and his freedom to change

residence or occupation, have such origin. In many instances it is easy

to render striking proof of the proposition: as in the problems of high

tariff, or the Athanasian creed, or compulsory vaccination, which are so

technical or intricate as to be impossible of independent solution by

evidence and argument by the majority of men. Time alone would forbid:

we should starve while making the necessary research. And the difference

between the average man’s attitude on such difficult points and the

highly gifted individual’s attitude toward them or even toward simpler

problems, would seem to be one of degree only.

Even on the material sides of culture, unconscious motivation plays

a part. In the propulsion of ships, oars and sails fluctuated as the

prevalent means down almost to the period of steam vessels. It would be

impossible to say that one method was logically superior to the other,

that it was recognized as such and then rationally adhered to. The

history of warfare shows similar changes between throwing and thrusting

spears, stabbing and hewing swords, light and heavy armor. The Greeks

and Macedonians in the days of their military superiority lengthened

their lances and held them. It no doubt seemed for a time that a definite

superiority had been proved for this type of weapon over the shorter,

hurled javelin. Then the Romans, as part of their legionary tactics,

reverted to the javelin and broke the Macedonian phalanx with their

pilum. But the Middle Ages again fell back on the thrusting lance. The

Greeks successfully developed heavy armor, until Athenian light armed

troops overcame Spartan hoplites. The Macedonians reintroduced heavy

armament, which held sway in Europe until after the prevalence of

firearms. But the last few years have brought the rebirth of the helmet.

These fashions in tools and practical appliances do not alter as fast as

modern dress styles, and part of their causes can often be recognized.

Yet there seems no essential difference, as regards consciousness,

between the fluctuation of fashions in weapons—or navigation or cooking

or travel or house building—and, let us say, the fluctuation of mode

between soft and stiff hats or high and low shoes. It may be admitted to

have been the open array of the legion that led to the pilum; the bullet

that induced the abandonment of the breast plate, shrapnel that caused

the reintroduction of the helmet. But these initiating factors were not

deliberate as regards the effects that came in their train; and in their

turn they were the effects of more remote causes. The whole chain of

development in such cases is devious, unforeseen, mainly unforeseeable.

At most there is recognition of what is happening; in general the

recognition seems to become full only after the change in tool or weapon

or industrial process has become completed and is perhaps already being

undermined once more.

Of course purely stylistic alterations—and linguistic innovations—also

possess their causes. When the derby hat or the pronoun _thou_ becomes

obsolete, there is a reason, whether or not we know it or do not see it

clearly.

The common causal element in all these changes may be called a shift

in social values. Perhaps practical chemical experience has grown, and

gunpowder explodes more satisfactorily; or an economic readjustment has

made it possible to equip more soldiers with guns. The first result

is a greater frequency of bullet penetrations in battle; the next,

the abandonment of the breast plate. Increasing wealth or schooling or

city residence makes indiscriminate familiarity of manners seem less

desirable than at an earlier period: brusque _thou_ begins to yield to

indirect plural _you_. Or again, new verbs, all of regular conjugation

like _love_, _loved_, are formed in English or imported from French until

their number outweighs that of the ancient irregular ones like _sing_,

_sang_. A standardizing tendency is thereby set going—“analogizing” is

the technical term of the philologist—which begins to turn irregular

verbs into regular ones: _dived_ replaces _dove_, just as _lenger_

becomes _longer_, and _toon_ becomes _toes_. There is the same sort of

causality in one of these phenomena as in another. The individual or

community that leaves off the breast plate or stiff hat is more likely

to be aware that it is performing the act than the one that leaves

off saying _toon_ or _thou_. But it does not seem that there is an

essential difference of process. Linguistic and æsthetic changes are

most fully unconscious, social ones next, material and economic ones

perhaps least. But in all cases change or innovation is due to a shift of

values that are broader than the single phenomenon in question, and that

are held to impulsively instead of reasonably. That is why all social

creations—institutions, beliefs, codes, styles, speech forms—prove on

impartial analysis to be full of inconsistencies and irrationalities.

They have sprung not from weighed or reasoned choices but from impulsive

desires and emotionally colored habits.

The foregoing discussion may be summarized as follows. Linguistic

phenomena and processes are on the whole more deeply unconscious than

cultural ones, without however differing in principle. In both language

and culture, content is more readily imparted and assimilated than form

and enters farther into consciousness. Organization or structure in both

cases takes place according to unconscious patterns, such as grammatical

categories, social standards, political or economic points of view,

religious or intellectual assumptions. These patterns attain recognition

only in a late stage of sophistication, and even then continue to

alter and to be influential without conscious control. The number of

such linguistic and social patterns being limited, they tend to be

approximately repeated without historic connection. Partially similar

combinations of such patterns sometimes recur, producing languages or

cultures of similar type. But established patterns, and still more

their combinations, replace each other with difficulty. Their spread

therefore takes place through the integral substitution of one language

or culture for another, rather than by piecemeal absorption. This is

in contrast to the specific elements of which language and culture

consist—individual words, mechanical devices, institutional symbols,

particular religious ideas or actions, and the like. These elements

absorb and diffuse readily. They are therefore imitated more often than

they are reinvented. But linguistic and cultural patterns or structures

growing up spontaneously may possess more general resemblance than

historic connection.

63. LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL STANDARDS

It does not follow that because social usages lack a rational basis, they

are therefore unworthy of being followed, or that standards of conduct

need be renounced because they are relative, that is, unconsciously

founded and changing. The natural inclination of men being to regard

their standards of taste, behavior, and social arrangement as wholly

reasonable, perfect, and fixed, there follows a first inclination to

regard these standards as valueless as soon as their emotionality and

variability have been recognized. But such a tendency is only a negative

reaction against the previous illusion when this has disappointed by

crumbling. The reaction is therefore in a sense a further result of the

illusion. Once the fundamental and automatic assumption of fixity and

inherent value of social patterns has been given up, and it is recognized

that the motive power of behavior in man as in the other animals is

affective and unconscious, there is nothing in institutions and codes

to quarrel with. They are neither despicable nor glorious; no more

deserving in virtue of their existence to be uprooted and demolished than

to be defended as absolute and eternal. In some form or other, they are

inevitable; and the particular form which they take at this time or that

place is always tolerably well founded, in the sense of being adapted

with fair success, or having been but recently well adapted, to the

conditions of natural and social environment of the group which holds the

institution, code, or standard.

That this is a sane attitude is more easily shown in the field

of language than of culture, because, language being primarily a

mechanism or means, whereas in culture ends or purposes tend more to

obtrude, it is easier to view linguistic phenomena dispassionately.

Grammars and dictionaries, for instance, are evidently the result of

self-consciousness arising about speech which has previously been mainly

unconscious. They may be roughly compared to social formulations like

law codes or written constitutions or philosophic systems or religious

dogmas, which are also representations of usages or beliefs already in

existence. When grammarians stigmatize expressions like _ain’t_ or _them

cows_ or _he don’t_ as “wrong,” they are judging an innovation, or one

of several established conflicting usages, by a standard of correctness

that seems to them absolute and permanent. As a matter of actuality,

the condemned form may or may not succeed in becoming established. _He

don’t_, for example, might attain to correctness in time, although

_ain’t_ is perhaps less likely to become legitimized, and _them cows_

to have still smaller prospect of recognition. That a form departs from

the canon of to-day of course no more proves that it will be accepted

in future than that it will not. What is certain is that if it wins

sufficient usage, it will also win sanction, and will become part of the

standard of its time.

Linguistic instances like these differ little if at all in principle, in

their involved psychology, from the finding of the Supreme Court that a

certain legislative enactment is unconstitutional and therefore void;

or from the decision of a denomination that dancing or playing golf on

Sunday is wicked; or from the widespread sentiment that breaking an

unpopular law like that on liquor prohibition is morally justifiable. The

chief point of divergence would seem to be that a court is a constituted

body endowed with an authority which is not paralleled on the linguistic

side, at any rate in Anglo-Saxon countries; although the Latin nations

possess Academies whose dicta on correctness of speech enjoy a moral

authority approximating the verdicts of a high court.

It is also of interest to remember that the power of nullifying

legislation was not specifically granted the Supreme Court by the

Constitution of the United States, but that the practice grew up

gradually, quite like a speech innovation which becomes established.

Certain elements in the American population look upon this power

as undesirable and therefore take satisfaction in pointing out its

unsanctioned origin. The majority on the other hand feel that the

situation on the whole works out well, and that a Supreme Court with its

present powers is better than the risk of a Court without power. Still,

it remains curiously illogical that the preservation of the Constitution

should take place partly through the extra-constitutional functioning of

a constitutional body. In principle such a case is similar to that of

grammarians who at the same time lay down a rule and exceptions to the

rule, because the contradictory usages happen to be actually established.

Codes, dogmas, and grammars are thus normally reflections rather than

causes. Such influence as they have is mainly in outward crystallization.

They produce a superficial appearance of permanence. In the field of

speech, it is easy to recognize that it is not grammarians that make

languages, but languages that make grammarians. The analogous process

evidently holds for culture. Lawgivers, statesmen, religious leaders,

discoverers, inventors, therefore only seem to shape civilization.

The deep-seated, blind, and intricate forces that shape culture, also

mold the so-called creative leaders of society as essentially as they

mold the mass of humanity. Progress, so far as it can objectively be

considered to be such, is something that makes itself. We do not make it.

Our customary conviction to the contrary is probably the result of an

unconscious desire not to realize our individual impotence as regards the

culture we live in. Social influence of a sort we do have as individuals.

But it is a personal influence on the fortune and careers of other

individual members of society, and is concerned largely with aims of

personal security, relative dominance, or affection among ourselves. This

obviously is a different thing from the exertion of influence on the form

or content of civilization as such.

64. RAPIDITY OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE

The rate of change in language is circumscribed by the principles of

linguistic causality that have been discussed, but it remains an obscure

subject in detail. The opinion often held that unwritten languages

necessarily alter faster than written ones, or that those of savages

are less stable than the tongues of civilized men, is mainly a naïve

reflection of our sense of superiority. It contravenes the principles

just referred to and is not supported by evidence. Occasional stories

that a primitive tribe after a generation or two was found speaking

an almost made-over language are unconscious fabrications due to

preconception and supported by hasty acquaintance, faulty records,

misunderstanding, or perhaps change of inhabitants. Nahuatl, the language

of the Aztecs, has probably changed less in four hundred years than

Spanish; Quechua, that of the Incas, no more. English has apparently

altered more than any of the three in the same period. Dozens of native

tongues, some of them from wholly rude peoples, were written down in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Spanish and other priests, and in

most instances the grammars and dictionaries prove to be usable to-day.

Cultural alteration would appear to work toward speech change chiefly in

certain ways. New things need new names; new acts mean new thoughts and

new ideas require new words. These may be imported; or they may be made

out of elements already in the language; or old words may undergo a shift

of meaning. In any event, the change is mainly on the side of vocabulary.

The sounds of a language are generally much less affected; its plan of

structure least of all. The introduction of a new religion or development

of a new form of government among a people need not be accompanied by

changes in the grammar of their speech, and usually are not, as abundant

historical examples prove.

While the causes of grammatical innovation are far from clear, contact

with alien tongues is certainly a factor in some degree. An isolated

off-shoot of a linguistic group is generally more specialized, and

therefore presumably more altered, than the main body of dialects of the

family. The reason is that the latter, maintaining abundant reciprocal

contact, tend to steady one another, or if they swerve, to do so in

the same direction. The speakers of the branch that is geographically

detached, however, come to know quite different grammars so far as they

learn languages other than their native one, and such knowledge seems

to act as an unconscious stimulus toward the growth of new forms and

uses. It is not that grammatical concepts are often imitated outright or

grammatical elements borrowed. Acquaintance with a language of different

type seems rather to act as a ferment which sets new processes going.

It is in the nature of the case that direct specific evidence of changes

of this character is hard to secure. But comparison of related languages

or dialects with reference to their location frequently shows that the

dialects which are geographically situated among strange languages

are the most differentiated. This holds of Abyssinian in the Semitic

family, of Brahui in Dravidian, of Singhalese in the Indic branch of

Indo-European, of Hopi and Tübatulabal in Shoshonean, of Arapaho and

Blackfoot in Algonkin, of Huastec in Mayan.

But it is also likely that languages differ among each other in their

susceptibility to change, and that the same language differs in

successive periods of its history. It is rather to be anticipated that a

language may be in a phase now of rapid and then of retarded metabolism,

so to speak; that at one stage its tendency may be toward breaking down

and absorption, at another toward a more rigid setting of its forms.

Similarly, there is reason to believe that languages of certain types of

structure are inherently more plastic than others. At any rate, actual

differences in rate of change are known. The Indo-European languages,

for instance, have perhaps without exception altered more in the three

thousand years of historic record than the Semitic ones. And so in native

America, while contemporary documentary record is of course wanting, the

degree of differentiation within the two stocks suggests strongly that

Athabascan is more tenaciously conservative than Siouan.

There are also notable differences in the readiness to borrow words

ready-made. English is distinctly more hospitable in this regard than

German, which tends rather to express a new concept by a new formation of

old elements. The South American languages appear to have borrowed more

words from one another than those of North America. In this matter the

type of language is probably of some influence, yet on the whole cultural

factors perhaps predominate. The direction and degree of cultural

absorption seem to determine the absorption of words to a considerable

measure. Here writing is certainly potent. The Latin and French element

in English, the Sanskrit and Arabic element in the Malaysian languages,

were brought in to a large extent by writing, and would evidently have

remained much smaller if the historic contacts had been wholly oral. This

is perhaps the most important way in which writing exerts influence on

the development of spoken language; an influence which in other respects

is usually overestimated.