_Berber_ dialects of Northern Africa, spoken on the coast from Egypt to
the Atlantic Ocean before the invasion of the Arabs, and now pushed back
towards the interior. Some other African languages, too, such as the
_Haussa_ and _Galla_, have been classed as Semitic; and the language of
Egypt, from the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions to the Coptic, which
ceased to be spoken after the seventeenth century, has equally been
referred to this class. The Semitic character of these dialects, however,
is much less clearly defined, and the exact degree of relationship in
which they stand to the Semitic languages, properly so-called, has still
to be determined.
Strictly speaking the Aryan and Semitic are the only _families_ of speech
which fully deserve that title. They both presuppose the existence of a
finished system of grammar, previous to the first divergence of their
dialects. Their history is from the beginning a history of decay rather
than of growth, and hence the unmistakable family-likeness which pervades
every one even of their latest descendants. The language of the Sepoy and
that of the English soldier are, strictly speaking, one and the same
language. They are both built up of materials which were definitely shaped
before the Teutonic and Indic branches separated. No new root has been
added to either since their first separation; and the grammatical forms
which are of more modern growth in English or Hindustání, are, if closely
examined, new combinations only of elements which existed from the
beginning in all the Aryan dialects. In the termination of the English _he
is_, and in the inaudible termination of the French _il est_, we recognize
the result of an act performed before the first separation of the Aryan
family, the combination of the predicative root _as_ with the
demonstrative root _ti_; an act performed once for all, and continuing to
be felt to the present day.
It was the custom of Nebuchadnezzar to have his name stamped on every
brick that was used during his reign in erecting his colossal palaces.
Those palaces fell to ruins, but from the ruins the ancient materials were
carried away for building new cities; and on examining the bricks in the
walls of the modern city of Baghdad on the borders of the Tigris, Sir
Henry Rawlinson discovered on each the clear traces of that royal
signature. It is the same if we examine the structure of modern languages.
They too were built up with the materials taken from the ruins of the
ancient languages, and every word, if properly examined, displays the
visible stamp impressed upon it from the first by the founders of the
Aryan and the Semitic empires of speech.
The relationship of languages, however, is not always so close. Languages
may diverge before their grammatical system has become fixed and hardened;
and in that case they cannot be expected to show the same marked features
of a common descent as, for instance, the Neo-Latin dialects, French,
Italian, and Spanish. They may have much in common, but they will likewise
display an after-growth in words and grammatical forms peculiar to each
dialect. With regard to words we see that even languages so intimately
related to each other as the six Romance dialects, diverged in some of the
commonest expressions. Instead of the Latin _frater_, the French _frère_,
we find in Spanish _hermano_. There was a very good reason for this
change. The Latin word _frater_, changed into _fray_ and _frayle_, had
been applied to express a brother or a friar. It was felt inconvenient
that the same word should express two ideas which it was sometimes
necessary to distinguish, and therefore, by a kind of natural elimination,
_frater_ was given up as the name of brother in Spanish, and replaced from
the dialectical stores of Latin, by _germanus_. In the same manner the
Latin word for shepherd, _pastor_, was so constantly applied to the
shepherd of the people or the clergyman, _le pasteur_, that a new word was
wanted for the real shepherd. Thus _berbicarius_ from _berbex_ or
_vervex_, a wether, was used instead of _pastor_, and changed into the
French _berger_. Instead of the Spanish _enfermo_, ill, we find in French
_malade_, in Italian _malato_. Languages so intimately related as Greek
and Latin have fixed on different expressions for son, daughter, brother,
woman, man, sky, earth, moon, hand, mouth, tree, bird, &c.(295) That is to
say, out of a large number of synonymes which were supplied by the
numerous dialects of the Aryan family, the Greeks perpetuated one, the
Romans another. It is clear that when the working of this principle of
natural selection is allowed to extend more widely, languages, though
proceeding from the same source, may in time acquire a totally different
nomenclature for the commonest objects. The number of real synonymes is
frequently exaggerated, and if we are told that in Icelandic there are 120
names for island, or in Arabic 500 names for lion,(296) and 1,000 names
for sword,(297) many of these are no doubt purely poetical. But even where
there are in a language only four or five names for the same objects, it
is clear that four languages might be derived from it, each in appearance
quite distinct from the rest.
The same applies to grammar. When the Romance languages, for instance,
formed their new future by placing the auxiliary verb _habere_, to have,
after the infinitive, it was quite open to any one of them to fix upon
some other expedient for expressing the future. The French might have
chosen _je vais dire_ or _je dirvais_ (I wade to say) instead of _je
dirai_, and in this case the future in French would have been totally
distinct from the future in Italian. If such changes are possible in
literary languages of such long standing as French and Italian, we must be
prepared for a great deal more in languages which, as I said, diverged
before any definite settlement had taken place either in their grammar or
their dictionary. If we were to expect in them the definite criteria of a
genealogical relationship which unites the members of the Aryan and
Semitic families of speech, we should necessarily be disappointed. Such
criteria could not possibly exist in these languages. But there are
criteria for determining even these more distant degrees of relationship
in the vast realm of speech; and they are sufficient at least to arrest
the hasty conclusions of those who would deny the possibility of a common
origin of any languages more removed from each other than French and
Italian, Sanskrit and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. You will see this more
clearly after we have examined the principles of what I call the
_morphological classification_ of human speech.
As all languages, so far as we can judge at present, can be reduced in the
end to roots, predicative and demonstrative, it is clear that, according
to the manner in which roots are put together, we may expect to find three
kinds of languages, or three stages in the gradual formation of speech.
1. Roots may be used as words, each root preserving its full independence.
2. Two roots may be joined together to form words, and in these compounds
one root may lose its independence.
3. Two roots may be joined together to form words, and in these compounds
both roots may lose their independence.
What applies to two roots, applies to three or four or more. The principle
is the same, though it would lead to a more varied subdivision.
The first stage, in which each root preserves its independence, and in
which there is no formal distinction between a root and a word, I call the
_Radical Stage_. This stage is best represented by ancient Chinese.
Languages belonging to this first or Radical Stage, have sometimes been
called _Monosyllabic_ or _Isolating_. The second stage, in which two or
more roots coalesce to form a word, the one retaining its radical
independence, the other sinking down to a mere termination, I call the
_Terminational Stage_. This stage is best represented by the Turanian
family of speech, and the languages belonging to it have generally been
called _agglutinative_, from _gluten_, glue. The third stage, in which
roots coalesce so that neither the one nor the other retains its
substantive independence, I call the _Inflectional Stage_. This stage is
best represented by the Aryan and Semitic families, and the languages
belonging to it have sometimes been distinguished by the name of _organic_
or _amalgamating_.
The first stage excludes phonetic corruption altogether.
The second stage excludes phonetic corruption in the principal root, but
allows it in the secondary or determinative elements.
The third stage allows phonetic corruption both in the principal root and
in the terminations.
A few instances will make this classification clearer.
In the first stage, which is represented by Chinese, every word is a root,
and has its own substantial meaning. Thus, where we say in Latin _baculo_,
with a stick, we say in Chinese _ỳ ćáng_.(298) Here _ỳ_ might be taken for
a mere preposition, like the English _with_. But in Chinese this _ỳ_ is a
root; it is the same word which, if used as a verb, would mean “to
employ.” Therefore in Chinese _ỳ ćáng_ means literally “employ stick.” Or
again, where we say in English _at home_, or in Latin _domi_, the Chinese
say _ŭŏ-li, ŭŏ_ meaning _house_, and _li_ originally _inside_.(299) The
name for _day_ in Chinese is _ģi-tse_, which means originally _son of the
sun_.(300)
There is in Chinese, as we saw before, no formal distinction between a
noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition. The same root,
according to its position in a sentence, may be employed to convey the
meaning of great, greatness, greatly, and to be great. Everything in fact
depends in Chinese on the proper collocation of words in a sentence. Thus
_ngò tà ni_ means “I beat thee;” but _ni tà ngò_ would mean “Thou beatest
me.” Thus _ngŏ ģin_ means “a bad man;” _ģin ngŏ_ would mean “the man is
bad.”
As long as every word, or part of a word, is felt to express its own
radical meaning, a language belongs to the first or radical stage. As soon
as such words as _tse_ in _ģi-tse_, day, _li_ in _ŭŏ-li_, at home, or _ỳ_
in _ỳ-ćáng_, with the stick, lose their etymological meaning and become
mere signs of derivation or of case, language enters into the second or
_Terminational_ stage.
By far the largest number of languages belong to this stage. The whole of
what is called the _Turanian_ family of speech consists of Terminational
or Agglutinative languages, and this Turanian family comprises in reality
all languages spoken in Asia and Europe, and not included under the Aryan
and Semitic families, with the exception of Chinese and its cognate
dialects. In the great continent of the Old World the Semitic and Aryan
languages occupy only what may be called the four western peninsulas,
namely, India with Persia, Arabia, Asia Minor, and Europe; and we have
reason to suppose that even these countries were held by Turanian tribes
previous to the arrival of the Aryan and Semitic nations.
This Turanian family is of great importance in the science of languages.
Some scholars would deny it the name of a family; and if family is only
applicable to dialects so closely connected among themselves as the Aryan
or Semitic, it would no doubt be preferable to speak of the Turanian as a
class or group, and not as a family of languages. But this concession must
not be understood as an admission that the members of this class start
from different sources, and that they are held together, not by
genealogical affinity, but by morphological similarity only.
These languages share elements in common which they must have borrowed
from the same source, and their formal coincidences, though of a different
character from those of the Aryan and Semitic families, are such that it
would be impossible to ascribe them to mere accident.
The name Turanian is used in opposition to Aryan, and is applied to the
nomadic races of Asia as opposed to the agricultural or Aryan races.
The Turanian family or class consists of two great divisions, the
_Northern_ and the _Southern_.
The Northern is sometimes called the _Ural-Altaic_ or _Ugro-Tataric_, and
it is divided into five sections, the _Tungusic_, _Mongolic_, _Turkic_,
_Finnic_, and _Samoyedic_.
The Southern, which occupies the south of Asia, is divided into four
classes, the _Tamulic_, or the languages of the Dekhan; the _Bhotîya_, or
the dialects of Tibet and Bhotan; the _Taïc_, or the dialects of Siam, and
the _Malaic_, or the Malay and Polynesian dialects.
No doubt if we expected to find in this immense number of languages the
same family likeness which holds the Semitic or Aryan languages together,
we should be disappointed. But the very absence of that family likeness
constitutes one of the distinguishing features of the Turanian dialects.
They are _Nomad_ languages, as contrasted with the Aryan, and Semitic
languages.(301) In the latter most words and grammatical forms were thrown
out but once by the creative power of one generation, and they were not
lightly parted with, even though their original distinctness had been
blurred by phonetic corruption. To hand down a language in this manner is
possible only among people whose history runs on in one main stream; and
where religion, law, and poetry supply well-defined borders which hem in
on every side the current of language. Among the Turanian nomads no such
nucleus of a political, social, or literary character has ever been
formed. Empires were no sooner founded than they were scattered again like
the sand-clouds of the desert; no laws, no songs, no stories outlived the
age of their authors. How quickly language can change, if thus left to
itself without any literary standard, we saw in a former Lecture, when
treating of the growth of dialects. The most necessary substantives, such
as father, mother, daughter, son, have frequently been lost and replaced
by synonymes in the different dialects of Turanian speech, and the
grammatical terminations have been treated with the same freedom.
Nevertheless, some of the Turanian numerals and pronouns, and many
Turanian roots, point to a single original source; and the common words
and common roots, which have been discovered in the most distant branches
of the Turanian stock, warrant the admission of a real, though very
distant, genealogical relationship of all Turanian speech.
The most characteristic feature of the Turanian languages is what has been
called _Agglutination_, or “gluing together.”(302) This means not only
that, in their grammar, pronouns are _glued_ to the verbs in order to form
the conjugation, or prepositions to substantives in order to form
declension. _That_ would not be a distinguishing characteristic of the
Turanian or nomad languages; for in Hebrew as well as in Sanskrit,
conjugation and declension were originally formed on the same principle.
What distinguishes the Turanian languages is, that in them the conjugation
and declension can still be taken to pieces; and although the terminations
have by no means always retained their significative power as independent
words, they are felt as modificatory syllables, and as distinct from the
roots to which they are appended.
In the Aryan languages the modifications of words, comprised under
declension and conjugation, were likewise originally expressed by
agglutination. But the component parts began soon to coalesce, so as to
form one integral word, liable in its turn to phonetic corruption to such
an extent that it became impossible after a time to decide which was the
root and which the modificatory element. The difference between an Aryan
and a Turanian language is somewhat the same as between good and bad
mosaic. The Aryan words seem made of one piece, the Turanian words clearly
show the sutures and fissures where the small stones are cemented
together.
There was a very good reason why the Turanian languages should have
remained in this second or agglutinative stage. It was felt essential that
the radical portion of each word should stand out in distinct relief, and
never be obscured or absorbed, as happens in the third or inflectional
stage.
The French _âge_, for instance, has lost its whole material body, and is
nothing but termination. _Age_ in old French was _eage_ and _edage_.
_Edage_ is a corruption of the Latin _œtaticum_; _œtaticum_ is a
derivative of _œtas_; _œtas_ an abbreviation of _œvitas_; _œvitas_ is
derived from _œvum_, and in _œvum_, _œ_ only is the radical or predicative
element, the Sanskrit _ây_ in _ây-us_, life, which contains the germ from
which these various words derive their life and meaning. From _œvum_ the
Romans derived _œviternus_, contracted into _œternus_, so that _age_ and
_eternity_ flow from the same source. What trace of _œ_ or _œvum_, or even
_œvitas_ and _œtas_, remains in _âge_? Turanian languages cannot afford
such words as _âge_ in their dictionaries. It is an indispensable
requirement in a nomadic language that it should be intelligible to many,
though their intercourse be but scanty. It requires tradition, society,
and literature, to maintain words and forms which can no longer be
analyzed at once. Such words would seldom spring up in nomadic languages,
or if they did, they would die away with each generation.
The Aryan verb contains many forms in which the personal pronoun is no
longer felt distinctly. And yet tradition, custom, and law preserve the
life of these veterans, and make us feel unwilling to part with them. But
in the ever-shifting state of a nomadic society no debased coin can be
tolerated in language, no obscure legend accepted on trust. The metal must
be pure, and the legend distinct; that the one may be weighed, and the
other, if not deciphered, at least recognized as a well-known guarantee.
Hence the small proportion of irregular forms in all agglutinative
languages.(303)
A Turanian might tolerate the Sanskrit,
as-mi, a-si, as-ti, ’s-mas, ’s-tha, ’s-anti,
I am, thou art, he is, we are, you are, they are;
or even the Latin,
’s-um, e-s, es-t, ’su-mus, es-tis, ’sunt.
In these instances, with a few exceptions, root and affix are as
distinguishable as, for instance, in Turkish:
bakar-im, bakar-sin, bakar,
I regard, thou regardest, he regards.
bakar-iz, bakar-siniz, bakar-lar
we regard, you regard, they regard.
But a conjugation like the Hindustání, which is a modern Aryan dialect,
hun, hai, hai, hain, ho, hain,
would not be compatible with the genius of the Turanian languages, because
it would not answer the requirements of a nomadic life. Turanian dialects
exhibit either no terminational distinctions at all, as in Mandshu, which
is a Tungusic dialect; or a complete and intelligible system of affixes,
as in the spoken dialect of Nyertchinsk, equally of Tungusic descent. But
a state of conjugation in which, through phonetic corruption, the suffix
of the first person singular and plural, and of the third person plural
are the same, where there is no distinction between the second and third
persons singular, and between the first and third persons plural, would
necessarily lead, in a Turanian dialect, to the adoption of new and more
expressive forms. New pronouns would have to be used to mark the persons,
or some other expedient be resorted to for the same purpose.
And this will make it still more clear why the Turanian languages, or in
fact all languages in this second or agglutinative stage, though protected
against phonetic corruption more than the Aryan and Semitic languages, are
so much exposed to the changes produced by dialectical regeneration. A
Turanian retains, as it were, the consciousness of his language and
grammar. The idea, for instance, which he connects with a plural is that
of a noun followed by a syllable indicative of plurality; a passive with
him is a verb followed by a syllable expressive of suffering, or eating,
or going.(304) Now these determinative ideas may be expressed in various
ways, and though in one and the same clan, and during one period of time,
a certain number of terminations would become stationary, and be assigned
to the expression of certain grammatical categories, such as the plural,
the passive, the genitive, different hordes, as they separated, would
still feel themselves at liberty to repeat the process of grammatical
composition, and defy the comparative grammarian to prove the identity of
the terminations, even in dialects so closely allied as Finnish and
Hungarian, or Tamil and Telugu.
It must not be supposed, however, that Turanian or agglutinative languages
are forever passing through this process of grammatical regeneration.
Where nomadic tribes approach to a political organization, their language,
though Turanian, may approach to the system of political or traditional
languages, such as Sanskrit or Hebrew. This is indeed the case with the
most advanced members of the Turanian family, the Hungarian, the Finnish,
the Tamil, Telugu, &c. Many of their grammatical terminations have
suffered by phonetic corruption, but they have not been replaced by new
and more expressive words. The termination of the plural is _lu_ in
Telugu, and this is probably a mere corruption of _gaḷ._, the termination
of the plural in Tamil. The only characteristic Turanian feature which
always remains is this: the root is never obscured. Besides this, the
determining or modifying syllables are generally placed at the end, and
the vowels do not become so absolutely fixed for each syllable as in
Sanskrit or Hebrew. On the contrary, there is what is called the Law of
Harmony, according to which the vowels of each word may be changed and
modulated so as to harmonize with the key-note struck by its chief vowel.
The vowels in Turkish, for instance, are divided into two classes, _sharp_
and _flat_. If a verb contains a sharp vowel in its radical portion, the
vowels of the terminations are all sharp, while the same terminations, if
following a root with a flat vowel, modulate their own vowels into the
flat key. Thus we have _sev-mek_, to love, but _bak-mak_, to regard, _mek_
or _mak_ being the termination of the infinitive. Thus we say, _ev-ler_,
the houses, but _at-lar_, the horses, _ler_ or _lar_ being the termination
of the plural.
No Aryan or Semitic language has preserved a similar freedom in the
harmonic arrangement of its vowels, while traces of it have been found
among the most distant members of the Turanian family, as in Hungarian,
Mongolian, Turkish, the Yakut, spoken in the north of Siberia, and in
dialects spoken on the eastern frontiers of India.
For completeness’ sake I add a short account of the Turanian family,
chiefly taken from my Survey of Languages, published 1855:—
_Tungusic Class._
The _Tungusic_ branch extends from China northward to Siberia and westward
to 113°, where the river Tunguska partly marks its frontier. The Tungusic
tribes in Siberia are under Russian sway. Other Tungusic tribes belong to
the Chinese empire, and are known by the name of Mandshu, a name taken
after they had conquered China in 1644, and founded the present imperial
dynasty.
_Mongolic Class._
The original seats of the people who speak Mongolic dialects lie near the
Lake Baikal and in the eastern parts of Siberia, where we find them as
early as the ninth century after Christ. They were divided into three
classes, the _Mongols_ proper, the _Buriäts_, and the _Ölöts_ or
_Kalmüks_. Chingis-khán (1227) united them into a nation and founded the
Mongolian empire, which included, however, not only Mongolic, but Tungusic
and Turkic, commonly called Tataric, tribes.