103. Secondary Parallelism in the Indo-European Languages
Parallel growth secondary to a former unity and differentiation is illustrated by the Indo-European languages. All the known ancient forms of this speech family, Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, Latin, Gothic, were highly inflecting and compounding. Their tendency was synthetic (§ [51], [57]).
Grammatical ideas such as voice, tense, number, case, were expressed by elements affixed to the word stem and incapable of a separate existence. For they will have loved Latin says ama-v-eru-nt. The -v- has the force of have, the -eru- of will, -nt of they; but none of these parts can be used alone, as their equivalents in English can be, or as in French ils auront aimé. The two latter languages are analytical. They break an idea into parts which they express by separate words that change form but little. They retain only fragments of conjugations and declensions. Sanskrit had eight noun cases, Latin six; English has only two, the subjective-objective and the possessive, and French only one, or rather no case-form at all.[15]
This development toward a more analytical form is not only traceable in several non-Indo-European speech families, such as Chinese and Malayo-Polynesian (§ [61]), but has gone on in all the branches of Indo-European. It is visible in the growth of English from Anglo-Saxon; of French, Spanish, and Italian from Latin; of modern from ancient Persian; of Hindi and Bengali from Sanskrit. True, some of these have been in contact, like the Germanic and Latin languages, and might therefore be imagined to have set one another an example, although there is little evidence that languages seriously influence each other’s forms. But many of the Indo-European idioms have not been in contact at all for thousands of years. The Germanic and the Indo-Iranic branches, for instance, must have separated at least four thousand years ago. For the greater part of this period, accordingly, the related but no longer communicating languages that have resulted in modern English and Bengali, to take only one instance, have independently driven toward the same goal of more and more analytical structure. It may well be that the hidden germ of this impulse lay implanted in the common Indo-European mother-tongue at the time of its differentiation five or more thousand years ago. But the movement of its daughters has certainly been an astoundingly parallel one.