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.”