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.