Z
- Zaconic dialect of Greek, [(162)]
[ Footnote 1: ] We shall reserve capitals for radical elements.
[ Footnote 2: ] These words are not here used in a narrowly technical sense.
[ Footnote 3: ] It is not a question of the general isolating character of such languages as Chinese (see [Chapter VI]). Radical-words may and do occur in languages of all varieties, many of them of a high degree of complexity.
[ Footnote 4: ] Spoken by a group of Indian tribes in Vancouver Island.
[ Footnote 5: ] In this and other examples taken from exotic languages I am forced by practical considerations to simplify the actual phonetic forms. This should not matter perceptibly, as we are concerned with form as such, not with phonetic content.
[ Footnote 6: ] These oral experiences, which I have had time and again as a field student of American Indian languages, are very neatly confirmed by personal experiences of another sort. Twice I have taught intelligent young Indians to write their own languages according to the phonetic system which I employ. They were taught merely how to render accurately the sounds as such. Both had some difficulty in learning to break up a word into its constituent sounds, but none whatever in determining the words. This they both did with spontaneous and complete accuracy. In the hundreds of pages of manuscript Nootka text that I have obtained from one of these young Indians the words, whether abstract relational entities like English that and but or complex sentence-words like the Nootka example quoted above, are, practically without exception, isolated precisely as I or any other student would have isolated them. Such experiences with naïve speakers and recorders do more to convince one of the definitely plastic unity of the word than any amount of purely theoretical argument.
[ Footnote 7: ] “Coördinate sentences” like I shall remain but you may go may only doubtfully be considered as truly unified predications, as true sentences. They are sentences in a stylistic sense rather than from the strictly formal linguistic standpoint. The orthography I shall remain. But you may go is as intrinsically justified as I shall remain. Now you may go. The closer connection in sentiment between the first two propositions has led to a conventional visual representation that must not deceive the analytic spirit.
[ Footnote 8: ] Except, possibly, in a newspaper headline. Such headlines, however, are language only in a derived sense.
[ Footnote 9: ] E.g., the brilliant Dutch writer, Jac van Ginneken.
[ Footnote 10: ] Observe the “voluntary.” When we shout or grunt or otherwise allow our voices to take care of themselves, as we are likely to do when alone in the country on a fine spring day, we are no longer fixing vocal adjustments by voluntary control. Under these circumstances we are almost certain to hit on speech sounds that we could never learn to control in actual speech.
[ Footnote 11: ] If speech, in its acoustic and articulatory aspect, is indeed a rigid system, how comes it, one may plausibly object, that no two people speak alike? The answer is simple. All that part of speech which falls out of the rigid articulatory framework is not speech in idea, but is merely a superadded, more or less instinctively determined vocal complication inseparable from speech in practice. All the individual color of speech—personal emphasis, speed, personal cadence, personal pitch—is a non-linguistic fact, just as the incidental expression of desire and emotion are, for the most part, alien to linguistic expression. Speech, like all elements of culture, demands conceptual selection, inhibition of the randomness of instinctive behavior. That its “idea” is never realized as such in practice, its carriers being instinctively animated organisms, is of course true of each and every aspect of culture.
[ Footnote 12: ] Purely acoustic classifications, such as more easily suggest themselves to a first attempt at analysis, are now in less favor among students of phonetics than organic classifications. The latter have the advantage of being more objective. Moreover, the acoustic quality of a sound is dependent on the articulation, even though in linguistic consciousness this quality is the primary, not the secondary, fact.
[ Footnote 13: ] By “quality” is here meant the inherent nature and resonance of the sound as such. The general “quality” of the individual’s voice is another matter altogether. This is chiefly determined by the individual anatomical characteristics of the larynx and is of no linguistic interest whatever.
[ Footnote 14: ] As at the end of the snappily pronounced no! (sometimes written nope!) or in the over-carefully pronounced at all, where one may hear a slight check between the t and the a.
[ Footnote 15: ] “Singing” is here used in a wide sense. One cannot sing continuously on such a sound as b or d, but one may easily outline a tune on a series of b’s or d’s in the manner of the plucked “pizzicato” on stringed instruments. A series of tones executed on continuant consonants, like m, z, or l, gives the effect of humming, droning, or buzzing. The sound of “humming,” indeed, is nothing but a continuous voiced nasal, held on one pitch or varying in pitch, as desired.
[ Footnote 16: ] The whisper of ordinary speech is a combination of unvoiced sounds and “whispered” sounds, as the term is understood in phonetics.
[ Footnote 17: ] Aside from the involuntary nasalizing of all voiced sounds in the speech of those that talk with a “nasal twang.”
[ Footnote 18: ] These may be also defined as free unvoiced breath with varying vocalic timbres. In the long Paiute word quoted on [page 31] the first u and the final ü are pronounced without voice.
[ Footnote 19: ] Nasalized stops, say m or n, can naturally not be truly “stopped,” as there is no way of checking the stream of breath in the nose by a definite articulation.
[ Footnote 20: ] The lips also may theoretically so articulate. “Labial trills,” however, are certainly rare in natural speech.
[ Footnote 21: ] This position, known as “faucal,” is not common.
[ Footnote 22: ] “Points of articulation” must be understood to include tongue and lip positions of the vowels.
[ Footnote 23: ] Including, under the fourth category, a number of special resonance adjustments that we have not been able to take up specifically.
[ Footnote 24: ] In so far, it should be added, as these sounds are expiratory, i.e., pronounced with the outgoing breath. Certain languages, like the South African Hottentot and Bushman, have also a number of inspiratory sounds, pronounced by sucking in the breath at various points of oral contact. These are the so-called “clicks.”
[ Footnote 25: ] The conception of the ideal phonetic system, the phonetic pattern, of a language is not as well understood by linguistic students as it should be. In this respect the unschooled recorder of language, provided he has a good ear and a genuine instinct for language, is often at a great advantage as compared with the minute phonetician, who is apt to be swamped by his mass of observations. I have already employed my experience in teaching Indians to write their own language for its testing value in another connection. It yields equally valuable evidence here. I found that it was difficult or impossible to teach an Indian to make phonetic distinctions that did not correspond to “points in the pattern of his language,” however these differences might strike our objective ear, but that subtle, barely audible, phonetic differences, if only they hit the “points in the pattern,” were easily and voluntarily expressed in writing. In watching my Nootka interpreter write his language, I often had the curious feeling that he was transcribing an ideal flow of phonetic elements which he heard, inadequately from a purely objective standpoint, as the intention of the actual rumble of speech.
[ Footnote 26: ] For the symbolism, see [chapter II].
[ Footnote 27: ] “Plural” is here a symbol for any prefix indicating plurality.
[ Footnote 28: ] The language of the Aztecs, still spoken in large parts of Mexico.
[ Footnote 29: ] Indian language of British Columbia closely related to the Nass already cited.
[ Footnote 30: ] Including such languages as Navaho, Apache, Hupa, Carrier, Chipewyan, Loucheux.
[ Footnote 31: ] This may seem surprising to an English reader. We generally think of time as a function that is appropriately expressed in a purely formal manner. This notion is due to the bias that Latin grammar has given us. As a matter of fact the English future (I shall go) is not expressed by affixing at all; moreover, it may be expressed by the present, as in to-morrow I leave this place, where the temporal function is inherent in the independent adverb. Though in lesser degree, the Hupa -te is as irrelevant to the vital word as is to-morrow to the grammatical “feel” of I leave.
[ Footnote 32: ] Wishram dialect.
[ Footnote 33: ] Really “him,” but Chinook, like Latin or French, possesses grammatical gender. An object may be referred to as “he,” “she,” or “it,” according to the characteristic form of its noun.
[ Footnote 34: ] This analysis is doubtful. It is likely that -n- possesses a function that still remains to be ascertained. The Algonkin languages are unusually complex and present many unsolved problems of detail.
[ Footnote 35: ] “Secondary stems” are elements which are suffixes from a formal point of view, never appearing without the support of a true radical element, but whose function is as concrete, to all intents and purposes, as that of the radical element itself. Secondary verb stems of this type are characteristic of the Algonkin languages and of Yana.
[ Footnote 36: ] In the Algonkin languages all persons and things are conceived of as either animate or inanimate, just as in Latin or German they are conceived of as masculine, feminine, or neuter.
[ Footnote 37: ] Egyptian dialect.
[ Footnote 38: ] There are changes of accent and vocalic quantity in these forms as well, but the requirements of simplicity force us to neglect them.
[ Footnote 39: ] A Berber language of Morocco.
[ Footnote 40: ] Some of the Berber languages allow consonantal combinations that seem unpronounceable to us.
[ Footnote 41: ] One of the Hamitic languages of eastern Africa.
[ Footnote 42: ] See [page 49].
[ Footnote 43: ] Spoken in the south-central part of California.
[ Footnote 44: ] See [page 50].
[ Footnote 45: ] These orthographies are but makeshifts for simple sounds.
[ Footnote 46: ] Whence our ping-pong.
[ Footnote 47: ] An African language of the Guinea Coast.
[ Footnote 48: ] In the verbal adjective the tone of the second syllable differs from that of the first.
[ Footnote 49: ] Initial “click” (see [page 55], [note 15]) omitted. Transcriber's Note: This footnote has been renumbered as Footnote 24.
[ Footnote 50: ] An Indian language of Nevada.
[ Footnote 51: ] An Indian language of Oregon.
[ Footnote 52: ] It is not unlikely, however, that these Athabaskan alternations are primarily tonal in character.
[ Footnote 53: ] Not in its technical sense.
[ Footnote 54: ] It is, of course, an “accident” that -s denotes plurality in the noun, singularity in the verb.
[ Footnote 55: ] “To cause to be dead” or “to cause to die” in the sense of “to kill” is an exceedingly wide-spread usage. It is found, for instance, also in Nootka and Sioux.
[ Footnote 56: ] Agriculture was not practised by the Yana. The verbal idea of “to farm” would probably be expressed in some such synthetic manner as “to dig-earth” or “to grow-cause.” There are suffixed elements corresponding to -er and -ling.
[ Footnote 57: ] “Doer,” not “done to.” This is a necessarily clumsy tag to represent the “nominative” (subjective) in contrast to the “accusative” (objective).
[ Footnote 58: ] I.e., not you or I.
[ Footnote 59: ] By “case” is here meant not only the subjective-objective relation but also that of attribution.
[ Footnote 60: ] Except in so far as Latin uses this method as a rather awkward, roundabout method of establishing the attribution of the color to the particular object or person. In effect one cannot in Latin directly say that a person is white, merely that what is white is identical with the person who is, acts, or is acted upon in such and such a manner. In origin the feel of the Latin illa alba femina is really “that-one, the-white-one, (namely) the-woman”—three substantive ideas that are related to each other by a juxtaposition intended to convey an identity. English and Chinese express the attribution directly by means of order. In Latin the illa and alba may occupy almost any position in the sentence. It is important to observe that the subjective form of illa and alba, does not truly define a relation of these qualifying concepts to femina. Such a relation might be formally expressed via an attributive case, say the genitive (woman of whiteness). In Tibetan both the methods of order and of true case relation may be employed: woman white (i.e., “white woman”) or white-of woman (i.e., “woman of whiteness, woman who is white, white woman”).
[ Footnote 61: ] Aside, naturally, from the life and imminence that may be created for such a sentence by a particular context.
[ Footnote 62: ] This has largely happened in popular French and German, where the difference is stylistic rather than functional. The preterits are more literary or formal in tone than the perfects.
[ Footnote 63: ] Hence, “the square root of 4 is 2,” precisely as “my uncle is here now.” There are many “primitive” languages that are more philosophical and distinguish between a true “present” and a “customary” or “general” tense.
[ Footnote 64: ] Except, of course, the fundamental selection and contrast necessarily implied in defining one concept as against another. “Man” and “white” possess an inherent relation to “woman” and “black,” but it is a relation of conceptual content only and is of no direct interest to grammar.
[ Footnote 65: ] Thus, the -er of farmer may he defined as indicating that particular substantive concept (object or thing) that serves as the habitual subject of the particular verb to which it is affixed. This relation of “subject” (a farmer farms) is inherent in and specific to the word; it does not exist for the sentence as a whole. In the same way the -ling of duckling defines a specific relation of attribution that concerns only the radical element, not the sentence.
[ Footnote 66: ] It is precisely the failure to feel the “value” or “tone,” as distinct from the outer significance, of the concept expressed by a given grammatical element that has so often led students to misunderstand the nature of languages profoundly alien to their own. Not everything that calls itself “tense” or “mode” or “number” or “gender” or “person” is genuinely comparable to what we mean by these terms in Latin or French.
[ Footnote 67: ] Suffixed articles occur also in Danish and Swedish and in numerous other languages. The Nootka element for “in the house” differs from our “house-” in that it is suffixed and cannot occur as an independent word; nor is it related to the Nootka word for “house.”
[ Footnote 68: ] Assuming the existence of a word “firelet.”
[ Footnote 69: ] The Nootka diminutive is doubtless more of a feeling-element, an element of nuance, than our -ling. This is shown by the fact that it may be used with verbs as well as with nouns. In speaking to a child, one is likely to add the diminutive to any word in the sentence, regardless of whether there is an inherent diminutive meaning in the word or not.
[ Footnote 70: ] -si is the third person of the present tense. -hau- “east” is an affix, not a compounded radical element.
[ Footnote 71: ] These are classical, not modern colloquial, forms.
[ Footnote 72: ] Just as in English “He has written books” makes no commitment on the score of quantity (“a few, several, many”).
[ Footnote 73: ] Such as person class, animal class, instrument class, augmentative class.
[ Footnote 74: ] A term borrowed from Slavic grammar. It indicates the lapse of action, its nature from the standpoint of continuity. Our “cry” is indefinite as to aspect, “be crying” is durative, “cry put” is momentaneous, “burst into tears” is inceptive, “keep crying” is continuative, “start in crying” is durative-inceptive, “cry now and again” is iterative, “cry out every now and then” or “cry in fits and starts” is momentaneous-iterative. “To put on a coat” is momentaneous, “to wear a coat” is resultative. As our examples show, aspect is expressed in English by all kinds of idiomatic turns rather than by a consistently worked out set of grammatical forms. In many languages aspect is of far greater formal significance than tense, with which the naïve student is apt to confuse it.
[ Footnote 75: ] By “modalities” I do not mean the matter of fact statement, say, of negation or uncertainty as such, rather their implication in terms of form. There are languages, for instance, which have as elaborate an apparatus of negative forms for the verb as Greek has of the optative or wish-modality.
[ Footnote 76: ] Compare [page 97].
[ Footnote 77: ] It is because of this classification of experience that in many languages the verb forms which are proper, say, to a mythical narration differ from those commonly used in daily intercourse. We leave these shades to the context or content ourselves with a more explicit and roundabout mode of expression, e.g., “He is dead, as I happen to know,” “They say he is dead,” “He must be dead by the looks of things.”
[ Footnote 78: ] We say “I sleep” and “I go,” as well as “I kill him,” but “he kills me.” Yet me of the last example is at least as close psychologically to I of “I sleep” as is the latter to I of “I kill him.” It is only by form that we can classify the “I” notion of “I sleep” as that of an acting subject. Properly speaking, I am handled by forces beyond my control when I sleep just as truly as when some one is killing me. Numerous languages differentiate clearly between active subject and static subject (I go and I kill him as distinct from I sleep, I am good, I am killed) or between transitive subject and intransitive subject (I kill him as distinct from I sleep, I am good, I am killed, I go). The intransitive or static subjects may or may not be identical with the object of the transitive verb.
[ Footnote 79: ] Ultimately, also historical—say, age to “act that (one).”
[ Footnote 80: ] For with in the sense of “against,” compare German wider “against.”
[ Footnote 81: ] Cf. Latin ire “to go”; also our English idiom “I have to go,” i.e., “must go.”
[ Footnote 82: ] In Chinese no less than in English.
[ Footnote 83: ] By “originally” I mean, of course, some time antedating the earliest period of the Indo-European languages that we can get at by comparative evidence.
[ Footnote 84: ] Perhaps it was a noun-classifying element of some sort.
[ Footnote 85: ] Compare its close historical parallel off.
[ Footnote 86: ] “Ablative” at last analysis.
[ Footnote 87: ] Very likely pitch should be understood along with stress.
[ Footnote 88: ] As in Bantu or Chinook.
[ Footnote 89: ] Perhaps better “general.” The Chinook “neuter” may refer to persons as well as things and may also be used as a plural. “Masculine” and “feminine,” as in German and French, include a great number of inanimate nouns.
[ Footnote 90: ] Spoken in the greater part of the southern half of Africa. Chinook is spoken in a number of dialects in the lower Columbia River valley. It is impressive to observe how the human mind has arrived at the same form of expression in two such historically unconnected regions.
[ Footnote 91: ] In Yana the noun and the verb are well distinct, though there are certain features that they hold in common which tend to draw them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible. But there are, strictly speaking, no other parts of speech. The adjective is a verb. So are the numeral, the interrogative pronoun (e.g., “to be what?”), and certain “conjunctions” and adverbs (e.g., “to be and” and “to be not”; one says “and-past-I go,” i.e., “and I went”). Adverbs and prepositions are either nouns or merely derivative affixes in the verb.
[ Footnote 92: ] If possible, a triune formula.
[ Footnote 93: ] One celebrated American writer on culture and language delivered himself of the dictum that, estimable as the speakers of agglutinative languages might be, it was nevertheless a crime for an inflecting woman to marry an agglutinating man. Tremendous spiritual values were evidently at stake. Champions of the “inflective” languages are wont to glory in the very irrationalities of Latin and Greek, except when it suits them to emphasize their profoundly “logical” character. Yet the sober logic of Turkish or Chinese leaves them cold. The glorious irrationalities and formal complexities of many “savage” languages they have no stomach for. Sentimentalists are difficult people.
[ Footnote 94: ] I have in mind valuations of form as such. Whether or not a language has a large and useful vocabulary is another matter. The actual size of a vocabulary at a given time is not a thing of real interest to the linguist, as all languages have the resources at their disposal for the creation of new words, should need for them arise. Furthermore, we are not in the least concerned with whether or not a language is of great practical value or is the medium of a great culture. All these considerations, important from other standpoints, have nothing to do with form value.
[ Footnote 95: ] E.g., Malay, Polynesian.
[ Footnote 96: ] Where, as we have seen, the syntactic relations are by no means free from an alloy of the concrete.
[ Footnote 97: ] Very much as an English cod-liver oil dodges to some extent the task of explicitly defining the relations of the three nouns. Contrast French huile de foie de morue “oil of liver of cod.”
[ Footnote 98: ] See Chapter IV.
[ Footnote 99: ] There is probably a real psychological connection between symbolism and such significant alternations as drink, drank, drunk or Chinese mai (with rising tone) “to buy” and mai (with falling tone) “to sell.” The unconscious tendency toward symbolism is justly emphasized by recent psychological literature. Personally I feel that the passage from sing to sang has very much the same feeling as the alternation of symbolic colors—e.g., green for safe, red for danger. But we probably differ greatly as to the intensity with which we feel symbolism in linguistic changes of this type.
[ Footnote 100: ] Pure or “concrete relational.” See Chapter V.
[ Footnote 101: ] In spite of my reluctance to emphasize the difference between a prefixing and a suffixing language, I feel that there is more involved in this difference than linguists have generally recognized. It seems to me that there is a rather important psychological distinction between a language that settles the formal status of a radical element before announcing it—and this, in effect, is what such languages as Tlingit and Chinook and Bantu are in the habit of doing—and one that begins with the concrete nucleus of a word and defines the status of this nucleus by successive limitations, each curtailing in some degree the generality of all that precedes. The spirit of the former method has something diagrammatic or architectural about it, the latter is a method of pruning afterthoughts. In the more highly wrought prefixing languages the word is apt to affect us as a crystallization of floating elements, the words of the typical suffixing languages (Turkish, Eskimo, Nootka) are “determinative” formations, each added element determining the form of the whole anew. It is so difficult in practice to apply these elusive, yet important, distinctions that an elementary study has no recourse but to ignore them.
[ Footnote 102: ] English, however, is only analytic in tendency. Relatively to French, it is still fairly synthetic, at least in certain aspects.
[ Footnote 103: ] The former process is demonstrable for English, French, Danish, Tibetan, Chinese, and a host of other languages. The latter tendency may be proven, I believe, for a number of American Indian languages, e.g., Chinook, Navaho. Underneath their present moderately polysynthetic form is discernible an analytic base that in the one case may be roughly described as English-like, in the other, Tibetan-like.
[ Footnote 104: ] This applies more particularly to the Romance group: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Roumanian. Modern Greek is not so clearly analytic.
[ Footnote 105: ] See [pages 133, 134].
[ Footnote 106: ] The following formulae may prove useful to those that are mathematically inclined. Agglutination: c = a + b; regular fusion: c = a + (b - x) + x; irregular fusion: c = (a - x) + (b - y) + (x + y); symbolism: c = (a - x) + x. I do not wish to imply that there is any mystic value in the process of fusion. It is quite likely to have developed as a purely mechanical product of phonetic forces that brought about irregularities of various sorts.
[ Footnote 107: ] See [page 110].
[ Footnote 108: ] See Chapter V.
[ Footnote 109: ] If we deny the application of the term “inflective” to fusing languages that express the syntactic relations in pure form, that is, without the admixture of such concepts as number, gender, and tense, merely because such admixture is familiar to us in Latin and Greek, we make of “inflection” an even more arbitrary concept than it need be. At the same time it is true that the method of fusion itself tends to break down the wall between our conceptual groups II and IV, to create group III. Yet the possibility of such “inflective” languages should not be denied. In modern Tibetan, for instance, in which concepts of group II are but weakly expressed, if at all, and in which the relational concepts (e.g., the genitive, the agentive or instrumental) are expressed without alloy of the material, we get many interesting examples of fusion, even of symbolism. Mi di, e.g., “man this, the man” is an absolutive form which may be used as the subject of an intransitive verb. When the verb is transitive (really passive), the (logical) subject has to take the agentive form. Mi di then becomes mi di “by the man,” the vowel of the demonstrative pronoun (or article) being merely lengthened. (There is probably also a change in the tone of the syllable.) This, of course, is of the very essence of inflection. It is an amusing commentary on the insufficiency of our current linguistic classification, which considers “inflective” and “isolating” as worlds asunder, that modern Tibetan may be not inaptly described as an isolating language, aside from such examples of fusion and symbolism as the foregoing.
[ Footnote 110: ] I am eliminating entirely the possibility of compounding two or more radical elements into single words or word-like phrases (see [pages 67-70]). To expressly consider compounding in the present survey of types would be to complicate our problem unduly. Most languages that possess no derivational affixes of any sort may nevertheless freely compound radical elements (independent words). Such compounds often have a fixity that simulates the unity of single words.
[ Footnote 111: ] We may assume that in these languages and in those of type D all or most of the relational concepts are expressed in “mixed” form, that such a concept as that of subjectivity, for instance, cannot be expressed without simultaneously involving number or gender or that an active verb form must be possessed of a definite tense. Hence group III will be understood to include, or rather absorb, group IV. Theoretically, of course, certain relational concepts may be expressed pure, others mixed, but in practice it will not be found easy to make the distinction.
[ Footnote 112: ] The line between types C and D cannot be very sharply drawn. It is a matter largely of degree. A language of markedly mixed-relational type, but of little power of derivation pure and simple, such as Bantu or French, may be conveniently put into type C, even though it is not devoid of a number of derivational affixes. Roughly speaking, languages of type C may be considered as highly analytic (“purified”) forms of type D.
[ Footnote 113: ] In defining the type to which a language belongs one must be careful not to be misled by structural features which are mere survivals of an older stage, which have no productive life and do not enter into the unconscious patterning of the language. All languages are littered with such petrified bodies. The English -ster of spinster and Webster is an old agentive suffix, but, as far as the feeling of the present English-speaking generation is concerned, it cannot be said to really exist at all; spinster and Webster have been completely disconnected from the etymological group of spin and of weave (web). Similarly, there are hosts of related words in Chinese which differ in the initial consonant, the vowel, the tone, or in the presence or absence of a final consonant. Even where the Chinaman feels the etymological relationship, as in certain cases he can hardly help doing, he can assign no particular function to the phonetic variation as such. Hence it forms no live feature of the language-mechanism and must be ignored in defining the general form of the language. The caution is all the more necessary, as it is precisely the foreigner, who approaches a new language with a certain prying inquisitiveness, that is most apt to see life in vestigial features which the native is either completely unaware of or feels merely as dead form.
[ Footnote 114: ] Might nearly as well have come under D.
[ Footnote 115: ] Very nearly complex pure-relational.
[ Footnote 116: ] Not Greek specifically, of course, but as a typical representative of Indo-European.
[ Footnote 117: ] Such, in other words, as can be shown by documentary or comparative evidence to have been derived from a common source. See Chapter VII.
[ Footnote 118: ] These are far-eastern and far-western representatives of the “Soudan” group recently proposed by D. Westermann. The genetic relationship between Ewe and Shilluk is exceedingly remote at best.
[ Footnote 119: ] This case is doubtful at that. I have put French in C rather than in D with considerable misgivings. Everything depends on how one evaluates elements like -al in national, -té in bonté, or re- in retourner. They are common enough, but are they as alive, as little petrified or bookish, as our English -ness and -ful and un-?
[ Footnote 120: ] In spite of its more isolating cast.
[ Footnote 121: ] In a book of this sort it is naturally impossible to give an adequate idea of linguistic structure in its varying forms. Only a few schematic indications are possible. A separate volume would be needed to breathe life into the scheme. Such a volume would point out the salient structural characteristics of a number of languages, so selected as to give the reader an insight into the formal economy of strikingly divergent types.
[ Footnote 122: ] In so far as they do not fall out of the normal speech group by reason of a marked speech defect or because they are isolated foreigners that have acquired the language late in life.
[ Footnote 123: ] Observe that we are speaking of an individual’s speech as a whole. It is not a question of isolating some particular peculiarity of pronunciation or usage and noting its resemblance to or identity with a feature in another dialect.
[ Footnote 124: ] It is doubtful if we have the right to speak of linguistic uniformity even during the predominance of the Koine. It is hardly conceivable that when the various groups of non-Attic Greeks took on the Koine they did not at once tinge it with dialectic peculiarities induced by their previous speech habits.
[ Footnote 125: ] The Zaconic dialect of Lacedaemon is the sole exception. It is not derived from the Koine, but stems directly from the Doric dialect of Sparta.
[ Footnote 126: ] Though indications are not lacking of what these remoter kin of the Indo-European languages may be. This is disputed ground, however, and hardly fit subject for a purely general study of speech.
[ Footnote 127: ] “Dialect” in contrast to an accepted literary norm is a use of the term that we are not considering.
[ Footnote 128: ] Spoken in France and Spain in the region of the Pyrenees.
[ Footnote 129: ] Or rather apprehended, for we do not, in sober fact, entirely understand it as yet.
[ Footnote 130: ] Not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so.
[ Footnote 131: ] In relative clauses too we tend to avoid the objective form of “who.” Instead of “The man whom I saw” we are likely to say “The man that I saw” or “The man I saw.”
[ Footnote 132: ] “Its” was at one time as impertinent a departure as the “who” of “Who did you see?” It forced itself into English because the old cleavage between masculine, feminine, and neuter was being slowly and powerfully supplemented by a new one between thing-class and animate-class. The latter classification proved too vital to allow usage to couple males and things (“his”) as against females (“her”). The form “its” had to be created on the analogy of words like “man’s,” to satisfy the growing form feeling. The drift was strong enough to sanction a grammatical blunder.
[ Footnote 133: ] Psychoanalysts will recognize the mechanism. The mechanisms of “repression of impulse” and of its symptomatic symbolization can be illustrated in the most unexpected corners of individual and group psychology. A more general psychology than Freud’s will eventually prove them to be as applicable to the groping for abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of experience, as to the life of the fundamental instincts.
[ Footnote 134: ] Note that it is different with whose. This has not the support of analogous possessive forms in its own functional group, but the analogical power of the great body of possessives of nouns (man’s, boy’s) as well as of certain personal pronouns (his, its; as predicated possessive also hers, yours, theirs) is sufficient to give it vitality.
[ Footnote 135: ] Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as when You saw whom? is equivalent to You saw so and so and that so and so is who? In such sentences whom is pronounced high and lingeringly to emphasize the fact that the person just referred to by the listener is not known or recognized.
[ Footnote 136: ] Students of language cannot be entirely normal in their attitude towards their own speech. Perhaps it would be better to say “naïve” than “normal.”
[ Footnote 137: ] It is probably this variability of value in the significant compounds of a general linguistic drift that is responsible for the rise of dialectic variations. Each dialect continues the general drift of the common parent, but has not been able to hold fast to constant values for each component of the drift. Deviations as to the drift itself, at first slight, later cumulative, are therefore unavoidable.
[ Footnote 138: ] Most sentences beginning with interrogative whom are likely to be followed by did or does, do. Yet not all.
[ Footnote 139: ] Better, indeed, than in our oldest Latin and Greek records. The old Indo-Iranian languages alone (Sanskrit, Avestan) show an equally or more archaic status of the Indo-European parent tongue as regards case forms.
[ Footnote 140: ] Should its eventually drop out, it will have had a curious history. It will have played the rôle of a stop-gap between his in its non-personal use (see [footnote 11], [page 167]) and the later analytic of it. Transcriber's Note: This footnote has been renumbered as Footnote 132.
[ Footnote 141: ] Except in so far as that has absorbed other functions than such as originally belonged to it. It was only a nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.
[ Footnote 142: ] Aside from the interrogative: am I? is he? Emphasis counts for something. There is a strong tendency for the old “objective” forms to bear a stronger stress than the “subjective” forms. This is why the stress in locutions like He didn’t go, did he? and isn’t he? is thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis.
[ Footnote 143: ] They: them as an inanimate group may be looked upon as a kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more properly belongs.
[ Footnote 144: ] See [page 155].
[ Footnote 145: ] I have changed the Old and Middle High German orthography slightly in order to bring it into accord with modern usage. These purely orthographical changes are immaterial. The u of mus is a long vowel, very nearly like the oo of English moose.
[ Footnote 146: ] The vowels of these four words are long; o as in rode, e like a of fade, u like oo of brood, y like German ü.
[ Footnote 147: ] Or rather stage in a drift.
[ Footnote 148: ] Anglo-Saxon fet is “unrounded” from an older föt, which is phonetically related to fot precisely as is mys (i.e., müs) to mus. Middle High German ue (Modern German u) did not develop from an “umlauted” prototype of Old High German uo and Anglo-Saxon o, but was based directly on the dialectic uo. The unaffected prototype was long o. Had this been affected in the earliest Germanic or West-Germanic period, we should have had a pre-German alternation fot: föti; this older ö could not well have resulted in ue. Fortunately we do not need inferential evidence in this case, yet inferential comparative methods, if handled with care, may be exceedingly useful. They are indeed indispensable to the historian of language.
[ Footnote 149: ] See [page 133].
[ Footnote 150: ] Primitive Germanic fot(s), fotiz, mus, musiz; Indo-European pods, podes, mus, muses. The vowels of the first syllables are all long.
[ Footnote 151: ] Or in that unconscious sound patterning which is ever on the point of becoming conscious. See [page 57].
[ Footnote 152: ] As have most Dutch and German dialects.
[ Footnote 153: ] At least in America.
[ Footnote 154: ] It is possible that other than purely phonetic factors are also at work in the history of these vowels.
[ Footnote 155: ] The orthography is roughly phonetic. Pronounce all accented vowels long except where otherwise indicated, unaccented vowels short; give continental values to vowels, not present English ones.
[ Footnote 156: ] After I. the numbers are not meant to correspond chronologically to those of the English table. The orthography is again roughly phonetic.
[ Footnote 157: ] I use ss to indicate a peculiar long, voiceless s-sound that was etymologically and phonetically distinct from the old Germanic s. It always goes back to an old t. In the old sources it is generally written as a variant of z, though it is not to be confused with the modern German z (= ts). It was probably a dental (lisped) s.
[ Footnote 158: ] Z is to be understood as French or English z, not in its German use. Strictly speaking, this “z” (intervocalic -s-) was not voiced but was a soft voiceless sound, a sibilant intermediate between our s and z. In modern North German it has become voiced to z. It is important not to confound this s—z with the voiceless intervocalic s that soon arose from the older lisped ss. In Modern German (aside from certain dialects), old s and ss are not now differentiated when final (Maus and Fuss have identical sibilants), but can still be distinguished as voiced and voiceless s between vowels (Mäuse and Füsse).
[ Footnote 159: ] In practice phonetic laws have their exceptions, but more intensive study almost invariably shows that these exceptions are more apparent than real. They are generally due to the disturbing influence of morphological groupings or to special psychological reasons which inhibit the normal progress of the phonetic drift. It is remarkable with how few exceptions one need operate in linguistic history, aside from “analogical leveling” (morphological replacement).
[ Footnote 160: ] These confusions are more theoretical than real, however. A language has countless methods of avoiding practical ambiguities.
[ Footnote 161: ] A type of adjustment generally referred to as “analogical leveling.”
[ Footnote 162: ] Isolated from other German dialects in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is therefore a good test for gauging the strength of the tendency to “umlaut,” particularly as it has developed a strong drift towards analytic methods.
[ Footnote 163: ] Ch as in German Buch.
[ Footnote 164: ] The earlier students of English, however, grossly exaggerated the general “disintegrating” effect of French on middle English. English was moving fast toward a more analytic structure long before the French influence set in.
[ Footnote 165: ] For we still name our new scientific instruments and patent medicines from Greek and Latin.
[ Footnote 166: ] One might all but say, “has borrowed at all.”
[ Footnote 167: ] See [page 206].
[ Footnote 168: ] Ugro-Finnic and Turkish (Tartar)
[ Footnote 169: ] Probably, in Sweet’s terminology, high-back (or, better, between back and “mixed” positions)-narrow-unrounded. It generally corresponds to an Indo-European long u.
[ Footnote 170: ] There seem to be analogous or partly analogous sounds in certain languages of the Caucasus.
[ Footnote 171: ] This can actually be demonstrated for one of the Athabaskan dialects of the Yukon.
[ Footnote 172: ] In the sphere of syntax one may point to certain French and Latin influences, but it is doubtful if they ever reached deeper than the written language. Much of this type of influence belongs rather to literary style than to morphology proper.
[ Footnote 173: ] See [page 163].
[ Footnote 174: ] A group of languages spoken in southeastern Asia, of which Khmer (Cambodgian) is the best known representative.
[ Footnote 175: ] A group of languages spoken in northeastern India.
[ Footnote 176: ] I have in mind, e.g., the presence of postpositions in Upper Chinook, a feature that is clearly due to the influence of neighboring Sahaptin languages; or the use by Takelma of instrumental prefixes, which are likely to have been suggested by neighboring “Hokan” languages (Shasta, Karok).
[ Footnote 177: ] Itself an amalgam of North “French” and Scandinavian elements.
[ Footnote 178: ] The “Celtic” blood of what is now England and Wales is by no means confined to the Celtic-speaking regions—Wales and, until recently, Cornwall. There is every reason to believe that the invading Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) did not exterminate the Brythonic Celts of England nor yet drive them altogether into Wales and Cornwall (there has been far too much “driving” of conquered peoples into mountain fastnesses and land’s ends in our histories), but simply intermingled with them and imposed their rule and language upon them.
[ Footnote 179: ] In practice these three peoples can hardly be kept altogether distinct. The terms have rather a local-sentimental than a clearly racial value. Intermarriage has gone on steadily for centuries and it is only in certain outlying regions that we get relatively pure types, e.g., the Highland Scotch of the Hebrides. In America, English, Scotch, and Irish strands have become inextricably interwoven.
[ Footnote 180: ] The High German now spoken in northern Germany is not of great age, but is due to the spread of standardized German, based on Upper Saxon, a High German dialect, at the expense of “Plattdeutsch.”
[ Footnote 181: ] “Dolichocephalic.”
[ Footnote 182: ] “Brachycephalic.”
[ Footnote 183: ] By working back from such data as we possess we can make it probable that these languages were originally confined to a comparatively small area in northern Germany and Scandinavia. This area is clearly marginal to the total area of distribution of the Indo-European-speaking peoples. Their center of gravity, say 1000 B.C., seems to have lain in southern Russia.
[ Footnote 184: ] While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for it is stronger than one might suppose. There are a surprising number of common and characteristic Germanic words which cannot be connected with known Indo-European radical elements and which may well be survivals of the hypothetical pre-Germanic language; such are house, stone, sea, wife (German Haus, Stein, See, Weib).
[ Footnote 185: ] Only the easternmost part of this island is occupied by Melanesian-speaking Papuans.
[ Footnote 186: ] A “nationality” is a major, sentimentally unified, group. The historical factors that lead to the feeling of national unity are various—political, cultural, linguistic, geographic, sometimes specifically religious. True racial factors also may enter in, though the accent on “race” has generally a psychological rather than a strictly biological value. In an area dominated by the national sentiment there is a tendency for language and culture to become uniform and specific, so that linguistic and cultural boundaries at least tend to coincide. Even at best, however, the linguistic unification is never absolute, while the cultural unity is apt to be superficial, of a quasi-political nature, rather than deep and far-reaching.
[ Footnote 187: ] The Semitic languages, idiosyncratic as they are, are no more definitely ear-marked.
[ Footnote 188: ] See [page 209].
[ Footnote 189: ] The Fijians, for instance, while of Papuan (negroid) race, are Polynesian rather than Melanesian in their cultural and linguistic affinities.
[ Footnote 190: ] Though even here there is some significant overlapping. The southernmost Eskimo of Alaska were assimilated in culture to their Tlingit neighbors. In northeastern Siberia, too, there is no sharp cultural line between the Eskimo and the Chukchi.
[ Footnote 191: ] The supersession of one language by another is of course not truly a matter of linguistic assimilation.
[ Footnote 192: ] “Temperament” is a difficult term to work with. A great deal of what is loosely charged to national “temperament” is really nothing but customary behavior, the effect of traditional ideals of conduct. In a culture, for instance, that does not look kindly upon demonstrativeness, the natural tendency to the display of emotion becomes more than normally inhibited. It would be quite misleading to argue from the customary inhibition, a cultural fact, to the native temperament. But ordinarily we can get at human conduct only as it is culturally modified. Temperament in the raw is a highly elusive thing.
[ Footnote 193: ] See [pages 39, 40].
[ Footnote 194: ] I can hardly stop to define just what kind of expression is “significant” enough to be called art or literature. Besides, I do not exactly know. We shall have to take literature for granted.
[ Footnote 195: ] This “intuitive surrender” has nothing to do with subservience to artistic convention. More than one revolt in modern art has been dominated by the desire to get out of the material just what it is really capable of. The impressionist wants light and color because paint can give him just these; “literature” in painting, the sentimental suggestion of a “story,” is offensive to him because he does not want the virtue of his particular form to be dimmed by shadows from another medium. Similarly, the poet, as never before, insists that words mean just what they really mean.
[ Footnote 196: ] See Benedetto Croce, “Aesthetic.”
[ Footnote 197: ] The question of the transferability of art productions seems to me to be of genuine theoretic interest. For all that we speak of the sacrosanct uniqueness of a given art work, we know very well, though we do not always admit it, that not all productions are equally intractable to transference. A Chopin étude is inviolate; it moves altogether in the world of piano tone. A Bach fugue is transferable into another set of musical timbres without serious loss of esthetic significance. Chopin plays with the language of the piano as though no other language existed (the medium “disappears”); Bach speaks the language of the piano as a handy means of giving outward expression to a conception wrought in the generalized language of tone.
[ Footnote 198: ] Provided, of course, Chinese is careful to provide itself with the necessary scientific vocabulary. Like any other language, it can do so without serious difficulty if the need arises.
[ Footnote 199: ] Aside from individual peculiarities of diction, the selection and evaluation of particular words as such.
[ Footnote 200: ] Not by any means a great poem, merely a bit of occasional verse written by a young Chinese friend of mine when he left Shanghai for Canada.
[ Footnote 201: ] The old name of the country about the mouth of the Yangtsze.
[ Footnote 202: ] A province of Manchuria.
[ Footnote 203: ] I.e., China.
[ Footnote 204: ] Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origins from the singing voice and the measure of the dance. Yet accentual and syllabic types of verse, rather than quantitative verse, seem to be the prevailing norms.
[ Footnote 205: ] Quantitative distinctions exist as an objective fact. They have not the same inner, psychological value that they had in Greek.
[ Footnote 206: ] Verhaeren was no slave to the Alexandrine, yet he remarked to Symons, à propos of the translation of Les Aubes, that while he approved of the use of rhymeless verse in the English version, he found it “meaningless” in French.