Lecture VIII. Morphological Classification.
We finished in our last Lecture our analysis of language, and we arrived at the result that predicative and demonstrative roots are the sole constituent elements of human speech.
We now turn back in order to discover how many possible forms of language may be produced by the free combination of these constituent elements; and we shall then endeavor to find out whether each of these possible forms has its real counterpart in some or other of the dialects of mankind. We are attempting in fact to carry out a morphological classification of speech, which is based entirely on the form or manner in which roots are put together, and therefore quite independent of the genealogical classification which, according to its very nature, is based on the formations of language handed down ready made from generation to generation.
Before, however, we enter on this, the principal subject of our present Lecture, we have still to examine, as briefly as possible, a second family of speech, which, like the Aryan, is established on the strictest principles of genealogical classification, namely, the Semitic.
The Semitic family is divided into three branches, the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and the Arabic.[280]
The Aramaic occupies the north, including Syria, Mesopotamia, and part of the ancient kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria. It is known to us chiefly in two dialects, the Syriac and Chaldee. The former name is given to the language which has been preserved to us in a translation of the Bible (the Peshito[281]) ascribed to the second century, and in the rich Christian literature dating from the fourth. It is still spoken, though in a very corrupt form, by the Nestorians of Kurdistan, near the lakes of Van and Urmia, and by some Christian tribes in Mesopotamia; and an attempt has been made by the American missionaries,[282] stationed at Urmia, to restore this dialect to some grammatical correctness by publishing translations and a grammar of what they call the Neo-Syriac language.
The name of Chaldee has been given to the language adopted by the Jews during the Babylonian captivity. Though the Jews always retained a knowledge of their sacred language, they soon began to adopt the dialect of their conquerors, not for conversation only, but also for literary composition.[283] The book of Ezra contains fragments in Chaldee, contemporaneous with the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, and several of the apocryphal books, though preserved to us in Greek only, were most likely composed originally in Chaldee, [pg 277] and not in Hebrew. The so-called Targums[284] again, or translations and paraphrases of the Old Testament, written during the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era,[285] give us another specimen of the Aramaic, or the language of Babylonia, as transplanted to Palestine. This Aramaic was the dialect spoken by Christ and his disciples. The few authentic words preserved in the New Testament as spoken by our Lord in His own language, such as Talitha kumi, Ephphatha, Abba, are not in Hebrew, but in the Chaldee, or Aramaic, as then spoken by the Jews.[286]
After the destruction of Jerusalem the literature of the Jews continued to be written in the same dialect. The Talmud[287] of Jerusalem of the fourth, and that of Babylon of the fifth, century exhibit the Aramean, as spoken by the educated Jews settled in these two localities, though greatly depraved and spoiled by an admixture of strange elements. This language remained the literary idiom of the Jews to the tenth century. The Masora,[288] and the traditional commentary of the Old Testament, was written in it about that time. Soon after the Jews adopted Arabic as their literary language, and retained it to the thirteenth century. They then returned to a kind of modernized Hebrew, which they still continue to employ for learned discussions.
It is curious that the Aramaic branch of the Semitic family, though originally the language of the great kingdoms of Babylon and Nineveh, should have been preserved to us only in the literature of the Jews, and of the Christians of Syria. There must have been a Babylonian literature, for the wisdom of the Chaldeans had acquired a reputation which could hardly have been sustained without a literature. Abraham must have spoken Aramaic before he emigrated to Canaan. Laban spoke the same dialect, and the name which he gave to the heap of stones that was to be a witness between him and Jacob, (Jegar-sahadutha) is Syriac, whereas Galeed, the name by which Jacob called it, is Hebrew.[289] If we are ever to recover a knowledge of that ancient Babylonian literature, it must be from the cuneiform inscriptions lately brought home from Babylon and Nineveh. They are clearly written in a Semitic language. About this there can be no longer any doubt. And though the progress in deciphering them has been slow, and slower than was at one time expected, yet there is no reason to despair. In a letter, dated April, 1853, Sir Henry Rawlinson wrote:—
“On the clay tablets which we have found at Nineveh, and which now are to be counted by thousands, there are explanatory treatises on almost every subject under the sun: the art of writing, grammars, and dictionaries, notation, weights and measures, divisions of time, chronology, astronomy, geography, history, mythology, geology, botany, &c. In fact we have now at our disposal a perfect cyclopædia of Assyrian science.” Considering what has been achieved in deciphering one [pg 279] class of cuneiform inscriptions, the Persian, there is no reason to doubt that the whole of that cyclopædia will some day be read with the same ease with which we read the mountain records of Darius.
There is, however, another miserable remnant of what was once the literature of the Chaldeans or Babylonians, namely, the “Book of Adam,” and similar works preserved by the Mendaïtes or Nasoreans, a curious sect settled near Bassora. Though the composition of these works is as late as the tenth century after Christ, it has been supposed that under a modern crust of wild and senseless hallucinations, they contain some grains of genuine ancient Babylonian thought. These Mendaïtes have in fact been identified with the Nabateans, who are mentioned as late as the tenth century[290] of our era, as a race purely pagan, and distinct from Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans. In Arabic the name Nabatean[291] is used for Babylonians,—nay, all the people of Aramaic origin, settled in the earliest times between the Euphrates and Tigris are referred to by that name.[292] It is supposed that the Nabateans, who are mentioned about the beginning of the Christian era as a race distinguished for their astronomical and general scientific knowledge, were the ancestors of the mediæval Nabateans, and the descendants of the ancient Babylonians and Chaldeans. You may have lately seen in some literary journals an account of a work called “The Nabatean Agriculture.” It exists only in an Arabic translation by Ibn-Wahshiyyah, the Chaldean,[293] who lived about 900 years [pg 280] after Christ, but the original, which was written by Kuthami in Aramean, has lately been referred to the beginning of the thirteenth century b. c. The evidence is not yet fully before us, but from what is known it seems more likely that this work was the compilation of a Nabatean, who lived about the fourth century after Christ;[294] and though it contains ancient traditions, which may go back to the days of the great Babylonian monarchs, these traditions can hardly be taken as a fair representation of the ancient civilization of the Aramean race.
The second branch of the Semitic family is the Hebraic, chiefly represented by the ancient language of Palestine, where Hebrew was spoken and written from the days of Moses to the times of Nehemiah and the Maccabees, though of course with considerable modifications, and with a strong admixture of Aramean forms, particularly since the Babylonian captivity, and the rise of a powerful civilization in the neighboring country of Syria. The ancient language of Phœnicia, to judge from inscriptions, was most closely allied to Hebrew, and the language of the Carthaginians too must be referred to the same branch.
Hebrew was first encroached upon by Aramaic dialects, through the political ascendency of Babylon, and [pg 281] still more of Syria; and was at last swept away by Arabic, which, since the conquest of Palestine and Syria in the year 636, has monopolized nearly the whole area formerly occupied by the two older branches of the Semitic stock, the Aramaic and Hebrew.
This third, or Arabic, branch sprang from the Arabian peninsula, where it is still spoken by a compact mass of aboriginal inhabitants. Its most ancient documents are the Himyaritic inscriptions. In very early times this Arabic branch was transplanted to Africa, where, south of Egypt and Nubia, on the coast opposite Yemen, an ancient Semitic dialect has maintained itself to the present day. This is the Ethiopic or Abyssinian, or, as it is called by the people themselves, the Gees language. Though no longer spoken in its purity by the people of Habesh, it is still preserved in their sacred writings, translations of the Bible, and similar works, which date from the third and fourth centuries. The modern language of Abyssinia is called Amharic.
The earliest literary documents of Arabic go back beyond Mohammed. They are called Moallakat, literally, suspended poems, because they are said to have been thus publicly exhibited at Mecca. They are old popular poems, descriptive of desert life. With Mohammed Arabic became the language of a victorious religion, and established its sway over Asia, Africa, and Europe.
These three branches, the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and Arabic, are so closely related to each other, that it was impossible not to recognize their common origin. Every root in these languages, as far back as we know them, must consist of three consonants, and numerous [pg 282] words are derived from these roots by a simple change of vowels, leaving the consonantal skeleton as much as possible intact. It is impossible to mistake a Semitic language; and what is most important—it is impossible to imagine an Aryan language derived from a Semitic, or a Semitic from an Aryan language. The grammatical framework is totally distinct in these two families of speech. This does not exclude, however, the possibility that both are diverging streams of the same source; and the comparisons that have been instituted between the Semitic roots, reduced to their simplest form, and the roots of the Aryan languages, have made it more than probable that the material elements with which they both started were originally the same.
Other languages which are supposed to belong to the Semitic family are the 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 [pg 283] 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 [pg 284] 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, [pg 285] 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 [pg 286] 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, [pg 287] 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, [pg 288] 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, [pg 289] 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 [pg 291] 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 [pg 292] 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, [pg 293] 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 [pg 294] 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 [pg 295] 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 [pg 296] 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 [pg 297] them into a nation and founded the Mongolian empire, which included, however, not only Mongolic, but Tungusic and Turkic, commonly called Tataric, tribes.
The name of Tatar soon became the terror of Asia and Europe, and it was applied promiscuously to all the nomadic warriors whom Asia then poured forth over Europe. Originally Tatar was a name of the Mongolic races, but through their political ascendency in Asia after Chingis-khán, it became usual to call all the tribes which were under Mongolian sway by the name of Tatar. In linguistic works Tataric is now used in two several senses. Following the example of writers of the Middle Ages, Tataric, like Scythian in Greek, has been fixed upon as the general term comprising all languages spoken by the nomadic tribes of Asia. Hence it is used sometimes in the same sense in which we use Turanian. Secondly, Tataric has become the name of that class of Turanian languages of which the Turkish is the most prominent member. While the Mongolic class—that which in fact has the greatest claims to the name of Tataric—is never so called, it has become an almost universal custom to apply this name to the third or Turkic branch of the Ural-Altaic division; and the races belonging to this branch have in many instances themselves adopted the name. These Turkish, or as they are more commonly called, Tataric races, were settled on the northern side of the Caspian Sea, and on the Black Sea, and were known as Komanes, Pechenegs, and Bulgars, when conquered by the Mongolic army of the son of Chingis-khán, who founded the Kapchakian empire, extending from the Dniestr to the Yemba and the Kirgisian steppes. Russia for two centuries was under the sway of these [pg 298] Kháns, known as the Khans of the Golden Horde. This empire was dissolved towards the end of the fifteenth century, and several smaller kingdoms rose out of its ruins. Among these Krim, Kasan, and Astrachan, were the most important. The princes of these kingdoms still gloried in their descent from Chingis-khán, and had hence a right to the name of Mongols or Tatars. But their armies and subjects also, who were of Turkish blood, received the name of their princes; and their languages continued to be called Tataric, even after the tribes by whom they were spoken had been brought under the Russian sceptre, and were no longer governed by khans of Mongolic or Tataric origin. It would perhaps be desirable to use Turkic instead of Tataric, when speaking of the third branch of the northern division of the Turanian family, did not a change of terminology generally produce as much confusion as it remedies. The recollection of their non-Tataric, i.e. non-Mongolic origin, remains, it appears, among the so-called Tatars of Kasan and Astrachan. If asked whether they are Tatars, they reply no; and they call their language Turki or Turuk, but not Tatari. Nay, they consider Tatar as a term of abuse, synonymous with robber, evidently from a recollection that their ancestors had once been conquered and enslaved by Mongolic, that is, Tataric, tribes. All this rests on the authority of Klaproth, who during his stay in Russia had great opportunities of studying the languages spoken on the frontiers of this half-Asiatic empire.
The conquests of the Mongols or the descendants of Chingis-khán were not confined, however, to these Turkish tribes. They conquered China in the east, where they founded the Mongolic dynasty of Yuan, [pg 299] and in the west, after subduing the khalifs of Bagdad, and the Sultans of Iconium, they conquered Moscow, and devastated the greater part of Russia. In 1240 they invaded Poland, in 1241 Silesia. Here they recoiled before the united armies of Germany, Poland, and Silesia. They retired into Moravia, and having exhausted that country, occupied Hungary. At that time they had to choose a new khan, which could only be done at Karakorum, the old capital of their empire. Thither they withdrew to elect an emperor to govern an empire which then extended from China to Poland, from India to Siberia. But a realm of such vast proportions could not be long held together, and towards the end of the thirteenth century it broke up into several independent states, all under Mongolian princes, but no longer under one khan of khans. Thus new independent Mongolic empires arose in China, Turkestan, Siberia, Southern Russia, and Persia. In 1360, the Mongolian dynasty was driven out of China; in the fifteenth century they lost their hold on Russia. In Central Asia they rallied once more under Timur (1369), whose sway was again acknowledged from Karakorum to Persia and Anatolia. But in 1468, this empire also fell by its own weight, and for want of powerful rulers like Chingis-khán or Timur. In Jagatai alone, the country extending from the Aral Lake to the Hindu-kush, between the rivers Oxus and Yaxartes (Jihon and Sihon), and once governed by Jagatai, the son of Chingis-khán—the Mongolian dynasty maintained itself, and thence it was that Baber, a descendant of Timur, conquered India, and founded there a Mongolian dynasty, surviving up to our own times in the Great Moguls of Delhi. Most Mongolic tribes are now under the sway of the nations [pg 300] whom they once had conquered, the Tungusic sovereigns of China, the Russian czars, and the Turkish sultans.
The Mongolic language, although spoken (but not continuously) from China as far as the Volga, has given rise to but few dialects. Next to Tungusic, the Mongolic is the poorest language of the Turanian family, and the scantiness of grammatical terminations accounts for the fact that, as a language, it has remained very much unchanged. There is, however, a distinction between the language as spoken by the Eastern, Western, and Northern tribes, and incipient traces of grammatical life have lately been discovered by Castrén, the great Swedish traveller and Turanian philologist, in the spoken dialect of the Buriäts. In it the persons of the verb are distinguished by affixes, while, according to the rules of Mongolic grammar, no other dialect distinguishes in the verb between amo, amas, amat.
The Mongols who live in Europe have fixed their tents on each side of the Volga and along the coast of the Caspian Sea near Astrachan. Another colony is found south-east of Sembirsk. They belong to the Western branch, and are Ölöts or Kalmüks, who left their seats on the Koko-nur, and entered Europe in 1662. They proceeded from the clans Dürbet and Torgod, but most of the Torgods returned again in 1770, and their descendants are now scattered over the Kirgisian steppes.
Turkic Class.
Much more important are the languages belonging to the third branch of the Turanian family, most prominent among which is the Turkish or Osmanli of [pg 301] Constantinople. The number of the Turkish inhabitants of European Turkey is indeed small. It is generally stated at 2,000,000; but Shafarik estimates the number of genuine Turks at not more than 700,000, who rule over fifteen millions of people. The different Turkic dialects of which the Osmanli is one, occupy one of the largest linguistic areas, extending from the Lena and the Polar Sea, down to the Adriatic.
The most ancient name by which the Turkic tribes of Central Asia were known to the Chinese was Hiung-nu. These Hiung-nu founded an empire (206 b. c.) comprising a large portion of Asia, west of China. Engaged in frequent wars with the Chinese, they were defeated at last in the middle of the first century after Christ. Thereupon they divided into a northern and southern empire; and, after the southern Hiung-nu had become subjects of China, they attacked the northern Hiung-nu, together with the Chinese, and, driving them out of their seats between the rivers Amur and Selenga, and the Altai mountains, westward, they are supposed to have given the first impulse to the inroads of the barbarians into Europe. In the beginning of the third century, the Mongolic and Tungusic tribes, who had filled the seats of the northern Hiung-nu, had grown so powerful as to attack the southern Hiung-nu and drive them from their territories. This occasioned a second migration of Asiatic tribes towards the west.
Another name by which the Chinese designate these Hiung-nu or Turkish tribes is Tu-kiu. This Tu-kiu is supposed to be identical with Turk, and, although the tribe to which this name was given was originally but small, it began to spread in the sixth century from [pg 302] the Altai to the Caspian, and it was probably to them that in 569 the Emperor Justinian sent an ambassador in the person of Semarchos. The empire of the Tu-kiu was destroyed in the eighth century, by the 'Hui-'he (Chinese Kao-che). This tribe, equally of Turkish origin, maintained itself for about a century, and was then conquered by the Chinese and driven back from the northern borders of China. Part of the 'Hui-'he occupied Tangut, and, after a second defeat by the Mongolians in 1257, the remnant proceeded still further west, and joined the Uigurs, whose tents were pitched near the towns of Turfan, 'Kashgar, 'Hamil, and Aksu.
These facts, gleaned chiefly from Chinese historians, show from the very earliest times the westward tendency of the Turkish nations. In 568 Turkish tribes occupied the country between the Volga and the sea of Azov, and numerous reinforcements have since strengthened their position in those parts.
The northern part of Persia, west of the Caspian Sea, Armenia, the south of Georgia, Shirwan, and Dagestan, harbor a Turkic population, known by the general name of Turkman or Kisil-bash (Red-caps). They are nomadic robbers, and their arrival in these countries dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
East of the Caspian Sea the Turkman tribes are under command of the Usbek-Khans of Khiva, Fergana, and Bukhára. They call themselves, however, not subjects but guests of these Khans. Still more to the east the Turkmans are under Chinese sovereignty, and in the south-west they reach as far as Khorasan and other provinces of Persia.
The Usbeks, descendants of the 'Huy-'he and Uigurs, [pg 303] and originally settled in the neighborhood of the towns of 'Hoten, Kashgar, Turfan, and 'Hamil, crossed the Yaxartes in the sixteenth century, and after several successful campaigns gained possession of Balkh, Kharism (Khiva), Bukhára, and Ferganah. In the latter country and in Balkh they have become agricultural; but generally their life is nomadic, and too warlike to be called pastoral.
Another Turkish tribe are the Nogái, west of the Caspian, and also north of the Black Sea. To the beginning of the seventeenth century they lived north-east of the Caspian, and the steppes on the left of the Irtish bore their name. Pressed by the Kalmüks, a Mongolic tribe, the Nogáis advanced westward as far as Astrachan. Peter I. transferred them thence to the north of the Caucasian mountains, where they still graze their flocks on the shores of the Kuban and the Kuma. One horde, that of Kundur, remained on the Volga, subject to the Kalmüks.
Another tribe of Turkish origin in the Caucasus are the Bazianes. They now live near the sources of the Kuban, but before the fifteenth century within the town Majari, on the Kuma.
A third Turkish tribe in the Caucasus are the Kumüks on the rivers Sunja, Aksai, and Koisu: now subjects of Russia, though under native princes.
The southern portion of the Altaic mountains has long been inhabited by the Bashkirs, a race considerably mixed with Mongolic blood, savage and ignorant, subjects of Russia, and Mohammedans by faith. Their land is divided into four Roads, called the Roads of Siberia, of Kasan, of Nogai, and of Osa, a place on the Kama. Among the Bashkirs, and in villages [pg 304] near Ufa, is now settled a Turkish tribe, the Mescheräks who formerly lived near the Volga.
The tribes near the Lake of Aral are called Kara-Kalpak. They are subject partly to Russia, partly to the Khans of Khiva.
The Turks of Siberia, commonly called Tatars, are partly original settlers, who crossed the Ural, and founded the Khanat of Sibir, partly later colonists. Their chief towns are Tobolsk, Yeniseisk, and Tomsk. Separate tribes are the Uran'hat on the Chulym, and the Barabas in the steppes between the Irtish and the Ob.
The dialects of these Siberian Turks are considerably intermingled with foreign words, taken from Mongolic, Samoyedic, or Russian sources. Still they resemble one another closely in all that belongs to the original stock of the language.
In the north-east of Asia, on both sides of the river Lena, the Yakuts form the most remote link in the Turkic chain of languages. Their male population has lately risen to 100,000, while in 1795 it amounted only to 50,066. The Russians became first acquainted with them in 1620. They call themselves Sakha, and are mostly heathen, though Christianity is gaining ground among them. According to their traditions, their ancestors lived for a long time in company with Mongolic tribes, and traces of this can still be discovered in their language. Attacked by their neighbors, they built rafts and floated down the river Lena, where they settled in the neighborhood of what is now Yakutzk. Their original seats seem to have been north-west of Lake Baikal. Their language has preserved the Turkic type more completely than any other Turco-Tataric [pg 305] dialect. Separated from the common stock at an early time, and removed from the disturbing influences to which the other dialects were exposed, whether in war or in peace, the Yakutian has preserved so many primitive features of Tataric grammar, that even now it may be used as a key to the grammatical forms of the Osmanli and other more cultivated Turkic dialects.
Southern Siberia is the mother country of the Kirgis, one of the most numerous tribes of Turco-Tataric origin. The Kirgis lived originally between the Ob and Yenisei, where Mongolic tribes settled among them. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Russians became acquainted with the Eastern Kirgis, then living along the Yenisei. In 1606 they had become tributary to Russia, and after several wars with two neighboring tribes, they were driven more and more south-westward, till they left Siberia altogether at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They now live at Burut, in Chinese Turkestan, together with the Kirgis of the “Great Horde,” near the town of Kashgar, north as far as the Irtish.
Another tribe is that of the Western Kirgis, or Kirgis-Kasak, who are partly independent, partly tributary to Russia and China.
Of what are called the three Kirgis Hordes, from the Caspian Sea east as far as Lake Tenghiz, the Small Horde is fixed in the west, between the rivers Yemba and Ural; the Great Horde in the east; while the most powerful occupies the centre between the Sarasu and Yemba, and is called the Middle Horde. Since 1819, the Great Horde has been subject to Russia. Other Kirgis tribes, though nominally subject to Russia, are really her most dangerous enemies.
The Turks of Asia Minor and Syria came from Khorasan and Eastern Persia, and are Turkmans, or remnants of the Seljuks, the rulers of Persia during the Middle Ages. The Osmanli, whom we are accustomed to call Turks par excellence, and who form the ruling portion of the Turkish empire, must be traced to the same source. They are now scattered over the whole Turkish empire in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and their number amounts to between 11,000,000 and 12,000,000. They form the landed gentry, the aristocracy, and bureaucracy of Turkey; and their language, the Osmanli, is spoken by persons of rank and education, and by all government authorities in Syria, in Egypt, at Tunis, and at Tripoli. In the southern provinces of Asiatic Russia, along the borders of the Caspian, and through the whole of Turkestan, it is the language of the people. It is heard even at the court of Teheran, and is understood by official personages in Persia.
The rise of this powerful tribe of Osman, and the spreading of that Turkish dialect which is now emphatically called the Turkish, are matters of historical notoriety. We need not search for evidence in Chinese annals, or try to discover analogies between names that a Greek or an Arabic writer may by chance have heard and handed down to us, and which some of these tribes have preserved to the present day. The ancestors of the Osman Turks are men as well known to European historians as Charlemagne or Alfred. It was in the year 1224 that Soliman-shah and his tribe, pressed by Mongolians, left Khorasan and pushed westward into Syria, Armenia, and Asia Minor. Soliman's son, Ertoghrul, took service under Aladdin, the Seljuk Sultan [pg 307] of Iconium (Nicæa), and after several successful campaigns against Greeks and Mongolians, received part of Phrygia as his own, and there founded what was afterwards to become the basis of the Osmanic empire. During the last years of the thirteenth century the Sultans of Iconium lost their power, and their former vassals became independent sovereigns. Osman, after taking his share of the spoil in Asia, advanced through the Olympic passes into Bithynia and was successful against the armies of the Emperors of Byzantium. Osman became henceforth the national name of his people. His son, Orkhan, whose capital was Prusa (Bursa), after conquering Nicomedia (1327) and Nicæa (1330), threatened the Hellespont. He took the title of Padishah, and his court was called the “High Porte.” His son, Soliman, crossed the Hellespont (1357), and took possession of Gallipoli and Sestos. He thus became master of the Dardanelles. Murad I. took Adrianople (1362), made it his capital, conquered Macedonia, and, after a severe struggle, overthrew the united forces of the Slavonic races south of the Danube, the Bulgarians, Servians, and Kroatians, in the battle of Kossova-polye (1389). He fell himself, but his successor Bayazeth, followed his course, took Thessaly, passed Thermopylæ, and devastated the Peloponnesus. The Emperor of Germany, Sigismund, who advanced at the head of an army composed of French, German, and Slavonic soldiers, was defeated by Bayazeth on the Danube in the battle of Nicopolis, 1399. Bayazeth took Bosnia, and would have taken Constantinople, had not the same Mongolians, who in 1244 drove the first Turkish tribes westward into Persia, threatened again their newly acquired possessions. Timur had grasped the reins fallen from the hands of Chingis-khán: Bayazeth [pg 308] was compelled to meet him, and suffered defeat (1402) in the battle of Angora (Ankyra) in Galatia.
Europe now had respite, but not long; Timur died, and with him his empire fell to pieces, while the Osmanic army rallied again under Mahomet I. (1413), and re-attained its former power under Murad II. (1421). Successful in Asia, Murad sent his armies back to the Danube, and after long-continued campaigns, and powerful resistance from the Hungarians and Slaves under Hunyad, he at last gained two decisive victories; Varna in 1444, and Kossova in 1448. Constantinople could no longer be held, and the Pope endeavored in vain to rouse the chivalry of Western Europe to a crusade against the Turks. Mahomet II. succeeded in 1451, and on the 26th of May, 1453, Constantinople, after a valiant resistance, fell, and became the capital of the Turkish empire.
It is a real pleasure to read a Turkish grammar, even though one may have no wish to acquire it practically. The ingenious manner in which the numerous grammatical forms are brought out, the regularity which pervades the system of declension and conjugation, the transparency and intelligibility of the whole structure, must strike all who have a sense of that wonderful power of the human mind which has displayed itself in language. Given so small a number of graphic and demonstrative roots as would hardly suffice to express the commonest wants of human beings, to produce an instrument that shall render the faintest shades of feeling and thought;—given a vague infinitive or a stern imperative, to derive from it such moods as an optative or subjunctive, and tenses as an aorist or paulo-post future;—given incoherent utterances, to arrange them into a system where all is uniform and [pg 309] regular, all combined and harmonious;—such is the work of the human mind which we see realized in “language.” But in most languages nothing of this early process remains visible. They stand before us like solid rocks, and the microscope of the philologist alone can reveal the remains of organic life with which they are built up.
In the grammar of the Turkic languages, on the contrary, we have before us a language of perfectly transparent structure, and a grammar the inner workings of which we can study, as if watching the building of cells in a crystal bee-hive. An eminent orientalist remarked “we might imagine Turkish to be the result of the deliberations of some eminent society of learned men;” but no such society could have devised what the mind of man produced, left to itself in the steppes of Tatary, and guided only by its innate laws, or by an instinctive power as wonderful as any within the realm of nature.
Let us examine a few forms. “To love,” in the most general sense of the word, or love, as a root, is in Turkish sev. This does not yet mean “to love,” which is sevmek, or “love” as a substantive, which is sevgu or sevi; but it only expresses the general idea of loving in the abstract. This root, as we remarked before, can never be touched. Whatever syllables may be added for the modification of its meaning, the root itself must stand out in full prominence like a pearl set in diamonds. It must never be changed or broken, assimilated or modified, as in the English I fall, I fell, I take, I took, I think, I thought, and similar forms. With this one restriction, however, we are free to treat it at pleasure.
Let us suppose we possessed nothing like our conjugation, but had to express such ideas as I love, thou lovest, and the rest, for the first time. Nothing would seem more natural now than to form an adjective or a participle, meaning “loving,” and then add the different pronouns, as I loving, thou loving, &c. Exactly this the Turks have done. We need not inquire at present how they produced what we call a participle. It was a task, however, by no means so facile as we now conceive it. In Turkish, one participle is formed by er. Sev+er would, therefore, mean lov+er or lov+ing. Thou, in Turkish, is sen, and as all modificatory syllables are placed at the end of the root, we get sev-er-sen, thou lovest. You in Turkish is siz; hence sev-er-siz, you love. In these cases the pronouns and the terminations of the verb coincide exactly. In other persons the coincidences are less complete, because the pronominal terminations have sometimes been modified, or, as in the third person singular, sever, dropped altogether as unnecessary. A reference to other cognate languages, however, where either the terminations or the pronouns themselves have maintained a more primitive form, enables us to say that in the original Turkish verb, all persons of the present were formed by means of pronouns appended to this participle sever. Instead of “I love, thou lovest, he loves,” the Turkish grammarian says, “lover-I, lover-thou, lover.”
But these personal terminations are not the same in the imperfect as in the present.
| PRESENT. | IMPERFECT. |
| Sever-im, I love, | sever-di-m, I loved. |
| Sever-sen, | sever-di-ñ. |
| Sever, | sever-di. |
| Sever-iz, | sever-di-k (miz). |
| Sever-siz, | sever-di-ñiz. |
| Sever-ler, | sever-di-ler. |
We need not inquire as yet into the origin of the di, added to form the imperfect; but it should be stated that in the first person plural of the imperfect a various reading occurs in other Tataric dialects, and that miz is used there instead of k. Now, looking at these terminations m, ñ, i, miz, ñiz, and ler, we find that they are exactly the same as the possessive pronouns used after nouns. As the Italian says fratelmo, my brother, and as in Hebrew we say, El-i, God (of) I, i.e. my God, the Tataric languages form the phrases “my house, thy house, his house,” by possessive pronouns appended to substantives. A Turk says,—
| Bâbâ, | father, | bâbâ-m, | my father. |
| Aghâ, | lord, | aghâ-ñ, | thy lord. |
| El, | hand, | el-i, | his hand. |
| Oghlu, | son, | oghlu-muz, | our son. |
| Anâ, | mother, | anâ-ñiz, | your mother. |
| Kitâb, | book, | kitâb-leri, | their book. |
We may hence infer that in the imperfect these pronominal terminations were originally taken in a possessive sense, and that, therefore, what remains after the personal terminations are removed, sever-di, was never an adjective or a participle, but must have been originally a substantive capable of receiving terminal possessive pronouns; that is, the idea originally expressed by the imperfect could not have been “loving-I,” but “love of me.”
How then, could this convey the idea of a past tense as contrasted with the present? Let us look to our [pg 312] own language. If desirous to express the perfect, we say, I have loved, j'ai aimé. This “I have,” meant originally, I possess, and in Latin “amicus quem amatum habeo,” signified in fact a friend whom I hold dear,—not as yet, whom I have loved. In the course of time, however, these phrases, “I have said, I have loved,” took the sense of the perfect, and of time past—and not unnaturally, inasmuch as what I hold, or have done, is done;—done, as we say, and past. In place of an auxiliary possessive verb, the Turkish language uses an auxiliary possessive pronoun to the same effect. “Paying belonging to me,” equals “I have paid;” in either case a phrase originally possessive, took a temporal signification, and became a past or perfect tense. This, however, is the very anatomy of grammar, and when a Turk says “severdim” he is, of course, as unconscious of its literal force, “loving belonging to me,” as of the circulation of his blood.
The most ingenious part of Turkish is undoubtedly the verb. Like Greek and Sanskrit, it exhibits a variety of moods and tenses, sufficient to express the nicest shades of doubt, of surmise, of hope, and supposition. In all these forms the root remains intact, and sounds like a key-note through all the various modulations produced by the changes of person, number, mood, and time. But there is one feature so peculiar to the Turkish verb, that no analogy can be found in any of the Aryan languages—the power of producing new verbal bases by the mere addition of certain letters, which give to every verb a negative, or causative, or reflexive, or reciprocal meaning.
Sev-mek, for instance, as a simple root, means to love. By adding in, we obtain a reflexive verb, sev-in-mek, [pg 313] which means to love oneself, or rather, to rejoice, to be happy. This may now be conjugated through all moods and tenses, sevin being in every respect equal to a new root. By adding ish we form a reciprocal verb, sev-ish-mek, to love one another.
To each of these three forms a causative sense may be imparted by the addition of the syllable dir. Thus,
i. sev-mek, to love, becomes iv. sev-dir-mek, to cause to love.
ii. sev-in-mek, to rejoice, becomes v. sev-in-dir-mek, to cause to rejoice.
iii. sev-ish-mek, to love one another, becomes vi. sev-ish-dir-mek, to cause one to love one another.
Each of these six forms may again be turned into a passive by the addition of il. Thus,
i. sev-mek, to love, becomes vii. sev-il-mek, to be loved.
ii. sev-in-mek, to rejoice, becomes viii. sev-in-il-mek, to be rejoiced at.
iii. sev-ish-mek, to love one another, becomes ix. sev-ish-il-mek, not translatable.
iv. sev-dir-mek, to cause one to love, becomes x. sev-dir-il-mek, to be brought to love.
v. sev-in-dir-mek, to cause to rejoice, becomes xi. sev-in-dir-il-mek, to be made to rejoice.
vi. sev-ish-dir-mek, to cause them to love one another, becomes xii. sev-ish-dir-il-mek, to be brought to love one another.
This, however, is by no means the whole verbal contingent at the command of a Turkish grammarian. Every one of these twelve secondary or tertiary roots may again be turned into a negative by the mere addition of me. Thus, sev-mek, to love, becomes sev-me-mek, not to love. And if it is necessary to express the impossibility of loving, the Turk has a new root at [pg 314] hand to convey even that idea. Thus while sev-me-mek denies only the fact of loving, sev-eme-mek, denies its possibility, and means not to be able to love. By the addition of these two modificatory syllables, the numbers of derivative roots is at once raised to thirty-six. Thus,
i. sev-mek, to love, becomes xiii. sev-me-mek, not to love.
ii. sev-in-mek, to rejoice, becomes xiv. sev-in-me-mek, not to rejoice.
iii. sev-ish-mek, to love one another, becomes xv. sev-ish-me-mek, not to love one another.
iv. sev-dir-mek, to cause to love, becomes xvi. sev-dir-me-mek, not to cause one to love.
v. sev-in-dir-mek, to cause to rejoice, becomes xvii. sev-in-dir-me-mek, not to cause one to rejoice.
vi. sev-ish-dir-mek, to cause them to love one another, becomes xviii. sev-ish-dir-me-mek, not to cause them to love one another.
vii. sev-il-mek, to be loved, becomes xix. sev-il-me-mek, not to be loved.
viii. sev-in-il-mek, to be rejoiced at, becomes xx. sev-in-il-me-mek, not to be the object of rejoicing.
ix. sev-ish-il-mek, if it was used, would become xxi. sev-ish-il-me-mek; neither form being translatable.
x. sev-dir-il-mek, to be brought to love, becomes xxii. sev-dir-il-me-mek, not to be brought to love.
xi. sev-in-dir-il-mek, to be made to rejoice, becomes xxiii. sev-in-dir-il-me-mek, not to be made to rejoice.
xii. sev-ish-dir-il-mek, to be brought to love one another, becomes xxiv. sev-ish-dir-il-me-mek, not to be brought to love one another.
Some of these forms are of course of rare occurrence, and with many verbs these derivative roots, though possible grammatically, would be logically impossible. Even a verb like “to love,” perhaps the most pliant of all, resists some of the modifications to which a [pg 315] Turkish grammarian is fain to subject it. It is clear, however, that wherever a negation can be formed, the idea of impossibility also can be superadded, so that by substituting eme for me, we should raise the number of derivative roots to thirty-six. The very last of these, xxxvi. sev-ish-dir-il-eme-mek would be perfectly intelligible, and might be used, for instance, if, in speaking of the Sultan and the Czar, we wished to say, that it was impossible that they should be brought to love one another.
Finnic Class.
It is generally supposed that the original seat of the Finnic tribes was in the Ural mountains, and their languages have been therefore called Uralic. From this centre they spread east and west; and southward in ancient times, even to the Black Sea, where Finnic tribes, together with Mongolic and Turkic, were probably known to the Greeks under the comprehensive and convenient name of Scythians. As we possess no literary documents of any of these nomadic nations, it is impossible to say, even where Greek writers have preserved their barbarous names, to what branch of the vast Turanian family they belonged. Their habits were probably identical before the Christian era, during the Middle Ages, and at the present day. One tribe takes possession of a tract and retains it perhaps for several generations, and gives its name to the meadows where it tends its flocks, and to the rivers where the horses are watered. If the country be fertile, it will attract the eye of other tribes; wars begin, and if resistance be hopeless, hundreds of families fly from their paternal pastures, to migrate perhaps for generations,—for [pg 316] migration they find a more natural life than permanent habitation,—and after a time we may rediscover their names a thousand miles distant. Or two tribes will carry on their warfare for ages, till with reduced numbers both have perhaps to make common cause against some new enemy.
During these continued struggles their languages lose as many words as men are killed on the field of battle. Some words (we might say) go over, others are made prisoners, and exchanged again during times of peace. Besides, there are parleys and challenges, and at last a dialect is produced which may very properly be called a language of the camp, (Urdu-zebán, camp-language, is the proper name of Hindustání, formed in the armies of the Mogul emperors,) but where it is difficult for the philologist to arrange the living and to number the slain, unless some salient points of grammar have been preserved throughout the medley. We saw how a number of tribes may be at times suddenly gathered by the command of a Chingis-khán or Timur, like billows heaving and swelling at the call of a thunder-storm. One such wave rolling on from Karakorum to Liegnitz may sweep away all the sheepfolds and landmarks of centuries, and when the storm is over, a thin crust will, as after a flood, remain, concealing the underlying stratum of people and languages.
On the evidence of language, the Finnic stock is divided into four branches,
The Chudic,
The Bulgaric,
The Permic,
The Ugric.
The Chudic branch comprises the Finnic of the Baltic coasts. The name is derived from Chud (Tchud) originally applied by the Russians to the Finnic nations in the north-west of Russia. Afterwards it took a more general sense, and was used almost synonymously with Scythian for all the tribes of Central and Northern Asia. The Finns, properly so called, or as they call themselves Suomalainen, i.e. inhabitants of fens, are settled in the provinces of Finland (formerly belonging to Sweden, but since 1809 annexed to Russia), and in parts of the governments of Archangel and Olonetz. Their number is stated at 1,521,515. The Finns are the most advanced of their whole family, and are, the Magyars excepted, the only Finnic race that can claim a station among the civilized and civilizing nations of the world. Their literature and, above all, their popular poetry bear witness to a high intellectual development in times which we may call mythical, and in places more favorable to the glow of poetical feelings than their present abode, the last refuge Europe could afford them. The epic songs still live among the poorest, recorded by oral tradition alone, and preserving all the features of a perfect metre and of a more ancient language. A national feeling has lately arisen amongst the Finns, despite of Russian supremacy, and the labors of Sjögern, Lönnrot, Castrén, and Kellgren, receiving hence a powerful impulse, have produced results truly surprising. From the mouths of the aged an epic poem has been collected equalling the Iliad in length and completeness, nay, if we can forget for a moment all that we in our youth learned to call beautiful, not less beautiful. A Finn is not a Greek, and Wainamoinen was not a Homer. But if [pg 318] the poet may take his colors from that nature by which he is surrounded, if he may depict the men with whom he lives, “Kalewala” possesses merits not dissimilar from those of the Iliad, and will claim its place as the fifth national epic of the world, side by side with the Ionian songs, with the Mahábhárata, the Shahnámeh, and the Nibelunge. This early literary cultivation has not been without a powerful influence on the language. It has imparted permanency to its forms and a traditional character to its words, so that at first sight we might almost doubt whether the grammar of this language had not left the agglutinative stage, and entered into the current of inflection with Greek or Sanskrit. The agglutinative type, however, yet remains, and its grammar shows a luxuriance of grammatical combination second only to Turkish and Hungarian. Like Turkish it observes the “harmony of vowels,” a feature peculiar to Turanian languages, as explained before.
Karelian and Tavastian are dialectical varieties of Finnish.
The Esths or Esthonians, neighbors to the Finns, speak a language closely allied to the Finnish. It is divided into the dialects of Dorpat (in Livonia) and Reval. Except some popular songs it is almost without literature. Esthonia, together with Livonia and Kurland, forms the three Baltic provinces of Russia. The population on the islands of the Gulf of Finland is mostly Esthonian. In the higher ranks of society Esthonian is hardly understood, and never spoken.
Besides the Finns and Esthonians, the Livonians and the Lapps must be reckoned also amongst the same family. Their number, however, is small. The [pg 319] population of Livonia consists chiefly of Esths, Letts, Russians, and Germans. The number of Livonians speaking their own dialect is not more than 5000.
The Lapps, or Laplanders, inhabit the most northern part of Europe. They belong to Sweden and Russia. Their number is estimated at 28,000. Their language has lately attracted much attention, and Castrén's travels give a description of their manners most interesting from its simplicity and faithfulness.
The Bulgaria branch comprises the Tcheremissians and Mordvinians, scattered in disconnected colonies along the Volga, and surrounded by Russian and Tataric dialects. Both languages are extremely artificial in their grammar, and allow an accumulation of pronominal affixes at the end of verbs, surpassed only by the Bask, the Caucasian, and those American dialects that have been called Polysynthetic.
The general name given to these tribes, Bulgaric, is not borrowed from Bulgaria, on the Danube; Bulgaria, on the contrary, received its name (replacing Moesia) from the Finnic armies by whom it was conquered in the seventh century. Bulgarian tribes advanced from the Volga to the Don, and after remaining for a time under the sovereignty of the Avars on the Don and Dnieper, they advanced to the Danube in 635, and founded the Bulgarian kingdom. This has retained its name to the present day, though the Finnic Bulgarians have long been absorbed by Slavonic inhabitants, and both brought under Turkish sway since 1392.
The third, or Permic branch, comprises the idioms of the Votiakes, the Sirianes, and the Permians, three dialects of one language. Perm was the ancient [pg 320] name for the country between 61°-76° e. lon. and 55°-65° n. lat. The Permic tribes were driven westward by their eastern neighbors, the Voguls, and thus pressed upon their western neighbors, the Bulgars of the Volga. The Votiakes are found between the rivers Vyatka and Kama. Northwards follow the Sirianes, inhabiting the country on the Upper Kâma, while the eastern portion is held by the Permians. These are surrounded on the south by the Tatars of Orenburg and the Bashkirs; on the north by the Samoyedes, and on the east by Voguls, who pressed on them from the Ural.
These Voguls, together with Hungarians and Ostiakes, form the fourth and last branch of the Finnic family, the Ugric. It was in 462, after the dismemberment of Attila's Hunnic empire that these Ugric tribes approached Europe. They were then called Onagurs, Saragurs, and Urogs; and in later times they occur in Russian chronicles as Ugry. They are the ancestors of the Hungarians, and should not be confounded with the Uigurs, an ancient Turkic tribe mentioned before.
The similarity between the Hungarian language and dialects of Finnic origin, spoken east of the Volga, is not a new discovery. In 1253, Wilhelm Ruysbroeck, a priest who travelled beyond the Volga, remarked that a race called Pascatir, who live on the Yaïk, spoke the same language as the Hungarians. They were then settled east of the old Bulgarian kingdom, the capital of which, the ancient Bolgari, on the left of the Volga, may still be traced in the ruins of Spask. If these Pascatir—the portion of the Ugric tribes that remained east of the Volga—are identical with the [pg 321] Bashkir, as Klaproth supposes, it would follow that, in later times, they gave up their language, for the present Bashkir no longer speak a Hungarian, but a Turkic, dialect. The affinity of the Hungarian and the Ugro-Finnic dialects was first proved philologically by Gyarmathi in 1799.
A few instances may suffice to show this connection:—
| Hungarian. | Tcheremissian. | English. |
| Atya-m | atya-m | my father. |
| Atya-d | atya-t | thy father. |
| Atya | atya-se | his father. |
| Atya-nk | atya-ne | our father. |
| Atya-tok | atya-da | your father. |
| Aty-ok | atya-st | their father. |
Declension.
| Hungarian. | Esthonian. | English. | |
| Nom. | vér | werri | blood. |
| Gen. | véré | werre | of blood. |
| Dat | vérnek | werrele | to blood. |
| Acc. | vért | werd | blood. |
| Abl. | vérestöl | werrist | from blood. |
Conjugation.
| Hungarian. | Esthonian. | English. |
| Lelem | leian | I find. |
| Leled | leiad | thou findest. |
| Leli | leiab | he finds. |
| Leljük | leiame | we find. |
| Lelitek | leiate | you find. |
| Lelik | leiawad | they find. |
A Comparative Table of the Numerals of each of the Four Branches of the Finnic Class, showing the degree of their relationship.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| Chudic, Finnish | yksi | kaksi | kolme | neljä |
| Chudic, Esthonian | iits | kats | kolm | nelli |
| Bulgaric, Tcheremissian | ik | kok | kum | nil |
| Bulgaric, Mordvinian | vaike | kavto | kolmo | nile |
| Permic, Sirianian | ötik | kyk | kujim | ujoli |
| Ugric, Ostiakian | it | kat | chudem | njeda |
| Ugric, Hungarian | egy | ket | harom | negy |
| 5 | 6 | 7 | |
| Chudic, Finnish | viisi | kuusi | seitsemän |
| Chudic, Esthonian | wiis | kuas | seitse |
| Bulgaric, Tcheremissian | vis | kut | sim |
| Bulgaric, Mordvinian | väte | kóto | sisem |
| Permic, Sirianian | vit | kvait | sizim |
| Ugric, Ostiakian | vet | chut | tabet |
| Ugric, Hungarian | öt | hat | het |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | |
| Chudic, Finnish | kahdeksan | yhdeksan | kymmenen |
| Chudic, Esthonian | kattesa | üttesa | kümme |
| Bulgaric, Tcheremissian | kändäxe | endexe | lu |
| Bulgaric, Mordvinian | kavsko | väikse | kämen |
| Permic, Sirianian | kökjâmys | ökmys | das |
| Ugric, Ostiakian | nida | arjong | jong |
| Ugric, Hungarian | njolcz | kilencz | tiz |
We have thus examined the four chief classes of the Turanian family, the Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, and Finnic. The Tungusic branch stands lowest; its grammar is not much richer than Chinese, and in its structure there is an absence of that architectonic order which in Chinese makes the Cyclopean stones of language hold together without cement. This applies, however, principally to the Mandshu; other Tungusic dialects spoken, not in China, but in the original seats of the Mandshus, are even now beginning to develop grammatical forms.
The Mongolic dialects excel the Tungusic, but in their grammar can hardly distinguish between the different parts of speech. The spoken idioms of the Mongolians, as of the Tungusians, are evidently struggling towards a more organic life, and Castrén has brought home evidence of incipient verbal growth in the language of the Buriäts and a Tungusic dialect spoken near Nyertchinsk.
This is, however, only a small beginning, if compared with the profusion of grammatical resources displayed by the Turkic languages. In their system of conjugation, the Turkic dialects can hardly be surpassed. Their verbs are like branches which break down under the heavy burden of fruits and blossoms. The excellence of the Finnic languages consists rather in a diminution than increase of verbal forms; but in declension Finnish is even richer than Turkish.
These four classes, together with the Samoyedic, constitute the northern or Ural-Altaic division of the Turanian family.
The southern division consists of the Tamulic, the Gangetic (Trans-Himalayan and Sub-Himalayan), the [pg 324] Lohitic, the Taïc, and the Malaïc classes.[305] These two divisions comprehend very nearly all the languages of Asia, with the exception of Chinese, which, together with its neighboring dialects, forms the only representative of radical or monosyllabic speech. A few, such as Japanese,[306] the language of Korea, of the Koriakes, the Kamchadales, and the numerous dialects of the Caucasus, &c., remain unclassed; but in them also some traces of a common origin with the Turanian languages have, it is probable, survived, and await the discovery of philological research.
Of the third, or inflectional, stage, I need not say much, as we have examined its structure when analyzing in our former Lectures a number of words in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, or any other of the Aryan languages. The chief distinction between an inflectional and an agglutinative language consists in the fact that agglutinative languages preserve the consciousness of their roots, and therefore do not allow them to be affected by phonetic corruption; and, though they have lost the consciousness of the original meaning of their terminations, they feel distinctly the difference between the significative root, and the modifying elements. Not so in the inflectional languages. There the various elements which enter into the composition of words, may become so welded together, and suffer so much from phonetic corruption, that none but the [pg 325] educated would be aware of an original distinction between root and termination, and none but the comparative grammarian able to discover the seams that separate the component parts.
If you consider the character of our morphological classification, you will see that this classification, differing thereby from the genealogical, must be applicable to all languages. Our classification exhausts all possibilities. If the component elements of language are roots, predicative and demonstrative, we cannot have more than three combinations. Roots may either remain roots without any modification; or secondly, they may be joined so that one determines the other and loses its independent existence; or thirdly, they may be joined and be allowed to coalesce, so that both lose their independent existence. The number of roots which enter into the composition of a word makes no difference, and it is unnecessary, therefore, to admit a fourth class, sometimes called polysynthetic, or incorporating, including most of the American languages. As long as in these sesquipedalian compounds, the significative root remains distinct, they belong to the agglutinative stage; as soon as it is absorbed by the terminations, they belong to the inflectional stage. Nor is it necessary to distinguish between synthetic and analytical languages, including under the former name the ancient, and under the latter the modern, languages of the inflectional class. The formation of such phrases as the French j'aimerai, for j'ai à aimer, or the English, I shall do, thou wilt do, may be called analytical or metaphrastic. But in their morphological nature these phrases are still inflectional. If we analyze such a phrase as je vivrai, we find it was originally ego (Sanskrit [pg 326] aham) vivere (Sanskrit jîv-as-e, dat. neut.) habeo (Sanskrit bhâ-vayâ-mi); that is to say, we have a number of words in which grammatical articulation has been almost entirely destroyed, but has not been cast off; whereas in Turanian languages grammatical forms are produced by the combination of integral roots, and the old and useless terminations are first discarded before any new combination takes place.[307]
At the end of our morphological classification a problem presents itself, which we might have declined to enter upon if we had confined ourselves to a genealogical classification. At the end of our genealogical classification we had to confess that only a certain number of languages had as yet been arranged genealogically, and that therefore the time for approaching the problem of the common origin of all languages had not yet come. Now, however, although we have not specified all languages which belong to the radical, the terminational, and inflectional classes, we have clearly laid it down as a principle, that all languages must fall under one or the other of these three categories of human speech. It would not be consistent, therefore, to shrink from the consideration of a problem, which, though beset with many difficulties, cannot be excluded from the science of language.
Let us first see our problem clearly and distinctly. The problem of the common origin of languages has no necessary connection with the problem of the common origin of mankind. If it could be proved that languages had had different beginnings, this would in nowise necessitate the admission of different beginnings of the human race. For if we look upon language as [pg 327] natural to man, it might have broken out at different times and in different countries among the scattered descendants of one original pair; if, on the contrary, language is to be treated as an artificial invention, there is still less reason why each succeeding generation should not have invented its own idiom.
Nor would it follow, if it could be proved that all the dialects of mankind point to one common source, that therefore the human race must descend from one pair. For language might have been the property of one favored race, and have been communicated to the other races in the progress of history.
The science of language and the science of ethnology have both suffered most seriously from being mixed up together. The classification of races and languages should be quite independent of each other. Races may change their languages, and history supplies us with several instances where one race adopted the language of another. Different languages, therefore, may be spoken by one race, or the same language may be spoken by different races; so that any attempt at squaring the classification of races and tongues must necessarily fail.
Secondly, the problem of the common origin of languages has no connection with the statements contained in the Old Testament regarding the creation of man, and the genealogies of the patriarchs. If our researches led us to the admission of different beginnings for the languages of mankind, there is nothing in the Old Testament opposed to this view. For although the Jews believed that for a time the whole earth was of one language and of one speech, it has long been pointed out by eminent divines, with particular reference [pg 328] to the dialects of America, that new languages might have arisen at later times. If, on the contrary, we arrive at the conviction that all languages can be traced back to one common source, we could never think of transferring the genealogies of the Old Testament to the genealogical classification of language. The genealogies of the Old Testament refer to blood, not to language, and as we know that people, without changing their name, did frequently change their language, it is clearly impossible that the genealogies of the Old Testament should coincide with the genealogical classification of languages. In order to avoid a confusion of ideas, it would be preferable to abstain altogether from using the same names to express relationship of language which in the Bible are used to express relationship of blood. It was usual formerly to speak of Japhetic, Hamitic and Semitic languages. The first name has now been replaced by Aryan, the second by African; and though the third is still retained, it has received a scientific definition quite different from the meaning which it would have in the Bible. It is well to bear this in mind, in order to prevent not only those who are forever attacking the Bible with arrows that cannot reach it, but likewise those who defend it with weapons they know not how to wield, from disturbing in any way the quiet progress of the science of language.
Let us now look dispassionately at our problem. The problem of the possibility of a common origin of all languages naturally divides itself into two parts, the formal and the material. We are to-day concerned with the formal part only. We have examined all possible forms which language can assume, and we [pg 329] have now to ask, can we reconcile with these three distinct forms, the radical, the terminational, and the inflectional, the admission of one common origin of human speech? I answer decidedly, Yes.
The chief argument that has been brought forward against the common origin of language is this, that no monosyllabic or radical language has ever entered into an agglutinative or terminational stage, and that no agglutinative or terminational language has ever risen to the inflectional stage. Chinese, it is said, is still what it has been from the beginning; it has never produced agglutinative or inflectional forms; nor has any Turanian language ever given up the distinctive feature of the terminational stage, namely, the integrity of its roots.
In answer to this it should be pointed out that though each language, as soon as it once becomes settled, retains that morphological character which it had when it first assumed its individual or national existence, it does not lose altogether the power of producing grammatical forms that belong to a higher stage. In Chinese, and particularly in Chinese dialects, we find rudimentary traces of agglutination. The li which I mentioned before as the sign of the locative, has dwindled down to a mere postposition, and a modern Chinese is no more aware that li meant originally interior, than the Turanian is of the origin of his case-terminations.[308] In [pg 330] the spoken dialects of Chinese, agglutinative forms are of more frequent occurrence. Thus, in the Shanghai dialect, wo is to speak, as a verb; woda, a word. Of woda a genitive is formed, woda-ka, a dative pela woda, an accusative tang woda.[309] In agglutinative languages again, we meet with rudimentary traces of inflection. Thus in Tamil the root tûngu, to sleep, has not retained its full integrity in the derivative tûkkam, sleep.
I mention these instances, which might be greatly multiplied, in order to show that there is nothing mysterious in the tenacity with which each language clings in general to that stage of grammar which it had attained at the time of its first settlement. If a family, or a tribe, or a nation, has once accustomed itself to express its ideas according to one system of grammar, that first mould remains and becomes stronger with each generation. But, while Chinese was arrested and became traditional in this very early stage the radical, other dialects passed on through that stage, retaining their pliancy. They were not arrested, and did not become traditional or national, before those who spoke them had learnt to appreciate the advantage of agglutination. That advantage being once perceived, a few single forms in which agglutination first showed itself would soon, by that sense of analogy which is inherent [pg 331] in language, extend their influence irresistibly. Languages arrested in that stage would cling with equal tenacity to the system of agglutination. A Chinese can hardly understand how language is possible, unless every syllable is significative; a Turanian despises every idiom in which each word does not display distinctly its radical and significative element; whereas, we who are accustomed to the use of inflectional languages, are proud of the very grammar which a Chinese and Turanian would treat with contempt.
The fact, therefore, that languages, if once settled, do not change their grammatical constitution, is no argument against our theory, that every inflectional language was once agglutinative, and every agglutinative language was once monosyllabic. I call it a theory, but it is more than a theory, for it is the only possible way in which the realities of Sanskrit or any other inflectional language can be explained. As far as the formal part of language is concerned, we cannot resist the conclusion that what is now inflectional was formerly agglutinative, and what is now agglutinative was at first radical. The great stream of language rolled on in numberless dialects, and changed its grammatical coloring as it passed from time to time through new deposits of thought. The different channels which left the main current and became stationary and stagnant, or, if you like, literary and traditional, retained forever that coloring which the main current displayed at the stage of their separation. If we call the radical stage white, the agglutinative red, and the inflectional blue, then we may well understand why the white channels should show hardly a drop of red or blue, or why the red channels should [pg 332] hardly betray a shadow of blue; and we shall be prepared to find what we do find, namely, white tints in the red, and white and red tints in the blue channels of speech.
You will have perceived that in what I have said I only argue for the possibility, not for the necessity, of a common origin of language.
I look upon the problem of the common origin of language, which I have shown to be quite independent of the problem of the common origin of mankind, as a question which ought to be kept open as long as possible. It is not, I believe, a problem quite as hopeless as that of the plurality of worlds, on which so much has been written of late, but it should be treated very much in the same manner. As it is impossible to demonstrate by the evidence of the senses that the planets are inhabited, the only way to prove that they are, is to prove that it is impossible that they should not be. Thus on the other hand, in order to prove that the planets are not inhabited, you must prove that it is impossible that they should be. As soon as the one or the other has been proved, the question will be set at rest: till then it must remain an open question, whatever our own predilections on the subject may be.
I do not take quite as desponding a view of the problem of the common origin of language, but I insist on this, that we ought not to allow this problem to be in any way prejudged. Now it has been the tendency of the most distinguished writers on comparative philology to take it almost for granted, that after the discovery of the two families of language, the Aryan and Semitic, and after the establishment of the [pg 333] close ties of relationship which unite the members of each, it would be impossible to admit any longer a common origin of language. It was natural, after the criteria by which the unity of the Aryan as well as the Semitic dialects can be proved had been so successfully defined, that the absence of similar coincidences between any Semitic and Aryan language, or between these and any other branch of speech, should have led to a belief that no connection was admissible between them. A Linnæan botanist, who has his definite marks by which to recognize an Anemone, would reject with equal confidence any connection between the species Anemone and other flowers which have since been classed under the same head though deficient in the Linnæan marks of the Anemone.
But there are surely different degrees of affinity in languages as well as in all other productions of nature, and the different families of speech, though they cannot show the same signs of relationship by which their members are held together, need not of necessity have been perfect strangers to each other from the beginning.
Now I confess that when I found the argument used over and over again, that it is impossible any longer to speak of a common origin of language, because comparative philology had proved that there existed various families of language, I felt that this was not true, that at all events it was an exaggeration.
The problem, if properly viewed, bears the following aspect:—“If you wish to assert that language had various beginnings, you must prove it impossible that language could have had a common origin.”
No such impossibility has ever been established [pg 334] with regard to a common origin of the Aryan and Semitic dialects; while on the contrary the analysis of the grammatical forms in either family has removed many difficulties, and made it at least intelligible how, with materials identical or very similar, two individuals, or two families, or two nations, could in the course of time have produced languages so different in form as Hebrew and Sanskrit.
But still greater light was thrown on the formative and metamorphic process of language by the study of other dialects unconnected with Sanskrit or Hebrew, and exhibiting before our eyes the growth of those grammatical forms (grammatical in the widest sense of the word) which in the Aryan and Semitic families we know only as formed, not as forming; as decaying, not as living; as traditional, not as understood and intentional: I mean the Turanian languages. The traces by which these languages attest their original relationship are much fainter than in the Semitic and Aryan families, but they are so of necessity. In the Aryan and Semitic families, the agglutinative process, by which alone grammatical forms can be obtained, has been arrested at some time, and this could only have been through religious or political influences. By the same power through which an advancing civilization absorbs the manifold dialects in which every spoken idiom naturally represents itself, the first political or religious centralization must necessarily have put a check on the exuberance of an agglutinative speech. Out of many possible forms one became popular, fixed, and technical for each word, for each grammatical category; and by means of poetry, law, and religion, a literary or political [pg 335] language was produced to which thenceforth nothing had to be added; which in a short time, after becoming unintelligible in its formal elements, was liable to phonetic corruption only, but incapable of internal resuscitation. It is necessary to admit a primitive concentration of this kind for the Aryan and Semitic families, for it is thus only that we can account for coincidences between Sanskrit and Greek terminations, which were formed neither from Greek nor from Sanskrit materials, but which are still identically the same in both. It is in this sense that I call these languages political or state languages, and it has been truly said that languages belonging to these families must be able to prove their relationship by sharing in common not only what is regular and intelligible, but what is anomalous, unintelligible, and dead.
If no such concentration takes place, languages, though formed of the same materials and originally identical, must necessarily diverge in what we may call dialects, but in a very different sense from the dialects such as we find in the later periods of political languages. The process of agglutination will continue in each clan, and forms becoming unintelligible will be easily replaced by new and more intelligible compounds. If the cases are formed by postpositions, new postpositions can be used as soon as the old ones become obsolete. If the conjugation is formed by pronouns, new pronouns can be used if the old ones are no longer sufficiently distinct.
Let us ask then, what coincidences we are likely to find in agglutinative dialects which have become separated, and which gradually approach to a more settled [pg 336] state? It seems to me that we can only expect to find in them such coincidences as Castrén and Schott have succeeded in discovering in the Finnic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Samoyedic languages; and such as Hodgson, Caldwell, Logan, and myself have pointed out in the Tamulic, Gangetic, Lohitic, Taïc, and Malaïc languages. They must refer chiefly to the radical materials of language, or to those parts of speech which it is most difficult to reproduce, I mean pronouns, numerals, and prepositions. These languages will hardly ever agree in what is anomalous or inorganic, because their organism repels continually what begins to be formal and unintelligible. It is astonishing rather, that any words of a conventional meaning should have been discovered as the common property of the Turanian languages, than that most of their words and forms should be peculiar to each. These coincidences must, however, be accounted for by those who deny the common origin of the Turanian languages; they must be accounted for, either as the result of accident, or of an imitative instinct which led the human mind everywhere to the same onomatopoëtic formations. This has never been done, and it will require great efforts to achieve it.
To myself the study of the Turanian family was interesting particularly because it offered an opportunity of learning how far languages, supposed to be of a common origin, might diverge and become dissimilar by the unrestrained operation of dialectic regeneration.
In a letter which I addressed to my friend, the late Baron Bunsen, and which was published by him in his “Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History”[310] [pg 337] (vol. i. pp. 263-521), it had been my object to trace, as far as I was able, the principles which guided the formation of agglutinative languages, and to show how far languages may become dissimilar in their grammar and dictionary, and yet allow us to treat them as cognate dialects. In answer to the assertion that it was impossible, I tried, in the fourth, fifth, and sixth sections of that Essay, to show how it was possible, that, starting from a common ground, languages as different as Mandshu and Finnish, Malay and Siamese, should have arrived at their present state, and might still be treated as cognate tongues. And as I look upon this process of agglutination as the only intelligible means by which language can acquire a grammatical organization, and clear the barrier which has arrested the growth of the Chinese idiom, I felt justified in applying the principles derived from the formation of the Turanian languages to the Aryan and Semitic families. They also must have passed through an agglutinative stage, and it is during that period alone that we can account for the gradual divergence and individualization of what we afterwards call the Aryan and Semitic forms of speech. If we can account for the different appearance of Mandshu and Finnish, we can also account for the distance between Hebrew and Sanskrit. It is true that we do not know the Aryan speech during its agglutinative period, but we can infer what it was when we see languages like Finnish and Turkish approaching more and more to an Aryan type. Such has been the advance which Turkish has made towards inflectional forms, that Professor Ewald claims for it [pg 338] the title of a synthetic language, a title which he gives to the Aryan and Semitic dialects after they have left the agglutinative stage, and entered into a process of phonetic corruption and dissolution. “Many of its component parts,” he says, “though they were no doubt originally, as in every language, independent words, have been reduced to mere vowels, or have been lost altogether, so that we must infer their former presence by the changes which they have wrought in the body of the word. Göz means eye, and gör, to see; ish, deed, and ir, to do; îtsh, the interior, gîr, to enter.”[311] Nay, he goes so far as to admit some formal elements which Turkish shares in common with the Aryan family, and which therefore could only date from a period when both were still in their agglutinative infancy. For instance, di, as exponent of a past action; ta, as the sign of the past participle of the passive; lu, as a suffix to form adjectives, &c.[312] This is more than I should venture to assert.
Taking this view of the gradual formation of language by agglutination, as opposed to intussusception, it is hardly necessary to say that, if I speak of a Turanian family of speech, I use the word family in a different sense from that which it has with regard to the Aryan and Semitic languages. In my Letter on the Turanian languages, which has been the subject of such fierce attacks from those who believe in different beginnings of language and mankind, I had explained this repeatedly, and I had preferred the term of group for the Turanian languages, in order to express as clearly as possible that the relation between Turkish [pg 339] and Mandshu, between Tamil and Finnish, was a different one, not in degree only, but in kind, from that between Sanskrit and Greek. “These Turanian languages,” I said (p. 216), “cannot be considered as standing to each other in the same relation as Hebrew and Arabic, Sanskrit and Greek.” “They are radii diverging from a common centre, not children of a common parent.” And still they are not so widely distant as Hebrew and Sanskrit, because none of them has entered into that new phase of growth or decay (p. 218) through which the Semitic and Aryan languages passed after they had been settled, individualized, and nationalized.
The real object of my Essay was therefore a defensive one. It was to show how rash it was to speak of different independent beginnings in the history of human speech, before a single argument had been brought forward to establish the necessity of such an admission. The impossibility of a common origin of language has never been proved, but, in order to remove what were considered difficulties affecting the theory of a common origin, I felt it my duty to show practically, and by the very history of the Turanian languages, how such a theory was possible, or as I say in one instance only, probable. I endeavored to show how even the most distant members of the Turanian family, the one spoken in the north, the other in the south of Asia, the Finnic and the Tamulic, have preserved in their grammatical organization traces of a former unity; and, if my opponents admit that I have proved the ante-Brahmanic or Tamulic inhabitants of India to belong to the Turanian family, they can hardly have been aware that if this, the most extreme point of my argument be conceded, [pg 340] everything else is involved, and must follow by necessity.
Yet I did not call the last chapter of my Essay, “On the Necessity of a common origin of Language,” but “On the Possibility;” and, in answer to the opinions advanced by the opposite party, I summed up my defence in these two paragraphs:—
I.
“Nothing necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for the material elements of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech;—nay, it is possible even now to point out radicals which, under various changes and disguises, have been current in these three branches ever since their first separation.”
II.
“Nothing necessitates the admission of different beginnings for the formal elements of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech;—and though it is impossible to derive the Aryan system of grammar from the Semitic, or the Semitic from the Aryan, we can perfectly understand how, either through individual influences, or by the wear and tear of speech in its own continuous working, the different systems of grammar of Asia and Europe may have been produced.”
It will be seen, from the very wording of these two paragraphs, that my object was to deny the necessity of independent beginnings, and to assert the possibility of a common origin of language. I have been accused [pg 341] of having been biassed in my researches by an implicit belief in the common origin of mankind. I do not deny that I hold this belief, and, if it wanted confirmation, that confirmation has been supplied by Darwin's book “On the Origin of Species.”[313] But I defy my adversaries to point out one single passage where I have mixed up scientific with theological arguments. Only if I am told that no “quiet observer would ever have conceived the idea of deriving all mankind from one pair, unless the Mosaic records had taught it,” I must be allowed to say in reply, that this idea on the contrary is so natural, so consistent with all human laws of reasoning, that, as far as I know, there has been no nation on earth which, if it possessed any traditions on the origin of mankind, did not derive the human race from one pair, if not from one person. The author of the Mosaic records, therefore, though stripped, before the tribunal of Physical Science, of his claims as an inspired writer, may at least claim the modest title of a quiet observer, and if his conception of the physical unity of the human race can be proved to be an error, it is an error which he shares in common [pg 342] with other quiet observers, such as Humboldt, Bunsen, Prichard, and Owen.[314]
The only question which remains to be answered is this, Was it one and the same volume of water which supplied all the lateral channels of speech? or, to drop all metaphor, are the roots which were joined together according to the radical, the terminational, and inflectional systems, identically the same? The only way to answer, or at least to dispose of, this question is to consider the nature and origin of roots; and we shall then have reached the extreme limits to which inductive reasoning can carry us in our researches into the mysteries of human speech.