The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

But it is well known how slight a relation there is between the population of a country, and either its extent or the number of human groups by which it is peopled. In order to gain an idea of the importance, or of the part played upon the surface of the globe, by one, or by a group of languages, we must calculate the number of individuals by whom it is used. Now, in comparing statistical and linguistic data, for which we are indebted to MM. d’Omalius and Maury, we find that inflectional languages are spoken by 536,900,000 human beings; monosyllabic languages by 449,000,000; and agglutinative languages only by 216,550,000.

IX. Writing. Writing is, so to speak, to speech what speech is to thought. Nevertheless, by its very nature it furnishes the anthropologist with but very few precise data. Invented in a very limited number of places, it has been communicated from place to place, and by initiation. In their passage from one nation to another, the graphic representations of languages are often sensibly modified, and, from this point of view, they may undoubtedly be of real assistance to ethnology. But there is no real relation between the several forms which they assume, and the human groups by which they are employed.

We can hardly connect with writing the various arrangements of stories which were used by the Mexican Neophytes to recall to memory their prayers, or the purely mnemo-technical process observed by different travellers, such as the Wampum of the Red-Skins. But the latter, and especially the Chinese, Thibetian and Peruvian Quipos, were something more than this. Here the colour and the mode of juxtaposition of straws, shells, or wood, the knots and the colour of the threads, had a conventional value permitting the expression of ideas, of great and multiple numbers, etc. In Peru it seems that real books were written in this manner. Unfortunately, as M. Maury remarks, it is now impossible to decipher these singular productions.

Pictography, even, in a form as rudimentary as that which existed and which still exists among the Red-Skins, where Schoolcraft has studied it very thoroughly, was probably the universal starting point for writing properly so called. It is well known that pictography bears a strong resemblance to our rebus, and that it has its monuments, which have been discovered by several travellers in Siberia, North America, the basin of the Orinoco, and even as far as Patagonia.

When symbolism was introduced into pictography, it would seem that a step had really been made, although grave errors may result from this manner of representing events, when the sense of the symbol is forgotten. The Virginians represented the Europeans, their ships and arms, by a white swan vomiting fire. There was here evidently the germ of some legend. This observation alone, enables us to comprehend and interpret some of the traditions, fabulous in form, but having a foundation of truth, which have been collected with reference to the past history of certain American tribes. Nevertheless, symbolism has the advantage of accustoming the mind to detach itself from the material reproductions of objects. It is then an easy matter to pass to the graphic reduction of the symbol, and afterwards to the idiographic sign. At length, spurred on by the stimulus of necessity, the phonetic sign is reached.

Even when the representation of the syllable is attained, writing has made immense progress. It seems as if certain races, in spite of contact with more advanced nations, and though they may have before their eyes examples of alphabetic writing, can never get beyond this. So at least it is at the present time with the Cherokees in Florida and the Veï on the coast of Africa. Sequoyah and Doala Bukara, in their efforts to imitate the Yankees and Arabs, only invented spelling-books. And yet the papers printed by the former bore, by the side of the Cherokee text, the English alphabetic translation.

It is unnecessary to insist upon the immense superiority of alphabetic writing. This means of fixing speech, at once so simple and so complete, has always presented an appearance of the marvellous to those who were unacquainted with it; and the ancients, struck with its utility, and not knowing that man had gained the art by slow stages, did not hesitate to regard it as a divine invention. Cicero himself seems inclined to share this opinion. We now know that the honour of this great discovery really belongs to the Phœnicians.

But the Phœnicians did not make this discovery at once or by their own efforts. MM. Wuttke and Lenormand have rightly given the honour of having prepared the way for, and of almost achieving the discovery, to the Egyptians. Egyptian writing, with its figurative, idiographic and phonetic signs, displays the whole course traversed by the human mind in rising from simple pictography to the alphabet. Unfortunately the Egyptians, fettered by the combined influences of their past, and by the very mass of ideas and facts represented in their complicated writing, especially perhaps by their religious traditions, could not free themselves from the cumbersome element in their system of writing. A strange people, free from these restraints, could alone, as M. Maury has remarked, take this step.

The Phœnician alphabet once discovered spread rapidly. At the same time, however, it necessarily underwent modifications to suit, sometimes veritable necessities, sometimes simple convenience or caprice. M. Lenormand admits five great families of writing, as representing this filiation. These are the Semitic, Greco-Italian, Western or Iberian, and Northern or Indo-homerite. The latter, perhaps, owed its origin to the alphabet of Yemen, which, introduced into India about the third or fourth century of our era, has engendered almost all the Oriental alphabets.

Egypt and Phœnicia were not the only centres in which the art of writing took its rise. It also came into existence in the Old World in Mesopotamia and China, and in Mexico in the New World. Hieroglyphic writing, itself arising out of pictography, has been the universal starting point, but in each case writing has stopped short at different stages.