The origin of language, then, is to be sought in gestures, onomatopœia, and to a limited extent interjectional cries. Like the rope-bridges of the Himalayas or the Andes, they formed the first rude means of communication between man and man. Onomatopœic words and interjections came to be metaphorically applied to denote other ideas than those for which they properly stood, while the relations of grammar were pointed out by the help of gesticulation. Thus, by imitating the gurgling of water and pointing to the mouth, a man could signify what we express by the sentence, “I wish to drink,” or, “I am thirsty;” and by uttering a cry of pain and pointing to a knife, he could show that he had been cut by it. In course of time a collection of words would be formed, each of which represented what we now call a sentence. For a sentence, it must be remembered, is the name given by the grammarian to what the logician would call a proposition or a judgment, and though a judgment may be analyzed into subject and object and connecting copula (or mental act of comparison), we cannot, if we wish to be intelligible, separate its elements one from the other. The whole sentence, the whole Λόγος, as the Greeks would have termed it, is the only possible unit of thought; subject and object are as much correlated as the positive and negative poles of the magnet.
Language, then, we may lay down, begins with sentences, not with single words. The latter exist only for the lexicographer, and even the lexicographer has to turn them into sentences by affixing a definition if he would render them intelligible. We are accustomed to see sentences divided into their individual words in writing, and so we come to fancy that this is right and natural. But the very accent which we lay upon our words ought to show us how far this is from the truth. The accent of a word varies according to its place in a sentence; for purposes of accentuation, we regard not the individual words, but the whole sentence which they compose. And this outward fact of accentuation is but an indication of the inward fact of signification. All language must be significant; but until the whole sentence is uttered, until the whole thought which lies behind it is expressed, this cannot be the case. The expression of the thought may be faulty and imperfect, but unless the thought be sufficiently expressed to be intelligible to another, it has not yet embodied itself in the form of language. The Greek Λόγος was not the individual word, which, apart from its relation to other parts of the sentence, has no meaning in itself, but the complete act of reasoning, which on the inward side is called a judgment, and on the outward side a sentence or proposition. The single word is to the sentence what syllables and letters are to the single word. We may break up a word into the several sounds of which it is composed, but this is the work of the phonologist, not of the speaker. So, too, we may break up a sentence like “Don’t do that” into the four words Do-not-do-that, but this, again, is the conscious procedure of the grammarian. Sentences may be of any length; they may consist of a single syllable, like go! or yes, or they may have to be expressed by a large number of separate “words”; what is essential is that they should be significant to another, should adequately convey to his mind the whole thought that is intended to be expressed. Unless the sounds we utter are combined into a sentence, they have no more meaning than the cries of the jackal or the yelping of the cur; and until they have a meaning, and so represent our thought, they do not constitute language. The sentence, in short, is the only unit which language can know, and the ultimate starting-point of all our linguistic inquiries.
It is not necessary that the sentence should be divided into its component words in writing any more than it actually is in speech. The French je le vois is as much a single, undivided group of sounds as the Basque dakust or the Latin amatur. In the polysynthetic languages of America, in which the separate words of a sentence are cut down to their bare stems and fused into a single whole, the sentence can as little be split up into its elements as an ordinary compound in Greek or German. The ancient Hindu grammarians, with that wonderful insight into language which has made their labours the basis of modern scientific philology, treated the several words of a sentence just as we treat syllables and letters. A number of single words are run into one, the sounds at the end of each word being modified to suit those that follow, in accordance with the so-called rules of Sandhi, and the whole group of words is then written without division. Thus the word trinairguṇatwamâpannairbadhyante must be analyzed into trinais, “with grass blades” (an instrumental pl.), guṇatwam, “a rope’s state” (acc. sing), â-pannais, “having attained” (part. pass. of the compound verb â-pad, agreeing with trinais), and badhyante, “they are bound” (3rd pl. pres. pass. of the verb bandh). In fact, a little attention will convince every one that even in our own language not only does the accent of a word depend upon its place in the sentence, but that the sound with which it terminates equally depends upon the sound which follows. We pronounce “of” in one way when it stands by itself in the dictionary, in another way when it precedes “the” or “that.”
If the sentence is the unit of significant speech, it is evident that all individual words must once have been sentences; that is to say, when first used they must each have implied or represented a sentence. And this is borne out by an examination of the records of speech. We shall see hereafter that words may be divided into conceptual or presentative, and pronominal or representative, and that wherever we can trace back the latter to their source, we find them to have been originally presentative. Thus words like “and” or “because” are now purely symbolic and representative; there was a time, however, when they denoted the very definite ideas of “a going further,”[67] and “by the cause.”[68] Now, if we look carefully into the nature and essence of these presentative words, it becomes clear that they were at the outset so many shorthand notes or summaries of various sentences. Take, for example, the word memorandum. Before it can form a part of language, memorandum must be significant. This can come about only in two ways. Either we must accompany the utterance of the word memorandum with gestures which imply “This is a memorandum,” or “Write a memorandum,” or something similar, or else we must express the meaning of these gestures by equivalent words. That is to say, the isolated word memorandum must be incorporated into a sentence by being brought into relation with other words, before it can become part and parcel of living speech. Taken by itself, it belongs to the dictionary-maker only, and even he has to add a definition, that is to say, to make it the subject of a sentence, if his dictionary is to be something more than a mere catalogue of unmeaning sounds. Before a definition is supplied by the lexicographer or the reader, a word is not yet a word; it has no meaning.
The student of language, then, cannot deal with words apart from sentences. The significant word—that combination of sounds which represents a thought—is really a crystallized sentence, a kind of shorthand note in which a proposition has been summed up. Each advance in philosophy and science is marked by the acquisition of a new idea or fact, the result of a long train of previous observations and reasonings: and the more complex the idea or the fact, the more numerous will be the reasonings, the sentences or judgments, which underlie it. What a multitude of judgments, which when expressed in language we call sentences, are implied by the two simple words humanity and gravitation! It is a truism in psychology that the terms of a proposition, when closely interrogated, turn out to be nothing but abbreviated judgments. The ordinary theory of modern comparative philologists traces all languages back to a certain number of abstract roots, each of which was a sort of sentence in embryo, and though this theory is scarcely tenable in the form in which it is usually presented, it is yet certain that there was a time in the history of speech when the articulate or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primitive man were made the significant representatives of thought by the gestures with which they were accompanied. And this complex of sound and gesture—a complex in which, it must be remembered, the sound had no meaning apart from the gesture—was the earliest sentence. The isolating languages of Further India still express a new concept by the juxtaposition of two words which denote that it is the species of a higher genus. Thus, in Taic or Siamese kin is to “eat,” but when nam, “water,” is added, kin-nam means “to drink;” mi is “rich,” mi din, mi nám, “earthy,” and “watery,” that is to say, “rich (in) earth” and “water.”[69]
These examples from the far East show us the way in which our words first came into existence. They have grown out of sentences by a process of comparison and determination. Two or more sentence-words, referring to the same object or idea viewed under different relations to the speaker, might be set over against one another, and the phonetic part in which they agreed taken to denote the object or idea considered by itself. Thus in Semitic kâtal is “he killed,” kotêl, “killing,” k’tol, “to kill” and “kill,” kâtûl, “killed,” and katl, kitl, or kutl, “a killing,” where the difference of signification is marked by a difference of vowel, and co-existing forms of this kind, when compared with each other, would determine that the three consonants k-t-l had the general sense of “killing.” But an inflectional language does not permit us to watch the word-making process so clearly as do those savage jargons in which a couple of sounds like the Grebo ni ne signify “I do it” or “you do it,” according to the context and the gestures of the speaker. Here by degrees, with the growth of consciousness and the analysis of thought, the external gesture is replaced by some portion of the uttered sounds which agrees in a number of different instances, and in this way the words by which the relations of grammar are expressed come into being. A similar process has been at work in producing those analogical terminations whereby our Indo-European languages adapt a word to express a new grammatical relation. Thus, in English, the Greek termination ize (or -ise) has been abstracted from the words to which it properly belonged by comparing them together, and has been instinctively, as it were, invested with a particular meaning, so that we can now turn any word we like, whether of Greek origin or not, into a transitive verb by attaching to it this suffix. In humanize, for instance, it is added to an adjective of Latin origin, in jeopardize to a Romanic compound. When once a sentence-word had been broken up into single words by comparing it with other sentence-words relating to the same subject, it was easy to extend the operation to other sentence-words, which were accordingly broken up and analyzed without being compared with related sentences. The phonetic expression of the verbal copula by which the subject and object were connected together, was the last result of this analytic process; it was long left to be supplied by the mind, the simple juxtaposition of subject and object being considered sufficient to suggest the mental act by which they were compared or contrasted, and to this day many languages, those of Polynesia, for example, still remain without a verb. Thus, in Dayak kutoh ka-halap-e arut-m, “thy boat is very beautiful,” is literally “very its-beauty thy-boat,” andi-m handak imukul-ku, “thy brother will be struck by me,” means properly, “thy-brother my striking-being,” while to express “he has a white jacket on,” the Dayak must say, ia ba-klambi ba-puti, “he with-jacket with-white.”[70]
As we shall see hereafter, all the facts at our disposal tend to show that the roots of speech, or at all events the earliest sentence-words out of which the later languages of mankind have sprung, were polysyllabic, and other facts go equally towards proving that the terminations of these primitive roots or sentence-words displayed a wearisome monotony of agreement. Survivals, as Mr. Tylor has happily termed them, are among the most valuable means we have of arguing back to an earlier state of things, and we can only treat as a survival the habit of a child whom I know, who in her first essays at speech affixed a final ö to almost all her words, saying for instance, come-ö and dog-ö for “come” and “dog.” The older a speech is, the more it has suffered from the wasting and wearing effects of time, and a language like the Chinese, which stands out as some weather-beaten granite peak among the languages of a later day, has so concealed all traces of the originally pluriliteral character of its vocabulary, that it is only within the last few years that Sinologues, like Dr. Edkins and M. de Rosny, have detected it. So, we may infer, will it also be found with all the other languages of the world; the first utterances of mankind were polysyllabic, though not perhaps of such monstrous length as the sentence-words of Eskimaux or Algonquin. In the friction and comparison of these utterances similar terminations came in some instances to be set apart to denote the relations of grammar; in other instances the grammatical relations which lay implicit in the sentence-word were made explicit by its being set over against another sentence-word similarly employed elsewhere; and so it came in course of time to be what the Chinese would call an “empty word” with no presentative meaning of its own. Thus, on the one side, as M. Bergaigne has shown, the old adjectival suffix bha (bhi) in our own family of speech has become the sign of the dative and genitive cases (Latin ti-bi, dat., Old Slavonic te-be, gen.) just as the adjectival termination sya or tya (as in δημόσιος, “belonging to the people”) has become the sign of the genitive (ἱππο[σ]ιο); while, on the other side, the Chinese tsĭ̥ h‘ai, “to be hurt,” is literally “eat hurt,” and tshyeu tha̤n, “autumn,” “harvest-heaven.” The Chinese word can still be used indifferently as a noun, a verb, an adverb or the sign of a case much like such English words as silver and picture, and its place in the sentence alone determines in what sense it shall be construed. This is an excellent illustration of the early days of speech, when the sentence-words contained within themselves all the several parts of speech at once—all that was needed for a complete sentence; and it was only by bringing them into contact and contrast with other sentence-words, that they came to be restricted in their meaning and use, and to be reduced into mere “words.” Language never forgot the mode in which it had framed its first vocabulary, and the Greek and Roman, as much as the Red Indian of America, in framing their compounds instinctively stripped off the so-called inflections, and reduced the word they placed first to its simple stem. That part alone of the word which remained unchanged and unchangeable, could be made use of when the word was to be treated as simply a word and nothing more. The North American languages reflect more faithfully than the languages of the Old World the primitive condition of speech, and the North American languages can possess from six to eight thousand different verbal forms or sentences without having abstracted from them a single word which will express the sense of the verb out of all relation to anything else.[71] Thus, the Cheroki has thirteen verbs to denote particular kinds of “washing,” such as “washing the head,” or “the hands,” or “myself,” and each of these verbs has a multitude of forms, but no isolated word to denote “washing” in general has as yet been extracted from them.[72] The difficulty has often been noticed of getting a savage or barbarian to give the name of an object without incorporating it into a sentence or bringing it into relation with something else. Thus, a Kurd who supplied Dr. Sandwith with a vocabulary of the Zaza dialect, was so little able to conceive of words like “head,” “father,” “hair,” except as related to himself or some one else, that he had to combine them with a personal pronoun, saying sèrè-min, “my head,” piè-min, “my father,” porè-min, “my hair.” The Hoopah and Navaho vocabularies, published by Schoolcraft,[73] similarly prefix the possessive pronoun h’, hut to all their words, as hotsintah, hut-tah, “forehead,” huanah, hunnah, “eye,” hoithlani, hutcon, “arm;” and Dr. Latham points out the same fact in Wallace’s vocabularies from the river Uapes, where eri-bida, eri-numa in Uainambeu, tcho-kereu, tcho-ia in Juri, and no-dusia, no-nunia in Barrè, literally “my head,” “my mouth,” are given as the equivalents of simple “head” and “mouth.” He also states that he has noticed the same peculiarity among the English Gipsies.[74] The making of words as distinct from sentences was a long and laborious process, and there are many languages like those of North America in which the process has hardly yet begun. A dictionary is the result of reflection, and ages must elapse before a language can enter upon its reflective stage. Our children still learn the languages they speak by first acquiring the knowledge of certain phrases and sentences, and then gradually analyzing them into words, and the adult who wishes to gain a successful acquaintance with another tongue must pursue the same plan. What Steinthal says of the Chinese, that its “smallest real whole is a sentence, or at least a sentence-relation,”[75] is true of other languages as well, and the words of which a sentence is composed have no actual existence apart from that sentence, except for the phonologist and the lexicographer. Until the whole sentence is completed the individual words of which it consists have no more signification than the syllables ful and ness or cy and ly which occur so plentifully in English. The first condition of language is that it should be significant, and words are only significant when they stand in relation to one another. The logos, the true word, said Aristotle, was the cause of knowledge; the individual words of which it was composed were but symbols and tokens of the impressions of sense.
Now, if language be the embodiment of thought, and if thought can only express itself under the form of the complete sentence, it is plain that we must look to the sentence for a true classification of languages. The sentence expresses the way in which we think, and the different forms assumed by the sentence—that is to say, the different modes in which the relations of subject, object, and verb are denoted will constitute the only sound basis for classifying speech. The particular relation between the several ideas summed up in a judgment or sentence agrees with the manner in which we regard the objects about which we think and speak. If, for instance, we have no clear idea of any distinction between ourselves and the objects around us, in talking about them any reference to ourselves will be left out of sight. Instead of saying, “I am running,” where the speaker distinguishes himself from the act in which he is engaged, we should say like the Romans curro, where the personal pronoun has no separate and independent mark of its own. Different races of men do not think in the same way; and, consequently, the forms taken by the sentence in different languages are not the same. Thus in the so-called isolating languages, the separate terms or ideas which make up the sentence are not subordinated to each other, and fused into a single whole, but every word remains a separate and distinct sentence. The Chinaman has to say, “thya̤n-hi le̥ṅ tsyaṅ-s̆aṅ-lei”-literally, “heaven-air cold begin-rise-come,”—if he wants to state that “the weather began to be cold;” and the Burman’s way of expressing “we are going,” is by saying, “ṅā dō dhwā kra dhań”—“I multitude go multitude which.” In cases such as these, the ideas are each set down independently, instead of being subordinated one to another, and the words which embody them are accordingly contrasted with each other like so many independent sentences. On the other hand, in the agglutinative languages, the ideas which make up the sentence, though still kept distinct and independent, are no longer set over against one another, but brought into mutual relation and harmony, and regarded as of equal force and meaning. The root or stem still stands out clearly and separately, and the suffixes of relation are marked with equal distinctness; But for all that, the inward fact of the incipient subordination which exists between them is denoted by the outward fact of vocalic harmony, whereby the vowels of both stem and suffix have to belong to the same class. The Turkish sign of the infinitive, mak, has to become mek after a root like sev, “love,” though both root and suffix still retain their own individuality; and while at-lar is “horses,” ev-ler is “houses.” The grammatical relations expressed in the Aryan class of languages by case-endings and person-endings, or by prefixed pronouns and prepositions, have to be represented, as a general rule, by postfixes, since in no other way can sufficient emphasis be laid upon them, and the danger avoided of their being swallowed up in the verb or noun. Our “I love,” or “the man,” look but little different in writing from the Turkish sev-r-im, or the Basque gizoná, gizonák; the case is quite altered, however, when we try to pronounce these words, the accent falling on the verb in our “I love,” but allowing the distinction between verb and pronoun to be clearly felt in the Turkish sevrim. It is among the inhabitants of mountainous and cold regions in the Aryan and Semitic families of speech—among Albanians, Bulgarians, Scandinavians, and Aramæans—that the definite article is postfixed instead of being prefixed; and we can see at once what an emphasis and distinctness would be given to it by such a position. Only where foreign influences have been at work do the agglutinative languages change the order of the words in the sentence and, as in the case of the Hungarian definite article a, az, prefix the words expressive of the grammatical relations, instead of postfixing them. Still further, to mark out the several parts or terms of the sentence, the objective pronoun may be inserted between the subjective pronoun and the verbal root or stem; and so we may have a sentence-word like the French je vous donne, as in the Basque zamaztet (from eman, “to give”), or the converse arrangement of the terms, as in n-aza-zu-n, “that you may have me” (“me-have-you-may”). The incorporating languages, as they are called, are the oldest examples of the agglutinative class, for they go back to the time when the speaker had not yet begun to analyze his sentences, and when he could not say simply, “I give,” without finishing the sentence with the objective pronoun. Hence it is that in Basque we must say dituzte beren liburnac, “they have them their books,” instead of simply “they have their books;” and in Accadian, the language of primitive Chaldea, “I built a house” would be ê mu-n-rû,[76] literally “house I-it-built.”
Very distinct from these incorporating tongues are the polysynthetic or incapsulating dialects of America, in which the words that make up a sentence are stripped of their grammatical terminations, and then fused into a single word of monstrous length and appearance. Thus the Algonquin would say, wut-ap-pé-sit-tuk-quś-sun-noo-weht-unḱ-quoh, if he wished to express the sentence “he, falling on his knees, worshipped him;” and this cumbrous compound denotes exactly what we split up into seven words. These polysynthetic languages are an interesting survival of the early condition of language everywhere, and are but a fresh proof that America is in truth “the new world.” Primitive forms of speech that have elsewhere perished long ago still survive there, like the armadillo, to bear record of a bygone past. The conception of the sentence that underlies the polysynthetic dialects is the precise converse of that which underlies the isolating or the agglutinative groups. The several ideas into which the sentence may be analyzed, instead of being made equal or independent, are combined like a piece of mosaic into a single whole. The sentence has not passed beyond its primitive form, or rather that primitive form has been retained in spite of the growth and development of the languages to which it belongs. It is possible that the Eskimaux may be the descendants of the savage races who inhabited the caves of southern France, when the rivers were stiff with ice for half the year, and the reindeer roamed freely through the woods and meers; at all events, among the icebergs and dark winters of the North, they have preserved their old habits of thought, their old mode of viewing the world about them, almost unchanged. And yet our own class of speech, that class to which we give the name inflectional, and which we sometimes think is the crown and standard of all other kinds of language, is not so far removed in usage from the Eskimaux or the Algonquin as are the isolating dialects of China and the agglutinative jargons of Mongol and Turk. In the inflectional group the words or suffixes which denote grammatical relations are subordinated to the words which express objects or actions—that is to say, to nouns and verbs. The termination of the Latin currit has lost all distinct and independent meaning of its own; apart from the verbal stem to which it is subordinated, it is a mere flatus vocis, a mere empty sound. In flection proper, which we may see best exemplified in the Semitic tongues, the relations of grammar are denoted by internal vowel change—adamu, “man,” for instance, being nominative, adami genitive, and adama accusative. It was only afterwards, and by the force of analogy, that first unmeaning suffixes and then agglutinated words which were gradually assimilated to them, came to take the place of internal vowel change. What we may term the inflectional instinct sought to express the various relations of the sentence, as they successively rose to consciousness, out of the original sentence-word itself. When separate words like wards or ly (like) were afterwards employed for the same purpose, they first had to lose their own individuality, to become empty words, representative and not presentative, and as such to be engrafted upon the old stems. The Greek φη-μί, or the Sanskrit ad-mi, “I eat,” are single wholes; the first personal pronoun ma, weakened to mi, has lost all life of its own, and its sole right to existence lies in its absorption into the stems φη- and ad-. But an inflectional language cannot carry out its fundamental principle with logical completeness. All the subordinate relations of a sentence cannot be brought into the same close connection with the principal idea as in φημί and admi. Sentences like “I speak” or “I eat” may be comprehended under a single word; but there are many sentences where this is impossible, and where the attempt to express in language the relation between the principal and the subordinate, between the subject and the attribute, has to be given up. In the Latin poeta bonus, for example, the subject and the attribute appear as separate words; and there is nothing in the flection attached to each to show that they stand in any relation whatsoever one to the other. So far as the form goes there is nothing to tell us whether the two words mean “a good poet” or “the poet is good.” The fundamental principle of flection has been violated, and the language is on the high road to that more developed condition in which, as in Chinese, the two ideas are set plainly and distinctly one against the other, and the mind is left to supply the relation between them. This impossibility of carrying out thoroughly the principle of flection brings about an analytic tendency in all inflectional forms of speech. The longer an inflectional language lives the more analytic it becomes. The Englishman says “I will go,” and the Frenchman le monde, where the Latin was contented with ibo and mundus. One by one the grammatical relations implied in an inflectional compound are brought out, as it were, into full relief, and provided with special forms in which to be expressed; but the change that has taken place is but an apparent one, the inflectional spirit of the language still remains; and though we write “he runs,” “I will go,” we pronounce as if they were single words. The pronoun and the verb, taken apart and by themselves, convey no meaning to our minds; we have to combine them before they become significant, and (the order of the words excepted) there is but slight difference between an English sentence like “never to be sufficiently relied upon,” and the Tamil sārndāykku, “to thee that hast approached,” to be analyzed into sār, “approach,” d sign of the past, āy, “thee,” and ku, “to.”
Each of the leading classes of speech naturally comprises various species or subdivisions. Thus the isolating Chinese differs from the isolating dialects of Further India, in that the Chinese mode of expressing the relations of the sentence by position is replaced in these by the use of words like prū, “do;” khã, “suffer;” khōṅ, “possession,” mha, “from.” So, again, in the agglutinative class, the Bâ-ntu languages of Southern Africa prefix the same substantive, worn down, it may be, to a mere unmeaning symbol, to each of the words in a sentence which have to be brought into relation with each other; o-ka-ti k-etu o-ka-ua, for instance, being “our fine stick,” or literally, “stick ours fine.” The Malayo-Polynesian dialects have not yet attained to the conception of the verb; thus yaku imukul olo (“I smitten people”) is “I am smitten by the people;” iṅga̤ra̤-ku ia̤ tatau (“my-thought he rich”) “I thought he is rich;” ia̤ baklambi baputi (“he with-jacket with-white”) “he has a white jacket on.” Basque grammarians generally hold that the Basque has but two verbs, “to be” and “to have,” while, on the other hand, there are many languages which lack precisely these two.