Language and languages are in a constant state of change: nowhere, indeed, can the maxim of Herakleitus, πάντα ῥεῖ, be better illustrated. This perpetual flux and change is necessitated by the very fact that language is a product and creation of the human mind. Thought is ever shifting, moving, developing, and so, too, is the language in which it seeks to embody itself. But language is not only changing on this its inner side, it changes also on its outward, its phonetic side. The physiological organs of speech may be affected by an alteration in climate, food, or other physical conditions: they are certain to be affected by the psychological desire to save trouble or to add emphasis in speaking.
The three great causes of change in language may be briefly described as (1) imitation or analogy, (2) a wish to be clear and emphatic, and (3) laziness. Indeed, if we choose to go deep enough we might reduce all three causes to the general one of laziness, since it is easier to imitate than to say something new, while clearness in expression not only saves our neighbour trouble, but also preserves us from unnecessary repetition. Nothing is gained, however, by too wide a generalization; and it is, therefore, better to keep the three causes of linguistic change distinct and separate.
Imitation has played a far more important part in the history of speech than is ordinarily admitted. Imitation is the primary instinct of the infant and the savage, and, under the name of fashion, is a ruling power among civilized men. The great imitative powers of barbarous tribes have often been remarked upon by travellers; and a marvellous facility in mimicry and imitation seems to exist in proportion to the scanty development of the reasoning faculties. In this respect, at all events, the savage has not much ground for boasting of his superiority to the ape. Among the less cultivated races, indeed, the passion for imitation frequently passes into a morbid mania, and strange stories are related concerning it. Thus Dr. R. Maak, in his “Journey to the Amur,” states that “it is not unusual for the Maniagri to suffer from a nervous malady of the most peculiar kind, with which we had already been made acquainted by the descriptions of several travellers.[84] This malady is met with, for the most part, amongst the wild people of Siberia, as well as amongst the Russians settled there. In the district of the Yakutes, where this affliction very frequently occurs, those affected by it, both Russians and Yakutes, are known by the name of Emiura; but here the same malady is called by the Maniagri Olon, and by the Argurian Cossacks Olgandschi. The attacks of the malady which I am now mentioning consist in this, that a man suffering from it will, if under the influence of terror or consternation, unconsciously, and often without the slightest sense of shame, imitate everything that passes before him.” So, too, Mr. Jagor, in his “Travels in the Philippines,”[85] tells us that the malady in question is well known in those islands under the name of Mali-mali, and in Java under that of Sakit-latar; and goes on to relate how his “companions availed themselves of the diseased condition of a poor old woman who met us in the highway, to practise some rough jokes upon her. The old woman imitated every motion as if impelled by an irresistible impulse, and expressed at the same time the most extreme indignation against those who abused her infirmity.” The description reminds us of the feats of our own “electro-biologists.”
It is to the desire of imitation that we owe our first knowledge of our mother-tongue. The child tries to imitate those about him, and as the faculties of imitation and memory are the only ones yet developed in him his efforts are usually successful. The distance at which we stand from the infantile state, and the development of our reasoning powers, are measured by the prominence given to individuality and our power of taking the initiative. The community in which each man acts like his neighbour is not yet a civilized community; Athens is typical of all that is highest in human culture, and Athens was emphatically the State in which individuality had the freest play. It is well for the child who has to learn the language of his parents that he is rather a member of an uncivilized community than of Periklean Athens.
The love of imitation is the instrument whereby one language is able to influence another. Sometimes we find a community giving up its own tongue altogether and adopting that of his neighbours. Such has been the case with the Kelts of Cornwall, with the Wends of Prussia, or with the Huns of Bulgaria. The Negroes of Haiti speak French, the Lapps Finnish, while according to Humboldt and Bonpland,[86] “a million of the aborigines of America have exchanged their native for a European language.” Social contact and not identity of race occasions a similarity of language, since language is the medium of communication between the members of the same community, not between the scattered branches of the same race. No doubt where the languages are essentially distinct, based on radically different conceptions of the sentence and its parts, even the desire of imitation will be often not strong enough to cause the one language to be borrowed by the speakers of the other. Here and there we come across children who have a difficulty in imitating the pronunciation or use of the words they hear, and such a difficulty is a main cause of the origination of dialects; but it is among the speakers of agglutinative or polysynthetic tongues when brought into contact with an inflectional language that the difficulty is best exemplified. The Negro of the United States still speaks a jargon which can be called English only by courtesy, and Humboldt states[87] that “nothing can exceed the difficulty experienced by the (South American) Indians in learning Spanish,” although they “manifest quickness of intellect” in other respects, and “the missionaries assert that their embarrassment is neither the effect of timidity nor of natural stupidity, but that it arises from the impediments they meet with in the structure of a language so different from their native tongue.” Potent as imitation is, it yet has a limit, and this limit is reached wherever the element of conscious intelligence intervenes. The savage, like the child, finds it hard to mimic the products of civilized man, in so far as these embody the application of the reasoning faculties, and the mode of thought elaborated through long ages by a cultivated race necessarily forms a stumbling-block to the Negro or the South American Chayma. The Ethics of Aristotle could not have been written in a Semitic language, and a Negro Goethe is a somewhat incongruous conception. Wherever the distance between the two languages or the two levels of culture is great enough, the attempt to imitate is either given up altogether or else becomes a failure. The modes of thought of the borrower are read into the language he borrows. The Chinaman endeavoured to assimilate English, and the result was the Pigeon-English of Canton, a jargon in which we have a framework of English reared upon Chinese grammar and Chinese pronunciation. The difficulty of reproducing a cultivated language of foreign origin, or a language based upon a wholly alien conception of things and their relations, may be illustrated by the difficulty of translating accurately books written in another tongue. However closely related two languages may be, the various shades of meaning they attach to corresponding words or idioms will necessarily differ, and the more cultivated the style of a writer, the more impossible will it be to represent it exactly in a translation.
Where a language is not borrowed bodily, or at any rate engrafted upon the old modes of thinking and expression, it may yet exercise a greater or less influence upon a neighbouring language. Words, sounds, idioms, suffixes, and even grammatical forms may be and constantly are borrowed from one dialect by another; and it is not too much to say that a thoroughly pure and unmixed language does not exist among the civilized races of mankind. Our own English is a superstructure of Norman-French and Latin upon a foundation of Anglo-Saxon, and nine-tenths of the Hindi language is Sanskrit. No people can have neighbours close to them without receiving something from them in the shape of inventions, products, or social institutions; and these almost inevitably are adopted under foreign names. Thus the French have taken meeting and comfortable from us, and we have received naïve and éclat in return from them. Such loan-words are of great use in tracing the history and distribution of civilization, as well as the geographical and social relationships of the past. Boomerang proves our intercourse with the natives of Australia, from whom we have derived both the idea and the name of the weapon; pew, the Dutch puyde, puye, “a pulpit” or “reading-desk,” from the Latin podium, reveals the close connection that existed between the Churches of England and Holland in the seventeenth century, while words like maize, hammock, canoe, and tobacco, derived as they are from Haytian through the medium of Spanish, show as plainly as ordinary history that the Spaniards must have been the discoverers of America and the introducers of its products into the West. By similar reasoning we infer that the Baltic provinces must have been inhabited by a Teutonic population at the time when the Romans received amber from them under the name of glæsum (our glass), and Professor Thomsen has proved that the Finns must have bordered on Scandinavians and Teutons some two thousand or more years ago from the number of words borrowed by Finnish from their languages.
Sounds, again, may be borrowed from one language by another, or native sounds modified through the influence of a foreign tongue. The easier of the Hottentot clicks have been borrowed by the Kafirs, and the Souletin dialect of Basque has admitted the French vowel u. Idioms, too, may pass readily from one tongue to another. Words like avenir and contrée in French, are the result of an attempt to express German idioms in the Romance of the conquered provincials, avenir or ad venire being a literal translation of the German zu-kunft, and contrée for contrata (terra), a curious representative of the German gegend, “country,” as derived from gegen, “against.” The great extension of the English plural in -s, confined as it was in Anglo-Saxon to a comparatively few words, seems due to Norman-French influence, and the use of the genitive and dative of the personal pronouns in English “of me,” “to me,” in the place of the Anglo-Saxon min and me, is modelled after a French pattern. Bulgarian and Roumanian seem to have caught the infection of Albanian usage in which the definite article is attached to the end of the word, as in the Roumanian domnu-l, “the lord,” and Persian has even adopted the Semitic order of words so repugnant to the general structure of the Aryan group, in saying dăst-ĭ-’Umăr, for “Omar’s hand.” For instances of borrowed suffixes, we have only to point to our English -ize and -ist from the Greek -ιζ-ω and -ιστ-ης, which tend to supersede the old corresponding suffixes of the language, and the French participial termination is imitated in the letter of Gawin Douglas to Richard II. (1385), where we find such phrases as “Zour honourable lettres contenand,” and “brekand the trewis.”
The borrowing of grammatical forms is of much rarer occurrence, inasmuch as grammar is the essence and life blood of language, and to borrow the forms of grammar, therefore, is to intermingle the psychological histories of two separate tongues. It is a metamorphosis of the whole inherited mode of thinking and of viewing the relations of things to ourselves and one another, and to mix two grammars together is like mixing two different and incompatible modes of thought. A supposed instance of a mixed grammar (that is, of a mixed language) generally turns out to have another explanation. Thus it has been believed that the modern Aryan languages of India have substituted agglutinated postfixes for flection, and so have adopted the grammatical machinery of their Dravidian neighbours. Thus in Gujerati, dêv-mā̃ means “in the god,” like the Hindustani ãdhe-mē̃, “in the blind,” and in Nepalese mânis-visê is “in man,” mā̃ or mē̃ being a contraction of the Sanskrit madhyê (= madhya-i), “in the middle,” and visê of visayê, “in the thing.” What has really happened in these cases, however, is this. The first noun instead of being provided with the locative suffix (-i) is compounded with another noun which still retains the suffix, and the locative signification accordingly resides not in the second member of the compound, but in its worn-away flection. Here, then, there is no example of grammatical confusion. There are other instances of “mixed grammar,” however, which cannot be so easily disposed of, and it would really seem that in rare cases there actually has been an interchange of grammatical forms between two unallied languages. Thus in Assamese, which appears to be at bottom an Aryan language, the plural affix (bilak) is inserted between the noun and the case-ending, so that from manuh-bilak, “men,” we get the genitive manuh-bilak-or, the dative manuh-bilak-oloi, the accusative manuh-bilak-ok, the locative manuh-bilak-ot, and the ablative manuh-bilak-e, where the postpositions are all of them said to be of non-Aryan origin. The language of Harar, in Northern Africa, again, though apparently belonging to the Semitic family of speech, makes use of postpositions, and reverses the Semitic order of words when employing the genitive; while, according to Schott, the Persian affix of the dative and accusative was originally a Turanian postposition. Cases like these must, of course, be carefully distinguished from those in which we are dealing with an artificial language and not with the spoken language of the people. A curious language of this kind, the Pehlevi, was formed in the courts of the Sassanian princes of Persia, in which the elements of Aryan and Semitic grammar were mixed together in a strange fashion, but such a language did not penetrate beyond the limits of the learned class. Of the same nature are such affected plurals as termini and fungi from terminus and fungus in English, or the genitive and dative Christi and Christo in theological German. They would not be understood beyond the boundaries of a narrow circle.[88]
The most usual way in which the grammar of one language is influenced by that of another is by the adaptation of existing words and forms to express new grammatical ideas and relations imported from abroad. Thus the Assyrians became familiarized with the distinction between present and past time through their acquaintance with the extinct Accadian of ancient Chaldea, and they accordingly set apart certain separate phonetic forms, which had previously existed side by side without any difference of meaning, to express the present and the past tense.[89] So Spiegel[90] believes that he has discovered the influence of Semitic grammar in the Zend use of the feminine to denote a neuter or abstract, and of the dual to denote a pair. The invariable rule of the ancient Maya of placing the adjective after its substantive, is sometimes violated in the modern language through the influence of Castilian,[91] and the Ragusan custom of using the Illyrian svoj, “his own,” in the place of njegòv, “his,” is referred by Brugman to the influence of Italian and German.[92]