But though a literature and more especially a widely extended literary education form the chief obstacle to the action of phonetic decay, there are other social influences which operate to the same end. Wherever there is a fixed and stable society, cut off from close intercourse with its neighbours and handing down unchanged its customs and institutions, we are likely to find a more or less fixed and stable language. For language is the mirror of the community that uses it, and where the community alters but little the language will alter but little too. It is in this way that we must explain the fact that Lithuanian, though unprotected by a literature and spoken by the least progressive of the European members of the Aryan family, is yet the most conservative of all the Western languages of our group, or that the Bedouin of Central Arabia is said to speak at the present day a more archaic language than those of Nineveh or Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. Since the institution of an annual fair among the Rocky Mountains the idioms of the eastern and western Eskimaux, who at first were hardly understood by one another, became more and more assimilated;[112] and the stationary character of Icelandic may be ascribed as much to the isolation of the settled Norse community in the island as to the existence of a literature. Of course, the community must be one which has reached a certain level of culture, and its customs and institutions must imply organization and recognition of fixed principles. Where the customs and institutions are founded on mere unreasoning habit and precedent, we are dealing with a community of barbarians, and consequently with languages or dialects in a perpetual state of flux.
The changes wrought by phonetic decay are sometimes sufficient to alter the whole aspect of a language, and are at once the foundation and the riddle of etymology. Who would recognize in the French même, for instance, any derivative from the Latin pronoun se? And yet même goes back to the Low Latin semetipsissimum through the Old Provençal smetessme, the later Provençal medesme and the Old French meïsme. Words of different origin, like scale from the Latin scala and the Anglo-Saxon scalu and scealu, may come to assume the same form; while words of the same origin, like the French captif and chétif, from captivus, or noel and natal from natalis, may appear under different forms. The processes of assimilation and swarabhakti, of metathesis and epenthesis, to be described in the next chapter, are so many forms under which phonetic decay displays itself. The history of language is the history of the continual weakening of uttered sounds and the gradual lessening of the demands made upon the organs of speech, and attempts like that to reduce the triliteral roots of the Semitic tongues to biliteral ones are contrary to the whole tendency of language. Accent alone is able to hold out against the assaults of phonetic decay; it is only the accented syllable that remains unchanged when all around it is perishing, and, as in the case of age from ætaticum or dine from desinere, is often all that is left of the primitive word. It is again the struggle between the principle of emphasis and the principle of laziness, between conservatism and revolution. Only when the accent is shifted to another syllable can phonetic decay gain the victory, and the shifting of the accent is itself the work of the principle of decay.
The principle of laziness has much to do with the creation of dialects. Slight variations of pronunciation and of the usage of words are as inevitable in language as variations of species in zoology, and where there is no correcting standard these variations are perpetuated and intensified. Helped by the two other causes of linguistic change, the dialect of a household becomes in time the dialect of a clan or tribe, and as soon as its characteristics are sufficiently numerous and distinct, the dialect is transformed into a language. An isolated community will by slow degrees form a new language for itself. Just as the history and character of one society differ from those of another, so too must the dialect or language differ in which the society finds expression. Even where the rapid and intimate intercourse of modern civilization and the safeguard of a common and widely-studied literature stand in the way, as in the case of England and America, dialectical differences and peculiarities will yet spring up. In savage and barbarous communities the growth of innumerable dialects is a matter of necessity. The manifold languages of the Malayan and Polynesian Archipelago can be traced back to a common source, but the natives of two neighbouring islands are often unintelligible to one another; while von der Gabelentz says of the Melanesians, that “every small island has its own language or even several languages.”[113] Before the utter extinction of the Tasmanians, with a population of no more than fifty persons there were four dialects, each with a different word for “ear,” “eye,” “head,” and other equally common objects. The language of a shifting unorganized community will reflect the condition of those who speak it, and we are not surprised, therefore, at Captain Gordon’s assertion that “some” of the Manipuran dialects “are spoken by no more than thirty or forty families, yet (are) so different from the rest as to be unintelligible to the nearest neighbourhood.” Humboldt tells us[114] that in South America, together with a great analogy of physical constitution, “a surprising variety of languages is observed among nations of the same origin, and which European travellers scarcely distinguish by their features.” Greece, with its small extent of country and still smaller amount of population, was said a few years back to possess no fewer than seventy dialects,[115] and no less than eight principal dialects besides several subordinate ones exist among the modern Basques, whose whole population is under 800,000.[116] Indeed, considering the isolation of the Basques, socially, politically, and linguistically, as well as the narrow tract of country into which they have been compressed, it is remarkable that natives of places not forty miles distant from one another are yet mutually unintelligible.[117] But the natural condition of language is diversity and change, and it is only under the artificial influences of civilization and culture that a language becomes uniform and stationary. As soon as the coercive hand of civilization is removed it breaks out again into a plentiful crop of dialects. Of course, the vicissitudes through which semi-civilized peoples are continually passing greatly assist the process of change. Conquest and the mixture consequent upon it, famine, disease, and migration, are all powerful aids to dialect-making. The women of a tribe who stay at home, or who have been married out of another tribe, sometimes possess a language different from that of the men; thus, the Carib women in the Antille Isles used a different tongue from that of their husbands, while the Eskimaux women in Greenland turn k into ng and t into n.[118] Even religion and superstition play their part in the work; the sacred language of the “medicine-men” in Greenland, for instance, is for the most part an arbitrary perversion of the significations of known words; thus tak, “darkness,” is used in the sense of “the north,” and so gives rise to two new words of this secret speech, tarsoak, “earth,” and tarsoarmis, “roots.” The custom of tapu among the Pacific Islanders, according to which every word which contains a syllable identical with some part of the name of the reigning chief has to be dropped or changed, is due to the belief that all things belonging to a chief are consecrated and inviolable. Since the reign of Queen Pomare mi has been substituted for po, “night,” in Tahitian, and Hale tells us of this language[119] that its “manner of forming new words seems to be arbitrary. In many cases the substitutes are made by changing or dropping some letter or letters of the original word, as hopoi for hepai, ... au for tau, &c. In other cases the word substituted is one which had before a meaning nearly related to that of the term disused.... In some cases the meaning or origin of the new word is unknown, and it may be a mere invention, as ofai for ohatu ‘stone,’ papai for vai, ‘water,’ pohe for mate, ‘dead.’” Similar to the Polynesian tapu is the Chinese custom of tabooing the elements of the reigning emperor’s name, and the ukuhlonipa, which forbids the Kafir women to pronounce a word containing a sound like one in the names of their nearest relations. Thus, “Mr. Leslie states that the wives of Panda’s sons would never call him (Mr. Leslie) by his Kafir name of u’ Lpondo, on account of its partial identity with that of the chief, their father-in-law. In the name of the river Amanzimtoti, ‘Sweet Waters,’ in like manner, mtoti has been substituted for mnandi, hlonipaed or tabooed on account of its occurring in the name of Tsaka’s mother Unandi.”[120]
The Abipones of South America similarly alter the names of the friends and relatives of a dead member of the tribe, and the words which entered into the composition of his name are dropped out of use.[121] For a parallel superstition we have only to think of the old European belief in the omen involved in the mere pronunciation of a word, which caused the Greek to speak of his left hand as ἀρίστερος, “the better one,” and the Roman to change Maleventum into Beneventum. The belief in the power of words, in the vis verbi as the Latin termed it, is even now not extinct, and the same feeling which altered the “Cape of Storms” into the “Cape of Good Hope” is still prevalent among us.
The sacred jargon of the Eskimaux sorcerer, which finds its analogue in the slang of the schoolboy, is merely one step lower than the ceremonial dialects which are to be met with all over the world. The Bhasa Krama or ceremonial language of Java, for example, like the ceremonial languages of the larger islands of Polynesia, or the ceremonial conjugation of the ancient Azteks, hedges in the upper classes of the community with a veritable tapu. So, too, the Japanese when addressing a superior has to speak of himself as gu-sau, “a stupid vegetable,” or yátsŭ-ko (contracted yákko), “house-boy,” and of another as nandzi, “famous,” or te-máye-san, “the gentleman at hand,” while o or on, “great,” is prefixed to all words which relate to the latter[122] and distinctive verbs and verbal forms employed expressive of courtesy.[123] The Chinaman is equally the slave of an artificial politeness; he is himself “the thief” (ts’ie), “the soft-brained” (’iu), while the person he addresses is “the honourable” (ling) or “the noble brother” (ling hiung).[124] The Indian bhavan, “present,” is construed with the third person in order to denote the second with ambiguous courtesy, and the same reluctance to place oneself on a footing of equality by a blunt “thou” shows itself in the Latin of the Hungarian, who will say “Dominus dignetur commodare mihi librum,” meaning the second person.[125] The ceremonial use of the pronouns reaches a still greater extreme in German, where in addition to the various titles with which “His Highly well-born,” “His most serene,” or “His Transparency” require to be addressed, the second person singular has to be represented sometimes by a masculine Er (“he”), sometimes by a feminine Sie (“she”), sometimes by a plural Sie (“they”). The latter reminds us of the Hebrew “pluralis majestatis,” and recalls our own employment of the plural you for the singular thou. Our usage in this respect was probably influenced by the French use of vous, and it is perhaps to the same influence that we may ascribe the Basque use of Zute, “you,” instead of Zu, “thou,” which seems of comparatively late introduction. Two Basque dialects, indeed, the Souletin and the east Low Navarese, have even developed a ceremonial conjugation, every person of which, except the second plural, assumes a special form when a superior is addressed. Besides the ceremonial conjugation there is also a feminine one, employed whenever a woman is spoken to. It must be remembered that the Basque verb is an amalgamation of the verbal root with the personal pronouns.
The rapid changes undergone by languages in a natural state can only be appreciated by those who have had experience of a tribe of wandering savages, or who have observed the alterations children would make in the language they learn if left to themselves. According to Waldeck, a dictionary compiled by Jesuit missionaries in Central America became useless within ten years; and Messerschmidt states that the inhabitants of Ostiak villages, only a mile or two apart, are unintelligible to one another.[126] The Hurons, Sagard stated in 1631, spoke such a variety of dialects that not only was the same language hardly to be heard in two adjacent villages, but even in two adjacent houses, and these multitudinous dialects he further described as changing every day. Mr. Trumbull, however, points out that Sagard’s account must be received with caution, since he says that the instability of language among the French was almost as great as among the Hurons, and his “very imperfect dictionary of this unstable language, 200 years or more after it was compiled, enabled Duponceau to make himself understood without apparent difficulty by the Wyandots, a remnant of the last nation of the Hurons.”[127]
But the following account given by Sir C. Lyell in his “Antiquity of Man,”[128] shows that it is not necessary for a community to be semi-civilized or barbarous in order to prove how rapidly a non-literary language can be transformed. “A German colony in Pennsylvania,” he says, “was cut off from frequent communication with Europe for about a quarter of a century, during the wars of the French Revolution, between 1792 and 1815. So marked had been the effect even of this brief and imperfect isolation, that when Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar travelled among them a few years after the peace, he found the peasants speaking as they had done in Germany in the preceding century, and retaining a dialect which at home had already become obsolete. Even after the renewal of the German emigration from Europe, when I travelled in 1841, among the same people in the retired valleys of the Alleghanies, I found the newspapers full of terms half-English and half-German, and many an Anglo-Saxon word which had assumed a Teutonic dress, as ‘fencen,’ to fence, instead of umzäunen; ‘flauer,’ for flour, instead of mehl, and so on.” Destroy literature and facility of intercommunication, and the languages of England and America would soon be as different as those of France and Italy.
It is civilization which counteracts the natural tendency to multiply dialects, and which is ever striving to absorb the manifold dialects that exist into a single tongue. All the social conditions of civilized life tend to break down dialects, to assimilate languages, and to create a common medium of intercourse. A common government, a common literature, a common history and a common law, all require a common language. The Macedonian Empire made Greek the language of the East, and Rome effectually stamped out the various idioms of its subjects in the West. It needed an invasion of barbarism and the overthrow of Roman organization and culture to restore the period of linguistic disunion. The Church remained the sole representative of civilization, and consequently the sole possessor of a common tongue. In fact, wherever civilization has made an advance, the action of the great causes of change in language has received a check. Every conquest over a horde of barbarians, every attempt to found a settled government, to establish a code of laws, to systematize a religion, or to originate a literature, is a step forward in the direction of linguistic unity. The practical aim of the science of language is the formation of a universal speech, and the time may yet come when the dream will be converted into a reality. The inventions of the present century—the steamer, the railway, and the telegraph—are bringing all parts of the world into a closer connection with one another, and abolishing the barriers created by differences of speech. Commerce demands a lingua franca, and now that commerce is world-wide its lingua franca must be world-wide also.
The language of the chief trading nations must finally prevail in the struggle for existence, and the prophecy has already been hazarded that pigeon-English, or a similar grammarless jargon, will be the future medium of universal intercourse. However this may be, the endeavour to revive the perishing languages of Europe, and to make the limits of speech the limits of nationality, is a reversal of the lesson of history and a return to primitive barbarism. It is but the transient reaction against the Empire of the first Napoleon, based on the false belief that language and race are convertible terms. But the endeavour, however flattering to nations without a history, is doomed to failure. Little by little the weaker languages and dialects of Europe are disappearing before the schoolmaster and the railway, and artificial nurture can alone protract their lingering existence. Gaelic and Welsh in our own islands, like Breton in France or Lithuanian in Germany and Russia, must share the fate which has already overtaken Cornish and Wendic. The last Wendic speaker, Frau Gülzsin, died on the Island of Rügen as long ago as 1404,[129] while Lithuanian is now used by scarcely a million and a half persons, in spite of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s plea for it as “a still unmixed language of an old people, now isolated and confined within narrow bounds,” which would throw light on the history of the past.[130] The tendency of time is to unify and simplify, and exact science even now has but one tongue throughout the world. The attempt of Bishop Wilkins to invent a universal language failed, not because it was premature, but because such a language, like all others, must be a spontaneous growth; a better fortune may await the Pasigraphy of Bachmaier,[131] which attempts to do for the man of literature what the Arabic ciphers have done for the mathematician, since writing differs from language in being a conscious human invention.
The history of the extinction of languages is similar to that of the extinction of dialects. We see the same process at work in both cases, only on a different scale. Where several dialects exist together, the one which belongs to the dominant class will finally prevail over the others. The “Queen’s English” is really the court dialect of Chaucer’s day, which became the dialect of literature and education, and so has succeeded in degrading its sister-dialects into illiterate provincialisms, and in many cases in destroying them altogether. Where the educated and ruling caste is small, the other dialects will continue to flourish among the mass of the people, and on the overthrow of the cultured class will once more assert their own. But in a democratic age like the present, when books and newspapers are multiplied by the printing press, and the whole nation is being leavened by the general spread of education, the dialect of civilization will sooner or later swallow up its less favoured sisters. The remarkable sameness of dialect which prevails among the Arabic-speaking populations of the East may be largely accounted for by the democratic spirit of Mahommedanism which holds all men equal before the supreme Khalif. It is, therefore, of the highest importance to comparative philology that the decaying dialects of our own or other countries should be observed and written down before they have perished. The history of a language can be traced only by a comparison of its dialects, which often preserve words and forms that have become obscure and inexplicable in the standard dialect itself. Where the allied dialects have disappeared, the chasm that divides the language we are studying from those with which it was once connected may be too wide to be easily spanned. For in language, as in everything else, dialect passes gradually and insensibly into dialect, and it is not until we compare the two extremes in the series that we are made aware of the accumulated differences which the transitions have involved.