J denotes palatalized or mouillées characters, w labialized or veloutées characters, wj labio-palatalized or mixtes characters, ⌊ a weakened consonant, a doubled letter or group of letters an emphasized consonant, a prefixed . a semi-emphasized consonant, prefixed ˎ an alveolarized or dentalized or “advanced” consonant, a prefixed ˏ a “retracted” consonant, and ȷ a semi-palatalized or semi-mouillée consonant.[234]

MR. SWEET’S NARROW ROMIC ALPHABET AND LIST OF SYMBOLS.[235]

CHAPTER V.
THE MORPHOLOGY OF SPEECH.

“In der Wirklichkeit wird die Rede nicht aus ihr vorangegangenen Wörtern zusammengesetzt, sondern die Wörter gehen umgekehrt aus dem ganzen der Rede hervor.”—W. von Humboldt.

“Rien n’autorise donc à admettre deux moments dans la création du langage: un premier moment, où il n’aurait eu que des radicaux, à la manière chinoise, et un second moment, où il serait arrivé à la grammaire.”—Renan.

We have seen in an earlier chapter that the form under which our thought may express itself in language is capable of many variations. The minds of men and races are very various, and what may seem a perfectly natural mode of thought and expression to one man may be wholly strange and unnatural to another. It is as difficult for us to realize the conception of the sentence formed by the Chinaman, as it is for the Chinaman to realize ours. The world wears a different aspect to different individuals, and the relation of the speaker to the things about him may be regarded in widely different ways. Races start each with a peculiar temperament and peculiar characteristics; indeed, it is just these peculiarities that constitute what we call a race. And race peculiarities become strengthened by time and tradition, by the continuous influence of the circumstances which have at once created and fostered them. What may have been only a tendency in the beginning becomes in the end a settled and permanent feature; the germ develops into the full-grown organism, and in the course of ages makes explicit all the possibilities that lie implicit within it. The manifold races of mankind do not all think in the same manner, and the divergent modes in which they think are reflected in the languages they utter.

Hence it is that languages can be classed morphologically, that is, according to the form assumed by the sentence. Here the sentence may be built, as it were, around a verb, there any conception of a verb may be absent; here its several parts may be regarded as so many equipollent monads, set one against the other, there as interdependent pieces of a Chinese puzzle which all fit into their appropriate places. In one class of tongues the root may be monosyllabic, in another polysyllabic; one language may interpose the stem between the root and the grammatical suffix, another may know nothing of such an intermediary. Morphologically, therefore, languages differ from each other in the structure of the sentence and the grammatical relation of its parts.

Now we must not forget that the idea of race has not the same signification for the glottologist that it has for the physiologist. For the student of language it means an assemblage of psychological and physiological peculiarities which are expressed in articulate speech. For him the European Jew, who has no language but that of the country in which he is settled, is a member of the European race; only the Jew whose mother-tongue belongs to the Semitic stock can be reckoned a Semite. At the outset, no doubt, race meant the same thing in both a glottological and a physiological sense. The characteristics which reflected themselves in language were characteristics of which the physiologist has to take account. But the physiological races of the modern world are far more mixed than the languages they speak; the physiologist has much more difficulty in distinguishing his races than has the glottologist in distinguishing his families of speech.