The most definite determinations promise to eventuate from experiment. If fully controlled experiments in breeding and rearing human beings could be carried out, the problems would soon begin to solve. Experiments on animals would prove practically nothing because animals are cultureless—uninfluenced by social environment of their own making.
Progress will be aided by increasing shift of attention from the crude consideration of comparative lump rating of the races, that is, their gross superiority or inferiority, to a consideration of such specific qualitative differences as they may prove to show. The question of finding the race in which the greatest number of qualitative excellences are concentrated is subsequent and of much less scientific importance.
Scientific inquiries into race are for the present best kept apart from so-called actual race problems. These problems inevitably involve feeling, usually of considerable strength, which tends to vitiate objective approach. On the other hand, the practical problems will no doubt continue to be met practically, that is, morally and emotionally. Whether the Japanese should be forbidden to hold land and the Negro be legally disfranchised are problems of economics and of group ethics, which probably will for a long time be disposed of emotionally as at present, irrespective of the possible findings of science upon the innate endowment of Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid strains.
CHAPTER V
LANGUAGE
[47.] Linguistic relationship: the speech family.—[48.] Criteria of relationship.—[49.] Sound equivalences and phonetic laws.—[50.] The principal speech families.—[51.] Classification of languages by types.—[52.] Permanence of language and race.—[53.] The biological and historical nature of language.—[54.] Problems of the relation of language and culture.—[55.] Period of the origin of language.—[56.] Culture, speech, and nationality.—[57.] Relative worth of languages.—[58.] Size of vocabulary.—[59.] Quality of speech sounds.—[60.] Diffusion and parallelism in language and culture.—[61.] Convergent languages.—[62.] Unconscious factors in language and culture.—[63.] Linguistic and cultural standards.—[64.] Rapidity of linguistic change.
47. Linguistic Relationship: The Speech Family
The question that the historian and anthropologist are likely to ask most frequently of the philologist, is whether this and that language are or are not related. Relationship in such connection means descent from a common source, as two brothers are descended from the same father, or two cousins from a common grandfather. If languages can be demonstrated to possess such common source, it is clear that the peoples who spoke them must at one time have been in close contact, or perhaps have constituted a single people. If, on the other hand, the languages of two peoples prove wholly dissimilar, though their racial types and cultures be virtually identical, as indeed is sometimes found to be the case—witness the Hungarians and their neighbors—it is evident that an element of discontinuous development must somewhere be reckoned with. Perhaps one part of an originally single racial group gradually modified its speech beyond recognition, or under the shock of conquest, migration, or other historical accident entirely discarded it in favor of a new and foreign tongue. Or the opposite may be true: the two groups were originally distinct in all respects, but, being brought in contact, their cultures interpenetrated, intermarriage followed, and the two physical types became assimilated into one while the languages remained dissimilar. In short, if one wishes full understanding of a people, one must take its language into consideration. This means that it must be classified. If a historical classification is to be more than barrenly logical, it must have reference to relationship, development, origin. In a word, it must be a genetic classification.
The term used to indicate that two or more languages have a common source but are unrelated to all others, or seem so in the present state of knowledge, is “linguistic family.” “Linguistic stock” is frequently used as a synonym. This is the fundamental concept in the classification of languages. Without a clear idea of its meaning one involves himself in confusion on attempting to use philology as an aid to other branches of human history.
There is no abstract reason against referring to a group of unrelated languages as a “family” because they are all spoken in one area, nor against denominating as “families,” as has sometimes been done, the major subdivisions of a group of languages admittedly of common origin. Again, languages that show certain similarities of type or structure, such as inflection, might conceivably be put into one “family.” But there is this objection to all such usages: they do not commit themselves on the point of genetic relationship, or they contradict it, or only partially exhaust it. Yet commonness of origin is so important in many connections that it is indispensable to have one term which denotes its ascertainable presence. And for this quality there happens to be no generally understood designation other than “linguistic family,” or its synonym, “linguistic stock.” This phrase will therefore be used here strictly in the sense of the whole of a group of languages sprung from a single source, and only in that sense. Other groupings will be indicated by phrases like “languages of such and such an area,” “subfamily,” “division of a family,” or “languages of similar type.”