A true nominative case-ending, such as Latin and the other varieties of Indo-European evince, is an exceedingly specialized formation; yet is found in the Maidu language of California. Articles, in regard to which Indo-European varies, Latin for instance being without, while its Romance daughter tongues have developed them, recur in Semitic, in Polynesian, and in several groups of American languages, such as Siouan and Hokan. The growth in Romance is significant because of its historicity, and because it was surely not due to imitation of an unrelated language. That is, French developed its articles independently and secondarily; a fact that makes it probable that many languages in other parts of the world, whose history we do not know, developed theirs in a parallel manner, as a product of wholly internal causes—“invented” them, in short, although wholly unconsciously.
A trait found in a large proportion of the American languages is the so-called incorporation of the object pronoun (§ [51]). The objective pronoun, or an element representing it, is prefixed or suffixed to the verb, made a part of it. The process is familiar enough to us from Indo-European so far as the subject is concerned: in Latin ama-s, ama-t, ama-nt, the suffixes express “you, he, they” and pronouns comparable to the English ones—independent words—are usually omitted. The -s in he love-s is the sole survival of the process in modern English. None of the older Indo-European tongues however showed an inclination to affix similar elements for the objects, although there are some approaches in a few recent languages of the family: Spanish diga-me, “tell me,” and mata-le, “kill him,” for instance. Semitic on the other hand, and Basque, do “incorporate” objective elements, whereas most Asiatic and some American languages do not. Many other instances of parallel or convergent traits could be cited.
This greater frequency of parallel developments in language than in culture is perhaps in part due to easier demonstrability in the field of speech. But in the main the higher frequency seems real. Two reasons for the difference suggest themselves.
First, the number of possibilities is small in language, so far as structure is concerned. The categories or concepts used for classifying and for the indication of relations are rigorously limited, and so are the means of expression. The distinctions expressed by gender, for instance, may refer to sex, animateness, personality, worth, shape, position, or possibly one or two other qualities; but there they end. If a language recognizes gender at all, it must have gender of one of these few types. Consequently there is some probability of several unconnected languages sooner or later happening upon the same type of gender. Similarly, for the kinds of number, and of case, and so on, that are denotable. These larger categories, like gender and number and case, are not numerous. Then, the means of expressing such relational and classificatory concepts are limited. There is position or relative order of words; compounding of them; accretions of elements to stems, namely prefixes, infixes, and suffixes; reduplication, the repetition of part or the whole of words; internal changes by shift of vowel or accent within words; and therewith the types of grammatical means are about exhausted. The number of possible choices is so small that the law of accidental probability must cause many languages to hit upon the same devices.
A second reason for the greater frequency of parallelism in language is that structural traits appear to resist diffusion by imitation to a considerable degree. Words are borrowed, sometimes freely, almost always to some degree, between contiguous languages; sounds considerably less; grammar least of all. That is, linguistic content lends itself to diffusion readily, linguistic form with difficulty.
At bottom, the same holds of culture. Specific elements of culture or groups of such elements diffuse very widely at times and may be said to be always tending to diffuse: the wheel, for instance, smelting of metals, the crown as a symbol of royalty, the swastika, Buddhism. The relations of elements among themselves, on the other hand, change by internal growth rather than external imitation. Of this sort are the relations of the classes and members of societies, the fervor with which religion is felt, the esteem accorded to learning or wealth or tradition, the inclination toward this or that avenue of subsistence or economic development. By conquest or peaceful pressure or penetration one people may shatter the political structure or social fabric of another, may undermine its conservatism, may swerve its economic habits. But it is difficult to find cases of one people adopting such tendencies or schemes of cultural organization in mere imitation of the example of another, as it will adopt specific culture content—the wheel or crown or Buddhism, for instance—from outside, often readily. The result is that culture relations or forms develop spontaneously or from within rather than as a result of direct taking over. Also, the types of culture forms being limited in number, the same type is frequently evolved independently. Thus monarchical and democratic societies, feudal or caste-divided ones, priest-ridden and relatively irreligious ones, expansive and mercantile or self-sufficient and agricultural nations, evolve over and over again. On the whole, comparative culture history more often deals with the specific contents of civilization, perhaps because events like the spread of an invention can be traced more definitely and exactly than the rather complex evolutions of say two feudal systems can be compared. The result is that diffusions seem to outweigh parallels; as is set forth in several of the chapters that follow this one (§ [105], [111], [127]).
In comparative linguistics, on the other hand, interest inclines to the side of form rather than content; hence the parallelisms or convergences are conspicuous. If as much attention were generally given to words as to grammar, and if they could be traced in their prehistoric or unrecorded wanderings as reliably as many culture traits have been, it is probable that diffusion would loom larger as a principle shaping human speech. There are words that have traveled almost as far as the objects they denote: tobacco and maize, for example. And the absorption of words of Latin origin into English was as extensive as the absorption for over a thousand years of Latin, Christian, and Mediterranean culture by the English people—went on as its accompaniment and result.
61. Convergent Languages
Parallel development in speech form is not restricted to traits like sex gender and object incorporation. It may affect whole languages. Chinese a long time ago became an extremely analytical or “isolating” language. That is, it lost all affixes and internal change. Each word became an unalterable unit. Sentences are built up by putting together these atoms. Grammatical relations are expressed by the order of words: the subject precedes the predicate, for instance. Other ideas that in many languages are treated formally, such as the plural or person, are expressed by content elements, that is, by other words: many for the plural, separate pronouns instead of affixes for person, and so on. The uniformly monosyllabic words of Chinese accentuate this isolating character, which however does not depend intrinsically upon the monosyllabism. In the Indo-European family, as already mentioned, there has been a drift in the same direction during the last two thousand years. This drift toward loss of formal mechanisms and toward the expression of grammar by material elements or their position only, has been evident in all branches of Indo-European, but has been most marked in English. The chief remnants of the older inflectional processes in spoken English of to-day are four verb endings, -s, -ed, -ing, -en; three noun endings, the possessive -’s and the plurals -s and -en, the latter rare; the case ending -m in whom, them; a few vowel changes for plurals, as in man—men, and goose—geese; and perhaps two hundred vowel changes in verbs, like sing, sang, sung. Compared with Latin, Sanskrit, or even primitive Germanic, this brief list represents a survival of possibly a tenth of the original synthetic inflectional apparatus. That is, English has gone approximately nine tenths of the way towards attaining a grammar of the Chinese type. A third language of independent origin, Polynesian, has traveled about the same distance in the same direction. Superficially it is less like Chinese in that it remains prevailingly polysyllabic, but more like it in having undergone heavy phonetic attrition. This then is a clear case of entire languages converging toward a similar type.
Another instance is found in the remarkable resemblances in plan of structure of Indo-European, especially in its older forms, and of the Penutian group of languages in native California. Common to these two families are an apparatus of similar cases, including accusative, genitive, locative, ablative, instrumental; plural by suffix; vowel changes in the verb according to tense and mode; a passive and several participles and modal forms expressed by suffixes; pronouns either separate or expressed by endings fused with the tense-modal suffixes. Thus, the processes which make English sing, sang, sung, song, or bind, bound, band, bond, are substantially identical with those which have produced in Penutian Yokuts such forms as shokud, pierce, shukid-ji, pierced, shokod, perforation or hole, shikid, piercer or arrow. In short, most of the traits generally cited as constituting the Indo-European languages typically inflectional, reappear in Penutian, and of course independently as regards their origin and history.