The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study

by C. F. Keary

But what, we may ask, are the causes which put a stop to the free growth and development of language? One of these causes is the invention of writing. Language itself is of course spoken language, speech, and as such is subject to no laws save those which belong to our organs of speaking and hearing. No sooner is the word spoken than it is gone, and lives only in the memory; and thus speech, though it may last for centuries, dies, as it were, and comes to life again every hour. It is with language as it is with those national songs and ballads which, among nations that have no writing, take the place of books and histories. The same poem or the same tale passes from mouth to mouth almost unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet at no moment is it visible and tangible, nor for the most part of the time audible even, but for these centuries lives on in men’s memories only. So Homer’s ballads must have passed for several hundred years from mouth to mouth; and, stranger still, stories which were first told somewhere by the banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes by distant ancestors of ours, are told to this very day, little altered, by peasants in remote districts of England and Scotland. But to return to language. It is very clear that so long as language remains speech and speech only, it is subject to just so many variations as, in the course of a generation or two, men may have introduced into their habits of speaking. Why these variations arise it is perhaps not quite easy to understand; but every one knows that they do arise, that from age to age, from generation to generation, not only are new words being continually introduced, and others which once served well enough dropped out of use, but constant changes are going on in the pronunciation of words. As we have already said, if left to itself a language would not remain quite the same in two different districts. We know, for instance, that the language of common people does differ very much in different counties, so that what with varieties of pronunciation, and what with the use of really peculiar words, the inhabitants of one county are scarcely intelligible to the inhabitants of another.

This constant change in language can be resolved, so to say, into two forces—one of decay, the other of renewal. The change which each word undergoes is of the nature of decay. It loses something from its original form. But then, out of this change, it passes into new forms; and very often out of one word, by this mere process of change in sound, two words spring. We have already seen instances of how this may come about. The Anglo-Saxon agân becomes in process of time agone, as we have seen. That word again, by a further process of decay, changes into ago. So far we have nothing but loss. But then the Old English agân had only the same meaning as our past participle gone.[26] So now we have two words really in the place of one, and where formerly men would have said, ‘It is a long time agone,’ or ‘That man has lately agone,’ we now can say, ‘It is a long time ago,’ ‘The man has lately gone.’ And we may in any language watch this process of decay (phonetic decay, as it is called) and regeneration (dialectic regeneration, the philologists call it) ever going forward. We see, as it were,—

‘The hungry ocean gain
Advantage o’er the kingdom of the shore;
And the firm soil win of the watery main
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store.’

The influence which keeps a language together, and tends to make changes such as these as few as possible, is that of writing. When once writing has been invented it is clear that language no longer depends upon the memory only, no longer has such a seemingly precarious tenure of life as it had when it was no more than speech. The writing remains a strong bulwark against the changes of time. Although our written words are but the symbols of sound, they are symbols so clear that the recollection of the sound springs up in our minds the moment the written word comes before our eyes. So it is that there are hundreds of words in the English language which we should many of us not use once in a lifetime, which are yet perfectly familiar to us. All old-fashioned words which belong to the literary language, and are never used now in common life, would have been forgotten long ago except for writing. The fact, again, that those provincialisms which make the peasants of different counties almost mutually unintelligible do not affect the intercourse of educated people, is owing to the existence of a written language.

Chinese.

It was at one time thought by philologists that in Chinese we had a genuine specimen of a language in the radical stage of formation. As such it is cited, for instance, in Professor Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language. But the most trustworthy Chinese scholars are, I believe, now of opinion that the earliest Chinese of which we can find any trace had already passed through this stage and become an agglutinative language, and that it has since decayed somewhat from that condition to become once more almost a monosyllabic language.

However that may be, it is acknowledged that Chinese has never passed beyond a very primitive condition, and that its having rested so long in this state is due more than anything else to the early invention of writing in that country. We know how strange has been the whole history of civilization in China. How the Chinese, after they had made long ago an advance far beyond all their contemporaries at that date of the world’s history, seem to have suddenly stopped short there, and have remained ever since a stunted incomplete race, devoid of greatness in any form. Their character is reflected very accurately in their language. While it was still in a very primitive condition writing was introduced into the country, and from that time forward the tongue remained almost unchanged. Other languages which are closely allied to Chinese—Burmese, Siamese, and Thibetan—are so nearly monosyllabic that they can scarcely be considered to have yet got fairly into the agglutinative stage.

It is, then, writing which has preserved for us Chinese in the very primitive condition in which we find it. For people in a lower order of civilization there may be many other causes at work to prevent an agglutinative language

Turanian
languages.

becoming inflexional. It is not always easy to say what the hindering causes have been in any individual case; but perhaps, if we look at the difference between the last two classes of language, we can get some idea of what they might be for the class of agglutinative languages as a whole. An inflexional language has quite lost the memory of the real meaning of its inflexions—or at least the real reason of them. We could give no reason why we should not use bought in the place of buy, art in the place of am, whom in the place of who—no other reason save that we have always been taught to use the words in the position they take in our speech. But there was once a time when the changes only existed in the form of additions having a distinct meaning. Even in agglutinative languages these additions have a distinct meaning as additions, or, in other words, if we were using an agglutinative language we should be always able to distinguish the addition from the root, and so should understand the precise effect of the former in modifying the latter. To understand the use of words in an agglutinative language, therefore, a great deal less of tradition and memory would be required than are wanted to preserve an inflected language. This really is the same as saying that for the inflected language we must have a much more constant use; and this again implies a greater intellectual life, a closer bond of union among the people who speak it, than exists among those who speak agglutinative languages.