Or if we look at the change from another point of view, we can say that the cause of the mixing up of the root, and its addition came at first from a desire to shorten the word and to save time—a desire which was natural to people who spoke much and had much intercourse. We may then, from these various considerations, conclude that the people who use the agglutinative languages are people who have not what is called a close and active national life. This is exactly what we find to be the case. If a primitive language, such as the Chinese, belongs to a people who have, as it were, developed too quickly, the agglutinative languages, as a class, distinguish a vast section of the human race whose natural condition is a very unformed one, who are for the most part nomadic races without fixed homes, or laws, or states. They live a tribal existence, each man having little intercourse save with those of his immediate neighbourhood. They are unused to public assemblies. Such assemblies take among early peoples almost the place of literature, in obliging men to have a common language and a united national life. Being without these controlling influences, it results that the different dialects and tongues belonging to the agglutinative class are almost endless. It is not our intention to weary the reader by even a bare list of them. But we may glance at the chief heads into which these multifarious languages may be grouped, and the geographical position of those who speak them.
The agglutinative tongues include the speech of all those peoples of Central Asia whom in common language we are wont to speak of as Tartars, but whom it would be more correct to describe as belonging to the Turkic or Mongol class, and of whom several different branches—the Huns, who emigrated from the borders of China to Europe; the Mongols or Moghuls, who conquered Persia and Hindustan; and lastly, the Osmanlîs, or Ottomans, who invaded Europe and founded the Turkish Empire—are the most famous, and most infamous, in history. Another large class of agglutinative languages belongs to the natives of the vast region of Siberia, from the Ural mountains to the far east. Another great class, closely allied to these last, the Finnish tongues namely, once spread across all the northern half of what is now European Russia, and across North Scandinavia; but the people who spoke them have been gradually driven to the extreme north by the Russians and Scandinavians. Lastly, a third division is formed by those languages which belonged to the original inhabitants of Hindustan before the greater part of the country was occupied by the Hindus. These languages are spoken of as the Dravidian class. The natural condition of these various nations or peoples is, as we have said, a nomadic state, a state in which agriculture is scarcely known, though individual nations out of them have risen to considerable civilization. And as in very early times ancestors of ours who belonged to a race speaking an inflexional language bestowed upon some part of these nomadic people the appellation Tura, which means ‘the swiftness of a horse,’ from their constantly moving from place to place, the word Turanian has been applied to all these various peoples, and the agglutinative languages are spoken of generally as Turanian tongues.
Aryan and
Semitic
languages.
And now we come to the last—the most important body of languages—the inflected; and we see that for it have been left all the more important nations and languages of the world. Almost all the ‘historic’ people, living or dead, almost all the more civilized among nations, come under this our last division: the ancient Egyptians, Chaldæans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as the modern Hindus and the native Persians, and almost all the inhabitants of Europe, with the countless colonies which these last have spread over the surface of the globe. The class of inflected languages is separated into two main divisions or families, within each of which the languages are held by a tie of relationship. Just as people are of the same family when they recognize their descent from a common ancestor, so languages belong to one family when they can show clear signs that they have grown out of one parent tongue. We may be sure that we are all the children of the first pair, and we may know in the same way that all languages must have grown and changed out of the first speech. But the traces of parentage and relationship are in both cases buried in oblivion; it is only when we come much farther down in the history of the world that we can really see the marks of distinct kinship in the tongues of nations separated by thousands of miles, different in colour, in habits, in civilization, and quite unconscious of any common fatherhood.
Kinship in
languages.
Now as to the way in which this kinship among languages may be detected. Among some languages there is such a close relationship that even an unskilled eye can discover it. When we see, for instance, such likenesses as exist in English and German between the very commonest words of life—kann and can, soll and shall, muss and must, ist and is, gut and good, hart and hard, mann and man, für and for, together with an innumerable number of verbs, adjectives, substantives, prepositions, etc., which differ but slightly one from another—we may feel sure either that the English once spoke German, that the Germans once spoke English, or that English and German have both become a little altered from a lost language which was spoken by the ancestors of the present inhabitants of England and Deutsch-land. As a matter of fact the last is the case. English and German are brother languages, neither is the parent of the other. Now having our attention once called to this relationship, we might, any of us who know English and German, at once set about making a long list of words which are common to the two languages; and it would not be a bad amusement for any reader just to turn over the leaves of a dictionary and note how many German words (especially of the common sort) they find that have a corresponding word in English. The first thing we begin to see is the fact that the consonants form, as it were, the bones of a word, and that changes of a vowel are, as a rule, comparatively unimportant provided these remain unaltered. The next thing we see is that even the consonants do not generally remain the same, but that in place of one such letter in one language, another of a sound very like it appears in the other language.
For instance, we soon begin to notice that ‘T’ in German is often represented by ‘D’ in English, as tag becomes day; tochter, daughter; breit, broad; traum, dream; reiten, ride; but sometimes by ‘TH’ in English, as vater becomes father; mutter, mother. Again, ‘D’ in German is often equal to ‘TH’ in English, as dorf, thorpe; feder, feather; dreschen, thrash (thresh); drängen, throng; der (die), the; das, that. Now there is a certain likeness common to these three sounds, ‘T,’ ‘D,’ and ‘TH,’ as any one’s ear will tell him if he say te, de, the. As a matter of fact they are all pronounced with the tongue pressed against the teeth, only in rather different places; and in the case of the last sound, the,[27] with a breath or aspirate sent between the teeth at the same time. So we see that, these letters being really so much alike in sound, there is nothing at all extraordinary in one sound becoming exchanged for another in the two languages. We learn, therefore, to look beyond the mere appearance of the word, to weigh, so to speak, the sounds against each other, and to detect likenesses which might perhaps otherwise have escaped us. For instance, if we see that CH in German is often represented by GH in English—in such words as tochter, daughter; knecht, knight; möchte, might; lachen, laugh,—we have no difficulty in now seeing how exactly durch corresponds to our through. For we have at the beginning the d which naturally corresponds to our t, the r remains unchanged, and the ch naturally corresponds to our gh; only the vowel is different in position, and that is of comparatively small account. Nevertheless at first sight we should by no means have been inclined to allow the near relationship of durch and through. Thus our power of comparison continually increases, albeit a knowledge of several languages is necessary before we can establish satisfactory rules or proceed with at all sure steps.
When we have acquired this knowledge there are few things more interesting than noting the changes which words undergo in the different tongues, and learning how to detect the same words under various disguises. And when we have begun to do this, it is by comparing the words of our own language with corresponding words in the allied tongues German, Norse, or Dutch, whatever it may be, that we are most frequently reminded of the meaning of words which have half grown out of use with us. As, for instance, when the German Leiche (corpse) reminds us of the meaning of lich-gate (A.S. lica, a corpse) and Lichfield; or the Norse moos, a marshy or heathy region, explains our moss-troopers. I doubt if most people quite know what sea-mews are, still more if the word mewstone (which, for example, is the name of a rock near Plymouth) would at once call up the right idea into their mind. But the German Möwe, sea-gull, makes it all plain. How curious is the relationship between earth and hearth, which is exactly reproduced in the German Erde and Herde! or the obsolete use of the word tide for ‘time’ (the original meaning of the tides—the ‘times,’) in the expression ‘Time and tide wait for no man’! But in the Norse we have the same expression Tid og Time, which signifies exactly Macbeth’s ‘time and the hour.’ And of course these words, our tide, Norse Tid, are the correspondants of the German zeit. When once we have detected how often the German z corresponds to the English t—as in Zahn, tooth; Zehe, toe; Zählen, to tell (i.e., to count); Zinn, tin—we have no difficulty in seeing that our town may correspond to the German Zaun, a hedge: and we guess, what is in fact the case, that the original meaning of town was only an enclosed or empaled place. The relationship of our fee to the German Vieh, cattle, and the proof that the earliest money with us was cattle-money, would, at first sight, be perhaps not so easily surmised by a mere comparison of German and English words. These are only one or two of the ten thousand points of interest which rise up before us almost immediately after we have, so to say, stepped outside the walls of our own language into the domains of its very nearest relations.
Nor is the interest of this kind of comparison less great very often in the case of proper names. The smaller family—or, as we have used the word family to express a large class of languages, let us say the branch to which English and German belong—is called the Teutonic branch. To that branch belonged nearly all those barbarian nations who, towards the fall of the Roman empire, began the invasion of her territories, and ended by carving out of them most of the various states and kingdoms of modern Europe. The best test we have of the nationalities of these peoples, the best proof that they were connected by language with each other and with the modern Teutonic nations, is to be found in their proper names. We have, for instance, among the Vandals such names as Hilderic, Genseric, and the like; we compare them at once with Theodoric and Alaric, which were names of famous Goths. Then as the Gothic language has been preserved we recognize the termination rîk or rîks in Gothic, meaning a ‘king,’ and connected with the German reich, and also with the Latin rex—Alaric becomes al-rik, ‘all-king,’ universal king. In Theodoric we recognize the Gothic thiudarik, ‘king of the people.’ Again, this Gothic word thiuda is really the same as the German deutsch, or as ‘Dutch,’ and is the word of which ‘Teutonic’ is only a Latinized form. In the same way Hilda-rik in Gothic is ‘king of battles;’ and having got this word from the Vandals we have not much difficulty in recognizing Childeric, the usually written form of the name of a Frankish king, as the same word. This change teaches us to turn ‘CH’ of Frankish names in our history-books into ‘H,’ so that instead of Chlovis (which should be Chlodoveus) we first get Hlovis, which is only a softened form of Hlodovig, or Hludwig, the modern Ludwig, our Louis. Hlud is known to have meant ‘famous’[28] and wig a ‘warrior,’ so that Ludwig means famous warrior. The same word ‘wig’ seems to appear in the word Merovingian, a Latinized form of Meer-wig,[29] which would mean sea-warrior.
These instances show us the kind of results we obtain by a comparison of languages. In the case of these names, for instance, we have got enough to show a very close relationship amongst the Vandals, the Goths, and the Franks; and had we time many more instances might have been chosen to support this conclusion. Here, of course, we have been confining ourselves to one small branch of a large family. The road, the farther we go, is beset with greater difficulties and dangers of mistake, and the student can do little unless he is guided by fixed rules, which we should have to follow, supposing we were able to carry on our inquiries into many and distant languages. We may, to some extent, judge for ourselves what some of these guiding rules must be.