Ogimauoginissaunmukwun.
chiefhe-didkill-himbear-him.
Mukwahoginissaunogimaun.
bearhe-didkill-himchief-him.

This gives a notion of the natural manner in which grammatical government may have come into use to mark the parts of the sentence. At the same time, it shows that different languages may go different ways to work, for here the verb and object agree together, and the subject (so to speak) governs both, which is quite unlike our familiar rule of the verb agreeing with the nominative or subject. To see the working of concord or agreement in a far clearer and completer form than Latin can show it, we may look at the Hottentot language, where a sentence may run somewhat thus, “That woman-she, our tribe’s-she, rich-being-she, another village-in-dwelling-she, praise-we-do cattle-of-she, she-does present-us two calves-of-she-from.” Here the pronoun running through the whole sentence makes it clear to the dullest hearer that it is the woman who is rich, who dwells in another village, whose cattle are praised, and who gives two of her calves. The terminations in a Greek or Latin sentence, which show the agreement of substantive and adjective with their proper verb, are remains of affixes which may have once carried their signification as plainly as they still do in the language of the Hottentots. A different plan of concord, but even more instructive to the classical scholar, appears in the Zulu language, which divides things into classes, and then carries the marking syllable of the class right through the sentence, so as to connect all the words it is attached to. Thus “u-bu-kosi b-etu o-bu-kulu bu-ya-bonakala si-bu-tanda,” means “our great kingdom appears, we love it.” Here bu, the mark of the class to which kingdom belongs, is repeated through every word referring to it. To give an idea how this acts in holding the sentence together, Dr. Bleek translates it by repeating the dom of kingdom in a similar way; “the king-dom, our dom, which dom is the great dom, the dom appears, we love the dom.” This is clumsy, but it answers the great purpose of speech, that of making one’s meaning certain beyond mistake. So, by using different class-syllables for singular and plural, and carrying them on through the whole sentence, the Zulu shows the agreement in number more plainly than Greek or Latin can do. But the Zulu language does not recognise by its class-syllables what we call gender. It is in fact one of the puzzles of philology, what can have led the speaker of Aryan languages like Greek, or Semitic languages like Hebrew, to classify things and thoughts by sex so unreasonably as they do. For Latin examples, take the following groups: pes (masc.), manus (fem.), brachium (neut.); amor (masc.), virtus (fem.), delictum (neut.). German shows gender in as practically absurd a state, as witness der Hund, die Ratte; das Thier, die Pflanze. In Anglo-Saxon, wîf (English wife), was neuter, while wîf-man (i.e. “wife-man,” English woman) was masculine. Modern English, in discarding an old system of grammatical gender that had come to be worse than useless, has set an example which French and German might do well to follow. Yet it must be borne in mind that the devices of language, though they may decay into absurdity, were never originally absurd. No doubt the gender-system of the classic languages is the remains of an older and more consistent plan. There are languages outside our classical education which show that gender (that is genus, kind, class,) is by no means necessarily according to sex. Thus in the Algonquin languages of North America, and the Dravidian languages of South India, things are divided not as male or female, but as alive or dead, rational or irrational, and put accordingly in the animate or major gender, or in the inanimate or minor gender. Having noticed how the Zulu concord does its work by regularly repeating the class-sign, we seem to understand how in the Aryan languages the signs of number and gender may have come to be used as a similar means of carrying through the sentence the information that this substantive belongs to that adjective and that verb. Yet even in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic, such concord falls short of the fulness and clearness it has among the barbarians of Africa, while in the languages of modern Europe, especially our own, it has mostly disappeared, probably because with the advance of intelligence it was no longer found necessary.

The facts in this chapter will have given the reader some idea how man has been and still is at work building up language. Any one who began by studying the grammars of such languages as Greek or Arabic, or even of such barbarous tongues as Zulu or Eskimo, would think them wonderfully artificial systems. Indeed, had one of these languages suddenly come into existence among a tribe of men, this would have been an event mysterious and unaccountable in the highest degree. But when one begins at the other end, by noticing the steps by which word-making and composition, declension and conjugation, concord and syntax, arise from the simplest and rudest beginnings, then the formation of language is seen to be reasonable, purposeful, and intelligible. It was shown in the last chapter that man still possesses the faculty of bringing into use fresh sounds to express thoughts, and now it may be added that he still possesses the faculty of framing these sounds into full articulate speech. Thus every human tribe has the capabilities which, had they not inherited a language ready-made from their parents, would have enabled them to make a new language of their own.

CHAPTER VI.
LANGUAGE AND RACE.

Adoption and loss of Language, [152]—Ancestral Language, [153]—Families of Language, [155]—Aryan, [156]—Semitic, [159]—Egyptian, Berber, &c. [160]—Tatar or Turanian, [161]—South-East Asian, [162]—Malayo-Polynesian, [163]—Dravidian, [164]—African, Bantu, Hottentot, [164]—American, [165]—Early Languages and Races, [165].

The next question is, What can be learnt from languages as to the history of the nations speaking them, and the races these nations belong to?

In former chapters, in dividing mankind into stocks or races according to their skulls, complexions, and other bodily characters, language was not taken into account as a mark of race. In fact, a man’s language is no full and certain proof of his parentage. There are even cases in which it is totally misleading, as when some of us have seen persons whose language is English, but their faces Chinese or African, and who, on inquiry, are found to have been brought away in infancy from their native countries. It is within every one’s experience how one parent language disappears in intermarriage, as where persons called Boileau or Muller may be now absolutely English as to language, in spite of their French or German ancestry. Now not only individuals but whole populations may have their native languages thus lost or absorbed. The negroes shipped as slaves to America were taken from many tribes and had no native tongue in common, so that they came to talk to one another in the language of their white masters, and there is now to be seen the curious spectacle of black woolly-haired families talking broken-down dialects of English, French, or Spanish. In our own country the Keltic language of the Ancient Britons has not long since fallen out of use in Cornwall, as in time it will in Wales. But whether the Keltic language is spoken or not, the Keltic blood remains in the mixed population of Cornwall, and to class the modern Cornishmen as of pure English race because they speak English, would be to misuse the evidence of language. Much bad anthropology has been made by thus carelessly taking language and race as though they went always and exactly together. Yet they do go together to a great extent. Although what a man’s language really proves is not his parentage but his bringing-up, yet most children are in fact brought up by their own parents, and inherit their language as well as their features. So long as people of one race and speech live together in their own nation, their language will remain a race-mark common to all. And although migration and intermarriage, conquest and slavery interfere, from time to time, so that the native tongue of a nation can never tell the whole story of their ancestry, still it tells a part of it, and that a most important part. Thus in Cornwall the English tongue is a real record of the settlement of the English there, though it fails to tell of the Keltic race who were in the land before them, and with whom they mixed. In a word, the information which the language of a nation gives as to its race is something like what a man’s surname tells as to his family, by no means the whole history, but one great line of it.

It has next to be seen what the languages of the world can show as to the early history of nations. Great care has to be taken with the proofs of connexion between languages. It is of little use to compare two languages as old-fashioned philologists were too apt to do when, if they found half-a-dozen words at all similar, they took these without more ado to be remnants of one primitive tongue, the origin of both. In the more careful philological comparisons of the present day many similarities of words have to be thrown aside as not proving connexion at all. In any two languages a few words are sure to be similar by mere accident, as where, in the Society Islands, tiputa means a cloak, like tippet with us. Words must only be compared when there is a real correspondence of meaning as well as sound, or the way would be opened for fancies like that of a writer who connects the well known Polynesian word tabu, sacred, with tabut, the Arabic name of the ark of the covenant, apparently because that was a very sacred object. Also, words imitated from nature prove nothing in this way, as where the Hindus and the savages of Vancouver’s Island both call a crow kaka, this being not because their languages are connected, but because it is the bird’s cry. What is most important of all is to make sure that the words compared really belong to the old stock of the language they are found in. Before now a writer has proved to his own satisfaction that Turkish, Arabic, and Persian are all branches of one primitive language, his argument being that the Turks call a man adam, as the Arabs call the first man, and a father pader, which is like the Persian word. The fact is true enough, but what the argument omits to notice is that the Turks have been for ages enriching their own barbaric language by taking words from the cultured Arabic and Persian, and adam and pader are such lately borrowed words, not philologically Turkish at all. Borrowed words like these are indeed valuable evidence, but what they prove is not the common origin of languages, it is intercourse between the nations speaking them. They often give the clue to the country from which some new produce was obtained, or some new instrument, or idea, or institution, was learnt. Thus in English it is seen by the very words how Italy furnished us with opera, sonata, chiaroscuro, while Spain gave gallina and mulatto, how from the Hebrews we have sabbath and jubilee, from the Arabs zero and magazine, while Mexico has supplied chocolate and tomato, Haiti hammock and hurricane, Peru guano and quinine, and even the languages of the South Sea Islands are represented by taboo and tatoo. But in all this there is not one particle of evidence that any one of these languages is sprung from the same family with any other.