If we wished to represent these three stages of language algebraically, we might represent the first by RR, using R as the symbol of a root which has suffered no phonetic decay; the second, by R + ρ or ρ + R, or ρ + R + ρ representing by ρ an empty word that has suffered phonetic change; the third, by rρ, or ρr, or ρrρ, when both full and empty words have been changed, and have become welded together into one indistinguishable mass through the intense heat of thought, and by the constant hammering of the tongue.
Those who are acquainted with the works of Humboldt will easily recognize, in these three stages or strata, a classification of language first suggested by that eminent philosopher. According to him languages can be classified as isolating, agglutinative,[7] and inflectional, and his definition of these three classes agrees in the main with the description just given of the three strata or stages of language.
But what is curious is that this threefold classification, and the consequences to which it leads, should not at once have been fully reasoned out, nay, that a system most palpably erroneous should have been founded upon it. We find it repeated again and again in most works on Comparative Philology, that Chinese belongs to the isolating class, the Turanian languages to the combinatory, the Aryan and Semitic to the inflectional; nay, Professor Pott[8] and his school seem convinced that no evolution can ever take place from isolating to combinatory and from combinatory to inflectional speech. We should thus be forced to believe that by some inexplicable grammatical instinct, or by some kind of inherent necessity, languages were from the beginning created as isolating or combinatory, or inflectional, and must remain so to the end.
It is strange that those scholars who hold that no transition is possible from one form of language to another, should not have seen that there is really no language that can be strictly called either isolating, or combinatory, or inflectional, and that the transition from one stage to another is in fact constantly taking place under our very noses. Even Chinese is not free from combinatory forms, and the more highly developed among the combinatory languages show the clearest traces of incipient inflection. The difficulty is not to show the transition of one stratum of speech into another, but rather to draw a sharp line between the different strata. The same difficulty was felt in Geology, and led Sir Charles Lyell to invent such pliant names as Eocene, Meiocene, and Pleiocene, names which indicate a mere dawn, a minority, or a majority of new formations, but do not draw a fast and hard line, cutting off one stratum from the other. Natural growth, and even merely mechanical accumulation and accretion, here as elsewhere, are so minute and almost imperceptible that they defy all strict scientific terminology, and force upon us the lesson that we must be satisfied with an approximate accuracy. For practical purposes Humboldt’s classification of languages may be quite sufficient, and we have no difficulty in classing any given language, according to the prevailing character of its formation, as either isolating, or combinatory, or inflectional. But when we analyze each language more carefully we find there is not one exclusively isolating, or exclusively combinatory, or exclusively inflectional. The power of composition, which is retained unimpaired through every stratum, can at any moment place an inflectional on a level with an isolating and a combinatory language. A compound such as the Sanskrit go-duh, cow-milking, differs little, if at all, from the Chinese nieou-jou, vaccæ lac, or in the patois of Canton, ngau ü, cow-milk, before it takes the terminations of the nominative, which is, of course, impossible in Chinese.
So again in English New-town, in Greek Nea-polis, would be simply combinatory compounds. Even Newton would still belong to the combinatory stratum; but Naples would have to be classed as belonging to the inflectional stage.
Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and the Dravidian languages belong in the main to the combinatory stratum; but having received a considerable amount of literary cultivation, they all alike exhibit forms which in every sense of the word are inflectional. If in Finnish, for instance, we find käsi, in the singular, hand, and kädet, in the plural, hands, we see that phonetic corruption has clearly reached the very core of the noun, and given rise to a plural more decidedly inflectional than the Greek χεῖρ-ες, or the English hand-s. In Tamil, where the suffix of the plural is gaḷ, we have indeed a regular combinatory form in kei-gaḷ, hands; but if the same plural suffix gaḷ is added to kal, stone, the euphonic rules of Tamil require not only a change in the suffix, which becomes kaḷ, but likewise a modification in the body of the word, kal being changed to kar. We thus get the plural karkaḷ which in every sense of the word is an inflectional form. In this plural suffix gaḷ, Dr. Caldwell has recognized the Dravidian taḷa or daḷa, a host, a crowd; and though, as he admits himself in the second edition (p. 143), the evidence in support of this etymology may not be entirely satisfactory, the steps by which the learned author of the Grammar of the Dravidian languages has traced the plural termination lu in Telugu back to the same original suffix kaḷ admit of little doubt.
Evidence of a similar kind may easily be found in any grammar, whether of an isolating, combinatory, or inflectional language, wherever there is evidence as to the ascending or descending progress of any particular form of speech. Everywhere amalgamation points back to combination, and combination back to juxtaposition, everywhere isolating speech tends towards terminational forms, and terminational forms become inflectional.
I may best be able to explain the view commonly held with regard to the strata of language by a reference to the strata of the earth. Here, too, where different strata have been tilted up, it might seem at first sight as if they were arranged perpendicularly and side by side, none underlying the other, none presupposing the other. But as the geologist, on the strength of more general evidence, has to reverse this perpendicular position, and to re-arrange his strata in their natural order, and as they followed each other horizontally, the student of language too is irresistibly driven to the same conclusion. No language can by any possibility be inflectional without having passed through the combinatory and isolating stratum; no language can by any possibility be combinatory without clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum of isolation. Unless Sanskrit and Greek and Hebrew had passed through the combinatory stratum, nay, unless, at some time or other, they had been no better than Chinese, their present form would be as great a miracle as the existence of chalk (and the strata associated with it) without an underlying stratum of oolite (and the strata associated with it;) or a stratum of oolite unsupported by the trias or system of new red sandstone. Bunsen’s dictum, that “the question whether a language can begin with inflections, implies an absurdity,” may have seemed too strongly worded: but if he took inflections in the commonly received meaning, in the sense of something that may be added or removed from a base in order to define or to modify its meaning, then surely the simple argument ex nihilo nihil fit is sufficient to prove that the inflections must have been something by themselves, before they became inflections relatively to the base, and that the base too must have existed by itself, before it could be defined and modified by the addition of such inflections.
But we need not depend on purely logical arguments, when we have historical evidence to appeal to. As far as we know the history of language, we see it everywhere confined within those three great strata or zones which we have just described. There are inflectional changes, no doubt, which cannot as yet be explained, such as the m in the accusative singular of masculine, feminine, and in the nominative and accusative of neuter nouns; or the change of vowels between the Hebrew Piel and Pual, Hiphil and Hophal, where we might feel tempted to admit formative agencies different from juxtaposition and combination. But if we consider how in Sanskrit the Vedic instrumental plural, aśvebhis (Lat. equobus), becomes before our very eyes aśvais (Lat. equis), and how such changes as Bruder, brother, and Brüder, brethren, Ich weiss, I know, A.S. wât, and Wir wissen, we know, A.S. wit-on, have been explained as the results of purely mechanical, i.e., combinatory proceedings, we need not despair of further progress in the same direction. One thing is certain, that, wherever inflection has yielded to a rational analysis, it has invariably been recognized as the result of a previous combination, and wherever combination has been traced back to an earlier stage, that earlier stage has been simple juxtaposition. The primitive blocks of Chinese and the most perplexing agglomerates of Greek can be explained as the result of one continuous formative process, whatever the material elements may be on which it was exercised; nor is it possible even to imagine in the formation of language more than these three strata through which hitherto all human speech has passed.
All we can do is to subdivide each stratum, and thus, for instance, distinguish in the second stratum the suffixing (R + ρ) from the prefixing (ρ + R), and from the affixing (ρ + R + ρ) languages.