“4. As in the case of the comparison with Mongol, it is necessary in examining the connection of Tibetan with Chinese to adopt the old form of the Chinese with its more numerous final consonants, and its full system of soft, hard, and aspirated initials. The Tibetan numerals exemplify this with sufficient clearness.
“5. While the Mongol is near the Chinese in the extensive prevalence of words common to the two languages, the Tibetan is near in phonal structure, as being tonic and monosyllabic. This being so, it is less remarkable that there are many words common to Chinese and Tibetan, for it might have been expected; but that there should be perhaps as many in the Mongol with its long untoned polysyllables, is a curious circumstance.”[27]
This is no doubt the right spirit in which researches into the early history of language should be conducted, and I hope that Mr. Edkins, Mr. Chalmers, and others, will not allow themselves to be discouraged by the ordinary objections that are brought against all tentative studies. Even if their researches should only lead to negative results, they would be of the highest importance. The criterion by which we test the relationship of inflectional languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, cannot, from the nature of the case, be applied to languages which are still in the combinatory or isolating stratum, nor would they answer any purpose, if we tried by them to determine whether certain languages, separated during their inflectional growth, had been united during their combinatory stage, or whether languages, separated during their combinatory progress, had started from a common centre in their monosyllabic age. Bopp’s attempt to work with his Aryan tools on the Malayo-Polynesian languages, and to discover in them traces of Aryan forms, ought to serve as a warning example.
However, there are dangers also, and even greater dangers, on the opposite shore, and if Mr. Chalmers in his interesting work on “the Origin of Chinese,” compares, for instance, the Chinese tzé, child, with the Bohemian tsi, daughter, I know that the indignation of the Aryan scholars will be roused to a very high pitch, considering how they have proved most minutely that tsi or dci in Bohemian is the regular modification of dugte, and that dugte is the Sanskrit duhitar, the Greek θυγάτηρ, daughter, originally a pet-name, meaning a milk-maid, and given by the Aryan shepherds, and by them only, to the daughters of their house. Such accidents[28] will happen in so comprehensive a subject as the Science of Language. They have happened to scholars like Bopp, Grimm, and Burnouf, and they will happen again. I do not defend haste or inaccuracy, I only say, we must venture on, and not imagine that all is done, and that nothing remains to conquer in our science. Our watchword, here as elsewhere, should be Festina lente! but, by all means, Festina! Festina! Festina!
[Part II.]
ON CURTIUS’ CHRONOLOGY
OF THE INDO-GERMANIC LANGUAGES.
In a former Lecture on the “Stratification of Language” I ventured to assert 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 simply juxtaposition.
Professor Pott in his “Etymologische Forschungen” (1871, p. 16), a work which worthily holds its place by the side of Bopp’s “Comparative Grammar,” questions the correctness of that statement; but in doing so he seems to me to have overlooked the restrictions which I myself had introduced, in order to avoid the danger of committing myself to what might seem too general a statement. I did not say that every form of inflection had been proved to spring from a previous combination, but I spoke of those cases only where we have succeeded in a rational analysis of inflectional forms, and it was in these that I maintained that inflection had always been found to be the result of previous combination. What is the object of the analysis of grammatical inflections, or of Comparative Grammar in general, if not to find out what terminations originally were, before they had assumed a purely formal character? If we take the French adverb sincèrement, sincerely, and trace it back to the Latin sincerâ mente, we have for a second time the three stages of juxtaposition, combination, and, to a certain extent, inflection, repeated before our eyes. I say, inflection, for ment, though originally an independent word, soon becomes a mere adverbial suffix, the speakers so little thinking of its original purport, that we may say of a stone that it falls lourdement, heavily, without wishing to imply that it falls luridâ mente, with a heavy, lit., with a lurid mind.
If we take the nom. sing. of a noun in Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin, we find that masculine nouns end frequently in s. We have for instance, Sk. veśa-s, Gr. οἶκο-ς, Lat. vîcu-s. These three words are identical in their termination, in their base, and in their root. The root is the Sk. viś, to settle down, to enter upon or into a thing. This root, without undergoing any further change, may answer the purpose both of a verbal and a nominal base. In the precative, for instance, we have viś-yâ-t, he may enter, which yields to a rational analysis into viś, the root yâ, to go, and the old pronominal stem of the third person, t, he. We reduplicate the root, and we get the perfect vi-viś-us, they have entered. Here I can understand that objections might be raised against accepting us as a mere phonetic corruption of ant and anti; but if, as in Greek, we find as the termination of the third pers. plur. of the perfect ᾶσι, we know that this is a merely phonetic change of the original anti,[29] and this anti has been traced back by Pott himself (whether rightly or wrongly, we need not here inquire) to the pronominal stems ana, that, and ti, he. These two stems, when joined together, become anti,[30] meaning those and he, and are gradually reduced to ᾶσι, and in Sanskrit to us for ant. What we call reduplication has likewise been traced back by Pott himself to an original repetition of the whole root, so that vi-viś stands for an original or intentional viś-viś; thus showing again the succession of the three stages, juxtaposition, viś-viś, combination vi-viś, inflection, the same, vi-viś, though liable to further phonetic modification.
Used as a nominal base the same root viś appears, without any change, in the nom. plur. viś-as, the settlers, the clans, the people. Now here again Professor Pott himself has endeavored to explain the inflection as by tracing it back to the pronominal base as, in asau, ille. He therefore takes the plural viś-as as a compound, meaning “man and that;” that is to say, he traces the inflection back to a combinatory origin.
By raising the simple base viś to viśa, we arrive at new verbal forms, such as viś-â-mi, I enter, viś-a-si, thou enterest, viś-a-ti, he enters. In all these inflectional forms, the antecedent combinatory stage is still more or less visible, for mi, si, ti, whatever their exact history may have been, are clearly varieties of the pronominal bases of the first, second, and third persons, ma, tva, ta.