Lectures on the Science of Language

by F. Max Müller

As long as every word, or part of a word, is felt to express its own radical meaning, a language belongs to the first or radical stage. As soon as such words as tse in ģi-tse, day, li in ŭŏ-li, at home, or ỳ in ỳ-ćáng, with the stick, lose their etymological meaning and become mere signs of derivation or of case, language enters into the second or Terminational stage.

By far the largest number of languages belong to this stage. The whole of what is called the Turanian family of speech consists of Terminational or Agglutinative languages, and this Turanian family comprises in reality all languages spoken in Asia and Europe, and not included under the Aryan and Semitic families, [pg 289] with the exception of Chinese and its cognate dialects. In the great continent of the Old World the Semitic and Aryan languages occupy only what may be called the four western peninsulas, namely, India with Persia, Arabia, Asia Minor, and Europe; and we have reason to suppose that even these countries were held by Turanian tribes previous to the arrival of the Aryan and Semitic nations.

This Turanian family is of great importance in the science of languages. Some scholars would deny it the name of a family; and if family is only applicable to dialects so closely connected among themselves as the Aryan or Semitic, it would no doubt be preferable to speak of the Turanian as a class or group, and not as a family of languages. But this concession must not be understood as an admission that the members of this class start from different sources, and that they are held together, not by genealogical affinity, but by morphological similarity only.

These languages share elements in common which they must have borrowed from the same source, and their formal coincidences, though of a different character from those of the Aryan and Semitic families, are such that it would be impossible to ascribe them to mere accident.

The name Turanian is used in opposition to Aryan, and is applied to the nomadic races of Asia as opposed to the agricultural or Aryan races.

The Turanian family or class consists of two great divisions, the Northern and the Southern.

The Northern is sometimes called the Ural-Altaic or Ugro-Tataric, and it is divided into five sections, the Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Finnic, and Samoyedic.

The Southern, which occupies the south of Asia, is divided into four classes, the Tamulic, or the languages of the Dekhan; the Bhotîya, or the dialects of Tibet and Bhotan; the Taïc, or the dialects of Siam, and the Malaic, or the Malay and Polynesian dialects.

No doubt if we expected to find in this immense number of languages the same family likeness which holds the Semitic or Aryan languages together, we should be disappointed. But the very absence of that family likeness constitutes one of the distinguishing features of the Turanian dialects. They are Nomad languages, as contrasted with the Aryan, and Semitic languages.[301] In the latter most words and grammatical forms were thrown out but once by the creative power of one generation, and they were not lightly parted with, even though their original distinctness had been blurred by phonetic corruption. To hand down a language in this manner is possible only among people whose history runs on in one main stream; and where religion, law, and poetry supply well-defined borders which hem in on every side the current of language. Among the Turanian nomads no such nucleus of a political, social, or literary character has ever been formed. Empires were no sooner founded than they were scattered again like the sand-clouds of the desert; no laws, no songs, no stories outlived the age of their authors. How quickly language can change, if thus left to itself without any literary standard, we saw in a former Lecture, when treating of the growth of dialects. The most necessary substantives, such as father, mother, daughter, son, have frequently been lost and [pg 291] replaced by synonymes in the different dialects of Turanian speech, and the grammatical terminations have been treated with the same freedom. Nevertheless, some of the Turanian numerals and pronouns, and many Turanian roots, point to a single original source; and the common words and common roots, which have been discovered in the most distant branches of the Turanian stock, warrant the admission of a real, though very distant, genealogical relationship of all Turanian speech.

The most characteristic feature of the Turanian languages is what has been called Agglutination, or “gluing together.”[302] This means not only that, in their grammar, pronouns are glued to the verbs in order to form the conjugation, or prepositions to substantives in order to form declension. That would not be a distinguishing characteristic of the Turanian or nomad languages; for in Hebrew as well as in Sanskrit, conjugation and declension were originally formed on the same principle. What distinguishes the Turanian languages is, that in them the conjugation and declension can still be taken to pieces; and although the terminations have by no means always retained their significative power as independent words, they are felt as modificatory syllables, and as distinct from the roots to which they are appended.