3rdly. Analogous in great measure to the law which we have been mentioning (or perhaps we may say a further development of the same law), is the progress of language from Synthesis to Analysis.
We have seen that many ancient languages are polysynthetic or[222] holophrastic, i.e., that they produce the entire thought or sentence under the form of one complex and rich unity, and subordinate every word and phrase to the domination of the entire clause. Even in early Greek and Latin we may find traces of this “holophrasis” in the separation of two parts of the same word which was permissible by what is called tmesis, as for instance in such expressions as κατὰ δάκρυ χέουσα, and even κατὰ πίονα μήρι’ ἔκηα. In Latin the same licence is far more rare, although we find it in the lines, “Inque cruentatus,” &c., and it was retained in one or two compounds, as “Quo te cumque ferent.” In both languages these extreme cases early disappeared, and the startling audacity of Ennius in the famous
Cere comminuit brum,
for “comminuit cerebrum,” would probably have made Virgil stare and gasp, as much as[223] the modern
O Jo qui terras de cœlo despicis hannes.
But although nothing is left in the Indo-European languages but the faint traces of that sylleptical tendency which seems to have marked the earliest stage of language, they offer the most splendid examples of a perfect synthesis. By a facile power of composition, and by attaching to the verb and noun a variety of terminations capable of distinguishing the nicest modifications of meaning, they have produced an instrument of thought almost unrivalled in accuracy and beauty.
In Greek and Latin one word was enough to express alike the subject, copula, and predicate; in English, two are always requisite, and generally three. The single word τύπτω requires the three words—“I am striking”—to render it; to translate amabor in English or in German we require four words, “I shall be loved—Ich werde geliebt werden;” and the same is true of many other parts of the verb; as ἐτετιμήμεθα, periisses, “we had been honoured,” “you would have perished.”
At first sight this analysis may seem to be a defect, but, in point of fact, it is a development. It is a bad thing for the human mind to be subjected to the despotism of a rigid grammar, the tyranny of too perfect a form. As it is the danger of advancing civilisation and of too refined a society to reduce men to the dead level of uniformity, and subject every caprice of the individual to the domination of an unwritten code, called the “laws of society,” so a language which crystallises every relation in a definite form tends to cramp and restrain the genius of those who use it. In the tragedies of Æschylus and the odes of Pindar, marvellous as is the power which crams every rigid phrase with the fire of a hidden meaning, we yet feel that the form is cracking under the spirit, or at least there is a tension injurious to the general effect. A language which gets rid of its earlier inflections—English, for instance, as compared with Anglo-Saxon—loses far less than might have been supposed.
The progress of language from synthesis to analysis is that of the human intelligence. Later generations find the language of their ancestors too learned for their own use. For the unity, spontaneous but often obscure, of the primitive tongues, they substitute an idiom clearer and more explicit by giving a separate existence to every subject in the sentence. They break up the conglomerated jewels of old speech to reset them in an order less dazzling but more distinct. They sacrifice the magnificence of mystery to the light of distinct comprehension. Instead of one sentence, out of whose tangled intricacies flashed, all the more brightly from contrast, the rays of enthusiasm and genius, they attain to a logical accuracy which gives to each idea and each relation its isolated expression. What they lose in euphony, force, and poetic concision, they gain in the power of marking the nicest shades of thought; what they lose in[224] elasticity they gain in strength. If synthetic and agglutinative languages are the best instruments of imagination, analysis better serves the purposes of reflection. Splendid efflorescence is followed by ripe fruit.
It is thus[225] that Sanskrit, with its eight cases, six moods, and numerous inflections, capable of expressing a crowd of secondary ideas, decomposes first into the Pali (?), Prâkrit, and Kawi, dialects less rich and learned, but more precise, which substitute auxiliaries and prepositions for case and tense; and even these latter, too complex for ordinary use, are gradually displaced by the more vulgar dialects of Hindostan,—the Hindoo, the Mahrattah, and the Bengali.