Chinese, as we know, has been monosyllabic from the earliest period, and continues so to this day; and even Thibetian and Burmese,[235] though they have, under the influence of other languages, made great efforts to attain a grammar, have yet retained the ineffaceable impress of their original condition. We therefore reject this fourth law, as one which, even if possible, is by no means proven. Further discussion of it will, indirectly, be involved in the following chapter. At best, it can only be regarded as an artificial hypothesis, occasionally convenient for the purposes of the grammarian, but not corresponding to any real condition of the languages as once spoken.
[CHAPTER IX.]
THE FAMILIES OF LANGUAGES.
“Facies non omnibus una,
Nec diversa tamen, quales decet esse sororum.”—Virg.
It has been considered by many that language has passed through four[236] stages. 1. A period in which words succeed each other in the natural order of the thought, with nothing except this order to express their mutual relation, and with few or no inflections, as in Chinese. 2. A period of agglutination in which the smaller words to express relation have assumed an inflectional form, but without losing the trace of their originally distinct existence, as in Mongol and the majority of existing languages. 3. A period of amalgamation, in which the language becomes purely inflectional, as in Latin and Greek. 4. A period of analysis, in which inflections fall off and get displaced by separate words, auxiliaries, prepositions, &c., as in English.[237]
That languages exist in each of these conditions is undeniable, but that they represent an historical sequence is an inference which may well be disputed. The common à priori notion that complexity is a proof of development is, as we have already seen, entirely erroneous; since the languages of American savages and central Africans are surprising in their grammatical richness, and the bald monosyllabic Chinese is yet an adequate organ for a developed civilisation. The logical order is not the same as the historical. It is the opinion of M. Renan that each branch of languages was, from the first, pervaded by one dominant idea, which was due to the genius of the race by which it was produced, and that, from this idea, all further changes directly derive their origin. The entire language existed implicitly in its primitive stage, just as a bud contains entire every essential part of the full-grown flower. Languages once monosyllabic, for instance, have, he maintains, always continued so, and although some languages of the trans-Gangetic peninsula have effected a real progress in the direction of grammatical polysyllabism, yet an abyss still separates them from the languages which are truly grammatical,—an abyss which, he thinks, never has been and never can be bridged over.
But we shall be better able to enter on these most important considerations when we have glanced at the certain results respecting the classification of languages which have been at present established by modern philology.
Two families of languages, embracing a large and widely-separated number of the spoken languages of the globe, have now been distinctly recognised and clearly defined. These are the Indo-European, and the Semitic. The remaining languages, which are non-Semitic and non-Arian, have been recently included under the general name Turanian, and the high authority of Baron Bunsen and Prof. Max Müller has secured for this name a wide acceptation. We shall see hereafter that the semblance of unity in these languages, which is assumed by the adoption of this name, has been disputed by some of the ablest philologists, and at any rate the languages of the so-called Turanian family have far less real claim to the ties of mutual relationship than the members of the Semitic and Indo-European families.