Take the languages. A Sanskrit word, or a Greek, or Old Gothic, or Latin, is a living organism, a little articulate being. There is his spine, the root; his body, the stem; his limbs and head, the formative elements, prefixes and suffixes, case-endings and what not. Let him loose in the sentence, and see how he wriggles gaily from state to state: with a flick of the tail from nominative to genitive, from singular to plural: declaring his meaning, not by means of what surroundings you put about him, but by motions, changes, volitions so to say, of his own. 'Now,' says he, 'I'm pater, and the subject; set me where you will, and I am still the subject, and you can make nothing else of me.' Or, 'Now,' says he, 'I'm patrem, and the object; go look for my lord the verb, and you shall know what's done to me; be he next door, or ten pages away, I am faithful to him.' Patrem filius amat, or filius amat patrem, or in whatever order it may be, there is no doubt who does, and who (as they say) suffers the loving.—But now take a word in English. You can still recognise him for the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy: father is no such far cry from pater:—but oh what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just lumps backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in him, as you may say. No longer will he declare his meaning of himself; it must depend on where you choose to put him in the sentence.—Among the mountains of Europe, the grand Alps are the parvenus; the Pyrenees look down on them; and the Vosges on the Pyrenees; and—pardon me!—the little old time-rounded tiny Welsh mountains look down on them all from the heights of a much greater antiquity. They are the smallest of all, the least jagged and dramatic of all; time and the weather have done most to them. The storm, like the eagle of Gwern Abwy in the story, has lighted on their proud peaks so often, that that from which once she could peck at the stars in the evening, rises now but a few thousand feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the Welsh mountains. Every word is worn perfectly smooth and round. There is no sign left at all of prefix or suffix, root or stem. There are no parts of speech: any word without change can do duty for any part of speech. There is no sign of case or number: all has been reduced to an absolute simplicity, beyond which there is no going. Words can end with no consonant but the most rounded of all, the nasal liquids n and ng. There is about as much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages—you can trace about as much analogy between them—as you can between a centipede and a billiard-ball.
There are definite laws governing the changes of language. You know how the Latin castrum became in English ciaster and then chester; the change was governed by law. The same law makes our present-day vulgar say cyar for car; that word, in the American of the future, will be something like chair. The same law makes the same kind of people say donchyer for don't you; some day, alas! even that will be classical and refined American. Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times even on the Chinese billiard-ball: where Confucius said Ts'in like a gentleman, the late Yuan Shi Kai used to say Ch'in. So did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to do. So we ourselves have turned Ts'in into China.—And that is the one little fact—or perhaps one of the two or three little facts—that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin.
But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan might some day—after millions of years—wear down or evolve back even into billiard-ball Chinese? That human language is one thing; and all the differences, the changes rung on that according to the stages of evolution?
In the Aryan group of languages, the bond of affinity is easily recognisable: the roots of the words are the same: Pitri, pater, vater, are clearly but varying pronunciations of the same word. In the Turanic group, however—Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Tatar, Mongol and Manchu—you must expect no such well-advertised first-cousinship. They are grouped together, not because of any likeness of roots: not because you could find one single consonant the same in the Lappish or Hungarian, say, and in the Mongol or Manchu words for father—you probably could not;—but because there may be syntactical likenesses, or the changes and assimilations of sounds may be governed by the same laws. Thus in Turkic—I draw upon the Encyclopaedia Britannica—there is a suffix z, preceded by a vowel, to mean your: pederin is 'father'; 'your father' becomes pederiniz; dostun means 'friend'; 'your friend' becomes not dostuniz, but dostunus; and this trick of assimilating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish the relationship of the group. As for likeness of roots, here is a specimen: gyordunus is the Turkish for the Finnish naikke.—So here you see a degree of kinship much more remote than that you find in the Aryan. Where, say, Dutch and Gaelic are brothers—at least near relations and bosom friends,—Turkish and Mongol are about fifteenth cousins by marriage twice removed, and hardly even nod to each other in passing. And yet Turks and Mongols both claim descent from the sons of a common father: according to legends of both peoples, the ancestor of the Turks was the brother of the ancestor of the Mongols. (Always remember that in speaking of Turks thus scientifically, one does not mean the Ottomans, who inherit their language, but are almost purely Caucasian or even Aryan, in blood.)
Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group: Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan. Here there are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relationship. They do not meet on the street; they pass by on the other side, noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other's existence. They suppose they are akin—through Adam; but whould tell you that much has happened since then. Their kinship consists in this: the words are each are billiard-balls—and yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes. Thus I should call a Tibetan name like nGamri-srong-btsan a good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one like T'ang Tai-tsong a perfectly round smooth one of the kind we know.—The languages are akin, because each say, where we should say 'the horse kicked the man,' horse agent man kicking completion, or words to that effect,—dapped out nearly in spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables. But the words for horse and man, in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively as much phonetic likeness as geegee and equus, and Smith and Jones. As to the value and possibilities of such languages, I will quote you two pronouncements, both from writers in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. One says: "Chinese has the greatest capacity of any language ever invented"; the other, "The Chinese tongue is of unsurpass jejuneness."
In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, shih, pronounced like the first three letters in the word shirt in English. That vocable may mean: history, or to employ, or a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time, poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a house, and all such things as that;—I mention a few out of the list by way of example.* Now of course, were that all to be said about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused: would think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus Ts'in meant one country, and Tsin another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them, for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You pronounce shih one tone—you sing it on the right note, so to say, and it means poetry; you take that tone away, and give it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes a corpse:—as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress on you it really does.—Of course the hieroglyphs, the written words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of elements from those all our languages depend on. We have solid words that you can spell: articles built up with the bricks of sound-stuff we call letters: c-a-t cat, d-o-g dog, and so on;—but their words, no; nothing so tangible: all depends on little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,—and above all, musical tones. Now then, which is the more primitive? Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the spiritual, pole?
———- * Encyclopaedia Britannica: article, China: Language. ———-
More primitive—I do not know. Only I think when the Stars of Morning sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy; when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies of our ancestors; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight, quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;
"They prayed, but their worship was only
The wonder of nights and of days,"
—when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the poems of the earth was made:—it was song, it was tone, it was music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language: seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps: and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the Glory of God. And then—was it like this?—they grew material, and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit; and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis with its complex civilization—its infinitely more complex civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing human brain; and a thousand languages were formed—many of them to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America—as much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese: highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up and filigreed beyond telling;—and that was at the midmost point and highest material civilization of Atlantis. And then the Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of the first sub-race;—till you had something in character not intellectual, but spiritual:—Chinese. And meanwhile—I am throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second appears to contradict the first: presently a unity may come of them;—meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,— but also spiritual: not without tonalistic elements: a thing to be chanted, and not dully spoken:—and there, when the time came for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.