The number of these roots was not very great (Curtius, l.c.; Wood 294). This seems a natural enough conclusion when we picture the earliest speech as the most meagre thing possible.
These few short monosyllabic roots were real words—this is a necessary assumption if we are to imagine a root stage as a real language, and it is often expressly stated; Curtius, for instance, insists that roots are real and independent words (C 22, K 132); cf. also Whitney, who says that the root VAK “had also once an independent status, that it was a word” (L 255). We shall see afterwards that there is another possible conception of what a ‘root’ is; but let us here grant that it is a real word. The question whether a language is possible which contains nothing but such root words was always answered affirmatively by a reference to Chinese—and it will therefore be well here to give a short sketch of the chief structural features of that language.
XIX.—§ 3. Structure of Chinese.
Each word consists of one syllable, neither more nor less. Each of these monosyllables has one of four or five distinct musical tones (not indicated here). The parts of speech are not distinguished: ta means, according to circumstances, great, much, magnitude, enlarge. Grammatical relations, such as number, person, tense, case, etc., are not expressed by endings and similar expedients; the word in itself is invariable. If a substantive is to be taken as plural, this as a rule must be gathered from the context; and it is only when there is any danger of misunderstanding, or when the notion of plurality is to be emphasized, that separate words are added, e.g. ki ‘some,’ šu ‘number.’ The most important part of Chinese grammar is that dealing with word order: ta kuok means ‘great state(s),’ but kuok ta ‘the state is great,’ or, if placed before some other word which can serve as a verb, ‘the greatness (size) of the state’; tsï niu ‘boys and girls,’ but niu tsï ‘girl (female child),’ etc. Besides words properly so called, or as Chinese grammarians call them ‘full words,’ there are several ‘empty words’ serving for grammatical purposes, often in a wonderfully clever and ingenious way. Thus či has besides other functions that of indicating a genitive relation more distinctly than would be indicated by the mere position of the words; min (people) lik (power) is of itself sufficient to signify ‘the power of the people,’ but the same notion is expressed more explicitly by min či lik. The same expedient is used to indicate different sorts of connexion: if či is placed after the subject of a sentence it makes it a genitive, thereby changing the sentence into a kind of subordinate clause: wang pao min = ‘the king protects the people’; but if you say wang či pao min yeu (is like) fu (father) či pao tsï, the whole may be rendered, by means of the English verbal noun, ‘the king’s protecting the people is like the father’s protecting his child.’ Further, it is possible to change a whole sentence into a genitive; for instance, wang pao min či tao (manner) k’o (can) kien (see, be seen), ‘the manner in which the king protects (the manner of the king’s protecting) his people is to be seen’; and in yet other positions či can be used to join a word-group consisting of a subject and verb, or of verb and object, as an adjunct (attribute) to a noun; we have participles to express the same modification of the idea: wang pao či min ‘the people protected by the king’; pao min či wang ‘a king protecting the people.’ Observe here the ingenious method of distinguishing the active and passive voices by strictly adhering to the natural order and placing the subject before and the object after the verb. If we put i before, and ku after, a single word, it means ‘on account of, because of’ (cf. E. for ...’s sake); if we place a whole sentence between these ‘brackets,’ as we might term them, they are a sort of conjunction, and must be translated ‘because.’[90]
XIX.—§ 4. History of Chinese.
These few examples will give some faint idea of the Chinese language, and—if the whole older generation of scholars is to be trusted—at the same time of the primeval structure of our own language in the root-stage. But is it absolutely certain that Chinese has retained its structure unchanged from the very first period? By no means. As early as 1861, R. Lepsius, from a comparison of Chinese and Tibetan, had derived the conviction that “the monosyllabic character of Chinese is not original, but is a lapse (!) from an earlier polysyllabic structure.” J. Edkins, while still believing that the structure of Chinese represents “the speech first used in the world’s grey morning” (The Evolution of the Chinese Language, 1888), was one of the foremost to examine the evidence offered by the language itself for the determination of its earlier pronunciation. This, of course, is a much more complicated problem in Chinese than in our alphabetically written languages; for a Chinese character, standing for a complete word, may remain unchanged while the pronunciation is changed indefinitely. But by means of dialectal pronunciations in our own day, of remarks in old Chinese dictionaries, of transcriptions of Sanskrit words made by Chinese Buddhists, of rimes in ancient poetry, of phonetic or partly phonetic elements in the word-characters, etc., it has been possible to demonstrate that Chinese pronunciation has changed considerably, and that the direction of change has been, here as elsewhere, towards shorter and easier word-forms. Above all, consonant groups have been simplified.
In 1894 I ventured to offer my mite to these investigations by suggesting an explanation of one phenomenon of pronunciation in present-day Chinese. I refer to the change sometimes wrought in the meaning of a word by the adoption of a different tone. Thus wang with one tone is ‘king,’ with another ‘to become king’; lao with one is ‘work,’ with another ‘pay the work’; tsung with one tone means ‘follow,’ with another ‘follower,’ and with a third ‘footsteps’; tshi with one tone is ‘wife,’ with another ‘marry’; haò is ‘good,’ and haó is ‘love.’ Nay, meanings so different as ‘acquire’ and ‘give’ (sheu) or ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ (mai) are only distinguished by the tones. Edkins and V. Henry (Le Muséon, Louvain, 1882, i. 435) have attempted to explain this from gestures; but this is palpably wrong. In the Danish dialect spoken in Sundeved, in southernmost Jutland, two tones are distinguished, one high and one low (see articles by N. Andersen and myself in Dania, vol. iv.). Now, these tones often serve to keep words or forms of words apart that but for the tone, exactly as in Chinese, would be perfect homophones. Thus na with the low tone is ‘fool,’ but with the high tone it is either the plural ‘fools’ or else a verb ‘to cheat, hoax’; ri ‘ride’ is imperative or infinitive according to the tone in which it is uttered; jem in the low tone is ‘home’ and in the high ‘at home’; and so on in a great many words. There is no need, however, in this language to resort to gestures to explain these tonic differences: the low tone is found in words originally monosyllabic (compare standard Danish nar, rid, hjem), and the high tone in words originally dissyllabic (compare Danish narre, ride, hjemme). The tones belonging formerly to two syllables are now condensed on one syllable. Although, of course, Chinese tones cannot in every respect be paralleled with Scandinavian ones, we may provisionally conjecture that the above-mentioned pairs of Chinese words were formerly distinguished by derivative syllables or flexional endings (see below, p. [373]) which have now disappeared without leaving any traces behind them except in the tones. This hypothesis is perhaps rendered more probable by what seems to be an established fact—that one of the tones has arisen through the dropping of final stopped consonants (p, t, k).
However this may be, the death-blow was given to the dogma of the primitiveness of Chinese speech by Ernst Kuhn’s lecture Ueber Herkunft und Sprache der Transgangetischen Völker (Munich, 1883). He compares Chinese with the surrounding languages of Tibet, Burmah and Siam, which are certainly related to Chinese and have essentially the same structure; they are isolating, have no flexion, and word order is their chief grammatical instrument. But the laws of word order prove to be different in these several languages, and Kuhn draws the incontrovertible conclusion that it is impossible that any one of these laws of word position should have been the original one; for that would imply that the other nations have changed it without the least reason and at a risk of terrible confusion. The only likely explanation is that these differences are the outcome of a former state of greater freedom. But if the ancestral speech had a free word order, to be at all intelligible it must have been possessed of other grammatical appliances than are now found in the derived tongues; in other words, it must have indicated the relations of words to each other by something like our derivatives or flexions.