To the result thus established by Kuhn, that Chinese cannot have had a fixed word order from the beginning, we seem also to be led if we ask the question, Is primitive man likely to have arranged his words in this way? A Chinese sentence, according to Gabelentz (Spr 426), is arranged with the same logical precision as the direction on an English envelope, where the most specific word is placed first, and each subsequent word is like a box comprising all that precedes—only that a Chinaman would reverse the order, beginning with the most general word and then in due order specializing. Now, is it probable that primitive man, that unkempt, savage being, who did not yet deserve the proud generic name of homo sapiens, but would be better termed, if not homo insipiens, at best homo incipiens—is it probable that this urmensch, who was little better than an unmensch, should have been able at once to arrange his words, or, what amounts to the same thing, his thoughts, in such a perfect order? I incline to believe rather that logical, orderly thinking and speaking have only been attained by mankind after a long and troublesome struggle, and that the grammatical expedient of a fixed word order has come to Chinese as to European languages through a gradual development in which other, less logical and more material grammatical appliances have in course of time been given up.
We have thus arrived at a conception of Chinese which is toto cælo removed from the view formerly current. The Chinese language can no longer be adduced in support of the hypothesis that our Aryan languages, or all human languages, started at first as a grammarless speech consisting of monosyllabic root-words.
XIX.—§ 5. Recent Investigations.
I have reprinted the above sketch of Chinese, with a few very insignificant verbal changes, as I wrote it about thirty years ago, because I think that the main reasoning is just as valid now as then, and because everything I have since then read about this interesting language has only confirmed the opinion I ventured to express after what was certainly a very insufficient study. Chinese pronunciation, including its tones, may now be studied in two excellent books, dealing with two different dialects—Daniel Jones and Kwing Tong Woo, A Cantonese Phonetic Reader, London, 1912, and Bernhard Karlgren, A Mandarin Phonetic Reader in the Pekinese Dialect, Upsala, Leipzig and Paris, 1917 (Archives d’Études Orientales, vol. 13). Karlgren is also the author of Études sur la Phonologie Chinoise (ib. vol. 15, 1915-19), in which he deals with the history of Chinese sounds and the reconstruction of the old pronunciation in a thoroughly scholarly manner on the basis of an intimate knowledge of spoken and written Chinese, and in Ordet och pennan i mittens rike (Stockholm, 1918), he has given a masterly popular sketch of the structure of the Chinese language and its system of writing.
Of the greatest importance for our purposes is the same scholar’s recent brilliant discovery of a real case distinction in the oldest Chinese. In classical Chinese there are four pronouns of the first person (I, we) which have always been considered as absolutely synonymous. But Karlgren shows that the two of them which occur as the usual forms in Confucius’s conversations are so far from being used indiscriminately that one is nearly always a nominative and the other an objective case; the exceptions are not numerous and are easily explained. The present Mandarin pronunciation of the first is , of the second either [uo] or [ŋo]. But if we go back to the sixth century of our era we are able with certainty to say that the pronunciation of the former was [ŋuo], and of the latter [ŋa]. This, then, constitutes a real declension. Now, in the second person Karlgren is also able to point out a distinction of two pronouns, though not quite so clearly marked as in the first person, the objective showing here a greater tendency to encroach on the nominative (Karlgren here ingeniously adduces the parallel from our languages that the first person has retained the suppletive system ego: me, while the second uses the same stem tu: te). The oldest Chinese thus has the following case flexion:
| 1st Per. | 2nd Per. | |
| Nom. | ŋuo | nźiwo |
| Obj. | ŋa | nźia |
(See “Le Proto-chinois, langue flexionnelle,” Journal Asiatique, 1920, 205 ff.).[91]
XIX.—§ 6. Roots Again.
To return to roots. The influence of Indian grammar on European linguists with regard to the theory of roots extended also to the meanings assigned to roots, which were all of them of verbal character, and nearly always highly general or abstract, such as ‘breathe, move, be sharp or quick, blow, go,’ etc. The impossibility of imagining anybody expressing himself by means of a language consisting exclusively of such abstracts embarrassed people much less than one would expect: Chinese, of course, has plenty of words for concrete objects.
The usual assumption was that there was one definite root period in which all the roots were created, and after which this form of activity ceased. But Whitney demurred to this (M 36), saying that E. preach and cost may be considered new roots, though ultimately coming from Lat. præ-dicare and con-stare: these old compounds are felt as units, “reducing to the semblance of roots elements that are really derivative or compound.” As Whitney goes no further than to establish the semblance of new roots, he might be taken as an adherent rather than as an opponent of the theory he objects to. But, as a matter of fact, new words are created in modern languages, and if they form the basis of derived words, we may really speak of new roots (pun—punning, punster; fun—funny; etc.). Why not say that we have a French root roul in rouler, roulement, roulage, roulier, rouleau, roulette, roulis? This only becomes unjustifiable if we think that the establishment of this root gives us the ultimate explanation of these words; for then the linguistic historian steps in with the objection that the words have been formed, not from a root, but from a real word, which is not even in itself a primary word, but a derivative, Lat. rotula, a diminutive of rota ‘wheel.’ (I take this example from Bréal M 407). To the popular instinct sorrow and sorry are undoubtedly related to one another, and we may say that they contain a root sorr-; but a thousand years ago they had nothing to do with one another, and belonged to different roots: OE. sorg ‘care’ and sārig ‘wounded, afflicted.’ If all traces of Latin and Greek were lost, a linguist would have no more scruples about connecting scene with see than most illiterate Englishmen have now. Who will vouch that many Aryan roots may not have originated at various times through similar processes as these new roots preach, cost, roul, sorr, see?