Nor can it be said that English forms like he’s = he is (or he has), I’d = I had (or I would), he’ll = he will show a tendency towards ‘entangling,’ for however closely together these forms are generally pronounced, each of them must be said to consist of two words, as is shown by the possibility of transposition (Is he ill?) and of intercalation of other words (I never had); it is also noteworthy that the same short forms of the verbs can be added to all kinds of words (the water’ll be ..., the sea’d been calm). In the forms don’t, won’t, can’t there is something like amalgamation of the verbal with the negative idea. Still, it is important to notice that the amalgamation only takes place with a few verbs of the auxiliary class. In saying ‘I don’t write’ the full verb is not touched by the fusion, and is even allowed to be unchanged in cases where it would have been inflected if no auxiliary had been used; compare I write, he writes, I wrote with the negative I don’t write, he doesn’t write, I didn’t write. It will be seen, especially if we take into account the colloquial or vulgar form for the third person, he don’t write, that the general movement here as elsewhere is really rather in the direction of ‘isolation’ than of fusion; for the verbal form write is stripped of all signs of person and tense, the person being indicated separately (if at all), and the tense sign being joined to the negation. So also in interrogative sentences; and if that tendency which can be observed in Elizabethan English had prevailed by using the combination I do write in positive statements, even where no special emphasis is intended, English verbs (except a few auxiliaries) would have been entirely stripped of those elements which to most grammarians constitute the very essence of a verb, namely, the marks of person, number, tense and mood, write being the universal form, besides the quasi-nominal forms writing and written.
Now, it is often said that the history of language shows a sort of gyration or movement in spirals, in which synthesis is followed by analysis, this by a new synthesis (flexion), and this again by analysis, and so forth. Latin amabo (which according to the old theory was once ama + some auxiliary) has been succeeded by amare habeo, which in its turn is fused into amerò, aimerai, and the latter form is now to some extent giving way to je vais aimer. But this pretended law of rotation is only arrived at by considering a comparatively small number of phenomena, and not by viewing the successive stages of the same language as wholes and drawing general inferences as to their typically distinctive characters (cf. above, p. [337]). If for every two instances of new flexions springing up we see ten older ones discarded in favour of analysis or isolation, are we not entitled to the generalization that flexion or indissolubility tends to give way to analysis? We should beware of being under the same delusion as a man who, in walking over a mountainous country, thinks that he goes down just as many and just as long hills as he goes up, while on the contrary each ascent is higher than the preceding descent, so that finally he finds himself unexpectedly many thousand feet above the level from which he started.
The direction of movement is towards flexionless languages (such as Chinese, or to a certain extent Modern English) with freely combinable elements; the starting-point was flexional languages (such as Latin or Greek); at a still earlier stage we must suppose a language in which a verbal form might indicate not only six things, like cantavisset, but a still larger number, in which verbs were perhaps modified according to the gender (or sex) of the subject, as they are in Semitic languages, or according to the object, as in some Amerindian languages, or according to whether a man, a woman, or a person who commands respect is spoken to, as in Basque. But that amounts to the same thing as saying that the border-line between word and sentence was not so clearly defined as in more recent times; cantavisset is really nothing but a sentence-word, and the same holds good to a still greater extent of the sound conglomerations of Eskimo and some other North American languages. Primitive linguistic units must have been much more complicated in point of meaning, as well as much longer in point of sound, than those with which we are most familiar.
XXI.—§ 7. Irregularities.
Another point of great importance is this: in early languages we find a far greater number of irregularities, exceptions, anomalies, than in modern ones. It is true that we not unfrequently see new irregularities spring up, where the formations were formerly regular; but these instances are very far from counterbalancing the opposite class, in which words once irregularly inflected become regular, or are given up in favour of regularly inflected words, or in which anomalies in syntax are levelled. The tendency is more and more to denote the same thing by the same means in every case, to extend the ending, or whatever it is, that is used in a large class of words to express a certain modification of the central idea, until it is used in all other words as well.
Comparative linguistics did not attain a scientific character till the principle was established that the relationship of two languages had to be determined by a thoroughgoing conformity in the most necessary parts of language, namely (besides grammar proper) pronouns and numerals and the most indispensable of nouns and verbs. But if this domain of speech, by preserving religiously, as it were, the old tradition, affords infallible criteria of the near or remote relationship of different languages, may we not reasonably expect to find in the same domain some clue to the oldest grammatical system used by our ancestors? What sort of system, then, do we find there? We see such a declension as I, me, we, us: the several forms of the ‘paradigm’ do not at all resemble each other, as they do in more recently developed declensions. We find masculines and feminines, such as father, mother, man, wife, bull, cow; while such methods of derivation as are seen in count, countess, he-bear, she-bear, belong to a later time. We meet with degrees of comparison like good, better, ill, worse, while regular forms like happy, happier, big, bigger, prevail in all the younger strata of languages. We meet with verbal flexion such as appears in am, is, was, been, which forms a striking contrast to the more modern method of adding a mere ending while leaving the body of the word unchanged. In an interesting book, Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen (1899), H. Osthoff has collected a very great number of examples from the old Aryan languages of different stems supplementing each other, and has pointed out that this phenomenon is characteristic of the most necessary ideas occurring every moment in ordinary conversation: I take at random a few of the best-known of his examples: Fr. aller, je vais, j’irai, Lat. fero, tuli, Gr. horaō, opsomai, eidon, Lat. bonus, melior, optimus. Osthoff fully agrees with me that we have here a trait of primitive psychology: our remote ancestors were not able to see and to express what was common to these ideas; their minds were very unsystematic, and separated in their linguistic expressions things which from a logical point of view are closely related: much of their grammar, therefore, was really of a lexical character.
XXI.—§ 8. Savage Tribes.
If now it is asked whether the conclusions we have thus arrived at are borne out by a consideration of the languages of savage or primitive races nowadays, the answer is that these cannot be lumped together; there are among them many different types, even with regard to grammatical structure. But the more these languages are studied and the more accurately their structure is described, the more also students perceive intricacies and anomalies in their grammar. Gabelentz (Spr 386) says that the casual observer has no idea how manifold and how nicely circumscribed grammatical categories can be, even in the seemingly crudest languages, for ordinary grammars tell us nothing about that. P. W. Schmidt (Die Stellung der Pygmäenvölker, 1910, 129) says that whoever, from the low culture of the Andamanese, would expect to find their language very simple and poor in expressions would be strangely deceived, for its mechanism is highly complicated, with many prefixes and suffixes, which often conceal the root itself. Meinhof (MSA 136) mentions the multiplicity of plural formations in African languages. Vilhelm Thomsen, in speaking of the Santhal (Khervarian) language, says that its grammar is capable of expressing a multiplicity of nuances which in other languages must be expressed by clumsy circumlocutions; the native speakers go beyond what is necessary through requiring expressions for many subordinate notions, the language having, so to speak, only one fine gold-balance, on which everything, even the simplest and commonest things, must be weighed by the adding-up of a whole series of minutiæ. Curr speaks about the erroneous belief in the simplicity of Australian languages, which on the contrary have a great number of conjugations, etc. The extreme difficulty and complex structure of Eskimo and of many Amerindian languages is so notorious that no words need be wasted on them here. And the forms of the Basque verb are so manifold and intricate that we understand how Larramendi, in his legitimate pride at having been the first to reduce them to a system, called his grammar El Imposible Vencido, ‘The Impossible Overcome.’ At Béarn they have the story that the good God, wishing to punish the devil for the temptation of Eve, sent him to the Pays Basque with the command that he should remain there till he had mastered the language. At the end of seven years God relented, finding the punishment too severe, and called the devil to him. The devil had no sooner crossed the bridge of Castelondo than he found he had forgotten all that he had so hardly learned.
What is here said about the languages of wild tribes (and of the Basques, who are not exactly savages, but whose language is generally taken to have retained many primeval traits) is in exact keeping with everything that recent study of primitive man has brought to light: the life of the savage is regulated to the minutest details through ceremonies and conventionalities to be observed on every and any occasion; he is restricted in what he may eat and drink and when and how; and all these, to our mind, irrational prescriptions and innumerable prohibitions have to be observed with the most scrupulous, nay religious, care: it is the same with all the meticulous rules of his language.