If the fundamental thesis of language as a human activity is its direct correspondence to and expression of all the inner motives and forces of the users, we have here a key to the survival to our day, an unknown period past its own time, of the Chinese type.
Of the development, modification and decay of languages we have ample material in our own times for study, the periods over which the modifying forces operate being an equal measure of the periods of national activity and change. And, what is perhaps not always sufficiently recognized, we have an elaboration of the formal elements going on under very different impulses, at different periods of the life of the language. The time has come in the history of a people for it to play a greater part on the world’s stage: some danger has threatened the national life and aroused its energies, or other causes have worked to quicken the mental and spiritual life; an Elizabethan era is ushered in, frequently by a forerunner, a Chaucer, and the language responds, its forms develop and are perfected. Or else some fitting or amalgamating force comes in from outside, the life of the people is widened, new blood enters in every sense, and the forms of the language respond. Or perhaps, when they may seem to have come to the tether end of things, and men’s minds turn back to older, even prehistoric times, seeds long buried and forgotten in the nature spring up, and a true national Renaissance follows. In these cases the change and elaboration of forms is a symptom of new life; the vehicle is being molded and expanded to fit the growing thought.
But it is not always so. There comes a time when the outgoing force, the activity of life, wanes and, after a greater or less period of settled conditions, a period of proper use and government of the regions occupied, a change sets in. And then we may have again the wholly deceptive phenomenon of linguistic amplification; but it is the false activity of decay. The energy has turned in and begun to feed upon itself. The national impulse has changed from achievement to gratification, more and more sources are drawn upon to minister to its enjoyment, and that enjoyment becomes an art; forms of every kind are subtly refined in its service, and linguistic forms with them. And this is then the very period when all these material, formal elements are pointed to with pride as the evidence of culture and progress. The thought-life of the nation has lost itself in the conflict and confusion, in the distractions of the forms into which it has molded the matter its creative force had entered.
We have thus in nations and languages, as in individuals, the phenomena of birth, growth, use, and a quick or a slow death, all marked by various degrees and signs of health or disease, and every one at root a moral question. These are the facts of general average, quite corresponding to those that form the bases for life insurance tables. But, as with these latter, not only are there variations for inheritance, class, locality, and so on, but there are here and there cases of out and out exception—which from all we can see must be assigned to some external force in operation on the individual. We call them “freak” occurrences, only because we cannot see the wider law or causes at work. When we meet them in sufficient numbers, we make new tables to cover them as far as we can, again in general only. Other causes still elude us, though they must have a fountain somewhere.
We have, as great exceptions to our general averages, two opposite phenomena. One is the sudden inexplicable and dazzling rise on the world’s stage of a totally insignificant people, the other the seeming arrest for long periods of time of the normal processes of even incipient decay. And touching the latter point, it is strange indeed that in two such widely different cultures as those of Iceland and China we should find the same law apparently at work; the periods are vastly unlike in actual, but not so in relative duration. We have no way of properly placing the maintenance of Icelandic and Chinese as they have been other than by simply laying down the existence of what we may call a Law of Retardation, whose ultimate causes we cannot fathom or classify, but which will stand as an opposite phase of the Law of Stimulation, which is more frequent in operation, but is equally unexplained.
If we will now regard the languages and cultures of the world, we will find all the phases of linguistic and cultural activity, operative with about the same degree of rapidity, all over both hemispheres, save in places protected by our Law of Retardation. We will find the rate of changes and successions generally far less rapid the farther back in time we go; and finally we will find a special and marked acceleration on both sides of the Atlantic during the last thousand years, all incident to the placing of a new race in America.
So for the facts as we find them. They point to the descent of past American civilizations from a past period of continental, or far more probably, of world-wide extent. For who can imagine that people great enough to build as these did, should not also have navigated? Why should we assume in the face of other experiences, that Maya dates and calculations mean nothing, except on the general principle that they did not know as much as we do, and were doubtless liars? Bailly proved over a hundred years ago that Hindû exact astronomical observations must date back at least 5000 years, and that they were in possession of minutely accurate tables[61-*] long before Europe was. And the rotundity of the earth was certainly known both to them and the other great nations of antiquity.
Archaeology is today pushing back the dates of fixed and acknowledged history almost to the date given by the Egyptians to Solon for the submersion of the great Atlantean island; and if we can but read the Maya glyphs, and open that door, another twenty years from now may show us beyond all possible dispute evidences in every part of the earth belt of a contemporaneous culture, different from and precedent to the Aryan.
I have so far in this monograph, based upon and having to do as it has with the Maya glyphs, their interpretation and their place in the linguistic field, limited myself to an analysis and consideration of the facts presented to us by those linguistic and cultural data we have actually before us. But there is one further problem which is suggested by it all. It is this: Where, in point of time and place, is the change in the world’s linguistic and cultural life from ideographic to literal to be sought for, and what is its rationale? Separated from us by such an enormous period of time as it is, I still cannot believe that some view of it cannot be had. There are various facts of Old World history and language, partly of prehistoric Europe, partly of Asia, an analysis of which would extend this paper too far into other fields; but apart entirely from the question of myths or traditions, there are various actual observed phenomena both of language and writing, especially in Central Asia, which do not fit into any of the ordinary theories, and which do suggest this, as a simple linguistic conclusion. In point of locality, at least, the conclusion agrees with the usual “Aryan home” theory; but as far as concerns this latter it must be remembered that however fully it demonstrates the unity of the Aryan race, beyond that fact all questions of dates and even of the state of civilization at the time, are not matters of history as yet for us, but only of theory—as to which our present “perspective” may be once more as faulty as it has often been heretofore.[62-*]