Part 18

Sanskrit grammarians have reduced the whole growth of their language to 1706 roots,(269) that is to say, they have admitted so many radicals in order to derive from them, according to their system of grammatical derivation, all nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, which occur in Sanskrit. According to our explanation of a root, however, this number of 1706 would have to be reduced considerably, and though a few new roots would likewise have to be added which Sanskrit grammarians failed to discover, yet the number of primitive sounds, expressive of definite meanings, requisite for the etymological analysis of the whole Sanskrit dictionary would not amount to even one third of that number. Hebrew has been reduced to about 500 roots,(270) and I doubt whether we want a larger number for Sanskrit. This shows a wise spirit of economy on the part of primitive language, for the possibility of forming new roots for every new impression was almost unlimited. Even if we put the number of letters only at twenty-four, the possible number of biliteral and triliteral roots would amount together to 14,400; whereas Chinese, though abstaining from composition and derivation, and therefore requiring a larger number of radicals than any other language, was satisfied with about 450. With these 450 sounds raised to 1263 by various accents and intonations, the Chinese have produced a dictionary of from 40,000 to 50,000 words.(271)

It is clear, however, that in addition to these predicative roots, we want another class of radical elements to enable us to account for the full growth of language. With the 400 or 500 predicative roots at her disposal, language would not have been at a loss to coin names for all things that come under our cognizance. Language is a thrifty housewife. Consider the variety of ideas that were expressed by the one root _spaś_, and you will see that with 500 such roots she might form a dictionary sufficient to satisfy the wants, however extravagant, of her husband—the human mind. If each root yielded fifty derivatives, we should have 25,000 words. Now, we are told, on good authority, by a country clergyman, that some of the laborers in his parish had not 300 words in their vocabulary.(272) The vocabulary of the ancient sages of Egypt, at least as far as it is known to us from the hieroglyphic inscriptions, amounts to about 685 words.(273) The _libretto_ of an Italian opera seldom displays a greater variety of words.(274) A well-educated person in England, who has been at a public school and at the university, who reads his Bible, his Shakespeare, the “Times,” and all the books of Mudie’s Library, seldom uses more than about 3000 or 4000 words in actual conversation. Accurate thinkers and close reasoners, who avoid vague and general expressions, and wait till they find the word that exactly fits their meaning, employ a larger stock; and eloquent speakers may rise to a command of 10,000. Shakespeare, who displayed a greater variety of expression than probably any writer in any language, produced all his plays with about 15,000 words. Milton’s works are built up with 8000; and the Old Testament says all that it has to say with 5,642 words.(275)

Five hundred roots, therefore, considering their fertility and pliancy, was more than was wanted for the dictionary of our primitive ancestors. And yet they wanted something more. If they had a root expressive of light and splendor, that root might have formed the predicate in the names of sun, and moon, and stars, and heaven, day, morning, dawn, spring, gladness, joy, beauty, majesty, love, friend, gold, riches, &c. But if they wanted to express _here_ and _there_, _who_, _what_, _this_, _that_, _thou_, _he_, they would have found it impossible to find any predicative root that could be applied to this purpose. Attempts have indeed been made to trace these words back to predicative roots; but if we are told that the demonstrative root _ta_, this or there, may be derived from a predicative root _tan_, to extend, we find that even in our modern languages, the demonstrative pronouns and particles are of too primitive and independent a nature to allow of so artificial an interpretation. The sound _ta_ or _sa_, for this or there, is as involuntary, as natural, as independent an expression as any of the predicative roots, and although some of these demonstrative, or pronominal, or local roots, for all these names have been applied to them, may be traced back to a predicative source, we must admit a small class of independent radicals, not predicative in the usual sense of the word, but simply pointing, simply expressive of existence under certain more or less definite, local or temporal prescriptions.

It will be best to give one illustration at least of a pronominal root and its influence in the formation of words.

In some languages, and particularly in Chinese, a predicative root may by itself be used as a noun, or a verb, or an adjective or adverb. Thus the Chinese sound _ta_ means, without any change of form, great, greatness, and to be great.(276) If _ta_ stands before a substantive, it has the meaning of an adjective. Thus _ta jin_ means a great man. If _ta_ stands after a substantive, it is a predicate, or, as we should say, a verb. Thus _jin ta_ (or jin ta ye) would mean the man is great.(277) Or again,

ģin ngŏ, li pŭ ngŏ, would mean, man bad, law not bad.

Here we see that there is no outward distinction whatever between a root and a word, and that a noun is distinguished from a verb merely by its collocation in a sentence.

In other languages, however, and particularly in the Aryan languages, no predicative root can by itself form a word. Thus in Latin there is a root _luc_, to shine. In order to have a substantive, such as light, it was necessary to add a pronominal or demonstrative root, this forming the general subject of which the meaning contained in the root is to be predicated. Thus by the addition of the pronominal element _s_ we have the Latin noun, _luc-s_, the light, or literally, shining-there. Let us add a personal pronoun, and we have the verb _luc-e-s_, shining-thou, thou shinest. Let us add other pronominal derivatives, and we get the adjectives, _lucidus_, _luculentus_, &c.

It would be a totally mistaken view, however, were we to suppose that all derivative elements, all that remains of a word after the predicative root has been removed, must be traced back to pronominal roots. We have only to look at some of our own modern derivatives in order to be convinced that many of them were originally predicative, that they entered into composition with the principal predicative root, and then dwindled down to mere suffixes. Thus _scape_ in _landscape_, and the more modern _ship_ in _hardship_ are both derived from the same root which we have in Gothic,(278) _skapa_, _skôp_, _skôpum_, to create; in Anglo-Saxon, _scape_, _scôp_, _scôpon_. It is the same as the German derivative, _schaft_, in _Gesellschaft_, &c. So again _dom_ in _wisdom_ or _christendom_ is derived from the same root which we have in _to do_. It is the same as the German _thum_ in _Christenthum_, the Anglo-Saxon _dôm_ in _cyning-dom_, _Königthum_. Sometimes it may seem doubtful whether a derivative element was originally merely demonstrative or predicative. Thus the termination of the comparative in Sanskrit is _tara_, the Greek _teros_. This might, at first sight, be taken for a demonstrative element, but it is in reality the root _tar_, which means _to go beyond_, which we have likewise in the Latin _trans_. This _trans_ in its French form _très_ is prefixed to adjectives in order to express a higher or transcendent degree, and the same root was well adapted to form the comparative in the ancient Aryan tongues. This root must likewise be admitted in one of the terminations of the locative which is _tra_ in Sanskrit; for instance from _ta_, a demonstrative root, we form _ta-tra_, there, originally this way; we form _anyatra_, in another way; the same as in Latin we say _ali-ter_, from _aliud_; compounds no more surprising than the French _autrement_ (see p. 55) and the English _otherwise_.

Most of the terminations of declension and conjugation are demonstrative roots, and the _s_, for instance, of the third person singular, he loves, can be proved to have been originally the demonstrative pronoun of the third person. It was originally not _s_ but _t_. This will require some explanation. The termination of the third person singular of the present is _ti_ in Sanskrit. Thus _dâ_, to give, becomes _dadâti_, he gives; _dhâ_, to place, _dadhâti_, he places.

In Greek this _ti_ is changed into _si_; just as the Sanskrit _tvam_, the Latin _tu_, thou, appears in Greek as _sy_. Thus Greek _didōsi_ corresponds to Sanskrit _dadâti_; _tithēsi_ to _dadhâti_. In the course of time, however, every Greek _s_ between two vowels, in a termination, was elided. Thus _genos_ does not form the genitive _genesos_, like the Latin _genus_, _genesis_ or _generis_, but _geneos_ = _genous_. The dative is not _genesi_ (the Latin _generi_), but _geneï_ = _genei_. In the same manner all the regular verbs have _ei_ for the termination of the third person singular. But this _ei_ stands for _esi_. Thus _typtei_ stands for _typtesi_, and this for _typteti_.

The Latin drops the final _i_, and instead of _ti_ has _t_. Thus we get _amat_, _dicit_.

Now there is a law to which I alluded before, which is called Grimm’s Law. According to it every tenuis in Latin is in Gothic represented by its corresponding aspirate. Hence, instead of _t_, we should expect in Gothic _th_; and so we find indeed in Gothic _habaiþ_, instead of Latin _habet_. This aspirate likewise appears in Anglo-Saxon, where _he loves_ is _lufað_. It is preserved in the Biblical _he loveth_, and it is only in modern English that it gradually sank to _s_. In the _s_ of _he loves_, therefore, we have a demonstrative root, added to the predicative root _love_, and this _s_ is originally the same as the Sanskrit _ti_. This _ti_ again must be traced back to the demonstrative root _ta_, this or there; which exists in the Sanskrit demonstrative pronoun _tad_, the Greek _to_, the Gothic _thata_, the English _that_; and which in Latin we can trace in _talis_, _tantus_, _tunc_, _tam_, and even in _tamen_, an old locative in _men_. We have thus seen that what we call the third person singular of the present is in reality a simple compound of a predicative root with a demonstrative root. It is a compound like any other, only that the second part is not predicative, but simply demonstrative. As in pay-master we predicate pay of master, meaning a person whose office it is to pay, so in _dadâ-ti_, _give-he_, the ancient framers of language simply predicated giving of some third person, and this synthetic proposition, _give-he_, is the same as what we now call the third person singular in the indicative mood, of the present tense, in the active voice.(279)

We have necessarily confined ourselves in our analysis of language to that family of languages to which our own tongue, and those with which we are best acquainted, belong; but what applies to Sanskrit and the Aryan family applies to the whole realm of human speech. Every language, without a single exception, that has as yet been cast into the crucible of comparative grammar, has been found to contain these two substantial elements, predicative and demonstrative roots. In the Semitic family these two constituent elements are even more palpable than in Sanskrit and Greek. Even before the discovery of Sanskrit, and the rise of comparative philology, Semitic scholars had successfully traced back the whole dictionary of Hebrew and Arabic to a small number of roots, and as every root in these languages consists of three consonants, the Semitic languages have sometimes been called by the name of triliteral.

To a still higher degree the constituent elements are, as it were, on the very surface in the Turanian family of speech. It is one of the characteristic features of that family, that, whatever the number of prefixes and suffixes, the root must always stand out in full relief, and must never be allowed to suffer by its contact with derivative elements.

There is one language, the Chinese, in which no analysis of any kind is required for the discovery of its component parts. It is a language in which no coalescence of roots has taken place: every word is a root, and every root is a word. It is, in fact, the most primitive stage in which we can imagine human language to have existed. It is language _comme il faut_; it is what we should naturally have expected all languages to be.

There are, no doubt, numerous dialects in Asia, Africa, America, and Polynesia, which have not yet been dissected by the knife of the grammarian; but we may be satisfied at least with this negative evidence, that, as yet, no language which has passed through the ordeal of grammatical analysis has ever disclosed any but these two constituent elements.

The problem, therefore, of the origin of language, which seemed so perplexing and mysterious to the ancient philosophers, assumes a much simpler aspect with us. We have learnt what language is made of; we have found that everything in language, except the roots, is intelligible, and can be accounted for. There is nothing to surprise us in the combination of the predicative and demonstrative roots which led to the building up of all the languages with which we are acquainted, from Chinese to English. It is not only conceivable, as Professor Pott remarks, “that the formation of the Sanskrit language, as it is handed down to us, may have been preceded by a state of the greatest simplicity and entire absence of inflections, such as is exhibited to the present day by the Chinese and other monosyllabic languages.” It is absolutely impossible that it should have been otherwise. After we have seen that all languages must have started from this Chinese or monosyllabic stage, the only portion of the problem of the origin of language that remains to be solved is this: How can we account for the origin of those predicative and demonstrative roots which form the constituent elements of all human speech, and which have hitherto resisted all attempts at further analysis? This problem will form the subject of our two next Lectures.

LECTURE VIII. MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION.

We finished in our last Lecture our analysis of language, and we arrived at the result that _predicative_ and _demonstrative_ roots are the sole constituent elements of human speech.

We now turn back in order to discover how many possible forms of language may be produced by the free combination of these constituent elements; and we shall then endeavor to find out whether each of these possible forms has its real counterpart in some or other of the dialects of mankind. We are attempting in fact to carry out a _morphological classification_ of speech, which is based entirely on the form or manner in which roots are put together, and therefore quite independent of the genealogical classification which, according to its very nature, is based on the formations of language handed down ready made from generation to generation.

Before, however, we enter on this, the principal subject of our present Lecture, we have still to examine, as briefly as possible, a second family of speech, which, like the Aryan, is established on the strictest principles of genealogical classification, namely, the _Semitic_.

The Semitic family is divided into three branches, the _Aramaic_, the _Hebraic_, and the _Arabic_.(280)

The _Aramaic_ occupies the north, including Syria, Mesopotamia, and part of the ancient kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria. It is known to us chiefly in two dialects, the _Syriac_ and _Chaldee_. The former name is given to the language which has been preserved to us in a translation of the Bible (the Peshito(281)) ascribed to the second century, and in the rich Christian literature dating from the fourth. It is still spoken, though in a very corrupt form, by the Nestorians of Kurdistan, near the lakes of Van and Urmia, and by some Christian tribes in Mesopotamia; and an attempt has been made by the American missionaries,(282) stationed at Urmia, to restore this dialect to some grammatical correctness by publishing translations and a grammar of what they call the Neo-Syriac language.

The name of _Chaldee_ has been given to the language adopted by the Jews during the Babylonian captivity. Though the Jews always retained a knowledge of their sacred language, they soon began to adopt the dialect of their conquerors, not for conversation only, but also for literary composition.(283) The book of Ezra contains fragments in Chaldee, contemporaneous with the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, and several of the apocryphal books, though preserved to us in Greek only, were most likely composed originally in Chaldee, and not in Hebrew. The so-called _Targums_(284) again, or translations and paraphrases of the Old Testament, written during the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era,(285) give us another specimen of the Aramaic, or the language of Babylonia, as transplanted to Palestine. This Aramaic was the dialect spoken by Christ and his disciples. The few authentic words preserved in the New Testament as spoken by our Lord in His own language, such as _Talitha kumi_, _Ephphatha_, _Abba_, are not in Hebrew, but in the Chaldee, or Aramaic, as then spoken by the Jews.(286)

After the destruction of Jerusalem the literature of the Jews continued to be written in the same dialect. The Talmud(287) of Jerusalem of the fourth, and that of Babylon of the fifth, century exhibit the Aramean, as spoken by the educated Jews settled in these two localities, though greatly depraved and spoiled by an admixture of strange elements. This language remained the literary idiom of the Jews to the tenth century. The _Masora_,(288) and the traditional commentary of the Old Testament, was written in it about that time. Soon after the Jews adopted Arabic as their literary language, and retained it to the thirteenth century. They then returned to a kind of modernized Hebrew, which they still continue to employ for learned discussions.

It is curious that the Aramaic branch of the Semitic family, though originally the language of the great kingdoms of Babylon and Nineveh, should have been preserved to us only in the literature of the Jews, and of the Christians of Syria. There must have been a Babylonian literature, for the wisdom of the Chaldeans had acquired a reputation which could hardly have been sustained without a literature. Abraham must have spoken Aramaic before he emigrated to Canaan. Laban spoke the same dialect, and the name which he gave to the heap of stones that was to be a witness between him and Jacob, (Jegar-sahadutha) is Syriac, whereas Galeed, the name by which Jacob called it, is Hebrew.(289) If we are ever to recover a knowledge of that ancient Babylonian literature, it must be from the cuneiform inscriptions lately brought home from Babylon and Nineveh. They are clearly written in a Semitic language. About this there can be no longer any doubt. And though the progress in deciphering them has been slow, and slower than was at one time expected, yet there is no reason to despair. In a letter, dated April, 1853, Sir Henry Rawlinson wrote:—

“On the clay tablets which we have found at Nineveh, and which now are to be counted by thousands, there are explanatory treatises on almost every subject under the sun: the art of writing, grammars, and dictionaries, notation, weights and measures, divisions of time, chronology, astronomy, geography, history, mythology, geology, botany, &c. In fact we have now at our disposal a perfect cyclopædia of Assyrian science.” Considering what has been achieved in deciphering one class of cuneiform inscriptions, the Persian, there is no reason to doubt that the whole of that cyclopædia will some day be read with the same ease with which we read the mountain records of Darius.

There is, however, another miserable remnant of what was once the literature of the Chaldeans or Babylonians, namely, the “Book of Adam,” and similar works preserved by the _Mendaïtes_ or _Nasoreans_, a curious sect settled near Bassora. Though the composition of these works is as late as the tenth century after Christ, it has been supposed that under a modern crust of wild and senseless hallucinations, they contain some grains of genuine ancient Babylonian thought. These _Mendaïtes_ have in fact been identified with the _Nabateans_, who are mentioned as late as the tenth century(290) of our era, as a race purely pagan, and distinct from Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans. In Arabic the name Nabatean(291) is used for Babylonians,—nay, all the people of Aramaic origin, settled in the earliest times between the Euphrates and Tigris are referred to by that name.(292) It is supposed that the Nabateans, who are mentioned about the beginning of the Christian era as a race distinguished for their astronomical and general scientific knowledge, were the ancestors of the mediæval Nabateans, and the descendants of the ancient Babylonians and Chaldeans. You may have lately seen in some literary journals an account of a work called “The Nabatean Agriculture.” It exists only in an Arabic translation by Ibn-Wahshiyyah, the Chaldean,(293) who lived about 900 years after Christ, but the original, which was written by Kuthami in Aramean, has lately been referred to the beginning of the thirteenth century B. C. The evidence is not yet fully before us, but from what is known it seems more likely that this work was the compilation of a Nabatean, who lived about the fourth century after Christ;(294) and though it contains ancient traditions, which may go back to the days of the great Babylonian monarchs, these traditions can hardly be taken as a fair representation of the ancient civilization of the Aramean race.

The second branch of the Semitic family is the _Hebraic_, chiefly represented by the ancient language of Palestine, where Hebrew was spoken and written from the days of Moses to the times of Nehemiah and the Maccabees, though of course with considerable modifications, and with a strong admixture of Aramean forms, particularly since the Babylonian captivity, and the rise of a powerful civilization in the neighboring country of Syria. The ancient language of Phœnicia, to judge from inscriptions, was most closely allied to Hebrew, and the language of the Carthaginians too must be referred to the same branch.

Hebrew was first encroached upon by Aramaic dialects, through the political ascendency of Babylon, and still more of Syria; and was at last swept away by Arabic, which, since the conquest of Palestine and Syria in the year 636, has monopolized nearly the whole area formerly occupied by the two older branches of the Semitic stock, the Aramaic and Hebrew.

This third, or Arabic, branch sprang from the Arabian peninsula, where it is still spoken by a compact mass of aboriginal inhabitants. Its most ancient documents are the _Himyaritic_ inscriptions. In very early times this Arabic branch was transplanted to Africa, where, south of Egypt and Nubia, on the coast opposite Yemen, an ancient Semitic dialect has maintained itself to the present day. This is the _Ethiopic_ or _Abyssinian_, or, as it is called by the people themselves, the _Gees_ language. Though no longer spoken in its purity by the people of Habesh, it is still preserved in their sacred writings, translations of the Bible, and similar works, which date from the third and fourth centuries. The modern language of Abyssinia is called _Amharic_.