Part 19

The earliest literary documents of Arabic go back beyond Mohammed. They are called _Moallakat_, literally, suspended poems, because they are said to have been thus publicly exhibited at Mecca. They are old popular poems, descriptive of desert life. With Mohammed Arabic became the language of a victorious religion, and established its sway over Asia, Africa, and Europe.

These three branches, the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and Arabic, are so closely related to each other, that it was impossible not to recognize their common origin. Every root in these languages, as far back as we know them, must consist of three consonants, and numerous words are derived from these roots by a simple change of vowels, leaving the consonantal skeleton as much as possible intact. It is impossible to mistake a Semitic language; and what is most important—it is impossible to imagine an Aryan language derived from a Semitic, or a Semitic from an Aryan language. The grammatical framework is totally distinct in these two families of speech. This does not exclude, however, the possibility that both are diverging streams of the same source; and the comparisons that have been instituted between the Semitic roots, reduced to their simplest form, and the roots of the Aryan languages, have made it more than probable that the material elements with which they both started were originally the same.

Other languages which are supposed to belong to the Semitic family are the _Berber_ dialects of Northern Africa, spoken on the coast from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean before the invasion of the Arabs, and now pushed back towards the interior. Some other African languages, too, such as the _Haussa_ and _Galla_, have been classed as Semitic; and the language of Egypt, from the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions to the Coptic, which ceased to be spoken after the seventeenth century, has equally been referred to this class. The Semitic character of these dialects, however, is much less clearly defined, and the exact degree of relationship in which they stand to the Semitic languages, properly so-called, has still to be determined.

Strictly speaking the Aryan and Semitic are the only _families_ of speech which fully deserve that title. They both presuppose the existence of a finished system of grammar, previous to the first divergence of their dialects. Their history is from the beginning a history of decay rather than of growth, and hence the unmistakable family-likeness which pervades every one even of their latest descendants. The language of the Sepoy and that of the English soldier are, strictly speaking, one and the same language. They are both built up of materials which were definitely shaped before the Teutonic and Indic branches separated. No new root has been added to either since their first separation; and the grammatical forms which are of more modern growth in English or Hindustání, are, if closely examined, new combinations only of elements which existed from the beginning in all the Aryan dialects. In the termination of the English _he is_, and in the inaudible termination of the French _il est_, we recognize the result of an act performed before the first separation of the Aryan family, the combination of the predicative root _as_ with the demonstrative root _ti_; an act performed once for all, and continuing to be felt to the present day.

It was the custom of Nebuchadnezzar to have his name stamped on every brick that was used during his reign in erecting his colossal palaces. Those palaces fell to ruins, but from the ruins the ancient materials were carried away for building new cities; and on examining the bricks in the walls of the modern city of Baghdad on the borders of the Tigris, Sir Henry Rawlinson discovered on each the clear traces of that royal signature. It is the same if we examine the structure of modern languages. They too were built up with the materials taken from the ruins of the ancient languages, and every word, if properly examined, displays the visible stamp impressed upon it from the first by the founders of the Aryan and the Semitic empires of speech.

The relationship of languages, however, is not always so close. Languages may diverge before their grammatical system has become fixed and hardened; and in that case they cannot be expected to show the same marked features of a common descent as, for instance, the Neo-Latin dialects, French, Italian, and Spanish. They may have much in common, but they will likewise display an after-growth in words and grammatical forms peculiar to each dialect. With regard to words we see that even languages so intimately related to each other as the six Romance dialects, diverged in some of the commonest expressions. Instead of the Latin _frater_, the French _frère_, we find in Spanish _hermano_. There was a very good reason for this change. The Latin word _frater_, changed into _fray_ and _frayle_, had been applied to express a brother or a friar. It was felt inconvenient that the same word should express two ideas which it was sometimes necessary to distinguish, and therefore, by a kind of natural elimination, _frater_ was given up as the name of brother in Spanish, and replaced from the dialectical stores of Latin, by _germanus_. In the same manner the Latin word for shepherd, _pastor_, was so constantly applied to the shepherd of the people or the clergyman, _le pasteur_, that a new word was wanted for the real shepherd. Thus _berbicarius_ from _berbex_ or _vervex_, a wether, was used instead of _pastor_, and changed into the French _berger_. Instead of the Spanish _enfermo_, ill, we find in French _malade_, in Italian _malato_. Languages so intimately related as Greek and Latin have fixed on different expressions for son, daughter, brother, woman, man, sky, earth, moon, hand, mouth, tree, bird, &c.(295) That is to say, out of a large number of synonymes which were supplied by the numerous dialects of the Aryan family, the Greeks perpetuated one, the Romans another. It is clear that when the working of this principle of natural selection is allowed to extend more widely, languages, though proceeding from the same source, may in time acquire a totally different nomenclature for the commonest objects. The number of real synonymes is frequently exaggerated, and if we are told that in Icelandic there are 120 names for island, or in Arabic 500 names for lion,(296) and 1,000 names for sword,(297) many of these are no doubt purely poetical. But even where there are in a language only four or five names for the same objects, it is clear that four languages might be derived from it, each in appearance quite distinct from the rest.

The same applies to grammar. When the Romance languages, for instance, formed their new future by placing the auxiliary verb _habere_, to have, after the infinitive, it was quite open to any one of them to fix upon some other expedient for expressing the future. The French might have chosen _je vais dire_ or _je dirvais_ (I wade to say) instead of _je dirai_, and in this case the future in French would have been totally distinct from the future in Italian. If such changes are possible in literary languages of such long standing as French and Italian, we must be prepared for a great deal more in languages which, as I said, diverged before any definite settlement had taken place either in their grammar or their dictionary. If we were to expect in them the definite criteria of a genealogical relationship which unites the members of the Aryan and Semitic families of speech, we should necessarily be disappointed. Such criteria could not possibly exist in these languages. But there are criteria for determining even these more distant degrees of relationship in the vast realm of speech; and they are sufficient at least to arrest the hasty conclusions of those who would deny the possibility of a common origin of any languages more removed from each other than French and Italian, Sanskrit and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. You will see this more clearly after we have examined the principles of what I call the _morphological classification_ of human speech.

As all languages, so far as we can judge at present, can be reduced in the end to roots, predicative and demonstrative, it is clear that, according to the manner in which roots are put together, we may expect to find three kinds of languages, or three stages in the gradual formation of speech.

1. Roots may be used as words, each root preserving its full independence.

2. Two roots may be joined together to form words, and in these compounds one root may lose its independence.

3. Two roots may be joined together to form words, and in these compounds both roots may lose their independence.

What applies to two roots, applies to three or four or more. The principle is the same, though it would lead to a more varied subdivision.

The first stage, in which each root preserves its independence, and in which there is no formal distinction between a root and a word, I call the _Radical Stage_. This stage is best represented by ancient Chinese. Languages belonging to this first or Radical Stage, have sometimes been called _Monosyllabic_ or _Isolating_. The second stage, in which two or more roots coalesce to form a word, the one retaining its radical independence, the other sinking down to a mere termination, I call the _Terminational Stage_. This stage is best represented by the Turanian family of speech, and the languages belonging to it have generally been called _agglutinative_, from _gluten_, glue. The third stage, in which roots coalesce so that neither the one nor the other retains its substantive independence, I call the _Inflectional Stage_. This stage is best represented by the Aryan and Semitic families, and the languages belonging to it have sometimes been distinguished by the name of _organic_ or _amalgamating_.

The first stage excludes phonetic corruption altogether.

The second stage excludes phonetic corruption in the principal root, but allows it in the secondary or determinative elements.

The third stage allows phonetic corruption both in the principal root and in the terminations.

A few instances will make this classification clearer.

In the first stage, which is represented by Chinese, every word is a root, and has its own substantial meaning. Thus, where we say in Latin _baculo_, with a stick, we say in Chinese _ỳ ćáng_.(298) Here _ỳ_ might be taken for a mere preposition, like the English _with_. But in Chinese this _ỳ_ is a root; it is the same word which, if used as a verb, would mean “to employ.” Therefore in Chinese _ỳ ćáng_ means literally “employ stick.” Or again, where we say in English _at home_, or in Latin _domi_, the Chinese say _ŭŏ-li, ŭŏ_ meaning _house_, and _li_ originally _inside_.(299) The name for _day_ in Chinese is _ģi-tse_, which means originally _son of the sun_.(300)

There is in Chinese, as we saw before, no formal distinction between a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition. The same root, according to its position in a sentence, may be employed to convey the meaning of great, greatness, greatly, and to be great. Everything in fact depends in Chinese on the proper collocation of words in a sentence. Thus _ngò tà ni_ means “I beat thee;” but _ni tà ngò_ would mean “Thou beatest me.” Thus _ngŏ ģin_ means “a bad man;” _ģin ngŏ_ would mean “the man is bad.”

As long as every word, or part of a word, is felt to express its own radical meaning, a language belongs to the first or radical stage. As soon as such words as _tse_ in _ģi-tse_, day, _li_ in _ŭŏ-li_, at home, or _ỳ_ in _ỳ-ćáng_, with the stick, lose their etymological meaning and become mere signs of derivation or of case, language enters into the second or _Terminational_ stage.

By far the largest number of languages belong to this stage. The whole of what is called the _Turanian_ family of speech consists of Terminational or Agglutinative languages, and this Turanian family comprises in reality all languages spoken in Asia and Europe, and not included under the Aryan and Semitic families, with the exception of Chinese and its cognate dialects. In the great continent of the Old World the Semitic and Aryan languages occupy only what may be called the four western peninsulas, namely, India with Persia, Arabia, Asia Minor, and Europe; and we have reason to suppose that even these countries were held by Turanian tribes previous to the arrival of the Aryan and Semitic nations.

This Turanian family is of great importance in the science of languages. Some scholars would deny it the name of a family; and if family is only applicable to dialects so closely connected among themselves as the Aryan or Semitic, it would no doubt be preferable to speak of the Turanian as a class or group, and not as a family of languages. But this concession must not be understood as an admission that the members of this class start from different sources, and that they are held together, not by genealogical affinity, but by morphological similarity only.

These languages share elements in common which they must have borrowed from the same source, and their formal coincidences, though of a different character from those of the Aryan and Semitic families, are such that it would be impossible to ascribe them to mere accident.

The name Turanian is used in opposition to Aryan, and is applied to the nomadic races of Asia as opposed to the agricultural or Aryan races.

The Turanian family or class consists of two great divisions, the _Northern_ and the _Southern_.

The Northern is sometimes called the _Ural-Altaic_ or _Ugro-Tataric_, and it is divided into five sections, the _Tungusic_, _Mongolic_, _Turkic_, _Finnic_, and _Samoyedic_.

The Southern, which occupies the south of Asia, is divided into four classes, the _Tamulic_, or the languages of the Dekhan; the _Bhotîya_, or the dialects of Tibet and Bhotan; the _Taïc_, or the dialects of Siam, and the _Malaic_, or the Malay and Polynesian dialects.

No doubt if we expected to find in this immense number of languages the same family likeness which holds the Semitic or Aryan languages together, we should be disappointed. But the very absence of that family likeness constitutes one of the distinguishing features of the Turanian dialects. They are _Nomad_ languages, as contrasted with the Aryan, and Semitic languages.(301) In the latter most words and grammatical forms were thrown out but once by the creative power of one generation, and they were not lightly parted with, even though their original distinctness had been blurred by phonetic corruption. To hand down a language in this manner is possible only among people whose history runs on in one main stream; and where religion, law, and poetry supply well-defined borders which hem in on every side the current of language. Among the Turanian nomads no such nucleus of a political, social, or literary character has ever been formed. Empires were no sooner founded than they were scattered again like the sand-clouds of the desert; no laws, no songs, no stories outlived the age of their authors. How quickly language can change, if thus left to itself without any literary standard, we saw in a former Lecture, when treating of the growth of dialects. The most necessary substantives, such as father, mother, daughter, son, have frequently been lost and replaced by synonymes in the different dialects of Turanian speech, and the grammatical terminations have been treated with the same freedom. Nevertheless, some of the Turanian numerals and pronouns, and many Turanian roots, point to a single original source; and the common words and common roots, which have been discovered in the most distant branches of the Turanian stock, warrant the admission of a real, though very distant, genealogical relationship of all Turanian speech.

The most characteristic feature of the Turanian languages is what has been called _Agglutination_, or “gluing together.”(302) This means not only that, in their grammar, pronouns are _glued_ to the verbs in order to form the conjugation, or prepositions to substantives in order to form declension. _That_ would not be a distinguishing characteristic of the Turanian or nomad languages; for in Hebrew as well as in Sanskrit, conjugation and declension were originally formed on the same principle. What distinguishes the Turanian languages is, that in them the conjugation and declension can still be taken to pieces; and although the terminations have by no means always retained their significative power as independent words, they are felt as modificatory syllables, and as distinct from the roots to which they are appended.

In the Aryan languages the modifications of words, comprised under declension and conjugation, were likewise originally expressed by agglutination. But the component parts began soon to coalesce, so as to form one integral word, liable in its turn to phonetic corruption to such an extent that it became impossible after a time to decide which was the root and which the modificatory element. The difference between an Aryan and a Turanian language is somewhat the same as between good and bad mosaic. The Aryan words seem made of one piece, the Turanian words clearly show the sutures and fissures where the small stones are cemented together.

There was a very good reason why the Turanian languages should have remained in this second or agglutinative stage. It was felt essential that the radical portion of each word should stand out in distinct relief, and never be obscured or absorbed, as happens in the third or inflectional stage.

The French _âge_, for instance, has lost its whole material body, and is nothing but termination. _Age_ in old French was _eage_ and _edage_. _Edage_ is a corruption of the Latin _œtaticum_; _œtaticum_ is a derivative of _œtas_; _œtas_ an abbreviation of _œvitas_; _œvitas_ is derived from _œvum_, and in _œvum_, _œ_ only is the radical or predicative element, the Sanskrit _ây_ in _ây-us_, life, which contains the germ from which these various words derive their life and meaning. From _œvum_ the Romans derived _œviternus_, contracted into _œternus_, so that _age_ and _eternity_ flow from the same source. What trace of _œ_ or _œvum_, or even _œvitas_ and _œtas_, remains in _âge_? Turanian languages cannot afford such words as _âge_ in their dictionaries. It is an indispensable requirement in a nomadic language that it should be intelligible to many, though their intercourse be but scanty. It requires tradition, society, and literature, to maintain words and forms which can no longer be analyzed at once. Such words would seldom spring up in nomadic languages, or if they did, they would die away with each generation.

The Aryan verb contains many forms in which the personal pronoun is no longer felt distinctly. And yet tradition, custom, and law preserve the life of these veterans, and make us feel unwilling to part with them. But in the ever-shifting state of a nomadic society no debased coin can be tolerated in language, no obscure legend accepted on trust. The metal must be pure, and the legend distinct; that the one may be weighed, and the other, if not deciphered, at least recognized as a well-known guarantee. Hence the small proportion of irregular forms in all agglutinative languages.(303)

A Turanian might tolerate the Sanskrit,

as-mi, a-si, as-ti, ’s-mas, ’s-tha, ’s-anti, I am, thou art, he is, we are, you are, they are;

or even the Latin,

’s-um, e-s, es-t, ’su-mus, es-tis, ’sunt.

In these instances, with a few exceptions, root and affix are as distinguishable as, for instance, in Turkish:

bakar-im, bakar-sin, bakar, I regard, thou regardest, he regards.

bakar-iz, bakar-siniz, bakar-lar we regard, you regard, they regard.

But a conjugation like the Hindustání, which is a modern Aryan dialect,

hun, hai, hai, hain, ho, hain,

would not be compatible with the genius of the Turanian languages, because it would not answer the requirements of a nomadic life. Turanian dialects exhibit either no terminational distinctions at all, as in Mandshu, which is a Tungusic dialect; or a complete and intelligible system of affixes, as in the spoken dialect of Nyertchinsk, equally of Tungusic descent. But a state of conjugation in which, through phonetic corruption, the suffix of the first person singular and plural, and of the third person plural are the same, where there is no distinction between the second and third persons singular, and between the first and third persons plural, would necessarily lead, in a Turanian dialect, to the adoption of new and more expressive forms. New pronouns would have to be used to mark the persons, or some other expedient be resorted to for the same purpose.

And this will make it still more clear why the Turanian languages, or in fact all languages in this second or agglutinative stage, though protected against phonetic corruption more than the Aryan and Semitic languages, are so much exposed to the changes produced by dialectical regeneration. A Turanian retains, as it were, the consciousness of his language and grammar. The idea, for instance, which he connects with a plural is that of a noun followed by a syllable indicative of plurality; a passive with him is a verb followed by a syllable expressive of suffering, or eating, or going.(304) Now these determinative ideas may be expressed in various ways, and though in one and the same clan, and during one period of time, a certain number of terminations would become stationary, and be assigned to the expression of certain grammatical categories, such as the plural, the passive, the genitive, different hordes, as they separated, would still feel themselves at liberty to repeat the process of grammatical composition, and defy the comparative grammarian to prove the identity of the terminations, even in dialects so closely allied as Finnish and Hungarian, or Tamil and Telugu.

It must not be supposed, however, that Turanian or agglutinative languages are forever passing through this process of grammatical regeneration. Where nomadic tribes approach to a political organization, their language, though Turanian, may approach to the system of political or traditional languages, such as Sanskrit or Hebrew. This is indeed the case with the most advanced members of the Turanian family, the Hungarian, the Finnish, the Tamil, Telugu, &c. Many of their grammatical terminations have suffered by phonetic corruption, but they have not been replaced by new and more expressive words. The termination of the plural is _lu_ in Telugu, and this is probably a mere corruption of _gaḷ._, the termination of the plural in Tamil. The only characteristic Turanian feature which always remains is this: the root is never obscured. Besides this, the determining or modifying syllables are generally placed at the end, and the vowels do not become so absolutely fixed for each syllable as in Sanskrit or Hebrew. On the contrary, there is what is called the Law of Harmony, according to which the vowels of each word may be changed and modulated so as to harmonize with the key-note struck by its chief vowel. The vowels in Turkish, for instance, are divided into two classes, _sharp_ and _flat_. If a verb contains a sharp vowel in its radical portion, the vowels of the terminations are all sharp, while the same terminations, if following a root with a flat vowel, modulate their own vowels into the flat key. Thus we have _sev-mek_, to love, but _bak-mak_, to regard, _mek_ or _mak_ being the termination of the infinitive. Thus we say, _ev-ler_, the houses, but _at-lar_, the horses, _ler_ or _lar_ being the termination of the plural.

No Aryan or Semitic language has preserved a similar freedom in the harmonic arrangement of its vowels, while traces of it have been found among the most distant members of the Turanian family, as in Hungarian, Mongolian, Turkish, the Yakut, spoken in the north of Siberia, and in dialects spoken on the eastern frontiers of India.