II.

REDE LECTURE,

DELIVERED IN THE SENATE HOUSE BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, ON FRIDAY, MAY 29, 1868.[1]

Part I.

ON THE STRATIFICATION OF LANGUAGE.

There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering. We have all experienced it in childhood, in youth, and in our manhood, and we may hope that even in our old age this affection of the mind will not entirely pass away. If we analyze this feeling of wonder carefully, we shall find that it consists of two elements. What we mean by wondering is not only that we are startled or stunned,--that I should call the merely passive element of wonder. When we say “I wonder,” we confess that we are taken aback, but there is a secret satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of surprise, a kind of hope, nay, almost of certainty, that sooner or later the wonder will cease, that our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple with these novel impressions or experiences, grasp them, it may be, throw them, and finally triumph over them. In fact we wonder at the riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm conviction that there is a solution to them all, even though we ourselves may not be able to find it.

Wonder, no doubt, arises from ignorance, but from a peculiar kind of ignorance; from what might be called a fertile ignorance: an ignorance which, if we look back at the history of most of our sciences, will be found to have been the mother of all human knowledge. For thousands of years men have looked at the earth with its stratifications, in some places so clearly mapped out; for thousands of years they must have seen in their quarries and mines, as well as we ourselves, the imbedded petrifications of organic creatures: yet they looked and passed on without thinking more about it--they did not wonder. Not even an Aristotle had eyes to see; and the conception of a science of the earth, of Geology, was reserved for the eighteenth century.

Still more extraordinary is the listlessness with which during all the centuries that have elapsed since the first names were given to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field, men have passed by what was much nearer to them than even the gravel on which they trod, namely, the words of their own language. Here, too, the clearly marked lines of different strata seemed almost to challenge attention, and the pulses of former life were still throbbing in the petrified forms imbedded in grammars and dictionaries. Yet not even a Plato had eyes to see, or ears to hear, and the conception of a science of language, of Glottology, was reserved for the nineteenth century.

I am far from saying that Plato and Aristotle knew nothing of the nature, the origin, and the purpose of language, or that we have nothing to learn from their works. They, and their successors, and their predecessors too, beginning with Herakleitos and Demokritos, were startled and almost fascinated by the mysteries of human speech as much as by the mysteries of human thought; and what we call grammar and the laws of language, nay, all the technical terms which are still current in our schools, such as _noun_ and _verb_, _case_ and _number_, _infinitive_ and _participle_, all this was first discovered and named by the philosophers and grammarians of Greece, to whom, in spite of all our new discoveries, I believe we are still beholden, whether consciously or unconsciously, for more than half of our intellectual life.

But the interest which those ancient Greek philosophers took in language was purely philosophical. It was the form, far more than the matter of speech which seemed to them a subject worthy of philosophical speculation. The idea that there was, even in their days, an immense mass of accumulated speech to be sifted, to be analyzed, and to be accounted for somehow, before any theories on the nature of language could be safely started, hardly ever entered their minds; or when it did, as we see here and there in Plato’s “Kratylos,” it soon vanished, without leaving any permanent impression. Each people and each generation has its own problems to solve. The problem that occupied Plato in his “Kratylos” was, if I understand him rightly, the possibility of a perfect language, a correct, true, or ideal language, a language founded on his own philosophy, his own system of types or ideas. He was too wise a man to attempt, like Bishop Wilkins, the actual construction of a philosophical language. But, like Leibniz, he just lets us see that a perfect language is conceivable, and that the chief reason of the imperfections of real language must be found in the fact that its original framers were ignorant of the true nature of things, ignorant of dialectic philosophy, and therefore incapable of naming rightly what they had failed to apprehend correctly. Plato’s view of actual language, as far as it can be made out from the critical and negative rather than didactic and positive dialogue of “Kratylos,” seems to have been very much the same as his view of actual government. Both fall short of the ideal, and both are to be tolerated only in so far as they participate in the perfections of an ideal state and an ideal language.[2] Plato’s “Kratylos” is full of suggestive wisdom. It is one of those books which, as we read them again from time to time, seem every time like new books: so little do we perceive at first all that is pre-supposed in them,--the accumulated mould of thought, if I may say so, in which alone a philosophy like that of Plato could strike its roots and draw its support.

But while Plato shows a deeper insight into the mysteries of language than almost any philosopher that has come after him, he has no eyes for that marvelous harvest of words garnered up in our dictionaries, and in the dictionaries of all the races of the earth. With him language is almost synonymous with Greek, and though in one passage of the “Kratylos” he suggests that certain Greek words might have been borrowed from the Barbarians, and, more particularly from the Phrygians, yet that remark, as coming from Plato, seems to be purely ironical, and though it contains, as we know, a germ of truth that has proved most fruitful in our modern science of language, it struck no roots in the minds of Greek philosophers. How much our new science of language differs from the linguistic studies of the Greeks; how entirely the interest which Plato took in language is now supplanted by new interests, is strikingly brought home to us when we see how the _Société de Linguistique_, lately founded at Paris, and including the names of the most distinguished scholars of France, declares in one of its first statutes that “it will receive no communication concerning the origin of language or the formation of a universal language,” the very subjects which, in the time of Herakleitos and Plato, rendered linguistic studies worthy of the consideration of a philosopher.

It may be that the world was too young in the days of Plato, and that the means of communication were wanting to enable the ancient philosopher to see very far beyond the narrow horizon of Greece. With us it is different. The world has grown older, and has left to us in the annals of its various literatures the monuments of growing and decaying speech. The world has grown larger, and we have before us, not only the relics of ancient civilization in Asia, Africa, and America, but living languages in such number and variety that we draw back almost aghast at the mere list of their names. The world has grown wiser too, and where Plato could only see imperfections, the failures of the founders of human speech, we see, as everywhere else in human life, a natural progress from the imperfect towards the perfect, unceasing attempts at realizing the ideal, and the frequent triumphs of the human mind over the inevitable difficulties of this earthly condition,--difficulties, not of man’s own making, but, as I firmly believe, prepared for him, and not without a purpose, as toils and tasks, by a higher Power and by the highest Wisdom.

Let us look then abroad and behold the materials which the student of language has now to face. Beginning with the language of the Western Isles, we have at the present day, at least 100,000 words, arranged as on the shelves of a Museum, in the pages of Johnson and Webster. But these 100,000 words represent only the best grains that have remained in the sieve, while clouds of chaff have been winnowed off, and while many a valuable grain too has been lost by mere carelessness. If we counted the wealth of English dialects, and if we added the treasures of the ancient language from Alfred to Wycliffe, we should easily double the herbarium of the linguistic flora of England. And what are these Western Isles as compared to Europe; and what is Europe, a mere promontory, as compared to the vast continent of Asia; and what again is Asia, as compared to the whole inhabitable world? But there is no corner of that world that is not full of language: the very desert and the isles of the sea teem with dialects, and the more we recede from the centres of civilization, the larger the number of independent languages, springing up in every valley, and overshadowing the smallest island.

Ἴδαν ἐς πολύδενδρον ἀνὴρ ὑλατόμος ἐνθὼν Παπταίνει, παρέοντος ἄδην, πόθεν ἄρξεται ἔργω.

We are bewildered by the variety of plants, of birds, and fishes, and insects, scattered with lavish prodigality over land and sea;--but what is the living wealth of that Fauna as compared to the winged words which fill the air with unceasing music! What are the scanty relics of fossil plants and animals, compared to the storehouse of what we call the dead languages! How then can we explain it that for centuries and centuries, while collecting beasts, and birds, and fishes, and insects, while studying their forms, from the largest down to the smallest and almost invisible creatures, man has passed by this forest of speech, without seeing the forest, as we say in German, for the very number of its trees (_Man sah den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht_), without once asking how this vast currency could have been coined, what inexhaustible mines could have supplied the metal, what cunning hands could have devised the image and superscription,--without once wondering at the countless treasure inherited by him from the fathers of the human race?

Let us now turn our attention in a different direction. After it had been discovered that there was this great mass of material to be collected, to be classified, to be explained, what has the Science of Language, as yet, really accomplished? It has achieved much, considering that real work only began about fifty years ago; it has achieved little, if we look at what still remains to be done.

The first discovery was that languages admit of classification. Now this was a very great discovery, and it at once changed and raised the whole character of linguistic studies. Languages might have been, for all we know, the result of individual fancy or poetry; words might have been created here and there at random, or been fixed by a convention, more or less arbitrary. In that case a scientific classification would have been as impossible as it is if applied to the changing fashions of the day. Nothing can be classified, nothing can be scientifically ruled and ordered, except what has grown up in natural order and according to rational rule.

Out of the great mass of speech that is now accessible to the student of language, a number of so-called families have been separated, such as the _Aryan_, the _Semitic_, the _Ural-Altaic_, the _Indo-Chinese_, the _Dravidian_, the _Malayo-Polynesian_, the _Kafir_ or _Bâ-ntu_ in Africa, and the _Polysynthetic_ dialects of America. The only classes, however, which have been carefully examined, and which alone have hitherto supplied the materials for what we might call the Philosophy of Language, are the Aryan and the Semitic, the former comprising the languages of India, Persia, Armenia, Greece and Italy, and of the Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic races; the latter consisting of the languages of the Babylonians, the Syrians, the Jews, the Ethiopians, the Arabs.

These two classes include, no doubt, the most important languages of the world, if we measure the importance of languages by the amount of influence exercised on the political and literary history of the world by those who speak them. But considered by themselves, and placed in their proper place in the vast realm of human speech, they describe but a very small segment of the entire circle. The completeness of the evidence which they place before us in the long series of their literary treasures, points them out in an eminent degree as the most useful subjects on which to study the anatomy of speech, and nearly all the discoveries that have been made as to the laws of language, the process of composition, derivation, and inflexion, have been gained by Aryan and Semitic scholars.

Far be it from me, therefore, to underrate the value of Aryan and Semitic scholarship for a successful prosecution of the Science of Language. But while doing full justice to the method adopted by Semitic and Aryan scholars in the discovery of the laws that regulate the growth and decay of language, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that our field of observation has been thus far extremely limited, and that we should act in defiance of the simplest rules of sound induction, were we to generalize on such scanty evidence. Let us but clearly see what place these two so-called families, the Aryan and Semitic, occupy in the great kingdom of speech. They are in reality but two centres, two small settlements of speech, and all we know of them is their period of decay, not their period of growth, their descending, not their ascending career, their Being, as we say in German, not their Becoming (_Ihr Gewordensein, nicht ihr Werden_). Even in the earliest literary documents both the Aryan and Semitic speech appear before us as fixed and petrified. They had left forever that stage during which language grows and expands, before it is arrested in its exuberant fertility by means of religious or political concentration, by means of oral tradition, or finally by means of a written literature. In the natural history of speech, writing, or, what in early times takes the place of writing, oral tradition, is something merely accidental. It represents a foreign influence which, in natural history, can only be compared to the influence exercised by domestication on plants and animals. Language would be language still, nay, would be more truly language, if the idea of a literature, whether oral or written, had never entered men’s minds; and however important the effects produced by this artificial domestication of language may be, it is clear that our ideas of what language is in a natural state, and therefore what Sanskrit and Hebrew, too, must have been before they were tamed and fixed by literary cultivation, ought not to be formed from an exclusive study of Aryan and Semitic speech. I maintain that all that we call Aryan and Semitic speech, wonderful as its literary representatives may be, consists of neither more or less than so many varieties which all owe their origin to only two historical concentrations of wild unbounded speech; nay, however perfect, however powerful, however glorious in the history of the world,--in the eyes of the student of language, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, are what a student of natural history would not hesitate to call “_monstra_,” unnatural, exceptional formations which can never disclose to us the real character of language left to itself to follow out its own laws without let or hindrance.

For that purpose a study of Chinese and the Turanian dialects, a study even of the jargons of the savages of Africa, Polynesia, and Melanesia is far more instructive than the most minute analysis of Sanskrit and Hebrew. The impression which a study of Greek and Latin and Sanskrit leaves on our minds is, that language is a work of art, most complicated, most wonderful, most perfect. We have given so many names to its outward features, its genders and cases, its tenses and moods, its participles, gerunds, and supines, that at last we are frightened at our own devices. Who can read through all the so-called irregular verbs, or look at the thousands and thousands of words in a Greek Dictionary without feeling that he moves about in a perfect labyrinth? How then, we ask, was this labyrinth erected? How did all this come to be? We ourselves, speaking the language which we speak, move about, as it were, in the innermost chambers, in the darkest recesses of that primeval palace, but we cannot tell by what steps and through what passages we arrived there, and we look in vain for the thread of Ariadne which in leading us out of the enchanted castle of our language, would disclose to us the way by which we ourselves, or our fathers and forefathers before us, entered into it.

The question how language came to be what it is has been asked again and again. Even a school-boy, if he possesses but a grain of the gift of wondering must ask himself why _mensa_ means one table, and _mensæ_ many tables; why I love should be _amo_, I am loved _amor_, I shall love _amabo_, I have loved _amavi_, I should have loved _amavissem_. Until very lately two answers only could have been given to such questions. Both sound to us almost absurd, yet in their time they were supported by the highest authorities. Either, it was said, language, and particularly the grammatical framework of language was made by _convention_, by agreeing to call one table _mensa_, and many tables _mensæ_; or, and this was Schlegel’s view, language was declared to possess an organic life, and its terminations, prefixes, and suffixes were supposed to have sprouted forth from the radicals and stems and branches of language, like so many buds and flowers. To us it seems almost incredible that such theories should have been seriously maintained, and maintained by men of learning and genius. But what better answer could they have given? What better answer has been given even now? We have learnt something, chiefly from a study of the modern dialects, which often repeat the processes of ancient speech, and thus betray the secrets of the family. We have learnt that in some of the dialects of modern Sanskrit, in Bengali for instance,[4] the plural is formed, as it is in Chinese, Mongolian, Turkish, Finnish, Burmese, and Siamese, also in the Dravidian and Malayo-Polynesian dialects, by adding a word expressive of plurality, and then appending again the terminations of the singular. We have learnt from French how a future, _je parlerai_, can be formed by an auxiliary verb: “I to speak have” coming to mean, I shall speak. We have learnt from our own language, whether English or German, that suffixes, such as _head_ in _godhead_, _ship_ in _ladyship_, _dom_ in _kingdom_ were originally substantives, having the meaning of quality, shape, and state. But I doubt whether even thus we should have arrived at a thorough understanding of the real antecedents of language, unless, what happened in the study of the stratification of the earth, had happened in the study of language. If the formation of the crust of the earth had been throughout regular and uniform, and if none of the lower strata had been tilted up, so that even those who run might read, no shaft from the surface could have been sunk deep enough to bring the geologist from the tertiary strata down to the Silurian rocks. The same in language. Unless some languages had been arrested in their growth during their earlier stages, and had remained on the surface in this primitive state exposed only to the decomposing influence of atmospheric action, and to the ill-treatment of literary cultivation, I doubt whether any scholar would have had the courage to say that at one time Sanskrit was like unto Chinese, and Hebrew no better than Malay. In the successive strata of language thus exposed to our view, we have in fact, as in Geology, the very thread of Ariadne, which, if we will but trust to it, will lead us out of the dark labyrinth of language in which we live, by the same road by which we and those who came before us, first entered into it. The more we retrace our steps, the more we advance from stratum to stratum, from story to story, the more shall we feel almost dazzled by the daylight that breaks in upon us; the more shall we be struck, no longer by the intricacy of Greek or Sanskrit grammar, but by the marvelous simplicity of the original warp of human speech, as preserved, for instance, in Chinese; by the child-like contrivances, that are at the bottom of Paulo-post Futures and Conditional Moods.

Let no one be frightened at the idea of studying a Chinese grammar. Those who can take an interest in the secret springs of the mind, in the elements of pure reason, in the laws of thought, will find a Chinese grammar most instructive, most fascinating. It is the faithful photograph of man in his leading-strings, trying the muscles of his mind, groping his way, and so delighted with his first successful grasps that he repeats them again and again. It is child’s play, if you like, but it displays, like all child’s play, that wisdom and strength which are perfect in the mouth of babes and sucklings. Every shade of thought that finds expression in the highly finished and nicely balanced system of Greek tenses, moods, and particles can be expressed, and has been expressed, in that infant language by words that have neither prefix nor suffix, no terminations to indicate number, case, tense, mood, or person. Every word in Chinese is monosyllabic, and the same word, without any change of form, may be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, or a particle. Thus _ta_, according to its position in a sentence, may mean great, greatness, to grow, very much, very.[5]

And here a very important observation has been made by Chinese grammarians, an observation which, after a very slight modification and expansion, contains indeed the secret of the whole growth of language from Chinese to English. If a word in Chinese is used with the _bonâ fide_ signification of a noun or a verb, it is called a _full word_ (_shi-tsé_); if it is used as a particle or with a merely determinative or formal character, it is called an _empty word_ (_hiu-tsé_[6]). There is as yet no outward difference between full and empty words in Chinese, and this renders it all the more creditable to the grammarians of China that they should have perceived the inward distinction, even in the absence of any outward signs.

Let us learn then from Chinese grammarians this great lesson, that words may become empty, and without restricting the meaning of empty words as they do, let us use that term in the most general sense, as expressive of the fact that words may lose something of their full original meaning.

Let us add to this another observation, which the Chinese could not well have made, but which we shall see confirmed again and again in the history of language, viz.: that empty words, or, as we may also call them, dead words, are most exposed to phonetic decay.

It is clear then that, with these two preliminary observations, we can imagine three conditions of language:--

1. There may be languages in which all words, both empty and full, retain their independent form. Even words which are used when we should use mere suffixes or terminations, retain their outward integrity in Chinese. Thus, in Chinese, _jin_ means man, _tu_ means crowd, _jin-tu_, man-crowd. In this compound both _jin_ and _tu_ continue to be felt as independent words, more so than in our own compound _man-kind_; but nevertheless _tu_ has become empty, it only serves to determine the preceding word _jin_, man, and tells us the quantity or number in which _jin_ shall be taken. The compound answers in intention to our plural, but in form it is wide apart from _men_, the plural of _man_.

2. Empty words may lose their independence, may suffer phonetic decay, and dwindle down to mere suffixes and terminations. Thus in Burmese the plural is formed by _to_, in Finnish, Mordvinian, and Ostiakian by _t_. As soon as _to_ ceases to be used as an independent word in the sense of number, it becomes an empty, or if you like, an obsolete word, that has no meaning except as the exponent of plurality; nay, at last, it may dwindle down to a mere letter, which is then called by grammarians the termination of the plural. In this second stage phonetic decay may well-nigh destroy the whole body of an empty word, but--and this is important--no full words, no radicals are as yet attacked by that disintegrating process.

3. Phonetic decay may advance, and does advance still further. Full words also may lose their independence, and be attacked by the same disease that had destroyed the original features of suffixes and prefixes. In this state it is frequently impossible to distinguish any longer between the radical and formative elements of words.

If we wished to represent these three stages of language algebraically, we might represent the first by RR, using R as the symbol of a root which has suffered no phonetic decay; the second, by R + ρ or ρ + R, or ρ + R + ρ, representing by ρ an empty word that has suffered phonetic change; the third, by rρ, or ρr, or ρrρ, when both full and empty words have been changed, and have become welded together into one indistinguishable mass through the intense heat of thought, and by the constant hammering of the tongue.

Those who are acquainted with the works of Humboldt will easily recognize, in these three stages or strata, a classification of language first suggested by that eminent philosopher. According to him languages can be classified as _isolating_, _agglutinative_,[7] and _inflectional_, and his definition of these three classes agrees in the main with the description just given of the three strata or stages of language.

But what is curious is that this threefold classification, and the consequences to which it leads, should not at once have been fully reasoned out, nay, that a system most palpably erroneous should have been founded upon it. We find it repeated again and again in most works on Comparative Philology, that Chinese belongs to the _isolating_ class, the Turanian languages to the _combinatory_, the Aryan and Semitic to the _inflectional_; nay, Professor Pott[8] and his school seem convinced that no evolution can ever take place from _isolating_ to _combinatory_ and from _combinatory_ to _inflectional_ speech. We should thus be forced to believe that by some inexplicable grammatical instinct, or by some kind of inherent necessity, languages were from the beginning created as _isolating_ or _combinatory_, or _inflectional_, and must remain so to the end.

It is strange that those scholars who hold that no transition is possible from one form of language to another, should not have seen that there is really no language that can be strictly called either isolating, or combinatory, or inflectional, and that the transition from one stage to another is in fact constantly taking place under our very noses. Even Chinese is not free from combinatory forms, and the more highly developed among the combinatory languages show the clearest traces of incipient inflection. The difficulty is not to show the transition of one stratum of speech into another, but rather to draw a sharp line between the different strata. The same difficulty was felt in Geology, and led Sir Charles Lyell to invent such pliant names as _Eocene_, _Meiocene_, and _Pleiocene_, names which indicate a mere dawn, a minority, or a majority of new formations, but do not draw a fast and hard line, cutting off one stratum from the other. Natural growth, and even merely mechanical accumulation and accretion, here as elsewhere, are so minute and almost imperceptible that they defy all strict scientific terminology, and force upon us the lesson that we must be satisfied with an approximate accuracy. For practical purposes Humboldt’s classification of languages may be quite sufficient, and we have no difficulty in classing any given language, according to the prevailing character of its formation, as either isolating, or combinatory, or inflectional. But when we analyze each language more carefully we find there is not one exclusively isolating, or exclusively combinatory, or exclusively inflectional. The power of composition, which is retained unimpaired through every stratum, can at any moment place an inflectional on a level with an isolating and a combinatory language. A compound such as the Sanskrit +go-duh+, cow-milking, differs little, if at all, from the Chinese _nieou-jou_, _vaccæ lac_, or in the patois of Canton, _ngau ü_, cow-milk, before it takes the terminations of the nominative, which is, of course, impossible in Chinese.

So again in English _New-town_, in Greek _Nea-polis_, would be simply combinatory compounds. Even _Newton_ would still belong to the combinatory stratum; but _Naples_ would have to be classed as belonging to the inflectional stage.

Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and the Dravidian languages belong in the main to the combinatory stratum; but having received a considerable amount of literary cultivation, they all alike exhibit forms which in every sense of the word are inflectional. If in Finnish, for instance, we find _käsi_, in the singular, hand, and _kädet_, in the plural, hands, we see that phonetic corruption has clearly reached the very core of the noun, and given rise to a plural more decidedly inflectional than the Greek χεῖρ-ες, or the English _hand-s_. In Tamil, where the suffix of the plural is +gaḷ+, we have indeed a regular combinatory form in +kei-gaḷ+, hands; but if the same plural suffix +gaḷ+ is added to +kal+, stone, the euphonic rules of Tamil require not only a change in the suffix, which becomes +kaḷ+, but likewise a modification in the body of the word, +kal+ being changed to +kar+. We thus get the plural +karkaḷ+ which in every sense of the word is an inflectional form. In this plural suffix +gaḷ+, Dr. Caldwell has recognized the Dravidian +taḷa+ or +daḷa+, a host, a crowd; and though, as he admits himself in the second edition (p. 143), the evidence in support of this etymology may not be entirely satisfactory, the steps by which the learned author of the Grammar of the Dravidian languages has traced the plural termination +lu+ in Telugu back to the same original suffix +kaḷ+ admit of little doubt.

Evidence of a similar kind may easily be found in any grammar, whether of an isolating, combinatory, or inflectional language, wherever there is evidence as to the ascending or descending progress of any particular form of speech. Everywhere amalgamation points back to combination, and combination back to juxtaposition, everywhere isolating speech tends towards terminational forms, and terminational forms become inflectional.

I may best be able to explain the view commonly held with regard to the strata of language by a reference to the strata of the earth. Here, too, where different strata have been tilted up, it might seem at first sight as if they were arranged perpendicularly and side by side, none underlying the other, none presupposing the other. But as the geologist, on the strength of more general evidence, has to reverse this perpendicular position, and to re-arrange his strata in their natural order, and as they followed each other horizontally, the student of language too is irresistibly driven to the same conclusion. No language can by any possibility be inflectional without having passed through the combinatory and isolating stratum; no language can by any possibility be combinatory without clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum of isolation. Unless Sanskrit and Greek and Hebrew had passed through the combinatory stratum, nay, unless, at some time or other, they had been no better than Chinese, their present form would be as great a miracle as the existence of chalk (and the strata associated with it) without an underlying stratum of oolite (and the strata associated with it;) or a stratum of oolite unsupported by the trias or system of new red sandstone. Bunsen’s dictum, that “the question whether a language can begin with inflections, implies an absurdity,” may have seemed too strongly worded: but if he took inflections in the commonly received meaning, in the sense of something that may be added or removed from a base in order to define or to modify its meaning, then surely the simple argument _ex nihilo nihil fit_ is sufficient to prove that the inflections must have been something by themselves, before they became inflections relatively to the base, and that the base too must have existed by itself, before it could be defined and modified by the addition of such inflections.

But we need not depend on purely logical arguments, when we have historical evidence to appeal to. As far as we know the history of language, we see it everywhere confined within those three great strata or zones which we have just described. There are inflectional changes, no doubt, which cannot as yet be explained, such as the _m_ in the accusative singular of masculine, feminine, and in the nominative and accusative of neuter nouns; or the change of vowels between the Hebrew _Piel_ and _Pual_, _Hiphil_ and _Hophal_, where we might feel tempted to admit formative agencies different from juxtaposition and combination. But if we consider how in Sanskrit the Vedic instrumental plural, +aśvebhis+ (Lat. _equobus_), becomes before our very eyes +aśvais+ (Lat. _equis_), and how such changes as _Bruder_, brother, and _Brüder_, brethren, _Ich weiss_, I know, A.S. _wât_, and _Wir wissen_, we know, A.S. _wit-on_, have been explained as the results of purely mechanical, _i.e._, combinatory proceedings, we need not despair of further progress in the same direction. One thing is certain, that, wherever inflection has yielded to a rational analysis, it has invariably been recognized as the result of a previous combination, and wherever combination has been traced back to an earlier stage, that earlier stage has been simple juxtaposition. The primitive blocks of Chinese and the most perplexing agglomerates of Greek can be explained as the result of one continuous formative process, whatever the material elements may be on which it was exercised; nor is it possible even to imagine in the formation of language more than these three strata through which hitherto all human speech has passed.

All we can do is to subdivide each stratum, and thus, for instance, distinguish in the second stratum the suffixing (R + ρ) from the prefixing (ρ + R), and from the affixing (ρ + R + ρ) languages.

A fourth class, the infixing or incapsulating languages, are but a variety of the affixing class, for what in Bask or in the polysynthetic dialects of America has the appearance of actual insertion of formative elements into the body of a base can be explained more rationally by the former existence of simpler bases to which modifying suffixes or prefixes have once been added, but not so firmly as to exclude the addition of new suffixes at the end of the base, instead of, as with us, at the end of the compound. If we could say in Greek δείκ-μι-νυ, instead of δείκ-νυ-μι, or in Sanskrit +yu-mi-na-j+, instead of +yu-na-j-mi+, we should have a real beginning of so-called incapsulating formations.[9]

A few instances will place the normal progress of language from stratum to stratum more clearly before our eyes. We have seen that in Chinese every word is monosyllabic, every word tells, and there are, as yet, no suffixes by which one word is derived from another, no case-terminations by which the relation of one word to another could be indicated. How, then, does Chinese distinguish between the son of the father, and the father of the son? Simply by position. _Fú_ is father, _tzé_, son; therefore _fú tzé_ is son of the father, _tzé fú_, father of the son. This rule admits of no exception but one. If a Chinese wants to say _a wine-glass_, he puts _wine_ first and _glass_ last, as in English. If he wants to say _a glass of wine_, he puts _glass_ first and _wine_ last. Thus _i-pei thsieou_, a cup of wine; _thsieou pei_, a wine-cup. If, however, it seems desirable to mark the word which is in the genitive more distinctly, the word _tchi_ may be placed after it, and we may say, _fú tchi tzé_, the son of the father. In the Mandarin dialect this _tchi_ has become _ti_, and is added so constantly to the governed word, that, to all intents and purposes, it may be treated as what we call the termination of the genitive. Originally this _tchi_ was a relative, or rather a demonstrative, pronoun, and it continues to be used as such in the ancient Chinese.[10]

It is perfectly true that Chinese possesses no derivative suffixes; that it cannot derive, for instance, _kingly_ from a noun, such as _king_, or adjectives like _visible_ and _invisible_ from a verb _videre_, to see. Yet the same idea which we express by invisible, is expressed without difficulty in Chinese, only in a different way. They say _khan-pu-kien_, “I-behold-and-do-not-see,” and this to them conveys the same idea as the English _invisible_, though more exactly _invisible_ might be rendered by _kien_, to see, _pou-te_, one cannot, _tí_, which.

We cannot in Chinese derive from _ferrum_, iron, a new substantive _ferrarius_, a man who works in iron, a blacksmith; _ferraria_, an iron mine, and again _ferrariarius_, a man who works in an iron mine. All this is possible in an inflectional language only. But it is not to be supposed that in Chinese there is an independent expression for every single conception, even for those which are clearly secondary and derivative. If an arrow in Chinese is _shi_, then a maker of arrows (in old French _fléchier_, in English _fletcher_) is called an arrow-man, _shi-jin_. _Shui_ means water, _fu_, man; hence _shui-fu_, a water man, a water carrier. The same word _shui_, water, if followed by _sheu_, hand, stands for steersman, literally, water-hand. _Kin_ means gold, _tsiang_, maker; hence _kin-tsiang_, a goldsmith. _Shou_ means writing, _sheu_, hand; hence _shou-sheu_, a writer, a copyist, literally, a writing-hand.

A transition from such compounds to really combinatory speech is extremely easy. Let _sheu_, in the sense of hand, become obsolete, and be replaced in the ordinary language by another word for hand; and let such names as _shu-sheu_, author, _shui-sheu_, boatsman, be retained, and the people who speak this language will soon accustom themselves to look upon _sheu_ as a mere derivative, and use it by a kind of false analogy, even where the original meaning of _sheu_, hand, would not have been applicable.[11]

We can watch the same process even in comparatively modern languages. In Anglo-Saxon, for instance, _hâd_ means state, order. It is used as an independent word, and continued to be so used as late as Spenser, who wrote:--

“Cuddie, I wote thou kenst little good, So vainly t’ advaunce thy headlesse hood.”

After a time, however, _hâd_, as an independent word, was lost, and its place taken by more classical expressions, such as _habit_, _nature_, or _disposition_. But there remained such compounds as _man-hâd_, the state of man, _God-hâd_, the nature of God; and in these words the last element, being an empty word and no longer understood, was soon looked upon as a mere suffix. Having lost its vitality, it was all the more exposed to phonetic decay, and became both _hood_ and _head_.

Or, let us take another instance, The name given to the fox in ancient German poetry was _Regin-hart_. _Regin_ in Old High German means thought or cunning, _hart_, the Gothic _hardu_, means strong. This _hart_[12] corresponds to the Greek κράτος, which, in its adjectival form of κρατης, forms as many proper names in Greek as _hart_ in German. In Sanskrit the same word exists as _kratu_, meaning intellectual rather than bodily strength, a shade of meaning which is still perceivable even in the German _hart_, and in the English _hard_ and _hardy_. _Reginhart_, therefore, was originally a compound, meaning “thought-strong,” strong in cunning. Other words formed in the same or a very similar manner are: _Peranhart_ and _Bernhart_, literally, bear-minded, or bold like a bear; _Eburhart_, boar-minded; _Engil-hart_, angel-minded; _Gothart_, god-minded; _Egin-hart_, fierce-minded; _Hugihart_, wise-minded or strong in thought, the English _Hogarth_. In Low German the second element, _hart_, lost its _h_ and became _ard_. This _ard_ ceased to convey any definite meaning, and though in some words which are formed by _ard_ we may still discover its original power, it soon became a mere derivative, and was added promiscuously to form new words. In the Low German name for the fox, _Reinaert_, neither the first nor the second word tells us any longer anything, and the two words together have become a mere proper name. In other words the first portion retains its meaning, but the second, _ard_, is nothing but a suffix. Thus we find the Low German _dronk-ard_, a drunkard; _dick-ard_, a thick fellow; _rik-ard_, a rich fellow; _gêrard_, a miser. In English _sweet-ard_, originally a very sweet person, has been changed and resuscitated as _sweet-heart_,[13] by the same process which changed _shamefast_ into _shamefaced_. But, still more curious, this suffix _ard_, which had lost all life and meaning in Low German, was taken over as a convenient derivative by the Romance languages. After having borrowed a number of words such as _renard_, fox, and proper names like _Bernard_, _Richard_, _Gerard_, the framers of the new Romance dialects used the same termination even at the end of Latin words. Thus they formed not only many proper names, like _Abeillard_, _Bayard_, _Brossard_, but appellatives like _leccardo_, a gourmand, _linguardo_, a talker, _criard_, a crier, _codardo_, Prov. _coart_, Fr. _couard_, a coward.[14] That a German word _hart_, meaning strong, and originally strength, should become a Roman suffix may seem strange; yet we no longer hesitate to use even Hindustani words as English suffixes. In Hindustani +válá+ is used to form many substantives. If +Dilli+ is Delhi, then +Dill-vállá+ is a man of Delhi. +Go+ is cow, +go-válá+ a cow-herd, contracted into +gválá+. Innumerable words can thus be formed, and as the derivative seemed handy and useful, it was at last added even to English words, for instance in “Competition wallah.”

These may seem isolated cases, but the principles on which they rest pervade the whole structure of language. It is surprising to see how much may be achieved by an application of those principles, how large results may be obtained by the smallest and simplest means. By means of the single radical î or +yâ+ (originally +ya+), which in the Aryan languages means to go or to send, the almost unconscious framers of Aryan grammar formed not only their neuter, denominative, and causative verbs, but their passives, their optatives, their futures, and a considerable number of substantives and adjectives. Every one of these formations, in Sanskrit as well as in Greek, can be explained, and has been explained, as the result of a combination between any given verbal root and the radical _î_ or +yâ+.

There is, for instance, a root +nak+, expressive of perishing or destruction. We have it in +nak+, night; Latin _nox_, Greek νύξ, meaning originally the waning, the disappearing, the death of day. We have the same root in composition, as, for instance, +jîva-nak+, life-destroying; and by means of suffixes Greek has formed from it νεκ-ρός, a dead body, νέκ-υς, dead, and νέκ-υ-ες in the plural, the departed. In Sanskrit this root is turned into a simple verb, +naś-a-ti+, he perishes. But in order to give to it a more distinctly neuter meaning, a new verbal base is formed by composition with +ya+, +naś-ya-ti+, he goes to destruction, he perishes.

By the same or a very similar process denominative verbs are formed in Sanskrit to a very large extent. From +râjan+, king, we form +râjâ-ya-te+, he behaves like a king, literally, he goes the king, he acts the king, _il a l’allure d’un roi_. From +kumârî+, girl, +kûmârâ-ya-te+, he behaves like a girl, etc.[15]

After raising +naś+ to +nâśa+, and adding the same radical +ya+, Sanskrit produces a causative verb, +nâśa-ya-ti+, he sends to destruction, the Latin _nêcare_.

In close analogy to the neuter verb +naśyati+, the regular passive is formed in Sanskrit by composition with +ya+, but by adding, at the same time, a different set of personal terminations. Thus +náś-yá-ti+ means he perishes, while +naś-yá-te+ means he is destroyed.

The usual terminations of the Optative in Sanskrit are:--

yâm, yâs, yât, yâma, yâta, yus,

or, after bases ending in vowels:--

iyam, is, it, ima, ita, iyus.

In Greek:--

ιην, ιης, ιη, ιημεν, ιητε, ιεν,

or, after bases ending in o:--

ιμι, ις, ι, ιμεν, ιτε, ιεν.

In Latin:--

iêm iês iet ---- ---- ient, îm, îs, it, îmus, îtis, int.

If we add these terminations to the root +AS+, to be, we get the Sanskrit +s-yâm+ for +as-yâm+:--

syâm, syâs, syât, syâma, syâta, syus.

Greek ἐσ-ίην, contracted to εἴην:--

εἴην, εἴης, εἴη, εἴημεν, εἴητε, εἶεν

Latin _es-iem_, changed to _siêm_, _sîm_, and _erîm_:--

siêm, siês, siet,[16] ---- ---- sient. sim, sîs, sit,[17] sîmus, sitis, sint. erîm, erîs, erit, erîmus, erîtis, erint.

If we add the other termination to a verbal base ending in certain vowels, we get the Sanskrit +bhara-iyam+, contracted to +bháreyam+:--

bharêyam, bharês, bharêt, bharêma, bharêta, bharêyus.

in Greek φέρο-ιμι:--

φέρο-ιμι, φέρο-ις, φέρο-ι, φέρο-ιμεν, φέρο-ιτε, φέρο-ιεν

in Latin _fere-im_, changed to _ferem_, used in the sense of a future, but replaced[18] in the first person by _feram_, the subjunctive of the present:--

feram, ferês, feret, ferêmus, ferêtis, ferent.

Perfect Subjunctive:--

tul-erîm, tul-erîs, tul-erit, tul-erimus, tul-eritis,[19] tul-erint.

Here we have clearly the same auxiliary verb, i or +ya+, again, and we are driven to admit that what we now call an optative or potential mood, was originally a kind of future, formed by +ya+, to go, very much like the French _je vais dire_, I am going to say, I shall say, or like the Zulu 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 +ngi-ya-ku-tanda+, I go to love, I shall love.[20] The future would afterwards assume the character of a civil command, as “thou wilt go” may be used even by us in the sense of “go;” and the imperative would dwindle away into a potential, as we may say: “Go and you will see,” in the same sense as, If you go, you will see.

The terminations of the future are:--

Sanskrit:--

syâmi, syasi, syati, syâmas, syâtha, syanti.

Greek:--

σω, σεις, σει, σομεν, σετε, σοντι.

Latin:--

ero, erĭs, erĭt, erĭmus, erĭtis, erunt.

In these terminations we have really two auxiliary verbs, the verb +as+, to be, and +ya+, to go, and by adding them to any given root, as, for instance, +DA+, to give, we have the Sanskrit (+dâ-as-yâ-mi+):--

dâ-s-yâ-mi, dâ-s-ya-si, dâ-s-ya-ti, dâ-s-yâ-mas, dâ-s-ya-tha, dâ-s-ya-nti,

Greek (δω-εσ-ιω):--

δώ-σ-ω,[21] δώ-σ-εις, δώ-σ-ει, δώ-σ-ομεν, δώ-σ-ετε, δώ-σ-ουσι

Latin:--

pot-ero, pot-erĭs, pot-erit, pot-erĭmus, pot-erĭtis, pot-erunt.

A verbal form of very frequent occurrence in Sanskrit is the so-called gerundive participle which signifies that a thing is necessary or proper to be done. Thus from +budh+, to know, is formed +bodh-ya-s+, one who is to be known, _cognoscendus_; from +guh+, to hide, +gúh-ya-s+, or +goh-ya-s+, one who is to be hidden, literally, one who goes to a state of hiding or being hidden; from +yaj+, to sacrifice, +yâj-ya-s+, one who is or ought to be worshipped. Here, again, what is going to be becomes gradually what will be, and lastly, what shall be. In Greek we find but few analogous forms, such as ἅγιος, holy, στύγ-ι-ος, to be hated; in Latin _ex-im-i-us_, to be taken out; in Gothic _anda-nêm-ja_, to be taken on, to be accepted, agreeable, German _angenehm_.[22]

While the gerundive participles in +ya+ are formed on the same principle as the verbal bases in +ya+ of the passive, a number of substantives in +ya+ seem to have been formed in close analogy to the bases of denominative verbs, or the bases of neuter verbs, in all of which the derivative +ya+ expresses originally the act of going, behaving, and at last of simple being. Thus from +vid+, to know, we find in Sanskrit +vid-yâ+, knowing, knowledge; from +śi+, to lie down, +śayyâ+; resting. Analogous forms in Latin are _gaud-i-um_, _stud-i-um_, or with feminine terminations, _in-ed-i-a_, _in-vid-i-a_, _per-nic-i-es_, _scab-i-es_; in Greek, μαν-ί-α, ἁμαρτ-ί-α, or ἁμάρτ-ι-ον; in German, numerous abstract nouns in _i_ and _e_.[23]

This shows how much can be achieved, and has been achieved, in language with the simplest materials. Neuter, denominative, causative, passive verbs, optatives and futures, gerundives, adjectives, and substantives, all are formed by one and the same process, by means of one and the same root. It is no inconsiderable portion of grammar which has thus been explained by this one root +ya+, to go, and we learn again and again how simple and yet how wonderful are the ways of language, if we follow them up from stratum to stratum to their original starting-point.

Now what has happened in these cases, has happened over and over again in the history of language. Everything that is now formal, not only derivative suffixes, but everything that constitutes the grammatical framework and articulation of language, was originally material. What we now call the terminations of cases were mostly local adverbs; what we call the personal endings of verbs were personal pronouns. Suffixes and affixes were mostly independent words, nominal, verbal, or pronominal; there is, in fact, nothing in language that is now empty, or dead, or formal, that was not originally full, and alive, and material. It is the object of Comparative Grammar to trace every formal or dead element back to its life-like form; and though this resuscitating process is by no means complete, nay, though in several cases it seems hopeless to try to discover the living type from which proceeded the petrified fragments which we call terminations or suffixes, enough evidence has been brought together to establish on the firmest basis this general maxim, that _Nothing is dead in any language that was not originally alive_; that nothing exists in a tertiary stratum that does not find its antecedents and its explanation in the secondary or primary stratum of human speech.

After having explained, as far as it was possible in so short a time, what I consider to be the right view of the stratification of human speech, I should have wished to be able to show to you how the aspect of some of the most difficult and most interesting problems of our science is changed, if we look at them again with the new light which we have gained regarding the necessary antecedents of all language. Let me only call your attention to one of the most contested points in the Science of Language. The question whether we may assign a common origin to the Aryan and Semitic languages has been discussed over and over again. No one thinks now of deriving Sanskrit from Hebrew, or Hebrew from Sanskrit; the only question is whether at some time or other the two languages could ever have formed part of one and the same body of speech. There are scholars, and very eminent scholars, who deny all similarity between the two, while others have collected materials that would seem to make it difficult to assign such numerous coincidences to mere chance. Nowhere, in fact, has Bacon’s observation on this radical distinction between different men’s dispositions for philosophy and the sciences been more fully verified than among the students of the Science of Language:--_Maximum et velut radicale discrimen ingeniorum, quoad philosophiam et scientias, illud est, quod alia ingenia sint fortiora et aptiora ad notandas rerum differentias; alia ad notandas rerum similitudines. . . . . . Utrumque autem ingenium facile labitur in excessum, prensando aut gradus rerum, aut umbras._[24] Before, however, we enter upon an examination of the evidence brought forward by different scholars in support of their conflicting theories, it is our first duty to ask a preliminary question, viz.: What kind of evidence have we any right to expect, considering that both Sanskrit and Hebrew belong, in the state in which we know them, to the inflectional stratum of speech?

Now it is quite true that Sanskrit and Hebrew had a separate existence long before they reached the tertiary stratum, before they became thoroughly inflectional; and that consequently they can share nothing in common that is peculiar to the inflectional stratum in each, nothing that is the result of phonetic decay, which sets in after combinatory formations have become unintelligible and traditional. I mean, supposing that the pronoun of the first person had been originally the same in the Semitic and Aryan languages, supposing that in the Hebrew _an-oki_ (Assyrian _an-aku_, Phen. _anak_) the last portion, _oki_, was originally identical with the Sanskrit +ah+ in +aham+, the Greek ἐγ in ἐγ-ώ, it would still be useless to attempt to derive the termination of the first person singular, whether in _kâtal-ti_ or in _ektôl_, from the same type which in Sanskrit appears as +mi+ or +am+ or +a+, in +tudâ-mi+, +atud-am+, +tutod-a+. There cannot be between Hebrew and Sanskrit the same relationship as between Sanskrit and Greek, if indeed the term of relationship is applicable even to Sanskrit and Greek, which are really mere dialectic varieties of one and the same type of speech.

The question then arises, Could the Semitic and Aryan languages have been identical during the second or _combinatory_ period? Here, as before, the answer must be, I believe, decidedly negative, for not only are the empty words which are used for derivative purposes different in each, but, what is far more characteristic, the manner in which they are added to the stems is different too. In the Aryan languages formative elements are attached to the ends of words only; in the Semitic languages they are found both at the end and at the beginning. In the Aryan languages grammatical compounds are all according to the formula rρ; in the Semitic we have formations after the formulas rρ, ρr, and ρrρ.

There remains, therefore, the first or isolating stage only in which Semitic and Aryan speech might have been identical. But even here we must make a distinction. All Aryan roots are monosyllabic, all Semitic roots have been raised to triliteral form. Therefore it is only previous to the time when the Semitic roots assumed this secondary triliteral form that any community could possibly be admitted between these two streams of language. Supposing we knew as an historical fact that at this early period--a period which transcends the limits of everything we are accustomed to call historical--Semitic and Aryan speech had been identical, what evidence of this union could we expect to find in the actual Semitic and Aryan languages such as we know them in their inflectional period? Let us recollect that the 100,000 words of English, nay, the many hundred thousand words in all the dictionaries of the other Aryan languages, have been reduced to about 500 roots, and that this small number of roots admits of still further reduction. Let us, then, bear in mind that the same holds good with regard to the Semitic languages, particularly if we accept the reduction of all triliteral to biliteral roots. What, then, could we expect in our comparison of Hebrew and Sanskrit but a small number of radical coincidences, a similarity in the form and meaning of about 500 radical syllables, everything else in Hebrew and Sanskrit being an after-growth, which could not begin before the two branches of speech were severed once and forever.

But more, if we look at these roots we shall find that their predicative power is throughout very general, and therefore liable to an infinite amount of specification. A root that means to fall (Sk. +pat+, πί-πτ-ω) comes to mean to fly (Sk. +ut-pat+, πέτομαι). The root +dâ+, which means to give, assumes, after the preposition â, the sense of taking. The root +yu+, which means to join, means to separate if preceded by the preposition +vi+. The root +ghar+, which expresses brightness, may supply, and does supply in different Aryan languages, derivations expressive of brightness (gleam), warmth (Sk. +gharma+, heat), joy (χαίρειν), love (χάρις), of the colors of green (Sk. +hari+), yellow (_gilvus_, _flavus_), and red (Sk. +harit+, _fulvus_), and of the conception of growing (_ger-men_). In the Semitic languages this vagueness of meaning in the radical elements forms one of the principal difficulties of the student, for according as a root is used in its different conjugations, it may convey the most startling variety of conception. It is also to be taken into account that out of the very limited number of roots which at that early time were used in common by the ancestors of the Aryan and Semitic races, a certain portion may have been lost by each, so that the fact that there are roots in Hebrew of which no trace exists in Sanskrit, and _vice versâ_, would again be perfectly natural and intelligible.

It is right and most essential that we should see all this clearly, that we should understand how little evidence we are justified in expecting in support of a common origin of the Semitic and Aryan languages, before we commit ourselves to any opinion on this important subject. I have by no means exhausted all the influences that would naturally, nay necessarily, have contributed towards producing the differences between the radical elements of Aryan and Semitic speech, always supposing that the two sprang originally from the same source. Even if we excluded the ravages of phonetic decay from that early period of speech, we should have to make ample allowances for the influence of dialectic variety. We know in the Aryan languages the constant play between gutturals, dentals, and labials (_quinque_, Sk. +panca+, πέντε, Æol. πέμπε, Goth. _fimf_). We know the dialectic interchange of Aspirate, Media, and Tenuis, which, from the very beginning, has imparted to the principal channels of Aryan speech their individual character (τρεῖς, Goth. _threis_, High German _drei_).[25] If this and much more could happen within the dialectic limits of one more or less settled body of speech, what must have been the chances beyond those limits? Considering how fatal to the identity of a word the change of a single consonant would be in monosyllabic languages, we might expect that monosyllabic roots, if their meaning was so general, vague, and changeable, would all the more carefully have preserved their consonantal outline. But this is by no means the case. Monosyllabic languages have their dialects no less than polysyllabic ones; and from the rapid and decisive divergence of such dialects, we may learn how rapid and decisive the divergence of language must have been during the isolating period. Mr. Edkins, who has paid particular attention to the dialects of Chinese, states that in the northern provinces the greatest changes have taken place, eight initial and one final consonant having been exchanged for others, and three finals lost. Along the southern bank of the Yang-tsï-kiang, and a little to the north of it, the old initials are all preserved, as also through Chekiang to Fuh-kien. But among the finals, _m_ is exchanged for _n_; _t_ and _p_ are lost, and also _k_, except in some country districts. Some words have two forms, one used colloquially, and one appropriated to reading. The former is the older pronunciation, and the latter more near to Mandarin. The cities of Su-cheu, Hang-cheu, Ningpo, and When-cheu, with the surrounding country, may be considered as having one dialect, spoken probably by thirty millions of people, _i.e._, by more than the whole population of Great Britain and Ireland. The city of Hwei-cheu has a dialect of its own, in which the soft initial consonants are exchanged for hard and aspirated ones, a process analogous to what we call _Lautverschiebung_ in the Aryan languages. At Fu-cheu-fu, in the eastern part of the province of Kiang-si, the soft initials have likewise been replaced by aspirates. In many parts of the province of Hunan the soft initials still linger on; but in the city of Chang-sha the spoken dialect has the five tones of Mandarin, and the aspirated and other initials distributed in the same manner. In the island of Hai-nan there is a distinct approach to the form which Chinese words assume in the language of Annam. Many of the hard consonants are softened, instead of the reverse taking place as in many other parts of China. Thus _ti_, _di_, both _ti_ in Mandarin, are both pronounced _di_ in Hai-nan. _B_ and _p_ are both used for many words whose initials are _w_ and _f_ in Mandarin. In the dialects of the province of Fuhkien the following changes take place in initial consonants: _k_ is used for _h_; _p_ for _f_; _m_, _b_, for _w_; _j_ for _y_; _t_ for _ch_; _ch_ for _s_; _ng_ for _i_, _y_, _w_; _n_ for _j_.[26] When we have clearly realized to ourselves what such changes mean in words consisting of one consonant and one vowel, we shall be more competent to act as judges, and to determine what right we have to call for more ample and more definite evidence in support of the common origin of languages which became separated during their monosyllabic or isolating stages, and which are not known to us before they are well advanced in the inflectional stage.

It might be said,--Why, if we make allowance for all this, the evidence really comes to nothing, and is hardly deserving of the attention of the scholar. I do not deny that this is, and always has been my own opinion. All I wish to put clearly before other scholars is, that this is not our fault. We see why there can be no evidence, and we find there is no evidence, or very little support of a common origin of Semitic and Aryan speech. But that is very different from dogmatic assertions, so often and so confidently repeated, that there can be no kind of relationship between Sanskrit and Hebrew, that they must have had different beginnings, that they represent, in fact, two independent species of human speech. All this is pure dogmatism, and no true scholar will be satisfied with it, or turn away contemptuously from the tentative researches of scholars like Ewald, Raumer, and Ascoli. These scholars, particularly Raumer and Ascoli, have given us, as far as I can judge, far more evidence in support of a radical relationship between Hebrew and Sanskrit than, from my point of view, we are entitled to expect. I mean this as a caution in both directions. If, on one side, we ought not to demand more than we have a right to demand, we ought, on the other, not to look for, nor attempt to bring forward, more evidence than the nature of the case admits of. We know that words which have identically the same sound and meaning in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and German, cannot be the same words, because they would contravene those phonetic laws that made these languages to differ from each other. _To doom_ cannot have any connection with the Latin _damnare_; _to call_ cannot be the Greek καλεῖν, the Latin _calare_; nor Greek φαῦλος the German _faul_; the English _care_ cannot be identified with Latin _cura_, nor the German _Auge_ with the Greek αὐγή. The same applies, only with a hundred-fold greater force, to words in Hebrew and Sanskrit. If any triliteral root in Hebrew were to agree with a triliteral word in Sanskrit, we should feel certain, at once, that they are not the same, or that their similarity is purely accidental. Pronouns, numerals, and a few imitative rather than predicative names for father and mother, etc., may have been preserved from the earliest stage by the Aryan and Semitic speakers; but if scholars go beyond, and compare such words as Hebrew _barak_, to bless, and Latin _precari_; Hebrew _lab_, heart, and the English _liver_; Hebrew _melech_, king, and the Latin _mulcere_, to smoothe, to quiet, to subdue, they are in great danger, I believe, of proving too much.

Attempts have lately been made to point out a number of roots which Chinese shares in common with Sanskrit. Far be it from me to stigmatize even such researches as unscientific, though it requires an effort for one brought up in the very straitest school of Bopp, to approach such inquiries without prejudice. Yet, if conducted with care and sobriety, and particularly with a clear perception of the limits within which such inquiries must be confined, they are perfectly legitimate; far more so than the learned dogmatism with which some of our most eminent scholars have declared a common origin of Sanskrit and Chinese as out of the question. I cannot bring myself to say that the method which Mr. Chalmers adopts in his interesting work on the “Origin of Chinese” is likely to carry conviction to the mind of the _bonà fide_ skeptic. I believe, before we compare the words of Chinese with those of any other language, every effort should be made to trace Chinese words back to their most primitive form. Here Mr. Edkins has pointed out the road that ought to be followed, and has clearly shown the great advantage to be derived from an accurate study of Chinese dialects. The same scholar has done still more by pointing out how Chinese should at first be compared with its nearest relatives, the Mongolian of the North-Turanian, and the Tibetan of the South-Turanian class, before any comparisons are attempted with more distant colonies that started during the monosyllabic period of speech. “I am now seeking to compare,” he writes, “the Mongolian and Tibetan with the Chinese, and have already obtained some interesting results:--

“1. A large proportion of Mongol words are Chinese. Perhaps a fifth are so. The identity is in the first syllable of the Mongol words, that being the root. The correspondence is most striking in the adjectives, of which perhaps one half of the most common are the same radically as in Chinese; e.g., _sain_, good; _begen_, low; _ic‘hi_, right; _sologai_, left; _c‘hihe_, straight; _gadan_, outside; _c’hohon_, few; _logon_, green; _hung-gun_, light (not heavy). But the identity is also extensive in other parts of speech, and this identity of common roots seems to extend into the Turkish, Tatar, etc.; e.g., _su_, water; _tenri_, heaven.

“2. To compare Mongol with Chinese it is necessary to go back at least six centuries in the development of the Chinese language. For we find in common roots final letters peculiar to the old Chinese, _e.g._, final _m_. The initial letters also need to be considered from another standpoint than the Mandarin pronunciation. If a large number of words are common to Chinese, Mongol, and Tatar, we must go back at least twelve centuries to obtain a convenient epoch of comparison.

“3. While the Mongol has no traces of tones, they are very distinctly developed in Tibetan. Csoma de Körös and Schmidt do not mention the existence of tones, but they plainly occur in the pronunciation of native Tibetans resident in Peking.

“4. As in the case of the comparison with Mongol, it is necessary in examining the connection of Tibetan with Chinese to adopt the old form of the Chinese with its more numerous final consonants, and its full system of soft, hard, and aspirated initials. The Tibetan numerals exemplify this with sufficient clearness.

“5. While the Mongol is near the Chinese in the extensive prevalence of words common to the two languages, the Tibetan is near in phonal structure, as being tonic and monosyllabic. This being so, it is less remarkable that there are many words common to Chinese and Tibetan, for it might have been expected; but that there should be perhaps as many in the Mongol with its long untoned polysyllables, is a curious circumstance.”[27]

This is no doubt the right spirit in which researches into the early history of language should be conducted, and I hope that Mr. Edkins, Mr. Chalmers, and others, will not allow themselves to be discouraged by the ordinary objections that are brought against all tentative studies. Even if their researches should only lead to negative results, they would be of the highest importance. The criterion by which we test the relationship of inflectional languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, cannot, from the nature of the case, be applied to languages which are still in the combinatory or isolating stratum, nor would they answer any purpose, if we tried by them to determine whether certain languages, separated during their inflectional growth, had been united during their combinatory stage, or whether languages, separated during their combinatory progress, had started from a common centre in their monosyllabic age. Bopp’s attempt to work with his Aryan tools on the Malayo-Polynesian languages, and to discover in them traces of Aryan forms, ought to serve as a warning example.

However, there are dangers also, and even greater dangers, on the opposite shore, and if Mr. Chalmers in his interesting work on “the Origin of Chinese,” compares, for instance, the Chinese _tzé_, child, with the Bohemian _tsi_, daughter, I know that the indignation of the Aryan scholars will be roused to a very high pitch, considering how they have proved most minutely that _tsi_ or _dci_ in Bohemian is the regular modification of _dugte_, and that _dugte_ is the Sanskrit +duhitar+, the Greek θυγάτηρ, daughter, originally a pet-name, meaning a milk-maid, and given by the Aryan shepherds, and by them only, to the daughters of their house. Such accidents[28] will happen in so comprehensive a subject as the Science of Language. They have happened to scholars like Bopp, Grimm, and Burnouf, and they will happen again. I do not defend haste or inaccuracy, I only say, we must venture on, and not imagine that all is done, and that nothing remains to conquer in our science. Our watchword, here as elsewhere, should be Festina lente! but, by all means, Festina! Festina! Festina!

Part II.

ON CURTIUS’ CHRONOLOGY OF THE INDO-GERMANIC LANGUAGES.

In a former Lecture on the “Stratification of Language” I ventured to assert that wherever _inflection_ has yielded to a rational analysis, it has invariably been recognized as the result of a previous _combination_, and wherever _combination_ has been traced back to an earlier stage, that earlier stage has been simply _juxtaposition_.

Professor Pott in his “Etymologische Forschungen” (1871, p. 16), a work which worthily holds its place by the side of Bopp’s “Comparative Grammar,” questions the correctness of that statement; but in doing so he seems to me to have overlooked the restrictions which I myself had introduced, in order to avoid the danger of committing myself to what might seem too general a statement. I did not say that every form of inflection had been proved to spring from a previous combination, but I spoke of those cases only where we have succeeded in a rational analysis of inflectional forms, and it was in these that I maintained that inflection had always been found to be the result of previous combination. What is the object of the analysis of grammatical inflections, or of Comparative Grammar in general, if not to find out what terminations originally were, before they had assumed a purely formal character? If we take the French adverb _sincèrement_, sincerely, and trace it back to the Latin _sincerâ mente_, we have for a second time the three stages of juxtaposition, combination, and, to a certain extent, inflection, repeated before our eyes. I say, inflection, for _ment_, though originally an independent word, soon becomes a mere adverbial suffix, the speakers so little thinking of its original purport, that we may say of a stone that it falls _lourdement_, heavily, without wishing to imply that it falls _luridâ mente_, with a heavy, lit., with a lurid mind.

If we take the nom. sing. of a noun in Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin, we find that masculine nouns end frequently in _s_. We have for instance, Sk. +veśa-s+, Gr. οἶκο-ς, Lat. _vîcu-s_. These three words are identical in their termination, in their base, and in their root. The root is the Sk. +viś+, to settle down, to enter upon or into a thing. This root, without undergoing any further change, may answer the purpose both of a verbal and a nominal base. In the precative, for instance, we have +viś-yâ-t+, he may enter, which yields to a rational analysis into +viś+, the root +yâ+, to go, and the old pronominal stem of the third person, _t_, he. We reduplicate the root, and we get the perfect +vi-viś-us+, they have entered. Here I can understand that objections might be raised against accepting us as a mere phonetic corruption of +ant+ and +anti+; but if, as in Greek, we find as the termination of the third pers. plur. of the perfect ᾶσι, we know that this is a merely phonetic change of the original +anti+,[29] and this +anti+ has been traced back by Pott himself (whether rightly or wrongly, we need not here inquire) to the pronominal stems +ana+, that, and +ti+, he. These two stems, when joined together, become +anti+,[30] meaning _those_ and _he_, and are gradually reduced to ᾶσι, and in Sanskrit to +us+ for +ant+. What we call reduplication has likewise been traced back by Pott himself to an original repetition of the whole root, so that +vi-viś+ stands for an original or intentional +viś-viś+; thus showing again the succession of the three stages, juxtaposition, +viś-viś+, combination +vi-viś+, inflection, the same, +vi-viś+, though liable to further phonetic modification.

Used as a nominal base the same root +viś+ appears, without any change, in the nom. plur. +viś-as+, the settlers, the clans, the people. Now here again Professor Pott himself has endeavored to explain the inflection +as+ by tracing it back to the pronominal base +as+, in +asau+, _ille_. He therefore takes the plural +viś-as+ as a compound, meaning “man and that;” that is to say, he traces the inflection back to a combinatory origin.

By raising the simple base +viś+ to +viśa+, we arrive at new verbal forms, such as +viś-â-mi+, I enter, +viś-a-si+, thou enterest, +viś-a-ti+, he enters. In all these inflectional forms, the antecedent combinatory stage is still more or less visible, for +mi+, +si+, +ti+, whatever their exact history may have been, are clearly varieties of the pronominal bases of the first, second, and third persons, +ma+, +tva+, +ta+.

Lastly, by raising +viś+ to +veśa+, we arrive at a new nominal base, and by adding to it the stem of a demonstrative pronoun _s_, we form the so-called nom. sing. +veśa-s+, οἶκο-ς, _vicu-s_, from which we started, meaning originally house-here, this house, the house.

In all this Professor Pott would fully agree, but where he would differ, would be when we proceed to generalize, and to lay it down as an axiom, that all inflectional forms _must_ have had the same combinatory origin. He may be right in thus guarding against too hasty generalization, to which we are but too prone in all inductive sciences. I am well aware that there are many inflections which have not yielded, as yet, to any rational analysis, but, with that reservation, I thought, and I still think, it right to say that, until some other process of forming those inflections has been pointed out, inflection may be considered as the invariable result of combination.

It is impossible in writing, always to repeat such qualifications and reservations. They must be taken as understood. Take for instance the augment in Greek and Sanskrit. Some scholars have explained it as a negative particle, others as a demonstrative pronoun; others, again, took it as a mere symbol of differentiation. If the last explanation could be established by more general analogies, then, no doubt, we should have here an inflection, that cannot be referred to combination. Again, it would be difficult to say, what independent element was added to the pronoun +sa+, he, in order to make it sâ, she. This, too, may, for all we know, be a case of phonetic symbolism, and, if so, it should be treated on its own merits. The lengthening of the vowel in the subjunctive mood was formerly represented by Professor Curtius as a symbolic expression of hesitation, but he has lately recalled that explanation as untenable. I pointed out that when in Hebrew we meet with such forms as _Piel_ and _Pual_, _Hiphil_ and _Hophal_, we feel tempted to admit formative agencies, different from mere juxtaposition and combination. But before we admit this purely phonetic symbolism, we should bear in mind that the changes of _bruder_, brother, into _brüder_, brethren, of _Ich weiss_, I know, into _wir wissen_, we know, which seem at first sight purely phonetic, have after all been proved to be the indirect result of juxtaposition and combination, so that we ought to be extremely careful and first exhaust every possible rational explanation, before we have recourse to phonetic symbolism as an element in the production of inflection forms.

The chief object, however, of my lecture on the “Stratification of Language” was not so much to show that inflection everywhere presupposes combination, and combination juxtaposition, but rather to call attention to a fact that had not been noticed before, viz.: that there is hardly any language, which is not at the same time _isolating_, _combinatory_, and _inflectional_.

It had been the custom in classifying languages morphologically to represent some languages, for instance Chinese, as _isolating_; others, such as Turkish or Finnish, as _combinatory_; others, such as Sanskrit or Hebrew, as _inflectional_. Without contesting the value of this classification for certain purposes, I pointed out that even Chinese, the very type of the isolating class, is not free from combinatory forms, and that the more highly developed among the combinatory languages, such as Hungarian, Finnish, Tamil, etc., show the clearest traces of incipient inflection. “The difficulty is not,” as I said, “to show the transition of one stratum of speech into another, but rather to draw a sharp line between the different strata. The same, difficulty was felt in Geology, and led Sir Charles Lyell to invent such pliant names as _Eocene_, _Meiocene_, and _Pleiocene_, names which indicate a mere dawn, a minority, or a majority of new formations, but do not draw a fast and hard line, cutting off one stratum from the other. Natural growth and even merely mechanical accumulation and accretion, here as elsewhere, are so minute and almost imperceptible that they defy all strict scientific terminology, and force upon us the lesson that we must be satisfied with an approximate accuracy.”

Holding these opinions, and having established them by an amount of evidence which, though it might easily be increased, seemed to me sufficient, I did not think it safe to assign to the three stages in the history of the Aryan languages, the _juxtapositional_, the _combinatory_, and the _inflectional_, a strictly successive character, still less to admit in the growth of the Aryan languages a number of definite stages, which should be sharply separated from each other, and assume an almost chronological character. I fully admit that wherever _inflectional_ forms in the Aryan languages have yielded to a rational analysis, we see that they are preceded chronologically by _combinatory_ formations; nor should I deny for one moment that _combinatory_ forms presuppose an antecedent, and therefore chronologically more ancient stage of mere juxtaposition. What I doubt is whether, as soon as combination sets in, juxtaposition ceases, and whether the first appearance of inflection puts an end to the continued working of combination.

It seems to me, even if we argue only on _à priori_ grounds, that there must have been at least a period of transition during which both principles were at work together, and I hardly can understand what certain scholars mean if they represent the principle of inflection as a sudden psychological change which, as soon as it has taken place, makes a return to combination altogether impossible. If, instead of arguing _à priori_, we look the facts of language in the face, we cannot help seeing that, even after that period during which it is supposed that the United Aryan language had attained its full development, I mean at a time when Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin had become completely separated, as so many national dialects, each with its own fully developed inflectional grammar, the power of combination was by no means extinct. The free power of composition, which is so manifest in Sanskrit and Greek, testifies to the continued working of combination in strictly historical times. I see no real distinction between the transition of _Néa pólis_, i.e., new town, into _Neápolis_, and into _Naples_, and the most primitive combination in Chinese, and I maintain that as long as a language retains that unbounded faculty of composition, which we see in Sanskrit, in Greek, and in German, the growth of new inflectional forms from combinatory germs must be admitted as possible. Forms such as the passive aorist in Greek, ἐτέθην, or the weak preterite in Gothic _nas-i-da_, _nas-i-dédjau_, need not have been formed before the Aryan family broke up into national languages; and forms such as Italian _meco_, _fratelmo_, or the future _avro_, I shall have, though not exactly of the same workmanship, show at all events that analogous powers are at work even in the latest periods of linguistic growth.

Holding these opinions, which, as far as I know, have never been controverted, I ought perhaps, when I came to publish the preceding Lecture, to have defended my position against the powerful arguments advanced in the meantime by my old friend, Professor G. Curtius, in support of a diametrically opposite opinion in his classical essay, “On the Chronology of the Indo-Germanic Languages,” published in 1867, new edition, 1873. While I had endeavored to show that juxtaposition, combination, and inflection, though following each other in succession, do not represent chronological periods, but represent phases, strongly developed, it is true, in certain languages, but extending their influence far beyond the limits commonly assigned to them, Professor Curtius tried to establish the chronological character not only of these three, but of four other phases or periods in the history of Aryan speech. Confining himself to what he considers the undivided Aryan language to have been, before it was broken up into national dialects, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, he proceeds to subdivide the antecedent period of its growth into _seven_ definite stages, each marked by a definite character, and each representing a sum of years in the chronology of the Aryan language. As I had found it difficult to treat Chinese as entirely _juxtapositional_, or Turkish as entirely _combinatory_, or Sanskrit as entirely _inflectional_, it was perhaps not to be wondered at that not even the persuasive pleading of my learned friend could convince me of the truth of the more minute chronological division proposed by him in his learned essay. But it would hardly have been fair if, on the present occasion, I had reprinted my “Rede Lecture” without explaining why I had altered nothing in my theory of linguistic growth, why I retained these three phases and no more, and why I treated even these, not as chronological periods, in the strict sense of the word, but as preponderating tendencies, giving an individual character to certain classes of language, without being totally absent in others. Professor Curtius is one of the few scholars with whom it is pleasant to differ. He has shown again and again that what he cares for is truth, not victory, and when he has defended his position against attacks not always courteous, he has invariably done so, not with hard words, but with hard arguments. I therefore feel no hesitation in stating plainly to him where his theories seem to me either not fully supported, or even contradicted by the facts of language, and I trust that this free exchange of ideas, though in public, will be as pleasant as our conversations in private used to be, now more than thirty years ago.

Let us begin with the _First Period_, which Professor Curtius calls the _Root-Period_. There must have been, as I tried to explain before, a period for the Aryan languages, during which they stood on a level with Chinese, using nothing but roots, or radical words, without having reduced any of them to a purely formal character, without having gone through the process of changing what Chinese grammarians call _full_ words into _empty_ words. I have always held, that to speak of roots as mere abstractions, as the result of grammatical theory, is self-contradictory. Roots which never had any real or historical existence may have been invented both in modern and ancient collections or +Dhâtupâṭhas+; but that is simply the fault of our etymological analysis, and in no way affects the fact, that the Aryan, like all other languages we know, began with roots. We may doubt the legitimacy of certain chemical elements, but not the reality of chemical elements in general. Language, in the sense in which we use the word, begins with roots, which are not only the ultimate facts for the Science of Language, but real facts in the history of human speech. To deny their historical reality would be tantamount to denying cause and effect.

Logically, no doubt, it is possible to distinguish between a root as a mere postulate, and a root used as an actual word. That distinction has been carefully elaborated by Indian grammarians and philosophers, but it does in no way concern us in purely historical researches. What I mean by a root used in real language is this: when we analyze a cluster of Sanskrit words, such as +yodha-s+, a fighter, +yodhaka-s+, a fighter, +yoddhâ+, a fighter, +yodhana-m+, fighting, +yuddhi-s+, a fight, +yuyutsu-s+, wishing to fight, +â-yudha-m+, a weapon, we easily see that they presuppose an element +yudh+, to fight, and that they are all derived from that element by well-known grammatical suffixes. Now is this +yudh+, which we call the root of all these words, a mere abstraction? Far from it. We find it as +yudh+ used in the Veda either as a nominal or as a verbal base, according to suffixes by which it is followed. Thus +yudh+ by itself would be a fighter, only that +dh+ when final, has to be changed into t. We have +goshu-yúdh-am+, an accusative, the fighter among cows. In the plural we have +yúdh-as+, fighters; in the locative +yudh-i+, in the fight; in the instrumental, +yudh-â+, with the weapon. That is to say, we find that as a nominal base, +yudh+, without any determinative suffixes, may express fighting, the place of fighting, the instrument of fighting, and a fighter. If our grammatical analysis is right, we should have +yudh+ as a nominal base in +yúdh-ya-ti+, lit. he goes to fighting, +yudh-yá-te+, pass.; +(a)-yut-smahi+, aor., either we were to fight, or we were fighters; +yú-yut-sa-ti+, he is to fight-fight; +yudh-ya-s+, to be fought (p. 94), etc. As a verbal base we find +yudh+, for instance, or +yu-yudh-e+, I have fought; in +a-yud-dha+, for +a-yudh-ta+, he fought. In the other Aryan languages this root has left hardly any traces; yet the Greek ὑσμῖν, and ὑσμίνη would be impossible without the root +yudh+.

The only difference between Chinese and these Sanskrit forms which we have just examined, is that while in Chinese such a form as +yudh-i+, in the battle, would have for its last element a word clearly meaning middle, and having an independent accent, Sanskrit has lost the consciousness of the original material meaning of the _i_ of the locative, and uses it traditionally as an empty word, as a formal element, as a mere termination.

I also agree with Curtius that during the earliest stage, not of Sanskrit, but of Aryan speech in general, we have to admit two classes of roots, the _predicative_ and _demonstrative_, and that what we now call the plural of +yudh+, +yudh-as+, fighters, was, or may have been, originally a compound consisting of the predicative root +yudh+, and the demonstrative root, +as+ or +sa+, possibly repeated twice, meaning “fight-he-he,” or “fight-there-there,” _i.e._, fighters.

There is another point with regard to the character of this earliest radical stage of the Aryan language, on which formally I should have agreed with Curtius, but where now I begin to feel more doubtful,--I mean the necessarily monosyllabic form of all original roots. There is, no doubt, much to be said for this view. We always like to begin with what is simple. We imagine, as it has been said, that “the simple idea must break forth, like lightning, in a simple body of sound, to be perceived in one single moment.” But, on the other hand, the simple, so far as it is the general, is frequently, to us at least, the last result of repeated complex conceptions, and therefore there is at all events no _à priori_ argument against treating the simplest roots as the latest, rather than the earliest products of language. Languages in a low state of development are rich in words expressive of the most minute differences, they are poor in general expressions, a fact which ought to be taken into account as an important qualification of a remark made by Curtius that language supplies necessaries first, luxuries afterwards (p. 32). I quote the following excellent remarks from Mr. Sayce’s “Principles of comparative Philology” (p. 208): “Among modern savages the individual objects of sense have names enough, while general terms are very rare. The Mohicans have words for cutting various objects, but none to signify cutting simple.”[31] In taking this view we certainly are better able to explain the actual forms of the Aryan roots, viz., by _elimination_, rather than by _composition_. If we look for instance, as I did myself formerly, on such roots as +yudh+, +yuj+, and +yauṭ+, as developed from the simpler root +yu+, or on +mardh+, +marg+, +mark+, +marp+, +mard+, +smar+, as developed from +mar+, then we are bound to account for the modificatory elements, such as _dh_, _g_, _k_, _p_, _d_, _s_, _n_, _t_, _r_, as remnants of other roots, whether predicative or demonstrative. Thus Curtius compares +tar+ or +tra+, with +tras+, +tram+, +trak+, +trap+; +tri+ and +tru+ with +trup+, +trib+, taking the final consonants as modificatory letters. But what are these modificatory letters? Every attempt to account for them has failed. If it could be proved that these modificatory elements, which Curtius calls _Determinatives_, produced always the _same_ modification of meaning, they might then be classed with the verbal suffixes which change simple verbs into causative, desiderative, or intensive verbs. But this is not the case. On the other hand, it would be perfectly intelligible that such roots as +mark+, +marg+, +mard+, +mardh+, expressing different kinds of crushing, became fixed side by side, that by a process of elimination, their distinguishing features were gradually removed, and the root +mar+ left as the simplest form, expressive of the most general meaning. Without entering here on that process of mutual friction by which I believe that the development of roots can best be explained, we may say at least so much, that whatever process will account for the root +yu+, will likewise account for the root +yuj+, nay, that roots like +mark+ or +mard+ are more graphic, expressive, and more easily intelligible than the root mar.

However, if this view of the origin of roots has to be adopted, it need not altogether exclude the other view. In the process of simplification, certain final letters may have become typical, may have seemed invested with a certain function or determinative power, and may therefore have been added independently to other roots, by that powerful imitative tendency which asserts itself again and again through the whole working of language. But however that may be, the sharp line of distinction which Curtius draws between the First Period, represented by simple, and the Second Period represented by derivative roots, seems certainly no longer tenable, least of all as dividing _chronologically_ two distinct periods in the growth of language.

When we approach the Third Period, it might seem that here, at least, there could be no difference of opinion between Professor Curtius and myself. That Third Period represents simply what I called the first setting in of _combination_, following after the _isolating_ stage. Curtius calls it the _primary verbal period_, and ascribes to it the origin of such combinatory forms as +dấ-ma+, give-I, +dâ-tva+, give-thou, +dấ-ta+, give-he; +dâ-ma-tvi+, give-we, +dâ-tva-tvi+, give-you, +dâ-(a)nti+, give-they. These verbal forms he considers as much earlier than any attempts at declension in nouns. No one who has read Curtius’ arguments in support of this chronological arrangement would deny their extreme plausibility; but there are grave difficulties which made me hesitate in adopting this hypothetical framework of linguistic chronology. I shall only mention one, which seemed to me insurmountable. We know that during what we called the First Radical Period the sway of phonetic laws was already so firmly established, that, from that period onward to the present day, we can say, with perfect certainty, which phonetic changes are possible, and which are not. It is through these phonetic laws that the most distant past in the history of the Aryan language is connected with the present. It is on them that the whole science of etymology is founded. Only because a certain root has a tenuis, a media, an aspirate, or a sibilant, is it possible to keep it distinct from other roots. If t and s could be interchanged, then the root +tar+, to cross, would not be distinct from the root +sar+, to go. If d and +dh+ could vary, then +dar+, to tear, would run together with +dhar+, to hold. These phonetic distinctions were firmly established in the radical period, and continue to be maintained, both in the undivided Aryan speech, and in the divided national dialects, such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. How then can we allow an intervening period, during which +ma-tvi+, could become +masi+, +tva-tvi+, +thas+, and the same +tva-tvi+ appear also as +sai+? Such changes, always most startling, may have been possible in earlier periods; but when phonetic order had once been established, as it was in what Curtius calls his first and second periods, to admit them as possible, would be, as far as I can judge, to admit a complete anachronism. Of two things one; either we must altogether surrender those chaotic changes which are required for identifying Sanskrit e with Greek μαι, and Greek μαι with +mâ-ma+, etc., or we must throw them back to a period anterior to the final settlement of the Aryan roots.

I now proceed to point out a second difficulty. If Curtius uses these same personal terminations, +masi+, +tvasi+, and +anti+, as proof positive that they must have been compounded out of +ma+ + +tva+, and +tva-tva+, before there were any case terminations, I do not think his argument is quite stringent. Curtius says: “If plural suffixes had existed before the coining of these terminations, we should expect them here, as well as in the noun” (p. 33). But the plural of the pronoun _I_ could never have been formed by a plural suffix, like the plural of _horse_. _I_ admits of no plural, as little as _thou_, and hence the plural of these very pronouns in the Aryan language is not formed by the mere addition of a plural termination, but by a new base. We say _I_, but _we_; _thou_ but _you_, and so through all the Aryan languages. According to Curtius himself, +masi+, the termination of the plural, is not formed by repeating +ma+, by saying I and I, but by +ma+ and +tva+, I and thou, the most primitive way, he thinks, of expressing _we_. The termination of the second person plural might be expressed by repeating _thou_. “You did it,” might have been rendered by “thou and thou did it;” but hardly by treating _thou_ like a noun, and adding to it a plural termination. The absence of plural terminations, therefore at the end of the personal suffixes of the verbs, does not prove, as far as I can see, that plurals of nouns were unknown when the first, second, and third persons plural of the Aryan verbs were called into existence.

Again, if Curtius says, that “what language has once learnt, it does not forget again, and that therefore if the plural had once found expression in nouns, the verb would have claimed the same distinction,” is true, no doubt, in many cases, but not so generally true as to supply a safe footing for a deductive argument. In so late a formation as the periphrastic future in Sanskrit, we say +dâtâ-smaḥ+, as it were _dator sumus_, not +dâtâraḥ smaḥ+; and in the second person plural of the passive in Latin _amamini_, though the plural is marked, the gender is always disregarded.

Further, even if we admit with Bopp and Curtius that the terminations of the medium are composed of two pronouns, that the _ta_ of the third person singular stands for _ta-ti_, to-him-he, that καλύπτεται in fact meant originally hide-himself-he, it does not follow that in such a compound one pronominal element should have taken the termination of the accusative, any more than the other takes the termination of the nominative. The first element in every composition takes necessarily its Pada or thematic form; the second or final element has suffered so much, according to Bopp’s own explanation, that nothing would be easier to explain than the disappearance of a final consonant, if it had existed. The absence of case-terminations in such compounds cannot therefore be used as proof of the non-existence of case-terminations at a time when the medial and other personal endings took their origin. On the contrary, these terminations seem to me to indicate, though I do not say to prove, that the conception of a subjective, as distinct from an objective case, had been fully realized by those who framed them. I do not myself venture to speak very positively of such minute processes of analysis as that which discovers in the Sk. first pers. sing. ind. pres. of the middle, tude, I strike, an original +tuda+ + a + i, +tuda+ + +ma+ + i, +tuda+ + +ma+ + +mi+, tuda + +mâ+ + +ma+, but admitting that the middle was formed in that way, and that it meant originally _strike-to-me-I_, then surely we have in the first +mâ+ an oblique case, and in the compound itself the clearest indication that the distinction between a nominative and an oblique case, whether dative or accusative, was no longer a mystery. Anyhow, and this is the real point at issue, the presence of such compounds as +mâ-ma+, to-me-I, is in no way a proof that at the time of their formation people could not distinguish between +yudh (s)+, nom., a fighter, and +yudh (am)+, acc., a fighter; and we must wait for more irrefragable evidence before admitting, what would under all circumstances be a most startling conclusion, namely, that the Aryan language was spoken for a long time without case-terminations, but with a complete set of personal terminations, both in the singular and the plural. For though it is quite true that the want of cases could only be felt in a sentence, the same seems to me to apply to personal terminations of the verb. The one, in most languages we know, implies the other, and the very question whether conjugation or declension came first is one of those dangerous questions which take something for granted which has never been proved.

During all this time, according to Curtius, our Aryan language would have consisted of nothing but roots, used for nominal and verbal purposes, but without any purely derivative suffixes, whether verbal or nominal, and without declension. The only advance, in fact, made beyond the purely Chinese standard, would have consisted in a few combinations of personal pronouns with verbal stems, which combinations assumed rapidly a typical character, and led to the formation of a skeleton of conjugation, containing a _present_, _an aorist_ with an augment, and a _reduplicated perfect_. Why, during the same period, nominal bases should not have assumed at least some case-terminations, does not appear; and it certainly seems strange that people who could say +vak-ti+, speak-he, +vak-anti+, speak-this-he, should not have been able to say +vâk-s+, whether in the sense of speak-there, _i.e._, speech or speak-there, _i.e._, speaker.

The next step which, according to Curtius, the Aryan language had to make, in order to emerge from its purely radical phase, was the creation of bases, both verbal and nominal, by the addition of verbal and nominal suffixes to roots, both primary and secondary. Curtius calls this fourth the Period of the _Formation of Themes_. The suffixes are very numerous, and it is by them that the Aryan languages have been able to make their limited number of roots supply the vast materials of their dictionary. From +bhar+, to carry, they formed +bhar-a+, a carrier, but sometimes also a burden. In addition to +bhar-ti+, carry-he, they formed +bhara-ti+, meaning possibly carrying-he. The growth of these early themes may have been very luxuriant, and, as Professor Curtius expresses it, chiefly _paraschematic_. It may have been left to a later age to assign to that large number of possible synonyms more definite meanings. Thus from φέρω, I carry, we have φορά, the act of carrying, used also in the sense of _impetus_ (being carried away), and of _provectus_, i.e., what is brought in. Φορός means carrying, but also violent, and lucrative; φέρετρον, an instrument of carrying, means a bier; φαρέτρα, a quiver, for carrying arrows. Φορμός comes to mean a basket; φόρτος, a burden; φορός, tribute.

All this is perfectly intelligible, both with regard to nominal and verbal themes. Curtius admits four kinds of verbal themes as the outcome of his Fourth Period. He had assigned to his Third Period the simple verbal themes ἐσ-τί, and the reduplicated themes such as δίδω-σι. To these were added, in the Fourth Period, the following four secondary themes:--

(1) πλέκ-ε-(τ)-ι Sanskrit +lipa-ti+ (2) ἀλείφ-ε-(τ)-ι „ +laipa-ti+ (3) δείκ-νυ-σι „ +lip-nau-ti+ (4) δάμ-νη-σι „ +lip-nâ-ti+.

He also explains the formation of the subjunctive in analogy with bases such as +lipa-ti+, as derived from +lip-ti+.

Some scholars would probably feel inclined to add one or two of the more primitive verbal themes, such as

limpa-ti _rumpo_ limpana-ti λαμβάνε(τ)ι

but all would probably agree with Curtius in placing the formation of these themes, both verbal and nominal, between the radical and the latest inflectional period. A point, however, on which there would probably be considerable difference of opinion is this, whether it is credible, that at a time when so many nominal themes were formed,--for Curtius ascribes to this Fourth Period the formation of such nominal bases as

λόγ-ο, intellect, = +lipa-ti+ λοίπ-ο, left, = +laipa-ti+ λιγ-νύ, smoke, = +lip-nau-ti+ δάφ-νη, laurel, = +lip-nâ-ti+--

the simplest nominal compounds, which we now call nominative and accusative, singular and plural, were still unknown; that people could say +dhṛsh-nu-más+, we dare, but not +dhṛsh-ṇú-s+, daring-he; that they had an imperative, +dhṛshṇuhí+, dare, but not a vocative, +dhṛshṇo+? Curtius strongly holds to that opinion, but with regard to this period too, he does not seem to me to establish it by a regular and complete argument. Some arguments which he refers to occasionally have been answered before. Another, which he brings in incidentally, when discussing the abbreviation of certain suffixes, can hardly be said to carry conviction. After tracing the suffixes +ant+ and +tar+ back to what he supposes to have been their more primitive forms, +an-ta+ and +ta-ra+, he remarks that the dropping of the final vowel would hardly be conceivable at a time when there existed case-terminations. Still this dropping of the vowel is very common, in late historical times, in Latin, for instance, and other Italian dialects, where it causes frequent confusion and heteroclitism.[32] Thus the Augustan _innocua_ was shortened in common pronunciation to _innoca_, and this dwindles down in Christian inscriptions to _innox_. In Greek, too, διάκτορος is older than διάκτωρ; φύλακος older than φύλαξ.

Nor can it be admitted that the nominal suffixes have suffered less from phonetic corruption than the terminations of the verb, and that therefore they must belong to a more modern period (pp. 39, 40). In spite of all the changes which the personal terminations are supposed to have undergone, their connection with the personal pronouns has always been apparent, while the tracing back of the nominal suffixes, and, still more, of the case-terminations to their typical elements, forms still one of the greatest difficulties of comparative grammarians.[33]

Professor Curtius is so much impressed with the later origin of declension that he establishes one more period, the fifth, to which he assigns the growth of all compound verbal forms, compound stems, compound tenses, and compound moods, before he allows the first beginnings of declension, and the formation even of such simple forms as the nominative and accusative. It is difficult, no doubt, to disprove such an opinion by facts or dates, because there are none to be found on either side: but we have a right to expect very strong arguments indeed, before we can admit that at a time when an aorist, like ἔδεικ-σα, Sanskrit +a-dik-sha-t+ was possible, that is to say, at a time when the verb +as+, which meant originally to breathe, had by constant use been reduced to the meaning of being; at a time when that verb, as a mere auxiliary, was joined to a verbal base in order to impart to it a general historical power; when the persons of the verb were distinguished by pronominal elements, and when the augment, no longer purely demonstrative, had become the symbol of time past, that at such a time people were still unable to distinguish, except by a kind of Chinese law of position, between “the father struck the child,” and “the child struck the father.” Before we can admit this, we want much stronger proofs than any adduced by Curtius. He says, for instance, that compound verbal bases formed with +yâ+, to go, and afterwards fixed as causatives, would be inconceivable during a period in which accusatives existed. From +naś+, to perish, we form in Sanskrit +nâśa-yâmi+, I make perish. This, according to Curtius, would have meant originally, I send to perishing. Therefore +nâśa+ would have been, in the accusative, +nâśam+, and the causative would have been +nâśamyâmi+, if the accusative had then been known. But we have in Latin[34] _pessum dare_, _venum ire_, and no one would say that compounds like _calefacio_, _liquefacio_, _putrefacio_, were impossible after the first Aryan separation, or after that still earlier period to which Curtius assigns the formation of the Aryan case-terminations. Does Professor Curtius hold that compound forms like Gothic _nasi-da_ were formed not only before the Aryan separation, but before the introduction of case-terminations? I hold, on the contrary, that such really old compositions never required, nay never admitted, the accusative. We say in Sanskrit, +dyu-gat+, going to the sky, +dyu-ksha+, dwelling in the sky, without any case-terminations at the end of the first part of the compound. We say in Greek, σακέσ-παλος, not σάκοσ-παλος, παιδοφόνος, not παιδαφόνος, ὀρεσ-κῷος, mountain-bred, and also ὀρεσί-τροφος, mountain-fed. We say in Latin, _agri-cola_, not _agrum-cola_, _fratri-cīda_, not _fratrem-cīda_, _rēgĭfugium_, not _regis-fugium_. Are we to suppose that all these words were formed before there was an outward mark of distinction between nominative and accusative in the primitive Aryan language? Such compounds, we know, can be formed at pleasure, and they continued to be formed long after the full development of the Aryan declension, and the same would apply to the compound stems of causal verbs. To say, as Curtius does, that composition was possible only before the development of declension, because when cases had once sprung up, the people would no longer have known the bases of nouns, is far too strong an assertion. In Sanskrit[35] the really difficult bases are generally sufficiently visible in the so-called Pada, cases, _i.e._, before certain terminations beginning with consonants, and there is besides a strong feeling of analogy in language, which would generally, though not always (for compounds are frequently framed by false analogy), guide the framers of new compounds rightly in the selection of the proper nominal base. It seems to me that even with us there is still a kind of instinctive feeling against using nouns, articulated with case-terminations, for purposes of composition, although there are exceptions to that rule in ancient, and many more in modern languages. We can hardly realize to ourselves a Latin _pontemfex_, or _pontisfex_, still less _ponsfex_ instead of _pontifex_, and when the Romans drove away their kings, they did not speak of a _regisfugium_ or a _regumfugium_, but they took, by habit or by instinct, the base _regi_, though none of them, if they had been asked, knew what a base was. Composition, we ought not to forget, is after all only another name for combination, and the very essence of combination consists in joining together words which are not yet articulated grammatically. Whenever we form compounds, such as _railway_, we are still moving in the combinatory stage, and we have the strongest proof that the life of language is not capable of chronological division. There was a period in the growth of the Aryan language when the principle of combination preponderated, when inflection was as yet unknown. But inflection itself was the result of combination, and unless combination had continued long after inflection set in, the very life of language would have become extinct.

I have thus tried to explain why I cannot accept the fundamental fact on which the seven-fold division of the history of the Aryan language is founded, viz., that the combinatory process which led to the Aryan system of conjugation would have been impossible, if at the time nominal bases had already been articulated with terminations of case and number. I see no reason why the earliest case-formations, I mean particularly the nominative and accusative in the singular, plural, and dual, should not date from the same time as the earliest formations of conjugation. The same process that leads to the formation of +vak-ti+, speak-he, would account for the formation of +vak-s+, speak-there, _i.e._, speaker. Necessity, which after all is the mother of all inventions, would much sooner have required the clear distinction of singular and plural, of nominative and accusative, than of the three persons, of the verbs. It is far more important to be able to distinguish the subject and the object in such sentences as “the son has killed the father,” or “the father has killed the son,” than to be able to indicate the person and tense of the verb. Of course we may say that in Chinese the two cases are distinguished without any outward signs, and by mere position; but we have no evidence that the law of position was preserved in the Aryan languages, after verbal inflection had once set in. Chinese dispenses with verbal inflection as well as with nominal, and an appeal to it would therefore prove either too much or too little.

At the end of the five periods which we have examined, but still before the Aryan separation, Curtius places the sixth, which he calls the Period of the Formation of Cases, and the seventh, the Period of Adverbs. Why I cannot bring myself to accept the late date here assigned to declension, I have tried to explain before. That adverbs existed before the great branches of Aryan speech became definitely separated has been fully proved by Professor Curtius. I only doubt whether the adverbial period can be separated chronologically from the case period. I should say, on the contrary, that some of the adverbs in Sanskrit and the other Aryan languages exhibit the most primitive and obsolete case-terminations, and that they existed probably long before the system of case-terminations assumed its completeness.

If we look back at the results at which we have arrived in examining the attempt of Professor Curtius to establish seven distinct chronological periods in the history of the Aryan speech, previous to its separation into Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Teutonic, and Celtic, I think we shall find two principles clearly established:--

1. That it is impossible to distinguish more than _three_ successive phases in the growth of the Aryan language. In the first phase or period the only materials were roots, not yet compounded, still less articulated grammatically, a form of language to us almost inconceivable, yet even at present preserved in the literature and conversation of millions of human beings, the Chinese. In that stage of language, “king rule man heap law instrument,” would mean, the king rules men legally.

The _second_ phase is characterized by the combination of roots, by which process one loses its independence and its accent, and is changed from a full and material into an empty or formal element. That phase comprehends the formation of compound roots, of certain nominal and verbal stems, and of the most necessary forms of declension and conjugation. What distinguishes this phase from the inflectional is the consciousness of the speaker, that one part of his word is the stem or the body, and all the rest its environment, a feeling analogous to that which we have when we speak of _man_-hood, _man_-ly, _man_-ful, _man_-kind, but which fails us when we speak of _man_ and _men_, or if we speak of _wo-man_, instead of _wif-man_. The principle of combination preponderated when inflection was as yet unknown. But inflection itself was the result of combination, and unless it had continued long after inflection set in, the very life of language would have become extinct.

The _third_ phase is the inflectional, when the base and the modificatory elements of words coalesce, lose their independence in the mind of the speaker, and simply produce the impression of modification taking place in the body of words, but without any intelligible reason. This is the feeling which we have throughout nearly the whole of our own language, and it is only by means of scientific reflection that we distinguish between the root, the base, the suffix, and the termination. To attempt more than this three-fold division seems to me impossible.

2. The second principle which I tried to establish was that the growth of language does not lend itself to a chronological division, in the strict sense of the word. Whatever forces are at work in the formation of languages, none of them ceases suddenly to make room for another, but they work on with a certain continuity from beginning to end, only on a larger or smaller scale. Inflection does not put a sudden end to combination, nor combination to juxtaposition. When even in so modern a language as English we can form by mere combination such words as _man-like_, and reduce them to _manly_, the power of combination cannot be said to be extinct, although it may no longer be sufficiently strong to produce new cases or new personal terminations. We may admit, in the development of the Aryan language, previous to its division, three successive strata of formation, a _juxtapositional_, a _combinatory_, and an _inflectional_; but we shall have to confess that these strata are not regularly superimposed, but tilted, broken up, and convulsed. They are very prominent each for a time, but even after that time is over, they may be traced at different points, pervading the very latest formations of tertiary speech. The true motive power in the progress of all language is combination, and that power is not extinct even in our own time.

[Footnote 1: This Lecture has been translated by M. Louis Havet, and forms the first fasciculus of the Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, publiée sous les auspices du Ministère de l’Instruction Publique. Paris, 1869.]

[Footnote 2: See Benfey, _Ueber die Aufgabe des Kratylos_, Göttingen, 1868.]

[Footnote 3: Theokritos, xvii. 9.]

[Footnote 4: In my essay _On the Relation of Bengali to the Aryan and Aboriginal Languages of India_, published in 1848, I tried to explain these plural suffixes, such as +dig+, +gaṇa+, +jâti+, +varga+, +dala+. I had translated the last word by _band_, supposing from Wilson’s Dictionary, and from the Śabda-kalpa-druma that _dala_ could be used in the sense of band or multitude. I doubt, however, whether _dala_ is ever used in Sanskrit in that sense, and I feel certain that it was not used in that sense with sufficient frequency to account for its adoption in Bengali. Dr. Friedrich Müller, in his useful abstracts of some of the grammars discovered by the _Novara_ in her journey round the earth (1857-59), has likewise referred +dal+ to the Sanskrit +dala+, but he renders what I had in English rendered by _band_, by the German word _Band_. This can only be an accident. I meant _band_ in the sense of a band of robbers, which in German would be _Bande_. He seems to have misunderstood me, and to have taken _band_ for the German _Band_, which means a ribbon. Might +dala+ in Bengali be the Dravidian +taḷa+ or +daḷa+, a host, a crowd, which Dr. Caldwell (p. 197) mentions as a possible etymon of the pluralizing suffix in the Dravidian languages? Bengali certainly took the idea of forming its plurals by composition with words expressive of plurality from its Dravidian neighbor, and it is not impossible that in some cases it might have transferred the very word +daḷa+, crowd. This +daḷa+ and +taḷa+ appears in Tamil as _kala_ and _gala_, and as Sanskrit _k_ may in Sinhalese be represented by _v_ (+loka+ = _lova_), I thought that the plural termination used in Sinhalese after inanimate nouns might possibly be a corruption of the Tamil _kala_. Mr. Childers, however, in his able “Essay on the formation of the Plural of Neuter Nouns in Sinhalese” (_J. R. A. S._, 1874, p. 40), thinks that the Sinhalese _vala_ is a corruption of the Sanskrit +vana+, forest, an opinion which seems likewise to be held by Mr. D’Alwis (l.c. p. 48). As a case in point, in support of mv own opinion, Mr. Childers mentioned to me the Sinhalese _malvaru_, Sanskrit +mâlâ-kâra+, a wreath-maker, a gardener. In Persian both _ân_ and _hâ_ are remnants of decayed plural terminations, not collective words added to the base.]

[Footnote 5: Stanislas Julien, _Exercises Pratiques_, p. 14.]

[Footnote 6: Endlicher, _Chinesische Grammatik_, § 122. Wade, _Progressive Course on the Parts of Speech_, p. 102. A different division of words adopted by Chinese grammarians is that into _dead_ and _live words_, _ssè-tsé_ and _sing-tsé_, the former comprising nouns, the latter verbs. The same classes are sometimes called _tsing-tsé_ and _ho-tsé_, unmoved and moved words. This shows how purposeless it would be to try to find out whether language began with noun or verb. In the earliest phase of speech the same word was both noun and verb, according to the use that was made of it, and it is so still to a great extent in Chinese. See Endlicher, _Chinesische Grammatik_, § 219.]

[Footnote 7: _Agglutinative_ seems an unnecessarily uncouth word, and as implying a something which glues two words together, a kind of _Bindevocal_, it is objectionable as a technical term. _Combinatory_ is technically more correct, and less strange than agglutinative.]

[Footnote 8: Professor Pott, in his article entitled “Max Müller und die Kennzeichen der Sprachverwandtschaft,” published in 1855, in the _Journal of the German Oriental Society_, vol. ix. p. 412, says, in confutation of Bunsen’s view of a real historical progress of language from the lowest to the highest stage: “So cautious an inquirer as W. von Humboldt declines expressly, in the last chapter of his work on the _Diversity of the Structure of Human Language_ (p. 414), any conclusions as to a real historical progress from one stage of language to another, or at least does not commit himself to any definite opinion. This is surely something very different from that gradual progress, and it would be a question whether, by admitting such an historical progress from stage to stage, we should not commit an absurdity hardly less palpable than by trying to raise infusoria into horses or still further into men. [What was an absurdity in 1855 does not seem to be so in 1875.] Mr. Bunsen, it is true, does not hesitate to call the monosyllabic idiom of the Chinese an inorganic formation. But how can we get from an inorganic to an organic language? In nature such a thing would be impossible. No stone becomes a plant, no plant a tree, by however wonderful a metamorphosis, except, in a different sense, by the process of nutrition, _i.e._, by regeneration. The former question, which Mr. Bunsen answers in the affirmative, is disposed of by him with the short dictum: ‘The question whether a language can be supposed to begin with inflections, appears to us simply an absurdity;’ but unfortunately he does not condescend, by a clear illustration, to make that absurdity palpable. Why, in inflectional languages, should the grammatical form always have added itself to the matter subsequently and _ab extra_? Why should it not partially from the beginning have been created with it and in it, as having a meaning with something else, but not having antecedently a meaning of its own?”]

[Footnote 9: Cf. D. G. Brinton, _The Myths of the New World_, p. 6, note.]

[Footnote 10: Julien, _Exercises Pratiques_, p. 120. Endlicher, _Chineseische Grammatik_, § 161. See, also, Nöldeke, _Orient und Occident_, vol. i. p. 759. _Grammar of the Bornu Language_ (London, 1853), p. 55: “In the Treaty the genitive is supplied by the relative pronoun _agu_, singularly corroborative of the Rev. R. Garnett’s theory of the genitive case.”]

[Footnote 11: “Time changes the meaning of words as it does their sound. Thus, many old words are retained in compounds, but have lost their original signification. E.g., _’k·eu_, mouth, has been replaced in colloquial usage by _’tsui_, but it is still employed extensively in compound terms and in derived senses. Thus, _k·wai‘ ’k·eu_ a rapid talker, _.men ’k·eu_, door, _,kwan ’k·eu_, custom house. So also _muh_, the original word for eye, has given place to _’yen, tsing_, or _’yen_ alone. It is, however, employed with other words in derived senses. E.g., _muh hia·_, at present; _muh luh_, table of contents.

“The primitive word for head, _’sheu_, has been replaced by _.t‘eu_, but is retained with various words in combination. E.g., _tseh ’sheu_, robber chief.”

Edkins, _Grammar of the Chinese Colloquial Language_, 2d edition, 1864, p. 100.]

[Footnote 12: Grimm, _Deutsche Grammatik_, ii. 339.]

[Footnote 13: Cf. the German Liebhart, mignon, in Anshelm, 1, 335. Grimm, _Deutsche Grammatik_, iii. 707. I feel more doubtful now as to _sweetard_. Dr. Morris mentions it in his _Historical Outlines of English Grammar_, p. 219; but Koch, when discussing the same derivations in his _English Grammar_, does not give the word. Mr. Skeat writes to me: “The form really used in Middle English is _sweeting_. Three examples are given in Stratmann. One of the best is in my edition of William of Palerne, where, however, it occurs not _once_ only (as given by Stratmann), but _four times_, viz.: in lines 916, 1537, 2799, 3088. The lines are:--

‘Nai, sertes, _sweting_, he seide· that schal I neuer.’ 916 ‘& seide aswithe· _sweting_, welcome!’ 1537 ‘Sertes, _sweting_, thæt is soth. seide william thanne.’ 2799 ‘treuli, _sweting_, that is soth· seide william thane.’ 3088

The date of this poem is about A.D. 1360. Shakespeare has both forms, viz.: _sweeting_ and _sweet-heart_. Chaucer has _swete herte_, just as we should use _sweet-heart_.”]

[Footnote 14: Diez, _Grammatik_, ii. 358. Grimm, _Deutsche Grammatik_, i. p. 340, 706.]

[Footnote 15: See _Sanskrit Grammar_, § 497. I doubt whether in Greek ἀγγελλω is a denominative verb and stands for ἀγγελ(ο)ϳω (Curtius, _Chronologie_, p. 58). I should prefer to explain it as ἀνα-γαρ-ίω, to proclaim, as a verb of the fourth class.]

[Footnote 16: Lex Repetund. “ceivis romanus ex hac lege fiet, nepotesque -- ceiveis romanei justei sunto.” Cf. Egger, _Lat, Serm. Vetust. Reliq._, p. 245. Meunier, in _Mémoires de la Societé de Linguistique de Paris_, vol. i. p. 34.]

[Footnote 17: Still used as long by Plautus; of. Neue, _Formenlehre_, ii. p. 340.]

[Footnote 18: In old Latin the termination of the first person singular was _em_. Thus Quintilian, i. 7, 23, says: “Quid? non Cato Censorius _dicam_ et _faciam_, _dicem_ et _faciem_ scripsit, eundemque in ceteris, quæ similiter cadunt, modum tenuit? quod et ex veteribus ejus libris manifestum est, et a Messala in libro de s. littera positum.” Neue, _Formenlehre_, ii. p. 348. The introduction of _feram_, originally a subjunctive, to express the future in the first person, reminds us of the distinction in English between _I shall_ and _thou wilt_, though the analogy fails in the first person plural. In Homer the use of the subjunctive for the future is well known. See Curtius, _Chronologie_, p. 50.]

[Footnote 19: Historically the _i_ in _tuleritis_ should be long in the subjunctive of the perfect, short in the future.]

[Footnote 20: Bleek, _On the Concord_, p. lxvi.]

[Footnote 21: In δώ-σω, for δωσίω, the _i_ or _y_ is lost in Greek as usual. In other verbs _s_ and _y_ are both lost. Hence τενεσίω becomes τενέσω, and τενῶ the so-called Attic future. Bopp, _Vergleich-Grammatik_, first ed., p. 903. In Latin we have traces of a similar future in forms like _fac-so_, _cap-so_, etc. See Neue, _Formenlehre_, ii. p. 421. The Epic dialect sometimes doubles the σ when the vowel is short, αἰδέσσομαι. But this can hardly be considered a relic of the original σι, because the same reduplication takes places sometimes in the Aorist, ἐγέλασσα.]

[Footnote 22: See Bopp, _Vergleichende Grammatik_, §§ 897, 898. These verbal adjectives should be carefully distinguished from nominal adjectives, such as Sanskrit +div-yá-s+, divinus, originally +div-i-a-s+, _i.e._, divi-bhavas, being in heaven; ὀίκεῖος, domesticus, originally οἴκει-ο-ς, being in the house. These are adjectives formed, it would seem, from old locatives, just as in Bask we can form from _etche_, house, _etche-tic_, of the house, and _etche-tic-acoa_, he who is of the house; or from _seme_, son, _semea-ren_, of the son, and _semea-ren-a_, he who is of the son. See W. J. van Eys, _Essai de Grammaire de la Langue Basque_, 1867, p. 16.]

[Footnote 23: Bopp, _Vergleichende Grammatik_, §§ 888-898.]

[Footnote 24: Bacon, _Novum Organum_, i. 55.]

[Footnote 25: Until a rational account of these changes, comprehended under the name of _Lautverschiebung_, is given, we must continue to look upon them, not as the result of phonetic decay, but of dialectic growth. I am glad to find that this is more and more admitted by those who think for themselves, instead of simply repeating the opinions of others. Grimm’s Law stands no longer alone, as peculiar to the Teutonic languages, but analogous changes have been pointed out in the South-African, the Chinese, the Polynesian dialects, showing that these changes are everywhere collateral, not successive. I agree with Professor Curtius and other scholars that the impulse to what we call _Lautverschiebung_ was given by the third modification in each series of consonants, by the _gh_, _dh_, _bh_ in Sanskrit, the χ, θ, φ, in Greek. I differ from him in considering the changes of _Lautverschiebung_ as the result of dialectic variety, while he sees their motive power in phonetic corruption. But whether we take the one view or the other, I do not see that Dr. Scherer has removed any of our difficulties. See Curtius, _Grundzüge_, 4th ed., p. 426, note. Dr. Scherer, in his thoughtful work, _Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache_, has very nearly, though not quite, apprehended the meaning of my explanation as to the effects of dialectic change contrasted with those of phonetic decay. If it is allowable to use a more homely illustration, one might say with perfect truth, that each dialect chooses its own phonetic garment, as people choose the coats and trousers which best fit them. The simile, like all similes, is imperfect, yet it is far more exact than if we compare the ravages of phonetic decay, as is frequently done, to the wear and tear of these phonetic suits.]

[Footnote 26: Edkins, _Grammar_, p. 84.]

[Footnote 27: Having stated this on the authority of Mr. Edkins, one of our best living Chinese scholars, it is but fair that I should give the opinion of another Chinese scholar, the late Stanislas Julien, whose competence to give an opinion on this subject Mr. Edkins would probably be the first to acknowledge. All that we really want is the truth, not a momentary triumph of our own opinions. M. Julien wrote to me in July, 1868:--

“Je ne suis pas du tout de l’avis d’Edkins qui dit qu’un grand nombre de mots mongols sont chinois; c’est faux, archifaux.

_Sain_ est mandchou et veut dire bon, en chinois _chen_. _begen_, low: en chinois _hia_. _itchi_, droit; en chinois _yeou_. _sologaï_, left, gauche; en chinois _tso_. _c’hihe_, straight; en chinois _tchi_ (rectus). _gadan_, outside; en chinois _waï_. _logon_, green; en chinois _tsing_. _c’hohon_, few; en chinois _chao_. _hungun_, light (not heavy); en chinois _king_.

“Je voudrais bien savoir comment M. Edkins prouve que les mots qu’il cite sont chinois.

“Foucaux a échoué également en voulant prouver, autrefois, que 200 mots thibétains qu’il avait choisis ressemblaïent aux mots chinois correspondants.”

M. Stanislas Julien wrote again to me on the 21st of July:--

“J’ai peur que vous ne soyez fâché du jugemont sevère que j’ai porté sur les identifications faites par Edkins du mongol avec le chinois. J’ai d’abord pris dans votre savant article les mots mongols qu’il cite et je vous ai montré qu’ils ne ressemblent pas le moins du monde au chinois.

“Je vais vous en citer d’autres tirés du Dictionnaire de Khienlung chinois mandchou-mongol.

Mongol Chinois _tegri_, ciel _thien._ _naran_, soleil _ji._ _naram barimoni_, } _ji-chi._ éclipse de soleil } _saran_, lune _youeï._ _oudoun_, étoile _sing._ _egoulé_, nuages, _yun._ _ayounga_, le tonnerre _louï._ _tchagilgan_, éclair _tien._ _borogan_, la pluie _yu._ _sigouderi_, la rosée _lou._ _kirago_, la gelée _choang_. _lapsa_, la neige _ sioue._ _salgin_, le vent _fong._ _ousoun_, l’eau _chouï._ _gal_, le feu _ho._ _siroi_, la terre _thou._ _aisin_, l’or _altan._

“Je vous donnerai, si vous le désirez, 1000 mots mongols avec leurs synonymes chinois, et je défie M. Edkins de trouver dans les 1000 mots mongols un seul qui ressemble au mot chinois synonyme.

“Comme j’ai fait assez de thibétain, je puis vous fournir aussi une multitude de mots thibétains avec leurs correspondants en chinois, et je défierai également M. Edkins de trouver un seul mot thibétain dans mille qui ressemble au mot chinois qui a le même sens.”

My old friend, M. Stanislas Julien, wrote to me once more on this subject, the 6th of August, 1868:--

“Depuis une quinzaine d’anneés, j’ai l’avantage d’entretenir les meilleures relations avec M. Edkins. J’ai lu, anciennement dans un journal que publie M. Léon de Rosny (actuellement professeur titulaire de la langue Japanaise) le travail où M. Edkins a tâché de rapprocher et d’identifier, par les sons, des mots mongols et chinois ayant la même signification. Son systême m’a paru mal fondé. Quelques mots chinois peuvent être entrés dans la langue mongole par suite du contact des deux peuples, comme cela est arrivé pour le mandchou, dont beaucoup de mots sont entrés dans la langue mongole en en prenant les terminaisons; mais il ne faudrait pas se servir de ces exemples pour montrer l’identité ou les ressemblances des deux langues.

“Quand les mandchous ont voulu traduire les livres chinois, ils ont rencontré un grand nombre de mots dont les synonymes n’existaient pas dans leur langue. Ils se sont alors emparé des mots chinois en leur donnant des terminaisons mandchoues, mais cette quasi-ressemblance de certains mots mandchous ne prouve point le moins du monde l’identité des deux langues. Par exemple, un préfet se dit en chinois _tchi-fou_, et un sous-préfet _tchi-hien_; les mandchous qui ne possédaient point ces fonctionaires se sont contentés de transcire les sons chinois _dchhifou_, _dchhikhiyan_.

“Le tafetas se dit en chinois _tcheou-tse_; les mandchous, n’ayant point de mots pour dire tafetas, ont transcrit les sons chinois par _tchousé_. Le bambou se dit _tchou-tze_; ils ont écrit l’arbre (moo) _tchousé_. Un titre de noblesse écrit sur du papier doré s’appelle _tsĕ_; les mandchous écrivent _tche_. Je pourrais vous citer un nombre considérable de mots du même genre, qui ne prouvent pas du tout l’identité du mandchou et du chinois.

“L’ambre s’appelle _hou-pe_; les mandchous écrivent _khôba_. La barbe s’appelle _hou-tse_, ils écrivent _khôsé_.

“Voici de quelle manière les mandchous ont fait certains verbes. Une balance s’appelle en chinois _thien ping_, ils écrivent _p’ing-sé_; puis pour dire peser avec une balance, ils ont fait le verbe _p’ingselembi_; _lembi_ est une terminaison commune à beaucoup de verbes.

“Pour dire faire peser, ordonner de peser avec une balance, ils écrivent _p’ingseleboumbi_; _boumbi_ est la forme factive ou causative; cette terminaison sert aussi pour le passif; de sorte que ce verbe peut signifier aussi _être pesé avec une balance_.

“Je pourrais citer aussi des mots mandchous auxquels on a donné la terminaison mongole, et _vice versâ_.”

These remarks, made by one who, during his lifetime, was recognised by friend and foe as the first Chinese scholar in Europe, ought to have their proper weight. They ought certainly to make us cautious before persuading ourselves that the connection between the northern and southern branches of the Turanian languages has been found in Chinese. On the other hand I am quite aware that all that M. Stanislas Julien says against Mr. Edkins may be true, and that nevertheless Chinese may have been the central language from which Mongolian in the north and Tibetan in the south branched off. A language, such as Chinese, with a small number of sounds and an immense number of meanings, can easily give birth to dialects which, in their later development, might branch off in totally different directions. Even with languages so closely connected as Sanskrit and Latin, it would be easy to make out a list of a thousand words in Latin which could not be matched in Sanskrit. The question, therefore, is not decided. What is wanted are researches carried on by competent scholars, in an unprejudiced and at the same time thoroughly scientific spirit.]

[Footnote 28: If Mr. Chalmers’ comparison of the Chinese and Bohemian names for daughter is so unpardonable, what shall we say of Bopp’s comparison of the Bengali and Sanskrit names for sister? Sister in Bengali is +bohinî+, the Hindi +bahin+ and +bhân+, the Prakrit +bahiṇî+, the Sanskrit +bhaginî+. Bopp, in the most elaborate way, derives +bohinî+ from the Sanskrit +svasṛ+, sister. Bopp, _Vergleichende Grammatik_, Vorrede zur vierten Abtheilung, p. x.]

[Footnote 29: Curtius, _Verbum_, p. 72.]

[Footnote 30: Pott, E. F., 1871, p. 21.]

[Footnote 31: Dr. Callaway, in his _Remarks on the Zulu Language_ (1870), p. 2, says: “The Zulu Language contains upwards of 20,000 words in _bonâ fide_ use among the people. Those curious appellations for different colored cattle, or for different maize cobs, to express certain minute peculiarities of color or arrangement of color, which it is difficult for us to grasp, are not synonymous, but instances in which a new noun or name is used instead of adding adjectives to one name to express the various conditions of an object. Neither are these various verbs used to express varieties of the same action, synonyms, such as _ukupata_, to carry in the hand, _ukwetshata_, to carry on the shoulder, _ukubeleta_, to carry on the back.”]

[Footnote 32: Bruppacher, _Lantlere der Oskischen Sprache_, p. 48. Büchler, _Grundriss der Lateinischen Declination_, p. 1.]

[Footnote 33: “Die Entstehung der Casus ist noch das allerdunkelste im weiten Bereich des indogermanischen Formensystems.” Curtius, _Chronologie_, p. 71.]

[Footnote 34: Corssen, ii. 888.]

[Footnote 35: Cf. Clemm, _Die neusten Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Griechischen Composita_, p. 9.]