CHAPTER V
LANGUAGE
47. Linguistic relationship: the speech family.—48. Criteria of relationship.—49. Sound equivalences and phonetic laws.—50. The principal speech families.—51. Classification of languages by types.—52. Permanence of language and race.—53. The biological and historical nature of language.—54. Problems of the relation of language and culture.—55. Period of the origin of language.—56. Culture, speech, and nationality.—57. Relative worth of languages.—58. Size of vocabulary.—59. Quality of speech sounds.—60. Diffusion and parallelism in language and culture.—61. Convergent languages.—62. Unconscious factors in language and culture.—63. Linguistic and cultural standards.—64. Rapidity of linguistic change.
47. LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIP: THE SPEECH FAMILY
The question that the historian and anthropologist are likely to ask most frequently of the philologist, is whether this and that language are or are not related. Relationship in such connection means descent from a common source, as two brothers are descended from the same father, or two cousins from a common grandfather. If languages can be demonstrated to possess such common source, it is clear that the peoples who spoke them must at one time have been in close contact, or perhaps have constituted a single people. If, on the other hand, the languages of two peoples prove wholly dissimilar, though their racial types and cultures be virtually identical, as indeed is sometimes found to be the case—witness the Hungarians and their neighbors—it is evident that an element of discontinuous development must somewhere be reckoned with. Perhaps one part of an originally single racial group gradually modified its speech beyond recognition, or under the shock of conquest, migration, or other historical accident entirely discarded it in favor of a new and foreign tongue. Or the opposite may be true: the two groups were originally distinct in all respects, but, being brought in contact, their cultures interpenetrated, intermarriage followed, and the two physical types became assimilated into one while the languages remained dissimilar. In short, if one wishes full understanding of a people, one must take its language into consideration. This means that it must be classified. If a historical classification is to be more than barrenly logical, it must have reference to relationship, development, origin. In a word, it must be a genetic classification.
The term used to indicate that two or more languages have a common source but are unrelated to all others, or seem so in the present state of knowledge, is “linguistic family.” “Linguistic stock” is frequently used as a synonym. This is the fundamental concept in the classification of languages. Without a clear idea of its meaning one involves himself in confusion on attempting to use philology as an aid to other branches of human history.
There is no abstract reason against referring to a group of unrelated languages as a “family” because they are all spoken in one area, nor against denominating as “families,” as has sometimes been done, the major subdivisions of a group of languages admittedly of common origin. Again, languages that show certain similarities of type or structure, such as inflection, might conceivably be put into one “family.” But there is this objection to all such usages: they do not commit themselves on the point of genetic relationship, or they contradict it, or only partially exhaust it. Yet commonness of origin is so important in many connections that it is indispensable to have one term which denotes its ascertainable presence. And for this quality there happens to be no generally understood designation other than “linguistic family,” or its synonym, “linguistic stock.” This phrase will therefore be used here strictly in the sense of the whole of a group of languages sprung from a single source, and only in that sense. Other groupings will be indicated by phrases like “languages of such and such an area,” “subfamily,” “division of a family,” or “languages of similar type.”
48. CRITERIA OF RELATIONSHIP
The question that first arises in regard to linguistic families is how the relationship of their constituent idioms is determined. In brief, the method is one of comparison. If a considerable proportion of the words and grammatical forms of two languages are reasonably similar, similar enough to indicate that the resemblances cannot be due to mere accident, these similar words and forms must go back to a common source, and if this source is not borrowing, the two tongues are related. If comparison fails to bring out any such degree of resemblance, the languages are classed in distinct families.
Of course it is possible that the reason two languages seem unrelated is not that they are really so, but that they have in the lapse of ages become so much differentiated that one cannot any longer find resemblance between their forms. In that event true relationship would be obscured by its remoteness. Theoretically there is high probability that many families of languages, customarily regarded as totally distinct, do go back in the far past to a common origin, and that ignorance of their history, or inability to analyze them deeply, prevents recognition of their relationship. From time to time it happens that groups of languages which at first seemed unrelated are shown by more intensive study to possess elements enough in common to compel the recognition of their original unity. In that case what were supposed to be several “families” become merged in one. The scope of a particular family may be thus enlarged; but the scope of the generic concept of “family” is not altered.
Whether there is any hope that comparative philology may ultimately be prosecuted with sufficient success to lead all the varied forms of human speech back to a single origin, is an interesting speculation. A fair statement is that such a possibility cannot be denied, but that the science is still far from such a realization, and that progress toward it is necessarily slow. Of more immediate concern is an ordering and summarizing of the knowledge in hand with a view to such positive inferences as can be drawn.
In an estimate of the similarity of languages, words that count as evidence must meet two requirements: they must be alike or traceably similar in sound; and they must be alike or similar in meaning. This double requirement holds, whether full words or separable parts of words, roots or grammatical forms, are compared. The English word _eel_ and the French _île_, meaning island, are pronounced almost exactly alike, yet their meaning is so different that no sane person would regard them as sprung from the same origin. As a matter of fact _île_ is derived from Latin _insula_, whereas _eel_ has a cognate in German _aal_. These prototypes _insula_ and _aal_ being as different in sound as they are in meaning, any possibility that _eel_ and _île_ might be related is easily disposed of. Yet if the Latin and German equivalents were lost, if nothing were known of the history of the English and French languages, and if _île_ meant not _island_ but, say, _fish_ or _watersnake_, then it might be reasonable to think of a connection.
Such doubtful cases, of which a certain proportion are likely to be adjudged wrongly, are bound to come up in regard to the less investigated languages, particularly those of nations without writing, the earlier stages of whose speech have perished without trace. In proportion as more is known of a language, or as careful analysis can reconstruct more of its past stages, the number of such borderline cases obviously becomes fewer.
Before genetic connection between two languages can be thought of, the number of their words similar in sound and sense must be reasonably large. An isolated handful of resemblances obviously are either importations—loan words—or the result of coincidence. Thus in the native Californian language known as Yuki, _ko_ means _go_, and _kom_ means _come_. Yet examination of Yuki reveals no further instances of the same kind. It would therefore be absurd to dream of a connection: one swallow does not make a summer. This lone pair of resemblances means nothing except that the mathematical law of probability has operated. Among the thousands of words in one language, a number are likely to be similar in sound to words of another language; and of this number again a small fraction, perhaps one or two or five in all, will happen to bear some resemblance in meaning also. In short, the similarities upon which a verdict of genetic relationship is based must be sufficiently numerous to fall well beyond possibility of mere coincidence; and it must also be possible to prove with reasonable certainty that they are not the result of one language borrowing words from another, as, for instance, English borrowed from French and Latin.
At the same time it is not necessary that the similarities extend to the point of identity. In fact, too close a resemblance between part of the stock of two languages immediately raises a presumption of borrowing. For every language is continually changing, and once a mother tongue has split into several branches, each of these goes on modifying its sounds, and gradually shifting the meaning of its words, generation after generation. In short, where connection is real, it must be veiled by a certain degree of distortion.
Take the English word _foot_ and the Latin word of the same meaning, _pes_. To offhand inspection the sounds or forms of the two words do not seem similar. The resemblance becomes more definite in other forms of _pes_, for instance the genitive case _ped-is_ or the accusative _ped-em_. Obviously the stem or elementary portion of the Latin word is not _pes_ but _ped-_; and the _d_ is closer to the English _t_ of _foot_ than is the _s_ of _pes_. The probability of relationship is increased by the Greek word for foot, _pous_, whose stem proves to be _pod-_, with vowel closer to that of English. Meanwhile, it would be recognized that there are English words beginning with _ped-_, such as _pedal_, _pedestrian_, _pedestal_, all of which have a clear association with the idea of foot. All these words however possess almost exact equivalents in Latin. One would therefore be justified in concluding from these facts what indeed the history of the languages proves, namely, that _pedal_, _pedestrian_, and _pedestal_ are Latin words taken over into English; whereas _foot_ and _pes_ and _pous_, and for that matter German _fuss_, are derivatives from a common form which once existed in the now extinct mother tongue from which Greek and Latin and English and German are derived.
49. SOUND EQUIVALENCES AND PHONETIC LAWS
The question next arises whether it is possible to account for the distortions which have modified the original word into _foot_, _ped-_, etc. What has caused the initial sound of this ancient word to become _p_ in Latin and _f_ in English, and its last consonant to be _d_ in Latin and Greek, _t_ in English, and _ss_ in German? To answer this seemingly innocent question with accuracy for this one word alone would involve a treatise on the whole group of languages in question, and even then the causes, as causes, could scarcely be set down with certainty. But it has proved possible to assemble a large number of instances of parallel distortion in which Latin _p_ corresponds to English _f_, or _d_ to _t_. Evidently philology has got hold of a generalized phenomenon here. Since _father_ corresponds to _pater_, _full_ to _pl-enus_, _for_ to _pro_, _fish_ to _piscis_, and so on in case after case, we are evidently face to face with a happening that has occurred with regularity and to which the name “law” is therefore applicable.
The _f_ of _foot_ and _p_ of _pes_ are both lip sounds. They differ preëminently in that _f_ can be prolonged indefinitely, whereas _p_ is a momentary sound. It is produced by closure of the lips for a fraction of a second during which there is an interruption of sound production, followed by a somewhat explosive release of the breath which has been impounded in the mouth cavity. This explosion is of necessity instantaneous. Since it is preceded by occlusion, or stoppage of the breath, it is customary to speak of sounds produced by a process like _p_ as “stops.” _F_, on the other hand, is a “continuant,” or more specifically a “fricative.”
The English word _three_ begins with a sound which, although conventionally represented by the two letters _th_, is a simple sound and in a class with _f_ in being fricative. _Th_ is formed by putting the tongue lightly across the teeth, just as _f_ is made by placing the lower lip against the edge of the upper teeth. In both cases the breath is expelled with friction through a narrow passage. Now if the fricative _f_ is represented in Latin by the stop _p_, then, if regularity holds good, the English fricative _th_ ought to be represented in Latin by the stop sound in the corresponding dental position, namely _t_. The Latin word for _three_ is in fact _tres_; for _thin_, _ten-uis_; for _mother_, _mater_; for _thou_, _tu_, and so on. The regularity therefore extends beyond the limits of the single labial class of sounds, and applies with equal force to the dentals; and, it may be added, to the palatals or gutturals as well.
As one passes from English and Latin to German, one finds the initial sound of the word meaning three, _drei_, to be somewhat different from _th_ and _t_ but still clearly allied, since it also is made by the tongue against the teeth. _D_ is a stop like _t_, but the vocal cords vibrate while it is being pronounced, whereas in _t_ the vocal cords are silent. _D_ is “voiced” or “sonant,” _t_ “unvoiced” or “surd.” Hence the formulation: Latin, surd stop; German, sonant stop; English, fricative. This triple equivalence can be substantiated in other words. For instance, _ten-uis_, _dünn_, _thin_; _tu_, _du_, _thou_.
If it is the English word that contains a surd stop, what will be the equivalent in Latin and German? Compare _ten_, Latin _decem_, German _zehn_. Again the three classes of sounds run parallel; but the place of their appearance in the three languages has shifted.
The third possible placing of the three sounds in the three languages is when English has the sonant stop, _d_. By exclusion it might be predicted that Latin should then show the fricative _th_ and German the surd stop _t_. The word _daughter_ confirms. The German is _tochter_. Latin in this case fails us, the original corresponding stem having gone out of use and been replaced by the word _filia_. But Greek, whose sounds align with those of Latin as opposed to English and German, provides the _th_ as expected: _thygater_. Compare _death_, _tod_, _thanatos_.
Let us bring together these results so that the eye may grasp them:
Latin, Greek surd stop sonant stop fricative German sonant stop fricative surd stop English fricative surd stop sonant stop
Latin, Greek tres duo thygater German drei zwei tochter English three two daughter
These relations apply not only to the dentals _d_, _t_, _th_ (_z_), which have been chosen for illustration, but also to the labials, _p_, _b_, _f_, and to the palatals _k_, _g_, _h_ (_gh_, _ch_).
It is evident that most of the sounds occur in all three groups of languages, but not in the same words. The sound _t_ is common to English, Latin, and German, but when it appears in a particular word in one of these languages it is replaced by _d_ and _th_ in the two others. This replacing is known as a “sound shift.” The sound shifts just enumerated constitute the famous Grimm’s Law. This was the first discovered important phonetic law or system of sound substitutions. Yet it is only one of a number of shifts that have been worked out for the Indo-European group of languages to which English, German, and Latin belong. So far, only stopped and fricative consonants have been reviewed here, and no vowels have been considered. Other groups of languages also show shifts, but often different ones, as between _l_ and _n_, or _s_ and _k_, or _p_ and _k_.
The significance of a shift lies in the fact that its regularity cannot be explained on any other ground than that the words in which the law is operative must originally have been the same. That is, Latin _duo_, German _zwei_, English _two_ are all only variants of a word which meant “two” in the mother tongue from which these three languages are descended. This example alone is of course insufficient evidence for the existence of such a common mother tongue. But that each of the shifts discussed is substantiated by hundreds or thousands of words in which it holds true, puts the shift beyond the possibility of mere accident. The explanation of coincidence is ruled out. The resemblances therefore are both genuine and genetic. The conclusion becomes inevitable that the languages thus linked are later modifications of a former single speech.
It is in this way that linguistic relationship is determined. Where an ancient sound shift, a law of phonetic change, can be established by a sufficient number of cases, argument ceases. It is true that when most of a language has perished, or when an unwritten language has been but fragmentarily recorded or its analysis not carried far, a strong presumption of genetic unity may crowd in on the investigator who is not yet in a position to present the evidence of laws. The indications may be strong enough to warrant a tentative assumption of relationship. But the final test is always the establishment of laws of sound equivalence that hold good with predominating regularity.
50. THE PRINCIPAL SPEECH FAMILIES
The number of linguistic families is not a matter of much theoretical import. From what has already been said it appears that the number can perhaps never be determined with absolute accuracy. As knowledge accumulates and dissection is carried to greater refinements, new phonetic laws will uncover and serve to unite what now seem to be separate stocks. Yet for the practical purpose of classification and tracing relationship the linguistic family will remain a valuable tool. A rapid survey of the principal families is therefore worth while.
In Asia and Europe, which must be considered a unit in this connection, the number of stocks, according to conservative reckoning, does not exceed twenty-five. The most important of these, in point of number of speakers, is the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic or Aryan family, whose territory for several thousand years has comprised southwestern Asia and the greater part, but by no means all, of Europe. The most populous branches of the Indo-European family are the Indic, Slavic, Germanic, and Romance or Latin. Others are Persian or Iranic, Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Baltic or Lithuanian, and Keltic. From Europe various Indo-European languages, such as English, Spanish, French, Russian, have in recent centuries been carried to other continents, until in some, such as the Americas and Australia, the greater area is now inhabited by peoples speaking Indo-European. As the accompanying maps are intended to depict the historic or native distribution of languages they do not show this diffusion. It will be noted that the distribution of Indo-European has the form of a long belt stretching from western Europe to northeastern India, with an interruption only in Asia Minor (Fig. 12). Turkish peoples displaced Indo-Europeans there about a thousand years ago, thus breaking the territorial continuity. It is probable that another link between the western and eastern Indo-Europeans once stretched around the north of the Caspian sea. Here also there are Turks now.
Almost equaling Indo-European in the number of its speakers is Sinitic, which is generally held to include Chinese proper with its dialects; the Tibeto-Burman branch; the T’ai or Shan-Siamese branch; and probably some minor divisions like Lolo.
In extent of territory occupied the Altaic stock rivals the Indo-European. Its three main divisions, Turkish, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu, cover most of northern and central Asia and some tracts in Europe. The Turks, as just noted, are the only stock that within the period of history has gained appreciable territory at Indo-European expense. The Uralic or Finno-Ugric family has eastern Europe and northwestern Asia as its home, with the Finns and Hungarian Magyars as its most civilized and best known representatives. This is a scattered stock. Most scholars unite the three Altaic divisions, Finno-Ugric, and Samoyed into a vast Ural-Altaic family.
Of the Semitic family, Arabic is the chief living representative, with Abyssinian in Africa as a little known half-sister. Arabic is one of the most widely diffused of all languages, and as the orthodox vehicle of Mohammedanism has served an important function as a culture carrier. Several great nations of ancient times also spoke Semitic tongues: the Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Carthaginians, and Hebrews.
Southern India is Dravidian. While people of this family enter little into our customary thoughts, they number over fifty millions. Japanese and Korean also merit mention as important stock tongues. Anamese, by some regarded as an offshoot from Chinese, may constitute a separate stock. Several minor families will be found on the Asiatic map, most of them consisting of uncivilized peoples or limited in their territory or the number of their speakers. Yet, so far as can be judged from present knowledge, they form units of the same order of independence as the great Indo-European, Semitic, and Ural-Altaic stocks.
Language distributions in Africa are in the main simple (Fig. 13). The whole of northern Africa beyond latitude 10°, and parts of east Africa almost to the equator, were at one time Hamitic. This is the family to which the language of ancient Egypt belonged. Hamitic and Semitic, named after sons of Noah, probably derive from a common source, although the separation of the common mother tongue into the African Hamitic and the Asiatic Semitic divisions must have occurred very anciently. In the past thousand years Hamitic has yielded ground before Semitic, due to the spread of Arabic in Mohammedan Africa.
Africa south of the equator is the home of the great Bantu family, except in the extreme southwest of the continent. There a tract of considerable area, though of small populational density, was in the possession of the backward Bushmen and Hottentots, distinctive in their physical type as well as languages.
Between the equator and latitude ten north, in the belt known as the Sudan, there is much greater speech diversity than elsewhere in Africa. The languages of the Sudan fall into several families, perhaps into a fairly large number. Opinion conflicts or is unsettled as to their classification. They are, at least in the main, non-Hamitic and non-Bantu; but this negative fact does not preclude their having had either a single or a dozen origins. It has usually been easier to throw them all into a vague group designated as non-Hamitic and non-Bantu than to compare them in detail.
In Oceania conditions are similar to those of Africa, in that there are a few great, widely branching stocks and one rather small area, New Guinea, of astounding speech diversity. Indeed, superficially this variety is the outstanding linguistic feature of New Guinea. The hundreds of Papuan dialects of the island look as if they might require twenty or more families to accommodate them. However, it is inconceivable that so small a population should time and again have evolved totally new forms of speech. It is much more likely that something in the mode of life or habits of mind of the Papuans has favored the breaking up of their speech into local dialects and an unusually rapid modification of these into markedly differentiated languages. What the circumstances were that favored this tendency to segregation and change can be only conjectured. At any rate, New Guinea ranks with the Sudan, western North America, and the Amazonian region of South America, as one of the areas of greatest linguistic multiplicity.
All the remainder of Oceania is either Australian or Malayo-Polynesian in speech. The Australian idioms have been imperfectly recorded. They were numerous and locally much varied, but seem to derive from a single mother tongue.
All the East Indies, including part of the Malay Peninsula, and all of the island world of the Pacific—Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia—always excepting interior New Guinea—are the habitat of the closely-knit Malayo-Polynesian family, whose unity was quickly recognized by philologists. From Madagascar to Easter Island this speech stretches more than half-way around our planet. Some authorities believe that the Mon-Khmer languages of southern Indo-China and the Kolarian or Munda-Kol tongues of India are related in origin to Malayo-Polynesian, and denominate the larger whole, the Austronesian family.
North and South America, according to the usual reckoning, contain more native language families than all the remainder of the world. The orthodox classification allots about seventy-five families to North America (some fifty of them represented within the borders of the United States) and another seventy-five to South America. They varied greatly in size at the time of discovery, some being confined to a few hundred souls, whereas others stretched through tribe after tribe over enormous areas. Their distribution is so irregular and their areas so disproportionate as to be impossible of vivid representation except on a large-scale map in colors. The most important in extent of territory, number of speakers, or the cultural importance of the nations adhering to them, are, in North America, Eskimo, Athabascan, Algonkin, Iroquoian, Muskogean, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan, Maya; and in South America, Chibcha, Quechua, Aymara, Araucanian, Arawak, Carib, Tupi, Tapuya. It will be seen on the maps (Figs. 14, 15) that these sixteen groups held the greater part of the area of the double continent, the remaining smaller areas being crowded with about ten times as many stocks. Obviously, as in New Guinea, there cannot well have been such an original multiplicity; in fact, recent studies are tending to consolidate the hundred and fifty New World families into considerably fewer groups. But the evidence for such reductions is necessarily difficult to bring and much of it is still incomplete. The stocks mentioned above have been long determined and generally accepted.
About a third of humanity to-day speaks some form of Indo-European. A quarter talks some dialect of Sinitic stock. Semitic, Dravidian, Ural-Altaic, Japanese, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu have each from about fifty to a hundred million speakers. The languages included in these eight families form the speech of approximately ninety per cent of living human beings.
51. CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES BY TYPES
A classification is widely prevalent which puts languages according to their structure into three types: inflective, agglutinating, and isolating. To this some add a fourth type, the polysynthetic or incorporating. While the classification is largely misrepresentative, it enters so abundantly into current thought about human speech that it is worth presenting, analyzing, and, so far as it is invalid, refuting.
An inflecting language expresses relations or grammatical form by adding prefixes or suffixes which cannot stand alone, or if they stood alone would mean nothing; or that operates by internal modifications of the stem, which also can have no independent existence. The _-ing_ of _killing_ is such an inflection; so are the vowel changes and the ending _-en_ in the conjugation _write_, _wrote_, _written_.
An isolating language expresses such relations or forms by separate words or isolated particles. English _heart of man_ is isolating, where the Latin equivalent _cor hominis_ is inflective, the per se meaningless suffix _-is_ rendering the genitive or possessive force of the English word _of_.
An agglutinative language glues together into solid words elements for which a definite meaning of their own can be traced. English does not use this mechanism for purposes that are ordinarily reckoned as strictly grammatical, but does employ it for closely related purposes. _Under-take_, _rest-less_, are examples; and in a form like _light-ly_, which goes back to _light-like_, the force of the suffix which converts the adjective into the adverb is of a kind that in descriptions of most languages would be considered grammatical or formal.
Polysynthetic languages are agglutinative ones carried to a high pitch, or those that can compound words into equivalents of fair sized sentences. _Steam-boat-propeller-blade_ might be called a polysynthetic form if we spoke or wrote it in one word as modern German and ancient Greek would.
Incorporating languages embody the object noun, or the pronoun representing it, into the word that contains the verb stem. This construction is totally foreign to English.[7]
Each of these classes evidently defines one or more distinctive linguistic processes. There are different mechanisms at work in _kill-ing_, _of man_, _light-ly_. The distinction is therefore both valid and valuable. Its abuse lies in trying to slap the label of one type on a whole language. The instances given show that English employs most of the several distinct processes. Obviously it would be arbitrary to classify English as outright of one type. This is also the situation for most other languages. There are a few languages that tend prevailingly in one direction or the other: Sanskrit and Latin and Hebrew toward the inflective structure, Turkish toward the agglutinative, Chinese toward the isolating. But they form a small minority, and most of them contain certain processes of types other than their predominating ones. Sanskrit, for instance, has polysynthetic traits, Hebrew incorporating ones. Therefore, so long as these concepts are used to picture a language in detail, with balanced recognition of the different processes employed by it, they are valuable tools to philological description. When on the other hand the concepts are degraded into catchwords designating three or four compartments into one of which every language is somehow to be stuffed, they grossly misrepresent most of the facts. The concepts, in short, apply usefully to types of linguistic processes, inadequately to types of languages.
Why then has the classification of human languages into inflecting, agglutinating, isolating, and polysynthetic or incorporating ones been repeated so often? First of all, because languages vary almost infinitely, and a true or natural classification, other than the genetic one into families, is intricate. The mind craves simplicity and the three or four supposedly all-embracing types are a temptation.
A second reason lies deeper. As philology grew up into a systematic body of knowledge, it centered its first interests on Latin and Greek, then on Sanskrit and the other older Indo-European languages. These happened to have inflective processes unusually well developed. They also happened to be the languages from which the native speech of the philologists was derived. What is our own seems good to us; consequently Indo-European was elevated into the highest or inflective class of languages. As a sort of after-thought, Semitic, which includes Hebrew, the language of part of our Scriptures, was included. Then Chinese, which follows an unusually simple plan of structure that is the opposite in many ways of the complex structure of old Indo-European, and which was the speech of a civilized people, was set apart as a class of the second rank. This left the majority of human languages to be dumped into a third class, or a third and fourth class, with the pleasing implication that they were less capable of abstraction, more materialistic, cruder, and generally inferior. Philologists are customarily regarded as extreme examples of passionless, dry, objective human beings. The history of this philological classification indicates that they too are influenced by emotional and self-complacent impulses.
52. PERMANENCE OF LANGUAGE AND RACE
It is sometimes thought because a new language is readily learned, especially in youth, that language is a relatively unstable factor in human history, less permanent than race. It is necessary to guard against two fallacies in this connection. The first is to argue from individuals to societies; the second, that because change is possible, it takes place.
As a matter of fact, languages often preserve their existence, and even their territory, with surprising tenacity in the face of conquest, new religions and culture, and the economic disadvantages of unintelligibility. To-day, Breton, a Keltic dialect, maintains itself in France as the every-day language of the people in the isolated province of Brittany—a sort of philological fossil. It has withstood the influence of two thousand years of contact, first with Latin, then with Frankish German, at last with French. Its Welsh sister-tongue flourishes in spite of the Anglo-Saxon speech of the remainder of Great Britain. The original inhabitants of Spain were mostly of non-Aryan stock. Keltic, Roman, and Gothic invasions have successively swept over them and finally left the language of the country Romance, but the original speech also survives the vicissitudes of thousands of years and is still spoken in the western Pyrenees as Basque. Ancient Egypt was conquered by the Hyksos, the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman, but whatever the official speech of the ruling class, the people continued to speak Egyptian. Finally, the Arab came and brought with him a new religion, which entailed use of the Arabic language. Egypt has at last become Arabic-speaking, but until a century or two ago the Coptic language, the daughter of the ancient Egyptian tongue of five thousand years ago, was kept alive by the native Christians along the Nile, and even to-day it survives in ritual. The boundary between French on the one side and German, Dutch, and Flemish on the other, has been accurately known for over six hundred years. With all the wars and conquests back and forth across the speech line, endless political changes and cultural influences, this line has scarcely anywhere shifted more than a few dozen miles, and in places has not moved by a comfortable afternoon’s stroll.
While populations can learn and unlearn languages, they tend to do so with reluctance and infinite slowness, especially while they remain in their inherited territories. Speech tends to be one of the most persistent ethnic characters.
In general, where two populations mingle, the speech of the more numerous prevails, even if it be the subject nationality. A wide gap in culture may overcome the influence of the majority, yet the speech of a culturally more active and advanced population ordinarily wrests permanent territory to itself slowly except where there is an actual crowding out or numerical swamping of the natives. This explains the numerous survivals and “islands” of speech: Keltic, Albanian, Basque, Caucasian, in Europe; Dravidian and Kolarian in India; Nahuatl and Maya and many others in modern Mexico; Quechua in Peru; Aymara in Bolivia; Tupi in Brazil. There are cases to the contrary, like the rapid spread of Latin in most of Gaul after Cæsar’s conquest, but they seem exceptional.
As to the relative permanence of race and speech, everything depends on the side from which the question is approached. From the point of view of hereditary strains, race must be the more conservative, because it can change rapidly only through admixture with another race, whereas a language may be completely exchanged in a short time. From the point of view of history, however, which regards human actions within given territories, speech is often more stable. Wars or trade or migration may bring one racial element after another into an area until the type has become altered or diluted, and yet the original language, or one directly descended from it, remains. The introduction of the negro from Africa to America illustrates this distinction. From the point of view of biology, the negro has at least partially preserved his type, although he has taken on a wholly new language. As a matter of history, the reverse is true: English continues to be the speech of the southern United States, whereas the population now consists of two races instead of one, and the negro element has been altered by the infusion of white blood. It is a fallacy to think, because one can learn French or become a Christian and yet is powerless to change his eye color or head shape, that language and culture are altogether less stable than race. Speech and culture have an existence of their own, whose integrity does not depend on hereditary integrity. The two may move together or separately.
53. THE BIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL NATURE OF LANGUAGE
It is a truism, but one important never to forget in the study of man, that the faculty of speech is innate, but every language wholly acquired. Moreover, the environment of which languages are the product is not a natural one, that is, geographic or climatic, but social. All words and speech forms that are learned—and they constitute almost the complete mass of language—are imitated directly from other human beings. Those new forms that from time to time come into use rest on existing speech material, are shaped according to tendencies already operative although perhaps more or less hidden, cannot generally be attributed, as regards origin, or at least entire origin, to single individuals; in short, present a history similar to that of inventions and new institutions. Language thus is a superorganic product; which of course does not contradict—in fact implies—that it rests on an organic basis.
The “speech” of the animals other than man has something in common with human languages. It consists of sounds produced by the body, accompanied by certain mental activities or conditions, and capable of arousing certain definite responses in other individuals of the species. It differs from human speech in several fundamental particulars. First of all, the cries and calls and murmurs of the brutes appear to be wholly instinctive. A fowl raised alone in an incubator will peep and crow or cluck as it will scratch and peck. A dog reared by a foster cat will bark, or growl, or whine, or yelp, when it has attained the requisite age, and on application of the proper stimulus, as he will wag or crouch or hunt or dig, and no differently from the dog brought up in association with other dogs. By contrast, the Japanese infant turned over to American foster parents never utters or knows a single Japanese word, learns only English, and learns that as well as do his Caucasian step-brothers. Evidently then, animal speech is to all intents wholly organic and not at all “social” in the sense of being superorganic. If this summary is not absolutely exact, it departs from the truth only infinitesimally.
Further, animal speech has no “meaning,” does not serve as a vehicle of “communication.” The opposite is often assumed popularly, because we anthropomorphize. If it is said that a dog’s growl “means” anger, and that his bark “communicates” suspicion or excitement to his fellows, the words are used in a sense different from their significance when we say that the term _red_ “means” the color at one end of the spectrum, or that a message of departure “communicates” information. The animal sounds convey knowledge only of subjective states. They “impart” the fact that the utterer feels anger, excitement, fear, pain, contentment, or some other affect. They are immediate reflex responses to a feeling. They may be “understood” in the sense that a sympathetic feeling is evoked or at any rate mobilized; and thereby they may lead or tend to lead to action by the hearers. In the same way, any man instinctively “understands” the moan of a fellow human being. But the moan does not tell whether the pain is of a second’s or a week’s duration, due to a blow or to gas in the bowel, to an ulcerated tooth or to mental anguish. There is no communication of anything objective, of ideas as distinct from feelings, as when we say _red_ or _break_ or _up_ or _water_. Not one of these simple concepts can be communicated as such by any brute speech.
One consequence is the “arbitrariness” of human speech. Why should the sound-cluster _red_ denote that particular color rather than green? Why does the same word often designate quite distinct ideas in different languages—the approximate sound group _lay_ meaning “milk” in French; _lass_ “a girl” in English, “tired” in French, “allow” in German? Such facts are physiologically arbitrary; just as it is physiologically arbitrary and organically meaningless that Americans live in a republic and Britons under a monarchy, or that they turn respectively to the right and left on the road. Phenomena like these have other social, cultural, or superorganic phenomena as their immediate causes or antecedents. In the light of such antecedents, viewed on the level of history, these phenomena are intelligible: we know why the United States is a republic, we can trace the development of words like _lay_ and _lass_. It is only from the biological plane that such facts seem insignificant or arbitrary.
54. PROBLEMS OF THE RELATION OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
This association of language and civilization, or let us say the linguistic and non-linguistic constituents of culture, brings up the problem whether it would be possible for one to exist without the other. Actually, of course, no such case is known. Speculatively, different conclusions might be reached. It is difficult to imagine any generalized thinking taking place without words or symbols derived from words. Religious beliefs and certain phases of social organization also seem dependent on speech: caste ranking, marriage regulations, kinship recognition, law, and the like. On the other hand, it is conceivable that a considerable series of inventions might be made, and the applied arts might be developed in a fair measure by imitation, among a speechless people. Finally there seems no reason why certain elements of culture, such as music, should not flourish as successfully in a society without as with language.
For the converse, a cultureless species of animal might conceivably develop and use a form of true speech. Such communications as “The river is rising,” “Bite it off,” “What do you find inside?” would be within the range of thought of such a species. Why then have even the most intelligent of the brutes failed to develop a language? Possibly because such a language would lack a definite survival value for the species, in the absence of accompanying culture.
On the whole, however, it would seem that language and culture rest, in a way which is not yet fully understood, on the same set of faculties, and that these, for some reason that is still more obscure, developed in the ancestors of man, while remaining in abeyance in other species. Even the anthropoid apes seem virtually devoid of the impulse to communicate, in spite of freely expressing their affective states of mind by voice, facial gesture, and bodily movement. The most responsive to man of all species, the dog, learns to accept a considerable stock of culture in the sense of fitting himself to it: he develops conscience and manners, for example. Yet, however highly bred, he does not hand on his accomplishments to his progeny, who again depend on their human masters for what they acquire. A group of the best reared dogs left to themselves for a few years would lose all their politeness and revert to the predomestic habits of their species. In short, the culture impulse is lacking in the dog except so far as it is instilled by man; and in most animals it can notoriously be instilled only to a very limited degree. In the same way, the impulse toward communication can be said to be wanting. A dog may understand a hundred words of command and express in his behavior fifty shades of emotion; only rarely does he seem to try to communicate information of objective fact. Very likely we are attributing to him even in these rare cases the impulse which we should feel. In the event of a member of the family being injured or lost, it is certain that a good dog expresses his agitation, uneasiness, disturbed attachment; but much less certain is it that he intends to summon help, as we spontaneously incline to believe because such summoning would be our own reaction to the situation.
The history and causes of the development in incipient man of the group of traits that may be called the faculties for speech and civilization remain one of the darkest areas in the field of knowledge. It is plain that these faculties lie essentially in the sphere of what is ordinarily called the mind, rather than in the body, since men and the apes are far more similar in their general physiques than they are in the degree of their ability to use their physiques for non-physiological purposes. Or, if this antithesis of physical and mental seem unfortunate, it might be said that the growth of the faculties for speech and culture was connected more with special developments of the central nervous system than with those of the remainder of the body.
55. PERIOD OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
Is, then, human language as old as culture? It is difficult to be positive, because words perish like beliefs and institutions, whereas stone tools endure as direct evidence. On the whole, however, it would appear that the first rudiments of what deserves to be called language are about as ancient as the first culture manifestations, not only because of the theoretically close association of the two phases, but in the light of circumstantial testimony, namely the skull interiors of fossil men. In Piltdown as well as Neandertal man, those brain cortex areas in which the nervous activities connected with auditory and motor speech are most centralized in modern man, are fairly well developed, as shown by casts of the skull interiors, which conform closely to the brain surface. The general frontal region, the largest area of the cortex believed to be devoted to associative functions—in loose parlance, to thought—is also greater than in any known ape. More than one authority has therefore felt justified in attributing speech to the ancestors of man that lived well back in the Pleistocene. The lower jaws of Piltdown and in a measure of Heidelberg man, it is true, are narrow and chinless, thus leaving somewhat less free play to the tongue than living human races enjoy. But this factor is probably of less importance than the one of mental facultative development. The parrot is lipless and yet can reproduce the sounds of human speech. What he lacks is language faculty; and this, it seems, fossil man already had in some measure.
56. CULTURE, SPEECH, AND NATIONALITY
This point of view raises the question whether one ought to speak of language and culture or rather of language as a part of culture. So far as the process of their transmission is concerned, and the type of mechanism of their development, it is clear that language and culture are one. For practical purposes it is generally convenient to keep them distinct. There is no doubt that two peoples can share in what is substantially the same culture and yet speak fundamentally different idioms; for instance, the Finno-Ugric Magyars or Hungarians among the adjacent Slavs, Germans, and Latins of central Europe, who are all Indo-Europeans. The other way around, the northern Hindus and west Europeans are certainly different culturally, yet their languages go back to a common origin. In fact it has become a commonplace that the arguing of connection between the three factors of race, language, and culture (or nationality), the making of inferences from one to the other, is logically unsound (§ 33). One can no more think correctly in terms of Aryan heads or a Semitic race, for instance, than of blond linguistic types, Catholic physiques, or inflecting social institutions.
At the same time, speech and culture tend to form something of a unit as opposed to race. It is possible for a population to substitute a wholly new language and type of civilization for the old ones, as the American negro has done, and yet to remain relatively unmodified racially, or at least to carry on its former physical type unchanged in a large proportion of its members. On the other hand, a change of speech without some change of culture seems impossible. Certainly wherever Greek, Latin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Pali, Chinese have penetrated, there have been established new phases of civilization. In a lower degree, the same principle probably holds true of every gain of one language at the expense of another, even when the spreading idiom is not associated with a great or active culture.
The linkage of speech and culture is further perceptible in the degree to which they both contribute, in most cases, to the idea of nationality. What chiefly marks off the French nation from the Italian, the Dutch from the German, the Swedish from the Norwegian—their respective customs and ideals, or the language gap? It would be difficult to say. The cultural differences tend to crystallize around language differences, and then in turn are reinforced by language, so that the two factors interact complexly. Nationality, especially in its modern developments, includes another factor, that of social or political segregation, which may in some degree run counter to both speech and culture. Switzerland with its German, French, and Italian speaking population, or Belgium, almost equally divided between Flemings and Walloons, are striking examples. Yet however successfully Switzerland and Belgium maintain their national unity, it is clear that this is a composite of subnational elements, each of which possesses a certain cultural as well as linguistic distinctness. Thus the Walloon speaks a French dialect, the Fleming a Dutch one; and the point of view, temperament, historic antecedents, and minor customs of the two groups are perceptibly different. Similarly, both the history and the outlook and therefore the culture of the French and German cantons of Switzerland are definitely distinguishable.
57. RELATIVE WORTH OF LANGUAGES
One respect in which languages differ from cultures is that they cannot, like the latter, be rated as higher and lower. Of course, even as regards culture, such rating is often a dubious procedure, meaning little more than that the person making the comparison assumes his own culture to be the highest and estimates other cultures low in proportion as they vary. Although this is a subjective and uncritical procedure, nevertheless certain objective comparisons are possible. Some cultures surpass others in their quantitative content: they possess more different arts, abilities, and items of knowledge. Also, some culture traits may be considered intrinsically superior to others: metal tools against stone ones, for instance, since metal is adopted by all stone culture peoples who can secure it, whereas the reverse is not true. Further, in most cases a new addition does not wholly obliterate an older element, this retaining a subsidiary place, or perhaps serving some more special function than before. In this way the culture becomes more differentiated. The old art may even attain a higher degree of perfection than it had previously; as the finest polish was given to stone implements in northern Europe after bronze was known. In general, accretion is the process typical of culture growth. Older elements come to function in a more limited sphere as new ones are added, but are not extirpated by them. Oars and sails remain as constituent parts of the stock of civilization after it has added steam and motor boats. In the senses then that a culture has a larger content of elements, that these elements are more differentiated, and that a greater proportion of these elements are of the kind that inherently tend to supersede related elements, the culture may be considered superior.
As regards languages, there are also quantitative differences. Some contain several times as many words as others. But vocabulary is largely a cultural matter. A people that uses more materials, manufactures more objects, possesses knowledge of a larger array of facts, and makes finer discriminations in thought, must inevitably have more words. Yet even notable increases in size of speech content appear not to be accompanied by appreciable changes in form. A larger vocabulary does not mean a different type of structure. Grammar seems to be little influenced by culture status. No clear correspondence has yet been traceable between type or degree of civilization and type of language. Neither the presence nor the absence of particular features of tense, number, case, reduplication, or the like seems ever to have been of demonstrable advantage toward the attainment of higher culture. The speech of the former and modern nations most active in the propagation of culture has been of quite diverse type. The languages of the Egyptians (Hamitic); Sumerians; Babylonians and Arabs (Semitic); Hindus and Greeks (ancient Indo-European); Anglo-Saxons (modern Indo-European); Chinese; and Mayas, are about as different as exist. The Sumerian type of civilization was taken over bodily and successfully by the Semitic Babylonians. The bulk of Japanese culture is Chinese; yet Japanese speech is built on wholly different principles.
Then, it is impossible to rate one speech trait or type as inherently or objectively superior to another on any basis like that which justifies the placing of a metal culture above a stone culture. If wealth of grammatical apparatus is a criterion of superiority, Latin is a higher language than French, and Anglo-Saxon than English. But if lack of declensions and conjugations is a virtue, then Chinese surpasses English almost as much as English surpasses Latin. There is no reason favoring one of these possible judgments rather than its opposite. _Amabo_ is no better or worse than _I shall love_ as a means of expressing the same idea. The one is more compact, the other more plastic. There are times when compactness is a virtue, occasions when plasticity has advantages. By the Latin or synthetic standard, the English expression is loose jointed, lacking in structure; by the English or analytic standard, the Latin form is over-condensed, adhering unnecessarily to form. One cannot similarly balance the merits of a steel and a flint knife, of a medical and a shamanistic phase of society. The one cuts or cures better than the other.
So, from the point of view of civilization, language does not matter. Language will always keep up with whatever pace culture sets it. If a new object is invented or a new distinction of thought made, a word is coined or imported or modified in meaning to express the new concept. If a thousand or ten thousand new words are required, they are developed. When it desires to express abstractions like futurity or plurality, any language is capable of doing so, even if it does not habitually express them. If a language is unprovided with formal means for the purpose, such as a grammatical suffix, it falls back on content and uses a word or circumlocution. If the life of a people changes and comes to be conducted along lines that render it frequently important to express an idea like futurity to which previously little attention has been paid, the appropriate circumlocution soon becomes standardized, conveniently brief, and unambiguous. In general, every language is capable of indefinite modification and expansion and thereby is enabled to meet cultural demands almost at once. This is shown by the fact that virtually anything spoken or written can be translated into almost every other language without serious impairment of substance. The æsthetic charm of the original may be lost in the translation; the new forms coined in the receiving language are likely at first to seem awkward; but the meaning, the business of speech, gets expressed.
58. SIZE OF VOCABULARY
The tendency is so instinctive in us to presuppose and therefore to find qualities of inferiority, poverty, or incompleteness in the speech of populations of more backward culture than our own, that a widespread, though unfounded, belief has grown up that the languages of savages and barbarians are extremely limited quantitatively—in the range of their vocabulary. Similar misconceptions are current as to the number of words actually used by single individuals of civilized communities. It is true that no one, not even the most learned and prolific writer, uses all the words of the English language as they are found in an unabridged dictionary. All of us understand many words which we habitually encounter in reading and may even hear frequently spoken, but of which our utterance faculties for some reason have not made us master. In short, a language, being the property and product of a community, possesses more words than can ever be used by a single individual, the sum total of whose ideas is necessarily less than that of his group. Added to this are a certain mental sluggishness, which restricts most of us to a greater or less degree, and the force of habit. Having spoken a certain word a number of times, our brain becomes accustomed to it and we are likely to employ it to the exclusion of its synonyms or in place of words of related but distinguishable meaning.
The degree to which all this affects the speech of the normal man has, however, been greatly exaggerated. Because there are, all told, including technical terms, a hundred thousand or more words in our dictionaries, and because Shakespeare in his writings used 24,000 different words, Milton in his poems 17,000, and the English Bible contains 7,200, it has been concluded that the average man, whose range of thought and power of expression are so much less, must use an enormously smaller vocabulary. It has been stated that many a peasant goes through life without using more than 300 or 400 words, that the vocabulary of Italian grand opera is about 600, and that he is a person above the average who employs more than 3,000 to 4,000 words. If such were the case it would be natural that the uncivilized man, whose life is simpler, and whose knowledge more confined, should be content with an exceedingly small vocabulary.
But it is certain that the figures just cited are erroneous. If any one who considers himself an average person will take the trouble to make a list of his speaking vocabulary, he will quickly discover that he knows, and on occasion uses, the names of at least one to two thousand different things. That is, his vocabulary contains so many concrete nouns. To these must be added the abstract nouns, the verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and the other parts of speech, the short and familiar words that are indispensable to communication in any language. It may thus be safely estimated that it is an exceptionally ignorant and stupid person in a civilized country that has not at his command a vocabulary of several thousand words.
Test counts based on dictionaries show, for people of bookish tastes, a knowledge of about 30,000 to 35,000 words. Most of these would perhaps never be spoken by the individuals tested, would not be at their actual command, but it seems that at least 10,000 would be so controlled. The carefully counted vocabulary of a five and a half year old American boy comprised 1,528 understandingly used words, besides participles and other inflected forms. Two boys between two and three years used 642 and 677 different words.
It is therefore likely that statements as to the paucity of the speech of unlettered peoples are equally exaggerated. He who professes to declare on the strength of his observation that a native language consists of only a few hundred terms, displays chiefly his ignorance. He has either not taken the trouble to exhaust the vocabulary or has not known how to do so. It is true that the traveler or settler can usually converse with natives to the satisfaction of his own needs with two or three hundred words. Even the missionary can do a great deal with this stock, if it is properly chosen. But it does not follow that because a civilized person has not learned more of a language, that there is no more. On this point the testimony of the student is the evidence to be considered.
Dictionaries compiled by missionaries or philologists of languages previously unwritten run to surprising figures. Thus, the number of words recorded in Klamath, the speech of a culturally rude American Indian tribe, is 7,000; in Navaho, 11,000; in Zulu, 17,000; in Dakota, 19,000; in Maya, 20,000; in Nahuatl, 27,000. It may safely be said that every existing language, no matter how backward its speakers are in their general civilization, possesses a vocabulary of at least 5,000 words.
59. QUALITY OF SPEECH SOUNDS
Another mistaken assumption that is frequently made is that the speech of non-literary peoples is harsh, its pronunciation more difficult than ours. This belief is purely subjective. When one has heard and uttered a language all his life, its sounds come to one’s mouth with a minimum of effort; but unfamiliar vowels and consonants are formed awkwardly and inaccurately. No adult reared in an Anglo-Saxon community finds _th_ difficult. Nor does a French or German child, whose speech habits are still plastic, find long difficulty in mastering the particular tongue control necessary to the production of the _th_ sound. But the adult Frenchman or German, whose muscular habits have settled in other lines, tries and tries and falls back on _s_ or _t_. A Spaniard, however, would agree with the Anglo-Saxon as to the ease and “naturalness” of _th_. Conversely, the “rough” _ch_ flows spontaneously out of the mouth of a German or Scotchman, whereas English, French, and Italians have to struggle long to master it, and are tempted to substitute _k_. German _ö_ and French _u_ trouble us, our “short” _u_ is equally resistant to Continental tongues.
Even a novel position can make a familiar sound strange and forbidding. Most Anglo-Saxons fail on the first try to say _ngis_; many give up and declare it beyond their capacity to learn. Yet it is only _sing_ pronounced backward. English uses _ng_ finally and medially in words, not initially. Any English speaker can quickly acquire its use in the new position if, to keep from being disconcerted, he follows some such sequence as _sing_, _singing_, _stinging_, _ringing_, _inging_, _nging_, _ngis_.
So with surd _l_—Welsh _ll_—which is ordinary _l_ minus the accompaniment of vocal cord vibrations. A little practice makes possible the throwing on or off of these vibrations, the “voicing” of speech, for any sound, with as much ease as one would turn a faucet on or off. Surd _l_ thereupon flows with the same readiness as sonant _l_. As a matter of fact we often pronounce it unconsciously at the end of words like _little_. When it comes at the beginning, however, as in the tribal name usually written _Tlingit_, Americans tend to substitute something more habitual, such as _kl_, which is familiar from _clip_, _clean_, _clear_, _close_, _clam_, and many other words. The simple surd _l_ has even been repeatedly described quite inappropriately as a “click”; which is about as far from picturing it with correctness as calling it a thump or a sigh; all because it comes in an unaccustomed position.
Combinations of sounds, especially of consonants, are indeed of variable difficulty for anatomical reasons. Some, like _nd_ and _ts_ and _pf_, have their components telescope or join naturally through being formed in the same part of the mouth. Others, like _kw_ (_qu_), have the two elements articulated widely apart, but for that reason the elements can easily be formed simultaneously. Still others, like _kt_ and _ths_, are intrinsically difficult, because the elements differ in place of production but are alike in method, and therefore come under the operation of the generic rule that similar sounds require more effort to join and yet discriminate than dissimilar ones; for much the same reason that it is on the whole easier to acquire the pronunciation of a wholly new type of sound than of one which differs subtly from one already known. Yet in these matters too, habit rather than anatomical functioning determines the reaction. German _pf_ comes hard to adult Anglo-Saxons, English _kw_ and _ths_ to Germans. So far as degree of accumulation of consonants is concerned, English is one of the extremest of all languages. Monosyllables like _tract_, _stripped_ (_stripd_), _sixths_ (_siksths_), must seem irremediably hard to most speakers of other idioms.
Children’s speech in all languages shows that certain sounds are, as a rule, learned earlier than others, and are therefore presumably somewhat easier physiologically. Sounds like _p_ and _t_ which are formed with the mobile lips and front of the tongue normally precede back tongue sounds like _k_. _B_, _d_, _g_, which are voiced like vowels, tend to precede voiceless _p_, _t_, _k_. Stops or momentary sounds, such as _b_, _d_, _g_, _p_, _t_, _k_, generally come earlier than the fricative continuants _f_, _v_, _th_, _s_, _z_, which require a delicate adjustment of lip or tongue—close proximity without firm contact—whereas the stops involve only a making and breaking of jerky contact. But so slight are the differences of effort or skill in all these cases, that as a rule only a few months separate the learning of the easier from that of the more difficult sounds; and adults no longer feel the differences. The only sound or class of sounds seriously harder than others seems to be that denoted by the letter _r_. Not only do children usually acquire _r_ late, but among all races there appears to be a certain percentage of individuals who never learn to form the sound right, but substitute one approaching _g_ or _w_ or _j_ or _l_. The reason is that _r_ stands alone among speech sounds. It is the only one produced by blowing the tongue into a few gross vibrations; which means that this organ must be held in a special condition of laxness and yet elevated so that the flow of breath may bear on it. However, even this inherent difficulty has been insufficient to prevent many languages from changing easier sounds into _r_.
60. DIFFUSION AND PARALLELISM IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
A phenomenon which language shows more conspicuously than culture, or which is more readily demonstrated in it, is parallel or convergent development, the repeated, independent growth of a trait (§ 89, 100).
Thus sex gender is an old part of Indo-European structure. In English, by the way, it has wholly disappeared, so far as formal expression goes, from noun, adjective, and demonstrative and interrogative pronoun. It lingers only in the personal pronoun of the third person singular—_he_, _she_, _it_. A grammar of living English that was genuinely practical and unbound by tradition would never mention gender except in discussing these three little words. That our grammars specify _man_ as a masculine and _woman_ as a feminine noun is due merely to the fact that in Latin the corresponding words _vir_ and _femina_ possess endings which are recognized as generally masculine and feminine, and that an associated adjective ends respectively in masculine _-us_ or feminine _-a_. These are distinctions of form of which English possesses no equivalents. The survival of distinction between _he_, _she_, and _it_, while _this_ and _the_ and _which_ have become alike irrespective of the sex of the person or thing they denote, is therefore historically significant. It points back to the past and to surviving Indo-European languages.
Besides, Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic express sex by grammatical forms, although like French and Spanish and Italian, they know only two genders, the neuter being unrepresented. These three are the only large language stocks in which sex gender finds expression. Ural-Altaic, Chinese, Japanese, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu, and in general the language families of Asia, Africa, and America do without, although a number of languages make other gender classifications, as of animate and inanimate, personal and impersonal, superior and inferior, intelligent and unintelligent. Sex gender however reappears in Hottentot of South Africa, and in the Chinook and Coast Salish and Pomo languages of the Pacific coast of North America.
How is this distribution to be accounted for? Indo-European, Semitic, and Hamitic occupy contiguous territory, in fact surround the Mediterranean over a tract approximately co-extensive with the Caucasian area. Could they in the remote past have influenced one another? That is, could grammatical sex gender have been invented, so to speak, by one of them, and borrowed by the others, as we know that cultural inventions are constantly diffused? Few philologists would grant this as likely: there are too few authenticated cases of formal elements or concepts having been disseminated between unrelated languages. Is it then possible that our three stocks are at bottom related? Sex gender in that case would be part of their common inheritance. For Semitic and Hamitic a number of specialists have accepted a common origin on other grounds. But for Semitic and Indo-European, philologists, who are professionally exacting, are in the main quite dubious. Positive evidence seems yet to be lacking. Still, the territorial continuity of the three speech groups showing the trait is difficult to accept as mere coincidence. In a parallel case in the realm of culture history, a common source would be accepted as highly probable. Even Hottentot has been considered a remote Semitic-Hamitic offshoot, largely, it is true, because of the very fact that it expresses gender. Philologists, accordingly, may consider the case still open; but it is at least conceivable that the phenomenon goes back to a single origin in these four Old World stocks.
Yet no stretch will account for sex gender in the three American languages as due to contact influence or diffusion, nor relate these tongues to the Old World ones. Clearly here is a case of independent origin or parallel “invention.” Chinook and Coast Salish, indeed, are in contiguity, and one may therefore have taken up the trait in imitation of the other. But Pomo lies well to the south and its affiliations run still farther south. Here sex gender is obviously an independent, secondary, and rather recent growth in the grammar.
In short, it remains doubtful whether sex gender originated three or four or five or six times among these seven language stocks; but it evidently originated repeatedly.
Other traits crop out the world over in much the same manner. A dual, for instance, is found in Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian, Eskimo, and a number of other American languages. The distinction between inclusive and exclusive _we_—_you and I_ as opposed to _he and I_—is made in Malayo-Polynesian, Hottentot, Iroquois, Uto-Aztecan.
A true nominative case-ending, such as Latin and the other varieties of Indo-European evince, is an exceedingly specialized formation; yet is found in the Maidu language of California. Articles, in regard to which Indo-European varies, Latin for instance being without, while its Romance daughter tongues have developed them, recur in Semitic, in Polynesian, and in several groups of American languages, such as Siouan and Hokan. The growth in Romance is significant because of its historicity, and because it was surely not due to imitation of an unrelated language. That is, French developed its articles independently and secondarily; a fact that makes it probable that many languages in other parts of the world, whose history we do not know, developed theirs in a parallel manner, as a product of wholly internal causes—“invented” them, in short, although wholly unconsciously.
A trait found in a large proportion of the American languages is the so-called incorporation of the object pronoun (§ 51). The objective pronoun, or an element representing it, is prefixed or suffixed to the verb, made a part of it. The process is familiar enough to us from Indo-European so far as the subject is concerned: in Latin _ama-s_, _ama-t_, _ama-nt_, the suffixes express “you, he, they” and pronouns comparable to the English ones—independent words—are usually omitted. The _-s_ in _he love-s_ is the sole survival of the process in modern English. None of the older Indo-European tongues however showed an inclination to affix similar elements for the objects, although there are some approaches in a few recent languages of the family: Spanish _diga-me_, “tell me,” and _mata-le_, “kill him,” for instance. Semitic on the other hand, and Basque, do “incorporate” objective elements, whereas most Asiatic and some American languages do not. Many other instances of parallel or convergent traits could be cited.
This greater frequency of parallel developments in language than in culture is perhaps in part due to easier demonstrability in the field of speech. But in the main the higher frequency seems real. Two reasons for the difference suggest themselves.
First, the number of possibilities is small in language, so far as structure is concerned. The categories or concepts used for classifying and for the indication of relations are rigorously limited, and so are the means of expression. The distinctions expressed by gender, for instance, may refer to sex, animateness, personality, worth, shape, position, or possibly one or two other qualities; but there they end. If a language recognizes gender at all, it must have gender of one of these few types. Consequently there is some probability of several unconnected languages sooner or later happening upon the same type of gender. Similarly, for the kinds of number, and of case, and so on, that are denotable. These larger categories, like gender and number and case, are not numerous. Then, the means of expressing such relational and classificatory concepts are limited. There is position or relative order of words; compounding of them; accretions of elements to stems, namely prefixes, infixes, and suffixes; reduplication, the repetition of part or the whole of words; internal changes by shift of vowel or accent within words; and therewith the types of grammatical means are about exhausted. The number of possible choices is so small that the law of accidental probability must cause many languages to hit upon the same devices.
A second reason for the greater frequency of parallelism in language is that structural traits appear to resist diffusion by imitation to a considerable degree. Words are borrowed, sometimes freely, almost always to some degree, between contiguous languages; sounds considerably less; grammar least of all. That is, linguistic content lends itself to diffusion readily, linguistic form with difficulty.
At bottom, the same holds of culture. Specific elements of culture or groups of such elements diffuse very widely at times and may be said to be always tending to diffuse: the wheel, for instance, smelting of metals, the crown as a symbol of royalty, the swastika, Buddhism. The relations of elements among themselves, on the other hand, change by internal growth rather than external imitation. Of this sort are the relations of the classes and members of societies, the fervor with which religion is felt, the esteem accorded to learning or wealth or tradition, the inclination toward this or that avenue of subsistence or economic development. By conquest or peaceful pressure or penetration one people may shatter the political structure or social fabric of another, may undermine its conservatism, may swerve its economic habits. But it is difficult to find cases of one people adopting such tendencies or schemes of cultural organization in mere imitation of the example of another, as it will adopt specific culture content—the wheel or crown or Buddhism, for instance—from outside, often readily. The result is that culture relations or forms develop spontaneously or from within rather than as a result of direct taking over. Also, the types of culture forms being limited in number, the same type is frequently evolved independently. Thus monarchical and democratic societies, feudal or caste-divided ones, priest-ridden and relatively irreligious ones, expansive and mercantile or self-sufficient and agricultural nations, evolve over and over again. On the whole, comparative culture history more often deals with the specific contents of civilization, perhaps because events like the spread of an invention can be traced more definitely and exactly than the rather complex evolutions of say two feudal systems can be compared. The result is that diffusions seem to outweigh parallels; as is set forth in several of the chapters that follow this one (§ 105, 111, 127).
In comparative linguistics, on the other hand, interest inclines to the side of form rather than content; hence the parallelisms or convergences are conspicuous. If as much attention were generally given to words as to grammar, and if they could be traced in their prehistoric or unrecorded wanderings as reliably as many culture traits have been, it is probable that diffusion would loom larger as a principle shaping human speech. There are words that have traveled almost as far as the objects they denote: _tobacco_ and _maize_, for example. And the absorption of words of Latin origin into English was as extensive as the absorption for over a thousand years of Latin, Christian, and Mediterranean culture by the English people—went on as its accompaniment and result.
61. CONVERGENT LANGUAGES
Parallel development in speech form is not restricted to traits like sex gender and object incorporation. It may affect whole languages. Chinese a long time ago became an extremely analytical or “isolating” language. That is, it lost all affixes and internal change. Each word became an unalterable unit. Sentences are built up by putting together these atoms. Grammatical relations are expressed by the order of words: the subject precedes the predicate, for instance. Other ideas that in many languages are treated formally, such as the plural or person, are expressed by content elements, that is, by other words: _many_ for the plural, separate pronouns instead of affixes for person, and so on. The uniformly monosyllabic words of Chinese accentuate this isolating character, which however does not depend intrinsically upon the monosyllabism. In the Indo-European family, as already mentioned, there has been a drift in the same direction during the last two thousand years. This drift toward loss of formal mechanisms and toward the expression of grammar by material elements or their position only, has been evident in all branches of Indo-European, but has been most marked in English. The chief remnants of the older inflectional processes in spoken English of to-day are four verb endings, _-s_, _-ed_, _-ing_, _-en_; three noun endings, the possessive _-’s_ and the plurals _-s_ and _-en_, the latter rare; the case ending _-m_ in _whom_, _them_; a few vowel changes for plurals, as in _man_—_men_, and _goose_—_geese_; and perhaps two hundred vowel changes in verbs, like _sing_, _sang_, _sung_. Compared with Latin, Sanskrit, or even primitive Germanic, this brief list represents a survival of possibly a tenth of the original synthetic inflectional apparatus. That is, English has gone approximately nine tenths of the way towards attaining a grammar of the Chinese type. A third language of independent origin, Polynesian, has traveled about the same distance in the same direction. Superficially it is less like Chinese in that it remains prevailingly polysyllabic, but more like it in having undergone heavy phonetic attrition. This then is a clear case of entire languages converging toward a similar type.
Another instance is found in the remarkable resemblances in plan of structure of Indo-European, especially in its older forms, and of the Penutian group of languages in native California. Common to these two families are an apparatus of similar cases, including accusative, genitive, locative, ablative, instrumental; plural by suffix; vowel changes in the verb according to tense and mode; a passive and several participles and modal forms expressed by suffixes; pronouns either separate or expressed by endings fused with the tense-modal suffixes. Thus, the processes which make English _sing_, _sang_, _sung_, _song_, or _bind_, _bound_, _band_, _bond_, are substantially identical with those which have produced in Penutian Yokuts such forms as _shokud_, pierce, _shukid-ji_, pierced, _shokod_, perforation or hole, _shikid_, piercer or arrow. In short, most of the traits generally cited as constituting the Indo-European languages typically inflectional, reappear in Penutian, and of course independently as regards their origin and history.
These would appear to be phenomena comparable to the growth of feudalism in China more than a thousand years earlier than in Europe, or the appearance of a great centrally governed empire in Peru similar to the ancient monarchies of the Orient.
62. UNCONSCIOUS FACTORS IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
The unceasing processes of change in language are mainly unconscious. The results of the change may rise to the recognition of the speakers; the act of change, and especially its causes, happen without awareness of those through whose minds and mouths they take place. This holds of all departments of language: the phonetics, the structural form, largely even the meaning of words. When a change has begun to creep in, it may be observed and be consciously resisted on the ground of being incorrect or vulgar or foreign. But the underlying motives of the objectors are apparently as unknown to themselves as the impulses of the innovators.
If this view seem extreme, it can easily be shown that the great bulk of any language as it is, apart from any question of change, is employed unconsciously. An illiterate person will use such forms as _child_, _child’s_, _children_, _children’s_ with the same “correctness” as a philologist, yet without being able to give an explanation of the grammatical ideas of singularity and plurality, absoluteness and possession, or to lay down rules as to the manner of expression of these ideas in English. Grammar, in short, exists before grammarians, whose legitimate business is to uncover such rules as are already there. It is an obviously hasty thought that because grammar happens to be taught in schools, speech can be grammatical only through such formal teaching. The Sanskrit and Greek and Latin languages had their declensions and conjugations before Hindu and Greek and Roman scholars first analyzed and described them. The languages of primitive peoples frequently abound with complicated forms and mechanisms which are used consistently and applied without suspicion of their existence. It is much as the blood went round in our bodies quite healthily before Harvey’s discovery of its circulation.
The quality of unconsciousness seems not to be a trait specifically limited to linguistic causes and processes, but to hold in principle of culture generally. It is only that the unconsciousness pervades speech farther. A custom, a belief, an art, however deep down its springs, sooner or later rises into social consciousness. It then seems deliberate, planned, willed, and is construed as arising from conscious motives and developing through conscious channels. But many social phenomena can be led back only to non-rational and obscure motives: the wearing of silk hats, for instance. The whole class of changes in dress styles spring from unconscious causes. Sleeves and skirts lengthen or shorten, trousers flare or tighten, and who can say why? It is perhaps possible to trace a new fashion to Paris or London, and to a particular stratum of society there. But what is it that in the winter of a particular year makes every woman—or man—of a certain social group wear, let us say, a high collared coat, or a shoe that does not come above the ankle, and the next year, or the tenth after, the reverse? It is insufficient to say that this is imitation of a leader of fashion, of a professional creator of style. Why does the group follow him and think the innovation attractive and correct? A year earlier the same innovation would have appeared senseless or extravagant to the same group. A year after, it appeals as belated and ridiculous, and every one wonders that style was so tasteless so short a time ago.
Evidently the æsthetic emotions evoked by fashions are largely beyond the control of both individuals and groups. It is difficult to say where the creative and imitative impulses of fashion come from; which, inasmuch as the impulses obviously reside somewhere in human minds, means that they spring from the unconscious portions of the mind. Evidently then our justification of the dress styles we happen at any time to be following, our pronouncing them artistic or comfortable or sensible or what not, is secondary. A low shoe may be more convenient than a high one, a brown one more practical than a black one. That that is not the reason which determines the wearing of low brown shoes when they are customarily worn, is shown by the fact that at other times high black ones are put on by every one. The reasons that can be and are given are so changeable and inconsistent that they evidently are not the real reasons, but the false secondary reasons that are best distinguished as rationalizations. Excuses, we should call them with reference to individual conduct.
What applies to fashion holds also of manners, of morals, and of many religious observances. Why we defer to women by rising in their presence and passing through a door behind them; why we refrain from eating fish with a knife or drinking soup out of a two handled cup, though drinking it from a single handled one is legitimate; why we do not marry close kin; why we remove our hats in the presence of the deity or his emblems but would feel it impious to pull off our shoes; all the thousands of prescriptions and taboos of which these are examples, possess an unconscious motivation.
Such cases are also illustrations of what is known as the relativity of morals. The Jew sets his hat on to worship, the Oriental punctiliously slips out of his shoes. Some people forbid the marriage of the most remote relatives, others encourage that of first cousins, still others permit the union of uncle and niece. It would seem that all social phenomena which can be brought under this principle of relativity of standard are unconsciously grounded. This in turn implies the unconscious causation of the mores, those products of the social environment in which one is reared and which one accepts as the ultimate authority of conduct. As mores are those folkways or customs to which an emotional coloring has become attached, so that adherence to the custom or departure from it arouses a feeling respectively of approval or disapproval, it is evident that the origin of folkways generally is also unconscious, since there seems no reason why the emotions or ethical affect enveloping a customary action should incline more than the custom itself to spring up unconsciously.
It has become recognized that the average man’s convictions on social matters remote from him are not developed through examination of evidence and exercise of reason, but are taken over, by means of what is sometimes denominated the “herd instinct,” from the society or period in which he happens to have been born and nurtured. His belief in democracy, in monotheism, in his right to charge profit and his freedom to change residence or occupation, have such origin. In many instances it is easy to render striking proof of the proposition: as in the problems of high tariff, or the Athanasian creed, or compulsory vaccination, which are so technical or intricate as to be impossible of independent solution by evidence and argument by the majority of men. Time alone would forbid: we should starve while making the necessary research. And the difference between the average man’s attitude on such difficult points and the highly gifted individual’s attitude toward them or even toward simpler problems, would seem to be one of degree only.
Even on the material sides of culture, unconscious motivation plays a part. In the propulsion of ships, oars and sails fluctuated as the prevalent means down almost to the period of steam vessels. It would be impossible to say that one method was logically superior to the other, that it was recognized as such and then rationally adhered to. The history of warfare shows similar changes between throwing and thrusting spears, stabbing and hewing swords, light and heavy armor. The Greeks and Macedonians in the days of their military superiority lengthened their lances and held them. It no doubt seemed for a time that a definite superiority had been proved for this type of weapon over the shorter, hurled javelin. Then the Romans, as part of their legionary tactics, reverted to the javelin and broke the Macedonian phalanx with their pilum. But the Middle Ages again fell back on the thrusting lance. The Greeks successfully developed heavy armor, until Athenian light armed troops overcame Spartan hoplites. The Macedonians reintroduced heavy armament, which held sway in Europe until after the prevalence of firearms. But the last few years have brought the rebirth of the helmet.
These fashions in tools and practical appliances do not alter as fast as modern dress styles, and part of their causes can often be recognized. Yet there seems no essential difference, as regards consciousness, between the fluctuation of fashions in weapons—or navigation or cooking or travel or house building—and, let us say, the fluctuation of mode between soft and stiff hats or high and low shoes. It may be admitted to have been the open array of the legion that led to the pilum; the bullet that induced the abandonment of the breast plate, shrapnel that caused the reintroduction of the helmet. But these initiating factors were not deliberate as regards the effects that came in their train; and in their turn they were the effects of more remote causes. The whole chain of development in such cases is devious, unforeseen, mainly unforeseeable. At most there is recognition of what is happening; in general the recognition seems to become full only after the change in tool or weapon or industrial process has become completed and is perhaps already being undermined once more.
Of course purely stylistic alterations—and linguistic innovations—also possess their causes. When the derby hat or the pronoun _thou_ becomes obsolete, there is a reason, whether or not we know it or do not see it clearly.
The common causal element in all these changes may be called a shift in social values. Perhaps practical chemical experience has grown, and gunpowder explodes more satisfactorily; or an economic readjustment has made it possible to equip more soldiers with guns. The first result is a greater frequency of bullet penetrations in battle; the next, the abandonment of the breast plate. Increasing wealth or schooling or city residence makes indiscriminate familiarity of manners seem less desirable than at an earlier period: brusque _thou_ begins to yield to indirect plural _you_. Or again, new verbs, all of regular conjugation like _love_, _loved_, are formed in English or imported from French until their number outweighs that of the ancient irregular ones like _sing_, _sang_. A standardizing tendency is thereby set going—“analogizing” is the technical term of the philologist—which begins to turn irregular verbs into regular ones: _dived_ replaces _dove_, just as _lenger_ becomes _longer_, and _toon_ becomes _toes_. There is the same sort of causality in one of these phenomena as in another. The individual or community that leaves off the breast plate or stiff hat is more likely to be aware that it is performing the act than the one that leaves off saying _toon_ or _thou_. But it does not seem that there is an essential difference of process. Linguistic and æsthetic changes are most fully unconscious, social ones next, material and economic ones perhaps least. But in all cases change or innovation is due to a shift of values that are broader than the single phenomenon in question, and that are held to impulsively instead of reasonably. That is why all social creations—institutions, beliefs, codes, styles, speech forms—prove on impartial analysis to be full of inconsistencies and irrationalities. They have sprung not from weighed or reasoned choices but from impulsive desires and emotionally colored habits.
The foregoing discussion may be summarized as follows. Linguistic phenomena and processes are on the whole more deeply unconscious than cultural ones, without however differing in principle. In both language and culture, content is more readily imparted and assimilated than form and enters farther into consciousness. Organization or structure in both cases takes place according to unconscious patterns, such as grammatical categories, social standards, political or economic points of view, religious or intellectual assumptions. These patterns attain recognition only in a late stage of sophistication, and even then continue to alter and to be influential without conscious control. The number of such linguistic and social patterns being limited, they tend to be approximately repeated without historic connection. Partially similar combinations of such patterns sometimes recur, producing languages or cultures of similar type. But established patterns, and still more their combinations, replace each other with difficulty. Their spread therefore takes place through the integral substitution of one language or culture for another, rather than by piecemeal absorption. This is in contrast to the specific elements of which language and culture consist—individual words, mechanical devices, institutional symbols, particular religious ideas or actions, and the like. These elements absorb and diffuse readily. They are therefore imitated more often than they are reinvented. But linguistic and cultural patterns or structures growing up spontaneously may possess more general resemblance than historic connection.
63. LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL STANDARDS
It does not follow that because social usages lack a rational basis, they are therefore unworthy of being followed, or that standards of conduct need be renounced because they are relative, that is, unconsciously founded and changing. The natural inclination of men being to regard their standards of taste, behavior, and social arrangement as wholly reasonable, perfect, and fixed, there follows a first inclination to regard these standards as valueless as soon as their emotionality and variability have been recognized. But such a tendency is only a negative reaction against the previous illusion when this has disappointed by crumbling. The reaction is therefore in a sense a further result of the illusion. Once the fundamental and automatic assumption of fixity and inherent value of social patterns has been given up, and it is recognized that the motive power of behavior in man as in the other animals is affective and unconscious, there is nothing in institutions and codes to quarrel with. They are neither despicable nor glorious; no more deserving in virtue of their existence to be uprooted and demolished than to be defended as absolute and eternal. In some form or other, they are inevitable; and the particular form which they take at this time or that place is always tolerably well founded, in the sense of being adapted with fair success, or having been but recently well adapted, to the conditions of natural and social environment of the group which holds the institution, code, or standard.
That this is a sane attitude is more easily shown in the field of language than of culture, because, language being primarily a mechanism or means, whereas in culture ends or purposes tend more to obtrude, it is easier to view linguistic phenomena dispassionately. Grammars and dictionaries, for instance, are evidently the result of self-consciousness arising about speech which has previously been mainly unconscious. They may be roughly compared to social formulations like law codes or written constitutions or philosophic systems or religious dogmas, which are also representations of usages or beliefs already in existence. When grammarians stigmatize expressions like _ain’t_ or _them cows_ or _he don’t_ as “wrong,” they are judging an innovation, or one of several established conflicting usages, by a standard of correctness that seems to them absolute and permanent. As a matter of actuality, the condemned form may or may not succeed in becoming established. _He don’t_, for example, might attain to correctness in time, although _ain’t_ is perhaps less likely to become legitimized, and _them cows_ to have still smaller prospect of recognition. That a form departs from the canon of to-day of course no more proves that it will be accepted in future than that it will not. What is certain is that if it wins sufficient usage, it will also win sanction, and will become part of the standard of its time.
Linguistic instances like these differ little if at all in principle, in their involved psychology, from the finding of the Supreme Court that a certain legislative enactment is unconstitutional and therefore void; or from the decision of a denomination that dancing or playing golf on Sunday is wicked; or from the widespread sentiment that breaking an unpopular law like that on liquor prohibition is morally justifiable. The chief point of divergence would seem to be that a court is a constituted body endowed with an authority which is not paralleled on the linguistic side, at any rate in Anglo-Saxon countries; although the Latin nations possess Academies whose dicta on correctness of speech enjoy a moral authority approximating the verdicts of a high court.
It is also of interest to remember that the power of nullifying legislation was not specifically granted the Supreme Court by the Constitution of the United States, but that the practice grew up gradually, quite like a speech innovation which becomes established. Certain elements in the American population look upon this power as undesirable and therefore take satisfaction in pointing out its unsanctioned origin. The majority on the other hand feel that the situation on the whole works out well, and that a Supreme Court with its present powers is better than the risk of a Court without power. Still, it remains curiously illogical that the preservation of the Constitution should take place partly through the extra-constitutional functioning of a constitutional body. In principle such a case is similar to that of grammarians who at the same time lay down a rule and exceptions to the rule, because the contradictory usages happen to be actually established.
Codes, dogmas, and grammars are thus normally reflections rather than causes. Such influence as they have is mainly in outward crystallization. They produce a superficial appearance of permanence. In the field of speech, it is easy to recognize that it is not grammarians that make languages, but languages that make grammarians. The analogous process evidently holds for culture. Lawgivers, statesmen, religious leaders, discoverers, inventors, therefore only seem to shape civilization. The deep-seated, blind, and intricate forces that shape culture, also mold the so-called creative leaders of society as essentially as they mold the mass of humanity. Progress, so far as it can objectively be considered to be such, is something that makes itself. We do not make it. Our customary conviction to the contrary is probably the result of an unconscious desire not to realize our individual impotence as regards the culture we live in. Social influence of a sort we do have as individuals. But it is a personal influence on the fortune and careers of other individual members of society, and is concerned largely with aims of personal security, relative dominance, or affection among ourselves. This obviously is a different thing from the exertion of influence on the form or content of civilization as such.
64. RAPIDITY OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE
The rate of change in language is circumscribed by the principles of linguistic causality that have been discussed, but it remains an obscure subject in detail. The opinion often held that unwritten languages necessarily alter faster than written ones, or that those of savages are less stable than the tongues of civilized men, is mainly a naïve reflection of our sense of superiority. It contravenes the principles just referred to and is not supported by evidence. Occasional stories that a primitive tribe after a generation or two was found speaking an almost made-over language are unconscious fabrications due to preconception and supported by hasty acquaintance, faulty records, misunderstanding, or perhaps change of inhabitants. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, has probably changed less in four hundred years than Spanish; Quechua, that of the Incas, no more. English has apparently altered more than any of the three in the same period. Dozens of native tongues, some of them from wholly rude peoples, were written down in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Spanish and other priests, and in most instances the grammars and dictionaries prove to be usable to-day.
Cultural alteration would appear to work toward speech change chiefly in certain ways. New things need new names; new acts mean new thoughts and new ideas require new words. These may be imported; or they may be made out of elements already in the language; or old words may undergo a shift of meaning. In any event, the change is mainly on the side of vocabulary. The sounds of a language are generally much less affected; its plan of structure least of all. The introduction of a new religion or development of a new form of government among a people need not be accompanied by changes in the grammar of their speech, and usually are not, as abundant historical examples prove.
While the causes of grammatical innovation are far from clear, contact with alien tongues is certainly a factor in some degree. An isolated off-shoot of a linguistic group is generally more specialized, and therefore presumably more altered, than the main body of dialects of the family. The reason is that the latter, maintaining abundant reciprocal contact, tend to steady one another, or if they swerve, to do so in the same direction. The speakers of the branch that is geographically detached, however, come to know quite different grammars so far as they learn languages other than their native one, and such knowledge seems to act as an unconscious stimulus toward the growth of new forms and uses. It is not that grammatical concepts are often imitated outright or grammatical elements borrowed. Acquaintance with a language of different type seems rather to act as a ferment which sets new processes going.
It is in the nature of the case that direct specific evidence of changes of this character is hard to secure. But comparison of related languages or dialects with reference to their location frequently shows that the dialects which are geographically situated among strange languages are the most differentiated. This holds of Abyssinian in the Semitic family, of Brahui in Dravidian, of Singhalese in the Indic branch of Indo-European, of Hopi and Tübatulabal in Shoshonean, of Arapaho and Blackfoot in Algonkin, of Huastec in Mayan.
But it is also likely that languages differ among each other in their susceptibility to change, and that the same language differs in successive periods of its history. It is rather to be anticipated that a language may be in a phase now of rapid and then of retarded metabolism, so to speak; that at one stage its tendency may be toward breaking down and absorption, at another toward a more rigid setting of its forms. Similarly, there is reason to believe that languages of certain types of structure are inherently more plastic than others. At any rate, actual differences in rate of change are known. The Indo-European languages, for instance, have perhaps without exception altered more in the three thousand years of historic record than the Semitic ones. And so in native America, while contemporary documentary record is of course wanting, the degree of differentiation within the two stocks suggests strongly that Athabascan is more tenaciously conservative than Siouan.
There are also notable differences in the readiness to borrow words ready-made. English is distinctly more hospitable in this regard than German, which tends rather to express a new concept by a new formation of old elements. The South American languages appear to have borrowed more words from one another than those of North America. In this matter the type of language is probably of some influence, yet on the whole cultural factors perhaps predominate. The direction and degree of cultural absorption seem to determine the absorption of words to a considerable measure. Here writing is certainly potent. The Latin and French element in English, the Sanskrit and Arabic element in the Malaysian languages, were brought in to a large extent by writing, and would evidently have remained much smaller if the historic contacts had been wholly oral. This is perhaps the most important way in which writing exerts influence on the development of spoken language; an influence which in other respects is usually overestimated.