CHAPTER II.

THE NATURE AND SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE.

“It is a law universally illustrated by organizations of every kind, that, in proportion as there is to be efficiency, there must be specialization, both of structure and function—specialization which, of necessity, implies accompanying limitation.”—HERBERT SPENCER.

The review given in the preceding chapter of the opinions held by others on language and its science or philosophy will have prepared the way for an independent inquiry into the nature and objects of linguistic science. Before, however, we can discuss the limits and character of the science we must have a clear idea of the subject-matter with which it deals. Most of us, no doubt, have a rough-and-ready definition to give of language; but science requires something more than rough-and-ready definitions, and the discordant views as to the scope and meaning of the science of language which have come before us in the foregoing pages are plain evidence that an accurate definition of language is not so easy as would at first sight appear.

Provisionally, however, we may define language as _consisting of certain modulations of the voice, variously combined and arranged, which serve as symbols for the thoughts or feelings we wish to express_. The sounds that we utter must have a _meaning_ before they can become language, otherwise they will be mere cries or gibberish, less worthy of the name of language than even the howling of the dog upon the prairie or the wild song of the forest-bird. Language is the outward expression and embodiment of thought—the garment, so to speak, with which the mind clothes itself when it would reveal itself to another or even, it may be, to itself. The words of a foreign tongue form a language only for those who understand what they signify: for those who do not they are but empty sounds, the idle murmur of a “barbarous” jargon. “The language of birds” was discovered to the Eastern sage alone: to all others the notes of the nightingale and the thrush were as the plashing of the waterfall and the drowsy humming of the bees. “Lessons in running brooks” may indeed be read by the mind, but it is the mind itself that puts them there, and only in so far as it creates a meaning for them does it create also the language in which they speak.

It is evident that our thoughts could be represented by other symbols than sounds. The first and most familiar instance that rises to our minds is writing, though writing symbolizes thoughts only indirectly, its immediate office being to symbolize sounds. There is a written language because there is previously a spoken language, and those who learn foreign tongues know well how detrimental the power of reading a language is when we wish to speak it: the language of the eye has to be translated into the language of the ear. Language can only be symbolized directly to the eye by hieroglyphics; but if our communication with one another depended upon hieroglyphic writing it would never be very extensive or progressive. To say nothing of its requiring time, writing materials, and skill in drawing, hieroglyphic writing can indicate objects alone with that clearness and certainty which language demands. It is hardly possible to represent in this way abstract ideas, verbs, or adjectives, so that what is denoted shall be recognized by another without previous instruction. Apart from these drawbacks, however, picture-writing has this advantage over spoken language, that its symbols are not mere arbitrary signs like sounds, but intelligible all the world over; and even the degenerated picture-writing of China, by preserving everywhere the same character for the same idea, has kept up a unity and spread a culture throughout the empire which would otherwise have been impossible among a people divided into many and diverse dialects.

Another means of symbolizing thought is “mathematical language,” which represents the calculations of the mathematician by written symbols such as 1, 2, 3, _x_, _y_, _z_. But such symbols are of late invention, and could not well be applied to express the daily concerns of life. Quite different is gesture-language, whereby our thoughts and emotions are represented by movements of the hands and other parts of the body. Most of our common needs could be expressed in this way, though gestures would be quite inadequate to represent the wants of a civilized community. Only such ideas as “I am hungry,” “let me drink,” “it is pleasant,” could be denoted by them. But, like picture-writing, gestures possess the great advantage of standing for the same ideas everywhere and among all men. The expression of pain or surprise, the threatening shake of the hand, the pointing of the finger, have the same message for the Negro as for the European. The traveller in a strange and unknown region is thrown back upon the language of gesture. Burton,[49] perhaps, exaggerates when he says that the Arapahos of North America, “who possess a scanty vocabulary, can hardly converse with one another in the dark,” and another reason may be given for this preference for the light; but the importance of gesture-language where other means of communication are wanting is too evident to need examples. Thus Fisher[50] tells us that the Comanches and neighbouring tribes have “a language of signs, by which all Indians and traders can understand one another; and they always make these signs when communicating among themselves.” To the same effect James[51] writes of the Kiawa-Kashaia Indians: “These nations, although constantly associating together and united under the influence of the Bear-Tooth, are yet totally ignorant of each other’s language, insomuch that it was no uncommon occurrence to see two individuals of different nations sitting upon the ground, and conversing freely by means of the language of signs. In the art of thus conveying their ideas they were thorough adepts; and their manual display was only interrupted at remote intervals by a smile, or by the auxiliary of an articulated word of the language of the Crow Indians, which to a very limited extent passes current among them.” Gesture-language is instinctive—the heritage, it may be, of the days before man acquired articulate language, or differed thus far from the brute beast: certain ideas call forth certain corresponding gestures, and we are not obliged to learn what gestures stand for particular ideas. Hence it is that even now spoken language is so largely accompanied by gesture. An excited speaker is likely to make much use of his hands; and we can often tell what a person is saying to us, though we do not hear him distinctly, by watching the play of his features. We know from the appearance of his face whether he is asking a question, whether he is angry, or whether he is dispirited. With the cultivation of articulate speech and confidence in the use of it, men become more phlegmatic in speaking, less inclined to have recourse to subsidiary helps. It is the awkward country girl whose “manners” have “not that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.” The preacher who addresses an audience of barristers does well to dispense with the gesticulation which is necessary to the mob-orator. According to M. Antoine d’Abbadie, an Abyssinian Galla marks the punctuation of his speech by the help of a leathern whip, a slight stroke denoting a comma, a harder one a semi-colon, a still harder one a full stop, while a note of admiration is represented by a furious cut through the air.[52] Even in this country, we have not to go far to find gesture-language employed in default of spoken language. Where the new system of observing the movements of the lips has not been introduced, the deaf and dumb can communicate with the outer world only by the help of gestures, though the gesture-language of the deaf and dumb, like phonetic writing, implies a previous spoken language. It is, therefore, to the instinctive gesture-language of the North American Indians what our system of writing is to hieroglyphics.

It will be noticed that under the general term of “gesture-language” we have included not only gesticulation, but also that play of feature and modulation of the voice which outlast gesticulation among a civilized people. Gesticulation can hardly form a universal language in the same way that play of feature and modulation of the voice can. Only in part have such gestures the same meaning for all men, and so serve to bridge over the gulf that divides articulate from inarticulate speech. Like play of feature and modulation of the voice, they are common to men and animals; but, unlike the latter, they are capable of receiving an arbitrary and conventional meaning. Helvétius, following in the track of Anaxagoras, asserted that we have become men through the possession of hands; had our arms terminated in a horse’s hoof, for instance, we should have been like the beasts that perish, wanderers and defenceless.[53] Indeed, it is quite conceivable that our forefathers would have remained contented with a gesture-language, had not the hands been wanted for other purposes. Food could not be prepared without them, whereas it was not until the desire of food was satisfied that the mouth was put to another use than that of asking for it.

Still the arbitrary element in gesture-language is very small compared with what it is in spoken language. Here beyond a few interjections, or possibly a few onomatopœic sounds, the whole body of symbols that stand for thought is purely conventional. The same combination of sounds may be used to denote very different ideas. There is no necessary connection between an idea and a word that represents it. It is as arbitrary as our making the sign 1 symbolize the idea of unity or the sign = the idea of equivalence. However well we may be acquainted with our own language, a foreign one will be wholly unintelligible to us until we have learnt it. Even natural sounds strike the ear of different individuals and nations in a totally different way. Exactly the same sound was intended to be reproduced in the “_bilbit_ amphora” of Nævius,[54] the “_glut glut_ murmurat unda sonans” of the Latin Anthology[55] and the _puls_ of Varro; nay, as Dr. Farrar points out, even in the κόγξ and the βλώψ of the Greeks. The Persian _bulbul_ has but little resemblance to the _jugjug_ of Gascoigne, or the _whitwhit_ of other writers; and yet all are attempts at imitating the note of the nightingale. The first word uttered by the children on whom Psammitikhus is said to have tried his famous experiment seemed to their keepers to be βέκ[ος], whereas we read in the great Papyrus Ebers, the standard work on Egyptian medicine compiled in the sixteenth century B.C., that if “a child on the day of birth ... says _ni_, it will live; if it says _ba_, it will die.” And only the last of these infantile cries bears any likeness to what we are told are the primitive and original utterances of childhood, _ma_, _pa_, and _ta_—utterances, by the way, which are only in part possible to the Mohawks and Hurons, who possess no labials.[56] So arbitrary and conventional must be the meanings we associate with the sounds of articulate speech, and so impossible is it to discover in them any signs of universal currency. There is no reason in the nature of things why the word _book_ should represent what we mean when we look at the present volume; it might just as well be denoted by _koob_, or _biblion_, or _liber_; and if we chose we might always so denote it.

But although we might choose to do so, unless we could get other people to do the same, we should find ourselves unintelligible to our neighbours, and talking gibberish instead of a language. For the essential thing about a language is that it should be _an instrument for the communication of our thoughts to others_. There is no good in having symbols for our thoughts unless we wish our thoughts to become known to those about us. He who has no thoughts to communicate, no wants to be supplied, has no need of a language. But such a being, to use the words of Aristotle, is ἢ θηρίον ἢ θεός, “either a beast or a god;” or as we might, perhaps, render it in modern phraseology, either a hermit or an angel. The voiceless Yogi of India, or the Bernardine nun of southern France, is but as a dumb animal, or the hapless deaf-mute who has never been trained. The records of speech themselves testify to our instinctive recognition of the fact. The name _Slave_, for instance, by which so large a body of our Aryan kinsfolk have called themselves, means “the speaker,” in opposition to the “dumb” and unintelligible German; just as in Isaiah (xxxiii. 19), the Assyrians are a people “of a stammering tongue, that one cannot understand.” _Man_, indeed, comes from the root _man_, “to think;” but it is thinking for others, for the sake of embodying the thought in spoken utterance. The same root has produced μάντις, the “seer;” Μέντωρ and _Minerva_, whose counsels are for others, not for themselves; μηνύω, to “point out,” and _moneo_, to “advise;” μνή-μη, “recollection,” and _memini_, to “remember,” and _mentio_, “the bringing to mind” by mentioning in speech. Even in the Semitic idioms, _zâcâr_, “a man,” seems connected with _zâcâr_, “to remember,” just as the Latin _mas_ is with μνήμη and _memini_. Language, in short, is the prerogative of man, distinguishing him from the brute beast, because it is the basis and bond of society. Man is “a social animal” in virtue of language; society could not exist without language any more than language could without society. The two are correlative terms, though it is for the sake of society that language has been formed. It is a social product, springing up with the first community, developing with the increasing needs of culture and civilization, and disappearing when the individual Robinson Crusoe is cast back on the island of primitive isolation.

But though it is a social product, it may also with strict truth be spoken of as growing up. A society never met together to _make_ a language. To imagine this would be to revive the theories of the last century, which referred all society and government to a contract entered into by our remote forefathers. We do not call the present volume a _book_ because we have made a formal agreement with our neighbours to do so, but because if we called it _biblion_ or _liber_ we should not be understood by the majority of them. The language which we speak is the heritage which has come down to us from the past, like the laws by which we are governed, or the habits and customs to which we conform. We represent our idea of a printed work by the word book, because we have been taught to do so by others, and those who taught us had been taught by others, and those again by others. But this process of teaching and learning implies a very slow and gradual change in the language that is being handed down. New words come into use as new objects and ideas have to be named, old words are forgotten, the pronunciation gets altered, and other changes hereafter to be described take place. And so, without any deliberate intention on the part of any individual or individuals, the whole character of a language comes in course of time to be transformed. Now and then, it is true, we can trace the invention of a wholly new word to an individual, like _gas_ to the Dutch chemist van Helmont, or _od_ force to Baron von Reichenbach; and still oftener of a new derivative like _liberalize_, introduced by the Marquis of Lansdowne, _fatherland_ by Isaac Disraeli, _incuriosité_ by Montaigne, _urbanité_ by Balzac, or _bienfaisance_ by the Abbé de Saint Pierre. But such words must be accepted by society, be ratified by the tacit agreement of the whole community, before they can become a part of living speech. Though _gas_ has made its way into common use, _blas_, which van Helmont proposed at the same time to describe that property of the heavenly bodies whereby they regulate the changes of time, failed to commend itself to the general sense of the community, and so passed out of sight;[57] and such was also the fate of Balzac’s _sériosité_, of Malherbe’s _dévouloir_, and of Burke’s _literator_. In spite of his 262 works, and the grammars and vocabularies written to explain the jargon employed in them, Caramuel, a famous Spanish bishop of the seventeenth century, was unable to bequeath to posterity a single one of his numerous coinages. The “Cabalistic Grammar,” published at Brussels in 1642, and the “Audacious Grammar,” printed at Frankfurt twelve years later, remained unread and unknown, a monument of “cabalistic” dreams and “audacious” folly.[58] A paternal government may compel the acceptance of a foreign speech, in place of the familiar mother-tongue, like the rulers of Japan, who were said, a short time ago, to be meditating the substitution of English for the native language under pain of death. But even a government of this kind cannot invent a new grammar and a new dictionary; it can only borrow from others: and if we are to judge from the experiences of certain Oxford colleges where French was similarly enforced in the days of the Plantagenets, and Latin in those of the Commonwealth, the attempt, though backed by all the powers of State and Church, is likely to end in failure. Language must be the unconscious creation of the whole society, and the changes it undergoes must be equally that society’s unconscious work.

Now the sum of knowledge possessed by a society increases the longer the society exists and the more civilized it becomes. This increase of knowledge is reflected in the language; and hence languages grow fuller and richer—more developed, as it is termed—the longer they last. The further back we can trace a language, the poorer it is seen to be. Not only are words, or rather derivatives and compounds, wanting, but the words that exist embody but a few out of the many meanings which afterwards cluster around them. The dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon, of the Ormulum, or even of Chaucer, is scant and meagre compared with that at the disposal of a modern English writer. The dialects of savages, which most resemble what all languages originally were, have few words, because they have few ideas to express, and such ideas as are expressed are wonderfully simple. Thus, the Tasmanians, when they wanted to denote what we mean by “tall” and “round,” had to say “long legs” and “like a ball” or the “moon” or some other round object, eking out their scanty vocabulary by the help of gesture.[59] So, too, the New Caledonians cannot be brought to understand such ideas as those conveyed by _yesterday_ and _to-morrow_, and the jungle Veddahs of Ceylon are unable to remember even the names they give to their wives, unless the latter be present.[60] After this, it is not surprising that, like the Dammaras of South Africa, they are unable to count, and, consequently, have no numerals in their language. According to Mr. Galton,[61] indeed, the Dammaras are able to count as far as three, though he adds that they discover the loss of an ox, “not by the number of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face that they know.” If two sticks of tobacco are “the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep and give him four sticks.” “Once,” he goes on to say, “while I watched a Dammara floundering hopelessly in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half-a-dozen of her new-born puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her; and her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present, or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over them, backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the comparison reflected no great honour on the man.”

The number of abstracts possessed by a language is a good gauge of its development. It is difficult for us to realize the mental struggles and the ages of previous preparation required for the discovery of those ideas which now seem to us so familiar. The day on which, according to the ancient legend, Pythagoras struck out the idea of the _world_, and named it κόσμος, summed up all the labours of Eastern philosophy and Greek thought before which the law and order of the universe at last lay revealed. It is to Anaxagoras, to Herakleitus, to Xenophanes that we owe those ideas of mind, of motion, of existence which form the groundwork of modern science. Nay, our own generation has witnessed the creation of more than one great abstract idea, henceforth to be the common property of mankind, through the word by which it is expressed. To have won for the race a single idea like that of _natural selection_ is a higher glory than the conquests of a Cæsar. Man’s first work, according to the old Hebrew writer, was to give names to “every living creature;” and the Assyrian story of the Creation, with the profound conviction that chaos is there where language is not, begins its record with the words:

“At that time the heaven on high was unnamed; In the earth below no name had been recorded: And chaos unopened was their sire.”

The words by which we express such abstract and spiritual ideas as those of _spirit_, of _virtue_, or of _intellect_ are all, when examined, found to have a purely sensuous origin. The _spirit_ was but “the breath,” _virtue_ “the quality of a man,” _intellect_ “a choosing between.” We can only rise from the known to the unknown, from that which we perceive to that which is invisible. As the developing mind starts from the objects of sense, and passes over the bridge of analogy to objects of thought and reason, so, too, language, at the outset, had words only for the visible and the sensuous; and not until it called in the aid of metaphor could it express the higher imaginations of the soul. If we look closely into language, we may see how strewn it is with worn-out and forgotten metaphors. “They are,” as Carlyle has said, “its muscles and tissues and living integuments,” the aids whereby language can communicate something more than the things which we see and feel. Even among ourselves, there are few who can afford to dispense with the assistance of concrete illustration and metaphor when dealing with abstract subjects. They throw a halo of light around the impalpable objects of philosophic reasoning, and enable us to picture them before our minds. It is this picture-language, as we may call it, which gives so much of its charm to poetry, which made verse the first embodiment of literature, and lends to savage speech its poetical garb. The creations of mythology are in the main its work; and even modern science does not despise a “nature” which clothes itself with the attributes of humanity and of sex. It was the power possessed by language of rising from the concrete to the abstract that made the earliest hieroglyphic systems of writing possible, and which to this day enables the Chinaman to adapt his mode of writing to the introduction of new ideas. Like the Chinese lexicon, the multitudinous wealth of language can be traced back to a few and simple elements.

If we watch the first attempts of children to speak, we find that their wants and wishes are conveyed in a very small number of sounds, and that often a single word is made to express what we should represent by several. Now children, in spite of their inherited instinct of speech, are the best example we can have of the way in which the first men acquired their language, remembering only that the child nowadays has a complete language already framed for him, whereas the first men had to frame theirs for themselves. What the individual child now learns in a few years has been the laborious production of many a century and many a generation. But the child has still to learn it like his forefathers before him, and in learning it he may modify its sounds, its forms, or the meaning of its words, and so take part in bringing about what we call the growth of speech.

But it is not only by watching children that we can gain some idea of the way in which languages originally grew up. When we try to acquire a foreign tongue, not from books, but from conversation, we first pick up a few sentences and words, and then, by the help of these, endeavour to make our thoughts and wishes intelligible to others. But since the sentences and words we know are but few, we have to look about us for the simplest mode of expressing ourselves, and are obliged to make our expressions stand for many different ideas. Even then, however, our vocabulary is imperfect, and we often find ourselves wholly at a loss for any word by which to convey our meaning. Gestures are the only resource left to us, and it is by their help that we supplement our deficient knowledge of the spoken language. Indeed, the first words and sentences learnt at all may have been acquired by the same means. Travellers have drawn up vocabularies and phrase-books of the idioms of unknown tribes by pointing to objects or making use of gesticulations, and then observing what articulate sounds were associated with these movements by the persons addressed. It is a good example of the way in which gestures precede spoken language, and lead on to the latter. The same gestures are for the most part understood in the same sense among all the manifold races of men; a shake of the head signifies “no,” a pointing of the finger symbolizes “locality.” Gestures bridge over the gulf which separates inarticulate from articulate speech, and they are still a means of communication for the deaf-mute. But we must distinguish between gestures and that instinctive play of feature which Mr. Darwin has treated of in his work on the “Expression of the Emotions.” Gestures, in the proper sense of the term, are only partly the same for all races of men; no doubt the instinctive element preponderates in them, but we have to allow also for a certain element of conventionality. There is not the same physiological reason why a shake of the head should denote a negative as there is why a particular expression of the face should indicate pleasure, or pain, or surprise, or why a feeling of shame should bring a blush to the cheek. When we are told that the Veddahs of Ceylon are never seen to laugh, we at once infer that they have no sense of humour and no power of merriment. Gestures are rather a sign for the intellect than for the emotion, and since the same feeling must express itself similarly in the case of every one while the same thought need not, it is evident that that which expresses thought admits the element of conventionality more than that which expresses feeling. Pain must always be pain, and affect the nerves and muscles in the same way; what is thought of, on the contrary, may be conceived very differently, and represented in an equally varying manner. Hence it is that we share the play of feature with the brutes, whereas gestures—embodying as they do a rational rather than an emotional element—are for the most part peculiar to man. Man is man in virtue of language, and it was gestures that first made language possible.

But gestures alone are often but a poor resource for either the child or the traveller. They fail to express the meaning intended. Let us suppose a child, for example, to have been scratched by a cat, or frightened by a herd of cows. It can represent the pain it has suffered, or the terror it has experienced by gestures, but if it be unacquainted with the names of cat and cow, it can only point out those animals by imitating the sounds they utter; and _miow_ and _moo-moo_ become the nursery names for “cat” and “cow.” And what still goes on in the nursery was a general procedure in the childhood of mankind. The domestic cat was introduced into Egypt from Nubia in the time of the eleventh or twelfth dynasty, and the Egyptians forthwith called it the _miau_, a name which it still bears in China. Indeed, the French and German equivalents of “puss,” _mimi_ and _mitz_, have the same origin as the _miow_ of the nursery or of Egypt, though German could not refrain from borrowing the unmelodious ending of _katz_. Dr. Comrie states[62] that the natives of the north-east coast of Papua call the dog a “bow-wow,” and when first shown an iron axe named it _din-din_, from the sound which it seemed to make.[63] This imitation of natural sounds goes by the long and barbarous name of _Onomatopœia_, and though an attempt has been made to substitute “Imson” (_imitatio son-i_) for “onomatopœic word,” it has failed.[64] Now if we are to infer anything from the habits of the nursery, and of those savage tribes which best represent the infancy of mankind, onomatopœia must have played a large part in the formation of language. Its advocates have done much harm to what Professor Max Müller has happily termed “The Bow-wow Theory,” by endeavouring to trace back words as we now find them to an onomatopœic origin; but this does not prove that the theory when scientifically applied is false. It is true that there are few words like _miow_ which can be immediately referred to an onomatopœic source; it is true also that articulate language begins with roots, from which its scientific student must derive its words; but it is equally true that a large proportion of these roots—or rather of what these roots presuppose—was formed by the help of onomatopœia. It is not only objects like a dog or an iron axe that the Papuans met by Dr. Comrie named from the sounds they made upon his ear; an action like that of “eating” was equally called _nam-nam_ from the noise produced by the process. We who speak a highly developed language, the worn-out _débris_ of which are more than sufficient for the creation of new words and forms, can hardly realize the influence of onomatopœia upon rude and uncivilized jargons. Of course it is not necessary that the imitation of natural sounds should be an exact one; indeed, that it never can be: all that is wanted is that the imitation should be recognizable by those addressed. The same natural sound, consequently, may strike the ear of different persons very differently, and so be represented in articulate speech in a strangely varying manner. Thus, as has been noted before, _bilbit_, _glut-glut_, and _puls_, are all attempts to represent the same sound. Just as colours strike differently upon the eyes of different men, so also do sounds upon their ears, and the poverty of primitive languages in terms to denote the colours is parallel to the imperfection with which they represented natural sounds.[65]

Besides gestures and onomatopœia, there is a third way in which we can make ourselves intelligible without knowing the articulate language of those to whom we are speaking. This is by making use of interjectional cries. Like the play of feature, interjectional cries are the same for all men; we all make much the same kind of exclamation when hurt, or angry, or surprised. They express our emotions, not our ideas; and since the main object of language is to express ideas, interjectional cries can have had but a small share in its formation. Here and there we can point to a few roots, like _agh_ (_ach_) in Aryan, which seem to have this derivation; but before the root _agh_ could become a root in the linguistic sense of the word, and give rise to a number of derivatives, it was needful for it to cease to be an interjection; that is to say, it had to express an idea, and not an emotion. Many of our modern interjections, like _alas_, _lo_, are words that once possessed a full conceptual meaning, but have lost their original signification, and been degraded to the level of mere emotional cries. So hard is it for language to admit anything which was not from the first significant in thought. Interjections remind us of the animal side of our nature, and they have forced their way into language only because that animal side must be represented to the mind. But in thus forcing their way they have ceased to be the simple utterances of pleasure and pain, and become expressive of conceivable states of feeling. Only in so far as the first men approached the brutes more nearly than we do, were interjectional cries likely to help them in building up the structure of speech. We may, however, include under the head of interjections those instinctive cries uttered by men when engaged in a common work, to which Professor Noiré would trace all roots whatsoever.[66] The sense of life and power that makes the child shout or the bird sing, and is the ultimate motive of human speech, causes us to beat time by the help of rhythmical utterances. And though the utterance be but a monotonous sing-song, it becomes a symbol and sign of the action it accompanies to all those who have taken part in it, and in course of time may pass into a word. How many of the roots of languages were formed in this way it is impossible to say, but when we consider that there is no modern word which we can derive from such cries as the sailor makes when he hauls a rope, or the groom when he cleans a horse, it does not seem likely that they can have been very numerous. Still they were probably more numerous than the roots formed from other interjectional cries.

The origin of language, then, is to be sought in _gestures_, _onomatopœia_, and to a limited extent _interjectional cries_. Like the rope-bridges of the Himalayas or the Andes, they formed the first rude means of communication between man and man. Onomatopœic words and interjections came to be metaphorically applied to denote other ideas than those for which they properly stood, while the relations of grammar were pointed out by the help of gesticulation. Thus, by imitating the gurgling of water and pointing to the mouth, a man could signify what we express by the sentence, “I wish to drink,” or, “I am thirsty;” and by uttering a cry of pain and pointing to a knife, he could show that he had been cut by it. In course of time a collection of words would be formed, each of which represented what we now call a sentence. For a sentence, it must be remembered, is the name given by the grammarian to what the logician would call a proposition or a judgment, and though a judgment may be analyzed into subject and object and connecting copula (or mental act of comparison), we cannot, if we wish to be intelligible, separate its elements one from the other. The whole sentence, the whole Λόγος, as the Greeks would have termed it, is the only possible unit of thought; subject and object are as much correlated as the positive and negative poles of the magnet.

Language, then, we may lay down, begins with sentences, not with single words. The latter exist only for the lexicographer, and even the lexicographer has to turn them into sentences by affixing a definition if he would render them intelligible. We are accustomed to see sentences divided into their individual words in writing, and so we come to fancy that this is right and natural. But the very accent which we lay upon our words ought to show us how far this is from the truth. The accent of a word varies according to its place in a sentence; for purposes of accentuation, we regard not the individual words, but the whole sentence which they compose. And this outward fact of accentuation is but an indication of the inward fact of signification. All language must be significant; but until the whole sentence is uttered, until the whole thought which lies behind it is expressed, this cannot be the case. The expression of the thought may be faulty and imperfect, but unless the thought be sufficiently expressed to be intelligible to another, it has not yet embodied itself in the form of language. The Greek Λόγος was not the individual word, which, apart from its relation to other parts of the sentence, has no meaning in itself, but the complete act of reasoning, which on the inward side is called a judgment, and on the outward side a sentence or proposition. The single word is to the sentence what syllables and letters are to the single word. We may break up a word into the several sounds of which it is composed, but this is the work of the phonologist, not of the speaker. So, too, we may break up a sentence like “Don’t do that” into the four words _Do-not-do-that_, but this, again, is the conscious procedure of the grammarian. Sentences may be of any length; they may consist of a single syllable, like _go!_ or _yes_, or they may have to be expressed by a large number of separate “words”; what is essential is that they should be significant to another, should adequately convey to his mind the whole thought that is intended to be expressed. Unless the sounds we utter are combined into a sentence, they have no more meaning than the cries of the jackal or the yelping of the cur; and until they have a meaning, and so represent our thought, they do not constitute language. The sentence, in short, is the only unit which language can know, and the ultimate starting-point of all our linguistic inquiries.

It is not necessary that the sentence should be divided into its component words in writing any more than it actually is in speech. The French _je le vois_ is as much a single, undivided group of sounds as the Basque _dakust_ or the Latin _amatur_. In the polysynthetic languages of America, in which the separate words of a sentence are cut down to their bare stems and fused into a single whole, the sentence can as little be split up into its elements as an ordinary compound in Greek or German. The ancient Hindu grammarians, with that wonderful insight into language which has made their labours the basis of modern scientific philology, treated the several words of a sentence just as we treat syllables and letters. A number of single words are run into one, the sounds at the end of each word being modified to suit those that follow, in accordance with the so-called rules of Sandhi, and the whole group of words is then written without division. Thus the word _trinairguṇatwamâpannairbadhyante_ must be analyzed into _trinais_, “with grass blades” (an instrumental pl.), _guṇatwam_, “a rope’s state” (acc. sing), _â-pannais_, “having attained” (part. pass. of the compound verb _â-pad_, agreeing with _trinais_), and _badhyante_, “they are bound” (3rd pl. pres. pass. of the verb _bandh_). In fact, a little attention will convince every one that even in our own language not only does the accent of a word depend upon its place in the sentence, but that the sound with which it terminates equally depends upon the sound which follows. We pronounce “of” in one way when it stands by itself in the dictionary, in another way when it precedes “the” or “that.”

If the sentence is the unit of significant speech, it is evident that all individual words must once have been sentences; that is to say, when first used they must each have implied or represented a sentence. And this is borne out by an examination of the records of speech. We shall see hereafter that words may be divided into conceptual or presentative, and pronominal or representative, and that wherever we can trace back the latter to their source, we find them to have been originally presentative. Thus words like “and” or “because” are now purely symbolic and representative; there was a time, however, when they denoted the very definite ideas of “a going further,”[67] and “by the cause.”[68] Now, if we look carefully into the nature and essence of these presentative words, it becomes clear that they were at the outset so many shorthand notes or summaries of various sentences. Take, for example, the word _memorandum_. Before it can form a part of language, _memorandum_ must be significant. This can come about only in two ways. Either we must accompany the utterance of the word _memorandum_ with gestures which imply “This is a memorandum,” or “Write a memorandum,” or something similar, or else we must express the meaning of these gestures by equivalent words. That is to say, the isolated word _memorandum_ must be incorporated into a sentence by being brought into relation with other words, before it can become part and parcel of living speech. Taken by itself, it belongs to the dictionary-maker only, and even he has to add a definition, that is to say, to make it the subject of a sentence, if his dictionary is to be something more than a mere catalogue of unmeaning sounds. Before a definition is supplied by the lexicographer or the reader, a word is not yet a word; it has no meaning.

The student of language, then, cannot deal with words apart from sentences. The significant word—that combination of sounds which represents a thought—is really a crystallized sentence, a kind of shorthand note in which a proposition has been summed up. Each advance in philosophy and science is marked by the acquisition of a new idea or fact, the result of a long train of previous observations and reasonings: and the more complex the idea or the fact, the more numerous will be the reasonings, the sentences or judgments, which underlie it. What a multitude of judgments, which when expressed in language we call sentences, are implied by the two simple words _humanity_ and _gravitation_! It is a truism in psychology that the terms of a proposition, when closely interrogated, turn out to be nothing but abbreviated judgments. The ordinary theory of modern comparative philologists traces all languages back to a certain number of abstract roots, each of which was a sort of sentence in embryo, and though this theory is scarcely tenable in the form in which it is usually presented, it is yet certain that there was a time in the history of speech when the articulate or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primitive man were made the significant representatives of thought by the gestures with which they were accompanied. And this complex of sound and gesture—a complex in which, it must be remembered, the sound had no meaning apart from the gesture—was the earliest sentence. The isolating languages of Further India still express a new concept by the juxtaposition of two words which denote that it is the species of a higher genus. Thus, in Taic or Siamese _kin_ is to “eat,” but when _nam_, “water,” is added, _kin-nam_ means “to drink;” _mi_ is “rich,” _mi din_, _mi nám_, “earthy,” and “watery,” that is to say, “rich (in) earth” and “water.”[69]

These examples from the far East show us the way in which our words first came into existence. They have grown out of sentences by a process of comparison and determination. Two or more sentence-words, referring to the same object or idea viewed under different relations to the speaker, might be set over against one another, and the phonetic part in which they agreed taken to denote the object or idea considered by itself. Thus in Semitic _kâtal_ is “he killed,” _kotêl_, “killing,” _k’tol_, “to kill” and “kill,” _kâtûl_, “killed,” and _katl_, _kitl_, or _kutl_, “a killing,” where the difference of signification is marked by a difference of vowel, and co-existing forms of this kind, when compared with each other, would determine that the three consonants _k-t-l_ had the general sense of “killing.” But an inflectional language does not permit us to watch the word-making process so clearly as do those savage jargons in which a couple of sounds like the Grebo _ni ne_ signify “I do it” or “you do it,” according to the context and the gestures of the speaker. Here by degrees, with the growth of consciousness and the analysis of thought, the external gesture is replaced by some portion of the uttered sounds which agrees in a number of different instances, and in this way the words by which the relations of grammar are expressed come into being. A similar process has been at work in producing those analogical terminations whereby our Indo-European languages adapt a word to express a new grammatical relation. Thus, in English, the Greek termination _ize_ (or -_ise_) has been abstracted from the words to which it properly belonged by comparing them together, and has been instinctively, as it were, invested with a particular meaning, so that we can now turn any word we like, whether of Greek origin or not, into a transitive verb by attaching to it this suffix. In _humanize_, for instance, it is added to an adjective of Latin origin, in _jeopardize_ to a Romanic compound. When once a sentence-word had been broken up into single words by comparing it with other sentence-words relating to the same subject, it was easy to extend the operation to other sentence-words, which were accordingly broken up and analyzed without being compared with related sentences. The phonetic expression of the verbal copula by which the subject and object were connected together, was the last result of this analytic process; it was long left to be supplied by the mind, the simple juxtaposition of subject and object being considered sufficient to suggest the mental act by which they were compared or contrasted, and to this day many languages, those of Polynesia, for example, still remain without a verb. Thus, in Dayak _kutoh ka-halap-e arut-m_, “thy boat is very beautiful,” is literally “very its-beauty thy-boat,” _andi-m handak imukul-ku_, “thy brother will be struck by me,” means properly, “thy-brother my striking-being,” while to express “he has a white jacket on,” the Dayak must say, _ia ba-klambi ba-puti_, “he with-jacket with-white.”[70]

As we shall see hereafter, all the facts at our disposal tend to show that the roots of speech, or at all events the earliest sentence-words out of which the later languages of mankind have sprung, were polysyllabic, and other facts go equally towards proving that the terminations of these primitive roots or sentence-words displayed a wearisome monotony of agreement. Survivals, as Mr. Tylor has happily termed them, are among the most valuable means we have of arguing back to an earlier state of things, and we can only treat as a survival the habit of a child whom I know, who in her first essays at speech affixed a final _ö_ to almost all her words, saying for instance, _come-ö_ and _dog-ö_ for “come” and “dog.” The older a speech is, the more it has suffered from the wasting and wearing effects of time, and a language like the Chinese, which stands out as some weather-beaten granite peak among the languages of a later day, has so concealed all traces of the originally pluriliteral character of its vocabulary, that it is only within the last few years that Sinologues, like Dr. Edkins and M. de Rosny, have detected it. So, we may infer, will it also be found with all the other languages of the world; the first utterances of mankind were polysyllabic, though not perhaps of such monstrous length as the sentence-words of Eskimaux or Algonquin. In the friction and comparison of these utterances similar terminations came in some instances to be set apart to denote the relations of grammar; in other instances the grammatical relations which lay implicit in the sentence-word were made explicit by its being set over against another sentence-word similarly employed elsewhere; and so it came in course of time to be what the Chinese would call an “empty word” with no presentative meaning of its own. Thus, on the one side, as M. Bergaigne has shown, the old adjectival suffix _bha_ (_bhi_) in our own family of speech has become the sign of the dative and genitive cases (Latin _ti-bi_, dat., Old Slavonic _te-be_, gen.) just as the adjectival termination _sya_ or _tya_ (as in δημόσιος, “belonging to the people”) has become the sign of the genitive (ἱππο[σ]ιο); while, on the other side, the Chinese _tsĭ̥ h‘ai_, “to be hurt,” is literally “eat hurt,” and _tshyeu tha̤n_, “autumn,” “harvest-heaven.” The Chinese word can still be used indifferently as a noun, a verb, an adverb or the sign of a case much like such English words as _silver_ and _picture_, and its place in the sentence alone determines in what sense it shall be construed. This is an excellent illustration of the early days of speech, when the sentence-words contained within themselves all the several parts of speech at once—all that was needed for a complete sentence; and it was only by bringing them into contact and contrast with other sentence-words, that they came to be restricted in their meaning and use, and to be reduced into mere “words.” Language never forgot the mode in which it had framed its first vocabulary, and the Greek and Roman, as much as the Red Indian of America, in framing their compounds instinctively stripped off the so-called inflections, and reduced the word they placed first to its simple stem. That part alone of the word which remained unchanged and unchangeable, could be made use of when the word was to be treated as simply a word and nothing more. The North American languages reflect more faithfully than the languages of the Old World the primitive condition of speech, and the North American languages can possess from six to eight thousand different verbal forms or sentences without having abstracted from them a single _word_ which will express the sense of the verb out of all relation to anything else.[71] Thus, the Cheroki has thirteen verbs to denote particular kinds of “washing,” such as “washing the head,” or “the hands,” or “myself,” and each of these verbs has a multitude of forms, but no isolated word to denote “washing” in general has as yet been extracted from them.[72] The difficulty has often been noticed of getting a savage or barbarian to give the name of an object without incorporating it into a sentence or bringing it into relation with something else. Thus, a Kurd who supplied Dr. Sandwith with a vocabulary of the Zaza dialect, was so little able to conceive of words like “head,” “father,” “hair,” except as related to himself or some one else, that he had to combine them with a personal pronoun, saying _sèrè-min_, “my head,” _piè-min_, “my father,” _porè-min_, “my hair.” The Hoopah and Navaho vocabularies, published by Schoolcraft,[73] similarly prefix the possessive pronoun _h’_, _hut_ to all their words, as _hotsintah_, _hut-tah_, “forehead,” _huanah_, _hunnah_, “eye,” _hoithlani_, _hutcon_, “arm;” and Dr. Latham points out the same fact in Wallace’s vocabularies from the river Uapes, where _eri-bida_, _eri-numa_ in Uainambeu, _tcho-kereu_, _tcho-ia_ in Juri, and _no-dusia_, _no-nunia_ in Barrè, literally “my head,” “my mouth,” are given as the equivalents of simple “head” and “mouth.” He also states that he has noticed the same peculiarity among the English Gipsies.[74] The making of words as distinct from sentences was a long and laborious process, and there are many languages like those of North America in which the process has hardly yet begun. A dictionary is the result of reflection, and ages must elapse before a language can enter upon its reflective stage. Our children still learn the languages they speak by first acquiring the knowledge of certain phrases and sentences, and then gradually analyzing them into words, and the adult who wishes to gain a successful acquaintance with another tongue must pursue the same plan. What Steinthal says of the Chinese, that its “smallest real whole is a sentence, or at least a sentence-relation,”[75] is true of other languages as well, and the words of which a sentence is composed have no actual existence apart from that sentence, except for the phonologist and the lexicographer. Until the whole sentence is completed the individual words of which it consists have no more signification than the syllables _ful_ and _ness_ or _cy_ and _ly_ which occur so plentifully in English. The first condition of language is that it should be significant, and words are only significant when they stand in relation to one another. The _logos_, the true word, said Aristotle, was the cause of knowledge; the individual words of which it was composed were but symbols and tokens of the impressions of sense.

Now, if language be the embodiment of thought, and if thought can only express itself under the form of the complete sentence, it is plain that we must look to the sentence for a true classification of languages. The sentence expresses the way in which we think, and the different forms assumed by the sentence—that is to say, the different modes in which the relations of subject, object, and verb are denoted will constitute the only sound basis for classifying speech. The particular relation between the several ideas summed up in a judgment or sentence agrees with the manner in which we regard the objects about which we think and speak. If, for instance, we have no clear idea of any distinction between ourselves and the objects around us, in talking about them any reference to ourselves will be left out of sight. Instead of saying, “_I_ am running,” where the speaker distinguishes himself from the act in which he is engaged, we should say like the Romans _curro_, where the personal pronoun has no separate and independent mark of its own. Different races of men do not think in the same way; and, consequently, the forms taken by the sentence in different languages are not the same. Thus in the so-called isolating languages, the separate terms or ideas which make up the sentence are not subordinated to each other, and fused into a single whole, but every word remains a separate and distinct sentence. The Chinaman has to say, “_thya̤n-hi le̥ṅ tsyaṅ-s̆aṅ-lei_”-literally, “heaven-air cold begin-rise-come,”—if he wants to state that “the weather began to be cold;” and the Burman’s way of expressing “we are going,” is by saying, “_ṅā dō dhwā kra dhań_”—“I multitude go multitude which.” In cases such as these, the ideas are each set down independently, instead of being subordinated one to another, and the words which embody them are accordingly contrasted with each other like so many independent sentences. On the other hand, in the agglutinative languages, the ideas which make up the sentence, though still kept distinct and independent, are no longer set over against one another, but brought into mutual relation and harmony, and regarded as of equal force and meaning. The root or stem still stands out clearly and separately, and the suffixes of relation are marked with equal distinctness; But for all that, the inward fact of the incipient subordination which exists between them is denoted by the outward fact of vocalic harmony, whereby the vowels of both stem and suffix have to belong to the same class. The Turkish sign of the infinitive, _mak_, has to become _mek_ after a root like _sev_, “love,” though both root and suffix still retain their own individuality; and while _at-lar_ is “horses,” _ev-ler_ is “houses.” The grammatical relations expressed in the Aryan class of languages by case-endings and person-endings, or by prefixed pronouns and prepositions, have to be represented, as a general rule, by postfixes, since in no other way can sufficient emphasis be laid upon them, and the danger avoided of their being swallowed up in the verb or noun. Our “I love,” or “the man,” look but little different in writing from the Turkish _sev-r-im_, or the Basque _gizoná_, _gizonák_; the case is quite altered, however, when we try to pronounce these words, the accent falling on the verb in our “I love,” but allowing the distinction between verb and pronoun to be clearly felt in the Turkish _sevrim_. It is among the inhabitants of mountainous and cold regions in the Aryan and Semitic families of speech—among Albanians, Bulgarians, Scandinavians, and Aramæans—that the definite article is postfixed instead of being prefixed; and we can see at once what an emphasis and distinctness would be given to it by such a position. Only where foreign influences have been at work do the agglutinative languages change the order of the words in the sentence and, as in the case of the Hungarian definite article _a_, _az_, prefix the words expressive of the grammatical relations, instead of postfixing them. Still further, to mark out the several parts or terms of the sentence, the objective pronoun may be inserted between the subjective pronoun and the verbal root or stem; and so we may have a sentence-word like the French _je vous donne_, as in the Basque _zamaztet_ (from _eman_, “to give”), or the converse arrangement of the terms, as in _n-aza-zu-n_, “that you may have me” (“me-have-you-may”). The incorporating languages, as they are called, are the oldest examples of the agglutinative class, for they go back to the time when the speaker had not yet begun to analyze his sentences, and when he could not say simply, “I give,” without finishing the sentence with the objective pronoun. Hence it is that in Basque we must say _dituzte beren liburnac_, “they have them their books,” instead of simply “they have their books;” and in Accadian, the language of primitive Chaldea, “I built a house” would be _ê mu-n-rû_,[76] literally “house I-it-built.”

Very distinct from these incorporating tongues are the polysynthetic or incapsulating dialects of America, in which the words that make up a sentence are stripped of their grammatical terminations, and then fused into a single word of monstrous length and appearance. Thus the Algonquin would say, _wut-ap-pé-sit-tuk-quś-sun-noo-weht-unḱ-quoh_, if he wished to express the sentence “he, falling on his knees, worshipped him;” and this cumbrous compound denotes exactly what we split up into seven words. These polysynthetic languages are an interesting survival of the early condition of language everywhere, and are but a fresh proof that America is in truth “the _new_ world.” Primitive forms of speech that have elsewhere perished long ago still survive there, like the armadillo, to bear record of a bygone past. The conception of the sentence that underlies the polysynthetic dialects is the precise converse of that which underlies the isolating or the agglutinative groups. The several ideas into which the sentence may be analyzed, instead of being made equal or independent, are combined like a piece of mosaic into a single whole. The sentence has not passed beyond its primitive form, or rather that primitive form has been retained in spite of the growth and development of the languages to which it belongs. It is possible that the Eskimaux may be the descendants of the savage races who inhabited the caves of southern France, when the rivers were stiff with ice for half the year, and the reindeer roamed freely through the woods and meers; at all events, among the icebergs and dark winters of the North, they have preserved their old habits of thought, their old mode of viewing the world about them, almost unchanged. And yet our own class of speech, that class to which we give the name inflectional, and which we sometimes think is the crown and standard of all other kinds of language, is not so far removed in usage from the Eskimaux or the Algonquin as are the isolating dialects of China and the agglutinative jargons of Mongol and Turk. In the inflectional group the words or suffixes which denote grammatical relations are subordinated to the words which express objects or actions—that is to say, to nouns and verbs. The termination of the Latin _currit_ has lost all distinct and independent meaning of its own; apart from the verbal stem to which it is subordinated, it is a mere _flatus vocis_, a mere empty sound. In flection proper, which we may see best exemplified in the Semitic tongues, the relations of grammar are denoted by internal vowel change—_adamu_, “man,” for instance, being nominative, _adami_ genitive, and _adama_ accusative. It was only afterwards, and by the force of analogy, that first unmeaning suffixes and then agglutinated words which were gradually assimilated to them, came to take the place of internal vowel change. What we may term the inflectional instinct sought to express the various relations of the sentence, as they successively rose to consciousness, out of the original sentence-word itself. When separate words like _wards_ or _ly_ (_like_) were afterwards employed for the same purpose, they first had to lose their own individuality, to become empty words, representative and not presentative, and as such to be engrafted upon the old stems. The Greek φη-μί, or the Sanskrit _ad-mi_, “I eat,” are single wholes; the first personal pronoun _ma_, weakened to _mi_, has lost all life of its own, and its sole right to existence lies in its absorption into the stems φη- and _ad_-. But an inflectional language cannot carry out its fundamental principle with logical completeness. All the subordinate relations of a sentence cannot be brought into the same close connection with the principal idea as in φημί and _admi_. Sentences like “I speak” or “I eat” may be comprehended under a single word; but there are many sentences where this is impossible, and where the attempt to express in language the relation between the principal and the subordinate, between the subject and the attribute, has to be given up. In the Latin _poeta bonus_, for example, the subject and the attribute appear as separate words; and there is nothing in the flection attached to each to show that they stand in any relation whatsoever one to the other. So far as the form goes there is nothing to tell us whether the two words mean “a good poet” or “the poet is good.” The fundamental principle of flection has been violated, and the language is on the high road to that more developed condition in which, as in Chinese, the two ideas are set plainly and distinctly one against the other, and the mind is left to supply the relation between them. This impossibility of carrying out thoroughly the principle of flection brings about an analytic tendency in all inflectional forms of speech. The longer an inflectional language lives the more analytic it becomes. The Englishman says “I will go,” and the Frenchman _le monde_, where the Latin was contented with _ibo_ and _mundus_. One by one the grammatical relations implied in an inflectional compound are brought out, as it were, into full relief, and provided with special forms in which to be expressed; but the change that has taken place is but an apparent one, the inflectional spirit of the language still remains; and though we write “he runs,” “I will go,” we pronounce as if they were single words. The pronoun and the verb, taken apart and by themselves, convey no meaning to our minds; we have to combine them before they become significant, and (the order of the words excepted) there is but slight difference between an English sentence like “never to be sufficiently relied upon,” and the Tamil _sārndāykku_, “to thee that hast approached,” to be analyzed into _sār_, “approach,” _d_ sign of the past, _āy_, “thee,” and _ku_, “to.”

Each of the leading classes of speech naturally comprises various species or subdivisions. Thus the isolating Chinese differs from the isolating dialects of Further India, in that the Chinese mode of expressing the relations of the sentence by position is replaced in these by the use of words like _prū_, “do;” _khã_, “suffer;” _khōṅ_, “possession,” _mha_, “from.” So, again, in the agglutinative class, the Bâ-ntu languages of Southern Africa prefix the same substantive, worn down, it may be, to a mere unmeaning symbol, to each of the words in a sentence which have to be brought into relation with each other; _o_-ka-_ti_ k-_etu_ _o_-ka-_ua_, for instance, being “our fine stick,” or literally, “stick ours fine.” The Malayo-Polynesian dialects have not yet attained to the conception of the verb; thus _yaku imukul olo_ (“I smitten people”) is “I am smitten by the people;” _iṅga̤ra̤-ku ia̤ tatau_ (“my-thought he rich”) “I thought he is rich;” _ia̤ baklambi baputi_ (“he with-jacket with-white”) “he has a white jacket on.” Basque grammarians generally hold that the Basque has but two verbs, “to be” and “to have,” while, on the other hand, there are many languages which lack precisely these two.

But in all these sub-classes, just as in the main classes of speech, it is the different conception of the sentence and the form it takes which characterize the whole language. However much alike may have been the circumstances by which the first communities of men were surrounded, they yet viewed the world without them and their own relation to it with different eyes. The idea they formed of the sentence and its parts was not the same everywhere. When with the growth of consciousness came also the formal expression in utterance of the relations of the several parts of the sentence, it was inevitable that this expression should clothe itself in essentially various forms. And the psychological peculiarity which originated each of these forms—a peculiarity itself the result of previous experiences and tendencies—became continually more definite, more confirmed, more unalterable. The logician may reduce all forms of the affirmative proposition or judgment to the single “A is B,” but the grammarian knows that this is like the _jus gentium_ of the Romans, a mere abstraction from a limited number of observed instances. It may be the right form for the sentence to take in the manifold languages of the world, but as a matter of fact it has never been taken in any one of them. The form of the sentence as shaped by the primitive language-builders of each human community has imprinted itself indelibly upon the linguistic consciousness of their successors. Racial type and characteristics will change as soon as the conception of the sentence. Many of the agglutinative languages have approached so nearly to the phænomena of inflection, as to make it difficult to determine why they should not be classed with the inflectional tongues; and yet for all that they remain agglutinative, and have remained so as far back as we can trace them. Our own language is agglutinative, and even isolating in many respects, while the French _je vous donne_ seems a clear instance of incorporation. The Chinese, on the other hand, shows much that is agglutinative, much even that resembles inflection, and it is only the polysynthetic languages of America that remain true to their stereotyped primæval character. Nevertheless, in spite of all this apparent confusion and overlapping, this borrowing, as it were, of characteristics from other families of speech, the great types of language stand out each of them visibly and distinctly. Their broad characteristics can be clearly sketched, their essential diversity easily felt. It is only when we come to map out the boundaries between them, to determine where isolation ends and agglutination begins, that we find ourselves at fault. Here as elsewhere in nature there is no sharply-defined line of division to be drawn; species passes gradually and insensibly into species, class into class. But in spite of this, species and classes really exist, each with its own type and characteristics, each founded upon its own conception of the sentence and its parts. When we remember that the sentence, and not the isolated word, is the starting-point of philology—when we make it what the logician would term the _fundamentum divisionis_ for our classification of speech—there is no longer any difficulty in distinguishing between the several families of speech, and assigning to each its character and place. The Finnic idioms have become so nearly inflectional as to have led a recent scholar to suggest their relationship to our Aryan group; nevertheless, they have never cleared the magical frontier between flection and agglutination, hard as it may be to define, since to pass from agglutination to inflection is to revolutionize the whole system of thought and language and the basis on which it rests, and to break with the past psychological history and tendencies of a speech. There are South American butterflies whose colours have come to resemble so closely those of the plants on which they are found as to be indistinguishable from them; for all that, the butterfly still remains a butterfly, and the plant a plant.

Such, then, is language in its origin and its nature. It is significant sound, the outward embodiment and expression, however imperfect, of thought. Before sound can become significant it must express the whole thought or judgment; that is, it must take the form of a sentence. Historically, the sentence and not the word comes first. The sentence consists of two factors, one the external sound, the other the internal thought, and neither of these factors can be disregarded by a true science of language.

Now, science is accurate knowledge. The statement may seem a truism, but it is a truism which has sometimes been forgotten. For that which is accurate is only that which can be defined and limited, that of which all the boundaries, as it were, are distinctly mapped out and known. But the boundaries of knowledge can only be discovered by the help of comparison. It is, in fact, the comparative method that constitutes the very life of inductive science; it is the application of the comparative method to any subject which brings that subject within the domain of scientific knowledge. Our knowledge that night and day follow one another alternately, or that if we put our hands into the fire they will be burnt, is not yet scientific. In order to know anything scientifically we must be able to compare it with something else, and so determine its size, or weight, or character. Our feelings may tell us that the atmosphere is hot or cold, but we have no scientific knowledge of either fact until we can measure one degree of heat or cold against another by means of the thermometer. As soon as we know the exact amount and character of each degree of heat or cold, we have laid the foundations of a science of thermology. It is just the same in the case of language. Here, too, as soon as we can compare languages and the elements of languages together, and so measure and determine their character, we shall have the beginning of a science of language. But the comparison must be made by the aid of a common standard. The old attempts to compare Latin with Greek, or both with Hebrew, were failures because the test applied was a capricious one, depending on the subjective fancies and prejudices of the inquirer. We cannot compare two things together without having a third term—a common standard by which to measure them. We must not have one rule and measure for one set of words or languages and another rule and measure for another set. The comparative method we employ must be alike in all cases.

Language is a social product, at once the creation and the creator of society. It is independent of the caprice of the single individual, and the Emperor Tiberius could no more change a Latin word[77] than the slavish obedience of a Benedictine monastery could turn _sumpsimus_ into _mumpsimus_. Unless the community as a body agree to accept the new word or form, Cæsar himself is powerless to introduce it. The changes undergone by language are brought about by the action of circumstances over which the individual has no control. They are circumstances which affect the whole community, not the individual member of it. The primary condition of speech that it should be significant requires that it should be stamped and recognized by the common consciousness. Now, the circumstances that affect a whole community will always act in the same way should the conditions remain the same. Individual caprice is rendered impossible, and the forms assumed by language will be found referable to general laws. We have to deal, not with the infinite complexity of individual motives and caprice, but with the consentient action of many minds swayed by the same feelings, surrounded by the same atmosphere. The joint action of a multitude eliminates the accidental differences of individual character; all that is left is just that in which all agree, the result of the influences of which all alike are sensible. The circumstances that determine the common nature of a society determine also its common utterance, and this common utterance we call its language. It embodies all the past life and history of the community that speaks it; each phase in the development of its speakers is reflected in it as in a mirror, and its worn-out words and forms are so many crystallized embodiments of dead and bygone thought, so many fossil relics, as it were, of the past strata of social growth. The facts of language—its sentences and its words—are the result of the action of general laws and conditions; by comparing and classifying them we can discover what these general laws are, and how they act. A knowledge of these laws and their action constitutes glottology or the science of language; the use of the comparative method by which they are discovered constitutes comparative philology.

Comparative philology, therefore, furnishes the materials whereby the science of language investigates such questions as the origin of speech, the nature of roots, or the meaning of flection. It may be said to comprise both comparative and historical grammar, comparative grammar being primarily occupied in comparing the grammatical forms and syntax of different languages of the same group; historical grammar in tracing the history of the forms and syntax of a single language. The two studies, however, necessarily overlap, comparative grammar requiring a knowledge of the individual languages compared at the successive periods of their history, or restoring the older forms of the individual languages by means of comparison, and historical grammar calling in the aid of the allied dialects to supply the deficiencies of the literary or monumental record. Quite apart from either is philology proper in the old sense of the word, which busied itself solely with literary languages and the literature they enshrine. The business of philology is to compare author with author, style with style, to determine the employment of words and phrases in the writers it investigates and pronounce upon their correctness, to emend the readings of MSS. and imitate the idiosyncrasies of particular writers. From the old-fashioned classical philology to the so-called philosophy of speech there is a wide leap, but both have been equally transformed by the new comparative method. The philosophy of speech in the hands of men like Harris or Stoddart[78] endeavoured to attack the problems of language by “the high _priori_ road,” and by unverified and unverifiable reasoning from the phænomena of modern dialects to discover the origin of speech and the relation between grammar and logic. The philosophy of speech under the guidance of comparative philology has become the science of language, which may be said to comprehend both. The questions which the _à priori_ method failed to resolve are now yielding their answers to _à posteriori_ research, and the results already obtained have overthrown the unsubstantial speculations of the last century. The science of language has been variously termed “La Linguistique,”[79] “Linguistic Science,” Glottic,[80] and Glottology,[81] and it stands in the same relation to comparative philology that physiology stands to comparative anatomy.

Now, the ultimate facts with which comparative philology has to deal are sentences and the words that have been evolved out of them. These words and sentences must be real and not imaginary—that is, they must either belong to some living speech, or be preserved in a written record, or else be restored by a sound comparison of existing words which presuppose some common ancestor. Where such real and well-attested words are not to be had, no conclusions can be drawn. Unless inscribed monuments are hereafter brought to light or comparison with the Malayan dialects results in the recovery of a common parent-speech, the condition of the Polynesian languages 1,000 years ago must remain unknown. Much no doubt may be effected by comparing the scattered relics of these languages together, by showing that a sibilant, for instance, has been preserved in Samoan which has become a simple aspirate elsewhere, or that a guttural is retained between two vowels in Maori which has been dropped in most of the other Polynesian settlements; but to assert that some thousand years back they resembled another language to which they bear little similarity at present, would be to argue without data, and to violate the fundamental principles of comparative philology.

The object of the science of language is threefold:—

(1). It compares and classifies sentences, grammatical relations and words.

(2). It compares and classifies languages and dialects.

(3). By means of this comparison and classification it discovers the laws which govern language in general and certain languages and dialects in particular.

Thus by comparing the languages of the Aryan family we discover the phonetic law that an English _th_ must always represent _t_ in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, unless the action of other determinate laws interfere, and by comparing different groups of languages together, we find that the dual number everywhere preceded the plural. There are still many tongues in which the plural is formed by reduplication, tongues, that is, where duality, the repetition of the idea, is or has been the only conception of plurality yet reached; and others in which the number “three” is denoted by words like _prica_, “many” (in the dialect of the Puris of South America,) expressive of vague indefiniteness, and an inability to form a clear idea of anything beyond “two.” Indeed, in our own Aryan family of speech there was a time when _one_, and _two_, or that which was “divided” (δύω, δίς, διὰ, &c.) from one, were the only numerals known, and it required a fresh effort of thought to attain and conceive of a new numeral, which was accordingly named _tri_, _tres_, _three_, or that which is “beyond” (_trans_, _through_, Sansk., _tar-â-mi_, “I pass beyond”).

The laws of speech may be either primary or empirical. Empirical laws are those generalizations made from the survey of a limited number of phænomena, the reason of which we do not know. All we know is that given one particular fact, another particular fact follows, or that wherever we meet with a particular class of phænomena the same generalization is sure to hold good. Thus in astronomy, Kepler’s discovery that the planets move in an ellipse may be termed an empirical law, and the same may be said of the phonetic law mentioned above which obliges us to compare an English _th_ with the Greek and Latin _t_. Primary laws are those higher and more comprehensive laws or generalizations which embrace the empirical laws and give the reason of them. Such a primary law is gravitation, such, too, probably is the law of natural selection. In the science of language examples of these primary laws would be the law that all language is based on roots, or the law of economy in the use of speech. The determination of the primary laws of language leads us very nearly into the charmed land of metaphysic; as the physicist with his doctrine of force is transported out of the region of pure experiment and observation, and brought face to face with metaphysical problems, so is the scientific student of language with his doctrine of roots. Hence that part of the science of language which stands in the most direct relation with the old philosophy of speech, which would investigate such subjects as the origin of gender and case, or determine the priority of thought or language, has sometimes been called linguistic metaphysics.

When once the laws of language have been laid down we are able to apply them to our facts (that is, words and sentences), to whatever period these belong. The science of language, like all other sciences, rests upon the postulate of uniformity. So long as the conditions remain the same, the laws of the science will act with undeviating regularity. It does not matter whether the words we are dealing with are still living and spoken, or have been dead and obsolete for thousands of years; if we can show that they fall under the action of a particular law, we can apply that law to them in either case with equal certainty. When once we have ascertained that an English _d_ represents a Sanskrit _t_, only those Sanskrit words which contain a _t_ must be compared with English words of Teutonic origin which have a _d_ in the corresponding place, whatever their antiquity may be. A knowledge that an English _d_ answers to a Sanskrit and Latin _t_, and an English _h_ to a Sanskrit and Latin _c_ (_k_ or _ś_) shows that the English _hundred_ has the same origin as the Latin _centum_, and the Sanskrit _śatam_, and that, consequently, our linguistic ancestors were able to count as far as one hundred before they separated from each other, the one to conquer India, the other to occupy Europe. Words, in fact, are like the fossils of the rocks; they embody the thought and knowledge of the society that first coined and used them, and if we can find out their primitive meaning by the aid of the comparative method, we shall know the character of the society that produced them, and the degree of civilization it had attained. The palæontologist can reconstruct the animal life of the past ages of the globe with no greater ease than the comparative philologist can reconstruct the life of bygone and forgotten communities. If the fragment of a fossil bone can tell us the history of an extinct world, so, too, can the fragment of a word reveal to us the struggles of ancient societies, and ideas and beliefs that have long since perished.

But the laws of a science must be verified before they can be accepted as such. However brilliant or ingenious a hypothesis may be, it remains a hypothesis, more or less probable, until it has been verified by experiment and observation. It is to history, to psychology, and to physiology that the science of language has to look for the verification of its laws. In the phonautograph of König, or the phonograph of Edison, we can discover the very forms assumed by the waves of air set in motion by each sound we utter; and the first lessons of psychology confirm the conclusion of glottology, that the concrete precedes the abstract. Sometimes it is not so much the law, the generalization itself, that can best be verified; but the application of it to the phænomena of speech. Thus, a sound application of the laws of language makes it clear that the words possessed in common by Spanish and Arabic are not due to a common ancestry, but to contact between the two tongues, and the history of the Moorish conquest of Spain confirms the conclusion.

But we may ask, What is meant precisely by that comparison of words and sentences on which the laws of language are said to rest? A word, a sentence, a grammatical form, consists of two elements, one, the articulate utterance, the other, the signification or thought which the utterance symbolizes. Sound and sense are the two factors which make up speech, and it is, therefore, in respect of both sound and sense that our comparisons have to be made. Comparative philology divides itself into phonology and sematology, to which, perhaps, we may also add morphology. Phonology is the science of sounds, sematology the science of meanings, and morphology the science of grammatical forms. But inasmuch as grammatical forms are but a combination of the relations of the sentence (or rather of the meaning those relations convey to the mind) and of the phonetic sounds by which they are expressed, morphology may be strictly included partly under phonology, partly under sematology. We must never forget that the study of sounds is intended to be the vestibule through which we approach the thought within. The phonological investigations we carry on, the phonological laws we formulate, are the outworks by which we may storm the fortress of the inward signification. They enable us to trace to a common source words that have flowed through diverse regions, or to discover the origin of some strangely-changed form of grammar, but the value they possess is the value that belonged to the magic ring of the Nibelungs: it gives access to the treasure, but is not the treasure itself. Phonology is not commensurate with comparative philology, as seems sometimes to be thought. It forms but one side of the science, the instrument by which we discover the true force and meaning of sentences and words.

As the instrument of linguistic science, however, phonology is of the highest importance. In fact the modern science of language is wholly based upon it, and that which distinguishes comparative philology from the abortive attempts of former centuries is its scientific investigation into the laws of articulate utterance and of phonetic change. Here, and almost here only, we can as yet trace the nature and working of the laws of speech. It is only because we know that an English _h_ and _d_ must answer to a Sanskrit _k_ (_ś_) and _t_ that we are able to assert that the primitive Aryan community had attained the conception of “one hundred.” Sematology is still in a far more backward state; its laws are still a subject of investigation, and the differences of opinion that exist as to some of the great questions of linguistic science show only too plainly how much in this department of it still remains to be done. But the relative position of phonology and sematology is, after all, but natural. Phonology deals with the outward and physical, that which, can be weighed and measured, and imitated by mechanical contrivances; sematology belongs to the inward and the spiritual—to that realm of thought, in short, which can only be examined in so far as it makes itself accessible to the inspection of the senses, and submits itself to the action of physical laws. Thought seems infinite, manifold, and free, determining and determined by itself. Like the wind, it “bloweth where it listeth;” we hear “the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.” All the capriciousness and complex mobility of the individual appears to belong to it; we may formulate the laws of thinking, but not of the forms which that thinking takes. The vocal organs, on the other hand, through which thought becomes realized in speech, are subject to all the conditions of the material world. The utterance of each articulate sound and its relations to another are conditioned and defined by the physical constitution of man, by the circumstances in which he finds himself, and by measurable laws of sound. The outward form of language, the flesh-garment, as it were, in which thought clothes itself, falls entirely into the domain of physiology and acoustics. Here we can observe and experimentalize, can weigh and measure, can even reproduce artificially for ourselves. Every consonant and vowel can be accurately determined, the machinery and effort needed to produce them precisely known, the variations they are capable of exactly ascertained. But when we turn to the informing thought, to that inner essence which gives life and reality to each modulation of articulate sound, all appears different. What wonder that the science of significations should be so far behind the science of sounds?

Let us not forget, however, that thought, in so far as it finds its expression in language, is not so infinitely free and capricious as we might at first sight suppose. The very fact of its finding expression in language, that is, of being embodied in articulate sounds, implies restraint and submission to conditions. Thought is thus, as it were, arrested and crystallized; it is only gradually and in consequence of ascertainable causes that the signification attached to a particular sound or group of sounds comes to be changed. That these sounds should symbolize certain ideas is, after all, a matter of convention; it follows from the tacit agreement, not indeed of isolated individuals, but of individuals as forming a society. Changes, therefore, in the signification of words and sentences can only result from causes which affect the whole society, and as such causes necessarily work slowly and by degrees, significant change can accordingly be brought under the action of general laws. But these laws can only be established by the help of phonology: until we know what words and forms the laws of phonology will allow us to compare together and refer to a common origin, we cannot begin to discuss the genesis and history of the significations they bear. No doubt structure, that is, the conception of the sentence formed by a language, and the order in which the several parts of a sentence are arranged, is a very important element in the classification of languages; still it is only one element, and unless phonology prove that the roots and derivatives of two idioms are related, no amount of structural similarity will justify us in deriving them from the same stock.

Phonology, then, is the key and mainstay of modern linguistic science; it guarantees the correctness of the results already obtained, and is the indispensable preliminary to future researches. As will be shown in a later chapter, our knowledge of sounds and their laws is now tolerably complete. So, too, is the application of this knowledge to certain groups of language. The phonological laws of the Aryan family, for instance, are pretty well ascertained; we know what sounds in one member of the family answer to other sounds in another member, and what particular changes of sound are permissible within each of the several members themselves. It follows from the physical formation of the organs of speech that the various sounds capable of being articulated are limited in number. Prince Lucien Bonaparte has enumerated as many as 385, though some of these are not to be met with in any known language or dialect.[82] The number of different sounds occurring in any single language is not large among European languages; for instance, Modern Greek, Spanish, and Illyrian have but five vowel-sounds, while Gaelic, which has the largest number, possesses twenty-one, Portuguese and English following next with nineteen a-piece. So far as consonantal sounds are concerned the number tends to diminish with the culture and age of a language, and the evidence of facts is against identifying the hypothetical alphabet to which the sounds of the various Aryan dialects can be reduced with the actual alphabet of the parent Aryan speech. The physical formation of our vocal organs, due to climate, food, habit, and inherited aptitudes, obliges us to pronounce in a particular way. There are sounds, for instance, which birds and animals can make, but we cannot; while nothing is harder than to catch and reproduce the exact pronunciation of a foreign tongue. The Polynesian turns David into _Raviri_, Samuel into _Hemara_, London into _Ranana_, and Frederick into _Waratariki_, and the word _steel_ has been adopted in the Sandwich Islands in the shape of _tila_. It has been said that a foreigner can never speak another language so perfectly as to conceal all traces of his origin, and though this is going too far, it is quite certain that there are languages the pronunciation of which can never be thoroughly acquired after the age when growth has ended and the organs of speech have ceased to be plastic. There are numerous sounds which particular races or individuals are unable to imitate successfully; and those who have watched the attempt of children to learn their mother-tongue know how slowly some special sound is often acquired, and how in some cases it is never acquired at all. The sound which one person will pronounce as _r_ will be pronounced _l_ by another. Thus, the Chinese change every _l_ into _r_, and the nearest approach they can make to the pronunciation of _Christ_ is _Ki-li-sse-t(ŭ)_. The Japanese, on the other hand, cannot manage _l_, and in their mouths accordingly _idolatry_ becomes _idoratry_. The native children of Bengal, quick as they are in other respects, seldom pronounce rightly those English words which begin with a sibilant and a mute when a consonant precedes them, _ten stamps_, for instance, being made into _ten-y-stamps_, and _this string_ into _this-y-string_. The same sound which is pronounced without difficulty in certain combinations may be a hopeless puzzle in others, and the English tourist who mispronounces _Boulogne_ and _Cologne_, will yet ask for an _onion_ and talk of a _barrier_. No individual, it would seem, pronounces all his sounds exactly like his neighbours, and even the same individual will vary his pronunciation of the same word in the course of a few seconds. Variations of pronunciation, in fact, are like the variations we observe in plants and animals, and if any variation becomes marked and is rendered popular and general from some cause or other, it brings about an alteration in the form of words. Such alterations resemble new species in natural history, and we may compare the different species of pigeons or dogs with the differences of pronunciations given by different dialects to what was originally the same sound. Changes in the pronunciation of words are constantly going on, causing a language to alter its form and appearance or to branch out into dialects. As these changes are determined by circumstances and physical necessities, and not by the arbitrary will of the individual, the laws they follow can be discovered and laid down. The laws once known, we can tell what words and sounds in different dialects, or in the different periods of the same dialect, may be compared together and referred to a common source, supposing, that is, that the significations they bear allow us to ascribe the identity of their phonetic elements to anything more than coincidence. The laws of phonology enable us to assert that the Greek καλός, and the English _hale_ or _(w)hole_, may be traced back to a common origin so far as their outward crust and garment—the phonetic sounds of which they are composed—is concerned; it then remains for sematology to decide whether the ideas of “beauty” and “soundness” can be connected together. Distinctions between sounds must be studied in spoken languages, and we must not forget that it is always very difficult to discover what was the _exact_ sound attached to a word no longer spoken, but preserved only in the custody of writing.

Different tribes and races vary much as to the sounds which they find it easy or hard to pronounce and imitate. A sound which has been changed into a certain other sound in one language, may have been preserved or changed into quite a different sound in another language. In our Aryan group the palatals were originally gutturals; in Malayan, on the contrary, dentals. Because our Teutonic forefathers turned _k_ into _h_, we must not conclude that such a change was possible all over the world, and that wherever we come across an _h_ we are at liberty to assume an earlier _k_. Indeed, there is clear evidence that in some languages _h_ may become _k_. The phonetic laws which hold good of one group of languages, or of one member of a group, do not necessarily hold good of another.

In comparing languages we have first to compare their grammars, not their vocabularies. The reason of this is obvious. It is in the sentence, not in the isolated word, that languages agree or differ, and grammar deals with the relations that the several parts of the sentence bear to one another. Single words may accidentally resemble each other in both sound and sense, and yet belong to languages which have nothing in common. In the Quichua, or dialect of the Incas, three words—_inti_, “sun;” _munay_, “love;” and _veypul_, “great”—resemble the Sanskrit _indra_, _manyu_, and _vipula_,[83] but this is the only likeness that can be detected between the two tongues. So, too, the Mandshu _shun_, “the sun,” coincides in sound and meaning with the English word, like the Mandshu _sengi_ and Latin _sanguis_, “blood,” or the North American Indian _potómac_ and the Greek πόταμος, “river.” Such accidental coincidences turn up all the world over. The number of articulate sounds used in actual speech is, after all, not so very large, nor also the number of different ideas needed by primitive man; and when we bear in mind the probable onomatopœic origin of the greater part of our vocabulary, it is not wonderful that these coincidences should occur. Indeed, the wonder would be if they did not. But a coincidence of this sort is one of the surest evidences we can have that the words which seem to resemble one another have no connection whatsoever. As Professor Max Müller has said, “sound etymology has nothing to do with sound.” Language is continually changing; and as the phonetic and significant changes in it are occasioned by outward conditions and circumstances which vary from age to age and from country to country, they must necessarily take a different direction in the mouths of different speakers. The very fact that the English _call_ and the Greek καλέω have almost every letter in common, ought to have raised a presumption against their identity, even before the law was known that an English _c_ answers to a Greek γ, and a Greek κ to an English _h_, and that, consequently, the true Greek representative of _call_ is γήρυω, and the true English representative of καλέω is _hail_.

But if we are not to compare words of the same sound and sense together, how, it may be asked, are we to ascertain the relationship of two or more languages, and discover what sounds correspond to each other in them? Our only guide is grammar. If we find that two languages express the relations of grammar in the same way, and by the help of the same machinery, we may conclude that the two languages come from a common source, and, therefore, possess a common stock of words. Under grammar will also be included structure—that is to say, the order and position of the parts of the sentence, as well as the conception of the sentence itself. Grammar and structure, therefore, are the clue by which comparative philology must be guided in its researches. It was the neglect of such a clue that caused Latin and Greek to be compared with Hebrew, and made the etymological dictionaries of the last century a rubbish heap of wasted labour. Those languages only which agree in their way of viewing the relations of thought can be grouped together. When once agreement in grammar and structure has determined the probable connection of two tongues, the aid of phonology may be called in to complete and verify the inquiry. Where the grammars are really connected, we may feel quite certain that there will be a community of roots. Where, on the contrary, there is no connection between the grammars, a community of roots must be due to accident. What proved the existence of an Aryan family of speech, and thereby founded comparative philology, was not the resemblances between individual words, striking as these were, but the exact correspondence between the grammatical forms of the several members of the family. The lists of words drawn up by Sir W. Jones, by Adelung or by Vater, remain mere literary curiosities. The comparative philology of Aryan speech was really created by the comparative grammar of Bopp. When once the grammatical relationship of the Indo-European languages had been established, there was a solid basis for phonology to work upon, and it was not long before Grimm discovered the laws which regulate their interchanges of sound.

But in comparing grammar and structure, we must be careful to exclude the accidental, or rather the phænomena due to the peculiar circumstances in which an individual tongue has been placed. We ought to be able to trace the history and development of each special language as far back as possible, ascertaining its oldest forms and noting the successive changes they have undergone. For this purpose it is necessary that the language should be a literary one, and that the various phases of its growth should have been preserved on monuments or in books. Where this is not the case, we have to fall back upon a simple comparison of existing dialects, and endeavour to restore from these the common forms to which their variant derivatives seem to point. The greater the number of dialects the more satisfactory will be the results of our comparison; accidental resemblances will be better eliminated, and intermediate forms are more likely to be preserved. Where the dialects to be compared are few, we have to contend against one of two difficulties—either the differences between them are so slight—as in the case of the Semitic languages—that the parent-speech from which they branched off must be too recent to throw any light on its earlier history and relationships; or else the differences are so great, the time during which they have been separated so considerable, that the links have been lost by which we may connect them together and reduce them to a single origin.

Phonology requires a knowledge of the past history and development of the languages it deals with even more than the study of grammar. In the comparison of words we may lay down the general rule that roots and not derivatives should be compared together. We should trace the history of the words we examine as far back as may be, should reduce them to their simplest forms, and strip off the accretions that have grown round them like the lichen round the stone. Words derived from the same radical will often assume different forms in different languages, or even in the same dialect; while words derived from different radicals will, on the other hand, assume the same form in different languages, or even in the same one. _Captive_ and _caitiff_ have the same origin in the Latin _captivus_; _sound_ may be either the Latin _sonus_ or _subundare_, or the Anglo-Saxon _sund_, “hale,” or _sund_ from _swimman_. The American _potómac_, quoted above, is a compound, while the Greek πόταμος comes from the root πο-, which we find in πίνω and πότος, in the Sanskrit _pânam_, “a drink,” and our own _potion_. The lexicographers who have declared _monkey_ to be a corruption of _mannikin_ were little aware that the word is really the Italian _monichio_, the derivative of _monna_, and that _monna_, again, is a contraction of _madonna_, _mea domina_. Before we know the history of a word, we must not venture to compare it with another, though it may happen that the history will be learnt through the process of comparison itself. Thus we know that the Gothic _fimf_, “five,” has lost two gutturals, as well as a final labial, from the analogy of the Latin _quinque_ (for _quinquem_), the Sanskrit _panchan_ and the Lithuanian _penki_, and we can thus trace it back to the period when the Aryans of Europe and of Asia were still undivided. But at this point our materials fail us. We may feel pretty sure that _quemquem_, the original Aryan word for “five,” is a simple root, and that its numerical meaning is a derived one; we may even hazard the guess that it has been formed by reduplication, but beyond this a sound method of etymology cannot go. To connect it with the Semitic _khâmésh_, as Ewald has done, is to violate the rules of comparative philology. We know the history neither of _khâmésh_ nor of _quemquem_.

In comparing words together, it is safest to begin with two classes of words, those which, like the numerals, have acquired a fixed and arbitrary meaning, and terms of relationship and every day use. In the case of the former, the signification, once fixed, remains unaltered, however much the phonetic crust of the word may change, while new names are less likely to come into vogue; in the case of the latter, the very frequency of their use tends to keep them in existence. If a few families here and there adopt new modes of expression, still it may be expected that the larger part of the community will be more conservative. Hence, when we find two languages agreeing in their numerals and words expressive of common objects and ideas, we may infer that they are related to one another. The pronouns are not so sure a criterion, as they have generally been worn down by constant use to monosyllabic forms, while their antiquity prevents us from discovering their true history and origin. Like the names of “father” and “mother,” moreover, the first and second personal pronouns show a tendency to be represented in most languages by the simplest and earliest sounds uttered by the child.

The laws of phonology must be established by as large a number of instances as possible. In no other way can the chances of accident or mistake be avoided. A law, in fact, must hold good of all the phænomena that are summed up under it, and the more numerous the phænomena, the wider and more firmly established will the law be. Grimm’s laws of the interchanges of sound in the Aryan family of speech depend on the observation and comparison of a very large number of words. As soon as it was found that English words which contained a _th_ answered in signification and general form to Latin and Greek words which had a _t_ in the same place, it was possible to formulate the law: English _th_ = Latin and Greek _t_; all that remained was to verify the law by fresh instances, and in this way to strengthen the proof of the connection of the two languages. If it could be shown that real exceptions to the law occur which are not due to the interference of other laws, the law would have to be given up, however numerous might be the apparent instances on which it rested. The progress of comparative philology is continually strengthening its phonological laws and adding to their number.

The intimate connection of sound and sense must never be lost sight of in etymological research. They are as it were the outer and inner sides of the same object. Where the significations are unrelated, we cannot connect two words which agree in phonetic sound any more than we can connect two words of the same signification but different sound. In our own group of tongues the two separate roots _dhā_ “to suck,” and _dhā_ “to place,” for example, are identical in sound; and if we turn to languages like Chinese or Ancient Egyptian, we shall find numberless cases in which the same word, so far as pronunciation is concerned, has a variety of unallied meanings like our English _box_ or _scale_. Of course, it is not necessary that the signification of the words we compare should be exactly the same; the signification of words changes as much as their outward phonetic form; but we must be able to show that one meaning is derived from the other, or from a common parentage, just as we show that one sound is derived from another or from a common source.

For the purposes of phonology more especially, the study of living spoken dialects is indispensable. No doubt the historical character of glottology requires us to investigate the records of extinct languages with as much care as the facts of living ones, and it is only by learning what a language once was that we can properly know what it is now. Nevertheless, it is only in the modern languages that we can discover the nature and laws of pronunciation; it is only here, moreover, that we are brought face to face with the problems and realities of speech. The biologist, it is true, cannot dispense with the aid of comparative anatomy, but his primary object is the study of the living organism. What has been termed “antiquarian philology” has sometimes stood in the way of scientific progress; sounds have been confounded with letters, and words instead of sentences have been made the units of speech. Antiquarian philology, furthermore, still has the shadow of classical scholasticism hanging over it; it will need a long education before the world is disabused of the idea that superiority in literature means superiority in language, and that a scientific study of language is identical with the old-fashioned “philology” of the classical scholar. Before the forms of an extinct speech can be made available for scientific investigation, they must be revivified by the translation of their written symbols into phonetic sounds, and how hard such a task is need not be pointed out. If we wish to work back to the former pronunciation of a language we must start from its modern and actual pronunciation, and in spite of all that we can do, in spite of slow and patient induction and a careful weighing of the facts, our conclusions will be at the best imperfect and approximative. The older and more scanty the remains of a language, the more defective and uncertain will be our restoration of its pronunciation. In the larger number of cases we have to be content with merely approximative results. What Mr. Ellis and Mr. Sweet have done for the pronunciation of early English, is due to the abundance of the data and the unbroken tradition which they embody; to restore the pronunciation of Latin is a work of greater difficulty, to restore that of ancient Greek of greater difficulty still. In short, the records of dead speech must be interpreted by the facts of living language, just as the conditions which brought about the deposition of the rocks can only be explained by the forces still at work upon the surface of the globe. Here as elsewhere in science, we must proceed from the known to the unknown. The laws of consonantal change laid down for Latin and Greek, for Sanskrit and Zend, for Keltic and Old High German, receive their verification and explanation from the Romance dialects of modern Europe; while it is in the study of savage idioms, in the languages of Bushmen and of Kafirs, of North American Indians and of Papuans, that some of the most precious facts of linguistic science have been obtained. An extinct literary language, indeed, is by its very nature less serviceable to the comparative philologist than the artless jargons of barbarous tribes. It is artificial rather than natural, and the product of individual idiosyncrasies rather than of the whole community. The further removed it is from the fresh current of living speech, the less capable it becomes of strictly scientific treatment. The individual element, with all its arbitrary capriciousness, has entered too largely into it. The grammatical forms invented and enforced by ignorant grammarians, the words coined after false analogy by the Homeric rhapsodists and their successors, or the stilted phrases and inverted expressions employed by a particular writer and his imitators, all belong to the domain of the “philologist” rather than to that of the scientific student of language. He has nothing to do with textual criticism or the study of style, much less with the successful reproduction of the idiosyncrasies of classical authors.

Philology in the narrower sense of the term has to prepare materials for comparative philology in so far as the latter is concerned with literary languages or dialects. In its turn it is guided in its researches and kept within the limits of scientific accuracy by comparative philology which tests and rectifies its conclusions, and prevents for the future attempts like that of Buttmann to derive ἄφνος from ἄφθονος or that of K. O. Müller to extract πελασγός from πελαργός. The particular can only be understood in the light of the universal, and as long as we are dealing with one language only our comparisons must be limited to that language alone at different stages of its growth, and will consequently sometimes lead us astray. Error can only be avoided by making our field of comparison as wide as possible, and so bringing our theory to the test of the greatest possible number of facts. It is evident from this, however, that the comparative philologist will have a special and minute acquaintance with but a few out of the many facts which come before his view. The memory even of a Mezzofanti is limited, and the ordinary student of language must be content to derive from others a large proportion of the materials on which he works. Caution in the choice and use of his authorities is here absolutely requisite, and it ought to be the business of the specialists in each language to see that the facts presented to him are thoroughly accurate and exact. Their work is the foundation upon which the structure of comparative philology has to be built.

But the comparative philologist cannot dispense with a specialist’s knowledge of at least two languages. In no other way can he have that intimate acquaintance with the inner life of speech requisite for his studies, or possess the necessary instinct for selecting the right authorities to whom to trust when dealing with tongues with which he is unacquainted. The more languages he knows thus thoroughly the better, especially if these belong to different classes of speech. Unless the Aryan scholar is acquainted with a Semitic language, his theory of flection is likely to be one-sided and faulty, and unless he have a further knowledge of some agglutinative dialect, his views on the relation between flection and agglutination must be received with a certain amount of distrust. Grammars and dictionaries will not give us that grasp upon the inner structure and spirit of a dialect which is all-important in determining some of the chief problems of speech. They present us only with the external facts of a language: before we can _think_ in it, before we can place ourselves in the mental attitude of its framers and speakers, we must be saturated with it, as it were, and have that knowledge of it which can only come from daily and constant use.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the comparative philologist should not introduce the frame of mind of the specialist into his comparative inquiries. The specialist who takes up comparative philology as a subsidiary pursuit is likely to spoil it in the taking. The minor details of his special subject, whether it be Greek or Sanskrit or Hebrew, will assume an unreal importance in his eyes, and the main phænomena to which his attention ought to be directed will be correspondingly dwarfed. Bopp was the father of comparative philology simply because he was not a specialist in any one of the Aryan languages; had he been a Sanskritist, and nothing else, he would doubtless have produced an excellent Sanskrit grammar, but not the famous text-book of scientific philology. The errors into which he fell have since been corrected by the special students of the various languages he handled so freely: the knowledge he acquired of them was sufficient for the great purpose he had in view, and an exhaustive study of any one of them would merely have consumed the time and energy which were needed for his other work.

We can now see clearly what is the object and scope of the science of language. It has to do with language in all its forms as the significant utterance of society. Where utterance ceases to be significant, the science of language also ceases to investigate it. Beyond the barrier of roots it is unable to pass; other sciences—ethnology, psychology, physiology—must be called in if we wish to know what lies beyond that barrier, what, in short, were the inarticulate utterances and gestures which gave rise to articulate speech. Glottology has to investigate the origin of language so far as it is really language, but no further. By the use of the comparative method, words, forms, sentences, dialects, and languages are classified and traced back to their most primitive form, and the laws which govern their development and relationships determined and explained. In this work of comparison, phonology and sematology ought to go hand in hand, since language consists in the intimate union of sound and thought; but inasmuch as the facts and laws of phonology can be more readily discovered and tested than those of sematology, it is necessary that our linguistic researches should have their starting-point on the phonological side. Inasmuch as language is the reflection of the thought of a community, the history of words and forms, as determined by the application of the laws of glottology, will be also the mental and spiritual history of the community that used them. Like the geologist, therefore, who can reconstruct the material history of the earth and restore the various forms of life that have successively peopled it, the scientific student of language can read the past history of human society in the fossil-records of speech. By tracing the Greek δῆμος to the root δα, “to divide,” he can show that private property in Attica originated in that allotment of land by the commune which still prevails among the Slavs, while not only the existence but even the mode of life and intellectual horizon of the primitive Aryans has been revealed by comparative philology with more certainty and minuteness than could have been done by any chronicle, however perfect. But perhaps the most important of the results obtained by the application of the comparative method to language, has been the light thrown upon the origin and nature of mythology and the history of religion. Two new sciences, those of comparative mythology and comparative religion, have grown up under the shelter of glottology, and form subordinate sciences dependent upon it. In the more immediately practical sphere of education, again, the science of language has lightened the labours of the learner by explaining the reason of the rule while it insists upon the reversal of the old unscientific mode of teaching languages by beginning with the dead ones, and points out that the method of science and of nature alike is to proceed from the known to the unknown. By breaking down the prejudices that have so long maintained our present cumbrous and inaccurate spelling, it is preparing the way for a reform in that direction, with its consequent saving of time and labour, while the construction of an universal language is the aim towards which its students ultimately look.

But meanwhile, though much has been accomplished, much more still remains to be done. Comparative philology and the science of language are not yet a century old, and the problems of speech that still await solution are many and important. The previous chapter will have shown how various are the opinions still held as to the nature of language and its science, while the belief that the exceptional—we might almost say abnormal—Aryan family of speech is the type and rule of all others still unconsciously influences a large amount of philological reasoning. Is the science of language a physical or a historical one? Did roots constitute a spoken language or are they phonetic types which never entered into actual speech? Have isolating languages become agglutinative and agglutinative languages inflectional? Do dialects precede the common language or does the common language precede dialects? Have the languages of the world been all derived from one or two primitive centres or do they point to an infinite diversity of origin? Such are some of the questions which still await an answer, and the answer requires more investigation, more patient observation and induction, and, above all, more labourers in the field of research.