CHAPTER IV.

_ETHNIC CHARACTERS._

Various stages of social groups and essential characters of human societies: Progress.--Conditions of Progress: Innovating initiative, and tradition--Classification of “states of civilisation.”

I.--LINGUISTIC CHARACTERS.

_Methods of exchanging ideas within a short distance_--Gesture and speech--Divisions of language according to structure--Jargons--_Communications at a relatively remote distance_: optic and acoustic signals--_Transmission of ideas at any distance and time whatever_--Handwriting--Mnemotechnic objects--Pictography--Ideography--Alphabets--Direction of the lines of handwriting.

So far we have considered man as an isolated being, apart from the groupings which he forms with his fellows. But in order to get a correct idea of the sum-total of the manifestations of his physical life, and especially of his psychical life, we must further consider him in his social environment.

Nowhere on the earth has there been found a race of men the members of which lived completely alone and isolated as the majority of animals are seen to do. It is in fact but very rarely that the latter combine into societies; they form a family group only temporarily during the period of raising the young, etc. Man, on the contrary, becomes almost helpless apart from society, incapable of maintaining the struggle for existence without the help of his fellow-men. The development of all the manifestations of “sociality” is then the measure of progress of human societies. The more man is “socialised,” if I may thus express it, the less he depends on nature.

This dependence on nature has long served as a criterion in ethnography for dividing peoples into two groups--the “civilised” and the “savage.” The name given by the Germans to “savages,” _Naturvölker_ (peoples in a state of nature), explains sufficiently this way of looking at things. According to their greater or less dependence on nature, peoples were divided into hunters, shepherds or nomads, and tillers of the soil or settlers, without, however, characterising in a very precise way each of these states. Morgan was the first to bring a little definiteness into this nomenclature, and at the same time he has shown the necessity of introducing another criterion into the estimate of states of civilisation. In fact, to establish the three forms of socialisation--_savage_, _barbarous_, and _civilised_--he has accepted as a distinctive mark between the second and the third the existence of handwriting--that is to say, of the material means used by the two forces necessary to the inception and maintenance of progress: innovating initiative, and conservation of what has been acquired.[148] He has not made as much of this classification as, in my opinion, he might have done. In fact, the ethnic groups of the earth only differ among themselves from the social point of view by the _degree_ of culture--its essence being always and everywhere the same: pursuit of more and more easy means of satisfying wants and desires. Now, if the form assumed by this species of activity, in a word, if _production_, subject to the influence of climate, geographical position, etc., is the basis of all social development, as Grosse has so well shown,[149] the nature and evolution of the needs and desires themselves depend up to a certain point on the “temperament” of the race, which must likewise be taken into consideration. The nature and amount of psychic force in any given society, the evolution of which is effected by its mode of production, may in its turn, having attained a certain degree of development, re-act on the economic state, and modify it. We see nothing like this in the animal communities. Bees and ants arrange their hives and manage the affairs of their community to-day as they did a thousand insect-generations ago. It is very probable that race has something to do with psychic force, but up to the present time the fact has not been scientifically demonstrated. However that may be, in order to form a correct opinion as to the degree of civilisation of any people, we should have to take into consideration not only its material culture, but also its _état d’âme_, its psychology, to realise the psychical resources which it has at its command. Thus certain peoples (Australians, Bushmen), though at the bottom of the scale as regards material culture, are nevertheless well endowed from the artistic point of view; in the same way the Polynesians of a hundred years ago, who were inferior in knowledge of pottery and metallurgy to the Negroes, were superior to them in general intelligence and the richness of their mythology.

But progress is only possible if, side by side with individual power of initiating change, there exists in the social aggregate what may be called the power of conservation. There may be produced among savage peoples, as Ratzel[150] has so well pointed out, persons of exceptional natural talent, men of genius; but the activity of these will almost always be sterile. Even if they succeed in ameliorating the material condition, in raising the moral or intellectual level of the members of their tribe or of their class, the result of their activity has only an ephemeral existence, their efforts are not continued, and after their death, for want of the conservative power, everything falls back into the primitive condition. The secret of civilisation lies not so much in efforts of isolated individuals as in accumulation of these efforts, in the transmission from one generation to another of the acquired result, of a sum-total of knowledge which enables each generation to go further without beginning everything over again _ab ovo_. In this way progress is unlimited by the very conditions of its origin, and civilisation is only the sum of all the acquisitions of the human mind at any given period.

The conservative and transmittive power become really established in a society only when the means of communicating thought are sufficiently developed, when language has taken a definite form, and an easy method is devised of fixing it by conventional signs more or less indelible and transmissible to future generations. Thus, to estimate different states of civilisation we must have recourse to linguistic characters, understanding by such everything which concerns the means of communicating ideas in time and space--that is to say, spoken or mimetic language and its graphic representation. But before passing rapidly in review the linguistic characters, I owe the reader a few words of explanation of the terms which I am about to use in designating “states of civilisation.”

In these latter days a classification of these states nearly in accordance with the desiderata which were formulated at the beginning of this chapter has been proposed by Vierkandt.[151] This classification takes material culture into account, but the primordial division which is adopted in it, between peoples in a state of nature (or better, uncivilised) and civilised peoples, is based on the development of certain psychical traits denoting a greater or less development of individuality, of the spirit of free investigation, etc. Savage peoples, without any true civilisation, are divided in this classification into semi-civilised and uncivilised properly so-called, with sub-divisions into nomads and tillers of the soil for the former, and hunters and wanderers for the latter.

Admitting the criterion of the existence or non-existence of writing and the relative value of the two elements of progress mentioned above, I arrive at a classification of “states of civilisation” which recalls somewhat that of Vierkandt, but which differs from it on several points. It may be summarised as follows:--

(1) _Savage peoples_, progressing exceedingly slowly, without writing, sometimes possessing a pictographic method; living in little groups of some hundreds or thousands of individuals. They are divided into two categories: _hunters_[152] (examples: Bushmen, Australians, Fuegians) and _tillers of the soil_ (examples: Indians of North America, Melanesians, the majority of Negroes).

(2) _Semi-civilised peoples_, making an appreciable but slow progress, in which the conservative power predominates, forming authoritative societies or states of several thousands or millions of individuals; having an ideographic or phonetic writing, but a rudimentary literature. They are divided likewise into two categories: _tillers of the soil_ (examples: Chinese, Siamese, Abyssinians, Malays, Ancient Egyptians, and Peruvians) and _nomads_ (examples: Mongols, Arabs).

(3) _Civilised peoples_, making rapid progress, in which the initiating and innovating power predominates, forming states based on individual liberty, and consisting of several millions of individuals; having a phonetic writing and a developed literature. Their economic state is especially characterised by _industrialism_ and _cosmopolitan commercialism_ (examples: the majority of the peoples of Europe and North America).

Having said this much, we shall begin the study of ethnic characters with those which we may consider the indispensable condition of all associability, that is to say the linguistic characters.

I.--LINGUISTIC CHARACTERS.

Without pursuing the inquiry whether language is born of inarticulate cries, of onomatopæias or otherwise, whether it has a single or a multiple origin, we may content ourselves with stating the fact, that language does not constitute the only means by which men may understand each other and communicate ideas. There are several others. They may be arranged in three groups:--means of communicating near at hand: gestures and words; means of communicating at a relatively remote distance: various signals; means of communicating at any distance and time whatever: writing.

_Gestures._--Many gestures are natural and common to all men. All who have had to ask for anything to eat or drink in a foreign country without knowing the language, must have appreciated this means of international communication. However, the same gestures do not always and everywhere signify the same thing. Let us take, for example, the simplest ideas, negation and affirmation. In Central and Northern Europe these ideas are expressed, as every one knows, by a bending of the head forward and by lateral movements of the head. But there are few exotic peoples (Andamanese, Ainus, certain Hindus) who make use of the same gestures. Most of them, on the contrary, affirm by shaking the head laterally (Arabs, Botocudos, certain Negroes) and deny by raising it; most frequently this latter gesture is accompanied by an uplifting of the eyebrows (Abyssinians) or a particular smacking of the tongue (Syro-Arabs, Naya-Kurumbas, etc.). The natives of the Admiralty Islands express negation by a tap on the nose.[153] In Italy and generally in Mediterranean Europe, the signs of negation, with many other feelings besides, are expressed by gestures of the hands; thus to say “no,” the hand is moved sharply before the breast, the fingers being closed except the forefinger, which is held up vertically. Perhaps the practice of carrying burdens on the head, thus preventing the movements of this part of the body, has had something to do with the abundant development of gestures with the arms by which the European of the south may be recognised. An almost analogous sign, but consisting in a slow movement outward and downward, signifies “yes” among the Indians of North America. These last have pushed to the utmost limits the use of the language of gesture. G. Mallery has collected the treasures of this language, which is being lost to-day, and has drawn up a vocabulary of it.[154] At the period when this language flourished, the Indians were able to express by gestures not only common and proper nouns, but also verbs, pronouns, particles, etc.; they made elaborate speeches by combining the gestures of the body, the head, and the arms. They introduced abbreviations exactly as that is done in pictographic writing. Here is an example of how a Dakota Indian (Fig. 26) says by means of gestures, _I am going home_: he brings his hand with the forefinger stretched out towards his breast (_I_), then extends it forward and outward as high as the shoulder (_am going_), and, closing the fist, he lets it drop abruptly (_home_). It is supposed that extreme diversity of dialects has been the chief cause of the development of this strange sign-language; it would serve as a bond between tribes which could not converse with one another.

_Speech._--Setting aside the almost unique example of the North American Indians, gestures are generally only the auxiliaries of _speech_. The latter, which is the exclusive appanage of the genus _Homo_, while it is formed of a somewhat limited number of articulate sounds, nevertheless presents such a mass of varied combinations of these sounds that at first one would expect to be lost in the multitude of languages, dialects, idioms, vernacular forms, etc. Fortunately, linguists have been able to establish the fact that, in spite of their apparent diversity, dialects are capable of being grouped into languages, and the latter into linguistic families, which, in their turn, have been reduced, according to their morphological structure, to three principal groups: _monosyllabic_ or isolating languages, _agglutinative_ languages, and _inflectional_ languages.

In the _monosyllabic languages_ all the words are _roots_, there are neither suffixes nor prefixes nor any modification of the words, and their relation in a proposition is only given by the respective places which they occupy in it. Thus in the Chinese language the word _ta_ may signify “great, greatness, greatly, to enlarge,” according to its position in the phrase. The grammar is entirely a matter of syntax. Homophonous words of various signification abound in it, and in speech are only distinguished by the way in which they are pronounced, by the _tones_, high, low, rising, falling, interrogatory, etc.

In _agglutinative languages_ the words are formed of several elements, adhering, agglutinated together, of which one only possesses its own peculiar value, the others being coupled with it to define it, and having an entirely relative signification. The first of these elements is the root of the word, whilst the others are only obsolete roots, having lost their own signification, and are reduced to the rank of determinative particles or _affixes_ with a definite meaning. The affixes may be placed before the root (as in the Bantu languages), and then they bear the name of prefixes, or at the end (as in Turkish and Mongolian), and then they are called suffixes. Thus the suffix _lar_ or _liar_ in Turkish gives the signification of the plural of the word to which it is joined (ex. _arkan_, the rope; _arkanlar_, the ropes); the suffix _tchi_ designates the person concerned with something, etc., for instance, _arkantchi_, rope-maker; the suffix _ly_ indicates possession (ex. _arkanly_, with a cord, attached). Other suffixes, _la_, _lyk_, denote action, quality (_arkanla_, to attach with a cord; _arkanlyk_, the best kind of cord).[155]

Among the agglutinative languages we distinguish a special group called _polysynthetic_ or _incorporating languages_; this group is formed exclusively of American idioms. It is characterised by the phenomenon of incorporation, by syncope or by ellipsis, of nouns to the verb, so as to form but one word of the whole proposition; for instance, in Algonkin, the phrase-word _nadholiniu_, “bring us the canoe,” is formed of the elided words _naten_ bring, _amochol_ canoe, _i_ euphonic, and _niu_ to us. A similar incorporation takes place when in Italian they say, for instance, _dicendo-ci-lo_, “in telling it to us.”

The _inflectional languages_ differ from the agglutinative to this extent, that the root may modify its form to express its relations with another root. But this change is not indispensable; sometimes the inflection may be attained by the modification of prefix or suffix. Thus, in Hebrew, the root _mlch_ gives, when modified, _malach_ he reigned, _malchu_ they reigned, _melechu_ the king, _melachim_ kings, etc.

With the exception of the Chinese, the peoples of Indo-China, and the Thibetans, who speak monosyllabic languages, and also the Indo-Europeans and the Semito-Hamites, who use inflectional languages, all the rest of mankind belongs, by its mode of speech, to the division of agglutinative language. It must not be thought, however, that the difference is very marked in the three categories which I have just mentioned. We have already seen, for example, that the inflectional languages, like Italian, may have agglutinative forms; the Arab, the Frenchman, the Provençal have also recourse occasionally to agglutination; on the other hand, most of the isolating languages of Indo-China and Thibet exhibit several agglutinative characteristics, and even in Chinese, that pre-eminently monosyllabic language, there may be distinguished “_full_” _roots_ having their signification, and “_empty_” _roots_ playing the part of affixes.

It was thought until quite recently that originally all the languages of the earth were monosyllabic, that by a process of evolution they became transformed into agglutinative languages, passing thence into the final and most perfect form, the inflectional. But the immense disproportion between the number of peoples speaking the agglutinative languages and that of the other two categories; the presence of the agglutinative forms in monosyllabic languages; the unequivocal tendency of several inflected languages, like English, towards monosyllabism; lastly, the recent researches of Terrien de Lacouperie into the ancient pronunciation of Thibetan and Chinese words, have appreciably shaken this belief: one is rather led to see in agglutination the most primitive form of language. From it would be derived monosyllabism, polysyntheticism, and inflection; the two latter forms would tend in their turn towards monosyllabism.[156] I shall mention with regard to each of the principal ethnic groups, the peculiarities of the languages which they speak, and in Chapter VIII. I shall say a few words about linguistic classifications and the relation between “peoples” and “languages.” For the moment it is enough to point out that besides morphological structure, there are other characters: vocabulary, grammatical and phonetic forms, which enable us to group the allied idioms into linguistic families. Let me add that side by side with the thousands of languages and principal dialects distributed among the populations of the earth, there exist _jargons_, that is to say, semi-artificial languages, originating especially in the necessities of commerce.[157]

Let us not forget either that the different sexes and certain castes or classes, especially of sorcerers and priests, have often a special language, sacred or otherwise, but always unknown to persons of the other sex or of other castes, and kept secret. Language varies also among certain peoples (for example, among the Javanese) according as a superior speaks to an inferior, or _vice versâ_.

_Signals._--To communicate at a distance relatively remote, all peoples make use of optic or acoustic signals. _Optic signals_ are at first amplified gestures; thus the various tribes of Red Indians recognised each other at a distance by making conventional signs with the arms and the body. An arm raised high with two fingers uplifted and the others closed, signified “Who are you?” etc. Signals by means of lighted fires, to announce the tidings of a beast killed, the approach of the enemy, etc., still remain in use among the Indians of America, not only in the north, but also in the south of the continent as far as Cape Horn. Signalling by means of objects visible from afar, of a more complicated kind, is in everyday use even among civilised peoples, forming the basis of optic telegraphy; and there exists for sailors of all nations a truly international language, by means of flags of different colours, the code and the dictionary of which are found on board of every ship bound on a long voyage.

Among _acoustic signals_, apart from conventional cries and sounds of instruments, we must note two kinds of language of a quite special character. There is, firstly, the _whistle language_, which by means of whistles more or less loud, succeeding in a certain order and produced simply by the mouth, sometimes by introducing into it two fingers, enables a conversation to be held at a distance.

This language has attained a high degree of perfection in the Canary Islands,[158] but is also known in other parts of the globe (among the Berbers of Tunis, for instance). This language, however, must not be confounded with conventional signals, always the same, given by the whistle for commands in the navy, for example. The other mode of communicating at a distance, a highly developed one, is the _drum language_ of the Dualas and other Bantu Negroes of the Cameroons, the Gallas, the Papuans, etc. With simply a drum they succeed, by varying the number and the order of the beats, in forming a veritable language of two hundred to three hundred words, very complicated and difficult to learn.[159]

_Writing._--The idea of communicating his thought graphically, in time and in space, to his fellow, must have come to man from the origin of civilisation; but through what stages must it have passed before becoming embodied in a system at once so simple and ingenious as that of alphabetic writing! Before inventing phonetic writing in general, man must have passed through the period of ideographic writing, and this is already an advance on another and prior method of representing and communicating thought, a method much more simple, which may be called in a general way _the use of symbolic objects and mnemonic marks_. As typical of this use of symbolic objects we may mention the messages of the Malays of Sumatra, which are formed of packets containing different objects: small quantities of salt, pepper, betel, etc., having respectively the signification of love, hate, jealousy, etc. According to the quantity and arrangement of the objects in the packet the message serves to express such or such a feeling. This system attains its perfection in the _Wampums_ of the Red Indians. These are either chaplets of beads of different colours fashioned from shells (Fig. 83, 7), also used as money, or embroideries made with the same beads on long ribbons forming kinds of belts, which have the value of diplomatic documents to the Indians.[160] The staff-messages in use among the Melanesians, the Niam-Niams, the Ashantis, and the peasants of Lusatia and Silesia, etc., have the same signification. This is often a sort of passport or a summons; the form of the staff, as well as the particular marks which it bears, are so many signs to make known the commands of the chief, or of the mayor, the order of the day for the assembly, etc.

The notches which these staffs sometimes bear form a connecting link with the mnemonic marks which the less civilised peoples have the habit of making on trees, on bits of bark, or pieces of wood. It is the first step towards writing properly so called. Little horn tablets bearing notches have been found in the sepulchral caverns of the quaternary period at Aurignac (Dordogne). Even still the Eskimo, the Yakuts, the Ostiaks, the Macusis of Guiana, the Negroes of the west coast of Africa, the Laotians, the Melanesians, the Micronesians, commonly make use of them to keep their accounts, or note simple facts; they even continue in use among Europeans, as a survival of the old practice under the form of “baker’s tallies,” or words to denote letters (_Buchstabe_, little staff of “beechwood,” in German), etc. Here, for instance, is the translation of what was conveyed by a notched tablet found by Harmand in a Laotian village attacked by a cholera epidemic (Fig. 27): Twelve days from now (12 notches to the right) every man who shall venture to penetrate into our enclosure will remain a prisoner, or pay us four buffaloes (4 notches lower down) or twelve ticals (pieces of money) as ransom (12 notches). On the other side, but doubtful, is the number of men (8), women (9), and children (11) of the village.[161]

An analogous mnemotechnical object is the _knotted cord_, which is met with among a great number of peoples, Ostiaks, Angola and Loango Negroes, Malagasi, Alfurus of the Celebes, etc. According to the number and colour of the cords, and the number of the knots which they bear, events past or to come are brought to mind, accounts of a bartering transaction kept, etc. Among the Micronesians of the Pelew Islands, when two individuals make an appointment with one another for a certain date, each makes on a cord as many knots as there remain days to run. Undoing a knot each day and coming to the last knot at the date of the appointment, they of necessity recall it. According to Chinese tradition, the first inhabitants of the banks of the Hoang-ho, before the invention of writing properly so called, also made use of little cords knotted to notched staffs as mnemonic instruments. Besides, is not our practice of tying a knot in our handkerchief to remember something a simple survival of these customs? The method of expressing certain events and certain ideas by means of knots made in different ways and variously arranged has been carried to the last degree of perfection in the case of the _quipus_ of the ancient Peruvians. The _quipus_ are cord rings to which are attached various little cords of different colours. On each of these little cords are found two or more knots variously formed. The Peruvian and Bolivian shepherds again make use of similar _quipus_, but much less complicated, to keep accounts. Let us also note in the same order of ideas the different marks of ownership, of family relationship, of tribeship (the _Totems_ of the Red Indians, the _Tamgas_ of the Kirghiz, etc.), which it is the custom to put on weapons, dwellings, animals, and even the bodies of the men (New Zealand). Hence are derived trade-marks and armorial bearings.

Lastly, are not the pebbles bearing strokes printed in red, the number of which varies from one to nine, and several other signs (Fig. 28), found by M. Piette[162] in the palæolithic stations of the south of France, at Mas-d’Azil (Ariège), also mnemonic objects? It has been asserted that they were playing dice, but the size of the pebbles is against this view.

The methods which I have just mentioned are the precursors of true writing. This really only begins with drawings expressing a sequence of ideas, with _pictography_. Imperfect attempts at pictography are found in the drawings of the Melanesians, representing different events of their life; in certain rock-pictures of the Bushmen (Fig. 64) and Australians. But already among the Eskimo, side by side with the simple representation of objects, certain figures are seen to appear denoting action or relations between objects: this is the beginning of ideographic writing. Here, for example, is the gist of a hunting story engraved by an Eskimo of Alaska on an ivory whip (Fig. 29). The first figure (1) represents the story-teller himself, his right hand making the gesture which indicates “I,” and his left, turned in the direction in which he is going, means “go.” Continuing our translation, we read the subsequent figures as follows:--(2) “in a boat” (paddle raised); (3) “sleep” (hand on the head) “_one_ night” (the left hand shows a finger); (4) “(on) an island with a hut in the middle” (the little point); (5) “I going (farther);” (6) “(arrive at) an (other) isle inhabited” (without a point); (7) “spend (there) _two_ nights;” (8) “hunt with harpoon;” (9) “a seal;” (10) “hunt with bow;” (11) “return in canoe with another person” (_two_ oars directed _backward_); (12) “(to) the hut of the encampment.” As is evident, this ideography bears a relation to the language of gesture. It might be thus assumed _a priori_ that it is highly developed among the Indians of North America, and as a matter of fact it is. The number of pictographs on tablets of wood, bits of bark, skins (often on those forming the tent), is enormous in every tribe. These are messages, hunting stories, songs, veritable annals embracing cycles of seventy, a hundred and more years (the latter bear the picturesque name of “winter tales”).[163] We may judge of the degree of development of this art among the Indians by the following example of a petition (Fig. 30) presented in 1849 to the President of the United States by the Chippeway chiefs asking for the possession of certain small lakes (8) situated in the neighbourhood of Lake Superior (10), towards which leads a certain road (11). The petition is painted in symbolic colours (blue for water, white for the road, etc.) on a piece of bark. Figure 1 represents the principal petitioning chief, the totem of whose clan is an emblematic and ancestral animal (see Chapter VII.), the _crane_; the animals which follow are the totems of his co-petitioners. Their eyes are all connected with his to express unity of view (6), their hearts with his to express unity of feeling. The eye of the crane, symbol of the principal chief, is moreover the point of departure of two lines: one directed towards the President (claim) and the other towards the lakes (object of claim). In the other pictographs the symbolism is carried yet further by the reproduction either of parts of the object for the object itself (head or footmarks for the whole animal, etc.), or by conventional objects for very complicated ideas. Thus the Dakotas indicate “a fight” by the simple drawing of two arrows directed against each other (Fig. 31, 1); the Ojibways represent morning by the rising sun (2), “nothing” by the gesture of a man stretching out his arms despairingly (3), and “to eat” by the gesture of the hand carried to the mouth (4), exactly as the ancient Mexicans and Egyptians have drawn it in their hieroglyphics, or again, the natives of Easter Island (Fig. 31, 5) in their rude attempt at ideographic writing on their “speech tablets.”[164] The writing of these tablets is but a series of mnemonic signs which succeed each other in _boustrophedon_ arrangement (see p. 142), being used for sacred and profane songs, or for magical rites.

From a similar pictographic method is derived the figurative writing in hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Mexicans of the table-land of Anahuoc and their neighbours the Mayas of the peninsula of Yucatan. This mode of writing is a step in advance; certain figures have the phonetic value of the first syllable of the word which they represent. It is the rebus or “iconomatic” system, as Brinton calls it. Thus the first words of the Lord’s Prayer are represented in the Mexican code by the figures of a flag (Fig. 32) (_pantli_), a stone (_tetl_), the fruit of the Indian fig (_nochtli_), and another stone (_tetl_), the first syllables of which form pa-te-noch-te (Pater-noster).[165] The drawings not representing more than sounds, in this species of writing there is a tendency to simplify them, and thus we see the primitive figure being transformed into a conventional sign representing a sound, a syllable. This transformation may be traced in the Egyptian hieroglyphics as well as in the cuneiform writing of the ancient Assyrians. In Chinese writing the same phenomenon has taken place, as is evident from Fig. 33, which represents the ancient hieroglyphics side by side with the modern--morning, 1; the moon, 2; a mountain, 3; tree, 4; dog, 5; horse, 6; man, 7. These characters, though simplified, have kept their first signification corresponding to the figure. The association of these figures with the purely phonetic signs constitutes one of the principal resources of Chinese writing, which enables homophonic words,[166] etc., to be distinguished.

Chinese characters have been adopted by only one people with an agglutinative language, the Japanese, who along with these characters (_Mana_) use another method of writing (_Kana_), which is syllabic. The Egyptians, speaking an inflectional language, had, on the contrary, to abandon hieroglyphic writing at an early period in order to pass on to syllabic writing and running characters (hieratic and demotic). It is supposed that from the Egyptian (hieroglyphic and hieratic) writing was derived the alphabet styled the Phœnician, the prototype of most of the alphabets of the world.[167]

The _direction_ of the lines in writing is especially determined by the nature of the materials written upon. As long as it is a question of tracing on rocks, monuments, etc., there is no dominant direction, and the signs are disposed, as in the pictograph, at hazard, in any direction whatever. Even the ancient Greeks wrote sometimes from right to left, sometimes from left to right, sometimes in “boustrophedon”--that is to say, alternately, in both directions, as oxen walk during ploughing.

But from the time people began to write on palm leaves, on bits of bark, on tablets, papyrus, paper, it has been found necessary to choose a uniform direction.

The brush of the Chinese determined the direction downwards and from right to left, as for painting. The ancient Syriac _estranghelo_ was also written in the same way, but from left to right; this direction still persists in Mongol writing, which is derived from it, while Arabic had transformed it into horizontal writing from right to left. And to-day certain peoples, for instance the Somalis, yet write Arabic downwards, and read it from right to left, turning over the leaf at 90°. Writing from right to left may have been favoured by the sacred custom of the Arabs placing themselves with their face to the east, the light coming from the right; besides, contrary to what takes place with us, in Arabic writing the paper must be made to move from left to right with the left hand, while the right hand, which writes, remains motionless.[168]

The propagation of the different methods of ancient and modern writing and their adoption by different peoples, are closely bound up with the religion and progress in civilisation of these peoples. Thus the Mussulman world has adopted the Arabic writing; the Buddhists of the north, without distinction of race, hold in great esteem the sacred Thibetan characters, whilst those of the south venerate the Pali writing. The Mongol and Manchu alphabets are remains of the Uighuro-Nestorian influence and of the Syriac writing in Central Asia, as the Javanese alphabet is the remains of the civilising domination of the Hindus in Java. With the expansion of European colonisation the characters of the Latin alphabet become more and more prevalent; in Europe even, they tend to relegate to the second place the other characters (gothic, cyrilic, etc.). At the same time, new modes of writing are coming to the front, the telegraphic alphabet, stenography, precursors of a writing of the future, universal, international, simple, and rapid.