394 



LANGUAGE AND EACE. 



What, then, is Language? It is the outward expression 

 of conscious thought, and equally the expression of will, by 

 means of sounds uttered by the organs of voice ; the soundsr^ 

 being arranged or articulated into groups called Sente-nces. 

 A sentence implies a mental judgment, a limitation of one 

 idea by another ; the ideas being often represented by 

 Words. If it be asked. What is a word? the only compre- 

 hensive definition is, "meaning combined with form." 



Language is based upon the sentence, not upon the isolated 

 word. Waitz truly said, " We do not think in words, but 

 in sentences ; hence we may assert that a living language 

 consists of sentences, not of words." It is the conception 

 of the sentence, therefore, wherein languages will resemble, 

 or differ from, one another. In Chinese the sentence is 

 summed up in a single word, and the mind has not yet 

 clearly marked off its several parts. This next stage has 

 been done in the group of languages called Turanian, but 

 the sentence is of the simplest character, each portion having 

 the same force. Only when we come to such languages as 

 are comprised in the Semitic and Aryan groups do we find 

 that the parts of the sentence are duly subordinated, and 

 that co-ordination of function is replaced by a fitting corre- 

 lation. Thus we get the three primary groups into which 

 languages have been arranged {see Table I.) — the Isolating, 

 the Agglutinate, and the Inflectional. Chinese is a good 

 example of the first, Turkish and Finnish of the second, 

 Arabic and German of the third. 



These classes, however, are not limited by any very rigid 

 bounds, for in different parts of the world there are tongues 

 which partake in a greater or less degree of the characters 

 of two of the groups. Thus, Japanese and Corean have 

 characters which place them on the borderland between the 

 Chinese and the Altaic group of Agglutinate tongues ; and, 



