PRINCIPLES OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. HI 



the "law of harmonic sequence of vowels." Varieties atid irregularities of 

 conjugation and decleusiou are almost wholly wanting in Scythian grammar. 



The rank of the Scythian languages in the general scale of human speech, 

 notwithstanding their euphonious structftre and great wealth of forms in certain 

 departments, is but an inferior one. Those of the western or European branch 

 are decidedly the noblest, and they diminish in value eastward, the Tungusic 

 being the poorest of all. 



There are those who would give the Scythian family a yet wider extension, 

 even making it include most of the other Asiatic tongues, with those of the 

 islands. Such sweeping classification, in the present state of our knowledge, 

 has no scientific value, and is even opposed to the plainest evidences of lin- 

 guistic structure and material. One group, that of the Tamulic or Dravidian 

 dialects of Southern India, is most confidently, and with most plausibility, claimed 

 as Scythian, and may probably yet be proved such. 



China and Farther India are occupied by races whose languages form a sin- 

 gle class. Their distinction is that they are monosyllabic ; they have never 

 grown out of that original stage in which, as we have seen, Indo-European 

 speech also had its beginning. Their words are still roots, of indeterminate 

 logical form ; they are made parts of speech only by the consenting apprehen- 

 sion of speaker and hearer, guided by their order and by the general require 

 ments of the sense. But while the difi'erent languages of the class agree in 

 general morphological character, they show great diversity in material, and the 

 nature and degree of their relationship is very obscure. The' Chinese is infi- 

 nitely the most important among them. Its abundant literature goes back even 

 into the second thousand years before Christ. It has only about 450 different 

 phonetic combinations in its vocabulary ; which, however, by change in the 

 tone of utterance, are made into rather more than twice that number of distinct 

 words. Yet this scanty apparatus, by the power Avhich the mind has over its 

 instrument, has been the means of expression of far higher, profounder, and 

 more varied thought, than the majority of highly organized dialects spoken* 

 among men. China has been the mother of culture to the races lying south, 

 east, and west of her terrilory : the rest of the world she has affected mainly 

 through the products of h*' ingenuity and industry. 



Those who speak the Malay-Polynesian languages fill all the islands, from 

 the coast of Asia southward and eastward, from Madagascar to the Sandwich 

 group, from New Zealand to Formosa. Only the present spoken dialects are 

 known, and most of those but very imperfectly, s(» that their groupings and 

 degrees of relationship are little understood : there may prove t6 be more than 

 one distinct family among them. Their phonetic form is of the simplest kind. 

 Their roots are prevailingly dissyllabic in form, and of nominal rather than ver- 

 bal meaning. Reduplication is a common mode of their development ; the rest 

 is accomplished more by prefixes than suffixes. Anything that can properly 

 be called a verbal form is hardly to be found in most of the dialects ; mood, 

 tense, number, gender, case, are wanting. 



The oldest dated monuments of ancient culture, the oldest written records, 

 are found in the valley of the Nile. The earliest form of Egyptian speech is 

 preserved on tables of stone and rolls of papyrus held by dead hands ; a later, 

 the Coptic, has a Christian literaft.ure of the first centuries after Christ, but the 

 Coptic also has been extinct now for more than two centuries. It was of the 

 simplest structure ; its monosyllabic roots had value as verbs and a5 nouns, 

 and only primary derivatives were formed from them ; nor were its suffixes, 

 for the most part, more closely attached than those of the Scythian family. 

 In some of its constructions it was as bald as the Chinese, and even more am- 

 biguous. It agrees with the Indo-European and Semitic languages in distin- 

 guishing gender in its forms ; no other human languages do this. There are 

 apparent signs of relationship between Egyptian and Semitic which lead many 



