104 HOEATIO HALE ON LANGUAGE 



lost ? How is it possible to siippose that the hundreds of barbarous tribes in America 

 and Africa, while losing all other arts of an earlier civilization, have preserved solely this 

 beautiful mechanism of a highly organized speech ? 



These considerations led to a change of opinion — a change which resulted in two 

 directly opposite views of the problem and its proper solution. One of these was pro- 

 posed by an eminent Franco-American scholar, who was the first to study the complex 

 American languages with philosophical acuteness, and to exhibit in a clear light their 

 peculiar characteristics. The other, which will be first considered, has in later years been 

 maintained by many writers, but by none with more force and eloquence than have been 

 displayed by a distinguished English author, whose works in other departments have 

 been justly admired and have delighted thousands of readers. In reference to the subject 

 now under consideration, he states that he had formerly held the view that the rich and 

 artistic structure of the languages of some barbarous nations implies an intellectual power 

 superior to what we now find in these nations, and that they therefore prove a condition pre- 

 viously exalted. " Further explanation," adds Dr. Farrar, " has entirely removed this belief." ' 

 He is now of opinion that " this apparent wealth of synonyms and grammatical forms is 

 chiefly due to the hopeless poverty of the poiver of abstraction, and is " the work of minds in- 

 capable of all subtle analyses." He adds: "Many of these vaunted languages {e.g., the 

 American and Polynesian) — these languages which have countless forms of conjugation, 

 and separate words for the miinutest shades of specific meaning — these holophrastic lan- 

 guages, with their "jewels fourteen syllables long " to express the commonest and most 

 familiar objects — so far from proving a once elevated condition of the people who speak 

 them, have not even yet arrived at the very simple abstraction required to express the 

 verb " to be," which Condillac assumed to be the earliest of invented verbs ! " We are 

 further told by the same author in another work " that " a savage may have a dozen verbs 

 for ' I am here,' ' I am well,' ' I am tall,' ' I am hungry,' etc., because he has no word for 

 ' am,' — and a dozen words for ' my head,' ' your head,' ' his head,' and almost any con- 

 ceivable person's head, because he finds a difficulty in realizing the mere conception of 

 any head apart from its owner." And we are assured that while these savages have an 

 endless number of expressions for particular varieties of objects and actions, they have no 

 general terms for a whole class of such objects or acts. 



The account which has been given in the foregoing pages of the languages spoken 

 by two races in the lowest stage of savagery will show how widely astray this ingenious 

 and eloquent writer has been in his facts. Both Athabascans and Australians make 

 abundant use of the substantive verb, and exhibit the power of abstraction in its fullest 

 force. The savage Australian has no difficulty in distinguishing a head from its owner, 

 and does it perhaps with more logical correctness of grammar than an Englishman. He 

 employs the possessive pronoun in its genitive case like a possessive noun. Walan is 

 head, and kore is man, the latter making in the genitive korekoba, man's ; emmoemba is the 

 genitive of the first personal pronoun ; so we have walan korekoba, man's head (head of 

 man), walan emmoemba, my head (head of me). Could the most analytic of "civilized 

 tongues " do better than this ? 



It is observable that in all the objections which are made, all barbarous tribes are con- 



' "Chapters on Language," by the Eev. Frederic W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S., chap. 4, p. 45, American edit. 

 '■* " Families of Speech," Lecture iv, p. 400. 



