126 



PHILOLOGY 



new ciicnmsijuiee. To immler is old, but to 



burke,' a vi-rl ined froen a once famous 



murderer, gives the mlded sense of -mothering mid 

 hii-liing up; mill tin- wurd seems likely in siinhe, 

 though with it origin forgotten. To 'boycott' 

 expreoooi a slightly new form of exclusive dealing, 

 ami a* yet it- history i- rememliered. 



ThU -liu'bt -ketch may -ullice to Jirow gome 

 light on tin- nature of language. It i- a work of 

 man. the product of man - mind and vocal organs, 

 jn-t as a -tatue nr a picture in tin- product of his 

 mind and handH. Hut it differs frmii them in some 

 iiii|Hirtnnt respecte. First, it i not a tinJHlieil pro- 

 dnrt, |HTiiiuiient and unchangeable. It is subject 

 to incessant change, involuntary on its physical 

 -i'li-. partly voluntary on the mental Hide. It 



i- it constant tliix. a W ing,' not a 'being, 'as 



Plato mi^ht have put it : tlii- change is olisciired 

 for literary languages ; it l>ecome clear at once to 

 any one who will take the pains of looking at the 

 de\i.|i.pmcnt of English from Chaucer's day tu 

 ours. Old forms die out, and new ones take their 

 place (nee GRAMMAR). Old families of winds 

 cease to lie used : new ones take their place or are 

 produced under new needs e.g. the Boycott family 



Ixiycotted, boycotting, boycotter, boycottee 

 (extinct by this time), &c., all formed on the 

 analogy of the words of other older families. A 

 second point of difference is that language is not 

 an end in itself an a picture is : it exists fur an end, 

 communication between man and man. So long as 

 this is achieved the form which language takes is mi 

 material : it may change so long as it is intelligible. 

 No doubt language once existent can serve other 

 ends more or less connected with the tirst; but 

 that communication was the first is undeniable. 



Hut language is not the only means by which 

 communication can be made. Animals, which 

 have no language, certainly communicate. Man 

 can communicate by gestures, by pictures whether 

 rude scratches mode on the ground with a stick 

 or the more polished drawings which developed 

 into Egyptian hieroglyphics nr, lastly, by cries 

 common to man and to beasts, the natural exprcs 

 sums of joy, fear, |iaiu, iVc. Hut such cries are 

 not even the elements of language till they are 

 eiin-ciously reproduced to express the feeling even 

 when the stimulating cause max IN- absent. Lan- 

 guage itxelf arise- |,,.n t wu men connect the same 



feeling with the sa expression of it, and so can 



communicate that \,, others. There is no reason 

 to believe that any brute has ever attained even 

 to the lirst ol these last two steps. Their progress 

 in arrested. A dog may bark to express delight, 

 or to have a door opened to him, but he does no 

 more than any dog could do 2000 years ago. Man 

 can develop. It is not permissible, however, to 



lay down that the possession of s| -h i- the barrier 



between man and the brute, and to settle thereby 

 the question of the origin of man S|icech may be 



tl lcar differentia now. Itul it is at least con 



oeivable that there may have been lost type- 

 between man and the common progenitor of man 

 and the anthropoid ape with intermediate K t 

 of -(M-ecli development. It is another matter to 

 maintain that such development could have been 

 produced by natural selection alone (see Wallace. 

 Darirniixm, p. 4411, ff.). 



The different languages of the world can ! 

 clansiliisl according to their principle of format ion : 

 and within the classes so reached different families 

 of languages may be distinguished in which a 

 common origin can be proved for the different 

 language* of each family. Only the briefest 

 ketch can be attempted here. We find two 

 main chunen : I. Those languages which show no 

 rigiM (or hardly any signs) of inflection (Dee GRAM- 

 MAB) e.g. in which the plural of 'man' in ex- 



pressed not by vowel-change (as our 'men') nor 

 by an added suflix (as in Latin ' homin rv ') which 

 has no independent value, but by such a com 

 bination a- our ' man-kind,' where each part can 

 lie used independently. Such languages are the 

 Chim-so, the Tibetan, and those of Annam and 

 the BdgbboniilUjI states ; they are commonly called 

 Isolating. II. Those which possess some degree of 

 tied ion i.e. elements which have lost their inde- 

 pendent meaning, and are mere grammatical 

 machinery to make nouns, as /</ in 'pa-ter;' or 

 cases of nouns, as .< in 'father-s;' or persons of 

 verbs, a- .v or Hi in 'gives' or 'givelh.' Sucli 

 elements, however, are only the worn out rem- 

 nants of words coin[Kiunded with othei words 

 (see (iRAMMAlt); and the languages of this type 

 may vary very much according to the degree 



of obscuration in the characU-r of the c pound. 



Some, like the Mongolian, the Finnish, the Hun- 

 garian, the Turkish, make very long compounds, vet 

 the original elements, though not all capable of 

 separate use, remain quite distinct and recognisable 

 in each word. These languages used to lie called 



'agglutinative,' as dillerenl from the s] ially 



'inflectional ' Sanskrit, Latin, \c. : but even these 

 show signs of the phonetic change which produced 

 'inflections.' The North American languages in- 

 corporate different elements which are each barely 

 recognisable in the compound ; the principle of 

 composition is not really different. The I>rn\idinn 

 family of languages " in South India Tamil, 

 Telugii, Ac. is also of the agglutinative sort. 

 The languages of the purely inflectional type i.e. 

 those where the different elements of the original 

 compound are so firmly welded together as to lie 

 frequently indistinguishable are (I.) the Semitic 

 family, comprising Hebrew-ami theclosely connected 

 I'liiciiician ; Aiamaic. spoken in Mesopotamia, 

 Syria, and in later days in Palestine ; Arabic ; and 

 some Abyssinian languages. This family is remark- 

 able liecause of its triliteral roots i.e. expressions of 

 the several ideas by three unchanging consonant*, 

 the relation of the various derived forms of the 

 same idea lieing expressed by vowel change. ( II. i 

 The Indo -Germanic or Aryan family. The liist 

 term is most likely to survive; it denotes the 

 extreme limits of the area over which the Ian 

 guoges spread from Sanskrit India to Germanic 

 (or Teutonic) Iceland. The term Aryan has not 

 been adopted much outside of England. The chief 

 languages of this family are (1) Sanskrit, of which 

 the oiliest remains arc the Vedic hymns, with the 

 cognate Old Persian and /end, the language of the 

 Axesta. (2) Armenian, as yet imperfectly known. 



with records dating fr the .Mb century A.I). (3) 



Greek, with its inn oils dialects. (4') Albanian, 



proved to lulling to this family by I'.opp. and lately 

 investigated by G. Meyer and others, but jiossessing 

 no ancient records. (6) Italic, including Latin, 

 and the I'mbrian and Oxcnn dialects: from these 

 are descended the modern (so-called) Homalice Ian 

 guages the Italian, Spanish, Portugne-c. French, 

 Wallachian, and the speech of certain Alpine ili-- 

 tiicts (Grisons, \-c.). (6) Celtic, including the 

 ancient s|>eeoh of Gaul, with its surviving remnant 

 the Itos Mreton ; the now extinct Cornish ; the 

 Welsh, Mtill likely to survive ; the Erse of Ireland ; 

 the (iaelic of the Highlands of Scotland (the 

 records of these three date from almt the sib 

 century); and the Manx. (7) The Teutonic, now 



i e commonly called Germanic, comprising 



Gothic, the language into which Ullilas tran- 

 lated the Gos|icls in the 4th century A.D. ; the 

 Scandinavian, of which a very old form is isolated 

 in Iceland, more modern forms in Norway. Hen 

 mark, and Sweden ; the Anglo-Saxon : ('he Old 

 Frisian : the < >ld Saxon of the ' Heliand,' the parent 

 of the Platt-Deutsch languages of North Germany ; 



