CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



Mohammedan population of the coasts, and which 

 have even penetrated deep into the interior. How 

 far the Berber dialects are of Semitic character, 

 is a disputed question ; and the same is the case 

 with the language of the Gallas in Abyssinia. 

 Little has as yet been done in investigating and 

 classifying the native Agglutinate languages of 

 Africa, which have been designated by the com- 

 mon name of Hamitic. The ancient Egyptian, 

 from which the modern Coptic is derived, would 

 seem never to have got beyond the isolating 

 stage. Some of the languages adjoining Egypt 

 are thought to be allied to the Coptic. The 

 Negro languages, properly so called, of the 

 Sudan, and of the west coast from the Senegal 

 to the Niger, are exceedingly numerous and 

 widely diverse. The languages to the south of 

 the equator are markedly different from those to 

 the north. They fall, according to some, into two 

 great families, the Congo family on the west, and 

 the Kafir family on the east. The Hottentot 

 language is distinct from both. A valuable con- 

 tribution to the study of part of the field is to 

 be found in B leek's Comparative Grammar of 

 the South African Languages (1862). 6. The 

 Languages of the American Indians. The native 

 languages of the New World are numbered by 

 many hundreds, all differing totally in their vocab- 

 ulary, but still agreeing in the peculiar gram- 

 matical structure which has given the name of 

 Incorporative. Their area is fast contracting, 

 and they seem destined to disappear. 7. The 

 Basque or Euscara. 



III. Inflectional. This order consists of two 

 families, the Aryan and the Semitic, so distinct in 

 their grammatical framework that it is impossible 

 to imagine a language of the one family derived 

 from one of the other. It is the peoples speak- 

 ing these languages that have been the leaders 

 of civilisation within the historic period (see pp. 

 25-28). 



ARE ALL LANGUAGES SPRUNG FROM ONE? 



Connected with these radical differences of type, 

 is one of the higher and more speculative problems 

 of the science the question as to the common 

 origin of all languages. The inherent and appar- 

 ently ineffaceable difference of structure in the 

 three orders above described, as well as the 

 absence of all sure marks of genealogical affinity 

 even between the two families of the inflectional 

 type, the Aryan and the Semitic, are considered 

 by some as insuperable objections to the theory 

 of a common origin. But although it may be 

 fruitless to look for extensive identifications of the 

 roots and grammatical forms of the Aryan tongues, 

 even in the oldest forms to which we can trace 

 them, with those of the Semitic, still more with 

 Chinese or Turkish elements ; it seems rash and 

 unscientific to affirm that, going back to the radi- 

 cal stage, the development of all could not have 

 begun from a common stock of monosyllabic roots. 

 The wonderful transformations exhibited by lan- 

 guage in the course of its known history, seem 

 sufficient ground for maintaining the possibility of 

 a common origin. On the other hand, the nature 

 of the case forbids all hope of ever being able to 

 prove it ; for the coincidences that occur (e. g. 

 Chinese /, Tibetan pha, Lat. and Gr. fla-ter, Eng. 

 fa-tiler ; Chin, mu, Egyp. /, Lat. and Gr. ma- 

 so 



ter, Eng. z0-ther), even though they were much 

 more numerous than they are, might well arise 

 from the mind and vocal organs of man being 

 everywhere essentially the same. 



MIXTURES OF LANGUAGES AND RACES. 



On counting the words in one of our larger 

 English dictionaries, it is stated that about 13,000 

 are of Teutonic origin, while 29,000 can be traced 

 either mediately or immediately to Latin.* It 

 might seem from this that English ought to be 

 classed along with French, Italian, and Spanish, 

 as one of the Neo-Latin or Romanic tongues. 

 But if we take a page of an English book and 

 count the words as they occur, an overwhelming 

 majority will be found to be Teutonic. Thus 

 there are only three Latin words in the Lord's 

 Prayer. All the words of most frequent occur- 

 rence the articles, pronouns, prepositions, and 

 auxiliary verbs, together with the names of the 

 most familiar and essential conceptions, without 

 which there could be no communication are all, or 

 nearly all, from the Anglo-Saxon. Its grammati- 

 cal apparatus, too, is purely of the same origin. 

 From whatever source they may have come, when 

 once adopted into English, a noun forms its 

 plural in s, and its possessive in 's ; a verb has its 

 past tense and past participle in d; and an adjec- 

 tive is compared by er and est. The life-blood of 

 English is thus Teutonic, and this determines its 

 relationship. There is no such thing as a mixed 

 idiom. Whenever two languages come in conflict, 

 by the peoples speaking them being mixed, they 

 may exist distinct side by side for a time, but 

 they always end by one giving way to the other, 

 being either altogether extruded, or in part 

 absorbed and assimilated by the other. 



It is not always the tongue of the more numer- 

 ous people that carries the day. The Roman 

 armies and officials that conquered and ruled 

 Gaul, were few compared with the native inhab- 

 itants ; yet the subject Celts had in a few genera- 

 tions entirely given up their own tongue, and 

 taken to speaking Latin as they best could. 

 They felt the superiority of the Romans in culture, 

 and adopted their language as the most direct 

 expression and vehicle of that culture. It was 

 the same with the handful of Sanscrit-speaking 

 Aryans, who, unknown centuries before the 

 Christian era, migrated from Bactria into north- 

 ern Hindustan, and imbued the millions of its 

 previous inhabitants with their language and 

 religion. On the other hand, the Franks and 

 other Germanic tribes who subdued Gaul in the 

 5th century A.D. were at least as numerous as 

 the Roman conquerors had been ; but this time, 

 the language of the subject people, the Romanised 

 Gauls, was the cultured language ; it was, too, the 

 language of the new religion, to which the heathen 

 Germans soon submitted ; and thus the dominant 

 people dropped their own language, and adopted 

 that of their subjects, infusing into it, however, a 

 good many Teutonic words, still recognisable in 

 modern French (e.g. guerre = Eng. war, marche = 

 Goth, mark, a boundary). The disappearance of 



* Other enumerations make the proportion of the Teutonic ele- 

 ment greater than that stated in the text. In fact, if we set aside 

 the more strictly technical terras that occur only in books of science 

 and art, and look at the vocabulary of general literature, the 

 leu tonic words are even more numerous than those of Latin 

 origin. 



