520 



PHILOLOGY. 



guage extended themselves in various tribes, through 

 a very large extent of country. The learned baron W. 

 von Humboldt has shown, in an elaborate treatise, 

 that many proper names of places in what is now 

 Italy, are evidently of Basque origin ; and we have 

 no doubt, that further investigation will show numer- 

 ous derivations, like those from the word bi, in the 

 ancient and modern languages of the Italian penin- 

 sula, which may be traced to the idiom now spoken 

 in Uiscay. See the interesting dissertation entitled 

 Prilfung der Untersuchungen ilber die Urbewohner 

 Hispaniens, vermittelst der f'askischen Svrache, by 

 Wilhelm von Humboldt (Berlin, 1821.; 



We cannot take leave of this branch of our sub- 

 ject without mentioning a curious proof of the anti- 

 quity of the Basque language, which is given us by 

 the same writer, baron W. von Humboldt, in his 

 addenda to the second volume of the Mithridates, 

 published in the fourth part of that work which ap- 

 peared in 1817. It is an original song, or poem, in 

 that idiom, recording the five years' war in which 

 the Biscayans were engaged against the Romans, 

 who invaded their country under Octavianus Augus- 

 tus, at the end of which, after excessive sufferings, 

 they were not treated as a conquered nation, but 

 were received into the alliance of the Roman people. 

 The baron has given us a part of that poem in the 

 original, with a German translation, which we think 

 our readers will not dislike to see in an English 

 dress : 



1. Lelo is dead, Lelo is dead: Zara was the murderer of 

 Lelo. 



2. The strangers from Rome declared war against as ; and 

 Biscay set up her song of victory. 



3. On one side was Octavianus; on the other, Lecobidi, 

 the Biscayan. 



i. Master of the sea and of the strongholds, he surrounded 

 and besieged us. 



5. The dry plains were his, and so were the shady forests of 

 the mountains. 



(">. When we were posted in favourable spots, every one felt 

 himself strong and courageous. 



7. We are all brothers in arms, and have little fear : but, 

 oh 1 bread-basket, thou art sick. 



8. They cased themselves in heavy armour ; but the unarm- 

 ed body is light and quick in its motions. 



9. During five long years we were besieged ; we had no 

 rest by day or by night. 



10. If they murdered one of our men, they lost fifty of theirs. 



11. But though they were so numerous, and we only a small 

 Dand, we made, in the end, with them a treaty of alliance. 



It may be asked, perhaps, Who was this Lelo, whose 

 death is bewailed iu the first stanza of this poem, 

 and whose name is not afterwards mentioned ? 

 Tradition relates, that, at a very distant period, a 

 Biscayan warrior, named Lelo, was obliged to march 

 against the enemy. During his absence, his wife, 

 Tola, was unfaithful to him, and had a child by her 

 paramour, named Zara. When Lelo returned from 

 the war, the guilty lovers caused him to be murder- 

 ed ; but the crime was discovered ; the indignant 

 people expelled the criminals from their territory, 

 and it was resolved, in a general assembly of the na- 

 tion, that, thenceforth, every song should begin with 

 a stanza to the memory of the unfortunate Lelo. 

 There are yet in Biscay, says Mr. von Humboldt, 

 some -aged people, who recollect an old song, the 

 burden of which is 



Leluan, Lelo, 

 Leluan dot gogo. 



I think of Lelo, Lelo; 

 I think of Lelo. 



See Mithrid., vol. iv. p. 353. 



III. Ideology. We have hitherto considered the 

 elements of language in their simplest forms ; we are 

 now to take a view of them as modified by various 

 combinations, which men have agreed upon to facili- 

 tate their mutual intercourse. These modifications 

 have been called grammatical forms, and are by no 



means the same in all languages, but differ accord- 

 ing to the points of view in which men have consid- 

 ered the ideas which they meant to express, or, 

 rather, to awaken in the minds of others, by words 

 and sentences. There are very few ideas that we may 

 call absolutely simple ; when we speak of a tree, we 

 have in the eye or our mind, " a plant fastened to 

 the ground by means of roots, having a trunk, leaves 

 and branches, and bearing flowers and fruits in a 

 certain season." All these things are included in 

 the idea of what we call a tree. By a church or 

 temple, we understand " a place or a house where 

 people assemble to pray to an Almighty Being." 

 To express all this, we may either divide the gener- 

 al idea into its component parts, or combine these 

 together. In the latter case, we shall express the 

 whole by one word ; in the former, by several. Thus 

 in our own language, we say sometimes an inn, 

 sometimes a public house, and sometimes a house of 

 entertainment, making use, indifferently, of one, two, 

 or three words to express the same thing, or repre- 

 sent it to the mind of the hearer. This divisibility 

 of ideas is the origin of grammatical forms in lan- 

 guage. It is only since the beginning of the present 

 century, that this variety of forms in human lan- 

 guage has attracted the attention of the learned, and 

 that the idioms of even the most savage nations have 

 been studied with a view to ascertain their gramma- 

 tical structure. The results have been not less curi- 

 ous than interesting, inasmuch as they display the 

 various operations of the mind of man in the forma- 

 tion of languages. Great pains were formerly taken 

 to trace them up to a single original type, which 

 was to have been the primitive language ; but, as 

 the comparison of words, in respect to their ety- 

 mology and derivation from each other, has failed in 

 leading us thus far, so has the comparison of gram- 

 matical forms, which, as we have observed before, in 

 our article Language, rather tends to show that 

 the existing languages have not had a common 

 origin. Let us take a cursory view of their various 

 structures. 



There is, in the south-eastern division of Asia, a 

 group of nations whose languages are distinguished 

 by a singular formation, the like to which is not 

 found in any other part of the globe. The popula- 

 tion of those nations, according to Adelung, amounts 

 to about one eighth of the whole number of the 

 inhabitants of that part of the world. (See the 

 Mithridates, vol. i. p. 27.) The languages of those 

 nations are composed of a very small number of 

 monosyllables. M. Remusat, in his Essai sur la 

 Langue et la Litterature Chinoise (p. 55), has calcu 

 lated that those of the Chinese, the best known of 

 these idioms, do not exceed the number of 400, but 

 that, varied as they are by four different tones or 

 accents (some writers say five), they mey go as high 

 as 1600, or, at most, 2000. By the side of that 

 spoken idiom there is a written language (as it is 

 called), consisting according to the same author (p. 

 56), of 80,000 characters. Each of those characters 

 answers to a word or monosyllable of the spoken 

 language, and vice versa. (Grammaire Chinoise, 

 par Remusat, p. 1). This would be difficult to com- 

 prehend, if we did not know that the Chinese 

 abounds in homophonous words, which are represent- 

 ed by different characters, as in French the words 

 cens, cent, sang, sans, sens, sent, are to the eye 

 different from each other, though to the ear they are 

 the same, and still mean different things. These 

 homophonies, however, produce no confusion in 

 speech, partly owing to the tones or accents, to tt 

 place which they hold in the sentence, as is the case 

 in the French words sage-femme and femme sage, and 

 above all, to the subject and context of the discourse 



