512 



NATURE 



\Sept, 29, 1887 



that the absence of the mental tubercle, or bony excrescence in 

 which the tongue is inserted, in a skull of the Neanderthal type 

 found at La Naulette, indicates an absence of the faculty of 

 speech, one race at least of Palaeolithic man would have existed 

 in Europe before it had as yet invented an articulate language. 

 Indeed, it is difficult to believe that man has known how to 

 speak for any very great length of time. On the one hand, it is 

 true, languages may remain fixed and almost stationary for a 

 long series of generations. Of this the Semitic languages afford 

 a conspicuous example. Not only the very words, but even the 

 very forms of grammar are still used by the Bedouin of Central 

 Arabia that were employed by the Semitic Babylonians on their 

 monuments five thousand years ago. At that early dale the Semitic 

 family of speech already existed with all its peculiarities, which 

 have survived with but little alteration up to the present day. 

 And when it is remembered that Old Egyptian, which comes 

 before us a-; a literary and decaying language a thousand years 

 earlier, was probably a sister of the parent Semitic speech, the 

 period 10 which we must assign the formation and development of 

 the latter cannot fall much short of ten thousand years before the 

 Christian era. But on the other hand there is no language 

 which does not bear upon its face the marks of its origin. We 

 can still trace through the thin disj^uise of subsequent modifica- 

 tions and growth the elements, both lexical and grammatical, 

 out of which language must have arisen. The Bushman 

 dialects still preserve the inarticulate clicks which preceded 

 articulate sounds in expressing ideas ; behind the roots which the 

 philologist discovers in allied groups of words lie, plainly visible, 

 the imitations of natural sounds, or the instinctive utterances 

 of human emotion ; while the grammar of languages like 

 Eskimaux or the Aztec of Mexico carries us back to the first 

 mechanism for conveying the meaning of one speaker to another. 

 The beginnings of articulate language are still too transparent 

 to allow us to refer them to a very remote era. I once cal- 

 culated that from thirty to forty thousand years is the utmost limit 

 that we can allow to man as a speaking animal. In fact, the 

 evidence that he is a drawing animal, derived from the pictured 

 bones and horns of the Palaeolithic Age, mounts back to a much 

 earlier epoch than the evidence that he is a speaking animal. 



Mr. Horatio Hale has lately started a very ingenious theory 

 to account, not indeed for the origin of language in general, but 

 for the origin of that vast number of apparently unallied families 

 of speech which have existed in the world. He has come across 

 examples of children who have invented and used languages of 

 their own, refusing at the same time to speak the language they 

 heard around them. As the children belonged to civilized 

 communities the languages they invented did not spread beyond 

 themselves, and after a time were forgotten by their own in- 

 ventors. In an uncivilized community, however, it is quite 

 conceivable that such a language might continue to be used by 

 the children after they had begun to grow up, and be communi- 

 cated by them to their descendants. In this case a wholly new 

 language would be started, which would have no affinities with 

 any other, and after splitting into dialects would become the 

 parent of numerous derived tongues. I must confess that the 

 evidence brought forward by Mr. Hale in support of his theory 

 is not quite convincing to me. It is yet to be proved that the 

 words used by the children to whom he refers were not echoes of 

 the words used by their elders. If they were, a language that 

 originated in them would show more signs of lexical affinity to 

 the older language than is the case of one family of speech when 

 compared with another. On the other hand, the theory would 

 tend to throw light on the curious fact that the morphological 

 divisions of language are also geographical. 



By the morphology of a language I mean its structure ; that is 

 to say, the mode in which the relations of grammar are ex- 

 pressed in a sentence, and the order in which they occur. These 

 vary considerably, the chief variations being represented by 

 the polysynthetic languages of America, the isolating lan- 

 guages of Eastern Asia, the postfixal languages of Central Asia, 

 the prefixal languages of Africa, and the inflectional languages 

 of Europe and Western Asia. Now it will be observed that 

 each of these classes of language is associated with a particular 

 part of the globe, the isolating languages, for example, being 

 practically confined to Eastern Asia, and the polysynthetic 

 languages to America. Within each class there are numerous 

 families of speech between which no relationship can be dis- 

 covered beyond that of a common structure ; they agree 

 morphologically, but their grammar and lexicon show no signs 

 of connexion. If we adopt Mr. Hale's theory we might suppose 



that the genealogically distinct families of speech grew up in the 

 way he describes, while their morphological agreement would be 

 accounted for by the inherited tendency of the children to run 

 their thinking into a particular mould. The words and con- 

 trivances of grammar would be new, the mental framework in 

 which they were set would be an inheritance from former 

 generations. 



I have spoken of the inflectional languages as belonging to 

 Europe and Western Asia. This is true if we give a somewhat 

 wide extension to the term inflectional, and make it include not 

 only the Indo-European group, but the Georgian and Semitic 

 groups as well. But, strictly speaking, the Indo-European, or 

 Aryan, languages have a structure of their own, which differs 

 very markedly from that of either the Georgian or the Semitic 

 families. The Semitic mode of expressing the relations of 

 grammar by changing the vowels within a framework of con- 

 sonants differs as much from the Aryan mode of expressing them 

 by means of suffixes as does the Semitic partiality for words of 

 three consonants from the Indo-European carelessness about the 

 number of syllables in a word. Though it is quite true that the 

 Semitic languages at times approach the Indo-European by 

 using suffixes to denote the foruis of grammar, while at other 

 times the Indo-European languages may substitute internal vowel 

 change for external flection, nevertheless, in general, the kind of 

 flection employed by the two families of speech is of a totally 

 different character. 



This difference of structure, coupled with a complete difference 

 in phonology, grammar, and lexicon, has always seemed to me to 

 negative the attempts that have been made to connect the Aiyan 

 and Semitic families of language together. The attempts have 

 usually been based on the old confusion between language and race : 

 both Aryans and Semites belong to the white race ; therefore it 

 was assumed their languages must be akin. As long as it was 

 generally agreed that the primitive home of the Aryan lan- 

 guages was, like that of the Semitic languages, the western part 

 of Asia, the confusion was excusable. If the earliest seats of 

 the speakers of each were in geographical proximity, there was 

 some reason for believing that languages which were alike 

 spoken by members of the white race, and were alike classed as 

 inflectional, would, when properly questioned, show signs of a 

 common origin. 



But that general agreement no longer exists. While the 

 Asiatic origin of the Semitic languages is beyond dispute, scholars 

 have of late years been coming more and more to the conclusion 

 that Europe was the cradle of the Aryan tongues. Their 

 European origin was first advocated by our countryman Dr. 

 Latham, and was subsequently defended by the eminent com- 

 parative philologist Dr. Benfey ; but it is only within the last 

 half-dozen years that the theory has won its way to scientific 

 recognition. Different lines of research have been converging 

 towards the same result, and indicating North-Eastern Europe as 

 the starting-point of the Indo-European languages, while the 

 evidences invoked in favour of their Asiatic origin have one and 

 all broken down. 



These evidences chiefly rested on the supposed superiority of 

 Sanskrit over the other Indo-European languages as a represent- 

 ative of the parent-speech from which they were all descended. 

 The grammar and phonology of Sanskrit were imagined to be 

 more archaic, more faithful to the primitive pattern than those of 

 its i^ister-tongues. It was argued that this implied a less amount 

 of migration and change on the part of the speakers, a nearer 

 residence, in fact, to the region where the parent-speech had once 

 been spoken. As a comparison of the words denoting certain 

 objects in the Indo-European languages showed that this region 

 must have had a cold climate, it was placed on the slopes of 

 Hindu- Kush or at the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes. 



But vi'e now know that instead of being the most faithful repi 

 sentative of the parent-speech, Sanskrit is in many respects fa 

 less so than are its sister-languages of Europe. Its vocabul 

 for instance, has been thrown into confusion by the coalesce 

 of the three primitive vowel sounds a, e, 6 into the 

 monotonous a, a corruption which is paralleled by the co: 

 scence of so many vowels in modern cultivated English in 

 so-called "neutral"^. Greek, or even the Lithuanian, whi 

 may still be heard to-day from the lips of unlettered peasanj 

 has preserved more faithfully than the Sanskrit of India tl 

 features of the parent Aryan. If the faithfulness of the record 1 

 any proof of the geographical proximity of one of the Indo 

 European languages to their common mother, it is in the neigli 

 bourhood of Lithuania, rather than in the neighbourhood 



I 



