266 



KNOWLEDGE. 



[Decembek, 1908. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IN 

 SOCIOLOGY. 



By J. Collier. 

 IV. 

 The Linguistic Struggle. 

 It is estimated that over .5000 distinct languages are 

 spoken among men. A calculating prodigy would be 

 wanted to compute with exactness how many separate 

 dialects are in use. Sixty vears ago it was reckoned that 

 sixty different vocabularies were to be found in Brazil, 

 but the actual number must be far greater, for in much 

 smaller Mexico the Nahua language has broken up 

 into 700 dialects. There are hundreds in Borneo. In 

 Australia there is no classifying the complexities. And, 

 generally, the number of dialects is in inverse proportion 

 to the intellectual culture of the population. Assume 

 that only fifty dialects on an average belong to every 

 language, and we have the colossal total of a quarter of a 

 million linguistic varieties. In this Babel the battle 

 (what we call battle) is incessant. Could we examine the 

 habitat of a language or a dialect as we watch the 

 advancing or receding boundaries of a biological species, 

 we should perceive its frontiers to be in similar continual 

 movement, as now one and now the other gained the 

 victory. All manner of inflections — numbers and tenses, 

 cases and moods — likewise strive with one another for 

 predominance. Modes of utterance dictated by differently 

 modified laryngeal organs struggle for superioritv. Unlike 

 manners of arranging the written words are found to be 

 mutually incompatible, and several succumb, while one 

 survives here and another there. The visible transcripts 

 of sounds gather into alphabets, and the cuneiform, ideo- 

 grammatic, syllabic, and literal contend on bloodless 

 battlefields, where most of them perish or else live on in 

 isolated environments. What are the laws of the conflict 

 among all these groups 'r Canon Isaac Taylor affirms that 

 " plainly the laws which regulate the survival of language 

 do not conform to the same conditions as those which 

 regulate the survival of race." If such were the case, 

 either set of laws, or both sets, would be convicted of 

 unsoundness or inadequacy. The laws of evolution are 

 universal, or they are no true laws. The laws of survival 

 are identical in all provinces of Sociology. Thev are the 

 same as those which govern the survival of vegetal and 

 animal species. "We shall endeavour to trace the more 

 important of them by following the various aspects of the 

 linguistic struggle. 



Among Alphabets. 

 The decipherments of the cuneiform syllabary bv 

 George Smith, of the Cypriote alphal)et by the "same 

 scholar, and of the Hittite alphabet by Professor Sayce, 

 shed gleams of light on a conflict among alphatets. The 

 battlefield was Asia Minor and Hellas. The competing 

 alphabets were the three named. The Assyrian svUabarv 

 was backed by physical force. The victories of" Sargon 

 and Assurbanipal had made the influence of Assyrian 

 civilization felt in the islands and peninsulas washed bv 

 the Mediterranean. Yet it seems never to have been in 

 the running at all. We are told that the triumph of 

 Darwinism means the triumph of materialism. Here 

 military conquest availed nothing to procure acceptance 

 for an inferior script, belonging to one of the oldest forms 

 of wi-itteu language, in preference to less archaic tvpes. 

 The real battle was between two of these. Dr. William 

 Wright and some auxiliary explorers have rescued from 

 oblivion the existence and some portion of the history of 



an empire that occupied Northern Syria and Cappadocia 

 between the eighth and twelfth centuries b.c. If not 

 the Hittite language, at least the alphabet devised by 

 that warrior people prevailed all over Asia Minor. 

 Recently-discovered inscriptions reveal its true character. 

 Many of its 12.5 distinct signs were ideograms — survivals 

 of the picture-writing stage. It therefore stood midway 

 between the cuneiform Assyrian and the phonetic 

 Phoenician. It travelled south and west, through Lycia 

 and Caria, Phrygia and Lydia, dropping some portion of 

 its cumbrous structure at each halting-place. All of the 

 alphabets used in these countries seem to have been 

 derivatives of the Hittite, but apparently in all of them the 

 ideographic element was abandoned, the language becoming 

 more phonetic as it advanced. Arriving in Cyprus, it had 

 left behind it more than half of its baggage. In Cyprus 

 and Asia Minor a new struggle ensued. There the far 

 handier alphabet which the Phoenicians had adapted from 

 the Egyptian came into competition with the various 

 tongues adapted from the Hittite. The clumsy Cypriote 

 alphabet, with its 60 letters, most of its consonants having 

 five different forms, and its lack of aspirates, could not in 

 the long run stand against the simpler Cadmeian alphabet, 

 but was maintained to the time of the first Ptolemies in a 

 secluded environment by the authority of the priests. In 

 Asia Minor, which was less closed to outward influences, the 

 victory of the Phoenician alphabet was swifter. It expelled 

 the Hittite alphabets, some of whose characters, however, 

 lived on by the side of Phoenician to supplement its im- 

 perfections. No military force was at the back of the 

 new aljihabet. No priestly sanctions consecrated it. It 

 had nothing in its favour but its simplicity and its 

 convenience. It was propagated by a commercial people 

 inhabiting a territory thirty miles long and a mile broad. 

 Yet it spread over no small part of the world, driving 

 before it hundreds of cumbrous syllabaries or forms of 

 picture-writing. Its universal aficeptance may be described 

 as the triumph of utility. 



A new factor in the linguistic struggle is disclosed by 

 the battle at this moment being waged in Bosnia. Both 

 sides speak the same language — Croat, but they write it 

 with different alphabets: the Catholics with Roman letters, 

 and the Orthodox with the Cyrillic. To symplify the task 

 of the public teacher, the Austrian Government directed 

 that the Latin alphabet should alone be used in schools. 

 The innovation provoked a loud outcry from the Orthodox, 

 who deemed it a blow to their religion. The Government 

 had to yield, and once more in history physical force was 

 worsted. 



Another factor is revealed by the conflict in Germany 

 between black-letter characters and the Roman alphabet. 

 It is costly to keep two distinct kinds of type, and hence 

 the inferiority of German typography. The strain of 

 reading "Gothic" print doubtless also contributes to the 

 myopia prevalent in Germany. Yet, though Roman is 

 manifestly gaining ground, a perverted patriotism, long 

 fostered by a Gothic spirit like Bismarck, maintains the 

 archaic form. 



Among Scripts. 



Words were first written vertically or columnwise, and 

 cliildren are still taught to write as the Greeks, Hittites, 

 and Egyptians wrote from three to ten thousand years 

 ago. Test a boy, and he will be found to incline to 

 the left. The deviation was regularised, and writing 

 became horizontal. When the scribe got to the end of the 

 line, instead of turning back to the right, he began in the 

 space below at the side where he left off. It is almost 

 the ploughman's way, and the Greeks named it " ox- 

 turning-wise." Natural, simple, and easy as the plough- 



