286 



KNOVS/^LEDGE ♦ 



[Jl-lt ], 1886. 



a list of seventy-six iamilies in wliit-h due attention is paid 

 to collateral branches.* 



C'ompari.sons b3tween various languajjes liave been made 

 times out of number for the jiurpose of proving them to bo 

 related, which have been based on a resemblance of sound. 

 Thus, it has been argued, English and French are derived 

 from Hebrew, because the word to cut, Fi'ench couteau, a 

 knife or cuttinr/ instrument, are akin to the Semitic forms, 

 katsais, khatsats, ka'sa's, gazaz, gazah, gazam, gaza', 

 gazed, gnzar, khadad, gadad, kada-J, gadah, khntsah, 

 kataa', katsar, ca'sakh, ca'sam, which all give ths idea 

 of cutting; and similar fallacies have for centuries been 

 popular; but. as I have already shown, this would prove 

 only the imitative power of mankind, ami does not of 

 necessity prove any common origin. 8eieutitic philology, a 

 j)roduet of quite recent times, has, however, revealed the 

 fact that most essential difiei'ences exist Ijetween those great 

 families of language of which we have knowledge, and A'ery 

 striking results have been obtained especially with regard to 

 the so-called Aryan or Indo-European and Semitic groups. 



The Chinese language, belonging to the Turanian family, 

 is, for a cultivated tongue, perhaps the most ideally pii- 

 mitive with which we are acquainted. Chinese civilisa- 

 tion and literature are among the oldest, if not tlie oldest, 

 in existence ; some of the odes of the Shiking dating 

 as far back as 2(X)0 B.C., and they presuppose many 

 centuries of culture. The age of a language may be 

 gauged by the extent to which it has been affected by 

 phonetic decay, and Chinese, especially in the Mandarin 

 dialect, shows many signs of this. Owing to this decay, 

 words formerly distinct come to assume the same form. 

 This happened in Chinese, and in order to distinguish 

 between the different meanings of the same words, tones 

 were introduced, that is to say words were pronounced with 

 a different inflection of the voice in their various senses. 

 There are now eight tones, but only four are in common use. 

 I cannot tell Edkins's authority for milking the statement, 

 but if, as he says, it takes about twelve hundred years to 

 produce a new tone, the fact of the existence of no less than 

 eight says much for the antiquity of the language. The 

 Chinese language possesses only about .500 words without 

 reckoning these tones, the addition of wliich, giving different 

 meanings to the same words, raises the number of word- 

 meanings to 1,.500. Chinese words represent ideas in un- 

 defined forms and are equality convertible into verb, adverb, 

 or noun ; thus ta contains the r.adical idea of greatness, being 

 great, and may be used as a substantive, greatness ; verb to 

 be great or make great, magnifij ; and as an adverb, greatly ; 

 the meaning in which it is used being apparent from the 

 context and partly by its position iu the sentence. It seems 

 reasonable to suppose from what we have seen of the sign 

 language of the deaf and dumb, in which there is no possibi- 

 lity of inflectional changes, and of the use of gestures by 

 savages, to mai'k and supplement their application of words, 

 that the eailiest use of vocal signs or words was thus un- 

 defined. We have seen that phonetic variations of a single 

 word may produce hundreds of other words varying in their 

 construction according to the genius of the peoples who use 

 them, and we can, therefore, suppose some such an ideal 

 I'oot word as we meet with in Chinese remaining unchanged 

 among so conservative a nation as the Chinese, taking a 

 verbal form among Aryans and a nominal form among the 

 Semites. Whitney maintains t : "That the first traceable 

 linguistic entities are not names of concrete objects, but 

 designate actions, motions, phenoomnal conditions, is a truth 



* See "Introduction to the Science of Language," 1880, vol. ii. 

 pp. 3H-64. 



t "Language and the Study o£ Language," ed. 1810, pp. 2G0-1. 



resting on authority that overrides all preconceived theories 

 and subjective opinions," and from what we have already 

 learnt about the natural development of language, the growth 

 of the various parts of speech from such an original form 

 can be readily conceived. The first words would be repre- 

 sentations of sensations. " Miaou," the cat, as in Chinese and 

 ancient Egyptian, is the animal heard to produce that sound. 

 Fat, the Aryan root significant of flying, is a representation 

 of the sound of wings in motion. To take a modern parallel, 

 our word green, literally groii-ing, is u.sed as a noun, greens 

 meaning green vegetables, and in dumb language grass is 

 what "grows up from the ground," and the sign of moving 

 the hand gradually up from the ground also signifies green. 



Long years of patient research have brought philologists 

 to the conclusion that the origin of all Indo-European 

 languages may be found in a certain limited number of roots 

 whence the various words were derived. These roots are 

 monosyllabic, and may be compared to the monosyllabic 

 words of which the Chinese language is composed, and, 

 although they are never found at present in the form which 

 by careful analysis has been assigned to them, it is thought 

 that the ancestors of Indo-European races conversed in 

 single syllables indicating important ideas, but not as 3'et 

 showing their mutual relations.* These roots are divided 

 into two classes : I. Those signifying position — demonstra- 

 tive or pronominal roots; II. Those signifying action or 

 quality — predicative or verbal roots. 



From the first and smaller class come the demonstrative 

 and personal pronouns, the interrogatives, the possessives, 

 and relatives, and other less important classes, as also ad- 

 verbs of position and direction. Those beginning with »i 

 are especially used to denote the subject, those with t and n 

 more demonstratively, and those with k for interrogation. 

 There are but few of them, hardly more than a dozen, in- 

 cluding some which are probably themselves derived from 

 one original. They are very simple, consisting either of a 

 single vowel, srrch as a or i, or of one consonant followed 

 by an open vowel, as ma, na, ta, ta, ka. 



The other class is very large and shows every variety of 

 the syllable ; the roots imply properties and activities pre- 

 sented in natural objects : visible phenomena, motions, and 

 sounds. The following are some such roots shown to have 

 belonged to the original stock, as they are found in most, if 

 not all, Indo-European tongues, i and ga indicating motion ; 

 ak, swift motion ; stCi, standing ; as and sad, sitting ; ki, 

 lying ; ^jacZ, walking ; vas, staying ; sarj), creeping ; ^jai, 

 flying ; plu, flowing ; ad, eating ; an, blowing ; kin, hearing ; 

 dhd, putting ; da, giving ; dik, pointing out ; tan, stretching ; 

 skid and dal, cutting ; mar, rubbing. 



Polysyllables seem to have originated in the combination 

 of roots of these two classes for the purpose of defining some 

 idea, as vadmi, I here eat ; adsi, thou there eatest ; ma-si, I 

 plus thou, equals rve. Repetition of the root or reduplication 

 was made to represent the completion of the action indicated, 

 f.s Sans, daddn, given, from the root da, give, and so on, 

 every new form by analogy becoming the source of a hundred 

 others. It is thus that words signifying difierent ideas are 

 compounded to represent some idea which embraces both. 

 In the course of time these combinations with the ideas they 

 represent become fixed in the mind, and their origin is 

 obscured or forgotten ; then by the process of phonetic decay 

 they may become reduced to apparently simple forms. Thus 

 in English the words to don and to doff are from earlier 

 forms to do o?i and to do off. Our word vend is from the 

 Latin venum dare, our hlame from the Greek hlas-phemein, 

 and so on. 



* See Whitney's " Language and the Stufly of Language," p. 257, 

 ct scq. 



