OF LANGUAGES. 



23 



CHAPTER III. 



ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGE. 



The object and aim of speech is communication, which 

 certainly varies in point of clearness and perfection accord- 

 ing to the physical and intellectual state of the individual. 

 The ruder the speaker, the cruder the speech. Thus it is 

 not only possible, but even highly probable, that the origi- 

 nal enunciations of a language are interjections. If 

 interjections are, according to their nature, as a rule short 

 and monosyllabic, the original roots of words should be also 

 monosyllabic. "Interjections are," as Professor Max 

 Miiller observes, " only the outskirts of real language ; 

 language begins where interjections end." But these out- 

 skirts are already within the bounds of language, and form 

 the lines of its natural frontier. We cannot, therefore, 

 make a tabula rasa of these first efforts of speech ; their 

 vestiges are retained in the very language whose elemen- 

 tary landmarks they are, however much they may be altered 

 and modified subsequently. Interjections, or whatever name 

 we may give to the main essence of words, precede the 

 other forms of speech ; nay, they are most likely the very 

 nucleus from which the latter are formed. A word 

 embodies, as it were, an idea, whether this refers to a con- 

 crete object or to an abstract thought. Originally the 

 incoherently uttered word comprised within itself the 

 different variations in meaning as represented later by the 

 different forms of speech. This fact we observe in Old 

 Egyptian, in Chinese, Burmese, and other languages, where 

 e.g. " to live, life, alive, and a living being " great, to be 

 great, and greatness " eye, sight, and to see " are expressed 

 respectively by the same word or sound. 22 This concen- 

 tration of the various shapes which mental or material 

 essences may assume in one unchangeable body, their 



(22) See page 99, and compare Egypt's place in Universal History by Christ. 

 C. I. Bunsen, Vol. I, page 271, and Max Muller's Lectures, Vol. II, page 89, 



