Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/444

Rh the derivative godly, the compound love-did into the verbal form loved. And yet one further result sometimes follows: an internal change is wrought by phonetic influence in the body of a word, which change then may in the further history of the word be left as the sole means of distinction between one form and another. It is thus that, in the most recent period, the distinction of led from lead and met from meet and so on has been made; the added auxiliary which originally made these preterit es induced a shortening of the root-vowel, and this was left behind when the auxiliary disappeared by the usual process of abbreviation. It is in the same way that the distinctions of men from man, of were from was, of set from sit, with all their analogues, were brought about: by a modification of vowel-sound (Ger. Umlant) occasioned by the presence in the following syllable of an i-vowel, which in the older stages of the language is still to be seen there. And the distinctions of sing, sang, sung and song, of bind, bound, band and bond, are certainly of the same kind, though they go back so far in the history of our family of languages that their beginnings are not yet clearly demonstrable; they were in their origin phonetic accidents, inorganic, mere accompaniments and results of external combinations which bore the office of distinction of meaning and were sufficient to it; in some of our languages they have been disregarded and effaced, in others they have risen to prominent importance. To regard these internal changes as primary and organic is parallel with assuming the primariness of the formative apparatus of language in general; like this, it ignores the positive evidence we have of the secondary production of such differences; they are, like everything else in linguistic structure, the outcome of combination and adaptation.

Borrowing, or the taking-in of material out of another language, has been more than once referred to above as sometimes an important element in language-history, though less deep-reaching and organic than the rest. There is nothing anomalous about borrowing; it is rather in essential accordance with the whole process of language-acquisition. All our names were adopted by us because they were already in use by others; and a community is in the same way capable of taking a new name from a community with which it comes in contact as an individual from individuals. Not that it seeks or admits in this way new names for old things; but it accepts new things along with the names that seem to belong to them. Hence any degree of intercourse between one community and another, leading to exchange of products or of knowledge, is sure to lead also to some borrowing of names; and there is hardly a language in the world, except of races occupying peculiarly isolated positions, that does not contain a certain amount of foreign material thus won, even as our English has elements in its vocabulary from half the other tongues in the world. The scale of borrowing is greatly increased when one people becomes the pupil of another in respect of its civilization: hence the abundant classical elements in all the European tongues, even the non-Romanic; hence the Arabic material in Persian and Turkish and Malay; hence the Chinese in Japanese and Corean; and, as a further result, even dead languages, like the Greek and Latin and the Sanskrit, become stores to be drawn upon in that learned and conscious quest of new expression which in the school-stage of culture supplements or even in a measure replaces the unconscious growth of natural speech. So, in mixture of communities, which is a highly-intensified form of contact and intercourse, there follows such mixture of speech as the conditions of the case determine; yet not a mixture on equal terms, through all the departments of vocabulary and grammar, the resulting speech (just as when two individuals learn to speak alikel is essentially that of the one constituent of the new community, with more or less material borrowed from that of the other What is most easily taken in out of another language is the names of concrete things, every degree of removal from this involves additional difficulty—names of abstract things, epithets, verbs, connectives, forms. Indeed, the borrowing of forms in the highest sense, or forms of inflexion, is well-nigh or quite impossible, no example of it has been demonstrated in any of the historical periods of language, though it is sometimes adventurously assumed as a part of prehistoric growth. How nearly it may be approached is instanced by the presence in English of such learned plurals as phenomena and strata. This extreme resistance to mixture in the department of inflexion is the ground on which some deny the possibility of mixture in language, and hence the existence of such a thing as a mixed language. The difference is mainly a verbal one; but it would seem about as reasonable to deny that a region is inundated so long as the tops of its highest mountains are above water. According to the simple and natural meaning of the term, nearly all languages are mixed, in varying degree and within varying limits, which the circumstances of each case must explain. These are the leading processes of change seen at work in all present speech and in all known past speech, and hence to be regarded as having worked through the whole history of speech. By their operation every existing tongue has been developed out of its rudimentary radical condition to that in which we now see it. The variety of existing languages is well-nigh infinite, not only in their material but in their degree of development and the kind of resulting structure. ]ust as the earlier stages in the history of the use of tools are exemplified even at the present day by races which have never advanced beyond them, so is it in regard to language also—and, of course, in the latter case as in the former, this state of things strengthens and establishes the theory of a gradual development. There is not an element of linguistic structure possessed by some languages which is not wanting in others, and there are even tongues which have no formal structure, and which cannot be shown ever to have advanced out of the radical stage. The most noted example of such a rudimentary tongue is the Chinese, which in its present condition lacks all formal distinction of the parts of speech, all inflexion, all derivation; each of its words (all of them monosyllables) is an integral sign, not divisible into parts of separate significance; and each in general is usable wherever the radical idea is wanted, with the value of one part of speech or another, as determined by the connexion in which it stands; a condition parallel with that in which Indo-European speech may be regarded as existing prior to the beginnings of its career of formal development brieiiy sketched above. And there are other tongues, related and unrelated to Chinese, of which the same description, or one nearly like it, might be given. To call such languages radical is by no means to maintain that they exhibit the primal roots of human speech, unchanged or only phonetically changed, or that they have known nothing of the combination of element with element. Of some of them the roots are in greater or less part dis syllabic; and we do not yet know that all dissyllabism, and even that all complexity of syllable beyond a. single consonant with following vowel, is not the result of combination or reduplication. But all combination is not form-making; it needs a whole class of combinations, with a recognized common element in them producing a recognized common modification of meaning, to make a form. The same elements which (in Latin, and even to some extent in English also) are of formal value in con-stant and pre-dict lack that character in cost and preach; the same like which makes adverbs in tru-ly and right-ly is present without any such value in such and which (from so-like and who-like); cost and preach, and such and which, are as purely radical in English as other words of which we do not happen to be able to demonstrate the composite character. And so a Chinese monosyllable or an Egyptian or Polynesian dis syllable is radical, unless there can be demonstrated in some part of it a formative value; and a language wholly composed of such words is a root-language. Recent investigation goes to show that Chinese had at some period of its history a formal development, since extinguished by the same processes of phonetic decay which in English have wiped out so many signs of a formal character and brought back so considerable a part of the vocabulary to monosyllabism. In languages thus constituted the only possible external alteration is that phonetic change to which all human speech, from the