Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/132

118 conceivable ; it is, and always has been, in practical opera tion between people ignorant of one another s language, and as such is largely used in the intercourse of savage tribes. It is true that to some extent these means of utter ance are common to the lower animals, the power of ex pressing emotion by cries and tones extending far down in the scale of animal life, while rudimentary gesture-signs are made by various mammals and birds. Still, the lower animals make no approach to the human system of natural utterance by gesture-signs and emotional-imitative sounds, while the practical identity of this human system among races physically so unlike as the Englishman and the native of the Australian bush, indicates extreme closeness of mental similarity throughout the human species. When, however, the Englishman and the Australian speak each in his native tongue, only such words as belong to the interjectional and imitative classes will be naturally intelligible, and as it were instinctive to both. Thus the savage, uttering the sound waow! as an explanation of sur prise and warning, might be answered by the white man with the not less evidently significant sh ! of silence, and the two speakers would be on common ground when the native indicated by the name bwirri his cudgel, flung whirring through the air at a flock of birds, or when the native described as & jakkal-yakkal the bird called by the foreigner a cockatoo. With these, and other very limited classes of natural words, however, resemblance in vocabulary practically ceases. The Australian and English languages each consist mainly of a series of words having no apparent connection with the ideas they signify, and differing utterly; of course, accidental coincidences and borrowed words must be excluded from such comparisons. It would be easy to enumerate other languages of the world, such as Basque, Turkish, Hebrew, Malay, Mexican, all devoid of traceable resemblance to Australian and English, and to one another. There is, moreover, extreme difference in the grammatical structure both of words and sentences in vari ous languages. The question then arises, how far the employment of different vocabularies, and that to a great extent on different grammatical principles, is compatible with similarity of the speakers minds, or how far does diversity of speech indicate diversity of mental nature 1 ? The obvious answer is, that the power of using words as signs to express thoughts with which their sound does not directly connect them, in fact as arbitrary symbols, is the highest grade of the special human faculty in language, the presence of which binds together all races of mankind in substantial mental unity. The measure of this unity is, that any child of any race can be brought up to speak the language of any other race.

To ascertain the causes to which languages owe their unlikeness in material and structure, how far to essential differences of mental type among the races of mankind, and how far to minor causes of variation, which may be called secondary, is a problem of extreme difficulty, towards the precise solution of which little has yet been done. One of the most remarkable of linguistic differences is the ten dency of some languages to isolate their words, and of others to form elaborate inflexions. The extremes may be seen, on the one hand, in an ordinary Chinese sentence of isolated monosyllables, such as &quot; i/u tsze nien chiu tsin, tung chu,&quot; &c., i.e., &quot;in this year autumn ended, winter begun,&quot; &c. ; and, on the other hand, in one of the mon strous polysyllables into which the Greenlanders will agglutinate a whole phrase, inilertorniarpatdlasarqorpd, i.e., &quot;he will probably try too much to get it done soon.&quot; Among languages which form grammatical combinations or inflexions, the modes of so doing are as various as possible. Thus, in Africa, the Hottentot noun forms its plural by a suffix, as khoi, &quot;man;&quot; khoin, &quot;men;&quot; while the Zulu employs prefixes to distinguish its numbers, asumu-ntu, &quot;a man;&quot; aba-ntu, &quot;men.&quot; The Dinka may supply examples of forming the plural by internal change, ran, &quot;man;&quot; ror, &quot;men.&quot; Nor are the differences of syntax in different tongues less absolute. In non-inflecting languages one of the most vital points is the relative position of two nouns, of which the one stands as substantive, and the other as defining it by an attribute. This may be illustrated by English com pounds, such as work-house and house-work. Here our rule is to place the attribute -noun first, while, of two neighbour ing languages of Asia, the Burmese and the Siamese, the one settles this question in our way, the other in exactly the opposite. The Siamese expression for sailors, luk rua, means &quot; sons of the ship,&quot; just as the Burmese expression for villagers, rwa tha, means &quot; children of the village ;&quot;. but in the first case the construction is &quot;sons ship,&quot; whereas in the second it is &quot;village children. 5 Again, for reasons not yet fully explained, some languages place the adjective before the substantive, as Chinese pe ma, &quot; white horse ; &quot; while other languages reverse this construction, as Maori, rakau roa, &quot;tree long&quot; (i.e., tall tree). These are but examples of possible divergences in linguistic structure, and no prudent ethnologist would assert that racial peculiarities have nothing to do with such various tendencies. At the same time, there is no proof but that they may have resulted from historical cir cumstances more or less independently of race. Our own Aryan family of nations and languages affords what must always be prominent evidence in this argument. It is acknowledged that Sanskrit, Russian, Greek, Latin, Welsh, English, &c., are, philologically speaking, dialects of a single Aryan speech, which no doubt at some ancient period was spoken by a single tribe or nation. Yet the languages sprung from this original Aryan tongue, by various courses of development and accretion, are mutually unintelligible. If a Greek sentence be taken at random, such as this, &quot;Ou X/&amp;gt;^ Travvv^iov cv8cw /3ovXr]&amp;lt;f&amp;gt;6pov avSpa,&quot; and it be translated even too verbally into English, &quot; A counsel-bearing man ought not to sleep all night,&quot; the traces of linguistic con nection between the Greek and English words (phoros, bear; nux, night) are hardly perceptible except to philo logists. Even the essential character of the two languages is seen to be different, for the construction of the Greek sentence depends mainly on the inflexions of the words, while in English such inflexions are almost discarded, and their effect is produced by the syntax and the auxiliary particles. Moreover, as to some most important points of syntax, Aryan languages differ widely from one another ; thus, to use a familiar instance, French and English take contradictory lines as to the relative position of the adjec tive and substantive, as also of the object-pronoun and verb, &quot; c est un cheval blanc, je le vois,&quot; &quot; it is a white horse, I see him.&quot; So Hindustani and English, though both Aryan tongues, reverse the positions of the verb and object, as &quot;ghora lao&quot; (&quot; horse bring&quot;), i.e., &quot;bring the horse !&quot; Thus on the whole, the endless variety in vocabu lary and structure among the languages of the world affords important evidence as to the mental diversities of the nations speaking those languages. But the unity of the faculty of speech in man stands as the primary fact, while the character of the grammar and dictionary belong ing to any one nation represents only a secondary fact, such as might be fairly set down as resulting from their parti cular stage and circumstances of linguistic development.

The principles of the development of a family of Ianguages from a single parent tongue are laid down elsewhere. (See .) It has here to be noticed that the evidence on which such linguistic groups may be treated as allied by descent is of various degrees of fulness and strength. The most perfect available case is that of the 