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328 by comparison of languages, when this comparison shall have been made with sufficient knowledge and sufficient caution.

The other group referred to, as having been sometimes claimed to exhibit traces of relationship with the Scythian family, is composed of the languages which occupy the peninsulas and islands of the extreme north-eastern part of the Asiatic continent. Their character and relations constitute a very obscure and difficult problem in linguistic ethnology: whether they make up a group in any other than a geographical sense, whether they are not isolated and independent tongues, is at present exceedingly doubtful. Their linguistic tie, if there be one, is yet to be established.

By far the most conspicuous and important member of the group is the Japanese. It is wholly confined to the islands forming the empire of Japan (and into the northernmost of these, Yesso, it is a recent intrusion; the chief population of the island is Kurilian), and has no representatives or near kindred upon the main-land. So lively attention has been directed to it of late, since the re-opening of the empire to Europeans—its grammars, dictionaries, conversation-books, and the like, are multiplying so rapidly in European languages, and are leading to so much discussion of its linguistic character, that we may hope to see its position ere long definitely established. It has recently been repeatedly and confidently asserted to be "of the Turanian family;" but this is a phrase of so wholly dubious meaning that we cannot tell what it is worth: we shall be obliged to hold our judgments suspended until the general relations of the north-eastern Asiatic languages are better settled. The language is polysyllabic and agglutinative in character, possessing some of the features of construction which also characterize the Scythian tongues. It is of a simple phonetic structure (its syllables being almost always composed of a single consonant with following vowel), and fluent and easy of utterance. Besides the ordinary spoken dialect, there is another, older and more primitive, used as the medium of certain styles of composition: it is called the Yamato. Much, too, of the learned literature of the Japanese is written in Chinese. Their culture and letters come from China, being