Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/432

402 tions. The contents of such facial changes as physiognomical science is now tracing in the more advanced races indicate that an emotion, simple as it may seem, sways every feature to a special language, and combines these several syllables of expression in its single impulse. And why should not the language of the vocal organs have been equally complex with that of the facial ? Some analogous actions must have produced that agglutinative form of words which opens the history of language in the proper sense of the word.

It has been fully shown by Tylor that "the two great methods of stating verbal relations namely, by metaphor and by syntax belong to the infancy of expression, and are as much at home in the language of savages as in that of philosophers." l

Thus the definition of languages as the u living product of the whole inward man " 2 is true even of the earliest, whose complex units of speech contain in germ all the generic forces that are to be unfolded in the future structures of grammatical science. 3

"Roots" not the beginning of language, but a product.

The derivation of languages from the simplest verbal forms, or "roots," so general in modern linguistics, is therefore likely to mislead us. "Roots" can hardly have been the first forms of speech, which properly begins in such combinations as are necessary for the communication of feeling. It is extremely doubtful if any of the root syllables to which we reduce a language belonged to the primitive stock of actual words. They are either products of analysis, reached by stripping off prefixes and suffixes, and by other systematic methods of reducing words to an ideal nucleus which was probably never in use by itself; or else they result from

Primitive Culture.

Schlegel.

This must hold equally of the ethical element. Yet Goldziher (Hebr. Mythol.) attempts to trace, not only distinct words, but even mythology as a whole, to an epoch in which he affirms this element to have been as yet non-existent.