Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/112

102 a pure and simple succession of isolated roots. It is evident that the first process of elocution was of this character. Expression was found in uttering, one after another, monosyllables which were sometimes undoubtedly onomatopoetic—imitations of noises, sounds, and cries.

Existing monosyllabic languages have singularly improved upon this primitive process, while they have still remained monosyllabic. They have not created grammar, there being no structure in their words, but they have created a syntax. This syntax consists in the position in the phrase given to the different root-words. The place which any monosyllable occupies in the phrase determines the meaning of that monosyllable. The same process of syntactical arrangement comes back into use in the existing analytical languages that are most advanced in decadence. When, for example, we say in English, "Peter likes John," we are obliged to put the word Peter at the beginning of the phrase, and John at the end; for both words have lost every morphological distinction that could show which of them is the subject and which the object. It is not so in the synthetical languages in which the subject and the object are distinguished by the form of the word, and position in the phrase is of little importance. Thus, to say in Latin that the Helvetians sent legates, we say indifferently, Helvetii legatos miserunt, or Legatos miserunt Helvetii; the form in which the two nouns are put defining their respective functions.

In Chinese, the root which is to be the subject, or nominative in a phrase, takes its place before the root that has the significance of a verb. By thus assigning to the subject-word a fixed place in the phrase, the want of the grammatical elements which in Greek and Latin characterize the nominative case is obviated. In a monosyllabic language, in short, there is no grammar; there are no substantive forms, no verbal forms, or declensions, or conjugations, or gender, moods, or tenses, nothing but syntax, or "putting together." This, moreover, is what we shall more easily grasp in studying the transition from monosyllablism to agglutination, or the passage from the first to the second linguistic phase.

This transition or evolution takes place in a very simple way. Some word-roots abdicate a part of their meaning and become simple elements of relation, while others retain their full and independent signification. In Chinese and in other existing monosyllabic languages, we find this division of words into "full" words (which we may translate into English by a noun or a verb) and "vacant" words, the primary sense of which has gradually become obscured, and which have come to define more exactly or limit the broad sense of the "full" words. It is an interesting fact that a similar process has been employed at a much later stage in languages which have reached a high degree of development. Thus, in Latin, besides the word circus, a circle, we find circum, around, a kind of vacant word, denoting