Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/535

Rh they have done little since but live on the traditions of their farwestern ancestors. The truth is, for the eastern hemisphere at least, there is but one civilization, which began in Egypt and the Euphrates Valley, and spread in either direction, eastward to Persia, India, and China, or westward to Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and the Atlantic.

Even the Chinese language turns out, on examination, to be just the opposite of what earlier investigators thought it. Elder philologists took it for granted that primitive tongues must have been monosyllabic; and since Chinese is monosyllabic, they regarded it, somewhat illogically, as therefore primitive. But Terrien de Lacouperie and Douglas have shown, on the contrary, that Chinese is really Akkadian by origin, and that it was once polysyllabic, like most other languages. Its words have been shortened by wear and tear, or by that familiar process which turns omnibus into "bus," photograph into "photo," and bicycle into "bike." It consists of words said "for short," like the common abbreviation of William into Bill, Richard into Dick, or Theodore into Theo; or rather, it has suffered by that imperceptible phonetic change which has reduced eleemosyne to "alms," semetipsissimum to même, and Aethelthryth to Awdry. In fact, it turns out that Chinese, instead of being one of the most primitive languages, is really one of the most worn and degraded. In place of "psychology" it would content itself with psy; while tel or pho would do duty for "telephone."

In this case, the diffusion of a language and a culture is by simple migration, as in the well-known instances of Tyre and Carthage, of Greece and Sicily, of England and America. In other cases, the diffusion is rather by conquest, as in the equally well-known instances of Alexander's successors, of the Roman Empire, and of the Arabs in Egypt, North Africa, and Syria. Greek, Latin, and Arabic, with their accompanying arts, became naturalized among the subject peoples. Most often, it is the conquerors who thus impose their language on the conquered; we need go no further afield than Wales or Ireland, where the process is incomplete, and Cornwall, where it reached its termination a century ago. But sometimes it is the conquered who absorb and assimilate the conquerors; the Normans seem to have been good hands at thus losing their identity wherever they went; for in Normandy, they dropped their native Scandinavian and adopted old French; while in England again they lost their French, and in a few generations became thoroughgoing Englishmen. In Ireland, too, as an Irishman expressed it, they "inculcated Celtic habits," and gave rise to the famous saying, so often repeated, that they were "ipsis Hibernis Hiberniores."

On a large scale, this absorption of the conquerors by the conquered appears to have gone on over the entire Malayo-Polynesian