Page:The Indian Antiquary, Vol. 4-1875.djvu/347

 320 THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY, [OCTOBEB, 1875. by recent investigations into Accadian, as re- covered from the cuneiform inscriptions of Baby- lon. Many of its roots are dissyllabic. Accadian is a very ancient Turanian speecb, — older than the Sanskrit of the Veda; and Mr. Sayce strongly holds that the neglect of Turanian has led to many other rash conclusions besides the specific one now mentioned. On this point we quite agree with htm. Our readers are doubtless familiar with the division of languages into Isolating, Agglutinative, and Inflectional, with the great dispute whether an isolating tongue is naturally developed— or capable of being developed— into an agglutinative, and afterwards into an inflectional one. Mr. Sayce vehemently says, No. He asserts that even if the Aryan was "the eldest born of a gorilla/' "his brain could produce only an inflectional language, as soon as he came to speak consciously." He admits that the three stages of language above named mark "successive levels of civilization," but maintains that "each was the highest expres- sion of the race that carried it out." We would fain gather arguments from Mr. Sayce's pages as strong as these assertions ; but we have failed to find them. The question of the interchange, as it has been called, of letters has attracted much notice. Why, for example, hare we diet in Latin, two in English, and zv.-ni in German? Or, again. trs$ in Latin, three in English, diei in German ? Mr. Sayce holds t bat all the related Bounds were " differentiations of one obscure sound which contained within itself the clearer consonants." Primitive man, he be-, had no delicacy of ear. The further back we push our researches, the greater becomes the number of obscure, or neutral, sounds. The oldest words he holds to have conveyed ideas of the most purely sensuous kind. Mr. Sayee's speculations on the Metaphysics of language are in more than one sense oracular. But hia illustration or his meaning should be more intelligible. Take the question of gender:— how can the sexual character attributed to nouns bo explained ? Some have ascribed it to a philosophic, or perhaps poetic, view of the character of the objects as resembling in quality either males or females, or neither. Mr. Sayce sets aside thin view by referring to African dialects that have eight or even eighteen gendere. Following Bleek, but somewhat modifying his view, he says : Out of the endless variety of words that might have been taken for personal and demonstrative pronouns, use selected some ; each of these was associated with "an ever-increasingly specified" class of nouns ; and where the pronouns continued different the classes of substantives connected with them continued different also. "Where the majority of words with a conmon termination were of a certain gender, all other words with t the same ending were referred to the same gender." And then we have illustrations supplied from Moxa, and Abiponiau, and Mikir, and TshetBh, and Wolof! Mr. Sayce holds that the dual is older than the plural. This opposes the common belief of scholars ; but he argues the point ably, and, what is more, clearly. The chapter on Philology and Religion is the part of the book that satisfies ns leaBt. We find a multitude of propositions, stated without proof, which would upset the belief of nine-tenths of thinking men. For example — •'The religions instinct first exhibits itself in the worship of dead ancestors. Society begins with a hive-like community, the members of which are not individually marked out, but to- gether form one whole. In other words, the com- munity, and not the individual, lives and acts. But the community does not comprise the living only; the dead equally form a part of it; and their presence, it is believed, can alone account for the dreams of the savage or the pains and illnesses to which he is subject. In this way the concep- tion of a spiritual world takes its r And all this is quietly taken for granted ! Let ns pass on, lest we lose our temper, to the con- cluding chapter, which discusses the influence of Analogy in language. J t deals with nothing deep, but simply states some very obvious truths. The influence of analogy may be seen in the tendency now existing in English to reduce all verbs to the form of conjugation. It$ influence is far- reaching. It affects language both as to its mut- ter and its form. As to its matter, analogy pro* duces change in accent, quantity, and pronuncia- tion generally. It moulds not only accidence and syntax, but the signification of words. Exceptional cases are forced into harmony with the prevailing rule. Irish accents its words on the first sylll the cognate Welsh on the penultimate ; though originally the mode of accentuation must have been similar in both. " A particular mod© of accentua- tion became Fashionable/' and the "whole stor-k of words was gradually brought under the domin- ant type." This explanation does not explain much, however; it only asserts that the majority drew the minority after .it. But how did tho majority go in one direction in Irish, and in an- other in Welsh ? There are many striking things scattered up and down the pages before us. Bash as we deem Mr. Sayce, at all events he never fails to be in- teresting ; and his stores of information are very great.