Chapter III: The Three Causes of Change in Language (2)

In this way general terms come to be restricted to individuals, while words which denote the particular are extended to denote the universal. _Deer_, which, like the cognate German _thier_ and Latin _fera_, originally signified wild animals of all kinds, is now confined to a particular species; while, on the other hand, the Latin _emere_, which properly signified “to take” in general, came to be restricted to the special meaning of taking when we “buy.” The older significations of words are continually decaying and being supplanted by new ones. Those who use them are too lazy to find out their exact significance.

The principle of laziness is equally active in the province of grammar. Here, too, the relations formerly conceived to exist between the several parts of the sentence may be forgotten altogether or replaced by other relations. The inflections of the Anglo-Saxon noun have been almost all lost, and the datives _him_ and _whom_ have become objective cases. Prepositions have taken the place of the case-endings, the adjective no longer “agrees” with its noun, but is now conceived of as a simple attribute, while all remembrance of the dative relation has faded out of the expressions “give me a book,” “send it away.” The subjunctive is fast ceasing to exist, and the modern Englishman troubles himself but little about the difference between _be_ and _is_ or between _if I was_ and _if I were_.

It is in phonology, however, that the principle of laziness is most active. As far back as we can follow the history of language we see the stronger and harder sounds perpetually changing into weaker and easier ones; and so uniform and constant is this tendency that in the absence of counter-indications we are justified in referring most cases of phonetic change with which we may meet to the operation of decay. Mr. Douse[108] has lately made an ingenious but unsuccessful attempt to assign the phænomena of Grimm’s law to what he terms the principle of least effort, by supposing that the different phonetic systems of the several branches of the Indo-European family were evolved out of the _tenues_ or hard consonants, at a time when these branches were still co-existing dialects of a single language, through the influence of “Reflex Dissimilation.” Reflex dissimilation is explained to be a more complicated and somewhat varying instance of that simple cross compensation which we see exemplified in the Cockney interchange of _v_ and _w_, or the perverse persistency with which the same persons, who leave out the aspirate where it ought to exist, insert it where it ought to be omitted. In both cross compensation and reflex dissimilation, however, we have a compound action of the two antagonistic principles of laziness and emphasis.

The age of a language is marked by the extent to which it has been affected by phonetic decay, and when we find how large its influence has been upon the Old Egyptian and the Accadian of Chaldæa, as they appear in the earliest monuments we possess, we may form some idea of the length of time that must have elapsed since those languages were first being moulded and fixed. At the same time we must not forget that phonetic decay will act more readily upon some classes of languages than upon others. Wherever there is no clear consciousness of the distinction between root and grammatical suffix, as in our own inflectional family of speech, there we may expect a greater and more rapid amount of change than in agglutinative dialects where the relations of grammar are expressed by independent or semi-independent words. But even the latter cannot escape the law of gradual decay. To pass over the incorporating Basque in which words like _dakarkiotezute_, “ye eat it for them,” or _detzadan_, “that I should have them,” have to be decomposed into _da_, “it” or “him,” _ekarri_, “to eat,” _ki_, sign of the dative, _o_, “for him,” _te_, sign of the plural, _zute_, “ye,” and _d_, “him,” _ez_ (_izan_), “to be” or “have,” _za_, sign of the plural, _ta_, “I,” and _n_, conjunctive affix, we find Yakute Turkish changing _bin_ + _śän_ (“I + thou”) into _biś_, “we,”[109] while the written Japanese _taka-si_ and _taka-ki_, “high,” are pronounced _takai_. Chinese itself is not exempt from the universal rule. As Dr. Edkins[110] and M. de Rosny have shown, the modern Mandarin dialect has lost numerous initial and final consonants, and words like _yi_, “one,” and _ta_, “great,” were once _tit_ and _dap_. Along the southern bank of the Yang-tsi-kiang and through Chekiang to Fuh-kien the old initials are still preserved, while in the northern provinces no less than three finals have been lost and the tones by which Chinese words of similar form are distinguished from one another are so many compensations for the loss of letters. Here again we have the principle of emphasis endeavouring to repair the damage wrought by the principle of decay.

A literary dialect is naturally less subject to the inroads of decay than an unwritten one. The spelling of words reacts upon their pronunciation and preserves it from extensive alteration. There is a wide chasm between that Tuscan Italian which has been preserved from corruption by the genius of Dante and the modern dialect of Bologna or Naples. In the age of Cicero the _cave ne eas_ of polite society had become _cauneas_ in the language of the people,[111] and how artificial was the attempt of pedants and purists to maintain the older pronunciation, even to the restoration of the final _s_ which had already been dropped by Ennius, appeared pretty plainly as soon as the decline of the Roman empire and the extinction of the literary class deprived it of support. Latin at once fell away into the Romance dialects of modern Europe, just as literary Anglo-Saxon with its inflections and its learned vocabulary disappeared before the Norman Conquest. The language of the Assyrian inscriptions remains almost unaltered throughout the long period of nearly 2,000 years, during which we can watch its fortunes; but this language was the stereotyped one of literature and education, and differed very considerably from the spoken language of the people. The late linguistic character of Hebrew, the extent, that is, to which it has been influenced by phonetic decay as compared with its sister tongues, is an incontrovertible proof of the backward literary condition of its speakers. But even literature and cultivation are unable to preserve a language altogether from decay and change. The pronunciation of the educated slowly changes; words become clipped and shortened in spite of their spelling, and notwithstanding printers and schoolmasters the spelling in the end has to follow the pronunciation. Mr. Alexander Ellis has shown in his “Early English Pronunciation” how widely our modern pronunciation of English has departed from that of Shakspeare’s time, and the spelling of _though_, _through_, and _enough_ bears witness to a period when they ended in a guttural aspirate. Our pronunciation is still undergoing change; the vowels are becoming more and more indistinct and merged in a common obscure _ĕ_; while such contractions as _I’ll_, _I’d_, _won’t_, and _can’t_ can hardly be distinguished from Basque forms like those mentioned above. The educated Englishman speaks, as the French say, with his lips closed; he finds that he can be understood without the trouble of opening and rounding them, and his vowels are accordingly formed in the front rather than in the back part of the mouth. No wonder that he has a difficulty with the French _eu_; the effort to pronounce it is too great a strain upon the unexercised muscles of the lips, and so the English gentleman who told the waiter not to let the _feu_ go out in his absence found on his return that his friend had been strictly watched and guarded as a dangerous _fou_.

But though a literature and more especially a widely extended literary education form the chief obstacle to the action of phonetic decay, there are other social influences which operate to the same end. Wherever there is a fixed and stable society, cut off from close intercourse with its neighbours and handing down unchanged its customs and institutions, we are likely to find a more or less fixed and stable language. For language is the mirror of the community that uses it, and where the community alters but little the language will alter but little too. It is in this way that we must explain the fact that Lithuanian, though unprotected by a literature and spoken by the least progressive of the European members of the Aryan family, is yet the most conservative of all the Western languages of our group, or that the Bedouin of Central Arabia is said to speak at the present day a more archaic language than those of Nineveh or Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. Since the institution of an annual fair among the Rocky Mountains the idioms of the eastern and western Eskimaux, who at first were hardly understood by one another, became more and more assimilated;[112] and the stationary character of Icelandic may be ascribed as much to the isolation of the settled Norse community in the island as to the existence of a literature. Of course, the community must be one which has reached a certain level of culture, and its customs and institutions must imply organization and recognition of fixed principles. Where the customs and institutions are founded on mere unreasoning habit and precedent, we are dealing with a community of barbarians, and consequently with languages or dialects in a perpetual state of flux.

The changes wrought by phonetic decay are sometimes sufficient to alter the whole aspect of a language, and are at once the foundation and the riddle of etymology. Who would recognize in the French _même_, for instance, any derivative from the Latin pronoun _se_? And yet _même_ goes back to the Low Latin _semetipsissimum_ through the Old Provençal _smetessme_, the later Provençal _medesme_ and the Old French _meïsme_. Words of different origin, like _scale_ from the Latin _scala_ and the Anglo-Saxon _scalu_ and _scealu_, may come to assume the same form; while words of the same origin, like the French _captif_ and _chétif_, from _captivus_, or _noel_ and _natal_ from _natalis_, may appear under different forms. The processes of assimilation and swarabhakti, of metathesis and epenthesis, to be described in the next chapter, are so many forms under which phonetic decay displays itself. The history of language is the history of the continual weakening of uttered sounds and the gradual lessening of the demands made upon the organs of speech, and attempts like that to reduce the triliteral roots of the Semitic tongues to biliteral ones are contrary to the whole tendency of language. Accent alone is able to hold out against the assaults of phonetic decay; it is only the accented syllable that remains unchanged when all around it is perishing, and, as in the case of _age_ from _ætaticum_ or _dine_ from _desinere_, is often all that is left of the primitive word. It is again the struggle between the principle of emphasis and the principle of laziness, between conservatism and revolution. Only when the accent is shifted to another syllable can phonetic decay gain the victory, and the shifting of the accent is itself the work of the principle of decay.

The principle of laziness has much to do with the creation of dialects. Slight variations of pronunciation and of the usage of words are as inevitable in language as variations of species in zoology, and where there is no correcting standard these variations are perpetuated and intensified. Helped by the two other causes of linguistic change, the dialect of a household becomes in time the dialect of a clan or tribe, and as soon as its characteristics are sufficiently numerous and distinct, the dialect is transformed into a language. An isolated community will by slow degrees form a new language for itself. Just as the history and character of one society differ from those of another, so too must the dialect or language differ in which the society finds expression. Even where the rapid and intimate intercourse of modern civilization and the safeguard of a common and widely-studied literature stand in the way, as in the case of England and America, dialectical differences and peculiarities will yet spring up. In savage and barbarous communities the growth of innumerable dialects is a matter of necessity. The manifold languages of the Malayan and Polynesian Archipelago can be traced back to a common source, but the natives of two neighbouring islands are often unintelligible to one another; while von der Gabelentz says of the Melanesians, that “every small island has its own language or even several languages.”[113] Before the utter extinction of the Tasmanians, with a population of no more than fifty persons there were four dialects, each with a different word for “ear,” “eye,” “head,” and other equally common objects. The language of a shifting unorganized community will reflect the condition of those who speak it, and we are not surprised, therefore, at Captain Gordon’s assertion that “some” of the Manipuran dialects “are spoken by no more than thirty or forty families, yet (are) so different from the rest as to be unintelligible to the nearest neighbourhood.” Humboldt tells us[114] that in South America, together with a great analogy of physical constitution, “a surprising variety of languages is observed among nations of the same origin, and which European travellers scarcely distinguish by their features.” Greece, with its small extent of country and still smaller amount of population, was said a few years back to possess no fewer than seventy dialects,[115] and no less than eight principal dialects besides several subordinate ones exist among the modern Basques, whose whole population is under 800,000.[116] Indeed, considering the isolation of the Basques, socially, politically, and linguistically, as well as the narrow tract of country into which they have been compressed, it is remarkable that natives of places not forty miles distant from one another are yet mutually unintelligible.[117] But the natural condition of language is diversity and change, and it is only under the artificial influences of civilization and culture that a language becomes uniform and stationary. As soon as the coercive hand of civilization is removed it breaks out again into a plentiful crop of dialects. Of course, the vicissitudes through which semi-civilized peoples are continually passing greatly assist the process of change. Conquest and the mixture consequent upon it, famine, disease, and migration, are all powerful aids to dialect-making. The women of a tribe who stay at home, or who have been married out of another tribe, sometimes possess a language different from that of the men; thus, the Carib women in the Antille Isles used a different tongue from that of their husbands, while the Eskimaux women in Greenland turn _k_ into _ng_ and _t_ into _n_.[118] Even religion and superstition play their part in the work; the sacred language of the “medicine-men” in Greenland, for instance, is for the most part an arbitrary perversion of the significations of known words; thus _tak_, “darkness,” is used in the sense of “the north,” and so gives rise to two new words of this secret speech, _tarsoak_, “earth,” and _tarsoarmis_, “roots.” The custom of _tapu_ among the Pacific Islanders, according to which every word which contains a syllable identical with some part of the name of the reigning chief has to be dropped or changed, is due to the belief that all things belonging to a chief are consecrated and inviolable. Since the reign of Queen Pomare _mi_ has been substituted for _po_, “night,” in Tahitian, and Hale tells us of this language[119] that its “manner of forming new words seems to be arbitrary. In many cases the substitutes are made by changing or dropping some letter or letters of the original word, as _hopoi_ for _hepai_, ... _au_ for _tau_, &c. In other cases the word substituted is one which had before a meaning nearly related to that of the term disused.... In some cases the meaning or origin of the new word is unknown, and it may be a mere invention, as _ofai_ for _ohatu_ ‘stone,’ _papai_ for _vai_, ‘water,’ _pohe_ for _mate_, ‘dead.’” Similar to the Polynesian _tapu_ is the Chinese custom of tabooing the elements of the reigning emperor’s name, and the _ukuhlonipa_, which forbids the Kafir women to pronounce a word containing a sound like one in the names of their nearest relations. Thus, “Mr. Leslie states that the wives of Panda’s sons would never call him (Mr. Leslie) by his Kafir name of u’ Lpondo, on account of its partial identity with that of the chief, their father-in-law. In the name of the river Amanzimtoti, ‘Sweet Waters,’ in like manner, _mtoti_ has been substituted for _mnandi_, hlonipaed or tabooed on account of its occurring in the name of Tsaka’s mother Unandi.”[120]

The Abipones of South America similarly alter the names of the friends and relatives of a dead member of the tribe, and the words which entered into the composition of his name are dropped out of use.[121] For a parallel superstition we have only to think of the old European belief in the omen involved in the mere pronunciation of a word, which caused the Greek to speak of his left hand as ἀρίστερος, “the better one,” and the Roman to change Maleventum into Beneventum. The belief in the power of words, in the _vis verbi_ as the Latin termed it, is even now not extinct, and the same feeling which altered the “Cape of Storms” into the “Cape of Good Hope” is still prevalent among us.

The sacred jargon of the Eskimaux sorcerer, which finds its analogue in the slang of the schoolboy, is merely one step lower than the ceremonial dialects which are to be met with all over the world. The _Bhasa Krama_ or ceremonial language of Java, for example, like the ceremonial languages of the larger islands of Polynesia, or the ceremonial conjugation of the ancient Azteks, hedges in the upper classes of the community with a veritable _tapu_. So, too, the Japanese when addressing a superior has to speak of himself as _gu-sau_, “a stupid vegetable,” or _yátsŭ-ko_ (contracted _yákko_), “house-boy,” and of another as _nandzi_, “famous,” or _te-máye-san_, “the gentleman at hand,” while _o_ or _on_, “great,” is prefixed to all words which relate to the latter[122] and distinctive verbs and verbal forms employed expressive of courtesy.[123] The Chinaman is equally the slave of an artificial politeness; he is himself “the thief” (_ts’ie_), “the soft-brained” (_’iu_), while the person he addresses is “the honourable” (_ling_) or “the noble brother” (_ling hiung_).[124] The Indian _bhavan_, “present,” is construed with the third person in order to denote the second with ambiguous courtesy, and the same reluctance to place oneself on a footing of equality by a blunt “thou” shows itself in the Latin of the Hungarian, who will say “Dominus dignetur commodare mihi librum,” meaning the second person.[125] The ceremonial use of the pronouns reaches a still greater extreme in German, where in addition to the various titles with which “His Highly well-born,” “His most serene,” or “His Transparency” require to be addressed, the second person singular has to be represented sometimes by a masculine _Er_ (“he”), sometimes by a feminine _Sie_ (“she”), sometimes by a plural _Sie_ (“they”). The latter reminds us of the Hebrew “pluralis majestatis,” and recalls our own employment of the plural _you_ for the singular _thou_. Our usage in this respect was probably influenced by the French use of _vous_, and it is perhaps to the same influence that we may ascribe the Basque use of _Zute_, “you,” instead of _Zu_, “thou,” which seems of comparatively late introduction. Two Basque dialects, indeed, the Souletin and the east Low Navarese, have even developed a ceremonial conjugation, every person of which, except the second plural, assumes a special form when a superior is addressed. Besides the ceremonial conjugation there is also a feminine one, employed whenever a woman is spoken to. It must be remembered that the Basque verb is an amalgamation of the verbal root with the personal pronouns.

The rapid changes undergone by languages in a natural state can only be appreciated by those who have had experience of a tribe of wandering savages, or who have observed the alterations children would make in the language they learn if left to themselves. According to Waldeck, a dictionary compiled by Jesuit missionaries in Central America became useless within ten years; and Messerschmidt states that the inhabitants of Ostiak villages, only a mile or two apart, are unintelligible to one another.[126] The Hurons, Sagard stated in 1631, spoke such a variety of dialects that not only was the same language hardly to be heard in two adjacent villages, but even in two adjacent houses, and these multitudinous dialects he further described as changing every day. Mr. Trumbull, however, points out that Sagard’s account must be received with caution, since he says that the instability of language among the French was almost as great as among the Hurons, and his “very imperfect dictionary of this unstable language, 200 years or more after it was compiled, enabled Duponceau to make himself understood without apparent difficulty by the Wyandots, a remnant of the last nation of the Hurons.”[127]

But the following account given by Sir C. Lyell in his “Antiquity of Man,”[128] shows that it is not necessary for a community to be semi-civilized or barbarous in order to prove how rapidly a non-literary language can be transformed. “A German colony in Pennsylvania,” he says, “was cut off from frequent communication with Europe for about a quarter of a century, during the wars of the French Revolution, between 1792 and 1815. So marked had been the effect even of this brief and imperfect isolation, that when Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar travelled among them a few years after the peace, he found the peasants speaking as they had done in Germany in the preceding century, and retaining a dialect which at home had already become obsolete. Even after the renewal of the German emigration from Europe, when I travelled in 1841, among the same people in the retired valleys of the Alleghanies, I found the newspapers full of terms half-English and half-German, and many an Anglo-Saxon word which had assumed a Teutonic dress, as ‘fencen,’ to fence, instead of umzäunen; ‘flauer,’ for flour, instead of mehl, and so on.” Destroy literature and facility of intercommunication, and the languages of England and America would soon be as different as those of France and Italy.

It is civilization which counteracts the natural tendency to multiply dialects, and which is ever striving to absorb the manifold dialects that exist into a single tongue. All the social conditions of civilized life tend to break down dialects, to assimilate languages, and to create a common medium of intercourse. A common government, a common literature, a common history and a common law, all require a common language. The Macedonian Empire made Greek the language of the East, and Rome effectually stamped out the various idioms of its subjects in the West. It needed an invasion of barbarism and the overthrow of Roman organization and culture to restore the period of linguistic disunion. The Church remained the sole representative of civilization, and consequently the sole possessor of a common tongue. In fact, wherever civilization has made an advance, the action of the great causes of change in language has received a check. Every conquest over a horde of barbarians, every attempt to found a settled government, to establish a code of laws, to systematize a religion, or to originate a literature, is a step forward in the direction of linguistic unity. The practical aim of the science of language is the formation of a universal speech, and the time may yet come when the dream will be converted into a reality. The inventions of the present century—the steamer, the railway, and the telegraph—are bringing all parts of the world into a closer connection with one another, and abolishing the barriers created by differences of speech. Commerce demands a _lingua franca_, and now that commerce is world-wide its _lingua franca_ must be world-wide also.

The language of the chief trading nations must finally prevail in the struggle for existence, and the prophecy has already been hazarded that pigeon-English, or a similar grammarless jargon, will be the future medium of universal intercourse. However this may be, the endeavour to revive the perishing languages of Europe, and to make the limits of speech the limits of nationality, is a reversal of the lesson of history and a return to primitive barbarism. It is but the transient reaction against the Empire of the first Napoleon, based on the false belief that language and race are convertible terms. But the endeavour, however flattering to nations without a history, is doomed to failure. Little by little the weaker languages and dialects of Europe are disappearing before the schoolmaster and the railway, and artificial nurture can alone protract their lingering existence. Gaelic and Welsh in our own islands, like Breton in France or Lithuanian in Germany and Russia, must share the fate which has already overtaken Cornish and Wendic. The last Wendic speaker, Frau Gülzsin, died on the Island of Rügen as long ago as 1404,[129] while Lithuanian is now used by scarcely a million and a half persons, in spite of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s plea for it as “a still unmixed language of an old people, now isolated and confined within narrow bounds,” which would throw light on the history of the past.[130] The tendency of time is to unify and simplify, and exact science even now has but one tongue throughout the world. The attempt of Bishop Wilkins to invent a universal language failed, not because it was premature, but because such a language, like all others, must be a spontaneous growth; a better fortune may await the Pasigraphy of Bachmaier,[131] which attempts to do for the man of literature what the Arabic ciphers have done for the mathematician, since writing differs from language in being a conscious human invention.

The history of the extinction of languages is similar to that of the extinction of dialects. We see the same process at work in both cases, only on a different scale. Where several dialects exist together, the one which belongs to the dominant class will finally prevail over the others. The “Queen’s English” is really the court dialect of Chaucer’s day, which became the dialect of literature and education, and so has succeeded in degrading its sister-dialects into illiterate provincialisms, and in many cases in destroying them altogether. Where the educated and ruling caste is small, the other dialects will continue to flourish among the mass of the people, and on the overthrow of the cultured class will once more assert their own. But in a democratic age like the present, when books and newspapers are multiplied by the printing press, and the whole nation is being leavened by the general spread of education, the dialect of civilization will sooner or later swallow up its less favoured sisters. The remarkable sameness of dialect which prevails among the Arabic-speaking populations of the East may be largely accounted for by the democratic spirit of Mahommedanism which holds all men equal before the supreme Khalif. It is, therefore, of the highest importance to comparative philology that the decaying dialects of our own or other countries should be observed and written down before they have perished. The history of a language can be traced only by a comparison of its dialects, which often preserve words and forms that have become obscure and inexplicable in the standard dialect itself. Where the allied dialects have disappeared, the chasm that divides the language we are studying from those with which it was once connected may be too wide to be easily spanned. For in language, as in everything else, dialect passes gradually and insensibly into dialect, and it is not until we compare the two extremes in the series that we are made aware of the accumulated differences which the transitions have involved.

The progress of civilization, then, implies a continuous diminution of the languages and dialects of the world, and a corresponding extension of a single tongue. Just as we have seen that language advances from complexity to simplicity, so we now see that it advances from multiplicity to unity. The more barbarous a society is, the more numerous will be the languages that it speaks. The further back we go into the past, the greater must be the linguistic anarchy with which we meet. A language begins with dialects, and since language is the product and reflection of the community that uses it, the primæval languages of the world must have been as infinitely numerous as the communities that spoke them. We start with the Babel of confusion, with the houseless savage who did that which was right in his own eyes. Language, it is true, first cemented society together, but it also made each society a body of hostile units. Many as are the existing languages of the earth, they are but the selected relics of an infinitely greater number which have passed away. Here and there we still come across the last waifs of an otherwise extinct family of speech, the last survivors of a group of languages and dialects which has long since been forgotten. The Basque, like the scattered languages of the Caucasus, seems to have no connection with any other known speech; sheltered by the mountain fastnesses of Biscay, it remains to bear witness to the linguistic character of an extinct world. So far as appears at present, the mysterious Etruscan which has left us some 3,000 short inscriptions is another forlorn waif, without kith or kin in the world of known tongues. Perhaps, too, the language of the Lykian inscriptions, which still refuses to be “classified” in spite of the efforts that have been made to turn it into an Iranian idiom, is a further example of the same kind. The boulders that have been left on our hilltops do not tell us with more certainty of the icebergs and icefloes which brought them thither, than do these stray languages of the manifold forms of speech of which they are the scanty remnants. Our only wonder should be not that there are any tongues which refuse to be classed with others, but that there are so few which thus maintain an isolated existence.

As we shall see hereafter, families of languages are exceptional in the history of speech. Professor Max Müller very truly says:[132] “Families of languages are very peculiar formations; they are, and they must be, the exception, not the rule, in the growth of language. There was always the possibility, but there never was, as far as I can judge, any necessity for human speech leaving its primitive stage of wild growth and decay.” “If we confine ourselves to the Asiatic continent, with its important peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of drifting human speech, three, and only three oases have been formed, in which, before the beginning of all history, language became permanent and traditional; assumed, in fact, a new character—a character totally different from the original character of the floating and constantly varying speech of human beings.” And these oases, these families of speech, it is important to remember, are themselves made up of dialects, only dialects with a common grammar and a common stock of roots. We may, if we like, construct a hypothetical “parent-speech,” from which we may derive the several dialects and languages which are the only facts we have to work upon; but we must not forget that such a parent-speech is purely hypothetical, the product of reflective analysis and logical deduction. Fick’s dictionary of the Parent-Aryan is as much the creation of the comparative philologist’s closet as Schleicher’s “restoration” of its grammatical forms. Because the Sanskrit _panchan_ and the Latin _quinque_ can both be reduced to the same form _quemquem_, it does not follow that the latter form was ever actually existent. As far back as we can go, we still find ourselves in the presence of allied dialects, never of a single tongue. The east-Aryan primitive _ghard_, “heart,” cannot be reduced to the same form as the west-Aryan _kard_, with the same meaning; the two variant forms of the root testify to a dialectical difference from the outset.[133] Such, too, is the evidence of words like those for “daughter,” Greek θυγάτηρ, but Sanskrit _duhitâ_, or “door,” Greek θύρα, Sanskrit _dwâram_ (not _dhwâram_), while the demonstrative pronouns appear from the first under two incompatible forms _sa_(s) and _ta_(s). For the sake of convenience we may assume a parent-speech; we may even go so far as to picture to ourselves a family of languages like a family in social life, except that it springs not from two ancestors but from one; but unless we bear in mind that these assumptions are like the assumptions of the geometer, ideal creations, never realized in the actual world, we shall be betrayed into numberless absurdities and false conclusions. It is to them, indeed, that we owe the belief that the primitive Aryans had but the single vowel _a_ in their alphabet besides the three tenues _k_, _t_, _p_, the labials _r_, _m_, _n_, and the sibilant _s_. Even Dr. Murray, with his nine primæval roots _ag_, _bag_, _dwag_, _gwag_, _lag_, _mag_, _nag_, _rag_, and _swag_, did better than this.[134]

Repulsion and division, then, is the natural condition of language. The three causes of change are ever actively at work, and the influence of civilization cannot entirely destroy their power. But with the advance of culture, the dividing barriers are broken down, and to borrow a metaphor from mechanics, the centrifugal is exchanged for the centripetal force. Dialects make way for languages, and languages in their turn tend to centralization. Where thought is of more consequence than the vocal symbols in which it is expressed, means will be found for making the symbols uniform and constant. Language begins with multiplicity and disunion, but its end is unity. The theory that would derive the idioms of the world from three or four primæval centres, or even from a single centre, is contrary to the facts. In the very act of being formed a language necessarily splits itself into dialectical variety. The children of to-day resemble those children of humanity, the first framers of articulate speech, and the children of a single household, if left to themselves, would have each his own jargon, his own dialect. So it was, too, with primitive man. Where circumstances were favourable the inhabitants of the same locality, breathing the same air, and enjoying the same food, would maintain a family likeness in the tongues they spoke; but elsewhere all the causes of change would have had free play, and the languages of mankind would have been as numerous as the songs of birds. With the growth of society, however, language, the great social unifier, became more and more fixed and settled; though dialects continued to branch off, they each occupied a wider area, belonged to a larger community, and retained their marks of relationship to one another. When the first level of civilization had been reached, the history of language entered upon a new phase. Families of speech became possible, and the same causes that produced permanence and stability in the customs and beliefs of the community produced them also in the dialects that it used. The first step had been made towards counteracting the anarchy of primæval speech and attaining that ideal unity to which language tends. Here and there the race may have deteriorated; the Hottentots, for instance, with their developed dialects, may be the degenerate descendants of more civilized ancestors; but the movement on the whole has been forward and not backward. Science with a myriad voices declares the ascent and not the descent of man. Our civilization, it is true, like the languages that reflect it, is still imperfect, is still far from the goal that it has in view. But we may take heart from what has been achieved, and perhaps even look forward to the day when there shall be not only one hope and one faith, but also one language in which they shall find utterance.