Chapter V: The Morphology of Speech (1)

“In der Wirklichkeit wird die Rede nicht aus ihr
vorangegangenen Wörtern zusammengesetzt, sondern die Wörter
gehen umgekehrt aus dem ganzen der Rede hervor.”—W. VON
HUMBOLDT.

“Rien n’autorise donc à admettre deux moments dans la création
du langage: un premier moment, où il n’aurait eu que des
radicaux, à la manière chinoise, et un second moment, où il
serait arrivé à la grammaire.”—RENAN.

We have seen in an earlier chapter that the form under which our thought may express itself in language is capable of many variations. The minds of men and races are very various, and what may seem a perfectly natural mode of thought and expression to one man may be wholly strange and unnatural to another. It is as difficult for us to realize the conception of the sentence formed by the Chinaman, as it is for the Chinaman to realize ours. The world wears a different aspect to different individuals, and the relation of the speaker to the things about him may be regarded in widely different ways. Races start each with a peculiar temperament and peculiar characteristics; indeed, it is just these peculiarities that constitute what we call a race. And race peculiarities become strengthened by time and tradition, by the continuous influence of the circumstances which have at once created and fostered them. What may have been only a tendency in the beginning becomes in the end a settled and permanent feature; the germ develops into the full-grown organism, and in the course of ages makes explicit all the possibilities that lie implicit within it. The manifold races of mankind do not all think in the same manner, and the divergent modes in which they think are reflected in the languages they utter.

Hence it is that languages can be classed morphologically, that is, according to the form assumed by the sentence. Here the sentence may be built, as it were, around a verb, there any conception of a verb may be absent; here its several parts may be regarded as so many equipollent monads, set one against the other, there as interdependent pieces of a Chinese puzzle which all fit into their appropriate places. In one class of tongues the root may be monosyllabic, in another polysyllabic; one language may interpose the stem between the root and the grammatical suffix, another may know nothing of such an intermediary. Morphologically, therefore, languages differ from each other in the structure of the sentence and the grammatical relation of its parts.

Now we must not forget that the idea of race has not the same signification for the glottologist that it has for the physiologist. For the student of language it means an assemblage of psychological and physiological peculiarities which are expressed in articulate speech. For him the European Jew, who has no language but that of the country in which he is settled, is a member of the European race; only the Jew whose mother-tongue belongs to the Semitic stock can be reckoned a Semite. At the outset, no doubt, race meant the same thing in both a glottological and a physiological sense. The characteristics which reflected themselves in language were characteristics of which the physiologist has to take account. But the physiological races of the modern world are far more mixed than the languages they speak; the physiologist has much more difficulty in distinguishing his races than has the glottologist in distinguishing his families of speech.

But, as elsewhere in nature, so, too, in the domain of language, species passes gradually and insensibly into species, class into class. The types remain clear and strongly-marked, but the dividing lines between them are hard to draw. Around each type is grouped a large assemblage of languages which stand at a perpetually widening distance from it; on the one side the furthest member of the group almost loses itself in the outlying member of another, while the most distant member on the other side can with difficulty be distinguished from the most distant member of a third group. Isolating Chinese presents the phænomena of agglutination and even of inflection; the agglutinative Finnic dialects approach so nearly to inflection that attempts have been made to include them in the Aryan family; and English is in many respects highly agglutinative and even polysynthetic, while the French _je vous donne_ is almost as good an instance of incorporation as could be given from Basque itself. But with all this gradual approximation the several types of language still remain fixed and distinct. The Chinese in its main features, in its bone and muscle, so to say, continues true to its isolating type, just as Finnic continues true to its agglutinative type, or French to its inflectional one. The greater or less departure of a language from its primitive type is due to several causes. First of all, race in language may become mixed just as much as race in physiology. Contact between two languages produces not only mixture in their vocabularies, but a mutual influence upon their phonology, and even grammar as well. This is a point to which we shall have to return hereafter. Few languages any more than races in the physiological sense can have remained quite isolated during the long course of their history or been preserved from contact with languages of an alien class. Then, secondly, with all their differences the minds of most men are cast in the same mould. Thought is one, as a philosopher has said, though the forms under which it shows itself are infinitely various. Unity underlies diversity, and this unity finds its expression in the tendency of all languages to break away from their types and assume common forms. It is true that a language cannot wholly break away from its type without becoming another language, and so ceasing to exist; it is true, also, that such a psychological change as would be implied by the occurrence is almost inconceivable, and is certainly contrary to historical experience; but nevertheless languages belonging to two different types may gradually approach one another during the long ages of their development, and the difficulty experienced by the student in deciding to which type they belong may testify to the similarity of the intellectual outfit of all mankind. Here, at any rate, we can discover a common origin, a common descent for the manifold branches of the human family.

Schlegel’s attempt to divide languages morphologically has already been described. He distinguished them primarily as inorganic and organic, the first class including languages “with grammatical structure,” like the Chinese, and languages with affixes, and the second class, including the synthetic or ancient and analytic or modern dialects of the inflectional tongues. Pott, following Wilhelm von Humboldt, established the division which with various modifications is still upheld by most linguistic students. According to this the languages of the world fall into four groups, the polysynthetic (such as the Eskimaux or the Mexican), the isolating (like the Chinese), the agglutinative (like the Turkish), and the inflectional (like Sanskrit). The first group he terms transnormal, the second two intra-normal, and the third alone normal. Bopp falls back upon Schlegel’s classification, making but three kinds of speech, the isolating with monosyllabic roots but “without organism, without grammar;” the languages capable of composition, of which the Indo-European form the highest type; and the Semitic languages which denote the relations of grammar by internal vowel-change. Schleicher, like Max Müller, discards the first or polysynthetic class of Humboldt and Pott, while Max Müller acutely seeks historical support for the threefold division by referring the isolating languages to races which have not risen above family-life, the agglutinative to nomad tribes, and the inflectional to peoples who have arrived at the conception of the state.

All these divisions, so far as they are founded in fact, are really based, not on the word, but on the sentence, and only have a meaning if we explain them as representing the different forms under which the sentence has been conceived by the various races of mankind. To speak of Chinese being “without grammar,” as Bopp does, or to describe the larger number of languages as inorganic or other than normal, like Schlegel and Pott, is simply self-contradictory. Every morphological classification of language must be founded on grammar—that is, on the relations of the several parts of the sentence to one another; and the very existence of a class implies that it has a grammar and an organic life. We shall never have a satisfactory starting-point for our classification unless we put both word and root out of sight, and confine ourselves to the sentence or proposition, and the ways in which the sentence may be expressed. The reason why languages differ morphologically is that the thought which they embody assumes different forms.

In the second chapter (pp. 122-132) the languages of the world have been classed as (1) polysynthetic, (2) isolating, (3) incorporating, (4) agglutinative, (5) inflectional, and (6) analytic, and reason shown from the structure of the sentence why such a classification should be made. Steinthal was the first to make the sentence rather than the word the basis of morphological arrangement, and to point out that where we are dealing with grammar and structure, we must have at least two words standing in grammatical relation to each other. Steinthal’s system is very elaborate. He begins with the division of language into formless and formal, a division, however, of very questionable accuracy. It seems to take us back to the scheme of Schlegel, and to forget that where languages are distinguished from one another by the forms they assume, we cannot describe any of them as having no form at all. The form of speech, indeed, is the mode in which the mind views the connection between the several parts of a proposition, so that wherever we have a proposition, wherever, in fact, we have language, there must be form. Steinthal, however, goes on to divide his formless languages into “juxta-positive” and “compositive,” the Taic languages belonging to the first, and the Polynesian, Ural-Altaic, and American belonging to the second. The formal languages are similarly divided into “juxta-positive” and “compositive,” Chinese coming under the head of the one and Old Egyptian, Semitic, and Aryan coming under that of the other.

Humboldt did better than Steinthal in using the terms “imperfect” and “perfect,” instead of “formless” and “formal.” Like Steinthal, he classed Chinese along with the inflectional languages of Europe, rather than with Burman and the other isolating idioms of the far East. This seems most unnatural, since—so far as outward form is concerned—little difference can be made between isolating Chinese and isolating Burman. It is true that the order in which the parts of the sentence follow one another is more or less free in Chinese, while it is fixed in Burman, but this is a difference essentially unlike that between inflectional Aryan with its suffixes and inflectional Semitic with its internal vowel-change. Besides, both Aryan and Semitic are included in the same class. But both Humboldt and Steinthal found themselves in a difficulty. Starting with the assumption that all language follows a regular course of development, ascending from the isolating stage to the inflectional, they had further to assume that this development was but a reflection of the general development of the mind, and that the passage from one stage of speech to the other was marked by a passage to a higher intelligence and a higher form of civilization. How, then, could it be possible that the Chinese nation, which seems to have originated a considerable civilization, should show no signs of that civilization in its language, the mirror and reflection of the spirit of man? How could it be that the language spoken by the primitive Aryans, when they were still simple shepherds on the Hindu-Kush, before they had learnt the elements of writing and culture from their Semitic neighbours, was so much in advance of that of a race to whom belonged the hard task of initiating a civilization? The only escape from the difficulty was to deny that Chinese should be classed with Burman, in spite of appearances, and so to throw the whole system of classification into confusion.

For that system depends upon the mode in which the grammatical relations of the sentence are expressed, and so long as the mode is the same, the order followed by the several parts of the sentence matters but little. The order of words, in fact, is constantly liable to change, and the simple fact that the definite article is postfixed in Scandinavian, Albanian, Bulgarian, and Wallachian, while it is prefixed in those other members of the Aryan family which possess one, shows how impossible it is to ground any important conclusions upon it. The same language varies from age to age in the position it assigns to the words it uses. The modern _moreover_, for example, appears as _overmore_ in the Paston letters, and the Coptic, once a postfix language, has now become a prefix one. As we shall see presently, the order assumed by the parts of the sentence depends in great measure upon the development of grammatical forms.

Humboldt and Steinthal, nevertheless, are quite right in believing that there is a distinction between Chinese and Burman, but the distinction is that between a decrepit and civilized language on the one hand and a fresh and uncultivated language on the other. Chinese civilization is immensely old, and the language which enshrines it is immensely old also; but we must be on our guard against supposing that the antiquity of Chinese is proved by its isolating character. Chinese is no example of arrested growth, no fossilized relic of an earlier condition of speech. Were it so, Chinese civilization, and the originality and progress it implies, would be inexplicable. When we compare classical Chinese with Burman or Siamese, or even with the less cultivated dialects of the Chinese empire itself, we find the progress and development we should expect; but it is progress and development within the limits of “isolation.” All the possibilities of the isolating sentence have been worked out; and if these possibilities are not so numerous or so adequate as in the case of an agglutinative or inflectional sentence, the fault is due to the original conception of the sentence with which the Chinese started, not to fossilization or arrested growth. The Mandarin dialect of China has been affected by phonetic decay to an enormous extent; numerous sounds have perished, and words once dissimilar have become identical in pronunciation. By the help of the ancient rhymes, of the cognate dialects, and of a scientific examination of the written characters, Dr. Edkins has been able to restore the pronunciation of Chinese as it was two thousand and more years ago, and the evidences thus obtained of the wear and tear of the speech are most striking. _Dak_, “the flute,” for instance, has become _yo_; _zhet_, “the tongue,” is now _she_ and the table of correspondent sounds given in the foot-note will show how great has been the changes undergone by the outward form of the cultivated language.[236] Side by side with this decay of sounds went a corresponding grammatical development. Tones were introduced to distinguish words that had come to be pronounced alike, and the different parts of the sentence were marked out by “empty words,” used like our “of” or “if” in a purely symbolical and grammatical sense. It is probable that the spread of education and the extensive employment of ideographic writing had much to do with the phonetic decay that attacked the language. Ambiguities in conversation could always be remedied by an appeal to written symbols. At all events, it is curious that Accadian was almost equally affected by phonetic decay; and Accadian not only possessed a similarly ideographic system of writing, but was spoken in a country where education was similarly widespread, and clay—the ordinary writing material—was always at hand.

We are apt to assume that inflectional languages are more highly advanced than agglutinative ones, and agglutinative languages than isolating ones, and hence that isolation is the lowest stage of the three, at the top of which stands flection. But what we really mean when we say that one language is more advanced than another, is that it is better adapted to express thought, and that the thought to be expressed is itself better. Now, it is a grave question whether from this point of view the three classes of language can really be set the one against the other. So long as thought is expressed clearly and intelligibly, it does not much matter how it is expressed—how, that is, the relations of the sentence or proposition are denoted. When we begin to contrast the morphology of two classes of speech, there is a tendency to import our prejudices into the question, and to assume that the grammatical forms to which we have been accustomed are necessarily superior to those which appear strange to us. The masterpieces of Greek, or Latin, or Sanskrit literature have produced the impression that the languages which embody them must surpass all others as instruments of thought. But such an impression may, after all, be an incorrect one. English literature stands on quite as high a level as the literature of the classical tongues. The English language is quite as good an instrument of thought as Sanskrit or Greek, and yet English can hardly be said to be inflectional in the way that Sanskrit and Greek are. If we turn to China we shall find the Chinaman preferring his own classics to anything produced by the West, and regarding his own language as the best possible instrument of thought. Preferences of this kind can as little be referred to an absolute standard as preferences in the matter of personal beauty. The European, for instance, has a wholly different ideal of beauty from the Negro, and the Negro from the Mongol. If the excellence of a language is to be decided by the number and variety of its grammatical forms, the palm will be borne off rather by the Eskimaux or the Cheroki than by the dialects of Greece and Rome; if by the attainment of terseness and vividness, Chinese will come to the front; if by clearness and perspicacity, English will dispute the prize with the agglutinative languages. Indeed, the agglutinative languages are in advance of the inflectional in one important point, that, namely, of analyzing the sentence into its component parts, and distinguishing the relations of grammar one from another. It has been remarked[237] that “were the development theory true, the inflectional would have developed into the agglutinative, and not the converse.” Thought is obscured, not assisted, by the existence of different terminations to express the same grammatical relation, or of the same termination to express different grammatical relations; and yet this is an anomaly and source of confusion which continually meets us in the inflectional tongues. The ascription of gender to inanimate objects is worthy only of a savage and unreasoning age, and where the signs of gender have lost all reference to their original import, as in modern German, they become merely a relic and survival of barbarism. In fact, when we examine closely the principle upon which flection rests, we shall find that it implies an inferior logical faculty to that implied by agglutination. In a flectional language the relations of the sentence are denoted by particular suffixes or internal vowel-changes, which group themselves, as it were, round the principal thought contained in the sentence. In other words, every subordinate thought should be denoted by a flection. Such a principle, however, cannot be worked. _Amabit_, it is true, means “he will love;” but in order to express “he must love,” language has to break through its flectional principle and denote the idea, not by flection, but by independent words—_necesse est ut amet_, or _illi amandum est_. But this is not the only mode in which the principle of flection is violated by the necessities of developed speech. When sentences come to be brought into relation with one another, the subordinate sentence ought to be pointed out by flectional means. This is done in some cases, as in the Greek use of the inflected article with the infinitive. Generally, however, the subordination is left to be marked by independent words, such as the conjunctions, by the very means, in fact, adopted by Chinese and other isolating languages in accordance with their fundamental principle. In fact, the principle of flection cannot be logically carried out beyond the narrow circle of those simple sentences which sufficed for the needs and intelligence of primitive man, and the progress of thought in modern Europe has been marked by a corresponding revolt from the trammels of flection. It is only dialects like those of Slavs and Lithuanians which still cling to an elaborate system of flection. English has fitted itself to become a universal language by struggling to assimilate its condition to that of Chinese. Even the polysynthetic languages of America can, with a certain show of reason, claim a higher place for themselves than inflectional speech. If the object of language is to express thought, it is obvious that that thought should be expressed as a whole, as in a picture; and this is just what is done by a polysynthetic sentence. Our own language, when it forms such compound epithets as “The Employers’ Liability for Injury Bill,” or German when it interpolates a whole sentence between the article and its substantive, virtually adopt the principle of polysynthetism. Polysynthetism, however, is only to be preferred when we wish to represent our thought as a single whole, to bring it before the mind of another just as it presents itself to our own mind. The best test we really have of a growth in intelligence and reasoning power is an increasing clearness and analysis of thought. The polysynthetic languages are essentially the languages of races whose logical faculties are backward, or who have not yet left behind them the “jelly-fish” stage of development.[238] Division of labour, differentiated organization, analysis of thought and its expression—all these are the signs of advancing civilization.

The whole picture is imaged in the mind before we break it up into its several parts. So, too, the sentence which embodied a thought was conceived as a whole before it was separated into its elements. Gestures were the first makeshift for grammar; they determined the relations of each particular utterance. Then these utterances came to be compared together, and those that agreed were put on one side, and those that disagreed on another. By slow degrees the relations of grammar were thus evolved; gestures became more and more unnecessary, until at last in the most highly cultivated languages, such as modern English, they have disappeared almost entirely or been banished from educated speech. But this primitive monad, this undifferentiated sentence-word, developed very variously in the mouths of different speakers. In one case a number of antecedent circumstances combined to produce a certain conception of the outer world and the relation of things to each other and to the mind, altogether unlike the conception which grew up in other cases. Here the Chinaman regarded the elements of the sentence as co-ordinate and equal, setting part against part, and member against member, and leaving the relations between them to be supplied by the mind. There the Mongol drew a hard and fast distinction between the principal and the subordinate, between the nucleus of the proposition and the ideas dependent on it, but he took care to express each by a corresponding word and to place these words in the exact relation demanded by the thought. Elsewhere, again, the Hindu merged the subordinate in the principal, expressing the relations of the several parts of the sentence by modifications of the individual words or imitating the original form of speech by a long and elaborate compound. But in all cases the developed sentence of the later period would seem to have been evolved out of the primitive undifferentiated one according to the genius of the speakers and the mode in which they conceived the relations of ideas. The American tongues alone preserved a semblance of the form once assumed by all speech, and in the compounds of the inflected idioms we may also trace a reflection of the earliest utterances of man. What these were may still be gathered from the grammar of the Eskimaux, even though there is as great a gap between this and the primæval sentence-words of his forefathers as there is between the social condition of the Eskimaux and the social condition of his first ancestors. A cultured language like the Mexican shows the highest development attainable by the polysynthetic form of speech; here words may be isolated and separated from the sentence by means of the affix _tl_. _Sotsitl_, for instance, is “flowers,” _ni-sotsi-temoa_, “I look for flowers.” All over the world, indeed, wherever we come across a savage race, or an individual who has been unaffected by the civilization surrounding him, we find the primitive inability to separate the particular from the universal by isolating the individual word, and extracting it, as it were, from the ideas habitually associated with it. Thus the Hottentot cannot use a noun without a pronominal suffix indicating not only gender and case but also person as well, except as a predicate;[239] in several of the South American dialects the words which denote “head,” “body,” “eye,” or other parts of the person, cannot be named without personal relation being denoted by a prefixed possessive pronoun or denied by a negative or privative prefix,[240] and in Mr. Wallace’s vocabularies from the river Uapes this inability extends to other words. A Kurd of the Zaza tribe who furnished Dr. Sandwith with a list of words belonging to his dialect, was so little “able to conceive a _hand_ or _father_, except so far as they were related to himself, or something else, and so essentially concrete rather than abstract were his notions, that he combined the pronoun with the substantive whenever he had a part of the human body or a degree of consanguinity to name,” saying _sèrè-min_, “my head,” and _pie-min_, “my father.” Dr. Latham, from whom this fact is quoted, goes on to refer to a similar amalgamation noticed by him in the languages of the Louisiade and mentioned in the appendix to Macgillivray’s “Voyage of the Rattlesnake,” as well as in the ordinary Gipsy dialect spoken in England.[241]

A morphological review of the languages of the world reveals one curious and significant fact. Particular types of language belong to particular localities. In other words, a morphological classification of speech is also a geographical one. The polysynthetic idioms are characteristic of America, the isolating dialects of the extreme east of Asia. So, too, the leading inflectional families of speech, the Aryan and the Semitic, have both proceeded, it would seem, from Western Asia, like the Alarodian family, also inflectional, and best represented by the modern Georgian. The prefix-pronominal languages are confined to Southern Africa, as the incorporating Basque to the Pyrenees and the verbless Malayo-Polynesian to the islands of the Pacific. This fact would go to show that the distant emigration of languages, like the distant emigration of races, is very exceptional and chiefly characteristic of the higher species with their greater energy and expansiveness. The wanderings of savage tribes are circumscribed by the climatic and other conditions to which they are peculiarly subject. Without canoes voyages cannot be taken, and mountains, rivers, deserts, or stronger neighbours are all obstacles to movement more or less insurmountable. The fact would also go to show that it is only within the area peculiar to a certain class of languages that we may look for their progress and development. It is only in Eastern Asia or in America that we can hope to discover the highest development of which an isolating or a polysynthetic language is capable, and so regard Chinese and Mexican not as “arrested growths,” but as instinct with the progressive intelligence and cultivated life of the peoples that speak them. Where no traces of a type of speech different from the prevailing one are to be found, we are justified in concluding that it never existed there. And finally the fact will correct that tendency we all have to assume a unity upon insufficient evidence. Types of language, like types of race, are as strongly marked off from one another as the countries to which they belong. Polysynthetism is as much characteristic of America as the hatchet face and red skin of the aboriginal; isolation of Eastern Asia as the yellow skin and oblique eyes of the Chinaman or the Burman. Modern discoveries are gradually producing a conviction that the civilizations of China, of Babylonia, and of Egypt were all independent and self-evolved. Such at all events is the case with their modes of writing, the best product of any civilization, and no one can study the character of these three civilizations without perceiving that they are radically distinct. Egypt, when the monuments first cast light upon her some 6,000 years ago, is in the height of her culture and advancement; but she comes before us as a pharos of light in the midst of utter darkness, self-contained and self-sufficient, but surrounded on all sides by tribes and nations even more barbarous than the untaught Negro of to-day. And such as was the civilization, such too was the language; the civilizations of the Nile, of the Euphrates, and of the Hoang-ho, were not more isolated and peculiar than the languages which embodied them. It is difficult for us with our steamers and railways and telegraphs to realize the separation and practical immobility of the ancient world. Geographical barriers cut off tribe from tribe, race from race, language from language, and war instead of peace was the sole means that existed of overcoming them. It is to these barriers, however, that we owe the persistency of racial and linguistic type which we may still note in so many parts of the world. It has often been remarked that the fauna and flora of America take us back to a geological rather than a historical age; the same may also emphatically be said of the American type of speech. The Eskimaux may or may not be the survivor of the man of the reindeer age; his grammar, at all events, is a relic of a bygone era of speech.

The morphology of speech, then, deals with the relation of the parts of the sentence one to another. This relation is expressed by what we term grammatical forms. Position, it is true, as well as accent, frequently takes the place of grammatical forms, especially in languages like Burman or English, but in this case both position and accent will have to be considered as belonging to the province of morphology. The rule which in Burman makes the first of two substantives a genitive or in English a substantive which follows a transitive verb an accusative is itself a grammatical form. Even in those tongues in which the expression of grammatical relations is fullest and most exact, there is much that can never be expressed by outward means, but only hinted at and understood. “The rudest of men,” says Chaignet,[242] “are yet sages; ils s’entendent à demi-mot; ils parlent par _sous-entendus_.” “It is,” as he goes on to observe, “the gesture, the tone, the connection of the sense or its abrupt breaking off, the undefinable and speaking expression of the face, that supply and complete our thought, marking its relations, or more truly its formal side, its most spiritual element, whereby language raises itself above mere sensation and matter.” The structure of a language is determined not only by the general type, isolating, agglutinative, or otherwise, to which it conforms, but also by the mode in which its words are linked together, by the way in which its grammatical forms are used and connected, and by the greater or less extent to which the quickness of the hearer in understanding what is not expressed is called upon. Structurally, Coptic belongs to the inflectional class of tongues, but among these it is distinguished by its prefixing its grammatical forms instead of affixing them, as was the case with its parent the Old Egyptian.

We must not forget, however, that whether in Coptic or Old Egyptian, or any other language, the grammatical form, the relation to be expressed, the idea to be developed and formulated, lay quite as much in the mere act of prefixing or affixing as in the sounds which were prefixed or affixed. The Sanskrit _ad-mi_ means “I eat,” not only because it is a compound of a verbal stem or root signifying “eating,” and the personal pronoun _mi_, but because the pronoun is attached to the stem in such a way as to convey the conception of the relation intended to exist between the two ideas “eating” and “I.” We may therefore lay down that one of the modes adopted by language for denoting the relations of grammar is (1) the attachment of prefixes or affixes which may or may not be significant when used alone. (2) A second is the insertion of what are called infixes, as in Dayak, where from _kan_, “to eat,” the stem _k-um-an_ comes, or in Malay, where by the side of _ka-kan_ and _ma-kan_ we have also _k-um-akan_. So, too, in Tagala we find _b-in-atin_ for _in-batin_, just as in the secondary conjugations of the Semitic verb, _iphteal_, _iphtael_, _istaphal_, the suffix _ta_ is inserted between the first and second consonants of the root instead of being prefixed as elsewhere. No doubt, metathesis aided by analogy was the primary cause of this curious phænomenon, as it is in the Sanskrit _yu-na-j-mi_, “I join,” instead of _yuj-na-mi_ corresponding with the Greek ζεύγ-νυ-μι. The incorporating and polysynthetic languages are examples of the principle on a large scale. (3) A third mode of expressing the relations of grammar is by a change of vowel. The vowel may either pass into another or receive a different quantity or accent. Professor Pott refers to the use of _vṛiddhi_ in Sanskrit patronymics by way of illustration as well as to change of accent in Greek proper names or vocatives. A difference of vowel which was originally purely phonetic has been adapted to distinguish between singular and plural in the English _man_ and _men_, between transitive and intransitive in Greek verbs in -όω and -έω. Among the less cultivated languages of the world extended use has been made of this method of indicating the forms of grammar. In Javanese, for instance, _iki_ is “this,” _ika_, “that,” _iku_, “that there;” in Japanese _ko_ is “here,” _ka_, “there;” in Carib, _ne_ is “thou,” _ni_, “he;” in Brazilian Botocudo _ati_ is “I,” _oti_, “thou.”[243] In African Tumali _ngi_ is “I,” _ngo_, “thou,” and _ngu_, “her.” Even differences of signification may be denoted by the same means; the Carib _baba_, “father,” is contrasted with _bibi_, “mother,” just as the Mantschu _chacha_, “man,” and _ama_, “father,” stand over against _cheche_, “woman,” and _eme_, “mother,” or the Finnic _ukko_, “old man,” and African Ibo, _nna_, “father,” over against _akka_, “old woman,” and _nne_, “mother.” The numerals have not escaped being distinguished in a similar manner; _tizi_ is “one” in Lushu, and _tazi_, “two;” “three” and “four” are _ngroka_ and _ngraka_ in Koriak, _niyokh_ and _niyakh_ in Kolyma, _gnasog_ and _gnasag_ in Karaga, and _tsúk_ and _tsaak_ in Kamschatkan, while in Japanese _fitó_, _mi(tsu)_, and _yo_, are “one,” “three,” and “four,” _fŭtá_, _mu(tsu)_, and _yá_, “two,” “six,” and “eight.”[244] The Grebo of West Africa can distinguish between “I” and “thou,” “we” and “you,” solely by the intonation of the voice, _mâ di_ being equally “I eat” and “thou eatest,” _a di_, “you” and “we eat,” and in Bâ-ntu Mpongwe _tŏnda_ means “to love,” _tōnda_, “not to love.”[245] (4) An internal change of consonant will be the next mode adopted by language of marking a grammatical idea. Thus in Burman the active is distinguished from the passive or neuter by aspirating an unaspirated consonant, _kya_, for instance, being “to fall,” but _khya_, “to throw,” _pri_, “to be full,” _phri_, “to fill.”[246] (5) Fifthly, position may be the determining mark of relations of grammar, as is so pre-eminently the case in Chinese and the Taic languages. It makes a good deal of difference in English whether we say, “The man killed the dog,” or “The dog killed the man.” (6) Another determining mark is reduplication, which is common to all the languages of the world though used to express very different grammatical ideas. Sometimes it may denote a past tense, as in Aryan (δέδωκα, _cecidi_, _did_, &c.); sometimes a plural, as in the Bushman _tu-tu_, “mouths,” the Sonorian _qui-qui_, “houses,” or the Malay _raja-raja_, “princes;” sometimes a collective, as in the Canarese _nîru gîru_, “water and the like;” sometimes a superlative, as in the Accadian _gal-gal_, “very great,” the Mandingo _ding-ding_, “a very little child,” or the French _beaucoup-beaucoup_, “very much;” sometimes continuous action, as in the Dayak _kaká-kaka_, “to go on laughing loud,” or the Tamil _muru-muru_, “to murmur;” sometimes intensity, as in the Sanskrit _upary-upari_, “higher and higher,” the Greek παμ-φαίνω, “to shine brightly,” or the Dayak _ku lyang ku lyang_, “to think deeply;” sometimes emphasis and asseveration, as in the Dayak _kwai kwai_, “very strange!” _shi shi_, “yes, yes;” sometimes frequentative or repeated action, as in the Brazilian _acêm_, “I go out,” _ace-acêm_, “I go out frequently,” _oce-cem_, “they go out one after the other.”[247] The reduplication is often a broken one, that is, only the first syllable or part of a syllable is reduplicated, as in the Latin _mo-mordi_ for _mor-mordi_. Broken reduplication is very common in the Aryan languages, but Brugman[248] has shown reason for believing that it has arisen out of an earlier complete reduplication through the action of phonetic decay. Now and then the reduplication takes place in the middle of a word, as in the Sonorian Tepeguana where some plurals are formed by repeating the second syllable, as in _aliguguli_, “boys,” from _alguli_, “boy,” or a medial syllable, as in _hiim_, “gourds,” and _googosi_, “dogs,” from the singulars _him_ and _gogosi_.[249] Instead of the first syllable, only the initial vowel of a word may undergo reduplication; thus in Tepeguana _ali_, “child,” is _a-ali_ in the plural, _ogga_, “father,” is _o-ogga_, _ubi_, “woman,” is _u-ubi_. On the other hand, a word may be lengthened by the repetition of the vowel at the end, as well as in the middle; the Botocudos of Brazil, for instance, turn _uatu_, “a stream,” into _uatu-u-u-u_, “ocean;” with the Aponegricans “six” is _itawuna_, “seven,” _itawu-ú-una_, while the Madagascar _ratchi_, “bad,” becomes _ra-a-atchi_, “very bad.”[250] When whole words are reduplicated a change may be made in the initial consonant of the second part of the reduplication; thus in Canarese the initial consonant becomes the guttural _g_, as in the example quoted above, and the French _pêle-mêle_ and English _hurdy-gurdy_ are familiar instances of the same fact. Sir John Lubbock[251] has made an interesting calculation of the proportion of reduplicated words found in English, French, German, and Greek on the one side, and some of the barbarous languages of Africa, America, and the Pacific on the other, the result being that whereas “in the four European languages we get about two reduplications in about 1,000 words, in the savage ones the number varies from 38 to 170, being from twenty to eighty times as many in proportion.” Reduplication, in fact, is one of the oldest contrivances of speech. It is largely employed by children in their first attempts to speak, and we need not, therefore, be surprised at finding it so persistently holding its ground both in the nursery and among barbarous tribes. The Polynesians seem to have a special affection for it, though on the other hand, Mr. Matthews tells us that in North America while reduplication is a prominent feature of the Dakota verb it occurs in only one verb in the closely allied Hidacha dialect.[252] Reduplication, however, is one of the most important modes adopted by language for denoting the relations of grammar; it is, in fact, one of the most obvious and natural of its outward means of expressing those inward forms and grammatical conceptions which the human intelligence has painfully struggled to realize.[253]

The common division of speech into formal and material is at once defective and misleading. The articulate sounds of which words are composed may indeed be called their matter, but they do not become words, do not constitute a part of speech until they have thought and significancy breathed into them like the breath of life into man. This significancy is a relative one, that is to say, the meaning of a word depends upon its relation to some other. But this relation may be of two kinds, it may exist either between the ideas denoted by the words or between the words when coupled together in some particular sentence. In the first case we have to do with sematology, in the second with grammar. We can understand what is meant by the word _tree_ only by comparing and contrasting the idea of _tree_ with other cognate ideas; but the relation between _tree_ and _sheds_ in such a sentence as “the tree sheds its leaves,” is of a totally different nature. The idea of _tree_ remains the same whatever be the outward symbol by which it is expressed, whether _tree_, or _arbor_, or _baum_, or anything else; the relation between _tree_ and _sheds_ is one that can be discovered only by a historical and comparative investigation of English grammar. It is to this grammatical relation alone that the term _formal_ is strictly applicable; it has to do with the forms, or, as in the instance before us, the want of forms, whereby the relations of grammar, the relations, that is, of words in a sentence, are denoted. Going back to the primitive sentence-word, we shall have to distinguish between the material sounds of which it was composed, the meaning it always possessed whenever and however used, and the form (or position) that it assumed according to the occasion on which it was used. The child who says “Up!” always attaches the same signification to the general idea contained in the word, but whether it is to be regarded as an imperative, a hortative, an optative, or any other particular grammatical form is left to the context, the tone and gesture, or the intelligence of the bearer. Language consists of the material, the significant, and the formal, and it is only the latter, that part of language, in fact, the origin of which we have elsewhere traced to gesture, that properly concerns morphology.

Whatever, therefore, belongs to grammar belongs also to morphology. Not only general form and structure, but also grammar in the narrower sense of the word, as well as composition, and what our German neighbours term “word-building” must be included under it. Composition, indeed, is but a species of declension and conjugation. _Parricida_ and _patris (oc)cisor_, φερέοικος and οἶκον φέρει, have exactly the same force and meaning. The only difference between _good-for-nothing_ as a compound and “he is good for nothing” in a complete sentence, is that the first can be used as an attribute. The ordinary genitive of the Semitic tongues, the so-called “construct state,” is really an instance of composition, the first noun—that which “governs” the second—being pronounced in a single breath with the other, and accordingly losing the case-terminations. This did not happen originally, as may be seen from the occasional occurrence of these terminations even in Assyrian, which is more strict in following out the rule than any other of the cognate idioms. The power of composition is greater in some languages than in others. The polysynthetic sentences of an American dialect present the appearance of gigantic compounds, with this difference, however, that in a true compound the language has put together two words that have already been used independently, or at all events are capable of being used independently, whereas in the less advanced American languages the several members of the sentence have never attained the rank of independent words which can be set apart and employed by themselves. Even in some of the compounds of the Aryan family, where the flectionless “stem” shows itself, it may be questioned whether we have not before us the relics of that earliest stage of speech when the flections had not yet been evolved, and when the relations of grammar were expressed by the close amalgamation of flectionless stems in a single sentence-word. However that may be, the power of forming compounds possessed by the Aryan group of languages stands in marked contrast to the repugnance felt by the Semitic tongues in this respect. Composition is as rare in Semitic as it is common in Aryan, and this contrast between the two families of speech is one of the many that demonstrate the radical difference existing between them. Perhaps the extended use made by the Semitic languages of denoting the relations of grammar by internal vowel-change had much to do with their objection to the employment of compounds. They are less agglutinative in character than the Aryan dialects, truer, in fact, to the principle of flection, and the same instinct that makes them represent the ideas of “killing” and “a killing” by _kodhêl_ and _kidhl_ (_kedhel_), rather than by _trucida-n-s_ and _trucida-ti-o(n)_, makes them also use two unallied roots like _hâlach_ and _yâtsâ_ where the Aryan would have said _ire_ and _exire_. Even within the Aryan family itself we find the Greek with compounds like the comic λεπαδο-τεμαχο-σελαχο-γαλεο-κρανιο-λειψανο-δριμ-υπο-τριμματο-σιλφιο- παραο-μελιτο-κατα-κεχυμενο-κιχλ-επι-κοσσυφο-φαττο-περι-στερ-αλεκτρυον- οπτ-εγ-κεφαλο-κιγκλο-πελειο-λαγῳο-σιραιο-βαλη-τραγανο-πτερύγων,[254] and the Latin comparatively poor in them, while modern English, in spite of the loss of its flections, lags but little behind German. Russian can form such specimens of agglutination as _bezbozhnichestvovat_, “to be in the condition of being a godless person,” from _bez Boga_, “without God,” and classical Sanskrit almost dispenses with syntax by its superabundant use of composition. Where syntax is highly developed, as it was in Latin, the growth of composition is checked and limited.

Composition has been a fruitful source of grammatical flection, and a still more fruitful source of what is meant by “word-building.” It is highly probable that the person-endings of the Aryan verb _as-mi_, _a(s)-si_, _as-ti_, or ἐσ-μι, ἐσ-σι, ἐσ-τι, are but the personal pronouns closely compounded with the verbal stem. Such, certainly, has been the case with the so-called _tempus durans_ of Aramaic, where _kâdhêlnâ_, “I am killing,” is resolvable into _kâdhêl_ + _’anâ_, “killing + I,” and _kâdhlath_, “thou art killing,” into _kâdhêl_ + _at’_, “killing + thou.”[255] The Latin imperfect and future in -_bam_ and -_bo_ seem to be compounds of the verbal stem with the verb _fuo_, “to exist,”[256] like the perfect in -_ui_ or -_vi_ (_fui_), while the pluperfect _scripseram_ is a combination of _eram_ or _esam_ and the perfect _scripsi_ (itself formed from the verbal stem _scrib_- and the old perfect _esi_ of the substantive verb “sum”). So, too, the form _amavissem_ is just as much a compound of _amavi_ (_ama_ + _fui_) and _essem_ (_es_ + _siem_) as is _amatus sum_ of the passive participle and the substantive verb. If we turn to our own language we can trace our perfects in -_ed_ back to the Gothic amalgamation of the verb with _dide_, the reduplicated perfect of the verb _do_, while the origin of the French _aimerai_ in the infinitive _aimer_ (_amare_) and the auxiliary _ai_ (_habeo_) is as plain as that of the Italian _dármelo_ (“to give it to me”) or _fáteglielo_ (“do it for him”). The real character of the compound has come to be forgotten in course of time, and its final part has gradually lost all semblance of independence and been assimilated to the terminations which simply denote grammatical relations. The general analogy of the language has been too strong for it, and the agglutinated word has become a flection.

But there are many suffixes which are not flections—that is to say, which do not denote the relations of grammar, or rather the relations that exist between the different parts of the sentence. In _I loved_ for _I love-did_ the grammatical relation which we name a perfect tense, is not really expressed by the suffixed word _did_, but by the reduplication which that word has undergone. It was the reduplication that gave _did_ (_dide_) the force of a perfect, and the attachment of _did_ to another verb merely handed on to the latter the perfect force which it already possessed. Strictly speaking the suffix -_ed_ is a flection only because it is the relic of a reduplication, the flection—that is to say, the expression of a grammatical relation—lying in the reduplication or _form_ of the word. So, too, when we find _dêv-mã_, meaning “in God,” in Gujerati, or _andhê-mẽ_, meaning “in the blind,” in Hindustani, we must not suppose that the locative sense actually lies in the suffixes _mã_ and _mẽ_. These suffixes go back to the Sanskrit _madhyê_, “in the middle,” where the flection is to be sought in the termination _i_ (contained in _ê_ = _a_ + _i_) not in the stem _madhya_, “middle.”

When, then, we say that composition may be a fruitful source of flection, what we mean is this. Flection is the means adopted by a certain class of languages for expressing the relations that exist between the members of a sentence, but a perception of these relations must first grow up in the mind before external means are found for embodying them. The idea of past time must be arrived at and realized before the simple process of reduplication can be adopted to denote it. Not only in other languages but also in the Aryan family of speech reduplication serves to represent other relations of grammar than that of past time. When the Frenchman says _beaucoup beaucoup_—meaning “very much”—he is employing reduplication to express the superlative relation just as much as the old Accadian with his _galgal_, “very great,” while the very fact that there are Greek presents like δίδωμι and τίθημι, ought to show that there was once a time in the history of Aryan speech when reduplication served other purposes than that of denoting past time. So it is with all the rest of the grammatical machinery which we call flection. First of all the growing intelligence came to have, as it were, an intuition of certain relations between the parts of a sentence, and then sounds and forms already existing were adapted to denote these. And the very same form might at successive periods in the development of a language be adapted to denote different relations, as we have just seen was the case with reduplication. When suffixes were used for a similar purpose, they too had to follow the general analogy. Many of these suffixes seem coeval with the beginnings of Aryan speech, at least so far as we know anything about it, but others of them, like the person-endings of the verb, are really instances of composition, the final part of the compound having become a mere suffix, and so, like many other suffixes, been adapted to the use of flection.

This brings us to those suffixes which have never been applied to a purely flectional purpose. If we turn over the pages of an English dictionary we shall come across the two familiar words _knowledge_ and _wedlock_, which at first sight seem to have nothing in common. On tracing them back to earlier forms, however, we find that _knowledge_, Old English _know-leche_, like _wed-lock_, Old English _wed-lâc_, are both compounded with the Anglo-Saxon _lâc_, “sport” or “gift,” the Old High German _leih_, the Old Norse _leikr_, and the Gothic _láiks_. The word still survives in the north of England under the form of _laik_, “to play,” and the provincial _lake-fellow_ is merely “play-fellow.”[257] Several abstracts were formed in Anglo-Saxon by the help of it; thus we have _feoht-lâc_, “fight,” _gudh-lâc_, “battle,” _bryd-lâc_, “marriage,” _reaf-lâc_, “robbery.”

Now what has happened in the case of the English _lâc_ has happened in the case of a good number of other words in all the languages spoken throughout the world. Words originally independent and distinct become so glued together in composition that one of them loses its personal identity, as it were, and comes to be the mere shadow of the other, whose meaning it qualifies and classifies. Thus, for instance, the Greek κατὰ, when compounded with the verb ἄγω, “to lead,” limits the sense of the latter to “leading down,” and our own _hood_ or _head_, the Anglo-Saxon _hâd_, “a state,” in words like _Godhead_ or _maidenhood_, refers the nouns to which it is attached to a new and particular class.

Besides flectional suffixes, then, classificatory or formative suffixes also may ultimately be due to the process of composition. Upon them, too, analogy will have worked its influence, assimilating them to the other suffixes which in course of time they had come to resemble. When composition had once reduced a word to the condition of a mere adjunct of another word, there was no reason why it should not be put to the same uses as other similar adjuncts. When the root _bhar_, “to bear,” in such Latin compounds as _leti-fer_ could no longer be distinguished from the suffix -_tio(n)_ in words like _na-tio_, it was naturally treated in the same way.