Chapter II: The Nature and Science of Language (2)

Now, if language be the embodiment of thought, and if thought can only express itself under the form of the complete sentence, it is plain that we must look to the sentence for a true classification of languages. The sentence expresses the way in which we think, and the different forms assumed by the sentence—that is to say, the different modes in which the relations of subject, object, and verb are denoted will constitute the only sound basis for classifying speech. The particular relation between the several ideas summed up in a judgment or sentence agrees with the manner in which we regard the objects about which we think and speak. If, for instance, we have no clear idea of any distinction between ourselves and the objects around us, in talking about them any reference to ourselves will be left out of sight. Instead of saying, “_I_ am running,” where the speaker distinguishes himself from the act in which he is engaged, we should say like the Romans _curro_, where the personal pronoun has no separate and independent mark of its own. Different races of men do not think in the same way; and, consequently, the forms taken by the sentence in different languages are not the same. Thus in the so-called isolating languages, the separate terms or ideas which make up the sentence are not subordinated to each other, and fused into a single whole, but every word remains a separate and distinct sentence. The Chinaman has to say, “_thya̤n-hi le̥ṅ tsyaṅ-s̆aṅ-lei_”-literally, “heaven-air cold begin-rise-come,”—if he wants to state that “the weather began to be cold;” and the Burman’s way of expressing “we are going,” is by saying, “_ṅā dō dhwā kra dhań_”—“I multitude go multitude which.” In cases such as these, the ideas are each set down independently, instead of being subordinated one to another, and the words which embody them are accordingly contrasted with each other like so many independent sentences. On the other hand, in the agglutinative languages, the ideas which make up the sentence, though still kept distinct and independent, are no longer set over against one another, but brought into mutual relation and harmony, and regarded as of equal force and meaning. The root or stem still stands out clearly and separately, and the suffixes of relation are marked with equal distinctness; But for all that, the inward fact of the incipient subordination which exists between them is denoted by the outward fact of vocalic harmony, whereby the vowels of both stem and suffix have to belong to the same class. The Turkish sign of the infinitive, _mak_, has to become _mek_ after a root like _sev_, “love,” though both root and suffix still retain their own individuality; and while _at-lar_ is “horses,” _ev-ler_ is “houses.” The grammatical relations expressed in the Aryan class of languages by case-endings and person-endings, or by prefixed pronouns and prepositions, have to be represented, as a general rule, by postfixes, since in no other way can sufficient emphasis be laid upon them, and the danger avoided of their being swallowed up in the verb or noun. Our “I love,” or “the man,” look but little different in writing from the Turkish _sev-r-im_, or the Basque _gizoná_, _gizonák_; the case is quite altered, however, when we try to pronounce these words, the accent falling on the verb in our “I love,” but allowing the distinction between verb and pronoun to be clearly felt in the Turkish _sevrim_. It is among the inhabitants of mountainous and cold regions in the Aryan and Semitic families of speech—among Albanians, Bulgarians, Scandinavians, and Aramæans—that the definite article is postfixed instead of being prefixed; and we can see at once what an emphasis and distinctness would be given to it by such a position. Only where foreign influences have been at work do the agglutinative languages change the order of the words in the sentence and, as in the case of the Hungarian definite article _a_, _az_, prefix the words expressive of the grammatical relations, instead of postfixing them. Still further, to mark out the several parts or terms of the sentence, the objective pronoun may be inserted between the subjective pronoun and the verbal root or stem; and so we may have a sentence-word like the French _je vous donne_, as in the Basque _zamaztet_ (from _eman_, “to give”), or the converse arrangement of the terms, as in _n-aza-zu-n_, “that you may have me” (“me-have-you-may”). The incorporating languages, as they are called, are the oldest examples of the agglutinative class, for they go back to the time when the speaker had not yet begun to analyze his sentences, and when he could not say simply, “I give,” without finishing the sentence with the objective pronoun. Hence it is that in Basque we must say _dituzte beren liburnac_, “they have them their books,” instead of simply “they have their books;” and in Accadian, the language of primitive Chaldea, “I built a house” would be _ê mu-n-rû_,[76] literally “house I-it-built.”

Very distinct from these incorporating tongues are the polysynthetic or incapsulating dialects of America, in which the words that make up a sentence are stripped of their grammatical terminations, and then fused into a single word of monstrous length and appearance. Thus the Algonquin would say, _wut-ap-pé-sit-tuk-quś-sun-noo-weht-unḱ-quoh_, if he wished to express the sentence “he, falling on his knees, worshipped him;” and this cumbrous compound denotes exactly what we split up into seven words. These polysynthetic languages are an interesting survival of the early condition of language everywhere, and are but a fresh proof that America is in truth “the _new_ world.” Primitive forms of speech that have elsewhere perished long ago still survive there, like the armadillo, to bear record of a bygone past. The conception of the sentence that underlies the polysynthetic dialects is the precise converse of that which underlies the isolating or the agglutinative groups. The several ideas into which the sentence may be analyzed, instead of being made equal or independent, are combined like a piece of mosaic into a single whole. The sentence has not passed beyond its primitive form, or rather that primitive form has been retained in spite of the growth and development of the languages to which it belongs. It is possible that the Eskimaux may be the descendants of the savage races who inhabited the caves of southern France, when the rivers were stiff with ice for half the year, and the reindeer roamed freely through the woods and meers; at all events, among the icebergs and dark winters of the North, they have preserved their old habits of thought, their old mode of viewing the world about them, almost unchanged. And yet our own class of speech, that class to which we give the name inflectional, and which we sometimes think is the crown and standard of all other kinds of language, is not so far removed in usage from the Eskimaux or the Algonquin as are the isolating dialects of China and the agglutinative jargons of Mongol and Turk. In the inflectional group the words or suffixes which denote grammatical relations are subordinated to the words which express objects or actions—that is to say, to nouns and verbs. The termination of the Latin _currit_ has lost all distinct and independent meaning of its own; apart from the verbal stem to which it is subordinated, it is a mere _flatus vocis_, a mere empty sound. In flection proper, which we may see best exemplified in the Semitic tongues, the relations of grammar are denoted by internal vowel change—_adamu_, “man,” for instance, being nominative, _adami_ genitive, and _adama_ accusative. It was only afterwards, and by the force of analogy, that first unmeaning suffixes and then agglutinated words which were gradually assimilated to them, came to take the place of internal vowel change. What we may term the inflectional instinct sought to express the various relations of the sentence, as they successively rose to consciousness, out of the original sentence-word itself. When separate words like _wards_ or _ly_ (_like_) were afterwards employed for the same purpose, they first had to lose their own individuality, to become empty words, representative and not presentative, and as such to be engrafted upon the old stems. The Greek φη-μί, or the Sanskrit _ad-mi_, “I eat,” are single wholes; the first personal pronoun _ma_, weakened to _mi_, has lost all life of its own, and its sole right to existence lies in its absorption into the stems φη- and _ad_-. But an inflectional language cannot carry out its fundamental principle with logical completeness. All the subordinate relations of a sentence cannot be brought into the same close connection with the principal idea as in φημί and _admi_. Sentences like “I speak” or “I eat” may be comprehended under a single word; but there are many sentences where this is impossible, and where the attempt to express in language the relation between the principal and the subordinate, between the subject and the attribute, has to be given up. In the Latin _poeta bonus_, for example, the subject and the attribute appear as separate words; and there is nothing in the flection attached to each to show that they stand in any relation whatsoever one to the other. So far as the form goes there is nothing to tell us whether the two words mean “a good poet” or “the poet is good.” The fundamental principle of flection has been violated, and the language is on the high road to that more developed condition in which, as in Chinese, the two ideas are set plainly and distinctly one against the other, and the mind is left to supply the relation between them. This impossibility of carrying out thoroughly the principle of flection brings about an analytic tendency in all inflectional forms of speech. The longer an inflectional language lives the more analytic it becomes. The Englishman says “I will go,” and the Frenchman _le monde_, where the Latin was contented with _ibo_ and _mundus_. One by one the grammatical relations implied in an inflectional compound are brought out, as it were, into full relief, and provided with special forms in which to be expressed; but the change that has taken place is but an apparent one, the inflectional spirit of the language still remains; and though we write “he runs,” “I will go,” we pronounce as if they were single words. The pronoun and the verb, taken apart and by themselves, convey no meaning to our minds; we have to combine them before they become significant, and (the order of the words excepted) there is but slight difference between an English sentence like “never to be sufficiently relied upon,” and the Tamil _sārndāykku_, “to thee that hast approached,” to be analyzed into _sār_, “approach,” _d_ sign of the past, _āy_, “thee,” and _ku_, “to.”

Each of the leading classes of speech naturally comprises various species or subdivisions. Thus the isolating Chinese differs from the isolating dialects of Further India, in that the Chinese mode of expressing the relations of the sentence by position is replaced in these by the use of words like _prū_, “do;” _khã_, “suffer;” _khōṅ_, “possession,” _mha_, “from.” So, again, in the agglutinative class, the Bâ-ntu languages of Southern Africa prefix the same substantive, worn down, it may be, to a mere unmeaning symbol, to each of the words in a sentence which have to be brought into relation with each other; _o_-ka-_ti_ k-_etu_ _o_-ka-_ua_, for instance, being “our fine stick,” or literally, “stick ours fine.” The Malayo-Polynesian dialects have not yet attained to the conception of the verb; thus _yaku imukul olo_ (“I smitten people”) is “I am smitten by the people;” _iṅga̤ra̤-ku ia̤ tatau_ (“my-thought he rich”) “I thought he is rich;” _ia̤ baklambi baputi_ (“he with-jacket with-white”) “he has a white jacket on.” Basque grammarians generally hold that the Basque has but two verbs, “to be” and “to have,” while, on the other hand, there are many languages which lack precisely these two.

But in all these sub-classes, just as in the main classes of speech, it is the different conception of the sentence and the form it takes which characterize the whole language. However much alike may have been the circumstances by which the first communities of men were surrounded, they yet viewed the world without them and their own relation to it with different eyes. The idea they formed of the sentence and its parts was not the same everywhere. When with the growth of consciousness came also the formal expression in utterance of the relations of the several parts of the sentence, it was inevitable that this expression should clothe itself in essentially various forms. And the psychological peculiarity which originated each of these forms—a peculiarity itself the result of previous experiences and tendencies—became continually more definite, more confirmed, more unalterable. The logician may reduce all forms of the affirmative proposition or judgment to the single “A is B,” but the grammarian knows that this is like the _jus gentium_ of the Romans, a mere abstraction from a limited number of observed instances. It may be the right form for the sentence to take in the manifold languages of the world, but as a matter of fact it has never been taken in any one of them. The form of the sentence as shaped by the primitive language-builders of each human community has imprinted itself indelibly upon the linguistic consciousness of their successors. Racial type and characteristics will change as soon as the conception of the sentence. Many of the agglutinative languages have approached so nearly to the phænomena of inflection, as to make it difficult to determine why they should not be classed with the inflectional tongues; and yet for all that they remain agglutinative, and have remained so as far back as we can trace them. Our own language is agglutinative, and even isolating in many respects, while the French _je vous donne_ seems a clear instance of incorporation. The Chinese, on the other hand, shows much that is agglutinative, much even that resembles inflection, and it is only the polysynthetic languages of America that remain true to their stereotyped primæval character. Nevertheless, in spite of all this apparent confusion and overlapping, this borrowing, as it were, of characteristics from other families of speech, the great types of language stand out each of them visibly and distinctly. Their broad characteristics can be clearly sketched, their essential diversity easily felt. It is only when we come to map out the boundaries between them, to determine where isolation ends and agglutination begins, that we find ourselves at fault. Here as elsewhere in nature there is no sharply-defined line of division to be drawn; species passes gradually and insensibly into species, class into class. But in spite of this, species and classes really exist, each with its own type and characteristics, each founded upon its own conception of the sentence and its parts. When we remember that the sentence, and not the isolated word, is the starting-point of philology—when we make it what the logician would term the _fundamentum divisionis_ for our classification of speech—there is no longer any difficulty in distinguishing between the several families of speech, and assigning to each its character and place. The Finnic idioms have become so nearly inflectional as to have led a recent scholar to suggest their relationship to our Aryan group; nevertheless, they have never cleared the magical frontier between flection and agglutination, hard as it may be to define, since to pass from agglutination to inflection is to revolutionize the whole system of thought and language and the basis on which it rests, and to break with the past psychological history and tendencies of a speech. There are South American butterflies whose colours have come to resemble so closely those of the plants on which they are found as to be indistinguishable from them; for all that, the butterfly still remains a butterfly, and the plant a plant.

Such, then, is language in its origin and its nature. It is significant sound, the outward embodiment and expression, however imperfect, of thought. Before sound can become significant it must express the whole thought or judgment; that is, it must take the form of a sentence. Historically, the sentence and not the word comes first. The sentence consists of two factors, one the external sound, the other the internal thought, and neither of these factors can be disregarded by a true science of language.

Now, science is accurate knowledge. The statement may seem a truism, but it is a truism which has sometimes been forgotten. For that which is accurate is only that which can be defined and limited, that of which all the boundaries, as it were, are distinctly mapped out and known. But the boundaries of knowledge can only be discovered by the help of comparison. It is, in fact, the comparative method that constitutes the very life of inductive science; it is the application of the comparative method to any subject which brings that subject within the domain of scientific knowledge. Our knowledge that night and day follow one another alternately, or that if we put our hands into the fire they will be burnt, is not yet scientific. In order to know anything scientifically we must be able to compare it with something else, and so determine its size, or weight, or character. Our feelings may tell us that the atmosphere is hot or cold, but we have no scientific knowledge of either fact until we can measure one degree of heat or cold against another by means of the thermometer. As soon as we know the exact amount and character of each degree of heat or cold, we have laid the foundations of a science of thermology. It is just the same in the case of language. Here, too, as soon as we can compare languages and the elements of languages together, and so measure and determine their character, we shall have the beginning of a science of language. But the comparison must be made by the aid of a common standard. The old attempts to compare Latin with Greek, or both with Hebrew, were failures because the test applied was a capricious one, depending on the subjective fancies and prejudices of the inquirer. We cannot compare two things together without having a third term—a common standard by which to measure them. We must not have one rule and measure for one set of words or languages and another rule and measure for another set. The comparative method we employ must be alike in all cases.

Language is a social product, at once the creation and the creator of society. It is independent of the caprice of the single individual, and the Emperor Tiberius could no more change a Latin word[77] than the slavish obedience of a Benedictine monastery could turn _sumpsimus_ into _mumpsimus_. Unless the community as a body agree to accept the new word or form, Cæsar himself is powerless to introduce it. The changes undergone by language are brought about by the action of circumstances over which the individual has no control. They are circumstances which affect the whole community, not the individual member of it. The primary condition of speech that it should be significant requires that it should be stamped and recognized by the common consciousness. Now, the circumstances that affect a whole community will always act in the same way should the conditions remain the same. Individual caprice is rendered impossible, and the forms assumed by language will be found referable to general laws. We have to deal, not with the infinite complexity of individual motives and caprice, but with the consentient action of many minds swayed by the same feelings, surrounded by the same atmosphere. The joint action of a multitude eliminates the accidental differences of individual character; all that is left is just that in which all agree, the result of the influences of which all alike are sensible. The circumstances that determine the common nature of a society determine also its common utterance, and this common utterance we call its language. It embodies all the past life and history of the community that speaks it; each phase in the development of its speakers is reflected in it as in a mirror, and its worn-out words and forms are so many crystallized embodiments of dead and bygone thought, so many fossil relics, as it were, of the past strata of social growth. The facts of language—its sentences and its words—are the result of the action of general laws and conditions; by comparing and classifying them we can discover what these general laws are, and how they act. A knowledge of these laws and their action constitutes glottology or the science of language; the use of the comparative method by which they are discovered constitutes comparative philology.

Comparative philology, therefore, furnishes the materials whereby the science of language investigates such questions as the origin of speech, the nature of roots, or the meaning of flection. It may be said to comprise both comparative and historical grammar, comparative grammar being primarily occupied in comparing the grammatical forms and syntax of different languages of the same group; historical grammar in tracing the history of the forms and syntax of a single language. The two studies, however, necessarily overlap, comparative grammar requiring a knowledge of the individual languages compared at the successive periods of their history, or restoring the older forms of the individual languages by means of comparison, and historical grammar calling in the aid of the allied dialects to supply the deficiencies of the literary or monumental record. Quite apart from either is philology proper in the old sense of the word, which busied itself solely with literary languages and the literature they enshrine. The business of philology is to compare author with author, style with style, to determine the employment of words and phrases in the writers it investigates and pronounce upon their correctness, to emend the readings of MSS. and imitate the idiosyncrasies of particular writers. From the old-fashioned classical philology to the so-called philosophy of speech there is a wide leap, but both have been equally transformed by the new comparative method. The philosophy of speech in the hands of men like Harris or Stoddart[78] endeavoured to attack the problems of language by “the high _priori_ road,” and by unverified and unverifiable reasoning from the phænomena of modern dialects to discover the origin of speech and the relation between grammar and logic. The philosophy of speech under the guidance of comparative philology has become the science of language, which may be said to comprehend both. The questions which the _à priori_ method failed to resolve are now yielding their answers to _à posteriori_ research, and the results already obtained have overthrown the unsubstantial speculations of the last century. The science of language has been variously termed “La Linguistique,”[79] “Linguistic Science,” Glottic,[80] and Glottology,[81] and it stands in the same relation to comparative philology that physiology stands to comparative anatomy.

Now, the ultimate facts with which comparative philology has to deal are sentences and the words that have been evolved out of them. These words and sentences must be real and not imaginary—that is, they must either belong to some living speech, or be preserved in a written record, or else be restored by a sound comparison of existing words which presuppose some common ancestor. Where such real and well-attested words are not to be had, no conclusions can be drawn. Unless inscribed monuments are hereafter brought to light or comparison with the Malayan dialects results in the recovery of a common parent-speech, the condition of the Polynesian languages 1,000 years ago must remain unknown. Much no doubt may be effected by comparing the scattered relics of these languages together, by showing that a sibilant, for instance, has been preserved in Samoan which has become a simple aspirate elsewhere, or that a guttural is retained between two vowels in Maori which has been dropped in most of the other Polynesian settlements; but to assert that some thousand years back they resembled another language to which they bear little similarity at present, would be to argue without data, and to violate the fundamental principles of comparative philology.

The object of the science of language is threefold:—

(1). It compares and classifies sentences, grammatical relations and words.

(2). It compares and classifies languages and dialects.

(3). By means of this comparison and classification it discovers the laws which govern language in general and certain languages and dialects in particular.

Thus by comparing the languages of the Aryan family we discover the phonetic law that an English _th_ must always represent _t_ in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, unless the action of other determinate laws interfere, and by comparing different groups of languages together, we find that the dual number everywhere preceded the plural. There are still many tongues in which the plural is formed by reduplication, tongues, that is, where duality, the repetition of the idea, is or has been the only conception of plurality yet reached; and others in which the number “three” is denoted by words like _prica_, “many” (in the dialect of the Puris of South America,) expressive of vague indefiniteness, and an inability to form a clear idea of anything beyond “two.” Indeed, in our own Aryan family of speech there was a time when _one_, and _two_, or that which was “divided” (δύω, δίς, διὰ, &c.) from one, were the only numerals known, and it required a fresh effort of thought to attain and conceive of a new numeral, which was accordingly named _tri_, _tres_, _three_, or that which is “beyond” (_trans_, _through_, Sansk., _tar-â-mi_, “I pass beyond”).

The laws of speech may be either primary or empirical. Empirical laws are those generalizations made from the survey of a limited number of phænomena, the reason of which we do not know. All we know is that given one particular fact, another particular fact follows, or that wherever we meet with a particular class of phænomena the same generalization is sure to hold good. Thus in astronomy, Kepler’s discovery that the planets move in an ellipse may be termed an empirical law, and the same may be said of the phonetic law mentioned above which obliges us to compare an English _th_ with the Greek and Latin _t_. Primary laws are those higher and more comprehensive laws or generalizations which embrace the empirical laws and give the reason of them. Such a primary law is gravitation, such, too, probably is the law of natural selection. In the science of language examples of these primary laws would be the law that all language is based on roots, or the law of economy in the use of speech. The determination of the primary laws of language leads us very nearly into the charmed land of metaphysic; as the physicist with his doctrine of force is transported out of the region of pure experiment and observation, and brought face to face with metaphysical problems, so is the scientific student of language with his doctrine of roots. Hence that part of the science of language which stands in the most direct relation with the old philosophy of speech, which would investigate such subjects as the origin of gender and case, or determine the priority of thought or language, has sometimes been called linguistic metaphysics.

When once the laws of language have been laid down we are able to apply them to our facts (that is, words and sentences), to whatever period these belong. The science of language, like all other sciences, rests upon the postulate of uniformity. So long as the conditions remain the same, the laws of the science will act with undeviating regularity. It does not matter whether the words we are dealing with are still living and spoken, or have been dead and obsolete for thousands of years; if we can show that they fall under the action of a particular law, we can apply that law to them in either case with equal certainty. When once we have ascertained that an English _d_ represents a Sanskrit _t_, only those Sanskrit words which contain a _t_ must be compared with English words of Teutonic origin which have a _d_ in the corresponding place, whatever their antiquity may be. A knowledge that an English _d_ answers to a Sanskrit and Latin _t_, and an English _h_ to a Sanskrit and Latin _c_ (_k_ or _ś_) shows that the English _hundred_ has the same origin as the Latin _centum_, and the Sanskrit _śatam_, and that, consequently, our linguistic ancestors were able to count as far as one hundred before they separated from each other, the one to conquer India, the other to occupy Europe. Words, in fact, are like the fossils of the rocks; they embody the thought and knowledge of the society that first coined and used them, and if we can find out their primitive meaning by the aid of the comparative method, we shall know the character of the society that produced them, and the degree of civilization it had attained. The palæontologist can reconstruct the animal life of the past ages of the globe with no greater ease than the comparative philologist can reconstruct the life of bygone and forgotten communities. If the fragment of a fossil bone can tell us the history of an extinct world, so, too, can the fragment of a word reveal to us the struggles of ancient societies, and ideas and beliefs that have long since perished.

But the laws of a science must be verified before they can be accepted as such. However brilliant or ingenious a hypothesis may be, it remains a hypothesis, more or less probable, until it has been verified by experiment and observation. It is to history, to psychology, and to physiology that the science of language has to look for the verification of its laws. In the phonautograph of König, or the phonograph of Edison, we can discover the very forms assumed by the waves of air set in motion by each sound we utter; and the first lessons of psychology confirm the conclusion of glottology, that the concrete precedes the abstract. Sometimes it is not so much the law, the generalization itself, that can best be verified; but the application of it to the phænomena of speech. Thus, a sound application of the laws of language makes it clear that the words possessed in common by Spanish and Arabic are not due to a common ancestry, but to contact between the two tongues, and the history of the Moorish conquest of Spain confirms the conclusion.

But we may ask, What is meant precisely by that comparison of words and sentences on which the laws of language are said to rest? A word, a sentence, a grammatical form, consists of two elements, one, the articulate utterance, the other, the signification or thought which the utterance symbolizes. Sound and sense are the two factors which make up speech, and it is, therefore, in respect of both sound and sense that our comparisons have to be made. Comparative philology divides itself into phonology and sematology, to which, perhaps, we may also add morphology. Phonology is the science of sounds, sematology the science of meanings, and morphology the science of grammatical forms. But inasmuch as grammatical forms are but a combination of the relations of the sentence (or rather of the meaning those relations convey to the mind) and of the phonetic sounds by which they are expressed, morphology may be strictly included partly under phonology, partly under sematology. We must never forget that the study of sounds is intended to be the vestibule through which we approach the thought within. The phonological investigations we carry on, the phonological laws we formulate, are the outworks by which we may storm the fortress of the inward signification. They enable us to trace to a common source words that have flowed through diverse regions, or to discover the origin of some strangely-changed form of grammar, but the value they possess is the value that belonged to the magic ring of the Nibelungs: it gives access to the treasure, but is not the treasure itself. Phonology is not commensurate with comparative philology, as seems sometimes to be thought. It forms but one side of the science, the instrument by which we discover the true force and meaning of sentences and words.

As the instrument of linguistic science, however, phonology is of the highest importance. In fact the modern science of language is wholly based upon it, and that which distinguishes comparative philology from the abortive attempts of former centuries is its scientific investigation into the laws of articulate utterance and of phonetic change. Here, and almost here only, we can as yet trace the nature and working of the laws of speech. It is only because we know that an English _h_ and _d_ must answer to a Sanskrit _k_ (_ś_) and _t_ that we are able to assert that the primitive Aryan community had attained the conception of “one hundred.” Sematology is still in a far more backward state; its laws are still a subject of investigation, and the differences of opinion that exist as to some of the great questions of linguistic science show only too plainly how much in this department of it still remains to be done. But the relative position of phonology and sematology is, after all, but natural. Phonology deals with the outward and physical, that which, can be weighed and measured, and imitated by mechanical contrivances; sematology belongs to the inward and the spiritual—to that realm of thought, in short, which can only be examined in so far as it makes itself accessible to the inspection of the senses, and submits itself to the action of physical laws. Thought seems infinite, manifold, and free, determining and determined by itself. Like the wind, it “bloweth where it listeth;” we hear “the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.” All the capriciousness and complex mobility of the individual appears to belong to it; we may formulate the laws of thinking, but not of the forms which that thinking takes. The vocal organs, on the other hand, through which thought becomes realized in speech, are subject to all the conditions of the material world. The utterance of each articulate sound and its relations to another are conditioned and defined by the physical constitution of man, by the circumstances in which he finds himself, and by measurable laws of sound. The outward form of language, the flesh-garment, as it were, in which thought clothes itself, falls entirely into the domain of physiology and acoustics. Here we can observe and experimentalize, can weigh and measure, can even reproduce artificially for ourselves. Every consonant and vowel can be accurately determined, the machinery and effort needed to produce them precisely known, the variations they are capable of exactly ascertained. But when we turn to the informing thought, to that inner essence which gives life and reality to each modulation of articulate sound, all appears different. What wonder that the science of significations should be so far behind the science of sounds?

Let us not forget, however, that thought, in so far as it finds its expression in language, is not so infinitely free and capricious as we might at first sight suppose. The very fact of its finding expression in language, that is, of being embodied in articulate sounds, implies restraint and submission to conditions. Thought is thus, as it were, arrested and crystallized; it is only gradually and in consequence of ascertainable causes that the signification attached to a particular sound or group of sounds comes to be changed. That these sounds should symbolize certain ideas is, after all, a matter of convention; it follows from the tacit agreement, not indeed of isolated individuals, but of individuals as forming a society. Changes, therefore, in the signification of words and sentences can only result from causes which affect the whole society, and as such causes necessarily work slowly and by degrees, significant change can accordingly be brought under the action of general laws. But these laws can only be established by the help of phonology: until we know what words and forms the laws of phonology will allow us to compare together and refer to a common origin, we cannot begin to discuss the genesis and history of the significations they bear. No doubt structure, that is, the conception of the sentence formed by a language, and the order in which the several parts of a sentence are arranged, is a very important element in the classification of languages; still it is only one element, and unless phonology prove that the roots and derivatives of two idioms are related, no amount of structural similarity will justify us in deriving them from the same stock.

Phonology, then, is the key and mainstay of modern linguistic science; it guarantees the correctness of the results already obtained, and is the indispensable preliminary to future researches. As will be shown in a later chapter, our knowledge of sounds and their laws is now tolerably complete. So, too, is the application of this knowledge to certain groups of language. The phonological laws of the Aryan family, for instance, are pretty well ascertained; we know what sounds in one member of the family answer to other sounds in another member, and what particular changes of sound are permissible within each of the several members themselves. It follows from the physical formation of the organs of speech that the various sounds capable of being articulated are limited in number. Prince Lucien Bonaparte has enumerated as many as 385, though some of these are not to be met with in any known language or dialect.[82] The number of different sounds occurring in any single language is not large among European languages; for instance, Modern Greek, Spanish, and Illyrian have but five vowel-sounds, while Gaelic, which has the largest number, possesses twenty-one, Portuguese and English following next with nineteen a-piece. So far as consonantal sounds are concerned the number tends to diminish with the culture and age of a language, and the evidence of facts is against identifying the hypothetical alphabet to which the sounds of the various Aryan dialects can be reduced with the actual alphabet of the parent Aryan speech. The physical formation of our vocal organs, due to climate, food, habit, and inherited aptitudes, obliges us to pronounce in a particular way. There are sounds, for instance, which birds and animals can make, but we cannot; while nothing is harder than to catch and reproduce the exact pronunciation of a foreign tongue. The Polynesian turns David into _Raviri_, Samuel into _Hemara_, London into _Ranana_, and Frederick into _Waratariki_, and the word _steel_ has been adopted in the Sandwich Islands in the shape of _tila_. It has been said that a foreigner can never speak another language so perfectly as to conceal all traces of his origin, and though this is going too far, it is quite certain that there are languages the pronunciation of which can never be thoroughly acquired after the age when growth has ended and the organs of speech have ceased to be plastic. There are numerous sounds which particular races or individuals are unable to imitate successfully; and those who have watched the attempt of children to learn their mother-tongue know how slowly some special sound is often acquired, and how in some cases it is never acquired at all. The sound which one person will pronounce as _r_ will be pronounced _l_ by another. Thus, the Chinese change every _l_ into _r_, and the nearest approach they can make to the pronunciation of _Christ_ is _Ki-li-sse-t(ŭ)_. The Japanese, on the other hand, cannot manage _l_, and in their mouths accordingly _idolatry_ becomes _idoratry_. The native children of Bengal, quick as they are in other respects, seldom pronounce rightly those English words which begin with a sibilant and a mute when a consonant precedes them, _ten stamps_, for instance, being made into _ten-y-stamps_, and _this string_ into _this-y-string_. The same sound which is pronounced without difficulty in certain combinations may be a hopeless puzzle in others, and the English tourist who mispronounces _Boulogne_ and _Cologne_, will yet ask for an _onion_ and talk of a _barrier_. No individual, it would seem, pronounces all his sounds exactly like his neighbours, and even the same individual will vary his pronunciation of the same word in the course of a few seconds. Variations of pronunciation, in fact, are like the variations we observe in plants and animals, and if any variation becomes marked and is rendered popular and general from some cause or other, it brings about an alteration in the form of words. Such alterations resemble new species in natural history, and we may compare the different species of pigeons or dogs with the differences of pronunciations given by different dialects to what was originally the same sound. Changes in the pronunciation of words are constantly going on, causing a language to alter its form and appearance or to branch out into dialects. As these changes are determined by circumstances and physical necessities, and not by the arbitrary will of the individual, the laws they follow can be discovered and laid down. The laws once known, we can tell what words and sounds in different dialects, or in the different periods of the same dialect, may be compared together and referred to a common source, supposing, that is, that the significations they bear allow us to ascribe the identity of their phonetic elements to anything more than coincidence. The laws of phonology enable us to assert that the Greek καλός, and the English _hale_ or _(w)hole_, may be traced back to a common origin so far as their outward crust and garment—the phonetic sounds of which they are composed—is concerned; it then remains for sematology to decide whether the ideas of “beauty” and “soundness” can be connected together. Distinctions between sounds must be studied in spoken languages, and we must not forget that it is always very difficult to discover what was the _exact_ sound attached to a word no longer spoken, but preserved only in the custody of writing.

Different tribes and races vary much as to the sounds which they find it easy or hard to pronounce and imitate. A sound which has been changed into a certain other sound in one language, may have been preserved or changed into quite a different sound in another language. In our Aryan group the palatals were originally gutturals; in Malayan, on the contrary, dentals. Because our Teutonic forefathers turned _k_ into _h_, we must not conclude that such a change was possible all over the world, and that wherever we come across an _h_ we are at liberty to assume an earlier _k_. Indeed, there is clear evidence that in some languages _h_ may become _k_. The phonetic laws which hold good of one group of languages, or of one member of a group, do not necessarily hold good of another.

In comparing languages we have first to compare their grammars, not their vocabularies. The reason of this is obvious. It is in the sentence, not in the isolated word, that languages agree or differ, and grammar deals with the relations that the several parts of the sentence bear to one another. Single words may accidentally resemble each other in both sound and sense, and yet belong to languages which have nothing in common. In the Quichua, or dialect of the Incas, three words—_inti_, “sun;” _munay_, “love;” and _veypul_, “great”—resemble the Sanskrit _indra_, _manyu_, and _vipula_,[83] but this is the only likeness that can be detected between the two tongues. So, too, the Mandshu _shun_, “the sun,” coincides in sound and meaning with the English word, like the Mandshu _sengi_ and Latin _sanguis_, “blood,” or the North American Indian _potómac_ and the Greek πόταμος, “river.” Such accidental coincidences turn up all the world over. The number of articulate sounds used in actual speech is, after all, not so very large, nor also the number of different ideas needed by primitive man; and when we bear in mind the probable onomatopœic origin of the greater part of our vocabulary, it is not wonderful that these coincidences should occur. Indeed, the wonder would be if they did not. But a coincidence of this sort is one of the surest evidences we can have that the words which seem to resemble one another have no connection whatsoever. As Professor Max Müller has said, “sound etymology has nothing to do with sound.” Language is continually changing; and as the phonetic and significant changes in it are occasioned by outward conditions and circumstances which vary from age to age and from country to country, they must necessarily take a different direction in the mouths of different speakers. The very fact that the English _call_ and the Greek καλέω have almost every letter in common, ought to have raised a presumption against their identity, even before the law was known that an English _c_ answers to a Greek γ, and a Greek κ to an English _h_, and that, consequently, the true Greek representative of _call_ is γήρυω, and the true English representative of καλέω is _hail_.

But if we are not to compare words of the same sound and sense together, how, it may be asked, are we to ascertain the relationship of two or more languages, and discover what sounds correspond to each other in them? Our only guide is grammar. If we find that two languages express the relations of grammar in the same way, and by the help of the same machinery, we may conclude that the two languages come from a common source, and, therefore, possess a common stock of words. Under grammar will also be included structure—that is to say, the order and position of the parts of the sentence, as well as the conception of the sentence itself. Grammar and structure, therefore, are the clue by which comparative philology must be guided in its researches. It was the neglect of such a clue that caused Latin and Greek to be compared with Hebrew, and made the etymological dictionaries of the last century a rubbish heap of wasted labour. Those languages only which agree in their way of viewing the relations of thought can be grouped together. When once agreement in grammar and structure has determined the probable connection of two tongues, the aid of phonology may be called in to complete and verify the inquiry. Where the grammars are really connected, we may feel quite certain that there will be a community of roots. Where, on the contrary, there is no connection between the grammars, a community of roots must be due to accident. What proved the existence of an Aryan family of speech, and thereby founded comparative philology, was not the resemblances between individual words, striking as these were, but the exact correspondence between the grammatical forms of the several members of the family. The lists of words drawn up by Sir W. Jones, by Adelung or by Vater, remain mere literary curiosities. The comparative philology of Aryan speech was really created by the comparative grammar of Bopp. When once the grammatical relationship of the Indo-European languages had been established, there was a solid basis for phonology to work upon, and it was not long before Grimm discovered the laws which regulate their interchanges of sound.

But in comparing grammar and structure, we must be careful to exclude the accidental, or rather the phænomena due to the peculiar circumstances in which an individual tongue has been placed. We ought to be able to trace the history and development of each special language as far back as possible, ascertaining its oldest forms and noting the successive changes they have undergone. For this purpose it is necessary that the language should be a literary one, and that the various phases of its growth should have been preserved on monuments or in books. Where this is not the case, we have to fall back upon a simple comparison of existing dialects, and endeavour to restore from these the common forms to which their variant derivatives seem to point. The greater the number of dialects the more satisfactory will be the results of our comparison; accidental resemblances will be better eliminated, and intermediate forms are more likely to be preserved. Where the dialects to be compared are few, we have to contend against one of two difficulties—either the differences between them are so slight—as in the case of the Semitic languages—that the parent-speech from which they branched off must be too recent to throw any light on its earlier history and relationships; or else the differences are so great, the time during which they have been separated so considerable, that the links have been lost by which we may connect them together and reduce them to a single origin.

Phonology requires a knowledge of the past history and development of the languages it deals with even more than the study of grammar. In the comparison of words we may lay down the general rule that roots and not derivatives should be compared together. We should trace the history of the words we examine as far back as may be, should reduce them to their simplest forms, and strip off the accretions that have grown round them like the lichen round the stone. Words derived from the same radical will often assume different forms in different languages, or even in the same dialect; while words derived from different radicals will, on the other hand, assume the same form in different languages, or even in the same one. _Captive_ and _caitiff_ have the same origin in the Latin _captivus_; _sound_ may be either the Latin _sonus_ or _subundare_, or the Anglo-Saxon _sund_, “hale,” or _sund_ from _swimman_. The American _potómac_, quoted above, is a compound, while the Greek πόταμος comes from the root πο-, which we find in πίνω and πότος, in the Sanskrit _pânam_, “a drink,” and our own _potion_. The lexicographers who have declared _monkey_ to be a corruption of _mannikin_ were little aware that the word is really the Italian _monichio_, the derivative of _monna_, and that _monna_, again, is a contraction of _madonna_, _mea domina_. Before we know the history of a word, we must not venture to compare it with another, though it may happen that the history will be learnt through the process of comparison itself. Thus we know that the Gothic _fimf_, “five,” has lost two gutturals, as well as a final labial, from the analogy of the Latin _quinque_ (for _quinquem_), the Sanskrit _panchan_ and the Lithuanian _penki_, and we can thus trace it back to the period when the Aryans of Europe and of Asia were still undivided. But at this point our materials fail us. We may feel pretty sure that _quemquem_, the original Aryan word for “five,” is a simple root, and that its numerical meaning is a derived one; we may even hazard the guess that it has been formed by reduplication, but beyond this a sound method of etymology cannot go. To connect it with the Semitic _khâmésh_, as Ewald has done, is to violate the rules of comparative philology. We know the history neither of _khâmésh_ nor of _quemquem_.

In comparing words together, it is safest to begin with two classes of words, those which, like the numerals, have acquired a fixed and arbitrary meaning, and terms of relationship and every day use. In the case of the former, the signification, once fixed, remains unaltered, however much the phonetic crust of the word may change, while new names are less likely to come into vogue; in the case of the latter, the very frequency of their use tends to keep them in existence. If a few families here and there adopt new modes of expression, still it may be expected that the larger part of the community will be more conservative. Hence, when we find two languages agreeing in their numerals and words expressive of common objects and ideas, we may infer that they are related to one another. The pronouns are not so sure a criterion, as they have generally been worn down by constant use to monosyllabic forms, while their antiquity prevents us from discovering their true history and origin. Like the names of “father” and “mother,” moreover, the first and second personal pronouns show a tendency to be represented in most languages by the simplest and earliest sounds uttered by the child.