Language and the Study of Language/Lecture VIII
LECTURE VIII.
We have now taken a survey of the most important phenomena of language and of linguistic growth, as they are illustrated in the forms of speech peculiar to the Indo-European family. We have seen in what scanty beginnings our own tongue and those related to it had their origin, and what, in brief, were the steps by which they advanced from the weakness and barrenness of radical monosyllabism to the rich completeness of inflective speech. These matters were brought to light in the course of the regular prosecution of our fundamental inquiry, "why we speak as we do," it having been made to appear that our English linguistic tradition had been, during a protracted and most important period, one with that of all the other members of the family mentioned. But now, considering the possibility that the Indo-European family may be found, after all, only a constituent group in some yet vaster family—or even, supposing that possibility to be disproved, considering the impropriety of our so circumscribing our interests and our sympathies as to understand by the "we" of our question anything less than the whole human race—it becomes our duty next to pass in review the other great linguistic families which the science of language, has established, and to see wherein they agree with that which has hitherto absorbed the chief share of our attention, and wherein they differ from it. Moreover, it is clear that we should not appreciate the peculiar character of the mode of communication and expression belonging to our family, we should not even know that it had a distinctive character of its own, that the problem of speech was not solved in an identical manner by all parts of the human race, if we did not look to see how the other families have constructed the fabric of their language. We shall, accordingly, devote the present lecture and the one next following to such an examination; making it, of course, much more brief and cursory than has been our examination of Indo-European language.
There was the more reason why we should draw out with some fullness of detail the recognized history of development of the language which has been most deeply studied and is most thoroughly understood by linguistic scholars, inasmuch as some of the main results thereby won have a universal value. Much of that which has been demonstrated to be true respecting Indo-European speech is to be accepted as true respecting all human speech. Not that its historical analysis has been everywhere made so complete as to yield in each case with independent certainty the same results which the study of this one family has yielded. But nothing has been found which is of force to prove the history of language otherwise than, in its most fundamental features, the same throughout the globe; while much has been elicited which favours its homogeneousness: enough, indeed, when taken in connection with the theoretical probabilities of the case, to make the conclusion a sufficiently certain one, that all the varied and complicated forms of speech which now fill the earth have been wrought into their present shape by a like process of gradual development; that all designation of relations is the result of growth; that formative elements have been universally elaborated out of independent words; that the historical germs of language everywhere are of the nature of those simple elements which we have called roots; moreover, that roots have generally, if not without exception, been of the two classes described in the last lecture, pronominal and verbal; and that, in the earliest stages of growth, forms have been produced especially by the combination of roots of the two classes, the verbal root furnishing the central and substantial idea, the pronominal indicating its modifications and relations.
Linguistic families, now, as at present constituted, are made up of those languages which have traceably had at least a part of their historical development in common; which have grown together out of the original radical or monosyllabic stage; which exhibit in their grammatical structure signs, still discoverable by linguistic analysis, of having descended, by the ordinary course of linguistic tradition, from a common ancestor. We shall see hereafter (in the tenth lecture), indeed, that the science of language does not and cannot deny the possible correspondence of some or all of the families in their ultimate elements, a correspondence anterior to all grammatical development; but neither does she at present assert that correspondence. She has carried her classification no farther than her collected material, and her methods of sober and cautious induction from its study, have justified her in doing; she has stopped grouping where her facts have failed her, where evidences of common descent have become too slight and vague to be longer depended upon: and the limit of her power is now, and is likely ever to be, determined by coincidences of grammatical structure. The boundaries of every great family, again, are likely to be somewhat dubious; there can hardly fail to be branches which either parted so early from the general stock, or have, owing to peculiar circumstances in their history, varied so rapidly and fundamentally since they left it, that the tokens of their origin have become effaced almost or quite beyond recognition. There was a time when the Celtic languages were thus regarded as of doubtful affinity, until a more penetrating study of their material and structure brought to light abundant and unequivocal evidence of their Indo-European descent. The Albanian, the modern representative of the ancient Illyrian, spoken by the fierce and lawless race which inhabits the mountains of north-western Greece, is still in the same position; linguistic scholars are divided in opinion as to whether it is yet proved to be Indo-European, though with a growing preponderance upon the affirmative side. Examples of excessive and effacing differentiation are not wanting in existing speech. There are now spoken among barbarous peoples in different parts of the world—as on some of the islands of the Pacific, among the African tribes, and the aborigines of this continent—dialects in which the processes of linguistic change, the destruction and reconstruction of words and forms, are going on at a rate so abnormally rapid, that a dialect, it is said, becomes unintelligible in a generation or two; and in a few centuries all material trace of affinity between idioms of common descent may become blotted out. Such exceptional cases do not take away the value of the genetic method of investigation, nor derogate from the general certainty of its results in the classification of languages. But they do cause the introduction, cautiously and to a limited extent, of another indication of probable relationship: namely, concordance in the general method of solution of the linguistic problem. It is found that the great families of related languages differ from one another, not only in the linguistic material which they employ, in the combinations of sounds out of which, back to the remotest traceable beginning, they make their radical and formative elements, and designate given meanings and relations, but also, and often to no small degree, in their way of managing their material; in their apprehension of the relations of ideas which are to be expressed by the combination of elements, and in the method in which they apply the resources they possess to the expression of relations: they differ in the style, as well as the substance, of their grammatical structure. It is evident that the style may be so peculiar and characteristic as to constitute valid evidence of family relationship, even where the substance has been altered by variation and substitution till it presents no trustworthy coincidences. We shall have occasion to note and examine, farther on, some of the cases in which reliance is placed upon morphological correspondences, as they are called, upon correspondences of structural form; and also to refer to the morphological classifications of human languages which are founded upon them—classifications which mainly coincide with genetic, but also more or less combine and overlap them.
The main characteristic features of the structure of Indo-European language are readily enough deducible from the exposition given in the preceding lecture. It generates its forms by the intimate combination of elements originally independent; in this respect agreeing with nearly all other known tongues. In its combinations, moreover, the formative element is almost invariably added after the radical, forming a suffix; the only noteworthy exceptions are the augment of the primitive preterit tense of the verb, the negative prefix (our un, in, in unthankful, incapable, and the like), and the more separable elements which we call prepositions (in intend, pretend, extend, distend, and so forth): and here, too, its usage is paralleled by that of the majority of spoken languages throughout the world. A more distinctive characteristic of Indo-European language is the peculiar aptitude which it possesses for closely combining its radical and formal elements, for losing sight of their separate individuality, and applying their combination as independent conventional sign of the object indicated. It disembarrasses itself of useless reminiscences of the former status and quality of its elements, fuses them completely together, and exposes the result, as one whole, to the action of all the wearing and altering processes of linguistic life. In different constituents of the dialects of our family, in different dialects, and in different stages of their history, this tendency is seen exhibited in very different degree. In our own tongue, for instance, in such words as fully, thankfully, unthankfulness, the combined elements are held distinctly apart, and are present in their separate substance and office to the mind of any one who reflects a moment upon the words; on the other hand, in ken and can, in sit and set, in man and men, in lead and led, in sing, sang, sung, and song, in bind, bound, band, and bond, and other like cases, the fusion has gone to its utmost extent: various combinations of subordinate elements with the roots of these words have caused the development of the roots themselves into varying phonetic forms; and these have then been applied, at first to support, and afterwards to replace, the primitive means of grammatical expression: an internal flection has come in upon and supplanted the original aggregation. All Indo-European forms are originally of the kind here first illustrated, mere agglutinations of independent elements, whereof a part are reduced to a subordinate value and formal significance; but they tend, in a marked degree, to pass over into the other kind, indicating formal relations by internal change in the root or theme, instead of by external additions alone.
This tendency is generally regarded as constituting the highest characteristic of the Indo-European dialects, as making them properly inflective; and languages possessing in this sense an inflective character are reckoned to stand at the head of all the forms of human speech. Some, however, are inclined to claim a more original and fundamental importance for the process of internal change in the history of the tongues of our family, to regard a capacity of significant variation of vowel as inherent in their roots, and bearing a regular and conspicuous part in even the earliest steps of their development. The evidence upon which this claim is founded I cannot but regard as altogether insufficient to sustain it. Wherever, in the most ancient as well as the more modern processes of word-formation and inflection, we find internal changes of the root, they are, I am persuaded, of secondary growth, inorganic; they are called out ultimately by phonetic causes, not originated for the purpose of marking variation of meaning, though sometimes seized and applied to that purpose. To prove the element of internal flection one of prime value in the growth of Indo-European language, it would be necessary to show that the variation of vowel had a distinctly assignable office in the primitive production of words; that it regularly distinguished from one another certain parts of speech, certain classes of derivatives, certain forms of declension or conjugation; that it formed guiding analogies, which could be and actually were imitated continuously in the further processes of word-making. But this is far from being the case; on the contrary, the phenomena bear everywhere an irregular and sporadic character: the change of vowel in the oldest derivatives is only an accompaniment of derivation by means of suffixes; it has no constant significance; it acquires significance only at second hand, in the manner of a result, not a cause; and it remains everywhere as barren of formative force as in the Germanic verbs (where, as was shown in the third lecture, its infecundity led to the construction of a new scheme of conjugation), or as in our irregular plurals like men and feet, from man and foot. Only, therefore, so far as it is regarded as an effect and sign of thorough integration of elements, of complete unity of designation, can we accept internal change as an exponent of the superiority of Indo-European speech.
But the peculiarities belonging to the character of our family of languages will be more clearly apprehensible when we shall have taken a survey of the other principal forms of human speech, to which, accordingly, after these necessary introductory remarks, we now turn. We shall take up the families in an order partly geographical, and partly based upon a consideration of their respective importance.
On both these grounds, there can be no question as to which group of languages, outside of the Indo-European domain, ought first to receive our attention. It is evidently that one which includes as its principal branches the Hebrew, the Syriac, and the Arabic. From the names of its two extreme members, it is sometimes styled the Syro-Arabian family; but its usual and familiar designation is Semitic or Shemitic, derived from the name of the patriarch Shem, son of Noah, who in Genesis is made the ancestor of most of the nations that speak its dialects. It is a very distinctly marked group, and, though occupying but a limited tract in the southwestern corner of Asia, with some of the adjacent parts of Africa, is of the highest consequence, by reason of the conspicuous part which the race to which it belongs has played in the history of the world. This is too well known to require to be referred to here otherwise than in the briefest manner.
The Phenicians, inhabiting Tyre, Sidon, and the adjacent parts of the Mediterranean coast, and speaking a dialect so nearly akin with the Hebrew that its scanty remains are read with no great difficulty by the aid of that language, have been wont to be accounted as the first to give the race prominence in general history. The part which they played was of the most honourable and useful character. Their commercial enterprise widely extended the limits of geographical knowledge, and bound together distant peoples by the ties of mutual helpfulness; their colonies opened to civilization the countries bordering the Mediterranean, and prepared the way for the extension of Greek and Roman culture. A significant indication of the far-reaching and beneficent nature of their activity is to be seen in the fact that a large portion of the world's alphabets, including many of those which have the widest range, and have been used by the most cultivated nations, come from the Phenician alphabet as their ultimate source. To great political importance the Phenicians never attained, except in their most flourishing colony, Carthage, which, as we well know, disputed for a time with the Romans the empire of the world.
But it must not fail to be noticed that, even before the rise of the Phenician world-commerce, there were great Semitic empires in Mesopotamia, that country where the idea of universal empire appears to have had its origin and its first realization, and where some of the earliest germs of world-civilization sprang up and were nursed. The mixture of nationalities and of cultures which contended in that arena for the mastery during tens of centuries, until the Indo-European Persians subjected all beneath their sway, is most intricate, and as yet only partially understood; the knowledge of its intricacy, and the hopeful means of its final solution, were given together, but a few years since, in the discovery and decipherment of the monuments of Nineveh and Babylon, of the records known as "cuneiform," from the shape of the characters in which they are written. These records are abundant, and of various content, consisting not in inscriptions alone, but in whole libraries of annals and works of science and literature, stamped upon tablets and cylinders of burnt clay; but their examination is as yet too incomplete, and the results drawn from it too fragmentary and uncertain, to allow of our taking any detailed notice of them here; the questions which they affect are still under judgment, and only the very few who have made profound and original studies among the monuments can venture to speak respecting them with authority. It is enough for us to note that the Semitic race was prominent, and during a long period preëminent, in Mesopotamia, and that a highly important part of its history, and of the history of Semitic language, is coming to light as the fruit of cuneiform studies.
During all this time there was enacting—behind a screen, as it were—a part of Semitic history which was to prove of incomparably greater importance to the world than Phenician commerce or Babylonian empire. The little people of the Hebrews was politically a most insignificant item in the sum of human affairs; but its religion, made universal by Christ, has become the mightiest element in human history; its wonderful ancient literature is the work which all enlightened nations of the present day unite in calling Bible, that is, 'the book;' its language is even now more studied than any other outside the pale of Indo-European speech.
And yet once more, in comparatively modern times, long after Mesopotamian empire, and Phenician commerce, and Carthaginian lust of conquest, and Jewish temple-worship, had passed away for ever, extinguished in the extinction of those several nationalities, a new branch of the Semitic race, which till then had slumbered in inaction and insignificance in the deserts of Arabia, awoke all at once to the call of a great religious teacher, Mohammed, burst its limits, overwhelmed Asia, Africa, and no small part of Europe, and flowered out suddenly and brilliantly in science, art, and philosophy, attaining a combined political and literary eminence to which no Semitic people had made before any approach, and threatening to wrench the leadership of human destiny from the keeping of the enfeebled races of Europe. Finally, corrupted within, and foiled and broken without, it sank again into comparative obscurity; and with it went down, probably for ever, the star of Semitic glory and importance in the external history of the world; though half mankind still own the sway of Semitic religious ideas and institutions.
The Semitic dialects are divided into three principal branches: the northern, comprehending the idioms of Syria and Assyria, and usually called the Aramaic; the central, or Canaanitic, composed of the Hebrew and Phenician, with the Punic; and the southern, or Arabic, including, besides the proper or literary Arabic and the dialects most closely akin with it, the Himyaritic in the south-western region of the peninsula, and the outliers of the latter in Africa, the literary Ethiopic or Geëz, the Amharic, and other Abyssinian dialects. Passing over the Mesopotamian records, as of an age and character not yet fully established, the Hebrew literature is by far the oldest which the family has to show, and, as is known to every one, ranks among the oldest in the world. From a time anterior, doubtless, to that of Moses, the works of the Hebrew annalists, poets, and prophets cover the whole period of Jewish history until some four centuries before Christ, when the Hebrew had ceased to exist as a vernacular language, and was replaced by the Chaldee or Aramaic, the dialect of Syria. But it has never ceased to be read, written, and even to some extent spoken, by the learned, from that time until now—especially since the revival of its use, and the purification of its style, among the scattered Jewish populations of Europe, following upon the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the twelfth century. Of the degraded and mixed Hebrew used as the learned dialect of the Rabbins, not far from the beginning of our era, the Mishna is the most important monument. The Samaritan is another impure dialect of the Hebrew, so permeated with Aramaic elements as to be a kind of medium between Hebrew and Aramaic. Its oldest monument, a version of the Pentateuch, is referred to the first century of our era. It seems at present to be on the point of extinction.
Phenicia has left us no literature. The coffin of one of the kings of Sidon, found but a few years since, presents in its detailed inscription a fuller view of the Phenician tongue than is derivable from all its other known records, taken together. A few inscriptions, and a mutilated and obscure fragment in a play of the Roman poet Plautus, whereof the scene is laid in Carthage, are the only relics left us of the idiom of that queenly city.
The earliest records of Aramaic speech are the so-called Chaldee passages found in some of the later books of the Hebrew Bible (a single verse in Jeremiah, and longer passages in Esdras and Daniel). Other products of the literary use by the Jews of the same language are the Targums, or paraphrases of Scripture, dating from about the time of Christ, and the Talmuds, of the fourth and fifth centuries. But in the second century, with the translation of the whole Bible into the language of Syria (usually called the Peshito version), begins an important Christian Syriac literature, of which considerable portions are still preserved to us. It flourished especially between the fourth and ninth centuries. Besides the valuable historical information, touching the early ages of the Christian church, which it records, it played an important part in transmitting to the Arabs the literature, science, and philosophy of the Greeks. Its career was brought to a close, and even the Syriac idiom itself nearly crowded out of existence, by the rise and rapid extension of the Arabic, in the centuries after Mohammed. But the ancient Syriac is still the sacred dialect of the feeble bodies of Christians in Asia which represent the Syriac church; and its modern representatives, much corrupted in form and of mixed material, are even now spoken by a few scattered communities. With one of these communities, the Nestorians of Orumiah and its vicinity—scanty remains of a sect which once sent its missionaries into the remotest regions of Asia, into India, Mongolia, and China—the labours of American missionaries have lately made our public well acquainted. A modern Syriac literature is growing up once more under their auspices.
Besides these two Aramaic literatures, the one Jewish and the other Christian, it is believed that there has existed another, of native origin and of character more truly national; but it is now lost, doubtless beyond recovery. Traditions of ancient Chaldean learning attach themselves to the name Nabatean, and one or two curious books have been recently brought to light out of the Arabic literature, claiming to be versions of Nabatean works of a very high antiquity: but they are generally regarded as literary impostures, containing only a scanty, if an appreciable, element of what is genuine and ancient. In the practices and traditions of the Mendaites and Sabians are also seen traces of an indigenous Chaldean culture.
The oldest monuments belonging to the southern or Arabian branch of Semitic speech are the inscriptions discovered in the south-western corner of the great peninsula. They represent a language very different from the classical Arabic, as the character and civilization of the Sabeans and Himyarites, from whom they come, appear to have been very unlike those of the Arabs of the desert. Their exact period is hitherto unknown. Language and civilization have alike been almost wholly supplanted, since the rise of Islamism, by the conquering Arabic, only obscure relics of them being left in the Ehkili and other existing idioms of the south. Most nearly akin with the Himyaritic is the speech of the neighbouring region of Africa, which was unquestionably peopled from southern Arabia, by emigration across the Red Sea. The ancient tongue of Abyssinia, the Ethiopic or Geëz, has a literature, wholly of Christian origin and content, coming down from the fourth century of our era: its earliest monument is a version of the Bible. As a cultivated and current language, it has been gradually crowded out of use during the past six centuries by the Amharic, another dialect of the same stock, but of a more corrupt and barbarous character.
Immensely superior in value to all the other Semitic literatures, excepting the Hebrew, although latest in date of them all, is that which is written in the Arabic tongue. Its beginning is nearly contemporaneous with the rise of the Arab people to historical importance; the Koran, collected and written down, about the middle of the seventh century, from the records and traditions of Mohammed's revelations, is its starting-point. Only a few poems, of no great length, belong to an age somewhat earlier; and the inscriptions of Sinai and of Petra, which go back nearly to, or even somewhat beyond, the Christian era, give scanty representation of dialects nearly kindred. That which we call the Arabic was, anterior to Mohammed, the spoken dialect of the tribes occupying the central part of the country; that is to say, of that part of the population which was of purest Semitic blood, and less affected than any other, in language, manners, and institutions, by disturbing foreign influences. As a natural consequence of the political and religious revolution by which Islamism became the religion, first of Arabia, then of so large a portion of Asia and Africa, this dialect has had a career almost comparable with that of the Latin. It has extinguished nearly all the other dialects of the Semitic family within their ancient limits; it has spread over Egypt and the whole northern coast of Africa; the language of Spain, and yet more the Hindustani of central India, have borrowed abundantly of its material; the modern literary Persian and Turkish have their vocabularies made up almost more of Arabic words than of those of native growth. Of the wonderfully rich and various Arabic literature, of the part it played in the preservation and transmission of classical learning to modern times, of the treasures of information it contains respecting the history and geography of the Orient, it is not necessary here to speak; the theme belongs to literary, not to linguistic, history. We turn to a consideration of the chief peculiarities of Semitic language.
The Semitic type of speech is called inflective, like the Indo-European, and philologists are accustomed to allow the title to no other languages than these two. We must beware, however, of supposing that this inclusion in one morphological class implies any genetic relationship between the families, or is to be regarded as even suggesting the probability of their common descent. There is between them, on the contrary, only such a resemblance as is due to a correspondence of natural endowments in the language-making races. Semitic inflection is so totally diverse from Indo-European inflection, that the historical transition from the one to the other, or from a common original to both, is of a difficulty which cannot be exceeded. The Semitic tongues possess in many respects a more peculiar and isolated character than any others which exist. Their most fundamental characteristic is the triliterality of their roots. With rare and insignificant exceptions, every Semitic verbal root—the pronominal roots are not subject to the same law—contains just three consonants, no more and no less. Moreover, it is composed of consonants alone. That is to say: whereas, in the Indo-European and other tongues, the radical vowel is as essential a part of the root as any other, even though more liable than the consonants to phonetic alteration, in the Semitic, on the other hand, the vocalization of the radical consonants is almost solely a means of grammatical flexion. Only the consonants of the root are radical or significant elements; the vowels are formative or relational. Thus, for example, the three consonants q-t-l form a root (Arabic) which conveys the idea of 'killing;' then qatala means 'he killed;' qutila, 'he was killed;' qutilū, 'they were killed;' uqtul, 'kill;' qātil, 'killing;' iqtāl, 'causing to kill;' qatl, 'murder;' qitl, 'enemy;' qutl, 'murderous;' and so on. Along with this internal flection is found the use of external formative elements, both suffixes and prefixes, and also, to a limited extent, infixes, or inserted letters or syllables; yet they are but little relied on, and play only a subordinate part, as compared with their analogues in the languages of other races; the main portion of the needed inflection is provided for by means of the varying vocalization of the root, and what remains for affixes to do is comparatively trifling. The aggregation of affix upon affix, the formation of derivative from derivative, so usual with us (it was illustrated in a former lecture by such examples as inapplicabilities and untruthfully), is a thing almost unknown in the domain of Semitic speech. This truly Procrustean uniformity of the Semitic roots, and this capacity of significant internal change, separate the languages to which they belong by a wide and almost impassable gulf from all others spoken by the human race. So far as we can discover, the varying vocalization of the roots in these languages is an ultimate fact, and directly and organically indicative of a variation of meaning: it is not, like the occasional phenomena of a somewhat similar character presented by the Indo-European languages, a distinction originally euphonic, and afterwards made significant. We can point out the influences which have made men the plural of man, led the preterit of lead; we can trace back set and sang to forms in which their distinction from sit and sing was conveyed by formative elements added from without to the root; but no historical researches bring the Semitic scholar to, or even perceptibly toward, any such explanation of the forms he is studying. Now and then a kind of symbolism is pretty distinctly traceable: the weaker vowels i and u sometimes convey by their use an intimation of less active or transitive meaning, as compared with the strong full a: thus, the act of 'killing' is expressed by qatala, but the conditions of 'being sorry,' of 'being beautiful,' by 'hazina, 'hasuna; and especially, every active verb, like qatala, has its corresponding passive qutila. But such considerations can explain only a small portion of the derivatives from Semitic roots; the genesis of the rest is an unsolved problem, of extremest difficulty. The triplicity of radical consonants is an equally primitive characteristic of all the Semitic tongues, yet there are not wanting certain apparent indications that it is the result of historical development. To make out the required number of three, some roots contain the same consonant doubled; in others, one of the three is a weak or servile letter, hardly more than a hiatus, or it is a semivowel which seems to have been developed out of an original vowel; further, there are groups of roots of somewhat kindred signification which agree in two of their consonants, so that the third is plausibly conjectured to be an introduced letter, having the effect to differentiate a general meaning once conveyed by the other two alone. Guided by such signs, and urged on by the presumed necessity in theory for regarding triliterality as not absolutely original, scholars have repeatedly made the attempt to reduce these roots to an earlier and simpler condition, out of which they should be accounted a historic growth—but hitherto with only indifferent success; we are yet far from attaining any satisfactory understanding of the beginnings of Semitic speech. It is suggested with much plausibility that the universality of the three root-letters may be due to the inorganic and arbitrary extension of an analogy which had by some means become a dominant one; and that, in attaining their present form, the roots have prevailingly passed through the condition of derivative nouns. The Semitic verbal forms show many signs of a more immediate and proximate development out of forms of nouns than is to be traced in the structure of the Indo-European verb.[1]
In no small part of its structure, the Semitic verb differs very strikingly from the Indo-European. It distinguishes, indeed, the same three numbers, singular, dual, and plural, and the same persons, first, second, and third, and its personal endings are to a considerable extent formed in the same manner, by adding pronominal elements to the verbal root. But in the second and third persons it makes a farther distinction of the gender of the subject: thus, qatalat, 'she killed,' is different from qatala, 'he killed.' What is of much more consequence is that its representation of the important element of time is quite diverse from ours. The antithesis of past, present, and future, which seems to us so fundamental and necessary, the Semitic mind has ignored, setting up but two tenses, whose separate uses are to no small extent interchangeable and difficult of distinct definition, but whereof the one denotes chiefly completed action, the other incomplete; each of them admitting of employment, in different circumstances, as past, present, or future. The perfect or preterit is the more original, and its persons are formed by appended pronominal endings; the imperfect (sometimes called future) has the terminations of number belonging to a noun, and indicates person and gender by prefixes: thus, the three masculine persons in the singular are aqtulu, taqtulu, and yaqtulu; the third, masculine and feminine, dual, are yaqtulāni and taqtulāni; plural, yaqtulūna and yaqtulna. To the imperfect belongs a subjunctive and imperative, and one or two other less common quasi-modal forms. But of the wealth of modal expression into which our owh verb has always tended to develop, in a synthetic or an analytic way, that of the Semites has generated very little; its proneness is rather to the multiplication of such distinctions as are called conjugational, to the characterizing of the verbal action as in its nature transitive, causal, intensive, iterative, conative, reflexive, or the like: thus, qatala meaning 'he killed,' qattala means 'he killed with violence, massacred;' qātala, 'he tried to kill;' aqtala, 'he caused to kill;' inqatala, 'he killed himself;' and so on. Each Arabic verb has theoretically fifteen such conjugations; and near a dozen of them, each with its own passive, are in tolerably frequent and familiar use; in the other dialects, the scheme is less completely filled out. Verbal nouns and adjectives, or infinitives and participles, belong likewise to every conjugation.
In their nouns, the Semites distinguish only two genders, masculine and feminine. They have, of course, the same three numbers here as in the verb. Distinctions of case, however, are almost entirely deficient; only the Arabic makes a scanty separation of nominative and accusative, or of nominative, genitive, and accusative; and opinions still differ as to whether this is to be regarded as a separate acquisition made by the Arabic alone, or as an original possession of the whole family, lost by the other branches: the latter is probably the correcter view.
The simple copula, the verb to be, is generally wanting in the Semitic languages: for "the man is good" they say, "the man good" (often with a form of the adjective which indicates that it is used predicatively, rather than attributively), or "the man, he good." They are poor in connectives and particles; and this, with the deficiency of modal forms in the verb, gives to their syntax a peculiar character of simplicity and baldness: the Semite strings his assertions together, just putting one after the other, with an and or a but interposed, where the Indo-European twines his into a harmoniously proportioned and many-membered period. The same stiffness and rigidity which these languages show in respect to word-development appears also in their development of signification. While it is characteristic of our mode of speech that we use such words as comprehend, understand, forgive, as if they originally and always meant just what we employ them to express—not giving a thought to the metaphor, often striking, or even startling, which they contain—in the Semitic, the metaphor usually shows plainly through, and cannot be lost sight of. The language of the Semite, then, is rather pictorial, forcible, vivid, than adapted to calm and reasoning philosophy.
The various dialects of this family stand in a very close relationship with one another, hardly presenting such differences even as are found within the limits of a single branch of the Indo-European family: they are to one another like German, Dutch, and Swedish, for example, rather than like German, Welsh, and Persian. This fact, however, does not at all prove their separation to have taken place at a later period than that of the Indo-European branches; for, during its whole recorded history, Semitic speech has shown itself far less variable, less liable to phonetic change and corruption, less fertile of new words and forms, of new themes and apparent roots, than our own. And the reasons, at least in part, are not difficult to discover. Each Semitic word, as a general rule, presents distinctly to the consciousness of him who employs it its three radical consonants, with its complement of vowels, each one of which has a recognized part to play in determining the significance of the word, and cannot be altered, or exchanged for another, without violating a governing analogy, without defacing its intelligibility. The genesis of new forms, moreover, is rendered well-nigh impossible by the fact that such a thing as a Semitic compound is almost totally unknown: the habit of the language, from its earliest period, has forbidden that combination of independent elements which is the first step toward their fusion into a form. Hence everything in Semitic speech wears an aspect of peculiar rigidity and persistence. In its primitive development—as development we cannot but believe it to have been, however little comprehensible by us—it assumed so marked and individual a type that it has since been comparatively exempt from variation. In no other family of human speech would it be possible that the most antique and original of its dialects, the fullest in its forms, the most uncorrupted in its phonetic structure, the most faithful representative of the ideal type inherent in them all, should be the youngest of their number. But such is the character of the classical Arabic, whose earliest literary monuments are from fifteen to twenty centuries later than those of the Hebrew and Assyrian. There is reason, however, it should be remarked, to suspect that the Hebrew as we have it does not in all points truly represent the language of the earliest period of Hebrew history, that it has both partaken of the modernization of the popular tongue, and suffered some distortion in the hands of the grammarians from whom we receive it. The spoken vernaculars of the present day, while they exhibit something of the same character as the modern Indo-European dialects, in the abbreviation of words, the loss of inflectional forms, and the obscuration of etymological relations, yet do so in a much less degree. The modern Syriac of Orumiah has decidedly more of the aspect of a European analytic language than any other existing dialect of its family, and even more than, a few years ago, Semitic scholars were willing to believe possible. But its predecessor, the ancient Syriac, had been itself distinguished by like peculiarities among the contemporaneous and older dialects; having felt, perhaps, the modifying influence of the strange peoples and cultures by which Syria was shut in, invaded, and more than once subdued.
It may be hoped that wider and deeper study will succeed one day in casting additional light upon the difficulties of Semitic linguistic history. The dialect which is now in process of construction out of the recently discovered cuneiform monuments is claimed to possess some peculiar characteristics, yet it appears to be too decidedly accordant with the rest in its general structure to play other than a subordinate part, by farther illustrating that part of the course of development with which we are already more or less familiar. lt is confidently claimed, however, by some linguistic scholars (although as confidently denied by others), that the ancient tongue of Egypt, and a considerable group of the languages of northern Africa, have traces, still distinctly visible, of a far remoter connection with this family, a connection anterior to the full elaboration of the fundamental peculiarities of Semitic language which we have been considering. If this claim shall be established by maturer investigation, there will be reason to look for important revelations as the result of comparisons made between the two classes. The often-asserted relationship between the beginnings of Indo-European and of Semitic speech does not at present offer any appreciable promise of valuable light to be thrown upon their joint and respective history. It must be evident, I think, from the foregoing exposition, that the whole fabric and style of these two families of language is so discordant, that any theory which assumes their joint development out of the radical stage, the common growth of their grammatical systems, is wholly excluded. If correspondence there be between them, it must lie in their roots, and it must have existed before the special working-over of the Semitic roots into their present form. It will be time, then, to talk of the signs of Indo-European and Semitic unity when the earliest process of Semitic growth is better understood, its effects distinguished from the yet earlier material upon which they were wrought. Against so deep and pervading a discordance, the surface analogies hitherto brought to light have no convincing weight. The identification is a very alluring theme: the near agreement of the peoples speaking these two classes of languages in respect to physical structure and mental capacity, their position as the two great white races, joint leaders in the world's history, taken in connection with their geographical neighbourhood and an apparent agreement between the traditions held by some nations of each touching their earliest homes and fates, are inducements which have spurred on many a linguist to search for verbal and radical coincidences in the tongues of both, and to regard with a degree of credence such as he appeared to find—while, nevertheless, if the same coincidences were found to exist, along with the same differences, between our languages and those of some congeries of Polynesian or African tribes, they would at once be dismissed as of no value or account. To claim, then, that the common descent of Indo-European and Semitic races has been proved by the evidence of their speech is totally unjustifiable; the utmost which can be asserted is that language affords certain indications, of doubtful value, which, taken along with certain other ethnological considerations, also of questionable pertinency, furnish ground for suspecting an ultimate relationship. The question, in short, is not yet ripe for settlement. Whether the better comprehension of the history of Semitic speech which further research may give will enable us to determine it with confidence, need not here be considered: while such a result is certainly not to be expected with confidence, it may perhaps be looked for with hope.
To discuss the Semitic character, and to show how in its striking features it accords with Semitic speech, would be a most interesting task, but lies aside from the proper course of our inquiries. Through the might of their religious ideas, this people have governed, and will continue to govern, the civilized world; but in other respects, in that gradual working-out of ethnic endowment and capacity which constitutes the history of a race, they have shown themselves decidedly inferior to the other great ruling family, and their forms of speech undeniably partake of this inferiority. The time is long past when reverence for the Hebrew Scriptures as the Book of books could carry with it the corollary that the Hebrew tongue was the most perfect and the oldest of all known languages, and even the mother of the rest: it is now fully recognized as merely one in a contracted and very peculiar group of sister dialects, crowded together in a corner of Asia and the adjacent parts of Africa, possessing striking excellences, but also marked with striking defects, and not yet proved genetically connected with any other existing group.
The family of languages to which we have next to direct our attention is one of much wider geographical range, and more varied linguistic character. As usually constructed, it covers with its branches the whole northern portion of the eastern continent, through both Europe and Asia, together with the greater part of central Asia, and portions of Asiatic and European territory lying still further south. It is known by many different names: some call it the Altaic, or the Ural-Altaic, family, from the chains of mountains which are supposed to have served as centres of dispersion to its tribes; others style it, from one or other of its principal branches, the Mongolian, or the Tataric; the appellation Turanian has also won great currency within no long time, owing to its adoption by one or two very conspicuous authorities in linguistic ethnology, although recommended neither by its derivation nor its original application (we shall speak more particularly of both later); Scythian, finally, is a title which it has sometimes received, taken from the name by which the Greeks knew the wild nomad races of the extreme north-east, which were doubtless in part, at least, of this kindred—and the designation Scythian we will here employ, as, upon the whole, though far from being unexceptionable, best answering our purpose.
Five principal branches compose the family. The first of them, the Ugrian, or Finno-Hungarian, is almost wholly European in its position and known history. It includes the language of the Laplanders, the race highest in latitude, but lowest in stature and in developed capacity, of any in Europe; that of the Finns in north-western Russia, with related dialects in Esthonia and Livonia; those of several tribes, of no great numbers or consequence, stretching from the southern Ural mountains toward the interior of Russia and down the Volga—as the Permians, Siryanians, Wotiaks, Cheremisses, and Mordwins; and the tongue of the Hungarians or Magyars, far in the south, with those of their kindred, the Ostiaks and Woguls, in and beyond the central chain of the Ural—which was the region whence the rude ancestors of the brave and noble race who now people Hungary fought their way down to the Danube, within the historical period, or hardly a thousand years ago.
The second branch is the Samoyedic, nearest akin with the Ugrian, yet apparently independent of it. It occupies the territory along the northern coast of Europe and Asia, from the White Sea across the lower Yenisei, and almost to the Lena, one of the most barren and inhospitable tracts of the whole continent; while some of its dialects are spoken in the mountains to the south, about the head waters of the Yenisei—probably indicating the region whence the Samoyed tribes were driven, or wandered, northward, following the river-courses, and spreading out upon the shores of the northern ocean. What is known of them and their speech is mainly the fruit of the devoted labours of the intrepid traveller Castrén. The Samoyed dialects are destitute of literary cultivation and of records, and the wild people who speak them are without interest or consequence, in the present or the past, save simply as human beings. No other branch of the family has so little to recommend it to our notice.
The third branch includes the languages spoken by the Turkish tribes, a race which has played a part in modern history not altogether insignificant. Their earliest wanderings and conquests are doubtfully read in the annals of the Chinese empire, and their long struggles with the Iranian peoples in their border-lands are conspicuous themes of Persian heroic tradition. It was in the ninth and tenth centuries that they finally broke forth from their dreary abodes on the great plateau of central Asia; falling upon the eastern provinces of the already decaying Mohammedan caliphate, they hastened its downfall and divided its inheritance; and their victorious arms were carried steadily westward, until, in the middle of the fifteenth century, they were masters of Constantinople and of all that was left of the Greek empire; nor was their progress toward the heart of Europe checked but by the most heroic and long-continued efforts on the part of Magyars, Germans, and Slavonians. Their modern history, and their present precarious position upon the border of Europe, are too well known to call for more than an allusion. The subdivisions of the branch are numerous, and they cover a territory of very wide extent, reaching from the eastern edge of the Austrian dominions, through Asia Minor, Tatary, and Chinese Tatary, to beyond the centre of the Asiatic continent, while their outliers are found even along the Lena, to its mouth, in northernmost Siberia. They are classed together in three principal groups: first, the northern, of which the Kirghiz, Bashkir, and Yakut are the most important members; they occupy (with the exception of the Yakut in the extreme north-east) southern Siberia and Tatary, between the Volga and the Yenisei; second, the south-eastern, including the Uigurs, Usbeks, Turkomans, etc., and ranging from the southern Caspian, eastward to the middle of the great plateau; third, the western, stretching through northern Persia, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Asia Minor, to the Bosphorus, and scattered in patches amid the varied populations which fill the European dominions of the Sultan. This division, however, is rather geographical than linguistic: the nearer mutual relations of the different dialects are still, in great part, to be determined. They compose together a very distinct body of nearly kindred forms of speech, not differing from one another in anything like the same degree as the Ugrian languages. It is even claimed, although with questionable truth, that a Yakut of the Lena and a man of the lower orders at Constantinople could still make shift to communicate together.
The fourth branch of Scythian language is the Mongolian. The Mongols, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, ran a wonderful career of conquest, overwhelming nearly all the monarchies of Asia, and reducing even the eastern countries of Europe to subjection. The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, reigning from the borders of Germany to the coasts of south-eastern Asia, with his capital in China, the most populous and at that time well-nigh the most enlightened country of the earth, governed such a realm as the world never saw, before or since. But the unwieldy mass fell in pieces almost as rapidly as it had been brought together. The horribly devastating wars by which Mongol dominion was established were neither attended nor followed by any compensating benefits: they were a tempest of barbarian fury, to be thought of only with a shudder, and with gratitude for its brevity. The Mongols themselves were but the leaders in the movement, which was in great part executed by hordes of Turkish descent. A Mongol dynasty held possession of the Chinese throne for a century, until expelled, about A.D. 1365, by a successful revolt of the native race. At present, the still powerful remains of this once so redoubtable people are living in quiet and insignificance, as dependents of the Chinese empire. Their territory is bounded in the south by the Tibetan frontier, and extends thence eastward to the border of China, northward to lake Dzaisang, north-eastward to beyond lake Baikal, and to the edge of Manchuria, including the upper waters of the Lena and the Amoor. Their scattered fragments, too, are left in almost every country westward to the Volga, and a considerable colony of them are to be found upon both sides of the Volga, to some distance above its mouth. The Khalkas, Kalmucks, and Buriats are the most notable of their tribes.
The fifth and last branch is called the Tungusic. It occupies a broad tract of north-eastern Asia, from the frontier of China on the north to the Arctic Ocean, and from the neighbourhood of the Yenisei almost to Kamchatka. Its most conspicuous dialect, the Manchu, belongs to tribes which have established a claim upon the attention of the world by their conquest of China a little more than two centuries ago (A.D. 1644). In wielding the forces of that mighty empire, they long displayed a consummate ability; but their administration, attacked at once by foreign encroachment and domestic revolt, has now for some time been marked with fatal weakness; Scythian power seems at present not less decadent in the extreme East than in the West. This is not the first time that Tungusian races have built up their power upon a Chinese foundation. The powerful dynasties of Khitan and Kin, from the beginning of the tenth century to near the middle of the thirteenth, held a great part of northern China in subjection, though not to the entire subversion of the empire: like the modern Manchus, they adopted and perpetuated the Chinese institutions and culture. The realm of the Kin was one of the many which went down before the Mongolian onset. The Manchus call by the name Orochon, 'reindeer-possessors,' all Tungusian tribes excepting their own; respecting their mutual relations little is known in detail: they are dependences partly of the Chinese empire, partly of the Russian.
The brief survey of the history of the Scythian races with which we have thus accompanied our statement of their divisions is sufficient to set forth clearly the subordinate part they have played in human affairs. War and devastation have been the sphere in which their activity has chiefly manifested itself. Some of them have shown for a time no mean capacity in governing and managing their conquests. But they have had no aptitude for helping the advance of civilization, and but little, in general, even for appropriating the knowledge and culture of their subjects or their neighbours. The Manchus have written their language during some centuries past; but they have nothing which deserves the name of a national literature; their books are translations or servile imitations of Chinese works. The Mongol literature goes back to the thirteenth century, the period when the race rose to importance in history, but is almost equally scanty. The Mongol alphabet was the original of the present Manchu, and, in its turn, was derived from that of the Uigur Turks; the latter, again, goes back to the Syriac, having been brought into central Asia by Nestorian missionaries. The Uigurs, the easternmost members of the family of Turkish tribes, seem to have been the first among them to acquire and use the art of writing; their alphabet is said to be mentioned in Chinese annals of the fifth century, and their reputation for learning won them consideration and high employment even down to the era of the Mongolian outbreak; but they, their civilization, and their literature have since passed so nearly out of existence that it has even been possible to raise the question whether they were, in fact, of Turkish kindred and speech. Very scanty fragments of what are supposed to have been their literary productions, of uncertain age, are still preserved to us. The general conversion of the Turkish tribes to Mohammedanism led to the crowding out of their ancient alphabet by the Arabic. From the south-eastern division of the same branch, generally called the Jagataic, or Oriental Turkish, we have a literature of some value, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but not continued later: its most important work is the autobiography of the emperor Baber, that extraordinary man who early in the sixteenth century conquered India, founding there the Mogul dynasty, the final extinction of which we have ourselves witnessed within the past few years. The westernmost Turkish race, the conquerors of Constantinople, usually known by the distinctive name of Osmanlis, or Ottomans (both words are corruptions of the name of their leader, Othman), have a very rich and abundant literature, covering the whole period from the rise of the race to power in the fourteenth century down to our own time. It is, however, of only secondary interest, as being founded on Persian and Arabic models, and containing little that is distinctively national in style and spirit. The learned dialect, too, in which it is written, is crowded full of Persian and Arabic words, often to the nearly total exclusion of native Turkish material. In the Finno-Hungarian branch of the family, finally, there is the same paucity of literary records. In Hungary, after its conversion to Roman Christianity (about A.D. 1000), Latin was for a long time the almost exclusive medium of learned communication and composition. The Reformation, in the sixteenth century, favoured the uprising of a national literature, in a vernacular tongue; but Austrian policy checked and thwarted its development; and a renewed start, taken about the beginning of the present century, was baffled when the remains of Hungarian liberty were trampled out in 1849. Finnish written literature is still more recent, but boasts at least one work of a high order of interest, of a wholly native and original stamp: the Kalevala, composed of half-mythical, half-legendary songs, which have been handed down by tradition, apparently for many centuries, from generation to generation of the Finnish people. No other Ugrian race possesses a literature.
It is claimed of late, however, by those who are engaged in constructing linguistic, ethnological, and political history out of the just disentombed records of Assyrian culture and art, that sufficient evidence is found to compel the belief that neither Indo-Europeans nor Semites, but some third race, were the first occupants and owners of the soil, and laid the foundation of the culture which was adopted and developed there by the other races, as they later, one after another, succeeded to the supremacy; and some maintain further that the language of this race shows it to have been Scythian, a member of the westernmost, or Finno-Hungarian, branch of the family. By others the Scythian character of the dialect is explicitly denied. The discussion is at present in the hands of too few persons, and those too little versed in Scythian philology, to admit of a definite and satisfactory conclusion; and meanwhile we are justified in regarding with extreme incredulity any theory which puts Scythian races in the position of originators of an independent civilization, and teachers of Semites and Indo-Europeans. Such a position is wholly inconsistent with what is known of their history elsewhere, and would constitute a real anomaly in ethnology; while we are not authorized utterly to deny its possibility, we certainly have the right to demand full and unequivocal evidence before we yield it our belief. The fact—if fact it be—is of a revolutionary character, and must fight its way to acknowledgment.
The linguistic tie, now, which binds together the widely scattered branches of this great family, is a somewhat loose and feeble one, consisting less in the traceable correspondence of material and forms, the possession of the same roots and the same inflections, than in a correspondence of the style of structure, of the modes of apprehension and expression of grammatical relations. Each great branch forms by itself a group as distinct as is, for instance, the Germanic or the Slavonic in our own family; but there is no such palpable and unmistakable evidence of kinship between Ugrian, Turkish, Mongol, and Manchu, as between German, Russian, Greek, and Sanskrit. It is, to no small extent, those who know least in detail respecting the languages of the family who are most ready to assert and defend their historical connection: and, on the other hand, Castrén, himself a Finn, and whose long and devoted labours have taught us more respecting them than has been brought to light by any other man, ventures[2] to assert with confidence only the demonstrable linguistic relationship of Ugrian, Samoyed, and Turkish, and regards the inclusion of Mongol and Manchu within the same circle as still questionable. But even between the three former, the material evidence is but weak and scanty, as compared with that presented in the Indo-European idioms, of which specimens were given above, in the fifth lecture; no investigator has ever been able to draw up tables of pervading correspondences in the Scythian tongues, which should at once illustrate and prove their genetic unity. It is possible, of course, that the races who speak these tongues may have been separated longer than the Indo-European, enough longer for a more sweeping effacement of the evidence of their common descent; or, again, that the lack of those remains of dialects of great antiquity which so aid our researches into the history of our own family of speech is what prevents our recognition of the links that bind the Scythian languages into one. It may be, too, that these have possessed as much more variable and mobile a character than the Indo-European forms of speech as the latter than the Semitic: this, indeed, has been repeatedly assumed to be true, and even defended by theoretical and à priori arguments; but I am not aware that it has ever been established by proper linguistic evidence and reasoning, and it is strongly opposed by the coherence of the several branches, and the near accordance of the dialects composing them. And, were either or both of these possible explanations of the discordances of the Scythian tongues proved true, they would by no means settle the question in favour of the unity of the family; they would simply forbid us to maintain too dogmatically that the tongues were not and could not be related as members of one family; before consenting positively to regard them as thus related, we should still be entitled to demand tangible evidences; if not correspondences of material, then at least definite and distinctive correspondences of form. And, as already intimated, a morphological resemblance is the ground on which the claim of Scythian unity is chiefly founded; their fundamental common characteristic is that they follow what is styled an agglutinative type of structure. That is to say, the elements out of which their words are formed are loosely put together, instead of being closely compacted, or fused into one; they are aggregated, rather than integrated; the root or theme is held apart from the affixes, and these from one another, with a distinct apprehension of their separate individuality. As Professor Müller well expresses it, while Indo-European language, in putting two roots together to compose a form, sinks the individuality of both, the Scythian sinks that of but one, the suffix. The process is not, in its first stages, diverse in the two families, since every Indo-European form began with being a mere collocation, and, in a large proportion of cases, the root maintains to the end its integrity of form and meaning: the difference is one of degree rather than of kind; of the extension and effect, rather than the essential nature, of a mode of formation: and yet, it is a palpable and an important difference, when we compare the general structure of two languages, one out of each family.
The simple possession in common of an agglutinative character, as thus defined, would certainly be a very insufficient indication of the common parentage of the Scythian tongues; mere absence of inflection would be a characteristic far too general and indeterminate to prove anything respecting them. They do, however, present some striking points of agreement in the style and manner of their agglutination, such as might supplement and powerfully aid the convincing force of a body of material correspondences which should be found wanting in desired fullness. The most important of these structural accordances are as follows.
In the Scythian languages, derivation by prefixes is unknown; the radical syllable always stands at the head of the word, followed by the formative elements. The root, too, to whatever extent it may receive the accretion of suffixes, itself remains pure and unchanged, neither fused with them, nor euphonically affected by them: throughout the whole body of its derivatives, it has one unvarying and easily recognized form. It would appear, however, on theoretical grounds, that this fundamental characteristic, of the inviolability of the Scythian roots, must be admitted with some grains of allowance: since, if root be kept absolutely separate from ending, and changeless, we should, on the one hand, look for a much closer coincidence of roots than we actually find between the different dialects; and, on the other hand, the grand means of development of new words and roots would be cut off, and linguistic growth almost stifled. While, then, in general the root receives no modification from the endings, the latter, on the contrary, are modified by the root, in a way which constitutes the most striking phonetic peculiarity of the family. The vowels, namely, are divided into two classes, heavy (a, o, u, etc.), and light (e, i, ü, etc.), or guttural and palatal; and, in the suffixes, only vowels of the same class with that of the root, or with that of the last syllable of the root, if there be more than one, are allowed to occur. Hence, every suffix has two forms, one with light vowel and one with heavy, either of which is used, as circumstances may require. Thus, in Turkish, from baba, 'father,' comes baba-lar-um-dan, 'from our fathers,' with heavy vowels; but from dedeh, 'grandfather,' with light vowels, comes dede-ler-in-den, 'from their grandfathers'; al, 'to take,' makes almak, alma, alajak, while sev, 'to love,' makes sevmek, sevme, sevejek: or, in Hungarian, yuh-asz-nak means 'to the shepherd,' but kert-esz-nek, 'to the gardener.' This is usually called the "law of harmonic sequence of vowels:" it takes somewhat different forms in the different branches, and exhibits niceties and intricacies of harmonic equipoise into which it is unnecessary here to enter: it is most elaborately developed and most strictly obeyed in the Turkish dialects.
One or two important general characteristics of the languages of the family are the natural and direct results of this agglutinative method, which attributes to each suffix a distinct form and office, and in which a true feeling for the unity of words does not forbid an excessive accumulation of separate formative elements in the same vocable. In the first place, varieties and irregularities of conjugation and declension are almost unknown in Scythian grammar: all verbs, all nouns, are inflected upon the same unvarying model; every grammatical relation has its own sign, by which it is under all circumstances denoted. In the second place, a host of more or less complicated forms are derivable by inflectional processes from one root or theme. An instance is the word baba-lar-um-dan, given above, which contains the possessive um, signifying 'our,' besides the plural ending lar and the ablative case-affix dan. The Turkish verbs exemplify the same peculiarity in a much more striking manner: thus, by appending to the root one or more than one of half-a-dozen modifying elements, expressing passivity, reflexiveness, reciprocity, causation, negation, and impossibility, we may form an almost indefinite number of themes of conjugation, each possessing the complete scheme of temporal and modal forms: examples are, from the root sev, 'love,' sev-ish-dir-mek, 'to cause to love one another,' sev-ish-dir-il-eme-mek, 'not to be capable of being made to love one another,' and so on.
Of the more ordinary inflectional apparatus, analogous with that of the tongues of our own family, some of the Scythian languages possess an abundant store: the Finnish has a regular scheme of fifteen cases for its nouns; the Hungarian, one of more than twenty. Their plurals are formed by a separate pluralizing suffix (in Turkish, ler or lar, as seen above), to which then the same case-endings are added as to the simple theme in the singular. No distinction of grammatical gender is marked. Verbal forms are produced, as with us, by personal endings, of pronominal origin. These are of two kinds, personal and possessive, and are appended respectively to conjugational themes having a participial and an infinitival significance, to names of the actor and of the action. Thus, from Turkish dog-mak, 'to strike,' through the present participle dogur, 'striking,' comes the present dogur-um, 'striking-I,' i.e., 'I strike;' the preterit is dogd-um, 'act-of-striking-mine,' i.e., 'I have struck;' the third person is the simple theme, without suffix, as dogur, 'he strikes,' dogdi, 'he has struck;' and the addition to these of the common plural suflix of declension makes the third persons plural, dogur-lar, 'they strike,' dogdi-ler, 'they have struck'—literally, 'strikers,' 'strikings.' Such verbal forms are, then, essentially nouns, taken in a predicative sense; the radical idea has been made a noun of, in order to be employed as a verb; and so much of the nominal form and character still cleaves to them, that it must be conceded that the Scythian tongues have not clearly apprehended and fully worked out the distinction of these two fundamental parts of speech. Their conjugation, however, such as it is, is rich in temporal and modal distinctions. The root appears in its naked form as second person singular imperative.
Connectives and relational words are nearly unknown in the languages of this family. Where we should employ a clause, they set a case-form of a noun: for example, "while we were going" is rendered in Turkish by git-diy-imiz-de, 'in our act of going (wenting).' By means of gerundives and possessives, the different members of a period are twined together into a single intricate or lumbering statement, having the principal verb regularly at the end, and the determining word followed by the determined, often producing an inverted construction which seems very strange to our apprehension.
It must not fail to be observed that the different branches of this family are not a little discordant as regards the degree of their agglutinative development. The Ugrian dialects, especially the Hungarian and Finnish, are the highest in rank, being almost entitled to be reckoned as inflective. The eastern branches, the Mongolian and Tungusian, are in every way poorer and scantier, and the Manchu even verges upon monosyllabic stiffness, not having, for example, so much as a distinction of number and person in its predicative or verbally employed words. The Turkish, in rank as in geographical position, holds a middle place.
Whether the morphological correspondences thus set forth, along with others less conspicuous, which have been found to exist between Ugrian, Samoyed, Turkish, Mongol, and Tungusic languages, are of themselves sufficient to prove these languages genetically allied, branches of one original stock, may be regarded as still an open question. A wider induction, a more thorough grasp and comprehension of the resemblances and differences of all human speech, is probably needed ere linguistic science shall be justified in pronouncing a confident decision of a question so recondite. Whether, again, coincidences in the actual material of the same tongues have been brought out in sufficient number, or of a sufficiently unequivocal character, to constitute, along with these correspondences of form, such an argument in favour of the unity of the family as may be deemed satisfactory and accepted, is also a matter for doubt. It is safest to regard the classification at present as a provisional one, and to leave to future researches its establishment or its overthrow. The separate investigation and mutual comparison of many of the dialects is as yet only very imperfectly made, or even hardly commenced: farther and more penetrating study may strengthen and render indissoluble the tie that is already claimed to bind together the eastern and western branches; but it may also show their connection to be merely imaginary.