same language. Of course, an historical grammar is only possible where a succession of written records exists; where a language possesses no older literature we must be content with a comparative grammar only, and look to cognate idioms to throw light upon its grammatical peculiarities. In this case we have frequently to leave whole forms unexplained, or at most conjecturally interpreted, since the machinery by means of which the relations of grammar are symbolized is often changed so completely during the growth of a language as to cause its earlier shape and character to be unrecognizable. Moreover, our area of comparison must be as wide as possible; where we have but two or three languages to compare, we are in danger of building up conclusions on insufficient evidence. The grammatical errors of the classical philologists of the 18th century were in great measure due to the fact that their area of comparison was confined to Latin and Greek.
The historical grammar of a single language or dialect, which traces the grammatical forms and usages of the language as far back as documentary evidence allows, affords material to the comparative grammarian, whose task it is to compare the grammatical forms and usages of an allied group of tongues and thereby reduce them to their earliest forms and senses. The work thus carried out by the comparative grammarian within a particular family of languages is made use of by universal grammar, the object of which is to determine the ideas that underlie all grammar whatsoever, as distinct from those that are peculiar to special families of speech. Universal grammar is sometimes known as “the metaphysics of language,” and it has to decide such questions as the nature of gender or of the verb, the true purport of the genitive relation, or the origin of grammar itself. Such questions, it is clear, can only be answered by comparing the results gained by the comparative treatment of the grammars of various groups of language. What historical grammar is to comparative grammar, comparative grammar is to universal grammar.
Universal grammar, as founded on the results of the scientific study of speech, is thus essentially different from that “universal grammar” so much in vogue at the beginning of the 19th century, which consisted of a series of a priori assumptions based on the peculiarities of European grammar and illustrated from the same source. But universal Universal grammar.grammar, as conceived by modern science, is as yet in its infancy; its materials are still in the process of being collected. The comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages is alone in an advanced state, those of the Semitic idioms, of the Finno-Ugrian tongues and of the Bantu dialects of southern Africa are still in a backward condition; and the other families of speech existing in the world, with the exception of the Malayo-Polynesian and the Sonorian of North America, have not as yet been treated scientifically. Chinese, it is true, possesses an historical grammar, and Van Eys, in his comparative grammar of Basque, endeavoured to solve the problems of that interesting language by a comparison of its various dialects; but in both cases the area of comparison is too small for more than a limited success to be attainable. Instead of attempting the questions of universal grammar, therefore, it will be better to confine our attention to three points—the fundamental differences in the grammatical conceptions of different groups of languages, the main results of a scientific investigation of Indo-European grammar, and the light thrown by comparative philology upon the grammar of our own tongue.
The proposition or sentence is the unit and starting-point of speech, and grammar, as we have seen, consists in the relations of its several parts one to another, together with the expression of them. These relations may be regarded from various points of view. In the polysynthetic languages of America the sentence is conceived as a Differences in grammar of unallied languages.whole, not composed of independent words, but, like the thought which it expresses, one and indivisible. What we should denote by a series of words is consequently denoted by a single long compound—kuligatchis in Delaware, for instance, signifying “give me your pretty little paw,” and aglekkigiartoṙ-asuarnipok in Eskimo, “he goes away hastily and exerts himself to write.” Individual words can be, and often are, extracted from the sentence; but in this case they stand, as it were, outside it, being represented by a pronoun within the sentence itself. Thus, in Mexican, we can say not only ni-sotsi-temoa, “I look for flowers,” but also ni-k-temoa sotsitl, where the interpolated guttural is the objective pronoun. As a necessary result of this conception of the sentence the American languages possess no true verb, each act being expressed as a whole by a single word. In Cherokee, for example, while there is no verb signifying “to wash” in the abstract, no less than thirteen words are used to signify every conceivable mode and object of washing. In the incorporating languages, again, of which Basque may be taken as a type, the object cannot be conceived except as contained in the verbal action. Hence every verbal form embodies an objective pronoun, even though the object may be separately expressed. If we pass to an isolating language like Chinese, we find the exact converse of that which meets us in the polysynthetic tongues. Here each proposition or thought is analysed into its several elements, and these are set over against one another as so many independent words. The relations of grammar are consequently denoted by position, the particular position of two or more words determining the relation they bear to each other. The analysis of the sentence has not been carried so far in agglutinative languages like Turkish. In these the relations of grammar are represented by individual words, which, however, are subordinated to the words expressing the main ideas intended to be in relation to one another. The defining words, or indices of grammatical relations, are, in a large number of instances, placed after the words which they define; in some cases, however, as, for example, in the Bantu languages of southern Africa, the relation is conceived from the opposite point of view, the defining words being prefixed. The inflexional languages call in the aid of a new principle. The relations of grammar are denoted symbolically either by a change of vowel or by a change of termination, more rarely by a change at the beginning of a word. Each idea, together with the relation which it bears to the other ideas of a proposition, is thus represented by a single word; that is to say, the ideas which make up the elements of a sentence are not conceived severally and independently, as in Chinese, but as always having a certain connexion with one another. Inflexional languages, however, tend to become analytical by the logical separation of the flexion from the idea to which it is attached, though the primitive point of view is never altogether discarded, and traces of flexion remain even in English and Persian. In fact, there is no example of a language which has wholly forsaken the conception of the sentence and the relation of its elements with which it started, although each class of languages occasionally trespasses on the grammatical usages of the others. In language, as elsewhere in nature, there are no sharp lines of division, no sudden leaps; species passes insensibly into species, class into class. At the same time the several types of speech—polysynthetic, isolating, agglutinative and inflexional—remain clear and fixed; and even where two languages belong to the same general type, as, for instance, an Indo-European and a Semitic language in the inflexional group, or a Bantu and a Turkish language in the agglutinative group, we find no certain example of grammatical interchange. A mixed grammar, in which the grammatical procedure of two distinct families of speech is intermingled, is almost, if not altogether, unknown.
It is obvious, therefore, that grammar constitutes the surest and most important basis for a classification of languages. Words may be borrowed freely by one dialect from another, or, though originally unrelated, may, by the action of phonetic decay, come to assume the same forms, while the limited number of articulate sounds and conceptions out of which language was first developed, and the similarity of the circumstances by which the first speakers were everywhere surrounded, naturally produce a resemblance between the roots of many unconnected tongues. Where, however, the fundamental conceptions of grammar and
