easy to see what purpose the resolution should serve, if the endings are at the same time to be suffered to vary so rapidly that mutual unintelligibility is soon brought about. In every uncultivated community, the language is left to take care of itself; it becomes what the exigencies of practical use make it, not what a forecasting view of future possibilities leads its speakers to think that it might with advantage be made to be: let two tribes be parted from one another, and neither has any regard to the welfare of its fellow in shaping its own daily speech. In point of fact, moreover, Indo-European languages were inflective, were "state languages," long before the tribes had formed states—while many of them were as nomadic in their habits as the wildest of the so-called Turanian tribes. And to denominate the immense and highly-organized Chinese empire a mere exaggerated family, and account for the peculiarities of its speech by reference to the conditions of a family, is fanciful in the extreme. No nomenclature founded on such unsubstantial considerations has a good claim to the acceptance of linguistic scholars; and the one in question has, it is believed, won no general currency.
A very noteworthy attempt has been made within a short time by Professor Schleicher, of Jena,[1] to give greater fulness and precision to the morphological classification and description of language, by a more thorough analysis, and a kind of algebraic notation, of morphological characteristics. A pure root, used as a word without variation of form or addition of formative elements, he denotes by a capital letter, as A: a connected sentence expressed by a series of such elements, as is sometimes the case in Chinese, he would represent by A B C, and so on. Such a sentence we may rudely illustrate by an English phrase like fish like water, in which each word is a simple root or theme, without formal designation of relations.[2] A root which, while retain-
- ↑ See his paper, "Contribution to the Morphology of Language," in the Memoirs of the Academy of St. Petersburg, vol. i., No. 7 (1859); also, the Introduction to his work, the "German Language" (Stuttgart, 1860), p. ll seq.
- ↑ Of course, the parallel is to be regarded as only an imperfect one: though these three words are to our apprehension primitives, they are far from being ultimate roots; they all either contain formative elements added to such a root, or have possessed and lost them; each is, to be sure, employable as noun, adjective, or verb, without change of form, yet not, like Chinese roots, in virtue of an original indefiniteness of meaning, but as one distinct part of speech is in our usage convertible directly into others; nor can it be said that, even as they stand, they are altogether formless; for each is defined in certain relations by the absence of formative elements which it would otherwise exhibit: water is shown to be singular by lacking an s, fish and like to be plural by the absence of s from like.
