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By Edward Maundb Thompson, D. C. L., LL. D., P. S. A. |2.00. 71. A HISTORY OP CRUSTACEA. Recent Malacostraca. By the Rev. Thomas E. R. Stebbing, M. A. With numerous Illustrations. THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES BACE AND LANGUAGE BY ANDRE LEFEVEE rnoFEsaoB in the anthb!5pologioal school, fakis NEW YOEK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1894 Authorized Edition. ^ CONTENTS PART I.— TUB EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. OHAP. piOj. I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS I II. EMBRYOLOGY OF LANQUAGB 20 III. FORMATION OF WORDS AND THE STRUCTURE OF LAN- GUAGES 44 PART IL— GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF LANGUAGES AND RACES. I. THE SPREAD OF INFLECTED LANGUAGES . II. THE AGGLUTINATIVE IDIOMS OF CENTRAL ASIA . III. THE AGGLUTINATIVE IDIOMS OF SOUTHERN ASIA IV. THE MALAYO-POLYNESIAN LANGUAGES V. AI'RICAN RACES AND LANGUAGES VI. POLYSYNTHETIC LANGUAGES VII. THE SEMITIC WORLD .... VIIL THE INDO-EUROPEANS . 64 86 no 133 iSS 178 201 225 vi Contents. PART III.— THE INDO-EUROPEAN ORGANISM. CHAP. PAGE L INDO-EUEOPBAN ROOTS ...>.. 262 II. PABTS OP SPEECH^ — THE NODN 284 III. THE INDO-EUROPEAN VERB. ... . 303 IV. THE COMPOUNDS — THE INDECLINABLE WORDS . . 325 V. INDO-EUROPEAN PHONETICS — THE CONTINUOUS LETTERS 347 VL INDO-EUROPEAN PHONETICS— THE EXPLOSIVES . . 383 VIL TWO ANALYTICAL LANGUAGES 405 RACE AND LANGUAGE PART I. THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. CHAPTER I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. Method of evolution — Ancient and modern theories of the origin nf articulate speech — Eleim-nts (if sound — Vowels and semi-vowels — Explosives or consonants proper — Long uncertainty between gutturals, dentals, and labials — The four classes of language — Isolating or syllabic, agglutinative, inflected, analytic ; correspond- ing originally to different degrees of intellectual capacity. During many centuries mankind was anxious to be alone in the universe, to establish between the "fallen god " and all other living creatures a line of demarca- tion, the more inviolable that his vanity overlooked of set purpose all intermediate degrees. Montaigne and La Fontaine, Georges Leroy and La Mettrie, sceptical philosophers or observers of nature, who, without any very profound study, had yet remarked in animals memory, reason, affections, social relations, the rudiments of all arts and industries, seem all to be infected to a certain degree by what is still termed the spirit of evil. They are all branded with the orthodoxy oF religion and prejudice. Even Linnaeus repented of 2 The Evolution of Language. having classed man at tke head of apes in the order of Primatii. Yet, having seen the successive removal of the barriers raised by official geology, anatomy, and even by psychology, man resigns himself at last to be no more than tbe first of mortals. A very ancient doctrine, which, however, has only within the last forty years been put to the proof of experience and experiment, the theory of evolution and development, has led to a complete change of method. In the light of this doctrine students note divergences but seek resemblances. Leaving the barren comparison of extremes, they give up the easy task of contrasting modern civilised man, hoTno sapiens, with the ant, the dog, the elephant, or the gorilla. The enormous pro- gress made by the least imperfect of mammals is all the more clearly established by science, now that she grasps, not indeed its cause, but its point of departure. Science cannot, it is true, answer the insoluble ques- tion — Why is there progress at all ? but its existence postulated, science can trace its " low begianings." Step by step the scattered links, buried in the depths of the past, are recovered and joined anew, the slow transitions which have by degrees removed man so far from the animals are made manifest in their probable or certain succession ; and so the vain regrets for a lost paradise give place to the legitimate pride in an acquired dignity. We take this doctrine, this method, for lamp and guide in the boundless field of the science of language. Some parts of this domain have in our own day been explored with admirable wisdom ; and where we touch upon these discoveries of modern talent, we shall only need bo set forth facts which are admitted, if too little kaown. But here, in dealing with preliminary matters. General Considerations. 3 more initiative is necessary, because of the confusion of doctrines. On one point only, and even in this we must not press too closely the meaning of the words, there seems to be complete accord between the simplest of men and the most subtle of thinkers, from antiquity down to our own time. " Articulate speech is, together with the use of fire, the most characteristic attribute of man." If we add anything to this formula, we at once lay ourselves open to contradiction, specious or valid. Does man think because he speaks ? or does he speak because he thinks ? The discussion of this dilemma is not worth the ink that has been wasted on it. If by thought is meant the more or less dur- able impression produced in the brain by sensation, and the more or less conscious reasoning which gives rise to the action consequent on the impression, it is evident that thought precedes the vocal act which renders it. If thought becomes a labour of the brain, independent of the immediate impression, working on sound - symbols, retained by memory, elaborated by writing, expressed or understood, substituted for sensations stored in recollection and analysed by the mind, it is no less evident that language is not only the instrument, but also the form and condition of thought. We shall see, moreover, that there exist intermediary stages between crude thought and elabo- rated thought, between certain languages and articulate speech. The second question is even worse formulated than the first. Man does not speak because he thinks. He speaks because the mouth and larynx communicate with the third frontal convolution of the brain. This material connection is the immediate cause of articulate 4 The Evobition of Language. Many eminent men have thought, and still think, that man has always possessed articulate speech, nay, even grammatical forms. The legend of Adam giving names to all cattle has contributed to keep alive this convenient but undemonstrable theory. It may be said at once, that other: and not less weighty authori- ties have always regarded language as a conquest won by man, and that the studies of modern philologists have definitely established these ancient guesses. The wide-spread , faith in the divine origin of lan- guage is one of the arguments alleged or accepted by the partisans of the former theory. To begin with, it is worth neither more nor less than the pretended universal consent, so dear to hard-pressed deists and devout persons. We should leave it on one side with- out insisting further, but that it springs from a confusion of ideas on which it is well to throw some light. The ancients commonly attributed the invention and the gift of language to some special or national god, Thoth or Jahveh — that is to say, to superhuman men framed in their own image, and possessed, like them- selves, of mouth and throat — a childish theory whicH corresponded to their mental condition. It offered no explanation ; rather it solved the question in the sense of a chance acquisition of the powers of speech. An.d in truth the ancients were convinced that many cen- turies had elapsed before language was known. Some one had invented it, as Vulcan the art of working in metal, or Triptolemus agriculture; and the inventor was, like his fellows, a god. That was the point of view of the polytheist ; that of the modern metaphysi- cian is different. As by the slow process of elimination and absorption, the crowd of supernatural beings was General Considerations. 5 gradually reduced to unity, the particular virtues of the different gods were concentrated in the God of Mono- theism, and finally in the vague God of the deists, without parts or organs. This inconsistent being has inherited the attributes of Tlaloc, of the Cabiri, and the rest. He alone sways, as best he may, the unnum- bered thunderbolts whose caprices taxed in earlier days the powers of all the gods of Olympus. Amon^ other functions, he has retained the distribution of all the evil and all the good, of which the source remains unknown. Briefly, it is he whom men invoke or evoke when all other explanations fail. The writers of 1 830, poets, novelists, and historians, vie with each other in summoning this dmis ex machina. Even men of science intrench themselves behind his inscrutable designs. Is it necessary to state that we merely confess our igno- rance every time that we have recourse to the deity to explain any fact ? The dictum that God gave to man breath, memory, speech, is a meaningless phrase. There are those who, while they do not admit it, yet see the inanity of such an assertion ; but they return to it by another road. " No need," say they, " to in- voke the supernatural ; nature is all-sufficient ; nature gave language to man." If nature be, in this connec- tion, simply an equivalent for the deity, the question is no nearer a solution. Fortunately a term so indefinite is open to various interpretations ; we need not quarrel with it if it means the natural origin of language. From the moment that the word iiature connotes the sum of things and their relations to each other, it no longer brings us up against the dead wall of creation ex nihilo. Nature in this sense lends herself to the research and the inductions of science. We may there- fore admit the harmless truism that nature in man 6 The Evolution of Language. implies fclie expression of thought by means of speech. Such was the opinion of Epicurus, brilliantly expounded by Lucretius. But neither these philosophers nor any ancient writer, except the compiler of the Book of Genesis, supposed that language was a sudden revela- tion ; that man was at once endowed by nature with the noun substantive, or even with the separate syllables which enter into the composition of words. Their gradual evolution is dependent on the slow develop- ment of the cerebral and vocal instruments of social habits. Diodorus Siculus, a compiler of mediocre intelli- gence, and Vitruvius, another author of the second rank, have stated this simple conclusion in terms which Schleicher and Whitney would not disavow. "The voice of man," said Diodorus, " being at first confused and meaningless, he succeeded at length in framing a general system of designations common to all, by the constant endeavour to pronounce words articulately, and by agreeing together on vocal signs applied to each object. But as similar centres of organisation arose in all parts of the earth, the result was that absence of uniformity which gave rise to the diversity of tongues " (Hist. i. 8). This passage, of which every word should be remembered, is supple- mented by these words of Schleicher : " Language, which even during the short period of history has been subject to perpetual flux and change, is the product of a slow evolution. . , . Moreover, from the moment that we recognise in the physical constitution of man the principle of his speech, we are bound to admit that the development of language has accompanied, step by step, the development of the brain and of the organs of speech. But if it be language which makes man, General Considerations. 7 our first ancestors were not what we understand by man. . . . Thus the study of language conducts us unmistakably to the hypothesis of the gradual evolu- tion of man from lower forms." The ancients, intuitive adherents of the theory of evolution, here meet modern men of science. More than once they allude to the day when man had not the gift of speech, — mutuvi et turpepeciis, " a dumb and servile flock," says Horace, " until the day when words noted sounds and impi'essions." " Utility," as Lucre- tius clearly understood, " called forth the names of things," expressit nomina rerum. What need of words had the anthropoid of Neanderthal or of La Naulette, when, alone and naked, in the thick atmosphere or on marshy soil, flint in hand, he wandered from thicket to thicket, seeking some edible plant or berry, or fol- lowing the traces of some female as savage as himself. Act followed impulse as though mechanically, and was accompanied by cry or gesture, joyous or plaintive. Constant fear, wonder, desire, hunger, and thirst ; every- thing that is most crude, most instinctive, least the result of reflection ; fleeting curiosity ; the vague and fugitive impression of some unexpected sensation ; memory at times tenacious, but extremely limited ; senses young and unpractised ; brain smooth and with few divisions, incapable of analysis — nothing here suggests the use of fixed and numerous symbols. Before man could give names to things, he must have observed them, distinguished them ; nay, more, there must have been the need and the opportunity of com- municating his observations and discoveries ; the germ, however rudimentary, of the family, of a society, of a public whose interest it was to understand the utter- ances of its members, and to join together in a common 8 The Evolution of Language. undertaking. Afterwards long habit and constant effort were needed to retain and apply, to co-ordinate and multiply the vocal utterances which, to begin with, were uncertain and variable. Diodorus clearly per- ceived this ; and Vitruvius, who connects the origin of language with the discovery of fire, with the social influences of the hearth, shows us a company of men endeavouring by means of cries and gestures to com- municate to each other their admiration. " They uttered," he says, " various sounds %pd shaped words by chance ; then, using frequently the same sounds to indicate certain things, they began to speak to each other." Such are those African savages who fail to understand each other at night, and whose imperfect speech requires the aid of gesture. One of the strongest arguments in favour of this probability is the universal admiration which hailed the invention, or rather the acquisition of language ; the faith in litanies and formulas ; the magic power attributed to the spoken word, the revealer, almost the creator of the world ; the divine honours rendered to the personified Hymn, to poetry, to the Logos, to Brahma and the Word ; the inevitable confusion 1)6- tween light and language, between speech and reason. The study of the elements of speech lends its support to arguments drawn from sociology and such general considerations. We are not yet concerned with syllables, so variously combined in the thousands of idioms spoken all over the face of the earth. In their earliest form they do but take us back to the beginnings of those tongues, dead or living, which we now know of, which were built up from the fragments of other dialects now for ever vanished. The study of sounds goes yet far- ther back towards the source of language ; it deals General Considerations. 9 with the letters, with the sounds of which syllables are composed. Some of this material is common to us and the brutes. It is hardly necessary to observe that the vowels, pure or mixed, short or long, nasal or com- bined into diphthongs, may be recognised in the utter- ances of the dog, the cat, the horse, the ox, the sheep, the frog, the toad and the crow. Out of the sounds peculiar to each species it is easy to construct, without omitting a single note or quality of sound, the entire vowel scale : a a, an (nasal) ; e, e, eu, en ; i, I, in ; 0, 0, on ; ou, ou ; eu ; ii, u, un ; oa, oe, oi, oua, oue, ouon (nasal), owi, ui, &c. Note how e and are related to a ; to ou ; ou to u ; i to ^ and u ; while in diph- thongs the final vowel only is continuous, the first ceasing to be heard as soon as it is uttered. Another class of sounds give rise to similar obser- vations : not only the vowels are susceptible of pro- longation. Certain hissings and trills, which can give a continuous sound, and are very common among animals, have played so important a part in the formation of human speech that they cannot be too carefully studied. Nor can these be separated from other undefined utterances, midway between continuity and articulation, ingeniously called semi- vowels ; to these we may add hard and soft breathings, which precede or follow vowels, semi-vowels, sibilants, liquids, and true consonants. All these appear to be variants or degenerate forms of the consonants to which they are really related ; but the fact that they all, except the true consonants, may be found in the animal kingdom, may be urged in favour of their priority. They form the link between vocalism and consonantal language. lO The Evolution of Language. For while recognisiDg the part played by the teeth, the throat, the palate, and the lips in the liquids, r, I, Ih ; in the palatals, /, ch, sh ; in the sibilants, s, z ; in the semi-nasals, m, n ; and semi-labials, w, V, f ; it is also impossible to separate them from certain vowels. y, j, ch, Ik, derive from *, conse- quently also y, ch, sh, the liquids and the nasal n, which often changes with these last. Ou is the origin of V, w, m, f ; s and r, which are more independent, are not without vowel affinities through j, ch, sh and the liquids ; r is reckoned a vowel by the grammarians of India; s has something of the character of an aspirate, which often takes the place of this letter, particularly in Greek and Zend. Now the aspirate, considered apart from the consonant, which it streng- thens, is only a sort of toneless vowel ; it may be compared to the prefatory murmur of an old clock before the hour strikes. It results from the effort of the breath made in giving the vowel distinctly or in articulating the true consonant. In the present state of language the various semi- vowels often take tlie place of consonants. They have acquired this character by that which marks the decisive step towards articulation — i.e., the momentary arrest of the vowel-breathing by contact with the glottis, the tongue, the palate, teeth, and lips. From the moment this stoppage is produced, continuity is broken, and the issuing sound can only be heard together with a vowel or semi-vowel (however slightly audible), which precedes or follows it. Such is the phenomenon of articulation ; the word consonant, that which sounds with something else, expresses its essential character. The consonant is the substructure and the founda- tion of language. Man alone possesses it, and it is General Considerations. 1 1 the greatest and most fruitful of his conquests. This treasure is composed of but six letters: h, g ; t, d; p, b ; the gutturals, dentals, and labials. These can- not give a continuous sound, however we attempt to prolong them ; they can only be the beginning, middle, or end of a syllable ; it is impossible to separate them from a vowel, a sibilant, a liquid, or an aspirate, with which they form a sort of consonantal diphthong, Ics, sk, kv, kh, and so forth. It seems probable in- deed that these double sounds were the origin of the pure consonants. Here I foresee an objection : gutturals, it will be said, are not unknown to animals ; a number of birds and mammals pronounce k, t, p, h. But this is a vulgar error ; it is we who attribute these articulations to the utterances of animals. The cock does 7wt say cock-a-doodle-doo, nor the rook caw, nor the sheep laa. They utter the breathings akin to these consonants, which, so to speak, lead up to them ; they come near to articulate utterance, but man alone has achieved it ; not without effort, and with varying success, according to the vocal and hearing power of each human race or group. This is not an assertion deduced from the logic of the theory of evolution. The most perfect languages, like the crudest, have retained the traces of a Jong hesitation, of a remarkable confusion, not only as in German, between the weak and the strong consonants, but between the three types of true consonants and the corresponding aspirate, and even between the true consonants and semi-vowels. We hear, as it were, across the ages the stammerings and hesitations of speech in its infancy. Not only have the races unequal power in the use 12 The Evolution of Language. of the gutturals, dentals, and labials, but, in certain dialects of Africa and Polynesia, the pronunciation is still so uncertain that the most delicate ear can hardly distinguish between h and t ; the sound is doubtful, and approaches now the one, now the other. In like manner many children say tat for cat, many men fail to distinguish between cintiime and cinquidme. That which is obvious within the limits of the same lan- guage is seen on a wider scale in two dialects of the same origin, which have grown up at the same time and side by side. I give a few examples taken from the Indo-European languages. In all these the names of numbers np to ten, except the number one, are identical ; but it is not easy at first sight to recognise as sisters these casts from one mould. To be fully persuaded that eight and octo, zehn and deka, are the same words, we must have heard it stated more than once. The fact is certain, however, and I insist no further. Let us take the words/oMr and five, the only ones we need consider here. The Latin form quattwr, quadru, which has given quattro and quatre, corresponds to the Sanscrit tc/iatvaras ; Zend tchathwar, tchatru ; Pali tchattaro ; Hindustani tchar ; Lithuanian heturi ; Slav tchetvero, tcheturi ; Armenian tchorq, tchors ; Greek rerrapes and Tea-aapes; also the Umbrian and Celtic patour, pewar ; the ^olian irlarvpes ; - A.nglo Saxon and English fidvor, four ; thus we pass from guttural and dental diph- thongs, hv, tv, tch, to various dentals and labials, t, p, f, not to mention the double t alternating with the single or double s; or the transformation of the semi-vowel V into u and ou in qioatuor, patour, and into o in fidvor. It may be noticed that there has been a struggle between the guttural and the labial, and now General Considerations. 1 3 the It survives, as in quatre, and now the % strength- ened into f ov p (in vier, fidvor, four, patour) ; it is less easy to understand the presence of the mixed dental tchatvaras and the pure dental ; but it seems that at the time when Latin, Umbrian, Celtic, Greek, German, &c., were in process of formation from the parent language whence they all derive, there was still hesitation not only between h, t, or d, and p or /, but _ even between these consonants and the forms tch, kv, tv. This conclusion becomes yet more obvious on a comparison of the various forms of the word five. Sanscrit pcmtchan ; Lithuanian penlci ; Armenian hing ; Umbrian pump ; Gothic fiinf ; English five ; German fiinf ; Greek Tre/ixTre and irevTe ; Slav panti ; Latin quinque ; Italian cinque ; French cinq ; Irish coic. From these come derivatives as various as Quinc- tius, Pompeiiis, Pentecost, fifty. To these examples we may add a few well-known permutations: Latin coquere, coquus (cook, V. and subs.) ; Greek weTTToo (whence pep- sine) ; Sanscrit patch and pah ; Low-Latin sequere, to follow ; Sanscrit satch and saJc ; Greek e-woixai ; hoeuf, bos, jSoyy, gaus, kuh, cow; ceil (eye), Latin oc-ulus, Greek OTTTo/xai, 67xao/ia£, to bleat, in English to hark. "We can hardly omit, as the resemblance is so close, the French words brailler, lrair6,hredouiller, to brawl, to bray, to murmur. "If," continues our author, " as seems certain, these several forms are derived from a single original form, we must conclude that, far from distinguishing the cry of each animal by a special onomatopcfiia directly in relation with this special sound, our Aryan aneest,^is employed a generic term common to all, and probably without relation to any given cry, and that this was used to signify indifferently the voice of man, and for the utterances of the elephant, the lion, the sheep, the dog, &c.'' We would not assert so much ; we would not say " we must," but " we may " conclude from these facts that the single early form from ■ which these variants derive was either one of those generic onomatopceias, very vague and hardly distinguishable from the cry of emotion or of astonishment, or an onomatopoeia, at first special, chosen among twenty others which might have taken the same place and generalised for the needs of analogy and derivation. But it is time to sum up. Animals possess two of the important elements of language — the spontaneous reflex cry of emotion or need ; the voluntary cry of waruing, threat, or summons. From these two sort's of utterance, man, endowed already with a richer vocal apparatus and a more developed brain, evolved numerous varieties by means of stress, reduplication, intonation. The warning or summoning cry, the germ Embryology of Language. 43 of the demonstrative roots, is the parent of the names of numbers, sex, and distance ; the emotional cry, of which oar simple interjections are but the relics, in combination with the demonstratives, pi'epares the outlines of the sentence, and already represents the verb and the names of states or actions. Imitation, direct or symbolical, and necessarily only approxima- tive of the sounds of external nature, i.e., onomatopoeia, furnished the elements of the attributive roots, from which arise the names of objects, special verbs, and their derivatives. Analogy and metaphor complete the vocabulary, applying to the objects, discerned by touch, sight, smell, and taste, qualifying adjectives derived from onomatopoeia. Reason then coming into play, rejects the greater part of this unmanageable wealth, and adopts a certain number of sounds which have already been reduced to a vague and generic sense ; and by derivation, composition, and affixes, the root sounds produce those endless families of words, related to each other in every degree of kin- dred, from the closest to the most doubtful, which grammar finally ranges in the categories known as the parts of speech. CHAPTER III. FORMATION OF WORDS AND THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGES. The expedients of monosyllabism : examples from Chinese — Full roots and empty roots — Method of agglutinative languages ; subordina- tion of affixed roots, which modify the sense, to a central root which remains unaltered — Schlegel's error with regard to the nature of case and verbal endings — Examples from Turkish, Esquimaux, and Mexican — Inflexion : intimate fusion of the full and empty roots ; variation of the radical vowel in the Semitic languages ; complete change of the root in the Indo-European group— Analysis of the words apercevoir, respectable, rapproche- ment, recueillanent — Apposition, suffixation, composition — Par- allel advance of the intelligence and of language. Having, not solved, bat thrown some light upon the problem of the origin of language, we now leave a region where induction can only attain to a general certainty for those which lie open to direct observa- tion. From the genesis of speech we pass to the formation and structure of languages. The Chinese group has been content to form from the raw material, with demonstrative sounds on the one hand, and attributive on the other, by merely grouping the roots, but without composition, and without altering the syllables, more than 40,000 words, most of them fortunately unnecessary to the majority of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire. Fifteen thousand are enough for the average educated man. Since the fundamental roots of the Chinese tongue amount only to 450, it follows that the same Formation of Words. 45 sound is susceptible of numerous different meanings. Thus the form tao means indifferently to tear away, to reach, to cover, flag, corn, to lead, road, &c. And the form 1%, jewel, dew, to forge, vehicle, to turn aside, road. How then discover the sense ? Usually, by a method which is a trifle childish but very accurate, the Chinese determine the sense by placing two syn- onyms in juxtaposition ; the one certifies the other. T(M> and In have each one several significations, but taX) followed by Zm can only mean " road." The gram- matical value of these syllables in the proposition is determined by their respective positions. Ta, involving the notion of height, will be adverb or adjective before a word ; after it, a verb or an abstract noun : ta jin, a tall man ; jin ta, the man grows, or the man is tall, or the height of the man. In the same way chen will mefin by turns virtue, virtuous, to approve, well. The subject precedes the verb : Tigb ta ni, I beat thee ; -ni tcl ngb, thou beatest me. The relations of case, that which we call possessive, accusative, dative, &c., are expressed either by the position of the words, or more commonly by subordinate roots, pronominal or attributive, of which the proper sense is lost or obliterated. Y, to use, placed before tchang, y-tchanrj, means " with : " with a stick. Zi means interior : uo-li, in the house, l^chi (right, possession, the pronoun he) : jin-tcM-Jdun, the prince of men. Yu (to give) : sse yen yu jin, to give money to a man. Pa and tsiang (to seize, to take), i, iu, hou (to employ), often indicate the accusative. Fa tchoung jin teou kan, he looked furtively at the crowd of men ; pao hou min, to pro- tect the people ; i jin tsun sin, he keeps humanity in his heart. Thsong, yeou, tseu, hou, show origin, the point of departure, the ablative : thsong thien lai, to 46 The Evolution of Language. come from heaven ; U hou tlden, to obtain from heaven. Gender is determined, as it should be (we still do it), by the term male and female, nan and niu : nan-tse, son; niun-tse, daughter ; niu-Jin, .woman. Numerous words signifying summit, multitude, totality, may in- dicate the plural, though in most cases the number must be divined from the context ; for instance, to jin .(many men), people ; jin-kiai (man all), men ; i-pei (stranger class), foreigners. In spite of tendencies towards agglutination and grammatical organisation, Chinese, except in certain southern sub-dialects, has remained obstinately faithful to monosyllabism ; its associations of words do not form true compounds, and the neutralised syllables, which precede or follow its. substantives, keep their form intact, and never become terminations of case, number, or gender, but they play the part of these. " The Chinese," says M. Hpvelacque, " have clearly grasped this fact, since they class their roots in two distinct groups — -full words and empiy words. By the first they understand those roots of which the meaning keeps all its fulness and independence, the roots which we in our translations render by nouns or verbs ; they call empty the roots of which the true value has by degrees become obscured, and which are used to determine and define the sense, and to indicate the grammatical relations of the full words." "What is grammar ? " asks the Chinese teacher of his pupil. " A useful art, which enables us to distinguish full words from empty words." Now, in all languages, agglutinative or inflected, the constituent elements of the words are likewise full syllables, called root syllables and empty syllables, which we call prefixes, affixes, or generally suffixes and Formation of Words. 47 terminations. But these suffixes, altered in form as in sense, make a part of the word ; they are joined to the central root and amalgamated with each other. They do not differ in. kind from the roots to which they are attached ; when it is possible to separate them from it by analysis, we find them also to be roots, attributive or pronominal, quite capable of being the centre of a group of suffixes, amd, moreover, of exist- ing in a free state. Case-endings alone often escape analysis ; and this is easily understood : in their re- ciprocal contacts and friction words have become worn away at the edges, so to speak. Terminal suffixes, gradually obliterated and disfigured, have sometimes at last completely disappeared, even in ancient lan- guages ; sometimes they are still written, but are subject to elision, and- are no longer pronounced; sometimes the prolongation, slight or marked, of the syllable which preceded them alone reveals their former place ; then this syllable which they protected, now exposed, wears away and disappears in its turn. The word grows shorter, becomes contracted, but that which remains retains the accessory meanings which the vanished syllables added to the complete form, and the grammatical value which they had assigned to it in declension and conjugation. Thus the Sanscrit word a?anti is represented in Latin by sunt; the Latin amaverunt is sometimes altered into amavere or amarunt ; the primitive form paters has become the Greek iraTrip ; dominum has gradually contracted into dominu, domino, domno ; whence the modern dom, don (Dom Brial, Don Juan) ; the low Latin word domini- ariiom (suzerainty), after having dropped the termina- tion um, has gradually become doniffier, our word danger, embodying the philosophy of La Fontaine's 48 The Evolution of Language. proverb, " Notre enTiemi c'est rwtre maitre " (our master is our enemy). There are innumerable similar cases which characterise sufficiently what is called dialectal change. They belong to a series which has been summed up in the convenient formula : the law of least resistance. In science, as we know, laws deter- mine nothing; they are the resultant of a certain number of observations which confirm each other, and allow of classification, and of the prevision of similar phenomena. This is the case here. The intelligence, as it gained strength, by degrees reduced and rejected the means which were at first necessary to guide the thought and assure its expression ; it has abandoned all useless effort, for this is the sense and value which we should attach to the " law " of least resistance. Before an almost irresistible argument from analogy had revealed the origin of the suflSxes, the effacement of the verbal and case endings had misled one of the precursors of comparative philology, Frederic Schlegel. Schlegel believed that the terminations grew from the body of the word through some mysterious evolution, as the branches grow from the trunk of a tree, or else as elements which had no proper meaning, but were employed arbitrarily and conventionally to modify the sense of words. This mystical conception of the life of language has been ably criticised and set aside by Max Miiller. I give the passage : — " Certain thinkers have considered language as an organic whole, gifted in some sense with life, and they have explained its formal elements as being produced by an inner natural vegetation. Languages, say they, should be compared not to a crystal, formed by agglo- meration round a fixed point, but to a germ developed by its internal force ; all the essential parts of language Formation of Words. 49 existed in the primitive germ as truly, though only in the embryonic state, as the petals of the flower exist in the bud before it opens out to the air and sunshine. .... The science of language does not adopt these hypotheses. As for the one which represents to us a group of men discussing together about the manner in which it were best to express the relations indicated by the nominative, the genitive, singular and plural, active and passive, common sense might tell us that, if such abstract questions could have been discussed in a language destitute of inflexion, there would have been no reason for inventing a more perfect method of communication. (So thought the Chinese.) With regard to the supposition that there could exist in language — that is, in the nouns and the verbs — an inner principle of growth, all that we can say is that such a theory vanishes as soon as we look closely at it. Science gathers facts. Instead of regarding inflexions in general as conventional signs or natural excres- cences, she takes each termination separately, and when, by means of comparison, she has determined the earliest form of it, she treats this primitive syllable as she would treat any other part of language, that is to say, as a word which had originally its proper significa- tion." Two facts appear to us to be certain : First, that at a given moment of their existence, long before the dawn of history, the thousands of human groups scattered upon the surface of the earth found themselves in pos- session — we have seen by what probable genesis — of two articulate and significant vocal elements, the demon- strative or pronominal roots, and the attributive roots, substantive or verbal. Secondly, that these two classes of roots are the only elements of language ; that there 50 The Evolution of Language. are no others, and that all tongues are the result of their different combinations, varying according to the vocal and brain power of the distinct races and sub- races ; either by simple juxtaposition of unaltered, syllables, as ia Chinese, by agglutination of several syllables round a central syllable, as is the case in all the languages called agglutinative, or, finally, by fusing and contracting into a single whole the central and the subordinate syllables, as in all the inflected languages. We have quoted some examples of th.e Chinese method ; we will now analyse a few forms borrowed from the thousands of idioms which belong to the agglutinative class. To love, in the most general sense of the word, is, in Turkish, sev ; the subordinate root er forming adjectives or participles, sev-er will signify loving; join to it the pronoun sen, thou, or siz, you, sever sen, sever sis, loving thou, loving yon, i.e., thou lovest, you love ; other syllables, of which the original meaning is lost, gu, i, make sevgu, sevi, love ; di, placed between the theme sever and the personal termination abridged or altered, forms the imperfect : sever-di-n, sever-di-niz, thou lovedst, you loved. MeJc, the sign of the infinitive, gives us 'sev-mek. This is not all ; between the two parts of the word we can insert the ideas of reciprocity, of causality, of passivity, of nega- tion, and so sum up a whole phrase in a single word. This is a vice which has overtaken many idioms of this class ; incorporation and polysynthetism, under pretext of seizing fine shades and the succession of ideas, produce words which are difficult to handle, and far more difficult to interpret. The verb sev-mek may present itself under thirty-six forms, such as sev-in-il- rnekj to be glad, sev-isJi-dir-il-meh, to be drawn to love Formation of Words. 5 1 one another ; sev-ish-dir-il-Ke-me-mek, to be unable to be drawn to love one another. We are reminded of the Turk of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the Turk who said so much in a few words. Many of the above-mentioned forms are rarely used, and Turkish, in reality a correct and beautiful lan- guage, does not abuse its resources. The drawbacks to unlimited agglutination are especially marked in the Basque tongue, which incorporates with its verb, not only the possessive pronouns (as do also the Semitic languages), but even the indirect object ; and in the American Indian dialects, where words already com- pletely formed are capriciously deprived of their beginning or end, and, so amputated, swell with their unrecognisable fragments some interminable compound. The Greenland aulisar-iartor-asuarpok (he hastened to go and fish) includes aulisar, to fish, peartor, to do something, and pinnesiiarpoJc, he made haste. The Mexican no-tlazo-mahuiz-teopixcatdtzin (0 my father, divine and revered protectoi-) contains no, my, tlazontli, esteemed, mahuiztic, revered, teotl, goA, pixqui, protector, tatzi, father. There is an extreme variety in the agglutinative class of languages. There are simple languages, like the Japanese, like all those which belong to the great Malayo-Polynesian family, or again Finnish and Magyar ; 'others are strangely complicated, such as Basque and the American idioms ; some are extremely poor and barren, like the dialects of the Guinea Coast or of the Bosjesmans ; others are rich and regular, such as Turkish and Suomi (the language of the Kalevala) ; some prefer to suffix the added words ; others, such as Kaffir and the whole Bantu group, prefix them ; in some gender is wanting, in others number. Some are so variable that their whole 5 2 The Evolution of Language. vocabulary and physiognomy changes in fifty years. These languages, which form the great majority of known idioms, proceed from a great number of inde- pendent sources and have but one common character — the subordination' of one or more roots susceptible of alteration in form, and deprived of their proper sense, to a full unaltered root which conveys the principal or fundamental idea of the word. Only two systems, two families of languages, the Semitic and the Indo-European, which are very rich and very varied, but which at least can each be reduced to organic unity, to one vocabulary and one grammar, these two groups only have passed the agglutinative stage. To agglutination, which they possess, and the methods of which they use (including incoi-poration and polysynthetism), they have added inflexion. What is inflexion ? Not much, at the first glance : the possible alteration of all the elements of the root syllable, as well as of the afiixed syllables. The root is not necessarily modified ; it sometimes remains un- changed, as in the agglutinative stage ; but it can be modified. This small privilege allows inflected lan- guages to express the relation of one word to another, not only by the addition of suffixes and prefixes, but also by means of numerous variations in the elements of the root itself. Hence, an extraordinary richness and an extreme clearness in derivation, a peculiar delicacy in the gTammatical notation of case, gender, number, person, tense, and mood (the paradigm of a Greek verb may include i 300 forms), and at the same time a great simplification in the word ; and finally, perspicuity and order in the sentence, insuring the logical connection of ideas, and due proportion in the expression of the thought. Formation of Words. 53 Before analysing a few familiar words (for examples carry more weight than the most authoritative asser- tion), I must insist upon one point of capital im- portance : the irreducibility of the two families of the inflected class to a common origin. " Not only," says M. Hovelacque, " are the roots totally distinct in the Semitic and Indo-European languages ; they differ yet more in their structure. Inflexion is not the same in the one as the other." In the Indo-European idioms, viz., Sanscrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, German, Slav, Lithuanian, and their very numerous ancient and modern dialects, inflexion affects the consonants as well as the vowels. In the Semitic group, Assyrian, Pbofenidan, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Arabic, Himyarite, and Ghez of Abyssinia, the root consonants are unchangeable. Indo-European roots may be composed of a single vowel, long- or short, nasalised or coupled with another to form a diphthong, or of a vowel and one, two, or more consonants, and vice versd, provided they are pronounced by a single emission of the voice. The Semitic roots are composed of three consonants (at least analysis has not yet reduced them further). The characteristic of Semitism is the triliteral form of its roots : they are composed of three consonants; to which different vowels are joined as formative elements, indicating the various relations of the root. In Arabic, for instance, Mb includes the sense of writ- ing, dbr of speaking, Ml oi killing; gatl is murderer, gitl, enemy ; katala means he kills, hvMla, he was killed, &c. Besides this inflexion due to the use of different vowels, Semitism also forms words by using suffixes and prefixes, sometimes also inserted particles. But the heaping of suflBx on suffix, the formation of 6 54 The Evolution of Language. derivatives from derived words is unknown. Hence the close resemblance of all Semitic languages, which are all as nearly allied as Italian and Spanish. The Semitic noun can only have three cases, and these are wanting to most of the languages of the class. The Semitic verb, in the second and third person, dis- tinguishes the gender of the subject: gatala, he killed; gatalat, she killed. The antithesis of present, past, and future, which is essential, fundamental, in the Indo- European languages, does not exist in the Semitic ; it has only two tenses, answering the one to the idea of the accomplished action, the other to that of the in- complete action. These few characteristics will suffice to dispose of the temptation to assimilate Hebrew with Latin or Greek. These languages have not issued from the same earthly Paradise ; they have borrowed words from each other within the historic period, but they have not created a single one in common. We come now to the examples ; as we analyse them we shall learn the methods of the Indo-Europeans. I take, almost at hazard, a verb, an adjective, and a couple of nouns. Apercevoir. In Latin the corresponding form would be ad-per-cip-ere. Where is the central root ? and what changes has it suffered ? The root is dp, ren- dered in the French form by cev. The Latin labials are commonly softened into v in French : habere, avoir ; sapere, savoir ; rapere, ravir. The first form of the root is cap, with the sense of to seize (here to take with the eyes) ; in composition it becomes cip : accipit, incipit ; cep : inceptwtn, accepi ; cwp : aucipiwm, the art of snaring birds, beside auceps, bird-catcher. As for the c, it was hard in classical Latin ; the pronunciation Formation of Words. 55 was hap, kip, hep; the Eomance tongues have con- verted it into a sibilant : c, soft ; and even into a palatal, ch6tif (Ital. cattivo, Lat. cap-ti-v-us). Note the relationship of regu (receipt) and recetie (recipe). The idea of seizing may easily be extended to the hearing, the sight, and the mind, capis ne, capin' ? do you grasp, do you understand ? Compare the Ital. capisco, I seize, I understand. But this idea of seizing may be reinforced, and it is the case here, by suffixes indicating direction and movement. A, Lat. ad, which may be traced in the old spelling appercevoir, and in appeler, appartenir (where the first p shows the effect of the labial on the dental), implies movement towards. Per is one of those particles of a very indefinite mean- ing (in Gr. irapa, beside, near, against; in Latin, in composition, some, about ; paulisper, parumper, a few) ; but in Latin, as in French, the most usual sense is by, through, across, by means of; thus we find, for the first three elements of the word we are analysing : to seize^through — as far as, that is, to seize from a distance, from afar. There remains the termination, which is very obscure. We note, in the first place, that oir is very often the French form for the Lat. ere, not only long, as in habere, avoir, apparere, apparoir, but short, as in capere, sapere, recevoir, percevoir, savoir. Nothing is more frequent than the substitution of the diphthong oi for the Lat. e, as also for and i (moisson, messi-o ; moi, toi, soi, me, te, se ; mois, mensis ; loi, lex ; roi, rex ; poison, potio ; poisson, piscio, &c.). The science of language is thus full of minor problems of which the solution is impossible, inasmuch as it would have been necessary to study in the throat of a living Gallo-Roman the point of contact, of meeting between the two sound movements which result in oi and e. 56 The Evolution of Language. We must be content with the statement of the fact, which is certain. The Latin infinitive termination is almost equally embarrassing. We know that the short e, represents the i of leg-i-mus, cap-i-mus, common to all the verbs of the third conjugation, and that this i or e, which takes- the place of an ancient short a (Sana, hhar-a-ti, he carries), is joined to a number of roots, as a copulative letter, to receive the case or verbal ending, or a new suflSx. But it is by no means always present. Does it belong to an ancient state of language, in which no consonant could do without a supporting vowel, a stage which persists in many African idioms, and in almost all. the Malay languages ? Or is it the simplest addition which the need of some sign to indicate the noun or the adjec- tive could suggest : root, hhar ; hhar-a, bearer or bear- ing, he who bears ? A would thus be the readiest, the most instinctive of pronouns. And although the naked root retained the power to annex directly suf- fixes and case-endings (Lat. fer-s, fer-i, legs, lec-tus, reg-s, nec-s, &c.), the copulative vowel persisted be- tween roots terminated by consonants and suffixes beginning with consonants, preserving both from harsh contacts and from the more; diflacult assimilations. The final syllable re remains to be copsidered; it marks the infinitive in Latin and recurs everywhere in French : aimer, ravir, lire, fondre, risoudre, avoir. It has been compared to the past infinitive meminis-se, cessis-se, h,abuis-se ; and as the Lat. r between two vowels takes the place of a primitive s (floris, Jwnorii, generis, &c., fov flosis, honosis, genesis), it has been sup- posed that the two forms were originally one, se, a species of indefinite neuter person, joined to an inde- ■ clinable verbal noun. So that we may translate the Formation of Words. 57 word wpercewir, "the act of grasping through as far as," and this is the sense of the five amalgamated- elements. The adjectiV'e respectahle, re-spec-ta-b-le, is worthy of attention, because it includes, in the first place, one of the most fertile of our attributive roots, and secondly, sufiixes which are used throughout the Latin family. Spec, spic, to look, to see, which may be recognised in the Sanscrit of the Vedas, spac, guardian, in the Teut. speh-on, to see, to spy, speh-a, Eng. spy, Fr. espion, took in Greek the forms o-ktctt and o-kott. In our first chapter we pointed out this confusion between the labials and the strong gutturals. This ancient syllable shows or hides itself in suspic- io, Fr. soupgon ; haruspex, augiir, he who looks at and consults the lightning or the entrails of the victims ; in au-(avi)-spicium, the observation of the flight of birds ; in speculum, mirror (whence speculari, specula- tion, &c.), Ital. specchio, Ger. Spiegel ; and in the Fr. espi&gle, a corruption of the Ger. Vhlen Spiegel (mirror of owls), the fictitious hero of a collection of drolleries. The Greek form of the root gave e7r/cr/co7roy, overseer or bishop, Fr. Mque, Ital. vescovo, Span, obispo. Species, that which is looked at, beauty, form, charac- teristics, hence special, specific, specify, has given specie, coined money with a device, espice (in English the Latin word is used with the restricted sense) and ipices (speciar substances; Eng. spices, Ger. Spezerien), to the Italian words speziale and spezeria, chemist and drug shop, to the Yrenchipicier, dpicerie, words which do not look as if they were allied with hishop, but which are so undeniably. Ad, circum,pro, per, su, in, de, re-spic-ere, form as many verbs and derivatives, corresponding to different ways of looking. 58 The Evolution of Language. The demonstrative sufSx t, followed by a vowel, which exists in an independent state in Sans, ta, tad, in Gr. to, ra, in Lat. tani, turn,, forms, by joining itself directly to consonantal roots, a number of deriva- tives, nouns, participles, and adjectives (often taken unchanged into French and English, as in respect, sus- pect, aspect, inspector, prospectus, perspective). Latin, adding to this new theme the termination of its first conjugation, has formed a whole series of verbs called frequentatives, aspectare, respectare, whence a new theme specta, the source of other adjectives and nouns, e.g., spectator, spectatus, spectabilis. We leave the s, a case- ending which adds nothing to the sense. The double suffix bili, out bh, which has formed in Latin, and which still forms innumerable adjectives in French and in Italian, should be reduced to li, a demonstrative which may be recognised in il-le, and in the diminutives in l-us, annul-us, iellus, hel, nouvel, &c. Bi is due to the analogy of forms like habi-lis, where it makes a part of the root. I think that there is now nothing obscure left in the word respectable. Respect is the look thrown back- wards, twice repeated, on some remarkable person or thing. The old form, respite, was the time necessary to consider, to examine anew the case of an accused person ; despite or spite (Fr. dipit), despectus, the look from above on some disagreeable object. We shall consider more particularly the sense of the particle re in another example, a substantive, recueillement, where it represents, however, the same idea of a return upon the object, or upon oneself. But we must first discover the central root, of which but a single letter subsists in our example : the letter Formation of Words. 59 I. In its complete form, if such existed, recueillement would correspond to re-cum-leg-i-me-n-t-um. The root leg, lig, in Gr. Xey, Xo-y, is no less important for us than the roots cap and spec, since the derivatives from it include such words as ^lire (elect), Mite, election, selection, college, collection, perhaps Her (to bind, to tie), lien, odligation, certq.inly loi (law), religion, lire (to read), le<^on, lecteur ; legere, Xoyos ; and those valuable suffixes logg, logist, which we have borrowed directly from the Greek ; in brief, that whole world of ideas which range from choosing to repeating, reading, from speaking to reasoning and thinking. The origin is humble. Leg (which perhaps might be yet further analysed) had, and always has, the sense of taking, choosing (with the prefix e, ex, or dis, choosing among, selecting from a crowd, e-ligere, dili- gere, dilection, love). Gum (preposition, conjunction, and adverb) is the declined form of a demonstrative and relative root, ka, pa, ta, kv (in Gr. ttw?, kw?, ti, tis), which has given to Umbr. po-ei, and to Lat. qui, gum, quod, and quum. Since it connects propositions and ideas, it easily acquired the sense of " with." Here the final m has changed to I, attracted by the first letter of leg ; colleg conveys therefore the idea of taking with something, of assembling ; add the copulative letter i, e, of which we have traced the history, and the termination re ; you hfive the Lat. colligerc, the Fr. ctieillir, whence by apocope cueil, our word recueil (collection, anthology). L alone represents the root, but it has kept the entire meaning. In the liquid I (I mouilUe) I am tempted to recog- nise an intimate fusion of that letter with the guttural and the copulative i; so that this sound, which is 6o The Evolution of Language. peculiar to the Eomance languages, and wtich should not be pronounced like y (a Parisian tendency), would represent in its entirety the theme legi. The suffixes which terminate the substantive are three in number, ma, tm, ta (we omit the case-ending m). These are three demonstratives which can be used alone: uUi-mu-s, do-nu-m, dic-tu-s, or by two at a time, mana-s, Gr. /xei/o?, docu-men, but already united in a suffix, 'mant, ment, which forms participles and nouns. Perhaps ma, the attributive root of fievo?, mens, thought, of which the ablative mente is foiind in most of our adverbs, is identical with this demonstra- tive ma. We shall study this question later. How- ever this may be, there is no longer any mystery in the word cueillement. Lastly re, which means return, repetition, insistence, permits us to translate recueillement by " reflection on that which has been gathered, collected by the mind." But a slight peculiarity allows us to take yet another step towards the original sense of re^ and that is the t which in retro unites it to the comparative suffix ro : retro, farther behind, deeper. The Latin ablative ended in d, which may be seen in inscriptions, though it had been dropped in classical Latin. This d, strengthened and preserved by the proximity of r, weakened into I in relligio, is thus the remains of a case-ending. He would be declined, red would be a case of res, thing, one of those words which cannot be decomposed by analysis, which are at once general and positive, which M. Breal is inclined to consider as one of the oldest terms of the Indo-European languages. This syllable, so often contracted, and reduced to the letter r, which we use and abuse, would thus be an ancient witness of that early time when man, incapable of distinguishing Formation of Words. 6 1 objects by their names, termed them by one and the same vocal gesture, the object, the thing. Hence would come that force, not yet exhausted, that implicit power of a return to the reality which underlies all appear- ances, dangerous only when it produces reaction, the obstinate return upon things acquired for good or evil. One more example, which will not detain us long; we are already acquainted with almost all its elements. It is chosen to show one or two pronominal roots play- ing the same part as verbal or substantive roots! It is the word rapprochement, which may be analysed as follows : re-ad-pro-pe-timo-mentum. Proptimo, altered into proximo, is the superlative of the adverbial preposi- tion prope; it has been contracted in French va.\o proelie (whence rapprochement'). Prope, composed, it would seem, of pro and per, whence properare, to hasten for- ward, would mean " by there forward." Pro is, like p7'ce (prceire) and pri {primus), a case of the root pra, which we find in our words premier, prince, profound, and which implies priority, jiiroximity, advance, progress. These object-lessons have their philosophy. They show among the races which are assuredly the best endowed and the most capable of indefinite progress the parallel development of thought and language, the combinations of sounds responding to the association of ideas, the vague sense of the primitive roots being gradually rendered more precise by the use of meta- phor, which also furnished the greater variety of expression required by the notions and concepts of experience and reason. We have just been, as it were, spectators of some of the most ordinary episodes of the life of language : the passage of the significant sound into the word, of the proper sense into the figurative, the formation of the. 62 The Evohttion of Language. verb, the noun, the adjective, by means of suffixes, and by the unlimited power of derivation. I should mention also two other methods, secondary in the sense that they really belong to the agglutinative and monosyllabic stages of language : these are apposition {towel-horse, hoot-jack, esside-main, tire-botte, ronge-lard, so largely used in French and English, and composition (ve(f)e\ij- yepera), so common in Sanscrit, Greek, and German. The latter method consists in treating as suffixes two or more words stripped of their terminations and made into a single whole. The polysynthetism of the American Indian dialects is the same thing at bottom. Apposition closely resembles the Chinese method of construction, except that it operates on ready-made words already shaped by grammar, instead of juxtapos- ing monosyllables. Apposition, composition, suffixation, these three methods have ruled by turns in one or other of the phases of language ; but the second does not exclude the first, the third does not eliminate the second, and knows how to use the first. Vocabularies are maintained by heredity, difierentiated by selection and adaptation — that is to say, by phonetic change and dialectic variation. Language begins by a vague pro- position, without apparent cohesion, continues by syntax (the order of words), attains to grammar by the use of inflexions, and when construction and wear and tear have altered the word and destroyed the verbal and case-endings, tends to return to the purely syntactic order, and even to the rudimentary proposition, to the telegraphic style which is the stenography of thought. But a wide interval separates the starting-point and the goal. To traverse this interval language has in- vented all the combinations, all the copulatives which aid thought, all the artifices of declension and conjuga- Formation of Words. 63 tion, which it discards as the growing intelligence no longer needs them. Man casts aside his worn-out tools, but he keeps all that he has won by means of them. This evolution, or rather these unequal and special evolutions, of innumerable tongues, have been accom- plished in virtue of very diverse cerebral and vocal aptitudes, under the influence of the thousand circum- stances, natural and historical, which determine the progress of societies, apart from the human will. Hence some people have been led to consider speech and lan- guage as organisms which grow, improve, flourish, or degenerate in virtue of their proper qualities or their proper vices. It is a fascinating comparison ; but we must not forget that languages are also and before everything the product of human faculties. The share of intelligence and reason cannot be gainsaid. Col- lective intelligence, it will be urged, and impersonal reason. It may be so ; but collective reason is nothing but the aggregate reason of individuals. The life of languages is an unconscious life ; but from the animal or specific cry, there has been no modification of sound and of the corresponding sense which was not initiated by an utterance of some individual, accepted, imitated, and understood by two or three others, and afterwards by hundreds and thousands of others. There can, I think, be no doubt of this fact, though it has not been, cannot be, proved. The science of language is there- fore not only a natural science, but, more particularly, an anthropological and ethnographical science. PART IX GEOaRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF LANGUAGES AND RACES. CHAPTER I. THE SPREAD OF INFLECTED LANGUAGES. Chronology and philology — The coincidences of geography and history with the evolution of language — Diffusion of the inflected languages, and especially of the Indo-European family — Retreat of the agglu- tinative to the borders of the civilised world — The monosyllabic group of the extreme East — Chinese and its written character — Annamite — Siamese — Burmese — Tibetan — Identity of method — - Difference of vocabulary. In the study which we are about to undertake we shall naturally follow the order of development — monosyl- labism, agglutination, inflexion, analysis. But it is necessai'y to point out that this division cannot be founded upon chronology alone. A true succession of the four stages of language is most undoubtedly proved by the analysis of grammars, vocabularies, and of vocal elements. But various circumstances, the unequal development of nations, the precocity of some, the tardiness of others, migrations, conquests, have thrown great disorder into the distribution of languages and into their history. Some have become extinct in their place of origin, and their fragments are buried beneath the deposits of succeeding ages ; others, borne to a distance, are scattered in isolated 64 . The spread of Inpected Languages 65 Bpots or spread in great streams like the moraines of the glacial epoch over the face of the earth; Some vegetate in an eternal childhood, and will die without having grown up ; others, having made the whole cycle, live again in a numerous posterity. If we consult the oldest documents, written or preserved by oral ti-adi-- tion, we shall not be surprised that they do not gene- rally belong to the most ancient forms of language ; and on the other hand, a few important examples will force us to admit that inferiority in the means of ex- pression is not incompatible with true intellectual and literary culture. We will disregard for the moment those numerous idioms whose existence was unsuspected before the discovery of America and Oceania, and confine ourselves to the annals of the Old World, as far, at least, as science has been able to reconstruct them, and we shall see how little help they are able to afford towards a methodical enumeration. By far the oldest documents which we possess to-day are those of Egypt ; they are forty centui-ies old ; they witness to a long use of lan- guage prior to themselves, since the earliest of them reveal a state of transition between agglutination and inflexion. The hieroglyphs of , a King^ Snefrou have been recently deciphered on Mount Sinai, at the en- trance of a turquoise mine, in which the king boasts of his victory over the Bedouins of the mountains. Now this king is anterior to the great pyramids ; he belonged to the third Memphian .dynasty, which dates from four thousand two or three hundred years before our era. M. Bdnedite, the fortunate interpreter of this text, believes it to be the earliest line of writing which has come down to us. The most ancient cunei- form inscriptions cannot pretend to so great an age.; 66 Distribution of Languages and Races. they are later by a thousand years, but they testify also to a previous long elaboration of language. It is known that the inscriptions on the back of statues, on cylindrical or conical seals, and on innumerable bricks dug up from the sands of Chaldea and Syria, may be referred to two systems, to two organisms, often given together in bilingual texts. The tongue of the Acca- dians or Sumers, the ancient inhabitants and the first civil isers of the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, is of the agglutinative order ; the other, Chaldean or Assyrian, is inflected; it is the earliest known form of the Semitic tongues. Now the Semitic conquerors seem to have owed everything, arts, beliefs, ideas, to their industrious subjects, their only superiority con- sisting in the possession of more warlike qualities and of a more advanced type of language. But the fierce and boastful proclamations of the exterminating kings, which properly belong to the Semitic race, have less interest for us than the magical divagations, the frag- ments of cosmogonies, even of epics, which, translated from Accadian into Chaldean, furnished to a certain degree the somewhat barren and narrow mind of the Semites, and left their traces in the religions of Syria, Phoenicia, and Judea. The Indo - European parent language must be attributed to the same epoch, if not the written documents, at least the development of the spoken language ; it had already left the agglutinative stage and was fully inflected belbre its separation into the different dialects. For if the Vedas, as they have come down to us, are relatively modern and adapted to the Brahminical liturgy, the idiom remains more archaic than the oldest Sanscrit, which was already extinct in the days of Alexander, older therefore than the Greek and Latin idioms. It is certain that the The Spread of Inflected Languages. 67 parent Indo-European tongue, the common type to which seven families of languages are more or less faithful, was constituted with its grammar, its basis of words and ideas, more than twenty centuries before the Christian era, and that the tribes which spoke this language had traversed three stages, and mas- tered the most delicate shades of inflexion, while their nearest neighbours had stopped short, some at Semi- tic inflexion, some at agglutination, some at monosyl- labism. The official history of China does not go farther back. The Ghouhing, which purports to date from 2356 years before Christ, was edited, with the other sacred books, by Confucius, towards the end of the sixth century. Thus historical data, except in what concerns the tongues of the north-east of Africa, can only establish the synchronism, in times of remote antiquity, of those great phases which the philologist considers as the successive stages of evolution. Yet the general course of civilisation may furnish those indications which historical lore refuses to us. It is at least curious to note that the part played in history by the different classes of language assigns to them precisely that rank which the science of lan- guage attributes to them. Suppose you have before your eyes a map of the globe, three facts strike you on the most cursory glance : the central situation and the growing expansion of the inflected languages ; the isolation and the immobility of the monosyllabic group, confined to its vast empire, between the mountains of Thibet, the Mongolian desert, the steppes of Man- churia, and the seas of China and Indo-China ; lastly, the retreat of the agglutinative tongues towards the confines of the world ; they are driven to the borders of 68 Distribution of Languages and Races. civilisation, into the frozen regions of Siberia, into the heart of Africa, into the Malay Archipelago and the islands of the Pacific, into those parts of America where the remnant of the indigenous races is yet to be found. It is easy to see that their area diminishes from day to day ; once they occupied the whole of India, only a fifth remains to them, a part of the Dekr- kan ; once they covered the whole of Asia from the -Arctic Ocean to the Gul£ of Ormuz ; the Semites and the Iranians drove them thence ; perhaps tkey for- merly dominated in Western Europe, if it be true that Basque was the speech of the ancient inhabitants of Gaul — if it be true that the race whose remains were ■found at the Madeleine and at the Eyzies, retreating with the reindeer towards the frozen North, is repre- sented in modern days by the Esquimaux. In America they give way before the Teutonic and Neo - Latin tongues ; in another century they will have disappeared from Oceania. With Attila, Zengliis Khan, and Timour these idioms made a vigorous attempt to recover the ground they had lost ; but they failed sooner or later, conquered by the Semitic, by the Indo-European tongues, even by Chinese monosyllabism. The ancient Bulgarians of Belisarius were exterminated by the Greeks and Slavs. iTwo exceptions seem only to accentuate this universal movement of retreat. In the tenth century, Magyar, an Uralo-Altaic dialect, succeeded in taking root between the Danube and the Theiss ; but it remains there without spreading, and though the Hungarians have preserved their national language, and applied it ,t0 poetry and history, yet they only use it to express ideas acquired in their perpetual contact with European -peoples and idioms. Towards the same epoch, the The spread of Inflected Languages. 69 fanatical outburst of Islam, urging forward the robber hordes of Turkestan, let loose upon Persia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Greece the fierce invasion of the Turks. We know into what confusion this fatal conquest threw the political life of the East ; what disasters have ruined and stained with blood the richest countries of the world, the basin of the Mediterranean ; at the price of what defeats, of what efforts, Europe has con- trolled and kept within bounds this blind force ; with what infinite trouble European thought, arts, and in- dustries re-enter the regions which were their cradle. By slow degrees the health of the West has accustomed itself to the presence of this foreign body, now almost inoffensive. But the race, though no longer unmixed with the blood of other peoples, and in spite of its native virtues, and the language, in spite of its accuracy and harmony of sound, will always remain anomalies in the midst, of the civilised world. And the reason is that there is an anachronism, an original incompati- bility between the mental state of a former age and a more advanced intellectual condition — between a lan- guage which has stopped short at the agglutinative stage and languages which have arrived at the extreme limit of the inflected phase. The destiny of the inflected languages has been very different. The sub-group, which is represented to-day by Coptic and the Berber tongues, has not, it is true, progressed since the time of the Pharaohs ; it has remained suspended between agglutination and in- flexion ; it has lacked room ; wedged in between the dull mass of the Negroes of Central and Eastern Africa, and the adventurous boldness of the Arabs and of the Mediterranean peoples, it vegetates and dwindles. 6 70 Distribution of Languages and Races. But the Semites, whose conquering force is not yet spent, at any rate in Africa, have a long and important history. Their frontiers have receded on the North ; but they retain Syria, Arabia, Egypt and all the African coast. The nations which have spoken Semitic languages, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Cartha- giaians, Hebrews, Syrians and Arabs, have all con- tributed something, some of them very much, to civilisation ; they created arts, religions, sciences — arts which have been superseded, religions which are dan- gerous, sciences which are false or incomplete, but which in their day have moved the world. Their influence has spread not only over two hundred millions of Moslems and Jews ; it. may be recognised in the temperament and the accent of the Spaniard and in the intellectual mould of Christendom. Even the obstacles, the material and moral obstacles, which Semitic influence has raised to the development of the Indo-Europeans, are not the least of the proofs of its strength. Finally, the lan- guages which belong to it have contributed before and with the Indo- European idioms to the expulsion of the agglutinative group ; they vanquished Accadian in Chaldea and Assyria ; they have made inroads into Turkish, and are attacking the dialects of Central Africa. The fortunes of the European idioms and of the peoples which created or adopted them are yet more significant. They have not ceased to flourish from the day when five or six migratory columns left the neigh- bourhood of the Caspian to accomplish the education of Europe. These bands, which increased on the road, spread out like the sticks of a great fan, established their different languages from the Gulf of Finland to the most outlying rocks of the Greek Archipelago. The Spread of Inflected Languages. 7 1 The most fortunate, those which were the first to reach the temperate shores of the Mediterranean, became the ancestors of the Gr^co-Latin peoples and civilisation ; the Hellenic branch, finding a soil already cultivated, and precursors already somewhat polished by the lessons, often indirect and sometimes intermitted, which they had received from Egypt and Assyria, developed earliest with a rapid and magnificent expansion ; and never, it would seem, has a more supple, more rich, and more beautiful language been associated with a national genius so keen, so artistic, or so profound. The Latins, slower, more tenacious, hampered moreover by the strange mixture of races which they found wedged together in the narrow Italian peninsula, the Latins, partly by their own energies, partly aided by the gradual infiltrations of Hellenic culture, accom- plished the same work of conquest and progress ; then they embraced within their empire the Greeks, their brothers and their teachers, and the Celts and Gauls, also their near kinsmen, who, scattered over the forests of the West, had failed to turn to account, as yet, their courage, their intelligence, and their gift of elo- quence. Thus the most precocious of our Indo-Euro- pean ancestors had divided between them the East and West, when the distant pressure of the Huns and the Mongols, driving the belated Slavs upon the yet half- savage Germans, forced the frontiers of the Rhine and the Danube. When this terrible invasion was stayed, when the strong arm of Charlemagne had erected a barrier against that part of the horde which had not felt in some degree the influence of the Roman civili- sation, it could be seen that a large half of the new- comers had become assimilated to their predecessors, had become incorporated into the ancient Roman 72 Distribution of Languages and Races. world, which had renewed its youth by the infusion of the new blood of the barbarians. Those who remained outside the Latinised West, but who, endowed with language and intelligence from the same common stock, were destined to develop in the same manner, the Teutons and Slavs, claimed and acquired in their turn their legitimate share in the direction of modern thought. It is to a Teutonic race, to a Teutonic tongue, the Anglo-Saxon race and the English tongue, that the honour is due of completing the work begun and con- tinued by the Neo-Latins, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the French. The extraordinary diffusion of the Eng- lish race and speech is doubtless due to very numerous causes ; but its coincidence with a phenomenon of the evolution of language is curious. English, as ancient in origin as Greek, Latin, or Gothic, bnt considerably modified in the eleventh century by an invasion of Trench words (with the result that two-thirds of its vocabulary is composed of Latin or Neo-Latin forms), English is the first of the group to arrive at the last simplification, at the analytic stage ; and it spreads far and wide because it is the easiest of languages, not, alas ! to pronounce, nor to write well, but to learn by ear and to speak after a fashion. It were ungrateful to forget the Eastern groups, the Aryans of Hindustan, the Iranians of Bactriana, of Afghanistan, of Persia, and Armenia. The first named, in small migratory bands, which sometimes became stationary for a time, after having tarried long in the network of affluents which form the Indus, descended the left bank of that great river. They "appear to have reached its mouth about the tenth century. Their manners, their social polity, their creed, and their tongue spread thence, and became The spread of Infitcted Languages. 73 established not only in the valley of the Ganges, but throughout Hindustan, and even in Indo-Cbina. The career of the Sanscrit literature and of the nume- rous languages, dead and living, which are derived from it, have been most brilliant Hymns, inter- minable epics, religious and grammatical treatises, codes, philosophical systems, legends and love poems, melodrama and the comedy of manners, no style is lacking to this abundant literature. Between the first and the fifth centuries of our era, India, mistress of herself, and overflowing into Ceylon, Java, and Gambodge, listened to the learned discussions of the Brahmans, of the Bonzes, of the philosophers, or took delight in the ingenious fancies of -i^aer KlMidasa and of the SudraJca, and held in Asia the same rank and displayed the same civilising force as Greece and Rome in the West. Unfortunately, the numerical strength of the invading white race had always been small. Vigorous and intelligent enough to conquer a vast territory and to subdue inferior races, Negritos, Dravidians, Malays, they could not modify them, could not mould them to a common physiognomy and similar aptitudes. They could with diflSculty maintain by means of rigorous caste rules the purity of their own blood, and attacks from without brought about the fall of this edifice, inhabited by too many slaves and too few masters. In spite of a blind and deeply rooted fana- ticism the immense population^ of the great peninsula failed to ofier an efiectual resistance to the Afghans of Mahmoud, or j;o the Mongols of mixed race of Timour and Baber, or to the tenacious grasp of the English ; they retained only their languages, which was well, but also their faulty social polity, and the gross and inept superstitions which darken the mind of the people. 74 Distribution of Languages and Races. The Iranians, some of whose idioms, Zend and ancient Persian, are nearly akin to Sanscrit, occupied the basins of the Jaxartes and the Oxus. Disturbed, most probably, as the Aryans had been, by the tur- bulent Turcoman hordes, perhaps also urged forward by the barrenness of the land between the Caspian and the Sea of Aral (a barrenness due to the ex- haustion of the waters of the two rivers), the future Afghans and Persians descended the right bank of the Indus, or passed to the west of the great desert of Khorassan, while another stream, the Armenians, and perhaps .the Parthians, passing between the Cas- pian and the mountains, gained a region which lies about the sources of the Euphrates, whose ill-defined frontiers condemn it to instability and perpetual subjugation. The Iranians of antiquity must not be judged by the modern Persians, an amiable and artis- tic race, the possessors of a beautiful language and of a fascinating literature, but weary of their past great- ness, and destitute of any real power to withstand their ancient enemy the Turk, and th_eir distant cousins and powerful rivals the Slavs and Anglo-Saxons. But the ancient Iranians were resolute and formidable ; they practised an austere religion which honoured labour, agriculture, and the family. At the beginning of the fifth century they dominated Asia, from the Punjab to Ionia, and from the Oxus to the Indian Ocean ; they held Syria and Egypt, and in Europe Thrace and the mouths of the Danube. In the course of sixty years they had incorporated the Medes, over- thrown the Assyrian empire and Chaldea, and estab- lished themselves solidly on the banks of the Tigris, between the Euphrates and the Choaspes ; they had vanquished the Lydian power, subdued Phoenicia, The Spread of Inflected Languages. 75 ruined Ionia, dethroned the Pharaohs. They had raised, on the ruins and out of the ruins of the ancient empires, of which the languages were agglutinative or Semitic, a vast edifice, as frail as it was vast, a rapid construction, destined to a yet more rapid de- struction, and a terrible fall. Eendered effeminate by the intoxication of conquest, and yet more by the incorporation of exhausted races, dragging in their rear the hordes of savages described by Herodotus, they did not, when the impulse which affected all the Aryans drove them upon the West, bring to Europe the untired strength of young blood. Yet the rich de- velopment of the Hellenic youth was all but submerged beneath a deluge whose floods rolled onward the ruined fragments of an ancient world and the undisciplined energies of infant peoples. The first shock took place in 490 B.C. A few thousands of Athenians arrested at Marathon the hosts of Darius. A second and more terrible invasion laid waste Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica ; Athens perished in the flames. Greece, united to face the common danger, crushed the forces of Asia by sea and land at Salamis, Platsea, and Mycale. These were the critical moments of history. Montesquieu says : " Who would be a Persian ? " We should have had to submit to that fate but for the courage and the fortune of the Hellenes. Bat the Persians had nevertheless their hour of grandeur, and if they never recovered the power of which Alexander deprived them, their bravery in war and the influence of their religious doctrines more than once had their effect on their Graeco- Roman rivals. In this rapid sketch of the Indo-European group, we have sought to draw attention to two important truths : first, that to this group (whatever may be its 76 Distribution of Languages and Races. ethnical elements), the only one which has hitherto shown itself capable of indefinite progress, has be- longed for more than a thousand years the leadership of the human race ; secondly, that the superiority of the Indo-European tongues is inseparable from the pre-eminence of the peoples whifch speak them ; that before them the agglutinative languages and the already inflected idioms of the Semites gave way. This succession is thus in perfect accord with modern theories of the evolution of language. Here China intervenes. To the seven or eight hundred millions of men (six hundred in the Indo- European group alone) who speak inflected languages, China opposes the motionless and compact mass of monosyllabism, a form of language which has sufficed from time immemorial to about flve hundred millions of human beings, who have attained by themselves to a certain degree, sometimes a high degree, of civilisa- tion. This is a fact which must be recognised and explained, and its causes and consequences set forth. The traditions of China authorise us to seek the cradle of the Chinese race on the eastern boundary of the great table-land which is connected on the north with the Celestial and Altai mountains, and on the south by the Karakoram range with the formidable chain of the Himalayas. .Separa,ted from the Western world by this vast barrier, ignorant of and unknown, to the races on whom they turned their backs, they multiplied and extended towards the east, some cross- ing the great desert of Gobi and the " thick forests of Chan-si, the others passing down the twin valleys of the Hoang-ho and tlie Yang-tse-kiang. There can "be no doubt that they found and drove out earlier populations, whose survivors bear the name of The Spread of Inflected Languages. "jj Miao-tse, "raw or cooked," according as they retained or lost their independence. Moreover, the race is by no means unmixed ; the types of Fou-kien and of Canton, in spite of the uniformity of costume and of the universal pigtail (adopted only 250 years ago), differ markedly from the inhabitants of the centre and south. Numerous kingdoms, often rivals, afterwards united in a sort of feudal hierarchy, became fused at last into an immense empire, the second in extent after that of modern Russia, under the paternal govei-nment of a semi-god, a son of heaven, the father and the mother of his subjects. This whole organisa- tion had taken shape and become stereotyped before the Christian era, without any external influence, with- out any communication with the rest of Asia. The Chinese had invented for themselves alone and to their own taste, all the arts and industries, all the methods of agriculture, of working in metals, of making pottery. No civilisation was ever more original, more isolated or more precocious. After having passed through the Stone Age, to which the words cJd-fao, chi-tsien, chi- kien, chi-jin, chi-fou, " knife, point, sword, tool, axe, of stone," still testify, the Age of Bronze, then of Iron, they have become for ever fixed in the same morality, the same devotion to ancestors and genii. Centuries have passed, and neither the intrusion of Buddhism and Islam, nor the Mongol devastations, neither the Manchu revolution nor the violent and successful in- cursions of modern days, have appreciably modified the manners and the genius of China. To a passably educated Chinaman, the Barbarian world is veiled- in a mist, in which a few and soon effaced outlines can barely be distinguished ; and when, at rare intervals, a baud of priests or of soldiers comes to convince him 78 Distribution of Languages and Races. of the existence of that non-ego which is called France, England, or Germany, he attaches no more importance to it than the field-labourer to a passing hail-shower. Even those who have visited our lands retain as the impression of our civilisation only a vague wonder and a more definite mistrust. China herself, in the same way, in spite of the commercial relations between the Romans and the Seri, in spite of the narratives of the Arabs and of Marco Polo, notwithstanding wars, journeys, and scien- tific expeditions, China is for Western Asia and Europe merely a confused mass iu whjch can be distinguished for a moment, only to be lost again iu the oblivion of indifference, the names of a few Emperors and philoso- phers, scattered over an ocean of four thousand years. Silk, tea, porcelain, and enamels : with these we have from China all that the West cares about. Printing, gunpowder, decimal notation, an independent morality, and the art of government, these things we had dis- covered for ourselves. China has nothing to teach us now ; she has done nothing for us in the past. Had she never existed, the web of history, the long record of human existence, would never have shown at any point of its course the traces of any gap or failure. This isolation will doubtless cease, but is it not in itself an all-sufficient reason for Chinese conservatism ? And as concerns the language, a special obstacle may be mentioned — a written character almost as ancient as monosyllabism itself, which, adapted to the monosyl- labic form, has preserved it from all alteration. " According to tradition," says M. Vinson, " the first characters were rude drawings of material objects : a circle with a dot in the centre signified the sun ; a vertical stroke with two lines on either side at an The Spread of Injlected Languages. 79 angle indicated a tree ; and so on. To express com- plex ideas, several of tkese symbols were takeu together ; the signs for sun and moon together represented light ; those for woman, hand, and broom meant a married woman ; to hear was rendered by the signs for ear and door ; to follow, by three symbols for man, placed one after the other. Then certain symbols were taken of which the pronunciation only without the meaning survived.' Pk,, white, together with the sign tne, took the sense of cypress ; fan, with earth or mountain, meant dyke. There are about 169 of these signs which have become phonetic, and of which many are no longer employed singly. The Chinese characters often have variants borrowed from an earlier period, a system now out of date ; the written character has, in effect, varied since the date, 2950 B.C. according to the legend, when Fou-hi invented the pictorial char- acter. These variations have been classed into six different styles. In the ordinary style the characters retain little of the ideograms as originally drawn ; they are composed of strokes of which the number allows of an artificial classification of the vocabulary. There are 214 type words, called keys: six formed with one stroke, twentj'-three with two strokes, and so on up to seventeen strokes. But this classification varies according to the grammarians. It is said that these artifices allow as many as 43,496 words to be written, all monosyllabic or compounds of monosyllables, of which about one-third compose the ordinary current vocabulary." I have heard it said that an educated Chinaman could not boast of knowing how to refid before he reached the age of forty years or more. It may be imagined how great a part caligraphy plays in Chinese education. It is astounding that such a 8o Distribution of Languages and Races. system of writing should have been adopted also by the Japanese and the Annamites. The Chinese char- acter is written in vertical columns, or, if necessary, horizontally from right to left. The language is not nearly so alarming as the writ- ing, but use alone can teach it, since memory is not aided by grammar or by derivation. To complete the indications given in the chapter on vocabulary, we refer the student to the Linguistique of Hoyelacque and to the Dictionnaire des Sciences Anthrcypologiques ; and pass on to give some supplementary information. The language is by no means homogeneous and uni- form. Not only does the Chinese of the educated class differ from that of the peasant, of the sailor, of the arti- san or the trader, but each region has its dialect. There is more difference between the speech of the different provinces than between the various patois of France ; so much so that, according to M. Hovelacque, the Government officials sent to serve in the provinces of Fou-kien or of Canton, cannot, unless natives of the district, get on without interpreters. The speech of Canton is that of the south, the dialect of Fou-kien extends a little farther to the north along the coast and to the neighbouring islands ; in the central pro- vinces of the empire, at Pekin and Nankin, the Man- darin dialect prevails, which is the language of a wide tract of country, and also the official and literary language of the whole empire. The three principal dialects are distinguished chiefly by the sound. The letters 6, d, and g exist only in the language of Fou-kien. (All the g's so largely used in transliteration, tsong, tsieng, chang, represent merely a nasal reinforcement of the vowel.) The Mandarin language omits in pronunciation the initial compound The Spread of Inflected Languages. 8 1 ng ; nga, ngo, ngd, ngan, are prononnced a, o, 6, an ; h, followed by i, kia, Jcio, kiu, which remains hard in the south, has become ts in the north, tsia, tsio, tsiu. Nothing is more common than such variations ; they exist in every group of languages. We have just seen that the g is unknown to literary ■Chinese ; in fact, every word in it is composed of an initial . consonant or spirant and a vowel, simple or nasalised : ta, great ; fu, father ; mu, mother ; yuan, distant ; jin, man ; hiung, elder, &c. A single and very doubtful exception to this rule is the word which signifies "two'' and "ears'' : eul, ulh, urh, rh; the vowel seems here to precede the consonant, but the sound is confused and difficult to transcribe ; it is an efibrt towards the pure liquid r, which the Chinese do not possess. They write and pronounce France, for ex- ample, Folan-tsi. In the dialects of Canton and Fou-kien, the short words may be terminated by a strong explosive con- sonant, k, t, or f. There are in all the dialects short words and long, of which the quantity depends on the accent or tone. . These tones, invented to distinguish between syllables of the same sound but of very diverse meaning, number eight in Fou-kien, five in the Man- -darin dialect ; at Pelcin there are but four, three long and one short. These accents increase the number of roots from 450 to 1250. It will be seen that in this system, deprived of the aid of suffixes, the raw material of language is of the poorest. It is only by a marvel- lous ingenuity that the Chinese have been able, with- out other resource than apposition, to acquire 40,000 signs, that is to say, 40,000 ideas, and to apply their imperfect instrument to every style — philosophy, morals, history, poetry, and the drama. But to us 82 Distribution of Languages and Races. Europeans it seems that this ingemiity is displayed at the expense of perspicuity, logical composition, and also of inspiration. The thought of the Chinese, like their art, lacks perspective ; either it is stifled beneath a mass of detail, which is not properly subordinate to the whole, or, considering the whole as through a sort of fog, it loses its sense of reality ; it is either trite, diffuse, and prosaic, or incoherent and unreal. The chronicles are* interminable ; the enumerations are in- congruous; poetical imagination weak, and its form disfigured by mannerisms. Science is inaccessible, not indeed to the mind of the Chinese, but to their language and writing, and they cannot renounce these without losing all their past history. The dominion of the Chinese language is limited on the north by Corean, Mandchu, and Mongolian, agglu- tinative languages ; in the south it is found along the. Indo-Chinese coast in the commercial centres, where it contends with Malay. Though the type of the monosyllabic languages, Chinese is not the only one ; Annamite, Siamese, Bur- mese, and Thibetan are other examples. The countries where these languages are spoken are, however, but outlying parts of the great Chinese empire, to which they have been at times united by vassalage or alliance. Tiiey are a part of that great slice of Asia which in- clines towards the east, and turns away from the rest of humanity, the only portion of the globe where this fossil language could be protected in its growth. The hereditary tendency to monosyllabism must have been very strong to resist influences and conquests which left China intact, but which were not waTiting to Thibet and Indo-China. Buddhist missionaries established their principal sect in Thibet, and have reigned there for The Spread of Inflected Languages. 83 nearly twenty centuries. In the Middle Ages the Aryans of India founded at Gambodge a flourishing kingdom and a brilliant civilisation, of which we admire the ruins at Ang-kor-wat, where learned men, Bergaigne among others, have deciphered inscriptions in Sanskrit and Pali ; nevertheless the old type pre- vailed, and with it the ancient form of language. The inhabitants of Thibet and Indo-China have inherited only the worst of legacies from their fugitive civilisa- tion, a narrowing and childish religion. Annamite, the language of the eastern portion of Indo-China and of Tonquin, has borrowed considerably from the vocabulary of Southern China, and its written character, which is figurative and ideographic, is of Chinese origin, although much modified and developed. Its syntax corresponds to that of Chinese. The addi- tion of such terms as male and female, all and many, to a I'oot syllable, indicates gender and number ; the ad- jective follows the noun (which it precedes in Chinese) ; various terms which signify distance, proximity, doubt, give to the roots the value of verbs, and determine mood and tense. Six tones, acute, interrogative, as- cending, descending, grave, equal, serve, as in Chinese, to differentiate words of which the sound would be absolutely the same, although the sense'is different. But, in spite of this indebtedness and the similarity of form, Annamite is a distinct language. The vocabulary, the monosyllables, which are proper to this language, are purely Annamite, and in no sense Chinese. Siamese or Thai (spoken on the north and west coasts of the Gulf of Siam) is separated from the Annamite by the language of Gambodge, which is yet unclassed. Siamese is rich in aspirates and sibilants, and has a written character of Indian origin, but has 84 Distribution of Languages and Races. all the marks of monosyllabism — the use of tones (of which there are four), the absence of grammar, apposi- tion, and order of words determined by a rigid syntax. The language of Burmah offers the same characteris- tics, though it is poorer in sounds and has less variety of tones. The Burmese empire, which the English have diminished by four provinces — Arakan, Martaban, Tenasserim and Pegu — includes a number of tribes of which the origin is most uncertain, half-breeds of Hindus and Black Dravidians, of Malays and Negritos, of Mongoloids and Mois, &c., &c. These groups march on the north with the peoples of Yunnan, and on the south with the Siamese or Thai, and on the east with all the semi-savages of the Me-kong (Mother of Seas), Laotians, Stiengs, Kouis, Girais, Kharais, which Mouhot, De Lagrfe, and Garnier have visited and described. These are the relics of the ancient Gambodge^ the country of the Kams, Kammers, Kmers, who were so amenable at first, so indifferent afterwards, to the civi- lisation of the Hindus. These distant and interesting countries are now become fields of exploration open to our anthropologists and philologists. But the study of the methods and organisms of language will derive little profit from them. Thibetan, of which we have little to say, owes to India its rich and precious literature, consisting en- tirely of translations of Buddhist books (of which the original is sometimes lost) as well as its alphabet. Its method of determining case, and mood, or tense are once again the respective places of the words, and the association of full roots and empty roots. The inflec- tions which some have thought to discover in Thibetan are not more joined to the word than any other root .deprived in part of its primitive sense, and converted The spread of Inflected Languages. 85 into a particle. He who would write a comparative syntax of the isolating or monosyllabic languages must forget all such terms as number and gender, mood and tense, case and person. After having shown that chronology nowhere goes far enough back into the past to furnish a basis for the history of language, we have nevertheless made it clear that the gradual elimination of the agglutina- tive to the advantage of the inflected idioms, and espe- cially the ever-growing expansion of the Indo-European tongues, which always tend to become more analytic, coincides with the discoveries of philological analysis. Yet one great fossil block stands apart, outside, so to speak, of the current which has deposited the succes- sive strata of language ;. the monosyllabism of Chinese, Annamite, Siamese, Thibetan, emerges from the depths of the past. We have pointed out the purely geo- graphical causes of its survival, and displayed the con- sequences of the isolation of this group — useless effort, complication of the written character, atrophy of the higher functions of the brain, incoherence and petti- ness of thought. We have noted the fact that these peoples, who have undoubtedly great gifts, have yet played next to no part in the history of the world and of civilisation. CHAPTER II. THE AGGLUTINATIVE IDIOMS OF CENTRAL ASIA. Languages of Corea and of Japan — ^Ethnical elements of the Corean and Japanese peoples — Hyperborean group : Ainus, Ghiliaks, Kamschatkans, Tchonktches, Youkaghirs — Uralo-Altaio family : I. Samoyed group ; 2. Tongouse-Mandchu group ; 3. Mongol- Kalmuck group; 4. Turkish group; 5. Tinno- Hungarian group ; the characters common to the five groups — Vowel harmony. In passing from monosyllabiam to agglutination, we have no great distance to traverse. I am not speaking merely of territorial distance; I mean that between these two phases, these two linguistic organisms, there are insensible transitions, the one beginning where the otlier ends. The line of demarcation is so fine that certain eminent philologists, Max Miiller among the number, hesitate to class Siamese and Thibetan among the monosyllabic languages. It may even be said that absolute monosyllabism exists no longer. The majority of Chinese words consist of two or three syllables, and we find agglutinative dialects, more especially in the Tongouse group, of whicli the grammar is yet so un- developed that it has no case or verbal endings. We need to fix our attention on a positive and certain distinction, which I have already indicated, but on which I must insist fui-ther, because, though appar- ently slight, it is yet the point of departure and the common characteristic of all the agglutinative lan- es Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 87 guages ; it is the change in and gradual atrophy of the subordinate roots. The syllables which the Chinese call empty, as opposed to the full syllables, lose in part their signi- ficant force, but they retain their form ; the sense is effaced, the sound remains invariable. The result is that they can neither form terminations nor serve as a connecting link between a root and suffixes denoting case or person. The words, therefore, even when poly- syllabic, remain sterile, and cannot produce others by derivation ; no Chinese, Annamite, or Burmese word gives birth to a series of verbs, nouns, and adjectives derived from a common root. In the agglutinative order, the root, full, or principal syllable, alone remains invariable ; the subordinate roots, those which amplify or modify the meaning of the full syllable, are susceptible of change in form, in sound, as well as in their primary sense. Sometimes atrophied by their close connection with the root (a name which the subordinate roots change for that of suffix), sometimes with their initial consonant or their central vowel affected by the influence of the root, they furnish a certain number of signs, applicable respec- tively to the different parts of speech, or else they form with the root an indivisible whole, a new root or theme, susceptible in its turn of acquiring other suffixes, and of giving birth to a greater or less number of derivative terms. Thus monosyllabism and agglutination have in common the inalterability of the root or full syllable, and the alteration in the sense of the subordinate or empty syllable ; to agglutination alone belongs the change in the form of the subordinate root. Inflected languages have, in addition, the power to change the 88 Distribution of Languages and Races. root syllable. From one class to anothei: there is but one step ; the barrier is so slight that certain peoples have crossed without knowing it, so imperceptible that others have not sought to cross it, so decisive never- theless that it clearly divides the three stages of lan- guage. There is, I believe, no instance of a language tending to return to the stage which it has left, and it is rare that a language abandons that in which custom and literature have fixed it. China is the near neighbour, and even the titular sovereign, of the country of the Mandchus and of the Eastern Mongols ; she has been conquered by both at different times, but she has borrowed nothing from th^ir idioms, which are agglutinative, although poor specimens of the class, and her own influence is almost nil, in spite of the ascendency of her superior civilisa- tion. The Chinese language spreads to the north and west beyond the great wall, and is spoken in towns situated in the countries of the Mongols and Mandchus ; but the natives keep their own idiom, as do the mer- chants from the " Land of Flowers." Corea, a mountainous peninsula which juts out be- tween the Pe-tchili and Japan, was occupied from the twelfth to the first century B.C. by the Chinese, and has retained from the language of the conquerors a number of names of objects, of administrative divisions, and of occupations of all sorts ; its king, still a vassal of the Chinese emperor, sends a respectful embassy every year to Pekin to fetch the calendar of the year. Yet the Coreans have their language, in no way akin to the Chinese vocabulary, and weakly but certainly agglutinative from time immemorial. They have also an alphabet, of Indo-Thibetan origin it is believed ; but they do not seem to have profited to any consider- Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 89 able extent, any more tlian the Thibetans or the Siamese, by the possession of this precious instrument of progress. The latter have, it is true, been reduced to intellectual childhood by Buddhism. In Corea, Buddhism is, as it is in China, at once official and despised, and the cause which has hitherto retained the country in a semi-barbarous condition must be sought in the in- fluence of fear. The country is threatened at once by China and Japan, by Russia and by the Western Powers. This varied country, as large as the half of France, and peopled by at least eight millions of short broad- shouldered men with a type of face like that of the Japanese, and by a bearded race with horizontal eyes and light skin (the Han, descendants of immigrants from Nan-Ohang), opens its ports to other nations only under constraint. The Japanese have invaded it several times, notably in i 591, and exacted a tribute in which figured thirty human skins, and have recently established two trading ports on the south-east coast*; the Chinese, who left it alone for sixteen centuries, deprived it in the seventeenth century, but only for a short time, of its north-western provinces ; the French and the Americans have both made vain demonstrations at the mouth of the Hang-Kang, the river which waters Seoul, the capital. The Catholic and Protestant missions have made little way ; their labours have availed at least to give us those geographical details from which Anville has traced the outlines of Corea, and some valuable information regarding the people, its customs, and government, A Corean-French dic- tionary, the work of a priest who escaped the massacre of 1866, a Corean grammar in French, published at Yokohama, the fine collection brought back by a tra- veller and exhibited in 1889 at the Trocadero, and, go Distribution of Languages and Races. lastly, the perseverance of the Japanese, the English, and the Eussians, will sooner or later dissipate the obscurity which hangs over this nation, but may per- haps diminish the interest which is born of mystery and curiosity. Indeed, we know of the Corean people all that matters for our present purpose : the nominal power of an absolute king, the real power of the great chiefs who surround him with all the forms of a servile respect ; the division of the nation into nobles, plebeians, and slaves ; the sequestration of the married women ; polygamy ; the belief in genii and ancestor-worship ; survivals of iire-worship ; the rigour of mourning, which obliges a son to weep for his father three times a day at stated hours for three years, and to abstain for the same period from all public functions. None of these are uncommon customs, but two or three peculiarities deserve mention. The Ooreans do not spin or weave wool ; in winter they wear a greater amount of hempen and cotton clothing, and their soldiers wear cuirasses lined with many folds of similar material, which were proof against the bullets of old time ; violet and olive green are the favourite colours, white and green being reserved for moumingf. ■ A few more words are necessary about the language of the Kaokaiuli or Korai (of which we have made Ooreans ; it is the name of one of the northern pro- vinces, but they prefer to give their country a name which recalls its situation between the empire of the centre and the land of the rising sun ; Tchiaosien, the clearness of morning). In grammatical structure, says the missionary Dallet, Corean somewhat resembles the Uralian and Tongouse idioms. The terminations of the verbs vary according to the sex and condition of the interlocutors. The Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 9 1 prbnimciation is harsh and full of aspirates, drawling and indistinct ; each phrase ends with a peculiar guttural difficult to reproduce. The liquid I is "not clearly heard. The vowels, fourteen in number, are uncertain and incline to be diphthongs. The written character consists of rather more than 200 signs, some syllabic, others alphabetical, but educated people disdain to use them. " The introduction of a number of foreign words, Chinese in the north, Japanese in the south, has given birth," says Elisde Keclus, " to various jargons which are widely spoken in the centres of commerce. Chinese is the official language. Just as in Europe in the Middle Ages, Latin, the language of the lettered, persisted side by side with the local idiom, so the written Chinese is maintained in Corea together with the language of the people ; but it is pronounced in such fashion that the Chinese could not understand it without an interpreter. According to the missionary Daveluy, the language of many districts is composed entirely of Chinese words, but with Corean terminations. In brief, every place, every person, every thing has two names, one Corean, the other Coreanised Chinese, and these synonyms enter freely into the speech of all classes." The vocabulary is mixed, not the structure ; the agglutinative character is found even in the elements borrowed from the Chinese monosyllabism. Over against the immobility of China and the mis- trust of Corea we find a people eager for civilisation. No sooner had treaties, extorted by intimidation, opened five or six ports to Europeans, than this land, which from the sixteenth century violently opposed the foreigner, Japan, or rather Nippon, which mas- sacred missionaries and forced the Dutch to spit upon 92 Distribution of Languages and Races. the cross, became suddenly enamoured of our ideas, of our law, of our science, and made a vigoious effort towards progress. A reforming government put an end to the feudal daimos, to the military usurpation of the Syogun or Taikoun, centralised the administra- tion, caused a code of laws to be drawn up by French lawyers, projected railways, established schools every- where, destroyed the Buddhist temples under pretext of restoring the ancient worship of genii, published newspapers, sent students to Paris, London, and Berlin, to learn our languages, our manners, and institutions. And recently we have learned that the Mikado, the son of the rising sun, the ancient and divine head of a theocracy, has summoned an elected parliament. It is possible to have diverse opinions as to the future of a change so radical and urged forward with such unusual haste. In any case, it commands attention and sympathy; it is not possible to look coldly on those who welcome us with open arms. But what is the history of this people, which seems to be ancient and which yet shows all the signs of a vigorous youth ? A complete answer to this question would take us altogether beyond our subject, but some attempt must be made. Japan was inhabited before the dawn of history ; instruments of stone and of bone have been discovered in different parts of the Archipelago, in tumuli and kitchen-middens, mingled with the bones of monkeys, bears, boars, and deer, and of other animals, some of which are now extinct. Human bones fractured and split longitudinally even seem to point to cannibalism. It is not known what this ancient race was, nor whether it is represented by Negritos, who transmitted their woolly hair to some of the southern groups of Kiu-siu, or by the Ainus Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 93 (Yebiss or Mao-tsin of the Chinese), a hairy race which certainly long occupied the great island of Nippon or Hondo. At a very early period an in- vasion from Oorea, attacking Kiu-siu from the islands of Tsou-siina and Iki, drove back to the north-east the majority of the Ainns. These Coreans, the Kmapo or Ion-90, appear to have been plebeians or country folk of the Mongoloid type : the face wide and lozenge-shaped, retreating forehead, eyes narrow and oblique, short nose, high cheek-bones, and yellow skin. Finally, towards the seventh century before our era, tradition speaks of the arrival of a legendary con- queror, Kaniou-Tamato-Vare-Bixo, and of a new race, the Yamatos, which furnished the aristocratic element and the type with the oval face, straight forehead, narrow and often aquiline nose, horizontal almond- shaped eyes, and olive skin, a type which recalls in miniature the Malayo - Polynesian. The Yamatos, landing on the south-east of Kiu-siu, drove back by degrees the Kma90 towards the north-east. The fusion between the two races was slow ; the strife was prolonged to the middle of the second century of the Christian era. The Ainus, driven from Nippon in the seventh, held their own from the ninth to the sixteenth century in the island of Yeso. Then they lost their independence and retreated towards the extreme north of Yeso, and into the little archipelago of the Kouriles. They now number less than twenty thousand and are gradually dwindling ; but here and there atavism revives some of their characteristics in their ancient home. The civilisation of Japan was tardy and entirely Chinese. It was not until the sixth century that the worship and doctrine of Confucius, Ko-si, the 94 Distribution of Languages and Races. religion of Qaka (Qakyamouni), Buddhism, and tlie Chinese character, all penetrated to Japan by way of Corea. While the Mikado, the sacred emperor, re- mained faithful to his ancestors, the genii or Kamis, and to the ancient national religion, Shintoism, his lieutenant, or mayor of the palace, the Syognn who usurped the civil and military power, embraced Buddhism. Confucius became and remains the teacher of the lettered class. These three religions have mutually borrowed from each other and live in harmony, although Shintoism has again become the state religion. The aristocracy has passed from Con- fucianism to complete scepticism. But I leave the description of the manners and the arts of Japan, which the accounts of travellers, the novels of Pierre Loti, and the caprices of fashion have made familiar to all. " Japanese literature," says M. Julien Vinson, " is very rich ; in the last eight hundred years innumer- able works of poetry, of mystic philosophy, and even of science, have been composed in the archipelago of Nippon. The earliest known works are the Kosiki, the sacred book or bible of Shintoism, which dates from the year 712, and the Yamato-boumi, or ancient national annals." This literary and intellectual de- velopment is sensibly later than the indirect inter- vention of China in the history of Japan. This fact has had a marked influence on the fate of the national language, Yamato, the language brought by the early invaders from the south-east. The intrusion of mono- syllabism, and especially of so inconvenient a char- acter, paralysed Japanese, and arrested it at the first stage of agglutination, between declension and con- jugation, cut short its tendency towards the inflected state, and encumbered it with a quantity of Chinese Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 95 words to such an extent that the populace speak a sort of hybrid tongue, and the pure Yamato remains the appanage of the aristocracy, of the lettered class, and of the demi-monde. Nothing can be softer or simpler than the pro- nunciation. Five vowels, a, i, ou, 4, 0; four semi- vowels, y, V, vj, f or h ; one liquid, r ; three nasals, gn, n, m; four sibilants, s, ch, z, j ; four palatals, ts, toh, dj, dz ; finally, the six explosives and true con- sonants, h, g, t, d, p,i; I is wanting. The pronuncia- tion clearly shows the tendencies towards inflection mentioned above ; letters are modified by contact, ts and k become kJc ; ts and t become ss ; ts and p be- come pp ; n and v become h, &c. The final vowel is aJmost mute ; m and k fall by contraction between u and i ; uki is pronounced wi. These are Indo- European phenomena. KoTe, this man, and kare, that man, kimi, lord, and kami, genius, seem to be modi- fications of a same root. The declension is by the aid of sufiixed particles which have come to signify only a sense of relation : tsu, no, imply possession ; m, he, ye, e, towards ; to, for ; te, ni, in, by ; yori, ablative ; ka, ga, nga, na, partitive ; Yuki-ga fwru, it snows ; ama-tsu kami, genius of heaven ; Yedove, to Yedo ; inisive yori, from antiquity ; Yedoveno missi, road to Yedo ; Yamanove, from the mountain. The nominative and the accusa- tive are marked by a species of definite article, wa, wo. Gender is indetermined ; number is indicated in the Chinese way by the addition of a word signifying quantity, variety, or crowd, and also more frequently by a reduplication which is found also in Malay : kuniguni, lands; tokoro-dokoro, ]p\a,ces ; JUo-hito, per- sons ; iroirono-fana, flowers. g6 Distribution of Langttages and Races. It is curious that the personal pronouns are want- ing, unless indeed, mi-ga and mi-domo, I, we, formed by adding a suffix to the word mi, body, can be con- sidered such ; it may be said too that, in expressing the third person by the demonstrative, Yamato con- forms to what is almost universal usage. Still one cannot but be struck by the singularity of the forms which stand for /, thou, we, you. A Japanese does not say, I see thee, we see you ; but, this man see illustriov^, honoured, grandeur, lord; or again, slave, imbecile, selfishness see height, nohility. It would seem that the extreme politeness inherent in the Japanese character has prevented the formation of personal pronouns, or, if they existed, has caused them to fall into disuse. For lack of personal pronouns there is no con- jugation. The verbs have remained simple substan- tives, which are declined by the aid of noun suffixes which allow them to be compared to Indo-European infinitives. Yuhu, movement ; yuku-wa, the going, to go ; ahe, opening, sight ; fana wo akeni, flower to open, to see ; to open a flower, to see a flower. Mood, tense, and voice are all expressed by the addition of different suffixes, ta, mu, tara, and by the use of an auxiliary, are, uru, existence, to be. The dative e forms the termination of the passive ; and analogous methods produce reflective, causative, and negative forms. Japanese, in short, is a language beautiful in sound, very simple and easy to learn, and capable of clearly expressing a great number of ideas. I mean the spoken language ; written, it becomes an indecipher- able medley. The Chinese character has been destruc- tive of all order and reason ; now it is considered Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 97 merely as a sign, and corresponds to a Japanese poly- syllable ; now it retains its Chinese monosyllabic pronunciation, and answers to only one syllable in Japanese. In the former case it keeps its meaning and loses its original pronunciation, it then needs a translation to render it intelligible ; in the second case it is only a very inconvenient syllabic character. In one place a single monosyllabic sign represents a poly- syllable ; in another several Chinese signs are required to express one Japanese word ^ so that the same sign may be pronounced in several different ways, and several signs conveying different meanings may be pronounced alike. It seems that this strange use of Chinese chai-acters is more especially the rule when dealing with abstractions and scientific matters — that is to say, precisely where they ai-e most inappropriate. So persistent an adherence to an absurd custom shows to what a degree the subtle and brilliant Children of the Sun had been struck by the Chinese power and civilisation, and penetrated with respect for the wisdom of the mandarins. They possessed themselves more than one syllabic character, imperfect doubtless, but a thou- sand times superior to the Chinese system. The Buddhists had even contributed an alphabet, the Sinzi or divine, probably of Indian origin. There are seven syllabic characters, of which the most used are the lateral, the Kata kana, and the cursive, Hira hana or Fira Tcana. 'J'he first consists of explanatory signs written in small type beside the ideograms ; the second has no relation to the Chinese character. These systems consist of forty-eight characters. In- stead of recognising their evident superiority, the Japanese taught, perhaps still teach, a minimum of 3000 ideograms in their schools, which are even then 98 Distribution of Languages and Races. insufficient ; if the scholar would acquire a real culti- vation, he must retain not three, but eight thousand, or the literature of his own country will remain closed to him. The modern Japanese feel the necessity of sim- plification ; at the first Oriental Congress, held in Paris in 1873, the Japanese ambassador expressed in very correct French the desire to see the adoption by his country of an international alphabet. No, language would lend itself more easily to our character, slightly modified if necessary. This wish will probably be realised shortly ; but if they are to reject without regret all the Chinese lumber, the Japanese must first transcribe into modern letters all their ancient authors and their most precious documents, and resign them- selves to the gradual loss of comprehension of their rich literature. If they come to this decision, they will have imposed upon themselves the wholesome necessity of a new renaissance. The Yamato language, arrested at the first stage of agglutination, endowed with a tendency to inflexion, is not akin, any more than Corean, by vocabulary, either to Chinese or to the idioms of the Sakhalin Island (ceded to the Russians) and of the coast of Asia. The world is full of these solitary idioms, which are born in and for a single tribe, or wjiich have changed several times, perhaps after having separated from allied dia- lects. We shall find in Africa and in America groups of savages who wear out a language in fifty years ; but for the moment we are concerned with North- Bastern Asia. The languages known as Hyperborean — Ainu or Kourilien, Ghiliak, Kamtchadale, Koriak, Youkaghir, Tuhouktche or Kotte or Yenissein — seem to form a small and poor agglutinative family. They all differ, Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 99 more or less, like the tribes which speak them — fishers or hunters, living some in tents, some in rude huts or in holes, dens hollowed out of the frozen soil; tribes which worship the bear and the whale, and believe in charms and sorcerers ; some of them throw their dead to the dogs. The Ghiliaks, who now number only 6000, inhabit the north of Sakhalin and on the main- land the environs of Nikholaievsk and of the Lower Amur ; they will soon be engulfed by the Tongouses and the Russians. The Kamtchadales or Itelman, a dirty and inoffensive race, occupy the south of the Kamt- chatka ; tliey are perhaps connected by the Aleoutes to the Esquimaux of Alaska. The north of Kamtchatka belongs to the Koriaks and to the Tchoutktches. Beside these last, on the river Kolima, the Youkaghirs, tall and relatively handsome, a very mixed race, but distinct from the Samoyeds, have been driven back upon the Arctic Sea by the Tongouses and the Yakoutes. It is probable that all these groups are the last repre- sentatives of nations which formerly occupied a much more extended area in Eastern Siberia, and have not been able to resist the ancient pressure of the Chinese and the expansion in every direction of the Mongols and the Turks. They seem to be all more or less akin, at least from the point of view of language, to the Samoyed branch which borders the north-west of Siberia and the north-east of European Russia. All these tribes, who are not more wretched than others in their almost animal ignorance and under their harsli climate, are far from being or from think- ing themselves the lowest of humanity ; they glory, for the most part, in the name of heroes (this is generally the meaning of their name) ; they are aware of social distinctions ; they have their nobles and their priests, lOO Distribution of Languages and Races. their code of honour and morals. I would not omit them from this list ; it is useful to show how ill the infinite variety of human types and idioms agrees with the long-accepted dogma of the original unity of the human race and language. We come now to a true linguistic family, not in- deed closely allied, like the inflected groups, by filiation and constant relationship, but in which, nevertheless, the identity of certain pronominal roots permits us to suppose, if nob to reconstruct, a single ancestral form, a common vocabulary. This is the Uralo- Altaic family, of which the vast extent formerly suggested to Max Miiller his idea of a Turanian family, in which he essayed to class all those idioms which are neither Semitic nor Indo-European. But the hypothesis fell to pieces before the impossibility of ranging together the African, American, Malay, and Dravidian groups, in which there is no characteristic common to all ex- cept the agglutinative method. The classing together of these fundamentally different families only tends to throw the science of language into hopeless confusion. The vague and insufficient designation of Uralo- Altaic merely indicates the primitive area of the family ; it tells us that all the branches of this immense tree germinated between the Altai' Mountains and the Arctic Ocean, between the Sea of Okotsk and the Ural Moun- tains. The first branch is Samoyed, of which the Finlander Castren has made a study. Ifc extends, in Europe, along the eastern half of the Russian coast of the Arctic Sea as far as the White Sea ; in Asia, along the western part of the Siberian coast. Its five prin- cipal dialects, Yourak, Tavghi, Yenissein Samoyed, Ostiac Samoyed, and Kamassin, are not spoken by Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia, loi more than 20,000 individuals. The category of gender is unknown to Samoyed ; the noun and the verb are not distinguished : Lutsa, Russian ; Lutsa-me, I am a Russian. Like all the agglutinative languages, it ex- presses by means of suffixes all the relations of num- ber, case, person, mood and tense. There are various methods of derivation. Tongouse, a group which is a near neighbour to the Samoyed, is more important from the number of those who speak it> The little Tongouse people, active, cheerful and hospitable, who live on and by the rein- deer — a type with round face, narrow eyes, and square forehead — occupies that part of Siberia which lies between the river Tongouska and the district of the Lower Amur. The Mahdchus, who number 70,000, to the south of the great river Amur, are really a branch of the Tongouses, which was formerly nomadic and warlike, and became in the seventeenth century the masters of China. To this day their eight banners form the nucleus of the Chinese army. The reigning dynasty is Mandchu, and the Mandchu gen eral-in- chief is still, officially, the commander of all the forces of the immense empire, in many parts of which, doubtless, the very name and existence of the Mandchus are un- known. These chance conquerors occupy the north- east of China. They have retained their Ohamanist religion and their language. But, as in the case of the Japanese, the superior influence of the monosyllabic Chinese has hindered this language in its natural evo- lution ; so much so, that the independent Tongouse, which is not a written language, is richer in gram- matical forms than its more civilised brother, which is promoted to the rank of a literary idiom. Mandchu has no conjugation, whereas the Tongouse verb abounds 8 I02 Distribution of Languages and Races. in suffixed forms. Tongonse, like Saraoyed, has uo gender, but it expresses very completely all casual relations; it forms derivatives by combinations of suffixes, and true compounds with a common termina- tion. The pronunciation of Tongouse is fluid and plea- sant to the ear. The principal dialects are Tongouse, Mandchu, Lamout, Anadyr, Kondogyr, and Vilui. A third group has for centre the Lake Baikal, and for type Bouriate, spoken by 20,000 persons. M. Lucien Adam, who, with M. Victor Henry, must be the guide of those who would make a serious study of the Uralo- Altaic family, ranks this language very high in the scale, though it is without literature and has no future. He thinks the grammatical development of Bouriate important, inasmuch as it shows the inter- mediate forms through which pronouns have passed in order to become suffixes. Side by side with Bouriate have grown up, on the south-east, the Mongolian spoken in Mongolia proper, in the central part of Northern China, to the west of the Mandchu territory ; and in the west, the Western Mongolian or Kalmuck, which has penetrated into Russia as far as the mouths of the Volga. The brilliant and terrible history of the Mon- gols, to-day an exhausted race, has given them a pre- eminence which is not justified by the organisation of their language. Mongolian has, however, like Mandchu, a written character and a literature. What a contrast between its present obscurity and the tumult of the multitudes led Iby Zenghis Khan to the conquest of the world ! From the foot of the Altai' Mountains a torrent of disciplined hordes under Zenghis Khan spread east- ward over China and deposed the Yuan dynasty, which Marco Polo had seen in all its power. In the west it Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 103 overthrew the Caliphs of Bagdad and the Sultans of Iconium, reached Moscow, and wasted the greater part of Russia, which remained during two centuries under the domination of the Golden Horde ; invaded Poland, Moravia, Silesia, Hungary (1240—41), and was only stayed by the combined armies of the Germans and Slavs. In the fourteenth century the Mongols, rallied by Timour, reconquered Asia. Finally, from Bactriana, where a Mongol dynasty had established itself, Baber came down to the conquest of India, and founded there the Mogul Empire. But now the Mongols have to vegetate as the subjects of the nations of which they were once the masters — of the Mandchu rulers of China, of the Czars of Russia, and of the Sultans of Turkey. They once were free of soul ; superstitious doubtless, they were not bowed beneath the yoke of any religion. But they have long been Mussulman or Buddhist ; their part is played out. We pass to the fourth branch, which has done the world no less harm than the preceding one. The region which it still covers with its shade is of vast extent ; it stretches from the river Lena and the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean. The Turkish family, the Hiung-nu and the Tukiu of Chinese writers, the Turan- ians so dreaded by the ancient Persians, were already known and feared two centuries before our era. Their warlike character, and their constant attacks upon the Mongols, who were a nomadic and pastoral people, con- tributed most certainly to precipitate upon the west all those invasions which destroyed the ancient civilisa- tions and constituted at length modern Europe. Even a brief summary of the history of the innumerable tribes — Tatars, Turcomans, Seljuks, Ottomans — which belong to this family would take us too far from our I04 Distribution of Languages and Races. present subject. The Turkish race is divided into five principal branches, to which are attached a number of dialects. The most northerly, scattered among the Tongouses and near to the Bouriates, is represented by Yakout, which is remarkable for the purity which it owes to its long isolation ; it is spoken by hardly more than 20,000 people. Farther west the Cossack Kirghis stretch to the Sea of Aral and the Caspian, and to the south of these and on their left, in. Chinese Turkestan, towards Kashgar, lie the black Kirghis or Bouroutes. Tchouvache, spoken in Eussia in the south-west of Khazan and in the neighbourhood of Simbirsk, is classed with these dialects. The Kirghis came origin- ally from the district which lies between the Yenissei and the Obi ; their kinsmen and near neighbours were the Nogais, of whom the remnant (50,000 in number) now inhabit Astrakhan and a few districts between the Caspian and the Black Sea, near Azof, in the Crimea, and towards the Caucasus. Nogaic, with its Cauca- sian dialect Koumouk, is the language of the Russian Tatars. Better known and cultivated is Ouigour, with its Djataic and Turcoman varieties; it boasts a literature which dates from the fifth century of the Christian era; it has been recently studied by Pavet de Courteille and M. Barbier de Meynard. The Bib- liothfeque Nationale has a manuscript with illuminations in this language, which is of great value. Finally, the most celebrated, and from some points of view the most perfect, of the Turkish idioms, Osmanli or Otto- man, originally from Khorassan, carried by the Sel- jukian bands into Asia Minor, and by the heirs of Othman to Constatitinople, Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunis, is the language of about thirty millions of people, who inhabit ancient Bactriana, Media, Asia Minor, Thracia, Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 105 and some of the Greek islands. Osmanli, which has gathered on its route a great number of Persian and Arabic words, is making some effort to return to its native purity, which is happily preserved among the Oriental Turks, and, even in Europe, in the speech of the populace. It is, as we have already said, a very attractive language, from the harmony of its vowels, the wealth of its verbal categories, and the regularity of its grammar. But even the Turkish branch hardly equals in abun- dance and in interest the Finnish or Finno-Hungarian family, which can boast of two literatures, valuable on more than one count — the Suomi literature and the Magyar literature. Suomi is the language of Finland ; Magyar is the idiom of Hungary. The latter is the more fortunate brother of the Ostiac (20,000) and Vogoul (7000) dialects of Siberia ; the former, primics inter pares, is the type of the Finnish peoples which extend westward from the Obi and the Ural : Votiacs (200,000), Zyrienes (80,000), Permians (60,000) ; Finno-Lapps, Finlanders of the Volga, Mordvines (700,000), Tcheremisses (200,000), confused with the Tchouvaches and the Nogais ; Karelians, scattered from the White Sea to the Lake of Ladoga ; Suomia (to the number of 2,000,000) in the greater part of Finland ; li'choudes, Vepses, and Votes, round Lake Onega ; Cfevines in Courland ;. Estes on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland (Revel, Dorpat) ; finally, Livonians, reduced to a few square miles by the pres- sure of Lithuanians, Germans, and Russians. The Finnish languages are spoken by about 3,300,000 people ; the Hungarian by perhaps 6,000,000 ; but they have evidently covered an immense extent of territory. io6 Distribution of Languages and Races. The primitive union of the Pinno-Hungarian group admits of no doubt; here, as in each of the other divisions of the Uralo-Altaic family, we find words which testify to an original form common to all the subdivisions of that family ; fish is Ttala in Suomi, guolle in Lapp, Iml in Mordvin, hvl in Vogoul, hal in Magyar. Hand is Teat in Vogoul, Mfe, Ixt, or litd in Suomi, Lapp, Tcheremisse, and Ostiac, lidsi, cdiz, kez, in Vepse, Este, Livonian, and Magyar. The slight differences of sound which distinguish these variants perhaps indicate the method of procedure in inflected languages ; born of the encounter of several dialects, they may have made use of the variants which thus occurred. Another proof of the unity of the Finnish group is found in the collection in one poem (as was doubtless the case with the Iliad) of episodes gathered by Lonn- rot, not in Finland only, but throughout the north and east of Eussia. This mosaic constitutes, in truth, the epic of a race ; it relates the exploits accomplished by the heroes of Kaleva against the Magicians and the monsters of Pohja, that is to say, no doubt, the strife of invaders from the East with either the inoffensive Lapps who had preceded them, or against the savage aborigines, those Fenni, destitute of laws, of chiefs, and even of gods, of whom Tacitus had heard, whose name the conquering Suomis took together with their ter- ritory. The Magyar literature is richer, more European, and more ancient, but less original than the legendary cycle of the Suomi Cantelar and Kaleva. The two languages are of equal merit. Suomi loves to multiply its vowels ; Magyar makes a greater use of contrac- tions. Both are remarkable for the richness of their Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 1 07 conjugation ; they surpass even Turkish in this respect. All the Finnish dialects can incorporate the accusative of the third person into the verb : I see him, I touch him, is said in a single word. Magyar and Vogoul incorporate the pronoun of the second person : I love thee, he loves thee. Mordvin does the same with the pronoun of the first person. Basque goes yet farther, and engulfs even the dative with the verb : I give it thee. These expedients are not to be envied, and may cause inconvenient pleonasms ; but they imply a cer- tain ingenuity in the peoples which have not got beyond agglutination. Can the relationship which is traceable between the dialects of each branch of the Altaic family be shown to exist between the five branches ? Not in the pre- sent state of our knowledge. Nevertheless, it is pro- bable that races which are as near neighbours and as mixed as the Tongouses, the Bouriates, the Yakoutes, the Samoyeds, and the Vogouls have spoken kindred dialects. But the similarities which it is as yet pre- mature to seek in their vocabularies appear numerous and unmistakable in their syntax and their methods of suffixing. It is especially curious to note in almost all the members of the family (except the Samoyeds) a tendency which has become more and more marked as the development of the intelligence demanded greater order and precision. It is difiBcult not to suppose that when the same phenomenon, vowel harmony, manifests itself at once, separately, in thirty different languages, all originating in the same region, but since scattered in various quarters — it is, I say, difficult not to suppose that these languages , have received from a common original this latent disposition, which only becomes manifest at a certain stage of growth, like 1 08 Distribution of Languages and Races. those resemblances to some ancestor which may be nnperceived in the children of a family, and become evident as they grow up to manhood. Vowel harmony is a means of marking the subordi- nation of the suffix to the root ; its principle is that the vowel of the suffix should reflect the vowel of the root ; that the root se,v (Turkish), love, should have fop the infinitive suffix mek, and the root ha, look, for infinitive suffix mak ; at, horse, makes atlar in the plural ; ev, house, is evler in the plural. The Uralo- Altaic vowels, being divided into two classes, open and shut vowels, it follows that to an open root - vowel corresponds an open vowel in the suffix, and vice versd. Certain languages have a third order of vowels, neuters, which can also harmonise with the open vowel of the root. There are differences in the application of this law, which is strict or lax in proportion to the degree of cultivation to which the language has attained ; but, broadly speaking, the law has obtained for six or seven centuries in Mandchu, Bouriate, Mongolian, Turkish, Zyriene, Mordvin, Magyar, and Suomi. After having defined the narrow but capital distinction which separates agglutination from monosyllabism — - that is, the change in the suffix — or empty root attached to the unalterable root syllable, we have considered three sorts of agglutinative idioms : I. the isolated languages, of which the vocabulary is without relation to any other language, Corean, Japanese, or Yamato, arrested in its development by the Chinese civilisation and written character ; 2. the poor and remote dialects of North-Eastern Asia, Kourelien or Ainu, Ghilialc, Kamtchadale, Koriak, Toukaghir ; 3. a vast family connected at least by a grammatical relationship, the Uralo- Altaic family, of which the five branches, Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 1 09 Samoyed, Tongouse, Mandchu, Boriate-Mongol, Turkish, Finno - Hungarian, are all subdivided into numerous varieties, which may be respectively referred to a com- mon type, living or extinct. A few of these languages, Mandchu, Mongolian, Ouigour, Turkish, Magyar, and Suomi, have been the expression of literatures more or less rich, which are often interesting, and worthy of the part played in the world by tine peoples which speak them. CHAPTER III. THE AGGLUTINATIVE IDIOMS OF SOUTHERN ASIA. The Caucasian languages : Toherkesse group ; Kartvelien or Georgian group — The language of the Shumirs or Accadians — Brahui dialect • — Non-Aryan India : Kol-Aryan group (Djuangs, Birhors, Korvas, Moundas, Hos, Kharrias, Sonthals) ; Dravidian group — Dravi- dians of the North : Oraons, Paharyas, Gonds, Khonds — Dravi- dians of the Dekkan : dialects spoken by fifty millions of people : Tulu, Eanara, Tamil, Malayala, Telinga — Dravidian phonetics and literature. The violent and tardy incursions of the Uralo-Altaic peoples have led us far into Europe, and we must now return upon our steps to complete the chart of the agglutinative languages of Asia. Let us press along the northern coast of the Black Sea, where we have found more than one Tatar or Mongolian group, and re-enter Asia by the gorges of the Caucasus. It is a strange region, both from the place which it occupies in ancient tradition and from the inextricable mixture of the tribes which inhabit it. This region has had the honour of bestowing its name, of unknown origin, upon the whole white race. It contains the mountain on which, according to Jerome, the Ark of the Deluge was stayed, Ararat, and the summit on which the ven- geance of Zeus bound Prometheus, the ravisher of fire ; and finally, the highest northern summit of the great chain. Mount Elbruz, as well as the Persian Elbourz to the south of the Caspian, still bears the name of the Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 1 1 1 legendary holy mountain known to the Persians under the name of Hara - Barazaiti, and to the Greeks as Berecynth. The ancient traditions collected in the Bible have retained for us the former names of the Tuplai or Tibarenians, of the Muskai or Moschians (inhabitants of Colchis, Georgia, during the Assyrian and Persian period), Tubal and Meshech, sons of Japhet, whom the Jewish sometimes associate with Gomer (the Cimme- rians), and Togarma, " who comes from the north wind with all his troops." From the information furnished by Herodotus, by Hecateus, and by the cuneiform inscriptions, we gather that the ancients had a very clear idea of the inhabitants of Armenia, who were gradually driven back towards the southern slopes of the Caucasus, and a slighter acquaintance with the peoples of the other side, Scythians and Cimmerians, who had, however, more than once invaded and dis- turbed Asia. After having been a refuge for more or less com- pact groups of ancient peoples, driven out and broken up by better armed races, the Caucasus became a pas- sage, at least on its eastern and western borders, not only to the Scythians, those multitudes of unknown race, doubtless of very mixed blood, who overthrew the first Chaldean empire, and drove the Hyksos or Shep- herds on to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, but also for the vanguard of the Hellenes, the lonians of Lydia and Phrygia, who transmitted to their descendants, the fabled Argonauts, a vivid recollection of Colchis ; and also probably for the future Armenians, who came and settled precisely within the borders of the ancient Alarodian or Georgian race at Van, near the great lake, near the tri- lingual inscriptions, of which a 1 1 2 Distribution of Languages and Races. column may perhaps enlighten us as to the early forms of Georgian. Strabo counted in Caucasia seventy peoples and seventy dialects. The Eomans maintained as many as one hundred and thirty interpreters on the frontier at Sebastopol. Abonlfeda called the Cau- casus the mountain of languages. Many of these languages are in process of extinction, and the com- parative study of them becomes every day more diffi- cult. Yet, if we are guided by the information collected by Klaproth, by Baron TJslar, and by the Kussian Academician Schifner, the classification will not be very complicated. But we must first carefully exclude the Armenian of the banks of the Araxes, Ossetan, an Iranian idiom which has taken refuge in a central district to the south-east of Elbruz, modern Persian, and the Tatar or Turkish of Aderbaidjan, which are all spoken on the sonth-weEtern coasts of the Caspian, and also Nogai and Koumouk, which are found at different parts of the northern basin. We thus isolate the Caucasian group properly so called, represented to tlie north of the Caucasus by the Abazes, the Tcher- kesses, the Kistes, the Tchetchenes, and the Lesghians from the Black Sea to Daghestan ; to the south of the Caucasus, by the Imerethians, Mingrelians, and Lazes, by the Georgians and Suanians, between the Black Sea and the middle basin of the Cyrus and of the A rax (now Koura and Aras). On the maps and in the geography of Eeclus will be found the names of numerous tribes often very interesting from some characteristic custom, some ancient belief, from the beauty of their type, or from their courageous resistance to the Russian dominion. But from the linguistic point of view they probably belong to one or other of the two divisions which we mentioned above. AgglMtmative Idioms of Southern Asia, 1 1 3 It is doubtful whether the whole of the northern or Circassian group has a common origin; it has been so disorganised, so nearly obliterated, by the Russian conquest, that I doubt if it now comprises a million individuals. The Tcherkesse nation, which was Mussul- man, has almost all dispersed, and has been replaced by Slavs and Germans. A few Tcherkesse legends have been collected ; the language is hard, remarkable for certain sounds which are peculiar to it, and for the incorporation of the suffixes of number. The southern or Kartvelian group, early converted to Christianity, remains intact though not independent, to the number of one or two millions in the neighbour- hood of Koutais and Tiflis. It corresponds geographi- cally to the Colchis and Iberia of the ancients. Its principal dialect, Georgian, has an alphabet. Cultivated in the Middle Ages, it belongs, like Circassian, to the agglutinative class. Itwas probablyakin to the language of the Aghovanik or Albanians, which disappeared completely in the fifteenth century, leaving no traces in writing of its existence. The Georgian chronicles have been translated into French by M. Brosset. The names Iberians and Albanians, Georgians, Suanians, and Kartvelians require some explanation. The two first, which must not be confounded with the Albanians of Bpirus and the Iberians of Spain, are somewhat ancient. Albanian — Alwank in Armenian — is mentioned in the time of Alexander. Iberian, through the forms Wirg in Armenian, Amr in Pehlevi, A^etpes in Greek, goes back to a form ^a^etpoi, ^aa-iripei, given by Herodotus. The Saspires made part of the army of Xerxes. Georgian comes from the name of the saint chosen for patron by the Iberians. Kartvelian, Kartouli, is really a national name ; Karthlos, the eponymous hero of the 1 1 4 DistriBution of Languages and Races. race, was the son of Thargamos (the Togarma of the Bible), son of Japhet. Whence came these languages, which it is rash to class together in one Caucasian family, and of which the vocabulary forbids any attempt to bring them into relations with the other agglutinative idioms ? Whence came these peoples, this handsome race, similar in feature to the Iranian type, who were established in the neighbourhood of the Caucasus long before the development of the Assyrian Semites, before the arrival of the first Indo-European migrations ? These questions, like many others, must remain un- answered. I have sometimes thought that they were pre-Aryans — that is to say, a white race akin to those who wandered on the other side of the Caspian, on the banks of. the Jaxartes and the Oxus, and separated from these before the appearance, at first quite local, of inflexion and the Indo-European mother-tongue ; they would have remained at the agglutinative stage, protected by their mountains from the influence of a more advanced linguistic system. M. Lenormant connected them rather with the ancient inha,bitants of Mesopotamia and Chaldea, not by race however, but by language. In his view, the inscriptions deciphered with great difficulty at Van, which belong undoubtedly to the pre- Armenian tongue of the peoples of Mount Ararat, Urarti, or Alarodians, might serve as connecting link between the Georgian dialects, the Caucasian, and the more ancient idioms of Babylonia^ At the present day the obscurity which hung over the origins of Chaldea has been, if not dissipated, at least considerably diminished, thanks to the discoveries of those great cuneiform scholars Rawlinson and Opperfc Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 115 An insight which is truly marvellous has been able to reconstruct, not altogether without gaps, but from authentic documents, the military, social, and intel- lectual history of the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, from at least twenty centuries before our era. Names and dates have thus been recovered which had been much altered by the Hebrew writers, who were, nevertheless, so nearly akin to the Baby- lonians both in race and language. It has been found possible to separate the personal observations re- corded by Herodotus from the fables which the credulous historian set down on the faith of ignorant or duped interpreters — the stories, for instance, of Belus, Ninus, and Semiramis. Finally, side by side with a Semitic dialect which belongs to the central branch, midway between Aramaean and Arab, a language which abounds under the chisel of the scribes of Sennacherib and of Assourbanipal, MM. Oppert, Lenor- mant, and Schmidt think they have discovered, and established beyond a doubt, in spite of the strenuous opposition of M. J. Hal^vy, the presence of another language, anterior to the idiom of the Semitic con- querors, and so vigorous that it was long the official language of the kings of Babylon and Nineveh, aad that it still may be found on many inscriptions, over against the Assyrian text, in the manner of transla- tion or commentary. Some scholars have denied the existence of this language, which is markedly agglu- tinative, and of which several philologists have written the grammar ; it has been represented as an error in the deciphering, as a form, either archaic or symbolical, hieratic, so to speak, of ordinary Assyrian. I am not qualified to take a side in this debate, but whatever may be the truth about this second language found on 1 1 6 Distribution of Languages and Races. the Chaldean inscriptions, whether we should consider it, with M. HaMvy, to be cryptographic, Shumirian with M. Oppert, or Accadian with Lenormant, there is one point which admits of no doubt whatever, and that is the existence of the peoples to whom it is attributed. The Shumirs and the Accadians mentioned in the Bible are invariably mentioned in the official formulary: king of the Shumir and of the Accadians is a constant title of the Assyrian monarchs. In Blum, in Chaldea, in Babylonia, they form the bulk of the population ; we must, therefore, recognise in them the predecessors and the educators of the Kaldi (the Kasdim of the Bible), of the Kissi or Kossei or Kushites (whom M. Maspero identifies with the Oriental Ethiopians of Homer) ; finally, the Canaanites, Aramaeans, and Assyrians, all Semites, and speaking Semitic dialects. The antiquity of the Accado- Shumirian settlements is clearly demonstrated by the flint implements, arrow- heads, axes, and hammers found in their burying-places, together with utensils of bronze and ornaments of gold and iron. To them may be attributed a considerable share in the invention of the cosmogonies, the obscene forms of worship, and the talismanic superstitions which are so widely spread in the Bast ; and it is also from them that the Semites received the deplorable cunei- form character, afterwards adopted by the Hittites of Syria, by the Cypriotes, by the Armenians, and by the Persians. The cuneiform character, which seems to be com- posed of wedges, nails, and arrow-heads, results from the alteration and abbreviation of imitative figures. Its use, wonderful to relate, was prolonged as late as the first century of our era. " Some of these signs," says M. Maspero, " are true ideograms, which are not Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 1 1 7 always pronounced, and merely indicate the general sense; the greater number represent syllables, some- times simple, composed of a vowel and a consonant, or vice, versd; sometimes complex, formed of several con- sonants." The complex syllables may be written in two ways '. (i .) By decomposing them so as to form two simple syllables, of which the second always begins, in pronunciation, with the vowel of the first : thus the word napsat, soul, may be written na-ap-sa-at. (2.) By means of a special cliaracter answering to each syllable : nap-sat. Nabu-Kudur-Ussur may be spelt as written here, or thus : Jffa-bi-uv-ku-du-ur-ri-u-ts'u-ur. More- over, most of the signs may express several different sounds. Chinese and Egyptian have not imagined a more clumsy method. The decipherers have needed a hundred years to overcome the difficulties presented by the riddle of these inscriptions, to recognise the five or six extinct languages which have used the cunei- form character. It is but justice to recall here the names of the principal savants who have devoted them- selves to this task, and have carried it successfully through: Niebuhr, 1765; Tychsen, 1798; Munter, 1800; Gri'otefend, 1802; Eugene Bournouf and Las- sen, 1836; and more recently Rawlinson, Hi neks, Fox, Talbot, Lenormant, and Oppert. Thanks to these last, who are the creators of Assyrian science, thirty centuries of history have arisen in less than thirty years from out of the ruined tombs. After having deciphered the Babylonian, Ninevite, and Median texts, they have discovered the remains of the ancient Ohaldeo-Shumirian literature. The Shumirs and the Accadians have mingled with their Iranian and Semitic successors. Their name was hardly known, yet now we are led to regard thera 9 1 1 8 Distribution of Languages and Races. as holding a high rank among the industrial and religious teachers of the world. To what race did they belong ? Doubtless to an autochthonous people, dark of skin, intermediary between the Mongol and the Malay, between the blacks' of the east and the different varieties of Caucasian whites. Their lan- guage, recently discovered (if it be discovered), has been, somewhat prematurely, connected on the one hand with the extinct idioms of Mount Ararat and the yet living dialects of Georgia, and oh the other hand with the Dravidian family. We will be content with noting the agglutinative character, which implies no original relationship. On the route to India, where we shall find isolated or compact groups- of languages belonging to this immense class, we must stay a moment to consider some islets of peoples lost in the obscure chaos of Beluchistan, from Kej, Panjgur, and Palk, as far as the limits of Seistan. These are the Brahui or Birrhui, whose patois, though much mixed with Hindi and Persian, shows some Dravidian affinities. Its grammar, in any case, is agglutinative and very simple : no gender ; two numbers, singular and plural ; no relative pro- noun ; the adjective," which is invariable, precedes the substantive ; the verb, neuter or active, can take causa- tive and negative forms, admits but a single mood and three tenses, past, present, and future past. All derivation is by the aid of suffixes. India, which we now enter for the first time, is a world in itself ; it measures twenty-six by twenty-three geographical degrees, and contains a population equal to about two-thirds of the population of Europe, more than two hundred and fifty million inhabitants, of every colour and every race. By the western frontier, Aggbitinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 119 the basin of the Indus, the Aryan groups, relatively- few in number, but possessed of a very superior lan- guage and cultivation, descended slowly towards the affluents of the Ganges between the fifteenth and the tenth centuries before our era, and thence spread in every direction, north and eastward towards the Hima- layas and Indo-Oliina, to the south along the coasts, as far as Cape Comorin and the vast island of Ceylon. So great was their preponderance, that they have left an ineifaceable impress over this immense land ; neither internal wars nor invasion, nor durable conquest, has seriously affected the social organisation or the fanati- cal and scrupulous devotion of the Hindus educated by the Brahmans. But the number of the Aryans, of the white race, was too small to have any material influence on the blood of the multitude, or rather on the chaos of indigenous races. The meshes of the political, social, and religious net were never close enough to prevent all escape for the refractory groups, customs, and beliefs ; and even in regions which felt the Aryan influence most strongly, the expansive power of Sanscrit and its derivatives proved of no avail against the passive resistance of great masses of the population, who kept tbeir ancient languages, while using them to express the ideas which they learned from their conquerors. Thus, without counting the Europeans, the Jews, Parsees, and foreign Mussulmans, there are in India numerous barbarous or savage tribes which are un- touched by Brahmanism, tribes all the more precious to science that their manners and their langnages are a survival from pre-historic times. They have been called Kol-Aryans. Besides these tribes, which are chiefly found on the Ooromandel Coast and in the cen- 1 20 Distribution of Languages and Races. tral plateau or Ghondvana, millions of civilised men, who occupy the lower end of the Peninsula of Hindustan, between the Vindhyas and Cape Comorin, retain and cultivate their national dialects. These are the Dra- vidas or Dravidians, a race of very tnixed blood, whom certain ethnographers consider to be the resultant of two invasions, Thibetan and Uralo- Altaic, operating on an indigenous or, at any rate, a more ancient race. Some separate and some class together the Kol- Aryans and the Dravidians in regard to race and lan- guage; it would seen that the latest opinion of science inclines to separation, and forbids us to call the first Dravidians of the north, or even Proto- Dravidians. It is true that the name invented for them by Mr. George Campbell in 1866 is hardly more suitable. Kol might be allowed, since it is the name of one of the tribes in question ; but Aryan is misleading, because one of the characteristics of these peoples is that they have not been Aryanised. The Djuangs are the most savage ; their solemn oath is made upon an ant-heap or upon a tiger-skin. Little, naked, tattooed, red-brown in colour, bowmen or slingers, these poor wretches can neither spin nor weave, are ignorant of the potter's art and of the use of metals. The Birhors of the district of Hazaribagh and the Korvas of Chota Nagpur dispute the lowest place with them ; little, dark, tattooed, they live in the forest and build huts on steep rocks. The neighbours of these last Kols or Mundas, Hos and Bhumidjs (the name of the Bhumidjs seems to be Aryan ; it comes from bhumi, the earth, and is perhaps akin to the Latin homo for Jiumo), all these Kols form a total of about a million, some strong, thick-set, and chocolate-coloured, others tall, copper- coloured, with long coarse hair. They Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 121 neither spin nor weave, but can work in metals. They vow themselves to the tiger should they come short of their oath (which they nevertheless forget very readily). Some of their superstitions are curious ; if the shadow of a passer-by cross their food, they will not eat it, but throw it away; an evil spirit is in it.. The Kharrias, the Kurs, and especially the twelve tribes of the Sonthals, appear to be less unapproachable. They have houses ; some of them are cultivators, others readily leave their homes and enter service. The Sonthals number about a million, are smaller than the Aryan Hindus, have a round face, straight eyes, hair black and thick, snub nose, and large mouth. They are fond of music and dancing, bamboo flutes, rings, necklets, bracelets, and fine clothes. Their manners are not austere. The only written documents in the Kol dialects are some partial translations of the Bible into Mounda and Sonthal, and a few legends or songs collected by the curious. These present some interesting pecu- liarities, from the phonetic and grammatical point of view. They are very rich in vowels, and in addition to the spirants, palatals, and explosive consonants, they have other sounds difficult to define and imitate, which seem to be introduced into the Sanscrit alphabet under the name of cerebral or lingual letters. In the body of a word the consonants are separated from each other by supporting vowels, long, short, or even neuter, like the French e mute. Derivation is by sufBxes and infixes : dal, the action of beating ; da-pa-l, cushion ; da-na-pal, covering. The genders are not distin- guished, but the number has four or five forms — singular, plural, dual, the plural particular, and the plural .general : ain, I; abon, we all; cda, we others; 122 Distribution of Languages and Races. alin and aldn, we two, &c. The declension is very- full — genitive, dative, ablative, instrumental, and locative. The pronouns are personal, demonstrative, interro- gative. Placed after the noun, the personal pronouns give a possessive sense : apu, father ; apu-ling, our father ; apu-pe,, your father ; hopon, son ; hopon-in, my son. The relative pronoun is wanting ; the ad- jective, which is invariable, precedes the substantive. The verb, properly speaking, does not exist, since suffixes of person, place, and time can convert every noun and every adjective into verbal expressions. This is the case with all agglutinative languages, but the number of possible combinations and the use of auxiliaries place the Kol dialects on the same level as Turkish and Finnish, or even higher ; for they can not only make of their pseudo-verb a preposition which incorporates the direct and indirect objects ; not only can they make it active, passive, middle, causative, intensive, &c., but they have six or seven moods — indicative, imperative, potential, conditional, infinitive, gerundive, and participle ; and as many tenses — three presents, a preterite, an imperfect, and a pluperfect. Many of these methods are found also in Basque and the American dialects, and are wanting in Dravidian. It is not rare to find among uncivilised peoples a linguistic faculty superior to that of their neighbours or of their civilised kindred, but it is often difficult to explain this apparent anomaly. Here a probable solution has been found. The Kol-Aryans are the remnant of a fallen people who were at the time of the Brahmanic invasion at the head of the races of India. Though crushed and destroyed by the Aryans, they were yet powerful enough to modify and enrich Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 123 tlie Sanscrit pronunciation ; their influence is still to be discerned in the use, confined to India, of the so-called cerebral consonants, and perhaps in the complexity of the Sanscrit conjugation. The races to which the Aryans give the name of Drayidas stop short, on the contrary, at the first stages of the evolution of agglutination. Their northern and central groups, Oraons of Bengal, Ghonds of Ghond- vana, Khonds of Orissa, &c., have remained in their primitive condition, and the great masses of the Dekkan, fifty millions, while they accept with docility the education, ideas, and beliefs of their conquerors, have yet kept, and very cleverly utilised, the poor organisation of their rudimentary languages. It is probable that the Dravidians of the north and centre are nearer to the primitive type than their Aryan- ised kindred of the Dekkan. The Oraons of Bengal, num- bering about 600,000, say themselves that they come from the west, but they have nothing of the Turanian or Mongol ; they have low and narrow foreheads, curly hair, eyes large and well opened, long eyebrows, pro- minent teeth and jaws; their colour is dark-brown and their body well proportioned. They are fond of copper ornaments, and load their heads, necks, and arras with them. They often intoxicate themselves with a spirit distilled from rice. They have their dances, their banners, their feasts, their tribal gods, and their thousand superstitions and rites common all over the earth to all races whose creed is a vague animism. The Oraons live with their animals in miser- able huts. In the villages where the ancient customs are preserved, two exactly contrary to each other may be noted ; in one tribe the unmarried of both sexes sleep under the same roof, in another the young men 124 Distribution of Languages and Races. pass the night in a special cabin under the guard of an old man, the girls being under the charge of the elder widows. The primitive Oraons hesitated between promiscuity and decency, their descendants have not yet made their choice. From the banks of the Ganges to those of the Brahmaputra, the Eajmali^ls, Meiers, or Pah§,ryas (mountaineers), 400,000, build bouses of bamboo surrounded with gardens and orchards ; they also like strong waters made from rice and sorghum. They practise divination and have an animistic creed. The Aryans took from them the doctrine of metempsy- chosis. They are polygarnists ; they bury their dead. They differ from the Oraons by their oval face, their thick lips, and their long hair knotted up on the head. There are Ghonds (50,000) in Bengal, but their principal habitat is Ghondvana, a dangerous cen- tral district. Their twenty tribes or castes are among the most savage of India ; they are half naked, they shave their heads, their weapons are an axe and a pike ; they set fire to the forests to sow their crops, aud poison the waters to obtain fish. These are the ogres or Ratchas of the Brahmanic legends. There is a natural confusion between these Ghonds with flat face, with thick black hair, smooth or slightly waved, very da.rk skin, and fragile lower limbs, and the Khonds, who are smaller, but equally dark ; they live in the south of Bengal, on the coast of Orissa, are full of sanguinary superstitions, and practise human sacrifice. These diSerent tribes speak dialects which are akin to the Dravidian languages. But the Dravidians proper, whom we shall find in Mysore and in the Dekkan, who are, moreover, very much crossed witli Aryan blood, have retained nothing of the savagery Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 125 of their congeners. They are a civilised people, who have their cities, their monuments, their industries, and their literature ; they were the first to enter into relation with the Europeans, with the Portuguese and Dutch ; and the little which remains to the French of the empire which Dupleix and Labourdonnais souglit to found is all, with the exception of Chandernagor, situated on their coasts. Sixty thousand Dravido- French electors send a deputy and a senator to the French Assembly. One of our most eminent philologists, M. Julien Vinson, was brought up among them, and writes and speaks their language as he does Basque and French. We can have no surer guide, and we will take from him our account of the history, domain, languages, and literature of the Dravidians. " The existence of the Dravidian tongues is proved by history from very early times. Tamil words, geogra- phical names, Sangara, Pandion, Madoura, occur in Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny, and in Arrian in his ' Circum- navigation of the Red Sea.' A Sanscrit writer of the seventh century, KumS,rilabhatta, quotes a few common Tamil words, nader, step ; pdmb, snake. The name given to the peacock, mentioned in the Book of Kings as among the birds brought from Ophir to Solomon, thuJd, togei, is believed to be Tamil. From the time of the arrival of the Portuguese at Goa, the Jesuits, for the purposes of their propaganda, studied the native idioms. Towards 1550 they were teaching Malaysia and Tamil in their seminary at Ambalakkadu, near Cochin. In 1577 they published a Dodrina Chris- tiana in Malaysia by means of characters engraved on wood by a lay brother of their order ; in 1578 they printed in Tamil a book of devotions." 126 Distribution of Languages and Races. It was through the Dravidians that these missionaries studied the manners and the religions of India and the Sanscrit language. It was natural that, later, when the French Jesuit Cceurdoux and the first Eng- lish rulers had pointed out the relations of Sanscrit with Latin and Greek, the southern languages and traditions should be neglected. Interest centred on the Ganges and the Indus. Following the general tendency of their day, and misled besides by the con- siderable number of words borrowed from Sanscrit by the Dravidian vocabulary, Indian scholars (Carey in 1 8 1 4) treated Tamil and its congeners as derived, as descended from Sanscrit. This error is disproved by the Indians themselves. More accurate ideas pre- vailed, and in 1 8 1 6 Ellis first aflBrmed the original independence of Tamil, Kanara, and Telinga, which is now universally admitted. There is no doubt that the Dravidas, whom Vinson thinks identical with the ancient Parias, about whom so many fables are told, once occupied a much more extended area, beside the Kol- Aryans. Their present domain is more extensive than Italy, Prance, or Spain. It stretches from the tropic of Cancer to Cape Comorin, and into the northern half of Ceylon. There are five principal dialects : in the north-west, in the upper valley of the river Krishna, Kanara, Kanada, Kama- taka, is spoken by nine millions of people ; to the north-east Temougou, Telougou, Telinga, by fifteen millions, of whom 5000 inhabit the French settlement of Yamaon ; Telinga is spoken in the lower and middle basin of the Godavery and of the Krishna, and on the Coromandel coast. It is a language which has been tnuch modified, and is very soft and agreeable; it has been called the Italian of the Dekkan, and it is near Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 127 neighbour to the most archaic dialect, Kanara. On the east coast, and in the interior of the country, between Lake Pulicat, Bangalore, and Trivanderam, in the pro- vinces of Madras, Tanjore, and Travancore, in the French towns of Pondicherry and Karikal, fifteen mil- lions of men speak Tamil ; to the west, about Cochin and Cananore, and in the settlement of Mah4 Malaysia or Maleolum is the speech of three. and a half millions, separated from Kanara on the east by the Nilghiris, where the dialect Toda shelters itself, and towards the north by Tulu and Kudangu. Two or three slight indications seem to point to an original unity of these languages, and even to show that this unity was prolonged to a comparatively recent date. The name Kanara or Karanata has been given to the Tamil side, the Carnatic, and Tamil is often called Malabar by the earliest European visitors ; now at the present day it only occupies the extreme south of the Malabar coast, the rest belonging to Malay§,la. The Indians of Malacca and Singapore are called Kling — that is, Telinga ; they are, however, Tamils. The fact is, that the separation, now very marked, of the Dra- vidian idioms disappears as we approach the ancient forms in Kanara and Tamil, and as we recognise in Malaysia a derivative, a corruption of Tamil, and in Tulu, Kudagu, and Toda intermediaries between Tamil and Kanara. Telinga, which is the most altered of all, is also a descendant of Tamil. Tamil, in short, from the richness of its vocabulary, and from the priority of its culture, holds in the Dravidian group the same rank as Sanscrit among Indo-European lan- guages. It is also, like the people which speaks it, the only idiom of the group which retains any vitality, a certain power of expansion. Tamil has almost taken 128 Distribution of Languages and Races. the place in the north of Ceylon of Pali, an Aryan dialect. The Dravidian pronunciation is soft; it has no aspirates ; moreover, it grows weaker and more unde- cided every day. Many sounds which exist in the spoken Tamil language do not appear in its alphaljet, and where we read a pure vowel, such as a, e, % u, or a distinct diphthong like ai, we hear something unde- cided and muffled. The true consonants seem also to have been originally few in number, since the Tamil written character does not distinguish between &, g, and d, between t, p, and h. On the contrary, the trills, nasals, palatals, and sibilants have always existed in abundance, and have communicated to the explo- sives a species of hesitation and uncertainty which it is difficult to reproduce; the dentals especially are affected by it. Finally, the lingual consonants are found in the Dravidian as in the Mounda and Sonthal languages ; they result from what we should call a defect of pro- nunciation, the inopportune contact of the tongue either with the teeth or with the palate; the con- sonant is not clearly given, it is strangled, unfinished, like I and r in pickle and lord, and in the Provenpal chival. We have said above that Sanscrit adopted these incomplete sounds. Two marked peculiarities distinguish the words borrowed from Sanscrit ; no word can begin with a soft explosive ; no hard explo- sive can stand isolated in the body of a word. Thus the Tamil equivalent of the Sanscrit word gati is kadi (the German method is similar, brocket for projet). The consonant r cannot begin a word ; it requires too much effort ; it must be introduced by a vowel. The Sanscrit word rajah becomes in Tamil irayan, iragan. The dialectic variations lie generally between explo- Agglutinative Idioms of SoiUher7i Asia. 129 sives and palatals of the same order (this is a general rule). In Tamil and Malayslla the dentals have an increasing tendency towards the English ih, hard or soft. In Telinga tch and dj often pass into tz and 2, a phenomenon very common in Italian giorno, Venetian zorno, Neapolitan yorno. Vinson gives Icevi, ear, in Kanara, tchem in Telinga, cevi in Tamil. The derivation is clearly agglutinative, and need not delay us except to note a few new facts. Every declension, and that which the grammarians wrongly term conjugation and voice, is effected by suffixes accumulated and interlaced. There are not, properly speaking, any verbs, but derivatives indicating state, action, frequency, causation, negation, &c., actuality, distance in the past or ftiture. One peculiarity I think we have not yet encountered — the declension of forms already furnished with verbal suffixes. In old Tamil poems, says Vinson, we find forms such as garndayak ku: fa?',, to reach ; n, euphonic; d, sign of the past tense ; ay, thou ; kku, a sign of the dative : to thee who hast drawn near. It is the absence of the rela- tive pronoun which entails such constructions. One more example : tevar-ir signifies god-you, you are god, but also, you who are god, and is thus susceptible of all suffixes of declension, possessives, locatives, &c. The radical tevar is already declined (plural of majesty), and in such compounds remains invariable. The distinction of the genders is not common in the agglutinative class, and it seems to have been originally unknown to the Dravidian languages ; even now it only applies to adult human beings. Women have a right to the feminine gender only in the plural ; in the singular their name is neuter, like that of children. In Tamil there are really only two genders, 1 30 Distribution of Languages and Races. the noble gender and the inferior gender. For the rest, the intellectual evolution of the primitive Dra- vidians does not appear to have been very advanced, for their proper vocabulary does not contain the words which may be translated by to he, to have, soul, will, God, priest, hook, writing, grammar ; but by borrow- ing the conceptions, the ideas, and the terms which they lacked, they have acquired a very rich idiom, capable of lending itself to the subtleties of religious philosophy and to the fantasies of a brilliant poetry. The Kanara, Tulu, and Telinga alphabets are de- rived from the Sanscrit character employed, in the third century before our era, in the inscriptions of the Bud- dhist King Afoka. Malaysia has similarly adapted to its own use an old Sanscrit alphabet called Grantha. Tamil seems to have received its alphabet from the Phoenician and Arab merchants. The most ancient inscriptions (ninth century of our era) exhibit these different types. Dravidian literature is later than the Aryan influ- ence. The principal dialects have been cultivated, but the palm belongs to Tamil both for age and merit. Literary Tamil, which differs considerably from the spoken language, and is much purer, possesses mystic poems composed by Jaina, Sivaist, and Buddhist sec- taries, and epic poems encumbered with metaphor, among which is a long history of Joseph, written by the Jesuit Beschi in the last century. There are also collections of maxims, modern lyrics, solemn and very monotonous hymns, and licentious tales ; treatises on astrology, divination, and medicine belong to modern times. Vinson believes that all the Dravidian dialects of the south will become absorbed in Tamil, and those of Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 131 the north in Telinga, the one the best preserved, the other the most changed of this interesting and vigo- rous family. Tamil, as we have said, thanks to the energy and initiative of the people of the south of the Dekkan, is spoken in the northern half of Ceylon. The south of that great island is the home of another aggluti- native language, Cingalese or Elou, which contains a great number of Tamil and P§,li words more modern than the rest of the vocabulary. It is not yet known whether Cingalese should be considered as a branch very early separated from the Dravidian stem. Before quitting the Asiatic continent, let us cast a glance over the road we have travelled. Prom the Caucasus to the southern extremity of the Penin- sula of Hindustan we have found (omitting the Sem- ites and the Aryans) four groups or types of the agglutinative class : the very various dialects of the . Caucasus, which have been classed, with more or less certainty or probability, in two families which are related to each other, the northern or Tcherkess family, and the southern or Karfcvelian family ; they belong to races driven into the mountains, on the one side by the Altaics and the Slavs, on the other by the ancient Assyrians and Iranians. It seems that, under the name of Urarti, people of Ararat, the Kartvelians formerly occupied Armenia, and were the near neigh- bours of the ancient inhabitants of Lower Mesopotamia and Ohaldea, the Accads and the Shumirs. We have seen how skilfully modern research has reconstructed the civilisation and the language of these peoples, the inventors of the cuneiform character. Crossing the Indus, we have found in India, early conquered and organised by Aryans, two strata of agglutinative idioms. 132 Distribution of Languages and Races. the one destined to disappear, in spite of a relatively advanced development, the Kol- Aryan group; the other, the Dravidian group, vigorous and capable of hold- ing its own among the numerous dialects of Sanscrit origin. Separated by vocabulary, by the physical and in- tellectual diversity of the races which have used them or who still speak them, these four expressions of human thought are united by two features only which are common to both ; they belong to the same lin- guistic class, and to nations which occupied the soU of. Asia before the arrival of the Semites and Aryans^ that is to say, of inflected languages. CHAPTER IV. THE MALAYO-POLYNESIAN LANGUAGES. Ethnographic theories of the peoples between Madagascar and the Paschal Islands : Negritos, Papuans, Australians, Indonesians, Polynesians, Malays — The spread of the Malays on the Indo- Chinese coasts and in the Indian Archipelago — Softness and simplicity of the Malay dialects (Eastern group : 'l^gala, with which is connected Hova, Bisaya, Formosan ; Western group, Malayo-Javanese) — Character, manners, and literature of the Malays — The Polynesians : physical indolence ; effacement of consonants ; poetical and mythical tendencies. In the whole of the vast Malayo-Polynesian domain, extending from Madagascar to the Sandwich Islands in one direction, and in another to New Zealand, passing by the Sunda Islands, a common speech reigns, of which the groups and sub-groups not only belong to the same class, but possess the elements of the same vocabulary. Only three languages or families of languages are foreign to it, and these, moreover, are too little known for philo- logists to pronounce upon their origins and aflSnities. How did the dominant idiom come to extend over so vast a space ? Did it appear first at some central point ? Was it imported from Asia or Polynesia ? from the north or from the east? Is it the language of a conquered race which has absorbed that of the conquerors, as Anglo-Saxon imposed" itself upon the Normans ? Or the language of invaders, of ^migrat- ing tribes, like the languages of the Indo-Europeans ? 10 '3' 134 Distribution of Languages and Races. A cursory review of the races of Malaysia and Oceania will throw light upon these questions, if it does not solve them. Disregarding secondary distinctions, we find a central black mass, Australia, New Guinea, and the adjacent islands, Melanesia, between two wings of a lighter tint, olive and coffee-coloured to the west, copper and reddish - bronze towards the east. The black mass, which we must regard as autochthonous, is yet very far from being homogeneous. There are three types : the true Papuan, of middle height and robust frame, bearded, with long head and frizzled hair ; the Negrito, little and frail, with round head and wavy or smooth hair ; the Australian, of mixed race, of varying height, hair sometimes frizzled, sometimes stiff and straight, more or less dolicoce- phalous. The eastern lighter wing appears to be nearly homogeneous, more or less tinged towards the left by contact with the Papuans or Australians. It presents from the Tonga Islands eastward a fine race, tall, well made, and well endowed. These are the long-headed Polynesians, who people, in small scattered groups, those islands of the Pacific which are perhaps the relics of a submerged continent. The western wing, on the other side of New Guinea, includes the Philippines, Celebes, Borneo, Ceram, Bali, Sumbava, Java, and Sumatra ; here we find, sub- stituted almost everywhere for the ' Negritos, a faii'ly tall race with slightly lengthened cranium, corre- sponding to the Polynesians, and who can hardly be separated from these; they have been calted Indo- nesians. Their principal subdivisions are : the Battaks of Sumatra, who practise agriculture and keep flocks ; The Malayo- Polynesian Languages. 135 they are still cannibals as regards the bodies of criminals ; the Redjangs and the Lampoungs of the same island ; the Macassars and Boughis of Celebes ; the Dayaks of Borneo, obstinate head-hanters ; the Bisayas and Tagals of the Philippine Islands, of more or less mixed blood. Lastly, around, beside, amidst the Negritos, who are reduced to a savage condition, and the stronger and better armed Indonesians, the Malays, little, round-headed, with yellowish skin, active and coura- geous in spite of their slight frame and small ex- tremities, traffickers and pirates, occupy the coasts of the Malay Peninsula, of Borneo, of the Philippines ; haunt the ports of Indo-China and of Southern China ; and people the greater part of Sumatra and of Java, either pure or crossed in varying proportion with the Indonesians and Melanesians. Thus the Javanese proper, who fill the centre of the island to the number of thirteen millions, are of very mixed blood, while the Madurais of the east and the Sundeans of the west appear to belong to the true Malay type. We have seen that the Tamatos or Japanese aristocracy are supposed to be of Malay origin. It seems to me that from the preceding notes, incomplete and summary as they are, we may conclude that the Malays are the latest comers in all the places in which we find them established, and that they nowhere found the land uninhabited on their arrival. Even in Sumatra, of which they occupy the centre, they are wedged between the Atchinese and the Battaks on the west and the Lampoungs on the south- east. Even in Java, of which they occupy the two ends, they have only been able to modify the central group. Elsewhere, except in small islands, they only 136 DistribtUion of Languages and Races. occupy the coasts. Checked in Timor and Ceram, they have completely failed to establish themselves in New Guinea. Driven northwards, they left important groups in the Philippines, and thence perhaps gained Japan. We seem almost to see their invasion, their wanderings ; and probability here approaches certainty, inasmuch as everywhere they have driven out or pene- trated among Negritos or Indonesians, or else fallen back before immovable and dense populations, and that no invasion has followed theirs, or rather only well-known contingents of Klings or Tamils and Arab merchants, who have not sensibly modified either the distribution of races or the geography of the Malay world. What was the cradle of this race ? Was it the Philippine Islands, where the Tagal dialect preserves the purest and most developed forms of the Malay language? Or Sumatra, which the Malays themselves regard as their country, and whence, if we are to trust their chronicles, they set forth in the twelfth century to conquer the Indo - Siamese Peninsula, and to found Singapore and Malacca ? The first hypothesis, which finds few supporters, is hard to reconcile with the fact that the idiom of "the Hovas of Madagascar belongs to the Tagal branch of the Malay stem. Now the Tagal people appears never to have left the Philippines, unless perhaps to visit the Marianne and Pelew Islands ; moreover, they are not of Malay blood ; and if they have kept the language pure, it is because they received it before it had been mixed with Indian and Arabic. This applies also to the Hovas, Indonesians crossed with Papuan and Malay blood, who were probably driven out from one of the Sunda Islands in prehistoric times. With regard to Sumatra, The Malayo- Polynesian Languages. 1 3 7 everything tends to prove that this was an early, but not the original, centre of expansion. It is now generally agreed that the Malays are of Asiatic origin, and bear a general resemblance' in shape of skull, &c., to the Mongols or Mongoloids, Burmese, Laotians, Miao-tse ; and a probable cause for their emigration may be found in the great dis- turbance occasioned in the far east by the Chinese conquest and expansion. However this may be, the arrival of the Malays in the Sunda Islands must have taken place in very remote times. It must have taken long centuries for them to assimilate numerous Indonesian groups and teach their language, or at least the elements of their language, which was not completely developed, to those wandering tribes who carried it with them and scattered it in more or less altered form throughout the islands of the Pacific. For the inhabitants of Polynesia are for the most part Indonesians driven out by the pressure of the Malays and mixed in varying proportions with the blood of Papuans and Negritos, who are themselves of mixed race, and also with Australians (in New Zealand) ; perhaps also with indigenous races and with Americans of Peru. Polynesian tradition points to the Island of Bolotu as " the land of the souls " — that is to say, of their ancestors — an island of the west which is identified with Bouro near Ceram, one of the Moluccas. Thence rounding New Guinea, touching at the Solomon Islands, at Fiji, at Samoa, scattering themselves from island to island, they came to the central position of Tonga, the sacred island, Tongatabu, the land of Tangaloa or Taroa. From Tonga, from Savaiki, they went southward as far as New Zealand, northward as 138 Distribution of Languages and Races. far as the Sandwich Islands and Hawaii; then gain- ing Tahiti, the Marquesas, the Pomotu Islands, they made their way to the distant Paschal Islands. A later movement to the left carried some of their long canoes towards the lesser islands of the Carolines and of Micronesia. It is after the double exodus of the Hovas towards the Kaffir-land of Madagascar and of the Polynesians of the future towards the Pacific that the Malay world properly so called enters into history and begins to be sensible of external influences. The fame of the two-horned Alexander (Alexander the son of Ammon), the king of Rome, born in Macedonia, has penetrated as far as Sumatra. This fabled conqueror had visited the Malays, and the kings of P.alernbang trace their origin to him. It is necessary to add that this legend, which came, no doubt, through India, has acquired Persian and Arabic elements, and that the chronicles in which, it is embodied have a family resemblance to the " Thousand and One Nights " {Sedjarat Malayan, translated by Marcel Devic ; Leroux, 1878). From the second to the sixth cen- tury of our era the Malays were influenced by the Tlings, the Tlihgas of the Coromandel Coast ; the impression they made is most sensible in Java. They were also from this date in perpetual contact with the Chinese. In the tenth century their flourishing realm attracted the merchants of Arabia and Persia, as we see from the "Marvels of India," a curious little Arabic compilation, translated by Marcel Devic, and from the history of " Sinbad the Sailor." The names of Singa- pore,. the lion's town, and Malacca, which is the name of au Indian fruit, towns founded in the twelfth century, ■show that Hindu influence was still predominant ; but The Malayo- Polynesian Languages. 139 the work of the Moslem began in the following century. Yet religions were not wanting in Malaysia, Buddhism, Sivaism, not to mention animism, occult but never extinct. Mohammedanism, introduced at Atchin in 1206, at Malacca in 1276, was established in the Moluccas and in Java towards the middle of the fifteenth century. Celebes embraced Islamism just at the time when Vasco di Gama threw open the rich " Spice Islands " to European commerce and to the somewhat tardy and superfluous Christian propaganda. The rest belongs to modern history ; all that we need retain is that neither the Portuguese conquest, nor the Dutch, Spanish, and English occupations, nor the commercial rivalry of the prolific and swarming Chinese, have diminished the domain of the Malay idiom, which remains the international language of a very important part of the far east. Malay is in the Indian Archipelago, to borrow the phrase of the learned John Crawf urd, what the French language has been in Western Europe. All the nations who transact business there understand it ; all new-comers make haste to learn it ; and among the immense number of idioms spoken in the two con- tinents there is not perhaps one so well fitted to serve as the means of communication between the various peoples who meet in that part of the world. A language destined to play such a part must before all things be sonorous, easy to hear and pronounce, devoid of those aspirates of various kinds among which only a practised ear can distinguish at once, and of those guttural and clucking sounds which seem so natural to the aborigines and are the despair of the stranger whose throat and lips cannot fashion sounds so unfamiliar. In these respects Malay is a perfect 140 Distribution of Languages and Races. language. Its vowels, a, e, i, 0, u, are sounded as in Italian, and give rise to no confusion. Its consonants, which are in sufficient number to give richness to the vocabulary, include none which are difficult of arti- culation, even by the Chinaman, whose organ is so imperfect. At Singapore and in the other commercial centres of the Archipelago, Chinese, who have come from different parts of China, use the Malay tongue among themselves, because of the mai'ked divergences of their own dialects. An Englishman, Dutchman, Frenchman, Arab, Spaniard, Siamese, Hindu, hearing a Malay word pronounced, can repeat it at once without the smallest difficulty. To this quality, invaluable in an international idiom, is added another which is hardly less necessary — simplicity of structure. The great majority of the radicals are composed of words of two syllables, which are absolutely invariable : rati, bread ; padi, rice ; kayou, tree ; or any, man ; makan, to eat ; minom, to drink ; hetoul, true. These words cannot be distri- buted into grammatical categories ; the same term may be noun, adjective, or verb ; no gender, no number ; no declension or conjugation. The feminine and masculine are indicated when necessary by the addition of such words as man, woman, male, female. The plural is indicated either by the word many, much, or by reduplication ; orang-orang, men ; radja- radja, kings. Monosyllabic particles placed at the beginning, end, or in the body of a word may define the substantive or verbal sense. For example : in Dayak, lauk, fish, forms palauk, fishermen ; in Boughi, nasu, to cook, gives panasii, cook ; ^a is a prefix signifying action, condition. In Tagal, paligo means to bathe, paligo- an, the bathing-place; niog. The Malayo- Polynesian Languages. 141 palm-tree, niog-an, grove of palm-trees. The enclitic ni, na, makes of sipii, to seize ; tajMy, to knead ; sinipit, anchor ; tinapay, bread. Tense and mood are similarly rendered by the words already, still, to wish, &c. Translated word for word, a Malay phrase resembles what is familiarly called pidgin English. Here is the beginning of a collection of fables : " Live once a man merchant, Pouti his name ; very much rich, but no child him, therefore much wish for child," &c. It will be easily understood that so simple a language, which was suflBcient for the needs of peoples such as the Javanese, Boughis, Atchinese, hardly inferior to other Moslem races, suited also the Indone- sian and Melanesian tribes, scattered and hidden in the forests and mountains of the larger islands. These tribes, yellow, brown, or black, do not speak exactly the same language ; on the contrary, the idioms change from one to the other with an extreme variety ; but there exists a visible connection between them, which, if it does not at once show community of origin, points at least to a remarkable analogy of method. And in truth a brief study of the eighty dialects enumerated by Robert Gust will prove that the differences existing between them are far less than those which we find between the Romance languages. The Malay languages, properly so called, are divided into two branches, the eastern or Tagala, the western or Malayo-Javanese. To the first belongs Tagala, spoken in Luzon and Bisaya, in the islands immediately to the south of Luzon ; Formosan in the east and centre of Formosa (the western portion is Chinese) ; here there is no mixture of Hindu words, which proves the great antiquity of the arrival of the 142 Distribution of Languages and Races. Malays at Formosa. In tlie Marianne Islands the- language is still Tagala-Malay. Malagasy or Hova,. spoken in the extreme west of the Malay domain, is connected with this branch of the family. The second branch includes Malay proper, spoken in the Malay Peninsula, in the greater part of Sumatra, in the little neighbouring islands, and on the coasts of Borneo; Battak, Atchinese, and Larapoung in Sumatra ; Dayak in the centre and north of Borneo ; Boughi and Macassar in Celebes ; then the important Javanese sub-group : Javanese, spoken in the centre of Java by thirteen millions of people ; Sundean, spoken round Batavia by four millions, Madurese, Bali, &c. ; employed by almost equal numbers in the east of Java, Madura, Bali, and other smaller islands. Javanese is the most cultivated of the group, and its religious and poetic literature, inspired by Indian ideas, is not without value. But since we cannot treat of everything, we will concentrate our attention upon Malay proper. It gives me an opportunity of doing homage to the memory of my friend, Marcel Devic, linguist and philologist, who took pleasure in translating and making known this simple and liquid tongue. One word in the first place on the character used by the various dialects. When they accepted the lessons of the Persian and Arabian missionaries, the Malays adopted their alphabet. This detestable in- strument, which certainly makes half the difficulty of the Turkish, Persian, Hindustani, and Arab languages, this alphabet, destitute so to speak of vowels, and full of aspirates, of guttural sounds, of emphatic articula- tions, is ill suited to an idiom as sonorous as Spanish, as soft as Italian and Portuguese. The other peoples The Malayo-Polynesian Languages. 143 of the family have made use of an old Hindu character. The alphabet of the Javanese is agreeable to the eye and points to a true sense of art among them ; but their representation of the vowels is very singular ; to give only one example : the sound is expressed by two characters, of which one precedes and the other follows the consonant. The Tagala and Bisaya alpha- bet, which is incomplete in the vowels, has a certain strange grace. That of the Battaks is very ugly, as becomes a nation among whom literary cultivation has not put an end to cannibalism, which has become, on the contrary, a legal institution. One would not wish the Malays to adopt such a character, but their language "would profit much from the use of the Latin alphabet, which is so obviously suited to it. The introduction of Islamism has not flooded Malay with Arabic to the same extent as other Mussulman idioms. About a hundred and sixty Arabic words are reckoned, and there are about thirty Persian ones. We have more than that number in French, as any one may convince himself by consulting the Oriental part of Littr^'s Dictionary, which was revised by Marcel Devic. Hindu idioms have had a more sensible in- fluence; but the proportion of Hindu words is not more than five per cent. Finally, Portuguese and Dutch commerce and colonisation have introduced a few terms which it is hardly worth while to notice. Perhaps also China, Cochin-China, Burma, Siam, and Annam have furnished a small contingent. It is none the less true that Malay, as employed for several centuries, has not undergone that alteration which might have been expected in an idiom spoken as a lingua franca by peoples come from the four quarters of the horizon. There is no comparison, from this point of view, 1 44 Distribution of Languages and Races. between Malay and the lingua franca of the Levant, in which Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and Italian are mingled in a species of formless patois, suitable for the verbal exchange of a few ideas which are always the same, but insufficient for a business letter. The Malay vocabulary includes about five thousand radicals, of which half are pure Malay, a fourth part common to Malay and Javanese, and the other quarter is made up from the foreign sources mentioned above. The language is rather poor than rich ; it does not possess, like our tongues, a great variety of terms to express the different shades of the same idea ; so that where one word suffices us, a long periphrasis is neces- sary to them. On the other hand, it is not encumbered, like the Tagala of the island of Luzon, with dissyllabic terms which bear no resemblance to each other in form, and express the same action accomplished under some- what different circumstances. For example: to eat meat, to eat fruit, to eat in company, to eat in the morning, to eat in the evening, to eat a little, quickly, by mouthf uls, with appetite ; each of these phrases is expressed by a single word ; there are forty such words, and no two are derived from the same root. The lack of synonyms and of synthetic expressions is the cause of a certain slowness and repetition ; the language is diffuse and full of circumlocutions, and this defect, which is not very sensible in conversation, is very marked in the most careful writing. The literature is abundant, but very little of it is original ; it abounds in translations and imitations of Hindu, Persian, Arabic, and especially of Javanese originals ; thus it has borrowed from India the MaTia- bharaia, from the Arabic the famous collection " Kalila and Diinna," and from a species of current opinion, The Malayo-Polynesian Languages. 145 fragments of legendary history mixed with a few tradi- tions which have some probability. But every people assimilates more or less what it borrows, adding some traits of manners, national character, and domestic life. A fable of foreign origin, a fragment of a chronicle, will reveal to us the real character of these Malays, who find means to conciliate gentleness and barbarism, gaiety and the wildest delirium, piracy and commerce, an extremely lax morality and the precepts of the Prophet, and persistence in animism with a devout monotheism. There are Malay tribes who are very inoffensive and comparatively industrious — in Java, for instance ; but at bottom (and indeed not far below the surface) you would find, I think, the classic Malay, the brigand without faith or mercy, who sweeps the seas in search of his booty, attacks every solitary ship, massacres the crew, and makes off with the cargo to his lair on the shore. Such are those pirates who astound even the Arabs, who, armed with their kriss, seize a rich mer- chant in the open market at Timor or Taneh, and ransom or murder him then and there, run amuck, massacring all who resist, and if taken kill themselves. It is hardly likely that a people of this nature should understand justice and virtue as we do. The popular, and more or less justified, belief is well known, that a child who is precociously intelligent will not live to grow up. If Taylor undertook to show us that this is a survival from the time when too clever children were destroyed, he would find an argument in a passage in a Malay chronicle. A king of Sumatra was attacked by monstrous animals, which at certain hours came and bit the legs of his army. A child advised that a palisade should be raised breast-high. 1 46 Distribution of Languages and Races, This counsel, which filled the wisest ministers of the prince with wonder, discouraged the evil beasts and saved the camp. On this a song was composed, with the refrain, " No harm came of it, thanks to the wisdom of a child." Now as the blessed Maharajah Padouka was on his way home, the nobles said to him, " Sire, this child is already very clever though so young ; what will he be when full grown ? It were better to get rid of him." So all thought it right of the king to have him put to death. Nothing could be more simple, and neither the king nor the historian feel more remorse than would a soldier of Radetski, the judge or executioner of his vanquished and rebel fellow- countrymen. For there are lacunes also in our code of morality. So much for justice ; I pass to virtue. It is not absent, but it manifests itself with a brutality which recalls the most flourishing epoch of the Middle Ages. A moralist thus recounts the fable of two friends. Two men, brothers in heajt, travel together. At a tournament one of them, as is the custom, gained the hand of the princess by his skill at the games. His friend, who is in love with the lady, goes away, and after a long time comes back afflicted with a horrible disease. The wise men declare that there is no other remedy than to rub him with the blood of the little son of his ' friend, who has become king. The friend takes the knife, kills the child, and him- self rubs the sick man with the blood of the victim. " Such were the friends of old time," sighs the Malay writer ; " there are none like them now." Again, a young man wishing to put to the proof the devotion of his friends, pretends to have killed his mistress, and goes from door to door with the The Malay o-Polynesian Languages. 147 supposed corpse on his back asking who will help to dispose of it. In a fairly long romance, the heroine, wife of a king and mother of three children, is pursued by the attentions of a minister. The queen, who is devout, objects in vain that infidelity is forbidden by the Prophet, and that such a crime would lead them both straight to hell. The minister insists, and threatens to kill a child if the mother does not yield. He cuts the boy's throat in very deed, bat without gaining his end. The same threat in the case of the second son, with the same result. In brief, when all her children lie on the ground with their throats cut open, the mother asks permission to wash off the blood which has splashed her, and to bathe and perfume herself; "after which, she says, the valiant minister shall have his desire." Irresistible minister ! but he should have at least killed the hus- band while he was about it. The people which takes pleasure in such tales does not lack pedantic doctors, nor professors of social and political philosophy. Among them was Bokhari of Djohor, who, in the seventeenth century, wrote a treatise celebrated in Malaysia, entitled MaJcota Radja, or the Crown of Kings. This Bokhari possessed, it would seem, a learning which is rare among Malays. He knew Arabic and Persian ; and his book is full of anecdotes borrowed from writers in the two languages. It is a species of manual, filled with puerile and minute details about all that concerns the administra- tion of a monarchical state ; duties of subjects towards the sovereign, whether Moslem or infidel ; the etiquette and hierarchy of the court ; the office of the mini- sters, ambassadors, and functionaries ; the education of children; the qualities of a believer, justice, bene- 1 48 Distribution of Languages and Races. volence, true dignity ; even anatomy and physiognomy find a place in the work. Poetry is mingled with prose, and the author is so proud of his work that he puns upon his own name, Djohori, which means native of Djohor, and also jeweller. " Bokhari," he says, "is a jeweller, this may be seen from the orna- ments of the crown." In spite of these ornaments, the crown is wearisome, and the genius of the Malay is less suited to moral treatises than to tales and legendary histories, in which are set forth the force and cunning of heroes of adventure who resemble Ulysses or Hercules. The popular poetry of the peoples of the Sunda Islands is their most original contribution to literature. At their feasts two singers are pitted against each other, like the shepherds of Theocritus and Virgil. The one presents in an impromptu distich an image or an allusion ; the other replies in the same rhyme and metre, giving a similar or contrary idea. " What use is the lamp without a wick," says the one. "Why make play with the eyes if nothing is meant ? " retorts the other. And so on, piling up witty or fanciful notions, of which, it is true, the meaning and the charm often escape us. These quatrains are called pctintoums. Victor Hugo has quoted a few in the notes to Les OrientaUs ; and it would be easy to collect whole series at Sumatra and Borneo. We have said that New Guinea and the continent of Australia are a world apart, between the Malay and Polynesian worlds. The languages of Australia, which are imperfectly known, will soon have disap- peared with the natives who speak them. Tasmanian has lately become extinct with the death of an old woman, a queen, the sole survivor of her race. It M^r^.^ The Malay 0- Polynesian Languages. 149 is doubtful wlietlier these dialects belonged to a single family. In any case, the only thing which they have in common with the Malay group is their aggluti- native character. We are not able to say more of the Papuan languages ; but we shall at least be able to study them at leisure, when Europeans have taken possession of New Guinea. These eastern Negroes, much stronger and more vigorous than the wandering Australian tribes, much less savage and more in- dustrious, have there their centre and their home, in an island which is at least as large as Borneo ; they occupy also the islands of New Britain, the Solomon Islands, and the New Hebi-ides ; and it is believed tltat their language maintains itself in New Caledonia. In several places, however, a mixture of Malay or Indonesian blood is apparent. Passing to the north of this group, the emigrating tribes have just touched its borders and settled in the smaller islands. A first zone, called Melanesia, though inhabited by a race which is akin to the Papuans, a dark - skinned, hairy people of middle height, has yet been penetrated by Malay customs and language. Samoa and the Fiji Islands form the transition between Melanesia and Polynesia. From the Tonga Islands the whole of the Pacific belongs to one of the finest races in the world, tall, slender, deep-chested, often with regular features, and of noble or pleasing outline. Unfortunately, these well-made men and these attractive women lose their vitality in proportion to their distance from the Sunda Islands. The facility of gaining a livelihood, infanticide, tribal warfare, cannibalism, and lastly, traders and mission- aries, bringing in their train clothes and spirituous liquors, phthisis, small-pox, and other diseases, have 11 1 50 Distribution of Languages and Races. rapidly decimated these peoples, which are so worthy to survive. The most civilised, even those of the Sandwich Islands, dwindle without apparent cause. The most energetic, those of New Zealand, fought valiantly for their independence, and are now dying out, though unmolested, before the English and Scotch settlers. It is difficult to refrain from useless regrets over the gradual disappearance of this fine race ; it would not be safe to affirm that more than a million of Polynesians are scattered throughout these thou- sands of islands, which ai'e by no means all of small size : the New Zealand group is hardly smaller than Great Britain. Oook was the first to recognise the linguistic unity of Polynesia ; the native of Tahiti who went with him to New Zealand conversed without difficulty with the natives of that country. La Perouse noted the affinities of Polynesian with Tagal and Bisaya. Finally, Porter, Mariner, Dumont d'Urville, Ellis, Sir George Grey, and Eienzi have collected data which are precise and con- vincing. But the original Malay type tends to become effaced with distance. The Malay words are fewer in number in proportion to the distance from the point of departure. The methods of formation remain the same, but a free use is made of the common elements, of the monosyllabic roots which are hidden in the Malay dissyllables. This phenomenon is supposed to be caused by the detachment of the Polynesian branch of the family before the complete development of the race and of its language. But a yet deeper cause of the change may be found in the physical indolence of the race ; the law of least resistance may be seen in all its force in the modifications introduced. At the outset of these studies, when we sought to The Malay o-Polynesian Languages. 1 5 1 explain the origin of the explosive consonants, the bases of articulation, we pointed out the primitive in- decision of language between the sounds k, t, and p, between the gutturals, dentals, and labials, then between the liquids and the nasals, between the sibilants and the aspirates. Now nowhere is this confusion more apparent than in Polynesian between the different dialects, and sometimes in the same. Man is in- differently tanata or kanaka; shade or spirit is akoua, atoua, apoua ; kalo is the same as taro, Samoa as Hamoa, Sawaiki as Havaiki. Moreover, the consonants are perpetually dropped : tanata becomes tane ; Sawa- 'iki, Hawa/i ; Ariki, lord, arii, areoi ; tiki, demon, tii ; potcarka (the Spanish pnsrco, pig) becomes houaga or pouaa. The supreme god is Tangaroa, Tangaloa, Taaroa. Constantly there are double vowels and diph- thongs : aa, ee, ii, ea, oa, oahou, which suppose inter- mediary consonants which have been dropped. The repetition of syllables and dissyllables, mea-mea, oro- oro, Sac., tends to replace everywhere particles and affixes. The examples are sufficient to establish our point. The facts are constant. There are twenty consonants in the Malay alphabet ; there are only fifteen at Tonga, ten at Tahiti, and even less in some other islands. The nasals and liquids, few in number at Tonga, are almost unused at the Marquesas Islands. Lastly, the dialects which are relatively the roughest belong to the nations which are the least weakened, the Maoris and the Hawaians. The Polynesians have no written literature ; but their oral traditions and cosmogonies are numerous. From their traditious, transmitted from age to age by the harepos or historians, committed to memory by Hawaian princesses, handed down from father to son, 152 Distribution of Language^ and Races. from mother to daughter, we gather the little that is known of their history. The deeds of the gods — that is to say, of the chiefs and ancestors — were sung with every solemn accessory. These chants constituted the title of kings and chiefs ; an attempt has been made, in their interpretation, to separate truth from fable. In New Zealand the English administrators have ad- mitted, as constituting a valid claim in suits relating to the possession of land, genealogies and evidence contained in these traditional songs. The Polynesians share with their kinsmen of the Surida Islands the gift of poetical improvisation, which is rendered easier for them, by the sonorous fluidity of their language.. The arrival of a friend or of the convoy of a chief was saluted by stanzas or elegies, monotonous and diffuse, but not wanting in sentiment and grace. .Dumont d'Urville gives one, a funeral chant improvised by a woman of the Sand- wich Islands : — " Alaa ! alas ! my chief is dead. Dead is my lord and my friend, My friend in the time of famine, My friend in the drought, My friend in the rain and the wind, • In the sun and the heat, in the cold of the mountain, In the calm and in the storm. My friend in the eight seas. Alas ! alas ! gone is my friend, Gone never to return." The last line is the cry of nature, so simple and so natural, that it is the utterance of all peoples, savage or civilised, without regard to the contradiction it offers to all the fictions of animism and of religion. And it may be noted in passing, there is no people The Malayo-Polynesian Languages. 153 which has a firmer belief in. ghosts — that is, in another life, in the immortality of the soul — than the Poly- nesians. Here is another fragment, the description of a volcano in eruption : — " The summit has long been on fire. The land of Touha-Ehou was deserted. The bird perched on the rocks of Ohara-hara. During eight nights, during eight days, those who till the soil held their breadth, looking round them anxiously. By the wind, by the storm laden with rain, the dust has been carried to Hoina. The eyeballs were red- dened with this dust. Tavai, Tavai, blessed be thou, land in the midst of the sea, who sleepest peace- fully on the bosom of the waters, and turnest thy face to the pleasant breezes. The wind had reddened the eyeballs of the men with the tattooed skin; the sand of Taou is at Poha-Touhoa ; the lava at Ohia-Ota- Lani. The path is over the sea to the shores of Taimou. Inland the path to the mountains was hidden ; Kirau-Ea was hidden by the tempest ; Pele dwells in Kirau-Ea, in the gulf, and feeds for ever upon flames." The Malay family of languages is one of the simplest and most convenient of the agglutinative idioms, as it is the most extensive and the most clearly defined. It constitutes a perfectly independent group, or at least its relationship to any other has not been dis- covered. It is doubtful that such can be established, whether the Malays, who came originally from regions occupied since by the Chinese, brought it with them, or whether they found it in Indonesia, in the Sunda Islands, the Moluccas, and the Philippines. The first hypothesis appears the more probable ; it agrees with Polynesian traditions, all of which seem to take their rise in the west. The diffusion of the Malay race would seem to have determined the successive migra- 154 Distribution of Languages and Races. tions which have visited and occupied one after the other the different archipelagoes of the Pacific. Amidst the Malayo- Polynesian world subsist the remains of the Negritos and of the Australians, and the compact mass of the Papuans or eastern Negroes. The little known languages of these peoples hardly lend themselves to comparative study. The details we possess upon the literary culture of the Malays and Polynesians, un- happily arrested in their original development by Islam and by Christianity, show us specimens of humanity which range from the acceptable to the charming. CHAPTER V. AFRICAN RACES AND LANGUAGES. The past of Africa — Distribution of races— Linguistic map of Africa — General characteristics of the African languages — Idioms of the BoBJesmans and Hottentots — The clacking sounds or klicks — KafBr or Bantu family — Prefixing of the syllables which denote case or person — Phonetic peculiarities of the dialects — UkuJiZonipa—TTan- sitiim from the proper to the figurative sense — Bornu group : Haonssa — Senegambian group : Mandingue, Eiwe, Wolof — Peul or Poul — Upper Nile group : Dinka, Nouba, or Kensi — Gallaic group— The Berber languages — Coptic and Ancient Egyptian. We found a certain pleasure in reducing to a single family the various Malay and Polynesian idioms, and in showing by examples, drawn from the annals and imaginative poetry of these peoples, what good use had been made of these simple and sweet-sounding lan- guages by the different races, often well gifted, which speak them. Our study of Africa will not, I fear, oifer us the same kind of interest; for, with the ex- ception of the Mediterranean region. Lower Egypt and Barbary, nowhere in Africa has man risen to the intellectual level attained by the Malay or the Poly- nesian ; and in this great mass, which covers more than twenty-two millions of square miles, numerous ifroups of savage languages form what at the first glance is a hopeless chaos. We need to throw the light of history upon this confusion of races and tongues ; but history is arrested at the desert of Sahara. Two-thirds of the immense continent remain 156 Distribution of Languages and Races. buried in an obscurity wbicli is scarcely diminished by the vague reports of rare Carthaginian merchants trans- mitted to us by Herodotus and Diodorus, nor by the somewhat legendary accounts of Arab merchants about the country of the Zendj, doubtless Zanzibar and the Somali coast. For generations the boldest and most fortunate travellers hardly explored anything but the coasts; and the great discoveries which have been made in the last thirty years have brought to light no documents, no monuments of an historic character. Thus, the past of Africa (which is at least as ancient as the rest of the world) is hidden not only from the civilised nations of Europe, but also from the millions of savages who swarm and vegetate on a soil which is nevertheless fall of wealth and resource. These tribes, even the most advanced among them, were arrested so early in their development that they have not yet arrived at that point at which a people, either by writing or by some material sign, fixes the memory of its vicissitudes, and finds in the consciousness of its previous inferiority the desire and capacity for progress. The African negro is certainly capable of improve- ment, but not of his own initiative or in his own country. His memory is short, his foresight almost rdl. Present enjoyment suffices him, poverty or death affect him little.. His morality results from his im- mediate interest, especially from fear of his master. He is animal in the spontaneity of his instincts. Many of them are by nature gentle and indolent, but deceitful, and too often ferocious at times. Many of them laugh easily, but they bite as readily when hunger urges them. It is impossible to rely upon their promises and their most solemn oaths. There are among them brave soldiers, clever hunters, here African Races and Languages. 157 and there intermittent cultivators of the soil (who,, however, leave all the work to the women), travelling smiths ; lastly, and especially in the valley of the Niger, artisans, potters, weavers, tanners, enough to satisfy the limited wants of half-naked populations; but, generally speaking, from the Guinea Coast to the great lakes in which the Nile takes its rise, and from Bornu to the Orange River, these tribes stagnate in imme- morial savagery. The most ingenious of the Zulu tales are very poor stuff, and so is the mythology of the Dahomeyans. One is inclined to prefer to these laborious and futile inventions the hungry naivete of the Hottentot, who considers the sun as a piece of lard which has unfortunately been hung out of reach. The first impression caused by the narrow foreheads above the protruding jaw and thick lips, by the sooty bodies anointed with every species of evil-smelling grease, is uniformly unpleasant, but it is easy to per- ceive marked differences in conformation, stature, colour, physiognomy, among these tribes who live side by side, in a singular confusion, and generally without other frontier than the palisade or mound of earth which surrounds their village. It is easy to understand that there are intruders, conquerors, who are either absolute, or the suzerains of subjects whose condition varies between servitude and vassalage. We try to follow up the path taken by the invaders, and the geographical distribution of the victors and vanquished, and especi- ally the amount of mixture between them (which is a measure of the length of time during which forced relations have existed between the indigenous race and the later comers), will supplement to some extent the missing historical data. We thus are enabled to see, in a very remote age, 158 Distribution of Languages and Races. the north, of Africa, perhaps then joined to the Canaries and to Spain, inhabited on its borders by a white race, the Lybians or Berbers, whose domain extends to the delta of the Nile on the one hand, where they march with tribes, also white probably, of Asiatic origin, Khamites and Semites, and higher np the great river they encounter a black, smooth-haired race, the Noubas and Barabras. WhUe the mixture of these three races forms the Egyptian nation, whose colour varies from reddish - brown to a yellowish - white, the western Lybians, rounding and crossing the Sahara, find them- selves in presence of true Negroes with woolly hair, the Yolofa and others, who occupy the basins of the Senegal, the Niger, and the Ogooue, and whose dense masses are not much tinged with Berber blood. On the extreme east another white stream, issuing from the point of Arabia, takes the Noubas, already driven back by the progress of the Egyptian people, in flank, and leaves upon the coast, and in the highlands of Abyssinia, the Gallas, the Somalis, the Ethiopians, all mixed with native blood in varying proportions. This east central invasion -has had two important con- sequences : it drove towards the west, by slow degrees, to the south of the Sahara, towards the basin of Lake Tchad, and towards Guinea, a part of the Nouba population, already somewhat tinged with Lybian and Asiatic blood, and already somewhat awakened by contact with superior races. These Noubas are the Peuls or Pouls, studied by Faidherbe, who, scattered over Senegambia and Guinea, and further mixed with the Lybians of the south and with the Berbers of the desert, constitute the dominant class or caste of the Niger country. On the other hand, the pressure of the Nubian African Races and Languages. 159 Arabs, of the Gallas and the Somalis, determines a movement towards the south. A tall black race, the finest of all, with woolly hair but Caucasian features, the Bantus or Abantus, since named by the Mussul- mans Cafr, Kaffirs, or infidels, descend along the Zanzibar and Mozambique coasts, people the west of Madagascar, and cover the shores of the Indian Ocean from the Zambesi River to the river of the Great Fish ; important fractions of Bantu people ascend the great Zambesi River, and even gain the Atlantic coast : these are the Bechuanas in the centre, the Damaras in the west. These Kaffirs, destined later to fall under the yoke of England or of the free republics of the Dutch Boers (Orange Free State and Transvaal), took the place of the earlier occupants, the Hottentots or Khoin, and the Bosjesinans or Bushmen, doubtless of some- what mixed blood, forming the bulk of the population in the west of Cape Colony ; the latter were driven back into the desert of Kalahari, and confined -on the north and east by the Bechuanas, on the west by the Damaras and by the Namaquois Hottentots, and on the south by the Griqua Hottentots and the white inhabitants of Cape Colony. Neither the Hottentots nor the Bushmen are Negroes. It has been conjectured that the first are half-castes of Bushmen and Kaffirs, and also an attempt has been made to connect them with the mixed races of the north of Africa; but differences of language and feature render both opinions doubtful ; it is only proved that the names of places in Kaffraria are still Hottentot. It is probable that before they were driven out by the Kaffirs the Hottentots themselves had dis- possessed the Bushmen, whom they call 8ah and San, or natives. These last are interesting by their very 1 60 Distribution of Languages and Races. depth in the scale of human beings ; they are among the poorest specimens of the genus homo. Fritsch affirms that those who gave them their name, " men of the bush," wished to intimate that they are creatures inter- mediate between the man and the ape. Without shelter, even the most rudimentary hut, without chiefs, laws, or worship, neither tillers of the soil nor shepherds, wandering in small clans or isolated families, they live solely by hunting and pillage, on roots, fruit, honey, ostrich eggs, the larvae of ants, locusts, reptiles, &c., gathered by the women. Always hungry, they eat all that they can find, and their flattened bellies become enormous in a short time, to return to their original condition in a few hours. These alternations of repletion and inanition furrow their skin into pro- found wrinkles, in which collects the grease with which tbey anoint their bodies as a protection against mosquitoes. They weave a few mats, and manufacture their weapons, which, however, they do not forge ; they work the cold iron with flints. The dog is their only domestic animal. The Bushman is little, pot-bellied, his skin of a dirty yellowish-brown. His forehead is straight, but his brain very small ; his thin hair is rolled up into little balls like pepper-corns ; his nose flat, his mouth protruding ; his chin retreating under his thick lips, which do not meet. The women are frightful ; tlie famous Hottentot which may be seen at the Museum is a faithful copy of the form of a Bosjesman woman who died in one of our hospitals. This unhappy race, which is unfortunately of pure blood, has nevertheless certain qualities. The mother loves her children ; the man is lively, gay, obstinate ; hunted by hunger, killed without mercy by his stronger neighbours, whose territory he is constantly invading, African Races and Languages. i6i he is accused of being fierce and revengeful Wlio would not be so under like circumstances ? We have made the tour of the coasts of Africa ; the centre remains to be considered, the great plateau bounded on the east by a series of great lakes, Nyassa, Bengueolo, Tanganyika, Victoria and Albert Nyanza, traversed at the equator by the vast curve of the Congo, watered on the north by the marshy affluents of the Nile. This immense region has been traversed and partly made known by explorers, Speke, Livingstone, Baker, Stanley, Cameron, Brazza, and others, whose narratives are familiar to us. This region abounds in inhabitants of every height and build, of every shade of colour between ebony and light chocolate ; dwarfs like the Akkas, who were figured on the Egyptian monu- ments, and who appear to be only less savage than the Bushmen ; cannibals like the Niam-Niam of Schwein- furth, a race whose peculiarity of costume caused them to be taken for men with tails; courageous tribes, such as the Monboutous; finally, some attempts at absolute monarchy, notably Uganda. But nowhere is there any trace of what we call civilisation, of artistic or intellectual culture. The future of all this inferior humanity, vigorous and perhaps susceptible of improve- ment, if Islam and Christianity would abstain from fighting for its unconscious soul, if drunkenness, theft, and murder were not encouraged by the Arab traders in their greed for ivory and slaves, is one of the great problems which the Northern nations have to solve. Are there enough men in Europe to rule and educate these inert multitudes, and would it not have been wiser to leave them to themselves ? These are prob- lems of which the solution will not be seen by any one now living. 1 62 Dislributien of Languages and Races. The distribution of the four or five hundred dialects spoken in Africa corresponds fairly well to the above rough sketch. They may be classed in six or seven groups, according to the scheme laid down by Earth, Appleyard, Bleek, Fr. Mtiller, Hovelacque. In the north the Semitic and Khamitic languages prevail ; to the first belong ancient Ghez and Amharic, or modern Abyssinian ; to the second, the Berber idioms, the Egyptian of the Pharaohs, Coptic, and finally the Ethiopian branch : Somali, Galla, Bed] a, Saho, Dan- kali, Agaou. Immediately to the west the Nubian lan- guages are spoken by the inhabitants of the basin of the Upper Nile and of a part of Khordofan ; Nubian or Kensi, Dongolavi, Toumali, Koldadje. From Lake Tchad to the middle basin of- the Senegal, a distance of 2250 miles, extends Peul or Poul, entirely distinct from the families which it traverses or borders. Be- tween the equator and the Sahara, from the lakes of the Upper Nile to the Atlantic, the Negro dialects, properly so called, prevail: (i.) The Dinka group (Bari, Bongo Ohillouk, Nouer, &c.), the poorest of all, hardly issued from the monosyllabic stage ; (2.) The Bornou of Lake Tchad ; (3.) The Haoussa of the Soudan, a more advanced language, rich in dialects ; (4.) Sonrai, towards the great elbow of the Niger; (5.) Wolof on the Senegal, Mandingue or Malinke on the Gambia, Feloup in Guinea ; (6.) Krou, Egbe, and Ibo along the Gulf of Benin and the ocean. The most important and clearly limited family is the Kaffir or Bantu, which extends over all Eastern Africa, and south of Zanzibar penetrates as far as the Atlantic, between the Zambesi and the Congo, and even, crossing the equator, comes in contact with the Guinea languages. Its eastern branch comprehends African Races and Languages. i6 o the dialects of Zanzibar and Mozambique, of the Zam- besi and Kafifraria, Swali, Zulu, and Kaffir; a second central branch is represented by Tekesa and Setchuana. To the third branch belong, beginning in the north, the language of Fernando-Po, Mpongue (spoken in Gaboun), Dikele, Isubu, Congo, Angolian, and Herero or Damara. South of Herero the Nama, Kora, and Griqua dialects form the Hottentot group, the neigh- bours of the Bushmen. Before giving the characters of a few of these lan- guages, of which I have wished to give at least the principal names, let us see first if there are any features common to all. Here is one, very general in the agglutinative class, a dislike to the accumulation of consonants ; the African prefers syllables terminated by vowels, and in the groups of the north or of the extreme south, where final consonants exist, it is easy to trace the language back to an earlier period when the final vowel had not been dropped ; just as, by poetical license or rapid pronunciation, most Italian words may lose their final vowel. From this rhythmic and euphonic point of view the African languages are called alliteral. But it would be a mistake to regard the multiplicity of vowels as a certain guarantee of softness and harmony. Most of the African dialects possess gutturals and very hard aspirates, and espe- cially a number of confused nasal consonants, which our alphabets are obliged to render by two letters, ng, nk, nd, nt, mb, mp, &c. ; these commonly occur at the beginning of words. In so far as they are agglutinative and alliteral, the African tongues resemble the Dravidian, Malay, Fin- nish, and Turkish groups. It is a moral resemblance, the sign of the same intellectual level, manifested 1 64 Distribution of Languages and Races. at the moment when the languages were fixed by a similarity of method. Africa was a centre of production; its human and linguistic types, wide as are the differences among them, are manifestly autochthonous. The Mediter-' raneans of the north and the Semites who have pene- trated the eastern frontier have exercised on the black and yellowish masses a certain influence, but rather physical than intellectual. The avoidance of an accumulation of consonants is a trait common to all these languages ; there is anotherj this time a matter of grammar. They have a strange conception of number and gender. The African lan- guages generally divide objects into two categories, animate and inanimate. They again divide the animate into two classes, not according to sex, but according to intelligence, that is to say, into men and brutes ; thus they have a neuter, and two degrees correspond- ing to a rude classification of the living world, but they have no masculine and feminine properly so called. With regard to number, some have two plurals, apply- ing the one to things of the same nature, the other to a collection of iniscellaneous objects. From likenesses we pass to differences. One is sufficiently marked to claim consideration at the outset, since it separates into two irreducible groups the Guinea system and the Kaffir system. The latter places before the root or theme the syllables which modify or define its sense, the other employs suffixes, or rather places after the radical the particles which correspond to our verbal terminations and case-end- ings. Prefixation, which is not rare in the languages of Europe and Asia, but which here is exclusively em- ployed, constitutes the originality of the Bantu group. African Races and Languages. 165 Bosjesraan and Hottentot, whose relationship, al- though not proved, is nevertheless probable, are distinguished by a very remarkable peculiarity of pronunciation, the clucking of the tongue against the palate, cheeks, or the teeth ; these sounds are called Milts, and are very varied and difBcult to reproduce. There are six or seven in Bosjesman ; Hottentot has only four left, of which some traces are found in certain Kaffir dialects. Livingstone reports that be recognised the Bosjesman patois in the neighbour- hood of the great lakes, far to the north of their present home. Other authors think that they trace analogies between Hottentot and some of the Nile dialects. It is on such data, somewhat uncertain, that is based the probable opinion of the slow retreat of the Bushmen before the Bantu invasion. The ex- treme antiquity of these tribes is moreover attested by the kWks, in which we trace a resemblance to the sounds produced by angry or excited monkeys. The language of the Bushmen proper is very little known ; that of tlie Hottentots, Bushmen with an ad- mixture of other blood, and somewhat more civilised, has been a good deal studied. It is rich and varied in sound. Although complex in appearance, the formation of the words does not exceed the ordinary methods of agglutination. The root is always placed first, fol- lowed by the derivative elements. Tims, since the suffix differs with the subject, object, or vocative, and since each suffix has three forms corresponding to the singular, dual, and plural, it follows that a single word can have nine different forms ; but the root remains and gives the sense. The function of the various suffixes is easily recognised, and, compared to the simplest Indo-European declension, the Hottentot 12 1 66 Distribution of Languages and Races. xiiachinery is simple to childishness. Like Chinese and Annamite, Hottentots have numerous homophones, that is to say, words which have the same sound and correspond to several meanings; these are distinguished by intonation. Thus the word hoQ) signifies, according to the intonation, obscurity, place, or linen. Accent also helps to the comprehension of the language ; it is always placed on the first or root syllable ; in com- pound words, that is to say, when two or more roots precede the suffix, the accent remains on the princi- pal word, on the first syllable. Hottentot is, like the language of the Bushmen, in process of extinction ; its principal dialect, Nama, is spoken by not more than twenty thousand individuals. We have enumerated above the principal divisions of the Kaffir family. Its dialects may be traced back, both by grammar and by vocabulary, to a common origin, a mother - tongue of which these are the varieties. It is remar liable not only for the use of prefixes, but also for the almost inflected character of its vowel system. This group is in this particular much in advance of most agglutinative languages. Here are a few examples of both characteristics. In Kaffir the prefixes of the singular are v/m and Hi) of the plural, aha, ama. Ntu, man, gives um-ntu, the jnan, aha-ntu^ the men ; zvi, word, ili-zvi, the word, amazvi, the words. Hence the name of the Zulus is Ama-Zulu, and the prefix ama constantly recurs in the narratives of travellers, when they give the names of the tribes of East Africa. The suffixes of case are also prefixed. Various forms of the word man in the singular and plural will give a sufficient idea of the phonetic variation. The word is tu, often nasalised into ntu. African Races and Languages. 167 The suffixes are, as we have just said, um and aha or ama. Now we find in the singular in Zulu umu-ntu ; in Congo, omu-ntu; in Tete, mu-nttu ; in Kisambala, mu-ntu ; in Isubu, mo-tu ; and in the plural respec- tively aba-ntu, wa-ntu, ia-tu. Herero, which is softer in sound, has ova-ndu, va-ndu. The Va-Herero have the unfortunate custom of filing the front teeth of the upper jaw, and of extracting the four correspond- ing teeth of the lower jaw. Hence their lisping pro- nunciation, which resembles the imperfect speech of a child, has no liquids and no true sibilants. L, r, s,f, are wanting, and their z halts between the hard and soft th. These Bantu languages, Max Mtiller tells us, from the data furnished by Bleek, are generally alike in the simplicity of their syllables, which begin by a single consonant, preceded by a half-articulated vowel, perhaps the remains of an atrophied suffix, or by a double consonant (pt, ht, ks), or by a nasalised con- sonant, or accompanied by a clucking of the tongue, or followed by the semi-vowel w. All these groups are considered very simple. Lastly, the syllable cannot end in a consonant. Baptize becomes hapitizesha ; gold, igolide ; camel, nlcamela; bear, ibere; priest, mperesite; kirk, ikerike; apostle, mposile; sugar, isugile; English, ama-nge-si. These examples are given by Appleyard. The differences between Kafiir and its dialects consist almost entirely in changes of consonant, often very unexpected changes. Thus Sechnana is wanting in the hard g and the soft s, both found in Kaffir ; on the other hand, it possesses the r where Kaffir has only an I. Kaffir prefers the sounds b, d, g, V, z; Sechuana the stronger consonants p, t, k, f, s. The consonantal diphthongs of Kaffir and the Mpongue group, such as mb, ts, are hardened in 1 68 Distribution of Languages and Races. SecBuana into 'p. The dentals permute with the linguals. We must note a peculiarity which has contributed not a little to the confusion of the Bantu dialects. "The Kaffir women," says Appleyard, "have many words peculiar to themselves. This is the result of a custom called ukuUonipa, which forbids them to pro- nounce those words in which is found a sound which also occurs in the names of their nearest male re- latives." An analogous custom, tepi, which banishes from the language of Tahiti the syllables which com- pose the names of the kings and queens, has also existed among the ancient Kaffirs. Thus the Ama- mbalu, out of respect for their chief U-la-iiya, replace the word ilanga, sun, by the word isota. For a similar reason the Amagqunu-kwebi use the word 'mmela, immela, instead of 'si-she-tshe, which is the general term for knife. It is easy to imagine the confusion which such quaint customs have produced, repeated throughout long generations. It is curious to find these puerilities among two such different races as the Kaffirs and the Polynesians. Max Miiller, in pursuit of his chimeras, Turanianism and Monogenesis, sees in the phenomenon the result of I know not what ethnic relationship. I am rather inclined to regard this coin- cidence as the effect of a similar social and mental condition, the servile and superstitious respect of chiefs and ancestors. We may also add, a naive ten- dency to create new words, to vary and maltreat old words; a tendency which is visible in the various slang dialects, and noted also among the Indians of America. We will not leave the Kaffirs, who represent the highest elements of the negro race, without some further study of their intelligence, without giving some African Races a?id Languages. 1 69 examples, for instance, of the way in whicli they pass from the concrete to the figurative sense. It is a well-known phenomenon, and may be seen in all languages. But it is impossible to insist too much upon the metaphorical origin of language. Beta, to beat, to strike, becomes, to punish, to judge; dhle-la- 7ia, to eat in company, is to have friendly relations ; fa, to die, to be ill, to languish ; Mala, to be seated, to live, to dwell, to remain; ihladi, bush, shelter (a reminiscence of the Bushmen); ingcala, winged ant, skill, rapidity ; inncwadi, a reed, book, vessel ; inja, dog, an inferior; Icolwa, to be satisfied, to believe; lila, to weep, to deplore; mnandi, soft to the touch, content, agreeable ; gauka, to be broken in two, to be dead or stupefied; umsila, tail, courtier, or court messenger; akasiboni, he does not see us, he despises us ; nikela indhlehe, to give ear, to listen ; ukudhla uhomi, to eat , life, to live ; ukudhla umntu, to eat a man, to confiscate his goods ; ukumgekeza inholoh, to break the head, to weary, to bore ; tikunuka umntu, to smell some one, to accuse him of witchcraft. The Bantu peoples are not related to the Negroes of Guinea, of Senegambia, of the Soudan, at any rate in language. There is no similarity between their vocabulary and that of the numerous Negro groups of which I have given the most important. Their grammar also separates them by the exclusive use of prefixation. They have the privilege of forming a linguistic family, and of lending themselves to the study of comparative philology. Elsewhere in Africa we find nothing but dispersed and isolated groups ; more than twenty little groups divided up into tribes and dialects succeed and inter- mingle with each other Irom Gaboun to Morocco, 170 Distribution of Languages and Races. from Lake Tchad to the Atlantic. The most central, towards Bornou and Kanam, has been scientifically- studied by Dr. Barfch (1862). The most important dialects are Kanuri, with five cases and numerous verbal forms. Earth thinks it has some relations with Egyptian, Coptic, and even Finnish, but especially with the languages of the coast, Odji, Fanti, and Ashanti. Teda, in spite of the difference of the pronouns, is closely allied to Kanuri. Haoussa, a harmonious language, belongs to a mixed race, industrious and evidently superior to the neighbouring tribes ; it is understood in the markets from Timbuctoo and even into Senegambia. Barth has translated into Haoussa the second chapter of St. Matthew. Shall I name also Fufulde or Fulfude, Songui, Logona, Wandala, Bagrimma, and Maba, Tibbu, Goura, Legbe^ Roama, Kasm, Gbali, and the nine barbarous patois which are spoken round Lake Tchad ? Among the innumerable dialects spoken in Guinea and Senegambia we will mention only those of which the knowledge is important to the French military occu- pation : Mandingue, Malinke, Dialonke, with thirteen dialects, on the Gambia and the Niger ; Eiwe or Egbe, studied by the missionary Steinmann, with which is connected the idiom of Dahomey ; finally, Wolof, Serere, Bidchoro, &c., spoken in Cayor and in the French colony of Senegal. Eiwe is alliteral ; the English word school becomes su-ku, and the German Fenster, fesre. Wolof presents the same character ; it is, moreover, very nasal, without being therefore less harmonious and rhythmical. Markedly agglutinative, it obtains by means of divers suffixes seventeen voices to the verbs, and several shades in the meaning of the nouns, according as the object is near or far. African Races and Languages. 171 Throughout the Malinke territory we find Peul or Poul, which is supposed to be connected with the Nubian group, and through that perhaps with ancient Egyptian. But too many changes have taken place during three or four thousand years, over a distance of more than 2000 miles, to make it possible that any of these hypotheses should ever be confirmed. However this may be, the eastern origin of the race admits of no doubt. The language is totally foreign to the peoples which this race has conquered or dominated ; that which it has in common with Wolof and Serere is the result of reciprocal borrowing, and is noticeable especially in certain dialects of Poul : Foutatoro, Fouta- djallo, Bondu, Sokoto. It were as reasonable to connect it with Arab because Islam has introduced into it a number of terras relating to religion, law, and similar subjects. Poul has no guttural aspirates, and it rejects also ch and j. Its conception of gender is approximately that which we indicated above. Beings are divided into two categories, which Faidherbe calls the human and brute genders : in the one animals and inanimate things, in the other all which belongs to humanity. This capital distinction gives to the declension an appearance of complexity ; there are two singulars and two plurals. The nouns, adjectives, and participles which belong to the human gender, end in in the singular, this vowel is an agglutinated pronominal root : gorko, man ; in the plural these words end in le (they). In the brute gender the singular is marked by a vowel, or by the suffix am ; the termination is rare. The plural of the brute gender varies, and certain euphonic laws seem to play a great part in the agglutination of the terminations with the root. The initial consonants 1 7 2 Distribution of Languages and Races. of tke word in the singular may permute with others when the word is in the plural. The verb remains much simpler, and the analysis of its component elements is easy. The syntax is not complicated ; the order of the words in the sentence is determined by the succession of ideas. Thus the name of the pos- sessor is preceded by the name of the thing possessed ; the object, direct or indirect, follows the verb. It will be seen that the real difficulty of Poul consists in the great variety of the laws of euphony., On the left flank of Poul, and not far from its pro- bable birthplace, the Dinka family vegetates ; poor and almost monosyllabic, it suffices for the true savages of the Bahr-el-Abiad and of the left bank of the Upper Nile, Bongos, Dinkas, Monbottos, Nouers, Niam, who are still cannibals. A little farther north we find the Nouba group, of which it would be of great value to have a thorough knowledge, in order to determine whether it has any connection with the Libyan dialects. The districts which it occupies were formerly the refuge of the Pharaohs when driven out by the Hyksos ; Egyptian civilisation ascended the Nile as far as above Meroe, and left pyramids and temples in those regions, now once more given over to barbarism. The Shabak and the Tahraka came from Napata towards the end of the seventh century before our era to defend Egypt, enervated by the theocracy, against the Assyrian inva- sion. A few years ago, M. Benedite, in a stay of some length at Philse, made a study of Kensi, but without much result ; the dialect is in course of extinction, and the whole language consists in a few soft and easy phrases which are used by the boatmen of the Cataracts. We have several times mentioned the Libyan or Egypto-Berber group, which has occupied the whole, African Races and Languages. 173 and still occupies a part of tte Mediterranean zone, and the eastern point of Africa as far south as the Gulf of Aden. It is regarded as the transition between the agglutinative and the inflected languages ; nevertheless, it remains much nearer the first, and we cannot leave Africa without having given at least a sketch of it. We will, therefore, briefly define the three principal branches of the Libyan family : Berber, Ethiopian, Egyptian. Phoenician, Greek, Latin, and finally Arabic have been spoken in succession or simultaneously on those shores where the Libyan tongue was formerly spoken by the Numidians, the Getulse, and the Mauritanians. Never- theless, certain dialects have survived and are still extant in Algeria, in Morocco, Tunisia, and beyond the Sahara in the Upper Soudan. Such are Kabyl, Mozabi, Chaouya, Zenatya (in the environs of Con- stantine), Tamachek, Touareg. The Berber or Amazig language — for the resemblances . between its various vocabularies is suflSciently close to allow us to consider the language as a whole — still occupies a very vast domain, which formerly extended to the Canaries, the land of the Guanchos. It is a rude irregular idiom, modified by Semitism, but African in the power to use prefixes, and by the polysynthetism of its verbs ; it has, like Basque, a doubly reflective voice, expressing in a single word such phrases as je rrien doute. But the verb has but one tense, a sort of aorist, to which the ideas of present and future are attached by methods which are altogether accessory. The sign of the feminine is t : amaher, a Touareg man ; tamaher, a Touareg woman. This sign is often both prefixed and sufiixed : akli, negro, taklit, negress ; ekahi, cock, tekahit, hen. The Berber language has been written ; 1 74 Distribution of Languages and Races. there are a few fables and poems in this idiom, and Touareg inscriptions graven on rocks have been dis- covered, with twenty-eight peculiar characters, evi- dently of Semitic origin, and composing perhaps the Numidian alphabet mentioned by Valerius andMaximus. Tamachek has still a written character, fairly regular in appearance, but destitute of signs for the vowels ; it is necessary to know the language in order to be able to read it. The Ethiopian branch, Galla, Bedja, Saho, Dankali, and Somali, must not be confounded, it seems, with ^ the decidedly Semitic idioms of Abyssinia, Tigre, Amharic, and others, which are connected through Ghez with Himyarite of the coast of Arabia. Although influenced by Semitism, the Ethiopian dialects (very little studied from the point of view of comparative philology), belong to the Libyan family by the use of the sign t for the feminine, which may be either a prefix or a suffix. We note, however, that the two tenses of Bedja and Saho are expressed in a manner which is purely Semitic. The one, the aorist, is- indicated by the prefixing of the personal pronouns ; the other, the present, by the post-position of these pronouns. The same methods are employed, but indif- ferently, by Coptic, which uses auxiliaries to distinguish the tenses. Coptic, extinct since the seventeenth century, but still in use as the sacred language of the Monothelite sect, had from the second to the eighth century a fairly rich literature, very precious to those who are attracted by the minutiae of Christian exegesis. It was, as the name indicates (ha-ka-ptah, aiyvirro^ ; Guptos, Copt), the popular form of Pharaonic Egyptian, and it is through Coptic that Egyptologists have found African Races and Languages. 1 7 5 out how to decipher the annals of the Snefrou and the Rameses. The discovery of ancient Egypt is one of the finest conquests of the century, and it is a French conquest. The essays of Scholtz and of Barth^lemy presented only hypotheses which were hardly even ingenious (1775)- We must look in the works of Champollion the younger, the first reader of the hieroglyphs (1790— 1832), and of his successors Rosellini, Salvolini, Lepsius, Brugech, Rouge, Maspero, for the certain and estab- lished principles of decipherment. The reading has changed more than once ; the syllabic, alphabetic, or ideographic character of the signs has had to be deter- mined, and the hieroglyphs checked by the hieratic writings, which are more summary in form, and by the cursive or demotic, the instrument of the language of affairs and of common speech. There were in Egypt, from a very early epoch, two languages, the one sacred, the other popular, which soon presented marked differences, of which the prin- cipal (Lepsius proves this from the Rosetta inscription) was the preference of the demotic form for prefixation. That which the priests wrote after the root or theme, pronominal signs, affixes of tense, number, and gender, the people preferred to place at the beginning of the word, as in the Bantu group. The Egyptian language is very simple : a feminine of which the sign is ^ ; a plural in m, vA ; no oases. A syntax which rules that the verb shall occupy the first place in the sentence, followed by the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, and lastly the adverb, write I letter to you to-morrow ; a formula which does not lend itself to eloquence or poetry, and which yet has sufficed for the emphatic proclamations of the 176 Distribution of Languages and Races. kings, for the precepts of a lofty morality, and for the religious and philosophical lucubrations preserved by the priests in the " Book of the Dead." Triumphal odes have also been found, romances, and even medical treatises, which make the joy of Egyptologists. But the really important discovery is the probable relationship, now recognised by Fr. Miiller and by Maspero, of the Libyan and Semitic languages. In the two groups there are the same pronouns, the same method of forming the plural by the addition of a termination. The two families must have separated at an epoch when their common language was at a very early stage of its development. The one came to a standstill, the other advanced towards the inflected state. But where were they together, and wbere did they part company ? Did the Berbers come from Asia, or are the Semites a Mediterranean people, who, crossing the delta of the Nile, spread towards the Euphrates and into Arabia ? The first opinion has in its favour the prejudice which considers Asia as the cradle of the human race, at least of the white and yellow races. But the second seems to derive some support from the data of pre-historic anthro- pology. The question is unsolved, and the field open to conjecture. For the rest, everything is vague and obscure in the unknown past of Africa. We have endeavoured to present its probable phases ; in the north a flux and reflux of white peoples, causing the Nubians to retreat upon the Bantus, and the Bantus upon the Bushmen and Hottentots. In the east, a Semitic invasion, mingling the languages and the races of the Gallas, the Somalis, and the Abyssinians, and deter- mining the exodus of the Penis across Bornou and African Races and Languages. 177 the Soudan as far as Senegambia. On the extreme west, a descent of the Moors or Berbers, adding to the confusion of the groups and idioms of Nigritia and Guinea. In the centre, a remnant of divers savage races, tall or dwarfish, black or chocolate, the Bongos, the Dinkas, Nouers, Niam-Niain, Akkas, pressed to- gether pell-mell between the Nubians and the Peuls, between the Abyssinians, the Bantus of the lakes and of the Congo, and the Negroes of the Lower Niger and of Gaboun. A great civilisation in the valley of the Nile ; semi-barbarism on the northern coasts, in the basin of the Niger, and on the south-eastern coast ; everywhere else every shade and degree of moral and intellectual poverty, of a merely animal existence. CHAPTER VI. POLYSYNTHETIC LANGUAGES. The Basques — Complete isolation of the Basque or Uskara tongue — Incorporating or abbreviating character of this agglutinative idiom — Persistence of Basque customs — Origin of the Basques — Songs of Altabiscar and of the Cantabri — The American races and idioms — Has America an indigenous race — Probable Asiatic origin of the successive strata of the population — Fanciful com- parisons between the American religions and the Hindu or Egyp- tian beliefs — Table of races, general characteristics, and variety of the families of languages — Examples and decomposition of poly- synthetic terms — Life and language of the Inuit or Esquimaux — Iroquois and Algonquin group — The plateau of Anahuac — Central America — Peru — General review of the agglutinative languages. Before leaving tlie Old World we must say a few- words about a curious idiom which bears some resem- blance to the American languages, and which is found quite isolated in a district of the Pyrenees, between the Pic d'Anie and Biarritz, between Pampeluna and Bilbao. This is Eskuara, Euskara, or Uskara, spoken in three French arrondissements (Bayonne, Oloron, MauMon), and three Spanish provinces (Alava, Gui- puzcoa, Biscaya). Uskara, which from the tenth cen- tury has been the wonder of the Gallo-Romans and Gallo-Pranks, is simply an agglutinative language, at once poor and complex, like all the dialects belonging to the same class ; poor by its vocabulary — omitting of course the words borrowed from Latin, Spanish, Arabic, and French — complex by the richness of its sounds, by the delicacy of its euphonic laws, by the 178 Polysynthetic Languages. 179 double use, in conjugation, of suflBxes and auxiliaries, and by the abbreviation of words in compounds. The contrast of such a language, understood by hardly half a million of individuals, with the Neo-Latin dialects, which drove it back into the mountains, caused its im- portance and difficulty to be exaggerated by observers who were accustomed to quite different conceptions of the word and the sentence. It is barely thirty years since Uskara, more seri(jusly studied, has ceased to be a mystery. By degrees it has been discovered that its declensions consists in the post- position of numerous suffixes : of, in, by, for, with, without, towards, as far as, &c. ; that its primitive conjugation admits of the incorporation of the direct and indirect objects, and of numerous shades obtained by the accumulation of suffixes ; that the moods and tenses, at first consisting only of the- indicative, of the past and present, were enriched by the relatively modern use of the auxi- liaries naiz and dut, to be and to have, of which the termination varies according to the person addressed, whether a man, a woman, or a superior (this is known as the periphrastic conjugation); finally, that the famous compounds, called polysynthetic, -orteana, thunder, for ortz-azanz (cloud-noise) ; arkume, lamb, for ardi-hume (sheep-little) ; sagarno, cyder, for sagar-arno (apple- wine) ; Yainkoa, god, for Yaim-Goikoa, the lord on high, or rather the lord-moon, — it has been discovered, I say, that these famous compounds by apocope (which are yet more common in the American dialects) have parallels everywhere, and do not differ from idolatry for idololatry, hidalgo for hijo de algo, usted for vuestra merced, mamzell for mademoiselle. Thus, thanks to the labours of Prince Lucien Bonaparte, of MM. Van Eis and Julien Vinson, Uskara, in spite of its complicated i8o Distribution of Languages and Races. forms, its irregularity, and its constantly inverted phrase, has lost much of its strangeness. Its real intei-est lies, not in a few Uskara names of places mentioned in charters, letters-patent, Papal bulls', &c., from the year 980, nor in the little speech of Panurge in tbe second book of Eabelais, 1542, nor in the love-poems of a priest (1545), nor in the translation of the New Testament printed at La Eochelle in i 5 7 1 by the order of Jeanne d'Albret, nor in the extant sermons and pious tracts, nor even in the curious pastorals recently published and translated by Julien Vinson ; it lies in the long, the immemorial existence in a Gallo-Roman country of an idiom made for Bantus, Dravidians, or Algonquins. Suomi, Magyar, and Turkish have been imported into Europe by invasions of which the date is known ; but the establishment at the foot of the Pyrenees of the Uskara language and of those who speak it, the Escualdunac, is a fact anterior to history, and one of which neither anthropology nor ethnography render any account. These Vascons, Vascongados, Bascli, Basques — such is the name by which they have been known from antiquity^ — have lost since the seventeenth century their peculiar customs, their habit of carrying three little javelins, and their fierce manners; they have retained in Spain those fueros of ancient date which testify to their long independence, and in France the love of the game of tennis, of certain dances, and of open-air fetes; but they have become very peaceable and honest citizens, if very ignorant and very devout. As for their type, studied by Broca, it is mixed, passing from a marked dolichocephalous skull to a true sub- brachycephalous. At the utmost, the occipital develop- ment of their skull can be taken for a sign of race. Polysynthetic Languages. 1 8 1 The Basques, notwithstanding the similarity of the name, are not Gascons or Aquitani. Are they autoch- thonous, the. last remains of an age when the aggluti- native form of language prevailed in Europe as in the rest of the world ? And while their kindred retreated towards the north with the mammoth and the reindeer, did they take refuge with the bear in the Pyrenees, together with the Navarais and the Asturians or Can- tabri ? Proof is wanting, and can never be obtained, but the hypothesis is plausible. The most general opinion, which has perhaps been too lightly adopted, connects the Basques with the Iberians, an ancient Mediterranean race, doubtless Afri- can, which occupied the south of Western Europe before the coming of the Ligurians and Celts. Tlie evident fact that the Basques are established in regions necessarily occupied, or at least traversed, by the Iberians or Celtiberians is urged in support of this opinion. Some ancient names of places in Spain, [lliberis, Ebro, have been connected with Basque roots or terminations, as also a few words which have been deciphered on coins and medals or on inscriptions, Iberian words in the Latin character. But the inter- pretation of these documents is most uncertain, and the arguments produced are therefore iiot convincing. It is not known what language "the Iberians spoke, nor whether the Basques did not precede them in Spain or in the Pyrenean district. As for the comparisons which have been attempted, with regard either to the race or to the language, with the PhcBnicians, the Finns, the Magyars, the Berbers, or the Indians of North America, they cannot be considered seriously* Among agglutinative dialects resemblances do not, as we have already said, imply relationship. With, regard to the 13 1 82 Distribution of Languages and Races. race, whatever its origin, it has become completely European. The Basques for a long time took pride in their isolation, in their language unknown to other men, which they considered as the original language of humanity, the universal mother-tongue. These dreams may be found in the work of their gramma- rians, Ohaho and Inchauspe. The Basques resisted the Eomans, as they had perhaps resisted the Celts and the Iberians ; they destroyed at Roncesvalles the rear- guard of Charlemagne. The song of Altabiscar, which was at one-time believed to be a contemporary poem, but which is really several centuries later, and seems to have been thought in French, celebrates worthily this savage victory. It is the finest page in their literature : — " A cry was heard in the heart of the Basque mountains; it is the tumult of an army. Ours replied from the summits, and the chief of the clan sharpened his javelins. Why did they come to trouble our peace ? The Lord who made the mountains willed thfit men should not cross them. The rocks fall, roll, crushing the troops. Blood flows in torrents. What broken bones ! what a sea of blood ! Flee, King Carloman, with thy black plumes and thy red cloak. Thy loved nephew, the brave Roland, lies slain below. Chieftain, it is over ; go and embrace your wife and children. The eagles will devour these remains, and their bones will whiten there to all eternity." The song of the Cantabri, even less authentic, if that be possible, celebrates a strife with Augustus C^sar : Octavius is the master of the world, Lecobidi of Biscay a. . , , "For five years they have blocked our mountains ; they are many, and we are few. They will flee, if they can, towards the banks of the Tiber." Poly synthetic Languages. 183 This is very well ; but we need to know whether the Cantabri were Basques. The refrain, Ld U lelo leloa, appears to be a reminiscence of the Arabic formula Allah, il Allah. If we are unable to solve the problem of the origin of the Basques, we are yet more bafHed by the mystery oE the origin of the Indians of America. The Escu- aldunac have at any rate a long history, and the Europeans only landed in America four centuries ago, to exterminate the inhabitants and destroy all traces of their history. Thus the discussion as to the origin of the different tribes and nations, scattered over a continent four times as large as Europe, might be end- less. It is generally doubted that America had any indigenous race ; the absence of great apes, even of fossil ones, seems to exclude the possibility of a pre- liminary anthropoid evolution. Yet in America, as in Europe, and throughout the different pei'iods of the quaternary epoch, man has gone through the same industrial stages, passing from the rough stone imple- ment to tools of polished stone and of copper, beyond which he had not got at the time of the European inva- sion. Man in America seems to have had very humble beginnings, if, as appears established, his refuge in the Pampas consisted in holes hollowed out beneath the carapace of giant reptiles, now extinct ; and he appears also to have been endowed with a very slight degree of perfectibility, if we are to recognise him in the fierce Charrua, in the stupid B'otocudo, in the hateful Apache, or the hungry Californian. Asia, by way of the Behring Straits and the Aleutian Islands, seems to have sent to Polar and Northern America slightly more advanced specimens of humanity : first, the Esquimaux, the near relations of the Tchbukches 1 84 Distribution of Languages aii'd Races. and Koriaks ; then various Mongoloids of dark colour, the Sioux, Dacotas, Pawnees, Natchez, Seminoles, fol- lowed by the Algonquins, Hurons, Iroquois, Delawares, and behind these, closing the procession, the peoples of Athabasca, of Mackenzie, all of whom, pressing forward to Florida and Mexico, drove towards the extreme north the unhappy Esquimaux. This hypo- thesis offers an ex;planation of the progress along the Ohio and the Mississippi of the constructors of the mounds or tumuli, and the successive immigrations of the Guatemaltecs, Yucatecs, Othomis, Quiches, Mayas, phichimecs, and Aztecs, gradually heaped up between the Isthmus and Texas. But in South America the marked differences of stature, colour, physiognomy, and cranial capacity are a puzzle to the ethnologist. The wisest course is merely to note the thick-set form of the Brazilian savages, both the conquerors of ancient times, Guaranis, Caribs, and Tupis, and the conquered races, Botocudos and Tapuyas ; the middle height, the aquiline nose, and retreating forehead of the Peruvians; the tall stature of the Patagonians, and the miserable character of the Fuegians, who sometimes eat an old woman for want of something better, and who replied to Darwin's question as to whether they preferred their wife or their dog, that they preferred the dog because he could catch the otter. It is, of course, possible that among these diverse types some should be of foreign origin, but whence could they have come ? What wind bore them to this immense peninsula, isolated between two vast oceans ? There is no answer to this question. Some of the beliefs, and some of the constructions of Mexico and Peru have been compared with the religion and the arts of Egypt and India. This, in my opinion, is quite Polysynthetic Languages. 185 cMmerical. If there are coincidences, they are for- tuitous, or they result from evolution, which leads alt the human groups through the same stages and by the same steps. Observers have also sought to trace in North America some sign, physical or intellectual, of the Scandinavians, who towards the tenth century probably discovered, and to some extent colonised, the coast of Greenland and of North-Eastern America. Without disputing the fact, which appears to be established, and even admitted, that a slight infusion of European blood has been propagated in the scattered tribes of the Eed Indian hunters, we do not see that the dolichocephalous Esquimaux have been modified by it, or that the deep-set eyes, the heavy jaw, the narrow foreheads of the Assiniboines and Cherokees have been altered. In order to improve upon these faces, for which nature has not done much, the recent but repeated crossing with the French Canadians was necessary. No part of the world was so sparsely peopled as America. Tribes which live chiefly by hunting need a great deal of space, and the continual wars which they wage in order to keep their territory clear from the encroachments of their neighbours do not further the increase of the groups. Only in the region of the centre were there compact populations, in Mexico, the Antilles, the Isthmus, Columbia, and Pern, where a true civilisation flourished, unhappily extinguished by the Spanish conquest. The jealous isolation main- tained by most of the tribes prevented the fusion of the dialects, even of those which were near neighbours; and linguists reckon, between the Arctic Ocean and Cape Horn, as many as twenty-seven families of Ian- ] 86 Distribution of Languages and Races. guages, not related to each other, and belonging for the most part to the agglutinative class. Omitting certain independent and little known idioms of Sonora and Texas, of Mexico, the Andes, Guatemala, and of the Antilles, which have not got beyond the monosyllabic phase, we find the following twenty-three groups : — On the shore of the Arctic Ocean and in the Aleoutian Islands, Inuit or Esquimaux; to the north-west, Kenia, in Alaska; in the west of the Dominion, on the shores of the Athabasca, Ata- pache ; to the south of Hudson's Bay, Algonquin ; on the St. Lawrence, around the great lakes, Iroquois ; Koloche, to the west of New Britain ; in the United States, Oregonese, Calif ornian, Yuma, Dakota or Sioux, Pawnee, Alapache ; Maya, in Yucatan ; Mexican, Nahuatli or Aztec ; Ohiboha, among the Muyscas of Columbia ; Carib and Arevac, in the Guianas ; Quichua-Aymara, in Brazil and Parana; Guaycuru and Abipone, in La Plata ; Araucan, in Chili ; Pnelche, in the Pampas to the west of Buenos Ayres ; Tehuelche, in Patagonia ; and the idioms of Terra del Puego. Before considering any of these groups, all rich in dialects, we must point out those characters which they have in common. For their general resemblance is as striking as the variety of their constituent parts. They are all incorporating and polysynthetic. " The American languages," says Frederick Miiller (" General Ethnography "), " repose as a whole upon the principle of polysynthetism or of incorporation : thus the sepa^ rate ideas, which, in our languages, the phrase unites together" under the form of detached words, are, on the contrary, in the American idioms, united together in an indivisible unity." This method has seemed to many students of these languages to be sufficiently typical to Poly synthetic Languages. 1 87 justify th.e creation of a new class of languages. But it is easy to see that many other languages, agglutina- tive or inflected, have made use of the methods which the American dialects abuse. The incorporation of the objective pronouns, and even of nouns, exists in Basque, as we have mentioned above (hence by some it has been connected with the American languages) ; we also noted it in the Finnish dialects. The incorporation of the subject pronouns is the basis of the Indo-European conjugation, dadami, dadasi, dadati, I give, thou givest, he gives ; the in- corporation of the object prevails in some Romance languages : in Itfdian, portandovi, portandovelo, carrying to you, carrying it to you ; in Gascon, dechemdroumi, let me sleep. The Semitic languages incorporate the direct object. In short, the Hebrew sabachthani, thou hast forsaken me ; the Magyar latlak, I see him ; the Basque deniogu, we give it to hiui ; and the Iroquois keiavis, I give it to them, differ in reality, says M. Hovelacque, only in the order of the elements of which the word is composed. The American languages go far- ther, they amalgamate the noun subject with the verb ; Algonquin, nadholiTieen, bring us the canoe, formed of naten, to bring, amochol, canoe, i euphonic, neen, to us ; Iroquois, sogininjinitizoyan, if I do not take the hand, into which enter sogena, to take, and oningina, hand. The possessive declension of the noun (Iroquois, onkiasita, the foot of both of us; Algonquin, nindawema, my sister) is used in Hungarian, atynnlc, our father ; in Hebrew, eli, my God. There is nothing here peculiar to the American dialects ; the French m'amie, m'dmour, present a sporadic case of the same incor- poration ; in the word tante, for instance, is concealed the possessive ta placed before the Latin amita. 1 88 Distribution of Languages and Races. The variation of the verb, when the speaker wishes to express changes in the manner of the action or in the object, points especially to tlie absence of general ideas; it is a mark of inferiority often observed in those languages which are not far advanced in their evolution, and of which the inflected stage has retained some traces. Prom this phenomenon are issued the many verbal variants, causative, intensive, desiderative, &c., which Arab and Sanscrit obtain by means of the insertion of atrophied suffixes, and which make the inconvenient and barren wealth of Turkish, and Wolof. Why then should we be astonished that the Chilian elu%, to give, ramifies into ehyuen, to give more, eluz- qmn, to seem to give, eluvcden, to be able to give, eluduamen, to wish to give ; or that Tamanacan has JUCU7-U, to eat bread, jemeri, to eat fruit, janeri, to eat ■ cooked things ; and Cherokee, kutuvo, I wash myself, tsekusquo, I wash some one else, takiiteya, I wash dishes, takuTigkala, I wash my clothes ? Polysynthetism proper remains to be considered, a species of oral stenography, which amalgamates into a compound word four, five, or six words, capriciously abridged, with the beginning, middle, or end omitted. It is an agglutination of words instead of an aggluti- nation of suflSxes ; but we need not go far to find examples, very simple ones it is true, which we hardly remark. In German, heiTn, for hei dem, zur for zu der ; in French, du, au, ds, for de le, it, Je, en les, anjoiir d'hui for a le jour de hui (hodie) ; in English, lady for hlaf- dige, loaf-giver, are the result oP contractions in every way similar to the Chippeway toto-chdbo, wine, formed of toto, milk, and cJwminabo, bunch of grapes. Finally, in many of our complex derivatives, rapprochement, recueillemcnt, &c., the constituent parts of the woi'd Polysynthetic Languages. 189 are hardly less obliterated than in the Algonquin pilwpe, bachelor, formed of pilsitt, chaste, and lenape, man. These observations, chosen among many, will render less singular words such as amaTujanachqioi- mincM, large-leaved oak, an Algonquin word composed of amangi, large ; nachic, hand ; quim, termination ap- plied to fruits with a shell, and aelvpanti, tree trunk ; as the Esquimaux .aulisariartora suarpok, he has hastened to go fishing ; as the Mexican notlazomahuiz teopixcatatzin, my father, divine protector, esteemed and venerated. In short, the faculty of incorporation and of poly- synthetism, very inconvenient when it produces these immensely long words, which can hardly be pronounced in one breath, is not unknown to the languages of Asia and Europe. Developed in America to an extra- ordinary degree, it gives to these very various idioms a superficial resemblance, an appearance of unity; but it does not place them out of, still less beyond, the agglutinative class ; it does not bring them nearer to the inflected ordei», where what remains of these antique methods is of the nature of an atavic survival. We have only lately been able to consider the American languages with anything but extreme re- serve and mistrust. The study of these idioms has been brought back to its proper place by such men as Lucieri Adam and Victor Henry, whose work has confirmed the previsions of Hovelacque and of Vinson, but it has been given over for three hundred years either to the pious fancies of missionaries, seeking to find in Ontario or Chili some dialect escaped from Babel, or to the illusions of etymologists such as Brasseur de Bourbourg, who would connect Nahuatl iQO Distribution of Languages and Races. with the Teutonic languages, or the jargon of Van- couver with both English and French, never inquiring whether a given word has not been borrowed, very naturally, from the foreign colonists; or, finally, to the preconceived theories of the upholders of Tura- nianism and Monogenesis, and others who seek Aryans, Oopfcs, and Buddhists in Peru, and the remnant of the ten tribes of Israel in the Par West. The essay of Duponceau on the Canadian languages (1836) marks the first step towards the scientific classification of the northern group, and it was only at the second American Congress at the Luxem- bourg that, in his studies on the sixteen groups of American idioms, M. Lucien Adam drew up a table of which the arrangement will not be disputed by specialists. We have just seen what common features give to the American languages a marked family resemblance. But this apparent likeness conceals an extreme diver- sity in the vocabularies, and in composition and syntax, which take the place of grammar in the agglutinative idioms. A detailed study of these differences would be out of place in these summaries, of which the chief aim, is to determine the extent of the domain of language, and the ancient or actual area which the principal varieties of language occupy in it. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a few groups chosen in the north, the centre, and the south of the New World; The Inuit (" men," so they call themselves), whom in disdain the Mohicans called Eskimanzik, eaters of raw meat, whence Esquimaux, seem to deserve our attention for more than one reason. First of all, tliey liave the rare if slender privilege of constituting a pure race ; secondly, they represent, by their extreme Polysynthetic Languages. 191 dolichocephaly and their manner of life, the man of the quaternary age, the man of the reindeer ; thirdly, in spite of their dirty-yellow skin, their narrow eyes, their coarse hair, their flat round face, their thick-set ungraceful frame, they are not wanting in courage, in gaietyj or in moral and intellectual qualities. The Esquimaux of Greenland have become very acceptable Danish citizens, municipal councillors and merchants. They display a real taste for geographical science. Since i860 they have had at Godthaab a printing-press and an illustrated journal, of which the text and drawings are furnished entirely by the natives ; and they publish in their own language collections of popular traditions. To the Esquimaux of Greenland belong the fifteen hundred natives of Labrador. Along the shores of the Arctic Ocean, from Hudson's Bay to the northern point of Asia and to Cape Sche- lagskoi, are scattered the Great Esquimaux, the Onki- lones, the Aleoutes, and the Tchoukches, divided into numerous tribes, but numbering in all not more than twenty or thirty thousand individuals. They extended formerly as far as the valley of the St. Lawrence, per- haps as far as Massachusetts. But the Red Indians, their hereditary foes, have driven them back towards the desolate regions, where they will one day die out, in spite of their strength to resist the miseries of their hard life. The soil produces nothing but grass in the summer and a few stunted shrubs. Reduced to hunting and fishing, especially the latter, having for assistants only dogs and reindeer, which are hardly tamed ; for weapons, whalebone, walrus horns, imple- ments of stone, and the drift timber from wrecks or forests, brought by favourable currents to their frozen shores, they have been able to provide for all their 192 Distribution of Languages and Races. needs. Warmly covered in impermeable clothing, and in boots made of sealskin, they embark in their frail boats and hurl against the sea-beasts their harpoons furnished with the bladders which permit them to recover these precious weapons. In the winter they make holes in the ice and keep watch for the walrus, which comes there to breathe ; they attract them by imitating their cry. At night they take refuge in huts built of earth and ice, which long galleries and furs protect against the cold ; lamps abundantly furnished with blubber give out such a heat (not without smell) that all clothing becomes superfluous. Here they dwell by twenties, naked, dirty, and happy ; there is no thought among them of decency, of modesty, or of monogamy ; yet the women are chaste, they are loved and they love their children, who are buried with them if they die before these are weaned. Everything is in common among these people, though each one has his fishing canoe, his ummiach or trans- port boat, his harpoons and nets, his wives and his little ones. The voracity of the Esquimaux is in direct ratio to the rarity of satisfying food. When a whale is thrown up on the coast, they rush upon the immense prey, cut it to pieces, tear away the meat, remove the bones, take out the intestines, run along under the ribs of the carcase. When this happy task is completed, the men lie down upon their back witji open mouth, and the favourite wife feeds them with the nicest morsels. He seems nearly to resemble our ancestors of the Magdeleine. Yet the Esquimaux haiS what these lacked, a religion, an ideal, and even a powerful clergy, initiated by long and hard trials to the mysteries of the invisible world. He worships the .whale, which is saluted by the hymns of tlie young Polysynthetic Languages. 193 girls; he fears the spirits of the dead and their great chief Togarnsuk ; he aspires to a paradise situated beneath the ice, at the depths of the sea, where unnumbered seals come of their own accord to be slain. The Angakok, priest or sorcerer, has visited this para- dise more than once, swallowed like Jonah by a friendly whale, or conducted thither by familiar spirits. The credulity of the Esquimaux is greater, though it is diffi- cult to believe it, than that of all past or present divots. The language of the Esquimaux bears no resem- blance (except in its polysynthetism) to that of the Red Indians of the great lakes. It is not known whether it belongs through Aleoute and Tchoukche to the Samoyed or Uralo-Altaic group. Its dialects, from Greenland to the mouth of the Mackenzie, are sepa- rated only by insignificant differences. Its sounds are simple, a little. too guttural: the g, h, g nasal, the groups rh, rkr, tch, dj, ch (the German ch), the dentals, and a sort of palatal I abound, while s and the labials are rare. The vowel a dominates the others ; e and i, ou and 0, seem to alternate according to accentuation and number : angakok, priest ; angekut, priests. There are a dual and a plural, numerous suffixes denoting case, which are always placed after the noun, a con- jugation poor in moods and tenses, but abounding in intensive, negative, and frequentative forms, as we have repeatedly found in the agglutinative languages. Their method of counting merits a special mention. At first, says M. Victor Henry, they only reckoned up to five, the hand; to express six the Inuit says "one upon the second hand," &c., for eleven, "one on the first foot ; " for twenty-one, " one on the first hand of the comrade;" for forty-one, "one on the first hand of the second comrade." It is rather long, but this 194 Distribution of Languages and Races. method of calculation leads to the decimal system, which is found in Aleoute. Many races, who long tarried at the notion of three, have wandered into complexities of the duodecimal system. M. Henry makes a very just observation about the interminable words of the Esquimaux, which may, I think, be ap- plied also to many cases of American polysynthetism. They are, he says, phrases in which the words are abbreviated by the rapidity of pronunciation, as in the French phrases Quest ce qu'il dit, pronounced keskidi ; Qu'est ce que c'est que cela, prgnounced kekckcga. Ohal- luktueksarsekautit, for ckaUuk/.uek-sakharsek-autit, " thou hast experienced many things worthy of memory." To the south-east of the Esquimaux lie two con- federations of Red Indians, the Algonquins and the Iroquois, whose numerous tribes furnished Cooper with most of his heroes, cruel, subtle, brave, magnanimous, and sententious. Compared with the Esquimaux these people are handsome, well-made, active, picturesquely clothed, their skin of a beautiful Florentine bronze under their family blazon and their variegated paint- ing. More favoured by climate, they are less dirty and less greedy, but they have not passed the moral and intellectual level of those whom they formerly drove out of their territory ; it is even doubted whether their most adaptable tribes can learn, like the Green- landers, to take part in political and municipal life. Among them agriculture was abandoned to the women, and was rare and rudimentary ; they lived only for and by hunting, always at war with their neighbours, in order to extend their domain as they killed out the game. Their religious ideas and practices, dances, songs, and exorcisms are pretty much the same, at bottom, as we find among civilised as among savage Polysynthetic Languages. 195 peoples. It is one of tlie great benefits of ethnography that it has shown ns over all the earth the equivalence of the genuflexions, the mummeries, and the beliefs called consoling or sublime. So Iroquois, Algonquins, or Esquimaux of the five parts of the world believe alike in the intervention, always capricious, often malign, of spirits or of gods, in the power of certain clever seers, well-paid interpreters of the will of those above or below; and, finally, in a second life in happy hunting- grounds which more than one has visited in dreams, and where the creatures come to be killed by the weapons which have been buried in the tombs of the warriors. The Iroquois or Hurons of the lakes were divided into six nations, speaking Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tusiarora. The Algonquins, far more numerous, included about thirty tribes and as many dialects, related to each other by grammar and vocabulary; in Canada proper: Algonquin, Chippeway, Ottaway, Menomeni, Knistemaux ; in Acadia : Souri- quois, Micmac, Etchemin, Abenaki, &c. ; in the States of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Georgia : Narragansett, Mohican, and Lenape, Miami, Saki, &c. The simple phonetic system of these languages pre- sents no remarkable peculiarities except perhaps a sort of labial sibilant w, wdanis, his daughter, in Lenape, but oudanis in Ottaway. The verb and the noun, as in many agglutinative languages, are not distinguished ; the verb is only a noun accompanied by suffixes which mark possession. The pseudo-conjugation is none the less very rich in forms, in variants, though not in moods and tenses. An English missionary, Edwin James, fancied that he conld attribute seven or eight thousand to the Chippe- 1 9^ Distribution of Languages and Races. Way verb, but his eyes must have deceived him at that- moment. The possessive pronoun and the first adjec- tive are prefixed to the noun ; kuligatchis, thy pretty little foot {hi, thou ; w%dit, pretty ; wichgat, foot ; chis, diminutive) ; hitanittowit, the Great Spirit (Jcitama- nitou) ; wit is an adjective termination. Algonquin has no genders ; Iroquois has two, the one for gods and men, the other for everything else, women and children, animals, plants, or mountains. Yet there are particles and affixes to distinguish animate and inanimate. The vocabulary is poor in abstract terms, and even with the aid of borrowed- words from English, Spanish, French, or German, the orator is condemned to have recourse to the strange metaphors which travellers have remarked with admira^ tion without always understanding them. Iroquois is strongest in numeration ; it has separate words for the first ten numbers. The Algonquin, like the Esquimaux of Hudson's Bay, stops short at five ; but as he calls ten Jive more, a hundred ten times ten, and a thousand the great ten of ten?, it will be seen that he is fairly well endowed with tlie arithmetical faculty. An Iroquois manuscript is said to exist ; it would be important to know its date. The missionaries were the first Iroquois and Algonquin litterateurs, and poor ones : at the present day the Cherokees, who appear to accept civilisation, publish newspapers. But all these tribes, in spite of the relative gentleness of the Canadian immigrants, will disappear, either by the intermixture of their race with others, or destroyed by drink, before they have learned to submit to regular work and to social servitude. It was, however, from their borders, perhaps even from one of their groups, that the mound -builders focysyninettc L.angiiages. 1 97 started to go down the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio, and their tombs testily to a certain degree of industrial civilisation. Mingling with the Natchez, the Pawnees, and the Oomanches, they invaded in successive waves the plateau of Anahuac, the Olmecs, Toltecs, Chichimecs, and Aztecs, whose different features, monuments, and religions we are now iDeginning to dis- tinguish. Tlieae conquerors from the north encountered in Yucatan, in Chiapas, in Guatemala, and in the Isthmus, the Mayas and the Quiches, the builders of Izamal and of Pallanque, who had perhaps come from the north before them, or perhaps from Columbia, where the Chibchas already formed a theocratic state, with four kings and two popes. The brilliant Aztec empire overthrown by Cortez was not very ancient; but it is certain that for some centuries a considerable civilisation had existed in these regions, which were full of opulent cities and majestic monuments. For my part, I have not yet been able to admire in them- selves the hideous carvings of the Mexican temples, yet they are tolerable from the decorative point of view. These were the dwelling-places of innumerable gods — of the air, of the spring, of fire, of lightning, of the sun — whom a sincere piety worshipped with human sacrifice. To-day the poor peons of the pueblos, although they retain a vague memory of Montezuma and their past grandeur, genuflect before other gods, who have also drunk deep of the blood of the vanquished. The god of the Inquisitors was a worthy successor to the fierce Huitzilopochtli. But though the people of the Anahuac were terribly oppressed in the sixteenth century, they are gradually recovering their place in humanity, and through the mixture of races are again taking their place in civilise'd life. The Christian zeal of the Spaniards destroyed the cities, the arts, the inscrip- U igS Distribution of Languages and Races. tions, and the books of Mexico, except, if it be authentic, the Popid-vuh, a puerile rhapsody on cosmogony. But the results of scientific study of the various ethnic strata and of the thousand languages which are heaped up in these districts are full of interest. According to the fine work of M. V. A. Malte Brun (1877), there are, in au area only four times the size of France, not less than 2 80 dialects, classed in eleven great families, which comprehend thirty-five idioms and sixty-nine principal dialects, besides sixteen languages not classed, and sixty-two lost idioms. Most of these eleven families are still extant sporadically among the peoples of the centre, but overshadowed by Nahuatl or Mexican, which is spoken as far as the Isthmus. The oldest authentic Mexican text is a catechism printed at Antwerp in 1558. On the other side of the equator, on the slopes of the Andes, another purely American civilisation had been formed, completely separated from Central America, the civilisation of the Quechuas and of the Aymaras, the vast empire of the Incas, theocratic and commu- nistic (to the profit of the kings, children of the Sun), with its harems, its towns, divided into four quarters by walls at right angles, its grandiose festivities, its mystic cake and liqueur, its legends, in which a little history was mixed with a good deal of self-adulatory fiction. The great originality of ancient Peru was this state communism, unknown elsewhere, this paternal exploitation of happy serfs, lodged, fed, and married, at the expense and for the benefit of one man. Quichua or Ketchua, the principal language of the Pacific coast and of the valleys of the Andes, seems to have come originally from Quito, from the upper basin of the Amazon; one dialect, Tchintchaysouya, occupies the centre of Pern ; a second, Cuzco, is spoken in the Poly synthetic Languages. 199 extreme south and towards Chili ; finally, Gochabamba in Bolivia, and Caltchaki on the eastern slope of the Andes, surround the somewhat narrow domain of Aymara, which appears to be entirely distinct from these. The mechanism of Quicha seems to be nearly identical with that of the other agglutinative idioms of America ; relatively rich in compounds of a reasonable length (tchimpu, cloud, rasu, block of snow, Chimhorazo), it abounds in forms with suffixes and in derivatives of great length. It has no gender ; the noun and tlie verb are confounded ; the particles of case, the personal and possessive pronouns, suffice for all the shades of thought. The language is guttiiral and affects doubled initial letters, ttanta, bread, ppatclia, dress. Spoken side by side with Spanish in the towns of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, and almost exclusively in the mountainous districts, and in the north-west of the Argentine Rt^public, Quicha has furnished to Spanish a number of geographical and local terms, among others, the names of the llama, the vigogne, and the alpaca. It was not written before the conquest ; the Peruvians, in spite of their advanced civilisation, had not even attained to the riddles of the hieroglyph ; they still used knots of different coloured ribbons as mnemonics. These were called quipos, and have a family likeness to the rows of seeds or shells which the Red Indians of the north threw in front of them to mark the different stages of their discourse. The Peruvians, like the Mexicans, have survived in great numbers the terrible Catholic invasion, and though long overwhelmed by the blow which had fallen on them, long stupefied by superstitions far inferior to their ancient religious beliefs, they are now raising their heads and claiming their place among free peoples. The rest of the American peoples, the most 200 Distribution of Languages atid Races. vigorous, the most worthy to live, have perished or are about to disappear before the greed of the European immigrants. Without hunting-grounds, without game, they are condemned to die out. Only the poorest specimens of American humanity, the Abipones, the Charruas, the Botocudos, and in the extreme north the Kienas and the Athabasks, the dwellers in thickets, in deserts, in the torrid or the frozen zones, may count upon a respite of a few centuries. Oar summary review of the agglutinative languages is terminated. We have seen that, simple or complex, their structure is founded solely upon the addition, to one or more invariable themes or radicals, of subordinate roots, emptied of their proper sense and reduced to aflBxes, suffixes, infixes, and prefixes. The immense majority of these languages have never been written ; driven out to the borders of civilisation, into countries not easily approachable by Europeans, they continue to Vegetate obscurely. But a few more favoured groups, preserved, and even developed, - by civilisation, have attained to some literary life. Japanese, Mandchu, Mon- golian, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Dravidian, Malay, Georgian, Basque, Greenland, Algonquin, Mexican, and Quicha have all contributed, in very different measure indeed, to the progress of human intelligence. Their names are worthy to be remembered. We pass by an easy transition from the agglutinative class to the inflected class. We shall find in the latter all that can be done by suffixation. A single thread separates inflexion from agglutination — that is, the possible variation of the root syllable ; a very slight acquisition, which, while it stops the abuse of suffixa- tion, allows of the expression of every shade of the idea without lengthening the word, and also of attaching a general idea to all the derivatives from the same root. CHAPTER VII. THE SEMITIC WORLD. Noah, Hain, and Shem — Conjectures on the origin of the Semites — • Ethnical variety, lingmstlc unity — Exodus of the Canaanites : Hyksos, Fhceniciatis, Hebrews— Jews and Syrians crushed in the struggle with Egypt and Assyrians — Rule of the Fersiaus, Greeks, and Romans — Appearance of the Arabs — Christianity and Islam — Tardy revenge of the Semites — Character of the inflexion and structure of the word in the Semitic languages — Northern branch of the Semitic family — i. Arameo-Assyrian group : Chaldean, Nabatean, Syriac, Syro-Chaldean, Assyrian — 2. Canaanitigh group : Phoenician, Punic, Samaritan, Moabitish, &c., Hebrew — Southern branch : Arabic, Himyarite, Ghez or Ethiopian. The peoples whom we are accustomed to call Semitic have always ignored their relations with the Biblical patriarch Shem, son of Noah. Bnt if we disregard the lettet of the precious record, compiled and recast many centuries after the events which are therein transformed into legendary fables, if we consider in themselves the names of Noah, Ham, Shern, and Gush, we shall readily overlook the inexactitude of the name given by the moderns to the Chaldeans, the Arameans, the Oanaanites, and to the Arabs. For Noah is a Semitic god of great antiquity, Nouach, a genius with four outspread wings, god and saviour, the spouse of Tihavti, the fecundity of the abyss ; Ham was Khemos, the god of the Moabites, and perhaps identical with the Egyptian Khem ; we find Gush among the Cos- sians or Kissians of the Euphrates, and among the southern peoples whom the Pharaohs fought on the 202 Distribution of Languages and Races. two shores of tlie Red Sea ; " the vile Gush," said the Egyptians*; but they none the less gave to their royal princes the title of Prince of Gush, which shows the importance which they attached to the subjugation of these Gush or Gushites, the Ethiopians of Herodotus, cut in two by the Semitic expansion ; as for Shem, it is difficult not to recognise in him Samas, Samson, the sun-god of the Assyrian pantheon. Gushites, Hamites, Semites are far from being synonyms ; but it is hardly possible to doubt their relationship, or at least the intimacy of their primitive connection. Only it is very difficult to determine the vicissitudes of their prehistoric life. Experts differ ; some, M. Eenan, for example, assigning to the Semites a northern origin ; others think, with Echrader, that the nucleus of the race was formed in the centre and west of the Arabian peninsula, where the language approaches most nearly to the supposed mother-tongue, where the Chaldean legends and divinities have least penetrated, though they form the common ground of thought among the other Semites. Finally, since philologists are agreed in recognising affinities, rudi- mentary but probable, between the Khamito-Berbers and the Semites, it is hard to conjecture where they both came from, or where we should place the common country where they possessed a common idiom. We must be content to know that their separation was accomplished at the time when Menes came down from Upper Egypt to the Delta to found the ancient empire and Memphis, about five thousand years before our era. At that date the languages of the Nile and of the Libyan desert had reached the extreme limit of the agglutinative stage, which they have not over-stepped ;■ and the Semites were doubtless progressing towards The Semitic World. 203 the inflected period. Thenceforward the two races have no point of contact except the Isthmus of Suez. The one, without advancing farther than Mount Sinai,- develops its precocious yet enduring civilisation, builds towns, pyramids, and temples, and, from the worship of animals and of the Nile, rises to the religion of the sun, of fire, and to the belief in immortality. The other, wandering without name or route, given up to the worship of stones and of the heavenly bodies, fluctuates between Nedjed and the Euphrates ; for two thousand years it is lost to history. At most, we may attribute to some attack on the part of the nomads the fall of the first Egyptian empire and the retreat of the Pharaohs to Thebes. When history first takes cognisance of the Semites, the practically unchanging unity of their linguistic organism was constituted, and much more strongly than the Indo-European unity. The dialectic differences do not affect either the formation of the words or the vocabulary, but only a few details of grammar and pronunciation. But ethnical unity exists no longer. If the Arab with hie high, long head, his slender, nervous body, his profile at once strongly marked and refined, may be considered as the faithful guardian of the racial type, the thick-set build of the Chaldean, the tendency to fat and the massive face of the Assyrian, point to various mixtures with more ancient peoples. We have already mentioned the very probable existence of non-Semitic races and languages, Shumi- rians and Elamites, round about the Persian Gulf, in Babylonia and Susiana. There, in these regions of ancient civilisation, several Semitic groups obtained their industrial and religious education. At the time when the Shumir Likbagas (3000) reigned in Chaldea, 204 Distribution of Languages and Races. Bab-ilou, Babylon, the gate of El, was already a tiourishing city under kings who were also priests ; and the shores and islands of the Gulf of Ormuz were occupied by the Canaanites, the Poun, Poeni, Punici, the future Phoenicians, whose territory on the other hand reached to the Himyarites of Southern Arabia. Mesopotamia and Armenia were also full of Semites, Arameans to the north and west, the future Jews to the north and in the centre, in Arrapachitis (Arphaxad) ; lastly, the Assyrians of the middle valley of the Tigris. It would seem from the legend of Nimrod preserved by the Bible, that the Assyrians were a Chaldean tribe, whose national god or eponymous hero, Assour, was the male of the Canaanitish Aschera. All these tribes, more or less compact, more or less powerful, received from Lower Chaldea their gods and their beliefs, the tradition of the deluge, the worship of winged bulls, transformed at a later date into cherubim, the Elohim and Baalim of every species, the goddesses of fertility and of the spring sunshine (Adonis, Tham- muz), dead and resuscitated. A cataclysm of which the causes are not known, an Elamite invasion under the pressure of the Persians, an incursion of Scythians from the other side of the Caucasus, destroyed about the year 2300 B.C. the earliest Assyrian empire, drove the Arameans back towards Syria, the Israelites towards Lower Chaldea, and decided the Canaanites to cross the desert ; while the torrent of the Hyksos (robber chiefs), bearing onward in its course Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, was hurled upon the delta of the Nile. The Canaanites, driving before them the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, the Pelestes or Philistines, massed themselves upon the Syrian coast around Arvad The Semitic World. 205 and Tyros ; these were the names of their ancient cities of the Persian Gulf. Finally, under the name of Hebrews, people of the other shore, the clan of a certain Terah and of a certain Nahor, decided to quit Ur in Clialdea, bearing away their gods like Anchises, eagerly pursued by the Elamite chieftains or kings ; among others by Chedorlaomer. The leaders of the fugitives, Abraham and his nephew Lot, underwent some misfortunes in the neighbourhood of the Jordan, of Sodom and Gomorrah ; others whose names have come down to us, of doubtful wisdom and uncertain morality, Isaac, the dishonest Laban, Esau the simple, and the astute Jacob, continued to live with difficulty, surrounded by other nomads, until famine or their vagabond habits drove the Hebrews to the confines of Egypt, into the land of Goshen, beside the Hyksos. Meanwhile Egypt had not abandoned the hope of revenge ; her national kings had not ceased for five centuries to harass the foreign conqueror. Ahmes, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, finally expelled from the delta the armies and the government of the Hyksos ; and his successors, returning upon Asia the attack which they had thence received, subjugating, or ratheik putting to ransom, all the Canaanites of Judea, Phoenicia, and Syria, crossed the Euphrates and the Tigris. Nineveh twice fell into their power, and the whole Semitic world became vassal to the .Pharaohs. The influence of Egypt was real though temporary, but in the reciprocal dealings which were the result of the conquests of the Tutnes and the Araenhoteps, the share of the Semites was on the whole the larger. Marriages with the daughters of kings or vassal governors brought into Egypt and established Asiatic types, ideas, and customs on the 2o6 Distribution of Languages and Races. 'Theban throne. Amenliotep IV. was purely Semitic ; lie endeavoured to replace the religion of Auimon by the sun-worship of Syria. In 1887 were discovered the fragments of a correspondence exchanged be- tween the kings of Syria, Armenia, and Babylonia and the Pharaohs Amenhotep III. and IV. ; all these letters are written in cuneiform character and in Semitic or other dialects ; it is probable that the answers were drawn up in the same character and in the same languages. For the rest, the subjugated nations had soon recovered. Saryoukin I. had recon- stituted the Chaldean empire ; the Assyrians, ever at war on their eastern and western frontiers, had more than once crossed the Upper Euphrates and pene- trated Asia Minor as far as Troad, where the name Assaracus seems to be a relic of an Assyrian dynasty. The Hittites or Itlietas occupied the north of Syria ; find when liamses II., Sesbstris, desired in the fifteenth century to renew the exploits of his ances- tors, he was checked at Kadech by the Hittites and forced to retreat after an undecided battle. Tlie great expansion of Egypt was stopped, at least towards the north. The Semitic peoples, on the contrary, were everywhere in the ascendant. Phcenicia was colonising the European and Libyan coasts of the Mediterranean ; Bylos (Gebel), Tyre, and Sidon had commercial settle- ments in many places, where the potteries, the stuffs, and the jewels of the East were exchanged for the raw products of Gaul, Spain, and Africa. Their boats, navigated by oar and sail, had even passed the Columns of Hercules and coasted round Europe as far as Eng- land and Denmark. Not only did they leave with the Etruscans, the Sards, the Pelasgians, the Siculi, and the Hellenes of the /Bj'can and of Ionia the rudiments The Semitic World. 207 of the arts and of philosopby, but they also brought them an inestimable treasure, the alphabet, sixteen or eighteen signs, extracted from the chaos of the hiero- glyphs. It is disputed at the present day whether the Phoenicians were really the authors of this famous in- vention ; but it was certainly they who spread it over Europe, and who unwittingly, for they, considered only the usefulness of a commercial writing, gave to the West this necessary instrument of intellectual progress. As for the great empires of the Euphrates and the Tigris, in the midst and in spite of bloody revolu- tions, now pretty well known and dated, they rose to a considerable degree of power and dignity. The excavations of recent years have laid bare their palaces and temples; their books graven on thousands of bricks, their seals with magical formulas, and the great triumphal inscriptions engraved by conquering kings on statues, walls, and on the living rock, have been deciphered. Their artists excelled in the minute and in the colossal ; their gigantic statues, rude and grandiose, sustain comparison with the finest Egyptian work, and their influence can easily be traced in the archaic monuments of Asia and Greece. The Hebrews bad as yet held no place in history. It was only towards the end of the fourteenth century, under one of the successo"s of Sesostris, that, urged by oppression and by want of room in the land of Goshen, they left Egypt, with difficulty avoiding disaster on the sandy shores of the Gulf of Suez. From the peninsula of Sinai they had to pass through the tribes of Midian, Moab, and of Edom, and then force their entrance into the promised land ; they returned to it late, the country was already occupied. Hence those ex^terminations, those servitudes, and all the adventures. 2o8 Distribution of Languages and Races. naively exaggerated later in the Book of Judges, which is often legendary, but full of interest from the double point of view of ethnography and ethics. By courage and perseverance the Benou-Israel to the north and east, the sons of Benjamin and Judah to the south, ended by subduing and absorbing in part the other Canaanites who had preceded them, without passing the bounds of Syria on the one hiand, and on the bther the Philistine towns, without piercing the narrow band of the Phoenicians. Like all the Semites of the north, they had their sacred stones, their Baalim, male and female, Baal, Moloch, Aschera, Dagon, their winged gods with bulls' heads, their bronze lions and serpents, worshipped in the high places ; but they all rallied more or less round a coffer or ark, which con- tained their national god, who was of the heavens or solar, named El Jahve, the Phoenician Jao, and vari- ous symbolical objects, a seven-branched candlestick (representing the seven planets), a table, bread, and sacerdotal ornaments. Their neighbours had also their favourite patron, some Dagon, others Astarte, Marna, Derketo, ' Moloch, or Chemos. We see what becomes of the primitive monotheism of the Hebrews. It was not till the tenth century, when the brave and not very virtuous David, and his son, the splendid and not less voluptuous Solomon, had, thanks to favourable but ephemeral circumstances, constituted the brilliant and brief Jewish empire, that the ark, transported with great pomp to the newly conquered capital, became the obligatory centre of religion. Even in the temple of Solomon (if this wonder of the world ever really existed), there were quarters reserved for puofetitutes and eunuchs, the sacred servants of the goddess Aschera ; not to mention the great serpent, The Semitic World. 209 the cherubim, and other animals representing the ancient creed of polytheism. Jahve had to himself only the holy of holies. The unity of creed was, moreover, so little established that the jealousies raised by the pretensions of the high priest brought about the division and the ruin of the empire ; and in the little principality of Jndah, retained by the tribe of Judah, together with the Levites or sacerdotal tribe, the elo- quence of the prophets and the effoi-ts of two pious kings, Hezekiah and Josiah (622), could not assure to Jahve a complete triumph over the strange gods. This triumph was only secured to him by the ruin of the people chosen by him from all eternity. The existence of the Jewish tribes had always been precarious and threatened by many foes. Unable to engage in serious strife even with the kings of Syria, their position was hopeless when, divided against themselves, they became the battlefield for the two great rivals, Assyria and Egypt. Towards the eighth cen- tury the victory declared itself in favour of the Assyrians, who in the following century invaded Egypt ; then the latter, reanimated by the Ethiopian princes, renewed the fatal war, of which one result was the destruction of Samaria by Saryoukin and the ruin of the kingdom of Israel. All who did not perish in the massacre •were transported into Mesopotamia at the end of the eighth century, 708—7 1 0. A few fugitives gained Jerusalem and Egypt. Finally, in the sixth century, 587—581, Jerusalem, attacked by Nebuchadnezzar, the greatest king of a new Chaldean empire, was taken and burned. The fierce courage of the unhappy Zedekiah, the last prince of Judah, could not prevent the second captivity. It was in humiliation and misery that the relics of this much-tried race put together their tradi- 2 lo Distribution of Languages and Races. tioas, not without some admixture of foreign elements, and rallied for ever to their god Jahve. Assyria had been conquered by the Medes ; Chaldea fell in her turn before the Persians (536 B.C.). Then it was that Zerubbabel, Esdras, and Nehemiah, 5*36-430, were able in the course of a hundred years to bring back two or three columns of exiles to reconstruct the Temple with great difficulty, and finally to compile those ancient fragments, completing tliem, interpolat- ing tbem, reconciling them as best they could with orthodoxy, the poems adjudged to David and Solo- mon, and the dithyrambs and revelations attributed to the different prophets. This work, which was nearly finished at the time of the Greek translation of the Septuagint, was begun under the Ptolemies for the AlexandrineJews,and continued through the timeof the Maccabees and up to the beginning of the Christian era. Meantime the Jewish nationality outlived that of the powerful Semites who thought to destroy it, and sur- vived alone ; alone it kept a species of independence. The Persian monarchy, the brilliant passage of Alex- ander, the Seleucidje, the dominion of the Parthians, had already buried the ancient glory of Assyria and Chaldea ; even the language of Sargon and Nebu- chadnezzar had ceased to be spoken above Babylon. Syria and Phcenicia had accepted in turn the yoke of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Finally, the cruel siege and sack of Jerusalem by Titus, and a last convulsion under Hadrian, put an end to the unhappy destiny of the people of Israel, or rather marked the beginning of a long and terrible agony, borne with invincible energy and patience. In fact, the three northern groups, Aramaic, Chaldean, Canaanitish, had been destroyed at the time of the Persian conquest, and The Semitic World. 2 1 1 the sceptre of the civilised world had passed into the hands of tlie Indo-Europeans. And it was lon» before men saw that the maladies inherited by the peoples of the West from these dying nations, — Baby- lonian corruption, orgiastic religions of Asia Minor, the enervating mysticism of despairing souls, assured but too well the vengeance of the conquered. Moreover, the Semites of the south, the Arabs, had not been touched. The Pharaohs by the Red Sea, the Sargonides by the desert, had attacked, pierced even here and there, this block of Arabia, and had annexed it to their empires. But this mattered little to the nomad Bedouin, to the hardly, formed tribes wliich floated about Mecca and Medina. Some carried their tents into another part of the desert, the others fell back or paid some small tribute, and continued to make war among themselves for women or horses. From the time when the Syrian dynasty came to hasten the decomposition of the Roman empire, and especially when Zenobia and Odenatus all but realised •their dream of an Oriental empire, the Arabs of the north, with whom were mixed the half Jewish Canaan- itish tribes, Idumeans, Moabites, &c., began to take some part in Western life, and to be influenced by Judaism and Christianity. Mahomet appeared with his incoherent and inoffensive book, but also with his terrible doctrine of the identity of the two powers, religious and civil ; and Islam, let loose upon a world still shaken by the fall of the Roman empire and by the struggle for its territory of the swarming new races, Islam gave a tremendous power to the Semitic races, a power far more fatal to the Mediterranean world than the domination of the cruel Assyrians or that of the superstitious Chaldeans. In less than a 2 1 2 Distribution of Languages mid Races. hundred years the Arabs had conquered Syria and Persia, Egypt, the African coast and Spain, and France as far at Poitiers. This conquest of the East and South by races which had not attained a high degree of intellectual cultui-e jeopardised the future of tlie world, until the day when John Sobieski, in the seventeentii century, forced the Ottoman vizier to raise the siege of Vienna. It is true, indeed, that the part played by the Arabs was not lacking in brilliancy, and the evils of which they were the cause are not without compen- sation. There was a brief and splendid civilisation at P)agdad, at Cairo, at Kairouan, at Tlemcen, at Fez, at Cordova, and Granada ; a rich literature ; an active commerce which reached to China, the Malay Archi- pelago, and India ; finally, a shock which, sending back upon Europe the translations of forgotten Greek authors, driving from Constantinople the last custodians of Hellenic science, determined the Renaissance in Italy, France, and Germany, the revolt against the humiliating, stupefying yoke of the Christian theocracy. But, and the fact is curious, that which is commonly called Arab philosophy, astronomy, and architecture, belongs in truth to the peoples roughly awakened by the sword of the Arab, to the people of Bactriana, of Mazenderan, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, of Barbary, and Spain. The Arab, unlike the , Assyrian, is no artist : no Arab has ever painted or carved the human face. He is a musician and a poet, a witty story- teller, with a taste for maxims, anecdotes, apologues, and pithy sentences ; but his mind lacks both breadth and concentration. No dogma could suit him better than the arid and empty formulae of Islam, than the Koran with its medley of maxims and narratives, its contradictions, its. idle and endless controversies. At The Semitic World. 2 1 3 the present dav, Seniitistti may be occasionally a source of trouble, but it is no longer a danger ; even Mussul- man fanaticism, its te.rible creation, though it may spread among the inferior races of Africa, seems only an anachronism, which we must know how to reckon with indeed, but which is powerless against civilised Europe, and its allies America and Australia. For the second nd the last time, Indo-European culture has conquered; first, in 537 B.C. with the Persian Cyrus, and in 330 B.C. with Alexander; and, secondly, in 732 with Charles Martel, and in 1683 with John Sobieski. Let us now endeavour to establish the general characteristics, and to sketch out a table of the lan- guages spoken by this important section of the human race. There is no stronger or more unchanging unity among any group of languages than that which exists in the Semitic group. The dead and living languages which compose it hardly differ from each other so much as the various Romance or Sclavonic dialects. Not only are the elements of the common vocabulary unchanged, but the structure of the word and of the phrase has remained the same. The persistence of the radical consonants is the most striking feature of the organism. The radical, as the agglutinative phase had left it, admits usually of three consonants, sus- tained by one, two, or three variable vowels, of which the diversity indicates tense, mood, voice, the form of the verb, the adjective or substantive character of the noun ; hence the Semitic roots are called triliteral, because the imperfect writing, not noting the vowels, puts in evidence the. three fundamental letters or con- sonants ; but Ihese roots may have one, two, or three IS 2 1 4 Distribution of Languages and Races. syllables. Moreover, various particles, generally mono- syllabic, pronouns, case endiags, verbal prefixes, com- plete the grammatical organism, which, is of extreme simplicity. From the same triliteral root, qtl., to kill, Idh, to write, dhr, to speak, &c., a change in the vowel produces nouns like qatl, murderer, qitl, enemy, qitalu, blow ; verbal forms like qatala, he killed, qutala, he was killed, qotla, qotel, qtal, &c. Suffixes or prefixes indi- cate the tense : takhoba, thou writest or wilt write, hatahta, thou hast written. Tlie Semitic verb has but two tenses, a perfect and an aorist, according as the action has been accomplished or is in course of accomplish- ment ; it admits only two moods, the indicative and the imperative, whence the Arab has drawn a subjunc- tive and a jussive. The two voices, active and passive, have each fifteen, thirteen, seven, or five forms, accord- ing to the dialect, characterised eitlier by the doubling of the second consonant (qattala, quttaia, he has killed many, he has been entirely killed), or by lengthening the first or second vowel, or by the prefixation of various syllables : hiqtil, hithqattel, hithqotal, niqtal, &c., to give an intensive, causative, desiderative meaning, an expedient already well known to the agglutinative languages, which we shall find again in the Indo- European. The second and third persons of the verb express the sex of the subject. The possessive and personal pronouns, whether sub- ject or object, are suffixed to the verbs and nouns ; 7d, me, ta, thou ; Sabachthani, thou hast forsaken me ; Mi, my God. The demonstrative pronouns appear to be formed from the vowels a, i, u, which the written character expresses, and which had an aspirated or consonantal character : h, soft, ye, oue. • The Semitic World. 2 1 5 The declension has two genders ; the termination t is the sign of the feminine ; the neuter appears to have existed, but has disappeared ; the plural and dual masculine are indicated by m or n (v/m, un, im, in) ; the feminine plural keeps the final t. Three cases, the nominative in ou, genitive in i, accusative in a (um, im, am) : abd-u, abd-i, abd-a (servus, servi, servum), are retained in Arabic. Hebrew replaces them by particles, I, b, and et ; sometimes the simple juxtaposition of the determined and determinant, that which is termed the constructed state, takes the place of the genitive : melekh Israel, king of Israel ; biti iamin, son of the right ; and again with a pronominal suffix, ben-on-i (son, sorrow, me), son of my sorrow. Lastly, the definite article, which is invariable, Aa(^) in Hebrew, al in Arabic, is prefixed to the word, doubling the initial consonant, or assimilating itself with it : in Hebrew hammelehh, the king ; in Arabic, ar-rahman, the merciful. All the processes we have just enumerated have nothing new for us except one, and that indeed important — the change in the root vowel, together with the invariability of the consonant. This ingenious artifice both brings the Semite near to the Indo- European and yet separates them ^profoundly ; so completely that, in supposing them to have had a common period, monosyllabic or agglutinative, it would be impossible to establish any relation between the two systems either in the conjugation, or — and this is far more important — in the conception of the root and in the formation of the word. The Semitic phonetic system, very simple in the vowels, abounds in aspirated gutturals and emphatic consonants, h soft, h hard, hh. gh, kh, &c., which are 2i6 Distribution of Languages and Races. diflBcult to render in our smoother tongues. We will content ourselves with these general indications ; the subject is too vast for us to engage upon it without transgressing our limits. It has been so long and so completely studied, that we refrain from even citing the hundreds of authors who have thrown light upon its smallest particulars. The Ristoire GiniraU des Langues SimifAqms, by M. Kenan, though unfortunately incomplete, is yet in French the surest and the most open-minded guide which we can indicate. Tlie Semitic languages form two great branches, each subdivided into two groups. The northern branch comprehends the Aramaic-Assyrian group and the Oanaanitish group ; the southern group includes the Arabic group, properly so called, and the Himyarite group. The name Aramaic is given to two dialects which are very nearly allied — Chaldean and Syriac, which are separated by preferences for certain vowels and by a difference of accentuation. As the remaining Baby- lonian inscriptions are deciphered, we shall attain to a better knowledge of ancient Chaldean. In the present state of science, this language is chiefly represented by certain parts of the Jewish Bible, espe- cially the Books of Esdras and of Daniel, which were doubtless written during the captivity, soon after the fall of the last Babylonian empire, from the fifth to the second century ; then, towards the Christian era, by the Targum, translations and paraphrases of the Hebrew books ; the Talmud, which is of somewhat earlier date, contains also some Aramaic elements. Nabatean aud Mend&ite or Sabian, southern forms of Chaldean, have left us a treatise on agriculture, translated into Arabic in the tenth century of our era, and the curious book The Semitic World. 2 i 7 of Adnm, which is perhaps posterior to Islamism. M. Renati found in the Museum of Naples some Nabatean inscriptions, dating from before the Christian era, which bear witness to the flourishing condition of this Chaldean colony, which had emigrated to Petra and- was governed by independent kings. The Aramaic which was spoken at the time of Christ was divided into two sub-dialects : that of Galilee, which resembled the Syriac pronunciation, and that of Jerusalem, of which the pronunciation was more marked and nearer to Chaldean. Jesus and his disciples evidently spoke the dialect of their country, as appears from certain passages in the New Testament. It was in this dialect, called Syro- Chaldean by Jerome, that the notes of Matthew and Mark were written, the point of departure of the tirst and second Gospels. Syriac, in its primitive state, is unknown to us, as also Syro-Chaldean. We know that it was one of the principal dialects spoken in Judea before and after Christ. It may claim the inscriptions of Pal- myra, which date from the three first centuries, and the version of the Bible called Pechito (the simple), which is attributed to the second. It is the language of the Aramaic Christians, of a whole literature of controversy, in which the works of St. Ephrem, poet, controversialist, and commentator, hold, we are in- formed, the first rank. The great schools of Nineveh and Edessa, species of theological faculties, ceased not from the fourth to the sixth century to send forth Gnostic, Monophysite, and Nestorian writers, whose disputes fill the bibliography of the Maronite Assemani (three folios). Syriac poetry and medicine were deeply tinctured with theology. History, or rather 2i8 Distribution of Languages and Races. the chronicle of contemporary events, is represented in this literature by the valuable works of James of Edessa and of Barhebraeus (tbirteentli century), doctor, bishop, primate of the East, known also by ■the Arabic name of Abulfarage. Barhebrseus is the last name in Syriac letters ; for as early as 853 the Caliph Mottewakkel had forbidden them to be taught. The language was declining also, having long been eked out with Greek, Latin, Frank, and Arabic words. But in its golden age (fifth to the ninth centuries) it had served the instrument for the beginnings of Arab philosophy. It was through Syriac translations of Aristotle, Proclus, Porphyrius, by Abraham the Great, Ibas, Sergius, and James of Edessa, that the works of the Greek mind became known to the barbarous West. We therefore owe some gratitude to this language, which lingers obscurely in the neighbourhood of the lakes of Van and Urmia. It is still used in the liturgy of the Nestorians and of the Maronites. Assyrian is a discovery of this century ; it was revealed by the third column of the Persian inscrip- tions. The labours of Rawlinson, Oppert, and Menant have assured its place, for some time disputed, in the Semitic family. It is sufficient to transcribe it into the Hebrew character to make clear its relationship to the other kindred dialects. The cuneiform char- acter, so difficult to read because of the mixture of ideograms with phonetic signs, has at least this advantage, that it is syllabic, and makes it evident that the famous neuter consonants of the triliteral root were not mute, and that the Semitic word is the result of a slow agglutination, and not of a pre- conceived abstraction. To the Canaanitish group belong Phoenician, The Semitic World. 2 1 9 Samaritan, the languages of the left bank of the Jordan, notably Moabite, known by the stele of Mesha, and lastly, Hebrew. The first and the last of these dialects are almost exactly alike. In Phoenician there are several primitive forms which exist in Hebrew only as archaisms ; it presents also, even in its colonial dialects, traces of Aramean, which the Jews in their Egyptian exile naturally avoided. Of Phoenician literature there only remain fragments trans- lated from the history of Sanchoniatho, and a Greek version of the circumnavigation of Hanno. But numerous inscriptions, collected from all the coasts of the Mediterranean, at Carthage, and in the islands of Cyprus, Malta, Sardinia, &c., allow the language to be classed with absolute certainty. Phoenicia itself has furnished epigraphic texts of great importance, the long inscription which may be seen at the Louvre on the totnb of Eschmounazar, king of Sidon, and the stele of Jehawmelek, king of Byblos, interpreted in 1875 by Vogue and Kenan. These little princes, vassals of Egypt or Persia, seem to have lived in the sixth or fifth century ; conquerors were commonly tolerant of these local sovereignties. " It is I," says Jehawmelek, " I, son of Jeharbaal, grandson of Adom- melek, whom our lady Baalath has made king of Byblos," &c. This text, which briefly describes the portico and the sanctuary dedicated to Baalath, proves the exactitude of the records of Lucian and Plutarch. We have mentioned Phoenician first, because it developed itself before the arrival of the Hebrews in Palestine ; but no one is ignorant of the fact that the language of the immortal Job has played, after its extinction, however, a far more important part in the world than its Canaanitish sister. We have spoken 2 20 Distribution of Languages and Races. oFtlie late date of tlie compilation of the Bible, tlie revision from the point of view of orthodoxy of all the fragments, of the books of all the ages which were carried to Babylon, the work" of unification due to Esdras and Neheraiah, which betrays itself by the almost perfect unity of the language. If there are, as it is thought, some parts of the Bible anterior to the eleventh century before Christ, if a few psalms, the Books of Job and of Judges, really date from the age of David and Solomon, it is by induction only that they can be distinguished from the parts which were re- written, like the Pentateuch, or quite modern, like the Chronicles and Judith, Ruth and Tobias, written long after Chaldean and Syriac had taken the place of Hebrew as spoken languages. Aramaic reigned in Palestine long before the epoch of the Maccabees. Hebrew was, however, the written language up to the first century before our era, and was main- tained in the rabbinical schools as late as the twelfth century. Its principal monument of this period was the Michna, a collection of traditions, a sort of second Bible. After the decline of the Arabs, especially in Spain, the Jewish priests returned to their national language, and wrote, spoke, and taught it still. Ancient Hebrew is poor in abstract terms, and from this relative poverty arises its principal beauty, its metaphorical energy of language ; there are few works fuller of colour and power than Job. Certain mythical psalms, generally misunderstood, several of the visions of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and others, when the idea does not disappear in a delirium like the frenzy of an oracle ; lastly, the simple narratives of the Book of Judges, so pagan, so cruel, and so courageous, may be read, some certainly with admiration, others with The Semitic World. 22 1; pleasure. PTebrew has the concision and the strength, of Latin with the simplicity of the analytical languages. Arabic, the prototype of the southern branch, has, on the other hand, the subtlety and richness of Greek. It has retained almost intact all the resources of Semitic speech, the three cases, various verbal forms (lost in Hebrew), the plurals,, obtained by modifying the vowels of the root {abd, servant, ihd or xbad, ser- vants) ; and we may add that we are far from knowing all the vocabulary of the other Semitic languages, whereas the vast Arabic literature, which embraces every subject and every style, employs all the wealth of its dictionary. This literature, of the purest and doubtless the oldest branch of the family, presents no monument comparable to the Bible, but it is brilliant and abun- dant. It is not ancient, and seems to have taken its rise only after the exhaustion of the other branches of the Semitic family. The famous Gacidns, poems which were crowned and suspended to the vaulted roof of the temple of Mecca, are little earlier than the time of Mohammed. Several of these describe with fury, so to speak, the sufferings and the joys of the fierce Bedouin : — ■ " I am not, says Chanfara, one of those beings who are stupid and timid like the ostrich, whose heart rises and falls in their breast like the lark in the air. . . . I swallow a handful of dust, without a drop of water, rather than give to an arrogant man the right to say that he has done me a service. ... I strangle hunger in the coils of my bowels, twisted like the cords of the spinner. ... I sleep on the hard earth, my back supported by the projecting bones of the spine. My pillow is a sinewy arm of which the joints stand out 2 2 2 Distribution of Languages and Races. like the little bones tossed by the gambler. Know that I am a man of patience, that I wear its mantle over the heart of a hyena or of a wolf, and that hardi- hood serves me for sandals. How many times have I plunged into the rain and the darkness, with hunger, cold, and ten-or for companions." So lived the hero Antar, the robber of horses and of women, whose adventures have been so well translated by Marcel Devic. ■- Islam and the Koran inspired these savage souls first with fanaticism and afterwards with a taste for mystical subtleties. Later the establishment of luxu- rious courts changed the poets of adventure into polished courtiers, servile parasites, clever narrators of Indian and Persian traditions, collectors of historical anecdotes, mixed with witticisms and verbal .jesting. Inspiration has failed and talent lias diminished, biit the written language is unchanged. The same cannot be said of the Arabic of the people, which alone has dialects, those of Barbary, Arabia, Egypt, and Syria differing very little the one from the other, but all characterised by the rejection of grammatical forms. This spoken Arabic lias arrived by degrees at the same stage as ancient Hebrew. The Mosarabic of Spain, which became extinct in the last century, and Maltese had long become formless patois. Arabic, being the language of Islam, has deeply penetrated all the Mussulman nations, Turkish, Persian, and Hindustani, and has contributed a considerable number of words to European vocabularies (see the Supplement to Littre's Dictionary) : '^ro, ciplur, cotton, sirup, algebra, magazine, crimson, &c. Himyarite reigned to the south of Arabic ; it was the language of the Queen of Sheba, and is now well The Semitic World. 223 known through a great number of inscriptions, and is perhaps still spoken under the name of Ekhili in the district of Marah. But Islam carried Arabic to the shores of the Indian Ocean. It is in Abyssinia that we must seek for the last vestiges of Himyarite. Several centuries before our era, the African coast of the Red Sea had received Semitic colonies, and a language known as Ghez or Ethiopian, which was very developed and still had cases and thirteen verbal forms. In the fourth century, when Christianity pene- trated into Ethiopia, the Bible was translated into Ghez, together with other Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Arabic works. For some time Ghez has only existed as a learned or liturgical language, but a cer- tain number of allied dialects, Amharic, Tigre, Harari, are still spoken in parts of Abyssinia. In this rapid summary, which is all that my general scheme will permit, I have tried to sketch the historical and intellectual destinies of the Semites, noting succes- sively the Chaldean education of the Aramaic and Canaanitish nations, their certain and probable migra- tions, the movement caused by the invasion of the Hyksos among the Phoenician or Punic tribes, among the Aramaic or Syrian nation, and, lastly, among the family of Terah, Abraham, and Jacob ; the great maritime and commercial expansion of the Phoe- nicians ; the late establishment of the Israelites in Judea ; the crushing of the Canaanites between Egypt and Assyria ; the northern Semites subjugated and annihilated by the Persians, by the Greeks, and the Romans ; Greco-Roman civilisation, undermined by Eastern corruption, by enervating mysticism, by Christianity, the vengeance of the vanquished Semites; finally, when invasions were dismembering the Roman 2 24 Distribution of Languages and Races. colossus, Mussulman fanaticism threw upon the world tlie Arab hordes which had remained till that time intact and free in their deserts. In enumerating the general features of Semitic speech, the invariability of the consonants and the flexion of the vowels, we have said that this important particular alone renders vain any attempt to establish a relationship between the Semitic family and the Indo-European. Finally, by a few dates and quotations we have characterised their groups and sub-groups, pointed out their points of resemblance and of difference, noted their duration, their respective merits, the importance and the bearing of their literatures. CHAPTER VIII. THE INDO-EUROPEANS. The science of language leaves untouched the domain of ethnography — Inattention of the ancients with regard to the manners, languages, and origin of their neigh bciurs — Philology, long forbidden by Chris- tian prejudice, was thrown open by Leibnitz — Discovery of Sanscrit — The Indo-European family of languages constituted by F. Sohlegel — Summary sketch of its eight branches; Celtic, Teutonic, Slav, Lettic, Italic, Hellenic, Iranian, and Hindu — Original unity, dialectic alteration — The mother-tongue and the organic forms — The cradle of the language should be sought between the two great sub-groups, Eastern and Western — The social, moral, and intellectual condition revealed by the elements which are common to all the Indo-European idioms — The Semitic history of Bossuet is effaced by the history of the Indo-Europeans — The Aryans reign throughout the world. The indigenous populations of quaternary Europe have been replaced, or rather over-laid, several times in succession, by migrations coming from the south and from the east. Successive crossings, modifying at once the type of the conquerors and of the conquered, have resulted in an extreme diversity in the height, build, and physiognomy, not only of the fifteen or twenty peoples who have shaped themselves during the historical period, but also of the far more numerous elements which geographical necessities and the course of events have united into nations. There is no doubt that these ethnical differences have had a very considerable influence on the construction and aspect of the idioms which have prevailed in a given region 2 26 Distribution of Languages and Races. of Europe. It is to them that we must attribute the peculiarities of pronunciation, of accent, and of syntax which separate and characterise the Hellenic, Latin, Teutonic, and Slav groups and sub-groups. But ethnography and the science of language do not coincide. It is very rarely found that a people speaks the original language of its ancestors. Unless the disproportion in numbers or cultivation be too great, the language of the immigrant conquering minority is imposed upon the conquered majority, and even survives the race which imported it. Hundreds of millions of men may employ an idiom, altering it more or less, but without destroying the basis of it, which has been created in its entirety by a race, a people, a tribe, which disappeared thousands of years ago from the distant and unknown land where it had its birth. And when a wonderful discovery reveals this fundamental identity between the languages of rival nations, enemies, or at least separated by manners, aspirations and distance, it arouses, together with a legitimate astonishment, erroneous confusions, protes- tations, controversies, which are occasionally useful, more often idle or exaggerated. Some infer brother- hood of race from kinship of tongues ; others deny the existence of the human group which has invented this uniqiie vocabulary and grammar ; others again claim for their country and their ancestors the honour of having conceived and propagated them. Philology is, I submit, in a position to resolve these difficulties and to put aside these objections ; and that without trespassing on the domain which properly belongs to ethnography ; it does not minimise the differences, the specii,! characters of peoples ; it does not maintain that at a given time, at any time, the inhabitants of The Indo-Europeans. 227 Western Asia, of Italy and Germany had a common ancestor ; it only establishes that they owe to a single definite group, and not to their own initiative, their languages, their .institutions, the germ of their destiny. The ancients were not unaware that the world was peopled before their arrival in Asia Minor, in Greece, in Italy. In many regions their predecessors main- tained themselves beside and amongst them. From the texts collected by M. Arbois de Jubainville credible traditions showed that the Iberians, nearly related to the Atlantides, were established in the west as far as the Rhone, and even threw off a branch into Italy, the Sicani ; the Pelasgians, under the name of Phrygians, Sardinians, Lydians, Lycians, Cares, Leleges, Tursenes, were scattered over the coast of Asia, in the archipela- goes of the JEgean, throughout Greece, and in southern Italy ; then came the successive arrivals of the Ligu- rians and the Siculi, of the Illyrians, Thracians, and Bithynians, closely followed by the little group of the Hellenic tribes. These vague traditions were all sufficient for the most enlightened Greeks. As for the different languages, which they certainly knew, and which were not extinct in the sixth century before our era, in the time of Peisistratus and Solon, it does not appear that they ever thought of collecting them. Their own idiom was enough for them ; all others were barbarous jargons, useless and negligible. Plato having remarked the resemblance of the names for fire and dog in Greek and Phrygian, contents himself with supposing that the Hellenes had perhaps received certain words from the autochthonous races. Even the prolonged contact with the Persians, whose lan- guage was learned by a few Greeks, notably by Alcibiades, did not win them from their indifference. 2 28 Distribution of Languages and Races. The expedition of Alexander taught the invaders nothing ; the Sanscrit dialect spoken by Porus re- mained a closed book to the learned men who sur- rounded the king of Macedonia ; and if we did not know that the Etnperor Olaudian had written sixteen books on the history and the language of the Etruscans, we might affii-m that the sense of language was as absolutely unknown to the Latins as to the Greeks. We shall not expect to find the Middle Ages more enlightened than antiquity. It took the ancestors of modern peoples centuries to learn that which intelli- gent humanity had already acquired before, them. Christianity, retaining a few scraps of Latin, the science of the day, preached to the new populations resignation, humility, obedience, and ignorance. The fall of Constantinople, the exile from thence of thp scholars, and the dispersal of the Byzantine manu- scripts, the discovery of printing, were necessary to rouse Europe from its torpor. This was the Renais- sance ; the veil was lifted, at least for a few, and day began to dawn on Europe. Man turned again, to things of earth, and regaining an interest in all the manifestations of human activity, leaving faith for reason, recognised in speech the necessary instrument of thought and analysed its organism. Nevertheless, despite the efforts of Bibliander, Henri Estienne, Roccha, and Scaliger, who attempted some comparisons between Greek, Latin, and French, and of Guichard, who in his ITarmonie Etymologiqm (1606) distin- guished the Teutonic and the Romance dialects^ and constituted a separate family, including Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac, a capital error long turned philology from the right path. Orthodox logic could not seek elsewhere than in Hebrew the origin of all The Indo- Europeans. 229 languages. Was it not in Hebrew that God spoke to Adam, and that the serpent tempted Eve ? More- over, God had dictated the Decalogue in Hebrew, and the creature made in his image could only speak in Hebrew. Even the boldest dared not doubt it. It is true that the adventure of Babel had happened since, but should there not exist, in the dispersed and con- fused languages, at least the traces of the primitive tongue ? One can but admire the ingenuity displayed by commentators and etymologists in the endeavour to, extract from the Bible the names of the gods of the heathen, and even Latin and French words. In order to bring Greek nearer to Hebrew, Guichard read it backwards, from right to left. Leibnitz was the first to oppose this inveterate prejudice. "There is," he says, "as much reason to consider Hebrew the primitive language as to adopt the opinion of Goropius, who in 1580 published a work at Antwerp to prove that Dutch was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden." He was the first to propose, in his " Dissertation on the Origin of Nations," the application of scientific methods to the science of language. Surmising that, in the absence of written history, the analysis of words might yield authentic information on the ideas and manners of primitive peoples, he proposed to Peter the Great, in 17 13, the plan of a collection of vocabularies. He drew up himself a list of common terms and encouraged the work of the German Bckhardt. His hypotheses, as we know, were too tentative, too little methodical to succeed ; but by their very failure they pointed out the way ; they showed that the first essential of fruit- ful comparison is the collection and classification of a sufficient number of facts. 16 230 Distribution of Languages and Races. The example of Leibnitz was followed by others. And if guess-work played the principal part in the clever study of Pr^ret on the " Origin and Mixture of Ancient Nations," if the premature philosophy of lan- guage, as displayed in the " Primitive World " of Court de Gdbelin, could throw no light on the affinities of European idioms, it was because there was wanting a standard of comparison which should explain their divergence. The sacred books of India concealed this standaud ; it lay there unknown and unexpected, until this century discovered it and realised its im- portance. Sanscrit, the language of the Brahmans, known before our era to the Buddhists of China, had been studied from the eighth century by Persian, Arab, and Turkish translators. Some fragments of its rich literature had even reached us and have remained in our tales and apologues. But although towards the end of the fifteenth century Filippo Sachetti had noted some points of resemblance between Italian and Indian words, it is doubtful that even the name of Sanscrit was known in Europe before the middle of the eighteenth century. Vasco di Gama, meanwhile, had landed in Calicut in 1498; the Portuguese missions, throwing them- selves at once on the rich Indian prey, must have learned the language of the countiy, Tamil, and from the year 1559 the priests of Goa knew enough of the doctrines of India to invite the Brahmans to public controversy. In 1606, Roberto de Nobili, who dis- guised himself as a Brahman, and cleverly presented himself as the interpreter of a fourth Veda, read in the original the Laws of Manii and the Puranas. It was doubtless under his influence that the Ezur- The Indo-Europeans. 231 Veidam was composed in India, a Christian imita- tion of tlie Vedas, which holds a certain place in the erudition of Voltaire. Fr. Pons in 1 740 sent to Fr. Duhalde an exact description of the four Vedas, of the grammatical treatises, and of the six great systems of philosophy. Lastly, in 1767, another Frenchman, Fr. Coeurdoux, sent to the AbW Barth^lemy, who in 1763 had asked him for some historical information, two papers on the analogies and the kinship of the Samscroutan language with Greek, Latin, German, and Sclavonic ; he gave four lists of similar words and grammatical forms, noted the presence of the augment in Sanscrit and of the a privative ; he refused to attribute to borrowing and commercial dealings resemblances which affected not only isolated terms, but the formation of the words themselves. If these precious documents had been made public, France would have had the honour to inaugurate the comparative study of Indo- European languages. Unfortunately they remained buried in the archives of the Academy, and only appeared in 1808, at the end of a memoir of Anquetil Duperron. In the interval science had progressed ; England and Germany had made the discovery which might have belonged to us. The affinities recognised by Hahled, 1778, Sir William Jones, Paulin de Saint-Barthelemy (Philippe Wesdin), 1790, were admitted by Lord Monboddo (1792— 1795). Dugald Stewart, it is hard to say why, was obstinate in denying the existence of San- scrit. But his incredulity was unavailing against the grammars published from 1790 to 1836 by Wesdin, Colebrooke, Carey, Wilkins, Forster, Yates, Wilson, Bopp, Benfey ; against the texts edited, beginning in 232 Distribution of Languages and Races. 1784, by the first Asiatic Society, founded at Calcutta. The contrary exaggeration prompted the enthusiastic Oriental scholars to regard Sanscrit as a universal mother-tongue. Sir William Jones avoided this error; he supposed for Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin a common source, which perhaps, he says, exists, no longer. Modern science has confirmed his hypothesis, and, while recognising the general priority of the Sanscrit forms, notes in the other idioms" of the family peculi- arities which cannot be traced farther back, which are, so to speak, collateral, and point to the necessary existence of an earlier language, of a type which is yet visible through the alterations suffered by its various forms. While the mysteries of India were being revealed to English investigators, two vast collections, the " Cata- logue " of Hervas, and the " Mithridates '' of Adelung, came to furnish philology with the treasure of facts which alone can change hypothesis into certainty. Hervas, a Spanish Jesuit, and a missionary in Ame- rica, collected three hundred vocabularies and thirty grammars, discovered the unity of the Malay group, the independence of Basque, the relationship of Hungarian, Lapp, Finnish, ^nd suspected the relation- ship of Greek and Sanscrit. His work, in six volumes, dates from 1 800. The " Mithridates," founded in part on the " Catalogue," in part on vocabularies collected by order of Catherine II., appeared from 1 806 to 1 8 1 7. Adelung died in 1 809, but his son finished the work. The classification of languages could thenceforward go on with a more rapid and assured step and in the right direction. The most brilliant, the richest, the most vigorous group, that which was the first to be clearly defined, claiming for itself the place till then The In do-Europeans. 233 abandoned to the Semites, was the group to which our European languages belong. In 1808, the poet Frederic Schlegel, who had studied Sanscrit under Hamilton (180 1 — 1802), constituted clearly, in his book on the " Language and Wisdom of the Hindus," the Indo-Germanic family. Though the work is out of date, like the symbolism of Kreutzer and of Herder which inspired it, though the bold guesses of the author have fallen before the demonstrations of gram- matical analysis, yet Schlegel is to Adelung, even to Sir William Jones, what Copernicus is to Ptolemy. He conceived a new world ; he created one of the richest domains of the human mind, or rather he opened its doors. His book, which is no longer read, gathers dust on the threshold of the science of which he was the inaugurator. Before studying the organism of the Indo-European speech, such as we are ^ble to reconstruct it from the features common to its numerous varieties, it is indis- pensable to glance over the immense area which it covers, and to indicate, in space and time, the place occupied by each of the groups of languages which have issued from it. If we disregard its modern annexes, which include the two Americas and Australia, we shall find that it reigns from the months of the Ganges to Iceland, and from Sweden to Crete, compre- hending five-sixths of Hindustan, Afghanistan, Persia, Armenia, three-quarters of Eussia, of Sweden, and of Norway, and all the rest of Europe, except the Basque country, Hungary, and a portion of Turkey in Europe. In the extreme west, in Scotland, in Ireland, in Wales, and in Brittany, we find the remains of the Celtic group, generally subdivided into Gaelic (in- cluding Erse and tlie dialect of the Isle of Man) and 234 Distribution of Languages and Races. Cymric (including Cornish and Breton). Save for a few inscriptions which are not yet completely ex- plained, these languages are only known to us by relatively recent texts. Some Irish glosses of the eighth century, and a few Breton and Cornish documents of the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, are the most ancient remains (all the rest is hypothetical) of a language formerly spoken in the north of Italy, throughout Gaul, and in the British Isles, a language which, in spite of the ■ illu- sions of Celtic enthusiasts, has only left to the French tongue a few names of places, historical names men- tioned by the Latin writers, and about two hundred and forty authentic words in addition to these. Eacially the Gauls and Celts can be distinguished. The latter were round-headed, with dark hair and eyes, of middle stature, and strongly built. The Gauls were very tall, very fair, warlike and adventurous. The Celts probably occupied before the dawn of history the whole of Central Europe, the valley of the Danube, Savoy, Auvergne, Brittany, Ireland ; traces of them are found in Roumania (or Dacia), in Austria, and in Bavaria. Did these bring with them the Celtic dia- lects, or did they receive them from the Gauls or Bel- gians ? This question is insoluble, for it is impossible to give the date of the arrival of the Gauls, who were doubtless the first wave of that great flood which bore the Teutons to the north of the- Alps, the Latins to the south. Towards the sixth century they certainly occupied a great part of Northern Germany, dominated Gaul from the Ehine provinces to the Pyrenees, and Italy as far as the Po, perhaps as far as the Tiber. They destroyed Rome at the beginning of the fourtk century, Delphi a hundred years later, and even pene- The Indo- Europeans. 235 trated into Asia Minor, into Galatia. It was to put an end to their incursions that the Eomans, after having with difficulty subdued them in Cisalpine Gaul, an- nexed the Transalpine provinces to the republic in the middle of the first century before our era. It is well known how rapidly the Gauls and the Celts adopted the languages and civilisation of their conquerors. Gallic, the most ancient of the Celtic dialects, had completely disappeared by the fifth century of our era, and the others are but the degenerate descendants of an extinct language which some consider to be related to Latin, others to Teutonic. However this may be, their literature, which is fairly abundant, has been carefully studied by Luzel, Gaidoz, D'Arbois de Jubainville, and the Indo-European origin of their vocabulary and grammar has been established by Pictet {Be, I'AffiniU des Langues Celtigms avec le Sans- crit, 1837), by Bopp (" The Celtic Languages from the Point of View of Comparative Philology," 1838), and by Zeuss (Grammatica Celtica, 1853). The powerful German branch had quite another destiny ; its historical existence is not very ancient, but it has itself ramified into vigorous and cultivated branches which cover a great part of northern Conti- nental Europe, the British Isles, and the United States. The earliest known name of the Germans or. Teutons (Teotisk) seems to be Bastarnes. From the year 182 B.C., they wandered between the Niemen and the Ehine, from the Alps to the Black Sea. Soon appeared the Teutons of Marius, the Suevi of Ariovistus, then the Germans of Varus, the Quadi, Alamanni, Franks, of Marcus Aurelius, Probus, and Julian. Owing to the strange lack of curiosity in the ancients, nothing of the earliest times of the German languages has come down 236 Distribution of Languages and Races. to us. By a fortunate chance, a precious manuscript of the fifth century, preserved at Upsal, the Codex Argen- teus, has retained for us the fragments of a Gothic trans- lation of the Bible. The author was a Cappadocian, brought up among the Western Goths on the Lower Danube, and under the name of Ulfilas he became their bishop and their chief (3 1 1-38 i). The Goths, Wisi- goths, and Ostrogoths, who played so fatal a part in the sad drama of the fall of the Roman empire, were the rearguard of the German invasion; they barred the passage between the Black Sea and the Baltic. Under the shock of the Slav or Wendic invasion, in the year 77 of our era, they were driven partly into Sweden, and in part between the Dniester and the Balkans, whence they hurled themselves upon Greece, Italy, and Southern Gaul. Gothic became extinct in the .ninth century. By its less mutilated forms it may be classed almost at the same stage as Latin and Greek ; it is not the father, but the elder brother of the other Teutonic dialects ; its relationship with the Scandinavian languages and the Low Dutch dialects is specially marked. The most anciently cultivated of the Scandinavian idioms, Norse or Norrois, carried to Iceland in the ninth century by pagans fleeing from the Christian propaganda, has preserved for us the most precious traditions on the mythology of the North. The Hliods and the Quidas, which were recited in the seventh and eighth centuries in Norway before the emigration, were collected in the eleventh in the poetical Edda of Soemund. The prose Edda of Snorri Sturleson in the following century, and then numerous Sagas, complete the cycle of national legends, which are for the most part common to all the Teutonic tribes. Danish and Swedish, which developed side by side with Norse, The Indo-Europeans. 237 form independent though nearly allied branches of the Scandinavian family. In the north of Germany there are certain spoken dialects which are no longer written, Platt-Deutsch or Low Dutch, which are intermediate between Scandi- navian, German, and English. This was the language of Wittikind, and two manuscripts of the eighth cen- tury have transmitted to us a Christian poem written at this epoch for the conversion of the Saxons, the Hel- jand or " Saviour." Frisian, cultivated in the twelfth century, Flemish, the language of the Burgundian court in the fifteenth century, and its twin, Dutch, be- long to the same group, and are intimately connected with Anglo-Saxon. The English tongue, which has received from Latin and French more than half of its rich vocabulary, is none the less essentially Germanic in what remains to it of grammar and in the core of the language. It was introduced in the fifth and sixth centuries by the Jutes and the Angles. Anglo- Saxon, very nearly allied to Gothic, is represented by the epic poem of Beowulf, which is attributed to the seventh century ; it was spoken until the time of William the Conqneror (1066). Thanks to the simplification which is the result of time, this old idiom has renewed its youth ; the la,nguage of Shake- speare, of Bacon, of Walter Scott, and of Shelley has produced a magnificent literature, and has spread itself over the whole earth. It is the conquering idiom. The Teutonic tribes destined to form the German nation, properly so called, have gone through many vicissitudes, which partly account for the absence of ancient documents in their dialects. That which the Romans and the Gauls called the Germanic invasion was commonly merely a forced emigration under the 238 Distribution of Languages and Races. double pressure of the Slavs and the Huns. Prom the fifth to the sixteenth century there were no Germans in Eastern Germany. Slavs occupied Silesia and bordered on Saxony ; the Avari approached the Ehine and harassed the frontiers of Charlemagne. Inde- pendent Germany in . the eighth century was reduced to Saxony, then conquered and annexed by the Frankish emperor. The Franks themselves, who had spread in great numbers over the Rhine provinces, were, so to speak, lost in the Latin empire, to which one of their families, which was much crossed with Belgian blood, had furnished the chiefs. And though the kings of Austrasia had kept their national dialect, although Charlemagne spoke it and took care to collect Ger- manic songs and traditions, the domain of the true Teuton was extremely limited. It comprehended Ala- man, Bavarian, Suabian, and Frankish dialects. The Prankish of the Merovingians and of Charlemagne no doubt held the first rank in Old High German. We may mention, as belonging to this period, the text of the sermon pronounced by Charles the Bald in 843 before the battle of Fontenay, and, in the tenth cen- tury, a poem which celebrates the victory of Louis III. and of Carloman over the Normans. In the thirteenth century Suabian prevailed and constituted Middle High German ; it was the language of the Minnesingers, and has been rendered famous by the creators of the national poem of the Nibelungen. Finally, literary German arose with the translation of the Bible by Luther, as did classical Arabic with the Koran, and became the universal language of a far larger Germany. I need not praise German poetry, philosophy, and science. But we may be permitted to regret, in language as in religion, the extreme timidity The Indo-Europeans. 239 of the Reform. Luther did not venture to rid the language of the silent or nasal terminations, of the clumsy construction, of the relics of declension which trouble the ear and weary the mind. The northern provinces of Prussia were long occupied by the Letts and Lithuanians, who had taken the place of the Vandals, the Heruli, and the Lombards. The greater part of them were attached to Germany by conquest, by the crusade of the knights of the Teutonic order. Russian Lithuania shared the fate of Poland. The Lettic group, interesting by its archaic forms, is only known to us, as so often happens, by modern documents. It comprehends Old Prussian, which became extinct in the seventeenth century, and is represented by the eight hundred words of a lexi- con of the fifteenth century, and by -a catechism dated 1561. On the frontier of Eastern Prussia and in Russian Lithuania, about 150,000 people speak Lithuanian, which is often better preserved than Sanscrit itself. Its literature consists of the works of a poet, Donalisius (17 14— 1780); a few prose fables have also been collected, together with proverbs and popular songs. Lettic, which is more corrupt, is spoken in the north of Courland and in the south of Livonia by about a million of people. These languages are akin to one of the largest" groups of the whole family, the Wendic or Slav group, which came into Europe during the first five centuries of our era ; it is divided into two great branches. Eastern and Western. The first includes Russian, Great Russian in West Central Russia ; Little Russian, Rusniac, or Ruthene in the south of Russia and even into Austria (spoken by fourteen millions of people ; there are documents of the eleventh century), Ser- 240 Distribution of Languages and Races. vian, Croatian, Slovenic, and Bulgarian, of which the most ancient form is to the whole group what Gothic is to the German dialects; modern Bulgarian is, on the contrary, very much altered. Old Bulgarian or ecclesiastical Slav, which Miklosich, the author of the Wendic grammar, declared to be the father of all the Slav idioms {lingua Palceo-Slomnica) was fixed in the ninth century by the apostles Cyrillns and Methodus in their translation of the Bible. Slovenic has left fragments which date from the tenth century. The western branch covered from the seventh to the ninth century vast districts of Germany in which only German is now known : Pomerania, Mecklen- burg, Brandenburg, Saxony, Western Bohemia, Austria, Styria, and Northern Oarinthia. Though now much restricted, it can still boast numerous dialects ; among others the Wendic of Lusatia, which is dying out, Tzech or Bohemian, which is very vigorous (ten mil- lions), of which a variety, Slovac, is found in Hungary ; lastly, Polish (ten millions), of which the very important literature begins at the end of the tenth century, and numbers, from the twelfth onwards, many chroniclers and poets. Tzech has been cultivated from the eighth century ; its first documents are the celebrated manu- scripts of Kralovdor and of Zelenohora, discovered in 1 8 17. Since they date from the transition period between Christianity and Paganism, they are as valuable to the student of mythology as to the philologist. The time of Huss gave great prominence to Tzech letters ; but conquered and given over to the Jesuits, Bohemia's language was proscribed ; it has, however, been revived from the end of the last century. The relatively modern cultivation of the Slav languages does not alter the fact that they date from the earliest The Indo-Europeans. 241 period of the Indo-European speech ; their grammar has a very archaic character, especially in the declen- sions. The various branches of the group are closely connected. Safarick tells us that a Bohemian under- stands Slovac, a Slovac Polish, a Pole the Wendic of Lusatia. A modern Eussian can still with a little attention follow the Bulgarian office of the ninth cen- tury. Eussian and Polish, though belonging to two distinct classes, hardly differ from each othei- more than do Spanish and Italian. The South of Europe belongs to the Italic and Hellenic families. The one has given birth to our languages, the other by its literature has formed our mind. They are in the first rank, — the finest impres- sion of the Indo-European type. Latin was at first a very small central group of dialects, Sabine, Volscian, Latin, superposed upon the unknown languages of the aborigines, Ausonians, Auronci, and Siculi. Its history is that of Eome itself. From the eighth to the fourth century B.C. it was written only in certain Annals, in a few liturgical books and songs, and in the Law of the twelve tables, and remained confined to Latium, between two kindred languages, Samnite to the south, Umbrian to the north, surrounded by Etruscan in Tuscany and in the Cam- pania. Celtic reigned in the valley of the Po, Greek in the two Sicilies. Samnite or Oscan, spoken and understood in Rome as well as Latin, and Umbrian, still heard on the right bank of the Upper Tiber at the time of the Antonines, have left valuable inscrip- tions, deciphered by Mommsen, Aufrecht, and Kirch- hoff (1845- 185 l), and completely elucidated by Michel Br^al. The tables of Agnona and Iguvium show us very peculiar forms and a remarkable phonetic system. 242 Distribution of Languages and Races. wticli certainly influenced the Latin pronunciation. Latin very early outgrew its primitive rudeness, of which a few inscriptions have preserved examples, and took that gravity, that harmonious strength, which command our admiration. By the first century of our era this tribal dialect, the language of Plautus, of Ennius, of Lucretius, of Cicero, of Virgil, and of Tacitus, had conquered not only Italy, but also Spain, Gaul, and Northern Africa ; and until the eighth century it remained the idiom of the civilised or half- barbarous We.st. But this language of literature and of the government had not suppressed the provincial patois, the Latin of the people, imported into the countries conquered by the legionaries. The Latin of the country and of the camp {riisticus, castrcTisis), modified, contracted, mutilated by Dacians, Germans, Gallo-Franks, Oeltiberians, gave birth, towards the ninth century, to seven new groups of dialects, called Neo-Latin or Romance : French (of the Isle of France, Burgundian, Picard, Walloon, Norman), Pro- venpal (Dauphinese, Genovese, Piedmontese, Limousin, Toulousain, Bearnais, Catalan), Spanish, Portuguese, Italian (Venetian, Lombard, Tuscan, Corsican, Sardinian, Neapolitan, Sicilian), Latin (Friulian, Tyrolese), and Roumanian (Moldo-Wallaphian), which, more or less mixed with foreign words, have kept the vocabulary and the accent of their mother-tongue, but have carried the Indo-European elements from the synthetic to the analytic stage. The history of the development of these languages, all daughters of provincial Latin, shows us the gradual transformation of an idiom into fcee and oi-iginaL derivatives. This phenomenon, which has taken place, as it were, before our eyes, will explain what took place when the Indo-European speech split The Indo- Europeans. 243 into the various families : history throws light even upon pre-historic time. Greek, the most complex, the most subtle, and the most learned of the languages of antiquity, was de- veloped centuries before Latin ; the traditions of the Hellenes take us back 1800 years before our era; the name of the Achaians figures on an Egyptian inscrip- tion of the fourteenth century B.C. Asia Minor was colonised in the eleventh century, the epoch of the Homeric poems, which were collected in the sixth. Tradition tells first ot the legendary heroes, ^olus, Acheeus, Ion, and Dorus, who descended by Mount Haemus among the Thracians, the Pelasgians, and the Epirotes, whose languages are perhaps preserved for us in Albanian and Etruscan, and established them- selves in the mountainous districts of Thessaly, of Pieria, and of Phtiotide, round Dodona and Delphi ; then from the Hellad and the Peloponnesus, which they rapidly conquered, the four or five tribes sent out swarms into Asia, Africa, into Italy and Gaul, where they everywhere succeeded the Phoenicians. The various co-existing dialects, -iEolian, the link between Greek and Latin, the Ionian of Homer, Hesiod, and Herodotus, the Attic of Plato and Demosthenes, the Dorian of Pindar, the choruses of the tragedians and the idylls of Theocritus, Cretan, Laconian, Macedonian, &c., preserved either by an imperishable literature or in abundant inscriptions, allow us to study in a most complete manner the structure and the history of Greek. Towards the time of Alexander its dialects, though they had not completely disappeared, were confounded in a uniform literary language, that of Polybins^ of Plutarch, of Lucian, which was spoken and under- stood from Marseilles to the Euphrates, from Byzantium 244 Distribution of Languages and Races. to Alexandria and Gyrene; it was characterised by the predominance of Attic. Towards the fifth century the Greek pronunciation became corrupt ; this was the Byzantine age, from which the language passed by degrees into Romaic or modern Greek, now spoken in Greece, in the Archipelago, and on the coasts of European and- Asiatic Turkey. The vast river at whose waters all thinking humanity slaked its thirst has now dwindled to this little stream. Leaving Europe, we find in Asia Minor a few extinct and little known languages, of which the inscriptions will doubtless determine the character, Phrygian, Garian, Lycian ; they were certainly related to Greek, and perhaps also to the Iranian group, of which we find the vanguard in Armenian, Khurd, and Ossetan or Iron of the Caucasus. We cannot tarry over these, which are, however, very interesting (especially Armenian). We can only enumerate also the Iranian dialects of the Bast, Afghan or Pushtu, and Beluchistan ; ancient Persian claims our, attention. The discovery of the Iranian group, which is re- presented by the charming language of Firdousi (tenth century), of Hafiz, and of Saadi, is one of the most glorious achievements of modern philology. The ad- venturous Anquetil Duperron, a Frenchman, at the price of unnumbered and unimaginable fatigues, after having learned Tamil, Persian, and Pehlevi at Surat and at Pondicherry, acquired from the Destours, or priests, i8o manuscripts, among others the Zend- Avesta, accompanied by Pehlevi, Sanscrit, and Persian translations, and escaping with them from the hands of the English, who had taken him prisoner, deposited them at last in the Royal Library at Paris (1754— 1762). The translation which he published in 1772, The Indo-Europeans. 245 made from the Persian, is extremely imperfect ; but it arrested the attention of the philosophers and philo- logists. Rask, a Dane, was the first after him to attempt a translation of the original text ; but the honour of founding the study of Iranian belongs to Eugene Burnouf. By comparing the Zend with the bad Sanscrit of the translator, Neriosengh, Burnouf discovered, with its grammar as well as its vocabu- lary, a language which enabled him to read the cunei- form inscriptions of Xerxes and Darius. His works ("Commentary on the Yafna," 1833; "Memoir on the Inscriptions of Hamadan," 1836; " Studies on the Zend Texts," 1840— 1850) have been taken up and completed by Brockhaus, 1850, Westergaard, 1853, Haug, Kossowics, Justi, Spiegel (185 1—56— 63), and lastly by MM. Michel Br^al, Hovelacque, and De Harlez. The most ancient Iranian monuments of which the date is certainly known are the inscriptions of the Achemenides (Hamadan, Bisoutoun) ; they belong to Persian proper. The Zend texts, in the state in which we have them, are probably later than the origin of the Husvarech or Pehlevi of the Sassanides, and of Parsee ; their date may be fixed at the third centmy of our era (226). Yet their language presents forms of the highest antiquity, almost always twins of the Sanscrit forms. This is because these Gathas, liturgical litanies, the remains of a literature which had already been extinct for perhaps five centuries, belong to an epoch which witnessed a restoration of Magism, and have preserved for us an idiom spoken by Zoroaster, in Media and Bactriana, some three thousand years ago, and carried eastward by the ancestors of the Medes and Persians when they came to establish themselves 246 Distribution of Languages and Races. to the north of the Elarnites and of the Assyrians, while the Ossetes and Armenians, connected with the Slavs by the Scythian dialects, passed along the western coast of the Caspian and the mountains of the Caucasus. Meanwhile the Aryans of India (this title will not be denied them any more than to the kings of Persia, who claim it), the future conquerors of Bengal, advanced slowly into the Punjab among the affluents of the Upper Indus, stopping here and there to build houses, to till the ground, pasture their fl&cks, to wage war among themselves, celebrating the discovery of fire upon the sacred hearth, associating in their sacrifices their ancestors, the forces of nature, and the brilliant gods of the storm and of light. Towards the tenth century they reached the Ganges and the mouths of the Indus ; they penetrated into the great peninsula, took possession of Ceylon, and overflowed into Burmah, Gambodge, and the Malay Islands. They acquired the art of writing late, only in the third century, when classical Sanscrit had ceased to be spoken, and was merely the language of literature ; they fixed the text of the Vedas, preserved by oral tradition, and composed in a language older than Zend. But though replaced in common use by Prakrit, by Maghadi, the language of Buddhism, by Pali, the sacred language of Ceylon, it remains the idiom of the philosophers, grammarians, and poetSj of the great epics, of the drama, of the Puranas ; it has not ceased down to modern times to be the sacred language of the Brahmans, who still write and speak it. Around it flourish the modern dialects, its children and grandchildren, Hindi, Hindustani, Bengali, Mahratta, Guzerati, the Eomany of the gypsies, and its powerful influence is felt even in Malay, through Kawi, the sacred language of Japan. The Indo-Europeans. 247 In order to prove the original unity of all these languages it would suffice to compare a few hundreds of words taken at hazard from the several grammatical categories ; but even more convincing is the study of the transformations undergone, from age to age and from nation to nation, by the elements, roots, and suffixes which are common to them all. It is, in fact, the constancy of the formal and phonetic changes in each group and each idiom of the family respectively which has served as the basis of comparative grammar. This phenomenon has allowed Bopp and Schleicher to measure as it were the degrees of relationship between kindred languages, to distinguish between the elements common to all, and the particular use of these elements, from which results the original development of each idiom ; to bring etymology into accord with the law of dialectal alteration ; and lastly, to discover, for each root, and for a great number of words which are con- jugated and declined, a primitive form, or, if not primi- tive, at least anterior to the variants of which it is the point of departure and the source. So that the divergences of the dialects furnish the surest proofs of their genealogical affinity, and by bringing back the student to the type of which they have blurred the outlines, they reveal to him the features, certain or probable, of the ancient Indo-European organism ; just as the numismatist traces in certain Merovingian or feudal coins the features of Probus, Aurelian, or Philip, disfigured by the clumsy tool of the ignorant and barbarous copyist. Thus it is that comparative grammar is enabled to re-establish, according to all probability, the organic forms of the Indo-European idiom, at the moment when, having already attained to the inflected state, it 248 Distribution of Languages and Races. was about to undergo those alterations and trans- formations which cleft it into eight mother-tongues. Suppose that Latin had disappeared ; an attentive comparison of the seven Eomance idioms which arose from it would enable us to reconstitute it. So with Indo-European ; bold or prudent philologists, Chav^e, Schleicher, analysed its mechanism ; Fick drew up its dictionary. The organic form so discovered becomes the term of comparison among all those which are more or less different from it, without, however, losing all trace of it. And it becomes clear at once that no idiom tends towards the organic state, but that all tend away from it ; all in varying degrees are, not sketches, but modi- fied effigies ; not embryos, but remnants and vestiges of an earlier unknown type. Again, it is easy, as we compare root with root, termination with termination, to show that the altera- tion, the wear of the elements common to the different vocabularies, increases as we go westwards, from the Sanscrit of the Vedas to Zend, from Zend to Slav, from Zend to Greek, from Slav to German, from Greek to Latin, from German and Latin to Celtic. Partial exceptions are assuredly numerous, but there is a general law. Avoiding absolute formulas, we may say that the eastern branch of the Aryan tongues, Sanscrit and Persian, is in a far better state of preservation, far nearer the organic state than the north-western and south-western branches. If, then, Indo-European has existed, with its roots and terminations, its declension and conjugation, with its typical grammar, it must have taken rise in a region where the ancestors, the linguistic ancestors, of the Hindu and the Persian, of the Greek, the Latin, and The Indo-Europeans. 249 the Celt, of the Goth, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Slav, and of the Lithuanian could know and under- stand each other. The trunk can only be found where the branches spring. "What does tradition or documentary history tell us ? With regard to the past of the Hindus and the Persians, we have the testimony of the Vedas, of the epics, and of the Zend-Avesta. We can determine the march from the gorges of the Hindu-Kush of the wandering tribes who advanced by slow degrees from the Punjab to Bengal and the Dekkan, and conquered the great peninsula, without, however, destroying the conquered races. They came from the north, and none of their traditions points to a distant Western origin. Their primitive country, which they call Aryavarta, is the same as the Arya-Vsedja of the Iranians^ who, there is no sort of doubt, remained in it longer tha*^ they — long enough to forget them. Now the Persian Aryans came from Bactriana, where the Gathas of ti(e Avesta were composed ; from Bactriana, whence th^y were driven by the Turanians, the Turks, their legendary and historic enemies, who were still cursed ip. the tenth century of our era in the Shahnameh. The pame Arie, Ariana, given to a region which lies between Afghanistan and Media, marks the second stag^ of these Persian Aryans, some of whom decided to go round the Caspian to gain Media and Armenia, ^he others massing themselves by degrees in Persia proper, until the day when the Medes and the Assyriai^s yielded them the empire. Loner before the arrival of the Persians in Western Asia, and even before that of the Hindus in the valley of the Ganges, history shows us relations of the Greeks, the Phrygians, and the Lycians installed in Asia Minor, 250 Distribution of Languages and Races. and the Hellenes themselves in the valleys of the Hsemus and of the Pindas, having already left Thrace, of which they knew and celebrated the mountains, Ehodope and Ismara. There is no doubt a vast hiatus between the Caspian and Thrace, and the Hellenes did not recollect the journey that they must have made. Here, however, mythology and philology come to the aid of history ; it is impossible to separate the language of Homer and that of the Vedas ; the legends crystal- lised by the Hellenes, the Phrygians, and the Cretans round Olympus and Ida come direct from the fount at which the Aryan rhapsodists dranlf. The march of the Hellenic tribes towards the Hellad and the Pelo- ponnesus is the . continuation of the movement which bore them into Phthiotide and into Pieria. Lastly, the fable of the Argonauts, the expansion of their colonies on the northern shore of the Black Sea, denotes an earlier acquaintance with Colchida and tlie Chersonese of Taurus. It was to the Caucasus that Zeus bound Prometheus. Ai'e not these reminiscences of the lands which they had travelled over, pressed by the Cimerians (the Cymri or Gauls) and the Scythians, who were doubtless Slavs, mingled with the Finno-Mongols ? The Latins are even more ignorant than the Greeks of their origin, since their history only begins in the eighth century B.C., and their Trojan traditions were borrowed from the Etruscans and from the Greeks of Cumse. But they could not have learned or created their language in Italy ; it proceeds directly from the Indo-European source, and is connected with the most ancient form of Greek, with j3Eolian. Nor did they invent their Jupiter, the Dyauspitar of the Aryans. Few in number, a small tribe, lost between the Hellenic nations and the Gallic mass making its way up the The Indo- Europeans. 251 Danube, they must have passed unperceived along the Alps and the Adriatic, borne onwards by the migra- tion of the Umbriaus (fourteenth century B.C.), or urged forward in the tenth century B.C. by the exodus of the Pelasgians or Etruscans. Then they encamped between the Albi and the Curii and vegetated there, until the day when they took part in the foundation of Rome. The diirk-haired Celts, of whom ethnography finds the traces from Dacia to Artriorica and Ireland, the fair-haired Gauls {Volk, Bolg, whence Belg-ian and Welsh; Eag. folh), the Gauls, who at the time of Ambigat and Biturix occupied the whole of Germany, and soon after of Gaul, Great Britain, and the west and centre of Spain, the Cymri, who were probably identical with the Cimmerians, all these peoples, who spoke Indo- European dialects, certainly progressed from east to west ; so much so, that they were driven to the Ehine and the Atlantic by the Germans and the Slavs. The Gallic language, which has almost entirely disappeared, was, it is well known, related to Latin, which explained its rapid disappearance. As for the Neo-Celtic dialects, in spite of the modifications they have undergone, they are none the less marked with the family features. The Germans, Slavs, and Lettic race remain to be considered ; their origin cannot admit of a doubt. The first did not occupy their present country at the time of the Gallic dominion, or at most they were disputing the coasts of the Baltic with their Finnish predecessors. It was only in the middle of the first century before our era that the Suevi appeared in force on the Lower Rhine ; Caesar kept them to the right bank. By degrees Germany filled up between the Oder and the Rhine, between Jutland and the Alps ; it swarmed 252 Distribution of Languages and Races. with once-famous tribes, whose names have now dis- appeared from our maps, Cherusci, Irminoni, Isc^voni, Ingsevoni, Quedi, Marcomanni, who were either de- stroyed in their long wars with the Roman world or in their intestine broils ; they existed obscurely up to the fourth century in the Decumatian lands, more or less subject to tribute, and penetrated as far as the Weser by the Roman legions and influence. Behind them stretched the land of the Goths, the most powerful of the Germanic races, who in the fourth century covered, from the Baltic to the Dniester, what was afterwards the Polish dominion ; they came from more distant lands. The proof of this is found in the pressure of the Slavs, themselves harassed by the Huns in their Scythian pastures ; this flood threw one branch of the Goths upon Sweden, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths on to the right bank of the Danube, and penetrated into the heart of Germany. The Germans of the north, the Lombards, the Rugi, Heruli, Vandals, urged by the Borusses and the Lithu- anians, were already in movement, wandering where chance led them, some to Italy, some to Spain, and even Africa ; then the Suevi, the Burgundians, and the Franks arrive in turn in the valleys of the Meuse, of the Scheldt, of the Somme. The Teuton tribes who remained in Germany, Alamanni, Suevi, Pranconians, Saxons, were crowded between the Rhine and the Weser, sometimes attained to the Elbe ; everywhere the Huns dominated, followed by the Slavs. The ancient Teutons dwelt in more or less scattered or dense masses in Scandinavia, England, the north-west of Gaul, Spain, and Cisalpine Gaul. But I have already sketched the table of these complicated events, which will sufiBce to destroy the The Indo- Europeans, 253 pretensions of our neighbours to the lands to which emigration once carried them, and where their bands, dominant for a time, ended by becoming absorbed into the earlier population, and also to show the Eastern origin of the Teutons. In the case of the Slavs, the point is not likely to be called in question ; but it may be necessary to insist upon the fact that the numerous and very rich languages of these peoples could not have been framed in the lands where they are now spoken, or have issued the one from the other ; they betray their close rela- tionship with the organic Indo-European. As long as no sign shall have been discovered of a Western origin in the case of the Slavs and Iranians, of the two groups which remained together longest in the neighbourhood of the common cradle, so long as it has not been demonstrated that the Celts and the Gauls progressed without an obvious reason from the west towards the east, or that the German hive, solid in its centre from all time, sent forth swarms to the right and the left, Celts, Gauls, Slavs, and Persians, even Latins and Hellenes, so long we shall be constrained to place the Indo-European country somewhere between the eastern and western branches. But even sup- posing that the smallest particle of evidence could be alleged in support of one of these hypotheses, com- parative grammar would still be there to tell us that no one of these idioms can render an account of its forms and its rules. None can explain itself, but all can be explained by each other; none of them is a sketch of a type towards which it tends ; all are the ■ various modifications of a common stock, of an earlier language, which has disappeared just because all have carried it away with them. Languages only travel with 254 Distribution of Languages and Races. those who speak them. Those which concern us now have therefore been imported by immigrants, who were probably too few in number to modify materially the mixture of more ancient ethnic elements, but powerful enough to impose their language, their intel- lectual discipline, and in some cases the corresponding civilisation. For speech, being the expression of thought, assuredly reveals the aptitudes, the facilities of the brain, the industrial, aesthetic, and social condition of each human race and group. The Indo-European unity was not merely a matter of grammar and lexicon, but of in- tellect and morals. If the majority of the sister languages designate by the same word a thing, a ' being, a relation, a sentiment, an abstract idea, is it not evident that these were already known to the primitive group ? Among all the roots which might characterise them, it had already chosen those which appeared to be the most expressive. In order to ascertain what some have kept or lost, what others have acquired, it is sufficient to gather together the terms which are common to all or to some of these idioms. This is what Adolphe has attempted to do, sometimes rashly, bat generally with success. Centuries of pastoral life had preceded the separa- tion of the idioms. The names of such things as flock, ox, sheep, pig, dog, shepherd, pasturage ; of the yard, the stable ; of meat, wool, milk, butter, cheese, present marked agreement; and from these terms are derived the words which imply wealth, property, the family, the master, the host. The bull and the cow are the principal actors in the myths, the prize in the battles between the sun and the clouds, the thunder and the winds. Though a shepherd people, the The Indo-Europeans. 255 Aryans were no longer nomads ; they knew barley, the art of ploughing, mills, flour, and perhaps bread. They drank fermented liquors, hydromel, and perhaps wine. The fabrication of the cart, the axle, and of the yoke necessitated the use of the chisel, the wedge, the axe, and the knife ; there were carpenters and smiths. Tiie anvil was of stone. There is no evidence of the use of iron, but there is no doubt that silver was known and bronze in use. Spinning and weav- ing of a rude kind existed ; the dress was sewn ; necklaces and bracelets adorned the neck and wrists. The art of building, or rather of hollowing boats, was known ; the names of the hull and of the oar are as old as our languages, but there is no question of mast, of sail, or of keel. The sea was distant or un- known, and the navigation was only upon lakes or rivers ; boats were required for crossing the rivers, as bridges were not invented. The house, which, by its principal name (dama, domus), recalls perhaps the bundle of poles which carried the primitive tent, was the chief work of the carpenter. It is doubtful whether masonry had any- thing to do with the construction, unless it contributed a little plaster or mortar. The bed, the seat, a few utensils constituted its furniture. The house was surrounded by a ditch, which seems to have furnished most of the words which signify enclosure, yard, or garden. Within this boundary was the well or the cistern, and the hearth where the food was cooked. It may also be conjectured that fire was also lighted in the hut, since some of the words which signify house seem to be connected with a root which means to burn. The door has kept its name throughout the ages, dvar, door, Oupa, fores, but the key only appears 256 Distribution of Languages and Races. among the Westerns. The houses belonged to families, to households, monogamous, at least in theory, in which the husband and wife were equals and master and mistress {jpati, iroa-is, patui, ttotvio) ; a tribe, a clan (djariana, yevos, gens, chunni) must therefore have occupied a certain number of huts, which formed a village (trapd, tribus, thaurp, dorf), or even a town (poura, ttoXk). There was no nation, no people ; the words which have since expressed this idea signified then number and multitude only. Everywhere there were small groups, sometimes united for their common defence, often separated by their quarrels among each other. War, for these barbarians, was already' the action, par eiccellence (adji, adjma, agon, agmen, the combat, the army), whether it were a battle in the open country, on horse with the javelin, on foot with the sword, or the assault of the enclosure, the burg, where the enemy had withdrawn with his troops and his booty. The hero {vira, vir, baro) fought upright on his chariot or mounted on the horse, which he excited with the sound of the horn {grina, cornu), the rude precursors of the trumpet. Owner of horses, tamer of horses, friend of horses, were the most coveted titles among the Persians, Greeks, and Gauls. The conquered enemy was carried into slavery, and was reckoned, with the flocks, in the wealth of his master. The powerful man and his wife were styled indiiferently dampati, gopati, dasapati (Secnrortii, Sear- TTOtva), masters of the house, of oxen, of slaves. The love of war, without which no robust and lonar- lived race has ever arisen, implies the love of glory, the true motive of every courageous action and of every great work. No human group has ever felt it more strongly than ours. To be known, to be sung, The Indo-Europeans. 257 the desire is innate in the Hindu as in the Greek, in the Persian as in the German. There is a root hru, Idu, ql%, which in a thousand diiTerent modifications has furnished the names of peoples, of heroes, even of gods ; the Slavs are the glorious ; all the qrwoas, all the slaf, all the KKri% the chl%, the Mod, and the Jirua, Ladislas, Herakles, Cloms, Louis, and Roland, were famous men, or aspired to justify the paternal pride which had bestowed upon them these high-sounding names. The tribes had chiefs of war and peace, kings, except perhaps the Hellenes, who made hardly any use of the root rag or reg, common to all the other sister languages. Their social organisation was founded upon property, common and individual. Inheritance was known, but was doubtless confined to the rank, the house, the product of toil, and the booty taken in war. Exchange was the only form of econo- mical relations. The oxen served for money. Law, right, debt, crime, judgment, evidence, and fine were named before the Indo-European expansion.- Most of the roots which express these notions allow us to discover the entirely material origin of the highest and most abstract ideas ; this may be said of all the terms which relate to the life of the mind ; the soul {animd), simply the breath of life ; thought, merely the power of measuring and weighing objects ; will, memory, knowledge, the power of creating things a second time (roots gan, to engender, gnd, to know). Religion is not the least striking characteristic of our ancestors ; freed from the minutiae of animism and from the enervating practices of chthonism (of which, however, some traces are retained), it had already attained to the adoration of the forces of nature and of atmos- 258 Distribution of Languages and Races. pherical phenomena. Lastly, the language, the result of an extreme degree of agglutination) simple in its roots, indefinite in its power of derivation, presents itself as a complete organism, cultivated and at the same time free. What name should be given to this aggregate of the immediate ancestors, of so many different races, which are nevertheless endowed with the same polity, the same language, the same creed, and the same culture ? There is one which, in spite of opposition, has finally prevailed, since it no longer misleads any one, no longer implies unity of race ; it is that of Darius, " Arya, son of Arya," that which the Brahmans claim, and which they have translated to the heavens in the person of the god Ahriman. It is true that the other peoples, except the Iron or Ossetes of the Caucasus, have not adopted it, but they knew it and used it. What are Ares, Avion, Aristos, Arete, Arte- mis, the strong, the best, virtue, the most honourable of the Greeks ; what the Ario-vist of the Germans, but doublets and derivatives of the name borne by so many great persons among the Hindus and Persians. The original meaning is vague ; among the true Aryas it is noble, famous ; but it also means traveller and labourer. This last acceptation is universal. Lat. arare, ara- trum, aratio ; Gr. apouv, apoTpov, ApotrK ; Litli. ar-ti, arhlas ; Slav, ora-ti, oradlo ; Goth, arj-an ; Anglo-Sax. erjan ; Eng. ear; Irish, ar ; Cornish, ara- dar ; Welsh, ardd. The ancient names of the earth are connected with it : Gr. epa ; Sans, ira ; Ger. ero, airtha, eortha, earth ; Gael, ire, irionn. How- ever this may be, Aryo-European would be better than Indo-European, and, for the sake of simplicity, I The Indo-Europeans. 259 shall use without scruple the words Aryans, Aryan languages and nations. I must meet in advance a possible reproach : for Bossuet's Semitic history you would substitute an Aryan history. You only dethrone the chosen people in order to put forward another privileged, predestined group. Yes and no. I suppress no fact of history. I attribute nothing more to the Aryans than the science of language allows them ; they began, like all others, in savagery ; but since they came late in time, and with an already developed language and intelli- gence, they rapidly reaped the benefit of the inventions of their predecessors. The Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Semites in Western Asia, the Chinese in the extreme East had reached a level which the Aryans have since passed in their institutions, in the arts, and in the expression of thought. For two or three thou- sand years the direction of the world has fallen to the Aryans, and, in spite of momentary failures, of Arabic, Mongolian, or Turkish incursions, they have kept the torch, they have carried it into America, into Aus- tralia, and returning to their cradle by sea and by land, they bear the light even into the heart of Africa, even into the dim twilight of the East. Compare the false and incoherent history to which Bossuet lent the support of his eloquence — history modified to suit the Jewish Bible as it was revised in the fifth century, and the prophecies after the event of Daniel and of John ; compare it with the realities unveiled by the discovery of the Indo-European group. Note how the movements of the peoples are ordered and illuminated by it. While from the eastern slope of the great Asiatic plateaus the ancestors of the Chinese descended their rivers, the Blue and the Yellow, 26o Distribution of Languages and Races. and multiplied in tkeir immense empire, isolated, use- less, and unknown, two centres of civilisation arose, on the banks of the Nile and at the mouth of the Euphrates. Separated from these Egypto- Semites by the Himalaya and the desert, slowly increasing tribes of white men, part shepherds and part agriculturists, monogamous, worshippers of the heavenly bodies, gra- dually, under the pressure of the Mongols, leave their common country, forgetting each other as they travel, but retaining their idioms and their acquired culture exactly in the proportion of their increasing distance. The Celts are driven westward by the Gauls, the G-auls by the Germans, these by the Slavs and Lithuanians, themselves urged forward and finally overrun by the Mongols and the incursion of the Huns. The future Hindus are already making their way among the affluents of the Indus. Lastly, the Greeks and Latins, passing south of the Celts, Germans, and Slavs, and north of the Semitic world, follow the right bank of the Danube, and one stream of them flows towards Thrace and Thessaly, the other towards the Tiber. The Iranians alone remain, harassed by the continual attacks of the Turks ; they reach Media, Persia, con- quer and take the place of the old Semitic empires, and come into collision in Ionia and at Marathon with their old neighbours, now forgotten, with the Hellenes, already masters of the Mediterranean basin. This large and simple view gives the true meaning of history. It explains the successive effacements of the ancient civilisations, the encounters and the strifes of the Gauls and the Italiots, of the Hellenes and the Persians, of the Germans and the Grseco-Roman world, the Mongolian incursions into the field left clear by the Aryan migrations, and the equilibrium slowly The Indo-Europeans. 26 1 established by the mutual resistance of the various races, occasionally disturbed by these passing irrup- tions. It explains also the movements of the Germans, checked by the Celtic block, and returning against the Slavs, who, long the victims of shock and counter- shock, fluctuated, without a fixed frontier, between Germany and the Tartar chaos. The various German invasions declare themselves as the consequences of the primeval impulse. Even the conquest of the Americas and of Oceania may be said to proceed from the impulse communicated by the pressure of the Mongols, four thoasand years ago, to the tribes who dwelt between Turkhestan and the Oxus. Such is the new conception of history, which rejects as a chimera the divine plan and the biblical genea- logies ; it is the creation of philology. 18 PART III. THE INDO-EUROPEAN ORaANISM. CHAPTER I. INDO-EUROPEAN ROOTS. Inflexion a higher degree of agglutination — The Indo - European material consists of full roots and empty roots, demonstrative or pronominal, and attributive or verbal — Pronominal roots : pronouns and suffixes — Attributive roots, primary, secondary, and tertiary — ■ Reduction of the variants to a small number of ancestral forms — Roots expressing an action of the mind : the ma family — The naked root, the tlieme or radical, often preserved by the com- position of words. The kinship of the Indo-European languages is a phenomenon of the same order as the close affinity of the Bantu, Berber, Turkish, or Semitic dialects. Their area is not more extensive than that of the Malay idioms. The ethnic differences between the nations which have acquired them are not greater than between the various Malayo-Polynesian groups. The pre-existence of a common speech and of a human aggregate where this mother-tongue was formed, is not less evident and less necessary here than in the case of the other independent families. All the earlier types have perished, because writing was unknown ; but they may yet be traced in the idioms derived from them. Indeed, it is not only what may be called the first types that have disappeared ; 262 Indo-European Roots. 263 even secondary forms have often passed away without leaving any monument of their existence ; nothing is left of the Teutonic, Slav, and Italic stems, which have produced so many different branches. Fortu- nately we possess in their earliest as well as in their latest forms Sanscrit, Iranian, Greek, and Latin ; and it is enough to compare with these the Hindu, Persian, Romaic, and Romance groups, which have issued from them, to understand the formation of the eight Indo- European branches, and to determine that they are all issued from a common trunk. Hence there is no mystery about the origin of these languages, save that obscurity which belongs to vast distances in time. The peoples which have carried along with them, or received in the course of their wanderings, the elements of the same intellectual cultivation, have, more or less rapidly, risen above the level of other races and nations. This fact is histori- cal and patent ; it need not surprise us, since we find everywhere these inequalities in aptitude and destiny. Is not the Malay superior to the Papuan, the Moor to the Negro, the Aztec to the Abipone, the Semite to the Berber, the Chinese to the Mongol ? Latest in time, the Aryan is heir to the conquests of his pre- decessors, and their apogee was his point of departure. Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria had given their measure and spent their force ; with livelier energy, with greater breadth and subtlety of mind, he took in hand the abandoned task ; and this intellectual and aesthetic superiority is manifest to us in his speech. But his language is not separated from others by any gulf ; it only differs from them by a more inti- mate combination of the same original elements ; it has outstripped them, but on the same road. It is 264 The Indo-European Organism. not possible to donbt this, since it is the comparative study of these great dialects and the analysis of its forms which have suggested the theory of language, and enabled philologists to determine the general development of speech, the successive phases of mono- syllabism, agglutination, and inflexion. Inflexion, as we have said, is but the fusion of the agglutinated syllables; it necessarily supposes, there- fore, an agglutinative period, but agglutination could not have taken place without a supply of roots which were already susceptible of juxtaposition, as in Chinese, that is already classed as fvll and empty, or principal and subordinate roots. Finally, this rudi- mentary use of the vocal elements bears witness to ages yet more remote, in which the sounds adapted to the designation of things and beings, relegated to the second place, into the class of demonstratives and auxiliaries, the ancient cries of pain, joy, summons and warning. Even the long trials and experiments which resulted at last in the true consonants are revealed to us by the numerous variants of a single root, either in the same language or in the passage from one dialect to another. Before attaining to the clear pronunciation of the simple guttural, dental, or labial, before uttering the sounds h and g, t and d, 2? and 6, the ancestors of the Indo-European long hesi- tated among consonantal diphthongs, such as sk, kch, lev, M, kh, gv, gj, gd, and gh, such as tch, tj, tv, dj, dv, or pt,pv, mp, id ; so with the sibilant s, so diiBcult for the Greeks and Iranians to pronounce at the beginning of a word, and for the Latins between two vowels, that these peoples replaced it either by an aspirate or by an r ; so with the liquids r and I or n, which are con- stantly interchanged or replaced by a dental. The Indo-European Roots. 265 acquisition of the vowels was the final result of similar hesitations and efforts ; thus the short e and were not familiar' to the Aryans of India or to the Goths, and these peoples only know the long e and as combina- tions of an a, short or long, with i and -y (vowel or semi-vowel). Then, according as a vowel was uttered with more or less force, followed or preceded by an aspirate, it annexed by degrees a guttural, a sibilant, or even a trill like the Sanscrit vowel r. Finally, if the soft palate rose at all towards the nasal passages, the vowel took a peculiar sound — it was nasalised, as an, in, on ; the insertion of an n was the inevitable result of this phonetic accident, and it is often diffi- cult to determine whether the added n is due to the nasalised vowel or to a suffix na. These inductions, which M. Paul Regnaud has in- terpreted I think somewhat too absolutely, are not merely logical processes — they repose on ascertained facts. These variants of which I spoke are not hypo- thetical ; they subsist and co-exist, forming groups in which the intimate relationship of the members is evident. The Indo-Europeans preserved them, and came by degrees to use them to express shades of meaning, and the new acquisitions which enriched thought as time went on. Sanscrit grammarians reckoned in their language about seventeen hundred roots, apparently irreducible by analysis ; the first com- parative study brought down to the number of five hundred the elements common to all the languages of the family. A more thorough analysis reduces them to one-fifth, perhaps one-tenth of this number, the narrow base on which reposes the most vast and the most fertile of linguistic organisms. From these preliminary but not a priori considera- 266 The Indo-European Orgajiism. tions let us retain the following points : The Indo- European mother-tongue is not a concept of the mind, nor a species of miracle ; it is a reality, the- product of the elaboration of ages, as is proved by the wasting, the atrophy of its case and verbal endings. Its genesis and material are those of other languages, which it has distanced only by a more vigorous and intelligent use of the same methods and artifices. Two classes of monosyllabic roots compose it — de- monstrative or pronominal^ roots, attributive or verbal roots ; the first furnished all the pronouns, most of the prepositions, conjunctions, and suflSxes ; the second, all nouns and adjectives, all _ verbs, and most of the ■ adverbs. The pronominal roots often occur in the naked isolated state, the primitive monosyllable : sa, ho, ta, to, this, that ; sya, tya, sva, snia ; ma, me, tu, te, I, thou ; ya, ka, ku, who, which ; dva, tri, two, three ; da, ga, as in the Greek and German particles ge, de ; often they have acquired case-endings, s, m, t, hliyam, hhyas, which are easily detached ; often again they are agglutinated and coagulated together, without chang- ing the indicative relation or personal meaning : for instance, in Sanscrit, ima, esa, ata, eta, ana, ena, eva, eka, into which enter the simplest sounds that man can utter, a, t, and which are naturally reinforced, doubled, with other syllables, vaguely associated with some ges- ture, with some idea of distance and of place ; under this form the pi'ominent roots have given birth in all the Indo-European idioms to many series of indispen- sable words, varied and changed to an indefinite ex- tent, in which it is difiicult to trace the amalgamated syllables. Who would think to find Jwc illud in the French word oui, or hie hie in iei, or hie ille hwic hie Indo-European Roots. 267 hie in eelui-ci, if these fusions were not revealed to us by forms such as o-'il and i-ce-lui? Bopp and his followers, Pott, Benfey, Kuhn, guided by similar in- dications, have been able to find and follow up with certainty the clue to these labyrinths. The pronoun / is present in Gothic and Latin in its naked simplicity, except that it has a declension. Gothic nominative and genitive singular is, accusative, singular and plural ina, ins, dative singular and plural imma, im. Latin is, id, ii, its, and the attenua- tions ea, ei, ejus, eum, &c., with suffixes isdem, idem, ita, itidem, i{s)pse, ihi, immo, enim ; there is, moreover, a permanent confusion with the form ya, ja, derived itself from i. From Latin it is permissible to pass to French to show the ancient pronoun / in a group where it is not easy to perceive it : the word meme, through the old form meisme, and the Italian medesimo, leads us to a supposed Latin form, met-ipse-timum, super- lative of metipse. Now in these compound forms the central significant part is the vanished pronoun /. / has not left in Zend or Sanscrit an isolated form, de- clined, but it appears in adjectives like idriga, such ; itara, other (Latin iterum), and the adverbs iha, idha, ithra, here ; itas, from here ; it-iham, iti ; Zend, itha, thus ; idanim, now ; tchet, for tcha-it, with the sense of yes, in contravention of a negative proposition (the French si) ; net (Zend, noid) for na-it, not, no-indeed, as one who should say, " Away with that." We have just mentioned a syllable famous above all others, since it has almost everywhere furnished the most energetic word in any language : English no, French non. It may cause surprise, perhaps, to learn that the root na and its neighbour ma, which have often taken a negative tense, have retained in most 268 The Indo-European Organism. cases, either as isolated words or as suffixes, a distinctly- positive demonstrative value. Affirmation and nega- tion would, therefore, seem not to be primitive ideas, or else they were sufficiently rendered by gesture. It is only after a long lapse of time, and by a sort of detour, that simple or compound pronouns have been used for the expression of consent or refusal. It is, moreover, easy to show that in modern speech our affirmative and negative terms are merely indicative adverbs or pronouns : si in Italian is but sic, so ; the French oui, that that ; German and Breton ja and English yes have no other meaning than the Aryan, Greek, and Latin expressions, such as ita, na, ma, md, nee, nai, &c. No doubt we see in Greek, Sanscrit, in Armenian, under the forms me, ma, mi, in Sanscrit, Gothic, Slav, Borusse, Lithuanian, Zend, under the forms na, ni. Tie, naiy, our two pronominal syllables employed for inhibition and negation ; but we must not forget that fia tov Qeov in Greek means " by God, I call God to witness ;" that nai means " certainly ;" "that in the Veda we find na with the sense of sicut, as, so, and nana with the sense of much ; finally, that mxi and no, form nouns, adjectives, participles, super- latives of every kind. It is, therefore, only by custom, by a choice easier to verify than to explain, that ma and na, isolated or prefixed, have become negative signs. Yet another striking example, non, an abbre- viation of the forms Tienu, ne-unum, has the root na twice over, negative at the beginning of the word, simply demonstrative at the end of it. These curious anomalies throw light upon the pri- mitive equality of all those cries of summons or warning to which gesture, accent, intonation, in the first place, and afterwards custom and Ihe preferences of a tribe, Indo-European Roots. 269 gave at last a precise value, a definite meaning. And here we are only dealing with independent words, composed of naked or declined demonstrative roots, and with compound words in which this wealth of roots takes the place of radical or central sj-llable. But wlien we come later to these same roots com- pounded with attributive roots, their original insigni- ficance will be yet more clear. There is no single vowel, there is no syllable formed of a consonant and a vowel, which, suffixed to a verbal root, cannot form part in the same way of a noun, an adjective, a participle, a verb, or an adverb. It is the need of clearness, the instinctive choice, variable according to vocal aptitude, according to intercourse with foreign peoples, which have more or less fixed upon a certain class of affixes {ta, ti, to, da, ma, na, ra, la, sa, pa, va, ka, ja, sja, &c.), the sense of agent, action, future, past. And in most cases to these sufiBxes, called primary, worn, altered, unrecognisable, it has been necessary to add one, two, or three others, neither more or less significant in themselves, to supply the exigencies of speech. Reckon in a word used by Lucretius, in-saf-i- a-bi-U-ter (insatiably), the syllables added to the root sat (found in the French saoul, from saturus, in rassasier, and in assez, from the Latin ad-satis). Leaving out the prefix in, which answers to the Greek and Sanscrit an and the Teuton un, and which has taken a negative sense, i, d, bi, It, and ter, for tara, are pronominal roots, atrophied and fused, and having at most a value of place; for we shall find them all, singly or in pairs — and that in all the idioms of the family — capable of forming nouns and verbs of every kind. But before giving other examples, we must define and class the attribu- tive roots, those which we tried in an earlier chapter to 270 The Indo-European Organism. connect either with onomatopoeia or with a metaphori- cal imitation of a sensation, a movement, an object. An Indo-European attributive root is neither noun nor verb ; it becomes the one or the other by tlie addition of verbal or case endings. It is, like the Chinese monosyllable, an utterance capable of specify- ing either a class of things, beings, or phenomena, or a state, an action of the thinking subject or of the object under observation. It may include all the vowels and consonants which can be contained in one syllable. " It can always be shown," says Max Mliller, " that the roots composed of more than one syllable are themselves derivatives." And even in the true monosyllabic roots we must distinguish between primary, secondary, and tertiary roots. Primary roots are composed : ( I ) of a vowel, i, to go ; (2) of a vowel and a consonant, ad, to eat ; as, to breathe; ag, to lead; alt, to run, to pierce; (3) of a consonant and a vowel, or of a semi-vowel and a con- sonant, da, to give ; pa, to drink, to pasture, to protect ; ma, to create, to measure ; 6Am., to be, to grow ; ^■a, to blow ; hr, to do ; itir, to die ; jii,, to join. Secondary roots are composed: (i) of a consonant, a vowel, and a consonant, tud, tup, to strike ; hhar, to bear ; ruk, to shine ; vak, to speak ; sak, to follow ; yug, to join and to fight ; vid, to see, to know ; dvJc, to milk ; gan, to engender ; man, to tliink ; (2) of two consonants and a long vowel, hlira, to carry ; mTvd, to remember ; gna, to know ; plu, to flow ; klu, to hear ; stha, to stand ; (3) of a vowel and two consonants, ard, to wound. Tertiary roots are composed : (i) of two consonants, a vowel, and a consonant, spak, to look at ; tras, to tremble ; grabh, to seize, to hollow, to engrave ; star, Indo-European Roots. 271 to stretcli ; livan, to make a noise, or vice-versa ; vart, to turn; cand, to shine; sarp, to glide; (2) of two consonants, a vowel, and two consonants, spand, to tremble ; shand, to ascend ; scalp, to hollow, to write, to carve. Initial groups of three consonants are also found. It is clear that the two first classes are the most ancient. In the second we already see traces of suf- fixation ; if we compare with yu, to join, the forms ytuf, to join (Lat. jugum, Gr. "Qjjov), yung and yu-na-j (Ij&\i. jung-ere), and yudh, to fight, you will perceive other suffixes, ga, dha, 71a, or a nasalisation of the secondary root. If to tud, to strike (Lat. con-tud-tus, contiisus), and to Utp (same sense, Gr. TUTrrai), we add ticnd (Lat. tund-ere), tump (Sans, tump-ati, he strikes), hibh and toih (Sans, tuhh-nati, tobh-ate) ; tuj, to strike, to ex- cite ; tur, to wound ; tuh, to afflict ; turv, to conquer ; we shall be led to connect all these variants with a primitive tu. So with ruk, ruksh, rut, rud, rub, ruth, clearness, colour. As for the tertiary roots, they result for the most part from very ancient agglutinations. Ghav^e, I think, was the first to propose the group- ing together of the roots which are related to each other; thus he constituted the families to blow, to make a noise, to shine, to burn, to strike, to measure, &c. The idea is valuable, and has been more or less accepted by all philologists. M. Paul Regnaud has followed it up with great ability, with the awowed intention of tracing back all roots to a single vague cry, from which ail are issued. This appears to me to force the theory too much, like Darwin's tendency to trace the whole living world back to a single cell of protoplasm. We have here a touch of monogenistic atavism. The theory of evolution accords perfectly with a great number of primary germs and a cerLain original variety 272 The Indo-European Organism. in them. "We have recognised differences and variations in the specific cry of animals ; the voice of man had even more. And in its earliest state language must have had at its disposal a variety of sounds which it slowly developed and defined into vowels, aspirants, and finally into consonants. Indo-European is far from being a primitive language ; and however far we trace back the efforts which led it from agglutination to inflexion, it would seem to have possessed even then at least three pure vowels and several varieties of the consonant. However this may be, the attempt of M. Eegnaud is full of interest, from the boldness of his comparisons, which are always supported by proof or by scientific hypotheses, and we will borrow from him a few ex- amples. There is in Sanscrit a root harsh, which it is easy to recognise in the Latin hirs-utus, horreo (Jorhors-eo), her (Fr. herissorij hedgehog). The same root is found in Greek as )(op6s, -^aipia (for -^^apaw, ■^(appw), perhaps 'Xpi-poi, pig ; but if this last word has kept something of the sense of bristle, " to be stiff," the two others, signifying dance, song, and to rejoice,have no connection with the usual meaning of the root Yet we must remark that in the Yeda, harsh has precisely and solely the sense of the Greek ■^a'lpo), to rejoice, and that it is difficult to separate from it the harifas, the trium- phant horses of the dawn, of which the Greeks have made their Graces or ■)(apiT>]i. How shall we reconcile these discrepancies ? First, is harsh the true form of the Indo-European root ? The jj of x/^ipw indicates a lost guttural, whence a more ancient variant, gharsh, which exists in Sanscrit itself in the adjectives gKrshii, gkrshvi, ardent, active, joyouB. The sibilant which Indo-European Roots. 273 terminates the root may be the remnant of a suffix, and this is the more probable that a well-known group, ghar, char, kar, skar, with the general sense of heat and brilliancy, presides over a whole series of kindred terms. M. Regnaud thinks that ghar, gharsh, harsh, meant before everything to burn and to shine, and answered to the two most important senses, touch and sight. This opinion is the more probable that more than thirty groups of roots have retained more or less of these two primitive meanings. With to hum and to shine are closely associated to shake, to move, to spring forth, to tremble, to radiate, to vibrate, and to bristle. To bwn has its proper successors, such as to dry, to harden ; to shine has also its own, such as to rejoice and to be joyful. Among the numerous roots which belong to the category to burn, to shine, to shake, to harden, there are two which approach the first named very closely ; they only differ from it by the initial letter. Tarsh and tras, tar and star, have given to Zend taresh, to be hot, dry, or thirsty ; to the Greek, Oipcros, heat ; Tepcrofiai, to dry, to harden ; rapdcraw, to agitate ; rpew, to tremble ; to the Latin, torreo, to burn, and torrens, to be agitated ; probably also stella for star-u-la, the shining thing, the star; terreo, to cause to tremble, tremo, to shudder; teira for tersa, the dry land, the earth ; to the Teutonic, starr, stiff, hard, bristling. Bhresh, bhreksh, Ihraj, bhrajj, are rich in specimens of the three or four meanings attached to the preceding groups. Moreover, they evoke from heat, from flame even, through the intermediary of dryness and hard- ness, the name of shivering and cold. The Latin torreo = terreo leaves besides no doubt about the transi- tions which connect these two opposite ideas. 2 74 T^^ Indo-European Organism. In the matter of heat and brilliancy we have the Greek (pXeyw, to burn {Phlegethon), (p\oys, flame ; the Latin flagro, I burn, flagma ( flamina), flagrum, and flagellum, (the whip or scourge, which seems to burn the skin), fulgor, fulgur, splendour, lightning. Agita- tion is expressed by the German spriessen, spriTigen, and by the Greek (pp'ia-a-ta ; hardness by this same word (ppla-ardd, and by piyeia ; by the Latin rigor, rigidus ; finally, the French word froid is but the Latin frigidum, frigus, frigere, of which rigen is a doublet. All these facts are ascertained, and if any doubt remain, it is because we have not yet been able to consider Indo-European phonetic laws. But M. Regnaud, considering the primitive unity (or rather indecision) of the three consonants, guttural, dental, and labial, whether aspirated, hard, or soft, proposes to assimilate, to reduce to a common type, the roots gharsh, marsh, and bharsh, with all their variants and transposed forms. He thinks also (judging from numerous and plausible indications) that a sibilant once preceded the initial consonant. In fact, a number of roots similar in form and meaning differ only by the presence or absence of an s. We should thus need to write above these three series a triple key, skar, star, sbar,- susceptible of a great number of attenuated or strengthened forms, and easily augmented by one or two atrophied pronominal suffixes, tch, dj, sh, kch, k, g. The three roots mentioned above are by no means the only ones which our learned friend desires to trace back to a common source ; and whether he succeeds or not, he deserves our gratitude for having in most cases led us back to the beginning, to the dawn of Indo-Eiiropean Roots. 275 intelligence. He has contributed in great measure to the destruction of the old psychology, to the demonstration of the slow and unequal growth of ideas, of the progressive but unconscious ingenuity, whereby our ancestors attained to the endowing of barren and naked syllables, not only with abstract meaning, but with moral concepts. In truth, they are not numerous, the roots which man used in the earliest ages to express an action of the mind : three or four sufficed. And it is easy to trace them . back to a physical sense ; smar, to re- member, connected doubtless with mar, to die ; hudh, in Greek irvQ, ttvvO (doubtless to shine, to lighten) ; grad, to believe (from Jcru, to hear) ; gna, to know, to name, a contracted form of gan-a, to engender, to produce ; finally ma, which we have already mentioned, and which, either simple, short, or long, or with, added con- sonants, has representatives in all the parts of speech. We have seen to what uses it has been turned in the pronominal order, now personal, and now demonstra- tive pronoun, now affirmative or negative particle, now case or verbal ending. In the attributive order ma plays a yet more important part. We do not doubt that it was one of the earliest distinct sounds pronounced by the child, and retained by men and women, in the sense of creating, en- gendering, producing, and afterwards commanding, weighing, thinking. The word ma-tar has been adopted by all the Indo-Europeans to designate the mother ; but it has also been used in a masculine sense, matar, creator, whence the name of the Vedic god, Matarigvan. In this connection one may mention. mas, the male, the producer. To this general sense be- longs Lat. ma-nare, to flow, to emanate; materies, matter, 276 The Indo-European Organism. the fertile substance, space ; and also, striking contrast, the famous m&yA, space, phenomenon, the illusion of the universe. The moon which traverses space, and whose phases are the measure of time, is mas, and its career is ma-sa, the months. The nasal sufSx adopted by the Greek ixypri, n-qv, by the Latin mensis, by the Gothic and Slav mena, menoth, by the Anglo-Saxon mona (moon), manadh, has not changed the value of these two correlative terms. A group of the family ma has remained in the direct and limited sense of measure. There are analogous terms in all our languages ; metiri, to measure, fierpov (whence metre), mensura, medius (whence nioyen, moitiS, mean), modus, modius (muid), magh, to grow, whence maha, fj-eya?, magnus, majestas. To pass now to the forms under which ma ex- pressed, before the separation of the idioms, actions of the human mind. It appears to us here in at least five different states — short, as it was originally ; long, with the nasal or the suffix na ; with the soft, hard, or aspirated dental ; with the causative suffix ya {ma, ma ; wMn and mn& ; mad, math, manth ; manya) ; and its meanings vary between thinking, knowing, remembering, hoping, desiring, loving. The naked form has been the least fertile : it has furnished in Sanscrit ma-tas and ma-ti, thougrht. Greek has retained it in the name of the goddess Metis, in the adjective ixtiTiera, an attribute of Zeus, and in the compounds PoXu^jjtj?, AvkuXo/hi^tij^, the ordinary surnames of Ulysses and Prometheus. Two plausible reasons have been suggested for the passage of ma into man : first, the very general tendency, even in Sanscrit, to nasalise the sound a; and secondly, the frequency of the suflSxes- na, na, ni. Indc-European Roots. 277 mm,, no, which characterise several classes of verbs. The addition of the dentals and of ja may be ex- plained in the same manner. The root man, once constituted, it acquired, according to a constant law, a contracted form mna, a reduplicated form ma/man, mimfie, and a causative manya ; and entering into the frequentative mat, became prolonged into mant and manth. The variation of the vowels in the different dialects came to increase the richness of the primitive sound ; and we may expect to find everywhere else than in Sanscrit equivalent forms : men, mon, min, miin, main, meth, med, ment, mna, mne, &c. Sanscrit offers several terms of great interest ; first, the verb to think ; man and mana, manute (lie thinks), then manas, thought, mind. The manas has been reckoned by the Hindus among the senses ; it is the sixth and greatest. In the most recent of the Vedic hymns it is deified. Another name has had a yet finer destiny, manu, man, the thinking being, the legislator, deified also among the Germans of Tacitus and during the Brahmanic period. With the causative particle ja, man forms words which signify a move- ment of the mind ; for example, anger, in Sans, man- y-u ; whence in Zend, Angro-Mainyu, the spirit of anguish, of pain, the Evil Genius, Ahriman. We may also mention man-tra, the instrument of mind, which has come to mean sacred text, verse, litany, in- cantation, talisman. To the root mna a liturgical meaning has also attached itself; to repeat the Vedas to oneself. The variety math, munth, has produced a famous name, Pramantha, he who turns the fire-stick for the sacrifice and produces the spark. Here we recognise Prometheus, another form of the same type. The same elements have been fertile in Greek. The 19 278 The Indo-European Organism. name of man, manu, has been abandoned, but ft-evoi, thought, has formed numerous derivatives; such as wfi.evrj, like av, as, va, ap, or aqv, gvau, which are found in serpeiis, in ovis, in asu, in vata, in aqua, in bos, were essentially what I shall call raw substan- tives, and signified before anything else serpent, sheep, breath, ivind, water, ox, and by analogy only came to be applied to other beings, or the actions of other beinjjs, and took other meanings, such as to glide, undulating, to breathe, life, to run, agile, to wander, to walk, earth. This opinion is plausible, yet the haste with which speech seizes upon those raw substantives to express qualities or actions seems to prove that 286 The Indo-European Organism. they themselves are the result of an unconscious analysis, and that they describe the most salient peculiarity of the object heard, seen, or touched. Our sensibility, in fact, having five ways of perceiving external things, is itself an instrument of abstraction. The senses co-operate and supplement each other, but it is always the one which is most directly affected which determines the impression on the brain and its expression by the voice ; and the vocal symbol neces- sarily differs according as it corresponds to an indication of sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste. Hence the number of synonyms ultimately rejected, or reserved for approximate shades of meaning, or qualities per- ceived in the same object by the eye, the ear, or the hand. So that the noun, even when the most in- voluntary expression of the primitive impression, can only be the expression of a quality. There is, then, no original difference between the substantive and the adjective. Both are names which express a quality, a manner of existence, either gene- ralised and applicable to all the objects which possess it, or specialised and identified with the whole of the object, of which it really designates but one property. " All substantives," says M. Breal, " were, to begin with, adjectives taken substantively." How did the adjective come to be distinguished in the long-run not only in meaning but in form ? In the first place, the adjective, habitually used to signify an object, lost its qualifying value, and came to be solely the name of the object. For instance, deva, which means the shining, and which has still in Sanscrit the three degrees of comparison, ended by meaning the god. Sourya, the brilliant, became the name of the sun. Akva, the runner, became the Parts of Speech. — The Noun. 22, j name of the horse. Manu, the intelligent, signified man. The epithet was forgotten in the thing desig- nated hy it. Other words,- on the contrary, laghu (Gr. e\a-)(y