I i . ■ Class J^_5 Book J K 2,5 i9 77 ne veut point, l He does not go a point with you in your wish.' Nowadays all this metaphorical meaning is gone, except to the eye of the grammarian. People recognize that// ne veut point is rather stronger than 77 ne veut pas, but it never occurs to them to ask why. There are so many of these curious examples that one is tempted to go on choosing instances; but we confine ourselves to one more. Our word yes is a word which by itself is quite incapable of calling up a picture in our minds, but the word is or ' it is,' though the idea it conveys is very abstract, and, so to say, intangible — as compared, for in- stance, with such verbs as move, beat — nevertheless belongs to the ' significant ' class. Now, it happens that the Latin language used the word est ' it is ' where we should now use the word 'yes;' and it Still further happens that om yes x is probably the same as the German es, and was used in the same sense of it is as well. Instead of the meaningless word ' yes ' the Romans used the word est ' it is,' and our own ancestors expressed the same idea by saying ' it.' Still more. It is well known that French is in the main a descendant from the Latin, not the Latin of Rome, but the corrupter Latin which was spoken in Gaul. Now these Latin-speaking Gauls did not, for some reason, say est, l it is,' for yes, as the Romans did ; but they used a pronoun, either ille, 'he,' or hoc, 'this.' When, therefore, a Gaul desired to say 'yes,' he nodded, and said he or else this, 1 Yes is probably not the same word as the German ja (whose significant form is lost), though our yea is. F 66 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. meaning 'He is so,' or 'This is so.' As it happens the Gauls of the north said tile, and those of the south said hoc, and these words gradually got corrupted into two meaningless words, out and oc. It is well known that the people in the south of France were especially distinguished by using the word oc instead of out for ' yes,' so that their i dialect ' got to be called the langue oToc, and this word Languedoc gave the name to a province of France. Long before that time, however, we may be sure, both the people of the langue d'otl, or langue d'oui, and those of the langue doc had forgotten that their words for ' yes ' had originally meant ' he ' and ' this.' We can, from the instances above given, form a pretty good guess at the way in which the auxiliary or meaningless class of sounds came into use in any language. Each of these must once have had a distinct significance by itself, then (getting meanwhile a little changed in form probably) it gradually lost the separate meaning and became only a particle of speech, only an adjunct to other words. In another way, we may say that before man spoke of ' on the rock' or 'under the rock' he must have used some ex- pression like ' head of rock,' or more literally ' head rock ' and 'foot rock;' and that as time went on, new words coming into use for head and foot, these earlier ones dropped down to be mere adjuncts, and men forgot that they had ever been anything else. Just so no ordinary Frenchman knows that his out and il are both sprung from the same Latin tile; nor does the ordinary Englishman recognize that ago is a past participle of ' go ; ' nor again, to take a new instance, does, perhaps, the ordinary German recognize that his gewzss, ' certainly,' is merely an abbreviation of the past participle gewi'ssen, ' known.' We have now followed the growth of language through ROOT-SOUNDS. 67 two of its stages, first, the coining of the principal or essen- tial parts of speech, the nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and secondly, the coining at a later date of the aux- iliary parts of speech, the prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, and (where they exist) the enclitics the and a; these last, however, (as separate words, 1 ) are wanting from a large number of languages. A third stage is the variation of certain words to form out of them other words which are nearly related in character to the first. We may speak of this process as a process of ringing the changes upon certain root-sounds to form a series of words allied in sound and allied in sense also. We have several instances of such groups of allied words in our own language. Fly, flee, flew, fled, are words allied in sound and in sense. In these cases the sound of the letters f-1 constitutes what we may call the root-sound. And it may be said at once that those languages are said to be related in each of which a certain number of words can be traced back to root-sounds which are common to the two or more tongues. In the case of the vast majority of words, before we can begin by comparing one word with another, or trying to discover the root-words of several different languages, we have first to trace the history of these words backwards, each in its own language, and find their most primitive forms. But in tongues which are pretty nearly related we have often no difficulty in seeing the similarity of corre- sponding words just as they stand to-day. We have no difficulty, for instance, in seeing the connection of the German Knecht and our knight? the German Nacht and 1 See below, pp. 70-80. 2 These two words have, it is true, quite changed their meanings ; but our knight rose to its honourable sense from having come to be used only for the servants or attendants of the king (in battle), while the German word retained its older sense of servant, groom, only. 68 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. our night, the German Raum and our room ; or, again, the connection between the Italian padre and the French pere, the Italian tavola and the French (and English) table, etc. But where the connection between languages is more distant, we have more and more to go back to much simpler roots, in order to show the relationship between them ; and by a vast majority the primitive root-sounds in any large family of languages are single syllables, whereof the most constant parts are (as a rule) the consonants. So far as our knowledge goes, we might think of man as beginning human speech with a certain number of these simple root- sounds, and then proceeding to ring the changes upon these root-sounds to express varieties in the root-idea. Sometimes it is easy enough to trace the connection of ideas between different words which have been formed out of the same root-word. But sometimes this is not at all easy. Nor can we say why this special sound has been adopted for any one notion more than for a number of others to which it would have applied equally well. From a root, which in Sanskrit appears in its most ancient form, as md, 'to measure,' we get words in Greek and Latin which mean ' to think ; ' and from the same root comes our 'man,' the person who measures, who compares, i.e., who thinks, also our moon, which means ' the measurer,' because the moon helps to measure out the time, the months. But how arbitrary seems this connection between man and moon ! So, too, our crab is from the word creep, and means the animal that creeps. But why this name should have been given to crab rather than to ant and beetle it is impossible to say. So that there appears as little trace of a reason governing the formation of words out of root- sounds as there appeared in the adoption of root-sounds to express certain fundamental ideas. ROOT-SOUNDS. 69 Thus equipped with his fixed root and the various words formed out of it, man had the rough material out of which to build up all the elaborate languages which the world has known. And he continued his work something in this fashion. As generation followed generation the pronunci- ation of words was changed, as is constantly being done at the present day. Our grandmothers pronounced 'Rome,' 1 Room,' and ' brooch/ as it was spelt, and not as we pro- nounce it — 'broach.' And let it be remembered, before writing was invented, there was nothing but the pronuncia- tion to fix the word, and a new pronunciation was really a new word. When there was no written form to petrify a word, these changes of pronunciation were very rapid and frequent, so that not only would each generation have a different set of words from their fathers, but probably each tribe would be partly unintelligible to its neighbouring tribes, just as a Somersetshire man is to a great extent unintelligible to a man from Yorkshire. The first result of these changes would be the springing up of that class of ' meaningless ' words of which we spoke above. Out of some significant words, such as 'head' and 'foot,' would arise insignificant words similar to 'over' and 'under.' Such a change could only begin when of two names each for ' head ' and ' foot ' one became obsolete as a noun, and was only used adverbially. Then what had originally meant, metaphorically, 'head of rock' and 'foot of rock' 1 might come to be used for ' over ' and ' under the rock,' in exactly the same way that the word ago, having changed its form from agone, has become a ' meaningless ' word to the Englishman of to-day. And with the acquisition of the insignificant words a new and very important process began. To understand 1 See above, p. 66. 70 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. what it was we will, as we did before, begin by examining the formation of some of the languages with which we are, probably, more or less familiar. Let us . T a w . ° note how very many more variations on the inflexions. J J same root are to be found in some lan- guages than in others. On the root die, which in Latin expresses the notion of speaking, we have the variations dico, dixi, dicere, dictum, dictio, dicto, dicor, dictor, dictator, dictatrix, etc. ; and yet this does not nearly exhaust the list, for we have all the changes in the different tenses of dico, dicto, dicor, etc., in the different cases of dictio, dictator, dictatrix, etc. The languages which contain these numerous variations upon one root are what are called the inflected languages, and the greater number of the changes which they make come under the head of what grammarians call inflexions. These inflexions are of no meaning in them selves, they have no existence even in themselves as words. And yet what is curious is that they are the same for a great number of different words ; and they express the same rela- tive meaning in the places where they stand whatever the word may be. If the -nis of dictionis expresses a certain idea relative to dictio, so does the -nis of lectionis express the same idea relative to lectio, the -nis of actionis the same idea relative to actio, and so forth. Or, to take an example from a modern inflected language, if the -es of Mannes, expresses a certain idea relative to Mann, so does the same inflexion (-es or -s) in Hauses, Baums, etc., relative to Haus and Banm. Now, how are we to explain this fact ? Our grammars, it is true, take it for granted, and give it us as a thing which requires no explanation — the genitive inflexion is -nis or -es, or whatever it may be. That is all they tell us. But we cannot be content to take anything of course. An GROWTH OF INFLEXIONS. 71 explanation, however, is not difficult, and follows, almost of course, on the exercise of a little common sense. If the -es of Mannes, Hauses, Baumes (Baums) expresses the idea 'of,' then, at one time or another, es, or some root from which it is derived, must have meant 'of.' This explains easily and naturally enough the inflexions in any inflected language. They have no meaning now, but at one time they (or their original forms — their ancestors, so to speak) had no doubt just as much meaning by themselves as our 'of.' And therefore the only difference between our use in England to-day, and the ancestral use in a primitive lan- guage, was that we say 'of [the] man,' and the ancestral language would have said 'man-of,' 'house-of,' etc. This accounts for the same genitive forms being used for so many different words. And that the same genitive forms are not used throughout any language is no real objection to this theory. If we say dictionis, lectionis, but musce, roses; if we say Mannes, Hauses, but Blume, Rose, the only reason of these varieties is that the languages from which these inflexions are derived pos- sessed more than one word meaning ' of,' and that one of these words was attached to a certain series of nouns, another word to another series. This is the explanation which mere common sense would give of the origin of inflexions in language, and further research, had we time to examine the history of language more elaborately, would show that it was fundamentally the right explanation. The only correction which we should have to make on this first arid crude theory is explained a little further on. Thus we see in this third stage of language a process very closely analogous to the second. The second stage gave us the auxiliary words, which have decayed so to say, out of the class of significant words. 72 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. The third stage gives us the auxiliary words joined on to the significant ones, and in their turn decaying to become mere inflexions. I have called this growth of inflexions the third stage. It is the third great stage in the formation of language, and is the only other stage distinguishable when we are examining what is called an inflected language. And all the languages the general reader is likely to know belong to this class. But when we turn to a wider study of the various tongues in use among mankind we find that this process of forming inflexions is a very slow one, that it, in its turn, has gone through many stages. And it is, in fact, the different stages through which a language has passed on its road to the formation of inflexions which settles the class in which it is to be placed among the various tongues spoken by mankind. We shall soon understand what are these further stages in language-formation. As far as we have been able to see at present, the inflexion presents itself as something added on to the significant word to give it a varied mean- ing. It is evidently therefore part of a new process through which language has to go after it has completed its original stock of sounds, namely, the formation of fresh words by joining together two others which already exist. This is a process which, no doubt, in some shape or other, began in the very earliest ages, and which is to this day going on continually. The simpler form of it is the joining together two words which are significant when they stand alone to form a third word expressing a new idea ; just as we have joined 'ant' to 'hill' and formed ant-hill, which is a different idea than either ant or hill taken alone. In the words playful, joyful, again, we have the same process carried rather further. The words mean simply play-full, ' full of GROWTH OF INFLEXIONS. 73 play,' joy-full, 'full of joy.' But we do not in reality quite think of this meaning when we use them. The termination ful has become half-meaningless by itself, and in doing so we observe it has slightly changed its original form. But far more important in the history of language is the joining of the meaningless or auxiliary words on to other words of the first, the significant class, whereby in the course of time the inflexions of language have been formed. Although we always put the meaningless quali- fying word before the chief word, and say ' on the rock,' or ' under the rock,' it is more natural to man, as is shown by all languages, to put the principal idea first, and say 'rock on,' 'rock under,' the idea rock being of course the chief idea, the part of the rock, or position in relation to the rock, coming after. So the first step towards forming grammar was the getting a number of meaning- less words, and joining them on to the substantive, 'rock,' ' rock-by,' ' rock-in,' ' rock-to,' etc. So with the verb. The essential idea in the verb is the action itself, the next idea is the time or person* in which the action takes place ; and the natural thing for man to do is to make the words follow that order. The joining process would give us from love, the idea of loving, 'love-I,' 'love-thou,' 'love-he,' etc.; and for the imperfect ' love-was-I,' ' love-was-thou,' 'love- was-he,' ' love-was-we,' ' love-was-ye,' ' love-was-they ; ' for perfect ' love-have-I,' ' love-have-thou,' 'love-have-he,' etc. Of course, these are merely illustrations, but they make the mode of this early joining process clearer than if we had chosen a language where that process is actually found in its purity, and then translated the forms into their English equivalents. We have now arrived at a stage in the formation of lan- guage where both meaning and meaningless words have been 74 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. introduced, and where words have been made up out of combinations of the two. We see at once that with regard to meaningless words the use of them would naturally be fixed very much by tradition and custom; and whereas there might be a great many words standing for ant and hill, and therefore a great many ways of saying ant-hill, for the meaningless words, such as under and on, there would probably be only a few words. The reason of this is very plain. While all the separate synonyms for hill expressed different ways in which it struck the mind, either as being high, or large, or steep, or what not, for under and on, being meaningless words not producing any picture in the mind, only one word apiece or one or two words could very well be in use. So long as under and on were significant words, meaning, perhaps, as we imagined, head of, ox foot of, there would be plenty of synonyms for them ; but only one or two out of all these would be handed down in their mean- ingless forms. And it is this very fact which, as we have seen, accounts for all the grammars of ail languages, every one of those grammatical terminations which we know so well in Latin and Greek, and German, having been originally nothing else than meaningless words added on to modify the words which still retained their meaning. We saw before that it was much more natural for people to say 'rock-on' or « hand-in ' than ' on the rock ' or ' in the hand ' — because rock and hand were the most important ideas and came first into the mind, while on, in, etc., were only subsidiary ideas depending upon the important ones. If we stop at rock or hand without adding on and in, we have still got something definite upon which our thoughts can rest, but we could not possibly stop at on and in alone, and have any idea in our minds at all. It is plain enough therefore that, though we say ' on the rock,' we must have the idea GROWTH OF INFLEXIONS. 75 of all the three words in our mind before we begin the phrase, and therefore that our words do not follow the natural order of our ideas ; whereas rock-on, hand-in, show the ideas just in the way they come into the mind. It is a fact, then, that all case-endings arose from adding on meaningless words to the end of the word, the noun or pronoun — Mann, des mann-es, dem Mann-e ; kom-o, hom-inis, hom-ini: the addition to the root in every case was once a distinct word of the auxiliary kind, or derived from such a word. The meanings of case-endings such as these cannot, it is true, be discovered now, for they came into existence long before such languages as German or Latin were spoken, and their meanings were lost sight of in ages which passed before history. But that time when the terminations which are meaningless now had a meaning, and the period of transition between this state and the state of a language which is full of grammatical changes inexplicable to those who use them, form distinct epochs in the history of every language. And it is just the same with verb-endings as with the case endings — ich bin, du bist, really express the ' I ' and ' thou ' twice over, as the pronouns exist though hidden and lost sight of in the -n and -st of the verb. In the case of verbs, indeed, we may without going far give some idea of how these endings can be detected. We may say at once that Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Norse, Gaelic, Welsh, Lithuanian, Russian, and other Slavonic languages are all connected together in various degrees of relationship, all descended from one common ancestor, some being close cousins, and some very distant. Now in Sanskrit ' I am ' is thus declined : — as -mi I am. '-smas we are. a-si thou art. , s-tha ye are. as-ti he is. 's-anti they are. 76 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. By separating the root from the ending in this way we may the more easily detect the additions to the root, and their meanings. As is the root expressing the idea of being, existing ; mi is from a root meaning I (preserved in me, Greek and Lat. me, moi, m\ich\ etc.) ; so we get as-mi, am-I, or I am. Then we may trace this form of word through a number of languages connected with the Sanskrit. The most important part of as-mi, the consonants, are preserved in the Latin sum, I am, from which, by some further changes come the French suis, the Italian sono : the same word appears in our a-m, and in the Greek eimi (Doric esmi), I am. Next, coming to the second word, we see one of the s's cut out, and we get a-si, in which the a is the root, and the si the addition signifying thou. To this addition correspond the final s's in the Latin es, French es — tu es, and the Greek eis (Doric essi). So, again, in as-ti, the ti expresses he, and this corresponds to the Latin est, French est, the Greek esti, the German ist ; in the English the expressive / has been lost. We will not continue the comparison of each word ; it will be sufficient if we place side by side the same tense in Sanskrit and in Latin, 1 and give those who do not know Latin an opportunity of recognizing for themselves the tense in its changed form in French or Italian : — English. Sanskrit. Latin. I am as-mi sum. thou art a-si es. he is as-ti est. we are 's-mas sumus. ye are 's-tha estis. they are 's-anti sunt. The plural of the added portion we see contains the letters m-s, and if we split these up again we get the separate roots 1 The reader who does not know Latin may easily recognize the kindred forms in French, Italian, Spanish, etc. GROWTH OF INFLEXIONS. 77 mi and si, so that mas means most literally ' I,' and ' thou,' and hence ' we.' In the second person the Latin has pre- served an older form than the Sanskrit, s-t the proper root- consonants for the addition part of the second person plural, combining the ideas thou and he, from which, ye. The third person plural cannot be so easily explained. It will be seen that in the English almost all likeness to the Sanskrit terminations has been lost. Our verb 'to be ' is very irregular, being, in fact, a mixture of several distinct verbs. The Anglo-Saxon had the verb bed contracted from beom (here we have at least the m- ending for I), I am, byst, thou art, bydh, he is, and the same appear in the German bin, bist It is, of course, very difficult to trace the remains of the meaningless additions in such advanced languages as ours, or even in such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. Never- theless, the reader may find it not uninteresting to trace in the Latin through most of the tenses of verbs these endings — m, for I, the first person \ s, for thou, the second person ; t, for he, the third person ; m-s f for I and thou, we ; st, for ye, thou and he, ye ; nt, for they. And the same reader must be content to take on trust the fact that other additions corresponding to different tenses can also be shown or reasonably guessed to have been words expressive by them- selves of the idea which belongs to the particular tense ; so that where we have such a tense as — amabam I was loving, amabas thou wast loving, amabat, etc. he was loving, we may recognize the meaning of the component parts thus : — ama-ba-m love-was-I. ama-ba-s love-was-thou ama-ba-t love-was-he. 7% THE DAWN OF HISTORY. Of course, really to show the way in which these mean- ingless additions have been made and come to be amalga- mated with the root, we should have to take examples from a great number of languages in different stages of develop- ment. But we have thought it easier, for mere explanation, to take only such languages as were likely to be familiar to the reader, and even to supplement these examples with imaginary ones — like ' rock-on,' ' love-was-I,' etc. — in Eng- lish. For our object has been at first merely to give an intelligible account of how language has been formed, of the different stages it has passed through, and to leave to a future time the question as to which languages of the globe have passed through all these stages, and which have gone part of their way in the formation of a perfect language. Between the state of a language in which the meaning of all the separate parts of a word are recognized and that state where they are entirely lost, there is an immense gap, that indeed which separates the most from the least advanced languages of the world. Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone through the stage of forming meaningless words, and is therefore possessed of words of both classes. Monosyllabic Th nQ 1q t head . f_ rock i or instance, through ages of change the 'was I' in our imaginary example got corrupted into ' wasi,' where wasi had no meaning by itself, but was used to express the first person of the past tense. The first person past of love would be 'love-wasi,' of move 'move-wasi,' and so on, 1 wasi ' no longer having a meaning by itself, but ' love ' and 1 move ' by themselves being perfectly understandable. Or, to take an actual declension from a Turanian language, — hakar-im I regard, bakar-iz we regard, bakar-sin thou regardest, bakar-siniz you regard, bakar he regards,* bakar-lar they regard, where, as we see, the root remains entirely unaffected by the addition of the personal pronoun. A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative stage, 1 because certain grammatical endings (like 'wasi') are merely as it were glued on to a root to change its mean- ing, while the root itself remains quite unaffected, and means neither less nor more than it did before. But, as ages pass on, the root and the addition get so closely combined that neither of them alone has, ,'•,.. . , , , Inflected as a rule, a distinct meaning, and the language i angua g e . arrives at its third stage of grammar-formation. It is not difficult to find examples of a language in this con- 1 Mr. Max Midler calls it the terminational stage. 80 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. dition, for such is the case with all the languages by which we are surrounded. All the tongues which the majority of us are likely to study, almost all those which have any literature at all, have arrived at this last stage, which is called the in- flexional. For instance, though we might divide actionis into two parts actio and nis, and say that the former contains the essential idea, and the addition the idea implied by the genitive case, there are only a few Latin words with which such a process is possible, and even in the case of actio the separation is somewhat misleading. In homo the real root is horn, and the genitive is not homo-nis but hominis. So, again, though we were able to separate ' asmi ' into two parts — ' as ' and ' mi ' — one expressing the idea of being, the other the person ' I,' this distinction is the refinement of the grammarian, and would never have been recognized by an ordinary speaker of Sanskrit, for whom ' asmi ' simply meant ' I am,' without distinction of parts. In our ' am ' the grammarian recognizes that the ' a ' expresses existence, and the ' m ' expresses I ; but so completely have we lost sight of this, that we repeat the ' I ' before the verb. Just the same in Latin. No Roman could have recognized in the * s ' of sum ' am ' and in the ' m ' ' I ; ' for him sum meant simply and purely ' I am.' It was no more separ- able in his eyes than the French ites (Latin estis) in vous etes is separable into a root ' es,' contracted in the French into ' e,' meaning are, and an addition ' tes ' signifying you. This, then, is the last stage upon which language enters. It is called the inflexional or inflected stage, because the different grammatical changes are not now denoted by a mere addition to an intelligible word, but by a change in the word itself. The root may in many cases remain and be recog- nizable in its purity, but very frequently it is unrecognizable, so that the different case- or tense-endings can no longer be FIVE STAGES IN FORMATION OF LANGUAGE. 81 looked upon as additions, but as changes. Take almost any Latin substantive, and we see this : homo, a man, the genitive is formed by changing homo into hominis, or, if we please, adding something to the root ho?n — which has in itself no meaning ; musa changes into musce ; and so forth. And now to recapitulate. We have in tracing the growth of language discovered first of all two stages whereby the material of the language was formed : the class The fiv of what we have called the meaning or signi- stages in the ficant words came into being, and out of this formation of was formed the second class of so-called mean- lan § ua S e - ingless or auxiliary words. These two stages were in the main passed through before any known language came into existence ; for there is no known language which does not contain words of both these classes ; albeit the second stage is likewise a process which is still going on, as in the examples chosen, where even and just pass from being adjec- tives into even and just the adverbs, and the French sub- stantives/^ and point take a like change of meaning. These first two stages passed, there follow three other stages which go to the formation of the grammar of a language : first the stage of merely coupling words together, so as to form fresh words — the monosyllabic state ; then the stage in which one part of the additional word has lost its meaning while the root-word remains unchanged — the stage called the agglutinative condition of language ; and, finally the stage in which the added portion has become to some extent absorbed into the root-word — which last stage is the inflected condition of a language. When we have come to this inflexional state, the history of the growth of language comes to an end. It happens indeed, sometimes, that a language which has arrived at G 82 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. the inflected stage may in time come to drop nearly all its inflexions. This has been the case with English and French. Both are descended from languages which had elaborate grammars — the Saxon and the Latin ; but both, through an admixture with foreign tongues and from other causes, have come to drop almost all their grammatical forms. We show our grammar only in a few changes in our ordinary verbs — the second and third persons singular, thou goest, he goes ; the past tense and the past participle, use } used; buy, bought, etc. ; in further variations in our auxiliary verb 'to be ; ' by changes in our pronouns, /, me, ye, you, who, whom, etc. ; and by the ' 's ' and ' s ' of the possessive case and of the plural, and the comparison of adjectives. The French preserve their grammar to some extent in their pronouns, their adjectives, the plurals of their nouns, and in their verbs. Instances such as these are cases of decay, and do not find any place in the history of the growth of language. We now pass on to examine where the growth of language has been fully achieved, where it has remained only stunted and imperfect. CHAPTER IV. FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE. We have now traced the different stages through which language may pass in attaining to its most perfect form, the inflected stage. There were the two stages in which what we may call the bones of the language were formed, the acquisition of those words which, like pen, ink and paper, when standing alone bring a definite idea into the mind, and, next, the acquisition of those other words which, like to, for, and, produce no idea in the mind when taken alone. We saw that while the first class of words may have been acquired with any imaginable rapidity, the second class could only have gradually come into use as one by one they fell out of the rank of the ' significant ' class. Again, after this skeleton of language has been got together, there were, we saw, three other stages which went to make up the grammar of a language : the radical stage, in which all the words of the language can be cut up into roots which are generally monosyllables, each of which has a meaning as a separate word ; the agglutinative stage, when the root, i.e. the part of the word which expresses the essen- tial idea, remains always distinct from any added portion; and, thirdly, the inflected stage, when in many cases the 84 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. root and the addition to the root have become so interwoven as to be no longer distinguishable. Of course, really to understand what these three condi- tions are like, the reader would have to be acquainted with some language in each of the three ; but it is sufficient if we get clearly into our heads that there are these stages of language-growth, and that, further, each one of all the languages of the world may be said to be in one of the three. Our opportunities of tracing the history of languages being so limited, we have no recorded instance of a lan- guage passing out of one stage into another ; but when we examine into these states they so clearly wear the appear- ance of stages that there seems every reason to believe that a monosyllabic language might in time develop into an agglutinative, and again from that stage into an inflexional, language, if nothing stopped its growth. But what, we may ask, are the causes which put a stop to the free growth and development of language ? One of Arrest in the these causes is the invention of writing. Lan- growth of guage itself is of course spoken language, language, gp^d^ an( j as suc h is subject to no laws save those which belong to our organs of speaking and hearing. No sooner is the word spoken than it is gone, and lives only in the memory ; and thus speech, though it may last for centuries, dies, as it were, and comes to life again every hour. It is with language as it is with those national songs and ballads which, among nations that have no writing, take the place of books and histories. The same poem or the same tale passes from mouth to mouth almost unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet at no moment is it visible and tangible, nor for the most part of the time audible even, but for these centuries lives on in men's memories only. So Homer's ballads must have passed for several ARREST IN THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. 85 hundred years from mouth to mouth; and, stranger still, stories which were first told somewhere by the banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes by distant ancestors of ours, are told to this very day, little altered, by peasants in remote districts of England and Scotland. But to return to language. It is very clear that so long as language remains speech and speech only, it is subject to just so many variations as, in the course of a generation or two, men may have introduced into their habits of speaking. Why these variations arise it is perhaps not quite easy to understand; but every one knows that they do arise, that from age to age, from generation to generation, not only are new words being continually introduced, and others which once served well enough dropped out of use, but constant changes are going on in the pronunciation of words. As we have already said, if left to itself a language would not remain quite the same in two different districts. We know, for instance, that the language of common people does differ very much in different counties, so that what with varieties of pronuncia- tion, and what with the 'use of really peculiar words, the inhabitants of one county are scarcely intelligible to the inhabitants of another. This constant change in language can be resolved, so to say, into two forces — one of decay, the other of renewal. The change which each word undergoes is of the nature of decay. It loses something from its original form. But then, out of this change, it passes into new forms ; and very often out of one word, by this mere process of change in sound, two words spring. We have already seen instances of how this may come about. The Anglo-Saxon agan be- comes in process of time agone, as we have seen. That word again, by a further process of decay, changes into ago. So far we have nothing but loss. But then the Old English 86 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. agdn had only the same meaning as our past participle gone. 1 So now we have two words really in the place of one, and where formerly men would have said, ' It is a long time agone,' or ' That man has lately agone,' we now can say, ' It is a long time ago,' 'The man has lately gone. 7 And we may in any language watch this process of decay {phonetic decay, as it is called) and regeneration {dialectic regeneration, the philologists call it) ever going forward. We see, as it were, — ' The hungry ocean gain Advantage o'er the kingdom of the shore ; And the firm soil win of the watery main Increasing store with loss, and loss with store.' The influence which keeps a language together, and tends to make changes such as these as few as possible, is that of writing. When once writing has been invented it is clear that language no longer depends upon the memory only, no longer has such a seemingly precarious tenure of life as it had when it was no more than speech. The writing remains a strong bulwark against the changes of time. Although our written words are but the symbols of sound, they are symbols so clear that the recollection of the sound springs up in our minds the moment the written word comes before our eyes. So it is that there are hundreds of words in the English language which we should many of us not use once in a lifetime, which are yet perfectly familiar to us. All old-fashioned words which belong to the literary language, and are never used now in common life, would have been forgotten long ago except for writing. The fact, again, that those provincialisms which make the peasants of different counties almost mutually unintelligible do not affect the intercourse of educated people, is owing to the existence of a written language. 1 Agone is possibly from a stronger form dqan, 'to pass away.' CHINESE. 87 It was at one time thought by philologists that in Chinese we had a genuine specimen of a language in the radical stage of formation. As such it is cited, for instance, in Professor Max Miiller's Lec- tures on the Science of Language. But the most trustworthy Chinese scholars are, I believe, now of opinion that the earliest Chinese of which we can find any trace had already passed through this stage and become an agglutinative language, and that it has since decayed somewhat from that condition to become once more almost a monosyllabic language. However that may be, it is acknowledged that Chinese has never passed beyond a very primitive condition, and that its having rested so long in this state is due more than anything else to the early invention of writing in that country. We know how strange has been the whole history of civilization in China. How the Chinese, after they had made long ago an advance far beyond all their contempo- raries at that date of the world's history, seem to have suddenly stopped short tfrere, and have remained ever since a stunted incomplete race, devoid of greatness in any form. Their character is reflected very accurately in their lan- guage. While it was still in a very primitive condition writing was introduced into the country, and from that time forward the tongue remained almost unchanged. Other languages which are closely allied to Chinese — Burmese, Siamese, and Thibetan — are so nearly monosyllabic that they can scarcely be considered to have yet got fairly into the agglutinative stage. It is, then, writing which has preserved for us Chinese in the very primitive condition in which we find it. For people in a lower order of civilization there may be many other causes at work to prevent an agglutinative language 88 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. becoming inflexional. It is not always easy to say what the hindering causes have been in any individual case ; but per- haps, if we look at the difference between the last , two classes of language, we can get some idea of what they might be for the class of agglutinative languages as a whole. An inflexional language has quite lost the memory of the real meaning of its inflexions — or at least the real reason of them. We could give no reason why we should not use bought in the place of buy, art in the place of am, ivhom in the place of who — no other reason save that we have always been taught to use the words in the position they take in our speech. But there was once a time when the changes only existed in the form of addi- tions having a distinct meaning. Even in agglutinative languages these additions have a distinct meaning as ad- ditions, or, in other words, if we were using an agglutina- tive language we should be always able to distinguish the addition from the root, and so should understand the pre- cise effect of the former in modifying the latter. To understand the use of words in an agglutinative language, therefore, a great deal less of tradition and memory would be required than are wanted to preserve an inflected language. This really is the same as saying that for the inflected language we must have a much more constant use ; and this again implies a greater intellectual life, a closer bond of union among the people who speak it, than exists among those who speak agglutinative languages. Or if we look at the change from another point of view, we can say that the cause of the mixing up of the root, and its addition came at first from a desire to shorten the word and to save time — a desire which was natural to people who spoke much and had much intercourse. We may then, from these various considerations, conclude TURANIAN LANGUAGES. 89 that the people who use the agglutinative languages are people who have not what is called a close and active national life. This is exactly what we find to be the case. If a primitive language, such as the Chinese, belongs to a people who have, as it were, developed too quickly, the agglutinative languages, as a class, distinguish a vast section of the human race whose natural condition is a very un- formed one, who are for the most part nomadic races without fixed homes, or laws, or states. They live a tribal existence, each man having little intercourse save with those of his immediate neighbourhood. They are unused to public assemblies. Such assemblies take among early peoples almost the place of literature, in obliging men to have a common language and a united national life. Being without these controlling influences, it results that the different dialects and tongues belonging to the aggluti- native class are almost endless. It is not our intention to weary the reader by even a bare list of them. But we may glance at the chief heads into which these multifarious languages may be grouped, and the geographical position of those who speak them. The agglutinative tongues include the speech of all those peoples of Central Asia whom in common language we are wont to speak of as Tartars, but whom it would be more correct to describe as belonging to the Turkic or Mongol class, and of whom several different branches — the Huns, who emigrated from the borders of China to Europe ; the Mongols or Moghuls, who conquered Persia and Hindustan ; and lastly, the Osmanlis, or Ottomans, who invaded Europe and founded the Turkish Empire — are the most famous, and most infamous, in history. Another large class of agglutinative languages belongs to the natives of the vast region of Siberia, from the Ural 9 o THE DAWN OF HISTORY. mountains to the far east. x\nother great class, closely allied to these last, the Finnish tongues namely, once spread across all the northern half of what is now European Russia, and across North Scandinavia ; but the people who spoke them have been gradually driven to the extreme north by the Russians and Scandinavians. Lastly, a third division is formed by those languages which belonged to the original inhabitants of Hindustan before the greater part of the country was occupied by the Hindus. These languages are spoken of as the Dravidian class. The natural condition of these various nations or peoples is, as we have said, a nomadic state, a state in which agriculture is scarcely known, though individual nations out of them have risen to considerable civilization. And as in very early times ancestors of ours who belonged to a race speaking an inflexional language bestowed upon some part of these nomadic people the appellation Tura, which means ' the swiftness of a horse,' from their constantly moving from place to place, the word Turanian has been applied to all these various peoples, and the agglutinative languages are spoken of generally as Turanian tongues. And now we come to the last — the most important body of languages — the inflected; and we see that for it have Aryan and ^ een ^ a ^ tne more important nations and Semitic languages of the world. Almost all the 'his- languages. toric ' people, living or dead, almost all the more civilized among nations, come under this our last division : the ancient Egyptians, Chaldaeans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as the modern Hindus and the native Persians, and almost all the inhabi- tants of Europe, with the countless colonies which these last have spread over the surface of the globe. The class of inflected languages is separated into two main divisions or KINSHIP IN LANGUAGES. 91 families, within each of which the languages are held by a tie of relationship. Just as people are of the same family when they recognize their descent from a common ances- tor, so languages belong to one family when they can show clear signs that they have grown out of one parent tongue. We may be sure that we are all the children of the first pair, and we may know in the same way that all languages must have grown and changed out of the first speech. But the traces of parentage and relationship are in both cases buried in oblivion ; it is only when we come much farther down in the history of the world that we can really see the marks of distinct kinship in the tongues of nations separated by thousands of miles, different in colour, in habits, in civili- zation, and quite unconscious of any common fatherhood. Now as to the way in which this kinship among languages may be detected. Among some languages there is such a close relationship that even an unskilled eye can discover it When we see, for instance, \™^^ such likenesses as exist in English and Ger- man between the very , commonest words of life — kann and can, soil and shall, muss and mush ist and is, gut and good, hart and hard, mann and man, fur and for, together with an innumerable number of verbs, adjectives, substantives, prepositions, etc., which differ but slightly one from another — we may feel sure either that the English once spoke German, that the Germans once spoke English, or that English and German have both become a little altered from a lost language which was spoken by the ancestors of the present inhabitants of England and Deutsch-land. As a matter of fact the last is the case. English and German are brother languages, neither is the parent of the other. Now having our attention once called to this relationship, we might, any of us who know English and German, at 92 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. once set about making a long list of words which are com- mon to the two languages ; and it would not be a bad amusement for any reader just to turn over the leaves of a dictionary and note how many German words (especially of the common sort) they find that have a corresponding word in English. The first thing we begin to see is the fact that the consonants form, as it were, the bones of a word, and that changes of a vowel are, as a rule, comparatively unimportant provided these remain unaltered. The next thing we see is that even the consonants do not generally remain the same, but that in place of one such letter in one language, another of a sound very like it appears in the other language. For instance, we soon begin to notice that * t ' in German is often represented by ' d ' in English, as tag becomes day ; tochter, daughter-, breit, broad; traum, dream; reiten, ride; but sometimes by 'th ' in English, as vater becomes father ; ??iutter, mother. Again, ' d ' in German is often equal to 'TH'in English, as dorf thorpe ; feder, feather ; dreschen, thrash (thresh) ; drangen, throng ; der (die), the ; das, that. Now there is a certain likeness common to these three sounds, ' t,' ' d,' and 'th,' as any one's ear will tell him if he say te, de, the. As a matter of fact they are all pronounced with the tongue pressed against the teeth, only in rather different places ; and in the case of the last sound, the, 1 with a breath or aspirate sent between the teeth at the same time. So we see that, these letters being really so much alike in sound, there is nothing at all extraordinary in one sound becoming exchanged for another in the two languages. We learn, therefore, to look beyond the mere appearance of the 1 To get the full sound of the th, this should be said not as we pronounce our article the (which really has the sound dhe), but like the first part of Thebes, theme, etc. KINSHIP IN LANGUAGES. 93 word, to weigh, so to speak, the sounds against each other, and to detect likenesses which might perhaps otherwise have escaped us. For instance, if we see that ch in German is often represented by gh in English — in such words as tochter, daughter ; knecht, knight; mochte, might ; lachen, laugh, — we have no difficulty in now seeing how exactly durch corresponds to our through. For we have at the beginning the d which naturally corresponds to our t, the r remains unchanged, and the ch naturally corresponds to our gh ; only the vowel is different in position, and that is of comparatively small account Nevertheless at first sight we should by no means have been inclined to allow the near relationship of durch and through. Thus our power of comparison continually increases, albeit a knowledge of several languages is necessary before we can establish satis- factory rules or proceed with at all sure steps. When we have acquired this knowledge there are few things more interesting than noting the changes which words undergo in the different tongues, and learning how to detect the same words under .various disguises. And when we have begun to do this, it is by comparing the words of our own language with corresponding words in the allied tongues German, Norse, or Dutch, whatever it may be, that we are most frequently reminded of the meaning of words which have half grown out of use with us. As, for instance, when the German Leiche (corpse) reminds us of the mean- ing of lich-gate (A.S. lica, a corpse) and Lichfield; or the Norse moos, a marshy or heathy region, explains our #ztf.w-troopers. I doubt if most people quite know what sea-mews are, still more if the word mewstone (which, for example, is the name of a rock near Plymouth) would at once call up the right idea into their mind. But the Ger- man Mowe, sea-gull, makes it all plain. How curious is the 94 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. relationship between earth and hearth, which is exactly repro- duced in the German Erde and Herde ! or the obsolete use of the word tide for ' time ' (the original meaning of the tides — the 'times,') in the expression ' Time and tide wait for no man ' ! But in the Norse we have the same expression Tid og Time, which signifies exactly Macbeth's ' time and the hour.' And of course these words, our tide, Norse Tid, are the correspondants of the German zeit. When once we have detected how often the German z corresponds to the English / — as in Zahn, tooth ; Zehe, toe ; Zahlen, to tell (i.e., to count) ; Zinn, tin — we have no difficulty in seeing that our town may correspond to the German Zaun, a hedge : and we guess, what is in fact the case, that the original meaning of town was only an enclosed or empaled place. The relationship of our fee to the German Vieh, cattle, and the proof that the earliest money with us was cattle-money, would, at first sight, be perhaps not so easily surmised by a mere comparison of German and English words. These are only one or two of the ten thousand points of interest which rise up before us almost immediately after we have, so to say, stepped outside the walls of our own language into the domains of its very nearest relations. Nor is the interest of this kind of comparison less great very often in the case of proper names. The smaller family — or, as we have used the word family to express a large class of languages, let us say the branch to which English and German belong — is called the Teutonic branch. To that branch belonged nearly all those barbarian nations who, towards the fall of the Roman empire, began the invasion of her territories, and ended by carving out of them most of the various states and kingdoms of modern Europe. The best test we have of the nationalities of these peoples, the best proof that they were connected by KINSHIP IN LANGUAGES. 95 language with each other and with the modern Teutonic nations, is to be found in their proper names. We have, for instance, among the Vandals such names as Hilderic, Genseric, and the like ; we compare them at once with Theodoric and Alaric, which were names of famous Goths. Then as the Gothic language has been preserved we recog- nize the termination rik or riks in Gothic, meaning a ' king,' and connected with the German retch, and also with the Latin rex — Alaric becomes al-rik, 'all-king,' universal king. In Theodoric we recognize the Gothic thiudarik, 'king of the people.' Again, this Gothic word thiuda is really the same as the German deutsch, or as 'Dutch,' and is the word of which ' Teutonic ' is only a Latinized form. In the same way Hilda-rik in Gothic is ' king of battles ; ' and having got this word from the Vandals we have not much difficulty in recognizing Childeric, the usually written form of the name of a Frankish king, as the same word. This change teaches us to turn ' ch ' of Frankish names in our history-books into ' h,' so that instead of Chlovis (which should be Chlodoveus) 'we first get Hlovis, which is only a softened form of Hlodovig, or Hludwig, the modern Ludwig, our Louis. Hlud is known to have meant ' famous ' * and wig a ' warrior,' so that Ludwig means famous warrior. The same word ' wig ' seems to appear in the word Mero- vingian, a Latinized form of Meer-wig, 2 which would mean sea-warrior. These instances show us the kind of results we obtain by a comparison of languages. In the case of these names, for instance, we have got enough to show a very close relation- ship amongst the Vandals, the Goths, and the Franks ; and had we time many more instances might have been chosen 1 Cf. the Greek klutos. * Stephen, Lectures on the History of France, 96 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. to support this conclusion. Here, of course, we have been confining ourselves to one small branch of a large family. The road, the farther we go, is beset with greater difficulties and dangers of mistake, and the student can do little unless he is guided by fixed rules, which we should have to follow, supposing we were able to carry on our inquiries into many and distant languages. We may, to some extent, judge for ourselves what some of these guiding rules must be. Those words which we have instanced as being common to English and German, both we and the Germans have got by inheritance from an earlier language. Yet there are in English hundreds of words which are not acquired by inheritance from other languages, but merely by adoption ; hundreds of words have been taken directly from the Latin, or from the Latin through the French, or from the Greek, and not derived from any early language which was the parent of the Latin, Greek, and English. How shall we distinguish between these classes of words ? We answer, in the first place, that the simpler words are almost sure to be inherited, because people, in however rude a state they were, could never have done without words to express such everyday ideas as to have, to be, to laugh, to make, to kill — 7, thou, to, for, and ; whereas they might have done well enough without words such as government, literature, sensation, expression, words which express either things which were quite out of the way of these primitive people, or commonish ideas in a somewhat grand and abstract form. One of our rules, therefore, must be to begin by choosing the commoner class of words, or, generally speaking, those words which are pretty sure never to have fallen out of use, and which therefore must have been handed down from father to son. THE SEMITIC RACES. 97 There is another rule — that those languages must be classed together which have like grammatical forms, This is the rule of especial importance in distinguishing a complete family of languages. For when once a language has got into the inflected stage, though it may hereafter lose or greatly modify nearly all its inflexions, it never either sinks back into the agglutinative stage, or adopts the grammatical forms of another language which is also in the inflected condition. These are the general rules, therefore, upon which we go. We look first for the grammatical forms and then for the simple roots, and according to the resemblance or want of resemblance between them we decide whether two tongues have any relationship, and whether that relationship is near or distant. Now it has in this way been found out that all inflected languages belong to one of two families, called the Semitic and the Aryan. Let us begin with the Semitic. This word, which is only a Latinized way of The Semitlc _,.... , . . races, saying Shemite, is given to the nations who are supposed to be descended from Shem, the second son 01 Noah. The nations who have spoken languages belonging to this Semitic family have been those who appear so much in Old Testament history, and who played a mighty part in the world while our own ancestors were still wandering tribes, and at an age when darkness still obscured the doings of the Greeks and Romans. Foremost among all in point of age and fame stand the Egyptians, who are believed to have migrated in far pre-historic ages to the land in which they rose to fame. They found there a people of a lower, a negro or half-negro race, and mingled with them, so that their language ceased to be a pure H 98 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. Semitic tongue. In its foundation, however, it was Semitic. The earliest of the recorded kings of Egypt, Menes, is believed to date back as far as 5000 B.C. Next in antiquity come the Chaldaeans, who have left behind them great monuments in the ancient cities Erech and Ur, and their successors the Assyrians and Babylonians. Abraham, himself, we know, was a Chaldsean, and from him descended the Hebrew nation, who were destined to shed the highest honour on the Semitic race. Yet, so great may be the degeneration of some races and the rise of others, so great may be the divisions which thus spring up between peoples who were once akin, it is also true that all those peoples whom the Children of Israel were specially commanded to fight against and even to exterminate — the Canaanites, the Moabites, and the Edomites — were likewise of Semitic family. The Phoenicians are another race from the same stock who have made their mark in the world. We know how, coming first from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they led the way in the art of navigation, sent colonies to various parts of the world, and foremost among these founded Carthage, the rival and almost the destroyer of Rome. Our list of celebrated Semitic races must close with the Arabs, the founders of Mohammedanism, the conquerors at whose name all Europe used to tremble, whose kingdoms once extended in an unbroken line from Spain to the banks of the Indus. Such a list gives no mean place to the Semitic family of nations; but those of the Aryan stock are perhaps even more conspicuous. This family (which is some- The Aryan ti n d j hetic or descendants of Japhet) races. J r . . . includes the Hindus and Persians among Asiatic nations, and almost all the peoples of Europe. It may seem strange that we English should be related not only THE ARYAN RACES. 99 to the Germans and Dutch and Scandinavians, but to the Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, French, Spanish, Italians, Romans, and Greeks as well; stranger still that we can claim kinship with such distant peoples as the Armenians, Persians, and Hindus. Yet such is the case, and the way in which all these different nations once formed a single people, speaking one language, and their subsequent dis- persion over the different parts of the world in which we now find them, affords one of the most interesting inquiries within the range of pre-historic study. What seems actually to have been the case is this : In distant ages, somewhere about the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, and on the north of that mountainous range called the Hindoo-Koosh, dwelt the ancestors of all the nations we have enumerated, forming at this time a single and united people, simple and primitive in their way of life, but yet having enough of a common national life to preserve a common language. They called themselves Aryas or Aryans, a word which, in its very earliest sense, seems to have meant those who move up- wards, or straight; and* hence, probably, came to stand for the noble race as compared with other races on whom, of course, they would look down. 1 How long these Aryans had lived united in this their early home it is, of course, impossible to say ; but as the tribes and families increased in numbers, a separation would naturally take place. Large associations of clans, would move into more distant districts, the connection between the various bodies which made up the nation would be less close, their dialects would begin to vary, and thus the seeds of new nations and languages would 1 This is the theory of Aryan origins still most generally accepted. It has, however, been maintained by several philologists that there is no evidence of an Asiatic origin of the European nations. LofC. too THE DAWN OF HISTORY. be sown. The beginning of such a separation was a dis- tinction which arose between a part of the Aryan nation, who stayed at the foot of the Hindoo-Koosh Mountains, and in all the fertile valleys which lie there, and another part which advanced farther into the plain. This latter received the name Yavanas, which seems to have meant the protectors, and was probably given to them because they stood as a sort of foreguard between the Aryans, who still dwelt under the shadow of the mountains, and the foreign nations of the plains. And now, their area being enlarged, they began to separate more and more from one another; while at the same time, as their numbers increased, the space wherein they dwelt became too small for them who had, out of one, formed many different peoples. Then began a series of migrations, in which the collection of tribes who spoke one language and formed one people started off to seek their fortune in new lands, and thus for ever broke off association with their kindred and their old Aryan home. One by one the different nations among the Yavanas (the protectors) were infected with this new spirit of adventure, and though they took different routes, they all travelled westward, and arrived in Europe at last. A not improbable cause has been suggested of these migrations. It is known that, in spite of the immense volume of water which the Volga is daily pouring into it, the Caspian Sea is gradually drying up, and it has been conjectured as highly probable that hundreds of years ago the Caspian was not only joined to the Sea of Aral, but extended over a large district which is now sandy desert. The slow shrinking in its bed of this sea would, by de- creasing the rainfall, turn what was once a fertile country 1 See Chapter I. THE ARYAN RACES. 101 into a desert ; and if we suppose this result taking place while the Aryan nations were gradually increasing in num- bers, the effect would be to drive them, in despair of finding subsistence in the ever-narrowing fertile tract between the desert and the mountains, to seek for new homes elsewhere. This, at any rate, is what they did. First among them, in all probability, started the Kelts or Celts, who, travelling perhaps to the south of the Caspian and the north of the Black Sea, found their way to Europe, and spread far on to the extreme west. At one time it is most likely that the greater part of Europe was inhabited by Kelts, who party exterminated and partly mingled with the stone-age