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; subordination 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, rapprochement, recueillement-Apposition, suffixation, composition-Parallel advance of the intelligence and of language.

HAVING, not solved, but 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 observation. 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

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 lu, 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 synonyms in juxtaposition; the one certifies the other. Tao and lu have each one several significations, but tao followed by lu can only mean "road." The grammatical 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 mean by turns virtue, virtuous, to approve, well.

The subject precedes the verb: ngò tà ni, I beat thee; ni tà ngò, 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-tchang, means" with: with a stick. Li means interior: uo-li, in the house. Tchi (right, possession, the pronoun he): jin-tchi-kiun, 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. Pa tchoung jin teou kan, he looked furtively at the crowd of men; pao hou min, to protect 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

come from heaven; te hou thien, 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 indicate 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 Ito 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. Hovelacque, "have clearly grasped this fact, since they class their roots in two distinct groups-full words and empty words. 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."

By

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

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, and, moreover, of existing in a free state. Case-endings alone often escape analysis; and this is easily understood: in their reciprocal 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 languages; 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 asanti is represented in Latin by sunt; the Latin amaverunt is sometimes altered into amavere or amarunt; the primitive form paters has become the Greek TαTýρ; dominum has gradually contracted into dominu, domino, domno; whence the modern dom, don (Dom Brial, Don Juan); the low Latin word dominiarium (suzerainty), after having dropped the termination um, has gradually become domgier, our word danger, embodying the philosophy of La Fontaine's

proverb, "Notre ennemi c'est notre maître" (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 determine 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 suffixes, 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 Müller. 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 agglomeration round a fixed point, but to a germ developed by its internal force; all the essential parts of language