PART II.

GEOGRAPHICAL 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 agglutinative to the borders of the civilised world-The monosyllabic group of the extreme East-Chinese and its written characterAnnamite-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-monosyllabism, agglutination, inflexion, analysis. But it is necessary 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

spots 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 tradition, we shall not be surprised that they do not generally 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 expression 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 centuries old; they witness to a long use of language 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 entrance 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. Bénédite, the fortunate interpreter of this text, believes it to be the earliest line of writing which has come down to us. The most ancient cuneiform inscriptions cannot pretend to so great an age;

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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 Accadians or Sumers, the ancient inhabitants and the first civilisers 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 consisting 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 fragments 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 before 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

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 mastered the most delicate shades of inflexion, while their nearest neighbours had stopped short, some at Semitic inflexion, some at agglutination, some at monosyllabism.

The official history of China does not go farther back. The Chouking, 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. AIt 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 language 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 Manchuria, 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

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 Dekkan; once they covered the whole of Asia from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Ormuz; the Semites and the Iranians drove them thence; perhaps they formerly 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 represented 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, Zenghis 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. Two 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 to 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