all the marks of monosyllabism-the use of tones (of which there are four), the absence of grammar, apposition, and order of words determined by a rigid syntax. The language of Burmah offers the same characteristics, 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, Kouïs, Giraïs, Kharaïs, which Mouhot, De Lagrée, 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 civilisation 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.

Its

Thibetan, of which we have little to say, owes to India its rich and precious literature, consisting entirely of translations of Buddhist books (of which the original is sometimes lost) as well as its alphabet. 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 inflections 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

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 agglutinative to the advantage of the inflected idioms, and especially 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 successive strata of language; the monosyllabism of Chinese, Annamite, Siamese, Thibetan, emerges from the depths

of the past.

We have pointed out the purely geographical causes of its survival, and displayed the consequences of the isolation of this group-useless effort, complication of the written character, atrophy of the higher functions of the brain, incoherence and pettiness 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, Tchouktches, Youkaghirs-Uralo-Altaic family : 1. Samoyed group; 2. Tongouse-Mandchu group; 3. MongolKalmuck group; 4. Turkish group; 5. Finno-Hungarian group; the characters common to the five groups-Vowel harmony.

IN passing from monosyllabism 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 other ends.

The line of demarcation is so fine that certain eminent philologists, Max Müller 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 which the grammar is yet so undeveloped 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 further, because, though apparently slight, it is yet the point of departure and the common characteristic of all the agglutinative lan

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 significant 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 polysyllabic, 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 respectively 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

L

root syllable.

From one class to another 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 nevertheless that it clearly divides the three stages of language. 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 their 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 civilisation. 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 merchants from the "Land of Flowers."

Corea, a mountainous peninsula which juts out between 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