Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/156

150 LANGUAGE realms of myths the so-called original languages constructed in modern times, such as the Euro- pean, North-European, Slavo-Germanic, South- European, Graeco-Italic or Italo-Celtic, than the mathematical certainty disappears, which was believed to have been already attained for the work of reconstructing the Indo-Germanic mother speech." It is true that there is still much need of argument and illustration to prove the genealogical relationship of the Ary- an family of speech; and even August Tick, in Die ehemalige Spracheinheit der Indogerma- nenEuropas: eine spracJigeschichtliche Unter- suchung (Gottingen, 1873), seems, without sus- taining all of Schmidt's premises, to be in favor of revising the order of the branches of the Indo-European tree of languages. Yet with- out adopting the theory of the concatenation of the Aryan languages, it is impossible to present a just idea of the nature, methods, and results of comparative philology or gram- mar, or the theoretical study of language. The whole group of those languages is supposed to come from a primitive language of mono- syllabic structure; the reason being that all Aryan words can be reduced to roots of sin- gle syllables. Grammatically considered, there are -two classes of roots: demonstrative or pronominal roots, ultimately indicative of po- sition merely ; and predicative or verbal roots, indicative of quality or action. Pronominal roots give rise primarily to demonstrative, per- sonal, and interrogatory pronouns; secondari- ly to possessives and relatives, adverbs of po- sition and direction, and several minor classes of words. Their number is about 15, all consist- ing either of a vowel only, or of a vowel prece- ded by a consonant. The predicative or verbal roots number several hundred, of various com- positions of letters, but always forming a sin- gle syllable, and indicative of the properties, motions, sounds, &c., of natural objects. The combining of verbal with pronominal roots, for the sake of definiteness of expression, gradu- ally developed various parts of speech. Singu- lar, dual, and plural numbers were invented ; prefixes of adverbial elements and repetitions of roots served to render verbal forms, which at first were neither past, present, nor future, but according to connection expressive of ei- ther, capable of indicating the various tenses. Interposition of vowels formed the moods, and modifications of roots, compositions with others, or extensions of pronominal endings, produced intensives, desideratives, causatives, and reflexives. Certain derivatives of verbal roots were used as nouns, which again received distinctive suffixes, capable of designating va- rious relations, so-called case endings. On what principle the distinctions of gender were made (for in the oldest forms of language there are masculines, feminines, and neuters which do not depend on sex) is very obscure. In early language all words were either verbs or nouns. Adverbs and prepositions were generated by separating from verbs and nouns various in- flectional suffixes which served to indicate the relations of time, place, &c. Conjunctions also came very late into existence ; the definite articles came from demonstrative pronouns; the indefinite article from the numeral one ; and interjections, which should be merely ejaculations without verbal significance, were increased in number by using abbreviated or corrupted words or phrases. The great cause of the varied appearances or pronunciations of words originally the same in the speech of several races, is love of ease in utterance. To economize efforts of voice, long words are ab- breviated, and combinations of harsh or diffi- cult sounds are rendered more agreeable and easy by omitting, inserting, or assimilating the letters, or by putting the accent back or for- ward, or by modifying the tone and length of vowels. The reasons for preferring one form to another are not always exactly definable, but as a rule the linguistic laws of phonetic alteration conform to the physical laws of ar- ticulation. The sense or ideas of proportion, rhythm, harmony, euphony, varying in nations of different degrees of culture, are also impor- tant factors in the mutations of language. One race abandons elements of speech highly valued by another, makes compounds which another abhors, and retains and adopts what others reject. Thus, while some languages of the In- do-European family continue to conjugate by changes of vowels and consonants, and by affixes, infixes, and suffixes, other languages indicate tenses, moods, and voices in a great measure by separate words. The same is ob- servable in the declension of nouns. Then again words change meaning in the same lan- guage in the course of its development, and in passing from one language to another ; new words are coined ; other words are taken from foreign languages, and some of them are used in a sense they did not possess ; others again obtain more than one meaning ; some words of originally different significations become synonymous; and synonymes again become anonymes. The causes which produce in dif- ferent ages and races these numerous significa- tions of the same words, or of derivatives from the same root, have also been analyzed. Com- parative grammar goes still further. Various languages have various modes of constructing sentences; words are placed in various rela- tions to each other ; they govern various cases ; their order or sequence is changed ; they com- bine into so-called idiomatic expressions, which if verbally translated into another language would often appear entirely void of meaning; and these often purely psychological causes have also been investigated. Yet even the grouping of languages into families of speech is far from being conclusive. A. W. von Schlegel proposes, three divisions : languages without any grammatical structure, languages that make use of affixes, and inflectional lan- guages. The last he considers superior to the others, and he calls them organic languages,