There was a very good reason why the Turanian languages should for a long time have remained in this second or agglutinative stage. It was felt essential that the radical portion of each word should stand out in distinct relief, and never be obscured or absorbed, as so often happens in the third or inflectional stage.

The French age, for instance, has lost its whole material body, and is nothing but termination. Âge in Old French was eage and edage. Edage is a corruption of the Latin ætaticum; ætaticum is a derivative of atas; ætas an abbreviation of avitas; avitas is derived from avum, and in ævum, œ only is the radical or predicative element, the Sanskrit ây in ây-us, life, which contains the germ from which these various words derive their life and meaning. From avum the Romans derived æviternus, contracted into æternus, so that age and eternity flow from the same source. What trace of œ or ævum, or even avitas and atas, remains in âge? Or, to take a more ancient case, what trace of the root si, to bind, is there left in μάσθλη for ἱμάσθλη, the thong of a whip? Turanian languages cannot afford such words as âge in their dictionaries. It is an indispensable requirement in a nomadic language that it should be intelligible to many, though their intercourse be but scanty. It requires tradition, society, and literature to maintain words and forms which can no longer be analysed at once. Such words would seldom spring up in nomadic languages, or if they did, they would die away with each generation.

The Aryan verb contains many forms in which the personal pronoun is no longer felt distinctly. And

yet tradition, custom, and law preserve the life of these veterans, and make us feel unwilling to part with them. But in the ever-shifting state of a nomadic society no debased coin can be tolerated in language, no obscure legend accepted on trust. The metal must be pure, and the legend distinct; that the one may be weighed, and the other, if not deciphered, at least recognised as a well-known guarantee. Hence the small proportion of irregular forms in all agglutinative languages.1

A Turanian might tolerate the Sanskrit

In these instances, with a few exceptions, root and affix are as distinguishable as, for instance, in

But a conjugation like the Hindustani, which is a modern Aryan dialect,

hún, hai, hai, hain, ho, hain,

would not be compatible with the original genius of the Turanian languages, because it would not answer the requirements of a nomadic life. Turanian dialects exhibit either no terminational distinctions at all,

1 The Abbé Molina states that the language of Chili is entirely free from irregular forms (Du Ponceau, Mémoire, p. 90).

as in Mandshu, which is a Tungusic dialect; or a complete and intelligible system of affixes, as in the spoken dialect of Nyertchinsk, equally of Tungusic descent. But a state of conjugation in which, through phonetic corruption, the suffix of the first person singular and plural and of the third person plural are the same, where there is no distinction between the second and third persons singular, and between the first and third persons plural, would in a Turanian dialect, which had not yet been fixed by literary cultivation, lead to the adoption of new and more expressive forms. New pronouns would have to be used to mark the persons, or some other expedient be resorted to for the same purpose.

And this will make it clear why the Turanian languages, or in fact all languages in this second or agglutinative stage, though protected against phonetic corruption more than the Aryan and Semitic languages, are so much exposed to the changes produced by dialectical regeneration. A Turanian retains, as it were, the consciousness of his language and grammar. The idea, for instance, which he connects with a plural is that of a noun followed by a syllable indicative of plurality; a passive with him is a verb followed by a syllable expressive of suffering, or eating, or going. Now these determinative ideas may be expressed in various ways, and though in one and the same clan, and during one period of time, a certain number of terminations would become stationary, and be assigned to the expression of certain grammatical categories, such as the plural, the pas1 Letter on the Turanian Languages, p. 206.

sive, the genitive, different hordes, as they separated, would still feel themselves at liberty to repeat the process of grammatical composition, and defy the comparative grammarian to prove the identity of the terminations, even in dialects so closely allied as Finnish and Hungarian, or Tamil and Telugu.

It must not be supposed, however, that Turanian or agglutinative languages are for ever passing through this process of grammatical regeneration.. Where nomadic tribes approach to a political organisation, their language too, though Turanian or agglutinative, may approach to the system of political or traditional languages, such as Sanskrit or Hebrew. This is particularly the case with the most advanced members of the Turanian family, such as the Turkish, the Hungarian, the Finnish, the Tamil, Telugu, &c. Many of their grammatical terminations have suffered by phonetic corruption, but they have not been replaced by new and more expressive words. The termination of the plural is lu in Telugu, and this is supposed to be a mere corruption of gal, the termination of the plural in Tamil. The only characteristic Turanian feature which always remains is this, the root is not obscured.

WE

CHAPTER XI.

URAL-ALTAIC FAMILY.

E may now proceed to examine the principal languages belonging to the Ural-Altaic

Family.

This family comprises the Samoyedic, Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic (or Tataric), and Finnic, or FinnoUgric classes. Among these we can distinguish three distinct nuclei, the Samoyedic, the Altaic, comprising the Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic, and the FinnoUgric.

The Samoyedic.

The tribes speaking Samoyedic dialects are spread along the Yenisei and Ob rivers, and were pushed more and more North by their Mongolic successors. They have now dwindled down to about 16,000 souls. Five dialects, however, have been distinguished in their language by Castrén, the Yurakian, Tawgyan, Yeniseian, Ostjako-Samoyede, and Kamassinian, with several local varieties.

The vocalic harmony is most carefully preserved in the Kamassinian dialect, but seems formerly to have existed in all. The Samoyedic has no gender of nouns, but three numbers, singular, dual, and plural, and eight cases. The verb has two tenses, an Aorist (present and future) and a Preterite. Besides the indicative, there is a subjunctive and an imperative.