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(ii) The languages of Mexico;

(iii) The languages of Central America; (iv) The languages of Peru.

These four centres of speech represent, however, four islands only in the vast ocean of American speech. They are surrounded by other islands which may formerly have belonged to larger continents of speech, but which for the present remain isolated. Such are the dialects of the Arctic or Hyperborean tribes, of the Eskimos and Greenlanders in the extreme North, the Arowakes and the once famous Caribes, in the north of South America and in the islands of the Antilles, of the aboriginal inhabitants of Brazil, of the Abipones, the Patagonians, and the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego.

It will require much time and labour before this abundant linguistic flora of America can be reduced to something like scientific order. To attempt at present to trace back the inhabitants of America to a Jewish, Phenician, Chinese, or Celtic source is simply labour lost, and outside the pale of real science.

Oceanic Languages.

Much more progress has been made in classifying the languages which extend from Madagascar on the East coast of Africa to the Sandwich Islands west of America.

There is an original, though very distant, relationship between the Malay, the Polynesian, and the Melanesian (and Micronesian) languages. They are independent branches of a common stem. The dialects of Australia, however, divided into three groups, and

those spoken by the Papuas of New Guinea, stand apart and have not yet been properly classified, though some dialects spoken in New Guinea, such as Motu, are clearly Melanesian.

This short survey of the work of linguistic classification, so far as it has been carried on at present, gives but a very imperfect idea of the labours bestowed on the study of languages all over the world. My object was only to point out the centres of linguistic life which have been discovered, and the ramifications from which have been determined with some amount of scientific accuracy. In some cases that ramification is perfectly clear, in others it is as yet vague and obscure. Many languages in Europe and Asia stand still completely isolated, such as Etruscan, Bask, Lycian, Japanese, Corean, the dialects of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, to say nothing of dialects spoken in other parts of the world. Future generations will probably smile at our linguistic maps of the world as we smile at the Orbis terrarum veteribus notus. Still, considering the difficulties in the way of studying unwritten languages, and the shortness of time that has elapsed since the genius of Leibniz, Humboldt, Bopp, Grimm, and Pott first gave the proper direction to these studies, the record of the Science of Language can well bear comparison with that of other sciences.

Inflectional Stage.

It must not be supposed, because this survey of languages has been inserted here as part of our discussion of the Terminational or Agglutinative Stage, that therefore all these languages, or even most of

them, are purely agglutinative. All we can say of them in general is that they have left the radical stage, and that they have not entered completely into the inflectional stage. But we must remember that these three stages are natural to all languages, that inflection invariably presupposes agglutination, and agglutination juxtaposition. The chief distinction between an inflectional and an agglutinative language consists in the fact that the speakers of agglutinative languages retain the consciousness of their roots, and therefore do but seldom allow them to be affected by phonetic corruption. Even when they have lost the consciousness of the original meaning of terminations, they feel distinctly the difference between the significative root and the modifying elements. Not so in the inflectional languages. There the various elements which enter into the composition of words, may become so welded together, and suffer so much from phonetic corruption, that none but the scholar would be aware of an original distinction between root and termination, and none but the comparative grammarian able to discover the seams that separate the component parts.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE QUESTION OF THE COMMON ORIGIN OF

LANGUAGES.

The Exhaustive Character of the Morphological Classification.

IF

F you consider the character of our morphological classification, you will see that this classification, differing thereby from the genealogical, must be applicable to all languages. Our classification exhausts. all possibilities. If the component elements of language are roots, predicative and demonstrative, we cannot have more than three combinations. Roots may either become words without any outward modification; or, secondly, they may be joined so that one determines the other and loses its independent existence; or, thirdly, they may be joined and be allowed to coalesce, so that both lose their independent character.

The number of roots which enter into the composition of a word makes no difference, and it is unnecessary, therefore, to admit a fourth class, sometimes called polysynthetic, or incorporating, including most of the American languages. As long as in these sesquipedalian compounds the significative root remains distinct, they belong to the agglutinative stage ; as soon as it is absorbed by the terminations, they belong to the inflectional stage.

We must guard, however, against a very common mistake. It often happens that in polysynthetic languages words appear in a fuller form when standing by themselves, and in a shorter form when incorporated in a compound. Scholars are generally inclined in such cases to look upon the shorter form as shortened, while it is far more likely that the short is the original form, which has been more fully developed when used as an independent noun or verb.

Nor is it necessary to distinguish between synthetic and analytical languages, including under the former name the ancient, and under the latter the modern, languages of the inflectional class. The formation of such phrases as the French j'aimerai, for j'ai à aimer, or the English, I shall do, thou wilt do, may be called analytical or metaphrastic. But in their morphological nature these phrases are still inflectional. If we analyse such a phrase as je vivrai, we find it was originally ego (Sanskrit aham) vivere (Sanskrit gîv-as-e, dat. neutr.) habeo (Sanskrit *ghâbh-ayâ-mi); that is to say, we have a number of words in which grammatical articulation has been almost entirely destroyed, but has not been cast off; whereas in Turanian languages grammatical forms are produced by the combination of integral roots, and the old and useless terminations. are first discarded before any new combination takes place.1

Common Origin of Languages.

At the end of our morphological classification a problem presents itself, which we might have declined to enter upon if we had confined ourselves to a genea1 Letter on the Turanian Languages, p. 75.

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