Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin - Otto Jespersen

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to differences of nationality—to discriminate, that is, the organs of a Frenchman (quâ Frenchman) from those of a German (quâ German). Accordingly, as the chemist can only arrive at the elements which compose the sun by examining the light which it emits, while the source of that light remains inaccessible to him, so must we be content to study the nature of languages, not in their material antecedents but in their audible manifestations. It makes no great difference, however, for “the two things stand to each other as cause and effect, as substance and phenomenon: a philosopher [i.e. a Hegelian] would say that they are identical.”

      Now I, for one, fail to understand how this can be what Schleicher believes it to be, “a refutation of the objection that language is nothing but a consequence of the activity of these organs.” The sun exists independently of the human observer; but there could be no such thing as language if there was not besides the speaker a listener who might become a speaker in his turn. Schleicher speaks continually in his pamphlet as if structural differences in the brain and organs of speech were the real language, and as if it were only for want of an adequate method of examining this hidden structure that we had to content ourselves with studying language in its outward manifestation as audible speech. But this is certainly on the face of it preposterous, and scarcely needs any serious refutation. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of a language must be in the hearing and understanding; but in order to be heard words must first be spoken, and in these two activities (that of producing and that of perceiving sounds) the real essence of language must consist, and these two activities are the primary (or why not the exclusive?) object of the science of language.

      Schleicher goes on to meet another objection that may be made to his view of the ‘substantiality of language,’ namely, that drawn from the power of learning other languages. Schleicher doubts the possibility of learning another language to perfection; he would admit this only in the case of a man who exchanged his mother-tongue for another in his earliest youth; “but then he becomes by that very fact a different being from what he was: brain and organs of speech develop in another direction.” If Mr. So-and-So is said to speak and write German, English and French equally well, Schleicher first inclines to doubt the fact; and then, granting that the same individual may “be at the same time a German, a Frenchman and an Englishman,” he asks us to remember that all these three languages belong to the same family and may, from a broader point of view, be termed species of the same language; but he denies the possibility of anyone’s being equally at home in Chinese and German, or in Arabic and Hottentot, etc., because these languages are totally different in their innermost essence. (But what of bilingual children in Finland, speaking Swedish and Finnish, or in Greenland, speaking Danish and Eskimo, or in Java, speaking Dutch and Malay?) Schleicher has to admit that our organs are to some extent flexible and capable of acquiring activities that they had not at first; but one definite function is and remains nevertheless the only natural one, and thus “the possibility of a man’s acquiring foreign languages more or less perfectly is no objection to our seeing the material basis of language in the structure of the brain and organs of speech.”

      Even if we admit that Schleicher is so far right that in nearly all (or all?) cases of bilingualism one language comes more naturally than the other, he certainly exaggerates the difference, which is always one of degree; and at any rate his final conclusion is wrong, for we might with the same amount of justice say that a man who has first learned to play the piano has acquired the structure of brain and fingers peculiar to a pianist, and that it is then unnatural for him also to learn to play the violin, because that would imply a different structure of these organs. In all these cases we have to do with a definite proficiency or skill, which can only be obtained by constant practice, though of course one man may be better predisposed by nature for it than another; but then it is also the fact that people who speak no foreign language attain to very different degrees of proficiency in the use of their mother-tongue. It cannot be said too emphatically that we have here a fundamental question, and that Schleicher’s view can never lead to a true conception of what language is, or to a real insight into its changes and historical development.

      Schleicher goes on to say that the classification of mankind into races should not be based on the formation of the skull or on the character of the hair, or any such external criteria, as they are by no means constant, but rather on language, because this is a thoroughly constant criterion. This alone would give a perfectly natural system, one, for instance, in which all Turks would be classed together, while otherwise the Osmanli Turk belongs to the ‘Caucasian’ race and the so-called Tataric Turks to the ‘Mongolian’ race; on the other hand, the Magyar and the Basque are not physically to be distinguished from the Indo-European, though their languages are widely dissimilar. According to Schleicher, therefore, the natural system of languages is also the natural system of mankind, for language is closely connected with the whole higher life of men, which is therefore taken into consideration in and with their language. In this book I am not concerned with the ethnographical division of mankind into races, and I therefore must content myself with saying that the very examples adduced by Schleicher seem to me to militate against his theory that a division of mankind based on language is the natural one: are we to reckon the Basque’s son, who speaks nothing but French (or Spanish) as belonging to a different race from his father? And does not Schleicher contradict himself when on p. 16 he writes that language is “ein völlig constantes merkmal,” and p. 20 that it is “in fortwährender veränderung begriffen”? So far as I see, Schleicher never expressly says that he thinks that the physical structure conditioning the structure of a man’s language is hereditary, though some of his expressions point that way, and that may be what he means by the expression ‘constant.’ In other places (Darw. 25, Bed. 24) he allows external conditions of life to exercise some influence on the character of a language, as when languages of neighbouring peoples are similar (Aryans and Semites, for example, are the only nations possessing flexional languages). On such points, however, he gives only a few hints and suggestions.

      III.—§ 5. Classification of Languages.

      In the question of the classification of languages Schleicher introduces a deductive element from his strong preoccupation with Hegelian ideas. Hegel everywhere moves in trilogies; Schleicher therefore must have three classes, and consequently has to tack together two of Pott’s four classes (agglutinating and incorporating); then he is able philosophically to deduce the tripartition. For language consists in meaning (bedeutung; matter, contents, root) and relation (beziehung; form), tertium non datur. As it would be a sheer impossibility for a language to express form only, we obtain three classes:

      I. Here meaning is the only thing indicated by sound; relation is merely suggested by word-position: isolating languages.

      II. Both meaning and relation are expressed by sound, but the formal elements are visibly tacked on to the root, which is itself invariable: agglutinating languages.

      III. The elements of meaning and of relation are fused together or absorbed into a higher unity, the root being susceptible of inward modification as well as of affixes to denote form: flexional languages.

      Schleicher employs quasi-mathematical formulas to illustrate these three classes: if we denote a root by R, a prefix by p and a suffix by s, and finally use a raised x to denote an inner modification, we see that in the isolated languages we have nothing but R (a sentence may be represented by R R R R …), a word in the second class has the formula R s or p R or p R s, but in the third class we may have p Rx s (or Rx s).

      Now, according to Schleicher the three classes of languages are not only found simultaneously in the tongues of our own day, but they represent three stages of linguistic development; “to the nebeneinander of the system corresponds the nacheinander of history.” Beyond the flexional stage no language can attain; the symbolic denotation of relation by flexion is the highest accomplishment of language; speech has here effectually realized its object, which is to give a faithful phonetic image of thought. But before a language can become flexional it must have passed through an isolating and an agglutinating period. Is this theory borne out by historical facts? Can we trace back any of the existing flexional languages to agglutination and isolation? Schleicher himself answers this question

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