LITMIR.BIZ

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languages. This would seem a sort of contradiction in terms; but the orthodox Hegelian is ready with an answer to any objection; he has the word of his master that History cannot begin till the human spirit becomes “conscious of its own freedom,” and this consciousness is only possible after the complete development of language. The formation of Language and History are accordingly successive stages of human activity. Moreover, as history and historiography, i.e. literature, come into existence simultaneously, Schleicher is enabled to express the same idea in a way that “is only seemingly paradoxical,” namely, that the development of language is brought to a conclusion as soon as literature makes its appearance; this is a crisis after which language remains fixed; language has now become a means, instead of being the aim, of intellectual activity. We never meet with any language that is developing or that has become more perfect; in historical times all languages move only downhill; linguistic history means decay of languages as such, subjugated as they are through the gradual evolution of the mind to greater freedom.

      The reader of the above survey of previous classifications will easily see that in the matter itself Schleicher adds very little of his own. Even the expressions, which are here given throughout in Schleicher’s own words, are in some cases recognizable as identical with, or closely similar to, those of earlier scholars.

      He made one coherent system out of ideas of classification and development already found in others. What is new is the philosophical substructure of Hegelian origin, and there can be no doubt that Schleicher imagined that by this addition he contributed very much towards giving stability and durability to the whole system. And yet this proved to be the least stable and durable part of the structure, and as a matter of fact the Hegelian reasoning is not repeated by a single one of those who give their adherence to the classification. Nor can it be said to carry conviction, and undoubtedly it has seemed to most linguists at the same time too rigid and too unreal to have any importance.

      But apart from the philosophical argument the classification proved very successful in the particular shape it had found in Schleicher. Its adoption into two such widely read works as Max Müller’s and Whitney’s Lectures on the Science of Language contributed very much to the popularity of the system, though the former’s attempt at ascribing to the tripartition a sociological importance by saying that juxtaposition (isolation) is characteristic of the ‘family stage,’ agglutination of ‘the nomadic stage’ and amalgamation (flexion) of the ‘political stage’ of human society was hardly taken seriously by anybody.

      The chief reasons for the popularity of this classification are not far to seek. It is easy of handling and appeals to the natural fondness for clear-cut formulas through its specious appearance of regularity and rationality. Besides, it flatters widespread prejudices in so far as it places the two groups of languages highest that are spoken by those nations which have culturally and religiously exercised the deepest influence on the civilization of the world, Aryans and Semites. Therefore also Pott’s view, according to which the incorporating or ‘polysynthetic’ American languages possess the same characteristics that distinguish flexion as against agglutination, only in a still higher degree, is generally tacitly discarded, for obviously it would not do to place some languages of American Indians higher than Sanskrit or Greek. But when these are looked upon as the very flower of linguistic development it is quite natural to regard the modern languages of Western Europe as degenerate corruptions of the ancient more highly flexional languages; this is in perfect keeping with the prevalent admiration for classical antiquity and with the belief in a far past golden age. Arguments such as these may not have been consciously in the minds of the framers of the ordinary classification, but there can be no doubt that they have been unconsciously working in favour of the system, though very little thought seems to be required to show the fallacy of the assumption that high civilization has any intrinsic and necessary connexion with the grammatical construction of the language spoken by the race or nation concerned. No language of modern Europe presents the flexional type in a purer shape than Lithuanian, where we find preserved nearly the same grammatical system as in old Sanskrit, yet no one would assert that the culture of Lithuanian peasants is higher than that of Shakespeare, whose language has lost an enormous amount of the old flexions. Culture and language must be appraised separately, each on its own merits and independently of the other.

      From a purely linguistic point of view there are many objections to the usual classification, and it will be well here to bring them together, though this will mean an interruption of the historical survey which is the main object of these chapters.

      First let us look upon the tripartition as purporting a comprehensive classification of languages as existing side by side without any regard to historic development (the nebeneinander of Schleicher). Here it does not seem to be an ideal manner of classifying a great many objects to establish three classes of such different dimensions that the first comprises only Chinese and some other related languages of the Far East, and the third only two families of languages, while the second includes hundreds of unrelated languages of the most heterogeneous character. It seems certain that the languages of Class I represent one definite type of linguistic structure, and it may be that Aryan and Semitic should be classed together on account of the similarity of their structure, though this is by no means quite certain and has been denied (by Bopp, and in recent times by Porzezinski); but what is indubitable is that the ‘agglutinating’ class is made to comprehend languages of the most diverse type, even if we follow Pott and exclude from this class all incorporating languages. Finnish is always mentioned as a typically agglutinative language, yet there we meet with such declensional forms as nominative vesi ‘water,’ toinen ‘second,’ partitive vettä, toista, genitive veden, toisen, and such verbal forms as sido-n ‘I bind,’ sido-t ‘thou bindest,’ sito-o ‘he binds,’ and the three corresponding persons in the plural, sido-mme, sido-tte, sito-vat. Here we are far from having one unchangeable root to which endings have been glued, for the root itself undergoes changes before the endings. In Kiyombe (Congo) the perfect of verbs is in many cases formed by means of a vowel change that is a complete parallel to the apophony in English drink, drank, thus vanga ‘do,’ perfect venge, twala ‘bring,’ perfect twele or twede, etc. (Anthropos, ii. p. 761). Examples like these show that flexion, in whatever way we may define this term, is not the prerogative of the Aryans and Semites, but may be found in other nations as well. ‘Agglutination’ is either too vague a term to be used in classification, or else, if it is taken strictly according to the usual definition, it is too definite to comprise many of the languages which are ordinarily reckoned to belong to the second class.

      It will be seen, also, that those writers who aim at giving descriptions of a variety of human tongues, or of them all, do not content themselves with the usual three classes, but have a greater number. This began with Steinthal, who in various works tried to classify languages partly from geographical, partly from structural points of view, without, however, arriving at any definite or consistent system. Friedrich Müller, in his great Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, really gives up the psychological or structural division of languages, distributing the more than hundred different languages that he describes among twelve races of mankind, characterized chiefly by external criteria that have nothing to do with language. Misteli establishes six main types: I. Incorporating. II. Root-isolating. III. Stem-isolating. IV. Affixing (Anreihende). V. Agglutinating. VI. Flexional. These he also distributes so as to form four classes: (1) languages with sentence-words: I; (2) languages with no words: II, III and IV; (3) languages with apparent words: V; and (4) languages with real words: VI. But the latter division had better be left alone; it turns on the intricate question “What constitutes a word?” and ultimately depends on the usual depreciation of ‘inferior races’ and corresponding exaltation of our own race, which is alone reputed capable of possessing ‘real words.’ I do not see why we should not recognize that the vocables of Greenlandic, Malay, Kafir or Finnish are just as ‘real’ words as any in Hebrew or Latin.

      Our final result, then, is that the tripartition is insufficient and inadequate to serve as a comprehensive classification of languages actually existing. Nor shall we wonder at this if we see the way in which the theory began historically in an obiter dictum of Fr. v. Schlegel at a time when the inner structure of only a few languages had been properly

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