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320
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
by recent investigations into Accadian, as recovered from the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylon. Many of its roots are dissyllabic. Accadian is a very ancient Turaniar speech,-older than the Sanskrit of the Veda; and Mr. Sayce strongly holds that the neglect of Turanian has led to many other rash conclusions besides the specific one now mentioned. On this point we quite agree with him.
Our readers are doubtless familiar with the division of languages into Isolating, Agglutinative, and Inflectional, with the great dispute whether an isolating tongue is naturally developed-or capable of being developed-into an agglutinative, and afterwards into an inflectional one. Mr. Sayce vehemently says, No. He asserts that even if the Aryan was "the eldest born of a gorilla," "his brain could produce only an inflectional language, as soon as he came to speak consciously." He admits that the three stages of language above named mark "successive levels of civilization," but maintains that "each was the highest expression of the race that carried it out." We would fain gather arguments from Mr. Sayce's pages as strong as these assertions; but we have failed to find them.
The question of the interchange, as it has been called, of letters has attracted much notice. Why, for example, have we duo in Latin, two in English, and zwei in German? Or, again, tres in Latin, three in English, drei in German? Mr. Sayce holds that all the related sounds were "differentiations of one obscure sound which contained within itself the clearer consonants." Primitive man, he be lieves, had no delicacy of ear. The further back we push our researches, the greater becomes the number of obscure, or neutral, sounds. The oldest words he holds to have conveyed ideas of the most purely sensuous kind.
Mr. Sayce's speculations on the Metaphysics of language are in more than one sense oracular. But his illustration of his meaning should be more intelligible. Take the question of gender:-how can the sexual character attributed to nouns be explained? Some have ascribed it to a philosophic, or perhaps poetic, view of the character of the objects as resembling in quality either males or females, or neither. Mr. Sayce sets aside this view by referring to African dialects that have eight or even eighteen genders. Following Bleek, but somewhat modifying his view, he says: Out of the endless variety of words that might have been taken for personal and demonstrative pronouns, use selected some; each of these was associated with "an ever-increasingly specified" class of nouns; and where the pronouns continued different the classes of substantives connected with them
[OCTOBER, 1875.
continued different also. "Where the majority of words with a common termination were of a certain gender, all other words with the same ending were referred to the same gender." And then we have illustrations supplied from Moxa, and Abiponian, and Mikir, and Tshetsh, and Wolof!
Mr. Sayce holds that the dual is older than the plural. This opposes the common belief of scholars; but he argues the point ably, and, what is more, clearly.
The chapter on Philology and Religion is the part of the book that satisfies us least. We find a multitude of propositions, stated without proof. which would upset the belief of nine-tenths of thinking men. For example
The religious instinct first exhibits itself in the worship of dead ancestors. Society begins with a hive-like community, the members of which are not individually marked out, but together form one whole. In other words, the community, and not the individual, lives and acts. But the community does not comprise the living only; the dead equally form a part of it; and their presence, it is believed, can alone account for the dreams of the savage or the pains and illnesses to which he is subject. In this way the conception of a spiritual world takes its rise."
And all this is quietly taken for granted! Let us pass on, lest we lose our temper, to the concluding chapter, which discusses the influence of Analogy in language. It deals with nothing deep, but simply states some very obvious truths. The influence of analogy may be seen in the tendency now existing in English to reduce all verbs to the weak form of conjugation. Its influence is farreaching. It affects language both as to its matter and its form. As to its matter, analogy produces change in accent, quantity, and pronunciation generally. It moulds not only accidence and syntax, but the signification of words. Exceptional cases are forced into harmony with the prevailing rule. Irish accents its words on the first syllable; the cognate Welsh on the penultimate; though originally the mode of accentuation must have been similar in both. "A particular mode of accentuation became fashionable," and the "whole stock of words was gradually brought under the dominant type." This explanation does not explain much, however; it only asserts that the majority drew the minority after it. But how did the majority go in one direction in Irish, and in an other in Welsh ?
There are many striking things scattered up and down the pages before us. Rash as we deem Mr. Sayce, at all events he never fails to be interesting; and his stores of information are very great.
