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AUGUST, 1899.)
A THEORY OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR.
197
A THEORY OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR, AS APPLIED TO A GROUP
OF SAVAGE LANGUAGES.
BY R. C. TEMPLE. TN reviewing lately for the Royal Asiatic Society Mr. Portman's Notes on the Languages 1 of the South Andaman Group of Tribes, I pointed out that he had used a pamphlet of my own, privately printed in 1883, entitled " A Brief Exposition of a Theory of Universal Grammar," which was specially designed to meet the very difficulties he had to face in giving a general idea of languages constructed on lines at first sight very different from those on whose structure modern European Grammar is based.
I also pointed out that the pamphlet in question arose out of the practioal impossibility of using the usual inflexional system of Grammar, as taught in Europe, for the scourate description of a group of agglutinative languages, and that it had its immediate origin in the criticisms of the late Mr. A. J. ENis, public and private, on an old work of 1877 and certain MSS. by myself and Mr. E. H. Man on the Andamanese speech. Mr. Ellis explained that in order to adequately represent for scientific readers such a form of speech as the Andamanese, "we require new terms and an entirely new set of grammatical conceptions, which shall not bend an agglutinative language to our inflexional translation," and he asked me accordingly if it were not possible to throw over the inflexional treatment of an uninflected language." This, and the farther consideration that since every human being speaks with but the one object of communicating his own intelligence to other human beings, the several possible ways of doing this must be based on some general laws applicable to them all, if only one could find them out, led me to make the attempt to construot & general theory on logical principles, which should abandon the inflexional treatment, its conceptions and its terms.
Such an attempt involved a wide departure from orthodox grammatical teaching, and I tound that Mr. Portman, while adopting the theory, had been unable to clear himself of the teaching in which he had been brought up, and had consequently prodaoed work which was a compromise between the two. His laborious and praiseworthy efforts to adequately represent the Andamanese languages had failed in point of clearness, and my theory was not properly represented in his pages. I have therefore determined to revert again to the subject, and to give a more extended view of the theory than was then possible.
With these few introductory remarks I will proceed at once with my subject, commencing with & general statement of the argumentation on which the theory is based, testing it as a method of clearly presenting a savage group of tongues constructed after the fashion of the Andamanese by an explanation thereby of the linguistio contents of an entire story, as given by Mr. Portman, vie., The Andaman Fire Legend, and concluding by a skeleton statement of the theory itself.
Premising that I am talking of the conditions of sixteen years ago, I found myself, in building up the theory, compelled, in order to work out the argument logically, to commence where the acoepted Grammars ended, vie., at the sentence, defining the sentence as the expression of a complete meaning, and making that the unit of language. Clearly, then, a sentence may consist of one or more expressions of a meaning. or words,' which I defined as single expressions of a meaning. It can also consist of two separate parts - the subject, i. e., the matter to be discussed or communicated, and the predicate, i. e., the discussion or communication. And when the subject or predicate consists of many words it must contain principal and additional words.
This leads to the argument that the components of a sentence are words, placed either in the subjective or predicative part of it, having a relation to each other in that part of principal
1 From J. R. A. 8., 1899.
