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APRIL, 1902.]
THEORY OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR.
• 165
NOTES ON SIR RICHARD C. TEMPLE'S THEORY OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR.
. BY SIDNEY H. RAY. TN July, 1899, Colonel (now Sir Richard C.) Temple published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
1 Society an outline of a “ Theory of Universal Grammar, as applied to a Group of Savage Languages," and illustrated this theory solely by reference to the South Andaman Group of Languages. It was, however, plainly manifest that its proper exhibition required examples in other unrelated and morphologically distinct languages, and so when reviewing Colonel Temple's paper for the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, the present writer attempted to apply the theory to a short statement in various languages, chosen partly with regard to his own studies and partly with regard to the facility with which the means of analysis were available to him. The languages chosen were :
1. English.
| 10. Nufor, Dutch New Guinea. 2. Hungarian.
11. Motu, British New Guinea. 3. Letin.
12. Mortlock Ids, Caroline.Group, Mioro4. Khasi, Hills of N. E. Bengal.
nesia. 5. Anam, French Cochin China.
13. Mota, Banks' Islands, Melanesia. 6. Ashanti, West Africa.
14. Samoan, Polynesia. 7. Kafir, South Africa.
15. Awabakal, Lake Macquarie, Australia. 8. Malagasy, Madagascar.
18. Dakota, North America. 9. Olo Ngadju or Dayak, South East
Borneo.
The passage chosen was the description of the sower, taken from the varions translations of the Bible in these languages, and although it is plain that a mere tra 1on offers a somewhat unsatisfactory test of the real structure of a language, the choice affords a means of comparison which would not appear if the examples were totally distinct in meaning.
In the earlier portion of his paper on the Theory, Colonel Temple, taking the sentence as the unit of language, discusses its composition and method of indicating purpose, and also the method of expressing the inter-relation of words in & sentence. This leads him to the definition of a series of terms in harmony with his analysis of the sentence, which therefore take the place of the old so-called parts of Speech. These terms are: - 1 Integers, words which are complete sentences ; 2. Indicators of Subjects or Complements of Subjects; 3. Explicators of Subjects or Complements; 4, Predicators, indicating the Predicate; 5. Illustrators of Predicate, Complement or Explicators; 6. Connectors of the internal components of the sentence; 7. Introduoers, explaining the purpose of the sentence; 8. Referent Conjunctors, joining connected sentences; 9 Referent Substitutes, representing in a subordinate sentence the word to which it refers in the principal sentence.
The arrangement of the examples follows Colonel Temple's order. There is given first the statement with its words in their proper order, the component parts of inflected or agglutinative words being separated by hyphens, and accompanied below by an exact literal translation into English. Then follows an analysis of the statement into separate sentences. These are indicated by numerals, the Subjects and Predicates being separated and the Complements indicated by italics, A word omitted by ellipsis is entered in brackets. All the words of the statement are then grouped according to their several functions, using Colonel Temple's nomenclature.
Vid. Jour. Anthrop. Inst. Vol. XXX. (N. S. Vol. III.) July 1999. Mlecellanea No. 79.
