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JULE, 1907.]
RECORD OF THE LANGUAGES OF SAVAGES.
183
Thirty years ago this subject was forcibly brought to the present author's notice when trying to represent, with Mr. E. H, Man, the purely "savage" language of the Andaman Islanders, in which work the active and very competent assistance of the late Mr. A. J. Ellis, F.R.S., President of the Philological Society, was secured. Some years later Mr. Ellis, finding the accepted grammatical terms so little suited to the adequate representation of savage speech for scientific readers, stated in his Annual Presidential Address to that Society for 1882, that: "we require new terms and an entirely new set of grammatical conceptions, which shall not bend an agglutinative language to our inflexional translation." In 1883 he started the author on the present enquiry, and asked if it were not possible " to throw over the inflexional treatment of an uninflected language." Ever since then, as opportunity offered, the enquiry has been taken up and has resulted in the evolution of a Theory of Universal Grammar, which is of necessity a plan for the uniform scientific record of all languages, though, for the reason already stated, it is now sought to limit its application to “savage” languages only.
The Theory was applied in part in Portman's Comparative Grammar of the South Andaman Languages in 1898 and again in an article on the same languages by the present. author in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1899, and elaborately and fully in his Census Report of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for 1901, in which the languages of both groups of islands were discussed and explained in full Grammars. The Andamanese Languages are agglutinative and represent the speech of savages of very limited mental development: the Nioobarese Languages are a highly developed analytical form of spoooh, like English. In both, inflection is only present in a secondary and rudimentary form, as in English. The Theory was also applied in outline by Mr. Sydney Ray in the Indian Antiquary for 1902 to sixteen selected languages of every type--synthetic, agglutinative, analytical, syntactical (monosyllabic) - from the most highly civilised and developed to those of the most primitive savages. In the opinion of these writers, the theory succeeds in describing on a uniform plan every language to which it has been applied, as indeed it must succeed in doing, if it be a correct theory.
The very great importance to anthropologists and observers of Savage tribes and peoples unknown to Earopeans of a uniform scientific system in this matter is so obvious, that no excuse is made for bringing it once more before the readers of this Journal.
The root ides of the Theory is, that as speech is a convention devised by the human brain for intercommunication between human beings, there must be some fundamental natural laws by which it is governed, however various the phenomena of those laws may be. The basiness of the Grammarian is to discover and report the laws. These considerations form the basis of the Theory of Universal Grammar, the practical application of which at the present day must, on account of long formed habits, be limited to a Plan for Uniformly Recording the Languages of Savages.
In bailding up a Theory of Universal Grammar, it is necessary, in order to work out the argument logically, to commence where the accepted Grammars end, viz., at the sentence, defining the sentence as the expression of a complete meaning, and making that the unit of language. This is the fundamental argument. Nothing is an intelligiblo communication, unless it is complete enough to be understood. It is by observation of the internal and external development of the sentence or complete meaning that the natural laws of speech will be discovered.
A sentence may, clearly, consist of one or more expressions of a meaning or "words," defined as single expressions of a meaning. The difference between a word and a sentence may be shown thus: - "go" is a sentence, as it says all that is necessary; bat "Cor" is merely a word, because something must be said about the cow before the communication is complete.
A sentence 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. Thus,
