IV. INCORPORATIVE LANGUAGES.
leading word is either divided and the modify ing terms inserted, or they are united to it as prefixes and suffixes, so that the whole sentence assumes the form and sound of one word.
Spoken by most of the American tribes. Incorporation is regarded as a characteristic of American languages. The Basque has a somewhat similar character.
Polyglodic and illenoglailic will be seen that while these great divisions are, in a general way, peculiar to certain races, they are not absolutely so. Still less is this the case with single stocks of lan guages. Both the Semitic and Aryan peoples belong to the pure white race, but their languages are totally diverse, and it is next to impossible to believe that they could ever have flowed from the same source. Such races are called paygioilic, while those who speak dialects of the same tongue are monogloilic. The best specimen of the latter is the Malay race. All its members, from Madagascar to Easter Island, make use of dialects unquestionably scions of the same stock. This is also the case with all the Caffir tribes of South Africa, and some aver it of the nativeE of Australia.
Changes in facts show the great permanence of linguistic forms when not disturbed by violence. In geographical are the Malayan race was the most widely dispersed of any. By it the Poly.
nesian islands were inhabited between two thousand and three thousand years ago. They were found by them uninhabited ; therefore since then the language has undergone no other alterations than those caused by time alone. These have proved to be very slight, and dialects which certainly have been dissevered two thousand years remain almost mutually intel ligible.
The principal causes of change in language are war and migration. But it has been well said that a nation which loses its language is also quite sure to lose its independent nationality, whether conqueror or con quered. The Normans entered France as a victorious people, and seized and held the land, but in one or two generations they had lost both their native tongue and national unity. On the other hand, the Jews and the Gypsies, though for centuries wandering over the globe, retained their uni ty by maintaining through all changes their separate tongues, the Hebrew and the Romany. In proportion as they lose the knowledge of these they
dissolve and become merged in the nations among whom their lot is cast.
Causes.—The forced migration of great numbers of the African race to America as slaves led to the phenomenon of large bodies of the blacks speaking English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish. But in pre-historic times no such extensive transportation would have been possible, and it is safe to say that the simpler the conditions of social life the more accu rately does similarity in language testify to the kinship of blood.
Rise of Dissimilar Languages.—The problem of accounting for abso lutely dissimilar linguistic stocks occurring in the same race, as the Aryan, Semitic, and Basque in the white race, is perplexing. It is inconceivable that one of these could ever have been derived from either of the others. Nor can we understand how the three could ever have been developed from any one primitive form of speech.
The modern theory to explain these and similar instances is that the race had definitely obtained and fixed its racial characteristics before it had a language at all—before it had emerged from that inarticulate con dition which, as has heretofore been observed (p. 38), seems to be indicated by some of the oldest osseous remains. When these had become fixed and the race had separated into several branches, living remote from each other, then, and not till then, did these branches severally develop their modes of speech and on entirely dissimilar principles of construction.
If this view is accepted, an interesting sequence is that the number of distinct linguistic stocks spoken within the limits of a race is probably in proportion to the antiquity of that race, as it is evident that its bands were numerous at that remote epoch when human speech had not appeared. Hence an extremely polyglottic race, like the American, would be much more ancient than a monoglottic race, like the Malayan. In these two instances the reasoning is borne out by geologic and historic evidence, and is sufficient to disprove conclusively the theory sometimes advanced that America was peopled by landfalls on its western coast from the Poly nesian islands.