PHONETIC LAWS. Plesiosauri, nor is all language made of Sanskrit, teeming with Supines and Paulo-pluperfects. Up to a certain point the method by which so great results have been achieved in classifying the Aryan languages may be applicable to other clusters of speech. Phonetic laws are always useful, but they are not the only tools which the student of language must learn to handle. If we compare the extreme members of the Polynesian dialects, we find but little agreement in what may be called their grammar, and many of their words seem totally distinct. But if we compare their numerals we clearly see that these are common property; we perceive similarity, though at the same time great diversity: 29 "Hale, United States Exploring Expedition, vol. vii. p. 246. We begin to note the phonetic changes that have taken place in one and the same numeral, as pronounced by different islanders: we thus arrive at phonetic laws, and these, in their turn, remove the apparent dissimilarity in other words which at first seemed totally irreconcilable. Let those who are inclined to speak disparagingly of the strict observance of phonetic rules in tracing the history of Aryan words, and who consider it mere pedantry to be restrained by Grimm's Law from identifying such words as Latin cura and care, Greek kalein and to call, Latin peto and to bid, Latin corvus and crow, look to the progress that has been made by African and Polynesian philologists in checking the wild spirit of etymology even where they have to deal with dialects never reduced as yet to a fixed standard by the influence of a national literature, never written down at all, and never analysed before by grammatical science. The whole of the first volume of Dr. Bleek's 'Comparative Grammar of the South African Languages' treats of Phonology, of the vowels and consonants peculiar to each dialect, and of the changes to which each letter is liable in its passage from one dialect into another (see page 82, seq.). And Mr. Hale, in the seventh volume of the United States Exploring Expedition' (p. 232), has not only given a table of the regular changes which words common to the numerous Polynesian languages undergo, but he has likewise noted those permutations which take place occasionally only. On the strength of these phonetic laws once established, words which have hardly one single letter in common have been traced back with perfect certainty to one and the same source. DIALECTIC REGENERATION. But mere phonetic decay will not account for the differences between the Polynesian dialects, and unless we admit the process of dialectic regeneration to a much greater extent than we should be justified in doing in the Aryan and Semitic families, our task of reconciliation would become hopeless. Will it be believed that since the time of Cook five of the ten simple numerals in the language of Tahiti have been thrown off and replaced by new ones? This is, nevertheless, the fact. Two was rua; it is now piti. Eight was varu; it is now vau ̧1o It is clear that if a radical or monosyllabic language, like Chinese, begins to change and to break out in independent dialects, the results must be very different from those which we observe in Latin as split up into the Romance dialects. In the Romance dialects, however violent the changes which made Portuguese words to differ from French, there always remain a few fibres by which they hang together. It might be difficult to recognise the French plier, to fold, to turn, in the Portuguese chegar, to arrive, yet we trace plier back to plicare, and chegar to the Spanish llegar, the old Spanish plegar, the Latin plicare," here used in the sense of plying or turning towards a place, arriving at a place. But when we have to deal with dialects of Chinese, everything that could possibly hold them together seems hopelessly gone. The United States Exploring Expedition under the command of Charles Wilkes. Ethnography and Philology,' by H. Hale, vol. vii. p. 289. 1 Diez, Lexicon, s. v. llegar; Grammar, i. p. 379. language now spoken in Cochin-China is a dialect of Chinese, at least as much as Norman-French was a dialect of French, though spoken by Saxons at a Norman court. There was a native language of Cochin-China, the Annamitic,32 which forms, as it were, the Saxon of that country on which the Chinese, like the Norman, was grafted. This engrafted Chinese, then, is a dialect of the Chinese which is spoken in China, and it is most nearly related to the spoken dialect of Canton.33 Yet few Chinese scholars. would recognise Chinese in the language of CochinChina. It is, for instance, one of the most characteristic features of the literary Chinese, the dialect of Nankin, or the idiom of the Mandarins, that every syllable ends in a vowel, either pure or nasal.34 In Cochin-Chinese, on the contrary, we find words ending in k, t, p. Thus ten is thap, at Canton chap, instead of the Chinese chi.35 No wonder that the On the native residuum in Cochin-Chinese, see Léon de Rosny, Tableau de la Cochinchine, p. 138. " In the island of Hai-nan there is a distinct approach to the form that Chinese words assume in the language of Annam. Edkins, Mandarin Grammar, p. 87. 34 Endlicher, Chinesische Grammatik, p. 53, 78, 96. 35 Léon de Rosny, Tableau de la Cochinchine, p. 295. He gives as illustrations :- Annamique. Cantonnaís. Peking. He likewise mentions double consonants in the Chinese as spoken in Cochin-China, namely, bl, dy, ml, ty, tr; also f, r, s. As final consonants he gives ch, k, m, n, ng, p, t (p. 296). The Rev. J. Edkins, in his Mandarin Grammar, shows that in Chinese ancient and modern sounds differ, just as the dialects in modern times of two places distant from each other: p. 268 283. early missionaries described the Annamitic as totally distinct from Chinese. One of them says: When I arrived in Cochin-China, and heard the natives speak, particularly the women, I thought I heard the twittering of birds, and I gave up all hope of ever learning it. All words are monosyllabic, and people distinguish their significations only by means of different accents in pronouncing them. The same syllable, for instance, daï, signifies twenty-three entirely different things, according to the difference of accent, so that people never speak without singing.'36 This description, though somewhat exaggerated, is correct in the main, there being six or eight musical accents or modulations in this as in other monosyllabic tongues, by which the different meanings of one and the same monosyllabic root are kept distinct. These accents form an element of language which we have lost, but which was most important during the primitive stages of human speech." The Chinese language commands no more than about 450 distinct sounds, and with them it expresses between 40,000 and 50,000 words or meanings." These meanings are now kept distinct by means of composition, as in other languages by derivation, but in the radical stage words with more than twenty significations would have bewildered the hearer entirely, without some hints to indicate their actual intention. Such hints were given by different intonations. We have something left of this faculty in the tone of our sentences. We distinguish an interro See Beaulieu, Mémoire sur l'Origine de la Musique, 1863. |