less determined. The history of languages is hut the continual
march from synthesis towards analysis. Everywhere one beholds a
first idiom giving place to a vulgar tongue, that does not constitute,
to speak correctly, a different idiom, hut which is a vernacular in its
second phasis, that is, at a period more analytical. Whilst the
primitive tongue is overloaded with flexions in order to express the
more delicate relations of thought, richer in images if perhaps poorer
in ideas, the modern dialect is clearer, more explicit, — separating
that which the ancients crowded together; breaking up the mechanisms
of the ancient tongue so as to give to each idea, and to each
relation, its isolated expression.
And here let not the expressions he confounded with the words.
The ivords, otherwise called the elements, that enter into the expression,
are short, generally monosyllabic, furnished nearly all with
short vowels or with simple consonants; but these words disappear
in the expressions within which they enter;—one does not seize them
more than can the eye, in the color green, distinguish the blue and
yellow. The composing words are pressed (imbricated, to speak with
botanists), to such degree, that one might call them, according to
the comparison of J a c o b G r im m , blades of herbage in a grass-plot.
And that which .takes place, for the composition of the expressions,
happens also as regards the pronunciation of the words that so stringently
cling to them, viz: the same simplicity of sounds, inasmuch
as the expression must nevertheless allow all the parts of its organism
to be seized. “ No primitive tongue,” writes M. J a c o b G r im m ,
in his memoir on the origin of speech, “ possesses a duplication of
consonant. This doubling arises solely from the gradual assimilation
of different consonants.” At the secondary epoch there appear the
diphthongs and breakages (brisements); whereas the tertiary is characterized
by softenings and by other alterations in the vowels.
Above all, it is the Sanscrit which has made evident these curious
laws of the gradual transformation of languages. The Sanscrit, with
its admirable richness of grammatical forms, its eight cases, its six
moods,—its numerous terminations and its varied forms enouncing,
alongside of the principal idea, a host of accessory notions—was eminently
suited to the study of the growth and decline of a tongue. At
its début, in the Rig-veda, the language appears with this synthetic
character; these continual inversions, these complex expressions that
we just now signalized as conditions in the primordial exercise of
thought. Afterwards follows the Sanscrit of the grand epopees of
India. The language had then acquired more suppleness, whilst
preserving, nevertheless, the rigidity of its pristine processes: but
soon the grammatical edifice becomes decomposed. The Pali, which
corresponds to its first age of alteration, is stamped with a remarkable
spirit of analysis. “The laws that presided over the formation
ofbthis tongue,” writes E u g é n e B u r n o u f , 4 “ are those of which the
application is discernible in other-idioms, at diverse epochas and in
very different countries. These laws are general, inasmuch as they
are necessary. Let the Latin, in fact, be compared with the languages
which are derived from it; the ancient Teutonic dialects
with the tongues of the same origin; the ancient Greek with the
modern; the Sanscrit with the numerous popular dialects of India;
and the same principles will be seen to develop themselves, the same
laws to be applicable. The organic inflections of the mother tongues
subsist in part, but in an evident state of alteration. More generally
they disappear, and are replaced; the cases by particles, the tenses
by auxiliary verbs. These processes vary from one tongue to
another, but the principle remains the same. It is always analysis,
whether a synthetical language finds itself suddenly spoken by barbarians
who, not understanding the structure, suppress and replace
its inflexions; or whether, abandoned to its own course, and by dint
of being cultivated, it tends towards decomposition, and to subdivide
the signs representative of ideas and of the relations themselves.”
The Prakrit, which represents the secondary age of’alteration in
ancient tongues, is submitted to the same analogies. On the one
hand, it is less rich; on the other, simple and more facile. Finally,
the Kawi, ancient idiom of Java, is a corruption of the Sanscrit;
wherein this language, deprived of its inflexions, has taken in their
place the prepositions and the vernacular dialects of that island.
These three tongues, themselves formed through derivation from the
Sanscrit, soon undergo the same lot as their mother: they become,
each in its turn, dead, learned, and sacred languages,—the Pali, in
the iBle of Ceylon and in Indo-China; the Prakrit among the Djainas;
the Kawi in the islands of Java, Bali and Madoura; and in their
place arise in India dialects more popular still, the tongues G-ours,
Hindee, Qashmerian, Bengalee, the dialect of Guzerat, the Mahratta,
&c., together with the other vulgar idioms of Hindostán, of which
the system is far less learned.5
Languages of the regions intermediary between India and the
Caucasus offer, in their relation and affiliation, differences of the
same order. At the more ancient periods appear the Zend and the
Parsi, bound together through a close .relationship with the Sanscrit,
but corresponding to two different developments of the faculty of
* Essai sur le Pali, par E. B urnouf e t Chr. Lassen.
6 Ernest R enan, Op. cit., “ de l ’origine du lan g a g e ,” p. 22.