The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic StudyKeary, C. F. (Charles Francis)
History
The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study
Keary, C. F. (Charles Francis)
Archaeology; History, Ancient; Mythology
Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone through the
stage of forming meaningless words, and is therefore possessed of words
of both classes. They no longer say ‘head-of-rock’ or ‘foot-of-rock,’
but ‘rock-on’ and ‘rock-under.’ But there are still known languages in
which almost every syllable is a word, and where grammar properly
speaking is scarcely needed. For grammar, if we come to consider it
exactly, is the explanation of the meaning of those added syllables or
letters which have lost all natural meaning of their own. If each part
of the word were as clear and as intelligible as ‘rock-on’ we should
have no need of a grammar at all. A language of this sort is called a
monosyllabic or a radical language, not because the people only speak
in monosyllables, but because each word, however compound, can be split
up into monosyllables or _roots_, which have a distinctly recognizable
meaning. ‘Ant-hill-on’ or ‘love-was-I,’ are like the words of such a
language.
[Sidenote: Agglutinative language.]
The next stage of growth is where the meaning of the added parts has
been lost sight of, except when it is connected with the word which it
modifies; but where the essential word has a distinct idea by itself,
and without the help of any addition. Suppose, for instance, through
ages of change the ‘was I’ in our imaginary example got corrupted into
‘wasi,’ where _wasi_ had no meaning by itself, but was used to express
the first person of the past tense. The first person past of love would
be ‘love-wasi,’ of move ‘move-wasi,’ and so on, ‘wasi’ no longer having
a meaning by itself, but ‘love’ and ‘move’ by themselves being perfectly
understandable. Or, to take an actual declension from a Turanian
language,--
_bakar-im_ I regard,
_bakar-sin_ thou regardest,
_bakar_ he regards,
_bakar-iz_ we regard,
_bakar-siniz_ you regard,
_bakar-lar_ they regard,
where, as we see, the root remains entirely unaffected by the addition
of the personal pronoun.
A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative stage,[25]
because certain grammatical endings (like ‘wasi’) are merely as it were
glued on to a root to change its meaning, while the root itself remains
quite unaffected, and means neither less nor more than it did before.
[Sidenote: Inflected language.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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