energies of infant peoples. The first shock took place
in 490 B.C. A few thousands of Athenians arrested
at Marathon the hosts of Darius. A second and more
terrible invasion laid waste Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica ;
Athens perished in the flames. Greece, united to face
the common danger, crushed the forces of Asia by sea
and land at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. These
were the critical moments of history. Montesquieu
says : " Who would be a Persian ? " We should have
had to submit to that fate but for the courage and
the fortune of the Hellenes. . But the Persians had
nevertheless their hour of grandeur, and if they never
recovered the power of which Alexander deprived
them, their bravery in war and the influence of their
religious doctrines more than once had their effect on
their Graeco- Roman rivals.
In this rapid sketch of the Indo-European group,
we have sought to draw attention to two important
truths : first, that to this group (whatever may be its
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76 Distribution of Languages and Races,
ethnical elements), the only one wliich has hitherto
shown itself capable of indefinite progress, has be-
longed for more than a thousand years the leadership
of the human race ; secondly, that the superiority of
the Indo-European tongues is inseparable from the
pre-eminence of the peoples which speak them ; that
before them the agglutinative languages and the
already inflected idioms of the Semites gave way.
This succession is thus in perfect accord with modern
theories of the evolution of language.
Here China intervenes. To the seven or .eight
hundred millions of men (six hundred in the Indo-
European group alone) who speak inflected languages,
China opposes the motionless and compact mass of
monosyllabism, a form of language which has sufficed
from time immemorial to about five hundred millions
of human beings, who have attained by themselves to
a certain degree, sometimes a high degree, of civilisa-
tion. This is a fact which must be recognised and
explained, and its causes and consequences set forth.
The traditions of China authorise us to seek the
cradle of the Chinese race on the eastern boundary of
the great table-land which is connected on the north
with the Celestial and Altai mountains, and on the
south by the Karakoram range with the formidable
chain of the Himalayas. Separated from the Western
world by this vast barrier, ignorant of and unknown
to the races on whom they turned their backs, they
multiplied and extended towards the east, some cross-
ing the great desert of Gobi and the thick forests
of Chan-si, the others passing down the twin valleys
of the Hoang-ho and the Yang-tse-kiang. There
can be no doubt that they found and drove out
earlier populations, whose survivors bear the name of
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The Spread of Inflected Langjmges. 7 7
Miao-tse, " raw or cooked," according as they retained
or lost their independence. Moreover, the race is by
no means unmixed; the types of Fou-kien and of
Canton, in spite of the uniformity of costume and of
the universal pigtail (adopted only 250 years ago),
differ markedly from the inhabitants of the centre and
south. Numerous kingdoms, often rivals, afterwards
united in a sort of feudal hierarchy, became fused at
last into an immense empire, the second in extent
after that of modern Russia, under the paternal
government of a semi-god, a son of heaven, the father
and the niiother of his subjects. This whole organisa-
tion had taken shape and become stereotyped before
the Christian era, without any external influence, with-
out any communication with the rest of Asia. The
Chinese had invented for themselves alone and to their
own taste, all the arts and industries, all the methods
of agriculture, of working in metals, of making pottery.
No civilisation was ever more original, more isolated
or more precocious. After having passed through the
Stone Age, to which the words chi-faOy chi-tsien, chi-
Men, chi'jin, chi-fou, ** knife, point, sword, tool, axe, of
stone,'* still testify, the Age of Bronze, then of Iron,
they have become for ever fixed in the same morality,
the same devotion to ancestors and genii. Centuries
have passed, and neither the intrusion of Buddhism
and Islam, nor the Mongol devastations, neither the
Manchu revolution nor the violent and successful in-
cursions of modern days, have appreciably modified the
manners and the genius of China. To a passably
educated Chinaman, the Barbarian world is veiled in
a mist, in which a few and soon effaced outlines can
barely be distinguished ; and when, at rare intervals,
a band of priests or of soldiers comes to convince him
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yS Distribution of Languages and Races.
of the existence of that rum-ego which is called France,
England, or Germany, he attaches no more importance
to it than the field-laboarer to a passing hail-shower.
Even those who have visited onr lands retain as the
impression of onr civilisation only a vague wonder and
a more definite mistmst.
China herself, in the same way, in spite of the
commercial relations between the Romans and the
Seri, in spite of the narratives of the Arabs and of
Marco Polo, notwithstanding wars, journeys, and scien-
tific expeditions, China is for Western Asia and Europe
merely a confused mass in which can be distinguished
for a moment, only to be lost again ia the oblivion of
indifference, the names of a few Emperors and philoso-
phers, scattered over an ocean of four thousand years.
Silk, tea, porcelain, and enamels : with these we have
from China all that the West cares about. Printing,
gunpowder, decimal notation, an independent morality,
and the art of government, these things we had dis-
covered for ourselves. China has nothing to teach us
now ; she has done nothing for us in the past. Had
she never existed, the web of history, the long record
of human existence, would never have shown at any
point of its course the traces of any gap or failurjB. This
isolation will doubtless cease, but is it not in itself an
all-sufficient reason for Chinese conservatism? And
as concerns the language, a special obstacle may be
mentioned — a written character almost as ancient as
monosyllabism itself, which, adapted to the monosyl-
labic form, has preserved it from all alteration.
** According to tradition," says M. Vinson, "the
first characters were rude drawings of material objects :
a circle with a dot in the centre signified the sun ; a
vertical stroke with two lines on either side at an
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The Spread of Inflected Languages. 79
angle indicated a tree ; and so on. To express com-
plex ideas, several of these symbols were taken together ;
the signs for sun and moon together represented light ;
those for woman, hand, and broom meant a married
womap; to hear was rendered by the signs for ear
and door ; to follow, by three symbols for man, placed
one after the other. Then certain symbols were taken
of which the pronunciation only without the meaning
survived. P!^, white, together with the sign tret took
the sense of cypress; fan, with earth or mountain^
meant dyke. There are about 169 of these signs
which have become phonetic, and of which many are
no longer employed singly. The Chinese characters
often have variants borrowed from an earlier period, a
system now out of date ; the written character has, in
effect, varied since the date, 2950 B.C. according to
the legend, when Foa-hi invented the pictorial char-
acter. These variations have been classed into six
diflferent styles. In the ordinary style the characters
retain little of the ideograms as originally drawn;
they are composed of strokes of which the number
allows of an artificial classification of the vocabulary.
There are 214 type words, called keys: six formed
with one stroke, twenty -three with two strokes, and so
on up to seventeen strokes. But this classification
varies according to the grammarians. It is said that
these artifices allow as many as 43,496 words to be
written, all monosyllabic or compounds of monosyllables,
of which about one-third compose the ordinary current
vocabulary." I have heard it said that an educated
Chinaman could not boast of knowing how to read
before he reached the age of forty years or more. It
may be imagined how great a part caligraphy plays
in Chinese education. It is astounding that such a
Digitized by VjOOQIC
8o Distribution of Languages and Races.
system of writing should have been adopted also by
the Japanese and the Annamites. The Chinese char-
acter is written in vertical columns, or, if necessary,
horizontally from right to left.
The language is not nearly so alarming as the writ-
ing, but use alone can teach it, since memory is not
aided by grammar or by derivation. To complete the
indications given in the chapter on vocabulary, we
refer the student to the Linguistique of Hovelacque
and to the Bictionnaire des Sciences Anth7*opologiques ;
and pass on to give some supplementary information.
The language is by no means homogeneous and uni-
form. Not only does the Chinese of the educated class
diflPer from that of the peasant, of the sailor, of the arti-
san or the trader, but each region has its dialect. There
is more diflference between the speech of the different
provinces than between the various patois of France ;
so much so that, according to M. Hovelacque, the
Government officials sent to serve in the provinces of
Fou-kien or of Canton, cannot, unless natives of the
district, get on without interpreters. The speech of
Canton is that of the south, the dialect of Fou-kien
extends a little farther to the north along the coast
and to the neighbouring islands ; in the central pro-
vinces of the empire, at Pekin and Nankin, the Man-
darin dialect prevails, which is the language of a
wide tract of country, and also the oflScial and literary
language of the whole empire.
The three principal dialects are distinguished chiefly
by the sound. The letters &, d, and g exist only in the
language of Fou-kien. (All the g's so largely used in
transliteration, tsong^ tsieng, chang, represent merely
a nasal reinforcement of the vowel.) The Mandarin
language omits in pronunciation the initial compound
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The Spread of Inflected Languages. 8 1
ng ; nga, ngo, ng4y ngan, are prononnced a, o, S, an ; k,
followed by i, Ma, kio, km, which remains hard in
the south, has become ts in the north, tsia, tsio, tsiu.
Nothing is more common than such variations ; they
exist in every group of languages.
We have just seen that the g is unknown to literary
Chinese ; in fact, every word in it is composed of an
initial consonant or spirant and a vowel, simple or
nasalised : ta, great ; fu, father ; mu, mother ; yuan,
distant ; jin, man ; hiung, elder, &c. A single and
very doubtful exception to this rule is the word which
signifies "two" and "ears" : etd, ulh, iirh, rh; the vowel
seems here to precede the consonant, but the sound
is confused and difficult to transcribe ; it is an eflFort
towards the pure liquid r, which the Chinese do not
possess. They write and pronounce France, for ex-
ample, Folan-td,
In the dialects of Canton and Fou-kien, the short
words may be terminated by a strong explosive con-
sonant, A, t, or p. There are in all the dialects short
words and long, of which the quantity depends on the
accent or tone. These tones, invented to distinguish
between syllables of the same sound but of very diverse
meaning, number eight in Fou-kien, five in the Man-
darin dialect ; at Pekin there are but four, three long
and one short. These accents increase the number of
roots from 450toi250. It will be seen that in tliis
system, deprived of the aid of suffixes, the raw material
of language is of the poorest. It is only by a marvel-
lous ingenuity that the Chinese have been able, with-
out other resource than apposition, to acquire 40,000
signs, that is to say, 40,000 ideas, and to apply
their imperfect instrument to every style — philosophy,
morals, history, poetry, and the drama. But to us
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82 Distribution of Languages and Races.
Europeans it seems that this ingenuity is displayed at
the expense of perspicuity, logical composition, and
also of inspiration. The thought of the Chinese, like
their art, lacks perspective ; either it is stifled beneath
a mass of detail, which is not properly subordinate to
the whole, or, considering the whole as through a sort
of fog, it loses its sense of reality ; it is either trite,
diffuse, and prosaic, or incoherent and unreal. The
chronicles are interminable ; the enumerations are in-
congruous; poetical imagination weak, and its form
disfigured by mannerisms. Science is inaccessible,
not indeed to the mind of the Chinese, but to their
language and writing, and they cannot renounce these
without losing all their past history.
The dominion of the Chinese language is limited on
the north by Corean, Mandchu, and Mongolian, agglu-
tinative languages ; in the south it is found along the
Indo-Chinese coast in the commercial centres, where it
contends with Malay.
Though the type of the monosyllabic languages,
Chinese is not the only one ; Annamife, Siamese, Bur-
mese, and Thibetan are other examples. The countries
where these languages are spoken are, however, but
outlying parts of the great Chinese empire, to which
they have been at times united by vassalage or alliance.
They are a part of that great slice of Asia which in-
clines towards the east, and turns away from the rest
of humanity, the only portion of the globe where this
fossil language could be protected in its growth. The
hereditary tendency to monosyllabism must have been
very strong to resist influences and conquests which
left China intact, but which were not wanting to Thibet
and Indo-China. Buddhist missionaries established
their principal sect in Thibet, and have reigned there for
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The Spread of Inflected Languages. 83
nearly twenty centuriea In the Middle Ages the
Aryans of India founded at Gambodge a flourishing
kingdom and a brilliant civilisation, of which we
admire the ruins at Ang-kor-wat, where learned men,
Bergaigne among others, have deciphered inscriptions
in Sanskrit and Pali ; nevertheless the old type pre-
vailed, and with it the ancient form of language. The
inhabitants of Thibet and Indo-China have inherited
only the worst of legacies from their fugitive civilisa-
tion, a narrowing and childish religion.
Annamite, the language of the eastern portion of
Indo-China and of Tonqirin, has borrowed considerably
from the vocabulary of Southern China, and its written
character, which is figurative and ideographic, is of
Chinese origin, although much modified and developed.
Its syntax corresponds to that of Chinese. The addi-
tion of such terms as male and female, all and many,
to a root syllable, indicates gender and number ; the ad-
jective follows the noun (which it precedes in Chinese) ;
various terms which signify distance, proximity, doubt,
give to the roots the value of verbs, and determine
mood and tense. Six tones, acute, interrogative, as-
cending, descending, grave, equal, serve, as in Chinese,
to diflEerentiate words of which the sound would be
absolutely the same, although the sense is different.
But, in spite of this indebtedness and the similarity of
form, Annamite is a distinct language. The vocabulary,
the monosyllables, which are proper to this 'language,
are purely Annamite, and in no sense Chinese.
Siamese or Thai (spoken on the north and west
coasts of the Gulf of Siam) is separated from the
Annamite by the language of Gambodge, which is yet
unclassed. Siamese is rich in aspirates and sibilants,
and has a written character of Indian origin, but has
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84 Distribution of Languages and Races,
all the marks of monosyllabism — the use of tones (of
which there are four), the absence of grammar, apposi-
tion, and order of words determined by a rigid syntax.
The language of Burmah offers the same characteris-
tics, though it is poorer in sounds and has less variety
of tonea The Burmese empire, which the English
have diminished by four provinces — Arakan, Martaban,
Tenasserim and Pegu — includes a number of tribes of
which the origin is most uncertain, half-breeds of
Hindus and Black Dravidians, of Malays and Negritos,
of Mongoloids and Mois, &c., &c. These groups march
on the north with the peoples of Yunnan, and on the
south with the Siamese or Thai, and on the east with
all the semi-savages of the Me-kong (Mother of Seas),
Laotians, Stiengs, Kouis, Girais, Kharais, which Mouhot,
De Lagr^e, and Gamier have visited and described.
These are the relics of the ancient Gambodge, the
country of the Kams, Kammers, Kmers, who were so
amenable at first, so indifferent afterwards, to the civi-
lisation of the Hindus. These distant and interesting
countries are now become fields of exploration open to
our anthropologists and philologists. But the study
of the methods and organisms of language will derive
little profit from them.
Thibetan, of which we have little to say, owes to
India its rich and precious literature, consisting en-
tirely of translations of Buddhist books (of which the
original is sometimes lost) as well as its alphabet. Its
method of determining case, and mood, or tense are
once again the respective places of the words, and the
association of full roots and empty roots. The inflec-
tions which some have thought to discover in Thibetan
are not more joined to the word than any other root
deprived in part of its primitive sense, and converted
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The Spread of Injlected Languages. 85
into a particle. He who would write a comparative
syntax of the isolating or monosyllabic languages must
forget all such terms as number and gender, mood and
tense, case and person.
After having shown that chronology nowhere goes
far enough back into the past to furnish a basis for
the history of language, we have nevertheless made it
clear that the gradual elimination of the agglutina-
tive to the advantage of the inflected idioms, and espe-
cially the ever-growing expansion of the Indo-European
tongues, which always tend to become more analytic,
coincides with the discoveries of philological analysis.
Yet one great fossil block stands apart, outside, so to
speak, of the current which has deposited the succes-
sive strata of language ; the monosyllabism of Chinese,
Annamite, Siamese, Thibetan, emerges from the depths
of the past. We have pointed out the purely geo-
graphical causes of its survival, and displayed the con-
sequences of the isolation of this group — useless effort,
complication of the written character, atrophy of the
higher functions of the brain, incoherence and petti-
ness of thought. We have noted the fact that these
peoples, who have undoubtedly great gifts, have yet
played next to no part in the history ©f the world and
of civilisation.
Digitized by VjOOQIC
CHAPTER n.
THE AGGLUTINATIVE IDIOMS OF CENTRAL ASIA.
Languages of Corea and of Japan — Ethnical elements of the Corean
and Japanese peoples — Hyperborean group : Alnus, Gbiliaks,
Kamschatkans, Tcbouktches, Youkagbirs — Uralo- Altaic family :
I. Samoyed group ; 2. Tongouse-Mandchu group ; 3. Mongol-
Kalmuck group ; 4. l^irkish group ; 5. Finno- Hungarian group ;
the characters common to the five groups — Vowel h^mony.
In passing from monosyllabism to agglutination, we
have no great distance to traverse. I am not speaking
merely of territorial distance; I mean that between
these two phases, these two linguistic organisms, there
are insensible transitions, the one beginning where the
other ends.
The line of demarcation is so fine that certain
eminent philologists, Max Miiller among the number,
hesitate to class Siamese and Thibetan among the
monosyllabic languages. It may even be said that
absolute monosyllabism exists no longer. The majority
of Chinese words consist of two or three syllables, and
we find agglutinative dialects, more especially in the
Tongouse group, of which the grammar is yet so un-
developed that it has no case or verbal endings. We
need to fix our attention on a positive- and certain
distinction, which I have already indicated, but on
which I must insist further, because, though appar-
ently slight, it is yet the point of departure and the
common characteristic of all the agglutinative lan-
86
Digitized by VjOOQIC
Agglutinative Idioms of Cetitral Asia, 87
guages; it is the change in and gradual atrophy of
the subordinate roots.
The syllables which the Chinese call empty, as
opposed to the full syllables, lose in part their signi-
ficant force, but they retain their form ; the sense is
effaced, the sound remains invariable. The result is
that they can neither form terminations nor serve as a
connecting link between a root and suffixes denoting
case or person. The words, therefore, even when poly-
syllabic, remain sterile, and cannot produce others by
derivation ; no Chinese, Annaraite, or Burmese word
gives birth to a series of verbs, nouns, and adjectives
derived from a common root.
In the agglutinative order, the root, full, or principal
syllable, alone remains invariable ; the subordinate
roots, those which amplify or modify the meaning of
the full syllable, are susceptible of change in form, in
sound, as well as in their primary sense. Sometimes
atrophied by their close connection with the root (a
name which the subordinate roots change for that of
suffix), sometimes with their initial consonant or their
central vowel affected by the influence of the root, they
furnish a certain number of signs, applicable respec-
tively to the different parts of speech, or else they
form with the root an indivisible whole, a new root
or theme, susceptible in its turn of acquiring other
suffixes, and of giving birth to a greater or less number
of derivative terms.
Thus monosyllabism and agglutination have in
common the inalterability of the root or full syllable,
and the alteration in the sense of the subordinate or
empty syllable ; to agglutination alone belongs the
change in the form of the subordinate root. Inflected
languages have, in addition, the power to change the
Digitized by VjOOQIC
88 Distribution of Langttages and Races,
root syllable. From one class to another there is but
one step ; the barrier is so slight that certain peoples
have crossed without knowing it, so imperceptible that
others have not sought to cross it, so decisive never-
theless that it clearly divides the three stages of lan-
guage. There is, I believe, no instance of a language
tending to return to the stage which it has left, and
it is rare that a language abandons that in which
custom and literature have fixed it.
China is the near neighbour, and even the titular
sovereign, of the country of the Mandchus and of the
Eastern Mongols ; she has been conquered by both at
different times, but she has borrowed nothing from
their idioms, which are agglutinative, although poor
specimens of the class, and her own influence is almost
nil, in spite of the ascendency of her superior civilisa-
tion. The Chinese language spreads to the north and
west beyond the great wall, and is spoken in towns
situated in the countries of the Mongols and Mandchus ;
but the natives keep their own idiom, as do the mer-
chants from the " Land of Flowers."
Corea, a mountainous peninsula which juts out be-
tween the Pe-tchili and Japan, was occupied from the
twelfth to the first century B.C. by the Chinese, and
has retained from the language of the conquerors a
number of names of objects, of administrative divisions,
and of occupations of all sorts; its king, still a vassal
of the Chinese emperor, sends a respectful embassy
every year to Pekin to fetch the calendar of the year.
Yet the Coreans have their language, in no way akin
to the Chinese vocabulary, and weakly but certainly
agglutinative from time immemorial. They have also
an alphabet, of Indo-Tbibetan origin it is believed ;
but they do not seem to have profited to any consider-
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Agglufinative Idioms of Central Asia. 89
able extent, any more than the Thibetans or the Siamese,
by the possession of this precious instrument of progress.
The latter have, it is true, been reduced to intellectual
childhood by Buddhism. In Corea, Buddhism is, as
it is in China, at once official and despised, and the
cause which has hitherto retained the country in a