has penetrated into Bussia as far as the mouths of the
Volga. The brilliant and terrible history of the Mon-
gols, to-day an exhausted race, has given them a pre-
eminence which is not justified by the organisation of
their language. Mongolian has, however, like Mandchu,
a written character and a literature. What a contrast
between its present obscurity and the tumult of the
multitudes led by Zenghis Khan to the conquest of the
world !

From the foot of the Altai' Mountains a torrent of
disciplined hordes under Zenghis Khan spread east-
ward over China and deposed the Yuan dynasty, which
Marco Polo had seen in all its power. In the west it



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Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia, 103

overthrew the Caliphs of Bagdad and the Saltans of
Iconium, reached Moscow, and wasted the greater part
of Russia, which remained during two centuries under
the domination of the Golden Horde ; invaded Poland,
Moravia, Silesia, Hungary (1240-41), and was only
stayed by the combined armies of the Germans and
Slavs. In the fourteenth century the Mongols, rallied
by Timour, reconquered Asia. Finally, from Bactri^na,
where a Mongol dynasty had established itself, Baber
came down to the conquest of India, and founded there
the Mogul Empire. But now the Mongols have to
vegetate as the subjects of the nations of which they
were once the masters — of the Mandchu rulers of China,
of the Czars of Russia, and of the Sultans of Turkey.
They once were free of soul ; superstitious doubtless,
they were not bowed beneath the yoke of any religion.
But they have long been Mussulman or Buddhist; their
part is played out.

We pass to the fourth branch, which has done the
world no less harm than the preceding one. The
region which it still covers with its shade is of vast
extent ; it stretches from the river Lena and the Arctic
Ocean to the Mediterranean. The Turkish family, the
Hiung-nu and the Tukiu of Chinese writers, the Turan-
ians so dreaded by the ancient Persians, were already
known and feared two centuries before our era. Their
warlike character, and their constant attacks upon the
Mongols, who were a nomadic and pastoral people, con-
tributed most certainly to precipitate upon the west all
those invasions which destroyed the ancient civilisa-
tions and constituted at length modem Europe. Even
a brief summary of the history of the innumerable
tribes — Tatars, Turcomans, Seljuks, Ottomans — ^which
belong to this family would take us too far from our



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104 Distribution of Languages and Races,

present subject. The Turkish race is divided into five
principal branches, to which are attached a number of
dialects. The most northerly, scattered among the
Tongouses and near to the Bouriates, is represented by
Yakout, which is remarkable for the purity which it
owes to its long isolation ; it is spoken by hardly more
than 20,000 people. Farther west the Cossack Kirghis
stretch to the Sea of Aral and the Caspian, and to the
south of these and on their left, in Chinese Turkestan,
towards Kashgar, lie the black Kirghis or Bouroutes.
Tchouvache, spoken in Russia in the south-west of
Khazan and in the neighbourhood of Simbirsk, is
classed with these dialects. The Kirghis came origin-
ally from the district which lies between the Tenissei
and the Obi ; their kinsmen and near neighbours were
the Nogais, of whom the remnant (50,000 in number)
now inhabit Astrakhan and a few districts between the
Caspian and the Black Sea, near Azof, in the Crimea,
and towards the Caucasus. Nogaic, with its Cauca-
sian dialect Koumouk, is the language of the Eussian
Tatars. Better known and cultivated is Ouigour,
with its Djataic and Turcoman varieties; it boasts a
literature which dates from the fifth century of the
Christian era; it has been recently studied by Pa vet
de Courteille and M. Barbier de Meynard. The Bib-
lioth^ue Nationale has a manuscript with illuminations
in this language, which is of great value. Finally, the
most celebrated, and from some points of view the
most perfect, of the Turkish idioms, Osmanli or Otto-
man, originally from Khorassan, carried by the Sel-
jukian bands into Asia Minor, and by the heirs of
Othman to Constantinople, Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunis,
is the language of about thirty millions of people, who
inhabit ancient Bactriana, Media, Asia Minor, Thracia,



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Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 105

and some of the Greek islands. Osmanli, which has
gathered on its route a great number of Persian and
Arabic words, is making some effort to return to its
native purity, which is happily preserved among the
Oriental Turks, and, even in Europe, in the speech of
the populace. It is, as we have already said, a very
attractive language, from the harmony of its vowels,
the wealth of its verbal categories, and the regularity
of its grammar.

But even the Turkish branch hardly equals in abun-
dance and in interest the Finnish or Finno-Hungarian
family, which can boast of two literatures, valuable on
more than one count — the Suomi literature and the
Magyar literature. Suomi is the language of Finland ;
Magyar is the idiom of Hungary. The latter is the
more fortunate brother of the Ostiac (20,000) and
Vogoul (7000) dialects of Siberia ; the former, primus
inter pares, is the type of the Finnish peoples which
extend westward from the Obi and the Ural : Votiacs
(200,000), Zyrienes (80,000), Permians (60,000) ;
Finno-Lapps, Finlanders of the Volga, Mordvines
(700,000), Tcheremisses (200,000), confused with the
Tchouvaches and the Nogais ; Karelians, scattered
from the White Sea to the Lake of Ladoga ; Suomis
(to the number of 2,000,000) in the greater part of
Finland; Tchoudes, Vepses, and Votes, round Lake
Onega ; Crevines in Oourland ; Estes on the southern
coast of the Gulf of Finland (Revel, Dorpat) ; finally,
Livonians, reduced to a few square miles by the pres-
sure of Lithuanians, Germans, and Russians. The
Finnish languages are spoken by about 3,300,000
people ; the Hungarian by perhaps 6,000,000 ; but
they have evidently covered an immense extent of
territory.



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io6 Distribution of Languages and Races.

The primitive union of the Finno-Hungarian group
admits of no doubt ; here, as in each of the other
divisions of the Uralo-Altaic family, we find words
which testify to an original form common to all the
subdivisions of that family ; fish is kola in Suomi,
guolU in Lapp, leal in Mordvin, hul in Vogoul, lial in
Magyar. Hand is hat in Vogoul, hate, het, or hed in
Suomi, Lapp, Tcheremisse, and Ostiac, Msi, cdiZy hez,
in Vepse, Este, Livonian, and Magyar. The slight
differences of sound which distinguish these variants
perhaps indicate the method of procedure in inflected
languages ; born of the encounter of several dialects,
they may have made use of the variants which thus
occurred.

Another proof of the unity of the Finnish group is
found in the collection in one poem (as was doubtless
the case with the Iliad) of episodes gathered by Lonn-
rot, not in Finland only, but throughout the north and
east of Russia. This mosaic constitutes, in truth, the
epic of a race; it relates the exploits accomplished by
the heroes of Kaleva against the Magicians and the
monsters of Pohja, that is to say, no doubt, the strife
of invaders from the East with either the inoffensive
Lapps who had preceded them, or against the savage
aborigines, those Fenni, destitute of laws, of chiefs, and
even of gods, of whom Tacitus had heard, whose name
the conquering Suomis took together with their ter-
ritory.

The Magyar literature is richer, more European, and
more ancient, but less original than the legendary
cycle of the Suomi Cantelar and Kaleva. The two
languages are of equal merit. Suomi loves to multiply
its vowels ; Magyar makes a greater use of contrac-
tions. Both are remarkable for the richness of their



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Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 107

conjugation ; they surpass even Turkish in this respect.
All the Finnish dialects can incorporate the accusative
of the third person into the verb : I see him, I touch
him, is said in a single word. Magyar and Vogoul
incorporate the pronoun of the second person : I love
thee, he loves thee. Mordvin does the same with the
pronoun of the first person. Basque goes yet farther,
and engulfs evqn the dative with the verb : I give it
thee. These expedients are not to be envied, and may
cause inconvenient pleonasms ; but they imply a cer-
tain ingenuity in the peoples which have not got
beyond agglutination.

Can the relationship which is traceable between the
dialects of each branch of the Altaic family be shown
to exist between the five branches ? Not in the pre-
sent state of our knowledge. Nevertheless, it is pro-
bable that races which are as near neighbours and as
mixed as the Tongouses, the Bouriates, the Yakoutes,
the Samoyeds, and the Vogouls have spoken kindred
dialects. But the similarities which it is as yet pre-
mature to seek in their vocabularies appear numerous
and unmistakable in their syntax and their methods of
suffixing. It is especially curious to note in almost all
the members of the family (except the Samoyeds) a
tendency which has become more and more marked as
the development of the intelligence demanded greater
order and precision. It is difficult not to suppose
that when the same phenomenon, vowel harmony,
manifests itself at once, separately, in thirty different
languages, all originating in the same region, but since
scattered in various quarters — it is, I say, difficult not
to suppose that these languages have received from a
common original this latent disposition, which only
becomes manifest at a certain stage of growth, like



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io8 Disti'ibution of Languages and Races.

those resemblances to some ancestor which may be
unperceived in the children of a family, and become
evident as they grow up to manhood.

Vowel harmony is a means of marking the subordi-
nation of the suffix to the root ; its principle is that
the vowel of the suffix should reflect the vowel of the
root ; that the root se.v (Turkish), love, should have for
the infinitive suffix mek, and the root 6a, look, for
infinitive suffix mak ; at^ horse, makes atlar in the
plural ; ev^ house, is evler in the plural. The Uralo-
Altaic vowels, being divided into two classes, open and
shut vowels, it follows that to an open root - vowel
corresponds an open vowel in the suffix, and vice versd.
Certain languages have a third order of vowels, neuters,
which can also harmonise with the open vowel of the
root There are differences in the application of this
law, which is strict or lax in proportion to the degree
of cultivation to which the language has attained ; but,
broadly speaking, the law has obtained for six or seven
centuries in Mandchu, Bouriate, Mongolian, Turkish,
Zyriene, Mordvin, Magyar, and Suomi.

After having defined the narrow but capital distinction
which separates agglutination from monosyllabism —
that is, the change in the suffix — or empty root attached
to the unalterable root syllable, we have considered
three sorts of agglutinative idioms: I. the isolated
languages, of which the vocabulary is without relation
to any other language, Corean, Japanese, or Yamato,
arrested in its development by the Chinese civilisation
and written character ; 2. the poor and remote dialects
of North -Eastern Asia, Kourelien or Ainu, Ghiliak,
Kamtchadale, Koriak, Toukaghir ; 3. a vast family
connected at least by a grammatical relationship,
the Uralo- Altaic family, of which the five branches,



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Agglutinative Idioms of Central Asia. 109

Samoyed, Tongouse, Maodcba, Boriate-Mongol, Turkish,
Finno - Hungarian, are all subdivided into numerous
varieties, which may be respectively referred to a com-
mon type, living or extinct. A few of these languages,
Mandchu, Mongolian, Ouigour, Turkish, Magyar, and
Suomi, have been the expression of literatures more
or less rich, which are often interesting, and worthy of
the part played in the world by the peoples which
speak them.



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CHAPTER III.

THE AGGLUTINATIVE IDIOMS OP
SOUTHERN ASIA,

The Caucasian languages : Tcherkesse group ; Kartvelien or Greorgian
group — The language of the Shumirs or Accadians — Brahui diaJect
— Non-Aryan India : Kol- Aryan group (Djuangs, Birhors, Korvas,
Moundas, Hos, Kharrias, Sonthals) ; Dravidian group — Dravi-
dians of the North : Oraons, Paharyas, Gonds, Khonds — Dra vi-
dians of the Dekkan : dialects spoken by fifty millions of people :
Tulu, Kanara, Tamil, Malayala, Telinga— Dravidian phonetics
and literature.

The violent and tardy incursions of the Uralo- Altaic
peoples have led us far into Europe, and we must now
return upon our steps to complete the chart of the
agglutinative languages of Asia. Let us press along
the northern coast of the Black Sea, where we have
found more than one Tatar or Mongolian group, and
re-enter Asia by the gorges of the Caucasus. It is a
strange region, both from the place which it occupies
in ancient tradition and from the inextricable mixture
of the tribes which inhabit it. This region has had
the honour of bestowing its name, of unknown origin,
upon the whole white race. It contains the mountain
on which, according to Jerome, the Ark of the Deluge
was stayed, Ararat, and the summit on which the ven-
geance of Zeus bound Prometheus, the ravisher of fire ;
and finally, the highest northern summit of the great
chain. Mount Elbruz, as well as the Persian Elbourz
to the south of the Caspian, still bears the name of the



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Aggltiiinative Idioms of Southern Asia, 1 1 1

legendary holy mountain known to the Persians under
the name of Hara - Barazaiti, and to the Greeks as
Berecynth.

The ancient traditions collected in the Bible have
retained for us the former names of the Tuplai or
Tibarenians, of the Muskai or Moschians (inhabitants
of Colchis, Georgia, during the Assyrian and Persian
period), Tubal and Meshech, sons of Japhet, whom the
Jewish sometimes associate with Gomer (the Cimme-
rians), and Togarma, " who comes from the north wind
with all his troops." From the information furnished
by Herodotus, by Hecateus, and by the cuneiform
inscriptions, we gather that the ancients had a very
clear idea of the inhabitants of Armenia, who were
gradually driven back towards the southern slopes of
the Caucasus, and a slighter acquaintance with the
peoples of the other side, Scythians and Cimmerians,
who had, however, more than once invaded and dis-
turbed Asia.

After having been a refuge for more or less com-
pact groups of ancient peoples, driven out and broken
up by better armed races, the Caucasus became a pas-
sage, at least on its eastern and western borders, not
only to the Scythians, those multitudes of unknown
race, doubtless of very mixed blood, who overthrew the
first Chaldean empire, and drove the Hyksos or Shep-
herds on to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, but also for
the vanguard of the Hellenes, the lonians of Lydia
and Phrygia, who transmitted to their descendants, the
fabled Argonauts, a vivid recollection of Colchis ; and
also probably for the future Armenians, who came and
settled precisely within the borders of the ancient
Alarodian or Georgian race at Van, near the great
lake, near the tri- lingual inscriptions, of which a



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112 Distribution of Languages and Races.

Golumn may perhaps enlighten us as to the early forms
of Georgian. Strabo counted in Caucasia seventy
peoples and seventy dialects. The Romans maintained
as many as one hundred and thirty interpreters on the
frontier at Sebastopol. Aboulfeda called the Cau-
casus the mountain of languages. Many of these
languages are in process of extinction, and the com-
parative study of them becomes every day more diffi-
cult. Yet, if we are guided by the information collected
by Klaproth, by Baron Uslar, and by the Russian
Academician Schifner, the classification will not be
very complicated. But we must first carefully exclude
the Armenian of the banks of the Araxes, Ossetan, an
Iranian idiom which has taken refuge in a central
district to the south-east of Elbruz, modern Persian,
and the Tatar or Turkish of Aderbaidjan, which are
all spoken on the south-western coasts of the Caspian,
and also Nogai and Koumouk, which are found at
diffferent parts of the northern basin. We thus isolate
the Caucasian group properly so called, represented to
the north of the Caucasus by the Abazes, the Tcher-
kesses, the Kistes, the Tchetchenes, and the Lesghians
from the Black Sea to Daghestan ; to the south of the
Caucasus, by the Imerethians, Mingrelians, and Lazes,
by the Georgians and Suanians, between the Black
Sea and the middle basin of the Cyrus and of the
A rax (now Koura and Aras). On the maps and in
the geography of Reclus will be found the names of
numerous tribes often very interesting from some
characteristic custom, some ancient belief, from the
beauty of their type, or from their courageous resistance
to the Russian dominion. But from the linguistic
point of view they probably belong to one or other of
the two divisions which we mentioned above.



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Agglutinative Idioms of Soutkern Asia. 1 1 3

It is doubtful whether the whole of the northern
or Circassian group has a common origin; it has been
so disorganised, so nearly obliterated, by the Russian
conquest, that I doubt if it now comprises a million
individuals. The Tcherkesse nation, which was Mussul-
man, has almost all dispersed, and has been replaced
by Slavs and Germans. A few Tcherkesse legends
have been collected ; the language is hard, remarkable
for certain sounds which are peculiar to it, and for
the incorporation of the suffixes of number.

The southern or Kartvelian group, early converted
to Christianity, remains intact though not independent,
to the number of one or two millions in the neighbour-
hood of Koutais and Tiflis. It corresponds geographi-
cally to the Colchis and Iberia of the ancients. Its
principal dialect, Georgian, has an alphabet. Cultivated
in the Middle Ages, it belongs, like Circassian, to the
aggl utinative class. It was probably akin to the language
of the Aghovanik or Albanians, which disappeared
completely in the fifteenth century, leaving no traces
in writing of its existence. The Georgian chronicles
have been translated into French by M. Brosset. The
names Iberians and Albanians, Georgians, Suanians, and
Kartvelians require some explanation. The two first,
which must not be confounded with the Albanians of
Epirus and the Iberians of Spain, are somewhat ancient.
Albanian — Alwank in Armenian — is mentioned in the
time of Alexander. Iberian, through the forms Wirq^ in
Armenian, Avir in Pehlevi, 'AjSezjOe9 in Greek, goes back
to a form ^a^eipoi, ^acnripeg, given by Herodotus. The
Saspires made part of the army of Xerxes. Georgian
comes from the name of the saint chosen for patron
by the Iberians. Kartvelian, Kartouli, is really a
national name ; Karthlos, the eponymous hero of the



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1 14 Distribution of Languages and Races.

race, was the son of Thargamos (the Togarma of the
Bible), son of Japhet.

Whence came these languages, which it is rash to
class together in one Caucasian family, and of which
the vocabulary forbids any attempt to bring them
into relations with the other agglutinative idioms?
Whence came these peoples, this handsome race, similar
in feature to the Iranian type, who were established
in the neighbourhood of the Caucasus long before
the development of the. Assyrian Semites, before
the arrival of the first Indo-European migrations?
These questions, like many others, must remain un-
answered. I have sometimes thought that they were
pre- Aryans — that is to say, a white race akin to those
who wandered on the other side of the Caspian, on
the banks of the Jaxartes and the Oxus, and separated
from these before the appearance, at first quite local,
of inflexion and the Indo-European mother-tongue;
they would have remained at the agglutinative stage,
protected by their mountains from the influence of a
more advanced linguistic system.

M. Lenormant connected them rather with the
ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia and Chaldea, not
by race however, but by language. In his view, the
inscriptions deciphered with great difticulty at Van,
which belong undoubtedly to the pre- Armenian tongue
of the peoples of Mount Ararat, Urarti, or Alarodians,
might serve as connecting link between the Georgian
dialects, the Caucasian, and the more ancient idioms
of Babylonia.

At the present day the obscurity which hung over
the origins of Chaldea has been, if not dissipated, at
least considerably diminished, thanks to the discoveries
of those great cuneiform scholars Rawlinson and Oppert.



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Agglutinative Idioms of Southern Asia. 1 1 5

An insight which is truly marvellous has been able
to reconstruct, not altogether without gaps, but from
authentic documents, the military, social, and intel-
lectual history of the valleys of the Tigris and the
Euphrates, from at least twenty centuries before our
era. Names and dates have thus been recovered
which had been much altered by the Hebrew writers,
who were, nevertheless, so nearly akin to the Baby-
lonians both in race and language. It has been found
possible to separate the personal observations re-
corded by Herodotus from the fables which the
credulous historian set down on the faith of ignorant
or duped interpreters — the stories, for instance, of Belus,
Ninus, and Semiramis. Finally, side by side with
a Semitic dialect which belongs to the central branch,
midway between Aramaean and Arab, a language
which abounds under the chisel of the scribes of
Sennacherib and of Assourbanipal, MM. Oppert., Lenor-
mant, and Schmidt think they have discovered, and
established beyond a doubt, in spite of the strenuous
opposition of M. J. Hal^vy, the presence of another
language, anterior to the idiom of the Semitic con-
querors, and so vigorous that it was long the oflScial
language of the kings of Babylon and Nineveh, and
that it still may be found on many inscriptions, over
against the Assyrian text, in the manner of transla-
tion or commentary. Some scholars have denied the
existence of this language, which is markedly agglu-
tinative, and of which several philologists have written
the grammar; it has been represented as an error in
the deciphering, as a form, either archaic or symbolical,
hieratic, so to speak, of ordinary Assyrian. I am not
qualified to take a side in this debate, but whatever
may be the truth about this second language found on



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i 1 6 Distribution of Languages and Races.

the Chaldean inscriptions, whether we should consider
it, with M. Hal^vy, to be cryptographic, Shumirian with
M. Oppert, or Accadian with Lenormant, there is one
point which admits of no doubt whatever, and that is
the existence of the peoples to whom it is attributed.
The Shumirs and the Accadians mentioned in the
Bible are invariably mentioned in the oflScial formulary :
king of the Shumir and of the Accadians is a'constant
title of the Assyrian monarchs. In Elam, in Chaldea,
in Babylonia, they form the bulk of the population;
we must, therefore, recognise in them the predecessors
and the educators of the Kaldi (the Kasdim of the
Bible), of the Kissi or Kossei or Kushites (whom
M. Maspero identifies with the Oriental Ethiopians
of Homer) ; finally, the Canaanites, Aramaeans, and
Assyrians, all Semites, and speaking Semitic dialects.
The antiquity of the Accado-Shumirian settlements
is clearly demonstrated by the flint implements, arrow-
heads, axes, and hammers found in their burying-places,
together with utensils of bronze and ornaments of gold
and iron. To them may be attributed a considerable
share in the invention of the cosmogonies, the obscene
forms of worship, and the talismanic superstitions which
are so widely spread in the East ; and it is also from
them that the Semites received the deplorable cunei-
form character, afterwards adopted by the Hittites of
Syria, by the Cypriotes, by the Armenians, and by
the Persians.

The cuneiform character, which seems to be com-
posed of wedges, nails, and arrow-heads, results from
the alteration and abbreviation of imitative figures.
Its use, wonderful to relate, was prolonged as late as
the first century of our era. " Some of these signs,"