Khoisan languages

“ Around 20 different spoken and written languages have been identified in Xinjiang. The Sino-Tibetan, Altaic, and Indo-European languages still exist in Xinjiang today, and a traditional feature of Xinjiang culture is that different languages are used in daily life. It was common for different ethnic groups to borrow from and use each other’s languages. ”

“ I have met people in the land of Cho-sen, whose cleverness would have been conspicuous in any country, Western or otherwise. When they set their mind to learn something they never cease till their object is attained, and I can vouch for their quick comprehension, even of matters of which they have never before heard. Languages seem to come easy to them, and their pronunciation of foreign tongues is infinitely better than that of their neighbours, the Chinese and the Japanese. ”

“ Consequently the new structure which becomes wholly separate and independent cannot be said to be mixed as a language in the individuated form. No language of this world can coincide with another, for every language has its own separate grammar or structure; but it can be shown that in their growth many languages in India incorporated many foreign elements and had adopted foreign methods of expression. We can only say that no two languages are identical, but as in the case of human races, so in the case of human speeches, absolute purity cannot be thought of. ”

“ We have all accustomed ourselves to look for the cradle of the Aryan languages in Asia, and to imagine these dialects flowing like streams from the centre of Asia to the South, the West, and the North. I must confess that Professor Benfey’s protest against this theory seems to me very opportune, and his arguments in favor of a more northern, if not European, origin of the whole Aryan family of speech, deserve, at all events, far more attention than they have hitherto received. ”

“ The student from Peru finds Quichua words in every vocabulary he lights upon, whilst the student from Brazil finds Guarani words.
Asian.—Asia and Europe, though different quarters of the globe, form but a single continent, and as such have characteristics of their own. One great class of languages is absolutely common to the two—the great Ugrian or Fin family. We miss, no doubt, in Europe such districts as those of Caucasus, and the parts to the North of the Burmese Empire, where numerous mutually unintelligible languages are pressed together within a small area. ”

“ The three fundamental forms of human language are found in the same countries and under similar relations. In the centre, and south-east of our area, the monosyllabic languages are represented by those of China, Cochinchina, Siam and Thibet. As agglutinative languages, we find in the north-east and north-west the group of Ougro-Japanese, in the south that of the Dravidian and Malay, and in the west the Turkish languages. Lastly, Sanscrit with its derivatives, and the Iranian languages represent in the south and south-west the inflectional languages. ”

“ Interruptions are frequent and unavoidable. How to find time for language study is indeed a serious problem,—but he must find it, if his life is to tell for Christ, at its best. Moreover, the missionary must master practically two languages before he is fully equipped for service,—the language of the book, and the language of the people. The formal style of classical Burmese would be as out of place in the jungle as the colloquial Burmese would be in the pulpit. ”

“ Are there pronouns, and prepositions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian languages?
One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan languages that such differences are not natural, and that they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature before they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryan etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the back of our Skeat. Nature herself has no grammar. ”

“ One cannot even speak with assurance of the diffusion of an Aryan civilization. It is at least not certain that the civilization that was spread by the migration of peoples speaking Aryan tongues originated amongst and remained for a time peculiar to such peoples. The utmost that can be said is that the Aryan languages must in their earliest forms have spread from some geographical centre. That centre, however, is no longer sought for in Asia, but in some part of Europe, so that we can no longer speak of any detachment of Aryan-speaking peoples entering Europe. ”

“ In India we witness a constant simplification of grammar from Sanskrit through Prakrit and Pali to the modern languages, Hindi, Hindostani (Urdu) , Bengali, etc. Outside the Aryan world we see the same movement: Hebrew is simpler and more regular than Assyrian, and spoken Arabic than the old classical language, Koptic than Old Egyptian. Of most of the other languages we are not in possession of written records from very early times; still, we may affirm that in Turkish there has been an evolution, though rather a slow one, of a similar kind ”

“ A language, such as Chinese, with a small number of sounds and an immense number of meanings, can easily give birth to dialects which, in their later development, might branch off in totally different directions. Even with languages so closely connected as Sanskrit and Latin, it would be easy to make out a list of a thousand words in Latin which could not be matched in Sanskrit. The question, therefore, is not decided. What is wanted are researches carried on by competent scholars, in an unprejudiced and at the same time thoroughly scientific spirit. ”

“ And since we know of no Semitic languages in Africa which were not brought from Asia, we are justified in concluding that the Semitic element in the Egyptian language was of Asiatic origin.
But we can go yet a step further. Where two languages are brought into close contact, the general rule is that that of the stronger race prevails. The conqueror is less likely to learn the language of the conquered than the conquered are to learn the language of their masters. ”

“ Language, on the other hand, is always a perfectly constant diagnostic. A German may occasionally compete in hair and prognathism with a negro, but a negro language will never be his mother tongue. Of how little importance for mankind the so-called race characters are, is shown by the fact that speakers of languages belonging to one and the same linguistic family may exhibit the peculiarities of various races. Thus the settled Osmanli Turk exhibits Caucasian characters, while other so-called Tartaric Turks exemplify the Mongol type. ”

“ An analysis of the character of our vocalic and consonantal sounds can only lead us to form a definite idea regarding our provincial accent system. As such, a comparative study of Bengali phonology should be carefully pursued, though this sort of study involves a detailed consideration of the phonology of not only the ancient Vedic and the post-Vedic languages, but also of the Dravidian accent system. ”

“ The traveller, he assures us, “may hear the Cairene donkey-boys shouting three or four European dialects with an accent as good as his own;” and he “has frequently known Armenians (to whom, among all the Easterns, he assigns the first place as linguists) speak, besides their mother tongue, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Hindostanee, and at the same time display an equal aptitude for the Occidental languages.” ”

“ The Mexican antiquary Mendoza has marshalled far more coincidences of like character and equal worth to show that the Nahuatl is an Aryan dialect descended from the Sanscrit. [39] In fine, any, even the remotest, linguistic connection between American and Mongolian languages has yet to be shown; and any linguist who considers the radically diverse genius of the two groups of tongues will not expect to find such relationship. ”

“ And in the [72] days when civilization first grew up there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional. The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist, [67] and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent ”

“ In leaving the soil of Asia the language of Egypt took upon it an African dress.
Now though language can prove but little as regards race, it can prove a great deal as regards history. A mixed language means a mixed history, and indicates an intimate contact between the populations who spoke the languages which are represented in it. Egyptian grammar would not have been Semitic if those who imposed it upon the natives of the Nile had not been of Semitic descent, or at all events had not come from a region where the language was Semitic. ”

“ The name does not properly apply to the other Sinitic peoples—the Cochin-Chinese and the Annamese of the French colonies and the Burmese of the British colonies, all of whom border on China on the south and southwest. The people of Manchuria and of Mongolia are not so nearly related linguistically to the Chinese as they are to the Japanese. All these “Sibiric” peoples have agglutinative languages, while the Chinese is monosyllabic, being more nearly related to the languages stretching from Thibet southeast to the Malay Peninsula. ”

“ With savage nations whose original languages are essentially dissimilar, the constant wars which take place between them possibly introduce elements of change which would influence very considerably the spoken dialects of the opposing tribes. It was a frequent custom after the conclusion of hostilities for the conquerors to incorporate in their tribe the women and children of those whom they had vanquished. Thus a new dialect would be introduced amongst them, and the two languages would necessarily become blended. ”

“ The moolahs learn some Arabic because the Koran is written in that language: otherwise, foreign languages are not taught. The Court pages seem to be taught rather more than other boys; some of them learn the different languages of the country—Pushtu and Turki—as well as Persian. The Amîr’s eldest son, Prince Habibullah, was learning English when I was in Kabul, though I never heard of anyone else learning the language. I have heard the Amîr speak Persian, Pushtu, and Turki. ”

“ In Asia we found, on one side, the Turk tribes spread over a space nearly as large as Europe, and that with but little variation—a typical instance of what constitutes a large ethnological area. Then, on the other hand, were the fastnesses of Caucasus, where we found, packed up within a very limited area, a multiplicity of mutually unintelligible languages, languages that were counted by the dozen and the score—the Circassian, Georgian, Lesgian, Mizjeji, and their subordinate dialects. ”

“ Every spoken dialect of Hindostan has a per-centage of Sanskrit words in it; just as every dialect of England has an amount of Anglo-Norman. What does this prove? That depends upon the per-centage; and this differs in different languages. In a general way it may be stated that, amongst the tongues already enumerated, it is smallest in the isolated Tamulian tongues; larger in the Tamul of the Dekhan; and largest in the tongues about to be enumerated; these being the chief languages of modern Hindostan. ”

“ In Nepal, Khas-kuṛa is the language only of the Aryan population, the mother tongue of most of the inhabitants being some form or other of Tibeto-Burman speech (see Tibeto-Burman Languages) , not Indo-Aryan. As may be expected, Khas-kuṛa is mainly differentiated from Central Pahari through its being affected, both in grammar and vocabulary, by Tibeto-Burman idioms. The speakers of Central and Western Pahari have not been brought into close association with Tibeto-Burmans, and their language is therefore purely Aryan. ”

“ The Chinese language can no longer be adduced in support of the hypothesis that our Aryan languages, or all human languages, started at first as a grammarless speech consisting of monosyllabic root-words. ”

“ In respect to the general relations of the language, the evidence of the work under notice is confirmatory (though not absolutely) of the views to which the present writer has committed himself, viz.— (1.) that the languages of Caucasus in general are so nearly mono-syllabic as to be with fitness designated pauro-syllabic; (2.) that the distinction drawn by Klaproth between the Mizhdzhedzhi and Lesgian groups is untenable; both belonging to the same class, a fact by which the philologic ethnography of Caucasus is, pro tanto, simplified. ”

“ Instead, language change will take place in the form of new vocabulary – Lojban does not yet have nearly the vocabulary it needs to be a fully usable language of the modern world, as Chapter 12 (p. 263) explains – and through the irregular natural processes of drift and (who knows?) native-speaker evolution. (Teach your children Lojban!) You can learn the language described here with assurance that (unlike previous versions of Lojban and Loglan, as well as most other artificial languages) it will not be subject to further fiddling by language-meisters. ”