Locus

“ If we restrict ourselves to all the points in a fixed plane which are at a given distance from a given point, the locus is the circumference of the circle described from the given point as centre, with the given distance as radius. ”

“ I will take one more instance of a name presumed to be common to the Germans and to the Celts as an illustration of the manner in which—men's names being handed down from generation to generation without, even in ancient times, any thought of their meaning—a name may survive, while the word from which it was originally derived has perished out of the language, or is retained in a sense so changed as hardly to be recognised. ”

“ When you can trace back the ancestry of any man we bring you with what you call negro characteristics, tell us who his father and grandfather were, and so on, until you reach one of your negro immigrants—when you can do this with all our inhabitants, and show us that every man with these characteristics is the descendant of one of these immigrants, and that every man with European characteristics has some of the blood of one of your European immigrants in his body, you may claim that you have given us scientific proof of your hypothesis. ”

“ What is the scope and bearing of the division into families? Does it separate the human race into so many different branches, which must have been independent from the very beginning? Does linguistic science both fail to find any bond of connection between the families and see that no such bond exists? Or, in short, what has the study of language to say respecting the unity of the human race? ”

“ If we are dealing here with phenomena of late assimilation, a disturbing element is introduced that will make it more difficult to assign a language to a definite genealogical line, much more so than is the case in the borrowing of words. ”

“ Everything that is abstract [pg 220] in language was originally concrete. If people wanted to say the King of Rome, they meant really the King at Rome, and they would readily have used what I have just described as the locative; whereas the more abstract idea of the genitive would never enter into their system of thought. But more than this, it can be proved that the locative has actually taken, in some cases, the place of the genitive. In Latin, for instance, the old genitive of nouns in a was as. ”

“ Meanwhile we are confronted by the baffling fact that important traits of morphology are frequently found distributed among widely differing languages within a large area, so widely differing, indeed, that it is customary to consider them genetically unrelated. ”

“ How many fragments of other races may have been worked in during the course of the family's migrations—how far the purity of blood of one or another of its branches or sub-branches may have been thus affected by successive partial dilutions, so that some of their present peculiarities of type are attributable to the mixture—is, of course, a legitimate matter for inquiry, and one upon which we may even look for information from their languages, when these shall have been more narrowly examined. ”

“ If by direct proof of an unbroken descent a full pedigree is made out, or if, when some link is wanting, the collateral proof from strong family or race resemblances is sufficient to warrant the belief that the link once existed, we might accept it as a fact that the individual descended from the supposed ancestors in a direct line, or that some peculiarity of blood came into his constitution at some point in the descent of individuals from individuals. ”

“ But it went no further than to show that possibly all languages have begun with a common vocabulary, all languages have some common features, as all men have the organs common to the human family. The question is how far, and at what period, such have diverged from the common type, so as to form an essentially distinct family. ”

“ Moreover since Pronouns, which are the principal basis of Grammar, are merely different Synonymes for “Man,” or a “Human Being” (see page 13) , appropriated to different Persons, the supposition that kindred nations may be expected in all cases to use the same grammatical forms is founded on the gratuitous and highly unreasonable assumption, that the process of appropriating these various Nouns to different Persons must have been complete at a very early period, before the separation of the Human Race into distinct Tribes! ”

“ If direct evidence is demanded, we must give up the whole doctrine of families and races, as far as we take language, manners, institutions, any thing but physical conformation, as the distinguishing marks of races and families. ”

“ I had noticed, in other foreign languages, that verbs are bred in families, and that the members of each family have certain features or resemblances that are common to that family and distinguish it from the other families--the other kin, the cousins and what not. ”

“ THE QUESTION OF COMPLEXION.
The tendency of scientific thought in ethnology is in the direction of giving more and more importance to the race characteristics, such as height, color of the hair, eyes and skin, and the formation of the skull and body generally, than to language. The language possessed by a people may be merely the result of conquest or migration. ”

“ If in a given language we find the words indicative of a certain turn of life to have been derived from [298] a particular race, which forms part of the nation speaking that language, while other words, referable to other habits and pursuits, have been supplied by other races also numbered among its constituent parts, it is just to read the characters of those races respectively through the character of the words that they contribute to the common tongue. ”

“ Surnames and Place-names Before leaving the subject of the preservation of old words in the dialects, one other store-chamber of words no longer current in the standard speech is worth a passing notice. Many old words which have ceased to be used as common nouns, have become crystallized in surnames, and it is interesting to compare them with the existing cognates in the dialects. ”

“ Kind Determined by Origin.—It is inheritance in the sense of community of origin that determines whether a given living creature shall be man, beast, bird, fish, or what not. A given individual is human because his ancestors were human. In addition to this stock supply of human qualities he has certain well-marked features which we recognize as characteristics of race. That is, if he is of Anglo-Saxon or Italian or Mongolian parentage, naturally his various qualities will be Anglo-Saxon, Italian, or Mongolian. ”

“ Ancestry alone furnishes the material for the factor, and no amount of induced change can get itself registered in the organism so as to come into this charmed circle of ancestral characters which alone seem to be passed on to posterity. ”

“ Now I hope to show some reason for believing that by the use of proper methods, the origin of our place-names may often be determined with a high degree of probability, and even with positive certainty. That the matter is not of the highest importance may be freely admitted; but as false local etymology has in the past been the source of a great deal of historical error, so sound local etymology may sometimes be a valuable help in the discovery of historical truth. ”

“ Evidence from the Gens or γένος.—There is no more puzzling topic in the history of the ancient world than the origin and nature of the community called by the Romans the gens, and by the Greeks the γένος. To the present writer it seems that no existing community of men, neither totem kin, nor clan, nor house community, nor gotra, precisely answers to the gens or the γένος. Our information about these forms of society is slight and confused. ”

“ We are attempting in fact to carry out a morphological classification of speech, which is based entirely on the form or manner in which roots are put together, and therefore quite independent of the genealogical classification which, according to its very nature, is based on the formations of language handed down ready made from generation to generation. ”

“ Why then has the classification of human languages into inflecting, agglutinating, isolating, and polysynthetic or incorporating ones been repeated so often? First of all, because languages vary almost infinitely, and a true or natural classification, other than the genetic one into families, is intricate. The mind craves simplicity and the three or four supposedly all-embracing types are a temptation. ”

“ When, again, you dissociate the sound which stands for the action or substance from the pronoun, you come, in a certain group of words, to another range of thought connected with the primary family relation, and showing the existence of that particularly ancient form of endogamy, in which all the elder females are the mothers and all the elder men are the fathers of the tribe. ”

“ Second, the attempt has more frequently been made to establish an ethnic classification than a linguistic classification, and linguistic characteristics have been confused with biotic peculiarities, arts, habits, customs, and other human activities, so that radical differences of language have often been ignored and slight differences have been held to be of primary value. ”

“ To overcome this difficulty we must understand the resemblance upon which classification is based to include resemblance of Causation, that is, the fact itself of descent from common ancestors. For organic beings, all other rules of classification are subordinate to one: trace the genealogy of every form. ”

“ Turning to the influence of heredity, we recognized that by it are determined all the most fundamental features of each race and type of man, and that often the individual reverts to the traits of the one or the other of his parents, or of his remote ancestors, in such manner that one trait may belong to one ancestor, another to another. ”

“ But the point to which I desire particularly to draw the reader’s attention in this comparison of the Indo-Germanic languages with the branches of the vertebrate stem is, that one must never confuse direct descendants with collateral branches, nor extinct forms with living. ”

“ The most superficial knowledge of any modern 341 language, or of Latin etymology, is sufficient to show that it is as impossible to draw a line between suffix and flectional termination, as between syntactical group and compound. ”

“ Names of this class are generally retained by men and women throughout life and, to a degree, are regarded as sacred in character. These names have also a social significance, as they always indicate the birth status of the person, for the name at once shows to which clan or kinship group the bearer belongs. No one can exchange his clan or birth name, any more than he can change his sex. ”

“ Stamm, masculine, ‘stem, trunk, stock, tribe,’ from Middle High German and Old High German stam (mm) , masculine, ‘trunk, pedigree, race, reason, cause’; corresponding to Dutch stam, Anglo-Saxon stemn (stœfn) , English stem (see Steven) , Old Icelandic stafn. ”

“ Now as, in all genethlialogical cases, a certain common and general arrangement, affecting the region or country and the race or generation, is pre-supposed to be in operation, to which arrangement particular inferences, relating to the form of the body, the properties of the mind, and national habits and variations, must each be subservient ”

“ Even modern Languages metaphorical or descriptive, as regards the Names of Substances recently known to Man. Progressive Change from a metaphorical to a conventional Character displayed by more Modern compared to more Ancient Languages. Illustration from the Sanscrit Words for “The Sun.” But not only may the dispersion of Synonymes be referred to influences of which the active agency still continues; it will appear that the first Origin of the numerous Synonymes which Human Language presents may also be explained by means of causes still in operation! ”

“ Wherever we find a considerable number of variations, in which the two or more arrays of documents attesting the two or more variants are identical, we know that at least a considerable amount of the texts of the documents constituting each array must be descended from a common ancestor subsequent to the single universal original, the limitation of ancestry being fixed by the dissent of the other array or arrays. ”

“ If you consider the character of our morphological classification, you will see that this classification, differing thereby from the genealogical, must be applicable to all languages. Our classification exhausts all possibilities. If the component elements of language are roots, predicative and demonstrative, we cannot have more than three combinations. Roots may either remain roots without any modification ”

“ In such a sentence as “That fierce lion who came here is dead,” the class of “lion,” which we may call the animal class, would be referred to by concording prefixes no less than six times,—with the demonstrative (“that”) , the qualifying adjective, the noun itself, the relative pronoun, the subjective prefix to the verb of the relative clause, and the subjective prefix to the verb of the main clause (“is dead”) . ”

“ A very notable fact about new words, and a very signal testimony of their popular origin, of their birth from the bosom of the people, is the difficulty so often found in tracing their pedigree. When the causae vocum are sought, as they very fitly are, and out of much better than mere curiosity, for the causae rerum are very often wrapt up in them, those continually elude our research. ”