Читать книгу Philological Proofs of the Original Unity and Recent Origin of the Human Race - Arthur James Johnes - Страница 8

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Here the Monosyllabic and Polysyllabic languages branch off from a common centre. The former begin in Tibet, the latter in Cashmire.

The Monosyllabic languages which prevail in Tibet, China, Ava, Pegu, Siam, Tonquin, and Cochin China, countries which contain a population of 180 millions, betray all the rudeness of human speech in its infancy. They have no compound words and no grammar. “The same sound,” says Adelung, “which means Joy, means also Joyful and To rejoice through all persons, numbers, and tenses!”

“They form their plural like a child, either by repetition, as ‘Tree-tree’ (i.e. ‘Trees’), or by means of an additional word, as ‘Tree-many! Tree-other!’ When the great grown-up child is heard stammering ‘Be Heaven, I Other,13 Father which,’ who but another child like him can guess that this means ‘Our Father which art in Heaven!’ ”

The imperfection of the Monosyllabic languages does not arise solely from their consisting of Monosyllables, but from the want of the more refined grammatical forms which are found in all other Tongues, even those of the wildest American Tribes. No nation, however uncivilized, that had once acquired [pg xxvi] a knowledge of these would ever fall back “to the speech of childhood!” Hence Adelung infers that the Chinese, &c. must have been completely separated at an early period from the other races of men. But it will be asked, Why is it that the Chinese have remained stationary in this respect, while nations far inferior to them in every other point of view have surpassed them in this one instance? There is, I conceive, no other mode of solving this problem than by regarding these opposite results in the light of vestiges, belonging to an early stage of society, of the same variableness and inequality in the efforts of the human mind, which are observable in the inventions of modern times! That this question admits of no other solution will be manifest from Chapter VI, in which it is shown that the Chinese is not fundamentally different from the tongues of Europe and Western Asia, but the same language in a different stage of its growth!