Читать книгу The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe - Leon Dominian - Страница 4

INTRODUCTION

Table of Contents

By Madison Grant

Mr. Dominian’s book on “The Frontiers of Language and Nationality” is the logical outcome of the articles written by him in 1915 in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society under the titles of “Linguistic Areas in Europe: Their Boundaries and Political Significance” and “The Peoples of Northern and Central Asiatic Turkey.” In the present work the problems arising from the distribution of main European languages and from their relation to political boundaries are discussed with clearness and brilliancy. The text embodies a vast collection of facts and data laboriously collected by the author, who has applied to the subject his familiarity with Eastern languages, as well as an impartial vision which is hard to find in these days when our judgments are so warped by the tragedy of the Great War.

The difficulty of depicting conditions geographically in colors or with symbols is of necessity very great. The peasants who form the majority of the population of most European states often speak a different language or dialect from that of the educated upper classes, and such lines of linguistic cleavage frequently represent lines of race distinction as well. For example, in Transylvania the language of about sixty per cent of the inhabitants is Rumanian, while the literary, military and land-owning classes speak either Magyar or German, and these Hungarians and Saxons, in addition to forming everywhere the ruling class, are gathered together in many places in compact communities. A similar condition of affairs exists along the eastern boundary of the German Empire, except that here the speech of the peasants is Polish and that of the dominant classes German.

The preparation of the maps which accompany this volume has been a task of peculiar difficulty. It is an easy matter to show by colors the language spoken by actual majorities, but such a delineation frequently fails to indicate the true literary language of the nation. Mr. Dominian’s solution of these difficulties has been a very successful one, and the resultant maps are really of great value, especially where they deal with little-known frontiers and obscure lines of demarcation, such as the eastern and western frontiers of the German Empire.

In spite of exceptions, language gives us the best lines for the boundaries of political units whenever those frontiers conform to marked topographical features such as mountain systems. In many cases where the boundaries of language and nationality coincide they are found to lie along the crest of mountains or a well-defined watershed, often along the base of plateaus or elevated districts, and very seldom along rivers. But the boundaries of nationality and of language, when they do coincide, seldom correspond with those of race, and political boundaries are more transitory and shifting than those of either language or race.

There are a few nations in Europe, chiefly small states, which are composed of sharply contrasted languages and races, such as Belgium, where the lowlands are inhabited by Flemish-speaking Teutons, and the uplands by French-speaking Alpines. Belgium is an artificial political unit of modern creation, and consequently highly unstable. The Belgian upper classes are bilingual, a condition which precedes a change of language, and unless Flanders becomes united to Holland or Germany it is more than probable that French speech will ultimately predominate there also.

Among the Celtic-speaking peoples, we have in the highlands of Scotland, in the mountains of Wales, in western Ireland and in the interior of Brittany, remnants of two distinct forms of Celtic speech. These diverse populations have, in common, only their Celtic speech, and are not related, one to the other, by race. As a matter of fact, the Scotch, the Welsh and the Bretons are excellent representatives of the three most divergent races of Europe. The Armorican-speaking Bretons are Alpine by race, the Cymric-speaking Welshmen are Mediterranean, while the Gaelic-speaking Scots are Nordic. In short, there is today neither a Celtic race nor any recognizable remnant of it. If one of these three peoples be Celtic in bodily characters, the other two must of necessity not be Celtic, and furthermore, if we designate any one of the three as Celtic by race, we must include in that term other distant populations which by no stretch of the imagination can be so regarded.

The literary revival of some Celtic dialects may be interesting, but it will only serve to keep the Celtic-speaking populations still more out of touch with the march of modern progress. In the long run the fate of Erse, Gaelic, Cymric and Armorican is certain. They will be engulfed by the French language on the continent, and by the English speech in the British Isles, just as Cornish and Manx have become extinct within a century.

In eastern Europe, the Slavic tongue of Bohemia and Moravia, known as Czech, was fifty years ago on the point of utter collapse, but the literary revival of Bohemia has been successful because it had for support on the east a solid mass of Slavic speech and the political power of Pan-Slavism, and in consequence was able to hold its own against the encroaching German. These Slavic dialects all through eastern Europe and the minor tongues elsewhere are greatly handicapped by the lack of books, newspapers and good literary forms. In the case of Erse and Cymric the difficulties of the spelling are an almost insuperable obstacle. The French language in Quebec and the various languages spoken among newly arrived immigrants in the United States will ultimately meet the same fate, since a few million illiterate and poverty-stricken habitants of Canada and a few million laborers in the United States must in the long run inevitably succumb to the overwhelming power of the world language of the English people.

Although race taken in its modern scientific meaning—the actual physical character of man—originally implied a common origin, it has today little or nothing to do with either nationality or language, since nearly all the great nations of Europe are composed of various proportions of two and sometimes all three of the primary European races. The population of England owes its blood to the Mediterranean and to the more recent Nordic race. Germany is composed of a combination of Nordic and Alpine, Italy of a mixture of Alpine and Mediterranean, while France unites within her boundaries the Nordic in the north, the Mediterranean in the south and the Alpine in the center. Spain and Portugal, however, are overwhelmingly of Mediterranean blood, while the Scandinavian races are purely Nordic. Thus it is quite evident that nationality and language are independent of race, and in fact the meaning of the word “race” as used not only by the man in the street, but also by the historian, is based on the spoken language. So far as race is concerned in its scientific sense, there exists no such thing as a “Latin,” a “Celtic,” a “German,” a “Slavic,” or even an “Aryan” or “Caucasian” race. These are linguistic terms, and are not correlated to bodily characters.

Throughout Europe, as pointed out by Mr. Dominian, there is, however, a close correspondence between topographical and geological land features, on the one hand, and the extent and spread of language on the other. A similar close connection has been noted between geographical features and race. Man’s topographical surroundings are among the most potent elements of environment, and have operated powerfully in the selection and development of man, but they do not transform or change one race into another. We have now discarded the old conception that blondness has anything to do with latitude, or altitude. Where two distinct races compete in a given environment, it generally happens that one or the other is better adapted to its surroundings, and that race tends to increase at the expense of its rival, with the result that one ultimately replaces the other. The races of Europe were originally adjusted to a certain fixed habitat, and when through conquest or commercial expansion they moved out of their native surroundings into unfamiliar ground, they tended to disappear. In short, race supplies the raw material, and environment is the molding force, or to use another simile, “the oak tree and the poplar tree are both wood, but the one can be polished by rubbing, while the other cannot.” In other words, the Greek genius and Hellenic culture were not created by the irregularity and broken configuration of Greece, and if the Greeks had been transplanted at an early time to Arabia, it is hardly conceivable that the world would have seen classic civilization in its most typical form. On the other hand, we have no reason to believe that if the Arabs had settled in Greece, they would have produced either Homer or the Parthenon. If England had remained exclusively in the hands of its original Mediterranean inhabitants, and if the Teutonic Nordics had not conquered it, or even if the Nordic Normans had not reinforced the Saxon strain, it is more than probable that the British Empire would not have achieved its triumphs.

Geographical situation, conditions of soil and of climate, mountain barriers, navigable rivers and abundant seaports have a powerful, even a controlling environmental influence on the raw material supplied by heredity, but in the last analysis it is race that manifests itself by characteristic achievement.

The prevailing lack of race consciousness in Europe compels us to disregard it as a basis for nationality. In the existing nations, races are generally scattered unevenly throughout the map, and are nearly always grouped in classes, as originally race was the basis of all class, caste and social distinctions. Race therefore being not available as a test of nationality, we are compelled to resort to language. As a matter of fact, language is the essential factor in the creation of national unity, because national aspirations find their best expression through a national language.

At the close of the Great European War the question of national boundaries will undoubtedly come to the front and the data collected and set forth in this book will be useful to a thorough understanding of the problems involved. There is reason to believe that if, at the termination of the Franco-Prussian war, the international boundary in Alsace-Lorraine had been run in conformity with the linguistic facts, much of the bitter animosity of later years might have been avoided. Similar problems will press for solution during the next few years, and if a permanent peace is to be assured neither the Allies nor the Central Empires can afford to create new Alsace-Lorraine or Schleswig-Holstein problems by disregarding national aspirations as expressed and measured by a common language or literature.

In the Balkan states the difficulty of finding any political boundaries that in any way correspond to race or language has heretofore been insuperable, but when the Congress of the Nations convenes, whether this year or next, or the year after, every member of it should be familiar with all facts that bear on the case, and above all with the meaning of such facts, and there exists today no book which covers these questions so fully, so accurately and so impartially as Mr. Leon Dominian’s “Frontiers of Language and Nationality.”