THE HISTORY AND VARIETIES OF HUMAN SPEECH.1

By Dr. EDWARd Sapir,

The Canadian Geological Survey.

Perhaps no single feature so markedly sets off man from the rest of the animal world as the gift of speech, which he alone possesses. No community of normal human beings, be their advance in culture ever so slight, has yet been found, or is ever likely to be found, who do not communicate among themselves by means of a complex system of sound symbols; in other words, who do not make use of a definitely organized spoken language. It is indeed one of the paradoxes of linguistic science that some of the most complexly organized languages are spoken by so-called primitive peoples, while, on the other hand, not a few languages of relatively simple structure are found among peoples of considerable advance in culture. Relatively to the modern inhabitants of England, to cite but one instance out of an indefinitely large number, the Eskimos must be considered as rather limited in cultural development. Yet there is just as little doubt that in complexity of form the Eskimo language goes far beyond English. I wish merely to indicate that, however much we may indulge in speaking of primitive man, of a primitive language in the true sense of the word we find nowhere a trace. It is true that many of the lower animals, for example, birds, communicate by means of various cries, yet no one will seriously maintain that such cries are comparable to the conventional words of present-day human speech; at best they may be compared to some of our interjections, which, however, falling outside the regular morphologic and syntactic frame of speech, are least typical of the language of human beings. We can thus safely make the absolute statement that language is typical of all human communities of to-day and of such previous times as we have historical knowledge of, and that language, aside from reflex cries, is just as untypical of all nonhuman forms of animal life. Like all other forms of human activity, language must have its history.

Much has been thought and written about the history of language. Under this term may be included two more or less distinct lines of inquiry. One may either trace the changes undergone by a partic

1 Lecture delivered at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Apr. 1, 1911. (Reprinted by permission from The Popular Science Monthly, July, 1911.)

ular language or group of languages for as long a period as the evidence at hand allows, or one may attempt to pass beyond the limits of historically recorded or reconstructed speech, to reconstruct the ultimate origin of speech in general, and to connect these remote origins by means of reconstructed lines of development with historically attested forms of speech. Superficially the latter sort of inquiry is similar in spirit to the labors of the evolutionary biologist, for in both apparently heterogeneous masses of material are, by direct chronologic testimony, inference, analogy, and speculation reduced to an orderly historical sequence. As a matter of fact, however, the reconstruction of linguistic origins and earliest lines of development is totally different in kind from biological reconstruction, as we shall see presently.

Taking up the history of language in the sense in which it was first defined, we find that there are two methods by which we can follow the gradual changes that a language has undergone. The first and most obvious method is to study the literary remains of the various periods of the language of which we have record. It will then be found that not only the vocabulary, but just as well the phonetics, word morphology, and syntactic structure of the language tend to change from one period to another. These changes are always very gradual and, within a given period of relatively short duration, slight or even imperceptible in amount. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of these slight linguistic changes is, with the lapse of time, so great that the form of speech current at a given time, when directly compared with the form of speech of the same language current at a considerably earlier time, is found to differ from the latter much as it might from a foreign language. It is true that the rate of change has been found to be more rapid at some periods of a language than at others, but it nevertheless always remains true that the changes themselves are not violent and sudden, but gradual in character. The documentary study of language history is of course the most valuable and on the whole the most satisfactory. It should not be denied, however, that there are dangers in its use. Literary monuments do not always accurately reflect the language of the period; moreover, orthographic conservatism hides the phonetic changes that are constantly taking place. Thus there is no doubt that the amount of change that English has undergone from the time of Shakespeare to the present is far greater than a comparison of present-day with Elizabethan orthography would lead the layman to suppose, so much so that I am quite convinced the great dramatist would have no little difficulty in making himself understood in Stratford-on-Avon to-day. For some languages a considerable amount of documentary historical material is available. Thus, the literary monuments that enable us to study the history of the English language succeed each other in a

practically uninterrupted series from the eighth century A. D. to the present time, while the course of development of Greek in its various dialects can be more or less accurately followed from the ninth century B. C., a conservative date for the Homeric poems, to the present time.

For some, in fact for most languages, however, literary monuments are either not forthcoming at all or else are restricted to a single period of short duration. At first sight it would seem that the scientific study of such languages would have to be limited to purely descriptive rather than historical data. To a considerable extent this is necessarily true, yet an intensive study will always yield at least some, oftentimes a great deal of, information of a historical character. This historical reconstruction on the basis of purely descriptive data may proceed in two ways. It is obvious that the various phonetic and grammatical features of a language at any given time are of unequal antiquity, for they are the resultants of changes that have taken place at very different periods; hence it is reasonable to suppose that internal evidence would, at least within modest limits, enable one to reconstruct the relative chronology of the language. Naturally one must proceed very cautiously in reconstructing by means of internal evidence, but it is oftentimes surprising how much the careful and methodically schooled student can accomplish in this way. Generally speaking, linguistic features that are irregular in character may be considered as relatively archaic, for they are in the nature of survivals of features at one time more widely spread. Not infrequently an inference based on internal evidence can be corroborated by direct historical testimony. One example will suffice here. We have in English a mere sprinkling of noun plurals in -en, such as brethren and oxen. One may surmise that nouns such as these are but the last survivals of a type formerly existing in greater abundance, and indeed a study of Old English or Anglo-Saxon demonstrates that noun plurals in -en were originally found in great number but were later almost entirely replaced by plurals in -8. There is, however, a far more powerful method of reconstructing linguistic history from descriptive data than internal evidence. This is the comparison of genetically related languages.

In making a survey of the spoken languages of the world, we soon find that though they differ from each other, they do so in quite varying degrees. In some cases the differences are not great enough to prevent the speakers of the two languages from understanding each other with a fair degree of ease, under which circumstances we are apt to speak of the two forms of speech as dialects of a single language; in other cases the two languages are not mutually intelligible, but, as in the case of English and German, present so many similarities of detail that a belief in their common origin seems warranted and

indeed necessary; in still other cases the two languages are at first glance not at all similar, but reveal on a closer study so many fundamental traits in common that there seems just ground for suspecting a common origin. If other languages can be found which serve to lessen the chasm between the two, and particularly if it is possible to compare them in the form in which they existed in earlier periods, this suspicion of a common origin may be raised to a practical certainty. Thus, direct comparison of Russian and German would certainly yield enough lexical and grammatical similiarites to justify one in suspecting them to have diverged from a common source; the proof of such genetic relationship, however, can not be considered quite satisfactory until the oldest forms of German speech and Germanic speech generally have been compared with the oldest forms of Slavic speech and until both of these have been further compared with other forms of speech, such as Latin and Greek, that there is reason to believe they are genetically related to. When such extensive, not infrequently difficult, comparisons have been effected, complete evidence may often be obtained of what in the first instance would have been merely suspected. If all the forms of speech that can be shown to be genetically related are taken together and carefully compared among themselves, it is obvious that much information will be inferred as to their earlier undocumented history; in favorable cases much of the hypothetical form of speech from which the available forms have diverged may be reconstructed with a considerable degree of certainty or plausibility. If under the term "history of English" we include not only documented but such reconstructed history as has been referred to, we can say that at least in main outline it is possible to trace the development of our language back from the present day to a period antedating at any rate 1500 B. C. It is important to note that, though the English of to-day bears only a faint resemblance to the hypothetical reconstructed Indogermanic speech of say 1500 B. C. or earlier, there could never have been a moment from that time to the present when the continuity of the language was broken. From our present standpoint that bygone speech of 1500 B. C. was as much English as it was Greek or Sanskrit. The history of the modern English words foot and its plural feet will illustrate both the vast difference between the two forms of speech at either end of the series and the gradual character of the changes that have taken place within the series. Without here going into the actual evidence on which the reconstructions are based, I shall merely list the various forms which each word has had in the course of its history. Starting, then, with foot-feet, and gradually going back in time, we have fut—fit, fot-fet, fōt-féte, fōt-főte, fōt-főti, fōt-fōti, fōt—fótir, fōt-fótiz, fōt-fótis, fōt-fótes, fōd-fodes, and finally pōd-pódes, beyond

which our evidence does not allow us to go; the last forms find their reflex in Sanskrit pād-pādas.

All languages that can be shown to be genetically related--that is, to have sprung from a common source-form a historic unit to which the term linguistic stock or linguistic family is applied. If, now, we were in a position to prove that all known forms of speech could be classified into a single linguistic stock, the apparent parallel above referred to between linguistic and biological reconstruction would be a genuine one. As it is, we must content ourselves with operating with distinct and, as far as we can tell, genetically unrelated linguistic stocks. The documentary evidence and the reconstructive evidence gained by comparison enable us to reduce the bewildering mass of known languages to a far smaller number of such larger stock groups, yet the absolute number of these latter groups still remains disquietingly large. The distribution of linguistic stocks presents great irregularities. In Europe there are only three such represented: the Indogermanic or Aryan, which embraces nearly all the better known languages of the continent; the Ural-Altaic, the best known representatives of which are Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish; and the Basque of southwestern France and northern Spain. On the other hand, that part of aboriginal North America which lies north of Mexico alone embraces 50 or more distinct linguistic stocks so far as known at present. Some stocks, as, for instance, the Indogermanic just referred to and the Algonkin of North America, are spread over vast areas and include many peoples or tribes of varying cultures; others, such as the Basque and many of the aboriginal stocks of California, occupy surprisingly small territories. It is possible to adopt one of two attitudes toward this phenomenon of the multiplicity of the largest known genetic speech aggregates. On the one hand one may assume that the disintegrating effects of gradual linguistic change have in many cases produced such widely differing forms of speech as to make their comparison for reconstructive purposes of no avail, in other words, that what appear to us to-day to be independent linguistic stocks appear such not because they are in fact historically unrelated, but merely because the evidence of such historical connection has been so obscured by time as to be practically lost. On the other hand, one may prefer to see in the existence of mutually independent linguistic stocks evidence of the independent beginnings and development of human speech at different times and places in the course of the remote history of mankind; there is every reason to believe that in a similar manner many religious concepts and other forms of human thought and activity found widely distributed in time and place have had multiple origins, yet more or less parallel developments. It is naturally fruitless to attempt to decide bewteen the monogenetic and polygenetic