The Philosophic Grammar of American Languages, as Set Forth by Wilhelm von Humboldt

The immediate causes of the improvement of a language through forcible admixture with another, are: that it is obliged to drop all unneccessary accessory elements in a proposition; that the relations of ideas must be expressed by conventional and not significant syllables; and that the limitations of thought imposed by the genius of the language are violently broken down, and the mind is thus given wider play for its faculties.

Such influences, however, do not act in accordance with fixed laws of growth. There are no such laws, which are of universal application. The development of the Mongolian or Aryan tongues is not at all that of the American. The goal is one and the same, but the paths to it are infinite. For this reason each group or class of languages must be studied by itself, and its own peculiar developmental laws be ascertained by searching its history.32

With reference to the growth of American languages, it was Humboldt’s view that they manifest the utmost refractoriness both to external influence and to internal modifications. They reveal a marvellous tenacity of traditional words and forms, not only in dialects, but even in particular classes of the community, men having different expressions from women, the old from the young, the higher from the lower classes. These are maintained with scrupulous exactitude through generations, and except by the introduction of words, three centuries of daily commingling with the white race, have not at all altered the grammer and scarcely the phonetics of many of their languages.

Nor is this referable to the contrast between an Aryan and an American language. The same immiscibility is shown between themselves. “Even where many radically different languages are located closely together, as in Mexico, I have not found a single example where one exercised a constructive or formative influence on the other. But it is by the encounter of great and contrasted differences that languages gain strength, riches, and completeness. Only thus are the perceptive powers, the imagination and the feelings impelled to enrich and extend the means of expression, which, if left to the labors of the understanding alone, are liable to be but meagre and arid.”33

§ 9. Internal Form of Languages

Besides the grammatical form of a language, Humboldt recognized another which he called its internal form. This is that subtle something not expressed in words, which even more than the formal parts of speech, reveals the linguistic genius of a nation. It may be defined as the impression which the language bears of the clearness of the conceptions of those speaking it, and of their native gift of speech. He illustrates it by instancing the absence of a developed mode in Sanscrit, and maintains that in the creators of that tongue the conception of modality was never truly felt and distinguished from tense. In this respect its inner form was greatly inferior to the Greek, in the mind of which nation the ideally perfect construction of the verb unfolded itself with far more clearness.

The study of this inner form of a language belongs to the highest realm of linguistic investigation, and is that which throws the most light on the national character and capacities.34

§ 10. Criteria of Rank in Languages

Humboldt’s one criterion of a language was its tendncy to quicken and stimulate mental action. He maintained that this is secured just in proportion as the grammatical structure favors clear definition of the individual idea apart from its relations, in other words, as it separates the material from the inflectional elements of speech. Clear thinking, he argued, means progressive thinking. Therefore he assigned a lower position both to those tongues which inseparably connect the idea with its relations, as the American languages, and to those which, like the Chinese and in a less degree the modern English, have scarcely any formal elements at all, but depend upon the position of words (placement) to signify their relations.

But he greatly modified this unfavorable judgment by several extenuating considerations.

Thus he warns us that it is of importance to recognize fully “that grammatical principles dwell rather in the mind of the speaker than in the material and mechanism of his language.”35

This led him to establish a distinction between explicit grammar, where the relations are fully expressed in speech, and implicit grammar, where they are wholly or in part left to be understood by the mind.

He expressly and repeatedly states that an intelligent thinker, trained in the grammatical distinctions of a higher language, can express any thought he has in the grammar of any other tongue which he masters, no matter how rude it is. This adaptability lies in the nature of speech in general. A language is an instrument, the use of which depends entirely on the skill of him who handles it. It is doubtful whether such imported forms and thoughts appeal in any direct sense to those who are native to the tongue. But the fact remains that the forms of the most barbarous languages are such that they may be developed to admit the expression of any kind of idea.

But the meaning of this must not be misconstrued. If languages were merely dead instruments which we use to work with, then one would be as good as another to him who had learned it. But this is not the case. Speech is a living, physiological function, and, like any other function, is most invigorating and vitalizing when it works in the utmost harmony with the other functions. Its special relationship is to that brain-action which we call thinking; and entire harmony between the two is only present when the form, structure and sounds of speech correspond accurately to the logical procedure of thought. This he considered “an undeniable fact.”

The measure of the excellence of a language, therefore, is the clearness, definiteness and energy of the ideas which it awakes in the nation. Does it inspire and incite their mind? Has it positive and clear tones, and do these define sharply the ideas they represent, without needless accessories? Does its structure present the leading elements of the proposition in their simplicity, and permit the secondary elements to be grouped around them in subordinate positions, with a correct sense of linguistic perspective? The answers to these queries decide its position in the hierarchy of tongues.36

As its capacity for expression is no criterion of a language, still less is the abundance or regularity of its forms. For this very multiplicity, this excessive superfluity, is a burden and a drawback, and obscures the integration of the thought by attaching to it a quantity of needless qualifications. Thus, in the language of the Abipones, the pronoun is different as the person spoken of is conceived as present, absent, sitting, walking, lying, or running, all quite unnecessary specifications.37

In some languages much appears as form which, on close scrutiny, is nothing of the kind.

This misunderstanding has reigned almost universally in the treatment of American tongues. The grammars which have been written upon them proceed generally on the principles of Latin, and apply a series of grammatical names to the forms explained, entirely inappropriate to them and misleading. Our first duty in taking up such a grammar as, for instance, that of an American language, is to dismiss the whole of the arrangement of the “parts of speech,” and, by an analysis of words and phrases, to ascertain by what arrangement of elements they express logical, significant relations.38

For example, in the Carib tongue, the grammars give aveiridaco as the second person singular, subjunctive imperfect, “if thou wert.” Analyze this, and we discover that a is the possessive pronoun “thy;” veiri is “to be” or “being” (in a place); and daco is a particle of definite time. Hence, the literal rendering is “on the day of thy being.” The so-called imperfect subjunctive turns out to be a verbal noun with a preposition. In many American languages the hypothetical supposition expressed in the Latin subjunctive is indicated by the same circumlocution.

Again, the infinitive, in its classical sense, is unknown in most, probably in all, American languages. In the Tupi of Brazil and frequently elsewhere it is simply a noun; caru is both “to eat” and “food;” che caru ai-pota, “I wish to eat,” literally “my food I wish.”

In the Mexican, the infinitive is incorporated in the verb as an accusative, and the verb is put in the future of the person spoken of.

Many writers continue to maintain that a criterion of rank of a language is its lexicographical richness – the number of words it possesses. Even very recently, Prof. Max Müller has applied such a test to American languages, and, finding that one of the Fuegian dialects is reported to have nearly thirty thousand words, he maintains that this is a proof that these savages are a degenerate remnant of some much more highly developed ancestry. Founding his opinion largely on similar facts, Alexander von Humboldt applied the expression to the American nations that they are “des débris échappés à un naufrage commun.”

Such, however, was not the opinion of his brother Wilhelm. He sounded the depths of linguistic philosophy far more deeply than to accept mere abundance of words as proof of richness in a language. Many savage languages have twenty words signifying to eat particular things, but no word meaning “to eat” in general; the Eskimo language has different words for fishing for each kind of fish, but no word “to fish,” in a general sense. Such apparent richness is, in fact, actual poverty.

Humboldt taught that the quality, not merely the quantity, of words was the decisive measure of verbal wealth. Such quality depends on the relations of concrete words, on the one hand, to the primitive objective perceptions at their root, and, on the other, to the abstract general ideas of which they are particular representatives; and besides this, on the relations which the spoken word, the articulate sound, bears to the philosophic laws of the formation of language in general.39

In his letter to Abel-Remusat he discusses the theory that the American languages point to a once higher condition of civilization, and are the corrupted idioms of deteriorated races. He denies that there is linguistic evidence of any such theory. These languages, he says, possess a remarkable regularity of structure, and very few anomalies. Their grammar does not present any visible traces of corrupting intermixtures.40

In a later work he returns to the subject when speaking of the Lenape (Algonkin Delaware) dialect, and asks whether the rich imaginative power, of which it bears the evident impress, does not point to some youthful, supple and vigorous era in the life of language in general?41 But he leaves the question unanswered.

§ 11. Classification of Languages

The lower unit of language is the Word; the higher is the Sentence. The plans on which languages combine words into sentences are a basic character of their structure, and divide them into classes as distinct and as decisive of their future, as those of vertebrate and invertebrate animals in natural history.

These plans are four in number:

1. By Isolation.

The words are placed in juxtaposition, without change. Their relations are expressed by their location only (placement). The typical example of this is the Chinese.

2. By Agglutination.

The sentence is formed by suffixing to the word expressive of the main idea a number of others, more or less altered, expressing the relations. Examples of this are the Eskimo of North America, and the Northern Asiatic dialects.

3. By Incorporation.

The leading word of the sentence is divided and the accessory words either included in it or attached to it with abbreviated forms, so that the whole sentence assumes the form and sound of one word.

4. By Inflection.

Each word of the sentence indicates by its own form the character and relation to the main proposition of the idea it represents. Sanscrit, Greek and Latin are familiar examples of inflected tongues.

It is possible to suppose that all four of these forms were developed from some primitive condition of utterance unknown to us, just as naturalists believe that all organic species were developed out of a homogeneous protoplasmic mass; but it is as hard to see how any one of them in its present form could pass over into another, as to understand how a radiate could change into a mollusk.

§ 12. Nature of Incorporation

Of the four plans mentioned, Incorporation is that characteristic of, though not confined to, American tongues.

It may appear in a higher or a lower grade, but its intention is everywhere the effort to convey in one word the whole proposition. The Verb, as that part of speech which especially conveys the synthetic action of the mental operation, is that which is selected as the stem of this word-sentence; all the other parts are subordinate accessories, devoid of syntactic value.

The higher grade of incorporation includes both subject, object and verb in one word, and if for any reason the object is not included, the scheme of the sentence is still maintained in the verb, and the object is placed outside, as in apposition, without case ending, and under a form different from its original and simple one.

This will readily be understood from the following examples from the Mexican language.

The sentence ni-naca-qua, is one word and means “I, flesh, eat.” If it is desired to express the object independently, the expression becomes ni-c-qua-in-nacatl, “I it eat, the flesh.” The termination tl does not belong to the root of the noun, but is added to show that it is in an external, and, as it were, unnatural position. Both the direct and remote object can thus be incorporated, and if they are not, but separately appended, the scheme of the sentence is still preserved; as ni-te-tla-maca, literally, “I, something, to somebody, give.” How closely these accessories are incorporated is illustrated by the fact that the tense augments are not added to the stem, but to the whole word; o-ni-c-te-maca-e, “I have given it to somebody;” when the o is the prefix of the perfect.

In these languages, every element in the sentence, which is not incorporated in the verb, has, in fact, no syntax at all. The verbal exhausts all the formal portion of the language. The relations of the other words are intimated by their position. Thus ni-tlagotlaz-nequia, I wished to love, is literally “I, I shall love, I wished.” Tlagotlaz, is the first person singular of the future, ni-nequia, I wished, which is divided, and the future form inserted. The same expression may stand thus: ni-c-nequia-tlagotlaz, where the c is an intercalated relative pronoun, and the literal rendering is, “I it wished, I shall love.”

In the Lule language the construction with an infinitive is simply that the two verbs follow each other in the same person, as caic tucuec, “I am accustomed to eat,” literally, “I am acustomed, I eat.”

None of these devices fullfils all the uses of the infinitive, and hence they are all inferior to it.

In languages which lack formal elements, the deficiency must be supplied by the mind. Words are merely placed in juxtaposition, and their relationship guessed at. Thus, when a language constructs its cases merely by prefixing prepositions to the unaltered noun, there is no grammatical form; in the Mbaya language e-tiboa is translated “through me,” but it is really “I, through;” l’emani, is rendered “he wishes,” but it is strictly “he, wish.”

In such languages the same collocation of words often corresponds to quite different meanings, as the precise relation of the thoughts is not defined by any formal elements. This is well illustrated in the Tupi tongue. The word uba is “father;” with the pronoun of the third person prefixed it is tuba, literally “he, father.” This may mean either “his father,” or “he is a father,” or “he has a father,” just as the sense of the rest of the sentence requires.

Certainly a language which thus leaves confounded together ideas so distinct as these, is inferior to one which discriminates them; and this is why the formal elements of a tongue are so important to intellectual growth. The Tupis may be an energetic and skillful people, but with their language they can never take a position as masters in the realm of ideas.

The absence of the passive in most, if not all, American tongues is supplied by similar inadequate collocations of words. In Huasteca, for example, nana tanin tahjal, is translated “I am treated by him;” actually it is, “I, me, treats he.” This is not a passive, but simply the idea of the Ego connected with the idea of another acting upon it.

This is vastly below the level of inflected speech; for it cannot be too strenuously maintained that the grammatical relations of spoken language are the more perfect and favorable to intellectual growth, the more closely they correspond to the logical relations of thought.

Sometimes what appears as inflection turns out on examination to be merely adjunction. Thus in the Mbaya tongue there are such verbal forms as daladi, thou wilt throw, nilabuite, he has spun, when the d is the sign of the future, and the n of the perfect. These look like inflections; but in fact d, is simply a relic of quide, hereafter, later, and n stands in the same relation to quine, which means “and also.”

To become true formal elements, all such adjuncts must have completely lost their independent signification; because if they retain it, their material content requires qualification and relation just as any other stem word.

A few American languages may have reached this stage. In the Mexican there are the terminals ya or a in the imperfect, the augment o in the preterit, and others in the future. In the Tamanaca the present ends in a, the preterit in e, the future in c. “There is nothing in either of these tongues to show that these tense signs have independent meaning, and therefore there is no reason why they should not be classed with those of the Greek and Sanscrit as true inflectional elements.”42

§ 13. Psychological Origin of Incorporation

This Incorporative plan, which may be considered as distinctive of the American stock of languages, is explained in its psychological origin by Humboldt, as the result of an exaltation of the imaginative over the intellectual elements of mind. By this method, the linguistic faculty strives to present to the understanding the whole thought in the most compact form possible, thus to facilitate its comprehension; and this it does, because a thought presented in one word is more vivid and stimulating to the imagination, more individual and picturesque, than when narrated in a number of words.43

But the mistake must not be made of supposing that Incorporation is a creative act of the language-sense, or that its products, the compounds that it builds, are real words. Humboldt was careful to impress this distinction, and calls such incorporated compounds examples of collocation (Zusammensetzung), not of synthesis (Zusammenfassung). On this ground, he doubted, and with justice, the assertion of Duponceau, that the long words of the Lenape (Delaware) dialect are formed by an arbitrary selection of the phonetic parts of a number of words, without reference to the radical syllables.44 He insisted, as is really the case, that in all instances the significant syllable or syllables are retained.

§ 14. Effect of Incorporation on Compound Sentences

As has been seen, the theory of Incorporation is to express the whole proposition, as nearly as possible, in one word; and what part of it cannot be thus expressed, is left without any syntax whatever. Not only does this apply to individual words in a sentence, but it extends to the various clauses of a compound sentence, such as in Aryan languages show their relation to the leading clauses by means of prepositions, conjunctions and relative pronouns.

When the methods are analyzed by which the major and minor clauses are assigned their respective values in these tongues, it is very plain what difficulties of expression the system of Incorporation involves. Few of them have any true connecting word of either of the three classes above mentioned. They depend on scarcely veiled material words, simply placed in juxtaposition.

It is probable that the prepositions and conjunctions of all languages were at first significant words, and the degree to which they have lost their primary significations and have become purely formal elements expressing relation, is one of the measures of the grammatical evolution of a tongue. In most American idioms their origin from substantives is readily recognizable. Frequently these substantives refer to parts of the body, and this, in passing, suggests the antiquity of this class of words and their value in comparison.

In Maya tan means in, toward, among; but it is also the breast or front of the body. The Mexican has three classes of prepositions – the first, whose origin from a substantive cannot be detected; the second, where an unknown and a known element are combined; the third, where the substantive is perfectly clear. An example of the last mentioned is itic, in, compounded of ite, belly, and the locative particle c; the phrase ilhuicatl itic, in heaven, is literally “in the belly of heaven.” Precisely the same is the Cakchiquel pamcah, literally, “belly, heaven”=in heaven. In Mexican, notepotzco is “behind me,” literally, “my back, at;” this corresponds again to the Cakchiquel chuih, behind me, from chi, at, u, my, vih, shoulder-blades. The Mixteca prepositions present the crude nature of their origin without disguise, chisi huahi, belly, house – that is, in front of the house; sata huahi, back, house – behind the house.

The conjunctions are equally transparent. “And” in Maya is yetel, in Mexican ihuan. One would suppose that such an indispensable connective would long since have been worn down to an insoluble entity. On the contrary, both these words retain their perfect material meaning. Yetel is a compound of y, his, et, companion, and el, the definite termination of nouns. Ihuan is the possessive, i, and huan, associate, companion, used also as a termination to form a certain class of plurals.

The deficiency in true conjunctions and relative pronouns is met in many American languages by a reversal of the plan of expression with us. The relative clause becomes the principal one. There is a certain logical justice in this; for, if we reflect, it will appear evident that the major proposition is, in our construction, presented as one of the conditions of the minor. “I shall drown, if I fall in the water,” means that, of the various results of my falling in the water, one of them will be that I shall drown. “I followed the road which you described,” means that you described a road, and one of the results of this act of yours was that I followed it.

This explains the plan of constructing compound sentences in Qquichua. Instead of saying “I shall follow the road which you describe,” the construction is “You describe, this road I shall follow;” and instead of “I shall drown if I fall in the water,” it would be, “I fall in the water, I shall drown.”

The Mexican language introduces the relative clause by the word in, which is an article and demonstrative pronoun, or, if the proposition is a conditional one, by intla, which really signifies “within this,” and conveys the sense that the major is included within the conditions of the minor clause. The Cakchiquel conditional particle is vue, if, which appears to be simply the particle of affirmation “yes,” employed to give extension to the minor clause, which, as a rule, is placed first.

Or a conventional arrangement of words may be adopted which will convey the idea of certain dependent clauses, as those expressing similitude, as is often the case in Mexican.