Part 11 (2/2)
Meanwhile we are confronted by the baffling fact that iy are frequently found distributed ae area, so widely differing, indeed, that it is custoenetically unrelated Sometimes we ence, that a sirown up independently in unrelated languages Yet certain ical distributions are too specific in character to be so lightly dismissed There must be some historical factor to account for theuistic stock” is never definitive[173] in an exclusive sense
We can only say, with reasonable certainty, that such and such languages are descended from a couages are not genetically related All we can do is to say that the evidence for relationshi+p is not cuin absolutely necessary May it not be, then, that ent languages of a restricted area are es of a community of type and phonetic substance that the destructive work of diverging drifts has now h lexical and lish and Irish to enable us to enetic relationshi+p on the basis of the present-day descriptive evidence alone It is true that the case would seem weak in comparison to the case that we can actually make with the help of the historical and the comparative data that we possess It would not be a bad case nevertheless In another two or three millennia, however, the points of reselish and Irish, in the absence of all but their own descriptive evidence, will have to be set down as ”unrelated” languages They will still have in coical features, but it will be difficult to kno to evaluate theht of the contrastive perspective afforded by still es, such as Basque and Finnish, will these vestigial resemblances receive their true historic value
[Footnote 173: See page 163]
[Transcriber's note: Footnote 173 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 5037]
I cannot but suspect that ical sies
The theory of ”borrowing” seems totally inadequate to explain those fundamental features of structure, hidden away in the very core of the linguistic complex, that have been pointed out as common, say, to Sees, to Malayo-Polynesian and Mon-Khit and Haida We htened away by the ti in the sense of what I have called ”contrastive perspective”
[Footnote 174: A group of languages spoken in southeastern Asia, of which Khian) is the best known representative]
[Footnote 175: A group of languages spoken in northeastern India]
Attempts have sometimes been made to explain the distribution of these fundamental structural features by the theory of diffusion We know that anization, industrial devices, and other features of culturethemselves at home in cultures to which they were at one time alien We also know that words may be diffused no less freely than cultural elements, that sounds also ical elenize that certain languages have, in all probability, taken on structural features owing to the suggestive influence of neighboring languages An examination of such cases,[176] however, alnificant fact that they are but superficial additions on theas such direct historical testi exaical influence by diffusion, we shall do well not to put too much reliance in diffusion theories On the whole, therefore, we shall ascribe the uistic fory--to the autonole, diffused features that cluster now this way, now that Language is probably the most self-contained, the most massively resistant of all social phenorate its individual for, the presence of postpositions in Upper Chinook, a feature that is clearly due to the influence of neighboring Sahaptin languages; or the use by Takelgested by neighboring ”Hokan”
languages (Shasta, Karok)]
X
LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE
Language has a setting The people that speak it belong to a race (or a nuroup which is set off by physical characteristics froe does not exist apart froe of practices and beliefs that deterists have been in the habit of studying e, and culture One of the first things they do with a natural area like Africa or the South Seas is to map it out from this threefold point of view These maps answer the questions: What and where are the ically considered (eg, Congo Negro, Egyptian White; Australian Black, Polynesian)? What are the uistic stocks,” and what is the distribution of each (eg, the Haes of the south; the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia)? How do the peoples of the given area divide the ”cultural areas” and what are the do, the Moharicultural culture of the Bushmen in the south; the culture of the Australian natives, poor in physical respects but richly developed in cerehly specialized culture of Polynesia)?
The man in the street does not stop to analyze his position in the general scheme of huly integrated portion of huht of as a ”nationality,” now as a ”race”--and that everything that pertains to hiroup solishlo-Saxon” race, the ”genius” of which race has fashi+oned the English language and the ”Anglo-Saxon” culture of which the language is the expression Science is colder It inquires if these three types of classification--racial, linguistic, and cultural--are congruent, if their association is an inherently necessary one or is merely a matter of external history The answer to the inquiry is not encouraging to ”race” sentiists find that races, languages, and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashi+on, that their areas of distribution intercross in thefashi+on, and that the history of each is apt to follow a distinctive course
Races interuagesthe territory of new races and of new culture spheres A languagepeoples violently hostile to the persons of its original speakers Further, the accidents of history are constantly rearranging the borders of culture areas without necessarily effacing the existing linguistic cleavages If we can once thoroughly convince ourselves that race, in its only intelligible, that is biological, sense, is suprees and cultures, that these are no more directly explainable on the score of race than on that of the laws of physics and cheained a viewpoint that allows a certain interest to such lo-Saxondoenius but that quite refuses to be taken in by any of theuistic distributions and of the history of such distributions is one of the driest of coroup of languages need not in the least correspond to a racial group or a culture area is easily dee intercrosses with race and culture lines The English language is not spoken by a unified race In the United States there are several e It is their hts and sentiments It is asof England's Nor do the English-speaking whites of America constitute a definite race except by way of contrast to the negroes Of the three fundanized by physical anthropologists--the Baltic or North European, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean--each has nu representatives in A peoples, those relatively ”unland and its colonies, represent a race, pure and single? I cannot see that the evidence points that way The English people are an alo-Saxon,” in other words North German, element which is conventionally represented as the basic strain, the English blood comprises Norman French,[177] Scandinavian, ”Celtic,”[178] and pre-Celtic elelish” we mean also Scotch and Irish,[179] then the term ”Celtic” is loosely used for at least two quite distinct racial elements--the short, dark-cohter, often ruddy-haired type of the Highlands and parts of Ireland Even if we confine ourselves to the Saxon element, which, needless to say, nowhere appears ”pure,” we are not at the end of our troubles We hly identify this strain with the racial type now predo parts of northern Germany If so, we lish language is historically ree with the other West Gerh Gerree with Scandinavian, the specific ”Saxon” racial type that overran England in the fifth and sixth centuries was largely the same as that now represented by the Danes, who speak a Scandinavian language, while the High Ger population of central and southern Germany[180] is am of North ”French” and Scandinavian elements]
[Footnote 178: The ”Celtic” blood of what is now England and Wales is by no ions--Wales and, until recently, Cornwall There is every reason to believe that the invading Gerles, Saxons, Jutes) did not exterether into Wales and Cornwall (there has been far too ” of conquered peoples into mountain fastnesses and land's ends in our histories), but sie upon them]
[Footnote 179: In practice these three peoples can hardly be kept altogether distinct The terms have rather a local-sentione on steadily for centuries and it is only in certain outlying regions that we get relatively pure types, eg, the Highland Scotch of the Hebrides In Alish, Scotch, and Irish strands have becoh Gere, but is due to the spread of standardized Gerh German dialect, at the expense of ”Plattdeutsch”]
But what if we ignore these finer distinctions and simply assume that the ”Teutonic” or Baltic or North European racial type coincided in its distribution with that of the Gerround then? No, we are now in hotter water than ever First of all, thepopulation (central and southern Ger to the tall, blond-haired, long-headed[181] ”Teutonic” race at all, but to the shorter, darker-complexioned, short-headed[182] Alpine race, of which the central population of France, the French Swiss, and , Boheood representatives The distribution of these ”Alpine” populations corresponds in part to that of the old continental ”Celts,” whose language has everywhere given way to Italic, Ger of a ”Celtic race,” but if ere driven to give the term a content, it would probably be hly, the western portion of the Alpine peoples than to the two island types that I referred to before These latter were certainly ”Celticized,” in speech and, partly, in blood, precisely as, centuries later, land and part of Scotland was ”Teutonized” by the Angles and Saxons Linguistically speaking, the ”Celts” of to-day (Irish Gaelic, Manx, Scotch Gaelic, Welsh, Breton) are Celtic and most of the Gerro, Alish” But, secondly, the Baltic race was, and is, by nopeople The northernhland Scotch, are in all probability a specialized offshoot of this race What these people spoke before they were Celticized nobody knows, but there is nothing whatever to indicate that they spoke a Gere may quite well have been as remote from any known Indo-European idioain, to the east of the Scandinavians are non-Germaniclanguages that are not definitely known to be related to Indo-European at all
[Footnote 181: ”Dolichocephalic”]
[Footnote 182: ”Brachycephalic”]
We cannot stop here The geographical position of the Gerhly probable that they represent but an outlying transfer of an Indo-European dialect (possibly a Celto-Italic prototype) to a Baltic people speaking a language or a group of languages that was alien to Indo-European[184] Not only, then, is English not spoken by a unified race at present but its prototype, e to the race hich English is more particularly associated We need not seriously entertain the idea that English or the group of languages to which it belongs is in any intelligible sense the expression of race, that there are eenius” of a particular breed of hu back from such data as we possess we can inally confined to a comparatively small area in northern Gerinal to the total area of distribution of the Indo-European-speaking peoples Their center of gravity, say 1000 BC, seems to have lain in southern Russia]
[Footnote 184: While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for it is stronger than onenumber of common and characteristic Germanic words which cannot be connected with known Indo-European radical elements and which e; such are _house_, _stone_, _sea_, _wife_ (German _Haus_, _Stein_, _See_, _Weib_)]