Etruscan language of northern central Italy, which long ago
became extinct, in consequence of the conquest and absorption
of Etruria by Rome, but which still exists in numerous brief inscriptions
(see Etruria). Many attempts have been made to
connect the language with other families, and it has even quite
recently been pronounced Aryan or Indo-European, of the
Itahcan branch, by scholars of high rank. But its supposed
Indo-European relationship was at once shown to be erroneous
when, in 1892, a small book which had been used to pack a
mummy was discovered in the museum at Agram, and published.
The probability of relationship with the ancient Lydian, as was
the opinion held in ancient times, has been increased by recent
research, and is likely soon to be verined or disproved by the
discovery of Lydian records.
In order to complete this review of the languages of the Old World it only remains to notice those of Africa which have not been already mentioned. They are grouped under two heads: the languages of the south and those of the centre of the continent.
11. South African or Bantu Family.—This is a very extensive and distinctly marked family (see Bantu Languages), occupying (except the Hottentot and Bushman territory) the whole southern peninsula of the continent from some degrees north of the equator. It is held apart from all other known families of language by a single prominent characteristic—the extent to which it makes use of prefixes instead of suffixes as the apparatus of grammatical distinction; its inflexion, both declensional and conjugational, is by appended elements which precede the stem or root. The most conspicuous part of this is the variety of prefixes, different in singular and plural, by which the various classes or genders (not founded on sex; the ground of classification is generally obscure) of nouns are distinguished; these then reappear in the other members of the sentence, as adjectives and verbs and pronouns, which are determined by the noun, thus producing an alliterative concord that runs through the sentence. The pronominal determinants of the verb, both subject and object, also come before it; but the determinants of mode of action, as causative, &c., are mostly suffixed. The language in general is rich in the means of formal distinction. Those dialects which border on the Hottentots have, apparently by derivation from the latter, the clicks or clucking-sounds which form a conspicuous part of the Hottentot spoken alphabet.
12. Central African Languages.—The remaining languages of Africa form a broad band across the centre of the continent, between the Bantu on the south and the Hamitic on the east and north. The Bantu group, extending from north of the equator to the Cape of Good Hope, with a vast variety of dialects, is the most important of all African languages. To it belongs Swahili, the language of Zanzibar, only less valuable as a means of communication and trade than the Haussa of the Sudan, the most important of the dialects under the influence of the Hamitic languages. The African languages are by no means to be called a family, but rather a great mass of dialects, numbering by hundreds, of varying structure, as to the relations of which there is great discordance of opinion even among the most recent and competent authorities. It is no place here to enter into the vexed questions of African linguistics, or even to report the varying views upon the subject; that would require a space wholly disproportioned to the importance of Atrican speech in the general sum of human language. There is no small variety of physical type as well as of speech in the central belt; and, partly upon the evidence of lighter tint and apparently higher endowment, certain races are set off and made a separate division of; such is the Nuba-Fulah division of F. Muller, rejected by Lepsius. The latter regarded all the varieties of physical and linguistic character in the central belt as due to mixture between pure Africans of the south and Hamites of the north and east; but this is at present an hypothesis only, and a very improbable one, since it implies modes and results of mixture to which no analogies are quotable from languages whose history is known; nor does it appear at all probable that the collision of two races and types of speech should produce such an immense and diverse body of transitional types. It is far from impossible that the present prominence of the South African or Bantu family may be secondary, due to the great expansion under favouring circumstances of a race once having no more importance than belongs now to many of the Central African races, and speaking a tongue which differed from theirs only as theirs differed from one another. None of the Central African languages is a prefix-language in the same degree as the Bantu, and in many of them prefixes play no greater part than in the world’s languages in general; others show special forms or traces of the prefix structure; and some have features of an extraordinary character, hardly to be paralleled elsewhere. One group in the east (Oigob, &c.) has a gender distinction, involving that of sex, but really founded on relative power and dignity: things disparaged, including women, are put in one class; things extolled, including men, are put in the other. This is perhaps the most significant hint anywhere to be found of how a gender-distinction like that in our own Indo-European languages, which we usually regard as being essentially a distinction of sex, while in fact it only includes such, may have arisen. Common among the African languages, as among many other families, especially the American, is a generic distinction between animate beings and inanimate things.
13. American Languages.—With these the case is closely the same as with the Central African languages: there is an immense number of dialects, of greatly varied structure (see Indians, North American). Even among neighbouring families like the Algonquin, Iroquois and Dakota, whose agreement in style of structure (polysynthetic), taken in connexion with the accordant race-type of their speakers, forbids us to regard them as ultimately different, no material correspondence, agreement in words and meanings, is to be traced; and there are in America all the degrees of polysynthetism, down to the lowest, and even to its entire absence. Such being the case, it ought to be evident to every one accustomed to deal with this class of subjects that all attempts to connect American languages as a body with languages of the Old World are and must be fruitless.
Literature.—Many of the theoretic points discussed above are treated by the writer with more fulness in his Language and the Study of Language (1867) and Life and Growth of Language (1875). Other English works to consult are M. Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language; Farrar’s Chapters on Language; Wedgwood’s Origin of Language (all more or less antiquated); Sayce’s Principles of Philology and Introduction to the Science of Language, &c.; Sweet, The History of Language (1900). In German, see Paul’s Principien der Sprachgeschichte (Halle, 1880); Delbruck’s Einleitung in das Sprachstudium (Leipzig, 1880; 4th ed., 1909; 5th ed., 1910; there is also an English version); Brugmann and Delbruck’s Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (1886–1900; a second edition of the first volume was published in 1897, two parts of vol. ii., including the stem formation and declension of the noun and pronoun appeared in 1906 and 1909); also the works of W. von Humboldt and of H. Steinthal, the most important of whose linguistic works, Charakteristik der hauptsächlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues (1861), was recast and brought up to date under the same title by F. Misteli (1893). See also handy summaries covering the same ground, but without bibliography, in F. N. Finck’s Die Sprachstamme des Erdkreises (1909) and Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus (1910). Many of the languages of India and Farther India have been treated in the Linguistic Survey of India, edited by Dr G. E. Grierson (a government publication still in progress). A short popular account of the subject is given in Porzczinski’s Einleitung in die Sprachwissenschaft (1910), a German translation of a Russian original. The Bantu languages have been treated by Black, Torrand, and most recently by Meinhof, whose Lautlehre der Bantu Sprachen (1910) is the most complete handling of the subject. As to the classification and relationships of languages, see Hovelacque’s La Linguistique (Paris, 1876) and F. Muller’s Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (Vienna, 3 vols.; a fourth was left incomplete at the author’s
