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

§ 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.

§ 15. The Dual in American Languages

In his admirable philosophical examination of the dual number in language, Humboldt laid the foundation of a linguistic theory of numerals which has not yet received the development it merits. Here he brings into view the dual and plural endings of a list of American languages, and explains the motives on which they base the inclusive and exclusive plurals so common among them. It is, in fact, a species of pronominal dual confined to the first person in the plural.

This, he goes on to say, is by no means the only dual in these tongues. Some of them express both the other classes of duals which he names. Thus, the Totonaca has duals for all objects which appear as pairs in nature, as the eyes, the ears, the hands, etc.; while the Araucanian equals the Sanscrit in extending the grammatical expression of the dual through all parts of speech where it can find proper application.⁴⁵

§ 16. Humboldt’s Essay on the American Verb

The essay on the American verb translated in the following pages has never previously appeared in print, either in German or English. The original MS. is in the Royal Library at Berlin, whence I obtained a transcript. The author alludes to this essay in several passages of his printed works, most fully in his “Letter to M. Abel-Remusat” (1826), in which he says:

“A few years ago, I read before the Berlin Academy a memoir, which has not been printed, in which I compared a number of American languages with each other, solely with regard to the manner in which they express the verb as uniting the subject with the attribute in the proposition, and from this point of view I assigned them to various classes. As this trait proves to what degree a language possesses grammatical forms, or is near to possessing them, it is decisive of the whole grammar of a tongue.”

On reading the memoir, I was so much impressed with the acuteness and justness of its analysis of American verbal forms that I prepared the translation which I now submit.

In the more recent studies of the American verb which have appeared from the pens of Friedrich Müller, J. Hammond Trumbull and Lucien Adam, we have the same central element of speech subjected to critical investigation at able hands. But it seems to me that none of them has approached the topic with the broad, philosophic conceptions which impress the reader in this essay of Humboldt’s. Although sixty years and more have elapsed since it was written, I am confident that it will provide ample food for thought to the earnest student of language.