The Coming Race

  Chapter XII.

  The language of the Vril-ya is peculiarly interesting, because it seemsto me to exhibit with great clearness the traces of the three maintransitions through which language passes in attaining to perfection ofform.

  One of the most illustrious of recent philologists, Max Muller, inarguing for the analogy between the strata of language and the strataof the earth, lays down this absolute dogma: "No language can, byany possibility, be inflectional without having passed through theagglutinative and isolating stratum. No language can be agglutinativewithout clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum ofisolation."--'On the Stratification of Language,' p. 20.

  Taking then the Chinese language as the best existing type of theoriginal isolating stratum, "as the faithful photograph of man in hisleading-strings trying the muscles of his mind, groping his way, and sodelighted with his first successful grasps that he repeats them againand again," (Max Muller, p. 3)--we have, in the language of the Vril-ya,still "clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum," the evidencesof the original isolation. It abounds in monosyllables, which are thefoundations of the language. The transition into the agglutinativeform marks an epoch that must have gradually extended through ages,the written literature of which has only survived in a few fragments ofsymbolical mythology and certain pithy sentences which have passedinto popular proverbs. With the extant literature of the Vril-ya theinflectional stratum commences. No doubt at that time there must haveoperated concurrent causes, in the fusion of races by some dominantpeople, and the rise of some great literary phenomena by which theform of language became arrested and fixed. As the inflectional stageprevailed over the agglutinative, it is surprising to see how much moreboldly the original roots of the language project from the surface thatconceals them. In the old fragments and proverbs of the preceding stagethe monosyllables which compose those roots vanish amidst words ofenormous length, comprehending whole sentences from which no one partcan be disentangled from the other and employed separately. But whenthe inflectional form of language became so far advanced as to have itsscholars and grammarians, they seem to have united in extirpating allsuch polysynthetical or polysyllabic monsters, as devouring invaders ofthe aboriginal forms. Words beyond three syllables became proscribedas barbarous and in proportion as the language grew thus simplified itincreased in strength, in dignity, and in sweetness. Though now verycompressed in sound, it gains in clearness by that compression. By asingle letter, according to its position, they contrive to expressall that with civilised nations in our upper world it takes the waste,sometimes of syllables, sometimes of sentences, to express. Let me herecite one or two instances: An (which I will translate man), Ana (men);the letter 's' is with them a letter implying multitude, according towhere it is placed; Sana means mankind; Ansa, a multitude of men. Theprefix of certain letters in their alphabet invariably denotes compoundsignifications. For instance, Gl (which with them is a single letter, as'th' is a single letter with the Greeks) at the commencement of a wordinfers an assemblage or union of things, sometimes kindred, sometimesdissimilar--as Oon, a house; Gloon, a town (i. e., an assemblage ofhouses). Ata is sorrow; Glata, a public calamity. Aur-an is the healthor wellbeing of a man; Glauran, the wellbeing of the state, the good ofthe community; and a word constantly in ther mouths is A-glauran, whichdenotes their political creed--viz., that "the first principle of acommunity is the good of all." Aub is invention; Sila, a tone in music.Glaubsila, as uniting the ideas of invention and of musical intonation,is the classical word for poetry--abbreviated, in ordinary conversation,to Glaubs. Na, which with them is, like Gl, but a single letter, always,when an initial, implies something antagonistic to life or joy orcomfort, resembling in this the Aryan root Nak, expressive of perishingor destruction. Nax is darkness; Narl, death; Naria, sin or evil.Nas--an uttermost condition of sin and evil--corruption. In writing,they deem it irreverent to express the Supreme Being by any specialname. He is symbolized by what may be termed the heiroglyphic of apyramid, /. In prayer they address Him by a name which they deem toosacred to confide to a stranger, and I know it not. In conversation theygenerally use a periphrastic epithet, such as the All-Good. The letterV, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearlyalways denotes excellence of power; as Vril, of which I have said somuch; Veed, an immortal spirit; Veed-ya, immortality; Koom, pronouncedlike the Welsh Cwm, denotes something of hollowness. Koom itself isa cave; Koom-in, a hole; Zi-koom, a valley; Koom-zi, vacancy or void;Bodh-koom, ignorance (literally, knowledge-void). Koom-posh is theirname for the government of the many, or the ascendancy of the mostignorant or hollow. Posh is an almost untranslatable idiom, implying, asthe reader will see later, contempt. The closest rendering I can give toit is our slang term, "bosh;" and this Koom-Posh may be loosely rendered"Hollow-Bosh." But when Democracy or Koom-Posh degenerates from popularignorance into that popular passion or ferocity which precedes itsdecease, as (to cite illustrations from the upper world) during theFrench Reign of Terror, or for the fifty years of the Roman Republicpreceding the ascendancy of Augustus, their name for that state ofthings is Glek-Nas. Ek is strife--Glek, the universal strife. Nas, as Ibefore said, is corruption or rot; thus, Glek-Nas may be construed, "theuniversal strife-rot." Their compounds are very expressive; thus,Bodh being knowledge, and Too a participle that implies the action ofcautiously approaching,--Too-bodh is their word for Philosophy; Pah isa contemptuous exclamation analogous to our idiom, "stuff and nonsense;"Pah-bodh (literally stuff and nonsense-knowledge) is their term forfutile and false philosophy, and applied to a species of metaphysical orspeculative ratiocination formerly in vogue, which consisted in makinginquiries that could not be answered, and were not worth making; such,for instance, as "Why does an An have five toes to his feet instead offour or six? Did the first An, created by the All-Good, have the samenumber of toes as his descendants? In the form by which an An will berecognised by his friends in the future state of being, will he retainany toes at all, and, if so, will they be material toes or spiritualtoes?" I take these illustrations of Pahbodh, not in irony or jest, butbecause the very inquiries I name formed the subject of controversy bythe latest cultivators of that 'science,'--4000 years ago.

  In the declension of nouns I was informed that anciently there wereeight cases (one more than in the Sanskrit Grammar); but the effectof time has been to reduce these cases, and multiply, instead of thesevarying terminations, explanatory propositions. At present, in theGrammar submitted to my study, there were four cases to nouns, threehaving varying terminations, and the fourth a differing prefix.

  SINGULAR. PLURAL. Nom. An, Man, | Nom. Ana, Men. Dat. Ano, to Man, | Dat. Anoi, to Men. Ac. Anan, Man, | Ac. Ananda, Men. Voc. Hil-an, O Man, | Voc. Hil-Ananda, O Men.

  In the elder inflectional literature the dual form existed--it has longbeen obsolete.

  The genitive case with them is also obsolete; the dative supplies itsplace: they say the House 'to' a Man, instead of the House 'of' a Man.When used (sometimes in poetry), the genitive in the termination is thesame as the nominative; so is the ablative, the preposition that marksit being a prefix or suffix at option, and generally decided by ear,according to the sound of the noun. It will be observed that theprefix Hil marks the vocative case. It is always retained in addressinganother, except in the most intimate domestic relations; its omissionwould be considered rude: just as in our of forms of speech inaddressing a king it would have been deemed disrespectful to say "King,"and reverential to say "O King." In fact, as they have no titles ofhonour, the vocative adjuration supplies the place of a title, and isgiven impartially to all. The prefix Hil enters into the composition ofwords that imply distant communications, as Hil-ya, to travel.

  In the conjugation of their verbs, which is much too lengthy a subjectto enter on here, the auxiliary verb Ya, "to go," which plays soconsiderable part in the Sanskrit,
appears and performs a kindredoffice, as if it were a radical in some language from which bothhad descended. But another auxiliary or opposite signification alsoaccompanies it and shares its labours--viz., Zi, to stay or repose. ThusYa enters into the future tense, and Zi in the preterite of all verbsrequiring auxiliaries. Yam, I shall go--Yiam, I may go--Yani-ya, I shallgo (literally, I go to go), Zam-poo-yan, I have gone (literally, Irest from gone). Ya, as a termination, implies by analogy, progress,movement, efflorescence. Zi, as a terminal, denotes fixity, sometimes ina good sense, sometimes in a bad, according to the word with which itis coupled. Iva-zi, eternal goodness; Nan-zi, eternal evil. Poo (from)enters as a prefix to words that denote repugnance, or things fromwhich we ought to be averse. Poo-pra, disgust; Poo-naria, falsehood,the vilest kind of evil. Poosh or Posh I have already confessed to beuntranslatable literally. It is an expression of contempt not unmixedwith pity. This radical seems to have originated from inherent sympathybetween the labial effort and the sentiment that impelled it, Poo beingan utterance in which the breath is exploded from the lips with more orless vehemence. On the other hand, Z, when an initial, is with them asound in which the breath is sucked inward, and thus Zu, pronounced Zoo(which in their language is one letter), is the ordinary prefix to wordsthat signify something that attracts, pleases, touches the heart--asZummer, lover; Zutze, love; Zuzulia, delight. This indrawn sound ofZ seems indeed naturally appropriate to fondness. Thus, even in ourlanguage, mothers say to their babies, in defiance of grammar, "Zoodarling;" and I have heard a learned professor at Boston call his wife(he had been only married a month) "Zoo little pet."

  I cannot quit this subject, however, without observing by what slightchanges in the dialects favoured by different tribes of the same race,the original signification and beauty of sounds may become confused anddeformed. Zee told me with much indignation that Zummer (lover) which inthe way she uttered it, seemed slowly taken down to the very depths ofher heart, was, in some not very distant communities of the Vril-ya,vitiated into the half-hissing, half-nasal, wholly disagreeable, soundof Subber. I thought to myself it only wanted the introduction of 'n'before 'u' to render it into an English word significant of the lastquality an amorous Gy would desire in her Zummer.

  I will but mention another peculiarity in this language which givesequal force and brevity to its forms of expressions.

  A is with them, as with us, the first letter of the alphabet, andis often used as a prefix word by itself to convey a complex idea ofsovereignty or chiefdom, or presiding principle. For instance, Iva isgoodness; Diva, goodness and happiness united; A-Diva is unerring andabsolute truth. I have already noticed the value of A in A-glauran,so, in vril (to whose properties they trace their present state ofcivilisation), A-vril, denotes, as I have said, civilisation itself.

  The philologist will have seen from the above how much the languageof the Vril-ya is akin to the Aryan or Indo-Germanic; but, like alllanguages, it contains words and forms in which transfers from veryopposite sources of speech have been taken. The very title of Tur, whichthey give to their supreme magistrate, indicates theft from a tongueakin to the Turanian. They say themselves that this is a foreign wordborrowed from a title which their historical records show to have beenborne by the chief of a nation with whom the ancestors of the Vril-yawere, in very remote periods, on friendly terms, but which has longbecome extinct, and they say that when, after the discovery of vril,they remodelled their political institutions, they expressly adopted atitle taken from an extinct race and a dead language for that of theirchief magistrate, in order to avoid all titles for that office withwhich they had previous associations.

  Should life be spared to me, I may collect into systematic form suchknowledge as I acquired of this language during my sojourn amongst theVril-ya. But what I have already said will perhaps suffice to show togenuine philological students that a language which, preserving so manyof the roots in the aboriginal form, and clearing from the immediate,but transitory, polysynthetical stage so many rude incumbrances, hasattained to such a union of simplicity and compass in its finalinflectional forms, must have been the gradual work of countless agesand many varieties of mind ; that it contains the evidence of fusionbetween congenial races, and necessitated, in arriving at the shape ofwhich I have given examples, the continuous culture of a highlythoughtful people.

  That, nevertheless, the literature which belongs to this language is aliterature of the past; that the present felicitous state of society atwhich the Ana have attained forbids the progressive cultivation ofliterature, especially in the two main divisions of fiction and history,--I shall have occasion to show.