ioo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nounce any syllable that is found in the name of a near male relative. 

 But these are special usages, temporary fashions, and have nothing 

 whatever to do with the structure of the language. Then, again, we 

 witness the creation of new words every day, but these words are 

 always formed according to analogies with already existing words. 

 They may be happy inventions or awkward attempts, but they are 

 never pure creations or wholly fanciful. 



A second objection to the classification of linguistic among scien- 

 tific studies rests upon the fact that whole peoples, and even races, are 

 capable of abandoning their own language and adopting another. The 

 fact is undeniable ; but it is also undeniable that language is inde- 

 pendent of history ; and, to take one example among many, we have 

 seen Latin go on in its evolution in Gaul, Spain, and Roumania, after 

 having been adopted by the barbarians. 



It is proper to say something here about so-called mixed languages, 

 which are, however, not at all hybrid in their structure, but have 

 simply admitted foreign words into their vocabularies. With all the 

 Persian and Arabic words it contains, the Turkish language is evi- 

 dently and only Altaic. The Araucanian language, although it has 

 received a host of Spanish words, is a purely American idiom. Eng- 

 lish is Germanic, although its vocabulary is loaded with words of 

 Latin origin. The French language was introduced into England by 

 the Norman conquest in the eleventh century. From the two lan- 

 guages which were then found in the presence of one another, the 

 Anglo-Saxon and the French, it has been usually said that a mixed 

 language was formed the English. This assertion is very inexact, 

 from the morphological point of view. French, after the conquest, 

 became the language of the court and of justice, while it entered into 

 the popular language, the Anglo-Saxon, only as to its vocabulary ; but 

 there it made a deep impression. Of 43,000 words in the English lan- 

 guage, as they occur in the dictionary, more than 29,000 are of Roman 

 origin, while only 13,000 or 14,000 are of Germanic origin, or Anglo- 

 Saxon ; yet the English language is wholly Germanic in its structure. 

 The remains of the declensions of nouns and of the conjugations of 

 verbs are Germanic, with no Latin about them. Another example of 

 the kind is found in the Basque language, three quarters of the vo- 

 cabulary of which is to-day Romanic ; yet the fact does not prevent 

 the language from having a peculiarly individual structure and form 

 wholly free from Romanic elements in its grammar. 



In short, the processes of linguistic study which have nothing in 

 common with those of the study of philology demonstrate that the 

 linguist studies the anatomy of forms just as the botanist and zoolo- 

 gist do. 



Another objection to the scientific view of linguistics is more 

 specious, but not more solid. It is that, since articulate language can 

 not be produced without vocal organs, it can not be regarded as an 



