43° POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



as to make complete reciprocal comprehension impossible. At this 

 day the speech of the outlying districts differs to a greater or less 

 extent from that of the capital. We may see, or rather we may hear, 

 the same thing in France and Spain. Although Italy, until recently, 

 had no political capital, Florence has for more than six centuries been 

 the fountain-head of pure Italian, for the reason that the coryphaei of 

 Italian literature were natives of the Florentine district. Much of the 

 so-called Italian used by the uneducated bears hardly more resemblance 

 to the literary type than another language. The same is true of Ger- 

 many. What is regarded as the best German is spoken near the middle 

 of the present empire, and to it foreigners usually try to conform. The 

 Germans themselves are rather careless about the matter and are con- 

 tent to speak a tongue more or less marked by local words and by a 

 distinctive pronunciation. The speech of Holstein, on the one hand, 

 and that of South Germany and Switzerland, on the other, differs so 

 widely that the natives of these regions who know only their mother 

 dialect are unable to understand one another. I read somewhere that 

 when Schiller first declaimed his early dramas before a middle German 

 audience he was only half understood and that their merit was not 

 appreciated until they were read aloud in a pronunciation unmarred 

 by Swabian, the only kind of German he knew. Even so small a 

 country as Denmark is not without its local peculiarities of speech. In 

 the United States the diversities of speech are so slight as to occasion 

 no inconvenience to a person passing from one end of the country to 

 the other. The reason is that the Atlantic seaboard, roughly speaking, 

 provided the norm for all the region extending westward to the Pacific. 

 The Mississippi valley and the Far West are simply a linguistic exten- 

 sion of the East. The origin of dialects within a given language can 

 only be accounted for hypothetically. They seem to be due to phonetic 

 laws that operated on a larger scale in producing the wider divergencies 

 of speech which are called languages. Limiting the statement to the 

 Aryan stock, it is assumed by philologists that its eight branches are all 

 descendants from one primitive tongue which was at first spoken by 

 a comparatively small tribe. In the course of time the initial group 

 scattered or was dispersed and each fragment became the nucleus of a 

 new language. It needs but a superficial study of all the languages of 

 Europe to make it evident that except the Finnish, the Magyar and 

 the Turkish, together with a few smaller groups, they have many points 

 of resemblance. When, however, we examine the structure of the 

 three just named, we soon find a fundamental difference which is, how- 

 ever, common to the trio. The farther back we trace these eight 

 languages, the closer becomes the resemblance. That the Irish branch 

 of the Keltic differs more widely from the Kussian than does the 

 German is owing to the fact that the early settlers of Erin split off 

 from the parent stock at a period prior to those of central and northern 



