30 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL, I02 



that after the confusion of tongues, the original holy language was 

 called Hebrew, since it had been preserved by Eber ; and later on it 

 did not persist in all the children of Israel, but only in those in direct 

 descent, like Peleg and Reu, and not in all the sons of Abraham, but 

 only in Isaac, and after Isaac, not in Esau but only in Jacob, and 

 from Jacob to the Ten Tribes descended from his sons. At that time 

 the Hebrew language was complete and perfect, which it is not today, 

 for only the words which are written in the Law have come down 

 unchanged, and not the rest ; for since the sons of Jacob and their 

 descendants who were born in Egypt, lived among the Egyptians and 

 other nationalities, they adopted many of their words and kept mix- 

 ing them in with their own, which led to the introduction and inven- 

 tion of various different languages. 



73. In the same way in Spain, since at different times so many 

 diverse nationalities have governed there, the original natural lan- 

 guage was corrupted and disappeared, so that at present it is not what 

 it was in the beginning, for in our Castilian speech we have words 

 from the Gothic, the Latin, the Romance, the Arabic, etc., in conse- 

 quence of their rule over Spain ; this is so generally and widely known 

 that I discuss it no further, to avoid diffuseness. In addition, the 

 diversity of the nationalities which entered Spain at different epochs, 

 occasioned a diversity of tongues, e.g., Basque, Valencian, Catalan, 

 Portuguese, Galician, and others still different, mutually unintelligible, 

 which is remarkably surprising in so tiny a corner of the world as 

 Spain. Our Castilian language of today differs greatly from that 

 spoken a century ago, in that we have adopted and use currently many 

 words from other nations with which we have intercourse, so that 

 Spanish serves very generally as a means of intercommunication all 

 over the world among different nations which have dealings with 

 each other. 



74. The same thing happened in the Indies with the first settlers 

 there, members of the Ten Tribes ; they lost their language, or at 

 least adulterated it with words imported from the various nationalities 

 through whom they passed ; the invention of man helped in this, and 

 alongside it, the tricks and schemes of the Devil, to cause greater 

 confusion and keep them from mutual understanding, and thus hold 

 them in blindness and deceit ; and in the course of time the confusion 

 increased so materially with this diversity of tongues over so wide- 

 spread and extensive a territory, that their number surpasses 50,000. 

 And to give some comprehension of them, I will cite some selected 



