280 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vo.. VI. 
a period of decay, and some have become altogether extinct. Modern 
German has extinguished Polabish and old Prussian. Latin has ab- 
sorbed Oscan and Umbrian, the Galatians, Normans and Lombards lost 
their tongue, Cornish is no longer spoken, the Hochelagan and other 
native tongues of Canada have become extinct, and many of the Ameri- 
can Indian forms of speech are doomed by the increasing power of 
English and the advance of a superior race. The beginnings of a tongue 
may arise from individuals in infancy possessed of a creative faculty, 
who are separated in age and intelligence from others, and compelled by 
association to hold communication with each other; words are formed 
only intelligible to themselves, which by modifications serve all the pur- 
poses of their life. Children have possessed this language-forming 
faculty and have made a language of their own, sufficient for their needs, 
which required only time, continued association, and such conditions as 
would preserve their speech from the dominant influence of a superior 
tongue, to give it a place in the world as a new language. The study of 
child-language reveals a faculty of sound-speech, vowel-sounds, expres- 
sions made up of consonants, meaningless in themselves, syllables which 
as nouns stand for several things, and by a change of accent become 
verbs, and finally an arrangement of the vocabulary into sentences. 
The growth of a tongue seems to depend upon individuals who un- 
consciously, yet by an act of the will, introduce syllables and various 
changes by their creative faculty, then by imitation and finally through 
habit. The origin and growth of languages by individuals seem to 
indicate a primitive stage of purity, strength and richness, which is 
not found in later stages, when the descendants of the first speakers 
are only imitators. 
There are eleven stocks of languages and great divisions of the Amer- 
ican race in Canada and Newfoundland as follows: Eskimo, Beothuk, 
Algonkin, Iroquois, Sioux, Athapascan, Kootenay, Salish, Kwakiutl- 
Nootka, Tsimshian, and Haida. In British Columbia alone there are 
six linguistic stocks having twenty-nine dialects. The mental diversities 
of the native races, influenced by their environment, have contributed to 
the origin and growth of these languages. Political, social, literary and 
religious influences arrest languages in their growth, as seen in the 
formation of the three great families of speech, Turanian, Aryan, and 
Semitic, and in the Chinese, which is an example of a written language, 
arrested in an early period of its development, before the alphabet was 
reached. There are progressive and retrogressive movements evidencing 
growth and decay. There are evidences of corruption by loss of words, 
and replenishing from cognate dialects. Phonetic convenience works 
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