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1898-99. | LANGUAGE AND RELIGION. 281 
many changes. The Normans found the French tongue a barbarous 
jargon, but they gave it dignity and permanence by fixing it.in writing, 
and employing it in legislation, poetry, and romance. Sanskrit, Russian, 
Greek, Latin, Welsh, and English are acknowledged to be descendants 
of a single Aryan form of speech, spoken at some time by a single tribe 
or nation, yet the languages sprung from the original Aryan tongue are 
mutually unintelligible. There are certain differences in words arising 
from changes to which the sounds of a language are liable, and from 
different names given to the same thing. The Blackfeet, Bloods, and 
Piegans speaking the same language, when separated gave different 
names to the same things introduced by the white settlers. The Cree 
dialects reveal phonetic changes by the introduction of letters expressive 
of sounds which run through the whole language. The Eastern Dénés 
have lost quite a number of inflections still existing in the verbs of Car- 
rier, a dialect of the Déné. The Déné languages belonging to the Atha- 
pascan stock have changed considerably. A.G. Morice says: ‘ Time, 
or some other cause, has greatly reduced in the Chippewayan, Hare and 
Loucheux idioms, the number of the modificative forms of the 
objective, locomotive, and instrumentative verbs. The ordinal ad- 
jectives, which still exist in Carrier, have equally disappeared with 
the tribes’ migrations eastward. It is also worthy of remark that 
the Chilxohtin—a Western dialect—which has many terminological 
affinities with the Hare (Eastern) dialect, has similarly lost those 
terms.” The organs of speech change so that there arises an in- 
ability to utter certain sounds, as we find the Blackfoot tongue has 
no sound of the letters b, d, ], r. 
The physical characteristics of races change, while language is influ- 
enced very slightly by climate, food and labour. The flora and fauna of 
the territory inhabited, and the tribal customs introduce new words, yet 
affect little the internal structure. Political influences arrest language, 
so that wherever we find a mixed language, as the Blackfoot, there has 
invariably been a mixture of blood. Language is not merely the con- 
ventional instrument of thought, but it is to a great extent its creator, 
and the mould in which it is cast. The mould may be broken and races 
adopt the language of a conquering race, but there is no instance in 
which there is a complete transformation, so as to pass into a different 
type. Kinship in speech develops national unity, and exercises a strong 
influence on politics, as seen in the change of attitude of the British 
towards the people of Hindostan upon the discovery of Sanskrit. Civi- 
lization again begets an influence diffusing some forms of speech, and 
destroying others. Mythology likewise changes the modes of expres- 
