LANGUAGE. 



371 



its kindred dialects completely monosyllabic ; that 

 is to say, that every syllable of which they are 

 composed, with very few exceptions, has an appro- 

 priate moaning and conveys, by itself, to the 

 mind, either a simple or a compound idea. At the 

 opposite end of the grammatical scale, we find the 

 languages of the Indians of the American continent 

 polysyllabic in the extreme, composed of words some 

 of them of an enormous length, while their compon- 

 ent syllables have, when separately taken, no mean- 

 ing whatsoever. The Sanscrit, in Asiatic India, and 

 in the vicinity of China, is also an eminently poly- 

 syllabic language, though the roots of its words may 

 be more easily traced than those of the idioms of 

 America. The Sanscrit abounds in grammatical 

 forms, by means of which accessary ideas are con- 

 veyed to the mind by regular inflections, evidently 

 the result of a preconceived system. The Chinese 

 has none of those forms : every syllable, every word, 

 conveys a detached idea; and it wants those connect- 

 ing vocables which, in other languages, bind the 

 discourse together, and help the hearer to understand 

 the sense of a period. The same differences exist, 

 in a greater or less degree, in all the languages of 

 the earth, ancient as well as modern. No two of 

 them, it is believed, have exactly the same manner 

 of conveying ideas from mind to mind in the form of 

 words; and, though they may have the same gram- 

 matical character in a general point of view, they 

 differ in the details. That is not, however, what we 

 are considering. We mean to speak only of those great 

 and essential differences, in consequence of whicli lan- 

 guages may be divided into strongly distinguished 

 classes, such as the monosyllabic and the polysyllabic, 

 the atactic, that is to say, those that are devoid of 

 connecting words and of grammatical forms, and the 

 syntactic, which possess these in greater or lesser abun- 

 dance. These differences, it will be said, may have gra- 

 dually taken place in the course of time, and prove 

 nothing against the common origin from one primi- 

 tive language. Unfortunately for this objection, 

 they may be traced back so far, and have continued 

 so long, that it is impossible to suppose that they 

 may have been thus successively produced. Taking, 

 for instance, only two of the languages of the old 

 world the Chinese and the Sanscrit, or, if it be 

 alleged that the latter is no longer spoken, we will 

 take those languages of India which are known to 

 be mediately or immediately derived from it, and 

 which may fairly be considered as its continuation. 

 Now, the Chinese and the languages of India are 

 known to have existed at least 4000 years, the one 

 monosyllabic and atactic; the other, or the others, 

 polysyllabic and syntactic. It does not appear that, 

 in all that period of time, they have at all approached 

 nearer to each other, and, in their general structure 

 and character, they remain now as they were as far 

 back as we can trace them. The same might be 

 .said of the Hebrew and the class of languages called 

 Semitic, of the Basque, the Greek, the Teutonic, the 

 Sclavonic, the Coptic, the Berber of mount Atlas, 

 and the barbarous languages, as they are called, of 

 Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and America, all- of which 

 are more or less ancient, and some of which may be 

 traced as far back as the Chinese and Sanscrit ; and 

 their origin is lost in the night of time. Their 

 organic differences have remained the same, not only 

 for ages, but thousands of ages. 



From these facts an inference forces itself irresisti- 

 bly upon the mind, which is, that in all languages 

 there is a strong tendency to preserve their original 

 structure. From the most remote time that the 

 memory of man can reach, we have never seen a 

 monosyllabic language become polysyllabic, or vice 

 rersa. Why have not the Chinese, and the Sanscrit 



or its cognate languages, in the course of 4000 years, 

 approximated in the least to each other ? Has the 

 Tartar conquest made the least alteration in the 

 structure of the former idiom ? How has the Basque 

 preserved its grammatical forms, different as they 

 are from those of any other language, and surrounded 

 as that handful of ancient Iberians is, and has been 

 for so many ages, by idioms of a character entirely 

 opposite ? How comes it that the polysynthetic 

 forms of the languages of America extend from one 

 end of that vast continent to the other, and that one 

 general grammatical system pervades them all, and 

 appears to have been, from the beginning of time, 

 peculiar to the races of American red men ? The 

 strong tendency of languages to preserve their 

 organic structure can alone account, in a satisfactory 

 manner, for these phenomena. If such a tendency be 

 admitted, and we do not see how it can be reason- 

 ably denied, it must have existed in the primitive 

 language, as well as in those that are supposed to 

 have been derived from it. But when we see that 

 these have preserved their grammatical characters 

 unchanged for more than 4000 years, we cannot 

 believe that, in the 2000 years preceding, according 

 to the generally received chronology, which makes 

 the .world about 6000 years old, language should 

 have suffered so many changes in its organic struc- 

 ture as to form new languages, so essentially and so 

 entirely different from each other in that respect, to 

 say nothing of the difference which exists in the 

 etymology of words ; for between the Chinese and 

 the Cherokee, for instance, it will be difficult to find 

 the least etymological affinity ; and, if the distance 

 of place is assigned as the cause, we will instance 

 the Bengalee a language spoken in a country not 

 far from China, and which differs from the Chinese 

 full as much as the Mohawk and the Potawatamee. 

 We are therefore forced into the conclusion, that all 

 the languages which exist on the face of the earth 

 are not derived from one, but that they must be 

 divided into classes or genera, to which must be 

 assigned separate and distinct origins. It is not our 

 business to reconcile this theory with the Mosaic 

 records ; we think, however, it may be easily done 

 by supposing (to the contrary of which there is 

 nothing in Scripture) that, at the confusion of 

 tongues, the primitive language, its words and its 

 forms, were entirely effaced from the memory of 

 man, and men were left to their own resources to 

 form new ones, which they did without reference to 

 any pre-existing model. We can in this manner 

 very easily account for all the differences, gram- 

 matical as well as etymological, that exist between 

 languages. As to the former, we need only look to 

 the various capacities of the human mind. As the 

 physical eye perceives objects differently, and ascribes 

 to them different shapes and colours, according to the 

 strength of the organ and the point of view from 

 which it contemplates them, so the eye of the mind 

 receives ideas or mental perceptions, according to its 

 various capacities, and to different attending circum- 

 stances. What we call ideas, are rapid perceptions, 

 continually flitting before the mental eye. Like 

 objects viewed through the kaleidoscope, they pass 

 before us in ever-changing shapes, and, in endea- 

 vouring to fix them on the memory by articulate 

 sounds, the appearance of the moment will decide 

 the form to be given to those representative signs. 

 The man of quick perceptions will try to retain the 

 idea of a whole physical or moral object, or, per- 

 haps, a whole group of objects, in his memory, by 

 means of one single word : another, of slower com- 

 prehension, seeing or perceiving a part only, will 

 appropriate a word or a syllable to the expression of 

 that part, and another and another to each of the 

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