LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD 



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LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD 



guages and in time have a real "world speech," 

 at least for Europe and America; but the 

 more conservative persons merely aim to pro- 

 duce a speech which shall be used for interna- 

 tional purposes only and exist side by side with 

 the languages of the various countries. But 

 whatever the object, it has persistently failed 

 of success. The new, invented language may 

 be more reasonable, more logical than those 

 already in existence, but it is not and cannot 

 be vital. No people's life is woven into it; no 

 contacts and withdrawals are shown in it, and 



the articles in these volumes on the various 

 languages the chief characteristics of each are 

 pointed out the musical quality of Italian, the 

 delicacy and precision of French, and so on. 



Many men have given their lives to the 

 study of languages, and to classifying them. 

 There are languages in which no word has more 

 than one syllable, like the Chinese; and on the 

 other hand there are those, like the German, 

 which contain ponderous words of seven or 

 eight syllables. There are tongues, belonging 

 almost entirely to comparatively undeveloped 



there remain, instead of the language of the 

 world, the languages of the world, as sharply 

 differentiated as ever in their history. For 

 each expresses in a large degree the genius and 

 spirit of the people who built it. 



Kinds of Languages. The fact stated above 

 will bear emphasis that the history of a people 

 is legible in its language; and the greatest 

 nations, those which have swayed the destinies 

 of the world, have fashioned the greatest lan- 

 guages. The language of Greece was exquisite, 

 musical, as truly a work of art as any statue 

 ever hewn from marble; the Roman language 

 was strong, compact, as capable of accomplish- 

 ing its purpose as was the Roman legion. In 



peoples, which make use of but a few sounds, 

 and there are others, as English, which have 

 more than twoscore. Then there are divisions 

 according to grammatical structure, as lan- 

 guages which inflect their words to show vary- 

 ing relations, and languages which have slight 

 inflection or none at all. However, all of these 

 technical distinctions are the province of the 

 scholar; the ordinary reader, even the ordi- 

 nary student, has little interest in them. On 

 the other hand, he is interested in such ques- 

 tions as, How many languages and dialects are 

 there in the world? How many sounds or 

 articulations are there in all of them? Which 

 language is spoken by the most people? Which 



