THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE 225 



In such ways as these we may conceive of early 

 Man building up the fabric of speech. In time his 

 vocabulary would enlarge and become, so far as 

 objects in the immediate environment were con- 

 cerned, fairly complete. As Man gained more 

 knowledge of the things around him, as he came 

 into larger relations with his fellows, as life became 

 more rich and complex, this accumulation of words 

 would go on, each art as it was introduced creating 

 new terms, each science pouring in contributions 

 to the fund, until the materials of human speech 

 became more and more complete. This process 

 was never finished. The evolution of Language is 

 still going on. No corroboration of the theory of 

 the evolution of Language could be more perfect 

 than the simple fact that it has gone on steadily 

 down to the present hour and is going on now. 

 Tens of thousands of words — no longer now ono- 

 matopoetic — have been evolved since Johnson com- 

 piled his dictionary, and every year sees additions 

 not only to technical terms but to the Language 



more extensive modifications in the same direction." Even 

 for differences in dialect, as the same writer points out, 

 there is a physical basis. "With the macrodont alveolar 

 arch and the corresponding modified tongue, sibilation is a 

 difficult feat to accomplish, and hence the sibilant sounds 

 are practically unknown in all the Australian dialects." — British 

 Association : Anthropological Section. Edinb., 1891. 



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