522 NATURE OF ROOTS AND WORDS. 



missionary, that in that country " in the course of one generation the 

 entire character of the language is changed ;" * and also tells us of 

 " missionaries in Central America who attempted to write down the 

 language of savage tribes, and who compiled with great care a 

 dictionary of all the words they could lay hold of. Returning to the 

 same tribe after the lapse of only ten years, they found that this 

 dictionary had become antiquated and useless. Old words had sunk 

 to the ground, and new ones had i-isen to the surface ; and to all 

 outward appearance the language was completely changed."! 



The multiplicity of barbarian dialects is another proof of this 

 rapidity of change. Gabriel Sagard, missionary to the Hurons in 

 1626, as quoted by the same author, J" states that among these North 

 American ti-ibes hardly one village speaks the same language as 

 another ; nay, that two families of the same village do not speak 

 the same language." Again : § " In the neighbourhood of Manipura 

 [near the Irawaddy] alone, Captain Grordon collected no less than 

 twelve dialects. ' Some of them,' he says, ' are spoken by no more 

 than thirty or forty families, yet so different from the rest as to be 

 unintelligible to the nearest neighbourhood.' " 



After this digression, let us return again to the changes of outward 

 form. If we begin comparing the vai-ying forms which the same 

 roots have assumed in different derivatives, the examples crowd upon 

 us to such an extent that it is hard to say which we should take 

 first. What can be more unlike in form than Lat. semetipsissimus 

 and Fr. meme ; Lat. canis and Germ. Hund; Germ. Zahn, Lat. dens, 

 Eng. tooth (the last of which has not a single letter in common with 

 either of its foreign relatives) 1 But few words in an extract from 

 Chaucer would remain unchanged in a modernized version, after the 

 lapse of only a few centuries, which we are now taught to regard as 

 a very trifling portion of the history of the human race. Nor should 

 it be forgotten that phonetic laws originated and came into force, in 

 the Aryan languages for instance, at a period much later than the 

 existence of the language which consisted chiefly of the Aryan roots 

 in the form which is assigned to them by comparative lexicography, 

 when what afterwards developed into a phonetic law was merely a 

 phonetic habit or usage, bu.t still variable, and not prevalent to such 



* Lectures, First Series, p. 56. 



t Hid., p. 53. The italics are my owii. 



X lUd., p. 53. 



§ Ihid., p. 5i. 



