SCIENCE.-SUPPLEMENT. 



FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 1886. 



THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES, AND THE 

 ANTIQUITY OF SPEAKING MAN. 



In the study of every science there arise from 

 time to time difficult questions or problems which 

 seem to bar the way of the student in one direc- 

 tion or another. It becomes apparent that on the 

 proper sohition of these problems the progress of 

 the science mainly depends ; and the minds of aU 

 inquu-ers are bent earnestly on the discovery of 

 this solution. Such, in biology, are the questions 

 of the origin of life and the genesis of sjiecies. 

 Anthropology, and its auxiliary or "component 

 sciences of comparative philology, ethnology, and 

 archaeology, have their share of these problems. 

 Among them, two of the most important are un- 

 doubtedly, in philology, the question of the origin 

 of linguistic stocks, and in archaeology, the ques- 

 tion of the epoch at which man acquired the 

 faculty of speech. A brief consideration of these 

 questions, in the hght cast upon them by the most 

 recent discoveries, may therefore be' deemed to 

 form an appropriate introduction to the work of 

 our section. 



The question of the origin of languages must 



be distinguished from the different and larger 



question of the origin of language, which belongs 



rather to anthropology proper than to the science 



of linguistics, and will come under consideration 



in the later part of our inquiry. Nor yet does 



our question concern the rise and development 



of the different tongues belonging to one linguistic 



stock or family, like the sixty languages of the 



Aryan or Indo-European stock, the twenty 



languages of the Hamito-Semitic family, the one 



hundred and sixty -eight languages enumerated 



by Mr. R. N. Cust as composing the great Bantu 



or South African famUy, and the thirty-flve 



languages of the widespread Algonkin stock. 



Such idioms, however much they may differ, are 



in their nature only dialects. The manner in which 



these idioms originate is perfectly well understood. 



But we have no satisfactory theory to explain the 



distinction between the families themselves. 



When, for example, we have traced back the 



Aryan languages and the Semitic languages to 



their separate mother-tongues, which we are able 



Abstract of an address before the section of anthro- 

 pology of the American association for the advancement 

 of science at Buffalo, Aug. 19, 1886, by Horatio Hale, vice- 

 president of the section. 



to frame out of the scattered dialects, we tind 

 between these two mother-tongues a great gulf, 

 which no explanation thus far proposed has 

 sufficed to bridge over. How strongly the sense 

 of this difficulty has been felt by the highest 

 minds engaged in philological study, wUl be evi- 

 dent from two striking examples. Sixty years 

 ago. Baron William von Humboldt found it (as 

 Dr. Brinton states) " so contrary to the results of 

 his prolonged and profound study of languages, 

 to believe, for instance, that a tongue like the 

 Sanscrit could ever be developed from one like 

 the Chinese, that he frankly said that he would 

 rather accept at once the doctrine of those who 

 attribute the different idioms of men to an imme- 

 diate revelation from God." Fifty years later 

 Prof. Abel Hovelacque, in his work, ' La Linguis- 

 tique,' declared, as the final conclusion of science, 

 that there could be no conceivable community of 

 origin between systems so unlike as that of the 

 Indo-European and that of the Semitic tongues. 

 "The abyss between the two systems," he affirms, 

 " is not merely profound : it is impassable." 



The number of distinct linguistic stocks is com- 

 puted to exceed two hundred, most of which are 

 found on the western continent. Various at- 

 tempts have been made to explain their origin, 

 but none have gained general acceptance. Some 

 of the most eminent philologists have given up the 

 question, in despair of a solution. Yet the simple 

 and sufficient explanation has been lying close at 

 hand, awaiting only, like many other discoveries 

 in science, the observation of some facts of com- 

 mon occurrence to bring it to light. In the pres- 

 ent case, the two observers who have made the 

 conclusive facts known to us have both been 

 Americans, and both of them writers of more 

 than ordinary intelligence ; but both were entirely 

 unknown in this branch of investigation, and 

 both, moreover, had the Ul-fortune of publishing 

 their observations in works of such limited circu- 

 lation that their important contributions to science 

 have hitherto failed to attain the notice they 

 deserved. 



Before setting forth the facts, it wiU be weU to 

 state at once the result of the inquiry. Briefly, 

 then, the plain conclusion to which aU the obser- 

 vations point, with irresistible force, is that the 

 origin of linguistic stocks is to be found in what 

 may be termed the language-making instinct of 

 very young children. From numerous cases, of 

 which the history has been traced, it appears that, 



