78 INTELLECTUAL AND 



Semitic idioms. " If the planets, whose physical nature seems 

 to be analogous to that of the earth," says M. Kenan,* " are 

 peopled with beings organised like ourselves, we may presume 

 that the history and the language of those planets does not 

 differ more from our own than does the history and language 

 of the Chinese." It is impossible to establish by a clearer and 

 more striking image the individuality of the different families 

 of language, not one of which owes its origin to its neighbours, 

 and which have, probably, never been in one another's pre- 

 sence, except when they had already been formed, bringing 

 with them their own characteristics, their fundamental and 

 profound type, as unalterable by contact as is the physical 

 type of the men who spoke them. These, in presence of 

 others, may have been able to alter their traditions, their re- 

 membrances, their words, but these were never more than 

 simple loans ; we may be certain that these men were strangers 

 one to the other on the day when they uttered their first words 

 in their cradles. 



We must limit ourselves merely to recording the result, 

 which is, that each system of language is absolutely irre- 

 ducible to others, both by its basis and its form ; all born 

 in human thought, it is true, but this thought following at each 

 point a particular path, so that each of these systems, as M. 

 Renan has said, only abuts on the others by the community of 

 the aim it is intended to reach. 



Certain families of languages do not differ solely by their 

 constitution, they show special phonetic or physiological qua- 

 lities ;f that is to say, we can observe, in two different lan- 

 guages, varieties of the same order which is explained among 

 animals, by the words barking, braying, cooing, etc. This is 

 particularly the case with the strange language spoken by the 

 clear-complexioned race of South Africa, probably much more 

 widely diffused in former times than at present. It resembles 

 no other known language, and consists in a clucking which has, 

 they say, nothing analogous to it among any other nation on 



* Histoire des Langues Semitiqucs, p. 467, Paris, 1855. 



f See Prichard, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations, edited by Latham, 

 1857. 



