502 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Prance as the every-day language of the people in the isolated province 

 of Brittany — a sort of philological fossil. It has withstood the influ- 

 ence of 2,000 years of contact, first with Latin, then with Prankish 

 German, at last with French. In the same way, its Welsh sister tongue 

 flourishes in spite of the Anglo-Saxon speech of the remainder of 

 Great Britain. The original inhabitants of Spain were mostly of non- 

 Aryan stock. Celtic, Eoman and Gothic invasions have successively 

 swept over them and finally left the language of the country Eomance ; 

 but the original speech also survives the vicissitudes of thousands of 

 years and is still spoken in the western Pyrenees as Basque. Ancient 

 Egypt was conquered by the Shepherd, the Assyrian, the Persian, the 

 Macedonian and the Eoman, but whatever the official speech of the 

 ruling class, the people continued to speak Egyptian. Finally, the 

 Arab came and brought with him a new religion, which entailed the 

 use of the Arabic language. Egypt has finally become Arabic-speaking, 

 but until barely a century ago the Coptic language, the daughter of the 

 ancient Egyptian tongue of 5,000 years ago, was kept alive by the na- 

 tive Christians along the Nile ; and even to-day it survives in literature. 

 While nations, like individuals, can learn and unlearn languages, 

 as a rule they do so only with the utmost reluctance and with infinite 

 slowness. Speech tends to be one of the most persistent and permanent 

 ethnic characters. 



Indian Linguistic Families 



The seemingly endless Indian idioms are by classification reducible 

 to about 150 groups or families, almost equally divided between North 

 and South America. The first problem of American ethnology, after 

 determining and mapping these families, is to deduce the probable 

 migrations of peoples that can be inferred and the connection which 

 existed between different tribes. The second task is to carry out similar 

 inquiries within the bounds of each group or family, and in this way to 

 ascertain the minor or more recent affiliations and movements. 



The number of languages is large; the aboriginal population was 

 relatively sparse ; the necessary consequence is an unusually small num- 

 ber of people per distinct language. In California, where the linguistic 

 diversity reached its height, there were spoken about 135 idioms belong- 

 ing to 21 families. The total Indian population was 150,000 or a little 

 less — an average for each dialect of almost exactly 1,000 souls, and 

 only 7,000 for each linguistic family. There is something incongruous 

 in comparing the tongue of a paltry 7,000 uncivilized people with, for 

 instance, the whole group of Aryan languages that are the birthright 

 of hundreds of millions of people of the most important nations. Yet 

 to the ethnologist such comparisons are a necessity, for each group of 

 related languages, whether extending only over a little valley, or spread- 

 ing from continent to continent, is an ultimate unit in itself, which 



