16 



ON THE CLASSIFICATION 



Languages exhibit, like the persons who speak them, the 

 different phases of life, with its commencement and develop- 

 ment, its decay and death. If once a dialect is no more 

 spoken by a people, it is dead, though it might be kept 

 artificially alive by being used for scientific, religious, or 

 professional purposes, as is the case with Sanskrit, Hebrew, 

 and Latin. The relationship of parentage and offspring 

 among living creatures is also found among languages. 

 Owing to change of abode (emigration), to political circum- 

 stances, to contact with other nations, new languages 

 might rise from old ones, as the Romanic languages pro- 

 ceeded from Latin. However much such daughter languages 

 differ from the parent tongue in words and construction (e.g., 

 by assuming an analytic, instead of the synthetic formation 

 of the parent language), a real change of thinking does not 

 take place. If, on the other hand, two nations belonging 

 to different races and speaking consequently different lan- 

 guages are brought together through wars or treaties and 

 intermix with each other, the character of the language 

 which they will speak depends on a variety of circumstances. 

 Both French and English contain Latin and Teutonic 

 elements, but the former belongs to the Latin, the latter to 

 the Teutonic branch of the Aryan stock, because the internal 

 construction, that is, the grammar and syntax, expressing 

 the thought of the first framers of the rising dialects is in 

 the one Romanic, in the other Teutonic. The Frank 

 invaders of G-aul submitted to the higher civilization and 

 the clerical influence of Rome, while the Saxon immigrants 

 contrived to retain as much as possible their national inde- 

 pendence, which could be less interfered with in insular Albion 

 than in continental Gaul. A language can be many times 

 propagated or regenerated, but it dies as soon as its 

 da.ughter-languages establish themselves independently, or 

 it ceases to supply a real want. In nature and construc- 

 tion similar, often even identical, yet a mother-language 



