OF LANGUAGES. 



21 



period. This applies as well to the more as to the less 

 developed languages. The character of the individual, and 

 also of the individual language, must be already perceptible 

 in the first enunciations and acts, though it may be difficult, 

 nay, even impossible, clearly to define or specify them after- 

 wards. As individuals differ from each other in their 

 attainments, so also do the languages they speak, and as 

 many men remain throughout their life in a state of 

 childhood, so do certain languages. A child must be 

 younger than a grown-up man, but an intellectually gifted 

 man need not be older than one of smaller capacity. In 

 the former mental development is steadily increasing ; in the 

 latter it remains stationary. It is therefore hazardous to 

 ascribe to languages certain phases of growth through which 

 they have to pass from a lower to a higher development, or 

 from an isolating to a terminational, and finally to an inflec- 

 tional stage. In reality the characteristic marks of every 

 language are already contained in its primordials, as the seed 

 comprehends the elements of the plant, the egg those of the 

 bird, &c. 21 The supposition that rude dialects of uncultivated 

 nations prove by their actual state of rudeness a great 

 age, or that dialects spoken by modern savages are of later 

 origin than the more developed languages of their civilized 

 contemporaries is incorrect, the right conclusion being that 

 the former belong to a lower species of speech. Age in 

 itself does not bear on the decision of this question. The 

 peculiarly clumsy character of Chinese does no more express 

 its antiquity than the constructional perfection of Sanskrit 

 warrants us to refer its origin to a later period. It is, more- 



(21) Compare : De l'origine du langage par Ernest Kenan, deuxieme edition, 

 1858, page 16. " Je persiste done, apres dix ans de nouvelles etudes, k 

 envisager le langage comme forme d'un seul eoup, et comme sorti instantane- 

 ment du genie de chaque race;" and page 20 " La seule chose qui me 

 semble incontestable e'est que 1' invention du langage ne fut point le resultat 

 d'un long tatonnement, mais d'une intuition primitive, qui revela a chaque 

 race la coupe generale de son discours et le grand compromia qu'elle dut 

 prendre une fois pourtoutes avec sa pensee." 



