22 



ON THE CLASSIFICATION 



over, very remarkable that, as a rule, the earlier periods of 

 highly developed languages display a greater abundance of 

 expressions and of grammatical formations, especially in 

 declensions and conjugations, than is met with at a later and 

 more advanced stage. The savage languages of the Negroes 

 and Papuans may represent a more backward stage, but they 

 do not betray an earlier origin. As languages arise in the 

 infancy of national life, in fact at a time when a nation is in 

 a more or less barbarous state, the civilization which it may 

 afterwards obtain cannot be taken into consideration in an 

 inquiry into comparative philology ; and when both savage 

 and civilized nations live at the same time, it is certainly 

 wrong to ascribe to age what does not apply to it. 



Two languages may be equally old, and yet one may never 

 have left its primeval undeveloped state, while the other has 

 attained high perfection. As long as a language in its 

 growth does not overstep the natural boundary of its evolu- 

 tion and does not change its laws of development, it only 

 pursues its true course of life ; but the admission of new 

 rules, occasioned by foreign pressure, produces a variation 

 which will ultimately cause it to appear as a new peculiar 

 dialect. However far we might pursue our researches 

 respecting the original thoughts and enunciations of the 

 various species of men, and however much these enunciations 

 may have been altered in the course of time as to their 

 outward appearance, the primitive ideas remain throughout 

 the same. Even though the different races of mankind should 

 show in their formation indications which would allow us 

 to presume that the higher classes have been developed from 

 the lower, we may at the same time be quite unable to prove 

 by historical facts that any people, as long as it remained 

 unmixed with foreign elements, has undergone such a 

 change of character respecting its speech. If therefore 

 such a development has occurred, it happened previously to 

 the appearance of the individual forms of speech. 



