151 
classified ; and some are of opinion that they may he con- 
sidered as offshoots of the Malay, which is itself (they imagine) 
to be referred to the Aryan family. The peculiarity of these 
languages is that the words and their inflective particles are 
simple syllables, consisting of a consonant and vowel, or in 
some cases of a single vowel. They might be termed poly- 
syllabic. 
7. The languages of Northern America are characterized by 
the same colligation of syllables ; but as the syllables are com- 
pound, and the whole system of colligation more complicated, 
some incline to group them with the Turanian or agglutina- 
tive, some to consider them a special family, the polysynthetic. 
We have here, then, seven families of human speech ; or, to 
reduce them to the very lowest number, by classing the Poly- 
nesian with Aryan, the Shemitic with Hamitic, and the 
American with Turanian — at least four different forms of 
language. 
But the clear statement of Scripture is that there was a 
time when “ all the earth was one lip, one set-of-words 33 (I 
translate Gen. xi. 1, literally). Their vocabulary and their 
pronunciation were the same. 
Here the opponents of Scripture join issue. They tell us 
that, do what we will, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the 
various families of languages, be they seven or four, or any 
ultimate number, exhibit such specific differences that they 
cannot have been developed from one original; that, in fact, 
the diversity of human speech is as good and convincing an 
argument in favour of the polygenist hypothesis as the diver- 
sity of human physiology. 
But this is rather a violent assumption. What proof is 
there that the differences in human languages, great as they 
are now, are so essential that they may not be explained by 
the disturbing and disorganizing causes which are at work 
even amongst ourselves, and are productive of speedy effects 
where there is no written literature to give fixity to the voca- 
bulary and grammatical forms ? Granted that Chinese and 
Sanskrit, Siamese and Gaelic, Finnish and Kafir, are so 
utterly and entirely dissimilar now, that we can scarcely 
imagine the human being who has learnt the one acquiring 
the power of using the other, that dissimilarity is not other in 
kind, it is only greater in degree , than the difference between 
a page of the Saxon Chronicle and a page of the Times ; or 
to use a still better illustration, than that between an upnekhat 
of the Zend-Avesta and a division of the Shah-Nameli, or a 
proclamation by the present Shah of Persia, between the 
Hutch Bible and Ulfilas. 
