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The disturbing forces which act upon language are in the 
main the following; — I postpone, of course designedly, that 
supernatural disturbing force which we of this Institute believe 
to have been injected into humanity in the plain of Babel ; 
and to have been, temporarily and in part, lulled in the early 
days of Christianity after the great day of Pentecost 
1. National or tribal peculiarities. Those anatomical or 
physiological peculiarities which constitute the differences be- 
tween races of men are not without effect upon their speech. 
The inhabitants of a southern climate, and of a richly fertile 
territory, naturally fall, after a generation or two, into slothful 
unenergetic habits. They speak lazily ; they shrink from the 
difficulty of hard consonantal pronunciation, and complicated 
inflexion. Compare the Polynesian tongues with every other 
family ; or, to come to differences in the same family, contrast 
the soft Italian with the harder Rumonsch of the mountains ; 
Servian with Polish ; Bengali with Mahratta, — nay, the English 
of Aberdeen with the English of Exeter. Again, a peculiar 
conformation of the organs of speech, produced by some 
external cause, climatic or otherwise, would soon eliminate 
some sounds, and introduce others ; and thus, if I may so 
express it, the tuning of the national ear would take a parti- 
cular direction, and the pronunciation and vocalization of the 
language would have a tendency to alter towards one class of 
sounds, and away from another class. As an instance of this 
<c tuning 33 as I have called it, I may allege the aversion of 
the Italian ear to a number of consonants in juxtaposition. 
Such a sentence as “ with great strength and speed 33 is posi- 
tively terrible to a nation which cannot say it but lo sbaglio, 
and turns Xerxes into Serse. Another example is the rigid 
rule of harmonizing sounds in Turkish, according to which a 
flat suffix must follow a flat root, and a sharp suffix a sharp 
root : e. g. ( ye-mec , to eat) ; but Jm#. (yu-mak, to 
wash). Another perhaps is the rejection, as offensive and 
barbarous, of the clicks which are so prominent in the language 
of the Bosjesmans and some few other African tribes ; not only 
are they found in no other family of tongues, but the higher 
Kafirs, as the Sechuana, never employ them. 
Further, habits of mutilation or distortion, not uncommon 
among barbarous tribes, must exercise a great influence in 
modifying language. Dental sounds and sibilants must be 
considerably altered, if not utterly lost, among those who file 
away or strike out the front teeth. Distortion of the lips, too, 
must interfere with the articulation of labials. So also among 
the imperfectly civilized, the habits of mutual suspicion and 
