asxlouy or uiaiecxs. 
313 
ho, easy to be established between the numerous hordes 
which had remained hostile to each other, and had been 
kept asunder by diversity of idioms ; for, in uncultivated 
countries, after the lapse of several ages, dialects often 
assume the form, or at least the appearance, of mother- 
tongues. 
When it is said that a Dane learns the German, and a 
Spaniard the Italian or the Latin, more easily than they learn 
any other language, it is at first thought that this facility 
results from the identity of a great number of roots, common 
to all the Germanic tongues, or to those of Latin Europe; it is 
not considered, that, with this resemblance of sounds, there is 
another resemblance, which acts more powerfully on nations 
of a common origin. Language is not the result of an arbi- 
frary convention. The mechanism of inflections, the gram- 
matical constructions, the possibility of inversions, all are 
the offspring of our own minds, of our individual organiza- 
tion. There is in man an instinctive and regulating princi- 
ple, differently modified among nations not of the same 
race. A climate more or less severe, a residence in the 
defiles of mountains, or on the sea-coasts, or different habits 
of life, may alter the pronunciation, render the identity of 
the roots obscure, and multiply the number; but all these 
causes do not affect that which constitutes the structure and 
mechanism of languages. The influence of climate, and of 
external circumstances, vanishes before the influence which 
depends on the race, on the hereditary and individual dispo- 
sitions of men. 
In America (and this result of recent researches* 
is extremely important with respect to the history of 
our species) from the country of the Esquimaux to the 
banks of the Orinoco, and again from these torrid re- 
gions to the frozen climate of the Straits of Magellan, 
mother-tongues, entirely different in their roots, have, if we 
may use the expression, the same physiognomy. Striking 
analogies of grammatical construction are acknowledge, 
not only in the more perfect languages, as in that of 
the Incas, the Aymara, the Guarauno, the Mexican, and the 
Cora, but also in languages extremely rude. Idioms, the 
roots of which do not resemble each other more than tha 
* See Vater’s Mithriflates. 
