Indigenous Races of the Earth

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34 ON TilE DISTRIDUTION AND of a civilization alrcacly advanced, amid an infinitude of pr~ductio:s of nature or of industry, the nouns take precedence over 10 vcr s. Here the richness of the cases dispenses with the rigorous sen:c ~f rc ->Ositions as occurs in Greek; whereas among ourselves, w 10 m ~r;nch :ross~ss no longer any cases, tho meaning of the phrase ~x~~s that our prepositions should be well defined. II~ncc,. then, t ~ . e itself of a people bas been the source of the modrfi.catwns opmat~d in its tongue, and each idiom has pursued its development after 1ts own fashion. . Two causes combine towards effecting an alteratw~ of languag~s, viz : their development within themselves, and the1~ .contact w1th ~ · · d' s above all with such as belong to famthes altogether 101' 1gn 1 10m ,- . • distinct; but the second, compared to the first,. 1s of small account. Tlle influence of 11eighboring foreign tongues mtr?duccs som~ new words and sundry locutions, certain" idiotisms;" b~t 1t cannot, '~1thout difficulty, inject into alien speech those grammatical forms whiCh are its own hcrit.'tO'O, Its influence re-acts much more upon the style than on tho grammar. If two languages o~ ~isti~ct families arc spoke.n by neighborin()' populations, or by those hvmg m perpetual contact, 1t or­dinarily ba;pcns that the most analytical tongue .fo:ces its processes to penetrate into that which is the less so. Thence 1t I? that t_he Gcrma~, brou()'ht into contact with the French, loses a portwn of 1ts syntheti­cal :xpressions, as well as the habitual use of those c?n:pound phrases which it received from the .Asiatic speech whence It 1ssucd; and that the French, when spoken by N cgrocs, is stripped of its grammatical richness, and becomes simplified almost t~ tho lovol of an .African ton()'ue. In the same manner the Armoncan, or Bas­Breton, whilst ~reserving tho ground-work of Celtic grammar, is now-a-clays spoken under a form that recalls more of French than of the ancient Armorican. One sees, therefore, that the crossing of languages, like that of races, has really not been very deep. Once invaded by a strangcr­ton()' uc ono of a nature more logical in its processes, the old lan­gua~ c ~itho:r has not undergone more than superficial alterations, or has disappeared entirely, without bequeathing to the idiom which followed it any inheritance but that of a few words. Such is what happened to Latin as regards the Gallic ( Gaulois). This Celtic tongue is completely supplanted by the idiom of the Romans, and has loft no other vestiges of its existence than a few words, together with, doubtless, some peculiarities of pronunciation also that have passed into the French. One perceives equally well in English, here and thoro, words and locutions that appertain to the W clsh; and which, CLASSIFICATION OF TONGUES. 35 in consequence, must be a heritage of the tongue whilom spoken by the Kelts of Albion. If the grammatical dispossession of a language could have been wrought gradually, one ought to :find some mixed phrases at the living period of those tongues that have boon driven out by others. Now, such is not the ca!:lo. 'l'ho Basque, for example, foreign in origin both to French and Spanish, has indeed been altered through the adoption of a few words and a few locutions borrowed from tho e languages, by which it is surrounded, and, as it wore, invested; but it evermore clings to the basis of its structure, the vital principle of its organism ; and a Franco-Basque, or a Basco-Spanish, is not spoken, nowhere has ever boon spoken. Modern Greek has appro­priated many words from Turkish, no loss than from Italian, as well as some expressions of both tongues; but its en tiro construction remains fundamentally IIollonic, notwithstanding that it belongs to tho analytical period, and that the ancient Greek was still emerging from the synthetic. Again, the Persian, which is so imbued with Arabic words that writers of this language often inter­calate sentences wholly .Arabic in their discourses, remains, never­theless, completely Indo-Germanic as concerns its grammar. But we have not seen that this tongue has ever associated the Persian declension with the Arabic conjugation, or yoked tho Por!:lian pre­positions to Semitic affixes and suffixes. Finally, the Osmanloe Turkish, besides incorporating words of every langLwgo with which the Turks have been in contact for more than a thousand years, bas purloined all its scientific nomenclature from tho .Arabs, most of its polite diplomatic phrases from the Persians; but, wl1 ilst fusing Semitic as well as Indo-European exotic words into its copia ver­borum, the radical structure of its so-called Tartarian [or, Turanian J grammar, no less than its original vocabulary, is still so tenaciously preserved, that a coarse Siberian Yalcut can even now, after ages of ancestral separation, communicate his simple ideas to the intelligence of a Cor1stantinopolitan Turko-Sybarite. All those considerations show us, therefore, that the families of tongues arc assemblages (des ensembles) very distinct, and tho results of a divorsi:fi.od order of tho cr ativc faculty of speech. This faculty does not, then, appear to us as absolutely identical in its action; and we must necessarily admit that it corresponds, under its different forms, to races of mankind possessing different faculties, as well for speech as for ideas. This is what the study of the principal classes or families of tongues will make still more evident; seeing that we shall :find them in a relation sufficiently striking to tho diil~rent human races.