Franz Boas

“ Taking our American conditions as an example, we may observe at the present time that many languages are spoken by small communities, and while there is no proof of the recent development of any new very divergent language, there are numerous proofs showing the extinction of some languages and the gradual extension of others. As the area occupied by the Indo-European family has gradually extended and as foreign languages have become extinct owing to its expansion, so we find that Chinese has gradually expanded its area. ”

“ I have discussed this question in another place and have explained my view that probably at a very early time the diversity of languages among people of the same physical type was much greater than it is now. I do not mean to imply by this that all the languages must have developed entirely independently, but rather that, if there was an ancient common source of several modern languages, they have become so much differentiated, that without historical knowledge of their growth, the attempts to prove their interrelation cannot succeed. ”

“ If these observations regarding the influence of acculturation upon language should be correct, then the whole history of American languages must not be treated on the assumption that all languages which show similarities must be considered as branches of the same linguistic family. We should rather find a phenomenon which is parallel to the features characteristic of other ethnological phenomena—namely, a development from diverse sources which are gradually worked into a single cultural unit. ”

“ It is not so easy to understand the development of similar categories of words in neighboring languages. It is undoubtedly true that forms of social and political organization, as well as religious life, have become alike among neighboring tribes owing to a process of acculturation. The similarity in forms of life creates the necessity of developing terms expressing these forms, and will thus bring about indirectly similarity in those ideas that are expressed by words. ”

“ How, for instance, should the habit of mind to classify all motion according to form spread from one language to another? Equally difficult to understand is the spread of morphological traits from one language to another. ”

“ If this point of view is correct, then we have to ask ourselves in how far the phenomena of acculturation extend also over the domain of languages.
Considering the conditions of life in primitive society, it is intelligible how the phonetics of one language may influence those of another one. Many of the American tribes are very small and intertribal marriages are, comparatively speaking, frequent, either owing to peaceful intercourse, or to the abduction and enslavement of women after warlike raids. ”

“ There must always have been a considerable number of alien women in each tribe who acquired the foreign language late in life and who, therefore, transmitted the foreign pronunciation to their children. It is true that we cannot give definite observations which prove the occurrence of this phenomenon, but it can hardly be doubted that these processes were operative in all those cases where the number of alien women was considerable in proportion to the number of native women. The objective study of languages also shows that phonetic influences do spread from one people to another. ”

“ When we apply this assumption to such concepts as terms of relationship, in which we remain in doubt as to whether the term creates the feeling accompanying the sub-summation of an individual under a category, or whether the feeling creates the term, it seems difficult to understand the psychological process that led to the similarity of classification, although the facts of distribution make it perfectly clear that the similarities are due to diffusion. This difficulty is still greater when we deal with the fundamental concepts contained in the ancient stems that underly the modern words. ”

“ It is true enough that in a comparison of modern Indo-European languages, without any knowledge of their previous history, it might be very difficult to prove relationship let us say, between Armenian and English and we might be compelled to adopt a similar conclusion as the one suggested here. Partially this inference would be correct, because our modern Indo-European languages contain much material that is not Indo-European by origin. ”