Language family

“ In concluding this account of the chief families of language, it is to be noticed that there are many more, some only consisting of a few dialects or a single one. Altogether a list of fifty or a hundred might perhaps be made, of which no one has been satisfactorily shown to be related to any other. It may, indeed, be expected that often two or three which now seem separate may prove on closer examination to be branches of one family, but there seems no prospect of the families all coming together in this way as offshoots of one original language. ”

“ I have, as we may suppose, a kind of home dialect, containing a certain proportion of baby-talk, and a larger of favourite colloquialisms, which would sound a little queerly, if they were not unintelligible, to any one outside of my family circle; as an artisan, pursuing a special branch of manufacture or trade, or as one engaged in a particular profession, or study, or department of art, I am a member of another community, speaking a language to some extent peculiar, and which would be understood neither by my wife and children nor by the majority of speakers of English. ”

“ This is what our instructors set before us as the true origin of nations and their languages. And, in drawing out the picture, we cannot avoid, our teachers themselves do not avoid, the use of words which imply that the strictly family relation, the relation of community of blood, is at the root of the whole matter. We cannot help talking about the family and its branches, about parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins. ”

“ The great mass of dialects of the family, descendants of a common parent, covering a period of four thousand years with their converging lines of development, supplied just the ground which the science needed to grow up upon, working out its methods, getting fully into view its ends, and devising the means of their attainment. The true mode of fruitful investigation was discovered; it appeared that a wide and searching comparison of kindred idioms was the way in which to trace out their history, and arrive at a real comprehension of the life and growth of language. ”

“ While it is obvious that the material goods of society are thus transmitted by the family from one generation to another, it is perhaps not quite so obvious, but equally true, that the spiritual possessions of the race are also thus transmitted. For example, language is very largely transmitted in the family, and students tell us that each family has its own peculiar dialect. Literature, ideas, beliefs on government, law, religion, moral standards, artistic tastes and appreciation—all of these are still largely transmitted in society from one generation to another through the family. ”

“ We have seen that even among ourselves, where uniformity of speech prevails certainly not less than elsewhere in the world, no two individuals speak absolutely the same tongue, or would propagate absolutely the same, if circumstances should make them the founders of independent linguistic traditions. However small, then, may have been the community which laid the basis of any actually existing language or family of languages, we must admit the existence of some differences between the idioms of its individual members, or families. ”

“ Moreover, it is clear that we should not appreciate the peculiar character of the mode of communication and expression belonging to our family, we should not even know that it had a distinctive character of its own, that the problem of speech was not solved in an identical manner by all parts of the human race, if we did not look to see how the other families have constructed the fabric of their language. ”

“ A single language is called a stock or family when it is not found to be cognate with any other language. Languages are said to be cognate when such relations between them are found that they are supposed to have descended from a common ancestral speech. The evidence of cognation is derived exclusively from the vocabulary. Grammatic similarities are not supposed to furnish evidence of cognation, but to be phenomena, in part relating to stage of culture and in part adventitious. ”

“ They have had to give every little child the start toward that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for the mother, knows what the 62child says before any one else can understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Counter-tendencies toward differentiation. While the standard language does become fixed and stable, there are, in the daily life of different social groups, varying actual languages. Every class, or profession, every social group, whether of interest, or occupation, has its slight individuality in articulation or vocabulary. We still observe that members of a family talk alike; sometimes households have literally their own household words. ”

“ But the English spoken in the fifth century was a very different language from the English that is spoken now. It was different, yet still the same. It was different in appearance, as a child of one year old is different in looks from a man of forty; but both the English of to-day and the English of the fifth century are the same—because the one has grown out of the other, just as the tall strong man of forty has grown out of the child of one year old.
3. FAMILY.—To what family of languages does our English speech belong? It belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. ”

“ But the role of the child in the development of language is concerned with other things than physonyms and onomatopes. In his work on Brazilian ethnography and philology, Dr. von Martius writes (522. 43) : "A language is often confined to a few individuals connected by relationship, forming thus, as it were, a family institute, which isolates those who use it from all neighbouring or distant tribes so completely that an understanding becomes impossible." This intimate connection of language with the family, this preservation and growth of language, as a family institution, has, as Dr. ”

“ The men of my family—that is, my uncle John, my father, and my eldest brother—were all philologists, and extremely fond of the study of language. Grammar was favorite light reading, and the philosophy which lies at the root of human speech a frequent subject of discussion and research with them; but they none of them spoke foreign languages with ease or [51] fluency. My uncle was a good Latin scholar, and read French, Italian, and Spanish, but spoke none of them; not even the first, in spite of his long residence in French Switzerland. ”

“ There is no other trait that binds together its scattered clans, and brands them as members of one great family, so unmistakably as this of language. From the Frozen Ocean to the Land of Fire, without a single exception, the native dialects, though varying infinitely in words, are marked by a peculiarity in construction which is found nowhere else on the globe,6-1 and which is so foreign to the genius of [7] our tongue that it is no easy matter to explain it. ”

“ In spite of all imitation, the individual’s language is largely his own creation adapted to his individual needs. To the extent to which the children of a community, of a nation, have similar interests and similar experiences, these individual creations must be similar. But to the extent to which interests and experiences differ, language must differ. Baby talk which is quite comprehensible to the members of one family is incomprehensible to those of another family. ”

“ Konunigare so debá."
which being interpreted into English, 'May the enmity of nations fall away, fall away, for the hour is come! All mankind must become as one family.'
On the table, in addition to the grammar and dictionary, lay some translations in the new language. ”

“ What is the scope and bearing of the division into families? Does it separate the human race into so many different branches, which must have been independent from the very beginning? Does linguistic science both fail to find any bond of connection between the families and see that no such bond exists? Or, in short, what has the study of language to say respecting the unity of the human race? ”

“ Class dialects, too, would spring up; the dialects of servants, grooms, shepherds, and soldiers. Women would have their own household words; and the rising generation would not be long without a more racy phraseology of their own. Even we, in this literary age, and at a distance of thousands of years from those early fathers of language, do not speak at home as we speak in public. ”

“ The children of to-day resemble those children of humanity, the first framers of articulate speech, and the children of a single household, if left to themselves, would have each his own jargon, his own dialect. ”

“ In fact, a man’s language is no full and certain proof of his parentage. There are even cases in which it is totally misleading, as when some of us have seen persons whose language is English, but their faces Chinese or African, and who, on inquiry, are found to have been brought away in infancy from their native countries. It is within every one’s experience how one parent language disappears in intermarriage, as where persons called Boileau or Muller may be now absolutely English as to language, in spite of their French or German ancestry. ”

“ An infant is taken alive from the arms of its drowned mother, the only waif cast upon the shore from the wreck of a strange vessel; and it learns the tongue of its foster-parents; no outbreak of natural and hereditary speech ever betrays from what land it derived its birth. The child of a father and mother of different race and speech learns the tongue of either, as circumstances and their choice may determine; or it learns both, and is equally at home in them, hardly knowing which to call its native language. ”

“ Their use rises and falls with fashion in nations, classes, groups, and families, and it controls the habits of individuals. Whether certain persons use a pious dialect, a learned (pedantic) dialect, a gambler's slang, a phraseology of excessive adjectives and silly expletives, or profane expressions, oaths, and phrases which abuse sacred things, depends on birth and training. In this sense each dialect is the language for each group and corresponds to the mores of the group. ”

“ But it went no further than to show that possibly all languages have begun with a common vocabulary, all languages have some common features, as all men have the organs common to the human family. The question is how far, and at what period, such have diverged from the common type, so as to form an essentially distinct family. ”

“ Would an universal idiom result from this fusion of societies, or would there be a dialect of compromise, employed for daily use, while each nation would talk its own language, or else would the different languages be understood by all? ”

“ Further, we must remember that the child has far more abundant opportunities of hearing his mother-tongue than one gets, as a rule, with any language one learns later. He hears it from morning to night, and, be it noted, in its genuine shape, with the right pronunciation, right intonation, right use of words and right syntax: the language comes to him as a fresh, ever-bubbling spring. ”

“ The child learns its own or mother tongue from the mother; it learns a foreign tongue from a teacher, whose highest ambition is to be a grammarian. Does the child learn better from the mother or from the grammarian? Without doubt, from the mother, according to the mother method. If this is so, must we use the example of the mother or of the grammarian when we are to begin the teaching of a foreign language? Is there any reason why a foreign tongue should be otherwise taught than the mother tongue? ”

“ The same circumstances which give rise to the formal language of a clan, as distinguished from the dialects of families, produce, on a larger scale, the languages of a confederation of clans, of nascent colonies, of rising nationalities. Before there is a national language, there have always been hundreds of dialects in districts, towns, villages, clans, and families; and though the progress of civilization and centralization tends to reduce their number and to soften their features, it has not as yet annihilated them, even in our own time. ”

“ Many of the dialects belong to the same parent language; many of the races sprang from the same stock, but each has acquired a certain individuality by reason of its environment and the conditions under which it has been living. ”

“ Not only are the American linguistic stocks different from each other, and fail to furnish evidence of having been derived from a single parent tongue, but, as philologists assure us, no one of them is analogous to any language spoken in other lands. ”

“ Our mother tongue is our mother tongue only because we learned it in infancy. Although his ancestors have thought and spoken in one language for countless generations, a child who hears from the first nothing else, will learn with equal facility any other tongue. ”

“ What evidence is afforded by bilingual children, that is to say, by children who have learnt two languages simultaneously, children of mixed parentage, children whose care has been entrusted to foreign nurses, children who live abroad with their parents? ”