Linguistic diversity

“ 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. ”

“ They use the same accents as ourselves, forming their words either on the palate, the teeth, or the lips, only they have other words for things. Great is the diversity of languages, for in a hundred leagues we found such change in the language that the inhabitants could not understand each other. ”

“ Thus innumerable dialects spring up. Whenever a difference of situation takes place among the people composing the aggregate by whom the original language was spoken, a diversity of dialect is at once created. ”

“ But the natural condition of language is diversity and change, and it is only under the artificial influences of civilization and culture that a language becomes uniform and stationary. As soon as the coercive hand of civilization is removed it breaks out again into a plentiful crop of dialects. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Second, the attempt has more frequently been made to establish an ethnic classification than a linguistic classification, and linguistic characteristics have been confused with biotic peculiarities, arts, habits, customs, and other human activities, so that radical differences of language have often been ignored and slight differences have been held to be of primary value. ”

“ A new language, says the proverb, is a new sense; but a multiplicity of dialects means, for the possessors of the main language, an enlargement of the pleasures of the linguistic sense without the fatigue of learning a totally new grammar and vocabulary. ”

“ When we close our minds to months and years and think in centuries, it is easy to understand the diversity of languages. Tribes going off by themselves, drop words from their vocabulary as time goes on, and use other words that mean the same; after the passing of generations there is an entirely new dialect. It is so in nearly all the countries of the Old World; people living under the same government, neighbors, cannot talk to each other. ”

“ The development of a future universal language seems improbable. It is true that dialects become merged in languages, and these languages lost in others still more extensive, just as streams flow into rivers, and rivers into the sea. It is true that diversity of idioms is the characteristic of barbarism, and unity the slow result of civilisation. ”

“ There always have been reciprocal relations between communities of signs and groups of people. At one time the ethnic force predominates over the linguistic; and at another period, or in other circumstances, the linguistic influence spreads more victoriously than arms. ”

“ Migration introduces a potent agency of mutation, but a new environment impresses its characteristics upon a language more by a change in the semantic content or meaning of words than by change in their forms. There is another agency of change of profound influence, namely, association with other tongues. When peoples are absorbed by peaceful or militant agencies new materials are brought into their language, and the affiliation of such matter seems to be the chief factor in the differentiation of languages within the same stock. ”

“ Unduly impressed by the career of modern cultivated dialects, their effacement of existing dialectic differences and production of homogeneous speech throughout wide regions, and failing to recognize the nature of the forces which have made such a career possible, these authors affirm that the natural tendency of language is from diversity to uniformity; that dialects are, in the regular order of things, antecedent to language; that human speech began its existence in a state of infinite dialectic division, which has been, from the first, undergoing coalescence and reduction. ”

“ The very fact that language is unstable—is a matter of growth—renders the argument that these peculiarities indicate unity of the American race valueless; while, on the other hand, the fact that here we have a greater number and variety of languages than is to be found in any of the other grand divisions of the earth, is strong evidence of a diversity more radical than that which simply arises 191from tribal affiliations. ”

“ Helped by the two other causes of linguistic change, the dialect of a household becomes in time the dialect of a clan or tribe, and as soon as its characteristics are sufficiently numerous and distinct, the dialect is transformed into a language. ”

“ They present examples of divergence of phonetic character, of differences in structure and vocabulary, that will bring us face to face with the problem of the origin of these divergent elements.
The more detailed study of American languages promises rich returns in the fields of the mechanical processes of linguistic development and of the psychological problems presented by languages of different types. In many American languages the etymological processes are so transparent, that the mechanism of phonetic adaptation stands out with great clearness. ”

“ Just as we have seen that language advances from complexity to simplicity, so we now see that it advances from multiplicity to unity. The more barbarous a society is, the more numerous will be the languages that it speaks. The further back we go into the past, the greater must be the linguistic anarchy with which we meet. A language begins with dialects, and since language is the product and reflection of the community that uses it, the primæval languages of the world must have been as infinitely numerous as the communities that spoke them. ”

“ Thus there come to exist among the same people two separate tongues; the one an inheritance from the past, becoming ever more stiff and constrained, and employable only for special uses; the other the production of the present, growing constantly more unlike the other by the operation of the ordinary processes of linguistic change; full of inaccuracies and corruptions, if we choose to call them so, but also full of a healthy and vigorous life, which enables it finally to overthrow and replace the learned or sacred dialect of which it is the offspring. ”

“ Prevalence of the same tongue over wide regions of the earth's surface was, indeed, impossible in the olden time, and human speech is now, upon the whole, tending toward a condition of less diversity with every century; but this is only owing to the vastly increased efficiency at present of those external influences which counteract the inherent tendency of language to diversify. ”

“ Only a careful and thorough sifting of their linguistic material can determine how far the ramifications of genetical relationship may bind together languages apparently diverse. If two kindred tongues can, by divergent growth, come to differ from each other as much as English and German, there is no à priori ground for believing that they may not come to differ as much as English and Polish, or Greek, or Hindustani. ”

“ It is therefore conceivable that the structure of this highly complex speaking apparatus should determine a man's linguistic potentiality; that is to say, should enable him to use a language of one class and not of another. It is further conceivable that a particular linguistic potentiality should be inherited and become as good a race mark as any other. As a matter of fact, it is not proven that the linguistic potentialities of all men are the same.
CLXXXIII
Community of language is no proof of unity of race, is not even presumptive evidence of racial [Pg 54] identity. ”

“ When we consider the history of human languages as it is revealed by their present distribution and by what little we know about their history during the last few thousand years, it appears fairly clearly that the present wide distribution of a few linguistic stocks is a late phenomenon, and that in earlier times the area occupied by each linguistic family was small. ”

“ We then proceeded to inquire into the manner in which the same processes operate to divide any given form of speech, with the lapse of time, into varying forms, or to convert a language into dialects. We passed in review the causes which favour the development of dialectic differences, as well as those which limit and oppose such development, and even tend to bring uniformity out of diversity. They are, we found, of two general kinds: the one, proceeding from individuals, and founded on the diversities of individual character and circumstance, tend to indefinite separation and discordance ”

“ And since a language is the outward expression of the mind and history of a nation, the nation whose language is the most perfect has approached the most nearly to a perfect culture and civilization. Language is at once the most exquisite work of art and the most marvellous creation of science that the spirit and intellect of a people can produce, and its character, as tested by the standard which linguistic science has to establish, is a sure and certain clue to the stage of art and science attained by its speakers. ”

“ Every word, then, in whose examination the linguistic scholar engages, is to be first set alongside its correspondents or analogues in other related languages, that its history may be read aright. Thus the deficiencies of the evidence which each member of a connected group of dialects contains respecting its own genesis and growth are made up, in greater or less degree, by the rest, and historical results are reached having a greatly increased fulness and certainty. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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? ”

“ The comparative philologist and the educated linguist do not deny, but recognize, the fact that evolution and devolution are both continually going on in every language, causing more or less marked changes which become appreciable at the end of a sufficiently long period of time; neither would they deny that, when the transformation due to these causes has become sufficiently great through dialectic segregations, the resultant language—which is at first only a dialect—may, in time, become a distinct language. ”

“ Nor would it follow, if it could be proved that all the dialects of mankind point to one common source, that therefore the human race must descend from one pair. For language might have been the property of one favored race, and have been communicated to the other races in the progress of history.
The science of language and the science of ethnology have both suffered most seriously from being mixed up together. The classification of races and languages should be quite independent of each other. ”

“ I take as a best example language, which, even in the different branches of the Indo-European race, offers such variety that the primitive unity passed unobserved for centuries, and only the philologist is able to trace the European languages back to the same root. The fairy-tales are, more or less, entirely the same, the changes being relatively slight, when compared with those which differentiate one language from another. ”

“ Wherever, on the contrary, we have a scattered and barbarous people, we have great diversities, and comparatively rapid alterations of language. Insomuch that, while English, French, and German are each spoken with little variation by many millions, there are islands in the Indian archipelago, probably not inhabited by one million, but in which there are hundreds of languages, as diverse as are English, French, and German. It is easy to see how this should be. There are peculiarities in the vocal organization of every person, tending to produce peculiarities of pronunciation ”

“ How are we to trace the history of dialects? In the ancient history of language, literary dialects alone supply us with materials, whereas the very existence of spoken dialects is hardly noticed by ancient writers. ”

“ It was as fortunate as it was necessary that the single language of the learned should give way before the vulgar tongues, the speech of the people, each in its own region best fitted to phrase the feelings and the aspirations of races dissimilar in their characteristics and in their ideals. No one tongue could voice the opposite desires of the northern peoples and of the southern; and we see the several modern languages revealing by their structure as well as by their vocabularies the essential qualities of the races that fashioned them, each for its own use. ”

“ 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. ”