narrow district, and appear to have no affinity with those of the other tribes in the immediate vicinity[1]. Hence, perhaps, it may be inferred, that the higher capacity for the formation and development of language was at this early period combined with a greater physical and mental energy—in short, with all those qualities on which the ulterior improvement and increase of the nations by which it was spoken depended.
While the Semitic branch occupies the south-west of Asia, the Indo-Germanic languages run in a straight line from south-east to north-west, through Asia and Europe: a slight interruption, which occurs in the country between the Euphrates and Asia Minor, appears to have been occasioned by the pressure of Semitic or Syrian races from the south; for it seems probable that originally the members of this national family succeeded one another in a continuous line, although we are not now able to trace the source from which this mighty stream originally flowed. Equally uncertain is it whether these languages were spoken by the earliest inhabitants of the countries to which they belonged, or were introduced by subsequent immigrations; in which latter case the rude aborigines would have adopted the principal features of the language spoken by the more highly endowed race, retaining at the same time much of their original dialect—an hypothesis which appears highly probable as regards those languages which show a general affinity with the others, but nevertheless differ from them widely in their grammatical structure and the number of their radical forms.
§ 2. On the other hand, this comparison of languages leads to many results, with respect to the intellectual state of the Greek people, which throw an unexpected light into quarters where the eye of the historian has hitherto been able to discover nothing but darkness. We reject as utterly untenable the notion that the savages of Greece, from the inarticulate cries by which they expressed their animal wants, and from the sounds by which they sought to imitate the impressions of outward objects, gradually arrived at the harmonious and magnificent language which we admire in the poems of Homer. So far is this hypothesis from the truth, that language evidently is connected with the power of abstracting or of forming general notions, and is inconsistent with the absence of this faculty. It is plain that the most abstract parts of speech, those least likely to arise from the imitation of any outward impression, were the first which obtained a permanent form; and hence those parts of speech appear most clearly in all the languages of the Indo-Teutonic family. Among these are the verb "to be," the forms of which seem to alternate in the Sanscrit, the Lithuanian, and the Greek; the pronouns, which denote the most general relations of persons and things to the speaker; the numerals, also abstract
- ↑ Some of the American languages are rather cumbersome than meagre in their grammmatical forms; and some are much more widely spread than others.—Note by Editor.
