[125]. T. Benfey, in preface to Fick’s Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen, 1868.
Language and Race.
From claiming too much the swing of the pendulum brought linguistics into disrepute with ethnologists, and for a time the evidence of language was looked upon with suspicion. Even philologists were accused of going too far in this direction.
Professor Sayce[[126]] says: “Identity or relationship of language can prove nothing more than social contact.... Language is an aid to the historian, not to the ethnologist.” But, as Professor Keane points out, there are many cases in which language infallibly proves the existence of ethnic elements which would otherwise have been unsuspected—as, for example, in the case of the Basques of Europe. “Language used with judgment is thus seen to be a great aid to the ethnologist in determining racial affinities, and in solving many anthropological difficulties” (1896, p. 205).
Although Max Müller wrote nearly twenty years ago, “I believe the time will come when no anthropologist will venture to write on anything concerning the inner life of man without having himself acquired a knowledge of the language in which that inner life finds its truest expression,” we are obliged still to echo his lament: “How few of the books in which we trust with regard to the characteristics or peculiarities of savage races have been written by men ... who have learnt their languages until they could speak them as well as the natives themselves!”[[127]]
[126]. Science of Language, ii., p. 317.
[127]. Rep. Brit. Assoc. (Cardiff), 1891, p. 792.
Chapter XII.
CULTURAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT