Comparative philology points to a common origin of all the more important languages, and furnishes no evidence that the less important are not also so derived.
On Sanskrit as a connecting link between the Indo-Germanic languages, see Max Müller, Science of Language, 1:146-165, 326-342, who claims that all languages pass through the three stages: monosyllabic, agglutinative, inflectional; and that nothing necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for either the material or the formal elements of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech. The changes of language are often rapid. Latin becomes the Romance languages, and Saxon and Norman are united into English, in three centuries. The Chinese may have departed from their primitive abodes while their language was yet monosyllabic.
G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters, 195—“Children are the constructors of all languages, as distinguished from language.” Instance Helen Keller's sudden acquisition of language, uttering publicly a long piece only three weeks after she first began to imitate the motions of the lips. G. F. Wright, Man and the Glacial Period, 242-301—“Recent investigations show that children, when from any cause isolated at an early age, will often produce at once a language de novo. Thus it would appear by no means improbable that various languages in America, and perhaps the earliest languages of the world, may have arisen in a short time where conditions were such that a family of small children could have maintained existence when for any cause deprived of parental and other fostering care.... Two or three thousand years of prehistoric time is perhaps all that would be required to produce the diversification of languages which appears at the dawn of history.... The prehistoric stage of Europe ended less than a thousand years before the Christian Era.” In a people whose speech has not been fixed by being committed to writing, baby-talk is a great source of linguistic corruption, and the changes are exceedingly rapid. Humboldt took down the vocabulary of a South American tribe, and after fifteen years of absence found their speech so changed as to seem a different language.
Zöckler, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 8:68 sq., denies the progress from lower methods of speech to higher, and declares the most highly developed inflectional languages to be the oldest and most widespread. Inferior languages are a degeneration from a higher state of culture. In the development of the Indo-Germanic languages (such as the French and the English), we have instances of change from more full and luxuriant expression to that which is monosyllabic or agglutinative. The theory of Max Müller is also opposed by Pott, Die Verschiedenheiten der menschlichen Rassen, [pg 479]202, 242. Pott calls attention to the fact that the Australian languages show unmistakable similarity to the languages of Eastern and Southern Asia, although the physical characteristics of these tribes are far different from the Asiatic.
On the old Egyptian language as a connecting link between the Indo-European and the Semitic tongues, see Bunsen, Egypt's Place, 1: preface, 10; also see Farrar, Origin of Language, 213. Like the old Egyptian, the Berber and the Touareg are Semitic in parts of their vocabulary, while yet they are Aryan in grammar. So the Tibetan and Burmese stand between the Indo-European languages, on the one hand, and the monosyllabic languages, as of China, on the other. A French philologist claims now to have interpreted the Yh-King, the oldest and most unintelligible monumental writing of the Chinese, by regarding it as a corruption of the old Assyrian or Accadian cuneiform characters, and as resembling the syllabaries, vocabularies, and bilingual tablets in the ruined libraries of Assyria and Babylon; see Terrien de Lacouperie, The Oldest Book of the Chinese and its Authors, and The Languages of China before the Chinese, 11, note; he holds to “the non-indigenousness of the Chinese civilization and its derivation from the old Chaldæo-Babylonian focus of culture by the medium of Susiana.”See also Sayce, in Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1884:934-936; also, The Monist, Oct. 1906:562-596, on The Ideograms of the Chinese and the Central American Calendars. The evidence goes to show that the Chinese came into China from Susiana in the 23d century before Christ. Initial G wears down in time into a Y sound. Many words which begin with Y in Chinese are found in Accadian beginning with G, as Chinese Ye, “night,” is in Accadian Ge, “night.” The order of development seems to be: 1. picture writing; 2. syllabic writing; 3. alphabetic writing.
In a similar manner, there is evidence that the Pharaonic Egyptians were immigrants from another land, namely, Babylonia. Hommel derives the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians from the pictures out of which the cuneiform characters developed, and he shows that the elements of the Egyptian language itself are contained in that mixed speech of Babylonia which originated in the fusion of Sumerians and Semites. The Osiris of Egypt is the Asari of the Sumerians. Burial in brick tombs in the first two Egyptian dynasties is a survival from Babylonia, as are also the seal-cylinders impressed on clay. On the relations between Aryan and Semitic languages, see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 55-61; Murray, Origin and Growth of the Psalms, 7; Bib. Sac., 1870:162; 1876:352-380; 1879:674-706. See also Pezzi, Aryan Philology, 125; Sayce, Principles of Comp. Philology, 132-174; Whitney, art. on Comp. Philology in Encyc. Britannica, also Life and Growth of Language, 269, and Study of Language, 307, 308—“Language affords certain indications of doubtful value, which, taken along with certain other ethnological considerations, also of questionable pertinency, furnish ground for suspecting an ultimate relationship.... That more thorough comprehension of the history of Semitic speech will enable us to determine this ultimate relationship, may perhaps be looked for with hope, though it is not to be expected with confidence.” See also Smyth, Unity of Human Races, 199-222; Smith's Bib. Dict., art.: Confusion of Tongues.
We regard the facts as, on the whole, favoring an opposite conclusion from that in Hastings's Bible Dictionary, art.: Flood: “The diversity of the human race and of language alike makes it improbable that men were derived from a single pair.” E. G. Robinson: “The only trustworthy argument for the unity of the race is derived from comparative philology. If it should be established that one of the three families of speech was more ancient than the others, and the source of the others, the argument would be unanswerable. Coloration of the skin seems to lie back of climatic influences. We believe in the unity of the race because in this there are the fewest difficulties. We would not know how else to interpret Paul in Romans 5.” Max Müller has said that the fountain head of modern philology as of modern freedom and international law is the change wrought by Christianity, superseding the narrow national conception of patriotism by the recognition of all the nations and races as members of one great human family.
3. The argument from psychology.
The existence, among all families of mankind, of common mental and moral characteristics, as evinced in common maxims, tendencies and capacities, in the prevalence of similar traditions, and in the universal applicability of one philosophy and religion, is most easily explained upon the theory of a common origin.