[119]. C. O. Müller, in an admirable passage which I cannot resist the temptation of transcribing, shows the true nature of language: “Our age has learnt, by the study of the Hindu and especially the Germanic languages, that the laws of speech are as fixed as those of organic life. Between different dialects, developing independently after their separation, there are still mysterious links, which reciprocally determine the sounds and their sequences. Literature and science set limits to this growth, and arrest perhaps some of its richer developments; but they cannot impose any law on it higher than that ordained by nature, mother of all things. Even a long time before the coming of decadence and bad taste, languages may fall sick, from outward or inward causes, and suffer vast changes; but so long as life remains in them, their innate power is enough to heal their wounds, to set their torn limbs, and to restore unity and regularity, even when the beauty and perfection of the noble plants has almost entirely disappeared” (Die Etrusker, p. 65).
[120]. Pott, op. cit., p. 74.
[121]. That the mixture of idioms is proportionate to that of the races constituting a nation had already been noticed before philology, in the modern sense, existed at all. Kämpfer for example says in his “History of Japan” (published in 1729): “We may take it as a fixed rule that the settlement of foreigners in a country will bring a corresponding proportion of foreign words into the language; these will be naturalized by degrees, and become as familiar as the native words themselves.”
[122]. Keferstein shows that German is merely a hybrid language made up of Celtic and Gothic (Ansichten über die keltischen Altertümer, Halle, 1846–51; Introduction, p. xxxviii). Grimm is of the same opinion.
[123]. W. von Humboldt says: “Languages, that are apparently crude and unrefined, may show some striking qualities in their structure, and often do so. In this respect they may quite possibly surpass more highly developed tongues. The comparison of Birman with Delaware, not to speak of Mexican, can leave no doubt of the superiority of the latter; yet a strand of Indian culture has certainly been interwoven into Birman by Pali” (Über die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. xxxiv).
[124]. This difference of level between the intellect of the conqueror and that of the conquered is the cause of the “sacred languages” that we find used in the early days of an empire; such as that of the Egyptians, or the Incas of Peru. These languages are the object of a superstitious veneration; they are the exclusive property of the upper classes, and often of a sacerdotal caste, and they furnish the strongest possible proof of the existence of a foreign race that has conquered the country where they are found.
[125]. W. von Humboldt, Über die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. xxxiv.
[126]. See p. 82 above.
[127]. Ancient Greece contained many dialects, but not so many as the Greece of the sixteenth century, when seventy were counted by Simeon Kavasila; further we may notice (in connexion with the following paragraph) that in the thirteenth century French was spoken throughout Greece, and especially in Attica (Heilmayer, quoted by Pott, op. cit., p. 73).
[128]. The Hebrews themselves did not call their language “Hebrew”; they called it, quite properly, the “language of Canaan” (Isaiah xix, 18). Compare Roediger’s preface to the Hebrew grammar of Gesenius (16th edition, Leipzig, 1851, p. 7 et passim).