[346] I do not here mention the opinions of the Swede (see Latham, Celtic Nations, p. 2), who thinks that important changes can be introduced into a language by certain customs of a people, who change, for instance, the lips for the nostrils, and thus substitute nasal for labial consonants. These facts are, perhaps, true in the detail, but they ought not to have much importance, as they do not alter the specific and personal character of the language, which is far from consisting in the relative number of one or two kinds of letters.
[347] Bunsen (Eng. transl.), Niebuhr’s Life and Letters, vol. i, p. 39.
[348] “Languages,” he says, “give but feeble probabilities in Anthropology.” Voyage aux regions Equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, vol. iii, p. 352.
[349] See, in the Mémoires de la Société Ethnologique (July 1843), a letter in which M. Vivien denies a first rank to language as a distinctive characteristic, and gives it to physical type.
[350] See above, p. 32.
[351] “I am led to believe that familiar languages (if this philological barbarism is permitted me) do not resemble one another because they come from the same parent, but because they have been brought up together; Africa especially seems to me to furnish a proof of it, for we must study the history of families of languages, especially in the place where they began to be formed, and I believe that language was formed in Africa. My hypothesis is not applicable to all cases, but to several; thus, the French, Italian, Spanish, etc., come from the Latin, and were born at its death; but many other languages appear to me to take their features one from the other by simple frequentation, by the natives being often in company together, and, as time goes on, these mutual loans make two or several languages, like the branches of the same tree, only, in my idea, the tree does not exist.”—Correspondence, 1857.
[352] See above, p. 78.
[353] [Pali, the ordinary language of daily life in Hindoostan at the time when Sanscrit was used in elevated literature alone.—Editor.]
[354] Des Colorations de l’épiderme, 4to, Paris, 1864.
[355] See The Natural History of Man, 1844.