Page:A Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language with a Preliminary Dissertation- Dissertation and Grammar, in Two Volumes, Vol. I (IA dli.granth.52714).pdf/17

 history refute this notion. Thus, the half-dozen languages spoken in ancient Italy were all, in time, absorbed by one of them. The languages spoken in Britain twenty centuries ago have been nearly supplanted by a German tongue. Several millions of negroes in the New World, whose parent tongues. were African, have exchanged them for English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. For the languages spoken in ancient France and Spain, a language of Italian origin bas been almost wholly substituted. Although language often affords valuable historical evidence, it would only lead to error to consider it as invariably identical with race.

It is quite certain, that within the proper Indian Archipelago, or islands extending from Sumatra to the western shores of New Guinea, and respecting which our information is most complete, no languages exist derived from a common stock, and standing to each other in the relation of sisterhood, as Italian, Spanish, and French, do to each other; or as Gaelic does to Irish; or Armorican to Welsh, or Scotch to English. The only dialects that exist are of the Malay and Javanese languages, but they consist of little more than differences in pronunciation, or the more or less frequent use of a few words. In the Polynesian islands alone, real dialects of a common tongue do exist; but here, as will be afterwards shown, the number of words common to such dialects, and to the languages of the Archipelago, is so trifling, that it refutes at once the notion of a common origin.

Another insuperable argument against the theory of one original tongue is found in the nature of many of the words of the imagined derivative dialects. These abound in terms very widely diffused, indicating an advanced state of society; as for example, an useful system of numeration, terms connected with agriculture, navigation, the useful arts, and even with letters. The people that had such a language must necessarily have been in a tolerably advanced state of civilisation, in such a one for example as we find the principal nations of Sumatra, Java, and Celebes to be in, at the present day; and many of the tribes which the theory supposes to be derived from it, not only did not maintain the civilisation of the parent nation, but have even fallen into the condition of mere savages; a result