Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/355

 several independent origins, and second o£ one sole origin of Language, continues as follows:—"If the first supposition be true, the different tribes or families of languages, however analogous they may be, as being the produce of the same human mind upon the same outward world, by the same organic means, will, nevertheless, offer scarcely any affinity to each other in the skill displayed in their formation, and in the mode of it ; but their very roots, full or empty ones, and all their words, monosyllabic or polysyllabic, must needs be entirely different. There may be some similar expressions in those inarticulate bursts of feeling, not reacted on by the mind, which grammarians call interjections. There are, besides, some graphic imitations of external sounds, called Onomatopoetica—words the formation of which indicates the, relatively, greatest passivity of the mind. There may be, besides, some casual coincidences in real words; but the law of combination, applied to the elements of sound, gives a mathematical proof that with all allowances, such a chance is less than one in a million for the same combination of sounds, signifiying the same precise object. If there be entirely different beginnings of speech, as philosophical inquiry is allowed to assume, and as the great philosophers of antiquity have assumed, there can be none but stray coincidences between words of a different origin. Referring to what has already been stated as the result of the most accurate linguistic inquiries, such a coincidence does exist between three great families spreading from the north of Europe to the tropic Lands of Asia and Africa. If there exists, not only in radical words, but even in what may appear as the work of an exclusively peculiar coinage—the formative words and inflections which pervade the whole structure of certain families of languages—and are interwoven, as it were, with every sentence pronounced in every one of their branches. All nations which, from the dawn of history to our days, have been the leaders of civilization, in Asia, Europe, and Africa, must consequently have had one beginning." The remarks of the learned writer refer more especially to the Semitic, Japetic, and Chametic languages, but the same conclusions equally apply to the Turanian, which is a branch of the Japetic. What could be more interesting to you as students of philology and natives of this land, than to trace, for example, your ancient Indian stock—more or less closely allied to the Sanskrit—with its polysyllabic words and store of inflectional forms through nearly all the languages of the West; to note its development into splendour and precision in the classic tongues of Greece and Rome, and following, let us suppose, one of the most remarkable of its branches into Central Europe, to observe