Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/256

234 as will be shown later, is in some respects more primitive in its structure than any other human tongue; but what it was at the beginning, that it has ever since remained, a solitary example of a language almost destitute of a history. Egypt has records to show of an age surpassing that of any other known monuments of human speech; but they are of scanty and enigmatical content, and the Egyptian tongue also stands comparatively alone, without descendants, and almost without relatives. The Semitic languages come nearest to offering a worthy parallel; but they, too, fall far short of it. The earliest Hebrew documents are not greatly exceeded in antiquity by any others, and the Hebrew with its related dialects, ancient and modern, fills up a linguistic scheme of no small wealth; yet Semitic variety is, after all, but poor and scanty as compared with Indo-European; Semitic language possesses a toughness and rigidity of structure which has made its history vastly less full of instructive change; and its beginnings are of unsurpassed obscurity. The Semitic languages are rather a group of closely kindred dialects than a family of widely varied branches: their whole yield to linguistic science is hardly more than might be won from a single subdivision of Indo-European speech, like the Germanic or Romanic. None of the other great races into which mankind is divided cover with their dialects, to any noteworthy extent, time as well as space; for the most part, we know nothing more respecting their speech than is to be read in its present living forms. Now it is so obvious as hardly to require to be pointed out, that a science whose method is prevailingly historical, which seeks to arrive at an understanding of the nature, office, and source of language by studying its gradual growth, by tracing out the changes it has undergone in passing from generation to generation, from race to race, must depend for the soundness of its methods and the sureness of its results upon the fulness of illustration of these historical changes furnished by the material of its investigations. It is true that the student's historical researches are not wholly baffled by the absence of older dialects, with whose forms he may compare those of more modern date. Something of the development