Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/377

IX.] the Black Sea, and through the mountains nearly to the Caspian; the Lesghian borders the Caspian; and the Mitsjeghian lies between it and the Circassian. The Georgian possesses a peculiar alphabet and a literature; but the whole group, except as it presents a problem for the solution of the linguistic ethnographer, has no special importance.

The Albanian or Skipetar, the modern representative of the ancient Illyrian, has already been spoken of as doubtfully classifiable with the Indo-European languages. If its connection with them shall not finally be made out to the satisfaction of the learned, it, too, will have to be numbered among the isolated and problematical tongues.

One more Asiatic dialect may be worth a moment's notice: the Yenisean, occupying a tract of country along the middle course of the Yenisei, with traces in the mountains about the head waters of that river; it belongs to the feeble and scanty remnant of a people which is lost in the midst of Scythian tribes, and apparently destined to be ere long absorbed by them, but which is proved to be of different race by its wholly discordant language.

The number of such isolated tongues is, of course, liable to be increased as we come to know more thoroughly the linguistic condition of regions of the world which are as yet only partially explored. There is a possibility that many types of speech, once spread over wide domains, may exist at present only in scanty fragments, as well as that some may have disappeared altogether, leaving not even a trace behind.