Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/534

516 When, in place of mere juxtaposition, each remaining in the place it has occupied for an indefinite time, the different nations, from any cause whatever, come to be mixed together, they each bring their language; and, in consequence of the fusion, each brings his part of the language that becomes common. A language so formed is a mixed language, which consists of words and turns of phrases recalling the mother-languages which gave it birth.

Here, again, history shows us that this thing has actually been done. The English language, for example, has words and expressions which bring to mind the languages of all the faces that have been mixed and confounded in that isle.

Consequently, when we enter for the first time a country of which we know not the history, and find a population presenting in its language words and phrases borrowed from other languages, on the right and on the left, we are authorized to conclude that this population results from the mixture of anthropological elements, which imply the linguistic elements themselves.

We may go still further.

Language, you know, changes—is transformed with time. The French language of our day is not the French of five centuries ago; the Frenchman of to-day must study specially and with dictionaries before he can read the French of the past.

So, language alters, changes, even when there has been no displacement of population. And all the more when immigration intervenes; if mixtures occur, the language will be altered, and a new language will arise. This new language may differ so much from the primitive one as to appear at first to have no resemblance to it. This may happen not only for one people and for one language, but for many. A language may also become the mother of many different languages. But these daughter languages always preserve something in common with that from which they descended; and men who have made these questions the object of continued study, the linguists, know very well how to discover the filiation. They know how to rise from derivative languages to their primitive tongues. In this way they attach together people that were thought to be very distinct because they spoke languages that at first seemed very different.

It is by this study, wholly recent, but which for some years has advanced with the stride of a giant, that we are able to unite in one source most of the people who now cover almost the whole of Europe; such as, on the one hand, the French, the Germans, the Swedes, and the Spanish; and, on the other, the people who inhabit Persia and the valley of the Ganges. These people constitute what is called the Aryan race.

More marvelous still, thanks to the comparison of languages, a philosopher of Geneva, M. Adolph Pictet, was able to trace a sort of history of the primitive Aryans, the common parents of Europeans,