Niveo in his youth noticed, that on three Christmas-days collectively there fell a superb amount of snow, and now hath writ it down in his almanack, as part of bis wise remarks on the weather, that it’ll at all times snow at Christmas. In Europe there are only three such represented: the Indogermanic or Aryan, which embraces practically all the better identified languages of the continent; the Ural-Altaic, the most effective known representatives of which are Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish; and the Basque of southwestern France and northern Spain. By this means you is not going to only be better fitted to offer the book the first reading, but you will be much assisted in your second perusal of it, which needs to be performed with higher attention and deliberation, and you’ll learn with extra ease and readiness what the author pretends to show. And due to this fact in such treatises, we shouldn’t stay till we master each problem at the primary perusal ; for perhaps many of these would look like solved when now we have proceeded additional in that ebook, or would vanish of themselves upon a second reading. IV. If several individuals engaged in the identical research take into their fingers distinct treatises on one subject and appoint a season of communication as soon as a week, they might inform each other in a brief method concerning the sense, sentiments, and method of those a number of authors, and thereby promote one another’s enchancment, both by recommending the perusal of the same e book to their companions, or perhaps by satisfying their enquiries concerning it by dialog, with out each one’s perusing it.
VII. Though it may be correct typically to make your observations concerning persons in addition to things, the subject of your discourse in discovered or helpful conversations, yet what remarks you make oo specific persons, particularly to their disadvantage, ought to for probably the most half lie hid in your individual breast, until some just and apparent occasion, some needed name of Providence, leads you to speak to them. Our late Archbishop Tillotson has written a small however excellent discourse on evil talking, wherein he admirably explains, limits, and applies, that basic apostolic precept, Speak evil of no man, Tit. Some stocks, as, for instance, the Indogermanic just referred to and the Algonkin of North America, are spread over vast areas and include many peoples or tribes of various cultures; others, such as the Basque and most of the aboriginal stocks of California, occupy surprisingly small territories. If, now, we have been in a position to prove that each one known forms of speech could possibly be categorized right into a single linguistic stock, the apparent parallel above referred to between linguistic and biological reconstruction could be a real one. Perhaps no single function so markedly sets off man from the remainder of the animal world as the reward of speech, which he alone possesses.
Although we can’t demonstrate a genetic unity of all types of human speech, it is attention-grabbing to observe that there are a number of elementary traits that every one languages have in widespread. Thus, direct comparability of Russian and German would certainly yield sufficient lexical and grammatical similarities to justify one in suspecting them to have diverged from a common source; the proof of such genetic relationship, nonetheless, can’t be considered fairly passable till the oldest forms of German speech and Germanic speech generally have been in contrast with the oldest forms of Slavic speech and till both of these have been additional compared with different forms of speech, akin to Latin and Greek, that there’s purpose to imagine they’re genetically associated to. There may be, in any case, no à priori purpose why the communication of ideas needs to be primarily via sound symbols produced by the apparatus simply defined; it’s conceivable that a system of sound symbols of noises produced by the fingers and toes may need been developed for a similar function. But within the composures of men, remember you’re a man as well as they; and it isn’t their motive but your individual that’s given to guide you while you arrive at years of discretion, of manly age and judgment.
It’ll then be discovered that not solely the vocabulary, but simply as nicely the phonetics, word morphology, and syntactic construction of the language have a tendency to alter from one period to another. In these our enterprise is just to search out out the true sense, and perceive the true which means of the paragraph and page, and our assent then is certain to follow after we arc earlier than happy that the writing is divine. To what use is it for a divine or physician, or a tradesman, to read over the massive volumes of stories of judged instances within the law? No group of normal human beings, be their advance in culture ever so slight, has but been found, or is ever prone to be found, who do not communicate among themselves by means of a complex system of sound symbols; in different words, who do not make use of a definitely organized spoken language. It is indeed one of many paradoxes of linguistic science that a few of probably the most complexly organized languages are spoken by so-known as primitive peoples, while, alternatively, not just a few languages of relatively easy construction are found amongst peoples of appreciable advance in culture.