The Paleolinguist Bulletin Spring 2023
Hampshire Advertiser and Salsibury Guardian, Southampton, 17 November 1832, Page 2
LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITITION.
—On Tuesday evening, Mr. Bullar delivered a Lecture on the Origin of Language. The process by which every one acquires the use of his native tongue, affords a clue to the origin of language in the first instance. We learn it by imitating our parents: those who cannot hear, and who are thus unable to imitate, remaining dumb. But the first of the human race being without parents to imitate, must have received the gift of language by some immediate communication from his Creator. So the book of Genesis states the fact: and the futile theories, utterly at variance with common sense and experience, which suppose the first of men a race of speechless savages, place them in a condition below that of the brute creation. With regard to the various languages now existing, no better account of their origin can be given, than that of the dispersion at Bable. The number of languages which originated there may not have been considerable; inasmuch as many of the languages and dialects at present spoken have been already traced up by laborious, patient, and well-directed learning, to a few stocks. The lecturer dwelt particularly on the difficulty of discovering the parent stocks of languages, in consequence of the imperfect manner in which written speech often represents the actual language of a people: and he proceeded to illustrate this by various instances of dialectical changes, in our own and other tongues, rendering it often hard to find out the family likeness, without much tact and practice. The recent discovery of the similarity of the Sanskrit, the very ancient language of India, not only to the Greek and Latin but also to our own and inane other western languages. additionally confirms the fact of the comparatively small number of parent stocks, and demonstrates the extensive affiliation of
what are now called the Indo-Teutonic tongues, and, consequently proves, that the western nations thus possessing intercommunity in an oriental language have themselves sprung, at a remote period, from an eastern origin. The lecture for next Tuesday is on the origin of Letters, with some illustrations of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics, and other similar subjects, by the same lecturer.
James C. L'Angelle Undergraduate Research University of Nevada, Reno
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