Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Language
Is Not The Result Of An Arbitrary Convention.
The mechanism of
inflections, the grammatical constructions, the possibility of
inversions, all are the offspring of our own minds, of our
individual organization.
There is in man an instinctive and
regulating principle, differently modified among nations not of the
same race. A climate more or less severe, a residence in the
defiles of mountains, or on the sea-coasts, or different habits of
life, may alter the pronunciation, render the identity of the roots
obscure, and multiply the number; but all these causes do not
affect that which constitutes the structure and mechanism of
languages. The influence of climate, and of external circumstances,
vanishes before the influence which depends on the race, on the
hereditary and individual dispositions of men.
In America (and this result of recent researches* (* See Vater's
Mithridates.) is extremely important with respect to the history of
our species) from the country of the Esquimaux to the banks of the
Orinoco, and again from these torrid regions to the frozen climate
of the Straits of Magellan, mother-tongues, entirely different in
their roots, have, if we may use the expression, the same
physiognomy. Striking analogies of grammatical construction are
acknowledged, not only in the more perfect languages, as in that of
the Incas, the Aymara, the Guarauno, the Mexican, and the Cora, but
also in languages extremely rude. Idioms, the roots of which do not
resemble each other more than the roots of the Sclavonic and the
Biscayan, have those resemblances of internal mechanism which are
found in the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, and the German
languages.
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