•Ct. Sayce, Races of the OT, p. STL, 'Diversity ol race U older than diversity of language.*
TONGUES, CONFUSION OF
TONGUES, CONFUSION OF 791
problem whether man appeared originally upon the globe at one centre or at many centres.
The fonner of these altemativea is preferred by mwlem flcientiOc authorities. Mr. Darwin in his Ijti^cj-nt of Man, vol. i. ch. 7, after reviewing the ar^'uinents on both sides, sums up (]>)>. 231-2;i:>, ed. lS71)in its favour (upon the ground, stated brielly, tliat the resemblances, physical and mental, between dilTert-nt rai;c3 are such that it is extremely improbable that they should have been acquired independently by aboriginally distinct species or races); see also to the same effect Lvell, yrinciphs 0/ Geology "(ISlb), li. ch. 43 ; Huxley, Crilir/net'arul Athlnsges (1883), p. 163 fl. (,= CollfCled Essays, vii. p. 240 lI.) ; and Dr. Tylor, art. 'Anthropology' in the Encijcl. lirdfiimi in his volume Anthropology (18S1), p. 0. But of course these authori- ties ]K>stulate for man a far higher antiquity than is ttUowed by the biblical narrative (so also Sayce, Itaat of Ihe OT iS, 37).
But, whichever of these alternatives be adopted, it is easy to see that diti'erences of raco are not accounted for in the biblical narratives: (lie case of primitive man appearing independently at dif- ferent centres (with, it may be sui)posed, racial distinctions, at least to some degree, already im- planted in him at these centres) is not contem- plated in them at all ; if, on the other hand, racial ditlerences were gradually developed by the plaj- of natural selection upon the descendants of a single pair, migrating into new climatic and other physical conditions, then the growth of these ditlerences is neither explained by the bib- lical narratives, nor, in fact, reconcilable with them. For, taking account only of the simplest and most obvious division of mankind into the white, black, and jellow races,* even Gn 10 (Sayce, ECM 120) notices only (except Cush?) tribes and nations belonging to the uwte race ; while, from the known lixity of racial types, in cases where we are able to observe them, it is certain that, if the wliite, black, and yellow races, with the many sub-races included in each, have been developed from a single original pair, the process must have occupied a vastly longer period of time than is allowed by the biblical narrative (which places the creation of m.an at B.C. 4157, or [LXX] B.C. 5328), however early after Adam the dis- persion of Gn 11' may be supposed to have actually occurred.
:{. It does not fall within the province of a Diction.ary of the Bible to give an account of the languages of the world ; but a few particulars may be stated here for the purpose of indicating tlie general conclusions to which the study of the subject has led modem philologists. Prof. Sayce writes (Introd. to the Science 0/ Language, 18S0, ii. 31f. ): 'The genealogical classilication of lan- guages, that which divides them into families and subfamilies, each mounting up, as it were, to a single parent-speech, is based on the evidence of granmiar and roots. Unless the grammar agrees, no amount of similarity between the roots of two languages could warrant us in comparing them together, and referring them to the same stock. . . . The test of linguistic kinship is agreement in structure [i.e. the formation of sentences], craiiimar, and roots. Judged by this test, tlie languages at present spoken in the world probably fall, £is Prof. Friednch Miiller observes, into "about 100 difl'erent families," between which science can discover no connexion or relationship. Wlicn we consider how many languages have' probably ' perished since man lirst appeared upon the globe, we may gain some idea of the number- less essays and types of speech which have gone to form the language-world of the present elay.' Basque is an example of an isolated survival of an otherwise extinct family of speech ; and in Tasmania four dialects spoken when our colonists lirst landed on the island nave recently disappeared. On pp. 33-04 of the same volume Prof. Sajce gives a list
* See, further, on the classiflcation of the races of mankind, Dr Tylor'a article and work (ch. 8) referred to above.
of 75 families of languages, all unrelated to each other, and each comprising mostly a variety of individual languages or groups of languages.
Of these families the two best known are the Semitic and the Aryan (or Indo-Kuropean). The princip.al luiguages in- cluded in the Semitic family are Assyro-lJabyloni*!, liebrew, Ph(Enician and Ptinic, the different Aramaic dialects, Arabic, the S. Arabian dialects (Himyaritic or Sabajan, and Minajan), Kthiopic and allied tliatects : "all these, though in subordinate details they often differ widely, ^-et display such obvious resem- blances in ' structure, grammatical form, and roots,' that they are manifestly merely varieties of a common parent-tongue. The principal groups included in the Anjan family are the Indian group (Sanskrit, with allied languai,'es and many modern verniuruiars), the Iranian group (Zend, Persian, etc.), the Celtic group (Welsh, Cornish, Irish, etc.), the Italian group (Unibrian, Oscaii, I..atin, with the dependent Romance languages), the Thrako-Illyrian group, the Hellenic group, the Letto-Slavonic ^'roup (Slavonic, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, etc.), and the Teutonic group (Gothic, Low German, Anglo-Saxon, Englisli, Dutch. Ili^'h German, Old Norse, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, Nor- wegian) : all these languages, though in details they differ even more widely than the Semitic languages, nevertheless exhibit so many common features as to make it evident that they are but varieties, which have arisen by gradual differentiation, under the inrtuence of separation and different local conditions, out of a single original parent-tongue.