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entering into a new phase of grammatical life; and that while the literary language of the Mongolians has no terminations for the persons of the verb, that characteristic feature of Turanian speech had lately broken out in the spoken dialects of the Buriates and in the Tungusic idioms near Njertschinsk in Siberia. One more observation of the same character from the pen of Robert Moffat, in his "Missionary Scenes and Labors in Southern Africa." "The purity and harmony of language," he writes, "is kept up by their pitches, or public meetings, by their festivals and ceremonies, as well as by their songs and their constant intercourse. With the isolated villagers of the desert it is far otherwise; they have no such meetings; they are compelled to traverse the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and those still further advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, through their livelong day, _become habituated to a language of their own_. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious; and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect of a host of mongrel words and phrases, joined together without rule, and _in the course of one generation the entire character of the language is changed_." Such is the life of language in a state of nature; and in a similar manner, we have a right to conclude, languages grew up which we only know after the bit and bridle of literature were thrown over their necks. It need not be a written or classical literature to give an ascendency to one out of many dialects, and to impart to its peculiarities an undisputed legitimacy. Speeches at pitches or public meetings, popular ballads, national laws, religious oracles, exercise, though to a smaller extent, the same influence. They will arrest the natural flow of language in the countless rivulets of its dialects, and give a permanency to certain formations of speech which, without these external influences, could have enjoyed but an ephemeral existence. Though we cannot fully enter, at present, on the problem of the origin of language, yet this we can clearly see, that, whatever the origin of language was, its first tendency m
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