s you can between a
centipede and a billiard-ball.

There are definite laws governing the changes of language. You
know how the Latin _castrum_ became in English _ciaster_ and then
_chester;_ the change was governed by law. The same law makes
our present-day vulgar say _cyar_ for _car;_ that word, in the
American of the future, will be something like chair. The same
law makes the same kind of people say _donchyer_ for _don't you;_
some day, alas! even that will be classical and refined American.
Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times
even on the Chinese billiard-ball: where Confucius said _Ts'in_
like a gentleman, the late Yuan Shi Kai used to say _Ch'in._ So
did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to
do. So we ourselves have turned _Ts'in_ into _China._--And that
is the one little fact--or perhaps one of the two or three little
facts--that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of
kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same
humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin.

But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan
might some day--after millions of years--wear down or evolve back
even into billiard-ball Chinese? That human language is _one
thing;_ and all the differences, the changes rung on that
according to the stages of evolution?

In the Aryan group of languages, the bond of affinity is easily
recognisable: the roots of the words are the same: _Pitri,
pater, vater,_ are clearly but varying pronunciations of the
same word. In the Turanic group, however--Finnish, Hungarian,
Turkish, Tatar, Mongol and Manchu--you must expect no such
well-advertised first-cousinship. They are grouped together,
not because of any likeness of roots: not because you could
find one single consonant the same in the Lappish or Hungarian,
say, and in the Mongol or Manchu words for _father_--you
probably could not;--but because there may be syntactical
likenesses, or the changes and assimilations of sounds may
be governed by the same laws. Thus in Turkic--I draw upon
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_--there is a suffix z, preceded
by a vowel, to mean your: _pederin_ is 'father'; 'your father'
becomes _pederiniz;_ _dostun_ means 'friend'; 'your friend'
becomes not _dostuniz,_ but _dostunus;_ and this trick of
assimilating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the
stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish
th