m by writing. They change more rapidly
when men migrate into new climates, and are placed in contact with new
objects. The English, the Dutch, and the German were perhaps all at
the dawn of the mediaeval era Maeso-Gothic. At the same rate of change,
allowing for greater barbarism and greater migrations, they may very
well have been something not far from Egyptian or Sanscrit 2000 years
before Christ. The truth is that present rates of variation afford no
criterion for the changes that must occur in the languages of small
and isolated tribes lapsing into or rising from barbarism, possessing
few words, and constantly requiring to name new objects and until some
ratio shall have been established between these conditions and those
of modern languages, fixed by literature and by a comparatively
stationary state of society, it is useless to make any demands for
longer time on this ground.[131]

Even in the present day, Moffat informs us that in South Africa the
separation of parts of a tribe, for even a few months, may produce a
notable difference of dialect. If we take the existing languages of
civilized men whose history is known, we shall find that it is
impossible to trace many of them back as far as the Christian era, and
when we have passed over even half that interval, they become so
different as to be unintelligible to those who now speak them. Where
there are exceptions to this, they arise entirely from the effects of
literature and artificial culture. While, therefore, there is good
ground in philology for the belief in one primitive language, there
seems no absolute necessity to have recourse even to the confusion of
tongues at Babel to explain the diversities of language.[132] Farther,
the Bible carries back the Semitic group of languages at least to the
time of the Deluge, but it does not seem necessary on the mere ground
of antediluvian names, to carry it any farther back, and the Assyrian
inscriptions show the coexistence of Turanian and Semitic tongues at
the dawn of history in the region of the Euphrates and Tigris. One or
other of these--or a monosyllabic language underlying it--was probably
an antediluvian tongue, and the other a very early derivative; and
both history and philology would assign the precedence to the Turanian
language, which was probably most akin to that which had descended
from antediluvian times, and which at that early period of dispersion
indicated in the Bible story of Babel, had begu