intercourse in the interior.[263] The Gauchos of central Uruguay speak
Spanish with harsh rough accents. They change _y_ and _ll_ into the
French _j_.[264] Whitney and Waitz thought that all American languages
proceeded from a single original one. Powell thought that they were
"many languages, belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent
unity of origin."[265] Evidence is adduced, however, that "the same
aboriginal peoples who named the waters of North America coined also the
prehistoric geographical titles in South America."[266] The Finns and
Samoyeds are, from the standpoint of language, practically the same
race. The two tongues present the highest development of the
agglutinative process of the Ural-Altaic languages.[267]

+139. Taking up and dropping languages.+ The way in which languages are
taken up or dropped is also perplexing. Keane[268] gives a list of
peoples who have dropped one language and taken up another; he also
gives a list of those who have changed physical type but have retained
the same language. Holub[269] mentions the Makololo, who have almost
entirely disappeared, but their language has passed to their
conquerors. It became necessary to the latter from the spread of their
dominion and from their closer intercourse with the peoples south of the
Zambesi, on account of which, "without any intentional interference by
the rulers, a common and easily understood language showed itself
indispensable." Almost every village in New Guinea has its own language,
and it is said that in New Britain people who live thirty miles apart
cannot understand each other.[270]

+140. Pigeon dialects.+ The Germans find themselves at a disadvantage in
dealing with aborigines because they have no dialect like pigeon English
or the Coast Malay used by the Dutch.[271] Many examples are given, from
the Baltic region, of peasant dialects made in sport by subjecting all
words to the same modification.[272] Our own children often do this to
English in order to make a secret language.

+141. How languages grow.+ What we see in these cases is that, if we
suppose men to have joined in cooperative effort with only the sounds
used by apes and monkeys, the requirement of their interests would push
them on to develop languages such as we now know. The isolating,
agglutinative, incorporative, and inflectional languages can be put in a
series according to the convenience and correctness of the logical
processes which they em