A grammar and dictionary of the Malay language - Wallace-online.org

DISSERTATION.
iii
history refute this notion. Thus, the half-dozen languages
spoken in ancient Italy were all, in time, absorbed by one of
them. The languages spoken in Britain twenty centuries ago
have been nearly supplanted by a German tongue. Several
millions of negroes in the New World, whose parent tongues
were African, have exchanged them for English, Spanish, French,
and Portuguese. For the languages spoken in ancient France
and Spain, a language of Italian origin has been almost wholly
substituted.
Although language often affords valuable historical
e^idence, it would only lead to error to consider it as invariably
identical with race.
It is quite certain, that within the proper Indian Archipelago,
or islands extending from Sumatra to the western shores of New
Guinea, and respecting which our information is most complete,
no languages exist derived from a common stock, and standing
to each other in the relation of sisterhood, as Italian, Spanish,
and French, do to each other ; or as Gaelic does to Irish ; or
Armorican to Welsh, or Scotch to English. The only dialects
that exist are of the Malay and Javanese languages, but they
consist of little more than differences in pronunciation, or the
more or less frequent use of a few words. In the Polynesian
islands alone, real dialects of a common tongue do exist; but here,
as will be afterwards shown, the number of Avords common to
such dialects, and to the languages of the Archipelago, is so
trifling, that it refutes at once the notion of a common origin.
Another insuperable argument against the theory of one
original tongue is found in the nature of many of the words of
the imagined derivative dialects. These abound in terms very
widely diffused, indicating an advanced state of society ; as for
example, an useful system of numeration, terms connected with
agriculture, navigation, the useful arts, and even with letters.
Tlie people that had such a language must necessarily have
been in a tolerably advanced state of civilisation, in such a
one for example as we find the principal nations of Sumatra,
Java, and Celebes to be in, at the present day ; and many of the
tribes which the theory supposes to be derived from it, not only
did not maintain the civilisation of the parent nation, but have
even fallen into the condition of mere savages ; a result
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