Kinship of Races Demonstrated From the Kinship of Languages

Linguistics, having determined the kinship of languages, has at the same time determined the kinship of the various races of the human genus; for it has proven that the same language was the mother of all languages, and that peoples separated by the greatest distances all belong to the same family, whose religious and moral principles and the elements of the original language, although distorted and modified according to the moral and spiritual development of the separated members, are nonetheless found as the roots of all moral and religious principles and of the innumerable languages. Linguistics, investigating the relationship of languages, has discovered the history of the human genus, and has been able to trace the various races to a single kind; this science has solved with persuasion and scientific authority the problem of the origin of different races of the earth, and has lifted the mysterious veil covering the truth, which it demonstrated shining and splendid in its original beauty. Linguistics, through many great struggles, has torn down all the walls that from the ages and from the all-changing nature have been erected to separate peoples, races, and nations, and proceeding boldly in its investigative work, discovered the broken link and joined the various links of the small chain of the human genus, proving that all languages had one source, and that there was once on all the earth one lip and one voice for all.

The great work of linguistics has shown that the same spirit dwells in all races, since the communication of ideas was possible to all, and that the internal human is one and the same.

A faint idea of the magnitude of the work of linguistics and of its importance is given by the following numbers. According to the compiled tables and linguistic catalogues, the languages spoken throughout the whole earth are numbered at 8,000, and their dialects at 5,000; such a number of languages and dialects subjected to philological study has given a result in perfect harmony with everything concerning humans mentioned in Holy Scripture. How great should be the authority of the results of such study of such great work? Those who in the last century denied faith in Holy Scripture, as evidence of the division of humanity into different independent kinds, brought the indigenous Americans, whom they considered as autochthonous and never having received communication with the inhabitants of the Old World. Their argument appeared strong and irresistible because it was supported by color, shape of the head, and language, which were all quite different from those of the Old World inhabitants; and as for color and the shape or type of the head, study of these has already shown that the same reasons that produced so many colors and varieties in the Old World could have produced those of the Americans; as for language, until philological study and comparison of languages and dialects, the objection stood immovable; but like every baseless hypothesis, it soon withstood for a short time and then fell, so also with this; comparative linguistics has demonstrated the weakness of the argument and the fallacy of the hypothesis, discovering the close relationship of the languages of the New World to those of the Old. Smith Barton was the first to undertake the great work of studying American languages; and his works were embodied in a very extensive form in a work which Vater first published in 1810 and subsequently reissued in his Mithridates. Here is what a qualified critic says about the results of these men: “From the very accurate investigations I conducted following a method that had not yet been employed in the study of etymology, the existence of six certain families was demonstrated: of the two infinite, in thirty-three (83) American languages examined by Barton and Vater, one hundred and seventy words are found whose roots appear to be the same; and it is easy to see that this correspondence cannot be accidental, for it does not rest purely on the harmony of similarity, but on the analogy of organs that produces almost complete identity with the first articulate sounds of children. Of these one hundred and seventy words which have this correspondence, fifty-three resemble the languages of the Manchus, the Tungus, the Mongols, and the Samoyeds; and fifty-two are found in the Celtic, Basque, Coptic, and the Congo language. These words were found in the comparison of all American languages to the Old World languages, for until now we have known no American idiom that appeared to have an exclusive relationship with any language of Asia, Africa, and Europe.”

Malte-Brun endeavored to advance a step forward and to construct a demonstrative geographic relationship between American and Asiatic languages; and after a very careful investigation, here are what conclusions he drew: That American tribes, related by language to the families (Finoise, Ostiak, portière) and crossing the Caucasus the length of the frozen sea road and crossing the Bering Strait, dispersed in various directions toward Greenland and Chile; and that other tribes belonging to the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Koreans, following the length of the shore, entered Mexico; and that another colony related to the Japanese, the Sambans, the Norwegians, following the mountain ranges of the two continents had the same destination. Beyond these great migrations, he hypothesizes that many small ones crossed to America as well as to the most remote of the oceanic islands, bringing a number of Malayan, Japanese, and African words.

De Humboldt believes that the Toltèques (Aztecs), a Mexican colony, were the Hoanghos, whom the Chinese chronicles mention, and about whom it is said that they migrated under the chief Taao and settled in the northern regions of Siberia.

Others have formed opinions of the same kind, such as Blacker, who sought to connect the Japanese to the Nahuatl, a large American nation between Mexico and Florida. Although these opinions do not have absolute authority, they have much importance, for they express the sentiment of those engaged in philological, linguistic, and ethnographic studies of the peoples of the Old and New Worlds. The authority of these opinions is supported by later other works; there are results derived from ethnographic science that bring more substance to the subject and eliminate all difficulties arising from the multitude of American languages; and they first of all, the examination of the common structure found in all the languages of America, did not permit doubt that they do not all constitute one atomic family, united in all its parts by the most essential bonds of grammatical analogy.

This analogy is not partial, but extends throughout the two great divisions of the New World, giving a family character to the spoken languages, both on the dispersed zone and the arctic pole among the wildest tribes and the most civilized. “This wonderful uniformity,” says one author, “of forming the conjugations of verbs in a particular way from one end of America to the other favors particularly the hypothesis of a primitive people that formed the common descent of all the nations of America.” This analogy is not partial, but extends throughout the two great divisions of the New World and gives a family character to the spoken languages, on the dispersed zone and the arctic pole among the wildest tribes and the most civilized. De Humboldt gave the name family to American languages as forming their conjugations in that way which was called agglutination.

Another observes that the most natural conclusion to which we can arrive, seeing such an exceptional relationship between languages separated by so many hundreds of leagues, is that we must accept a common center of civilization from which all departed.

It is observed that the more American languages are researched, the more they appear to be subject to the laws of other families; in such a way that this great and united family, day by day being subdivided into significant groups, tends to present such closest kinship with one another as it does with the great division of which they form a part. Thus missionaries have happily observed that certain languages can be considered as keys to other dialects, so that when they know them, they quickly understand the others. Thus Balbi in his table of American languages was able to divide them into certain large sections, each containing numerous examined languages.

In this way the hypothesis of the independence of kinds is refuted, and it is demonstrated that these nations can belong to a common origin, to which also the nations of the ancient world belong.

Comparative linguistics discovered many signs of the kinship of American races to the races of the Old World and to the inhabitants of the most remote islands of the ocean.

The division of time among the Americans presents a most characteristic coincidence, resembling that of the inhabitants of Eastern Asia; also divisions into parts with particular names, with fine variations; the zodiac figures have the same animals, the tiger, the rabbit; the tradition concerning the deluge; the particular traditions of the peoples of America that they came as colonists, that they descended from the northern extremity of America; their monuments and symbols bearing Egyptian type and many others, religious, moral, and cultic testimonies demonstrate the kinship of the American people with the inhabitants of the ancient world.

The present study does not permit us to adduce all the testimonies of the kinship of the peoples of the earth; but in order to satisfy the very demanding, we adduce the opinions of those who have the right to speak authoritatively on such questions. The wise Alexandre de Humboldt, says Wiseman, to whom we owe such precious information about the languages and monuments of America, expresses himself as follows concerning the question that interests us: “However isolated and unique certain languages may appear at first, however unique and peculiar their characteristics and rights may be, they always have a correspondence among them; and their numerous references will be more easily apparent in the analogy which the history of the Philosophy of nations and the study of languages will bring to completion.”

And Jules Evariste Parny, who thinks about the deluge what Holy Scripture thinks, hardly is its faithful follower, because he prefers the salvation of certain generations on the lofty peaks, says: “the universal kinship of languages was established in the days of mankind so vividly that everyone ought to regard it as most fully demonstrated.” He adds: “this kinship cannot be explained by any hypothesis except by the assumption that remnants of a primitive language still exist in all the languages of the Old and New Worlds.”

And Herder, who regards the Sacred History of the Tower of Babylon as a poetic piece of Oriental type, says: “as this is accepted, great probability arises that the human race, as also its language, are traced to a common source, to a first human, from whom afterward being born they scattered into the different parts of the world.”

That this first human was born and raised not in wild forests, nor had wild beasts as companions, nor was taught anything by them, nor imitated them in anything, but was born in Paradise and was raised in it, his companions were holy angels, his sole teacher was his Creator, the good and benevolent God, who made him according to His image and likeness and gave him the gifts of the Holy Spirit so that he would increase perfecting himself and subject the beasts and rule over the earth in which he lives, behold something is said by another wise man whose opinion has the greatest scientific value.

The wise M. Frédéric de Rougemont in his work on the first peoples says: “Having reached the conclusion of our works, we have before us forty languages or dialects of the first primitive peoples or of the time before the deluge and of the post-deluge world. All these agree in their primitive elements with the others, and all nations’ concerning Genesis (Introduction, page XXVIII) and onward. Our efforts were directed to this: the genealogies of our narrative proceed further from one known source, which is the religion of the primitive people. All nations at the time when they withdrew from the ancient trunk of humanity had the same faith, the same law, the same hope, the same worship, the same sacred rites with some variations, the same symbols. All equally are responsible to God, waged war against each other uninvited and fell before the sword. All knew the creative spirit of Chaos, Eden, Paradise and the Fall, the flame of fire and the deluge. Noble Jewish peoples, civilized, wild tribes, races of the ancient world and races of the New World, all humans under thousands of different languages give the same testimony before the judgment seat of history. They do not communicate with one another at all, and thus are ignorant of the meaning of their own testimonies; but every testimony always helps in

Our researches, from which we gladly guess that which they wish to tell us. In comparison of all, all are explained. We would have had to be Pyrrhonian skeptics not to repeat with Tertullian to the ears of findings so numerous and so harmonious; If languages differ, the tradition is true, ONE.”

The multitude of authors is such that sufficient space would be taken up if we sought to set forth all the testimonies; those desiring more we refer to the study of the works of more recent linguists, in which it is demonstrated more clearly than sunlight that there was once on all the earth one lip and one voice for all. (Genesis.)