Matheson Collection > Popular tales of the west Highlands > Volume 4

MYTHOLOGY — ARYAN THEORY. 279
speech. Parrots have organs of speech, and speak, but
they have no language, because they have no reasonable
ideas to express. Such ideas as they have, they express
in their own way, by tones, not words. Men then
being gifted with reason and the faculty of speech,
began to speak ; and expressed their ideas by sounds,
which are the roots of language. Languages pass
through stages of growth and decay, and so far as has
been ascertained, there are three stages, of which
examples exist.
Languages whose words are all roots, which have
neither verbs nor adjectives, nor terminations, such as
Chinese, which, as it would seem, has never grown,
though much cultivated.
Languages in which one word is glued to another and
becomes a termination, and loses its independent mean-
ing.
And languages which have passed through these
two stages, where the roots and terminations have be-
come so intimately joined and altered by time and use
that it requires a practised workman to distinguish
them, and hunt them back to their sources.
All languages, it is assumed, have passed, or will pass,
through these three stages of growth and decay ; and
the modern languages of the great Aryan family are in
the third stage. Of the Aryan family of languages, the
Sanscrit, is the oldest known, and this system of roots
and growths, the principle on which letters change, and
the framework of the whole science, existed centuries ago
amongst the sages of the East, where writings have been
discovered, read, and adopted, by modern philosophers.
A philologist, then, with sacred and profane history
pointing eastwards, with Sanscrit books, and eastern
learning at his command, with a stock of roots gathered