Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
of this kind, more or fewer; men who belong to it by speech, but who do
not belong to it by race. And what happens in the case of individuals
happens in the case of whole nations. The pages of history are crowded
with cases in which nations have cast aside the tongue of their
forefathers, and have taken instead the tongue of some other people.
Greek in the East, Latin in the West, became the familiar speech of
millions who had not a drop of Greek or Italian blood in their veins.
The same has been the case in later times with Arabic, Persian,
Spanish, German, English. Each of those tongues has become the
familiar speech of vast regions where the mass of the people are not
Arabian, Spanish, or English, otherwise than by adoption. The Briton
of Cornwall has, slowly but in the end thoroughly, adopted the speech
of England. In the American continent full-blooded Indians preside
over commonwealths which speak the tongue of Cortes and Pizarro. In
the lands to which all eyes are now turned, the Greek, who has been
busily assimilating strangers ever since he first planted his colonies
in Asia and Sicily, goes on busily assimilating his Albanian neighbors.
And between renegades, janizaries, and mothers of all nations, the
blood of many a Turk must be physically anything rather than Turkish.
The inherent nature of the case, and the witness of recorded history,
join together to prove that language is no certain test of race, and
that the scientific philologers are doing good service to accuracy of
expression and accuracy of thought by emphatically calling attention to
the fact that language is no such test.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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