On Sanskrit as a connecting link between the Indo-Germanic languages, see Max Müller, Science of Language, 1:146-165, 326-342, who claims that all languages pass through the three stages: monosyllabic, agglutinative, inflectional; and that nothing necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for either the material or the formal elements of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech. The changes of language are often rapid. Latin becomes the Romance languages, and Saxon and Norman are united into English, in three centuries. The Chinese may have departed from their primitive abodes while their language was yet monosyllabic. G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters, 195—“Children are the constructors of all _languages_, as distinguished from _language_.” Instance Helen Keller’s sudden acquisition of language, uttering publicly a long piece only three weeks after she first began to imitate the motions of the lips. G. F. Wright, Man and the Glacial Period, 242-301—“Recent investigations show that children, when from any cause isolated at an early age, will often produce at once a language _de novo_. Thus it would appear by no means improbable that various languages in America, and perhaps the earliest languages of the world, may have arisen in a short time where conditions were such that a family of small children could have maintained existence when for any cause deprived of parental and other fostering care.... Two or three thousand years of prehistoric time is perhaps all that would be required to produce the diversification of languages which appears at the dawn of history.... The prehistoric stage of Europe ended less than a thousand years before the Christian Era.” In a people whose speech has not been fixed by being committed to writing, baby-talk is a great source of linguistic corruption, and the changes are exceedingly rapid. Humboldt took down the vocabulary of a South American tribe, and after fifteen years of absence found their speech so changed as to seem a different language.