students of language have not succeeded in establishing more than three families of speech—or rather two, for the Turanian can hardly be called a family, in the strict sense of that word, till it has been fully proved that Chinese forms the centre of the two Turanian branches, the North Turanian on one side, and the South Turanian on the other; that Chinese forms, in fact, the earliest settlement of that unsettled mass of speech, which, at a later stage, became more fixed and tradltional,—In the north, in Tungusic, Mongolic, Tartaric, and Finnic, and in the south, in Taic, Malaic, Bhotiya, and Talmulic.” And yet again, amid much more to the same effect our Author adds:[1]—“In the Turanian class, in which the original concentration was never so powerful as in the Aryan and Semitic families, we can still catch a glimpse of the natural growth of language, though confined within certain limits. The different settlements of this great floating mass of homogeneous speech do not show such definite marks of relationship as Hebrew and Arabic, Greek and Sanskrit, but only such sporadic coincidences and general structual similarities as can be explained by the admission of a primitive concentration, followed by a new period of independant growth. It would be wilful blindness not to recognise the definite and characteristic features which pervade the North Turanian languages: it would be impossible to explain the coincidences between Hungarian, Lapponian, Esthonian, and Finnish, except on the supposition that there was a very early concentration of speech from which these dialects branched off. We see less clearly in the Turanian group, though I confess my surprise even here has always been, not that there should be so few, but that there should be even these relics, attesting a former community of these divergent streams of language. The point in which the South Turanian and North Turanian languages meet goes back as far as Chinese; for that Chinese is at the root of Mandshu and Mongolian as well as of Siamese and Tibetan becomes daily more apparent through the researches of Mr. Edkins and other Chinese scholars.”
- ↑ Introduction to the Science of Religion, page 162.
