Page:The Brasilian language and its agglutination.pdf/18

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of scattered races and tribes; but it is just this want of uniformity in their grammatical forms or in their usages and applications, which constitutes one of the fundamental reasons of this group.

« They are speeches of nomadic people and of savages, and only, by this characteristic, they destinguish themselves from the Aryan and Semitic languages. In these two families of tongues, « Aryan and Semitic » the majority of words and their grammatical forms were produced, at once, for all of them, by the creative force of one generation; and it would be very difficult to abandon them, though their primitive clearness had been obscured by further phonetic alterations.

« The transmission of a language in such conditions would be only possible among people, whose history flows, as a large river, and among whom religion, laws and poetry serve, like dams, to bound the current of speech.

« But we know, that among nomadic people there was never established a true nucleus of political, social and literary institutions. Their, so-called, empires were no sooner founded, than they were scattered, like sand-clouds in the desert: almost no laws, legends, stories