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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: brethren of the white men, or whether yellow and red men have
a common pedigree: these questions belong to comparative
physiology. But the science of language can and does tell us
that a certain amount of civilization is requisite for the
production of a language sufficiently durable and wide-spread
to give birth to numerous mutually resembling offspring
Barbaric languages are neither widespread nor durable. Among
savages each little group of families has its own dialect, and
coins its own expressions at pleasure; and in the course of
two or three generations a dialect gets so strangely altered
as virtually to lose its identity. Even numerals and personal
Myths and Myth-Makers |
