ABSTRACT
The most barbarous language is, in its degree, an instrument of human thought, and as such, worthy of a careful and reverent scrutiny. On the contrary, no language has yet been discovered which is without grammatical rules, and in many cases these rules are extremely complicated. Most European languages, including our own, are said to belong to the Aryan family of speech. Sanscrit was found to contain ancient forms which explained the history of grammatical inflexions in European languages, and showed them to be all akin to one another, in a way unsuspected before. All languages, then, which, when their structure is examined, show such resemblances as indicate their derivation from a common stock, are called a family and are said to be genetically related. In like manner, "the Negro group" seemed the only possible designation for a large number of languages, many of them very slightly known, spoken in Western and Central Africa.
