ABSTRACT
T H E M E N T A L ITY OF PR IM ITIVES IN R ELA TIO N TO TH E LANGUAGES T H E Y SPEA K
T he essential characteristics of the mentality of a given social group should, it seems to me, be reflected to some extent in the language its members speak. In the long run the mental habits of the group cannot fail to leave some trace upon their modes of expression, since these are also social phenomena, upon which the individual has little, if any, in fluence. With differing types of mentality, therefore, there should be languages which differ in their construction. We could not venture very far upon the strength of so general a principle, however. In the first place, we do not know whether even in primitive peoples there is a single one who speaks his own language-that is, a language which exactly corresponds, according to the hypothesis suggested above, with the type of mind which his group ideas express. On the contrary it is probable that by reason of migration, inter mingling and absorption of groups we shall nowhere encounter the conditions which such a hypothesis implies. Even in the period known to history a social group very often adopts the language of another group which has conquered it, or been conquered by it. We can therefore safely establish nothing more than a very general correspondence between the characteristics of the languages and those of the mentality of the social groups, confining ourselves exclusively to such characteristics as are to be found in the language and the mentality of all the groups of a certain kind.
