This has advantages and
defects. It offers marvellous facilities for defining the perceptions of
the senses with the utmost accuracy, but regarding everything in the
concrete, it is unfriendly to the nobler labors of the mind, to
abstraction and generalization. In the numberless changes of these
languages, their bewildering flexibility, their variable forms, and
their rapid deterioration, they seem to betray a lack of individuality,
and to resemble the vague and tumultuous history of the tribes who
employ them. They exhibit an almost incredible laxity. It is nothing
uncommon for the two sexes to use different names for the same object,
and for nobles and vulgar, priests and people, the old and the young,
nay, even the married and single, to observe what seem to the European
ear quite different modes of expression. Families and whole villages
suddenly drop words and manufacture others in their places out of mere
caprice or superstition, and a few years' separation suffices to produce
a marked dialectic difference.
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