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Blair, in his introduction to his Lectures on Rhetoric, speaking of language, says:—“One of the most distinguished privileges which Providence has conferred upon mankind is the power of communicating their thoughts to one another. Destitute of this power, reason would be a solitary and, in some measure, an unavoidable principle. Speech is the great instrument by which man becomes beneficial to man; and it is to the intercourse and transmission of thought, by means of speech, that we are chiefly indebted for the improvement of thought itself.”

Tooke, in one of his admirable golden sentences, says:—“The first aim of language was to communicate our thoughts; the second, to do it with dispatch.”

“And all the worlde was of one tongue and one language.”—Bible, 1551, Gen. xi.

Language came into the world along with all things that had life. It was the voice of nature speaking through things animate, giving form and harmony to objects animate as well as inanimate; and all of which, as soon as created, God pronounced good.

Flowers had their language, and there was music in the spheres. Trees murmured through their deep forest-home long before the woodman’s axe stripped them of their mode of expressing their wild æolian sounds to each other. And there was language in waterfalls, mountain cataracts, as well as music in the sound, though expressed in thundertones; and, as the spirit of Deity passed over the earth, all living things found tongue, thought, expression, and the human voice syllabled the words and commands of its Maker. Language, therefore, is a divine institution.

Horace, Pliny, Juvenal, and others, held the opinion that it was a divine institution, and only reached its present state after a long and gradual improvement of the human family.

Many of the ancient philosophers and poets believed that men were originally “a dumb, low herd.”

“Mutum et turpe pecus.”

Lord Monboddo—who, in his work on “the Origin of Language,” labors to prove that man is but a higher species of monkey—thinks that originally the human race had only a few monosyllables, such as, “Ha, he, hi, ho,” by which, like beasts, they expressed certain emotions. Others, again, assert that the early races were in all things rude and savage, totally ignorant of the arts, unable to communicate with each other, except in the imperfect manner of beasts, and sensible of nothing save hunger, pain, and similar emotions. Cicero, alluding to the human race in primeval ages, says:—

“There was a time when men wandered everywhere through life after the manner of beasts, and supported themselves by eating the food of beasts. Fields and mountains, hills and dales were alike their homes.”

Rousseau represents men as originally without language, as unsocial by nature, and totally ignorant of the ties of society. He does not, however, seek to explain how language arose, being disheartened at the outset by the difficulty of deciding whether language was more necessary for the institution of society, or society for the invention of language.

Language is beyond doubt a divine institution, invented by Deity, and by him made known to the human race. If language was devised by man, the invention would not have been at once matured, but must have been the result of the necessities and experience of successive generations. Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden, spoke a language the purity of which continued until its final disruption at the building of the Tower of Babel.

What language is more beautiful and expressive than that of the Hebrew? It is the language of Deity, and it pleased our Lord Jesus to make use of it when he spake from heaven unto Paul.

There are said to be no less than 3425 known languages in use in the world, of which 937 are Asiatic, 588 European, 276 African, and 1624 American languages and dialects.

By calculation from the best dictionaries, for each of the following languages there are about 20,000 words in the Spanish, 22,000 in the English, 38,000 in the Latin, 30,000 in the French, 45,000 in the Italian, 50,000 in the Greek, and 80,000 in the German.

In the estimate of the number of words in the English language it includes, of course, not only the radical words, but also derivatives, except the preterites and participles of verbs; to which must be added some few terms which, though set down in the dictionaries, are either obsolete or have never ceased to be considered foreign. Of these about 23,000, or nearly five-eighths, are of Anglo-Saxon origin.

The alphabets of different nations contain the following number of letters:—English, 26; French, 23; Italian, 20; Spanish, 27; German, 26; Sclavonic, 27; Russian, 41; Latin, 22; Hebrew, 22; Greek, 24;8 Arabic, 28; Persian, 32; Turkish, 33; Sanscrit, 50; Chinese, 214.

Anthony Brewer (1617) thus characterized those best known:—