Note 113 — Chapter XV · THE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES ARE UNEQUAL, AND CORRESPOND PERFECTLY IN RELATIVE MERIT TO THE RACES THAT USE THEM

W. von Humboldt, in one of the most brilliant of his minor works, has admirably expressed this fact, in its essentials. “In language,” he says, “the work of time is helped everywhere by national idiosyncrasies. The characteristic features in the idioms of the warrior hordes of America and Northern Asia were not necessarily those of the primitive races of India and Greece. It is not possible to trace a perfectly equal, and as it were natural, development of any language, whether it was spoken by one nation or many” (W. von Humboldt, Über das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen, und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwickelung).