Note 351 — Chapter IX

“I am led to believe that familiar languages (if this philological barbarism is permitted me) do not resemble one another because they come from the same parent, but because they have been brought up together; Africa especially seems to me to furnish a proof of it, for we must study the history of families of languages, especially in the place where they began to be formed, and I believe that language was formed in Africa. My hypothesis is not applicable to all cases, but to several; thus, the French, Italian, Spanish, etc., come from the Latin, and were born at its death; but many other languages appear to me to take their features one from the other by simple frequentation, by the natives being often in company together, and, as time goes on, these mutual loans make two or several languages, like the branches of the same tree, only, in my idea, the tree does not exist.”—Correspondence, 1857.