Pantographia; containing accurate copies of all the known alphabets in the world; together with an English explanation of the peculiar force or power of each letter: to which are added, specimens of all well-authenticated oral languages. Forming a comprehensive digest of phonology / By Edmund Fry.

  • Fry, Edmund, 1754-1835.
Date:
1799
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pantographia; containing accurate copies of all the known alphabets in the world; together with an English explanation of the peculiar force or power of each letter: to which are added, specimens of all well-authenticated oral languages. Forming a comprehensive digest of phonology / By Edmund Fry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    by composition and derivation. This would long preserve the language radically the same, though it could not prevent the introdudlion of different dialedts into the different countries over which men might spread themselves. In whatever region we may suppose the human race to have been originally placed, the increase of their numbers would, in process of time, either disperse them into various nations, or ex- tend the one nation to a vast distance on every side. In either case, they would every where meet with new objects, which would occasion the invention of new names; and as the dif- ference of climate, and other natural causes, would compel those who moved eastward or northward to adopt manners, in many respefts, different from the modes of those who settled in the west and south, a vast number of words would in one country be fabricated, to denote complex conceptions, which must of course be unintelligible to the body of the people inhabiting countries where those conceptions could never be formed : thus would various dialedts be unavoidably introduced into the ori- ginal language, even whilst all mankind continued in one society, < and under one government. But after separate and independent societies were formed, these variations would become more nu- merous, and the several dialedfs would deviate farther and farther from each other, as well as from the idiom and genius of the parent tongue, in proportion to the diversity of manners of the tribes by whom they were spoken. If we suppose a few persons to have been banished together from the society of their brethren, or to have wandered of their own accord to a distance, from which, through trackless forests, or other causes, they could not return, it is easy to see how the most copious language must soon have become narrow, and how the offspring of inspiration must in time have become so deformed, as scarcely to retain a feature of the ancestor whence it originally sprang. Men do not long retain a practical skill in those arts which they never exercise : and there is an abundance of fails to prove, that a single man cast upon a desart island, and having to pro- vide the necessaries of life by his own ingenuity, would soon lose the art of speaking his mother tongue with fluency. A small number of persons cast away together, would be likely to retain the