[Footnote 126:  Though indications are not lacking of what these remoter kin of the Indo-European languages may be.  This is disputed ground, however, and hardly fit subject for a purely general study of speech.]

All languages that are known to be genetically related, i.e., to be divergent forms of a single prototype, may be considered as constituting a “linguistic stock.”  There is nothing final about a linguistic stock.  When we set it up, we merely say, in effect, that thus far we can go and no farther.  At any point in the progress of our researches an unexpected ray of light may reveal the “stock” as but a “dialect” of a larger group.  The terms dialect, language, branch, stock—­it goes without saying—­are purely relative terms.  They are convertible as our perspective widens or contracts.[127] It would be vain to speculate as to whether or not we shall ever be able to demonstrate that all languages stem from a common source.  Of late years linguists have been able to make larger historical syntheses than were at one time deemed feasible, just as students of culture have been able to show historical connections between culture areas or institutions that were at one time believed to be totally isolated from each other.  The human world is contracting not only prospectively but to the backward-probing eye of culture-history.  Nevertheless we are as yet far from able to reduce the riot of spoken languages to a small number of “stocks.”  We must still operate with a quite considerable number of these stocks.  Some of them, like Indo-European or Indo-Chinese, are spoken over tremendous reaches; others, like Basque,[128] have a curiously restricted range and are in all likelihood but dwindling remnants of groups that were at one time more widely distributed.  As for the single or multiple origin of speech, it is likely enough that language as a human institution (or, if one prefers, as a human “faculty”) developed but once in the history of the race, that all the complex history of language is a unique cultural event.  Such a theory constructed “on general principles” is of no real interest, however, to linguistic science.  What lies beyond the demonstrable must be left to the philosopher or the romancer.

[Footnote 127:  “Dialect” in contrast to an accepted literary norm is a use of the term that we are not considering.]

[Footnote 128:  Spoken in France and Spain in the region of the Pyrenees.]

We must return to the conception of “drift” in language.  If the historical changes that take place in a language, if the vast accumulation of minute modifications which in time results in the complete remodeling of the language, are not in essence identical with the individual variations that we note on every hand about us, if these variations are born only to die without a trace, while the equally minute, or even minuter, changes that make up the drift are forever imprinted on the history of the language, are we not