Frederick Starr:
It is well known that a tribe may have peculiarities in speech, in
manners, in arts, that distinguish it at once from its neighbors. The
Haida carves slate as no other tribe does. The elegant blankets of
mountain sheep wool from Chilcat are characteristic. The Hebrews
tested the enemy with the word _shibboleth_, and found that he could
only say _sibboleth_. A twist of the tongue in pronouncing a word is a
small matter, but, small as it is, it may be perpetuated for ages.
Such a perpetuation of a tribal peculiarity has been aptly called an
ethnic survival. Some of the advanced linguists of the present day are
beginning to query whether the group of modern languages of the Aryan
family are not examples of such ethnic survival; whether the
differences between French and Italian and Spanish, Latin, Greek and
Slavonic, are not due to the difficulty various ancient tribes found
in learning to speak the same new and foreign language. To draw an
example of ethnic survival from another field of science, consider the
art of the French cave men. The archaeologist finds in the caverns
bones of various mammals, teeth of cave bear, and antlers of reindeer
carved with animal figures.
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