“ If in this immensity of time many languages have won so little, if everywhere language growth has been so slow, then we can only differ as to whether it is reasonably certain, or probable, or only possible, that there should have been a considerable first period of human existence without traditional speech, and a yet more considerable one before the fixation of so much as should leave abiding traces in its descendants, and that meanwhile the race should have multiplied and scattered into independent communities. ”

“ In point of fact, taking languages as they now exist, only those have been shown related which possess a common structure, or have together grown out of the more primitive radical stage, since structure proves itself a more constant and reliable evidence than material. And this is likely ever to be the case; at any rate, to trace all the world’s languages so far back toward their beginnings as to find in them evidences of identity is beyond the wildest hope. We must be content with demonstrating for those beginnings a unity of kind as alike a body of formless roots. ”

“ Since culture has become incontestably the dominant power in human history, the unifying forces in language have also been stronger than the diversifying, and with culture at its full height, and spread equally to every land and race, one universal language, like one universal community, is not an absurdity or theoretic impossibility, but only a Utopian or millennial dream. ”

“ If any one chooses to assert the possibility that even the completely isolated dialect of the little Basque community may have been derived by the Iberian race from an intrusive minority as small as that which made the Celts of Gaul speakers of Latin, we should have to admit it as a possibility—yet without detriment to the value of the dialect as indicating the isolated race-position of its speakers. In strictness, language is never a proof of race, either in an individual or in a community ”

“ It is at first slight, even to insignificance; not greater than exists between the dialects of different localities or ranks or occupations in the same community, without detriment to the general unity of speech. This unity, namely, rests solely on mutual intelligibility, and is compatible with no small amount of individual and class difference, in vocabulary, in grammar and in pronunciation; indeed, in the strictest sense, each individual has a dialect of his own, different from that of every other, even as he has a handwriting, a countenance, a character of his own. ”

“ We might conceive of a solitary man as housing and dressing himself, devising rude tools, and thus lifting himself a step from wildness toward cultivation; but we cannot conceive of him as ever learning to talk. Recognition of the impulse to communication as the efficient cause of language-making is an element of primary importance in the theory of the origin of language. No one who either leaves it out of account or denies it will, however ingenious and entertaining his speculations, cast any real light on the earliest history of speech. ”

“ It is in vain to attempt to use dates in language-history, to say when this or that step in development was taken, and how long a period it cost, especially now that the changed views as to the antiquity of man are making it probable that only a small part of the whole history is brought within the reach even of our deductions from the most ancient recorded dialects. ”

“ The doctrine of the inaccessibility of language to other action than that of its speakers does not imply a power in the individual speaker to create or alter anything in the common speech, any more than it implies his desire to do so. What he suggests by his example must be approved by the imitation of his fellows, in order to become language. The common speech is the common property, and no one person has any more power over it than another. ”

“ Before the attainment of civilization the human race, whether proceeding from one centre of dispersion or from several, was spread over the earth in a state of utter disintegration; but every centre of civilization becomes also a centre of integration; its influences make for unity of speech as of all other social institutions. ”

“ Dialectic resemblances point inevitably back to an earlier unity of speech, and hence of community; from what we know of the history of speech, they are not to be accounted for in any other way. The longer the separation that has produced the diversity, the greater its degree. With every generation the amount of accordance decreases and that of discordance increases the common origin of the dialects is at first palpable, then evident on examination, then to be made out by skilled research, then perhaps no longer demonstrable at all ”

“ On the whole, the contributions of language to ethnology are practically far greater in amount and more distinct than those derived from any other source.
The genetical classification of languages, then, is to be taken for just what it attempts to be, and no more: primarily as a classification of languages only; but secondarily as casting light, in varying manner and degree, on movements of community, which in their turn depend more or less upon movements of races. It is what Classification. the fates of men have left to represent the tongues of men—a record imperfect even to fragmentariness. ”

“ It is not, therefore, matter for wonder that Delbruck has confined himself in the investigation of syntax to a part only of the languages whose sounds and forms are discussed by Brugmann in the earlier volumes of the Grundriss. To cover the whole ground is beyond the powers of a single man, and there is a great lack of preliminary studies on the syntax of many of the languages.
One of the most difficult problems connected with syntax, but primarily, as it appears, a question of morphology, is the origin of grammatical gender. ”

“ In languages thus constituted the only possible external alteration is that phonetic change to which all human speech, from the very beginning of its traditional life, is liable; the only growth is internal, by that multiplication and adaptation and improvement of meanings which is equally an inseparable part of all language-history. ”

“ That it does not depend upon his race is demonstrated by facts the most numerous and various; the African whose purity of descent is attested by every feature is found all over the world speaking just that language, or jargon, into the midst of which the fates of present or former slavery have brought his parents; every civilized community contains elements of various lineage, combined into one by unity of speech ”

“ Grouping into families is nothing more than the best classification attainable at a given stage in the progress of linguistic science; it is in no small part provisional only, and is always held liable to modification, even sweeping, by the results of further research. Of some families we can follow the history by external evidences a great way back into the past; their structure is so highly developed as to be traced with confidence everywhere ”

“ For it we have not to seek special disturbing causes in the history of the speakers, although such may come in to heighten and quicken the change; we know that even in a small community, on a narrow islet, cut off from all intercourse with other communities, the speech would grow different—as certainly, if not as rapidly, as anywhere in the world—and only by the action of its speakers: not that the speakers of a language act in unison and simultaneously to produce a given change. ”

“ One group in the east (Oigob, &c.) has a gender distinction, involving that of sex, but really founded on relative power and dignity: things disparaged, including women, are put in one class; things extolled, including men, are put in the other. This is perhaps the most significant hint anywhere to be found of how a gender-distinction like that in our own Indo-European languages, which we usually regard as being essentially a distinction of sex, while in fact it only includes such, may have arisen. ”

“ So, by a true and instructive analogy, the beginnings of writing are rude depictions of visible objects; it is now thoroughly recognized that no alphabet, of whatever present character, can have originated in any other way; everything else is gradually arrived at from that—as, indeed, in the ingeniously shaping hands of man, from any central body of signs, though but of small extent, all else is attainable by processes of analogy and adaptation and transfer. Now what is it that is directly signifiable in the world about us? ”

“ But, on the other hand, since this unity is really demonstrated, since all structure is the result of growth, and no degree of difference of structure, any more than of difference of material, refuses explanation as the result of discordant growth from identical beginnings, it is equally inadmissible to claim that the diversities of language prove it to have had different beginnings. That is to say, the question of the unity of speech, and yet more that of the unity of the race, is beyond the reach of the student of language ”

“ Along with these, too, a constant change of phonetic form constitutes an inseparable part of the life of language. Speech is no more stable with respect to the sounds of which it is composed than with respect to its grammatical forms, its vocabulary, or the body of conceptions signified by it. Even nearly related languages differ as much in their spoken alphabets and the combinations of sounds they admit, and in their uttered forms of words historically the same, as in any other part; and the same is true of local dialects and of class dialects within the same community. ”

“ It is not a question of absolute propriety or correctness, since the word philology is in its nature wide enough to imply all language-study of whatever kind; it is one, rather, of the convenient distinction of methods that have grown too independent and important to be any longer well included under a common name.
I —The Science of Language in general.
Philology, in all its departments, began and grew up as classical; the history of our civilization made the study of Greek and Latin long the exclusive, still longer the predominant and regulating, occupation of secular scholarship. ”

“ So a cough within hearing of any one attracts his attention; but to cough, or to produce any other sound, articulate or inarticulate, for the purpose of attracting another’s attention, is to commit an act of language-making, such as in human history preceded in abundance the establishment of definite traditional signs for conceptions. Here begins to appear the division between human language and all brute expression, since we do not know that any animal but man ever definitely took this step. ”

“ Being what he is by nature, man has by the development of language and other institutions become what he is by culture. His acquired culture is the necessary result of his native endowment, not the contrary. The acquisition of the first stumbling beginnings of a superior means of communication had no more influence to raise him from a simian to a human being than the present high culture and perfected speech of certain races has to lift them up to something more than human and specifically different from the races of inferior culture. ”

“ If a large number of persons migrate in a body and continue to live in close intercourse with one another and but little in contact with the outside world, changes such as take place in the pronunciation of the individual emigrant do not occur. There can be no imitation of alien sounds, for there are none; no greater effort to be intelligible is required, for the audience has not changed. Hence it has been often remarked that a population which history shows to have remained undisturbed for very long periods in the same geographical situation manifests but little change in its language. ”

“ The change which the past century has seen has been a part of the general scientific movement of the age, which has brought about the establishment of so many new branches of knowledge, both historical and physical, by the abandonment of shackling prejudices, the freedom of inquiry, the recognition of the dignity of all knowledge, the wide-reaching assemblage of facts and their objective comparison, and the resulting constant improvement of method. ”

“ Hence any degree of intercourse between one community and another, leading to exchange of products or of knowledge, is sure to lead also to some borrowing of names; and there is hardly a language in the world, except of races occupying peculiarly isolated positions, that does not contain a certain amount of foreign material thus won, even as our English has elements in its vocabulary from half the other tongues in the world. ”

“ For in language there are two kinds of sound change, that which is unconscious, universal at a given time and within a given area, and, on the other hand, that which belongs only to a particular class or clique, deviates consciously from the pronunciation of the majority, is therefore not universal, and exercises no permanent influence on the language. ”

“ It is far from impossible that the present prominence of the South African or Bantu family may be secondary, due to the great expansion under favouring circumstances of a race once having no more importance than belongs now to many of the Central African races, and speaking a tongue which differed from theirs only as theirs differed from one another. None of the Central African languages is a prefix-language in the same degree as the Bantu, and in many of them prefixes play no greater part than in the world’s languages in general ”

“ By perhaps the majority of students of language it is, as a generally descriptive title, restricted to that family and one other, the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic, but such a classification is not to be approved, for, in respect to this characteristic, Indo-European speech ranks not with Semitic but with the great body of agglutinative tongues. To few of these can the name be altogether denied, since there is hardly a body of related dialects in existence that does not exhibit some items of “inflective” structure; the Aryan is only the one among them that has most to show. ”

“ Taken by itself, one sound is as easy as another to the person who has accustomed himself to it from childhood, and those which the young child most easily acquires are not those which in the history of speech are least liable to alteration, it is especially in the combinations and transitions of rapid speaking that the tongue, as it were, finds out for itself easier ways of performing its task, by dropping and slurring and adapting. ”

“ There is no analogy closer and more instructive than this between speech and writing. But analogies are abundant elsewhere in the history of human development. Everywhere it is the lower and more obvious inducements that are first effective, and that lead gradually to the possession of what serves and stimulates higher wants. ”

“ If language were stable there would of course be no divarication; but since it is always varying, and by items of difference that proceed from individuals and become general by diffusion, there can be uniformity of change only so far as diffusion goes or as the influences of communication extend. Within the limits of a single community, small or large, whatever change arises spreads gradually to all, and so becomes part of the general speech ”