William Dwight Whitney

“ This conquering tongue—whose descendants now occupy so large and fair a part of Europe, and, along with their half-sister, the English, fill nearly all the New World, and numerous scattered tracts, coasts, and islands, on every continent and in every ocean, while its material has leavened and enriched the speech of all enlightened nations—was the vernacular idiom, not twenty-five centuries ago, of a little isolated district in middle Italy, a region which, on any map of the world not drawn upon a scale truly gigantic, one might easily cover with the end of a finger. ”

“ There was doubtless never a country before, where, down to the very humblest classes of the people, so many learned to read and spell out of the same school-books, heard the same speakers, from platform, desk, and pulpit, and read the same books and papers; where there was such a surging to and fro of the population, such a mixture and intimate intercourse of all ranks and of all regions. In short, every form of communication is more active and more far-reaching with us than ever elsewhere; every assimilating influence has had unequalled freedom and range of action. ”

“ No necessary and indissoluble tie binds any human being to his own personal and local peculiarities of idiom, or even to his mother-tongue; habit and convenience alone make them his; he is ever ready to give them up for others, when circumstances make it worth his while to do so. The coarse and broad-mouthed rustic whom the force of inborn character and talent brings up to a position among cultivated men, wears off the rudeness of his native dialect, and learns to speak as correctly and elegantly, perhaps, as one who has been trained from his birth after the best models. ”

“ There is here no idea of a narrative, of an orderly setting forth of the successive incidents making up an act or occurrence: the whole complex is put before the eye at once, unanalyzed, in the form in which we might suppose it to lie in the mind of a brute—or, more properly, as it would lie in the mind of a man destitute of language, and lacking that education in progressive thought which the possession and use of language give; it abnegates, in short, the advantages conferred by language, and is confusedly synthetic, like the conceptions of an untaught human being. ”

“ They recoiled, at last, before the reviving might of the superior race, and the last and grandest era of Indo-European supremacy began, the era in the midst of which we now live. For the past few centuries, the European nations have stood foremost, without a rival, in the world's history. They are the enlightened and the enlighteners of mankind. They alone are extending the sphere of human knowledge, investigating the nature of matter and of mind, and tracing out their exhibition in the past history and present condition of the earth and its inhabitants. ”

“ As it is the product, so it is also the means and instrument, of community. It converts the human race from a bare aggregate of individuals into a unity, having a joint life, a common development, to which each individual contributes his mite, receiving an untold treasure in return. It alone makes history possible. All that man possesses more than the brute is so intimately bound up with language that the two are hardly separable from one another ”

“ But even in respect to the more intimate and sacred part of language, the words and phrases of universal and every-day use, the community confers some measure of authority upon those who have a just title to it, upon great masters in the art of speech, upon speakers whose eloquence carries captive all hearts, upon writers whose power in wielding the common instrument of thought is felt and acknowledged through all ranks. ”

“ Throughout its whole traceable history, language has been in the hands of those who have spoken it, for manifold modification, for enrichment, for adaptation to the varying ends of a varying knowledge and experience; nineteen twentieths, at the least, of the speech we speak is demonstrably in this sense our own work; why should the remaining twentieth be thought otherwise? It is but a childish philosophy which can see no other way to make out a divine agency in human language than by regarding that agency as specially and miraculously efficient in the first stage of formation of language. ”

“ A language like our own is an immense encyclopedia, as it were, in which are laid away the cognitions and experiences of a whole world, and of numerous generations; it is as many-sided, as cosmopolitan, as hard to grasp and interpret in detail, as is our culture; while the tongue of a rude and isolated tribe—like the Fuegians, the Fijians, the Eskimos—would be a comparatively plain and legible portraiture of its condition and character. ”

“ An infant is taken alive from the arms of its drowned mother, the only waif cast upon the shore from the wreck of a strange vessel; and it learns the tongue of its foster-parents; no outbreak of natural and hereditary speech ever betrays from what land it derived its birth. The child of a father and mother of different race and speech learns the tongue of either, as circumstances and their choice may determine; or it learns both, and is equally at home in them, hardly knowing which to call its native language. ”

“ Study of a foreign language brings it in some measure to our sense. He who begins to learn a tongue not his own is at first hardly aware of any incommensurability between its signs for ideas and those to which he has been accustomed. But the more intimately he comes to know it, and the more natural and familiar its use becomes to him, so much the more clearly does he see that the dress it puts upon his thoughts modifies their aspect, the more impossible does it grow to him to translate its phrases with satisfactory accuracy into his native speech. ”

“ Speech is not a personal possession, but a social; it belongs, not to the individual, but to the member of society. No item of existing language is the work of an individual; for what we may severally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employed by our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community. That is a word, no matter what may be its origin, its length, its phonetic form, which is understood in any community, however limited, as the sign of an idea ”

“ So was it also with the human race; the acquisition of speech constituted the first stage in the progressive development of its capacities. We, as individuals, have forgotten both the labour that the task cost us and the enlightenment its successful accomplishment brought us: the whole lies too far back in our lives to be reached by our memories; we feel as if we had always spoken, as directly and naturally as we have thought. As a race, too, we have done the same thing: neither history nor tradition can penetrate to a period at all approaching that of the formation of language ”

“ It does not shear off from a language masses of unnecessary means of expression which untaught speakers would fain force upon it; it finds no such materials to deal with. Some write and speak as if the uncultivated employer of speech were impelled to launch out indefinitely into new words and forms, rioting in the profusion of his linguistic creations, until grammar comes to set bounds to his prodigality, and to reduce the common tongue within reasonable dimensions. But it is by no means so easy and seductive a thing to increase the resources of a language. ”

“ Yet what a chaos of unanalyzed conceptions, undefined impressions, and unreasoned conclusions the mind of every one of us would be without speech, it is well-nigh impossible for us to have even a faint idea—for us who have so long enjoyed the advantage of expression, and so accustomed ourselves to lean upon it, that we can now even differ and dispute as to whether thought and its instrument are not one and the same thing. ”

“ How much better were it to confess candidly that we cling to our modes of spelling, and are determined to perpetuate them, simply because they are ours, and we are used to and love them, with all their absurdities, rather than try to make them out inherently desirable! Even if the irregularities of English orthography were of historical origin throughout—as, in fact, they are so only in part—it is not the business of writing to teach or suggest etymologies. ”

“ He would be, without language, hardly man at all, a creature little raised above the brutes; without the art of record, his elevation would soon find its limits; he could never become the being he was meant to be, the possessor of enlightenment, the true lord of nature and discoverer of her secrets. ”

“ China, indeed, in the primitiveness and persistency of its language, its arts, and its polity, is one of the most remarkable and exceptional phenomena which the story of our race presents. It has maintained substantially the same speech and the same institutions, by uninterrupted transmission from generation to generation upon the same soil, all the way down to our own times from a period in the past at which every Indo-European people of which we know aught was but a roving tribe of barbarians. Elsewhere, change has been the dominating principle; in China, permanency. ”

“ It is comparatively easy for a community to provide out of its vernacular resources of speech for that ordinary growth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom which comes in the main by the working over of conceptions already acquired and named, and only in lesser degree by the apprehension of new particulars; but we have only to rejoice that our language is by fortunate circumstances saved from a strain which the present conditions of our culture would otherwise have put upon it, and which is more severe than any living tongue has ever been obliged to endure. ”

“ Now the sum of knowledge in every community varies not a little from generation to generation. Every trade and handicraft, every art, every science, is constantly changing its materials, its processes, and its products; and its technical dialect is modified accordingly, while so much of the results of this change as affects or interests the general public finds its way into the familiar speech of everybody. As our material condition varies, as our ways of life, our institutions, private and public, become other than they have been, all is necessarily reflected in our language. ”

“ Each generation hands it down to the generation following. Every one is an actor in the process; in each individual speaker the language has, as we may say, a separate and independent existence, as has an animal species in each of its members; and each does what in him lies to propagate it—that is to say, his own part of it, as determined in extent and character by the inherent and acquired peculiarities of his nature. And, small as may be the share of the work which falls to any one of us, the sum of all the shares constitutes the force which effects the transmission of the whole language. ”

“ In all its stages of growth alike, then, speech is strictly a social institution; as the speaking man, when reduced to solitude, unlearns its use, so the solitary man would never have formed it. We may extol as much as we please, without risk of exaggeration, the advantage which each one of us derives from it within his inmost self, in the training and equipment of his own powers of thought: but the advantage is one we should never have enjoyed, save as we were born members of a community: the ideas of speech and of community are inseparable. ”

“ Every existing form of human speech is a body of arbitrary and conventional signs for thought, handed down by tradition from one generation to another, no individual in any generation receiving or transmitting the whole body, but the sum of the separate givings and takings being effective to keep it in existence without essential loss. Yet the process of traditional transmission always has been, is now, and will ever continue to be, in all parts of the world, an imperfect one: no language remains, or can remain, the same during a long period of time. ”

“ This incapacity of speech to reveal all that the mind contains meets us at every point. The soul of each man is a mystery which no other man can fathom: the most perfect system of signs, the most richly developed language, leads only to a partial comprehension, a mutual intelligence whose degree of completeness depends upon the nature of the subject treated, and the acquaintance of the hearer with the mental and moral character of the speaker.
It not infrequently happens that a variation of phonetic form comes in to aid the variation of significant content of a word. ”

“ And yet, we have no reason to believe that any one of those thirty or forty generations of Englishmen through whom we are descended from the contemporaries of King Alfred was less simply and single-mindedly engaged to transmit to its children the same language which it had received from its ancestors than is the generation of which we ourselves form a part. It may well be that circumstances were less favourable to some of them than to us, and that our common speech stands in no danger of suffering in the next thousand years a tithe of the change which it has suffered in the past thousand. ”

“ Did we find no traces of a primitive condition of language different from its later manifestations, did it appear to us as from the very beginning a completely developed apparatus, of complicated structure, with distinct signs for objects, qualities, activities, and abstract conceptions, with its mechanism for the due expression of relations, and with a rich vocabulary—then might we well shrink back in despair from the attempt to explain its origin, and confess that only a miracle could have produced it, that only a superhuman agency could have placed it in human possession. ”

“ It is, indeed, not a little surprising to see a man of the acknowledged ability and great learning of Professor Müller, after depreciating and casting ridicule upon the views of others respecting so important a point, put forward one of his own as a mere authoritative dictum, resting it upon nothing better than a fanciful comparison which lacks every element of a true analogy, not venturing to attempt its support by a single argument, instance, or illustration, drawn from either the nature or the history of language. ”

“ A vocabulary, even while undergoing no extension in substantial content of words and forms, may grow indefinitely in expressiveness, becoming filled up with new senses, its words and phrases made pregnant with deeper and more varied significance. It may do so, and it will, if there lie in the nature and circumstances of the people who speak it a capacity for such growth. The speech of a community is the reflex of its average and collective capacity, because, as we have already seen, the community alone is able to make and change language ”