William Dwight Whitney

“ In all these respects a language has its own peculiarities, distinguishing it from other institutions; but only as they all have their own, distinguishing them from one another: the difference is not in the fundamental points, but in non-essentials. The language of each community, in short, is one of the institutions that make up its civilization. ”

“ For a right understanding of the origin of language shows the natural utterances as suggestions and foundation of language, but not any part of its substance. Fear of a saltus, a lacuna in natural development, is just as much wasted here as it would be wasted on the relation of human clothing and ornament to the nakedness of the other animals, of human architecture to birds’ nests and rabbits’ burrows and beavers’ huts, of human song to that of birds, of human society to the gregariousness of bees and rooks and elephants. ”

“ All this, again, is only another mode of expression for the simple fact that every man learns his language—his “native” language just as much as any other which he may acquire later: that he gets it in no other way, accepting passively whatever circumstances place within reach of his powers of acquisition. The same fact is read, not less distinctly, in the process of learning to speak gone through by every child under our own eyes. The child learns first to understand, and then by imitation to produce; to produce at first imperfectly, fragmentarily, as regards sound, structure, and vocabulary ”

“ We do not know, and may very probably never be able to explain to ourselves, what in the particular character of different races, or what in the habits of speech formed by them in the first stages of language-making—either or both, but doubtless especially the latter—determines for all time the fundamental character of the language of each. ”

“ If our knowledge of the nature of universal language, of the forces at work in its history and of the manner of their working, suggests as the only acceptable view of its earliest condition the assumption of a scanty body of grammatically formless roots, then to have demonstrated by historical evidence the former existence of such a primitive condition in that family of languages which has attained on the whole the highest grade of inflective structure is practically equivalent to having demonstrated it for all languages. ”

“ For it is the tamed and humanized races that offer least resistance to intermixture, and it is civilization aided by literature that gives a language propagative power, making it acceptable to wide communities not kindred in blood to those by whom it was developed. A fact in language not less obvious and elementary than those already noticed by us is its constant change. No living tongue at any period of its existence maintains itself unaltered. ”

“ Whether, again, the Chinese vocables have never advanced out of the radical stage at all, or whether they are, rather, products of a development which for some reason was more limited than that of any other known tongue of a highly-endowed race, so that its relics have completely the semblance of roots, is a question of extreme interest as regards the history of that particular language, but of no necessary wider bearing. ”

“ But a structural value is to be seen also even in the vocabulary of a language—in the way in which, for the purposes of material as well as formal expression, the objects of thought are viewed and classified and selected: how, for example, the colors are distinguished and named, or the kingdoms and classes and genera of natural existences, or the parts and qualities of man, or numbers and their combinations ”

“ The predominance of the voice as instrumentality of expression is the result of a process of natural selection, experience teaching its higher availability for the purpose.
Further, it follows that language is not thought, but an instrumentality whereby vastly increased distinctness and precision and range are given to thought. The error of those who deny, in respect to any one of the characteristic modes of action of human intellect, that it can be carried on at all without the aid of external signs, is so great that it may fairly be called a blunder. ”

“ How long the period was, and what the number of roots produced, we have at present no means of determining, or hardly even ground for conjecturing.
5. To correlate the history of speech and the existence of man and the formation of the means to its attainment are an outcome of the insight and experience of the community; the institution, we may say, grows gradually up in the never-ending contest between human nature and human circumstances; it is a historical product of the joint activity of generations, each one of which has contributed to its elaboration. ”

“ Thus also, in all departments of structure, old forms are lost, and (much more sparingly) new forms are made, new parts of speech are developed, new auxiliaries and other form-words are originated; a language exchanges its prevalently synthetic for a prevalently analytic character. Most easily of all, a vocabulary is altered, by the bringing in of new material, with more or less loss of old. ”

“ Second, we see the fundamental diversity of human language from that of the lower animals. The one is an endowment, natural, instinctive, alike in all individuals of the species, inelastic, unchanging; the other is an acquisition, a historical product, learned by each speaker, indefinitely various among individuals of the same race, and indefinitely variable and expansible. ”

“ No fact in regard to language is more palpable, and at the same time more fundamental, than its diversity. The varieties of human sentence-combination—that is to say, what parts of speech—if any, are distinguished from one another ”

“ Hence all investigation of the cries of the lower animals, the chatterings of monkeys and the like, for their bearing on the origin and history of human speech, have been without fruit, and will always remain so, save so far as they may be directed to two points, now generally ignored: namely, a comparison with the natural and instinctive utterances of human beings, the only real analogues of those cries, utterances which just as much need investigation, and are far harder to get at, if they be at all attainable ”

“ It will take very strong and very direct evidence to convince us in regard to any family that its beginnings and its mode of development out of them have not been essentially of a like character. Even the elsewhere unparalleled and truly anomalous form of the tri-consonantal apparent roots of the Semitic tongues—the most difficult problem, perhaps, in language-history—cannot with our present light be regarded otherwise than as secondary, the product of a very peculiar growth ”

“ Whether, for example, primitive roots were always of one syllable only, or also of more than one, is a matter of very inferior consequence; the Indo-European roots are held to have been monosyllabic because historical analysis finds them so, but the analogy need not be binding as regards other families. ”

“ The inferior race-capacity of the African has full room to show itself in the mental work which he does with English when he has learned it: and there are a plenty of English blockheads who fall below the average African, and whose store of ideas and signs for them no average African need envy. A gifted Englishman, no doubt, would be crippled by the acquisition of an inferior tongue only ”

“ If aggregation is thus demonstrably a real method of Indo-European form-making, and the only one possessing that character, and if it is adequate to the explanation of all the facts, then we ought to accept it as sufficient, and to acknowledge that we have no reason to suppose that forms have been made in any other way. ”

“ In other departments than the linguistic, the non-progressive nature of some races as compared with others is clearly seen. And it appears as if a certain amount most obvious, the most external, inducement to its production was the effective one; every other advantage came as an unforeseen result of its possession. ”

“ His first steps are difficult, as on an untried way, but practice makes them easy, and long habit converts them into a second nature; it comes to seem “natural,” not only to speak, but to speak just as he does ”

“ The period of root-production will have been a limited one—limited by the circumstance that after a time it would come to be easier to make new names out of the significant material already in use, by combination and extension and change of application, than by the creation of new material. ”