William Dwight Whitney

“ If language is a direct emanation of the mind, or an organic product, a sort of excretion, of the bodily organs, so that a word, in any one’s mouth, is an entity having a natural and necessary significance, and can even involve powers which may lie indefinitely dormant and finally come forth into action, then one set of opinions on all theoretic points in linguistics will follow; but another and a very different one, if words are only signs for ideas, instruments with which the mind works, and every language therefore an institution, of historic growth. ”

“ We have no reason to doubt that the main subjects of thought, the leading conceptions which enter into an act of judgment, and of which the expressions form the members of an assertion, are present to all human minds, in an essentially accordant manner, as standing in certain relations, belonging in certain classes, invested with certain general qualities. ”

“ As regards, indeed, each separate and individual formation in language, each vocable, it is a law; the agglutination and fusion that makes a word is only the first step of a process of wearing down and wearing out; and this is equally true of the earliest and of the latest formations. So long, then, as more new formations are made than old ones worn out, the general growth of a language is upward; when the contrary begins to be the case, the growth is downward. ”

“ The mind, in language as elsewhere, is superior to the instruments it employs; it can do excellent work with tools apparently inadequate. As to the character of the tool, we are exceedingly liable to be swayed, in judging it, by our own habits. There are highly respectable students of language, speaking English as their native speech, who look upon Greek synthetic inflection as something to be contemned and apologized for, as characteristic of an inferior intellectual development, and burdensome to the minds that had to master and wield it ”

“ There are infinite shades of doubt and contingency, of hope and fear, of supplication and exaction, in our mental acts and cognitions, which all the resources of Greek synthesis or English analysis are but rude and awkward means of signifying. ”

“ Then, in the second place, language is no separator of quality from substance, or of quality from quality; it does nothing but incorporate and express the results of mental action. The mind may contemplate the more external and accidental relations of a thing apart from those more constant and essential ones which to our ordinary apprehension constitute the thing itself ”

“ Thus, by a change of form in the words employed, we have from house a plural houses; and in like manner men from man. We give also a particular form to a noun in order to mark its value as indicating the possessor of anything: thus man’s, men’s, from man and men; and, in most pronouns, we make a change of form to signify the objective relation as distinguished from that of subject: thus, me, us, him, her, them, whom, as compared with I, we, he, she, they, who. ”

“ Were it not for our pronouns I and me and their like, as already noticed, nominative and objective would never make their appearance as categories in English grammar.
It appears clearly, therefore, that the apparatus of formal designation is of great variety, and that some kind of it is not wanting in any dialect of human speech, however rude and undeveloped this may be: there is no language which fails altogether to signify the modifications and relations of its more material conceptions. ”

“ There is gender, for example. Our own mental apprehension of the diverse sex of objects having conspicuous sex is not less complete than that of the Roman, who intimated it by a difference in the ending and mode of declension of their names ”

“ Just so in the life of every human being there is a clearly recognizable law of youth and growth and decay and death; but a community grows so long as births are in excess of deaths, and decays when deaths are in excess of births: and for this there is no law ”

“ Once more, although the formal apparatus which used to serve for the expression of grammatical gender in our nouns and adjectives has gone out of employment and been forgotten, yet the ever-recurring use of he, she, and it in reference to all the subjects of thought classifies them in our minds as masculine, feminine, and neuter, and puts the distinctions of the two sexes, or the want of sex, before us as calling for constant notice and designation ”

“ Again, let our scheme of verbal inflection be as imperfect as it may, so long as we continue to say I love, thou lovest, he loves, and to set you love against thou lovest, and they love against he loves, so long shall we continue to attribute person and number to our verbs, through their whole conjugation. ”

“ He has been pointing out that some would parallel the primitive Indo-European language with the now existing monosyllabic tongues, but that this would imply the existence in the former of that non-separation of material and form which we see to characterize the latter; and he then proceeds: “Now, however, the Indo-European tongues belong confessedly (bekanntermassen) to those which have carried through on principle a separation of material and form.” ”

“ Such a vocable we call usually, and very properly, a “form-word.” Form-words are found in all or nearly all languages, constituting in some a much larger and more important part of the formative apparatus than in others ”