William Dwight Whitney

“ Examine any language, and you will find it different from its predecessor; different in a variety of items of the kinds instanced above, each of them being obviously the work of the speakers, and showing no signs of the presence of any other force. In the present stage of what we call the growth of language, nothing takes place which is not the effect of human agency; the only obscurity about it grows out of the fact that there is involved the consenting action of a community, since language is a social institution, and exists primarily and consciously for the purpose of communication. ”

“ Along with and by means of words, the young learner is made to take in the ideas which the knowledge and experience of older men have shaped; he accepts the current classifications and abstractions of his community, at first only imperfectly, then with fuller and more independent action of his own, till finally he grows up to the stature of his language, and has, at least in some departments, nothing more to learn of those about him. ”

“ It is in accordance with all that we know of the history and present use of language, and, not less, with all that we know of the development of man's powers in other departments. Through all its existence, speech is primarily and above all a social possession, its unity made and preserved by mutual intelligibility, all its items and their changes requiring the adoption of a community before they become language at all. Those who, by isolation or physical defect, are cut off from communication with their fellows, do not speak, and have no inclination to speak. ”

“ This is the way in which in general the powers of man have been drawn out and educated; the art of writing came, in like manner, from attempts at another kind of communication; machines came, one item after another, in the struggle of man to supply his physical needs. We are short-sighted beings, and never able to look more than one step ahead, but we have the power of putting each new step beyond its predecessor, and are surprised by-and-by to see how far we have come, how much we have attained that we had neither expected nor foreseen. ”

“ And, especially, communication is the only inducement to which every human being, at every grade of culture, is fully accessible. The great majority, even of speaking, civilized men, do not realize that language is any thing to them but a means of communication; and to ascribe to the uncultivated man a power to foresee that expression will furnish his mind an instrument to work with, and be to the race an indispensable help forward in the career of improvement, is to do him a great deal more than justice. ”

“ Most linguistic scholars hold that the development of a grammatical system has been a work of ages, always going on and never finished; but at least one celebrated and admired authority declares the whole essential structure of a language to be produced "at a single stroke." It is the prevailing belief that the world is filled everywhere with families of related dialects, and that a family of languages, as of individuals or of races, arises by the dispersion and differentiation of a unitary stock. ”

“ The general linguistic philosophy we profess must, first and above all things, be consistent with the most accessible facts of present living language; we may not be able to explain these from themselves alone, but our doctrines must at any rate not go counter to them. If physical science has been worth any thing for its influence upon other sciences, it has been by inculcating its method of investigation, to make the utmost of what is immediately under our eyes, and reason cautiously back from the present into the past. ”

“ Some hold (more or less consistently) that language is a natural organism, growing by its own forces and its own laws, with which men cannot interfere: others declare it an instrumentality, produced in every item by the men themselves who use it. Some write of it as a human faculty or capacity, like sight or hearing, as a gift, as identical with thought or reason, as the one distinguishing quality of man. Others regard it as one of the outcomes of a variety of faculties and impulses, by all of which man is far removed from the lower animals ”

“ Each controversy is to be judged, rather, on its own intrinsic merits. If I have failed to make out a tolerable case against those whom I have criticised, then, be they great men or small, I have been guilty of presumption, and deserve reproof; if, on the contrary, I have fairly sustained my views against theirs, I am justified; and on that basis I am perfectly willing to submit to judgment. ”

“ If my view of the nature of language is the true one, the absence of speech in the lower animals is easily seen to be correlated with many other deficiencies incident to their inferiority of endowment; they have no civilization, no "institutions" of any kind; nothing that goes down by tradition, is taught and learned. Their means of communication is almost wholly intuitive, not arbitrary and conventional, which are the most essential and highest attributes of ours. ”

“ We are all loath to put a truth regarded as humble in place of a brilliant error; and slow to realize that, when the false coloring is taken off, what remains is worth more to us than what we thought we had before. ”

“ But this is merely a matter of learned curiosity; our knowledge or want of knowledge, our belief or disbelief in the explanation when given us, has nothing to do with our use of the term book; we use it because others—those with whom it is our lot to have to do in life—also use it, because we can communicate with them by means of it. ”

“ The human intellect had the power to see what was gained by this means and to try it further; and it could follow on and on, in the same course, until a whole language of signs was the result. It cannot be successfully maintained that no animals are capable of taking even the earliest steps in this process; if a dog stands outside a door, and barks or scratches, to attract attention, and then waits for some one to come and let him in, that is, in all essential respects, an act of language-making; and the dog, and some other animals, can do much more than that. ”

“ Müller fears that I am generally becoming convinced that I am unanswerable. Perhaps every one runs that risk who, after what seems to him due examination and deliberation, has come to hold a certain set of opinions with great confidence, and who, with his best endeavors, does not find among opposing views and arguments any that can overbear his own. One thing I am certain about: namely, that neither Müller nor Steinthal has answered me. As Mr. Müller appreciates so fully the danger in which I am placed, I wonder that he is not willing to put forth a hand to save me from it. ”

“ Language is a body, not of thoughts, nor of physical acts, but of physically apprehensible signs for thought; and the student of language begins his work upon the signs, their office, and their history. Between him and the students of the other branches named there is a relation of mutual helpfulness. The history of words and the history of things cast constant and valued light upon one another. ”

“ It makes every human being capable of learning and using any language. It implies also that every human being is capable of producing a language—only let circumstances be sufficiently favorable, and give him time enough: say a few hundreds or thousands of ordinary lives. But the English language, for instance, or any other, is not such a capacity: it is the concrete accumulated product of the efforts at expression of the English-speaking or other community and its ancestors, continued through thousands of years. ”

“ Let a child of European parents be brought at birth into an Indian wigwam, and grow up among Indians only; and his life in all its parts will be Indian—his food, his occupations, his amusements, his knowledge, and his beliefs—and, along with the rest, his language also; while the African, for instance, born and bred in an American community, shows in all these same respects accordance with that particular class of Americans among whom his lot is cast. ”

“ Thought is the action of the mind, in apprehending, comparing, inferring; every word is an act of the body, and of the body only; performed, indeed, as all the voluntary acts of the body are, under the direction of the mind, but no more the work of the mind than are crooks of a finger, or brandishings of an arm, or kicks with a foot. There is no more immediate connection of the apparatus of thought with the muscles of utterance than with those of facial expression or of gesture. Talking is just as much thought as dancing is ”

“ The sounds of language illustrate the articulate capacity of the organs of utterance, and their changes require for explanation a knowledge of phonetic science, as a special department of physiology and acoustics combined. And the contributions of language to psychology greatly outweigh in value those of psychology to the science of language, since the latter is the key to the historical development of human thought; and since words are not the immediate product of processes of cognition, or abstraction, or induction, but only the result of voluntary attempts to communicate those products. ”

“ This by no means implies that there are no such things as race-differences of capacity and disposition, even as there are wide individual differences between members of the same race: the white man makes, perhaps, a somewhat peculiar kind of Indian, the African a peculiar kind of American; yet each acquires the civilization, language included, of the race with which he grows up, and shows his race-characteristics, as they their individual characteristics, inside of that. ”

“ Each such product has its history: that is to say, it has been wrought only in time, and under the infinitely varied modifying influence of historical circumstances; each is different, therefore, from all the rest: a thousand different products, of every degree of diversity, but each one answering the same general purpose, and capable of being acquired and wielded by every normally constituted human being, of whatever race. ”

“ If there are problems of structure as yet unsolved, they may be expected to yield to more skilled investigation; or, if they do not, it will be presumably because of the loss of needed evidence. The name-making process implies only the christening of a formed idea, the provision of a sign which shall henceforth be associated with a particular conception, and used to represent it in social intercourse and in the operations of thought. And the sign is obtained just where it can be most conveniently found, according to the circumstances and habits of each particular community. ”

“ Some maintain that the child learns his own language; others strenuously deny that there is any teaching or learning about it. Some, once more, declare the study in which they are engaged a physical science, while to others it seems as truly an historical or moral science as any other branch of the history of man and his works. ”

“ If they are true, then those are superficial who, in a mistaken endeavor after profundity, abandon the true basis and method of their science. There are infinite mysteries involved in every act of language-making and language-using, with which the linguistic scholar, as such, has to do only secondarily, or not at all. To recur to our former example: the psychological processes whereby the rude conception of a book is formed, partly under instruction, and gradually developed into fullness and accuracy, are one subject of study ”

“ But the animals can go no further in the direction of developing their rude beginnings of expression into a language, than of working up their tools into a mechanical art, with all its appliances, simply because they have not the capacity; and in this capacity of indefinite development, by accumulating the results of the exercise of his powers out of a condition originally as low, or wellnigh as low, as that of the animals, lies the distinction of man—a distinction which ought to satisfy the most exacting lover of his species. ”

“ I say "almost," because I think the want not absolute; the rudiments of speech are just as much present in animals as, for example, those of the use of instruments; on account of which latter, Mr. Muller pronounces the "use of tools" no barrier.
Human language began when sign-making by instinct became sign-making by intention; when, for example, an utterance of pain or pleasure, formerly forced out by immediate emotion, was repeated imitatively, no longer as a mere instinctive cry, but for the purpose of intimating to another, "I am (was, or shall be) suffering or glad;" ”

“ So far as a language is handed down from generation to generation by the process of teaching and learning, it is stable, and by this means it does remain nearly the same; so far as it is altered by the consenting action of its users, it is unstable, and it does in fact change. ”

“ Here is the point to which the attention of naturalists should be directed, if they wish to determine how far the animals advance on the road to language; to what extent are they able to turn signs—utterance, or gesture, or posture, or grimace—to account for the purpose, and with the intention, of intimating meaning. To determine what definite natural cries they have is comparatively nothing to the purpose, since these are not the analogue of human speech ”