English language

“ View'd freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. ”

“ There can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American continent. The prime function of a language, after all, is to interpret the ‘form and pressure’ of life—the experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, and aspiration of the race which employs it. ”

“ How entangled and wild with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares! ”

“ LOSS AND GAIN.—But, while the English language has, in the course of centuries, lost almost all its inflections, it has been all that time gaining new words, and at the same time gaining new powers of expression. In fact, the history of our language is a history of both loss and gain. ”

“ Modern geography, modern history, modern literature; the English language as a language; the whole circle of the sciences, physical, moral, and social, are even more completely ignored in the higher than in the lower schools. ”

“ Among world-wide objects of speculation, objects rising to the dignity of a mundane or cosmopolitish value, which challenge at this time more than ever a growing intellectual interest, is the English language. ”

“ The influences at work upon the English language at present are very complex, and play on it with great force, so that the changes are startling in their rapidity. English is not only the language of a nation or of a race, not even of an empire ”

“ Surely the mental habit of people who express their thoughts in so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding, cannot be essentially the same. The English language, strange compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin. ”

“ The English language is the tool of the peoples who speak English and who have made it to fit their hands. They have fashioned it to suit their own needs, and it is quite as characteristic as anything else these same peoples have made—quite as characteristic as the common law and as parliamentary government. ”

“ The English language, moreover, being spoken more or less over the greater part of the earth's surface, geographically speaking, the author who addresses his readers in that tongue is sustained by the flattering conviction that he will be understood by the majority of the nations of the globe! For it is not alone the educated classes of all countries that seek to master a language which possesses such a grand—all but unrivalled literature! ”

“ A language is but the instrument of those who use it; and English has flourished and spread not because of its own merits, many as they are, but because of the forthputting qualities of the masterful English stock. ”

“ The attention which has lately been given to the culture of the English language, by some who, in the character of critics or lexicographers, have laboured purposely to improve it, and by many others who, in various branches of knowledge, have tastefully adorned it with the works of their genius, has in a great measure redeemed it from that contempt in which it was formerly held in the halls of learning. ”

“ The English language illustrates this tendency to simplify and shorten words. the application of a single formula of evolution to all varieties of human speech. That the demands of so vast a civilization should have produced so scanty a vocabulary needs some other explanation than a supposed entire dependence on its primitive resources alone. ”

“ The English vocabulary offers a fruitful field of study. First of all, the cast of thought that it expresses is individual. Ours is a distinct, not necessarily superior, civilization; and all the forms of intellectual activity represented by our tongue are so characteristic that one may well believe in the formative influence of a language over the people speaking it. ”

“ Causes producing dialects; causes maintaining, producing, or extending homogeneity of speech. Illustrations: history of the German language; of the Latin; of the English. The English language in America. We have, in the last two lectures, occupied ourselves with tracing out and illustrating by typical examples the chief processes of that incessant change, that linguistic growth, which marks a language as living, as undergoing, in the minds and mouths of a community, constant adaptation to their needs, constant adjustment to their preferences and caprices. ”

“ The dictionaries of modern English are said to contain about 38,000 words, of which about 23,000 or five eighths of the whole number, come from the Anglo-Saxon.
The English language, by its remarkable combination of strength, precision, and copiousness, is worthy of being, as it already is, spoken by many millions, and these the part of the human race that appear likely to control, more than any others, the future destinies of the world. ”

“ When English becomes the world-language,—if our speech ever is raised to fill that position of honor and usefulness,—it will be the English language as it is spoken by all the branches of the English race, no doubt; but the dominant influence in deciding what the future of that language shall be must come from the United States. The English of the future will be the English that we shall use here in the United States ”

“ The English language has properly no dialects; the style of writers has no professed diversity in the use of words, or of their flexions and terminations, nor differs but by different degrees of skill or care. ”

“ Another interesting essay is that on the importance for science of a dominant language, and it contains some very curious facts as to the way in which the English language is spreading on the Continent. ”

“ English a Living Language
Our own is, of course, a living language still. It is therefore gaining and losing. It is a tree in which the vital sap is circulating yet, ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some of the evidences of this life at work in it still. ”

“ The power of language has been gradually enlarging for a great length of time, and I venture to say that the English language at the present time can express more, and is more subtle, flexible, and, at the same time, vigorous, than any of which we possess a record. ”

“ It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English as to suppose him writing an ancient English novel: that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one’s language and of one’s time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier. ”

“ The two facts, that the English language is the vehicle and the medium of a literature unequaled by that produced in any other known tongue, and that it is becoming the common intermediary and most widely diffused speech of the world, show that it possesses in the highest degree the two essential elements of a great and complete language—adaptation to man’s highest and to his homeliest needs in expression. ”

“ The language of literature and of civilized ideas is, for the English-speaking world to-day, English—not the weak, spoken dialect of each class and locality, but the rich and splendid language in which and with which our literature and philosophy grow. That, however, is by the way. Our point at present is that the exhaustive teaching of a language so that it may serve as a key to culture is a second function in the school. ”

“ We have three spheres of action in the use of the language—there is English to speak, English to write, And the wide field of English to read, and there are vital interests bound up in each for the after life of children. ”

“ The language is, of course, a dying one—English is slowly superseding it—but it seems safe to say that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the common speech of the people and the language of worship. ”

“ In the first place, the English which we thus learn is of that peculiar form or local variety which is talked by our instructors and models. It is, indeed, possible that one may have been surrounded from birth by those, and those only, whose speech is wholly conformed to perfect standards ”

“ He was the first to break loose from the prevailing custom, which confined all learning and philosophy and history, to the constrained medium of a dead language, and commenced those efforts in the living English, which have resulted in giving us a vernacular prose literature, unequalled by that of any other language in the world. ”

“ The English tongue, tho later in its progress towards perfection, has attained to a considerable degree of purity, strength and elegance, and been employed, by an active and scientific nation, to record almost all the events and discoveries of ancient and modern times.
This language is the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents. To cultivate and adorn it, is a task reserved for men who shall understand the connection between language and logic, and form an adequate idea of the influence which a uniformity of speech may have on national attachments. ”

“ The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo; And now my tongue's use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp; Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony. ”

“ Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions, which I controvert, are contained in the sentences—‘a selection of the REAL language of men’;—‘the language of these men’ (i. e. men in low and rustic life) ‘I propose to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.’ ‘Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference.’ It is against these exclusively that my opposition is directed. ”

“ We have modified the common language far less than we have modified the common law. We have kept alive here many a word and many a meaning which was well worthy of preservation, and which our kin across the seas had permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford, in his comprehensive volume on ‘English Prose,’ praises American authors for refreshing old words by novel combinations. ”

“ The English being a living Language, is subject to great Variations and Changes; but is now deservedly esteemed in high Perfection, as it is certainly stronger, more expressive, and more copious than heretofore. ”

“ English, especially, was claimed by many, some twenty years ago, to be not merely the auxiliary language of the future, but the universal language which must spread all over the world and supersede and drive out all others by a kind of survival of the fittest. ”

“ My knowlege of the practice of speaking in different parts of America, is derived from personal observation. My knowlege of the past and present state of the language in England, is taken from the writers who have treated expressly of the subject. [7] The authorities necessary to prove particular points will be quoted, as occasion shall require.
The talk of examining words cannot be agreeable to a writer, nor can his criticisms be very entertaining to the reader. ”

“ And therefore the Purity of our Language consisteth in preserving this Character, in writing with the English Strength and Spirit: Let us not envy others, that they are more soft, diffused, and rarified; be it our Commendation to write as we pay in true Sterling; if we want Supplies, we had better revive old Words, than create new Ones. ”

“ The learner is supposed to be unacquainted with all but his own native [xii] tongue; and in what other, consistently with reason and common sense, would you go about to explain it to him? When he has a competent knowledge of the main principles, the common terms, the general rules, the whole subject and business of Grammar, exemplified in his own Language; he then will apply himself with great advantage to any foreign language, whether ancient or modern. ”

“ The proper grammatical formation of the English language, so that one may acquit himself as a correct conversationalist in the best society or be able to write and express his thoughts and ideas upon paper in the right manner, may be acquired in a few lessons. ”

“ In asking this question I am not thinking about the tragic possibility that English may be the only language left in which civilized men can think and talk freely, even though that fact by itself would make it terribly basic. ”

“ O, good my lord, no Latin; I am not such a truant since my coming, As not to know the language I have liv'd in. A strange tongue makes my cause more strange, suspicious; Pray, speak in English. ”

“ Dual Character of our LanguageIt is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis of our modern English. If we read a paragraph from any good English book, and then analyze it, as we would a flower, to see what it contains, we find two distinct classes of words. The first class, containing simple words expressing the common things of life, makes up the strong framework of our language. These words are like the stem and bare branches of a mighty oak, and if we look them up in the dictionary we find that almost invariably they come to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. ”