Constructed language

“ So it is only by our ability to analyze roots—the compound constituents of Language—into the prime elements which have, except rarely, no distinctive and individual embodiment in it, that we can hope to gain a clear comprehension of the nature of Language itself, or of its most primitive concrete or composite foundations. ”

“ But a fatal objection to the hypothesis as explaining the universal and complete principle of the phenomenon of language in all its ramifications, is the fact that the noblest and most cultivated languages are found, upon investigation into their earliest state, to possess, even at this date, the most artificial form, and to be manifoldly rich, and at the same time highly regular and simple. ”

“ Language is slowly progressing, but no new word adds itself to a language; it is linked to thought-chains that precede. In order to create a word, as a rule, roots are used that are as established in philology as are building materials in architecture. ”

“ In fact, wherever civilization has made an advance, the action of the great causes of change in language has received a check. Every conquest over a horde of barbarians, every attempt to found a settled government, to establish a code of laws, to systematize a religion, or to originate a literature, is a step forward in the direction of linguistic unity. The practical aim of the science of language is the formation of a universal speech, and the time may yet come when the dream will be converted into a reality. ”

“ The question of the possibility of an universal language arises again. The invention of a new language, if we may judge at all by the past, is not practicable. But the extension universally of some living language seems possible. ”

“ Take language all in all over the world, it is obvious that the processes by which words are made and adapted have far less to do with systematic arrangement and scientific classification, than with mere rough and ready ingenuity and the great rule of thumb. Let any one whose vocation it is to realize philosophical or scientific conceptions and to express them in words, ask himself whether ordinary language is an instrument planned for such purposes. ”

“ Now that the ground has been prepared—now that the principles of linguistic science are the common property of the educated world, and the chief languages of the earth have been made accessible, and whole families of languages have been included in comparative grammars and dictionaries—we have a right to ask that no one shall henceforth come before the public as the inventor of a new language till he has made himself acquainted with those branches of the science of language which form the natural foundation for such a work. ”

“ I may here anticipate the results of the following investigation and say that in all those instances in which we are able to examine the history of any language for a sufficient length of time, we find that languages have a progressive tendency. But if languages progress towards greater perfection, it is not in a bee-line, nor are all the changes we witness to be considered steps in the right direction. ”

“ But after all, this is only what may be called a variety of expression, the same general idea being differently brought out, just as in speech the same thoughts are displayed in various idioms. All arts and all machines are but dialects of one language—reasonings and conclusions in tangible forms and figures—a universal speech, understood by all men. ”

“ And if, as I before remarked, we should in vain seek for that common and original language, from which all those now spoken on the face of the earth can be derived, both ethnographically and geologically, may we not still find in art a universal language intelligible to all men? ”

“ It is thus that it has become “scientific” to analyze language as itself a commanding element in man’s life. The history of word-roots, their modification under the influences of changes wrought in the vocal organs by habit or by climate, the laws of phonetic change to which they are obedient, and their persistence under all disguises of dialect, as if they13 were full of a self-originated life, a self-directed energy of influence, is united with the study of grammatical forms in the construction of scientific conceptions of the evolution and uses of human speech. ”

“ No nation ever consciously invented a grammar, and yet language has been shown to be capable of being treated as a science of natural growth, having its laws of mutation and development, never dreamt of by any of the many myriads of individuals that have unconsciously contributed to the formation of it. May not all the products of human intellects in the aggregate be made amenable to the same treatment, and, like language, be found to be influenced by laws of evolution and progress? ”

“ Since, however, ideas must be expressed by being reduced to a number of related ideas, the kinds of relation become important elements in articulate speech; and it follows that all languages must contain formal elements, and that their number must be the greater, the less the number of elementary word-stems that define special ideas. In a language which commands a very large, fixed vocabulary, the number of formal elements may become quite small. ”

“ If the Science of Language has proved anything, it has proved that this is not the case. We know that, with certain exceptions, about which there can be little controversy, all our words are derived from roots, and that every one of these roots is the expression of a general concept. “Without roots, no language; without concepts, no roots,” these are the two pillars on which our philosophy of language stands, and with which it falls. ”

“ For, as, on asking the origin of language in general, we are reminded that its complex, marvellously-adjusted structure has been evolved without the aid or oversight of any embodied power, Academic or other, so, on asking the origin of this particular improvement in language, we find that it, too, arose naturally, not artificially. ”

“ We have thus seen by an imaginary instance what we must be prepared for in the growth of language, and we shall now better understand why it must be laid down as a fundamental principle in Comparative Grammar to look upon nothing in language as merely formal, till every attempt has been made to trace the formal elements of language back to their original and substantial prototypes. ”

“ Now, however, although we have not specified all languages which belong to the radical, the terminational, and inflectional classes, we have clearly laid it down as a principle, that all languages must fall under one or the other of these three categories of human speech. ”

“ A living language is constantly in flux, inventing new words for itself, modifying its spelling and its grammatical construction, splitting its infinitives In a dead language the vocabulary is fixed, the spelling is fixed, the construction is fixed ”

“ It is true, also, that if you consult the works of the most distinguished modern philosophers you will find that whenever they speak of language, they take it for granted that language is a human invention, that words are artificial signs, and that the varieties of human speech arose from different nations agreeing on different sounds as the most appropriate signs of their different ideas. ”

“ Let us clearly see what we mean if we make a distinction between the radical and formal elements of a language; and by formal elements I mean not only the terminations of declension and conjugation, but all derivative elements; all, in fact, that is not radical. Our view on the origin of language must chiefly depend on [pg 216] the view which we take of these formal, as opposed to the radical, elements of speech. Those who consider that language is a conventional production, base their arguments principally on these formal elements. ”

“ And since a language is the outward expression of the mind and history of a nation, the nation whose language is the most perfect has approached the most nearly to a perfect culture and civilization. Language is at once the most exquisite work of art and the most marvellous creation of science that the spirit and intellect of a people can produce, and its character, as tested by the standard which linguistic science has to establish, is a sure and certain clue to the stage of art and science attained by its speakers. ”

“ It should be borne in mind that the problem of the study of languages is not one of classification but that our task is to trace the history of the development of human speech. Therefore, classification is only a means to an end. Our aim is to unravel the history of the growth of human language, and, if possible, to discover its underlying psychological and physiological causes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ People will often use the expressions ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ in connexion with language, but most linguists, when taken to task, will maintain that these expressions as applied to languages should be used without the implication which is commonly attached to them when used of other objects, namely, that there is a progressive tendency towards something better or nearer perfection. ”

“ The philosopher of science tells us that mankind was widely scattered over the earth anterior to the development of articulate speech, that the languages of which we are cognizant sprung from innumerable centers as each little tribe developed its own language, and that in the study of any language an orderly succession of events may be discovered in its evolution from a few simple holophrastic locutions to a complex language with a multiplicity of words and an elaborate grammatic structure, by the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence. ”

“ For if we look upon language as [pg 327] natural to man, it might have broken out at different times and in different countries among the scattered descendants of one original pair; if, on the contrary, language is to be treated as an artificial invention, there is still less reason why each succeeding generation should not have invented its own idiom. ”

“ Yet of [pg 117] the real nature, and natural growth of language, it teaches us nothing.
What then do we know of language after we have learnt the grammar of Greek or Sanskrit, or after we have transferred the network of classical grammar to our own tongue?
We know certain forms of language which correspond to certain forms of thought. We know that the subject must assume the form of the nominative, the object that of the accusative. We know that the more remote object may be put in the dative, and that the predicate, in its most general form, may be rendered by the genitive. ”

“ Such is the life of language in a state of nature; and in a similar manner, we have a right to conclude, languages grew up which we only know after the bit and bridle of literature were thrown over their necks. It need not be a written or classical literature to give an ascendency to one out of many dialects, and to impart to its peculiarities an undisputed legitimacy. ”

“ If we are to have any hope of success in our investigation we must try new methods and new ways—and fortunately there are ways which lead us to a point from which we may expect to see the world of primitive language revealed to us in a new light. ”

“ The conception of man, not as a tool-using but as a tool-making animal, is clear, defined, and unassailable; probably if we could trace language to its sources, we should be able to draw the same line between natural sounds employed as a medium of communication, and the created word. Thus the arts which we can study may perhaps be taken to illustrate the origin of language, which we cannot study in this phase. ”

“ You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulæ, and with every term in relations of exact logical consistency with every other. It will be a language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and all its constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable from every other word in sound as well as spelling. ”

“ And here it is fitting to remark, that the study of the spontaneous growth of languages is of the utmost importance to those who would logically remodel them. The classifications rudely made by established language, when retouched, as they almost all require to be, by the hands of the logician, are often themselves excellently suited to his purposes. ”

“ These are but a few out of many facts tending to shew that language is in a great measure independent of civilization, as far as its advance and development are concerned. Do they not also help to prove that cultivated intellect is not necessary for the origination of language?
Facts daily presented to our observation afford equally simple reasons for the almost infinite diversification of language. It is invariably found that, wherever society is at once dense and refined, language tends to be uniform throughout the whole population, and to undergo few changes in the course of time. ”

“ The method by which we are to proceed in grouping and classifying the languages spoken by mankind, now and in former times, results with necessary consequence from the principles which we have laid down. We have seen that no given form of speech remains permanently the same: each changes continually, in its structure and content, and tends to divide, with the progress of time, into varying forms or dialects. No existing language, no recorded language, is original ”

“ In short, and trying not to preclude future discussion of these phenomena, the historic development of language and logic within the many cultures we know of-more than the Western and Far Eastern mentioned-bears witness to the very complex relation between who and what people are: their language and the logic that the language makes possible and later embodies. ”