Language change

“ The drift of culture, another way of saying history, is a complex series of changes in society’s selected inventory—additions, losses, changes of emphasis and relation. The drift of language is not properly concerned with changes of content at all, merely with changes in formal expression. It is possible, in thought, to change every sound, word, and concrete concept of a language without changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one can pour into a fixed mold water or plaster or molten gold. ”

“ In languages thus constituted the only possible external alteration is that phonetic change to which all human speech, from the very beginning of its traditional life, is liable; the only growth is internal, by that multiplication and adaptation and improvement of meanings which is equally an inseparable part of all language-history. ”

“ Much is changed in it; much probably added; for the old garment of speech, which once served all needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them now no more. “Change in language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not equable, but eminently by fits and starts”; and when the foundations of the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. ”

“ Thus there come to exist among the same people two separate tongues; the one an inheritance from the past, becoming ever more stiff and constrained, and employable only for special uses; the other the production of the present, growing constantly more unlike the other by the operation of the ordinary processes of linguistic change; full of inaccuracies and corruptions, if we choose to call them so, but also full of a healthy and vigorous life, which enables it finally to overthrow and replace the learned or sacred dialect of which it is the offspring. ”

“ New dialects are wont to grow up among the common people, while the speech of the educated and lettered class continues to be what it has been. But the nature of the forces in action is the same in the one case as in the other: all change in language is the work of the will of its speakers, which acts under the government of motives, through the organs of speech, and varies their products to suit its necessities and its convenience. ”

“ But the natural condition of language is diversity and change, and it is only under the artificial influences of civilization and culture that a language becomes uniform and stationary. As soon as the coercive hand of civilization is removed it breaks out again into a plentiful crop of dialects. ”

“ How can we otherwise account for the change which has taken place in language, which is not the same that it was fifty years ago? There are phrases which have become obsolete; there are words which have been almost lost out of our vocabulary, which have changed their meaning, or which fashion has tabooed. ”

“ The meaning of the words, again, must adapt itself to the standard of culture attained from time to time by each nation. New words must be created for new objects and new relations and kindred, though novel meanings must become attached to the old words—as in the case of steel pen, properly, ‘a steel feather.’ And again, a quantity of unobserved changes are constantly passing on language which are hardly remarked as such, and are the immediate result of a change in the whole culture of a nation. ”

“ Since it is true that a spoken language is ever changing and never remains fixed, how great and far-reaching must be the modification and change which our own English speech has undergone during the many generations of its history! Because our written language has experienced comparatively little alteration since the invention of printing, it does not follow that the spoken speech has remained constant and unchanged from century to century. ”

“ This continual process is called the evolution of language. Slang is a strong element in the process.
As the servant of man, language has acquired a large part of his moral possessions as well as a stewardship of the most precious of his material property. Slowly through many centuries, language has assumed this power and made these acquisitions. The study of language must include, therefore, something more than orthographic change, grammatic loss, and historic speculation. It must deal with the phenomena of the mind, and it must approach them through the field of human interest. ”

“ The correct principle respecting changes in orthography seems to lie between these extremes of opinion. No great changes should ever be made at once, nor should any change be made which violates established principles, creates great inconvenience, or obliterates the radicals of the language. But gradual changes to accommodate the written to the spoken language, when they occasion none of these evils, and especially when they purify words from corruptions, improve the regular analogies of a language and illustrate etymology, are not only proper, but indispensable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of the development, modification and decay of languages we have ample material in our own times for study, the periods over which the modifying forces operate being an equal measure of the periods of national activity and change. And, what is perhaps not always sufficiently recognized, we have an elaboration of the formal elements going on under very different impulses, at different periods of the life of the language. ”

“ How far the growth of language was affected by external circumstances,—as, for instance, by the impress of individual minds, by the aristocracy or even autocracy of philosophic bodies, by the influence of sex, by the variations of climate, by the convulsions of history, by the slow change of religious or political convictions, and even by the laws of euphony and organisation, we may consider hereafter ”

“ The example is an extreme one of the transformation which a language may be made to undergo in the lapse of a few generations, at the bidding of imperious circumstances; as the present stability of the same language is an extreme example of what favouring circumstances can do to prevent change, and maintain the integrity of speech. ”

“ They use the same accents as ourselves, forming their words either on the palate, the teeth, or the lips, only they have other words for things. Great is the diversity of languages, for in a hundred leagues we found such change in the language that the inhabitants could not understand each other. ”

“ We need give but a moment's attention to another process of linguistic change, whereby not letters, parts of words, formative elements, alone are lost, but whole words, signs of ideas, disappear from among the stores of expression of a language. ”

“ As long as it is alive and spoken, it is constantly changing and will not remain “fixed” according to the whimsical desire of the purist. When it ceases to be used upon the lips of the people as a [Pg 120] medium of communication of their thoughts and feelings, then it will cease to change and grow and will become “fixed.” But when a language is no longer spoken, it is characterized as dead. ”

“ At any rate, for aught that we Unity of Origin of Speech. know or have reason to believe, all existing dialects are equally old, every one alike has the whole immeasurable past of language-life behind it, has reached its present condition by advance along its own line of growth and change from the first beginnings of human expression. ”

“ A custom of this sort, it is plain, may easily be a potent agent of change in language, for, where it prevails to any considerable extent, many words must constantly become obsolete and new ones spring up. ”

“ The fact was not sufficiently appreciated that, when it is desired to reproduce impressions which are different in different persons, and which even in the same person may change from one moment to another, a flexible, impressionable language is required, a language which accepts its spirit and whole stamp from the person using it. ”

“ Whereby they emerge other than they originally were, for an idea does not pass from one language to another without change. ”

“ What may now sound to us like a perverted sense is often historically correct, for whereas learned influences, the introduction of foreign words—which makes for further specialization and differentiation of meaning—and the general march of civilization affecting manners, customs, and habits of thought, all tend to divert the normal course of language, the dialects have meanwhile kept the noiseless tenor of their way unmolested. ”

“ Not only is some knowledge of dialects needful for any true understanding of the history and character of our language, but the standard speech has in the past derived much enrichment and what is called 'regeneration' from the picturesque vocabularies of local vernaculars. ”

“ How our English vernacular has changed ever since the days of the famous virgin queen, not to mention the more radical changes of the far-remote days of the ill-starred Richard II! A spoken language is constantly changing. It grows and develops, or languishes and decays, upon the lips of those who employ it as their mother-tongue, now incorporating into itself new expressions and idioms and now casting off such as are old and worn out. ”

“ Would an universal idiom result from this fusion of societies, or would there be a dialect of compromise, employed for daily use, while each nation would talk its own language, or else would the different languages be understood by all? ”

“ There are also, no doubt, many hidden causes of gradual changes in language. These are difficult to ascertain; and some of them escape the sagacity of even the most acute observers. Political struggles, foreign wars, domestic habits, literary studies, &c., may all contribute to alter the character of a people, and so far to affect their language. ”

“ 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! ”

“ It may well be the case that a thorough reform of English orthography will be found for ever impracticable; it certainly will be so, while the public temper remains what it now is. But let us at any rate acknowledge the truth, that a reformation is greatly to be desired, and perhaps, at some time in the future, a way will be found to bring it about. If we expect and wish that our tongue become one day a world-language, understood and employed on every continent and in every clime, then it is our bounden duty to help prepare the way for taking off its neck this heavy millstone. ”

“ It is during times when the higher classes are either crushed in religious and social struggles, or [pg 069] mix again with the lower classes to repel foreign invasion; when literary occupations are discouraged, palaces burnt, monasteries pillaged, and seats of learning destroyed,—it is then that the popular, or, as they are called, the vulgar dialects, which had formed a kind of undercurrent, rise beneath the crystal surface of the literary language, and sweep away, like the waters in spring, the cumbrous formations of a by-gone age. ”

“ But we have seen that the final perfection of the noblest languages has been the result of a slow and gradual development, under the impulse of tendencies, and through the instrumentality of processes, which are even yet active in every living tongue; that all this wealth has grown by long accumulation out of an original poverty; and that the actual germs of language were a scanty list of formless roots, representing a few of the most obvious sensible acts and phenomena appearing in ourselves, our fellow-creatures, and the nature by which we are surrounded. ”

“ The comparative philologist and the educated linguist do not deny, but recognize, the fact that evolution and devolution are both continually going on in every language, causing more or less marked changes which become appreciable at the end of a sufficiently long period of time; neither would they deny that, when the transformation due to these causes has become sufficiently great through dialectic segregations, the resultant language—which is at first only a dialect—may, in time, become a distinct language. ”

“ In an age of extended literature, conversant with objects and productive of associations which never entered into the experience of our forefathers, the ancient language of the people must necessarily prove inadequate; a new language must start out of new conceptions. Look into our present “exchequer of words;” there lies many a refined coinage struck out of the arts and the philosophies of Europe. Every word which genius creates, and which time shall consecrate, is a possession of the language which must be inscribed into that variable doomsday book of words—the English Dictionary. ”

“ A new language, says the proverb, is a new sense; but a multiplicity of dialects means, for the possessors of the main language, an enlargement of the pleasures of the linguistic sense without the fatigue of learning a totally new grammar and vocabulary. ”