Modern language

“ Of all that men have invented and combined; of all that they have produced or interchanged among themselves; of all that they have drawn from their peculiar organism, language is the noblest and most indispensible treasure. An immediate emanation of human nature, and progressing with it, language is the common blessing, the common patrimony, of mankind. It is an [5] admirable poem on the history of all ages; [4] a living monument, on which is written the genesis of human thought. Thus “the ground [6] on which our civilisation stands is a sacred one, for it is the deposit of thought. ”

“ In like manner, I would abolish the language-examination in modern languages, and give 250 marks for the literature of each of the three modern languages—French, German, Italian. The history would be taken as modern history, with an adequate total value. ”

“ Language is the sum total of those articulate sounds which man, by the aid of this marvellous faculty of speech, has produced and accepted as the signs of all those inward and outward phenomena wherewith he is made acquainted by sense and thought. These signs are “those [2] shadows of the soul, those living sounds which we call words! and compared with them how poor are all other monuments of human power, or perseverance, or skill, or genius! They render the mere clown an artist, nations immortal, writers, poets, philosophers divine!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ That therefore the improvement of language was formerly the first and most necessary work of a growing race, and that the most refined perfection of its comprehension and its use is, and must ever be, the primary problem in the education of each individual, is undoubted. The culture of modern European nations has a peculiarly intimate connection with the study of the remains of antiquity; and, thereby, directly with the study of language. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The science of language is, as it were, the geology of the most modern period, the Age of Man, having for its task to construct the history of development of the earth and its inhabitants from the time when the proper geological record remains silent; when man, no longer a mere animal, begins by the aid of language to bear witness respecting his own progress and that of the world about him. ”

“ A few imitative roots, uttered under the guidance of a divine instinct, and aided by the play of intelligence in movement and feature, would with wonderful ease grow into a language sufficient for the needs of a nascent humanity, and the living germ would soon bud and bourgeon by the very law of its production. ”

“ The chief change which the language has experienced during the modern period consists in its absorbing new words from all quarters in obedience to the requirements of advancing science, more complicated social relations, and increased subtlety of thought. ”

“ No doubt he has in most cases practically no choice in the matter. The language which he speaks is practically determined for him by fashion, habit, early teaching, a crowd of things over which he has practically no control. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is hardly needful to point out that these desirable conditions are much more nearly realized in the case of our modern cultivated and literary languages than in those of olden time, and that the former have, in all human probability, a destiny before them very different from that of the latter. ”

“ The assertion is often heard that the ancient languages supply a permanent standard by which to judge of the progress and the decay of modern languages; also that the ancient classics must be regarded as furnishing the models for purity and beauty in style. ”

“ Affecting to write politely in Modern Languages, especially the French and ours, has also helped very much to lessen it, because it has enabled Abundance of Men who want Academical Education to talk plausibly, and some exactly, upon very many learned Subjects. ”

“ It was believed by the ancients generally, and perhaps by the majority of moderns, that language was innate and organic; i.e., a distinct creation synchronising with the creation of man. The inferences drawn from this supposition led men to regard words as “types of objective reality, the shadow of the body and the image reflected in the mirror.” ”

“ He insists in a passage which we quote at length in the chapter on the Prose of the Century, that if this training in logic had not been obtained at this time in European development, the results might have been serious for our modern languages and modern education. He says: "If at the outset of the career of the modern languages, men had thought with the looseness of modern thought, had indulged in the haphazard slovenliness of modern logic, had popularized theology and vulgarized rhetoric, as we have seen both popularized and vulgarized since, we should indeed have been in evil case." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This being so, the more tap-roots a language sends down into the soil of life, and the more varied the strata of human experience from which it draws its nourishment, whether of vocabulary or idiom, the more perfect will be its potentialities as a medium of expression. ”

“ In all written languages this advancement from one stage of perfection to another, by the addition of abstract ideas, can be traced; and experience teaches, incontrovertibly, that the advancement of human language, as above described, and the advancement of human society, are dependent upon each other. ”

“ His linguistic philosophy also, his view of words as inventions, of each language as an aggregation of these inventions, a national institution, and of the science of language as a branch of human history, made it a matter of course that he should regard language as a field for improvements, like other inventions and institutions. ”

“ The history of language, the mouth speaking from the fulness of the heart, is the history of human action, faith, art, policy, government, virtue, and crime. When society progresses, the language of the people necessarily runs even with the line of society. ”

“ Wherever approached, they are as level to our own times in thought and deed as any of the so-called moderns; and though their language, in its former dialect, is dead, its golden words always fall upon our ears as if from the lips of some wiser contemporary. ”

“ That living authority which language needs lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognising always that every language possesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own, expand at once and purify its very elements, which must needs change along with the changing thoughts of living people. ”

“ How much more important when the general uses and benefits are considered. The adoption of a universal language would remove the greatest obstacle from the path of the general diffusion of knowledge and innumerable difficulties from methods of communication. ”

“ We shall next pass in review the other great families into which the known forms of human speech are divided, noticing their most striking characteristics. Then will be taken up certain general questions, of prime interest and importance, suggested by such a review—as the relative value and authority of linguistic and of physical evidence of race, and the bearing of language upon the ultimate question of the unity or variety of the human species. Finally, we shall consider the origin of language, its relation to thought, and its value as an element in human progress. ”

“ It was they who moulded their tongues into so brief and expressive a form, and, in the course of their progressive formation through successive centuries, rendered them daily more brief and more comprehensive. It was the men who made the language—not the language the men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social force is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. ”

“ The progress of language in every department, accompanying and representing the advance of the race, on the whole, in the art of speaking as in other arts, is from the grosser to the more refined, from the physical to the moral and intellectual, from the material All formal Elements once Material. ”

“ I reply. “When a certain degree of culture is attained, the important point is conformity of feeling rather than a common language, but at the outset, language is the means of arriving at intellectual culture. ”

“ But before that moment comes, through the medium of an extraordinarily terse and unspoiled language, a language that has not lost its earthy freshness by mauling and softening at the hands of literary generations, what a lilting crystal-bright vision of things. ”

“ The circumstances that determine the common nature of a society determine also its common utterance, and this common utterance we call its language. It embodies all the past life and history of the community that speaks it; each phase in the development of its speakers is reflected in it as in a mirror, and its worn-out words and forms are so many crystallized embodiments of dead and bygone thought, so many fossil relics, as it were, of the past strata of social growth. The facts of language—its sentences and its words—are the result of the action of general laws and conditions ”

“ Thus, language represents a continuous stream of word-bearing thought, moving from the beginning of human association to the present time. It is through it that we have a knowledge of the past and frame the thoughts of the present. ”

“ 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 introduction of culture and knowledge, of art and science, may bring in a vocabulary of expressions for the knowledge communicated, the conceptions taught or prompted; but it cannot touch the most intimate fund of speech, the words significant of those ideas without whose designation no spoken tongue would be worthy of the name. ”

“ These changes, by which words in ordinary use become more and more generalized, and less and less expressive, take place in a still greater degree with the words which express the complicated phenomena of mind and society. Historians, travelers, and in general those who speak or write concerning moral and social phenomena with which they are not familiarly acquainted, are the great agents in this modification of language. The vocabulary of all except unusually instructed as well as thinking persons, is, on such subjects, eminently scanty. ”

“ Undoubtedly, we have a right to make new words, as [Pg lxii] they are needed by the fresh aspects under which life presents itself here in the New World; and, indeed, wherever a language is alive, it grows. ”

“ And, in all these respects, the study of language need fear a comparison with no one of the physical sciences. Its field is the speech of all mankind, cultivated or savage; the thousands of existing dialects, with all their recorded predecessors; the countless multitudes of details furnished by these, each significant of a fact in human history, external or internal. The wealth of languages is like the wealth of species in the whole animal kingdom. ”