Original language

“ Nor is it a question of the previous ancestry of those who continue to speak an original language; on the contrary, the importance lies solely in the fact that this language continues to be spoken, for men are formed by language far more than language is formed by men. ”

“ On the other hand, the natural progress of language will account also for the opposite qualities displayed by the dialects of modern Europe. As Society advanced, the severe features that belonged to Language at its first commencement must have gradually softened down. Words originally intelligible only as imitations of the qualities of objects, or by reason of the signs with which they were accompanied, must have gradually acquired conventional meanings, calculated to render the use of signs and of rough and painful articulations unnecessary. ”

“ what is it to know a variety of languages, but merely to have a variety of sounds to express the same idea? Original thought is the ore of the mind; language is but the accidental stamp and coinage by which it is put into circulation. ”

“ To whom and in what cases are translations of poets useful? To a perfect scholar in the original tongue they are superfluous, to one wholly ignorant of it they are apt to be (unless here and there to a Keats) meaningless, flat, and puzzling. There remains the third class of those who have a certain amount of knowledge of a language, but not enough to enable them to read unassisted its more difficult books without an expenditure of time and trouble which is virtually prohibitive. It is to this class that a translation ought, it would seem, chiefly to address itself. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Since language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life—physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools—it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other appliances. ”

“ I turn up my nose at nothing, being convinced that it is to low origins that the great lexicographers will eventually have to stoop. In truth, the innate strength of the English language, which is becoming more and more the Master Tongue of the world, lies in its homely, trivial, and democratic origin. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Surely, to render a work from a dead tongue into a living language and specially such a language as English with all its resources, is literally taking it from its narrow and circumscribed sphere of influence, and placing it before the world at large—in fact, making it the common property and heritage of all mankind. ”

“ 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 a general way, then, we may be permitted to dogmatize, and to lay it down as a law which is always in force, that the first authentic history of a nation is the history of its tongue. We can form no notion of the literature of a country apart from its language, and the consideration of its language necessarily involves the consideration of its history. ”

“ Between the second and third class of languages, there are a multitude of intermediate tongues which have sprung up out of that intermixture of races and nations, occurring at all periods of history, and necessarily affecting more or less language itself. ”

“ But languages may be tempted to borrow beyond their actual needs when the foreign language and culture is higher prized than the native, and when, accordingly, the usage of such words is considered fashionable or tasteful. ”

“ But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ In the 19th century, again, especially about the middle of it, we anew meet with conscious and energetic efforts after purism both in the formation of new words and in the adoption of words from the old language (id, diligence, mäla, to speak, fylking, battle-array, &c.) , and from the dialects (bliga, to gaze, flis, flake, skrabbig, bad, &c. ) . Consequently, the present vocabulary differs to a very great extent from that of the literature of the 17th century. ”

“ But as men proceed in the progress of society, their ideas multiply, and new words are necessary to express them. They must therefore either invent words, or combine those before used into compounds, or borrow words of suitable import from a foreign language. The latter method was principally pursued by the English. The learned of the nation spoke and wrote Latin, which had been the language of a polite and improved nation, and consequently abounds with terms in the various arts and sciences. ”

“ The different arts, or, rather, the different directions of one and the same art, in the several epochs and ages of the world, or among nations variously divided by language and manners, as well as by the style and character of their thought and intellect, may be considered as merely so many varying dialects of one and the same language, which have a common origin and are nearly related. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now every person at all acquainted with Philology, knows that foreign language to be easiest to himself which bears the greatest resemblance to his vernacular tongue in its structure, syntax, the sequence of its words in sentences, and the identity or similarity of many of its terms with corresponding ones in his own language. It will be evident to any individual, that in these particulars the French resembles our language much more than the Latin. ”

“ In their power of taking up foreign words into healthy circulation and making them truly their own, languages differ much from one another, and the same language from itself at different periods of its life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the "modulated cries" of the men who lived in holes in the earth—not yet in the comparatively elegant cave-dwellings—to the exquisite language of the troubadours, what has been the course of its growth? No one knows. The only real guide that remains is the language itself, a confusing phonographic record of the whole troublous existence of the country of its birth.
The nearer a language is to its origin the more it is complicated. Ingenious and subtle grammatical forms prove an ancient tongue. ”

“ 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 can we overrate in this respect the enormous value of a common language—an {109} influence which, according to the use made of it, may be either healing and remedial, unifying and progressive—the source of all that is most beneficial and delightful, or else jarring, discordant, retroactive, and pernicious. Ought it ever to be forgotten that to the mother country belongs the glory of originating and forming this great language? ”

“ It has been the effort of the author to connect the study of language with the study of other branches of anthropology, for a language is best understood when the habits, customs, institutions, philosophy—the subject-matter of thought embodied in the language—are best known. ”

“ And though, perhaps, to correct the language of nations by books of grammar, and amend their manners by discourses of morality, may be tasks equally difficult; yet as it is unavoidable to wish, it is natural likewise to hope, that your Lordship's patronage may not be wholly lost; that it may contribute to the preservation of antient, and the improvement of modern writers; that it may promote the reformation of those translators, who for want of understanding the characteristical difference of tongues, have formed a chaotic dialect of heterogeneous phrases ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not only every country that has its own language. It is each generation. The books and family letters of our grandfathers are not quite in our dialect. And so of the books of their grandfathers, and the letters they wrote. ”

“ In order to learn to write and read our own modern living language, which we have spoken from childhood—in order to appreciate the system employed in representing it upon paper, we are to acquire a considerable knowledge of two foreign ancient dead languages, the pronunciation of which no one knows, and all dispute about!! ”

“ And now that the nineteenth century has drawn to an end, if we can guess at the future from our acquaintance with the past, we are justified in believing that the world-language at the end of the twentieth century—should any one tongue succeed in winning universal acceptance—will be English. If it is not English, then it will not be German or Spanish or French ”

“ In more peaceful times, a new and popular literature springs up in a language which seems to have been formed by conquests or revolutions, but which, in reality, had been growing up long before, and was only brought out, ready made, by historical events. From this point of view we can see that no literary language can ever be said to have been the mother of another 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first therefore is unrelated to every thing but to the genius of language in general; the second hath an intimate connexion with the fashions, notions, and opinions of that people only, to whom the language is native.
‘Let us consider then the constant way which illiterate men take to acquire the knowledge of a foreign tongue. Do they not make it their principal, and, at first, their only study, to treasure up in their memory the signification of the terms? Hence, when they come to talk or write in the speech thus acquired, their language is found to be full of their own native idioms. ”